Facing Evil : Genocide in Darfur

“Do you feel old enough to make this decision?” I asked Micah Allen-Doucot,

The 12-year-old was sitting next to his father, Chris, at their dining table last April, a few days before their planned trip to Darfur. Micah had removed his Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

“Yes,” Micah said. “My aunt doesn’t think so. She thinks I’ll see things I’m not ready to see. She’s worried. But I think I’m old enough.”

“Are you concerned about the risks?” I asked.

“Risks?” He screwed up his eyebrows. Micah has an open, trusting face; brown eyes and a mobile forehead much like his father’s when Chris drops his mask of quiet determination and becomes quizzical.

“You could be attacked by the Janjaweed,” I ventured.

“Attacked?” Micah’s brow swam with bewilderment. “I’ve never been attacked.” In the end he concluded, “I’ll be okay, I’ll be with my dad.”

This would be Chris’s second trip to Darfur. But Micah had never traveled outside the United States.

I was left with the feeling that Micah did not really understand the risks. He was relying on Chris, as a child would who truly trusts a parent.

Darfur raises questions for us all.

At what point does an individual start to care about people suffering in another part of the world?

What strikes the first spark of interest? And once that spark is struck, how is it kindled into a passion deep enough and hot enough to lead a person to action?

My own interest in Darfur was first sparked by a small article in the back pages of the Guardian Weekly in the spring of 2004. It seemed that as Sudan’s decades-long civil war was winding down, the conflict between the Khartoum government in the north and rebels in the south had spread into the western region of Sudan known as Darfur. Arab militias, called Janjaweed-meaning “devils on horseback”-were driving black African farmers, who were also Muslim, from their land in an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing. Their rampage of killing and raping was supported by the Arabist government in Khartoum.

By the time that article appeared, this brutal campaign had been going on for more than a year. Tens of thousands of Darfurians had been killed, more than a million driven from their land. Why was I only now hearing about it?

Because it was happening in Africa, I thought. Indignation lodged in me for months. It was an outrage, but a distant outrage, like a small pesky splinter festering somewhere. Not enough to provoke me to action. By July of last year the word genocide was being used in the U.S. House of Representatives, with reference to Darfur. Later, in September, the word was used by Secretary of State Colin Powell when he visited Sudan. However, he qualified his assessment by saying the U.S. would take no action because it had no strategic interests in the region. I was appalled at the qualification, but at least he had used the word.

Still I did nothing. And I was supported by the surrounding silence. I saw little about Darfur in the progressive magazines I read, heard nothing from any Quaker organizations. By late October the silence was eerie.

Then in December came the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which claimed as many as 300,000 lives, followed by the answering wave of sympathy from around the globe.

Somehow we could all relate to this natural disaster. So massive was the charitable response that MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières-Doctors Without Borders) asked the public to stop earmarking contributions for tsunami victims when MSF lacked resources to address the acute suffering elsewhere.

At about that time an article in The Hartford Courant caught my attention, this one with a local twist: Chris Allen-Doucot, a founding member of the Catholic Worker team in Hartford, had returned from a three-week visit to Darfur.

Knowing of Chris’s work a few years earlier-when he led several delegations to Iraq to witness the impact of sanctions upon Iraqi civilians-and knowing him to be an effective speaker, I was finally moved to take my first small step. I contacted Chris and organized a Darfur evening under the sponsorship of Storrs Meeting, my meeting, in eastern Connecticut, this past January 28. I worked hard to publicize the event, which evolved into a panel discussion. Chris and I appeared on a radio talk show beforehand. Members of the meeting pitched in to distribute fliers and direct parking.

The January event drew nearly 100 people, most of whom signed petitions directed at Kofi Annan and George W. Bush.

Appearing on the panel with Chris was a Sudanese refugee, Mohamed Ibrahim, who had been active in the struggle for civil liberties under the radical fundamentalist Islamist dictatorship that seized control of Sudan’s democratically elected government in 1989 and that is still in power. Tortured by Sudanese authorities, Mohamed Ibrahim had fled the country and eventually came to the United States, where he worked with other torture survivors. Today he is a U.S. citizen, working for American Friends Service Committee on refugee and immigration issues. I heard about him through Amnesty International.

During the panel discussion, Mohamed drew a sharp distinction between Islamic culture and the Islamist movement, the political expression of Islamic fundamentalism that seeks to impose its theocratic vision on the Islamic world. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s with the Islamic Brotherhood, this movement morphed into the National Islamic Front (NIF), which took control of Sudan in the 1989 coup and turned Khartoum into an international center for guerilla activities elsewhere. Osama bin Laden lived in Khartoum for five years before leaving for Afghanistan in 1995. Today the NIF is trying to impose its Islamist and Arabist worldview on all of Sudan, at the expense of indigenous farmers, mostly in the south and west, who identify themselves by tribe and for whom Arabic is a second language.

Roughly speaking, the conflict is ethnic more than religious. Fewer than a third of the African farmers practice animist African religions, and a small minority is Christian. But the Muslim majority is considered inferior by the privileged Arabist minority centered in Khartoum and, in a comparison drawn by Gillian Lusk, deputy editor of the London-based fortnightly newsletter Africa Confidential, was “in the way,” much as the Jews, Roma, and other “others” were for the Nazis.

Historically, racism plays a part. Arabs refer to darker Africans as “abeed,” roughly equivalent to “slave.” These ancient antipathies go back to the Ottoman Empire, when conquerors developed the north of Sudan and neglected the more inaccessible south-and earlier, under Egypt, when northern Arabs raided the south for ivory and slaves. Slavery continued as a powerful undercurrent in the north-south war that has wracked Sudan for the past two decades, as the northern rulers kidnapped young Africans and forced them into military service.

What is driving the present genocide, however, is a new struggle for resources-chiefly oil. Water was always contested between nomadic Arabs and African farmers. But when oil was discovered by Chevron in 1978, the zone of conflict moved south. Chevron was forced out. Khartoum redrew Sudan’s internal boundaries to seize the oil finds and exclude the south. Thus began the north-south civil war.

The government in Khartoum has relentlessly exploited the ancient rivalries, arming the Janjaweed and claiming that it cannot control their predations. Today, oil rigs drill on land seized from African farmers. The wellheads are encircled by burned earth and military guards to protect against rebel attacks. Chinese and Indian companies pipe the oil to tankers waiting in the Red Sea, to fuel those countries’ expanding economies. U.S. oil interests are deployed elsewhere, in the Middle East, Azerbaijan, and the Caspian Sea; hence our State Department’s declaration that no vital U.S. interests are involved.

“Sounds like the major powers have cut a deal,” a member of the audience observed during the January discussion. “You get this country’s oil. We get that country’s oil.”

The Sudan regime uses roughly half of the $1,000,000,000 in annual oil revenues to buy weapons to use against the rebels in the south and in Darfur. Thus one of the poorest countries in Africa is locked into an impoverishing cycle of violence.

Chris showed slides from his travels among Darfurian refugees. He talked about the atrocities-how villages are attacked by the Janjaweed, often with support from Sudan government helicopters and troops; how the men in the villages are killed, often castrated and left to bleed to death; how women and young girls are raped; how crops and buildings are burned; how the attacks continue-at refugee camps, when women and children venture outside to gather firewood, and when people try to return to their devastated villages and farms.

This glimpse into the horror might have been too much had he not also described the resilient spirits of the survivors, though they’ve lost everything and live in shelters cobbled together with twigs and scraps of plastic, and how children stranded in the desert with nothing but the clothes on their backs somehow find joy in their play. Chris announced his plan to return with his 12-year-old son Micah, along with another Connecticut father and his son, who was Micah’s age. They would distribute soccer balls, along with food and water. If they were arrested or otherwise prevented from making this simple humanitarian gesture, it would call world attention to the barbarity of the NIF regime.

For weeks afterward, those who attended the event spoke of how informative and influential the evening had been. I myself was moved in unexpected ways. Some of it was the energy I had invested in informing myself. Some of it was the tsunami, and the realization that something larger and more terrible because it was human-created was happening right now in Africa. Some of it was the force of Chris’s firsthand testimony. All these things combined perhaps to create an opening for me.

And then, a few days after the panel discussion, I saw the powerful film Hotel Rwanda, in which actor Don Cheadle plays the role of Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who by cunning and compassion saved more than 1,000 Tutsis taking refuge from the genocide in Rwanda that claimed 800,000 lives in the span of 100 days, while the world turned its back.

Two days after that, I e-mailed Chris: I want to go to Darfur… Would it be appropriate for me to go with you and your companion and your sons, or would I be in the way? Please think about it and let me know.

He e-mailed back quickly: You would be more than welcome to join us. To do this you must immediately get a passport (cannot have a stamp from Israel) get me a copy of the front page…

His friend Jory-the other father-and his son had applied for visas two weeks earlier. The trip was planned for mid-April. Chris estimated my portion would cost roughly $2,000 for airfare and ground expenses. Any more money I could raise would help with the purchase of food and water to distribute at the camp.

I overnighted my visa application to the Sudanese embassy. According to the embassy’s website, I could expect to receive my visa in ten business days.

This was in early February. Just about that time, a United Nations special commission issued a report on Darfur that documented war crimes but famously stopped short of using the word “genocide.” For anyone able to read between the lines, the commission’s pretzel logic was an abdication of responsibility. A declaration of genocide would have required the UN to intervene. For the NIF regime in Khartoum and the military officers who were carrying out the genocide, the report must have brought a sigh of relief.

In retrospect, I suspect that the head of state in virtually every country, from Europe and the Middle East to the United States, breathed the same sigh of relief. The UN commission had legitimatized the world’s inertia.

For all of February, I waited for my visa. Little did I know how long it would take. What I did know was that Darfur had entered my life with the inexplicable force of love. I don’t know how else to put it. It was not the outrage that propelled me, but a caring so deep that it lay beyond me and surrounded me like a tide of light. This was the second time in my life that I felt called in that way. I surrendered to it. My life, I knew, was about to change.

Chris’s plan was simple. We would fly into Khartoum, then take a small plane west to Nyala, the regional capital of Darfur. There we would buy food and other humanitarian supplies to deliver to Derej-an unofficial refugee camp located two or three miles north of Nyala that Chris had visited in his earlier trip. The approximately 5,000 inhabitants-mostly women and children; the men had been killed-were technically not refugees; they were, in the lexicon of international relief agencies, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), since they had fled across no national borders.

We hoped to deliver the bulk of the supplies without calling attention to ourselves. In the meantime we would contact members of the international press corps in Nyala, so they could be present during a final, more brazen delivery of supplies aimed at provoking our arrest.

The Khartoum government had not recognized Derej officially. Chris supposed this was because it was located only a couple of miles from Nyala, and could not be attacked with the same impunity as more isolated camps. But I have learned since then of many such unofficial camps, and I believe they are a calculated part of the genocide. Even in the officially sanctioned camps, IDPs are surviving on less than the UN-prescribed minimum of 1,900 calories per day. For those herded into places like Derej, the malnourishment is more extreme.

The NIF regime gets away with barring aid workers from unofficial camps like Derej because human rights organizations-especially service organizations like International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, and Doctors Without Borders-who are engaged in servicing tens of thousands of IDPs-are wary of doing anything that might get them expelled. This includes criticism of the regime and the taking of photographs. Khartoum is thus able to restrict the flow of information to the outside world.

By traveling on tourist visas and delivering food and water to the camp, we would be doing what aid organizations were prevented from doing. The amount of food and water we could provide was token, measured against the hunger and thirst of so many people, but it was a calculated act of nonviolent confrontation with the Sudanese authorities. If they arrested us or otherwise stopped us, it would call international attention to the plight of Derej. Pressure might be brought to bear on our own government, and consequently on Khartoum, to open the camp to aid agencies.

If the plan worked, it would be a tiny accomplishment in the larger scheme of things. Was it worth the risk? One has to weigh one’s life and physical well-being.

The more I learned about Darfur, the more unsettling the possibilities. We might be attacked by Janjaweed. We might be kidnapped or thrown into jail by the Sudanese secret police.

On the other hand, our act of conscience might save a few lives. Our witness would speak our truth not only to the Sudan government, but to our own government’s assumption that Darfurian lives were not worth U.S. intervention. And for me as a writer, this witness would allow me to write about events firsthand. It would give power to my efforts to make Darfur’s plight known in the world.

When it came to the two children, my feelings were more complicated. Chris’s willingness to take Micah into this situation was underlain by a belief, based on his travels in December, that the level of risk was reasonable. “Our white skins will protect us,” he said. “It’s racism in reverse. And the Sudanese government has no interest in getting the U.S. involved. The biggest risk, as far as I’m concerned, is if they don’t arrest us-if they just ignore us.”

I wondered, though, whether Micah was capable of making this decision.

A member of my support committee asked whether I thought the two fathers were exploiting their children. I did not. Nevertheless, there were times in the weeks that followed when an image flew unbidden into my mind: the Old Testament prophet Abraham, prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac.

I could not imagine taking my own sons on a venture at Micah’s age. Yet I did expose them to dangers, known and unknown, and this is true for most of us-whether from idealism: the parent who takes a child to a potentially violent political rally; or whether mundanely: the smoker who exposes a child to secondhand smoke. As I write these words I am aware of children Micah’s age being propagandized by Army recruiters in the schools.

Chris’s choice was mindful. Whether or not it was the choice I would make, I respected it.

Chris is quick on his feet. He has “street smarts” honed by past travel to areas of unrest, and by the life he and his wife, Jackie, have chosen, basing their Catholic Worker organization in the poor and largely black Clay/Arsenal section in the North End of Hartford. They operate out of two frame houses, one painted purple, the other green. They are living a life of voluntary poverty in the tradition of Dorothy Day, who founded The Catholic Worker newspaper in the 1930s and inspired a loose network of such houses, based on Jesus’ injunction to care for “the least among us.” Chris and Jackie and their cohorts offer a safe haven for kids in the neighborhood whose homes are sometimes fragmented by drugs and violence, who need a structured environment where they can hang out safely and get an occasional hot meal.

Chris has a scar running from his hairline down to his right eyebrow, compliments of a drug dealer pursuing a young man who burst into the house and took refuge behind Chris. Chris got out the words “The Bible says ?Thou Shall Not Kill’” before the pistol slashed at his head and he dropped to the floor, unconscious. The drug dealer spared his quarry.

Another time Chris was leading a group in Iraq that included a photographer, Brad Clift, who had been assigned to cover it for Northeast, the Sunday supplement of The Hartford Courant. The desert sun was harsh, throwing everything into stark light and shadow. The photographer insisted he needed early morning light. However, the Iraqi “minders” were not available at such an early hour. One time at dawn Chris-who had several days’ growth of beard and could pass for Iraqi-put on his very best clothes, polished his shoes, and acted like a minder while Brad Clift got his shots.

I was impressed with Chris’s ability to proceed pretty much autonomously in the Darfur venture, in contrast to the more collective approach favored by Friends. He networked; he consulted with the Bishop of Hartford and the Council of Catholic Bishops of Sudan; but he was accustomed to making quick decisions on the spot.

We agreed that certain key decisions, affecting our ability as a group to stay together, would be made by consensus. Still, Chris and I had very different operating styles, coming from very different traditions and probably from my being some 20 years older. He sometimes took my suggestions as challenges to his leadership.

I was operating within the more cumbersome constraints of Quaker process. Part of my leading was to involve my meeting as fully as I could. I asked for a travel letter, a support committee, and a clearness committee. I wanted the deeper involvement from the meeting that I had experienced several years earlier when I felt called to shepherd the process of building a substantial addition onto our meetinghouse. That had been a humbling and exhilarating period in my life. It found its way into the novel I was completing at the time, in which the heroine thinks of herself as “the foremost molecule at the crest of a great curling wave.”

Alas, the slowness of the collective process was at odds with the speed of events in Darfur. First there was the newness of the venture-a far cry from our meeting’s long-seasoned interest in enlarging its own physical space. Darfur was far from most minds. John Woolman’s challenge in “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, Part Second” came to mind: how to make vivid the kidnapping of Africans “some thousand miles off” to his mostly comfortable middle class audience.

A second field of resistance arose from competing concerns. I experienced this myself whenever someone asked me, “Why Darfur? Why not Togo or Uganda?” My instinct was to stay tightly focussed on Darfur, lest the clarity of my leading be diluted. Feeling that self-protectiveness, I understood how Friends wedded to their own causes might resist mine.

A third and especially daunting obstacle lay in the fluidity of the situation. Between early February and late March, my mission changed outwardly at least three times. At the core it remained the same: to help the people of Darfur. But as the situation changed, I felt like someone trying to stay on a bucking horse.

In February I queried my editor at Northeast about a story. This would partly finance my trip, and would guarantee a ready audience. Chris and I met with the editors, and I pitched my own role as that of a photojournalist, since photography was not Chris’s long suit. We left the meeting by way of the Courant’s news desks, Chris talking all the way-“chumming,” as he later called it, referring to the practice of throwing pieces of fish in the water before putting in a line. Their interest was piqued enough that The Hartford Courant itself decided to take over the story, sending its own staff reporter and its own photographer, Brad Clift.

Whatever twinge of disappointment I felt at this turn, I welcomed it. Darfur would have more impact on the front page of The Hartford Courant, and the story might get picked up by the parent company, The Tribune, for national syndication. I could still write something for FRIENDS JOURNAL, as I had always planned.

In the meantime, the wait for our visas stretched to three weeks, then four. My phone calls to the Sudanese embassy became a daily ritual. Each time the receptionist put me on hold and left me to listen to taped wooden flute music, only to report that approval had not yet arrived from Khartoum.

In March, Chris’s visas arrived. He went ahead and purchased plane tickets for himself and Micah, since flights on the London leg of the journey were filling up fast. Jory and I were left waiting. Presumably Brad Clift, who had a reputation for getting in and out of difficult places, would find some route into Sudan.

The waiting became ever more stressful. I asked Senator Chris Dodd’s office to intervene at the Sudanese embassy. “They’re closing the country to visitors,” I said, “while a genocide is going on.” I received little encouragement. Countries grant visas at their discretion. As the wait stretched from five weeks to six, the price for my airfare was becoming prohibitively costly. In the meantime, my elderly father feared for my safety. The Hartford Courant editors seemed to be having second thoughts. My blood pressure, which had always been good, was suddenly elevated.

As my chances of going to Darfur began to fade, I felt almost relieved. Still, I could not let go. I sent letters to every Quaker organization I could think of, seeking others to join me in a small fact-finding delegation. AFSC had no presence in Darfur. I tried to make the case that such a delegation could serve as a conduit for Quaker concern.

Briefly, toward the end of March, I entertained the possibility of going to Chad, which shares a border with western Darfur, and where some 200,000 Darfurian refugees are encamped.

“Chad?!” I will never forget John Plank’s response to this last-ditch effort. He was a beloved and weighty member of Storrs Meeting, a spiritual father to me, for whom I felt a world of affection. When I broached the idea of Chad at a meeting for business, his eyes narrowed. “Chad? David, do you have any idea of the logistics involved in getting across the desert? How would you carry food?” He grilled me unmercifully. I could feel the love behind his fierce skepticism, and I treasure it now with his passing. But at the time I felt the meeting’s rejection bear down on me with the weight of lead.

“Maybe you’re trying to slow yourself down,” a Friend said, hugging me after the meeting, “by trying to get the meeting’s support.”

Maybe.

Slow was a painful word for me to hear, in the context of the slaughter raging through Darfur. All I could think of was Darfurians dying at a rate estimated at 6,000 per month while Quakers deliberated.

By April, the situation was deteriorating. Aid convoys were now being attacked in Darfur and Chad, a truck driver killed. Banditry was commonplace, as well as attacks by Janjaweed. The scene was chaotic enough that UN agencies and other organizations were pulling out their workers.

One night, when my wife and I were driving home from Hartford, our headlights surprised three fox kits about to cross the rural road-caught them falling over each other awkwardly in their adolescent haste to stop.

I thought of Micah.

By now Khartoum was restricting the movements of diplomats. Chris and Micah might turn out to be the last tourists to get through the door before it slammed closed.

Do you still plan to go? I e-mailed Chris.

He did.

I interviewed them a few days before they left. That was when Micah told me he thought he was old enough to make this decision, when it seemed to me he did not fully comprehend the danger, but was going on trust. Chris believed the trip was still viable. He assured me he would not leave Micah’s side. And he and Jackie had told Micah he was free to change his mind any time before the scheduled departure.

For Chris, the journey to Darfur was an opportunity for “faith formation” in Micah. In a formal statement that later appeared in Northeast, he spoke more eloquently about his reasons for taking Micah, his belief that taking action was an antidote to despair. “My wife Jackie and I refuse to surrender ourselves or our children to the debilitating ethos of fear that has overtaken our society. We are attempting to raise our sons to be disciples of the intrepid man from Galilee who said: ?Fear is useless, what is needed is faith.’” (Luke 8:50).

“What good is it to know of the suffering of others if we are not going to do anything about it? The suffering in our world is so great it is not possible to shield our children, nor ourselves, from the ugly brutality we often wreak upon each other. In my mind the more dangerous course of action is that of inaction. To do nothing in response to genocide is a tacit admission that evil is a force more powerful than us, that is, more powerful than Good, because in the end that is what we are: Good.”

How do we face genocide?

The query is immense.

I’m not sure that as Quakers we are facing it.

We are few in number, and busy with existing concerns. The response to my inquiries about a delegation was meager. From Jessica Huber, who works the “Emerging Crises” desk at Quaker United Nations Office in New York, I learned that QUNO’s slender resources were focussed on Northern Uganda. She confessed she was “shocked” to realize that no Friends organizations were involved in Darfur.

Fortunately, a Friend on leave from Friends Committee on National Legislation proved extraordinarily helpful last spring, when legislation came before the U.S. Congress in the form of the Darfur Accountability Act.

But “we” are larger than Quakers, obviously. We are U.S. citizens. We are spiritual and political beings, apart from our particular sect. We are humans sharing the planet.

Author Samantha Power pursues the question from a national historic perspective in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. After examining each instance of genocide in the past century-inflicted by Ottoman Turks on Armenians; by Nazis on Jews and other “undesirables”; by Serbs on Bosnian Muslims; by Hutus on Tutsis in Rwanda-she concludes that our record as a nation is not only poor, but “astonishingly similar across time, geography, ideology, and geopolitical balance.” Mostly we stand idly by.

“Despite graphic media coverage,” she observes, “American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil. They assume rational actors will not inflict seemingly gratuitous violence. They trust in good-faith negotiations and traditional diplomacy. . . . They urge cease-fires and donate humanitarian aid.”

“In each case,” she notes, “U.S. policymakers in the executive branch (usually with the passive backing of most members of Congress) had two objectives. First, they wanted to avoid engagement in conflicts that posed little threat to American interests, narrowly defined. And second, they hoped to contain the political costs and avoid the moral stigma associated with allowing genocide.” Not only has the suffering of victims “rarely been sufficient to get the United States to intervene,” but this country’s inaction has generally emboldened the perpetrators of genocide.

From my own experience, we Quakers seem not very different from the public at large.

A recent Zogby poll showed that 81 percent of people in the United States support tough sanctions against Sudanese officials; 91 percent support U.S. cooperation with the International Criminal Court in bringing these officials to justice. These people are responding more sympathetically than their government.

Recently (and ironically) the George W. Bush administration has been dragging its heels on Darfur ostensibly on the strength of Khartoum’s cooperation in sharing anti-terrorism intelligence! Whether this speaks to the willing credulity of our own government or to the sophistication of the NIF leaders-some of whom hold advanced degrees from London and Paris-it is of a piece with the scenarios described in Samantha Power’s book. Our own government is going to stand idly by.

“The world is failing Darfur,” UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland announced recently. “We’re only playing the humanitarian card, and we’re just witnessing the massacres.”

Whatever our sympathies for the people of Darfur, as U.S. citizens we have not raised our voices sufficiently to make our government’s inaction politically untenable.

I am pleased that Storrs Meeting did pass a minute supporting the Darfur Accountability Act 2005 and sent letters to Connecticut’s Congressional representatives as well as to newspapers. The Darfur Accountability Act took a stand against the genocide. It provided for sanctions against the Sudanese officials responsible for the genocide, including restrictions on their travel, freezing of their assets, and prosecution before the International Criminal Court. It also called for beefing up the African Union peacekeeping forces and broadening their mandate to include protection of civilians. It has been replaced by a similar bill called the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act.

Please let me be clear. If ever there was a body of legislation that Friends should be able to rally around, it is the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. It is as relevant today as its counterpart was last April. And yet, as of this writing, I know of only one other meeting-South Berkshire Monthly Meeting in Great Barrington, Massachusetts-that has taken this simple step.

Earlier in this account I described three obstacles I encountered in trying to gather my meeting around Darfur: the newness of the idea, the resistance we may all feel if committed to other causes, and the fluidity of the situation in Darfur. But in the end I have come to feel the great-est threshold of resistance is more rudimentary than that. It is our inability to confront evil.

As Friends, we believe in goodness; we strive to see that of God in others. But if we fail to acknowledge the evil of genocide, if we look away when confronted with the slaughter of innocents, then we have discarded our finest aspirations. If we do not confront this genocide head-on, if we do not actively seek nonviolent interventions before it is too late, then our posture of nonviolence has no moral standing and is only a posture.

When Chris and Micah entered Derej on April 21, they found the camp more crowded than before. Its population had swollen to an estimated 14,000 people. Without Jory and me there to help, and the need to protect Micah, Chris was hard-pressed by the desperate condition of the IDPs. Many had gone several days without eating, having walked across the desert from a town burned to the ground by Janjaweed and government troops.

Distributing the food was difficult. On his previous trip, Chris had depended on local sheiks to make up bundles, and an old woman who commanded special authority to make sure the bundles were distributed fairly and with dignity. This proved impossible. They tried various ways. Taking the food around in their rented pickup truck didn’t work, because of the crowds that gathered. Members of the African Union peacekeeping force ended up helping.

At one point Chris and Micah were inside a round house made of thatch interwoven with acacia thorns for protection, in which their food was stored: bags of rice, dates, beans. Members of the AU peacekeeping force stood guard. Surrounding them was a sea of several thousand people. Micah could barely see out. It was dark and stifling hot inside the hut, whose walls swayed and bulged under the pressure of the crowd.

“Suddenly this woman dives through the thorns,” Micah said. “To get food for her children.”

“And we would all do the same thing, wouldn’t we?” I said. The three of us were sitting at the picnic table in the backyard with play equipment that serves neighborhood kids. This was a few days after their return to Connecticut.

Chris nodded. “I would dive through thorns for you, Micah.”

Micah recalled the day they left, throwing food from the truck, and his joy at seeing kids kicking the soccer balls around.

Altogether they had managed to distribute several tons of rice and lentils, a couple of cows and some chickens, tarps, containers of water, and a couple dozen soccer balls.

Near the end of their stay in Nyala, the photographer Brad Clift arrived. Although The Hartford Courant higher-ups had backed out, Brad had traveled to Khartoum at his own expense and, once there, managed to obtain a visa. Chris and Micah accompanied him to Derej camp, where he took photographs. However, after Chris and Micah flew back to Khartoum they learned that Brad had been arrested in Nyala. His camera and film were confiscated. He was being charged with espionage.

Back at the hotel in Khartoum, Micah was scared. “I was scared because the secret police were looking for us. I was scared because we might be detained at the airport.” An official at the U.S. Embassy arranged their transport to the airport, however, and they successfully boarded their plane.

Later, Brad described his ordeal. I felt a bond with him, knowing it could have been me. He described being held for ten days, being told, “We want to find you guilty and we want to hang you.” With the help of two lawyers he was finally freed. He returned home traumatized, with intestinal problems, and a $10,000 debt, mostly in legal fees.

“You look at the power of images,” he said, “and you see why they don’t want photographs.”

More arrests followed. Two officials with MSF were arrested, also on charges of espionage. Their offense was delivering a scholarly paper in the Netherlands about Sudan’s systematic use of rape as a weapon. The MSF report confirms what others have documented as well-that ethically targeted rape, inflicted on tens of thousands of Darfurian women and children, is a continuing and brutal feature of the genocide. The victims are stigmatized and the entire society disrupted and demoralized.

By now it is clear that I cannot go to Darfur. What I have written here in Friends Journal is grounds for “espionage” in the eyes of a highly manipulative and essentially fascist regime.

The perpetrators of genocide do not make it easy for people of conscience to intervene or even to bear witness. Or, to put it another way, the perpetrators of genocide make it all too easy for people of conscience to acquiesce.

Where does my calling lead me now?

I cannot turn away from Darfur. The slaughter continues. It is not over, as the mass media have been suggesting for months. More than 2,000,000 Darfurians have been driven from their homes. Civilian deaths are conservatively estimated at 370,000 as of this writing. According to the latest UN assessment, starvation threatens 3,500,000.

Darfur has taught me to explore my faith.

I know better than I did that love energizes me more than outrage. I don’t think one has to believe in God to experience this kind of embracing love. Or maybe that experience is God.

Whatever the words we use, we can open ourselves to its transformative power. And experiencing it, we can’t turn our backs on it. We can only listen for that still, small voice within.

How do I kindle the flame in others? For me as a writer and occasional speaker, there is the magpie’s art: the humble task of collecting testimonies and images from the likes of Chris and Micah, from the testimony of that mother diving through thorns; or the dilemma described to me by a MSF official, who said “Imagine yourself in one of the camps. If you go outside for firewood, you will be killed. If your wife goes, she will be raped or beaten. So, if they are young enough for the Janjaweed not to bother with, do you ask one of your children to go?”

In confronting evil, there is the possibility of love. For each of us, if we are willing to confront this genocide, there is some small step we can take.

We can educate ourselves, organize events, write letters, contribute to relief organizations. We can gather support for the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act vigorously enough to make it a force in U.S. politics. We can join the nationwide grassroots and student-led movement to get pension funds and college endowments to divest from companies such as PetroChina that are doing business with Sudan.

We must be unstoppable. Unlike the tsunami, this is a preventable humanitarian disaster. To face it, I believe, requires a recognition of evil and a belief in the power of love.

David Morse is a member of Storrs (Conn.) Meeting. His novel, The Iron Bridge, is about to be reissued in paperback as Bridge Over Time (RockWay Press).