Panel addresses U.S., U.N. in Darfur

Panel addresses U.S., U.N. in Darfur

by Marie-Jo Mont-Reynaud
Stanford Daily
3/5/2005

In an effort to discuss the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan in light of U.S.-African relations, a panel of academics and experts entitled “U.S.-U.N.-Africa: Darfur and Beyond,” convened Wednesday night.

The speakers at the event addressed the alleged genocide in Sudan and the HIV / AIDS pandemic plaguing most African nations.

Organized as the first town-hall meeting presented by the newly-formed Stanford chapter of Americans for Informed Democracy, or AID, in conjunction with the Roosevelt Institution’s Center on International Development, the panel featured Political Science Profs. David Abernethy and Jeremy Weinstein.

Panelist David Devlin-Foltz, director of the Global Interdependence Initiative and a Peace Corps volunteer in Rwanda, began the presentation by encouraging the audience to become more engaged in international affairs. He said that a key part of resolving the situation in Darfur will be to educate Americans about what is happening. The Global Interdependence Initiative is an organization that seeks to close the gap between the American public’s values and decisions made by policymakers.

“Most American attitudes on Africa are not deeply fixed in any African reality,” Devlin-Foltz said. “When they are lacking information, people will fall back on general principles.”

He said he blames television news for the widely-held American view that the world is full of unrelated catastrophic events and that the United States is the only nation that can make a difference.

Panelist Heather Hamilton, vice president of Citizens for Global Solutions, followed Devlin-Foltz’s call for education with a call to action, comparing the crisis in Darfur to last year’s tsunamis in Southeast Asia. Citizens for Global Solutions is a grassroots organization that encourages public officials to promote multilateral foreign policy.

“They were a massive natural event that took hundreds of thousands of lives and provoked the largest outpouring of shock and compassion,” Hamilton said. “What we’re facing now in Darfur is a man-made catastrophe in which a government is sponsoring a genocide. Over 220,000 have died and 10,000 a month are dying. But where is that surge of horror?”

She suggested that people responded more immediately to the tsunamis due to the relative ease of making a monetary donation, but urged that there are plenty of actions individuals can take to ameliorate the suffering in the Sudan as well.

Hamilton advised audience members to be proactive in contacting government representatives to make their voices heard on the issue.

She advocated the enforcement of the no-fly zone over Darfur to keep the Sudanese government from bombing civilian villages and promoted a U.S. arms embargo on Sudan’s government. She also urged students to support the expansion of the African Union troops in Sudan, who now have no power to protect civilians but only to report violations of the cease-fire agreement.

Following Hamilton’s remarks, Abernethy questioned the ethical reasoning and effectiveness of American intervention and aid operations.

“The ease with which outsiders can come in [to work for aid programs] means that Africans can quickly become dependent on outsiders rather than looking to themselves to solve problems,” Abernethy said, adding that foreign aid programs should be designed by the potential recipients and not by the donors themselves.

He also offered what he noted to be a controversial perspective on the HIV / AIDS epidemic throughout the African continent.

“Outsiders may want to reconsider the rationale for funding HIV / AIDS treatment programs,” Abernethy said, explaining that the intent of treatment is to prolong patients’ lives despite negative consequences.

“The longer an infected person lives the more people he or she is likely to infect through sexual contact,” he said. “I don’t know the answer to this horrible dilemma, but I have been struck by the unwillingness of treatment advocates to acknowledge that an effective anti-retroviral program can have the effect of extending and prolonging the terrible AIDS pandemic.”

Several students who attended the event said they were struck by Abernethy’s comments on the subject.

“I was shocked by Abernethy’s statement about AIDS,” said sophomore Jonny Carson. “He really had a lot of balls to say that.”

In contrast to the other panelists, Weinstein spoke on the progress made toward improving quality of life in Africa, including governments’ punishment of corruption and the spread of a more proactive stance on the AIDS pandemic.

However, he also underscored the need for a reconstruction of the international community in order to fully address human rights abuses perpetrated by African governments.

“Sovereignty should be conditional,” Weinstein said. “We need to disband the United Nations and rewrite the U.N. charter to have a fundamentally different United Nations, in which a state’s sovereignty is conditional on internal treatment of its citizens.”

While some students said they were shocked by this analysis, others agreed.

“Rethinking sovereignty in a way that puts the sanctification of human life above the protection of political jurisdiction could be a huge step for global human rights,” said sophomore Chrissie Coxon, director of the Roosevelt Institution’s Center on Development.

Freshman Kara Johnson said she thought the panel presented a balance of views.

“We always get a lot of the activist perspective, the idealist side,” she said. “It was good to hear the Abernethy perspective about the realistic and logical consequences and Prof. Weinstein managed to integrate both.”