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| April 15, 2008 |
By EDDIE PELLS - 2 hours ago
CHICAGO (AP) - The activist group, Dream for Darfur, is putting final touches on its report card on the human rights record of the International Olympic Committee. The group's most high-profile spokeswoman, Mia Farrow, already has issued her grade.
"Personally, I flunk them," Farrow said Monday. "The definition of failure is 'the omission of expected or required action.' They flunk. They chose Beijing to be their host. How can China host the Olympic Games at home while underwriting genocide in Sudan?"
The suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan is a sad, confusing issue that doesn't lend itself to sound bites or quick, easy answers. The United Nations estimates more than 200,000 have been killed and about 2.5 million displaced in the conflict.
Because of China's oil connections to the African country, however, Farrow and Dream for Darfur have found an exceptional opportunity - maybe the best they'll have - to shine a light on the issue.
Their latest publicity blitz came Monday night, not by accident, at a private club across the street from where the U.S. Olympic Committee is hosting its biggest pre-games gathering. More than 450 credentialed media and about 120 athletes are scheduled to attend through Wednesday.
The group is scheduled to issue its report card Wednesday. It will criticize the IOC for being "inept in addressing China's human rights abuses and ongoing role in the Darfur genocide," according to a news release.
The report card is much like one the organization issued earlier criticizing Olympic sponsors.
The USOC media summit was supposed to be a time for writers and TV crews to gather feature material for stories they'll be telling in the lead-up to the Beijing Games in August. It has been that, but on the first day of the summit, athletes were buffeted by questions about China's role in the world, the troubles in Tibet and Darfur and environmental degradation.
"Our story has now moved from the policy pages to the business pages and now it's moving into the sports pages," said Dream for Darfur's executive director, Jill Savitt. "I don't know if people understand why we care so much about this particular moment. We've got a genocide being called a genocide as it's going on at this very moment. And we're going to have one going on at the Olympics."
Farrow said she is encouraged by the publicity the Olympics have generated for her cause.
She's seen editorials she's co-written with her son, Ronan, garner attention instead of "falling into the dark hole where all our pieces usually fall."
She's watched multiple protests along the torch relay route - though largely over China's policies in Tibet, not Darfur - with some hope, knowing it is taking people out of their comfort zones. "We see this sputtering torch passing through nations, and the burden it's placed on athletes, sponsors and individuals," she said.
She's witnessed what she calls "the biggest civic reaction to an African atrocity since Apartheid."
But, Farrow says, "it hasn't been enough to produce the political will to actually do something."
She believes real results must come on the ground. Four years after the U.N. Security Council first took up the issue of Darfur, U.N. and African Union peacekeepers are finally heading to the region. But the Sudanese government, which has long resisted such a force, continues to delay the full deployment.
Now, Farrow says, most citizens are not any safer than they were six months or a year ago.
Fighting has raged in Darfur since 2003, when ethnic African tribesman took up arms, complaining of decades of neglect and discrimination by the Sudanese Arab-dominated government.
Khartoum is accused of unleashing janjaweed militia forces to commit atrocities against ethnic African communities in the fight with rebel groups - charges the government denies.
The Dream for Darfur report card will be the next in a series of events to publicize the issue, culminating during the first week of the Olympics with Farrow's live broadcast from refugee camps in Chad, near the Darfur border.
One of the actress' biggest fears, however, is that once the Olympics end, any progress she makes will erode once the world's attention is diverted elsewhere.
"This is a time to push, and after that point, I really don't know," she said. "Do we leave Darfur to their own fate? I won't leave them. I have friends there, and those are people who renew my own fragile modicum of hope."
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