Free Not on Our Watch by Don Cheadle, John Prendergast

gathering stories, trying to shine a spotlight on some of the world’s worst atrocities.
    Sudan is indeed where all the world’s worst atrocities come together, like a perfect storm of horrors. War, slavery, genocide—you name it. But particularly genocide. Beyond the Sudanese government and other perpetrators of mass atrocities, however, the ‘bad guys’ in this story are apathy, ignorance, indifference, and inertia. It is up to us to overcome them.
    Darfur represents the first genocide of the 21st century. The 999 call has gone out again. And people in Western or First World countries, particularly younger ones, are starting to respond in ways I could never have imagined 20-something years ago. Across the First World, people are objecting to a political system which has made responding to Darfur a low priority, and they are succeeding in overcoming the apathy based on sheer ignorance of the situation. At the public education events I participate in at campuses across the US, students come up to me now with the same look I had back in the 1980s when I first saw the pictures of the Ethiopian famine. They say how they are inspired by the crisis to do more, from just doing something immediately like writing a letter, all the way to changing their majors and their career ambitions to pursue human rights advocacy, conflict resolution, or humanitarian action. In person and in e-mails, they express a desire to get involved somehow, to lend their hearts, minds, and commitment to the ultimate just cause, and to live a meaningful life. The hunger out there for meaning is extraordinary. It is perhaps the most fulfilling part of my work. We’ve gone through Generation X and Generation Y, but if Generation Z is in formation, and the massive outpouring of student action over the Darfur genocide is any indication, we have very good reason to hope in the future.
    When I first went to Africa and saw the extraordinary suffering, the massive numbers of people that had been forsaken and forgotten, what little connection I felt with God disappeared. Like so many others that have witnessed such scenes of absolute deprivation and unfairness, I became angry at any construct that would have a god somehow in charge of all this. That angry and studied agnosticism held for nearly two decades. It has only been in the last three years, corresponding ironically to the time of the Darfur genocide, that I have begun to reconnect to my faith.
    I remember going into a cathedral in Khartoum during that fateful trip in the summer of 2003. There I witnessed a vigil of hundreds of southern Sudanese praying for peace. I stayed after everyone had left and knelt in the pew, reading stories from the Gospels about Jesus, about redemption, about second chances, about forgiveness, about sacrifice, the themes that resonate so powerfully with southern Sudanese. I remember watching the pigeons (They looked like doves. Wait a minute, are doves actually pigeons? Are pigeons actually flying rats? Never mind, you get the point.) flying around in the church, as I reflected on the mistakes I had made in my life and the sadness I had caused, hoping that this redemption was real. And mostly I just felt an emptiness born of 20 years of travelling and battling, often on my own, in my personal and professional life, and I felt a peace creeping in as I read about Jesus’ life and his teaching. Though the particular window through which I view God is Christianity, surely only just one window into the divine, one of the most gratifying things about working on Darfur issues in the US is the way people of all major faiths—particularly Muslims, Jews, and Christians—come together in respect and partnership around a common cause and are motivated by their faith to pursue what is right.
    Early on, I had been a bit incredulous as to the real possibilities of citizen action in moving governments to act. Then, as I saw student and religious groups and others really responding and