Column:

The trouble with genocide

By John Hendel

Published April 11, 2008

Who’s a fan of genocide? Raise your hands high. Anyone?

These days, the answer seems to be China. Talk about the summer Olympics has floated on the periphery of all global discussion for the past year. For whatever reason, people are big fans of the Olympics. I never fully got it, but I’ll bite. There’s nothing wrong with shiny medals and obscure sports such as curling.

This year, though, we’ve got the extra spice of the “Genocide Olympics.”

The phrase shouldn’t sound particularly new. A little NGO called Dream for Darfur has spent a year trying to brand the games as complicit in genocide and they’ve been shockingly successful so far. Their campaign, along with the help of Mia Farrow, pressured Steven Spielberg to resign as a creative consultant for the Olympics’ opening ceremonies in February. The New York Times Magazine has a fantastic account of Dream for Darfur’s rise in prominence in their March 30 issue for anyone interested in learning more about how the specific branding of the Olympics.

The genocide refers, as you might guess or know, to China’s support of the government of Sudan. China sells Sudan weapons and buys its oil. The two have a solid and healthy relationship. It’s this help that allows Sudan to continue its actions against Darfur, where the Coalition for International Justice estimated in 2005 that about 400,000 had been killed and a couple million displaced since the conflicts broke out in 2003. Our own government called this an official genocide in 2004.

So far, the Save Darfur Coalition has assembled a petition of thousands to the Chinese government asking them to cease their support of Sudan. The list includes 101 Nobel Laureates, 120 members of the House of Representatives and now Steven Spielberg too, according to the group’s Web site. That’s not too shabby a showing.

The historical trouble in the Sudanese region has been increasingly on my mind in the past few years. A good friend of mine recently wrote a full-length play that was performed at MU this past week about the subject’s historical roots. Dave Eggers wrote a terrific book about Sudan’s Lost Boys (refugees from Sudan’s civil war in the ‘80s and ‘90s) called “What Is The What.” I loved the book, and a magazine I interned at last year nominated the novel for an award at a free expression awards ceremony in London.

Now that summer approaches, it’s hard to ignore the shouts about the “Genocide Olympics.” I’d say it’s about time.

What’s interesting is that even in Columbia we’re hardly cut off from the Olympics. Our very own School of Journalism is sending 50 students, both graduate and undergraduate, to report on the sports spectacle in Beijing this July and August. The decision makes some sense and truly is awesome, I’m sure, for the students selected to attend what the J-school calls the world’s most celebrated sporting event.

Yet our journalism school is also, admirably, often at the forefront of ethics, in spite of issues like the hyped Merrill slip last semester. Our connections to the Innocence Project and IRE and Global Journalist reflect exactly the progressive values a good journalism school should espouse.

In this spirit, I’m calling for the School of Journalism to release a statement or formal editorial condemning China’s connections with the Darfur genocide. It makes all the sense in the world that we’d want our students covering the biggest sporting event in the world, something well worth documenting. We should still send them. But please, for Christ’s sake, given the global climate, preface the partnership with China with a few words of support against genocide before sending our students there.