NEVER AGAIN

Politics makes strange bedfellows, it is said. And in my case, mutual political interest found me at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple (LA's oldest Jewish synagogue) this evening. The temple is located, as its name suggests, on Wilshire Boulevard, a prestigious address, on the far east side towards downtown, in the heart of today's Koreatown. It looks a bit like St. Peter's in Rome with its huge dome, and inside the 1929 building is all art-deco frescos (would Moses approve of all the human forms?) and wooded filigree. It should be beautiful, but tonight it seemed a bit dark inside after sunset. Maybe it just needed sunlight?

http://www.wbtla.org/pages/about_history (the temple's website)

My reason for attending this Thursday evening was the premiere of a documentary on the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan ("Sand and Sorrow") by a prize-winning documentary director, Paul Freedman, who had also done a film on the Rwandan genocide, 10 years old this year.

Some backstory: Back in my Cairo days, I had become friends with a British Anglican priest and his wife, Andy and Sue Wheeler, who had served in an Anglican mission in Sudan for many years. When I was elected to the church council for the English-speaking congregation at All Saints' Cathedral and they were looking for a volunteer to be liaison with the Joint Refugee Ministry (JRM), which was a local charity aimed at local displaced persons from Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia in Cairo, I leapt at the chance. In those days, the pressing humanitarian issue was the civil war in the South of Sudan (now in a fragile peace). Only in the past few years did I become aware that another civil war (ethnic cleansing, really) was going on in another part of the country (Darfur), sending millions of non-Arab (tribal) Sudanese fleeing from their villages to waste away and die in refugee camps both in Sudan and in Chad, next door. Well-documented cases exist of the Sudanese government using helicopters and bombers to bomb civilian villages and government-armed (and directed) armies on camel and horseback to burn, massacre and rape (the infamous "Janjaweed"). The tactics have worked only too well: most of Darfur Province is now empty of non-Arabs, except those in refugee camps. I have been wearing a green "Save Darfur" wristband for over year in solidarity with the victims.

Our Congress declared the events "genocide" two years ago, yet so far only words have resulted. This September, Bush appointed a special envoy to Sudan's Islamist Arab-run government, Andrew Natsios. The situation has "hotted up" once again - recently, the UN envoy Jan Pronk was unceremoniously kicked out of the country by the Sudanese, many aid organizations are leaving due to lack of security for their own employees, and 200,000 out of the million displaced are currently beyond any reach of international assistance (and witnesses). It's as bad as it was in 2003 - just older with thousands more dying in camps.

For more background, I recommend these websites:

http://www.savedarfur.org/ (Save Darfur.com)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5316306.stm (BBC's Quick Guide: Darfur)

The documentary, still in post-production stage and still not 100% ready for release, was close to an hour and a half long! (I am ashamed to say I checked my watch after about an hour.) It could use a bit more ruthless editing (too many false endings) and desperately needs a sound engineer to clean up some recorded interviews that sounded like they were recorded underwater in a Russian submarine using a $5 mic, but its central points were unmistakable and many of its images are seared into my brain. One scene that got to me was an amateur video clip filmed live by African Union "observer" forces during a large armed raid by Sudanese forces on the refugee camp under the AU jurisdiction just outside their camp, burning huts and firing on the Darfuri refugees with tanks and rifles right under the noses of the foreign troops. ("With impunity" was a phrase used frequently in the follow-up discussion.)

After the showing to a mainly Jewish audience, there was a panel discussion that included the film maker, the president of the American Jewish World Service, Ruth Messinger, who is one of the oldest and loudest advocates for Darfur, and a rabbi, David Saperstein, who runs the Religious Action Center (a political and social lobby) for US Reform Judaism. They all agreed that "never again" meant involvement in the genocides of our time, and that now we more expert on the crisis than most Americans and had a duty to raise the nation's consciousness. I sincerely hope anyone reading this blog posting will take a few minutes to check out at least the Save Darfur site and send off one of their quickie email forms to US political leaders.