By Brenna
Cussen '03M.A.
On my last night in Darfur, Father Denima Emmanuel, a priest
at Saint Joseph's Church in Nyala, celebrated Mass with our Catholic
Worker delegation to Sudan. In his homily he related our December
2004 trip to the meaning of Christmas. He explained that God became
human to visit with us, to suffer with us, to be with us, adding
"Now that you have come so far and have seen the camps, you can
better understand why Jesus had to come down from heaven to be
with the poor . . . for the closer we come to the poor, the better
we know God."
The mission of the Catholic Worker is to take personal responsibility
for the poor and to respond to evil with active love. The horrors
occurring in Darfur are certainly evil. In this region in Western
Sudan, it is estimated that 400,000 people have died over the
past two years as a result of systematic genocide by the Khartoum
government. Another 2.5 million people have been displaced, and
many are dying of hunger.
We felt obliged to do something about it. The four of us (Chris
Allen Doucot of Hartford, Connecticut; Grace Ritter from Ithaca,
New York; Scott Schaeffer-Duffy of Worcester, Massachusetts; and
myself) were quite aware that we would not be able to end genocide.
However, we believed it was our duty to respond to it -- nonviolently
and effectively.
Our peace team had three goals in traveling to Sudan. We wanted
firsthand knowledge of the crisis in Darfur that we could share
with our local communities. We also wanted to do what we could
to assist those in need and to promote peace in any way possible. We
had raised $17,000 to bring to Darfur, in addition to $10,000
provided by Martin Sheen, a longtime supporter of the Catholic
Worker movement. This money was distributed in camps, where tens
of thousands of people, mostly women and children, live in fear
of returning to their villages, where they would face violence
from rape to murder. We took pictures, asked questions and interviewed
refugees to bring their stories home.
Our team was able to visit four IDP (internally displaced people)
camps while in Nyala. The largest, Kalma Camp, was occupied by
at least 60,000 people. It consisted of small huts that people
had made themselves, with some help from non-government organizations,
NGOs. The huts were so small that it was impossible to fully stand
or recline in one of them.
We were told that Kalma Camp was one of the best-run camps in
Darfur. As soon as our truck stopped there, we were surrounded
by women and children begging for food and clothing. Scott went
into one house to interview a family with the help of a translator.
He spoke with a woman from Hatara who had to flee her village
after an attack. A year earlier, her village was bombed by Sudanese
government planes and attacked by ground troops and janjaweed.
Janjaweed, translated as "devils on horseback," is the
name given to roving militias that have been used by the government
for decades to kill men and take women, children and cattle.
The onslaught in Hatara left most of the men dead, many of the
women raped and the village burned. Bodies were left unburied
by the fleeing survivors. This woman had seven children. Her husband
was killed in the bombing. During her three-day walk to reach
Kalma, her 4-year-old daughter died of dehydration. An estimated
10,000 more die in Darfur every month.
Throughout our trip, we met many other women whose stories were
painfully similar to hers. We left clothing, food and money with
the families who spoke to us. Every time we ran out of aid at
the camps, we were surrounded by children who were excited to
see the "hajawa" -- "the white people." One of the mothers
encouraged her child to sing us a song, and she did. Then another
child did the same. Chris Doucot began to sing the "hokey pokey,"
and the two of us put on a show. The kids loved it and soon joined
in. After we had finished dancing, the children sang us a song
in their own language. I was overwhelmed by their smiles and joy
in the midst of their misery.
The other camps we visited were much smaller than Kalma -- about
6,000 people in each. Because these camps were so close to the
town of Nyala, the government told the people in them to leave.
When they wouldn't leave, Khartoum denied all humanitarian aid
groups permission to serve the camps. As a result, the people
have no access to food, water or medical care. We spoke with women
who risk getting raped by janjaweed every time they leave
to gather firewood to sell at the market for money. At this camp,
we met a man named Mohammed who told us, "I have no voice. You
will have to be my voice."
This would be his story. In April 2003, the Islamic dictatorship
of Sudan, which considers itself of Arab ethnicity, as opposed
to the native African tribes, began to crack down on rebel groups
in the West (Darfur) with overwhelming violence -- killing men,
raping women and children, and burning down villages -- in order
to maintain power in the country. Both Arabs and African peoples
live in Darfur, and almost all of them are Muslims. In the past,
they have lived together peacefully and have even intermarried.
However, the government has used Arab militias -- janjaweed
-- to target African tribes in the area.
Part of the mission of our trip was to discover ways we could
promote peace. We asked everybody with whom we met what would
be the most effective way for four ordinary U.S. citizens to address
the conflict. The overwhelming response was to urge the U.S. government
to put pressure on the Khartoum government to stop the killing
and to provide equal access to land and political power to those
marginalized in the south and in the west. We asked if it would
be helpful to protest in Khartoum.
"No," the people said; we would be arrested and nobody would
ever hear about it. But if we protested at the Sudanese Embassy
in the United States, we were told, that might draw attention
in America to the crisis. That would give the Sudanese people
hope.
So on February 2, 2005, I was one of seven people arrested for
blocking the entrance to the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.
We held signs bearing enlarged pictures of Sudanese victims of
their government's campaign of genocide. Our message to the embassy
was that, as representatives of the Khartoum government, they
should express their outrage over the genocide rather than continuing
to cover it up by publishing false information. When they ignored
our requests, we felt it was our obligation to stop business as
usual.
For our crime, we spent 27 hours in jail. Our holding cells
were equipped with two stainless steel bunk beds and a stainless
steel toilet. A water-fountain was attached to the toilet. My
cellmate, Liz Fallon '04, and I didn't drink the water. We used
the fountain instead to wipe off the sticky red substance and
crumbs that covered our bunks. We also used the last of our toilet
paper to do this, and our requests for more were ignored.
Throughout the night, we were continually awoken by the guards
-- either when more women were taken into our corridor or when
they would bark orders at us or ask the same question they had
asked us two hours earlier. At 6:30 a.m. we were taken to the
cell underneath the courthouse, after being offered our last chance
at food for the day, a smushed bologna sandwich that we declined.
Jail was one of the closest things to hell I have ever experienced
-- except for the time I spent in IDP camps in Darfur, looking
out over a sea of makeshift tents inhabited by women and children
who had to flee their villages to escape the militias who had
killed their husbands and fathers. It was because of them that
I was able to survive jail; it is because of them that I am willing
to go again if it comes to that.
Our February protest led to our trial date on May 25. The trial
of the "Sudan Seven," as we were referred to, was an incredible
show of nonviolent witness.
Our defense was based upon the argument of necessity: Such a
grievous harm was taking place that we were forced to choose between
the lesser of two evils in order to try to save lives. To secure
a verdict of "not guilty," we had to show that on February 2,
2005, there was an imminent harm occurring (genocide), that our
actions would help to abate that harm, and that legal means had
been tried and found ineffective, so that illegal means were the
last resort.
Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Hampton, Massachusetts,
and a world-renowned expert on the genocide in Darfur, testified
to the fact that genocide indeed was taking place in Darfur.
Mark Lance, professor of peace studies at Georgetown University,
and Barbara Wein, co-director of Peace Brigades International,
testified to the fact that nonviolent civil disobedience has historically
been an effective way to change policies, and that in the case
of genocide in Darfur, legal means thus far have not
been effective.
Mwiza Munthali of the TransAfrica Forum testified to the fact
that protests at the South African Embassy in the 1980s contributed
to the end of apartheid and that protests at the Sudanese Embassy
last summer led the way to then Secretary of State Colin Powell's
declaration that genocide was taking place in Darfur.
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton testified that nonviolent civil disobedience,
coupled with prayer, cannot fail to be an effective way to bring
about positive change.
Each of these witnesses, when asked whether it was reasonable
to believe that the actions of the defendents on February 2, 2005,
could abate the harm taking place in Darfur, answered with a resounding
"Yes!"
The Honorable Judge Rufus King presided over the trial, which
lasted all day. In the morning, he informed us that he would be
interested only in the facts of our actions and would refuse to
"politicize" his courtroom in order to hear about genocide in
Darfur.
The district attorney did not argue much with our defense. He
cross-examined all of the defendants, in each case asking whether
we had contacted a member of congress, thus attempting to utilize
legal means to stop the genocide. As most of us had done so, he
questioned us on how many times and whether we had actually gone
to Washington, D.C., to visit our representatives. Some of us
had contacted representatives -- Schaeffer-Duffy had done so 21
times -- but the D.A. was not satisfied with the number of our
attempts. We talked about how we had used legal means to go to
Sudan and how we had asked the Sudanese people what they
thought the most effective thing we could do to promote peace
would be. It was the Sudanese people themselves who had told us
to protest at the Embassy of Sudan in Washington, D.C., we testified.
We talked about how members of our group had given talks and
slide show presentations throughout our communities, sent letters
and articles to various newspapers, put on a benefit concert for
Darfur, had photo exhibitions of the refugees in Darfur, helped
to organize a day-long educational symposium on Sudan, and had
personally informed family and friends about the genocide. We
did employ many legal means to end genocide, we said.
But in the end, we had concluded that our legal means must be
coupled with the more drastic means of putting our bodies on the
line.
Judge King did not find our defense of necessity sufficient
for an acquittal. He found each of the seven defendants guilty
of the misdemeanor offense of unlawful assembly. He said there
was no "imminent" harm to be averted and it was not reasonable
to believe our action in front of the Sudanese Embassy could immediately
abate the obviously greater evil of genocide.
However, he said, he respected that our actions were done in
"good faith." He sentenced three of the defendants who had no
prior record to 2 days in jail (already served). The other four
defendants, based on their prior convictions for other acts of
nonviolent civil disobedience, received suspended jail sentences
and several months of unsupervised probation.
When I later told a friend that we did not win our case, she
asked, "What is winning?"
No matter what the outcome, we had indeed won. For in the face
of a grave evil, we did not sit by and watch. In the face of a
grave evil, we have searched for nonviolent responses, for Christian
responses.
Brenna Cussen lives and works at the Saint Peter Claver Catholic
Worker community in South Bend. The Boston native has been involved
with the Catholic Worker movement since 2000.
(October 2005)
