2007 John Phillips Award Recipient

Ken Bacon's citation

Remarks by Kenneth H. Bacon '62
made at assembly on October 9, 2007

Thank you very much, Dr. Plater, Principal Tingley, fellow Exonians.  It’s a huge honor for me to be here.  I must say that when I learned that the committee and the board of trustees had selected me for the John Phillips Award I was both obviously pleased but also astounded because first of all, when I came to Exeter in the Dark Ages, the John Phillips Award didn’t even exist.  And even if it had, there was nothing in my early life, and you just heard a wonderful, dramatic, romanticized recitation of my early life, nothing in my early life that would have led me to believe that I might get this award.  So it’s wonderful to be here again on the Exeter campus.

As the citation said, I’ve really had three very distinct careers and looking back on them, 25 years with the Wall Street Journal, six and a half years at the Pentagon, and now six and a half years at Refugees International, you might ask aren’t they totally different?  What could possibly unify them?  Well, in one respect they’re very much the same, and that is they all involve gathering, analyzing, and presenting information.  And that’s a very enduring skill that I learned while I was at Exeter and I’m sure you’re learning exactly the same skill.  It’s hugely valuable and treasure it as you build it.

When I came to RI in 2001, Refugees International in 2001, we called ourselves a powerful voice for humanitarian action.  We had 14 employees.  Now we have 28 employees and at any given time five or six interns, and maybe one day some of you would be interns with us.  It’s a great opportunity.  I hope you’ll do it.  So 28 employees, five or six interns, and we have a much shorter tag line describing what we do.  We say, speak out, save lives.

Now it may seem unrealistic, even arrogant that such a small organization could call itself a powerful voice for humanitarian action and urge people to speak out and save lives, particularly when you look at the types of problems we’re dealing with, genocide in Darfur, huge displacement in Iraq, systemic rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, massive human rights abuses in Burma which have generated a refugee flow of over a million into Thailand, and India, and Malaysia.  Since our founding, we’ve demonstrated though that through our unique type of field based advocacy where we send people out to live with refugee populations, to talk to the people who provide them with food, to talk with the politicians, both the politicians trying to rescue them and the politicians who have caused the conditions that forced them to be refugees, we found that we can make a difference in terms of generating food shipments, in terms of improving legal protections, in terms of generating resettlement possibilities for people who have been in camps or away from their homes for long periods of time.  In fact, there are probably some of you who come from families who were resettled in the United States under the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program from either Vietnam, or Somalia, or Sudan, or the Soviet Union.  We were resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees a year after the Vietnam War, up to 200,000 after Vietnam and they were mainly Vietnamese and Cambodian.

So you might say, yeah, all right.  You can realize these short term gains, bringing food to people, generating legal protections for people, but what can you do about the most publicized and difficult displacement crises before us today?  And those two are Darfur in Sudan and Iraq.  Currently, there are 2.5 million people displaced from the Darfur region of Sudan where a vicious civil war has been going on for over four years, and there are over 4.7 million people displaced from Iraq, displaced from their homes.  Now of those in Iraq, 2.5 million are actual refugees who have crossed an international border, mainly gone to Syria or to Lebanon, and the other 2.2 million are internally displaced within Iraq.

Darfur in particular has been a lot in the news recently because the U.N. has just voted to increase its peacekeeping force there.  You probably read that 10 African Union peacekeepers were killed recently in a raid by rebel groups in one of the camps.  We conduct several assessment missions a year to Sudan and our advocacy is focused on very, very specific issues.  First, we’ve urged the Bush administration to adopt much tougher strategies towards Sudan.  Second, we’ve concentrated on improving the African Union peacekeeping force, or any peacekeeping force in Darfur.  Third, we have worked very aggressively to increase protections for rape victims.  Rape is endemic in the refugee camps and in the villages of Darfur.  And fourth, we’ve worked very hard to get peace talks restarted.  There have been intermittent peace talks and ceasefires.  They’ve led to no place but we’ve been working very hard dealing with people in the government and out in Sudan to get these peace talks going again. 

We’ve had success, I’d say, in all these areas.  As I pointed out earlier, the U.N. has just voted to triple the size of the peacekeeping force in Darfur, peace talks have scheduled to begin in Libya on October 27th, there have been some increased protections for rape victims, not enough obviously.  So we’re making progress in all these areas but still the fighting continues.  In fact, the violence is getting worse, not better, and there’s a long way to go.  I’m very glad that peace talks will take place, will begin in Libya, but I think it would be very unwise to assume any success from these peace talks now or in the distant future.  But we can hope and we can work for those.

But I do think that the advocacy by us working with many other groups, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, for instance, Crisis Group, which used to be the International Crisis Group, has made a huge difference.  It’s kept the pressure on our government, it’s kept the pressure on the U.N., and it’s kept the pressure on the government of Sudan.

The path to peace in Darfur is very, very difficult and uncertain, but the decision to work to end the genocide there, and President Bush has called it genocide, is really easy and unavoidable.  Many groups have decided that they can’t be bystanders to the slaughter that’s taking place there.  400,000 people have died of war related causes on top of the 2.5 million people who’ve been displaced.  They’ve decided they can’t be bystanders to this slaughter, that it’s time to speak out and save lives.  There’s really no other choice and so you’ve seen with Darfur a really incredible national movement led by the Save Darfur Coalition involving many entertainment stars such as Mia Farrow, George Clooney, and others, Don Cheadle, who have taken a real stand on trying to fight the genocide in Darfur, trying to get our administration to do more about Darfur, and trying to get the U.N. to do more.

And one of the things that’s been so encouraging about this is that students all across the country, all across the country, have been hugely involved in the Save Darfur movement.  And this is really the work of two people initially, Mark Hanis and Sam Bell, students in Swarthmore who started the Genocide Intervention Network several years ago, and this network has led a couple of nationwide campaigns.  First, it set up a group called STAND, which stands for ending the genocide in Darfur now, take a stand, and that has chapters all over the country in high schools and in colleges.  And this group has taken the lead in fighting for the divestment of holdings of stocks in any companies that do business with Sudan.  Exeter is part of that movement.  Exeter has decided to divest.  Most of the colleges in the country have decided and now many large pension funds, the California pension fund, the Massachusetts pension funds, the Michigan State pension funds have all decided to divest.

It’s a small victory perhaps because American sanctions prevent American companies from investing in Sudan and Sudanese companies, but there are many international companies, huge international companies, China National Petroleum, for instance, that do a lot of work with Sudan.  And in this day and age of globalized investment, international investing, everybody wants to own big international companies and yet Harvard, and Yale, and Exeter, and the state of California have all divested of these companies because they do business in Sudan.

It’s a statement that is beginning to irritate the government of Sudan.  I met personally with President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan in January.  I was there with Bill Richardson who was on a peace mission, and it was clear that al-Bashir was annoyed by what Save Darfur is doing, by the ads it’s been running in the New York Times, by the divestment campaign, by the efforts to vilify him and his government as genocidous.  And this I believe is one of the reasons that he’s decided to move towards peace talks.  A small reason, but one of the reasons, and it comes from the pressure that’s been put on him by people who have agreed to speak out to save lives, by people who can’t be silent about the genocide that is taking place in Darfur.

It’s not an academic issue, really, when you think about genocide.  In this century, the last hundred years, there’s been a genocide almost every ten years.  If you’re Armenian, you’re aware of the genocide in Armenia.  If you’re from the Ukraine or your family’s from there, you’re aware of the genocide that took place.  If you’re Jewish, you know about the holocaust and your family may have suffered from it.  Mark Hanis, the young man at Swarthmore, all four of his grandparents were holocaust survivors which is one of the reasons he got involved in setting up the Genocide Intervention Network.  Rwanda, Burundi, genocides.  Cambodia, a genocide.  The Balkans, genocides.  And now in Darfur.

The strange thing about Darfur, the encouraging thing but also the annoying thing, is that George Bush is the first sitting American president ever to call a contemporaneous slaughter genocide.  Franklin Roosevelt didn’t use the word for the holocaust.  Bill Clinton didn’t use the word for the Balkans or for Rwanda.  But George Bush has, correctly I believe, called what’s happening in Darfur genocide.  And yet the genocide convention is very clear.  It says that signatories to the crime of genocide must do everything they can to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.

And yet we have called it genocide but we’ve been unable to act effectively, either diplomatically, or economically, or militarily to stop what I believe is genocide in Darfur.  Because it’s the systematic removal of one group, mainly African farmers, from their land by another group, namely Arab militia people associated with the government, and taking over that land and throwing the African farmers off so that the Arabic herders can come in and take it over.  It has both economic and ethnic causes but either way, it’s eliminating a group from their lands in whole or in part, so it does qualify as genocide.

The national movement that has made Darfur such an issue, that has led to the placement of ads in the New York Times and on CNN, has gone far beyond Darfur.  It’s really created for the first time in this country a large and growing public constituency against genocide.  There are new groups starting all the time.  A recent one is called Enough.  It is designed to call attention to crimes of genocide around the world and to mobilize early public opposition to genocide.  That opposition has to target itself on governments and on the U.N., the only organizations that can take action against genocide.

But there is now, particularly in college campuses and particularly among human rights groups all around the world, a new focus on what genocide is, how often it occurs, and how negligent, how negligent our government and other governments have been in working to stop genocide.  This again is happening because people have decided to speak out to save lives.  But it’s not an easy thing to stop and it’s not something that can happen quickly.  It requires a great deal of patience, and a great deal of organizing, and a great deal of working with other organizations, and that’s what we’re doing now in the Save Darfur Coalition to target the genocide there.

Now I’m going to contrast that very dramatically with what’s happening in Iraq.  The Iraq situation, as a displacement crisis, is in many respects much worse, twice as bad in terms of numbers than the Darfur crisis.  As I said, 4.7 million people have left their homes in Iraq, 4.7 million.  They’re leaving at the rate of 60,000 a month and the rate is accelerating, not declining.  It’s received much less attention than the Darfur crisis and I’d like to just discuss why because any type of advocacy succeeds or fails to the extent that the public identifies with the problem, to the extent that the public understands what the problem is and mobilizes to solve that problem.

So a public context for advocacy is extremely important.  Cultivating that context through the Internet, through the media, through meetings like this, is also hugely important.  People have to understand what’s happening and they have to understand that they can do something to change the course of events.  The public context for Iraq clearly is much more complex, much more complex than Darfur.  Darfur, there is a group of Arabs killing a bunch of African tribesmen, and it’s happening in another country.  It seems clear and we ought to do something about it.

Iraq is a problem that is at some level created by ourselves.  The violence in Iraq is Iraqi versus Iraqi violence.  It’s not American versus Iraqi violence, but it’s been triggered by what happened and what was set in motion by our invasion.  So it’s a much more tricky, difficult political situation.

In Darfur, we have a president and a congress who have called it genocide, who have worked very hard to call attention to it, who have met with advocates, who have appointed envoys to go to Sudan repeatedly to meet with the government to put pressure on the government for peace talks, who have kept it in front of the U.N. security council day in and day out, who are not taking that same position in regards to Iraqi refugees.  The president has not seen this as a problem.  It’s very difficult for him to recognize that the displacement within from Iraq is a problem because at some level it’s a concession that our policies aren’t working.  So it’s a politically difficult position for the president to be in. 

The second major difference here is that the Darfur refugees have been displaced into huge camps and these are very evocative.  They can be pictured.  You can understand what’s going on.  In Iraq it’s much different.  They’re all urban refugees.  They don’t have nearly the same visibility that the Darfuri refugees have.

And finally, people are – they want us out of Iraq and they’re not really interested in doing the one thing that needs to be done to help Iraqi refugees.  I mean, the two things that need to be done.  One, resettlement into the United States for those who qualify, and two, massive aid to the countries hosting these refugees, mainly Syria and Jordan.

So legislation has been passed.  We generated a lot of publicity to the problem.  We called it, as the citation said, “The world’s fastest growing displacement crisis last year.”  We got front-page news.  We’ve gotten senate hearings.  We’ve gotten legislation.  The State Department has set up a task force but we’re still not moving fast enough.  Sweden will accept ten times more Iraqi refugees this year than the United States will.  Think about it, Sweden, ten times more refugees for resettling.  So there’s still a huge problem here, both in Darfur and in Iraq.

I just want to leave you with one thought.  By working on these problems you can help solve them.  You didn’t come to Exeter to be a passive bystander.  You came here to act.  You came here to change the world.  You came here to speak out and to save lives, and you can do that.  You can do that by following these events very closely in the news and on the web.  Go to my website, Refugees International, Human Rights Watch, any one.  Find out what’s going on.  Take a stand.  Figure out what your view is, take a stand.

Every candidate is going to come through Exeter in the next several months.  Ask them.  What are they doing about human rights abuses in Darfur?  What are they doing about Iraqi refugees?  You can do this.  You can speak out.  You can save lives.  Thank you very much.

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