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Students are urged to do the ‘write’ thing on Darfur
NJJN Staff Writer
01.18.07



 

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Veteran television anchor Nick Clooney urged New Jersey high school students to spread the word about the genocide in Darfur and “let people know how urgent the situation is.”

Clooney, an activist for Darfur and father of movie star George Clooney, delivered the keynote speech at a daylong student media seminar on the crisis in Africa.

The Jan. 12 event, “Do the Write Thing,” was hosted by a coalition led by state and national Jewish organizations, including the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ (see Sponsors sidebar article below).

Held at Drew University in Madison, the event included workshops on writing, advocacy, and community organizing, most focusing on the plight of those languishing in refugee camps in southern Sudan and neighboring Chad.

An audience of 200 teenagers and their teachers — gathered together by a coalition that also included Christian, educational, civic, and activist organizations — sat rapt as Clooney spoke without text for nearly an hour.

Clooney and his son spent 10 days in the region last April.

Clooney recalled learning about “this ongoing horror” and wondering, “if this is such a big story, why isn’t it on the news? I thought it was a huge story that ought to be covered.”

Clooney acknowledged that personal issues and such gripping world crises as the war in Iraq may have put young people in this country on “compassion overload.”

Nevertheless, he urged that the slaughter in Darfur, led by militias supported by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, demanded the students’ and the world’s attention.

“The reason I am here is that I believe one issue to be more urgent than the others,” Clooney said. “These folks in Darfur are dying today. But we are not going to read about it tomorrow morning in the paper. You’ll have to go to page 19 if you’re lucky. You’re not going to see it on the network newscast. Other imperatives have sucked all the oxygen out of the news cycle, so that suddenly, another 10,000 a month dying doesn’t seem like much of a story.”

Helping the students make Darfur more of a story was the goal of a series of workshops led by local journalists and media professionals. They included Star-Ledger reporter Russell Ben-Ali; David Chen, the NJ bureau chief of The New York Times; and Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor-in-chief of New Jersey Jewish News.

Paul Winkler, executive director of the NJ Commission on Holocaust Education, led a workshop for high school teachers on using survivors’ testimony in advocacy. Such first-person narratives provide invaluable classroom resources, he said.

Winkler, whose co-presenter was Alana Cooper, associate regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s NJ region, remembered stories he had heard from a panel of survivors of the Nazi persecution of Roma, or Gypsies.

“I asked them, ‘What happened before the tragedy struck? What were some of the ways the genocide was carried out? Was there anybody left to care for you? Did anyone speak up?’”

Indeed, the students did hear from one survivor of the slaughter in Darfur. Adelbagy Abushanab, president of the Newark-based Darfur Rehabilitation Project, urged the students to “please keep in mind that sometimes we think like, ‘Oh, this is evil. What can I do?’ Each and everyone in the world counts, no matter how old or how young.”

The students and their teachers “were invited from public schools all over the state,” said Allyson Gall, executive director of the American Jewish Committee’s Metro NJ Area.

“You are a part of our history,” said Blanche Foster, executive director of the Darfur Rehabilitation Project. “We encourage you to really use this moment to make far more momentous occasions in the history of our country and certainly on behalf of the people of Darfur.”

Helping inspire the young conference attendees was one of their peers: Millburn High School student Eric Messinger, a cofounder of Help Darfur Now, a student organization.

“It is really so hard to spread word of the problem,” said Messinger. “Journalism is the main effort in really broadening the scope of understanding among everyone in the country. This conference today is a huge means of teaching other kids like me how to respond throughout our communities and reach out to anyone we can about Darfur. It is a really tragic event. This is not something we can overlook.”

The students were hushed as Clooney, in his keynote, recounted staggering statistics on the rape of Darfurian women by government-backed militiamen.

“The mathematics, the terrible calculus of genocide, is that rape is better than death,” said Clooney. “But of course, rape is itself genocide. And that is what’s happening now. That’s what is happening every day.”

Looking out at his young audience in the auditorium of Drew’s Science Building, he spoke urgently.

“Call your two senators. Call the newspapers, call the radio and television stations. Ask, ‘What’s going in Darfur? Don’t you know there are 400,000 people dead over there? Shouldn’t we be doing something about it? Isn’t that what America is about?’”

AMONG THE 17 sponsors of “Do the Write Thing,” the daylong program of student activism against the genocide in Darfur, were the American Jewish Committee’s Metro NJ Area, the Anti-Defamation League’s NJ Region, the Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, the Newark Branch of the NAACP, the Newark-North Jersey Commission for Black Clergy, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark.

Haunted by images

IN HIS SPEECH at the Jan. 12 “Do the Write Thing” gathering at Drew University, newsman Nick Clooney said he was haunted by a memory from his boyhood growing up in the small town of Maysville, Ky. He remembers, he said, “grainy black-and-white pictures of people in pajamas as thin as a pencil.”

He remembers thinking that the people in the photos “are going to die as soon as the camera goes off. What happened? Who are these people? It was the Holocaust. I had never seen anything like it.”

As news of the slaughter of the European Jews became known, said Clooney, words like “Auschwitz” and “Birkenau” became part of the language and, eventually, “Holocaust” did as well. “And we said to ourselves, ‘If we had known we would have stopped that.’”

More than 60 years later, the veteran reporter said he was haunted by another gripping image during his trip to Darfur last April.

“Of the 200 people we interviewed in the refugee camps of Chad and Darfur, one story keeps me awake at night,” he said, describing a woman with “a stoic face and a baby in her arms” who lost her six-year-old son as they both ran in flight from the killers, the Janjaweed militia. Clooney said the woman told him, “‘As we both ran for our lives, I called to my six-year-old and I did not hear another word.’ ‘Did you find him?’ I asked. ‘Parts of him,’ she said.”

The 74-year-old Clooney, a U.S. Army veteran, was an anchor at television stations in Lexington, Ky.; Cincinnati; and Salt Lake City and did stints as a television game show host and radio disc jockey.

In 2004 he ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for a seat in Congress.

In addition to being the father of actor George Clooney, he is the brother of the late Rosemary and Betty Clooney, popular singers of the 1940s and ’50s; the brother-in-law of the late actor Jose Ferrer; and the uncle of television actor Miguel Ferrer.

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