Only a block away the “Dream for Darfur” campaign, with actress Mia Farrow its most prominent face, had set up camp, trying to use the gathering to educate both the media and the athletes on the crisis. Over a glass of wine at the University of Chicago Club, Farrow, who has made eight trips to the Darfur region, told me, “People can read the realities and the statistics, but there’s another level of knowing when you see the human faces.” She and I talked about the two dreams: the Beijing Olympics and the Darfur campaign. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: All our Olympic athletes are suddenly being asked about Darfur. What can we reasonably expect of them? Mia Farrow: This has been a difficult moment for the athletes. We’re very connected with Team Darfur, our counterpart with the athletes headed by [speed skater] Joey Cheek. It is a matter of conscience—how far they can go and still be within the constraints of their positions as athletes on the American team.
Their individual consciences? Like the woman runner from India who refused to carry the torch. We would never have asked that of her, but it was her conscience.
It’s quite different when these athletes have trained all their lives to compete in the Olympics. And we understand and respect that. No one is calling for a boycott of the Olympic Games, at least not in my group. We are calling for a boycott of the opening ceremonies, and we’re not alone in doing so.
By the athletes, too? I don’t advise the athletes at all. But we’re calling for responsible world leaders not to attend the opening ceremonies, beginning with President Bush. We don’t care what he does next year, but this year he represents us. Yes, support our athletes, but no, not the propaganda. We understand there is a larger Monopoly game going on here in which China is a huge player. But does it come down to the billions being worth more than the human beings? This is a moment when we have to show that the ideals and values upon which this nation was founded and which we all want to believe are still realities for us as a nation—that it still means something.
Much of the world doesn’t believe that America has much moral ground to stand on. But there is an election going on, and we do have candidates that stand for something better: the hope that America may return to representing those values.
But there are parts of the world, certainly many parts of Africa, where China is viewed more positively than the United States. And so they should be. The United States has missed the boat when it comes to Africa. Wherever you go in Africa, in every country, there will be Chinese people and Chinese foundations and Chinese initiatives. We didn’t get on board, and China is there.
Doesn’t that weaken our ability to preach on Darfur? Nothing weakens our ability to look forward to what should be. Once we start looking backward, then we’re on very, very slippery ground. When I speak to officials from China, they talk about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and Iraq, and these are indefensible positions as far as I’m concerned. And I immediately cede the ground. “You’re right,” I say. “Let’s not waste precious time. We’re talking now about the people of Darfur.” And they say, “You’re not talking about what we’re doing for Darfur, all the wells we build.” I tell them, in America when we take a car to the mechanic we don’t tell him what’s right with it, we say what’s wrong with it.
Isn’t it tough for American athletes to speak out about China when they may then have to defend our country and its policies? It’s an agonizing position for them. We have to look at the IOC [International Olympic Committee], why they picked China and placed our athletes and all the athletes of the world in such a position. Apparently there were promises made to the IOC that China would change policies. How can Beijing host the Olympics at home while underwriting genocide in the Sudan?
Such contradictions are not unprecedented in Olympic history. We go right back to 1936 [hosted by Hitler in Berlin]. Shame on the IOC in their isolation in Lausanne [Switzerland]. Now they throw up their hands and say, “We’re not political. How did this happen? Oh, dear.”
It’s often repeated that in the face of criticism China gets its back up and is even more intransigent. I’ve heard that time and time again, and I don’t agree. [Farrow and her son] wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “The Genocide Olympics.” Everyone said, “Don’t push China. They’ll go the other way.” But within days of that piece China, for the first time, appointed an envoy to Darfur. They hired two international public relations firms to sanitize their image. And, most importantly, they did sign on to the new U.N. Resolution 1769 appointing 26,000 peacekeepers to the Darfur region. Before, they had abstained.
You talk about dreams for Darfur. What is a reasonable hope? We would like to see security on the ground in Darfur. We would like to see Khartoum stop the aerial and ground attacks on civilians and cease to obstruct the admission of the full and capable force of peacekeepers. I think that’s realistic and within Beijing’s sphere of influence. I think Darfur is low-hanging fruit for Beijing.
With the flare-up in Tibet, does that complicate the issue? No, just the opposite. When we see monks being shot, there is a visceral reaction. When my son and I wrote that “Genocide Olympics” piece, we saw the time frame between [February] and the Olympics as a window of opportunity for China—perhaps in our dreams—to reconsider its no-strings-attached policy in Darfur. That the Tibetans jumped into that window is really no surprise.
And it doesn’t divide people’s attention. I don’t think so. Do you?
I don’t think it matters what I think. It certainly doesn’t matter what I think either. I’m just an actress, a mother and a grandmother. But I’m a citizen. That an old lady and a teenager can write a piece that causes some action to be taken, then it says something about responsibility. It’s so easy to just toss things over because we’re overwhelmed by the money, the politics and the enormity of the situation. The encouraging thing is that we do have a voice. I keep going back to the words of the late Sen. Paul Simon. On the Rwandan genocide, he said if just 100 people had written or called in from each separate congressional district, we would have done something. Almost a million people were killed in 90 days there. That puts the responsibility squarely on each of us
