General Session recap: Mia Farrow on Darfur: “This is a seminal moment for us as human beings”
October 21, 2007
In April 2004, Mia Farrow’s life took a dramatic turn. She was reading an op-ed by Samantha Power in The New York Times that described the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
“It was one of those knee-buckling moments,” said Farrow, a General Session speaker Sunday afternoon at the 2007 PRSA International Conference in Philadelphia. “I called UNICEF and said, ‘Can you get me into the Darfur region?’” Since then, Farrow has been a tireless advocate, raising awareness of the genocide occurring in Darfur as well as in Chad and the Central African Republic, areas where she said more than 400,000 people have been killed in the last four years. She has visited the region seven times. She’s returning next month.
“I talked with mothers whose children were shot through their backs or torn from their arms and [killed with bayonets] before their eyes.
“It was a lot to process, but I knew it was incumbent upon me to do my utmost to bring about an end to what I had witnessed. My family motto is, ‘With knowledge comes responsibility,’” said Farrow, a mother of 14 children, 10 of whom are adopted. “Now I have this immense knowledge and the weight of it has eclipsed everything in my mind, except my children. It’s that huge.”
Long a humanitarian activist, the 62-year-old Farrow, who has starred in more than 40 movies, most notably “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Great Gatsby” and “Hannah and Her Sisters,” had been working with UNICEF to help promote the cause of eradicating polio, a disease that she survived as a child. After reading the op-ed in the Times, Farrow said she scoured the Internet for information about Darfur. She didn’t find much. “It was simply beneath the media radar. And that is pretty disgraceful.” (For that reason, she launched miafarrow.org, a Web site that she updates with the latest news related to the genocide in Darfur and surrounding areas.)
Her passionate 45-minute General Session talk before 3,200 PR professionals and students included images and stories from her seven trips to Africa. She showed dozens of photos that she took herself. A mournful soundtrack of African music accompanied the presentation. She showed before-and-after photos of a village that was first bombed by Sudanese government planes then gutted by the government-backed Janjaweed Arab militia. She showed the hopeless condition of the refugee camps that nearly 2.5 million Darfur residents now call home. She showed a photo of a girl who she said had been raped by 30 Janjaweed soldiers. The soldiers had extinguished their cigarettes on her face.
Farrow told the story of Abdullah Idris Zaid, a 27-year-old father she met in November 2006. It was in a tiny hospital in Eastern Chad. His eyes had been gouged out by the Janjaweed. She saw him again this past July. He knew that he was not safe from the Janjaweed. “They will come again after the rains,” he told her. “If hell has a waiting room, that’s it: Mr. Zaid sitting blindly waiting for [the Janaweed] to come again. Beyond terror.”
Farrow and her 19-year-old son Ronan, a student at Yale Law School, have recently written a series of op-eds that have appeared in several major dailies, including The Wall Street Journal. In an op-ed from this past March 28 in the Journal, the two condemned the Chinese government for giving billions of dollars in aid to the Sudan in return for access to the country’s plentiful oil fields, another topic that she discussed during her General Session speech.
“Darfur represents an opportunity for Beijing to create a positive impression -- and desperately needed favorable PR in anticipation of the 2008 Olympic games,” she said. “The Chinese have hired more than one prestigious international PR firm to clean up their image. But the words they are churning out about Darfur are simply that at this point. The undeniable fact remains that China continues to underwrite genocide and the immeasurable suffering of millions of human beings in Darfur.”
Farrow said that if Beijing elected to act rather than talk, there is plenty it could do, such as refuse to sell weapons to Sudan. It could insist that the Janjaweed be disarmed. “Even the threat of such actions would have an immediate effect,” she said.
In the end, Farrow challenged the attendees to do something about what is happening in Darfur, from supporting NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders to joining the Genocide Intervention Network. (Farrow has a list of action steps here.)
“This is a seminal moment for us as human beings,” she said. “Do we choose to be among the many or will we be among the few who care? And beyond caring, what action will we take?”
Comments
John Boffa says:
Mia Farrow's talk was compelling. However, she should have warned about the severe nature of the photographs early in her talk. Her warning only came just before the photographs appeared on the screen. I expect almost everyone in the room understood the seriousness of the situation in Darfur, without the extreme photos. This is a well-educated audience.
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