After Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World
Service, spoke on campus Thursday, the Daily Bruin sat down with
her to discuss her work in Darfur.
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Daily Bruin: Why did you personally choose to become
involved in Darfur?
Ruth Messinger: I work for an international development
organization that supports grassroots change in 200 different
organizations in 35 countries around the world. We also respond to
world emergencies, from the earthquake in Turkey, to the tsunami,
to Sudan, which is a man-made political crisis, but nevertheless
has created an emergency situation.
DB: Why do you think there is such an effort to address
world poverty right now with the Millennium Project?
RM: Well, because some people have taken it seriously, since it
turned out that some of the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund approaches didn’t in fact help poverty ““ and
arguably increased it.
And many countries have not been able to deal with vast numbers
of poor people, and that becomes a problem for the world in an era
of globalization. The fact that a billion people live on less than
$1 a day, and then there are people in the world who are not
literate, who don’t go to school ever, who have a lack of
access to clean water or sanitation means that the world needs to
address all these issues.
To the credit of Kofi Annan and the U.N., they’ve taken on
this serious effort to identify the goals for 2015, and to make it
clear that the world powers would not have to put in too much money
if it was all coordinated.
DB: What would it take for the United States to increase our
aid to one-half of 1 percent of our gross domestic product in aid,
as stated by the Millennium Project?
RM: Absolutely nothing. I mean, it’s a tiny amount of
money. All it would take is somebody different in the White House,
I’m afraid. It would take an effort to think it out and phase
it in. Nobody’s suggesting that any of these countries should
do it tomorrow. But none of these countries has adapted a strategy
““ actually, I hope Great Britain will adapt one over the next
few months ““ and we ought to be doing the same in the U.S. We
could do 0.1 percent now, 0.2 percent by next year’s budget,
and this is how we’ll progress to get it to at least one-half
of 1 percent by 2015.
DB: You mentioned that you considered the situation in
Darfur to be a genocide. Why do you think the United Nations has
not chosen to call the situation a genocide?
RM: Well, I’m not an international lawyer, and I
don’t think this is a useful place to focus attention. But
one reason is that to describe this as a genocide under the
Genocide Convention would trigger a whole set of specific responses
that I think the U.N. feels it is paralyzed and unable to make. The
United Nations said that it didn’t have sufficient evidence
of an intent to destroy another people, and I think this is faulty,
that there is such evidence.
DB: As students, what can we do to help the
situation?
RM: The major thing that students can do, the major thing that
anyone can do, is to understand that every single intervention
makes a difference. You can help by contributing a small amount of
money to a charity that’s properly rated and that you know
will spend the money in Sudan to feed more people. We’re
talking about people dying, so very small amounts of money properly
channeled can make a difference.
DB: What role should the United States take in resolving
this issue?
RM: Well, I think that really by virtue of our power and
strength in the world, America has to be in the forefront of
organizing other developed world powers to really work together in
this specific case to punish, sanction, embargo, and freeze the
assets of the government of Sudan until it stops the killing.
Interview conducted by Colleen Honigsberg, Bruin senior
staff.