Sudan Rally Turns Up Pressure on Investors

Speaking to crowd of more than 100 local college students at a candlelight vigil in Boston Common Friday evening, runaway Sudanese slave Francis Bok recounted the horrors of his decade-long experience in bondage, as protesters sought to draw attention to the human rights abuses of the Khartoum regime.

“For 10 years I was in captivity in Sudan, in the hands of a master who beat me every evening and every day,” Bok told the crowd. He praised the Bush administration’s effort to mediate an end to the civil war in the south of Sudan, which has left over 2 million dead.

But Bok and several other speakers said students must lobby American politicians and UN officials to put increased pressure on Khartoum, which thus far has refused to rein in the ongoing genocide in the western Sudanese region of Darfur.

Meanwhile, the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), which organized the rally Friday, is preparing to launch a “massive campaign” aimed at persuading Western investors to pull their money out of companies that do business with the Sudanese regime, said the group’s associate director, Jesse A. Sage ’98.

“The Sudanese government has access to your wallets,” Sage told the protesters.

He endorsed an effort spearheaded by two Harvard juniors to force the University into selling its estimated $3.8 million stake in PetroChina, a Beijing-based oil firm with extensive links to Khartoum.

As of yesterday afternoon, eight faculty members and 180 students had signed an online petition at www.harvarddivest.com, calling on the University to sell its 72,000-share stake in PetroChina.

“Act. Act now. Words are not enough,” Sage told vigil attendants, who struggled to kindle their flames as heavy November winds rolled off the Charles River. As the chilly gusts extinguished the protesters’ candles, Sage shouted, “It’s the fire inside you that’s so important.”

The rally occurred just blocks away from the Harvard Management Company’s headquarters, where the management company’s president, Jack Meyer, told The Crimson on Friday that divestment might have adverse humanitarian consequences by eliminating jobs for Sudanese civilians.

“I think people have to understand, at least in my view, that divesting is not an effective way to make social change,” Meyer said, at his 16th floor office on Atlantic Avenue.

Hours later, speakers voiced frustration with the United Nations’ persistent failure to take decisive action on Darfur. “For too long the UN has done nothing—appointed a commission to appoint a commission, conducted a study to conduct a study,” Sage lamented.

AASG has sought to prod the United Nations toward action by mounting letter-writing campaigns directed at representatives from countries that have blocked the Security Council from imposing economic sanctions on Sudan.

Bok told The Crimson after the rally that he was increasingly optimistic that the United States would pressure Khartoum in the wake of President Bush’s re-election last week. Bok said he has met the President twice in the White House, and said he felt that Bush was committed to ending the Sudanese genocide.

“I was so excited when he got re-election,” Bok said. “He can act. He means what he says.”

Bok, now an associate at AASG, came to the United States in 1999 after escaping from his Sudanese slave-masters. He emphasized that he was a runaway—not a “redeemed” slave. Bok expressed concerns about the practice of redemption, in which Western philanthropists help southern Sudanese families buy their relatives out of bondage. “Redemption would make the enemy rich,” Bok said in an interview after the rally.

But he voiced his admiration for the human rights activists who have traveled deep into Sudan as part of their redemption efforts.

Harvard’s Black Students Association co-sponsored Friday’s vigil in Boston Common. And a collection of students calling themselves the Darfur Action Group are planning a vigil on the steps of Memorial Church on Nov. 18. The vigil will cap a week-long “awareness for action” campaign, in which organizers will distribute green ribbons to students and faculty who write letters to politicians and UN officials urging intervention in the Darfur crisis, according to Bec Hamilton, a joint-degree candidate at Harvard Law School and Kennedy School.

Hamilton, who spent the summer working on resettlement efforts in southern Sudan, said she thought future generations would look at the Darfur situation in much the same way that students today view the Holocaust. “I know our grandchildren are going to look at us and ask, ‘what were you doing when that was happening?’”

—Zachary M. Seward contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.havard.edu.