Foreign policy isn’t often high on Raleigh’s agenda, but human rights activists across the state hope it garners attention soon.
The state Senate was set this week to receive a bill that requires the state’s pension fund to divest of investments in foreign companies that do business with Sudan.
If successful, the legislation would remove state employees’ $70 pension plan — the eighth largest pension fund in the United States — from companies that aid a government that activists say is complicit in the death and destruction in Darfur, a region in western Sudan where since July 2003 government-armed militias, the Janjaweed, have terrorized the populace.
The proposal already has passed the state House of Representatives, where it sailed through unanimously. Kerry Gorman, a Durham software developer who coordinates the all-volunteer N.C. Sudan Divestment Campaign, attributes that success to a massive call-in campaign fueled by religious organizations and student groups. (Most Charlotte colleges have student groups devoted to concern about Darfur.)
“We’re not really sure what we’re going to see in the Senate, to be honest with you,” says Gorman. “We’re very hopeful that things will be positive.”
Gorman founded the state divestment campaign after hearing about the horrors in Darfur, where the United Nations estimates more than 400,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes.
While civilian deaths may have declined recently, people are still being forced from their homes, according to a transcript of testimony earlier this month before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. More than 80,000 people arrived at refugee camps in the first two months of this year.
The numbers don’t convey the horrors, says one Charlotte man who returned a few months ago from a refugee camp of 50,000 people. “You see a lot of tired eyes, who have obviously been on the run for months, some of them years,” says David Johnson, a photographer and missionary whose book, Voices of Sudan, comes out in July.
Johnson’s work has taken him to more than a dozen countries other than Darfur, and he’s visited sites full of painful history, including Cambodia’s Killing Fields. “I’ve seen some of the worst things in the world,” he says. “But this is the worst I’ve ever seen by far.”
Many local governments across the United States have passed resolutions in support of divestment campaigns, and some folks have spoken privately of urging Charlotte-Mecklenburg officials to take such action. But Mecklenburg County Commission Chairman Jennifer Roberts says the board hasn’t been approached about Darfur.
Roberts, who teaches international relations at UNC-Charlotte, says she’s uncertain she would support such a move. She says economic boycotts often hurt the targeted country’s most vulnerable residents. “The powers that be, the governments, etc., are often the ones that gather the resources and are able to keep their standard of living high and make the rest of the country suffer,” Roberts says. “I just think that economic sanctions, while they make a good political point, are too often ones that hurt the poorest, and they often hurt women, they often hurt children.”
Roberts left her comments in a voice mail and was speaking about total divestment campaigns that would cut off food agencies and international aid groups. But Gorman says Darfur divestment campaigns have studied and learned from past economic boycotts — these actions would not cut out groups providing food and medicine. They would cut out companies that manufacture arms or produce oil. “Divestment campaigns not only seek to influence the government monetarily, but also by keeping (the issue) in the media, to keep the pressure on them,” Gorman says.
Such campaigns may not have changed Sudan officials’ actions toward their own people, but the movement definitely has had impact, Gorman says. She cites as evidence an eight-page advertisement that the Sudanese government bought in The New York Times in 2006. The ad, which according to several published accounts cost nearly $1 million, urged Americans to invest in companies that do business in Sudan.
U.S. law already prohibits domestic-based companies from doing business in the Sudan. Divestment efforts have been targeted at international businesses whose home countries impose no such sanctions.
More than 20 states have passed or are considering divestment-related legislation, according to the Sudan Divestment Task Force. And in November, N.C. Treasurer Richard Moore announced the decision to divest the N.C. Retirement System from nine companies he said provided monetary or military support to the Sudanese government. The assets totaled $24 million of the pension fund’s $70 billion, according to the task force.
“There’s horror there, and as a human being, it’s your moral obligation to stand up and shine a spotlight on this,” Gorman says.
To pre-order David Johnson’s book Voices of Sudan, in which all proceeds go to support Darfur projects, please visit www.silentimages.org.
On the Web:
karen.shugart@creativeloafing.com
This article appears in May 2-8, 2007.
