Genocide Olympics Under Spotlight -- Changing the Rules of the Games /
NYTimes
-- Micky's HO : China got what it wanted : The attention of the world,
now the whole world is watching. . . . . :-) :-) --
The New York Times
March 30, 2008
Changing the Rules of the Games
By ILAN GREENBERG
On a morning in mid-February, the four staff members of Dream for Darfur
sat in silence in what they call their war room, contemplating posters
of Beibei the Fish and her four fellow Olympic mascots taped to the
walls. In this cramped office in a shared space on the 16th floor of a
downtown Manhattan Art Deco building, Beibei smiled welcomingly, as did
Jingjing the giant panda, Huanhuan the red Olympic flame, Nini the green
swallow and Yingying the horned orange Tibetan antelope: anime-style
drawings that regardless of name appear strikingly the same, Medusa hair
fused on teddy-bear faces with little-girl expressions. Once the Summer
Games begin in Beijing on Aug. 8, Chinese Olympic officials plan to sell
millions of the mirthful mascots; the Chinese government has planted
them everywhere in the country, hanging like religious icons from the
rearview mirrors of Beijing taxis, greeting guests as stuffed toys atop
hotel check-in desks and buzzing above city skylines on huge billboards
like hovering fairies.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Jill Savitt, Dream for
Darfur’s executive director, as she scanned the posters, “but these
cartoon creatures creep me out.” Scattered on the floor around her were
boxes overflowing with Dream for Darfur’s own media salvo: white
T-shirts emblazoned with “Genocide Olympics?”
Savitt, a peripatetic, hyperarticulate 40-year-old human rights
activist, is the mind behind a long string of organizations conducting
campaigns to pressure China to change its policies by threatening to
tarnish this summer’s Olympic Games. Dream for Darfur orchestrates a
coalition of the believing ― N.G.O.’s committed to ending the continuing
violence in Sudan, but also groups concerned with government abuses
inside China; Olympic athlete associations; organizations concerned
about Tibet or China’s influence in Burma; and a spindly archipelago of
other China-related causes. “We are happy to walk into space that’s been
created by the Darfur people, because they have created something
fresh,” says Mary Beth Markey, vice president for advocacy at the
International Campaign for Tibet in Washington. “It’s been opportunistic
for us.” But while Savitt’s many allies have adopted her strategy, Dream
for Darfur still has just one goal: to convince China’s government that
the Games are imperiled unless it halts its support for Sudan’s regime.
“China,” Savitt told me proudly, “is looking at the entire world calling
its cherished games the ‘Genocide Olympics.’ ” Nonetheless, shaping
world opinion is a tall order, especially with a staff of four; and the
Olympics is not as easy a target as it might appear. Who isn’t rooting,
at some level, for a successful Olympics, a precious two weeks set aside
for idealism and newly minted heroes? Aren’t the Games meant to eclipse
issues of the moment, aspiring to something universal and transcendent?
Who would want to tarnish that? Why would anyone want to ruin such a
good party?
“People say there are a lot of problems in the world, so why single out
Darfur and why target China?” Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan
borough president who is now head of the American Jewish World Service,
told me recently in her Manhattan office. “But this is the first
genocide, since the word was coined, where it was defined as genocide by
the American government while it has been happening,” she added,
referring to Colin Powell’s statement in 2004 that the Darfur killings
were indeed a genocide and a Congressional resolution making the same
designation. Messinger is one among perhaps three dozen professional
political operatives and freelance agitators who have collaborated
closely behind the scenes with the Dream for Darfur team, participating
in strategy sessions and connecting Savitt with larger political
networks. “Darfur is singular,” Messinger told me. “China is the reason
Darfur is happening. And it is happening now. There is nothing fast
about the killing in Darfur.”
For those on board with Dream for Darfur, connecting the dots between
the Summer Games and hundreds of thousands of African corpses is not
much more complicated than that. The brief against China is by and large
uncontested (except by China): the Sudan government buys its weapons
from China with the foreign currency it makes from selling China its
oil. China, meanwhile, protects Sudan from excessive attention in the
United Nations Security Council. “The Olympics is a unique lever with
the Chinese, and we’re not going to get another one ― it ain’t happening
again,” Savitt said one morning in January. (She has met five times with
Chinese diplomats, who each time, Savitt says, use the opportunity to
explain just how much the Chinese people like the Olympics and dislike
street demonstrations.) Now every form of opposition to the Beijing
government seems to have its Olympic angle; the repression of Tibetan
protests earlier this month, for example, immediately led to calls for a
boycott of the Games
But Savitt is keenly aware that her approach has to be nuanced, and in
her speeches she is careful to say that she is a fan of the Games and
that her organization is against a boycott. In a recent conference call
with other activist groups, she quickly shot down a suggestion to
publish a newspaper op-ed essay asking President Bush to skip the
opening ceremonies. “He’s not going to do that, and I’m not in the
business of asking for things I know I’m not going to get,” she snapped.
The message to Olympic athletes has been so nuanced that it verges on
abstruse: they should speak out on human rights issues but steer clear
of politics; opposing genocide demands the ultimate in moral outrage
from everyone, yet athletes shouldn’t jeopardize their medals. Speaking
at a Dream for Darfur rally on Feb. 12 outside the Chinese Mission to
the U.N., the Canadian Olympic swimmer Nikki Dryden (1992 and ’96) put
it like this: “China sullies everything the Olympics stands for because
of what it allows to happen in Darfur, but I would never ask athletes to
go outside their comfort zone.”
Savitt’s message to corporate sponsors is less ambivalent but in some
ways trickier. “No company wants to be the first whale to spout” is how
she put it to me. Dream for Darfur asks that the major sponsors like
McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft and Volkswagen take very small but
potentially significant actions: to meet privately with Chinese
officials to express concern over Darfur, for example, or to take a
symbolic stand by calling publicly for officials from Sudan who have
been accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal
Court to be banned from attending the Games. “These companies aren’t
pushing guns in anyone’s faces” in Darfur, says Ellen Freudenheim, a
consultant working on corporate outreach for Dream for Darfur. “We have
to be careful in how we frame this. They are not directly responsible.
Yet the morality is, You are complicit when you do nothing to try to
stop genocide when you can.”
Savitt says that the sponsors are starting to take notice. Even
executives at Coca-Cola have privately expressed anxiety about their
association with the Games, according to Minky Worden, a veteran China
specialist at Human Rights Watch. (On Tibet, Lenovo, the Chinese
computer giant, recently said it was following the conflict there “with
concern and regret.”) “Everything all these groups are doing has massive
popular support from inside China, which isn’t understood here,” says
Worden, who speaks fluent Cantonese and is focused on internal Chinese
issues ― like migrant-worker rights and press freedoms ― and holding the
Chinese government accountable for the promises it made to the
International Olympic Committee in 2001. “Here is the thing: our demands
for internal human rights are not something that Chinese people don’t
want, nor are they anything the Chinese government hasn’t explicitly
promised to do. We’re pushing an open door. These companies are making a
huge mistake in thinking the Chinese respect them for saying what they
think they want to hear. Just the opposite. The Chinese government
respects foreigners who repeatedly and reliably tell them the truth. How
hard is it really for G.E. or Microsoft to push for something that the
Chinese government already said it is receptive to doing?”
While the messaging to athletes and corporate sponsors is articulated
diplomatically, Savitt’s overall campaign to bend the government of
China to her demands remains straightforward. “Now we can really begin,”
she said with a wide smile on the day in mid-February when Steven
Spielberg resigned as a creative consultant for the opening ceremonies.
The actress Mia Farrow, who has visited the greater Darfur region eight
times and says that she may move permanently to that part of Africa when
her youngest child, now 14, gets a little older, had originally
identified Spielberg as a target. Farrow communicates daily with Savitt
and works on nearly every aspect of the campaign. She popularized the
Genocide Olympics slogan in an opinion column ― written with her son
Ronan Farrow, a 19-year-old Yale law student ― in The Wall Street
Journal a year ago. Farrow had decided that for the director of
“Schindler’s List” to have a role in China’s Olympics was unacceptable;
she called him a “key collaborator.” She and Savitt relentlessly
criticized Spielberg. He didn’t respond to their requests for a meeting;
Farrow said she heard from back channels that he was feeling the heat
but that he doubted fate would hand him “his Lillian Hellman moment,”
referring to the playwright’s refusal in 1952 to name names before the
House Un-American Activities Committee. And then Spielberg changed his
mind, saying his “conscience will not allow me to continue business as
usual.”
Spielberg’s withdrawal from the Olympics lifted Dream for Darfur from a
low in its campaign. (Admittedly, the publication that same day of an
open letter signed by nine Nobel Peace Prize winners urging China to
take action in Darfur also lightened spirits somewhat.) Dream for Darfur
was getting little in the way of news coverage, and attempts to get the
International Olympic Committee to hold China to account for
Olympic-related promises had failed. “The I.O.C. expressly and
repeatedly told Human Rights Watch in January that it will not speak in
public about human rights abuses in China,” says Worden. Days before,
Savitt had told me she thought she was losing. “Darfur is getting
worse,” she said one evening as we walked to the subway on which Savitt
commutes to Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and their
8-year-old son. “More people are dying, not less. It’s not like we can
say, ‘Well, at least we made some difference in these people’s lives.’
Either there is security on the ground in Darfur or there isn’t. There
is nothing we can achieve less than this that means anything.”
Many of the corporate sponsors were also refusing in February to meet
with Farrow, who travels with a MacBook containing her PowerPoint
presentation ― an affecting narrative of grim statistics and photos she
snapped of displaced women and orphaned children with dancing eyes.
Darfur remains to many an obscure, opaque conflict, and Farrow’s slide
show is a powerful instrument of communication in the Olympic campaign.
Weaving statistics (“2.5 million displaced people”) with personal
stories of encounters with the people in her photos (“this child had
lost her entire family, yet she was able to laugh and laugh”), she
unleashes the presentation on TV chat shows and on her friends, like
Barbara Walters, whom Farrow is currently lobbying. In the car on the
way to a radio interiew, Farrow told me she wanted Walters to include
Farrow’s plan for a “Live From the Camps” broadcast as a regular feature
on Walters’s popular daytime gabfest, “The View.” “Live From the Camps”
is envisioned, as the name suggests, as a live broadcast of Farrow from
inside one of the camps housing Darfur refugees, to be transmitted as an
alternative to watching commercials during the Olympics.
Dream for Darfur is also giving a report card to corporate sponsors
rating their actions on Darfur. Those who earn lower than a C will be
the focus of demonstrations at their offices beginning next month. And a
“Turn Off/Tune In” campaign will ask viewers of the Olympics to turn off
the ads of flunking sponsors and to watch Farrow’s broadcast from
refugee camps.
“From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand
cuts,” Savitt says. “China thought it would only face a ham-fisted
boycott. It is getting something more sophisticated, more insidious.”
The Spielberg news came as Savitt and Farrow were speaking at a sidewalk
news conference in Midtown Manhattan. It was freezing cold, and Farrow’s
hands froze tight while speaking into a bank of cameras. Savitt returned
to the office to find messages from dozens of news outlets requesting
interviews. Ben Cohen, the Ben in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, called with
his congratulations. Cohen came to New York in February to meet with
Dream for Darfur to offer his resources. Cohen said he would lend Dream
for Darfur his three mobile billboard trucks, then on loan to the Obama
presidential campaign. “And I told Jill and Mia that I would like to
focus on getting the attention of the corporate sponsors and work on
pre-emptively branding the Olympic mascots,” Cohen said to me from his
cellphone in Vermont. “I’m interested in running some sort of campaign
that introduces these little guys to the world as ‘Looks cute ― supports
genocide.’ There was a time at Ben & Jerry’s ― we were still a small
company ― we were going up against Pillsbury, who owned Ha"agen-Dazs. We
ended up attacking the Pillsbury doughboy. And we won.”
In January 2007, an English professor named Eric Reeves went to
Washington to propose, for the first time, a large-scale Beijing
Olympics campaign at a meeting of Save Darfur, an umbrella group of some
180 organizations concerned with the violence in Sudan, ranging from the
N.A.A.C.P. and Amnesty International to Yeshiva University and the
Affiliation of Christian Engineers. Reeves, a 6-foot-5 tenured professor
at Smith College with an effulgent personal presence who speaks in
fluid, often lyrical paragraphs, had spent the previous nine years
working on Sudan issues ― publishing more than 200 newspaper and
magazine articles; writing a book called “A Long Day’s Dying” that
comprehensively tallied the years of killing; sending thousands of
e-mail messages to politicians; supporting human rights workers on the
ground; and browbeating diplomats to do something about Darfur. Reeves,
an expert on John Milton and lately an investigator into the medieval
origins of modern reading habits, crisscrossed New England to speak on
college campuses and to meet with journalists, government officials and
U.N. diplomats. He began, mostly from a desktop computer in his restored
Victorian home in Northampton, Mass., an ultimately successful campaign
to pressure international companies; at the same time, by his count,
some 80 universities and 22 states have divested from Sudan.
But at the Save Darfur meeting that January, Reeves’s Olympic proposal
was immediately shot down as uninformed. “Save Darfur was interested in
selling bracelets and in consciousness-raising,” Reeves says. “Let’s
remember that Sudan has more than $25 billion in external debt. The
country only survives because of help from certain foreign governments.
I didn’t quite storm out, but I left. And that’s when I met Jill, who
ran out after me.”
Over the next three months, Savitt, along with her colleague Nicky
Lazar, discussed the idea with Reeves. Savitt had a comfortable senior
position with an establishment human rights organization called Human
Rights First. “I go a lot by intuition, and I knew this couldn’t just be
me, couldn’t just be viral,” Reeves says. “Jill and Nicky wanted to do
it, but they were cautious, too cautious. They were timid in their
presentations, and we got turned down for funding.”
Around the same time, Savitt and Reeves connected with Humanity United,
an unusual grant-making organization in Redwood City, Calif.,
underwritten by Pam Omidyar, the wife of the founder of eBay, Pierre
Omidyar. It focuses on financing efforts to stop contemporary slavery
and mass atrocities around the world and is committed to spending $100
million over five years. The organization takes its cue from Silicon
Valley’s famed tolerance for failure, according to Randy Newcomb,
Humanity United’s executive director. He says his strategy is to make
big bets on game-changing ideas, a philosophy that “at best annoys the
elite policy community; at worst, it threatens them.” Newcomb was
talking on the phone from Richard Branson’s Caribbean estate, where he
was participating, along with Nelson Mandela and Peter Gabriel, in a
conference on conflict resolution. Newcomb drew a long breath and
changed his tone: “But frankly, where were they? Where has the
traditional foreign-policy establishment been in pressuring China in
relation to the Olympics about Sudan? A lot of people tell me that we’re
wasting our money on this kind of long-shot campaign. But our ethos is
the willingness and ability to take a greater risk for the ultimate
yield that will come from that risk. We aren’t saying that we do things
without rigor. But we’re willing to absorb greater risk.”
Last spring, Humanity United wrote Dream for Darfur a check for
$500,000. The financing followed publication of Farrow’s “Genocide
Olympics” article ― Reeves and the actress were already closely
collaborating. “Now we had a campaign, a phrase and a target,” Reeves
says. As Ruth Messinger explained to me: “Maybe China’s vulnerability on
the Olympics is starting to look obvious to people now. But the amazing
thing about this campaign ― and the genius of Jill and Eric and Mia ―
was in making the connection. They were the first and for a long time
the only ones to make it.”
Late last month, Savitt arranged a meeting with M+R Strategic Services,
a national consultancy specializing in high-tech campaigning that
happens to have its New York offices in the same building as Dream for
Darfur. The goal was to gather advice on how to better focus the
campaign and to come up with a plan to galvanize a grass-roots
insurgency. She asked the consultants what actions to take consistent
with her resources and size. Michael Ward, who consulted for Savitt when
she was at Human Rights First, suggested making use of existing
databases of activists, sending out mass e-mail messages frequently and
leveraging free-marketing venues like social-networking Web sites.
“Facebook should be the place,” he advised.
“O.K.,” Savitt said, looking pointedly at her staff, Allison Johnson and
James Dunham, both in their mid-20s.
Savitt next asked for advice to give Ben Cohen for his jihad against the
Olympic mascots. “Tell him to keep his message short,” Ward said. “The
message here isn’t hard: Genocide bad; China helping.”
Looking over a list of Olympic sponsors, Ward advised Savitt to
streamline her targets: “Choose two or even one company and hammer it.
Everyone had sweatshops but it took that woman” ― referring to Kathy Lee
Gifford ― “to make it real. McDonald’s is a phenomenal target; they are
so retail. Johnson & Johnson is less of a brand and therefore less
useful. Same goes with General Electric.”
“O.K.,” Savitt said. “But then we have to give up on my crazy
bumper-sticker idea. She jumped to a white board and wrote “(GE)nocide.”
She looked at Ward and deadpanned, “The only problem is G.E. isn’t
actually responsible for any genocide”
“That’s an issue,” Ward said with a smile.
By the end of February, indications that the Olympic campaign was making
inroads with Chinese government officials began to surface in negative
form: the Save Darfur coalition met with F.B.I. agents to discuss what
appeared to be cyberattacks originating in China. Around the same time,
curious e-mail messages sent in Savitt’s name began popping up in the
in-boxes of people Savitt had previously written: “Dear (name of
recipient),” began the tersely worded messages. “There is no link
between Darfur and the Olympics. Best Wishes, Jill Savitt.” Meanwhile,
e-mail messages actually written by Savitt failed to arrive at their
intended destination.
Earlier this month, China sent a special envoy to Sudan, Liu Guijin, a
senior diplomat. “Since last May, I have visited Sudan four times,” Liu
told reporters. “In the future, if it is necessary I will pay more
visits. We have a good relationship with Sudan, we have some advantages
in talking to Sudan, so we should use this as leverage.” Then Liu said
something no Chinese official has ever said in the past: “We will
persuade them in a direct way to work with the international community
and be more cooperative,” he told reporters, adding that “concerning the
Olympic Games, any advice or comments, even if it contains
misunderstandings or criticism, we are open to and welcome this advice.
“We are willing to listen to any comments that contain reasonable
elements,” he went on to say, but warned that “for those few who attempt
to tarnish the Olympic Games on the pretext of issues totally unrelated
to the Olympics, like the Darfur issue, we are firmly opposed to such
attempts.”
Savitt was floored; it seemed that they were getting under China’s skin.
“It’s stunning,” she wrote in an e-mail message to me. The same week,
Dream for Darfur began developing a more focused message to Olympics
sponsors ― several of which had now agreed to meet with Farrow ― asking
them to publicly call on the United Nations to fully deploy, at long
last, the authorized multinational force in the Darfur region, with
China taking the lead.
Dream for Darfur was now viewing the corporate sponsorship part of the
campaign as more crucial than before. A significant point of leverage
that could tip the balance: Olympic broadcasters and corporate sponsors
account for 87 percent of Olympic revenue. Microsoft, which is poised to
become an even bigger player in China if its acquisition of Yahoo goes
through, responded in a written statement that the company is “shocked
and horrified by the violence and human rights violations in Darfur.”
The company further “commend[ed] Dream for Darfur and other
organizations for their leadership in casting a spotlight on this
atrocity and the need for immediate international resolution.
Governments and international organizations ― the United Nations chief
among them, as well as humanitarian relief organizations ― will need to
continue to work together locally and globally to address the problems
in the Sudan. Microsoft will continue to support these organizations in
their mission through technology assistance and other resources.”
Sponsors of the torch relay that began last week, which include
Coca-Cola and Lenovo, are especially vulnerable. The relay will traverse
Tibet, where in mid-March police cracked down on protesters, including
monks, leading to at least 16 deaths. Indeed, the Tibetan conflict is
threatening to supercede Darfur as the driver of the Olympic campaign.
Given the recent violence, Farrow is considering backing groups like
Reporters Without Borders in attacking heads of state like Gordon Brown
and George W. Bush, pressuring them to skip the opening ceremonies to
signal lack of support for China’s policies. The way some activists see
it, the opening ceremony is distinct from the rest of the Olympics and
fair game for a boycott. But it is also possible that the Tibet
situation could deteriorate to a point where the Darfur activists will
feel they have no choice but to go along with a boycott.
“The conventional wisdom you continue to hear, in articles that are
still coming out today, is that these advocates are great, God bless
them, but they are misled, they are making the wrong calculation that
China is going to move,” says Sharon K. Hom, executive director of Human
Rights in China, a leading political pressure group on China that
disseminates banned information to, and advocates on behalf of, a vast
network of reformers inside China, especially Chinese lawyers working
within the country’s court system. Hom criticizes this view as myopic
and credits the Dream for Darfur team for penetrating the Chinese
government bubble, a piercing that may lead to unanticipated political
consequences down the road in China.
For the human rights organizations concerned with reform inside China,
the key date is Aug. 25 ― the first day after the Olympics. Their
challenge is to try to institutionalize their reform efforts. “The
minute the Olympics end, we lose our leverage,” says Worden of Human
Rights Watch. “Somehow we have to preserve our gains and keep the
attention on external players. Private diplomacy alone does not work.”
According to Representative Sander M. Levin, “There is consensus in
Washington that China should live up to the commitments they themselves
made when seeking the Olympics.” Levin, who heads the joint
Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which has held hearings on
the Beijing Olympics, continued: “Their own statements about progress
and the spotlight of the Olympics disable some of China’s standard
repertoire of available responses to criticism. In this case, the
international spotlight is going to remain on long after the closing
ceremony.”
As summer approaches and excitement builds for the start of the Games,
no one knows how Chinese authorities will respond to an escalating
“Genocide Olympics” campaign abroad or the actions of agent provocateurs
at home. A security consultant working on the Olympics for a media
outlet told me that his chief worry is an isolated overreaction, perhaps
from a municipal police officer, that then spins out of control. “It
just takes one banner and one televised beating for everything to go to
hell,” he said. China watchers are deeply concerned about the
ramifications of China’s massive installation of surveillance technology
across Beijing. The city-to-city torch procession that is a lead-up to
the Games is also a potential powder keg. Groups representing aggrieved
minorities in China, like the Falun Gong religious sect and the ethnic
Uighurs in China’s western Xinjiang Province, hint at planned “street
actions” almost certain to spark an angry police response. The
torch-carrying route from Greece leads to the summit of Mount Everest to
Beijing ― and right through Tibet.
Dream for Darfur has also publicized that it has a “secret plan” for
drawing attention to Darfur during the Games but is staying mum on
details for security reasons, according to Savitt. Another reason for
the secrecy, however, might be that Darfur’s fate will be sealed months
before, in April or in May. In order for Dream for Darfur to reach its
goal of security on the ground for Darfurians by the start of the
Olympics, U.N.-sanctioned troops, with their vital helicopter support,
will need at least two months to mobilize. “You reach a point of
diminishing returns,” Reeves says. “If there is a point of ignition,
April is it.” For Dream for Darfur, the consequences of the big street
demonstrations planned during early April will be critical, especially
an extended rally planned in San Francisco. The coalition of Darfur
advocates wants these demonstrations, designed to garner maximum media
exposure, to set loose a contagion of critical perceptions about the
Olympics. The idea is that these demonstrations will put the words
“Genocide Olympics” on tens of millions of lips around the world. “The
Chinese had underestimated us,” Reeves says. “I seriously doubt they
will underestimate us in April.” No matter how it plays out, the last
day of the Olympics marks the end of existence for Dream for Darfur,
which will disband after the Summer Games wrap up on Aug. 24.
China has eased its opposition to Security Council action on Darfur,
including the joint United Nations-African Union force currently trying
to patrol Darfur. But China is not going to convince Dream for Darfur
that gradualism is the answer in Sudan.
Dream for Darfur may, however, have to wrestle with the price of its
success in leveraging China’s desire for a problem-free Olympics: other
organizations want to share the stage, and the momentum of Tibetan
activists could overwhelm the cause of Darfur. “The most climactic part
of our campaign will be during the Games themselves,” says Tenzin
Dorjee, the deputy director of a group called Students for a Free Tibet,
which claims 650 student chapters around the world. Dorjee, who works
out of New York, is planning a massive march from Dharamsala, India,
home to the Dalai Lama and a large exiled Tibetan population, to the
Chinese border. The group also plans to surreptitiously hang Free Tibet
banners on highly trafficked Chinese landmarks, as it did last year on
the Great Wall. “We plan to do more of the same: high-profile direct
actions in prominent places,” Dorjee says. “China will either have to
let these protests happen or crack down. And when it cracks down, it
shows its true colors. It gets unmasked. That’s our plan.”
Savitt maintains that “it’s actually great there are more voices in the
chorus ― it puts exponentially more pressure on China to do something.”
In her view, this will not necessarily detract from the Darfur cause.
“If there are going to be immediate changes having to do with the
Olympics,” she says, “I think it’s going to be with external issues ―
it’s more of a baby step. It’s one reason Darfur has gained so much
traction.”
Ilan Greenberg, an adjunct fellow with the Asia Society, reported on
Central Asia for The Times until last year. His last article for the
magazine was about Mikhail Saakashvili, the president of Georgia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/magazine/30olympics-t.html?_r=1&ex=1364529600&en...
