Hasnt anyone seen last Saturdays Strait Times LIFE? It carried
a report saying actually Hollywood played a critical role in
pressing Chinese authority to persuade Sudanese Government of
accepting the UN peacekeepers. It seems the decision has arrived
right after the Chinese envoy traveled to Sudan:
Beijing yields - somewhat - to Hollywood pressure on
Darfur
By Helene Cooper
Published: April 13, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/13/news/darfur.php
WASHINGTON: For the past two years, China has protected the
Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed
for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the
violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior
Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese
government to accept a UN peacekeeping force. Zhai even went all
the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps - a rare event for
a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business
and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries
how to conduct internal affairs.
Why? Credit goes to Hollywood - in particular, to the actress Mia
Farrow and the filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the
2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups
appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the
Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the
killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed
too concerned about.
Farrow, a UN good-will ambassador, has played a crucial role,
starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the
"Genocide Olympics" and calling on corporate sponsors and even on
Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to
exhort China publicly to do something about Darfur.
In a March 28 opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, Farrow
warned Spielberg that he could "go down in history as the Leni
Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games," a reference to a German
filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.
Four days later, Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of
China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking Beijing to use
its influence in the region "to bring an end to the human suffering
there," according to Spielberg's spokesman, Marvin Levy.
China soon sent Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a
classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike in a
vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years
of diplomacy could not.
Groups focusing on many issues, including Tibet and human rights,
have called for boycotts of the Games next year.
But none of those issues have packed the punch of Darfur, where at
least 200,000 people - some say as many as 400,000 - mostly
non-Arab men, women and children, have died, and 2.5 million have
been displaced, as government-backed Arab militias called the
janjaweed have attacked the local population.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has repeatedly refused American,
African and European demands that he allow a UN peacekeeping force
to supplement an underequipped and besieged African Union force of
7,000 soldiers which has been trying, with dwindling success, to
restore order in Darfur.
"Whatever ingredient went into the decision for him to go, I'm so
pleased that he went," Farrow said in a telephone interview about
Zhai's trip. She called the response from Beijing
"extraordinary."
In describing Spielberg's decision to write directly to the Chinese
leader, the filmmaker's spokesman said that while Spielberg
"certainly has been aware of the situation in Darfur," it was "only
recently that he became aware of China's involvement there."
At a news conference Wednesday, Zhai called people who wanted to
boycott the Games "either ignorant or ill natured." But he added
that "we suggest the Sudan side show flexibility and accept" the UN
peacekeepers.
In closed-door meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not
want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American
and European officials said.
In an e-mail message Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy
in Washington warned anew against such linkage. "If someone wants
to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her
fame, he/she is playing a futile trick," the spokesman, Chu
Maoming, wrote.
