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  • Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond
  • Samuel Totten
Don Cheadle and John Prendergast, Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. New York: Hyperion Books, 2007. Pp. 252, paper. $14.95 US.

Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond is a call to activism; it is not a scholarly work, and it does not present itself as such. What it does best is provide a solid overview of the anti-genocide activist movement that has been created as a result of the ongoing crisis in Darfur, Sudan. What it does not do, though it tries, is to offer any solid answers as to how genocide can be stopped. This is not surprising, given that the first author is a Hollywood actor (Don Cheadle starred in the feature film Hotel Rwanda). That said, a book of greater substance could have been expected from the second author, John Prendergast, a long-time associate of the highly regarded International Crisis Group and a former official in the Clinton Administration (1992–2000). But both authors are obviously concerned and passionate about the ongoing crisis in Darfur and are intent on doing their utmost to rally citizens to apply pressure on the United States and the international community to act whenever genocide’s ugly face appears on the horizon.

The book’s main title—Not on Our Watch—can be interpreted in at least four different ways. First, it is an assertion that the authors and many of the activists they write about (for that matter, anyone involved in the anti-genocide movement) will not remain silent when a genocide-like situation occurs. Second, it is a clarion call to citizens across the globe to join the current movement to bring an end to the crisis in Darfur. Third, it is a call to all people, no matter where they reside, to join the larger anti-genocide effort—an effort to end genocide once and for all.

Fourth, it is a dig at US President George W. Bush, who purportedly wrote—as he was about to take office, or early in his presidency—the words “Not on my watch” in the margins of a report about how the Clinton administration totally and callously ignored the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, allowing between 500,000 and 1 million people to be murdered by Hutu extremists. It is a dig at the fact that while the Bush administration declared, on 9 September 2004, that genocide had been perpetrated—and possibly continued—in Darfur, it simply referred the matter to the United Nations, and has subsequently done little more than watch as the Darfur crisis continues to this day (early 2009).

The authors correctly assert that “throughout American history, social movements have helped shape our government’s policy on a variety of issues” (13), but what they do not seem to appreciate (or do not want to admit, as it would interfere with their argument and their agenda) is that such social movements dealt with single self-contained national issues such as the emancipation of women, the Civil Rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement. Some, such as the anti-nuclear movement, had an international focus, but one has to question just how much good the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s did, given the nuclear arsenals that exist [End Page 139] around the world today: both the number of weapons in these arsenals and the number of nations belonging to the so-called nuclear club are slowly but inexorably growing.

The international anti-apartheid movement, on the other hand, was successful; but it took many, many years to finally break the spine of apartheid South Africa. The problem with approaching genocide from this perspective is at least twofold. First, genocide has the maddening tendency to pop up here, there, and everywhere, under different guises, in different circumstances, driven by vastly different antecedents, and undertaken by radically different actors. In other words, it is not the type of stationary phenomenon that apartheid was, being located solely in South Africa and thus easily zeroed in on because it was in one...

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