Ex-U.N. official urges humanitarianism
When Mukesh Kapila left Rwanda, blood was dripping down the walls of churches, and he had to walk carefully in the streets to dodge the bodies.
“That’s my memory from 1994,” he said in a rousing talk to a crowd Thursday night at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe before he signed his book, “Against a Tide of Evil.”
As a former official of the United Nations, the British government and Red Cross and Red Crescent, Kapila has experience in more than 130 countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Sudan.
He noted this year is the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the killing in Darfur, which he described as “the world’s most successful genocide. Look into history. A single mass atrocity hasn’t lasted that long.”
The Holocaust lasted six years, the Rwanda mass murder 100 days.
But no matter the length, it’s an atrocity, he said.
“Acrime against humanity in one place is a crime against humanity everywhere for all time,” he said.
Kapila grew up in India, studied medicine at Oxford in England, gravitated toward public health and then went into social activism.
At one point, he led the U.N.’s largest country mission at the time as the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan. He told the audience that when he was in that job, a young woman traveled hundreds of miles from northern Darfur to see him. She managed to get past his security, which had been beefed up since his counterpart in Iraq was killed.
The woman, a teacher, was filthy and ragged. She sat on his floor and spilled her story of the pain and humiliation of being one of a million women who had been raped.
“She had not just been raped, but raped in front of her husband and sons and father,” Kapila said. Before she appeared, Kapila had heard of villages being burned and of hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing to neighboring countries.
When he met the woman, his feeling of helplessness and hopelessness gave way to inspiration, and that was his message to his audience at Changing Hands: If you feel overwhelmed at all that needs to be done, think of one person you can help.
“This woman didn’t want to be a victim,” he said. “She got up and came all the way to tell me what happened to her. She was confronting meas an individual. It’s individuals who fail, not institutions.”
He said that blaming institu- tions, such as the U.N., allows people to hide behind the institutions’ anonymous facade.
“The reason why we fail is not because the U.N. is weak. ... It’s about the failure of individual accountability, the failure of individual empathy. What can we do? We can create a society where empathy is the norm,” he said.
“When you are faced with vast stories of millions affected and it’s all too much, think of that one person,” he said. “That will be a stimulus for your actions.”
Kapila urged the audience to take a position, to get involved.
“It’s silence that kills,” he said. “It’s indifference that kills.”
He said the millions of refugees from Darfur don’t want charity but simply a means to stand on their own feet and take charge of their own destiny.
Kapila, now a professor of global health and humanitarian affairs at the University of Manchester, reminded the audience that individuals can make a difference, admonishing them, “Don’t underestimate your power.”
His visit was co-sponsored by the non-profit Darfur and Beyond, whose representatives encouraged the audience to ask U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., to co-sponsor House Resolution 1692, the Sudan Peace, Security and Accountability Act of 2013. That measure would require President Barack Obama’s administration to create a comprehensive U.S. strategy to help end the ongoing crisis in Sudan.
U.S. Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., is a co-sponsor.
For more information, go to darfurandbeyond.org and wtap.org, the site for the Welcome to America Project, a nonprofit that helps refugees in Phoenix.