Sing after me: do they know it’s genocide?

from The Times Online

A new star-studded pop video highlighting the crisis in Darfur is the latest celebrity foray into world affairs. It’s not just posing, they can make a difference
Martin Wroe

Matt Damon holds up a plain white card that reads “Stop”. He turns over another card, “The Killing”. And another, “Now”. Archbishop Desmond Tutu follows suit: “Ceasefire”. “Now”. “Don’t Look Away”.

The actress Scarlett Johansson and supermodel Elle Macpherson reinforce the message with more starkly worded cards, as do rap superstar Kanye West and Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. Mick Jagger isn’t on camera, he’s behind it – famously careful about his fortune, he’s put up £25,000 to bankroll this first pop video to be shot in a refugee camp.

The crisis in Darfur, western Sudan, which has left 4m people living on humanitarian aid and 2m in camps, is about to depart the elite conversation of the dinner party for the mass audience of the dance floor.

As the vocals for the song Living Darfur, by the London-based hip-hop duo Mattafix, rise in volume, the camera scans the faces of boys playing football, mothers ironing and girls fetching water in plastic bottles. It is an incongruous location for a pop video – in the past four years more than 200,000 people have been killed in these camps in eastern Chad.

Living Darfur, featuring artwork from Chris Ofili, the Turner prize winner, is a high-powered and carefully orchestrated attempt by heavy-hitting celebrities to take the plight of the people of Darfur into popular mainstream culture.

While it will raise funds to support relief efforts, the prime goal is more ambitious – the latest example of the growing conviction of A-listers that the most responsible use of their fame might be to jump-start the flat battery of conventional politics.

“This is about the suffering of real people and raising awareness of the atrocities taking place every day,” explains Tutu, who is making his debut in a pop video. “Darfur is the world’s largest concentration of human suffering; it’s also entirely avoidable if people speak out.”

The release coincides with today’s Global Day for Darfur. Demonstrations in 50 countries are planned, ahead of next week’s opening of the United Nations general assembly. Marlon Roudette, one half of Mattafix, says only popular political pressure will bring an end to the crisis.

Since he visited Darfur last month, Roudette can now speak at first hand of the fear of living in a camp where many children are orphans, where many women have been raped and where it is often impossible to tell which side of the conflict many soldiers are on.

“When we saw barebacked militia with gun belts strapped on or rocket-propelled grenade launchers being lined up, we’d have to pull over and stop filming. Yes, it felt incongruous shooting a video in a war zone, but the song tries to capture the resource-fulness of the people in these camps despite everything that has happened to them,” Roudette says.

That the video is bankrolled by the famously fiscally conservative Jagger illustrates the remarkable celebrity network that can be harnessed when the cause is right. Roudette was initially approached by the human rights lawyer Jason McCue – Mr Mariella Frostrup – who linked him with Brendan Cox at Crisis Action, an organisation campaigning against armed conflict. Despite the promise of political agreement on a ceasefire between rival militias in Darfur, they were convinced that translating the political talk into action demanded greater popular awareness – cue music and the glitterati.

“We didn’t want to do Do They Know it’s Genocide?” says McCue. “But it needed to be upbeat and to show that the people in the camps need protection above everything. As I’ve no idea how you make a pop single I rang two of my mates in the music business, Mark Knopfler and Mick Jagger, and they did know.”

Jagger funded the video shoot in Africa while McCue called George Clooney, with whom he recently travelled to China to raise the situation of Darfur, to engage his even more star-studded BlackBerry.

“Don’t doubt the power of these people to put an issue in the public mind,” McCue says. “Darfur was unknown to most Americans until Clooney took it on.” He has just returned from the refugee camps: “What they tell you in the camps is that they want protection, they want the UN peacekeepers first and foremost.”

With a celebrity cast stretching from beauty to brains – from Macpherson to Tom Stoppard – the aim is to reach the broadest audience without trivialising the message. Celebrities, says Cox, “personalise a conflict in a way that newsreaders cannot”. The trick is to work with those who have authority and will commit to the time involved.

If the time is not completely past when soap stars will weep on cue at images of babies with distended bellies, a new breed of celebrity advocate may be eclipsing them. Damon, for example, the all-action star of The Bourne Ultimatum, talks more like a UN delegate than a Hollywood A-lister.

Peace is possible in Darfur, he says, if the international community demands an immediate ceasefire and provides the peacekeepers that “they have talked about for months”. He adds: “Once these conditions are in place and if the government of Sudan sticks to its agreements, we can finally talk about helping to rebuild the country and overcome the dreadful suffering and poverty in the region.”

Some will bill it as another dose of disaster porn or self-promotion, others, more seriously, will argue that celebrity-driven campaigning dumbs down complex political issues, hijacking the debate in search of headline-grabbing but short-lived solutions. Traditional development campaigners were furious at the access granted to Bob Geldof and Bono at the 2005 G8 meeting at Gleneagles – and scoffed when they apparently failed to make poverty history.

That’s missing the point, says Giles Bolton, who used to run Britain’s aid programme in Rwanda and is the author of Poor Story, a compelling study of “how good intentions have failed the world’s poor”. He says: “If some complain that not enough has changed they should be aware that even less would change without the coverage these celebrities bring to the issues. We can’t blame them when not as much change happens as we hope for.”

What Bono, Clooney or Damon show, with their well-briefed advocacy of the plight of the poorest countries, is that harnessing popular opinion can electrify a torpid political process. “No one but Bono would get access to the Oval Office or the US Treasury to hit them with the story of poor country debt or the Make Poverty History campaign. People like him and Clooney or Matt Damon or Angelina Jolie are genuinely interested in the issues. They are in this for the long term, they seem to realise that political change takes time,” Bolton says.

Critics of the celebrity do-gooders can sometimes overlook the small but boring print – politics can actually work. While poverty was not made history despite the celebrity overdrive of 2005, if you are one of 38m children in sub-Saharan Africa who now has a school place, or you live in one of the 22 countries that have had their debts cancelled, then poverty has actually retreated a little.

If one song and one video won’t be enough to stop the conflict in Darfur, says Macpherson, it can drive the cumulative political impact of growing public awareness – which is what can do it: “I can’t do anything directly to stop the killing in Darfur but I can say that I care about it and I want it to stop. If enough people say the same, politicians will have to do more to end the slaughter.”

Living Darfur by Mattafix is released today.
For more on Global Day for Darfur go to www.globefordarfur.org