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11
A
human wave
in support of the world’s most forgottenpeople is building. We’re not surfers, but we love howsurfers describe the perfect wave. The wave builds to a cre-scendo, you’re in awe of it, you approach and ride it, and itcarries you safely home to your destination. The formationof this human wave was not predicted. A decade ago, fewpeople even knew what a “Darfur” was, how our cell phonesdirectly contributed to making Congo the most dangerousplace in the world to be a woman or a girl, or who the “in-visible children” of Uganda were. Ten years ago, an eventregarding genocide or other crimes against humanity wouldhave attracted perhaps a dozen or so hardy souls, wearingtheir sandals and psychedelic t-shirts, prepared, if necessary,to break out into a stanza or two of “Kumbaya.”But today a strange and beautiful cocktail of hope, anger,citizen activism, social networking, compassion, celebrities,faith in action, and globalization are all coming togetherto produce the beginnings of a mass movement of people
chapter one
Enough Is Enough
Building a People’s Movement Against Genocide,Child Soldier Recruitment, and Rape as a War Weapon
12
The Enough Moment
against these crimes and for peace. And this is happeningat the very time that an American administration is pop-ulated by a number of people who have been the leadingelected officials to have stood up against genocide, childsoldier recruitment, and rape as a war weapon. We call thesheer possibility inherent in this confluence of factors theEnough Moment, and it means that our feeling that EnoughIs Enough might actually get translated into real action forchange.These are three of the great scourges of our world, of our time. Genocide, mass rape, and child conscription arethe most deadly and diabolical manifestations of war, withthe gravest human consequences imaginable. Nearly 10 mil-lion fresh graves have been dug as a result of these tactics inEast and Central Africa alone over the last twenty years, andcountless millions of refugees have been rendered homeless.Sudan and Congo, in fact, are the two deadliest conflicts inthe world since the Holocaust.The stakes remain enormous. And this is by no meansan Africa-only phenomenon. The kinds of tactics used bywarring parties globally are increasingly targeted at civilianpopulations who are usually defenseless and largely discon-nected from the perpetrators of the violence. As a result, theratio of civilians to soldiers who die at times runs as high asnine to one. Because of this targeting of civilians, over 100million people died violent deaths during the twentieth cen-tury’s wars and genocides. This exceeds the death count of allpre-twentieth-century wars and massacres combined.At this juncture of human history, and because of thedistortion and delay in Africa’s own historical trajectory cre-ated by the European colonial era, it turns out that the globalepicenter of this kind of targeted violence is currently play-ing itself out on African soil, with weapons that come largelyfrom America, Europe, and Asia. And these are therefore the
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