In the late 1970s, Stanford University student Steve Hansch helped launch a movement calling for colleges to help combat apartheid by divesting from companies doing business in South Africa. Today, as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown and American Universities teaching humanitarian aid, Hansch uses his three decades of aid work in Africa to bring insight into the problems in Sudan, where he also lived in the mid-1980s.
Diverse Senior Editor Christina Asquith caught up with Hansch recently and asked his thoughts on the current situation in Sudan, whether similar “divestment” will be successful and what professors can do to help.
Diverse: This conflict began in earnest in early 2003, and some say as many as 300,000 people have died and 2 million have been displaced. Yet few in the West can agree on the source of the dispute. Is this a religious conflict between Arabs and non-Arabs? Is it a conflict over scarce resources, power, money and control?
Hansch: It’s not a religious conflict. It’s a conflict over access to land, cattle, water and livelihood. All the factions which are in violent conflict in Darfur are Muslim. It’s not “Muslim against non-Muslim,” which is implied in much of the reportage when people characterize it as “Arab vs. African.” They’re all Muslims, they’re all Black and they’re all Africans.
When we — the Western world — promised a large aid package to southern Sudan if they would end their decades-old war, which worked, we did not think that it would lead then to the prospects for war in another part of the same country. We ought to know that marginalized people in other parts of the country are going to look at that large aid package and ask, ‘Wait, the way to get all that global support and money is to go to war first? Ok.”
Diverse: You say there is a success story in Darfur?
