San Francisco Darfur Rally Fails for Lack of Anti-Bush Marketing

May 1, 2007 | by Dan | No Comments

CSP Editorial

Sunday’s anti-genocide rally at San Francisco’s Civic Center completely failed to rally crowds even close to the hundreds of thousands who packed San Francisco’s streets to protest the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In contrast to San Francisco’s rallies to protest the Bush Administration and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that saw streets packed with 200,000 – 400,000 angry Bay Area residents, yesterday’s rally drew barely 300 attendees.

Pamela Rosenberg, a local activist supporting the efforts of the Save Darfur Coalition, recognized the critical marketing failure of the group. She noted that “in San Francisco, its not enough to have the senseless killing and torture of hundreds of thousands of people in distant lands. To rouse the kind of deep rage that you saw in the anti-Bush / anti-war rallies, you need a way to make Republicans the target. Everyone can get excited about an opportunity to rip on Republicans. No one cares about a few hundred thousand or million dead Africans otherwise. I had thought that the involvement of politically powerful oil companies in Darfur would get some interest, but unfortunately the oil companies involved are French and Chinese. If we could have fingered Exxon or some other American company, we might have gotten the necessary connection to Republicans.”

A common refrain heard at the Save Darfur rally was that if America does not act forcefully, nobody will. Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor and outspoken anti-war critic stated that “we should be more forceful to build international support.” Gov. Richardson did not say exactly how we should build international support and he was careful of course to not call for any military intervention. Ms. Rosenberg noted that “of course we can’t call for military action because that would tend to validate other uses of American military force, most obviously Iraq. In short, we don’t know quite how to protest. Yes, there are people dying, but we also can’t compromise the important domestic political gains we’ve made recently.”

Unfortunately, it looks like the janjaweed and their genocide in Darfur have the go-ahead from the American electorate. We’re sorry, but this African crisis simply does not work for us politically.