John Prendergast | |
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Born | Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
Occupation | Author, human rights activist |
Alma mater | Temple University, American University |
Notable awards | Huffington Post 2011 Game Changer Award [1] United Nations Correspondents Association Citizen of the World Award [2] Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Award [3] Princeton University Crystal Tiger Award [4] U.S. State Department Distinguished Service Award The Center for African Peace and Conflict Resolution Peace AwardContents[5] |
John Prendergast is an American human rights and anti-corruption activist as well as an author. He is the co-founder of The Sentry, [6] an investigative and policy organization that seeks to disable multinational predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy. Prendergast was the founding director of the Enough Project and was formerly director for African affairs at the National Security Council.
Prendergast worked for a variety of organizations in the U.S. and Africa in the latter half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, focusing primarily on peace and human rights. At the end of 1996, he joined the National Security Council as Director for African Affairs [7] and thereafter served as a special adviser to Susan Rice at the United States Department of State. [8] As a special adviser, Prendergast was a member of the team behind the two-and-a-half-year U.S. effort to broker an end to the Eritrean–Ethiopian War. [9] He was also part of the peace processes for Burundi, Sudan and DR Congo. Prendergast worked for the Clinton White House and two members of Congress, and left government in 2001 to become Special Adviser to the President of the International Crisis Group on Africa issues. [10] Outside of government, he has worked for organizations such as the United States Institute of Peace, UNICEF, and Human Rights Watch.
Alongside Gayle Smith, Prendergast co-founded the Enough Project in 2007. The policy organization aims at countering genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also a co-founder along with George Clooney of The Sentry, an investigative initiative created to uncover the financial networks behind conflicts in Africa. Together, Clooney and Prendergast had also previously co-founded the Satellite Sentinel Project, [11] which aimed to prevent conflict and human rights abuses through satellite imagery. [12] In 2020, Prendergast was named the Strategic Director of the Clooney Foundation for Justice. [13] Other initiatives of Prendergast include founding the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program with Tracy McGrady and other NBA players, which funded schools in Darfurian refugee camps and created partnerships with schools in the U.S., as well as the Raise Hope for Congo campaign, highlighting the issue of conflict minerals fueling war in Congo and supporting a more comprehensive peace process.
Prendergast has been a visiting professor at universities and colleges, including Yale Law School, Stanford University, and Columbia University. He has been awarded seven honorary doctorates, [14] and serves as the Anne Evans Estabrook Human Rights Senior Fellow at Kean University. [15]
Prendergast has written extensively on Africa and is the author or co-author of eleven books. His 2018 book Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed was co-authored with Congolese activist Fidel Bafilemba and featured photographs by Ryan Gosling. His two books prior to that were co-authored with actor and activist Don Cheadle. Those are Not On Our Watch , a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year, and The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Humanitarian Crimes . He is currently working on a project concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Gosling and New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh. [16]
Prendergast has appeared in five episodes of 60 Minutes [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] and traveled to Africa with Dateline NBC , [22] ABC's Nightline , [23] the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer [24] and CNN’s Inside Africa, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and The New York Times Magazine. [25] He has also appeared in several documentaries, including: Merci Congo, Sand and Sorrow , Darfur Now , 3 Points, [26] and War Child. [27] He co-produced Journey Into Sunset, and is Executive Producer of Staging Hope: Acts of Peace in Northern Uganda, [28] both about Northern Uganda. He also appeared in 2014 film The Good Lie .
Comedian Jane Bussmann was inspired by his work and meetings with him to write her 2012 book The Worst Date Ever: or How it Took a Comedy Writer to Expose Joseph Kony and Africa's Secret War, [29] a comic/tragic story of her attempt as a novice foreign correspondent to expose the truth about the war in Uganda. He is also the primary subject in another book by Bussmann, A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil. [30]
Prendergast's activism has been criticized by Mahmood Mamdani as simplistic, counter-productive, and detrimental to the reality on the ground, especially regarding Darfur and Northern Uganda. [31]
Articles
Books
Darfur is a region of western Sudan. Dār is an Arabic word meaning "home [of]" – the region was named Dardaju while ruled by the Daju, who migrated from Meroë c. 350 AD, and it was renamed Dartunjur when the Tunjur ruled the area. Darfur was an independent sultanate for several hundred years until 1874, when it fell to the Sudanese warlord Rabih az-Zubayr. The region was later invaded and incorporated into Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1916. As an administrative region, Darfur is divided into five federal states: Central Darfur, East Darfur, North Darfur, South Darfur and West Darfur. Because of the War in Darfur between Sudanese government forces and the indigenous population, the region has been in a state of humanitarian emergency and genocide since 2003. The factors include religious and ethnic rivalry, and the rivalry between farmers and herders.
The Second DR Congo War, also known as Africa's World War, the Great War of Africa, or the Great African War, began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 2 August 1998, just over a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues. It began when Congolese president Laurent-Désiré Kabila turned against his Rwandan and Ugandan allies who had helped him come to power.
The Second Sudanese Civil War was a conflict from 1983 to 2005 between the central Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army. It was largely a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War of 1955 to 1972. Although it originated in southern Sudan, the civil war spread to the Nuba mountains and the Blue Nile. It lasted for almost 22 years and is one of the longest civil wars on record. The war resulted in the independence of South Sudan 6 years after the war ended.
The Nuba Mountains, also referred to as the Nuba Hills, are an area located in South Kordofan, Sudan. The area is home to a group of indigenous ethnic groups known collectively as the Nuba peoples. They are not the same as the Nubians who are indigenous to north Sudan. Rather their name is derived from the name of the mountains, “Nuba”. In the Middle Ages, the Nuba mountains had been part of the Nubian kingdom of Alodia. In the 18th century, they became home to the kingdom of Taqali that controlled the hills of the mountains until their defeat by Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. After the British defeated the Mahdi army, Taqali was restored as a client state. Infiltration of the Messiria tribe of Baggara Arabs has been influential in modern conflicts. Up to 1.5 million people live in the mountains, mostly ethnic Nuba, with a small minority of Baggara.
The War in Darfur, also nicknamed the Land Cruiser War, was a major armed conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan that began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel groups began fighting against the government of Sudan, which they accused of oppressing Darfur's non-Arab population. The government responded to attacks by carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfur's non-Arabs. This resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the indictment of Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
The Save Darfur Coalition was an advocacy group that attempted "to raise public awareness and mobilize a massive response to the atrocities in Sudan's western region of Darfur." Headquartered in Washington, D.C., it was a coalition of more than 190 religious, political, and human rights organizations organized to campaign for a response to the atrocities of the War in Darfur, which culminated in a humanitarian crisis. By 2013, reports indicated that the conflict had claimed approximately 300,000 lives and had displaced over 2.5 million people.
This is the bibliography and reference section for the Darfur conflict series. External links to reports, news articles and other sources of information may also be found below.
Alexander William Lowndes de Waal, a British researcher on African elite politics, is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Previously, he was a fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University, as well as program director at the Social Science Research Council on AIDS in New York City.
The Aegis Trust, founded in 2000, is the British NGO which campaigns to prevent genocide worldwide. Based at the United Kingdom's Holocaust Centre, which opened in 1995, the Aegis Trust coordinates the UK Genocide Prevention All-Party Parliamentary Group, funds the Genocide Prevention Group (Canada) and is responsible for the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, which commemorates the 1994 genocide and is central to education of a new generation about the dangers of ethnic division.
Francis Mading Deng is a politician and diplomat from South Sudan who served as the newly independent country's first ambassador to the United Nations from 2012 to July 2016.
Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond is a non-fiction book co-authored by actor Don Cheadle and human rights activist and co-founder of the Enough Project, John Prendergast.
Day for Darfur is an international advocacy campaign that works to bring together activists in cities around the globe in calling for action on the crisis in Darfur, western Sudan.
Racism in Africa has been a recurring part of the history of Africa.
The Enough Project is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization that was founded in 2007. Its stated mission is to end genocide and crimes against humanity. The Enough Project conducts research in several conflict areas in Africa including Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and the areas controlled by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The Enough Project seeks to build leverage against the perpetrators and facilitators of atrocities and corruption through conducting research, engaging with governments and the private sector on policy solutions, and mobilizing public campaigns. Campaigns and initiatives aimed to bring attention to these crises include The Sentry and, previously, Raise Hope for Congo and the Satellite Sentinel Project.
The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes is the second book co-authored by actor Don Cheadle, and co-founder of the Enough Project and human rights activist, John Prendergast. Cheadle and Prendergast's first book, Not On Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, was published in 2007.
United Nations Security Council resolution 1556, adopted on 30 July 2004, after recalling resolutions 1502 (2003) and 1547 (2004) on the situation in Sudan, the council demanded that the Sudanese government disarm the Janjaweed militia and bring to justice those who had committed violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in Darfur.
The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) was conceived by George Clooney and Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast during their October 2010 visit to South Sudan. Through the use of satellite imagery, SSP provides an early warning system to deter mass atrocities in a given situation by focusing world attention and generating rapid responses to human rights and human security concerns taking place in that situation.
The Sentry is a non-profit investigative and policy organization that seeks to disable multinational predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy, based in the United States. It was founded in 2016.
The Darfur genocide was the systematic killing of ethnic Darfuri people during the War in Darfur. The genocide, which was carried out against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to indict several people for crimes against humanity, rape, forced transfer and torture. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 2003 and 2005.