THE GENOCIDE OLYMPICS: ERIC REEVES, CELEBRATED DARFUR ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR, TO TALK AT BARD

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Eric Reeves, one of the world’s best-known Darfur activists and a Smith College professor, speaks on “The Genocide Olympics: Highlighting China’s Role in Darfur,” at Bard College on Tuesday, April 24, at 7:00 p.m. The program, in room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building, is free and open to the public and sponsored by the Bard student Darfur Action Campaign (DAC) and the Rift Valley Institute at Bard College. This event is one of a week-long series devoted to the Darfur crisis, organized by DAC.

“It is time,” Reeves writes in a recent piece, “for China to recognize that it cannot be a legitimate host of the 2008 Olympic Games while complicit in the genocidal destruction of Darfur. Beijing must use its leverage with Khartoum to secure consent for the full deployment of international forces to protect civilians and humanitarian workers, or face a campaign of shame that will attach an unbearable opprobrium to its complicity in genocide.”

Reeves is one of the most articulate and well-informed critics of the Sudan Government—and of the inaction of other countries in the face of the chronic human rights abuse in Darfur. A professor of English language and literature at Smith College, Reeves has spent the past eight years working as a Sudan researcher and campaigner, publishing extensively in the United States and internationally. Reeves’s book about Darfur, A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide, appears this month; he will be signing copies at the talk. Links to his electronic publications and advocacy writings on Sudan can be found at www.sudanreeves.org.

The Rift Valley Institute, chaired by John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology at Bard College, is an independent association based in Kenya, the United Kingdom, and at Bard College in the United States. The institute has been working in eastern Africa, particularly Sudan, since 2001, supporting research, publishing, and education. The fellows of the institute are recognized specialists from Africa, Europe, and the Americas, distinguished in a range of scholarly and practical disciplines. The aim of the institute is to connect local knowledge to global information systems, in the spirit of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Minorities and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Action-oriented social research is the institute’s core activity—in the fields of history and culture, human rights, political economy, and environmental conservation. The Rift Valley Institute has received support from by the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Open Society Institute, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, UNICEF, UNEP, and DFID (the British Government’s Department for International Development).

For further information, call 845-758-7677 or e-mail [email protected].

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(04.12.2007)

This event was last updated on 04-25-2007

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