Creative Loafing Sarasota
March 19 2010
One Bradenton man’s experience on the front line of the fight against genocide
On Dec. 2, 2001, at 1:30 in the morning, Richard O’Brien was cold. He
had just closed down his favorite Alexandria, Va., pub, and since he
had sold his 1955 Cadillac to open a small nonprofit, he was walking
home, bracing himself against the wind. Passing by his old white brick
office, he decided to stop in, check his email and, to warm up, maybe
pour himself a little of the Courvoisier normally reserved for guests.
As he walked up the hyper-heated stairway into his office, the chill
slowly ebbed. His computer was on, a screen-saver aquarium lighting up
his desk. He sat down, rubbed his hands together and gave the mouse a
nudge, opening his email. The subject line of the most recent message
read: `Help us we are being massacred!’
O’Brien suddenly felt cold all over again. The email had come from a
Pastor Snyder in Poso, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Snyder
and his congregation had fled the city of Tentena, to escape Muslim
attackers. Muslims had come to outnumber Christians in the area, and
in the late 1990s a dispute over gold mining concessions led some
Muslims to declare jihad on the Christians. Killings of Christians in
the islands had become common, and Snyder’s email went on to detail
the largest armed attack by the Muslim paramilitaries of the Laskar
Jihad ever.
Stunned, O’Brien rose, walked to a framed piece of paper on the wall
by the front door and lifted the frame from its hook. `In Case of
Emergency,’ it said in bright Photoshopped boldness at the top;
beneath it, `Steps for Combating Unfolding Genocide.’ All just a
theory till that point, the steps it listed were about to be put to
the test.
NINE YEARS LATER, now a professor at USF Sarasota-Manatee (where I am
an employed alumnus), O’Brien, 43, is married, lives in Bradenton and
ran a surprisingly successful grassroots campaign for city council
last fall. He’s a man in love with what he does and what he has
accomplished, self-deprecating about losing his former `Tom Cruise’
physique and smiling about the first time he saw his wife, Ani, in
Georgetown. He splays the fingers of both hands out in front of his
eyes, fans them up and down and remembers, `All I saw was these
enormous eyes and long, long lashes.’
But back in December 2001, O’Brien changed a piece of history. If you
haven’t heard of the Christian genocide in Sulawesi, it might be
because of the work of O’Brien’s small nonprofit, The Center for the
Prevention of Genocide (CPG). What had started as O’Brien’s Georgetown
master’s thesis had evolved into a plan for alerting the world to
impending genocide.
O’Brien is part Armenian, which carries with it a collective burden
from the early days of the 20th century: In 1915, the Turkish
government systematically slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians. The
Turkish government denies the episode to this day, but O’Brien’s
great-grandmother begged to differ, having watched her husband sliced
into pieces, a story O’Brien grew up listening to. This may have been
the real reason O’Brien sold his cherished Caddy, was checking his
email at 1:45 a.m. on a Monday morning. Genocide is something he takes
personally.
Not that any of this was in O’Brien’s mind when he finally set down
the framed piece of paper, the step-by-step guide he had written, on
his desk and pulled open the top drawer. Inside lay three
pay-by-the-minute phone cards he kept for calling overseas.
Months before, O’Brien and his partners gave out their contact
information to various organizations and individuals in humanitarian
circles, telling them, `If you’re in trouble ‘ email us.’ There was no
way to tell if Snyder’s email was genuine till he spoke with someone
in Indonesia who could confirm it. If it were authentic, he would then
have to find out if he were the only person outside Indonesia to know
about it.
With the first card he called the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, but it ran
out of minutes before he could track down a live person. He burned up
the 15 minutes on the second card doing the same thing. Sulawesi is 12
hours ahead of the U.S. ‘ it was early Monday afternoon when O’Brien
called the embassy operator, Mary. Carefully, but quickly, O’Brien
explained the situation. `Oh my, this is important isn’t it? Let me
think,’ Mary said, minutes blazing away on the phone card.
She gave him the number he needed to call the consul general on
Surabaya, spitting distance from Sulawesi. The man was out. O’Brien
called back 15 minutes later and the man confirmed: Yes, there were
45,000 unarmed Christians left after the first massacre; yes, they
were surrounded by about 2,000 Muslim soldiers; yes¦ And then the
phone card ran out of minutes.
O’Brien called one of his volunteers, asking him to check the global
wire services and press reports to see if anyone else had heard.
Nothing. O’Brien called fellow CPG board member John Heidenrich, a
former State Department subcontractor, and asked him to whom they
should send press releases first. `Australia,’ Heidenrich said.
It was 3:45 a.m. when O’Brien drafted a press release, printed it and
sent a digital copy to Mark. `We sent that press release to every
single major radio station, TV station and print media in Australia,’
O’Brien says. `Mark emailed them and I faxed.’ At 6:12 a.m. the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation broke the story, broadcasting,
`Christians in the lakeside town of Tentena are reported to be
preparing for a big Muslim attack. Already thousands of Christians
from nearby villages have fled to the town in central Sulawesi trying
to escape armed Muslim fighters, members of the radical Laskar Jihad,
who are reported to be equipped with machine guns, rocket launchers
and even bulldozers. A church group which travelled to Tentena last
week reports Laskar Jihad manned road blocks, flying flags with the
image of Osama bin Laden and the words `this is our leader.”
The broadcast went out over the Internet and through a shortwave radio
transmission in eight languages: Burmese, French, Indonesian,
Vietnamese, Chinese, Khmer, English and Tok Pisin. Wire services
around the globe picked up the story.
O’Brien was checking off items from his handbook. They had confirmed
the events with a neutral third party, and the word was out. Now they
had to find someone in Washington who cared.
BY 9 A.M., when the interns started rolling in, O’Brien had already
used the shower in the office and put on a clean shirt he kept in his
desk. The interns put together packets that contained Snyder’s email,
background information, the press release and the wire service reports
to take with them to Capitol Hill. They plotted an itinerary to hit up
every congressman in the House who sat on the Human Rights Caucus or
the Appropriations Committee. Human Rights, for obvious reasons, but
Appropriations because Indonesia was about to receive $120 million in
military aid from the U.S. O’Brien’s thinking was that $120 million,
supplied largely by Christian taxpayers, could convince certain people
to take action.
After a 20-minute cab ride, O’Brien, a couple staffers and 10 interns
hit the Capitol. O’Brien himself targeted congressmen who received
substantial donations from the Christian Coalition. His 10th office
visit led him to the unlikely throne of Rep. Thomas Cass Ballenger, a
man who, for the previous 19 years, had kept a black lawn jockey in
front of his home in Hickory, N.C. `Not exactly the poster boy for
racial sensitivity,’ O’Brien points out in a detailed account of the
event that he wrote at the time.
O’Brien waited 15 minutes for the congressman to show up with a nod
and a `Ya’ waitin’ fo’me?’ in his Carolina drawl. O’Brien nodded back
and sat down in a chair in front of Ballenger’s bulwark of a desk.
O’Brien gave a `compelling but brief history of the conflict and the
immediate jeopardy these people were facing.’ Ballenger, to his
credit, did not yawn. `You know who loves this kinda stuff,’ Ballenger
said, as he slid the folders back across the expanse of his desk to
O’Brien, `Tom Lantos and Cynthia McKinney. Those liberals just love
this stuff.’
O’Brien leaned forward and gently pushed the files back across the
desk. `Congressman Ballenger,’ he said, `I didn’t come here to see
Mr. Lantos or Ms. McKinney. ¦ I came to see you. You have a strongly
devout population down there in North Carolina, filled with people
that will care deeply about other Christians being massacred, and I
know they would be impressed that you cared enough to pick up the
phone and get the ball moving with the administration.’
Ballenger blinked once, twice and then asked, `Where exactly is this
place again?’
Today, Ballenger suffers from dementia and lives in an assisted-living
facility. But his 80-year-old wife, Donna, agrees to talk about her
husband and his work, in that same inviting, Carolina drawl O’Brien
heard from her husband that day on the Hill. She expresses surprise
when I mention Indonesia, reflects a moment and then says, `Cass was
in charge of the Western Hemisphere. Indonesia was outside his
domain.’
Nevertheless, the BBC reported at 5:46 p.m. Mon., Dec. 2, 2001 that
the Indonesian government was sending 2,600 troops to Sulawesi. By
Wednesday morning more than 4,000 soldiers had shown up in Tentena,
the first time in history that Indonesia had intervened in any
massacre of Christians. O’Brien can’t be sure if Ballenger called the
president, Colin Powell or anyone at all, but `Just like that,’ he
says, `the threat of genocide vanished into thin air.’
THE CENTER FOR the Prevention of Genocide, however, did not vanish.
After that initial burst of success, O’Brien and his staff went on to
provide Cold War-era maps to bush pilots in Africa that resulted in
eight metric tons of sorghum being dropped by the State Department for
starving Nuba villagers. They helped bring Darfur from a place known
only in diplomatic circles to front pages. They managed people on the
ground in a dozen genocide hot-spots around the globe. `Rich lived for
helping people,’ former intern Stephainie Lawson says, `any place in
the world, 24 hours a day it seemed. I have no idea when he ever
slept.’
O’Brien shows me a stack of binders and dossiers, telling me to take
anything I need except for North Korea. `We still have assets on the
ground there,’ he says. I look to see if he’s joking. He isn’t. I skim
through the North Korea binder and between accounts of infant
cannibalism and gulags are interviews, labeled only by initials and
dates, floppy disks wedged inside the cover.
These days, between teaching classes at USFSM and pursuing political
office, O’Brien uses his experience where he can. He spent a week in
Haiti just after the quake, providing advice on expediting supplies to
those in need. When Michael Abramowitz came to Sarasota Feb. 28 to
speak on his federal proposal, `Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for
U.S. Policymakers,’ O’Brien used some local connections to get him to
also appear on the New College campus.
`Abramowitz has an outstanding plan,’ O’Brien says, `but it could be
done for much less that the $250 million price tag attached to it ‘
much less. I mean, we got by with selling old computer parts and a
classic Cadillac.’
But even for CPG, the money eventually ran out. In early 2004 O’Brien
wrote a $19,000 check to cover the organization’s final expenses.
For the Abramowitz visit, O’Brien prepared an exhibit, assigning bits
of his past to professionally prepared displays and posters: more
cries for help scrawled on ragged bits of paper; maps; photographs to
jar the jaded; records of the Armenian massacre in Italian, a find
from some research in Padua, Italy, that he’d stumbled upon in the
back of an old book on another topic.
I call him in the midst of all this, with yet more questions. `I am so
sick of genocide,’ he says, stressing each syllable and catching me a
little off guard. Then I understand he’s answering a question I’d
asked weeks before, when, stunned by the scope of his determination,
I’d asked: `What prompted all this?’
Photo by Camille Pyatte
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