Sudan’s Warrior
Never again, says a Kennedy School student activist

SHE WAS DRAWN TO THE REFUGEES, to the millions of people in the Sudan, who, because of years of civil war, no longer had a place to call home.

Although Bec Hamilton MPP/JD 2007 never lived in a war zone — she grew up in New Zealand and Australia — she could, in many ways, relate to their plight. When she turned nine, her father died of lung cancer. That same year, her mother almost hemorrhaged to death from a rare congenital condition, then struggled with cancer and severe clinical depression. After fending for herself, Hamilton dropped out of high school at 14 and moved to Australia, alone, to dance professionally full-time with a ballet troupe. There a domestic violence situation forced her to live on the streets, then with a social worker.

“I had a bad run of circumstances,” Hamilton says. “I was an only child and basically looking after myself. I moved a lot.”

Eventually the social worker convinced her to get a GED. She did, then went to the University of Sydney and started working with refugee kids in Australia — the latter influencing her decision to study at the Kennedy School and the Law School.

“I’ve always identified with refugees and came to Harvard thinking I wanted to work with them,” she says. “I have an intuitive feel for displacement.”

The summer after her first year as an MPP, she worked in Sudan for an NGO. While there helping hundreds of internally displaced people return to their homes, Congress declared the Darfur situation a genocide. When she returned to Cambridge a few months later, she was surprised that it was barely on anyone’s radar screen.

“I came back from rural Sudan to start at the Law School, which is even more extravagant than the first week at the Kennedy School, and found that no one was talking about Darfur,” Hamilton says. “It did my head in.I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the two extremes. My first thought was to jump back on a plane to Sudan.”

With some convincing, she eventually realized that she could make more of a difference staying at Harvard.

“Advocating is not something you can do in Sudan. You don’t have the voice. The government would squash you,” she says. “I recognized the amazing resources we have here and how to use them.”

With the help of Chad Hazlett MPP 2006, Hamilton started the Darfur Action Group to inform Harvard students. They brought in speakers and showed films.

“Six months down the road, we realized that awareness is the easy part,” she says. “The hard part was when students turned around and asked, ‘What can I do?’”

One thing they did, and did well, was put pressure on Harvard to divest from companies with ties to Sudan’s government. As a result, in the past year, the university has divested from two major companies.

Hamilton is now also involved with the Washington, DC-based Genocide Intervention Network, helping to build the organization’s constituency.

“Genocide feels like such an enormous problem, taking place so far away,” she says. “People have difficulty seeing how they can have an impact. But they can. There’s a Paul Simon quote in Carr Center Samantha Power’s book, A Problem From Hell, which says that if every congressperson had received just 100 letters from his or her constituents about Rwanda, it would have made a difference.

“My dream is that genocide will one day become a voting issue, but for that to happen, we have to stop reacting to genocide on an ad hoc basis. That’s why we’re building a permanent constituency,” she says. “We’re doing a campaign now to get Massachusetts to divest pension funds [with ties to Sudan’s government]. I’m out there talking to public school teachers who are outraged that their pension funds are used like that. They take it as a personal issue. There are ways to localize something that seems far away.”

She is also speaking around the country as a way to keep stories about genocide in the media.

“People have a short attention span, so we always have to look for new hooks to make what’s happening in Sudan tangible,” she says. “That’s one of the ongoing challenges we face.” — LH

Go to www.genocideintervention.net/ for more information.