Andrew Golis

Brandon Terry and Matt Mahan started a campaign today to convince the senior class to withhold its donations to the Senior Class Gift Fund until Harvard divests from PetroChina, a company with holdings in Sudan and is therefore complicit in the Sundanese genocide. I think this is tremendously important, so I’m attaching their entire letter:

Dear Senior,

In the course of the next few weeks, you will be asked to relinquish your hard earned dollars and cents as donations to the Class of 2005 Senior Gift. We are writing to request that you respectfully do the opposite and refuse to donate your money until Harvard University sells its $4 million dollar stake in PetroChina, a company that is doing business with the genocidal government of Sudan.

The Senior Gift is an annual program run by the Harvard College Fund and a number of our most active and respected classmates. The Gift’s goals are twofold: to raise money for the University and, more importantly, to convince graduating seniors that giving back to Harvard, now and in the future, is a worthwhile pursuit. It is true that running the university is extremely expensive–ordinarily we would be the first to donate to financial aid and the Gift’s other commendable goals. This year, however, we believe that there is a clear moral imperative to withhold your donation until Harvard divests from PetroChina and any other companies as of yet undisclosed that are financially enabling genocide by operating in Sudan.

As we prepare to enter the “real world” as supposedly enlightened and worldly individuals, we find ourselves confronted with a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions–the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Labeled by some as “Rwanda in slow motion,” the genocidal warfare launched by Arab militiamen and the Sudanese government against Darfurians has claimed well over 340,000 human lives, with at least two million more people displaced from their homes. This is not to mention the horrors reported by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Samantha Power, which include the gang rape and mutilation of Sudanese women. Professor Eric Reeves of Smith College, who is arguably the most prominent Sudan expert writing on the crisis today, estimates that over 2.5 million people will need food assistance just to make it through the year alive. For his assessment, see www.sudanreeves.org.

In July of 2004, both houses of Congress passed a unanimous, bipartisan resolution unequivocally denouncing the Sudanese government and its paramilitary allies of genocide. Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity–it is the systematic and planned killing of an entire racial, ethnic, religious, or national group.

We are asking you to refuse to contribute to the Senior Gift because Harvard, through its investments, is complicit in the Sudan crisis. On Tuesday, The Harvard Crimson reported that in the last quarter Harvard nearly doubled its investment in PetroChina, a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Company, which recently partnered with the Sudanese government in a more than $1 billion oil production project (http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505729). Our investments not only give implicit approval to the Sudanese government; they help maintain its financial viability, and therefore, its ability to facilitate the elimination of an entire ethnic group of non-Arab Africans. For Harvard’s administrators to claim ignorance of what is going on would be a slap in the face to the dead and suffering from Sudan, for The Crimson reported both Harvard’s investment in PetroChina and PetroChina’s role in financing the genocidal government of Sudan publicly as early as October 2004.

In the 1970s, Harvard students and faculty took action to protest apartheid in South Africa by demanding that Harvard stop doing business with South African countries until apartheid was dismantled. After much soul-searching, the University faced up to its moral duty as an intellectual leader in the global community and gradually divested from South Africa, hastening the end of apartheid. We can look back proudly on the people that participated in this anti-apartheid divestment campaign and know they were on the right side of history.

As we approach graduation and grapple with what our legacy to this University will be, we must question if continued inaction will place us on the wrong side of history. This is a crucial opportunity to show that we are leaders for a more just world, and will not tolerate our money and name being complicit in genocide. Please tell our classmates why you cannot support the Senior Gift and add your name to the more than 600 students who have signed a divestment petition (www.harvarddivest.com). The Gift Committee is hoping to get 75% of seniors to donate this spring–we must keep that number at zero until Harvard takes a principled stand against genocide.

Thank you for your time and your willingness to listen. If you have any questions, feel free to contact either one of us.

Sincerely,

Matthew W. Mahan Brandon Terry
President Emeritus President Emeritus
Harvard Undergraduate Council Black Men’s Forum

For general information regarding the situation in Sudan, see the following websites:

Human Rights Watch: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/01/13/sudan9885.htm
Amnesty International: http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/sudan/index.do
Doctors Without Borders: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/sudan.shtml
Save Darfur (coalition of over 100 faith-based and human rights groups): www.savedarfur.org

Read up!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2005 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.