10/12/2005

Refugees International gave the 2005 McCall-Pierpaoli Award for humanitarian action to Ambassador John Danforth for his role in negotiating the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended a 21-year civil war in southern Sudan.

At a dinner entitled “Celebrating Peacemakers”, RI also honored Richard Holbrooke on the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia. Sam Waterston, the actor and star of Law & Order, was recognized for his long service on the RI board of directors, and Samantha Power, the author of A Problem From Hell, a book that details U.S. responses -- or lack of responses -- to genocide was cited for helping to educate the American public about genocide.

“On Sept. 6, 2001, President Bush announced that John Danforth was coming out of retirement from public life to become his special envoy for peace in southern Sudan,” Farooq Kathwari, the chair of RI’s board told an audience of 250 people. “That war between the government in the north and rebel forces in the south had led to the death of some two million people, displaced four million internally and created over 500,000 refugees.”

John Danforth, a retired U.S. Senator who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations last year, played a catalytic role in brokering a peace agreement. As a result, hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons are returning home. “Refugees go home when wars end,” Kathwari noted. More than one million refugees have returned to Bosnia since the war ended there 10 years ago.

In accepting the award, Danforth noted that politicians respond to pressure, and that organizations like Refugees International have played a key role in forcing the U.S. to focus on ending violence in Sudan. As the war in southern Sudan was winding down, a new war broke out in the Darfur region of Sudan. That war, which is continuing, has caused as many as 400,000 deaths, created 210,000 refugees and driven some two million people into camps within Darfur.

Eileen Shields-West, a vice chair of the RI board, noted that Samantha Power had played a large role in organizing students and others to highlight the violence in Darfur, where the Bush administration says the government of Sudan is committing genocide.

Sam Waterston’s interest in refugees and RI started 21 years ago after he starred in “The Killing Fields” a movie about the genocide in Cambodia.

The McCall Pierpaoli Award memorializes three people—David and Penny McCall and Yvette Pierpaoli—who died on an RI mission to Albania in 1999. Last year RI gave the award to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his wife, Nane.