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Darfur 'champion' to receive Salem Award
By Tom Dalton
Staff writer
Wed, May 07 2008 SALEM — Eric Reeves sounded almost apologetic when asked about his visit here Friday to accept the 16th annual Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice. "I will not be especially energetic," he said. That is understandable. The 58-year-old English professor is on medical leave from Smith College following prostate cancer surgery in November. He is also about to begin chemotherapy for leukemia, a cancer he was diagnosed with in 2003. But lethargy is not a condition ever associated with Reeves, a man almost defined by his energy. There is some inexplicable force within Reeves that turned his life upside down a decade ago, when he began a personal, passionate and tireless campaign to stop what was then a largely unknown and almost invisible human tragedy — the genocide in Sudan and its Darfur region. He has traveled to Africa, taken unpaid sabbaticals to work on his humanitarian efforts, donated thousands of his own dollars to the cause, testified before the U.S. Congress, been interviewed by the BBC and countless radio and TV stations, published a book, "A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide," and written more than 100 opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines. In a 2004 article in The Washington Post, it was Reeves who used the term "genocide" for the first time to describe what was taking place in Darfur, where Arab militias with government backing were killing black African villagers, a human death toll now estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The unlikely hero — he teaches Shakespeare and Milton, after all — is almost universally recognized as one of the leading voices for Darfur. In an interview last year, Samantha Power, a genocide expert at Harvard, said "not a single person in the world has done as much for Darfur as Eric Reeves." Reeves said he is honored, almost humbled, by the Salem Award, which was established on the tercentenary of the Salem Witch Trials in 1992 to keep alive the lessons of that tragic event. Last year, the award went to Navy Lt. Commander Charles Swift and professor Neal Katyal, lawyers who fought for the rights of alleged terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, following the 2001 terrorist attacks. "I'm grateful for the recognition, truly honored by the recognition," Reeves said Monday during a telephone interview. "At the same time, I'm acutely aware that the world community is failing (in Darfur) and failing badly. ... "I'm also aware there are many people who are completely unrecognized who are the real heroes of Darfur, the humanitarian workers who have put their lives on the line ... the dozens of humanitarian workers who have been killed, mostly Sudanese but many non-Sudanese. ... It's difficult to accept this simply for myself. I can't — I have to feel this is a way of pointing to a larger effort." Reeves said he is especially honored to be part of a Salem Award program that includes two other Darfur advocates — Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights, who has documented the Darfur genocide, and the Rev. Gloria White-Hammond of Bethel AME Church, Boston, who has made seven trips to the Sudan and helped free 10,000 women and children enslaved there during the two-decades-long civil war. Reeves followed an unusual path to Darfur advocacy. A wood turner in his spare time, he made bowls and art objects on lathes in his basement that he started selling in the 1990s to art galleries. With success came profits, which he donated to humanitarian organizations, settling finally on Doctors Without Borders. In late 1998, Doctors Without Borders named the southern Sudan as the most underreported human crisis in the world. On a trip to New York, Reeves met with the executive director of the organization. That conversation changed his life. "She was talking about needing a champion," he said. "She wasn't looking at me. I guarantee she wasn't thinking about me. ... I made a commitment I would see what I could do, not knowing what that meant." That undefined commitment has led Reeves to make contacts with people throughout Sudan and with humanitarian organizations around the world. He is so "wired" to the inner workings of Darfur and other regions of the country that his Web site is almost required reading by officials at the U.S. State Department. His writings appear regularly in the Sudan Tribune. The married father of two adult daughters, who was diagnosed with cancer the same year that he visited Darfur, has devoted almost all his energy to the cause. "I'm not an especially patient person," he said. "I tend not to do anything less than in a very intense fashion. It's been true of my teaching, been true of my wood carving, and been true of my Sudan advocacy and research work."
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Eric Reeves, who has campaigned tirelessly to stop the genocide in Darfur, will be on the North Shore this Friday to accept the 16th annual Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice. Courtesy photo