From soundstage to world stage

An honorary Rotarian, Farrow was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador at the first Global Polio Partners Summit in 2000. “My first brush with Rotary was in Nigeria when I started with UNICEF,” she recalls. “There was an immunization day, actually several days. We immunized 40 million kids. Rotarians are good people doing tremendously important work.”

The privileged daughter of screen star Maureen O’Sullivan and director John Farrow, she fell at her ninth birthday party and couldn’t stand up. The diagnosis was polio. She spent the next several months in an iron lung. “I became a pariah,” she recalls. The experience changed her life and inspired her efforts to help women and children in Africa.

In late April, she announced a water-only fast to protest conditions in Darfur. She stopped after 12 days, on her doctor’s orders, and billionaire Richard Branson took her place, along with members of the U.S. Congress.

Days before Farrow began her fast, she met with journalist Warren Kalbacker in New Milford, Conn., USA, the rural town where she has raised many of her children.

The Rotarian: As a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, are visits to troubled regions part of your job description? 

Mia Farrow: With UNICEF, yes. Children caught in conflict is my niche, at my own request. I opened a UNICEF office in Angola after the war ended there [in 2002]. There was a fragile peace, and people were in hiding all over the country. Everyone was missing someone. Land mines littered the countryside. Seeing so many people with limbs blown off alters the way you think. My son Ronan, a UNICEF spokesperson for youth, came to Angola with me. Some guy in an encampment looked at Ronan’s belt and said that he once had a belt like that – but had to eat it. That was the level of hunger in Angola. I thought I could be the most help if I went where circumstances were most extreme.

TR: Such as Darfur, which has been in crisis for several years.

Farrow: Yes. There was an uprising in Darfur in February 2003. Darfur, Sudan’s western region, had been disenfranchised. Its people wanted representation in the government. They wanted roads and hospitals and schools. They wanted some share of the oil revenues that were coming in from southern Sudan and enriching Khartoum, the capital. None of this was coming to the Darfur region. In response to the uprising, the government of Sudan launched an all-out assault upon the civilian population of Darfur.

TR: Didn’t hired militias execute the attacks?

Farrow: They did. The government enlisted the help of Arab tribes now known as Janjaweed. The people in Darfur will tell you about the attacks on their villages: Without warning, the morning sky filled with bombers and helicopters. Bombs rained upon families as they slept, as they prayed, as they were going out to their fields. People began to flee in panic in all directions. Then came the Janjaweed on camels and horseback and, more recently, in vehicles stolen from aid workers. They came shouting racial epithets, shooting, and raping women and girls.
Eighty to 90 percent of Darfur’s villages are in ashes today. And 2.7 million people have now found relative safety in the wretched camps sprinkled across Darfur and eastern Chad.

TR: Even though this crisis has unfolded over years, is it worse now than ever?

Farrow: The very worst time, I guess, was during the initial attacks, when hundreds of thousands of people were killed. But now Darfuris will be deprived, because after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President [Omar al-Bashir], he threw out 13 international and [revoked the permits of] three Sudanese aid organizations. These were the implementing partners of the UN agencies and delivered about half of the medical care, food, and water. The situation will become the worst yet if that gap can’t be filled. The UN issued a plea to have those aid agencies reinstated. More than a million people could die of hunger and disease as the stockpiled food dwindles. Within weeks we could see the dying begin. And this while we watch.

TR: Does the government in Khartoum fear the aid workers?

Farrow: That government is claiming the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] are spies. We’re talking about Save the Children and those infamous spy rings of Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders. It’s atrocious. It’s “get rid of the witnesses.” 

TR: Does news about Darfur appear often enough in the headlines?

Farrow: It’s beneath the mainstream media radar. That’s why I set up my Web site, miafarrow.org. I blog when I travel, and I post relevant news as it happens. How is it that we could watch a million people die in Rwanda? The Darfur genocide is Rwanda in slow motion. [Former U.S.] President [George W.] Bush was among the first to call it genocide. [U.S. Senator John] McCain and [President Barack] Obama and [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton made a [joint statement during the 2008 presidential campaign]. Will we stand by and watch while hundreds of thousands of people die? We like to think we’re doing our best to live in a way that is responsible. Since we know what is happening in Darfur, we have a responsibility to act. We live in a democracy where we can persuade elected officials, if we say, in a loud enough voice, that this is unacceptable. The late [U.S.] Senator Paul Simon said that if just 100 people from every district had phoned or written on the Rwandan genocide, our government would have done something.

TR: Define genocide .

Farrow: After the Holocaust, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, coined the word genocide – the killing of a people. But Lemkin stopped short of saying what is demanded of us if we see a situation that meets that criterion. I think it’s mandatory that we respond.

TR: Have you become accustomed to the sound of gunfire?

Farrow: Gunfire and the braying of donkeys is the music of the night. Shots make different sounds depending on whether they hit something. Nobody is safe in the Darfur region and along the Chad border. If you’re looking to be safe, don’t go there. To me, that’s irrelevant because the need is there. The refugees, who are extraordinary in their losses, will share their shade if that’s all they have. A woman gave me this protection amulet in 2004. She insisted I wear it for my protection, the point being I could offer her none. She had been wearing this on a day her village was attacked. Three of her five children were killed on that day. She had tried to run with her baby son, and he was taken from her arms and bayoneted in front of her eyes. She clasped my hands and said, “Tell people what’s happening here. Tell them we’ll all be slaughtered. Tell them we need help.” I don’t know if she is still alive.

TR: Nongovernmental organization aid workers: tough people?

Farrow: Oh, my gosh. NGO workers are great. They’re usually quite young. They’re fun, and they care deeply about what they’re doing. They’re risking their lives to sustain the world’s most fragile and vulnerable population. And I haven’t met one aid worker who didn’t have a tremendous sense of humor. I remember one saying she couldn’t bear to wear flip-flops anymore because she could no longer look at her filthy feet. There was no way to get the dirt off because of very, very limited water.

TR: You find something to laugh about amid the danger and privation?

Farrow: There’s always a laugh among the refugees and the NGO workers and me. It can be any silliness. I clown around. I can always make people laugh. The refugees are quick to laugh. And they are good parents. Their humanity is focused because they don’t have the things that we would hoard or would distract us. They don’t have shopping or jobs or Wall Street. They don’t have a house to keep. They grind grain and gather firewood and cook. When they’re with their children, they have that heightened sense of humanity, the absolute joy of being together.

TR: Generals and militias have the firepower. Can refugee mothers and children exert a real moral power?

Farrow: Definitely. In Africa, the women are extraordinarily strong. But it is the men who have the power where I’ve visited, in Darfur and Chad. A man can marry early and often, and can have as many wives as he wants. The women do the work, get the firewood, grind the grain, cook the food, and care for children. And they get raped. I can’t imagine that most of us would have a fraction of the courage and retain the humanity that they have as they carry on and hope for something better for their children.

TR: You’ve traveled widely in Africa – to Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why do you keep returning?

Farrow: I’m connected in my heart to the African continent. I’ve made three trips into Darfur and 10 into eastern Chad. I’m also working on my own project, which is to document the traditions and culture of the Darfur tribes. After living for six years in tattered tents in camps, the refugees don’t sing and dance anymore. I went to a camp [in Chad] where they know me, because I’d been there so many times, and said I’d like to talk to the elders, to hear stories told by their grandparents. And they said, “Mia, we’re in mourning. If we brought you our elders, they would tell you stories, but that wouldn’t be what’s on their mind.” I told them, “I know what you’ve lost and how you continue to suffer. But if your elderly people and you yourselves die off, with you will die your culture and your treasures. And when your children and your children’s children can one day, inshallah [God willing], go back to Darfur, how would they know what they were?”  I brought a camera and sound equipment to the edge of the camp every day for the month of February. Thousands of people from seven tribes speaking seven different languages were out there. The cotton makers wove. The oil makers showed me how they make oil out of nuts from a very thorny plant. They use the oil to cook and to moisten their hair and skin. They enacted and explained all their rites of passage.

TR: What are the benefits and drawbacks of celebrity activism?

Farrow: Without my celebrity, I wouldn’t have been a UNICEF ambassador. But I had to figure out how to raise awareness and encourage people to voice their opinions and get behind the idea of taking action. My intention was to be a doctor, so I think I would have gone to Africa one way or another. Circumstances conspired for me to become an actress. That was one thing I could do without an education.

TR: Have you achieved any degree of success in Darfur?

Farrow: That would be for others to say. It’s easier to see the failure. Have lives been saved by putting more focus on Darfur? Perhaps. Are the people still suffering? Absolutely. Are they facing a deepening catastrophe? Absolutely. Does it feel like head banging? Absolutely. Could I have done otherwise?  No. I returned from Darfur in 2004 as a witness. I had to do my utmost to address what I’d seen. I am an actress and a mother, and I had no idea what my activism would involve. I’m still figuring it out. I’d never written an op-ed piece. I never envisioned traveling from campus to campus as a speaker, or going to [Congressional] divestment hearings.

TR: Does hope have a future?

Farrow: Our biggest enemy is our own sense of helplessness and hopelessness. I end my talks with a quote from Elie Wiesel. He said of the Holocaust, “What astonished us after the torment, after the tempest, was not that so many killers killed so many victims, but  that so few cared about us at all.” It’s a defining moment for each of us: whether we choose to be among the many or the few. If we love our neighbors and care about our fellow human beings, then something is required of us other than to turn away.