'Darfur Is Low-Hanging Fruit for Beijing'

You talk about dreams for Darfur. What is a reasonable hope?
We would like to see security on the ground in Darfur. We would like to see Khartoum stop the aerial and ground attacks on civilians and cease to obstruct the admission of the full and capable force of peacekeepers. I think that's realistic and within Beijing's sphere of influence. I think Darfur is low-hanging fruit for Beijing.

With the flare-up in Tibet, does that complicate the issue?
No, just the opposite. When we see monks being shot, there is a visceral reaction. When my son and I wrote that "Genocide Olympics" piece, we saw the time frame between [February] and the Olympics as a window of opportunity for China—perhaps in our dreams—to reconsider its no-strings-attached policy in Darfur. That the Tibetans jumped into that window is really no surprise.

And it doesn't divide people's attention.
I don't think so. Do you?

I don't think it matters what I think.
It certainly doesn't matter what I think either. I'm just an actress, a mother and a grandmother. But I'm a citizen. That an old lady and a teenager can write a piece that causes some action to be taken, then it says something about responsibility. It's so easy to just toss things over because we're overwhelmed by the money, the politics and the enormity of the situation. The encouraging thing is that we do have a voice. I keep going back to the words of the late Sen. Paul Simon. On the Rwandan genocide, he said if just 100 people had written or called in from each separate congressional district, we would have done something. Almost a million people were killed in 90 days there. That puts the responsibility squarely on each of us

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