It's long been fashionable to mock the synergy between Congress and Hollywood in which legislators invite movie stars to testify in Washington about issues dramatized in their films. The memory of Jessica Lange, Jane Fonda and Sissy Spacek telling a House hearing about the plight of small farmers is still an inviting target two decades later.
Don Cheadle is unlikely to face such cynicism. Since playing a heroic hotel manager who saved 1,200 people from tribal violence in "Hotel Rwanda," he has thrown himself into the daunting challenge of trying to make the world pay more attention to genocide in Africa.
Two weeks ago, on the morning he was nominated for a best actor Oscar, Cheadle was in a small United Nations plane over East Africa. He'd spent 2 1/2 days with a congressional delegation in Chad touring refugee camps, which had been set up in response to a civil war in neighboring Sudan. He got the news when he phoned home.
Two days later, Cheadle appeared at a Washington press conference with the delegation to draw a line between the genocidal nightmare of Rwanda, where a million people were murdered in the space of 100 days in 1994, and the crisis in Sudan, where an estimated 1.8 million people have been displaced, 70,000 have died and 200,000 have left to seek protection in Chad. "What we're seeing now is tsunamis of violence," he said.
Last week, MTV's mtvU channel said its campaign to raise consciousness about Sudan among college students would feature Cheadle in spots produced with Amnesty International.
And tonight, Cheadle will play a role somewhere between activist and journalist on ABC's "Nightline," functioning as the principal correspondent in a show devoted to the congressional tour. "Nightline" plans to devote Thursday night to a broader conversation about genocide in Africa that will include Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager Cheadle portrayed. Cheadle said he came away from making "Hotel Rwanda" frustrated by the international community's failure to intervene in Rwanda's violence, in which ruling Hutus attempted to wipe out the Tutsis. The two ethnic groups had been forced to carry identity cards ever since the Belgian occupation in the 1920s, when the Tutsis were picked to rule. Arguments over what constituted genocide contributed to a lack of international action.
"I just want to make it very hard for people to say, 'I didn't know about [the crisis in Sudan],' which was what so many people said about Rwanda," Cheadle said.
