College ensures Darfur divestment

Author: Polly Johnson

Recognizing the need for Middlebury to take a stance against the genocide that is taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan, President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz informed the community of the College's position on divestment in companies with direct ties to Sudan in an all-school e-mail on April 26. The e-mail stated, "The College decided to support the divesting of investments in companies whose business activities can be shown to support the Sudanese government and its policies in Darfur," noting that the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees, with the assistance of College staff and its external investment consultant, confirmed that the College does not currently have direct investments in any companies that hold any ties to the Sudanese government. He added that Middlebury will prohibit any future direct investment in those multinational companies.

The Darfur issue has become an international cause, attracting the attention and support of college students, activists and celebrities throughout the nation. According to an April 25 New York Times article, universities including the University of California system, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Brown have eliminated assets in companies doing business in Sudan as a result of pressure from student campaigns, protests, petitions and demonstrations. Divestment campaigns are underway at other universities and colleges across the nation. While at this stage, students and administrators agree that divestment is largely symbolic, the overall hope is that stock values of companies with ties to the Sudanese government will fall, forcing those companies to reassess their business ties to Sudan.

This past Sunday, thousands of citizens, lawmakers and celebrities marched in Washington D.C., urging the Bush administration to end the genocide and violence in Darfur. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), actor George Clooney and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel were among the high-profile faces to attend the rally ­- Clooney had just returned from a visit to Africa and described his experience to the vast crowd.

Since early 2003, violent conflict between Sudanese government forces and rebel groups has been rampant. Government forces and ethnic militia called "Janjaweed" have been engaged in civil warfare with two rebel groups called the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). For the past three years, the government has waged a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the civilian population who are members of the same ethnic groups as the rebels.

The Sudanese government and the members of the Janjaweed militias have decimated hundreds of rural villages, killed tens of thousands of people and raped thousands of women and girls. Currently, around 1.8 million Darfurians live in camps in Darfur, and approximately 220,000 have fled into Chad, a neighboring country. The violence has virtually destroyed the local economy and trade in Darfur, leaving 1.5 million people in dire need of food assistance.

The situation has worsened this year, and is threatening to spread into neighboring regions, including Chad, where Sudanese refugees have already fled. More than 400,000 civilians have been killed in the past three years.

In his e-mail, Liebowitz thanked the student-run Sunday Night Group (SNG) "for engaging the College administration on this issue." While the SNG, which formed in January of 2005, is primarily focused on issues of climate change, members have been meeting with Liebowitz since last September regarding socially responsible investment. The issue of Darfur only came to center stage recently when it was established that socially responsible investment, and thus divesting in companies with ties to Sudan, could have a profound effect on the situation in Sudan.

According to SNG member Peter Viola '06, a group of five SNG students met with Liebowitz and the Board of Trustees over Feb break to discuss socially responsible investment.

"After that meeting," Viola noted, "we were unsure of where we stood with the administration. They were supportive, but it was unclear whether or not they would make a decision." Currently, the group is hoping that the Trustees will vote to create the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment (ACSRI), which will be voted on when the Trustees meet this weekend.

Phil Aroneanu '06.5, another SNG member, said that he had hoped the ACSRI would have been formed before spring break so it could have begun work on the Darfur divestment campaign earlier. He stressed that "transparency is a key part of the socially responsible investment campaign, because how can we know what is socially responsible unless we can discuss the practices of specific companies?"

The SNG had hoped that Liebowitz would have responded sooner to their request to form the ACSRI, and according to Aroneanu, "we asked Liebowitz a number of times to release a statement on the topic, and he didn't until we made sure he knew we would be publishing an opinions submission about it in The Campus that would make him look bad."

A petition was published that received over 840 student signatures. In it, the Socially Responsible Investment Campaign members demanded the following: divestment of College endowment funds from companies supporting the Sudanese government, the creation of the ACSRI, to be comprised of faculty, students and administrators and transparency of our endowment investments in order to hold the College's investors accountable to greater social and environmental responsibility.

Liebowitz's e-mail was a first step in informing students about the College's reaction to the genocide and how divestment is a step in the right direction.

As Aroneanu said, "It was a significant step that Liebowitz made, to bring the issue of Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) into the public spotlight for a moment with his Darfur divestment announcement. We are excited that the campus now has some idea that this campaign is going on and that the issue of SRI exists."

Liebowitz, in the e-mail, praised the active students, writing, "It is an important statement, consistent with our educational mission to encourage Middlebury students who feel passionately about issues - such as this one - to exercise that passion in creative and productive ways."