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Photo by Reed Hutchinson |
Students outside the James West Alumni Center Nov. 14 listen to speakers urge the UC to divest its holdings in companies that do business with Sudan. |
Regents to take up divestment issue
BY Anne burke
Today Staff Writer
Prompted by a UCLA-based student group fighting genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, a UC Board of Regents committee has agreed to look into divestment of the university’s holdings in companies doing business in the East African country.
Meeting at the James West Alumni Center on Nov. 14, the Committee on Investments voted unanimously to ask UC President Robert C. Dynes to present to the full board in January a comprehensive plan on divestment from companies that have ties to the Sudanese government.
The vote took place in a room packed with more than 100 students, many of them active with the UCLA-based Darfur Action Committee. Students, some wearing green T-shirts symbolic of the Darfur peace movement, locked arms in solidarity and cheered the outcome. Peace activist Don Cheadle, an Academy Award nominee for his role in “Hotel Rwanda,” about the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, linked arms and stood with students in the front row.
“The time has come for the UC to start taking genocide seriously,” said student Regent Adam Rosenthal, who brought the divestment proposal to the committee. “I ask that we don’t sit silently as the atrocities continue.”
A law student at UC Davis, Rosenthal cited estimates of 160,000 to 400,000 dead in the western province of Darfur since the bloodshed started in February 2003. The killings are carried out mostly by the government-supported militia known as the Janjaweed. In 2004, the United States declared that the situation amounted to genocide, but the international community has yet to take steps to stop the slaughter.
Rosenthal said that Harvard and Stanford have shed investments in the Sudan, and “neither portfolio is suffering at all.”
The divestment proposal focuses on four companies doing substantial business in the Sudan. But Dynes, speaking from Oakland, cautioned that the four companies “may not be the only ones we unearth.” The president added that he would like to see an “analysis of the fiduciary impact” of shedding the investments.
Several regents reacted positively to the divestment proposal. “I think it is reasonable and it is responsible,” said Regent Norman J. Pattiz.
Before the vote, student leaders pumped up a crowd outside the alumni center with chants, hand-clapping and singing. The group was joined by several faculty and staff members, including Cynthia Hall, a counselor supervisor at the Career Center. She brought four student interns who work in her office to the event to emphasize the importance of values.
Cheadle spoke briefly but eloquently about the role of young people in ending the killings. “There is no greater humanitarian disaster than what is happening in eastern Africa right now,” said the actor, who accompanied a congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Darfur early this year. “This is a way for you to tell your elected representatives that you won’t stand for it.” |
