Jason Miller is hoping he’s given the Sudanese government a few billion reasons to think about ceasing its genocidal campaign in Darfur.
By day, he’s a medical student studying degenerative diseases at U.C. San Francisco. And by day he’s also a leader in the University of California-wide Darfurian divestment movement, which recently grabbed national headlines when it convinced the 10-campus U.C. system to agree to targeted divestment from companies enriching the Sudanese government.
Truth be told, by night he’s both of these as well — and, he admitted during an early-morning interview at j., he’s pretty tired.
“This is a full-time job,” said a weary Miller, 27, who’s also hoping to earn his M.D. and Ph.D. within the next few years.
Yet, unfortunately, combating genocide throughout the world will always be a growth industry. Like many leaders in the Darfur movement, Miller is Jewish. He and his co-leader in the U.C. campaign, Jewish UCLA student Adam Sterling, had been working independently before joining forces.
Miller lost family in the Holocaust and it always rankled him that he had been helpless to do anything to decry or prevent the Rwandan genocide (though, to be fair, he was just a high school junior in Dayton, Ohio). While an undergraduate at Stanford, he wrote a research paper on genocide and concluded that, given the right circumstances, virtually anyone could be a casual observer or even active participant in genocide.
He vowed he wouldn’t be silent during the next outbreak of state-sponsored killing — and he didn’t have to wait that long.
Kicking off a divestment campaign in early 2005, he was flatly rebuffed by the U.C. system. So, unlike many modern protesters, Miller and his colleagues didn’t just hit the streets, they hit the books.
Miller modeled parts of the campaign after the successful South African divestment movement of the 1980s. But he noticed that the systematic curtailment of international business ventures in South Africa left the nation anemic even after the ascent of the African National Congress. So, instead, he pushed “targeted divestment” of Sudan.
In order to raise Miller’s red flag, a company must meet three criteria: It must provide revenue to Sudan’s Khartoum-based government, not provide any benefits to Sudan’s disaffected outlying regions and not have expressed any company policy regarding the situation in Darfur. Of the hundreds of international businesses operating in Sudan, only about 30 met this test.
One year after being told his idea was impossible, Miller and his colleagues presented the list of problematic companies, and thoroughly researched alternate investments (by law, the University of California or any other fund manager cannot use altruistic rationales to make financial decisions, necessitating the alternatives).
U.C. ended up cutting ties with nine companies and wrote warning letters to four more. Because of the ripple disclosure would have on stock values, the University of California is not yet permitted to reveal how much money this entailed, but Miller notes that it’s somewhere between $20 million and $2.6 billion.
It was a huge victory for Miller and fellow Darfurian activists. The divestment was only the third the University of California had ever agreed to, following South Africa and tobacco. And, at $64 billion, the University of California holds the largest university endowment in the world — so people noticed.
Other universities, cities and even entire states have taken steps to adopt U.C.’s divestment model. A bill Miller helped author with Assemblyman Paul Koretz (D-West Hollywood) is circulating around Sacramento right now. The impact would be massive, as California’s state employee pension funds are the nation’s two largest.
Miller has cultivated hundreds of Darfur action networks around the country, and, with the ball now rolling, he hopes to move to a more advisory role.
And not only has the movement been good for Darfur — it’s also good for the Jews.
“What I find heartening about this movement is it’s proven to me that Jews have truly internalized the lessons of the Holocaust, which is ‘Never again, for anyone, anywhere,'” he said.
“It wasn’t just ‘let’s protect the Jews from the next genocide.’ It was ‘let’s protect anyone.'”
For more information, visit www.inosphere.com/sudan/home.asp