Sleepless in Skopia
03 Sep, 2009 by James L. Clark in Articles & Papers, Ethics & Morality, Interview, Magic, Musings
Tom Verner with children in Sudan. Photo courtesy of Tom Verner
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Sleepless in Skopia
The first real sign of danger in the area comes from the ominous drone of an aging Russian Antonov cargo plane as it sweeps over the remote Sudanese village. Soon it opens its doors and unloads a deadly payload of crude oil barrels stuffed to the brim with explosives and shards of metal. The entire village is ablaze sending terrified men, women, and children desperately running for safety; there is nowhere to hide.
Those who survive the aerial bombardment are soon hit again with a follow-up offensive led by the Janjaweed militia—a vicious nomadic Arab group that has long battled with Darfur’s farming and trading tribes for control over the areas scarce resources. A bloody orgy of destruction ensues.
Any male of fighting age is killed on the spot. Women are often stripped naked and repeatedly beaten with bull whips or with the butt of an AK47; countless women are gang-raped in front of their families, abducted and held as a sex-slave for up to a week before being released; many become pregnant from the attack. Anything of value is collected, including all livestock—the main form of wealth in the Darfur region—in an effort to render remaining villagers destitute.
Survivors, if there are any, flee the area to seek refuge only to end up in overcrowded camps where disease and famine are as real threats as those presented by their own countrymen.
The conflict in Darfur began in 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) launched an armed rebellion citing economic marginalization, chronic underdevelopment, and Khartoum’s failure to protect black farming tribes from attacks by Arab nomads. The SLA was then joined by a second group, the loosely-allied Justice Equality Movement (JEM). This conflict comes right on the heels of the 21-year war in the south of Sudan that preceded it; the similarities are striking. In that war against SPLA rebels, Khartoum sent bombers in, then armed local Arab militias would attack, again, killing the men, raping the women, and stealing anything of value. The government manipulated Western aid, as they still do today. This went on for twenty years. Is it me or is anyone else having historical déjà vu?
Clausewitz in his definitive work entitled On War described war as politics through another means, but this strikes me more as state sponsored terrorism. Call it what you want, typical of all conflict where guns and bombs are involved, it will always be defenseless civilians that suffer the most.
I read an interesting report recently. One of the largest circulated newspapers in the United States, The New York Times, dedicated more than 10,000 words to stories that mentioned Darfur in a singular reporting period. At first glance, you might think, “Hey, someone does care!” Well, maybe not. In that same period they also dedicated more than double that number to Paris Hilton. Frankly, that’s hot. Not.
I’ve spoken to several editors recently who have all told me essentially the same thing: stories about Sudan have little hope of finding placement because all eyes are focused on Iraq and the so-called “War on Terror.” But is this journalistic failing or a damning incitement of our societal interests?
Most of us turn the channel when news, if it ever shows, about places like Darfur comes across our television set. We see it, it makes us uncomfortable, we pick up the remote, and we change the channel. Of course, if we happen to land on a station that is replaying the boxing match where Mike Tyson bites off Evander Holyfield’s ear, well heck… that’s entertainment!
The reality is this: while we sit in relative comfort complaining about the fact that our super-sized fast food didn’t get to us fast enough, as if our increasingly gluttonous consumer-based and inwardly focused society needs any more grease and empty calories anyway, or that our favorite football player got carded (again) on the field for being the arrogant overpaid jerk that we all know he really is, there is a government sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing going on in Sudan that rivals 1994 Rwanda. In fact, there are people all over the world that are suffering in ways we can’t even imagine. So who really cares anyway?
Enter Magicians Without Borders. En Français: Magicien Sans Frontieres.
Yes, my friends, there is such an organization. It is a one-man non-profit tour de force headed by American psychologist and university professor Dr. Tom Verner, and it has one of the most unique humanitarian missions I’ve ever heard about—sharing the wonderful art of magic with the world’s neediest people. In this microwave society where young magicians virtually attack innocent bystanders on the street for their own amusements, rather than for that of the participant’s, Dr. Verner is a fresh and welcome change and we applaud him.
The 56-year-old Verner, who has been a magician for 30 years, started Magicians Without Borders after returning home from a trip that, through a strange twist of fate, found him performing magic for an audience at a refugee camp in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Kosovo, after Serbian forces expelled nearly a million ethnic Albanians in the spring of 1999. “During my time in Macedonia and Kosovo, I developed a sense of the great needs of refugees, and the delight and awe the magic shows could bring them,” says Verner.
On the phone Verner tells me about his time there. He relays to me with a soft eastern accent how he was traveling in a friend’s battered little Yugo as it bounced along the roads towards the Momenpotok refugee settlement. He recalls that when they arrived he was struck by the vast piles of garbage dumped on either side of the road and the fact that countless children were rummaging through it in an effort to find scraps of food and anything that could be salvaged to sell; he said it was impossible to tell where the dump ended and the camp began.
As they parked the car, he and his friend Martin walked to one of the hundreds of huts and knocked on a piece of corrugated metal that acted as a door. A wide-eyed, beautiful five-year-old Roma girl, named Fatima, greeted them. Though Verner spoke no Roma and Fatima spoke no English, she became his assistant for the shows; she just seemed to understand what he needed whether it was a prop or a volunteer. “Something wonderful—something very special—happened between the two of us that day,” Verner told me. But when it was time to go, Verner couldn’t find the little girl and was very disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to tell her goodbye, but when he got back to the car and opened up the door, there she was; Fatima had hid in the back seat. She was hoping to run away with the magician and escape from the camp.
That experience had a profound impact on Verner. In fact, he tells me that he couldn’t get it out of his mind. The last image he has in his mind leaving that camp was of Fatima waving him goodbye. But there was more to come.
About twenty minutes or so later Verner and his friend made their way into a small little town called Shutka, where many Roma refugees from Kosovo were gathered. His friend Martin said, “Why don’t you do a show for these people?” So he did. They made a makeshift table, broke out his gear, and did a show right there in the center of town. In a matter of minutes, over two hundred people had gathered around. At the end of the show most of the people left, except for a few Roma men and one Roma woman, who was ordained with a gorgeous head wrap and a dress with mirrors all over it. “She looked very old,” said Verner, “but I bet she wasn’t over fifty.” She walked right up to him and in broken English said, “Money!” as she dropped a five Denar Macedonia coin into his hand in a way that said, “I am not giving this to you magician; I want you to multiply it for me.”
Verner made it appear and disappear with ease. She was amused, but just pointed again at his hand and said, “Money!” So he changed it into a fifty Denar piece, which in today’s money is about seventy-eight cents, and dropped it into her hand. She smiled from ear-to-ear and skipped down the road staring at the coin. Immediately, the two Roma men rushed to Verner and asked for him to, “Make us visas to America!” At first Verner laughed, but then he realized they were serious. He politely told them he didn’t know that trick, packed up his things, and headed back to Skopia with his friend.
“That night,” Verner tells me. “I couldn’t sleep—I couldn’t get that picture of Fatima out of my mind.” He continued, “In some way, they all saw magic as a way to get out of their trapped situations. I thought of another refugee from Hungry, Erich Weiss, a four year old son of a rabbi, who immigrated to America and became known to the world as Harry Houdini.” You see, Houdini once wrote in his journal, “When I perform for poor people, I sometimes feel that when I get wrapped up with ropes and chains and put into locked boxes, and I escape from my impossible situation, I think I sometimes inspire hope in people that they too can escape from their impossible situations.”
Verner told me, “It was then that I realized that magic was a universal language that had the power to not only entertain people, but in some way, it could show them that the impossible can happen; when they see that it wakes up their imagination and inspires hope.”
After returning home to the United States, Verner set out to create Magicians Without Borders. Since its founding, he has taken a leave of absence from the university, and with the support of charitable donations, he and his wife Janet, a visual artist and teacher who performs as a mime and clown in the shows, have traveled to Sudan, Northern Uganda, Somalia, Ukraine, Croatia, Macedonia and Kosovo, India, Bangladesh, Burma and Thailand after the Tsunami, and to Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina.
Verner and his wife have performed for over 200,000 children, and hundreds of thousands of men and women, at refugee camps around the world. They’ve also preformed for people like Peter Okoye who, when they met in Sudan, was the head of the UN refugee effort in the horn of Africa. After seeing their show Okoye said, “The UN provides for refugees, a Department for Security, a Department for Food, a Department for Housing, but after seeing the children light up during your show, I realize we need a Department of the Imagination.”
Verner ends his shows with an illusion that he feels will resonate at a more spiritual level with his audiences. He takes shredded plain white pieces of paper, used to represent the shattered lives of the refugee’s themselves, and then carefully transforms them into a colorful forty-five foot streamer. “The reactions are incredible,” Verner says. “Though these shows do entertain, on a deeper level they are designed to be an endless procession of inspiring metaphors of broken things becoming whole again; of hope—that the impossible is possible.”
I consider myself privileged to have been able to interview Tom, and I hope that what I have shared with you will challenge you to use your gifts in ways that will bring hope to others around you. If you’ve ever shrugged off the troubles in this world with the rhetorical question, “What can I really offer?” maybe its time you honestly examine yourself and answer it; it may just be that you have magic to give too!
Facts About Darfur
Source: https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/su.html
Ethnic groups: Black 52%, Arab 39%, Beja 6%, Foreigners 2%, Other 1%
Major diseases: bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever, malaria, dengue fever, African trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis, meningococcal meningitis.
People living with HIV/AIDS: 400,000
Refugees and internally displaced persons: refugees (country of origin): 110,927 (Eritrea) 5,023 (Chad) 7,983 (Uganda) 14,812 (Ethiopia); IDPs: 5,300,000 – 6,200,000 (internal conflict since 1980s; ongoing genocide)
Background: Military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments have dominated national politics since independence from the UK in 1956. Sudan was embroiled in two prolonged civil wars during most of the remainder of the 20th century. These conflicts were rooted in northern economic, political, and social domination of largely non-Muslim, non-Arab southern Sudanese. The first civil war ended in 1972, but broke out again in 1983. The second war and famine-related effects resulted in more than 4 million people displaced and, according to rebel estimates, more than 2 million deaths over a period of two decades. Peace talks gained momentum in 2002-04 with the signing of several accords; a final Naivasha peace treaty of January 2005 granted the southern rebels autonomy for six years, after which a referendum for independence is scheduled to be held. A separate conflict that broke out in the western region of Darfur in 2003 has resulted in at least 200,000 deaths and nearly 2 million displaced; as of late 2005, peacekeeping troops were struggling to stabilize the situation. Sudan also has faced large refugee influxes from neighboring countries, primarily Ethiopia and Chad, and armed conflict, poor transport infrastructure, and lack of government support have chronically obstructed the provision of humanitarian assistance to affected populations.
Sudan is a source country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; Sudan may also be a transit and destination country for Ethiopian women trafficked for domestic servitude; boys are trafficked to the Middle East, particularly Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, for use as camel jockeys; small numbers of girls are reportedly trafficked within Sudan for domestic servitude, as well as for commercial sexual exploitation in small brothels in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps; the terrorist rebel organization "Lord’s Resistance Army" (LRA) continues to abduct and forcibly conscript small numbers of children in Southern Sudan for use as cooks, porters, and combatants in its ongoing war against Uganda; some of these children are then trafficked across borders into Uganda or possibly the Democratic Republic of the Congo; children are utilized by rebel groups and the Sudanese Armed Forces and associated militias in the ongoing conflict in Darfur; during the decades of civil war, thousands of Dinka women and children were enslaved by members of Baggara tribes and subjected to various forms of forced labor without remuneration, as well as physical and sexual abuse; with the cessation of the North-South conflict and the ongoing peace process, there were no known new abductions of Dinka by Baggara tribes during 2005; however, inter-tribal abductions of a different nature continue in Southern Sudan and warrant further investigation.
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This article was originally published in MagicSeen Issue No.11, Street Magic Magazine Issue No. 1, and Magician Magazine Issue No 1.
© Copyright 2007, 2009 by James L. Clark, Snr., Esq. All rights reserved. Duplication prohibited by domestic and international laws. This document is not for open publication and may not be released to third parties. The rights of the author have been asserted.
