Prendergast to be honored with Crystal Tiger

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Prendergast, a co-founder and co-chair of the ENOUGH project, has attracted international attention to the atrocities in the Darfur region of the Sudan and in northern Uganda and has lined up a number of famous figures ranging from actor Don Cheadle to former president Bill Clinton to help him in his efforts.

“I increasingly came to realize,” Prendergast said in an interview yesterday, “that without a real constituency of people working against genocide and working for peace, we would constantly be in a catch-up mode, trying to convince our government that it’s our moral obligation to respond.”

The Crystal Tiger Award committee of eight University students chose Prendergast out of the nominated candidates because they believed he will be particularly able to motivate the student body, committee member Daphne Earp ’10 said.

Prendergast said that he could hardly believe he had won the same award that had previously been given to such prominent political figures.

“I’ll take it, but I hope [the audience doesn’t] realize when I’m on stage that they made a terrible mistake,” he said.

Earp said, however, that the Crystal Tiger committee made a unanimous decision that Prendergast was the perfect candidate.

“The primary goal of the award is to give students an opportunity to interact with people who the student body feels has had a huge impact on society,” Earp said. “John Prendergast is one of the most famous activists in the world. His work has raised him to celebrity status, so we feel people will be really inspired by him.”

Prendergast will accept the award and deliver an address at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 21, in McCosh 50.

Prendergast made peace advocacy his life’s mission at the age of 20 after watching a “video that had been smuggled out of Ethiopia in 1983.”

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“It was a picture of Ethiopian citizens, as far as the eye could see, who were huddled over little fires and who had lost everything,” he recalled.

Seeing this depiction of innocent people burned out of their homes, suffering from a famine that would eventually claim a million lives, Prendergast decided that he had to act.

“These are people that needed someone to stand up for them,” he said, “that needed a voice because their voices have been taken away.”

Prendergast said he is most proud of his efforts with the International Crisis Group to end the war in Southern Sudan, which resulted in 2.25 million deaths. He added that he is also particularly satisfied with his previous work as the director of African affairs at the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, a group that helped stop violence between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Right now, Prendergast has a number of projects in the works with the goal of solving human rights issues all over Africa.

“We are focused on building the Darfur anti-genocide movement by enhancing the substance of policy requests so that the real root causes will be addressed by U.S. policy,” he explained.

ENOUGH is also launching a campaign to protect women and girls in the Congo as well as starting a sister schools program between students in the United States and Darfurian refugees in Chad.

Prendergast said he will continue to promote the peace project in Uganda, where war has been going on for 20 years, while expanding efforts to Somalia and the horn of Africa.

Prendergast has tried to get more people involved in his cause by working through grassroots coalitions and faith-based groups, taking advantage of popular media and traveling around the country to spread his message.

To University students who wish to emulate him, Prendergast recommends not doing so, at least not in an identical way.

“Don’t exactly follow in my footsteps because I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “Learn from my mistakes. Also, I know it sounds trite, but follow your dreams. Be open to all the possibilities because the road is never straight and predictable.”