"It's merciless but you know what? I don't care. I don't care if they lose a few million out of their gazillion. The great thing about Steven Spielberg's withdrawing his participation is that he did it through the front door, saying that it was a matter of conscience. And therefore he placed it squarely in the moral arena, leaving the sponsors very little place to hide."
As for Western leaders intending to go to the opening ceremony: "Shame on Gordon Brown I say. Because he represents the people of Great Britain. Our president has also accepted an invitation to go. I feel that - we don't care what he does next year - but this year he represents us and many of us don't want to see him take his place next to [Chinese] President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) at the genocide Olympics. He could have made it provisional, and then used the leverage."
But the game is surely bigger than this, as it was last year when Brown was accused of jeopardizing the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon by threatening a boycott if Robert Mugabe turned up.
"Clearly there's a bigger game," Farrow says, "in which the people of Darfur are simply expendable chips. One would like to have our leadership reflect that with knowledge comes responsibility. I know that sounds naive and soft, but I do believe we've gone too far in emphasizing the need for trade and economics against the cost of the value of a human life, and our own moral compass."
Farrow's great strength, and weakness, as a campaigner is that she can use the kind of emotive language a politician can't. She is a movie star with the time and financial security to pursue her charitable instincts to their fullest expression, but there is little of the self-gratification that we saw, for example, in Madonna's recent fundraiser on the lawn of the UN. It comes down, says Farrow, to a simple question of standing up to bullies. "I think you call people on things at certain points. Otherwise you create monsters. I see that even in my own business, where performers get a lot of undeserved adulation and start believing it and people stop telling them no, or telling them what is true, their reality becomes distorted."
Around her neck she wears a good luck charm given to her by a Sudanese woman named Halima, who was wearing it when her village was attacked by Janjaweed. Halima saw her husband and three of her five children bayoneted to death, says Farrow. "I believe it contains a piece of the Koran. You see everyone in Darfur wearing one, and in eastern Chad. Halima insisted that I have this, for my protection. She said tell people what is happening here: that we will all be slaughtered."
RSS