N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, is a typical place to encounter John Prendergast, the American peace-broker, human-rights activist, and former Clinton administration diplomat who, as essentially a one-man operation, has made it his mission to stop the genocide in Darfur. Half a century after France granted Chad its independence, the central African country is a post-colonial basket case, beset by coups d'état, corruption, and poverty.
N'Djamena is a city right out of a Graham Greene novel, bubbling with plotters, foreign rebels, aid workers, missionaries, mercenaries, oil prospectors, and U.S. advisers. Throughout Chad, local politicos are loyal primarily to the highest bidder, then to their tribe, then to their faith, and finally, with reservations, to a regime that controls little more than the capitol. The city streets are full of soldiers, but only the purple-ascot-wearing Presidential Guard is entrusted with guns. The desert lands near the eastern border with Sudan are home to 250,000 refugees from the bloody conflict in the neighboring region of Darfur.
Everyone who is anyone in N'Djamena hangs out at the slightly seedy sixties-era Novotel hotel. Prendergast stands out among the safari-shirted expats in the lobby and the brush-cut Foreign Legionnaires eyeing French businessmen's wives by the pool. He's in the perfect spot to hear who's up, who's down, and just when the rebels in exile are expected to invade in another coup attempt, the last just six months ago. Tall and slim at 43, with graying shoulder-length hair and a thin goatee, wearing jeans and wrap-around shades, Prendergast looks more rock roadie than former State Department official. Before and since his time in government, he has fashioned himself as a freelance peace-broker—the antithesis of a mercenary—and now works for the International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected left-leaning nonprofit that scouts out geopolitical conflicts (Balkans border disputes, terrorism in Indonesia, power struggles in Afghanistan) and then issues reports that offer critical intelligence, analysis, and solutions.
Within this Brussels-based organization, Prendergast is better known even than ICG's head, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans. It's Prendergast who takes movie stars and news anchors to various African war zones and who regularly appears on CNN and the BBC. "Every time you take your eye off the ball with Darfur, there is another op-ed by John recalling your attention to it," says journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has visited Africa with Prendergast. As a leader of the Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella group of disparate human-rights and relief organizations that are speaking out for peace with one loud voice, he has become a cult figure on college campuses.
Counting all his congressional testimonies and campus rallies, he gave more than 150 speeches last year, often railing against the Bush administrations mistakes in Darfur: "We don't need to send in the 82nd Airborne," he says, advocating instead United Nations peacekeeping troops and more consistent pressure from the U.S. "It worked in Sudan with Osama bin Laden. They kicked him out, broke up the Al Qaeda commercial network and the training camps." His outspokenness has given him a stature well above that of a squawking critic. "John goes into bad places, puts his ass on the line, and tries to figure out what governments and others should do," says his friend Samantha Power, whose reporting on Darfur in The New Yorker won a National Magazine Award. Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke puts it more bluntly: "John is one of those rare people who go out in the field, cut through the bullshit, cut through the bureaucracy, come back, and tell the truth. Attention must be paid." Nicholas Kristof, whose op-ed columns in The New York Times about his own dangerous treks in Darfur recently won a Pulitzer, calls Prendergast "the coolest policy wonk around. And probably the one most likely to come down with malaria or liver flukes."
Prendergast's combination of athletic prowess, fiery intellect, and moral glamour has also made him astonishingly well known—and well connected—among the entertainment community. Prendergast has addressed the foundations of top Hollywood agencies like William Morris—organizations that match agency clients with charitable causes. Indeed, Prendergast has his own agent in L.A., is writing a book on everyday activism with Hotel Rwanda star Don Cheadle, and is already acting in a part written for him in a Ugandan-crisis movie starring Robin Wright Penn and Javier Bardem. There is even talk of a film about his own adventures, if they could be made simple enough for a screenplay.
