Cheadle moves from set to world stage

It’s long been fashionable to mock the synergy between Congress and Hollywood in which legislators invite movie stars to testify in Washington about issues dramatized in their films. The memory of Jessica Lange, Jane Fonda and Sissy Spacek telling a House hearing about the plight of small farmers is still an inviting target two decades later.

Don Cheadle is unlikely to face such cynicism. Since playing a heroic hotel manager who saved 1,200 people from tribal violence in “Hotel Rwanda,” he has thrown himself into the daunting challenge of trying to make the world pay more attention to genocide in Africa.

Two weeks ago, on the morning he was nominated for a best actor Oscar, Cheadle was in a small United Nations plane over East Africa. He’d spent 2 1/2 days with a congressional delegation in Chad touring refugee camps, which had been set up in response to a civil war in neighboring Sudan. He got the news when he phoned home.

Two days later, Cheadle appeared at a Washington press conference with the delegation to draw a line between the genocidal nightmare of Rwanda, where a million people were murdered in the space of 100 days in 1994, and the crisis in Sudan, where an estimated 1.8 million people have been displaced, 70,000 have died and 200,000 have left to seek protection in Chad. “What we’re seeing now is tsunamis of violence,” he said.

Last week, MTV’s mtvU channel said its campaign to raise consciousness about Sudan among college students would feature Cheadle in spots produced with Amnesty International.

And tonight, Cheadle will play a role somewhere between activist and journalist on ABC’s “Nightline,” functioning as the principal correspondent in a show devoted to the congressional tour. “Nightline” plans to devote Thursday night to a broader conversation about genocide in Africa that will include Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager Cheadle portrayed. Cheadle said he came away from making “Hotel Rwanda” frustrated by the international community’s failure to intervene in Rwanda’s violence, in which ruling Hutus attempted to wipe out the Tutsis. The two ethnic groups had been forced to carry identity cards ever since the Belgian occupation in the 1920s, when the Tutsis were picked to rule. Arguments over what constituted genocide contributed to a lack of international action.

“I just want to make it very hard for people to say, ‘I didn’t know about [the crisis in Sudan],’ which was what so many people said about Rwanda,” Cheadle said.

Last fall, he sought out Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton), the chairman of the House subcommittee on Africa, and invited him to a screening of “Hotel Rwanda.” When Royce scheduled a congressional trip to Africa that included a visit to refugees from Sudan, he invited Cheadle, recognizing it would generate more media attention.

Rick Wilkinson, a freelance producer who works for “Nightline,” had the same idea. Earlier in January he had interviewed Cheadle for a segment on Africa for ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” and Cheadle mentioned the tour. Only later -- when he mentioned the trip to some ex-”Nightline” staffers, who scolded him for not pitching the idea immediately -- did Wilkinson ask Cheadle if “Nightline” could follow him.

What Wilkinson anticipated was that Cheadle would be a subject of the “Nightline” report: The cameras would watch him as he toured, and an off-camera staffer would “debrief” him, recording his thoughts. But the more they talked once they arrived in Africa, the more Wilkinson found himself wanting Cheadle to conduct interviews with refugees through a translator and thinking that Cheadle could do “stand-ups” -- explanatory moments on camera. Last week in L.A., Cheadle recorded “tracking” segments: short voice-overs that normally would be done by host Ted Koppel.

Wilkinson, who has an 18-year relationship with “Nightline” as a staff and freelance producer, said it was the only occasion he could remember in which an entertainer played such an active role in the news program. (The closest comparison: using novelist Richard Price to visit the neighborhood where Price’s “Clockers,” a book about low-level drug dealers, was set.) Tonight’s show catches Cheadle as he walks through refugee camps -- permanent, temporary, abandoned -- on a Mars-like landscape of reddish dirt. One man tells him he has lost his entire family: “I am alone.” “Everybody arrives here scarred,” he tells the camera, which turns to a woman who says she lost her husband and five children. She covers her face as an interpreter translates her story for Cheadle. At other moments refugees hold up banners illustrating how they were driven from their homes.

“Walking down the roads, I had two cameras. I didn’t take one picture,” Cheadle says during the segment. “I was just looking in their eyes, trying to imagine what they had seen. It’s unimaginable. I just felt very small in a way and very insignificant and humbled.”

Cheadle believes the scope of the Rwandan genocide made it difficult for people to understand the horror or to take action.

“Yes, in a hundred days, a million people killed, you feel like, wow, what could have been done? But in Sudan we’re talking about something that has been developing for 23 months; there is still time to intervene.”

Sudan’s Muslim-dominated government and Christian and animist rebels in the south signed a peace accord to end 21 years of civil war in January. But for nearly two years, violence has also flared in the western area of Darfur, where Arab militias called janjaweed are accused of numerous killings and rapes of non-Arabs.

Cheadle and Royce want the United Nations to adopt economic sanctions against Sudan. But there are fears that China and Russia, which are members of the U.N. Security Council and trading partners of Sudan, would veto the measure.

Cheadle is now routinely described in press accounts as “actor and activist.” Last year he produced his first movie (“Crash,” an ensemble film), and he is directing his first (“Tishomingo Blues”).

“One of my principal jobs is to stay visible -- every time I have the light on me, to talk about it, to keep the issue in front of people as much as I can. And to keep the light on me, I have to work.”

At the end of the “Nightline” segment, the camera watches Cheadle looking through a barbed wire fence at one of the camps.

“We saw so much despair and tragedy that you go, ‘How can I really combat this unless I spend every dime I have and somehow impress upon every human being I know to chip in?’ ” he says. “It’s one thing to show the numbers and think about it as statistics, and another thing to actually touch these people and hear their stories and really share with them on the human level.”