Actress and Activist Mia Farrow on Urgent Need to Save Darfur

This is a partial transcript from "Hannity & Colmes," April 6, 2007, that has been edited for clarity.

RICH LOWRY, GUEST CO-HOST: LOWRY: Welcome back to “Hannity & Colmes”. I'm Rich Lowry, in for Sean tonight. Recently, Alan sat down with actress and activist Mia Farrow to talk with her about her efforts to stop the slaughter in Darfur.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COLMES: We welcome Mia Farrow. Thank you very much for being here.

MIA FARROW, ACTRESS/ACTIVIST: Thank you.

COLMES: You've been so outspoken about having gone now to the Darfur area, what, four times?

FARROW: Four times.

COLMES: Four different trips. And you call what's going on there the first genocide of the 21st Century. What have you experienced?

FARROW: Atrocities of the worst kind ongoing in the Darfur region. And in the last trip I visited the Central African Republican and eastern Chad, the latter for the second time. And what was evident there is that Darfur's violence has spilled.

I mean, the border is nonexistent. It's completely porous, and the violence has spilled and reached well into Chad and the Central African Republic.

Believe it or not, people are actually running back into Darfur now from eastern Chad. Chadian villages are on fire.

COLMES: I want to back up for just one second and ask you what got you involved in this. I know you're a UNICEF Goodwill ambassador. You yourself suffered from polio.

FARROW: Yes.

COLMES: You had a son who's had polio.

FARROW: Yes.

COLMES: Is that what spurred you on or inspired you?

FARROW: I don't know. You know, I'm not a shrink, but I read some Nicholas Kristof pieces. And on the anniversary of Rwanda, the tenth anniversary, there was a very powerful piece by Samantha Powers. And I came to UNICEF. I was already a UNICEF ambassador. And I just said, "I need to go to Darfur."

And they said, "It's way too dangerous. Hold on, hold on." But eventually, I got there first in 2004.

COLMES: And then you've gone four times. When you just read about the things that you've seen and see, and what's going on there, every 30 minutes a child dies because of a vaccine preventable disease. One in five doesn't make it to their fifth birthday. Thirty-eight is the average life expectancy.

And there are simple things you think that any country, civilized countries could do to help ease the pain these people are suffering.

FARROW: The suffering is enormous. I mean, more than half a million people have been killed thus far. Two and a half million are living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps.

And you have tired aide workers risking their own lives, 14 of them killed since June, raped. Over the holiday season, there was an attack on aide workers.

So they're really putting their own lives on the line to do what, essentially, the world has turned away from doing, sustaining a very, very fragile, vulnerable population...

COLMES: We're showing some of the pictures now as you're talking.—We're seeing what some of these children look like. What some of the toll in human life that...

FARROW: It is immeasurable. The suffering is immeasurable. I mean, people maybe will never reclaim their lives. I mean, they've been displaced. Their lands have been burned, their villages burned, their wells poisoned, their crops destroyed.

COLMES: What does it say that it takes a Mia Farrow, someone with your level of celebrity, to come on the media, to talk about this? Otherwise, you wonder if it would get anywhere near the attention that it would be getting, if it weren't people with your stature talking about it?

FARROW: I don't know what it says. I just know that — you know, I think we all have — this is a defining moment for all of us, within, shall we say, our human family. That we have a moral mandate to do our utmost.

And if it's me doing my utmost, and I get to talk to you and people presumably are listening. But, you know, other people are doing other things. I mean, the aide workers risking their lives, for example, are the true heroes.

COLMES: What is being done? What's the U.N. doing? Can you address what is happening?

FARROW: Given that the U.N. is the best institution we have, it has utterly failed in Darfur. Kofi Annan recommended a force of 22,000 to enter Darfur to protect the civilian population and the humanitarian but requested the permission of the government of Sudan, perpetrators of the genocide.

Predictably they refused, and now we're beginning the fifth year of hand-wringing. Personally, what I'd like to see in the U.N. is a permanent force there, when there is a determination of genocide, that that force would automatically be there. I mean, we wouldn't — there wouldn't be a genocide in Darfur. They can't even fight the rebels. So this would have stopped it.

COLMES: Thank you very much for addressing this and talking about to us about it.

FARROW: Thank you. Thank you.

COLMES: And seeing these pictures, certainly also hopefully...

FARROW: And support our humanitarians, who do — who are doing what the world has turned away from.

COLMES: And hopefully educate all of us about what our priorities should be.

FARROW: Or you can go to MiaFarrow.org.

COLMES: It's a great web site.

FARROW: Thank you. Thank you.

COLMES: And some wonderful pictures of your visits there.

FARROW: Thank you.

COLMES: Thanks very much for being with us.

FARROW: Thanks for having me.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LOWRY: For more information or to donate to UNICEF, go to: www.UNICEFUSA.org.

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