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In March 31, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono appeared at a Vienna press conference in a bag large enough to hold the two of them closely together, hidden from the glare of the camera flashes. Inside the bag, they claimed to be eating chocolate cake. Perplexed, the press asked questions and John and Yoko explained that the bag represented total communication. “When you’re in a bag, you can’t be judged by the color of your skin, the length of your hair, your age or any other attributes.” After the press carefully considered their concept, John and Yoko were amused that the first question was, “Well then, what are you wearing?”
Exactly 38 years later, on March 31, 2007, horsemen masked by turbans and bandanas surrounded both Tiero and Marena—good-sized farming villages located just across the Chadanian border from Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. Although their faces were well hidden, rank was proudly displayed on the military uniforms they were wearing.
The villagers immediately recognized the horsemen as Janjaweed—an Arab militia backed by the Sudanese government. Villagers attempted to put up a fight, but over the course of three hours, they were burned, murdered and brutalized, leaving an estimated 300 to 400 people dead. An exact count has not yet been made because bodies continue to turn up in the bush.
The atrocity in Tiero and Marena is but one in a chain of state-supported massacres that led both Colin Powell and President Bush to conclude in 2004 that what is happening in Darfur is nothing short of genocide. But aside from generous aid packages from the U.S., very little has been done to stop the violence. As a consequence, more than 300,000 African Sudanese farmers have been murdered for the very sort of thing John and Yoko tried to hide in a bag—their skin color and tribal affiliations.
The unofficial goal of the Janjaweed has been to clear large swaths of the resource-scarce country for Arab farmers—displacing more than 2.5 million Darfuris to overflowing, disease-ridden camps throughout Chad in the process. The attacks on Tiero and Marena represent a growing problem as death, violence and brutality spill across the borders of Sudan into Chad and the Central African Republic, displacing an additional 140,000 refugees.
You Can’t Get Peace in a King-Sized Duvet
John Lennon realized that his high-minded art projects and chants of “Give Peace a Chance” were simplistic. And, to him, that was exactly the point. “We’re trying to sell peace, like a product,” he said on The David Frost Show. “We’re trying to sell peace the way people sell soap or soft drinks.”
John and Yoko’s “ad campaign for peace” took on Dadaist proportions as the couple bought billboards in major city squares and took out newspaper advertisements declaring, “War is Over (If You Want It).” They sent acorns to world leaders with the hope that they would be planted for peace. Most famously, they spent their honeymoon at the Amsterdam Hilton, hosting a bedside press conference with the slogans “bed peace” and “hair peace” posted above their heads. “My photo is going to be in the paper anyway. It might as well be in the paper with the word ‘peace’ above my head,” John reasoned.
“At the time, they were ridiculed,” says Helen Garrett, director of marketing for Amnesty International. “But here it is, 30-some years later and people are still talking about what they did. John took these large concepts and made them simple enough for people to understand. He put them into slogans that could then be used to inspire and mobilize.”
And he also turned many of these slogans into songs. Earlier this year, Ono waived licensing restrictions on Lennon’s entire solo catalog so U2 could record “Instant Karma,” The Black Eyed Peas could record “Power to the People,” Green Day could record “Working Class Hero” and the results could be packaged and sold—like soap—to raise money for Darfur and to promote peace there.
“With his music, Lennon says things about the relationship of life, love, fatherhood and fame,” says Jeff Ayeroff, executive producer of the resulting album, Instant Karma: The Campaign to Save Darfur. “And he means them. He doesn’t hide behind them. He doesn’t find irony and sarcasm. He believes in what he is saying.”
Ayeroff was the producer of The Beatles 1 album and the brains behind MTV’s Rock the Vote. He had the connections to pull everyone from Jackson Browne to The flaming Lips on board. “We ended up with 60 tracks, which I cut down to 23 for the album,” he says. “As a result, there are going to be a lot of Internet-only and special-edition tracks—like Willie Nelson’s version of ‘Imagine,’ available only at Borders bookstores, or Duran Duran’s take on ‘Instant Karma,’ available only in Europe.”
Nutopian International Anthem
The first UN Refugee Agency workers to make it to Tiero following the massacre found an apocalyptic scene far removed from the utopian dreamscape described in John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It’s a scene far too horrific to recount here, but in this bloodclot of reality we find the true power of a song that asks us to resist our impulse for violence and turn a cheek toward peace.
“‘Imagine’ has probably done better than any other song in making people aware that things don’t have to be the way they are,” says Jakob Dylan, who contributed “Gimmie Some Truth” to the Instant Karma project with his friend Dhanni Harrison. “It works in the subconscious. You could say that, lyrically, it’s naive, but if it is, then bring on more naiveté. Because these are the kind of lessons that even children don’t have to be taught.”
Throughout his career, John Lennon dared us to make a choice against violence. It’s the same choice the Instant Karma campaign is making right now. “We’re not asking people to send large sums of money or to travel to Sudan to work on our humanitarian team,” Garrett says. “We’re asking people to keep communicating. If our elected officials know that this is an issue their constituency cares about, they will be pressured to do more.”
For more info, visit InstantKarma.
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