Stirred by reports of genocide in Sudan, Swarthmore College senior Mark Hanis concocted a zany scheme last fall: an “adopt-a-peacekeeper” fund to finance an African Union (AU) force stationed in Darfur.

Hanis spent many sleepless nights e-mailing human rights leaders to request support for his plan. One of the activists he contacted was Samantha Power, a Kennedy School of Government (KSG) lecturer who last summer traveled to the western Sudanese region of Darfur, where government-backed militias have slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslim villagers.

“I thought, this kid at Swarthmore—he’s lost his mind,” Power said.

Power met Hanis face-to-face yesterday evening at a KSG panel discussion on Hanis’ brainchild, the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF).

Drawing roars of laughter from the audience of more than 100, Power asked Hanis, “What were you smoking when you had this idea?”

“I was smoking a lot,” Hanis quipped.

In November, Hanis persuaded Clinton-era National Security Council official Gayle Smith to back GIF’s mission. Smith said last night that she had traveled to Addis Abba, Ethiopia, and found that AU leaders were enthusiastic about Hanis’ initiative.

GIF, an upstart initiative staffed by Swarthmore students, aims to raise $1 million for the AU in the next 100 days.

GIF has attracted support from students on nearly 80 other college campuses, as well as several members of Congress and a coterie of retired military officers.

Senators Jon Corzine, D-N.J. and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas joined GIF members at a Capitol Hill press conference kicking off the campaign yesterday.

GIF is currently negotiating an agreement with the AU under which donations will be used to provide logistical support for the peacekeeping force—but funds will explicitly not be used to purchase lethal weapons.

Hanis noted that Swarthmore is a Quaker school, and he said that the initiative’s support on campus would suffer if GIF funded weapons purchases.

At last night’s panel event, Romeo Dallaire, a retired Canadian general who led the ill-fated UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in 1994, endorsed GIF’s decision to abstain from supporting weapons purchases. He said that millions of illicit small arms are already circulating in the developing world. “They are not void of weapon systems,” said Dallaire, a fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which sponsored last night’s event. “They are void of trucks. They are void of water purification equipment.”

Late last year, the AU sent a shoe-string force of 2,193 soldiers to Darfur, where more than 300,000 civilians have died since 2003.

Dallaire said that GIF’s efforts would likely boost the morale of Rwandan and South African peacekeepers in the AU force, who he said were suffering from a “sense of abandonment.”