The United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, recently admitted, “while the international community had provided unprecedented assistance to countries ravaged by the Asian tsunamis, it continues to ignore chronic crises of equally catastrophic consequences in Africa.” (New York Times, Jan. 25) The foremost of these crises are the systematic massacres of civilians in the Darfur region of western Sudan, a government-sponsored campaign that the U.S. Congress and many human rights organizations have called genocide, and which a recent U.N. report has referred to as crimes against humanity tantamount to genocide. As many as ten thousand men, women and children, mostly black Muslims, are slaughtered every week in Darfur.
These killings are perpetrated by the mainly Arab government and their militia henchmen, who were also responsible for the deaths of about two million Christians in the recently concluded “civil war” in the southern region of the country. This does not even include the thousands more dying from lack of food, water, shelter and medicine, who are rotting away ignored and abandoned by most of the world in makeshift refugee camps in both Darfur and across the border in Chad.
Although all of our hearts go out to the victims of the tsunami, the ratio of need to support given by Western countries to these two areas humanitarian disasters are skewed beyond any justification. While radio, television, the retail market, the Internet, the government and pretty much every nook and cranny in American civilization has come out in droves to support the tsunami victims – an inspiring and heartening trend in a country where concern for the outside world has been very much in doubt in recent years – Darfur has been all but forgotten. The United States is actually one of the few world powers contributing any aid at all to Darfur. The other four superpowers on the U.N. Security Council, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia, all have major economic interests tied up with Sudanese government and don’t want to rock the boat.
The next question is of course how to get involved. While donating money to humanitarian organizations like Oxfam is critical in assisting the Darfurian refugees who have already been driven from their homes, equally important is donating your time and effort into lobbying the government and the United Nations to support actions that could actually halt the genocide. Divestment from companies that invest in Sudan, diplomatic pressure on the Sudanese government and garnering support for an African Union military force backed up by international funding and oversight are all keys to stopping the genocide before it escalates any further.
Dozens of passionate activists have already started organizing on Wesleyan’s campus and are working with thousands of students from around the country in a united effort to stop the genocide. If you’d like to get involved right here on campus, go to www.riseup.net and sign up for the “westand” listserv (STAND = Students Taking Action Now: Darfur). This list will keep you informed about weekly meetings and ongoing events both on-campus and nationwide to fight for a lasting peace in Sudan. Below are some other websites that you can check out to stay informed about the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crisis.
What makes genocide so horrific and distinguishes it from natural disasters is not the cold statistics of the number of people killed, but the annihilation of the moral fabric and landscape of our very humanity. We, as world citizens, are collectively permitting this moral destruction by allowing these atrocities to continue, while we bury our heads in the sand and claim ignorance and helplessness. So speak up, be loud with your voices and make yourself as much of a burden as possible on your leaders, your administration and all those in power who persist in wiping their hands clean of this most unnatural of disasters.
• darfurgenocide.org
• genocideinterventionfund.org
• savedarfur.org
• iabolish.org
• www.mtvu.com/on_mtvu/activism/stand
• www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/darfur
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