Three people who had recently returned from western Sudan spoke during Saturday’s Darfur awareness event at First Christ Church in Middletown.
The speakers included Visiting Instructor of Arabic Yasir Hamed, Catholic Relief Services humanitarian worker Scott Schaffer-Duffy, and an asylum-seeking refugee from Darfur. They all gave first-hand accounts of the turmoil and political instability they witnessed in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The event was sponsored by Students Take Action Now: Darfur (STAND) to increase knowledge about genocide and to inform members of the community of the ways they can contribute to the effort to resolve the conflict.
The 25-year-old male refugee, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke emotionally about his emigration to the United States, which was translated by Hamed. According to Hamed, the refugee prefaced his narrative by explaining that it was a “sad story.” He said he initially fled from Darfur to Chad when seven members of his family were killed and his village destroyed by the Janjaweed militia. He was coerced, however, to return to Darfur by the Sudanese government. He escaped and arrived in the United States only a matter of days before appearing at the event.
Hamed began the event by presenting a brief history of Sudan and the country’s political instability since its independence from colonial Europe in 1956.
“The government is not a legal government in my opinion,” Hamed said. “It’s a military coup. I was there. I was a journalist when it happened.”
Hamed argued that the government must change if the genocide and political and civil turmoil is to stop. He also added that the crisis in Sudan will not be resolved by dividing the country.
“The future of Sudan is in unity,” Hamed said. “This is the most important thing.”
Schaffer-Duffy, who has worked in war zones before, gave a slide show presentation of his trip in December 2004 to the Sudanese cities of Khartoum, al Fashir, and Nyala, the capital of Darfur.
“When you fly over Darfur, you fly over hundreds of villages that have been burned,” Schaffer-Duffy said.
Schaffer-Duffy spent his time in Darfur traveling to different camps in the region helping deliver food to displaced victims. He recalled an instance when he drove into a city and returned to a camp he had been working in with 900 loaves of bread—all the loaves that would fit in his van.
Schaffer-Duffy was also invested in finding new ways he could effectively help the victims in Darfur.
“When I asked [a Darfur woman] what I could do to help, she said, ‘Humanitarian aid is good, but to just send humanitarian aid is like fattening them up for the slaughter,’” Schaffer-Duffy said. “The fight for justice is equally important as humanitarian aid.”
According to Schaffer-Duffy, it was extremely difficult to obtain a visa to travel to Sudan and to take pictures. The visa, he said, was not approved until the day before their flight. In order to obtain a visa to take pictures, Schaffer-Duffy said that he had to agree not to take any pictures that would be injurious to the government.
Schaffer-Duffy argued that Sudan has the resources to overcome a great deal of the country’s turmoil.
“Sudan has oil, so it will have money to support itself,” Schaffer-Duffy said. “If [the country gets] a reasonable government that won’t pilfer it, Sudan has a future.”
Schaffer-Duffy also said that the United States stands in a unique position with relation to the Darur genocide.
“It has been convention that [the United States] intervenes when we only have economic interest at stake,” Schaffer-Duffy said. “We don’t have the ax in the fire this time. But we can’t talk about Darfur if we don’t also talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
For Alison Koch ’06, the Advocacy Committee Leader of STAND, the images of Schaffer-Duffy’s slide-show presentation were very profound and left very strong impressions on her.
“The most memorable moment for me was when Mr. Schaffer-Duffy explained the story of the [fortunate] woman who escaped [death] with her seven children,” Koch said. “Her daughters escaped rape, her sons escaped the slave-trade where their hamstrings would be sliced to prevent them from running away.”
STAND concluded Saturday’s event with an advocacy workshop detailing the specific ways members from the Wesleyan and Middletown communities can get involved to help put an end to this crisis.
The Genocide Accountability Act, introduced on March 17, was recently passed in the Senate, but STAND encouraged those who attended the presention to write and call members of the House of Representatives, who will soon be reviewing the act.
“This issue is so urgent, and so much is happening all he time, students at Wesleyan have been great in helping us out,” said Rebecca Littman’08, STAND’s Awareness Committee Leader.
To raise money for and increase awareness about the genocide in Darfur, STAND will be holding an Afrobeat Festival in the WestCo courtyard this Saturday with performances by Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble and Wummi. There will also be a benefit party that night from 10 p.m.-2 a.m. at Psi-U.
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