Americans Rally to Save Darfur

The Progress Report. Posted April 29, 2006.

"It is in the realm of domestic politics that the battle to stop genocide is lost," Harvard University's Samantha Power wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of why the post-Holocaust pledge of "Never Again" is so rarely kept. "American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference. They reason that they will incur no costs if the United States remains uninvolved but will face steep risks if they engage." It is therefore of great significance that "public outrage, sporadic before, is growing over the continuing bloodshed in Darfur," as the New York Times reports today. This Sunday, tens of thousands of Americans -- including actor George Clooney, U.S. Olympic gold medal winner Joey Cheek, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) -- will join rallies around the country urging the Bush administration to step up its efforts to end the genocidal violence in Darfur. (Watch an excellent new short video on Darfur featuring Pelosi and others.)

The rallies are backed by an "unusually broad coalition of 164 humanitarian and religious groups, including Amnesty International and the National Association of Evangelicals," and its message is clear: "What we cannot do is turn our heads and look away and hope that this will somehow disappear," as Clooney put it yesterday. "It's the first genocide of the 21st century." Take a moment to sign up with SaveDarfur.org and the Genocide Intervention Network, and attend a rally in your area.

Not just symbolism

"What we do about Darfur says a lot about us and the conscience of our generation. We don't have that excuse anymore, saying we didn't know about it, there's nothing we can do," says Adam Zuckerman, 18, a senior at Deering High School in Portland, Maine, who "raised $6,000 to bring a busload of Reform Jews and Sudanese immigrants from Maine" to one of the rallies on Sunday. High school and college students have been among the most active in organizing grassroots efforts around Darfur. Universities nationwide are waging a successful effort to divest their financial holdings in oil firms and other corporations doing business with Sudan's government. (Sudan gets 43 percent of its revenue from oil-related sales and pours 60 percent of all oil revenue into military expenditures.)

The campaign "also aims at states and municipalities. Illinois, New Jersey and Oregon have approved divestment, and legislation is pending in several other states." And there are signs that the efforts are working. "Seeking to counter the divestment campaign," the New York Times reports, "Sudan's ambassador to the United States issued a statement on April 5, calling on American companies and universities to increase investments in Sudan."

Violence getting worse

By now, the scope of the atrocities in Darfur is well known; in this "slow motion genocide," which the United Nation calls the "world's greatest humanitarian crisis," 2.5 million have been driven from their homes and up to 400,000 have died. But after a relative downtick in violence in 2005, the situation has drastically deteriorated. "I don't think the world has understood how bad it has become of late," U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said last week, claiming the violence is "as bad as ever." He warned that many U.N. humanitarian operations are "in danger of collapsing within the next few weeks or months." Already, U.N. officials say the international community is "keeping people alive with our humanitarian assistance until they are massacred." Just yesterday, analysts warned of a "new military offensive by the Sudanese government" -- one that included the use of "an Antonov plane and two helicopter gunships" -- that has put "the lives of tens of thousands of people at risk."

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