I went to the Save Darfur Rally today in San Francisco. We heard from different speakers and entertainers, but I found it quite empowering to learn about this single University of California student who was shocked to hear that the UC system was doing business with the Sudan government, including the sale of firearms, but was quick to point out that this was not the UC's fault, but mainly just the fault of the way business works in America.
He then started to work with student groups on his campus to ask the UC system to divest from Sudan, and with a lot of effort from many student groups, this divestment was then adopted by the entire University of California system. The efforts were then continued state-wide and the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006 is currently sitting on Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk, with almost 15 other acts in other states pending approval as well. Now, that's people power starting from “me“.
Pictures from the San Francisco rally at the Justin Herman Plaza:
Background on the Darfur Genocide
taken from ourpledge.org
Entire villages bombed and pillaged; countless women raped; wells poisoned; humanitarian aid blocked; hundreds of thousands murdered and more than 2.5 million civilians displaced---this is the culture of impunity that continues today in Darfur, a region in Western Sudan. Today the region is the site of an ongoing genocide and---according to the UN---the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
The witnesses to atrocity can speak for themselves: "There was also another rape on a young single girl aged 17: M. was raped by six men in front of her house in front of her mother. M's brother, S., was then tied up and thrown into [the] fire."
Since February 2003, the Sudanese government and its proxy Janjaweed militias have been committing mass murder, mass rape, and other kinds of systematic violence against Darfur's civilians. More than 400,000 have been killed. Millions are now either displaced within their own county or cling to life as refugees; the World Food Program estimates that well over 3.5 million need daily food aid in order to survive.
In July 2004, Congress unanimously declared that the situation in Darfur constituted genocide. The Bush administration followed with its own official genocide determination in September 2004. Numerous human rights groups (including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International); international NGOs; bipartisan Congressional coalitions; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim community leaders in our own country---all these have brought attention to the deliberate and widespread ethnic cleansing of Darfur's African tribes.
This May, the Sudanese government and a Darfuri rebel faction (part of the government campaign is an ongoing fight with Darfur-based rebel groups) agreed to a U.S.-brokered peace plan, but this agreement is now in tatters. The plan requires the Sudanese government to disarm its militias, but instead a marked escalation in attacks has occurred.
September 2006 sees the beginning of a new, massive military campaign brought on by the genocidaires. The government is bombing and razing entire villages, threatening to kill, root out, and displace hundreds of thousands more.
President Bush, the State Department, and a large majority of Republicans and Democrats in Congress support a multinational intervention force to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. But in light of unrelated foreign policy priorities, Darfur risks completely falling off the U.S. agenda. It is up to citizens of conscience around this country to advocate on behalf of the people of Western Sudan.
The U.S. has helped to pass a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing a large and robust United Nations peacekeeping force with a mandate to protect Darfur's civilians. But, because UN deployment to Sudan is still a very uncertain issue, and because any UN mission for Darfur will most probably take a long time to hit the ground, the U.S. must help deploy right now a NATO rapid-reaction force of at least 12,000 troops to the Darfur region. NATO troops are well-equipped, well-trained, and have already held training exercises in Western Sudan.
The people of Darfur cannot wait any longer. If no multinational protection force is deployed to the region soon, the death toll in Darfur may reach over a million persons by the end of this year.