An ongoing community effort to halt the genocide in Darfur, Africa, continues at Palisades Charter High School, where four Human Rights Watch Student Task Force groups met with Darfur activists last week. Students from four high schools joined the national Million Voices campaign to help collect one million signed postcards urging President Bush to take action. PaliHi’s HRW Student Task Force alone projected it could gather 4,760 postcards by targeting mass-attendance events at the school, doing outreach in the larger community and publicizing their mission through media and networking systems. The nationwide goal is to deliver one million postcards to the president by April 30. “Students have been the leaders in this campaign,” said Mark Hanis, co-founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). He spoke with students about the importance of sending security as opposed to aid to the people in the Darfur region of western Sudan. The humanitarian crisis began in February 2003 when the Sudanese government initiated attacks against civilians in Darfur after rebels in the region rose up to demand a greater role in Sudan’s leadership. Almost three years later, the Sudanese government-sponsored Janjaweed militia has displaced more than two million people who are living in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad, which borders Darfur to the west. It is estimated that more than 200,000 people have died, and experts predict that as many as one million civilians could die in Darfur from hunger and disease in the coming months. “Instead of treating [the genocide] like [Hurricane] Katrina, let’s think more about the political action,” said Hanis, who graduated from Swarthmore College in 2005 and is the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors. “All the politicians keep saying ‘Never again, never again’,” said Hanis, referring to the inaction of the U.S. government during the Rwandan genocide. The problem is that politicians won’t take action unless they’re convinced that enough constituents are concerned about the issue. “Why should they care if all we do is turn the channel and go back to dinner?” Hanis said, comparing last year’s meager coverage of Darfur to widespread coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. “When it’s on 24/7, people do something about it.” Sudan actually made the news this week when Olympic gold medalist Joey Cheek donated his $25,000 bonus from the U.S. Olympic Committee to a humanitarian organization called Right to Play, and specifically to a program for refugees in Chad. The American speedskater won the men’s 500-meter race Monday night in Turin. Hanis encouraged students to call and write to their local Congressional representatives, alerting them to the genocide and urging them to take action. Now is a crucial time, since this month the United States is president of the United Nations Security Council. HRW Student Task Force representatives from PaliHi, led by Palisades resident and STF coordinator Pam Bruns, met with Congressman Henry Waxman in December to advocate for his continued support. Last week Waxman signed on to a letter calling for U.S. leadership on the UN Security Council with regard to the Darfur crisis. “This is not history. This is happening now,” said activist Gabriel Stauring, who recently returned from a trip to the refugee camps in Chad. He spoke about his journey at last week’s HRW/STF meeting and presented a slide show so students and teachers could connect to the issue on a more personal level. Most of the images showed women and children dressed in colorful clothing, many of them smiling’if cautiously’against a desert background of tents and straw huts. “Their resilience is incredible, but you can see behind the smiles that those kids have seen way too much,” said Stauring, who communicated with the refugees through a translator and posted video footage of his 21 days in the camps on his Web site, www.stopgenocidenow.org. Many Darfurians had walked 9 to 10 days to reach a camp, and numerous men had been killed; the surviving males are mainly 15 and 16 years old. When the women and children say their sons and brothers are “back in Sudan,” it often means they’re dead, Stauring said. The women and girls, who cook, build houses and take care of children in the camps, are often attacked and raped when they travel outside the camps to collect firewood for cooking. But the alternative is sending the boys, who might get killed. “[The women] are really the power that runs the camps,” said Stauring, who met a 14-year-old girl named Farha who had walked 25 days from Darfur to get to the Oure Cassoni refugee camp on the Chad-Darfur border. It’s one of the larger camps with more than 30,000 refugees, and one of the most dangerous because there are often attacks inside, according to Stauring. Farha is the head of her household, in charge of taking care of her siblings because her mother went looking for a son who was separated from the family during an attack. “The day I met her, she had not seen her mother for 41 days,” Stauring said, adding that it made him wonder, “Would we feel okay if Farha was our neighbor and had to live in those conditions? Why is distance a factor for when we act in situations like this?” He was inspired by the refugees’ sense of hope, explaining that when someone like himself visits the camps, “they think, ‘Maybe this will be the guy who’s going to help us.'” Besides security, education is another problem in the camps, Stauring said, explaining that there is only one primary school that children attend until they’re about 14 or 15, and most are too traumatized by what they’ve seen to be able to learn. For more information, visit www.genocideintervention.net or www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org. For local Darfur action/engagement, contact: hrwla@hrw.org (Subject line: Attention Darfur STF).
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