Help Alleviate the Suffering

This is a letter from a prominent Sudanese human rights defender.

Service to God is Service to Humanity

To: Every kind and loving heart, to help alleviate the suffering of people
through peace and Justice

I am born of Darfur soil. I am Darfurian and I am a Sudanese human rights
defender. I am a humanitarian aid worker with 4 years of experience, having worked in
South and West Darfur with Internally Displace Persons (IDPs) providing water,
medicine, food and shelter.

Since I came to the US five months ago, I have been asking for help with addressing
the needs of IDPs. In over 25 events and 30 meetings, I share with my audiences my
views about the current situation of IDPs; how IDPs lack essential services and security and how their suffering is vast.

I am now writing to you because of the current actions by the Government of
Sudan (GoS). The GoS has unjustly closed 13 non-governmental Organizations NGOs
working in Darfur who have been assisting 3,000,000 IDPs over the past six years. IDPs
depend 100% on these NGOs for the provision of basic life-saving services. To perhaps
better understand the severe negative impact the Government of Sudan has had on the
lives of these people with the closing of these NGOs, try to imagine the following:

• Imagine you do not have food when you are hungry!
• Imagine you do not have water when you are thirsty!
• Imagine you do not have access to medicine when you are sick!
• Imagine you do not have shelter when it is raining!

These are the conditions the 3,000,000 IDPs and affected populations remain in, that
these 13 NGOs were forced to leave behind. 70% of the IDPs constitute women, children,
the elderly, and the disabled. Imagine what will happen when the rains come in 4
months? This will absolutely lead to a state of further crisis.

When a Government, that is intended to protect and serve its people, instead punishes
them by denying them food, water, and health care.... is that not inhumane? If so, is that not, a crime against humanity? If so, are you going to stand by and allow that to happen with out taking action? If not, then take action by:

• Sending a letter to the UN Security Council to take urgent and
immediate action to help those suffering people and eliminate Article 16. Let the Humanitarian Affairs take over the intervention in Darfur
• Sending a letter to the Chinese mission at the UN and the Chinese
Embassy to act responsibly and humanely
• Encouraging the Government of Sudan to act responsibly and
mercifully toward its people and rescind their decision to closing NGOs
in Darfur
• Writing to the African mission at the UN, as well as their respective
Embassies to get involved with ending directorship on their continent
• letting human rights organizations the freedom to monitor human
rights violations more closely
• Raising money and launching food-drops, if necessary

With best wishes for Justice and Peace,

A Sudanese human rights defender Continue reading this article...

Hello,

My name is Evan Cinq-Mars, and I’m a dreamer.

And that’s what I’ve been asked to do. I’m here to dream ideas that will change the world and how it responds to genocide.

But I won’t be able to do this alone. I’ll need your help to change how the world responds to genocide.

After all, you’re reading this because you care. You have seen how the world responds to genocide and you want to change it.

If you’re like me, you were born in 1989 or just years before or after that.

While you may have been too young to remember, you watched Rwanda burn on the evening news with your parents. You heard of Srebrenica. As you grew older, you learned of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, Slavs, Roma, mentally ill, and homosexuals in your history class. You learned more about the Khmer Rouge, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. You began to understand the scope and brutality of the word genocide.

If you’re like me, you’re watching as the same word has claimed lives of more than three hundred thousand people in Darfur and displaced millions more.

If you’re like me, you’re asking, “How? How is this still possible?”

“Never Again” has become a hollow promise. But it need not be that way anymore. I ask that you share your ideas to change the world and how it responds to genocide so that we can fulfill the promise of “Never Again”. Because something needs to change. The world needs us. The world needs our ideas.

We are here to dream ideas that will change the world and how it responds to genocide.

And we will succeed! In our posts, we will refuse to assume the tragic fate of dreamers and idealists. The dreams and ideas that you will read will not fall to the confines of reality. Instead, we will fuse our dreams and ideas for a better world with practical policy recommendations and realistic next-steps.

That is where my blog posts find their spirit: I believe that our dreams can become a reality. I believe that we can change the world and how it responds to genocide.

Let’s get to it.

The Dreamer Continue reading this article...

A Grim Milestone

This month we mark a milestone. The genocide in Darfur is now the longest modern genocide, ever. It is longer than the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the genocides against Bosnian Muslims and Rwandan Tutsis. And yes, it is longer than Holocaust.

February 2009 is the six year anniversary of genocide beginning in Darfur. And it’s still going on.

A realization that we are now marking six years of genocide, which have unfolded and will continue to unfold before our very eyes as we largely engage in business as usual, raises three questions: the first is what does this mean, the second, why should we care, and third, what can we do.

What does this mean?

When asked why the world didn’t stop the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis, now president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, answered without blinking, “They didn’t care.”

For six years we’ve been hit with images of Darfur’s murdered men, women and children, burned out villages and survivors clinging to life in camps. We pause, shake our heads in despair and, for the most part, move on. Could it be that Kagame was right – that then, and now, we just don’t care, or care enough, to stop genocide?

Sure, there are obstacles to us being able to prioritize ending genocide. Our economy is crumbling, bills have to be paid and homework has to be done. Genocide isn’t a priority. Not now, later – when we have the time and energy, maybe.

Also, Darfur’s location and victims are almost too unfamiliar for us to relate too. But on their recent trip to Sudan, our colleagues met some of Darfur’s 3 million-plus displaced persons and discovered that our differences are trumped by our similarities. They share in the hopes and dreams common to people around the world – of life, health and sustenance for themselves and their families.

Truthfully though, obstacle is a synonym for excuse. Darfur doesn’t have to take the backburner in light of other seemingly more immediate priorities; it doesn’t have to seem so far away. Those are choices we make, because they are easy. Kagame might’ve been right.

So why should we care?

No human act is worse than genocide. It is a deliberate attempt to eradicate a people from this world for no reason other than who they are. In international criminal law it is referred to as the crime of crimes. Committing genocide means exterminating human beings.

One of the more sobering things one can do in one’s life is walk through Auschwitz, Cambodia’s killing fields or any other piece of earth stained by genocide. When you stand in Auschwitz’s gas chamber, or face to face with the ovens that cremated its 1.1 million victims, it becomes crystal clear – the cruelty and insanity of what happened can never, ever happen again. But it is. So we have to care.

What can we do?

We can be heard, in Ottawa and Darfur. Karashi, who after his village was burned, walked for nine days through scorched desert to reach safety. He told our colleagues, “Darfur is a forgotten place. The government is killing us and nobody helps.”

As members of a global community, we have to remember Darfur. Thus, the burden falls to us, ordinary Canadians to demand from our elected officials that we live up to our commitment to a world without genocide. When the government is confronted by our chorus demanding a more productive and effective Canadian response to Darfur’s genocide, by engaging more with the diplomatic attempts to end the genocide and with humanitarian efforts to protect and provide for its victims, they will be forced to act.

Six years is too long. Until now Canada’s politicians haven’t gotten the message. Only we can change that and force them to confront pledges they’ve already made.

In the guestbook at the Auschwitz museum there is an inscription from visit on April 5, 2008: “Let us never forget these things and work always to prevent their repetition.” The visitor was Stephen Harper. For Karashi and the millions of others, time is running out for the Prime Minister to make good on that pledge. Batika, another displaced person, once a mother of eight, now a mother of six, told our colleagues that for her the reality of Darfur is simple: “To die because of war or to die because of hunger.”

We have a choice to make. A year from now, will Darfur mark another grim milestone?

Ben Fine is the founder and past Executive Director of Stand Canada and a student in the Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto. Josh Scheinert, Stand’s past Advocacy Director, is a student at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Continue reading this article...

Call for Submissions - What Can Be Done?

One of the biggest challenges of Stand's work is confronting helplessness in the face of a conflict that is dizzying in its levels of complexity. The feelings of helplessness on not limited only to private citizens but also politicians who don't know what their realistic options are sometimes.

Well, now's your chance to weigh in. On the Stand blog we want to hear from you: how does Canada help bring a solution to the conflict in Darfur? How does Canada make sure that poor men, women, and children are no longer slaughtered, raped or forced to flee their homes in Darfur? I want to hear big ideas, crazy ideas, or practical and subtle ideas...anything. Discuss in your campus groups. Send me a post about it. Write up a post in the comments section and then battle it out among yourselves about which solution is more effective.

Below, I have included Stand-Canada's current policy recommendations. Please engage with them, debate them, and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Policy Recommendations:

1. Build on Canada's recent commitments to Darfur by appointing a Special Envoy to the region. A Special Envoy could strengthen Canadian policymaking on Darfur in three key ways: 1) providing the world with a public face for Canada's efforts on Darfur, 2) providing a presence on the ground in Sudan, and 3) coordinating an integrated "all of Sudan" approach to Canadian peacebuilding. Specifically, a Special Envoy could play a key role in assisting efforts of the Darfuri rebel groups to form a unified and coherent bargaining position, a critical success factor for renewed negotiations.

2. Form an all-party parliamentary special committee on Darfur whose goal it will be to determine viable actions for the Canadian government to undertake to lead in ending the crisis in Darfur. The committee should 1) exist for a specified period of time, 2) travel to Sudan to collect facts, 3) be fully resourced by the Canadian government and 4) have equal party representation.

3. Engage more actively with the Obama administration to identify new opportunities for collaboration and cooperation on Darfur.

4. Engage more actively in multilateral diplomacy at the UN to bring renewed prominence to the Darfur issue internationally and rally greater international support for conflict resolution efforts. Continue reading this article...

Call for Submissions - What can be done?

One of the biggest challenges of Stand's work is confronting helplessness in the face of a conflict that is dizzying in its levels of complexity. The feelings of helplessness on not limited only to private citizens but also politicians who don't know what their realistic options are sometimes.

Well, now's your chance to weigh in. On the Stand blog we want to hear from you: how does Canada help bring a solution to the conflict in Darfur? How does Canada make sure that poor men, women, and children are no longer slaughtered, raped or forced to flee their homes in Darfur? I want to hear big ideas, crazy ideas, or practical and subtle ideas...anything. Discuss in your campus groups. Send me a post about it. Write up a post in the comments section and then battle it out among yourselves about which solution is more effective.

Below, I have included Stand-Canada's current policy recommendations. Please engage with them, debate them, and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Policy Recommendations:

1. Build on Canada's recent commitments to Darfur by appointing a Special Envoy to the region. A Special Envoy could strengthen Canadian policymaking on Darfur in three key ways: 1) providing the world with a public face for Canada's efforts on Darfur, 2) providing a presence on the ground in Sudan, and 3) coordinating an integrated "all of Sudan" approach to Canadian peacebuilding. Specifically, a Special Envoy could play a key role in assisting efforts of the Darfuri rebel groups to form a unified and coherent bargaining position, a critical success factor for renewed negotiations.

2. Form an all-party parliamentary special committee on Darfur whose goal it will be to determine viable actions for the Canadian government to undertake to lead in ending the crisis in Darfur. The committee should 1) exist for a specified period of time, 2) travel to Sudan to collect facts, 3) be fully resourced by the Canadian government and 4) have equal party representation.

3. Engage more actively with the Obama administration to identify new opportunities for collaboration and cooperation on Darfur.

4. Engage more actively in multilateral diplomacy at the UN to bring renewed prominence to the Darfur issue internationally and rally greater international support for conflict resolution efforts. Continue reading this article...

Pursuing a world without genocide

It has been four years since one moment changed my life.

Acol Dor, a Sudanese refugee, stunned an audience of 200 young people with her story of Darfur. As the crowd sat silenced, one student stood up and said "I think we all agree. We need to do something about this." That was the flap of the butterfly's wing that started the hurricane that is Stand and Canada's Darfur advocacy movement.

This blog had been used for a number of purposes so far: discussing policy ideas, sharing analysis of Darfur, reporting on Darfur news, reporting on Stand’s successes. But I want to add something new and important: telling the stories of the Darfur advocacy movement. I will be clear about my intent: I want more people to hear our story. I want more people to be inspired to join us. I want more people to see that they are not alone in their convictions and can stand with us. I want young people already volunteering with Stand to feel apart of something greater, and to have the confidence to know that I - and thousands of others - are supporting their work.

The tone of these blogs may exude an aura of importance. Don't be turned off. The reason is simple: fighting to end genocide is important. It is too great an ill in this world. After 4 years of Darfur advocacy we must be ready to declare: we are not satisfied just planning "events"; this cause is important enough to demand that we fight until genocide never happens again.

And I want to hear from you. We will have differences. Let us learn from them. Consider your challenges to these ideas a benefit for Darfuris in our important mission.

In my first blog, I will take on a modest task: tell the story - as I see it - of what we all need to do to help stop a genocide. Read on.


Ben Fine
Volunteer, Founder
Stand Canada Continue reading this article...

Guest Post - Comments Needed

Here is a guest post from an anonymous Stand'er seeking feedback:

Recently, I've been asked to share my thoughts on Darfur as it stands today. That deadline has sharpened in my mind some of the questions I have on region right now. Obviously, situations change, and the Darfur we see today is not the same as that of four or five years ago.

Darfur has evolved to become far more complex than its original two- or three-sided conflict (the Government vs. one or two major rebel groups). I am also aware that rebel groups are guilty of adding to the chaos, having recruited child soldiers and engaged in acts of violence themselves (to what degree is an underreported issue). So, one question is, who much power does Sudan actually have to stop the violence? If the GoS suddenly wanted to bring peace to Darfur (and to its strained relations with South Sudan), would they be able to?

Given the painfully sluggish attempt to get 26,000 peacekeepers on the ground (I think we've reached about 50% of that goal), I am unclear on how much of this is Sudan's fault, and how much is the fault of UN Member States. Certainly, the GoS has in the past shown a lot of intransigence, and back-and-forth on UNAMID--rejecting contributions by certain nations, and flip-flopping whether or not to accept UNAMID or componenets thereof. Where my knowledge lags is in Sudan's actions of late--has the threat of ICC arrests made her more cooperative, or is this same-old, same-old? A final question is this: is targeted divestment still the right way to go with Sudan? Is it possible that it's no longer the correct remedy for the problem?

Knowing who holds the most influence in Sudan should directly affect where we focus our activist energies. I have my own hunches on all this, but what better place than the Stand blog to ask my peers for some research help!

We're in the thick of the holidays, but any links or responses you can give would help--short or long.

--

Here are a couple links to get us started:

http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2008/12/22/protecting-darfurian-civilians-the-icc-and-the-ncp/
http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article227.html

Both place continued blame strongly on Khartoum. From the former, here is an interesting side note: "Since July this year the Government and specially the National Congress Party priority has sharply changed. The issue of the ICC Chief Prosecutor's endeavour to indict President Omer al Bashir has become the only agenda in their calendar....[the GoS] has changed their instinct for common survival into individual concern for self-preservation. Every single one of them is looking back to see whether he has any link with the violations committed in the Darfur conflict and what responsibility he may have which could take him to The Hague. Some of the NCP leaders are even contemplating handing over President Bashir to save the Islamic movement. This movement recently elected Mr Ali Osman Taha to become its Secretary General, the post which used to be occupied by Dr Hassan al Turabi before the 1999 split." Continue reading this article...