In US, a push for action on Darfur
By Charles A. Radin
Boston Globe
Raking Williams recalls that when he heard a friend mention Darfur a couple of weeks ago, he thought she was talking about D-4, the Boston police district that encompasses the South End and Back Bay.
By last week Williams, who sells Afrocentric and Rastafarian paraphernalia from a storefront on Washington Street in Dorchester, was spending his lunch hours working the sidewalk, asking passersby to sign postcards urging President Bush to stop the genocide occurring in that troubled region of western Sudan.
Next weekend, Williams plans to be among tens of thousands of Americans demonstrating in Washington to show their concern for Darfur and pressure the president to keep his promises to help. Mass rallies also are planned in Chicago and San Francisco, in what organizers describe as a first-ever grass-roots movement to stop an ongoing genocide.
''I knew about Rwanda," Williams, 40, said, referring to the genocidal slaughter in that central African country in 1994, ''but it happened fast, and it seemed like you needed to be a superpower to do something about it. This time it is happening almost slow motion, and people offered me a chance to step forward, to sign up, and to get others to sign up."
For blacks determined to speak up more forcefully than they did during the Rwandan genocide, and for Jews, who commemorated the Nazi Holocaust on their Yom Hashoah holiday yesterday, the movement to save Darfur has become a means of keeping their most fervent promise: never again.
''When we say 'never again,' we mean it," said Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston. ''But as Jews, as Americans, we did not do enough about the Rwandan genocide. Here we have a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and we do not want to feel that way about this. Something could be done in this situation and not enough is being done."
The Save Darfur Coalition was created in July 2004 at the initiative of the American Jewish World Service and the Committee of Conscience of the US Holocaust Museum -- a panel set up on the premise that the museum should serve as a watchdog against future genocides. But it took extensive local organizing, much of it originating in the Boston area, to create the national grass-roots campaign.
Killing and massive human rights abuses began in early 2003 after rebels in Darfur rose up against the central government. In the subsequent campaign to defeat the insurgents, Sudanese government-backed militias are accused of killing more than 400,000 people, raping countless women, and displacing an estimated 2 million members of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massalit tribes. The victims and the persecutors all are Muslim, but the government forces identify ethnically as Arabs and practice a comparatively fundamentalist Islam, while their victims primarily identify as Africans. It is because of the ethnic divide that the conflict is considered a genocide.
Shortly after the Save Darfur Coalition was formed, Congress declared the fighting genocide, and Bush did so in September 2004.
''It was the first time the United States has ever identified a genocide while it was going on," said Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service. ''But then the government put it on a to-do list and didn't do anything about it."
Scattered local activities and the usual lobbying by human-rights groups in Washington had little effect.
''Having a rally here and a speech there wasn't going to do the job," Kaufman said. Gloria White-Hammond, a pediatrician and minister at Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, and former Boston television anchor Liz Walker, who also is a Bethel minister, ''were doing a lot of events, but it was not coordinated," Kaufman said. ''They were exhausting themselves."
So the community relations council organized the Massachusetts Save Darfur Coalition, one of the first statewide groups in the country, with White-Hammond and Boston lawyer Kenneth A. Sweeder as co-chairs. Local activities increased, and White-Hammond took a leave from her ministry and medical practice to run the national campaign.
''I see this as a critical opportunity for African-Americans to do what wasn't done for our ancestors 400 years ago," White-Hammond said. ''I see the abuse of women in Darfur as part of a global culture of violence against women that seems to operate with impunity. I cannot stand idly by."
Organizers planned next weekend's mass rallies and launched a drive to send Bush 1 million postcards urging him to do more to stop the genocide. A spokesman for the national coalition said that more than 500,000 postcards have been filled out, and that a stream of religious and secular organizations are joining the national organization. There are 164 organizations in the coalition, including 55 Jewish, 30 Christian, and 7 Muslim groups.
Hundreds of Christian congregations participated in a week of prayer and action for Darfur organized in early April. During Passover, Jews were asked to reflect on four questions about Darfur in addition to the classic four questions about the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt. ''The issue has begun to catch on, dramatically in the Jewish community and more broadly in the interfaith community," Messinger said.
The show of support comes at an opportune time.
An appropriation that would fund an international protective force for the region recently passed the House of Representatives by a razor-thin 213-to-208 vote last month and is now before the Senate. Bush discussed the Darfur situation last week with the leader of China, a nation that has threatened to use its UN Security Council veto to block deployment of a protective force.
