The situation in Sudan needs urgent attention, as Ingrid has been pointing out for weeks now. Time is wasting, action surely needs to be taken now. Should we let Rwanda happen again, the ethnic cleansing may have largely ceased, but starvation still threatens upwards of 350,000 people, with perhaps upto 500,000 people in danger.
The blogging community should be behind action – 100%. Read PassionofthePresent for the latest – and as a primer read Nicholas Kristoff’s piece.
As Passion notes:
In Darfur, a region in southern Sudan approximately the size of Texas, over a million people are threatened with torture and death at the hands of marauding militia and a complicit government. Genocide evokes not only the moral, but also, the legal responsibility of the world community. Under international agreement, a nation must intervene to stop a genocide when it is officially acknowledged. “Officially” is the key word here.
Though President Bush has publicly protested the “atrocities” in Darfur and U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan has urged the international community to act, no nation has officially acknowledged the truth: Sudan is a bleeding ground of genocide. In this void, the Sudanese government continues to act with brutal impunity. Perpetrators of genocide do not want anyone watching, but individuals working in human rights organizations watch and witness, and courageously support the victims.
These individuals represent, for all of us, a personal capacity to bear witness to the passion of the present; one candle lit against the darkness. However, before one can light a candle, someone has to strike a match: a donation to any of the human rights organizations active in Sudan will help the candlepower of witness overcome and extinguish the firepower of genocide.
And as Kristoff rightly says:
Islamic leaders abroad have been particularly shameful in standing with the Sudanese government oppressors rather than with the Muslim victims in Darfur. Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?
As for the United States, we Americans have repeatedly failed to stand up to genocide, whether of Armenians, Jews, Cambodians or Rwandans. Now we’re letting it happen again.