Your Turn
Helping Darfur a cause to hope for in new year
Erin Stattel
Guest Column

Aziza is only 17 years old, and as she went out to gather firewood in the bush with other women of her village in Darfur, three Sudanese militia men rode up on horseback and caught her. One man raped her and bit her arm and neck so everyone would know what had happened to her. She was told that she has no place in Darfur because she is black. He told her the Sudanese would push her people out and that the land will always belong to the Sudanese. This is just one story told by Ann Curry of NBC News, but it echoes almost a million others. Stronger efforts need to be taken in order to stop these types of atrocities.

Darfur is the region that created a stir around the United Nations General Assembly in 2006 and is in the Sudan on the continent of Africa. The Sudan shares a northern border with Egypt, an east coast with the Red Sea and Somalia, and borders with Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad and Uganda.

According to the Internet Web site Save Darfur.org, the Sudanese army and an independent yet government-linked militia known as the Janjaweed are fighting the Sudanese Liberation Army/

Movement (SLA) group and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) groups.

The two rebel forces are fighting for the Sudanese government to address the problems of the country's underdevelopment and political marginalization. The militias and the government are predominantly Arab and use mass killing, organized starvation, rape and threat to aid workers as a way to suppress the rebel movements and the Africans in Darfur.

The Sudan has been involved in a civil war ever since its independence from the United Kingdom in 1956. Nsongurua J. Udombana, author and professor at the Human Rights Center at the Central European University in Budapest, Hun-gary, explains in his article "When Neu-trality Is a Sin: The Darfur Crisis and the Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention in Sudan" that the Arab-dominated North has continually acted against the Chris-tian and animist South; however, most Sudanese are Muslim.

The current conflict erupted in Febru-ary 2003 when the Sudanese government began the killing of the Zaghawa, Fur and Masaalit tribes because of their ties and involvement in the JEM and SLA political groups. Genocide, by definition in the American Heritage Dictionary Fourth Edition, is the planned and systematic extermination of an entire national, racial, political or ethnic group. What is being done to these people is genocide.

According to Save Darfur Coalition, whose mission is to create awareness of what is happening in Darfur, the United States is responsible for 25 percent of all U.N. peacekeeping dues, and several bills are pending in Congress that will help with the mission in Darfur.

However, the pressure is not to be applied to the United States, but rather to the United Nations. What is happening in Darfur is a human rights crisis. With no physical intervention from the United Nations, there is a direct violation of the United Nations charter. The charter states that one of the United Nations' purposes is to promote social progress and freedom for better standards of life with the hopes of tolerance and peace resulting.

In his article, Udombana states that it has been argued that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the only body that can take direct action toward human rights-violating governments. The UNSC has not been known to expedite political action when it comes to these problems in Africa, despite its deployment of support. The U.N. estimates that about 200,000 people (others argue the number is close to 400,000) have been killed since the fighting began in 2003. Some two million others have been displaced. But there is only a cease-fire type of agreement so far.

At SaveDarfur.org there is a section about lobbying your congressman or representative. The link directs Web surfers to DarfurScores.org. On this Web site a scorecard is given for state congressmen and representatives. In New Jersey, Sen. Robert Menendez (D) scored an A plus along with Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D) and Rep. Christopher Smith (R) scoring A's. The Web site offers advice of contacting congressmen and representatives to educate them about the crisis and to lobby them for political help in legislation for Darfur. The U.S. can use this to Darfur's advantage in lobbying the United Nations to take immediate action.

The core of America was founded on courageous individuals standing up for what was right. It is in our being to stand up for the right side, and ignoring what is happening in Darfur is not right. We may not all be able to contribute large sums of money, as Melinda and Bill Gates did with their $10 million Gates Foundation donation. But even People magazine's Sexiest Man of 2006, George Clooney, is attracting people's attention to Darfur. He is working side by side with the Save Darfur Coalition and other politically charged organizations to help find a solution.

Clooney's father is journalist Nick Clooney, and the pair traveled to the Sudan and Chad in April in search of raising help and hope for the mission in Darfur. The pair recruited the help of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D) and Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback (R) to plead with the American government to take action. Currently, George Clooney is joined by actor Don Cheadle of the film "Hotel Rwanda" and U.S. Olympian Joey Cheek in the effort to involve the aid of nations such as China and Egypt.

There are plenty of ways to educate oneself about the region and its occurrences. While surfing the Web for advice pages on how to keep New Year's resolutions, visit Web sites such as the Global Nomads Group (www.gng.org), the United Nations (www.un.org) or Save Darfur.org (savedarfur.org) to become informed.

Web sites like these also offer tips on how to motivate. Motivate yourself and your community, whether it is a congregation, a campus or a club, to spread the word and lobby Congress and the U.N. Motivate others to learn about what is happening and how as individuals we can help, but as groups we can heal. With constant education and action against the atrocities in the Sudan, there could be a brighter future for people like Aziza. Maybe her story won't be so common someday.

Erin Stattel of Marlboro is a senior communications major at Monmouth University, West Long Branch.