Category: Darfur

OSMOSIS is gearing up for their second iniative — a letter writing campaign to encourage Congress to enact H Res 723. Like the petition I wrote about last week, you can find more information about H Res 723 at the Genocide Intervention Network.

Amy provided contact information if you’re interested in picking up a letter at her shop. If you’re not local, and you want to write a letter, I’ve got three different copies that you can grab:

A Word document that you can customize.
One version of a fill-in-the-blank pdf.
A second version of a fill-in-the-blank pdf.

If you’re not sure who your Representative is, you can find out by visiting the House of Representative’s website.

Darfur is Dying has a rather unique way to immerse people into the problems in the Sudan. It’s an interactive flash game, where you (the player) control a family and have to forage for water, grow food, and keep from getting killed by roving bands of militia and janjaweed.

The White House announced today that President Bush would meet with Minni Minnawi on Tuesday. The talks will reportedly center on how to get broader support for the Darfur Peace Agreement.

Earlier this month, the Sudanese Liberation Army, the only rebel group that signed the peace agreement on May 5, nominated Minnawi to the post of senior assistant to Sudan’s president. This would make him the head of what will be the Darfur Authority, the administration that will run Darfur as an autonomous part of Sudan once the terms of the peace accord have been implemented.

Many of the refugees in Darfur and Chad’s huge camps have rejected the peace agreement because they see no sign that the government will follow through on its pledge to disarm the government-backed militia responsible for most of the attacks.

Last week, Jerry Fowler (of the Committee on Conscience) talked with John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group as part of the Committee’s biweekly podcast. Prendergast has just recently returned from Chad, and had new information on what’s happening in the region:

We went into Eastern Chad and we crossed the border into rebel held areas of Darfur as well and both sides of the border, there is clearly an increasing tension as a result of cross border attacks by government of Sudan backed Janjaweed militias and government of Sudan backed Chadian rebels who are attacking across the border with the same kind of impunity, and in some cases the same kind of intention they did when attacking inside Darfur. We are seeing a sort of exporting some of the genocidal counterinsurgency strategies into Chad now, and that was one of the dominant themes. The other dominant theme was how uniformly the refugees and displaced people that we came across were unable to support the current peace agreement that has been signed between the government and one of the rebel factions in Darfur. There is an intense, palpable fear on the part of those who have been rendered homeless by this assault over the last three years, fear of the provision in the agreement that would leave the disarmament of the Janjaweed in the hands of the government of Sudan with no real international verification. In the absence of that, most people would have just said, “We cannot support this, and we have to keep the struggle alive until we get this fundamentally important provision into any kind of a text of an agreement.” It was quite eye opening to see, and people were not brain washed; they knew what was in the agreement and they just chose to say, “We do not want an incomplete peace because it will not bring peace,” and that was fairly uniform up and down the border, all over.

You can listen to the podcast in its entirety or find a complete transcript of the interview at Voices of Genocide Prevention.