Thursday, March 31, 2005
Not Without A Fight - Again
I have recently joined the Coalition For Darfur, which is a bi-partisan coalition of bloggers dedicated to raising awareness about the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, as well as raise money for charities like Save The Children. As that site's mission statement says:
An estimated 300,000 people have died from violence, disease and starvation in Western Sudan. We ask you to join us in raising awareness of this continuing genocide and raising money for Save the Children, which, despite the insecurity and deaths of several of its aid workers, continues to provide food, water, shelter, and protection to over 200,000 children and families each month.In pursuit of this worthwhile cause, I will be linking to stories appearing on the Coalition for Darfur homepage and directing the reader's attention to other Darfur-related issues (though I think a regular visit to the Coalition site is probably the best resource for anyone interested). Here is the first piece, which begins:
In her 2001 article "Bystanders to Genocide," Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power recounts how President Clinton was shocked and outraged by an article written by Philip Gourevitch recounting the horrors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, prompting him to send the article to his national security advisor Sandy Berger with a note scrawled in the margin reading "Is what he's saying true? How did this happen?"With frightening parallels, the Bush administration is repeating the most grievous errors of the Clinton administration. Also, this video is a disturbing yet useful appraisal of the situation.
After taking office, President Bush reportedly read Power's article on the Clinton administration's failure to intervene during the genocide. He too scrawled a message in the margin - "NOT ON MY WATCH."
Yet we are now faced with another African genocide, this time in Darfur, and the United States and the rest of the world are responding exactly as they did during Rwanda - with paralyzed inaction.
