Sudan, 220,000 Dead, CalPERS, and Action Steps

I received an email missive from a friend and former neighbor Rachel Timoner who is studying to be a Rabbi in Jerusalem. It is about a crisis that is occuring in Sudan that Malik Looper referenced a few weeks ago. Malik was arguing for CalPERS, the largest public pension fund, to divest from Sudan, an effort that Congresswoman Barbara Lee is heading up. Below is the email missive with action steps and an excerpt from an opinion piece in the New York Times last week. The death toll may actually surpass the death toll from the tsunami and yet the world seems to be able to ignore it.

Here is the email missive with action steps:

Dear Friends,

Just a few weeks ago, we observed the 60th Anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz. And many people have been powerfully
affected by the movie "Hotel Rwanda." And many of us have seen
"The Killing Fields" and "Schindler's List" or have read "Night" and
"A Problem from Hell" and "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We
Will be Killed With Our Families." And there's a feeling of compassion
fatigue that sets in when you're confronted with stories about
Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda.

But I need you to overcome that fatigue and muster your
compassion and your indigation and your outrage. We keep saying, "Never again!" about genocide, but it's happening again in Darfur. And the Sudanese government, in an act of remarkably calculated depravity, has taken advantage of the fact that we've been distracted by the tsunami to step up its campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing.

This is what I need you to do:

1 Please read the article from Nicholas Kristof from
Wednesday's New York Times. This will help fuel your compassion
And your indignation and your outrage and make the other things
easier to do. When you read it, please look carefully at the photographs.
You can see them in color on the New York Times website. The upper
left
hand photograph, in particular, deserves your close attention.
The Sudanese military and its militia allies are killing children
And leaving their bodies in the dirt.

2 Go to action.ajws.org/action and send a letter to American
government and UN officials demanding that they take action to
stop the genocide. There's a template there that will walk you
through the
process.

3 Send a letter like this one to everyone in your e-mail address
book. Ask them to do the same. Use your words, or feel free to use
mine.
Just please do this. If the 400 people to whom I am sending
This e-mail send a similar note to 100 people each, and those people
do the same, we could have a million e-mails land in Congress before
the end of the weekend. Let's do that.

My boss Ruth Messinger says, "The numbers are overwhelming but
we cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed." She's
right.

This is the most important thing in the world right now.

Thank you,
Aaron

Here is the excerpt from the article:

This archive, including scores of reports by the monitors on the scene, underscores that this slaughter is waged by and with the support of the Sudanese government as it tries to clear the area of non-Arabs. Many of the photos show men in Sudanese Army uniforms pillaging and burning African villages. I hope the African Union will open its archive to demonstrate publicly just what is going on in Darfur.
The archive also includes an extraordinary document seized from a janjaweed official that apparently outlines genocidal policies. Dated last August, the document calls for the "execution of all directives from the president of the republic" and is directed to regional commanders and security officials.

"Change the demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes," the document urges. It encourages "killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur."
It's worth being skeptical of any document because forgeries are possible. But the African Union believes this document to be authentic. I also consulted a variety of experts on Sudan and shared it with some of them, and the consensus was that it appears to be real.

Certainly there's no doubt about the slaughter, although the numbers are fuzzy. A figure of 70,000 is sometimes stated as an estimated death toll, but that is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period from nonviolent causes. It's hard to know the total mortality over two years of genocide, partly because the Sudanese government is blocking a U.N. team from going to Darfur and making such an estimate. But independent estimates exceed 220,000 - and the number is rising by about 10,000 per month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/23/opinion/23kristof.html?hp

From, The Secret Genocide Archive
By Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times - February 23, 2005