The Time is Now to Act on Sudan Posted: 03.22.05

NewsHour Extra (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer)
March 22 2005

Student Jennifer Dewey urges American teens to educate themselves
about the atrocities occuring right now in the Darfur region of Sudan
and then to act on that information and do something about it.

Imagine this: you are in your kitchen making lunch. It is a warm,
sunny, breezy day outside, and your friends are on their way over.
You give your ten year-old sister a plate, when all of a sudden a
group of militia men break down the door and point guns at you.

They take your sister by the hair and drag her outside where they throw
her on the ground, bind her hands and feet then take turns brutally
raping her. When they are done destroying her tiny womb, mutilating
any chance of bearing children, they burn her alive and drive off in
their truck with you in the back, wondering what they will do to you.

Stories like this happen every day in Sudan.

You can’t bury your head in the sand

Now, I apologize for ruining your otherwise fine day with this
gruesome bit of reality, but you know what? You’re not children and
you’re not ostriches. Life is not like a box of chocolates, and you
can’t keep burying your head in the sand.

PEOPLE ARE DYING, something to the tune of 10,000 per month in the
Darfur region of Sudan. According to The New York Times, “a figure
of 70,000 is sometimes states as an estimated death toll, but that
is simply a U.N. estimate for the deaths in one seven-month period
from non-violent causes.”

The actual death toll from the past two years of genocide is hard
to report, mostly because the Sudanese government is blocking
the U.N. and other agencies from knowing the truth and making such
an estimate. According to The New York Times, independent mortality
estimates exceed 220,000, and, as I said before, is rising by about
10,000 per month.

President Bush, Congress and the European Parliament have already
declared that genocide is under way, yet they have done almost
nothing. In previous incidences of genocide, such as those against
the Jews, Armenians and Cambodians, it was reasonable to believe that
our passivity was a result of ignorance; but not anymore. As Nicholas
Kristof from The New York Times put it, “This time, we have no excuse.”

Act now!

How can we allow Sudanese documents to urge to “change the
demography of Darfur and make it void of African tribes,” encouraging
“killing, burning villages and farms, terrorizing people, confiscating
property from members of African tribes and forcing them from Darfur?”

The truth is this: we can’t. We all know it’s wrong, and we all know
about it. It is our passivity which has allowed this grave injustice
to continue.

Former senator Paul Simon said after the Rwanda genocide, “If every
member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people
back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the
crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have
been different.”

IT’S NOT TOO LATE. We can still do something. PLEASE write a letter
or email your congressman, your senator, someone; I already have.
This is not the last you will hear about this from me. I must inform
you, move you and inspire change, or I wouldn’t be doing my job as
a human. Now you need to do yours. SO DO IT.

— Senior Jennifer Dewey is the Editor-in-Chief of Bourgade Catholic
High School’s newspaper The Eagle’s Eyrie in Phoenix, Arizona.