Those who have known genocide work to save Darfur
Published July 9, 2006
Sun-Sentinel.com, FL
July 9 2006
Fran Steinmark is used to puzzlement over her T-shirt.
The shirt reads, "Save Darfur."
"People ask me, `Is that a person in jail?’" she said. "They really
do not know."
Darfur is not a person in jail.
It is more like a country in hell.
It’s a parched section of western Sudan, about the size of Texas,
where a 3-year-old rebellion has mutated into a horrific conflict
pitting Arab Africans against black Africans.
Several hundred thousand people are dead. Some 2 million are
refugees.
It is a crisis on the periphery of the news — way down the pecking
order from Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Brad and Angelina. We’re
talking about African Muslims dying in a place with murky and
confusing politics, far away from obvious American interests.
No wonder people don’t always get the message of Steinmark’s shirt.
And yet, hearteningly, many people do understand and do share her
convictions.
"It’s genocide. Period," says Steinmark, a lawyer and artist from
Boca Raton. "And if you’re functioning as a human being in today’s
world, you cannot allow a genocide to occur in our lifetime."
Steinmark is a leader of the Save Darfur Coalition of South Palm
Beach, a year-old collection of churches, synagogues, student and
advocacy groups and plain citizens who just can’t sit by.
"The atrocities are so egregious, so horrendous: slavery, gang rape,
torture," Steinmark says. "Cruelty and violence of this magnitude
demand that we stop it — otherwise there is something fundamentally
wrong with us as human beings."
The group helped lead a drive this year to send 1 million postcards
to the White House. The cards urged President Bush to do his utmost
to support a stronger multinational force to halt the bloodshed.
Florida produced 50,000 postcards. Only California, Pennsylvania, New
York and New Jersey generated more.
A rally in April at Boca Raton’s First United Methodist Church drew
more than 700 people, an overflow house. Police had to be called to
manage the traffic.
"We wondered who was going to come," said Andrea Schuver, another
leader of the south-county coalition, "and it was a full range of
ages. Not just retirees with time on their hands. We had student
organizations from high schools and colleges — a whole cross-section
of the community."
Jewish groups make up a large segment of the coalition. The St. David
Armenian Church in Boca Raton is active, too. Jews and Armenians have
had their own tragic intimacies with genocide.
But many others in the movement are Catholic, Protestant, agnostic.
"If you’re a moral human being, you have to care about this,"
Steinmark says. "I don’t care what religion you are."
Steinmark is Jewish, born after World War II. It galls her to think
that the world stood by while the Nazis killed millions.
With Darfur, important leaders are saying the right things. Bush has
said the killings constitute genocide. UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan said it’s "the worst humanitarian crisis gripping the planet."
And yet, despite a peace treaty on paper and 7,000 monitors sent by
the African Union, the slaughter goes on.
Two weeks ago, Schuver and Steinmark went to Washington, D.C., for a
meeting of the national Darfur movement.
The first night they met some Sudanese refugees who told of losing
their homes and families.
Schuver, who also is Jewish, was reminded of her own grandparents.
How they’d lost track of European relatives after the Nazis came to
power and never heard from them again.
"When I heard someone say, `I lost 50 members from my extended
family, I have no idea where everyone is, except one sister,’ it was
just like the stories I was told," Schuver said.
The coalition’s motto speaks to this connection: "Never again means
never again for anyone."
Unfortunately, a world that was too late in discovering the
death-camp ovens has seen it happen again. In Cambodia. Bosnia.
Rwanda.
Wouldn’t it be something if citizen pressure created a better outcome
for Darfur?
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
