ADVOCATES LAUNCH APRIL GENOCIDE PREVENTION MONTH
By James Butty
Voice of America
voa6.cfm
April 1 2009
The month of April is Genocide Prevention month here in the United
States. It marks the anniversaries of six major genocides around
the world, including Darfur, Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Holocaust
and Armenia.
More than 50 of the world’s leading humanitarian organizations have
joined together to launch a public awareness and education campaign
during the month of April.
Jill Savitt, organizer of "Genocide Prevention Month" told VOA the
groups hope their advocacy would prevent future genocides.
"What we want the month to show is that there is a support among
genocide survivors to try and prevent such crimes from happening by
rallying support from the international community," she said.
Tuesday, the groups pre-screened "The Last Survivor", a new documentary
which tells the story of four survivors including from Rwanda, Sudan,
and Congo.
Savitt said the groups have been working with genocide survivors for
a long while.
"We’ve been working survivors in the of all the previous genocides
in the modern era as well as survivors of ongoing atrocity crimes,
and there has been become a network of survivor advocates who join
forces for each other and the people of Darfur to try and to talk to
the international community about prevention. One of our partners
in this project is Righteous Pictures which is a documentary film
company with two young film makers who have now made a documentary
that follows four genocide survivors during their advocacy about
genocide prevention," Savitt said.
She said her organization works with survivors from all of the
previous genocides.
We work with Darfurians who are living in exile in the United States
and in Canada, and the UK. As part of this month, they are organizing
events around the world during April because April is the start of the
seventh year of the Darfur genocide. We are working with Congolese,
and while that conflict hasn’t been called genocide, those survivors of
that massive crime are also trying to urge the international community
to act," Savitt said.
She said her organization welcomes President Barack Obama’s appointment
of retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration as his special envoy
for Sudan.
But Savitt said it remains to be seen whether General Scott would
have the mandate to really bring peace to Darfur.
"We welcome the appointment of the envoy for Sudan. The Obama
administration is showing leadership in that regard. What we now need
to see is this envoy really engaging Obama in the task of bringing
peace to Darfur. We need the envoy to do this job every day, to have
the mandate to address all parties, and access to the Oval office
and to the UN to try and bring in international leaders to bring the
parties to the negotiating table," Savitt said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress