More on The Sudan

This is an excerpt from an article by Samantha Power that appeared in The New Yorker in August of 2004. The piece, in it's entirety can be viewed here:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/index.ssf?040830fa_fact1

It is a very long article, so I have posted only a portion of it, but it is really thorough and well done. The section I chose to post here is particularly interesting to me because of how some of our leaders (church leaders and legislators and business people) and some regular folks really put themselves out there to draw attention to this situation. Read on...

On Capitol Hill, where interest in Sudan’s oppression of Christians had always been high, members of Congress finally shifted their focus to Darfur. “We were late,” Frank Wolf, a Republican congressman from Virginia, told me. “We so wanted to get peace in the South that it was like the Simon and Garfunkel song: ‘A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.’ ” Wolf and Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, visited Darfur in June and returned with grim refugee testimonies and video footage of torched villages. In July, Congress passed a resolution, introduced by Donald Payne, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, to describe the killings in Sudan as “genocide”—the first time that Congress had described an ongoing massacre in such terms.

Bush’s evangelical base offered full backing. That same month, Franklin Graham called the White House and told one of Bush’s aides, “Just because you’ve signed a peace deal with the South doesn’t mean you can wash your hands of Darfur.” Samaritan’s Purse, Graham’s charity, is now transporting food aid by plane from Khartoum to Darfur. “Killing is wrong, whether you’re killing a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim,” Graham told me. “I’m as concerned about what’s happening in Darfur as I am about what happened in southern Sudan. It’s evil. God made the people there in Darfur. For us to ignore them would be a sin.” In August, fifty-one evangelical Christian leaders, representing forty-five thousand churches, called on the President to consider sending troops to Darfur to stop the “genocide.”

For many African-American leaders, the targeting of Darfurians on the basis of ethnicity has rekindled memories of apartheid. On July 13th, Charles Rangel, the New York City congressman, and fifty protesters sang “We Shall Overcome” and were arrested in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. “We acted too late to save millions of Jews during World War II,” Rangel said. “We didn’t act at all when hundreds of thousands of innocents were slaughtered in Rwanda. We have the opportunity now to stop a genocide and we must act.” Numerous other protesters were arrested in July, including Bobby Rush, a Democratic congressman from Illinois; Joe Hoeffel, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania; Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s, the ice-cream company; Rabbi David Saperstein, from New York; and four grandmothers from the Washington area.