by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

February 21, 2008

One question simmered at the center of the conference on Darfur at Kean University in Union last Friday, Feb. 15: Of all the tragic situations calling out for international intervention, why keep focusing on this one seemingly hopeless conflict?

That question was asked by each member of the roster of distinguished speakers at the Wilkins Theatre. It was repeated by many in the audience of almost 1,000 teachers and high school and college students from around the state and by political and community leaders from New Jersey and beyond who gathered for the conference — Darfur: The First Genocide of the 21st Century — hosted by the university’s Center for Human Rights.

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer Nicolas Kristoff, the keynote speaker, gave the answer in three parts:

• Though elsewhere there have been larger numbers of victims, the cruelty inflicted on the people in the southwestern region of Sudan is extreme.

• The entire region is in danger of descending into warfare, sucking in not only northern and southern Sudan, but also Chad and the Central African Republic.

• Despite all the failed attempts, the aggression in Darfur can be halted if the right pressure is brought to bear on those supporting it.

Kristoff was returning to Africa the following day, planning to visit Darfur for the 10th time. “It’s not the magnitude of the suffering,” he said. “Many more people die each year of malaria and AIDS. I’ve seen awful things in other places, but nothing moves me more than being in Darfur — the degree of suffering there and the degree of evil. The tearing of the moral fabric there demands of us that we assert our humanity by helping others.”

With the Olympics Games drawing nearer, he said there is a rare chance to persuade host country China to reduce its crucial support for the Sudanese government — specifically by halting the supply of spare parts needed to keep its air force flying.

International human rights lawyer Dr. Harry Reicher presided over the Kean event. Australian-born and living now in Brooklyn, Reicher is a visiting scholar at the university. He was director of international affairs and representative to the United Nations for the Agudath Israel World Organization and is still actively involved in efforts to foster human rights around the world. The conference, he said, was a perfect opportunity to educate both students and teachers and to inspire further efforts to help the people of Darfur.

Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, said that while the attackers are relentless, aid tends to be sporadic, and he made a rousing call for sustained efforts to end the violence, gain access for humanitarian assistance, help the refugees return home, and bring the perpetrators to justice. While giving the Bush administration credit for its efforts, he said ongoing public pressure is needed to sustain the government’s commitment.

Like Kristoff, he stressed the importance of the upcoming Olympics as a means to pressure Sudan’s most powerful backer, China. “This is China’s coming-out party as a world power, as one of the ‘big boys,’” he said. “They know that stories about the Olympics will inevitably include the fact that it is aiding and abetting genocide in Darfur.”

Fowler is the William E. Podich Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College; he is on leave from his position as staff director of the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

He, Kristoff, and the other speakers emphasized that thousands of lives in fact have been saved by the international efforts, with desperate victims provided with shelter in refugee camps as well as food and medical help. While acknowledging what the Bush administration has done, they urged the audience to write and call their political leaders to demand more action and to call on the media to provide more coverage of the issue.

In response to a question, Fowler said that the three leading presidential candidates have all shown a concern about Darfur, and added, “It’s incredibly important that we show that there will be a clear political cost to any president who ignores this issue.”

Dr. Jerry Ehrlich, a pediatrician from Cherry Hill, moved many in the audience to tears and choked up himself as he described the suffering he witnessed in Darfur when he went there on behalf of Doctors Without Borders. He brought with him drawings produced by children he worked with there — made with crayons and paper he brought them — as a way to help them vent their feelings. He remarked how astonished some of those children would be if they knew that tens of thousands of people around the world have now seen their artwork.

The conference ended with a speech by Simon Deng, who has spoken at gatherings about Darfur all over the United States. Though not from the region himself, he is from southern Sudan, and he experienced firsthand the horror of the dehumanizing prejudice that has bedeviled the country. As a nine-year-old child, he was captured and held as a slave in a northern town until he managed to escape and get back to his family.

Underlining the unity of those who fight for justice and human rights, Deng expressed condolences to the family of U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), who died Feb. 11. Deng called the legislator, who was the only Holocaust survivor to become a member of Congress, a champion of freedom and a dear friend.

Kristoff, who won a Pulitzer in 2006 for his coverage of the genocide in Darfur, also stressed the fundamental factor of common humanity — even with regard to the Janjaweed militiamen who have been attacking the tribal people of Darfur since 2003.

He said there are psychopaths among them — the government freed men from jail to join their forces — and there are those who hate the people they target, but many of them are firing into the air, trying not to kill anyone. “A group of 100 men might ride into a village. By the time they leave, 40 or 50 people have been killed. If they were all firing to kill, there would be many more than that, but they aren’t.”

Commenting after the conference, Gordon Haas, cochair of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, said, “The chance to save lives that we now have is very precious, and the federation and our New Jersey Response coalition will continue to participate and advocate wherever we can.”

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Conflict background

THE CONFLICT in Darfur, the drought-stricken, impoverished southwestern region of Sudan, erupted in February 2003. Since then, about 400,000 people are believed to have lost their lives, and another two million have been raped, maimed, and driven away from their homes.

Asked why the government-backed Janjaweed commit such terrible atrocities against the people of Darfur, journalist Nicolas Kristoff said there is mutual prejudice between dark-skinned farmers with their African tribal culture and the lighter-skinned nomadic herdsmen, though both groups are Muslim. But the greater cause, he said, is that the Sudanese government provides the attackers with arms, assistance, and permission to steal cattle in return for the convenience of being rid of a population that was rebelling against its exploitive central control.

The conflict has been declared a genocide by the United States government, but not by the United Nations.

For more information, or to support efforts to help the people of Darfur, visit www.savedarfur.org or www.darfurinfo.org or the student-run site www.standnow.org.

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