In Whippany speech, Darfur activist urges Holocaust students to fight genocide

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

The president of a New Jersey-based group of Darfurian expatriates urged a group of 200 teenagers to write to public officials and use their influence among their peers to speak out against the genocide against his people in his Sudanese homeland.

Addressing a daylong symposium at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany, Abdelbagy Abushanab told the young students of Holocaust history that crimes similar to ones visited on European Jews by the Nazis 60 years ago are being carried out with chilling frequency against his own people by militiamen and government troops in the Sudan.

“As we speak, in the region of Darfur, 72 percent of over 300,000 people who died in the last two years were women and children,” Abushanab, president of the Darfur Rehabilitation Project, told the middle and high school students from the MetroWest area — all of whom have been recent visitors to the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

In stark terms, Abushanab detailed horrors he had witnessed on a tour of Darfurian refugee camps in the neighboring nation of Chad — speaking of victims the same age as, and sometimes younger than, his adolescent listeners.

“Imagine having to witness five members of your family being killed and then being raped and having to have your baby take care of your baby because of that rape,” he said,

Other children as young as nine are being seized from the camps by citizens of Chad and essentially pressed into slavery, Abushanab said. “They are picking up young boys to clean their houses, forcing them to clean prisons and police precincts, and if they refuse to do so they are handed over to the police. This issue is so tragic that most of the time we just don’t want to talk about it because it is so graphic in many ways.”

Seeking to capture the consciences of the young people already sensitized to genocide by their visits to the Holocaust museum, Abushanab gestured to his audience and observed that “by the time this event is over, for sure this many people” — indicating the members of the audience — “will have died from disease, raids by the Janjaweed militia from one side, by the government forces from the other side, and also by starvation.”

Talking about a tour he had made of an area of Darfur by truck, Abushanab said, he felt the vehicle “driving over the bones of dead people. They were just walking to go somewhere and they died. That is a tragedy happening to human beings in the 21st century.

“So please, as young people, as the future of tomorrow,” he appealed to the students, “please make a commitment. But no matter how much humanitarian help is going to go to Darfur, these people will die the day after the world community leaves Darfur.”

He noted that international efforts have failed to stop the atrocities.

“We’ve been to the United Nations about 41 times. The UN high commissioner for refugees said, ‘The problem is when you say “genocide,” you have to take immediate action, and we just do not have the resources.’

“I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of the United Nations was to avoid further genocides,” said Abushanab, referring to the “six million-plus people who died under the world’s watch. Everybody knew it was going on, but everybody would say, ‘Oh, it’s the other person who is supposed to take action.’

“We can’t say African problems are for Africans. No, not with genocide, not with genocide. I don’t know if the words ‘never again’ were ever given their true meaning at any time, But let us hope that in the future of this world these things do not happen to any other people.”

Abushanab ended with a direct plea to the teenagers.

“How can we solve this problem? Your help. Your help is very much needed. You as young people can form your institutions in a way that 10 years from now when you are taking over, you won’t have to waste time — that when there is a problem it has to be addressed in a way so that it never comes back.”

‘People cannot stand back’

Abushanab’s words echoed the intentions of Michael Rubell, chair of the Morris Rubell Foundation of Morristown.

Acting in the memory of his father, Morris, a survivor of four Nazi concentration camps, the younger Rubell is carrying on a determined effort to educate all young people about the Holocaust and instill in them a commitment to battle racism and injustice.

Since 1996, his family’s foundation has sponsored day trips to the Holocaust museum in Washington for 1,900 students and 175 teachers.

“Now we bring them back to hear about what they have learned and to give them more told and more knowledge,” Michael Rubell told NJ Jewish News. “We want to teach the lessons of the Holocaust that people cannot stand back, they cannot stand by when they see something happening, so that something like this does not happen again. It was something my father talked about when I was in school.

“How many of us are doing anything to stop what is happening in Darfur? How many of us did anything about Rwanda?” he asked. “That’s what we talk to these kids about. We try to relate that it is not just something that happened 60 years ago; it is something that is happening today, and they are the ones who have the voices that will be able to stop it.”

To Barbara Wind, director of the Holocaust Council of MetroWest, the daylong symposium was “about bringing the students back here for a follow-through,” to their museum visit, “to make them understand that that was just the beginning, really.

“We want them to feel empowered to become leaders in their own communities — to not be bystanders but upstanders, to prevent bullying, because after all, war is just bullying is mass scale,” she said. “To prevent bullying in their own schoolyard and cafeteria because they are the world, and it is up to them to make it a more peaceful world.”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.