Names of the dead emanated from the EMU Amphitheater from sundown Monday until sundown Tuesday as volunteers took shifts reading a list of names of Holocaust victims. The annual event, part of the Israeli national holiday of Yom HaShoah, is a dramatic reminder of the number of innocent lives lost during arguably the most traumatic event of the 20th century.
Hearing the seemingly endless list of names, which represent only a portion of the 6 million estimated Jewish casualties of the Holocaust, should solicit personal reflection and causes us to ponder the psychological factors that allowed the Nazis to kill each one of the named individuals.
The event should also remind us of the great humanitarian crisis facing our generation: Darfur.
Fighting started between African rebels and the Arab-controlled Sudanese government in Darfur in 2003. Human rights groups have accused the Sudanese government, which denies the charges, of commissioning Arab militias, the Janjaweed, to systematically murder and rape nonArabic civilians and to burn their villages.
Since 2003, about 180,000 people have died, many from disease and hunger, according to The Associated Press. More than 2 million have been displaced from their homes, and many are residing in refugee camps in Chad.
Both the United Nations and the U.S. government have acknowledged this immense problem, but the world has done little to aid the people suffering in Sudan.
Until recently, African Union forces were charged with peacekeeping duties, but their efforts have proved ineffectual. The Sudanese government has been resistant to outside forces.
The Darfur crisis conjures clear allusions to the 1994 crisis in Rwanda, when ethnic strife led to about 800,000 deaths and inspired the movie “Hotel Rwanda.” Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hotel manager portrayed as the movie’s protagonist, has himself called for a powerful U.N. presence in Darfur.
What “is happening today in Darfur is exactly what was going on in Rwanda … and the whole world closed eyes, ears, turned backs, didn’t want to see what was going on,” he said in an April 12 interview with The NewsHour. “Today, in Darfur, you have about 2 million people displaced in Darfur, in that part of the world, and the whole world doesn’t – seems not to care.”
Thankfully, African Union officials on March 10 began procedures to switch the peacekeeping role to the U.N. The U.N. has also set Sunday as the deadline for the parties in Darfur to declare peace, and it imposed sanctions Tuesday on four men accused of committing atrocities.
In a tape released Sunday, terrorist leader Osama bin Laden called for Islamic “jihad” in Darfur to combat any potential Western troops that might deploy there. The U.N. must not be dissuaded by his threats, and it must intervene in Sudan with an armed presence authorized to protect civilians unlike the weak U.N. force in Rwanda.
Allowing this killing to continue would show that we truly have not learned from the past.
“I think that, as human beings, we do not want to take – to face our duties and responsibilities,” Rusesabagina said. “The world knows that. The day that they recall what is going on in Darfur, a genocide, they will be in an obligation to intervene … and they fear that.”
The Lane County Darfur Coalition has organized a rally at 2 p.m. Sunday in the plaza outside the Lane County Courthouse to correspond with a national rally in Washington, D.C. We urge those who support action to attend.