Daily Darfur: Looking for Leadership to Answer the Call of the Suffering

by Michelle . · 2008-12-23 07:21:00 UTC
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Representatives Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md) and Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) are calling today for renewed American leadership to end the genocide in Darfur, and offer five steps for the incoming Obama administration:

  1. Reinvigorate the peace process.

  2. Ensure humanitarian access.

  3. Ensure peacekeepers are able to carry out their mandate.

  4. Engage the international community (and China in particular).

  5. Ensure that the North/South Civil War does not reignite.

The representatives are a bit vague on each of these points--it's only an op-ed, after all--but it's important nonetheless that members of the U.S. Congress are already taking up Darfur as a priority issue before Obama is even in office. The representatives write,

'On the walls of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, one can still read these heartrending words from the camps: 'All of us dying here amidst the icy, arctic indifference of the nations, forgotten by life and the world.' And today, in another language, from another side of the world, those same words are still audible."

The road to you-know-where is also paved with despicable intentions

In yet another example of just how vile the conflict in Darfur has become, the BBC reports that some 6,000 child soldiers, as young as 11 years old, are currently being used by forces on both sides--government and rebel.

The article notes that UNICEF is currently negotiating with various parties for the demobilization of child soldiers. The forced recruitment of child soldiers is, in my humble opinion, one of the most morally reprehensible and inexcusable acts of war--and those who engage are among a special category of scum.

[Photo from the BBC: Child soldiers in Sudan.]

Michelle . has been involved in various activist endeavors, including the Teach Against Genocide pilot campaigns.
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