With the election of the Democratic party into power in Congress and Senate, there is a glimer of hope that the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan will become a greater priority in Washington.For those of you keeping score, over 450,000 have perished in Sudan in the last few years and the international community has largely been silent.
Tomorrow I am headed up the Garden State Parkway to Newark to interview Congressman Donald Payne who's in line to chair the Congressional subcommittee on African affairs. We'll be chatting about the genocide in Darfur and WTF we can do to take some initiative to stop the dying.
Rep. Payne has long taken a leadership roll on African issues, for example he was one of the first politicans to sound alarm bells about the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980's. So the idea of him taking on the chairmanship of the Africa committee in a positive delevopment for those Africans in harm's way in Darfur. I'm certainly keeping my fingers crosses anyway.
If you have any suggestions about what to ask Rep. Payne, I am all ears. I am not an Africa expert so if you have some insight that could help me ask more probing questions about this escalating humanatarian crisis, then by all means share your thoughts in the comment section!
I regret to say that the United States always seems to turn a blind eye to genocide so long as it's "other kinds of people" dying: jews during WWII; Muslims in Bosnia on Pres. Clinton's watch; and black Africans in Rwanda, Uganda and now Darfur.
What a sad, stinging indictment of our proported values, wouldn't you say?
1 comment:
Conflict now continues in the Darfur region, where over 2 million people, that's a third of the population are displaced.
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