Zara is a refugee. Armed men came to her
village in Sudan, killing her husband and eight other members of her family.
She walked for ten days, carrying her only surviving child, until she reached
safety.
“They
attacked us very early in the morning,” Zara told reporters, “some militiamen
on horseback and camels and some soldiers in military vehicles. There was an
airplane above. They burned the village, they slashed their throats and
captured others.”
With your help, the nightmare in Sudan can
be ended. I urge you to take a moment to help stop the ongoing genocide.
In the Sudanese province of Darfur,
government-backed militia called the Janjaweed are conducting a campaign of
ethnic cleansing against non-Arabs. Atrocities are taking place on a massive
scale: children beaten to death, girls raped and mutilated, villages bombed or
burned to the ground, livestock killed, and wells poisoned. (The girl shown
here in a USAID photo was wounded in an attack.)
The death toll has been estimated at
70,000, but as Nicholas Kristof recently pointed out in the New York Times,
UN teams have been unable to make their own assessment, and independent
estimates exceed 220,000. Over 200,000 people have fled the country and are
living as refugees in Chad. More information is available from groups including
Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch.
The world did too little, too late, in
response to the genocide in Rwanda. We must not make the same mistake in Sudan.
As Senator Paul Simon said about an earlier genocide, “If every member of the
House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have
to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I
think the response would have been different.”
How can you help? Please
send the customizable letter below to express support for the Darfur
Accountability Act, proposed by Senators Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and Sam Brownback
(R-KS). This bill calls for a UN Security Council resolution to impose
sanctions on the government of Sudan, including an arms embargo, a military
no-fly zone over Darfur, and increased assistance to African Union
peacekeepers. It calls for denying visas and freezing the assets of those
responsible for the genocide, and prosecuting them in an international court.
It also calls for a U.S. diplomatic initiative to stop the genocide, through
the UN Security Council and the appointment of a special presidential envoy for
Sudan.
Your prompt action can make a difference!
- Click “send message” below to send your message to
President Bush, the U.S. State Department, and the U.S. mission to the UN.
- Visit http://www.congress.org to contact your Senator by
email. Feel free to copy and paste the text of the prepared message below.
