by Dane Roberts
Daily Lobo columnist
Instead of using this space to complain about some benign problem, I want to act as an amplifier for a message we all need to hear and act on right away.
As I write, an unimaginable amount of pain is being inflicted on a community. Children are being slaughtered. Women are being raped and killed. Men are being castrated and murdered. Entire towns and villages are being destroyed.
Usually at this point, many people stop reading. We are exposed to so much tragedy in the news, and we are so powerless it becomes easy to ignore.
But this tragedy is different, because there's genuine hope that it can be stopped. The only thing required to stop it might be the painless act of writing a letter, but I'll explain that later. First, here's a little background.
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A bona fide genocide is occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan. Government-backed militias collectively called Janjaweed are doing their best to eradicate certain ethnic groups in the western part of this Saharan-African nation.
Last Wednesday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof released classified photos from a fact-finding trip into Darfur. The first picture shows a slain toddler facedown in the sand and the debris of a ransacked hut.
Kristof said he didn't show the photo of the child's five-year-old brother who lay beside him, because the brother had been beaten so badly nothing was left of his face.
According to a report from Human Rights Watch released on Friday, eyewitnesses in South Darfur told the group how government-backed Janjaweed militia attacked villages. The militia picked out young women and girls to rape, and male relatives who protested were beaten, stripped naked, tied to trees and forced to watch the rape of the women and girls. In some cases, the men were then branded like cattle with a hot knife to permanently remind them of their humiliation.
The United Nations estimates about 2 million people have been forced from their homes, and a conservative estimate by the World Health Organization places the death toll for just six months of the violence at more than 70,000.
How can there be hope in the face of such evil? Is there any way we can stop Darfur from becoming the next Rwanda, where 800,000 people were massacred while we watched?
International pressure on the government of Sudan is light. But in the past, the government in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum was swayed relatively easily. In the 1990s, pressure from the United States led Sudan to force Osama bin Laden out.
Several specific actions by the international community might convince Khartoum to stop the genocide. I invite you to look them up on the many Internet resources available about Darfur, including savedarfur.org and darfurgenocide.org.
What's missing is the political will and leadership to make it happen. The United States could easily take that on role. The Late Sen. Paul Simon, one of the few American policy makers to call for intervention in Rwanda, said if every member of the House and Senate received 100 letters from people back home about Rwanda when the crisis was first developing, the response would have been different.
New Mexico is blessed with an unusually strong congressional delegation, and UNM is blessed with thousands of students. If everyone who reads this article would take five minutes to e-mail their representative and two senators, our leaders would get those 100 messages.
If you don't want to sit down at a computer and write, take out your cell phone, and leave a phone message telling our representatives you're concerned about what's happening in Darfur. Their numbers follow.
Sen. Pete Domenici: 346-6791
Sen. Jeff Bingaman: 346-6601
Rep. Heather Wilson: 346-6781
Rep. Tom Udall: (505) 984-8950
Rep. Steve Pearce: (202) 225-9599
Even if, like me, you're not used to activism, you can't deny the evil of what's occurring, the possibility for change or the ease of taking the important step of writing or calling.
Don't wait.
