The genocide continues

8/31/2005 8:00:00 PM

The genocide continuesJewish groups among sponsors of Darfur alert event
by Anath Hartmann WJW Intern

Toddler siblings with gunshot wounds, a headless man, a body burnt so badly its organs had been exposed, but its sex was impossible to discern ‹ all were recent photos from Darfur, Sudan.
Speaking to a packed District ballroom Monday night, Brian Steidle, a former Marine captain, displayed these photographs, taken while he served as an African Union monitor in that war-ravaged African nation.
"This is ongoing," Steidle said. "Has the violence slowed in recent months? Yes, it has. That's because there are very few villages left to burn ... but as you look around here," he told the 500 people at the National Press Club, "this many people will be dead by Wednesday."
Steidel was one of three panel speakers at "Taking Action on Darfur: A Capital Alert," which was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, the Greater Washington Jewish Task Force on Darfur and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Describing how an attack on a village takes place in Darfur, he said that initially all forms of communication are shut down so that no one can contact other villages for help. Then the attack on villagers begins.
"These people," he said, displaying a photo of several bodies lined up on the ground as an example of the "attack" phase, "have had their noses cut off and their eyes poked out."
Next, Steidle said, the looting begins. He showed a picture of government trucks parked to help the militiamen, or Janjaweed, load booty taken in their raid.
The last step in the demolition of a community in Darfur is, he said, the scorching of whatever remains and the poisoning of wells. Both are done to prevent those who have managed to flee from taking up residence again.
"Calling your congressman is great," he concluded, "but it's going to take everybody."
Speaker Paul Rusesabagina, the man who inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda, drew parallels between the genocide taking place in Darfur and what he experienced in his native African nation. The former hotel manager refused to leave hundreds of refugees in an abandoned Rwandan hotel in 1994.
Recalling the tension between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes in Belgian-colonized Rwanda, he said strains culminated in April 1994, when two Hutu presidents were killed in a plane crash. The Hutus largely considered the deaths planned assassinations.
"Belgium pulled out immediately," said Rusesabagina, "And so did the rest of the world. That was when I realized we had been abandoned. That was when I decided I had to do my responsibility."
A Hutu married to a Tutsi, Rusesabagina took in and hid 26 of his neighbors who feared for their lives because of ties to rebel opposition groups. He eventually managed to negotiate the neighbors' relocation and that of his family to the Hotel des Milles Collines, where he had once been manager. The building, no longer containing a functioning business, was already a proxy home to hundreds of refugees.
That May 2, when the Hutu insurgents decided to "evacuate" some of these refugees, Rusesabagina, in a move that would forever seal his status as a hero to many, refused to leave the hotel and its remaining residents behind, despite being on the list of evacuees.
Last spring, Rusesabagina visited Darfur, keenly aware of the similarities between its situation and the one in which he found himself a decade ago.
"It is a pity to see how their life is," he said of the Darfurians he saw. "All of their goals and objectives are completely forgotten. Their children are no longer attending schools. This is a shame to mankind."
According to Talia Levin, the AJCommittee's national liaison for crisis in Darfur, 400,000 have been killed in the Sudanese region during the past 30 months, 3.5 million have gone without sufficient food and another 2.5 million have been displaced from their homes.
Rusesabagina rejected the suggestion that these are merely "African problems."
"The international community says the African nations should take over and handle the issue. But the whole of Africa, my friends, is burning."
Rusesabagina urged the audience at the Press Club not to sit idly by.
"We need to get up, raise our voices, let our leaders know they can change things if they really want. Behind every [atrocity] in Africa there is always a superpower maneuvering. It's like Nintendo," he said, referencing the popular early 1990s video game system.
Charles Snyder, the State Department's senior adviser on Sudan, took a less emotional approach than either of his colleagues on the panel.
Snyder moved quickly to discuss the root of the genocide. According to him, religion is not the problem in Darfur.
The Darfurians, he said, "are already Islamicized. The Janjaweed are burning mosques ... the underlying problem is a scarcity of land and water."
He also noted that unlike Western nations, Sudan operates on a tribal system. "We're going to have to change the government to take down the entire tribal system," he said. "This is going to take, in my opinion, a minimum of six or seven years."
Still, Snyder said, American civilian advocacy on behalf of Sudan is very much needed. He asked those attending the talk to write their state representatives.
In closing, he used an analogy that referred to both Hotel Rwanda and the photos Steidle had shown.
"Stay in this for the long haul," he urged. "Africa's a movie, it's not a snap-shot."