Students asked to take action against violence, slaughters in Sudan

Colleen O'Doherty
November 01, 2005


UNO made human rights a focal point with a recent lecture about mass slaughters, rapes and violence in Sudan.

This year's 7th annual Shirley and Leonard Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights was entitled "Genocide Emergency Sudan: Who Will Survive Today?" and took place last Thursday night in the Dodge Room of the Milo Bail Student Center.

The Goldstein Lecture was started in 1997 by Shirley and Leonard Goldstein in the hopes of keeping UNO and the Omaha community informed on human rights issues. They were inspired to take action due to their experiences in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.

This year's speaker was Jerry Fowler, the first staff director of the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Using a picture slide show presentation and personal stories from his time interviewing people in Darfur, Fowler brought home to the audience the dire situation in the Darfur-Sudan region in Africa.

Fowler explained how some 2 million people have been driven out of the country, thousands of others have been slaughtered, and thousands more suffer due to rapes, continued violence and lack of supplies.

He hopes that students will step up and take action once they are informed of the atrocities that are occurring in the region.

Fowler said, "The first step is consider forming an organization."

Fowler explained that there is a nation-wide umbrella group called Students Taking Action Now for Darfur (STAND), which UNO students can network with and get ideas on how to take action.

Fowler brought up the point that when a lot of students learn about the Holocaust, they ask themselves what they would have done.

Fowler followed up with, "I think that the question we have to ask is 'what will we do now?' We're facing a crisis today where the choices that we make can make a difference."

As for the lecture itself, Fowler said, "I was delighted that so many people came."

He said he would eventually like to have audiences of thousands. About 100 people attended the lecture.

Rebecca Moshman, a sophomore majoring in Environmental Studies, was one of the attendees.

"I thought he was great," she said.

Moshman said she liked hearing about the Darfur-Sudan topic from someone who was there, as opposed to reading a report on it in the paper.

Moshman is also part of UNO's chapter of Amnesty International, a human rights organization, and she shared her views on the lecture topic.

"Genocide is something that's extremely terrible...and we have a collective responsibility on this planet to make sure that other people have their basic human rights respected," she said. "We can't...ignore what's going on. People should speak out."

For more information on The Darfur-Sudan genocide and STAND, go to www.committeeonconscience.

source: unogateway.com