Though news media are rightly focused on recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina, many of the world's "silent emergencies" have been long forgotten, according to a research assistant for the federal public policy office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).
One such emergency is that in Darfur, Sudan, where ELCA’s Kimberly C. Stietz said government-backed militias, known as the Janjaweed, have killed an estimated 400,000 Darfurians in the past two years and displaced another 2.5 million Darfurians when the militias destroyed their villages.
There is a false sense that the violence is subsiding, Stietz said according to the ELCA News Service, because there are fewer reports of fighting in the villages.
Recently, the ELCA hosted a rally and vigil in Washington, D.C., along with more than a dozen human-rights and faith-based organizations to mark the one-year anniversary of the Bush Administration's declaration of genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan in Africa.
On Sept. 9, 2004, President Bush had expressed the United State’s dismay over the violence in Darfur, concluding that genocide had taken place in war-ravaged African region.
“We urge the international community to work with us to prevent and suppress acts of genocide," he said last year. "We call on the United Nations to undertake a full investigation of the genocide and other crimes in Darfur."
By declaring the conflict in Darfur genocide, the U.S. government has placed itself in a position of global leadership to protect the people of Darfur and bring the conflict to an end, Stietz said, yet "completely not enough" has been done in the past year.
At the recent rally on Sept. 8, about 500 people gathered in Lafayette Park in front of the White House to hear a series of speakers and to unfurl a petition with 100,000 names that Africa Action collected, Stietz said. She reported to the ELCA that the unfolded petition and signatures reached the White House gates.
Rally organizers and speakers suggested that the United States support full funding for African Union forces in Darfur and back African Union efforts to assemble a multinational presence in that region of Sudan, the ELCA reported.
The speakers included Salih Booker, executive director, Africa Action; the Rev. Robert W. Edgar, general secretary, National Council of Churches USA; Fatima Haroun, Sudan Peace Advocates Network; Ruth Messinger, president, American Jewish World Service; David Rubenstein, coordinator, Save Darfur Coalition; and the Rev. Jim Wallis, founder and editor-in-chief, Sojourners Magazine.
In addition to the ELCA and other organizations the speakers represented, the day's events were planned by the Armenian National Committee of America, Faithful America, Greater Washington Jewish Task Force on Darfur, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National STAND Coalition (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Sudan Peace Advocates Network, TransAfrica Forum and United Methodist Church.
Joe Alvarez
Christian Today Correspondant