Activists targeting Chafee on Sudan

PROVIDENCE - With little good news coming out of Sudan's Darfur region, a group of Brown University students is urging U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee to support a bill they believe could make a difference.

In a two-week e-mail campaign, the Darfur Action Network is asking Chafee to back the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, which would mandate a mixture of diplomacy, sanctions and support for peacekeeping efforts.

The student group is reaching outside Brown, asking all Rhode Islanders to send e-mails to Allison Sugarman, Chafee's legislative assistant for foreign relations issues.

"We want to flood her in-box," says Brown senior Lisabeth Meyers, one of the Darfur Action Network's leaders.

The group is targeting Chafee because of his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is reviewing the bill, whose prime sponsor is Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan. Thus far, 33 senators have signed on as cosponsors. Chafee is not among them; Sen. Jack Reed added his name last week.

In Darfur, government-backed militias have been killing civilians since 2003 in an ethnic conflict. The Coalition for International Justice, a nongovernmental organization that conducted extensive interviews in Chad with refugees from Darfur, tallied the death toll at 400,000.

Peace talks continue, but just last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a statement saying Darfur's "escalating violence" threatened the November harvest, food distribution and operation of the Red Cross agricultural assistance program.

"We, as Americans, who call ourselves defenders of democracy, cannot stand by and do nothing," says the Darfur Action Network's sample e-mail to Sugarman. "We cannot watch passively as more people die."

Chafee said Tuesday that he was "taking a good look at" the bill, but hadn't yet made up his mind to support it. He said he worried that sanctions might actually hurt the people they're meant to help. "We all want to do the right thing," he said. "Whether sanctions are the right thing is the question we all have."

Chafee's press secretary, Stephen Hourahan, called back yesterday to say the Foreign Relations Committee leadership, which includes Chafee, had not decided to support the bill because it "basically does the same thing" as the Comprehensive Peace in Sudan Act, which was signed into law Dec. 23 after passing the Senate by unanimous consent. The sanctions in the earlier bill, whose prime sponsor was Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., "don't seem to have been effective," Hourahan said. Rather than approve redundant legislation, Hourahan said, the committee wants to examine the reasons the 2004 measure failed to stop the genocide.

The Darfur Action Network's e-mail campaign ends Nov. 11; after that, the students say they hope to meet with Chafee in person. Chafee said he would be open to such a meeting.

For more information on the e-mail campaign, including a sample e-mail, visit www.geocities.com/browndarfur or e-mail darfurbrown@gmail.com.

The full text of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, S. 1462, is available online at the U.S. Congress legislation database Web page, http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.html.