Students bring attention to Darfur

The word "genocide," stripped of specific detail, loses the ability to convey the horror it describes.

Last night, Brown University students brought attention to atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region by speaking not of cold, hard facts -- hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced -- but of personal stories.

A mother watched her three children die, and was gang-raped by Janjaweed militia afterward. "I'm even afraid of being killed by my relatives because of the Janjaweed baby that I'm carrying," she told a United Nations staffer.

The students, part of Brown's Darfur Action Network, lit candles on Brown's main green and read from a United Nations report on Darfur, where government-backed militias have been killing civilians since 2003 in an ethnic conflict. In spite of acts of Congress and U.N. resolutions, in spite of referral to the International Criminal Court, the killing continues.

The group that coordinated campus vigils and fasts across the country yesterday, Students Taking Action Now Darfur, estimates that the conflict kills 500 people each day. That's more than 20 people per hour.

Three minutes, one death.

The students stood silent for three minutes. "In that time, at least one woman has lost her husband, or one parent has lost a child," Scott Warren, a freshman who helped to organize the event, told the crowd. "It's not 400,000 dead. It's 400,000 people that all had families, all had lives."

Some of the Brown students gave up food yesterday. Others gave up "luxury items" such as chocolate, soda or cell phone use. Gabriel Corens, a Brown junior and another event organizer, gave up coffee. "It meant that throughout the day, I was thinking about the tragedy that's occurring in Darfur," he said.

The group set up collection boxes for students to donate the money they would have spent on those luxury items. At the end of the night, they had more than $1,200.

The money will go to the Mercy Corps, a humanitarian aid organization that works to improve living conditions in camps housing refugees from Darfur.

In fasting, the students joined people from all walks of life: in entertainment, Bette Midler and Bill Cosby; in religion, Desmond Tutu, archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, and Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland; in academia, Harvard University professor Samantha Power and Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz; in international aid, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, former commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, and Judith Lewis, director of U.S. relations for the World Food Programme.

Brown University President Ruth Simmons also joined in.

STAND arranged for news of the students' actions to be broadcast on radio frequencies in Darfur and eastern Chad, where many of the refugee camps are.

Brown senior Lisabeth Meyers, a modern European history major, was drawn to the Darfur Action Network, and to fast yesterday, by her personal history: She's the granddaughter of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. "You hear these expressions -- never again," she said last night. "As I got older, I realized it was happening again and again."