Apr
24
From Darfur, with love
April 24, 2008 | | 1 Comment
By Meryam
For my last post I had intended to write about something else, but I read this story and immediately wanted to share it.
Tomorrow will be the fifth anniversary of the Darfur conflict. On this occasion, a remarkable petition, consisting of over 30,000 handwritten signatures and testimonies from Darfuri refugees, will be submitted to Gordon Brown in Downing street.
“‘Your excellency, prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown,’ one entry from a 13-year-old begins. ‘With best greetings. Life in the refugee camps is difficult because the area is desert and there are a lot of desert storms.’ He tells Brown that ‘the parents in the camp are always in a panic’, and ‘if the women venture out to gather firewood they are raped by the locals’. A young woman describes what happened when the Janjaweed attacked her village: ‘When they ran out of ammunition, they burned people and killed them with knives.’
“Eyewitness accounts of terrible violence are delivered with bald simplicity between appeals, which sound more bewildered than enraged. ‘Why does the government still ask for more time which gives them a chance to kill more people while the UN has not made a move yet? Why is the international community still keeping quiet, although the Darfur disaster is the worst human disaster? Does the international community support what is going on? Do they agree with Omar Bashir that blacks are worthless? Why have they not done anything yet?’”
The idea for the petition came from aid worker Anna Schmitt, when she was asked by camp refugees how she would get her political leaders to listen to her. While petitions are normal behavior in the west, Schmitt says in Africa, it is unusual, even absurd.
“It needs to be stressed, this is just not something that happens in this culture. For us it’s no big deal. We do petitions all the time. But for them, it was extraordinary. When I went back, I’d say to them, are you sure? Do you realise the risk? But they said, if we need to die, we might as well die. We’re in an open-air prison as it is. They’re in their fifth year of this now. I think they just realised that unless they spoke out, the perpetrators were going to keep going.”
And so camp elders had distributed notebooks to educated persons within the camps, “and one by one illiterate refugees had dictated their personal experiences, and stated their political appeals, signing their testimonies with a thumb print.” Children’s entries are illustrated with drawings.
The refugees are clear about what they want.
“We, the mothers, want the UN peacekeepers to enter Darfur immediately.” In another signatory’s words, “We want the UN forces to disarm the Janjaweed and end ethnic cleansing, rape, random killing.” One entry reads simply, “We are in such a sorry state. We want them to secure our country, and end the fighting.”
Discretion has been critical in facilitating this remarkable petition, which is why Schmitt has been cagey in divulging logistical details.
“If this came to the ears of the Sudanese government,” she said, “And they knew which camps had signed, it would be easy for them to retaliate with bombs. And if the government in Chad or Sudan thought the humanitarians were helping with an action like this, they could close their programmes down.”
Comments
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)1 Comment so far
This is a timely reminder of how long this conflict has been going on- another of the world’s festering conflicts.