From the ground

Khartoum police arrested around 70 opposition members yesterday morning, including three leaders of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the ruling party of South Sudan. The arrests were in response to protests calling for electoral and legal reform by the National Assembly. The Sudanese government issued a last minute ban on the opposition rally on Sunday.

Guest post by Jenn Polish, Queens College STAND

Good music, good company, a dance floor, and - oh yeah - awareness raising, fundraising, and pledging against genocide - made for an AMAZING night at Queens College in Flushing, New York. What we've lovingly dubbed our Peace Jam was held the night of Thursday December 3rd in the fourth floor ballroom of our Student Union Building from 6 to 10 PM.

I have been to A LOT of of STAND conferences - no surprise since I first got involved in STAND in 2006, way back when I was a junior at Northwestern University in Chicago. Back then, STAND was a start-up run by students who were on fire about ending genocide, but who often didn't have the resources we needed to coordinate large-scale national events. Sitting here today, just three years later, it's crazy and inspiring to think about the differences.

World is Witness, a project of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has featured a powerful story on the Lord Resistance Army's (LRA) attacks in Congo.

Here's an excerpt from the story of Marie, a teenage girl who was captured by the LRA during its attacks on Faradje, Congo:

For years now, we have been letting the genocide in Darfur slip from crisis into a state of permanent chaos, we have waited as the camps for the displaced settle silently into the sand and transform into villages, and we have allowed children to be born, raised, and sometimes die in states of malnourishment and fear.

For some of us who have been talking about the Darfur genocide for 5 years now, it is almost as if this has become normal.

Former Education Coordinator Sabina Carlson, interning in South Sudan, sent me some thoughts and observations a week after the ICC released the arrest warrant for al-Bashir.  Living in the midst of Sudan, Sabina is able to offer us a unique view of the situation that we don't normally have as student activists.

It was the afternoon of March 4, at 4:00 PM local time in Sudan, and Juba fell quiet.

After the New York Times reported that the ICC had decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Bashir, and before the announcement – less than 24 hours later – that the warrant is still pending (at least for the moment), Sabina Carlson, STAND’s former National Education Coordinator, discussed the news with her friends and colleagues at the Crops Training Center in Yei, South Sudan.

This is Sabina Carlson, your former Education Coordinator, writing in from Southern Sudan. I am here at the Crops Training Center in Yei, Central Equatoria State, which is one of 6 agricultural training centers established by the Government of Southern Sudan after the war to help its rural citizens build and rebuild.

 When slavery is brought up, images are often conjured of African civilians being forced to work the cotton fields of America, or the cane fields of Haiti. The backbreaking agricultural work on no pay with no freedom to come and go, the physical coercion – these are all not things of the past:

Say the word out lout: “Janjaweed”. The first set of images and word that tend to flash into people’s minds are “devil on horseback”, “militia”, “genocide”, “Arab”. But beyond these clips of words and phrases and images, do we really know who the Janjaweed are? Where they come from? What role do they truly play in this conflict and do they play this role? If we want to end the crisis in Darfur, we need to understand where these actors are coming from.