Sudan:

189 police advisors arrive in Darfur to support the UN Peacekeeping mission, UNAMID. This week, the UN also committed to supplying 18 helicopters for UNAMID. Meanwhile, Qatar may be hosting new peace talks in the coming weeks.

Darfur was brought up in this week’s US Vice Presidential Debates, although Governor Palin’s response around Alaskan state divestment has been brought under scrutiny. Both were criticized by Sudan.

The UN General Assembly ended Monday – this session was marked by Sudan attempting to persuade the UN to block the potential indictment of its President Omar al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court, while Luis Moreno-Ocampo attempts to persuade the UN to allow justice to take its course.

Burma:

Due to China’s role on the Security Council, the UN still has not been able to properly address the child soilder issue in Burma.

Aung San Suu Kyi had a check up by her physician and eye doctor after reportedly going on a hunger strike.

Human Rights groups continue to pressure the UN to act on behlaf of the estimated 2100 political prisoners still being held in Burma. The same human rights organizations have been reporting new broad sweeping arrests of political activists as well.

Congo:

Tutsi rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has announced the withdrawal of his faction, known as the CNDP, from a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement signed in January 2008. Nkunda accused the Congolese government of failing to implement the deal and indicated plans to expand his operations from the east to the entire country, calling for the "liberation" of DRC.

In light of recent violence in eastern DRC, UN Special Representative Alan Doss called for a "surge" of peacekeeping troops and outlined a comprehensive disengagement plan. In a speech to the UN Security Council on Saturday, Doss indicated that most of the rebel groups had agreed to the plan, but that General Laurent Nkunda was proving uncooperative.

Civilians displaced by recent fighting in eastern DRC are facing starvation, as the UN World Food Programme has been forced to cut ration sizes by half in the region.

Reuters published a useful summary of the recent events in DRC, including origins of the conflict.

E-mail education@standnow.org with any questions

There are an incredible number of creative and comprehensive websites out there on Darfur for you and your chapters to explore – and take your level of knowledge to the next level…

One of them is the newest site on Darfur put up by Human Rights Watch called "Failing Darfur", featuring videos, timelines, maps, reports.

Others include:
PBS’s "Wide-angle: Darfur" site has some oft the best breakdowns of key players and events on the web

Amnesty International also is a great information hub for reports.

The UN Sudan Information Gateway has all the most in-depth, official, technical information you can find on the web.

And of course, GI-NET and ENOUGH have some of the most relevant and comprehensive resources and reports on the history, present, and future of the conflict.

Darfur may be oceans away, but with the resources on the web today we can bring our thoughts closer to Sudan and bring our understanding of the complexities on the ground that much closer to the truth.

Tonight, Darfur took the national stage. In front of probably more than 50 million viewers, Gwen Ifill, asked the vice-presidential candidates what they would do about Darfur. And, most likely, this was in no small part due to your letters and e-mails asking her to do so. Watch the video below!

Ifill referenced Sen. Joe Biden supporting intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. Sen. Biden, who has visited refugee camps in Chad, responded that he does "not have a stomach for genocide", that we should impose a no-fly zone and that "we can lead NATO if we take a hard stand." Gov. Sarah Palin responded that she also supported a no-fly zone and stressed that Alaska Sudan divestment legislation had been introduced and needs to be passed. Let’s dwell on that for a moment: Sudan divestment, a movement started by students such as yourselves, was endorsed by a vice-presidential nominee during primetime.

You wrote letters, you e-mailed, you made sure that Darfur was not ignored in a national policy debate.  This is your victory.

As Nick Kristof said, let’s treasure the moment.

Now let’s get back to work.

-Maggie Tiernan, National Advocacy Coordinator.

We’re working hard to get the best speakers for the 2008 National Student Conference – we’ll have experts on genocide and the conflicts in Sudan, Burma, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as many leaders in the anti-genocide movement. 

Check out this list of speakers who have been confirmed so far:

Journalists Roy Gutman, Ron Haviv, Ryan Spencer Reed                                     

Congo experts Sasha Lezhnev and Joseph Mbangu

Mark Hanis, Executive Director of the Genocide Intervention Network

Jerry Fowler, President of the Save Darfur Coalition

John Norris, Executive Director of ENOUGH

And there’s more coming!  Check the blog for continuous updates on STAND Out Loud!

In 2005, the United Nations endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, establishing the responsibility of the world to act when governments are unable – or unwilling – to protect their own populations from large-scale violence. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the international community has taken up this responsibility, deploying the world’s largest United Nations peacekeeping force and expending significant diplomatic efforts to broker peace deals. But continuation of renewed fighting this week in eastern DRC serves as a sobering reminder that this responsibility does not end when the signing ceremonies are over.

Since 1998, that fighting in DRC has claimed over 5.4 million lives. While the situation briefly stabilized following a ceasefire agreement signed in January 2008, we have seen consistent ceasefire violations from many sides, culminating in a resurgence of large-scale violence in late August 2008. According to estimates, 100,000 civilians have been displaced from their homes as a result of recent fighting between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and rebel CNDP militia led by General Laurent Nkunda. And just as the need for humanitarian aid is increasing, the deteriorating security situation, including looting and direct attacks on aid workers, has forced several aid agencies to suspend operations in North and South Kivu.

The recent violence marks the collapse of the January ceasefire agreement signed between the Congolese government and over 20 armed groups, including Nkunda’s CNDP. In a statement last week, the ENOUGH Project called on the international community, particularly the United States and the European Union as backers of the January agreement, to take urgent diplomatic measures “get the peace process on track.” Absent such efforts, as well as “a more impartial effort by United Nations peacekeepers to stop the fighting,” ENOUGH warned that the region could “descend back into total war.”

As anti-genocide activists, we have recognized the importance of creating political will to protect civilians from large-scale slaughter and mass atrocities, and to ensure that our government, as part of the international community, upholds the “Responsibility to Protect.” While the situation in eastern DRC has not been labeled “genocide,” it is characterized by ongoing, widespread targeting of noncombatant civilians on a nearly unparalleled scale. As this violence worsens, eastern DRC is increasingly becoming an area of focus for STAND.

Be sure to join us TONIGHT, Wednesday, October 1st, at 8 pm EST to discuss the conflict with STAND students and with Genocide Intervention Network (GI-NET) education associate Joshua Kennedy.

Hear an overview of the situation and find out more about why and how STAND and GI-NET are taking action. Get on the call at: (269) 320-8300 and dial access code 349902#.

–Nina McMurry, Congo Education Coordinator
 

Last week, Jim Lehrer, moderator for the first presidential debate between McCain and Obama, disappointed the world by not asking the candidates about their plans for Darfur, even though the debate was was slated to cover foreign policy issues. This week, you can prevent this from happening again! Take action to let the moderators and the candidates know that they owe it to their voters to outline their specific plans for Darfur.

Take action by:

1) Emailing Gwen Ifill, moderator for the debate this Thursday, October 2, between vice presidential nominees Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, at
Gifill@newshour.org. Email her by October 2!

2) Submitting a question for the debates at mydebates.org, a partner of MySpace. Submit a question by October 2!

3) Voting for the question concerning Darfur and Burma that the candidates will address via video. Voting will only occur on September 30, so vote today!

Sudan:

While the situation in the refugee and IDP camps remains unstable after last weeks’ attacks, the intensity of the attacks on the ground seems to have decreased this week.

Meanwhile, the intensity of the international debate around Darfur seems to have heated up: the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court vowed to pursue his case against Sudanese President Omar-al-Bashir in meetings with UN and AU officials – while Sudan lobbied intensely at the UN meeting this weekend to have the case against its leader dropped. Rebel leaders urged the international community to not mix justice and politics and to not drop the charges.

At the UN, Sudan was elected to chair the Group of 77 Developing Nations.

Burma:

Burma’s longest serving political prisoner, the 79 year old UWin Tin, was released. The release of 9,000 political prisoners in the country is seen as a publicity stunt by the international community. Amnesty International estimates that about 2,000 people are still held as political prisoners in jail.

People in Burma’s Chin state say they are starving and that over 100,000 people are at risk. This is after a famine that is caused by an infestation of rats who come to eat the fruits off of bamboo, which flowers once every 50 years. The rats then ear other crops nearby. The Indian government, which encounters the same rat infestation every 50 years, began making plans to deter the famine caused by the rats eating the crops in 2002. In contrast the Burmese military government has done nothing in preparation for this crisis.

A bomb detonated in front of Yangon’s city hall, approaching the anniversary of last year’s democratic peaceful protests. In response, the government has set up check points and initiated heavy patrols through the city, fearing some action to commemorate last year’s protests.

There is much concern over who will take over the government upon the death of general Than Shwe who is in his seventies.

Congo:

Fresh fighting between Congolese government troops and militia led by General Laurent Nkunda broke out Sunday in North Kivu province. According to Human Rights Watch, renewed clashes between the two groups that began August 28 have displaced over 100,000 civilians.

Approximately 90 Congolese schoolchildren were abducted last week by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group, during attacks in DRC’s Orientale province. UNICEF has expressed concern that the children will be used by the LRA for attacks in Uganda or sold into sexual slavery. In protest, hundreds of Congolese civilians attacked UN posts in Orientale, wounding two peacekeepers.

A new report by Amnesty International estimates that up to half of child soldiers reunited with their families have been re-recruited by warring parties over the past year, a consequence of the recent resurgence in violence.

The International Criminal Court ruled Friday ruled that there was sufficient evidence to try two militiamen, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in DRC.

E-mail education@standnow.org with any questions

Last week, students took action to influence the Presidential and VP debates by sending handwritten letters to Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill, asking that the moderators ask a question about Darfur.

With the first Presidential debate still scheduled for tomorrow, the letters have been a huge success so far.  College chapters in the Mid-Atlantic region have sent in more than 150 letters, and high-schools in the Northeast have sent over 100 as well.  We’re getting creative, too – one high school chapter in North Carolina even took pictures of their letters and e-mailed the photos to Jim Lehrer! 

And the letters haven’t stopped coming in – chapters in the Great Lakes and Southwest are still writing to Gwen Ifill, and you can, too!  The VP debate isn’t until October 2nd, so keep sending in those letters.  For Gwen Ifill’s contact info and a sample letter, check out our first post on the letters.

The first time I heard Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, speak, she told a personal story that’s remained extremely meaningful for me in considering how to approach my role as an activist. The story had to do with the pitfalls in her relationship with the atrocities that she works to portray; she recounted how, working in Bosnia during the war, she was able to begin to make a name for herself as a journalist. She eventually realized, however, that she was beginning to want to see her stories on the front page more than she wanted to stop the events that she was chronicling, and it was at this point, she told the audience, that she knew she had to quit.

Many of us have probably gone through similar iterations of this what could be called the “activist existentialist crisis”- questioning our motives, questioning our effectiveness, questioning why we think we can advocate for areas of the world that most of us have never even been to.

This kind of thinking can be paralyzing if we let it be, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to dwell on it a little. We often talk about how far STAND as a movement has come, and it’s true- we’ve gone from a smattering of small, independent student groups to a national network coordinating campaigns, building its members’ skill set, and engaging with US policy. We can tell that we’ve progressed because many of us now possess suits, Blackberries, and caffeine addictions, and many of our members can throw around acronyms (FPLA, R2P, ICC…) with the best of ‘em.

Obviously, I’m being a little facetious here- this is not what STAND is about. But the question remains nonetheless, what IS STAND about? Soul-searching as a movement, like as an individual, can be a painful process, but I believe that it’s just as necessary.

I love talking to chapters and hearing about all the important work that they’re doing, but I know that I didn’t get involved with STAND to hold a position called “Great Lakes Regional Outreach Coordinator.” Instead, I remember hearing a speaker from Rwanda who had come to my middle school and being horrified that the events he described had occurred during my lifetime. I remember how upsetting learning about the Holocaust for the first time was in elementary school, and I remember beginning to read newspapers at the same time that they were filled with stories about victims in Kosovo.

I think that many of us have a shared experience in this respect- having lived out our childhoods largely unaware that such terrible things could happen on such a large scale, we became cognizant of the larger world community at the same time that this community was abandoning victims in Rwanda and Bosnia, and we thus became aware at a very young age that this was not the world we wanted to live in.

For me, this is at its core what STAND is about- knowing that this is not the world that we want to live in and truly believing, independent of any particular political philosophy, that it can be otherwise. We’ve begun to articulate a much more concrete version of what it is that we would like the world to look like and to learn the skills necessary to make it so, but I think that staying attuned to the purpose of STAND and staying energized in our work has a lot to do with taking the skills and the nuances that we’ve learned and reconnecting them with the pure, uncomplicated passion that we felt about these issues when we decided to act on them in the first place. That we formed as a movement because a number of small, disconnected groups realized that they had this same passion and were working for the same goals is extremely powerful- we are truly a grassroots movement founded on the shared energy and motivation of people committed to building a better world. I believe that as we expand, improve, regroup, reorganize, grow up, get fed up, and sometimes, yes, become temporarily cynical, STAND, fundamentally, is still about this kind of energy.

-Rebecca Burns, Great Lakes College Regional Outreach Coordinator

On his blog today, Nicholas Kristof gave STAND a shout-out, writing that students have taken the lead in the fight against genocide:

"University campuses, backed by organizations like STAND, have been very active on Darfur, and high school groups have started and expanded groups like Dollars for Darfur…I hope President Bush sees this and feels suitably mortified that kids are acting where he is paralyzed."

Click here to read the full piece! And be sure to comment to let Kristof’s readers know what your chapter is up to and what they can do to help.