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:
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.
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:
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.
There has been a flood of heavy fighting in Darfur in the past two weeks. Large battles between a number of Darfur rebel groups and the Janjaweed/Sudanese Army have increased violence to a level the world has not seen since February of this year.
In this week’s news:
large-scale conflicts continue between the Janjaweed/Sudanese Army and the Darfur rebel groups – Burmese opposition leader ends her hunger strike – and the fresh fighting breaks out between the Congolese Army and a Laurent Nkunda’s armed forces. Read on for more…
Darfur
One of Africa’s longest running conflicts took a turn for the worse this week. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that has been fighting the Ugandan government in an attempt to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 commandments, abducted 50 school children and killed 3 people along the Congo-Sudan border this week. South Sudan’s military also said that LRA rebels attacked one of its units, killing one soldier and setting a child on fire along the remote Sudanese border with the DR Congo.
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.
Last week, this space introduced the role of DRC’s mineral resources in fueling the ongoing violence in the east – particularly how the illegal exploitation of minerals by armed groups on all sides provides both a means and an incentive for these groups to maintain the current state of insecurity. Experts, including organizations like Global Witness, warn that the ailing peace process is unlikely to survive unless the issue of resource exploitation is addressed in a serious way.
