The Conflict in Darfur Needs Attention
Part III of III
They only have a 7000 person force to police all of Darfur, which is about the size of Texas or France. Interviewees said that gunmen attacks are frequent and they are trying hard to stop them. They report that 200,000 have been killed and 2.5 million displaced even though the capital says only 9,000 have been killed. But a Catholic school posted a billboard on April 1 on a busy street of Springfield, Illinois. Posted on it says “ Stop genocide in Darfur 400,000 dead –and counting.” This is a more accurate number as reported by the United Nations. “A lot of people still don’t know about the atrocities happening in Darfur,” said Matthew Coryell, who teaches world history other classes in the history department at SHG the school sponsoring the billboard. “In order to get people to put their apathy aside, for lack of a better word, it needs to be ‘advertised,’” said Coryell, who instigated the Darfur awareness movement at the school. All of these articles have been published by reliable sources and have been out there. This conflict should have never lasted this long. We must present this media to the powers that be or establish a wider base for media prowess.
PART III
There have been many genocides throughout the years. Some cause wars, some wipe out an entire culture of people and some are so horrible, so grotesque, so staining that they go down in history forever as an atrocity and a degradation of human nature. By definition a genocide is a systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. But a genocide is much more than that. It is a deep-seated hatred that people have for another group that is so strong that they feel that they must exterminate their entire culture. Genocides are meant to erase from the Earth a certain group so that no one else will have to deal with that group ever again. Then they use this premise to commit crimes against these people that go unheard because to the ones committing the genocide these people are less than humans. So things that wouldn’t been done to animals without a second thought are forced upon human beings. Being put into giant ovens and being incinerated and then having your family and friends clean up your ashes, thrown into giant pits with live grenades for the amusement of the soldiers who have already taken everything from you including your clothes, hair and all sense of dignity, being chased down in your street to be hacked apart with machetes by a 12 year old. Being lined up single file to save rifle bullets and then being shot at point blank range. Those who survived that were shot executioner style. All these things have happened in genocides around the world. Genocide is not the fault of the oppressor or the ones killing. The weight of the people dead is one everyone’s shoulders that could have helped and did not. Those people might as pulled the trigger because not acting has killed all those people.
Gianni Risper is a 10th grade student. He attends Eastern High School in Lansing, MI.
Sources:
http://www.goal.ie/newsroom/darfurTimes.shtml,
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2004/pr51/en/
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?ModuleId=10007156&Type=normal+article , http://www.ushmm.org/conscience/alert/darfur/steidle/?gclid=COT95bKiqYsCFQgiSAod5wWcag , http://organizations.missouristate.edu/stand/aboutdarfur.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3613953.stm,
http://www.slate.com/id/2104210/
http://english.people.com.cn/200704/10/eng20070410_365087.html
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/04/10/ap3598307.html
http://www.catholic.org/diocese/diocese_story.php?id=23696