The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News September 29, 2006

Students STAND up for Darfur

Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, Oberlin’s chapter of the national student movement advocating for peace in Sudan, initiated a campus-wide call-in campaign to President Bush this week. The aim is to get United Nations peacekeeping troops on the ground in Sudan’s Darfur region, where somewhere between 50,000 and 400,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes to refugee camps. 

STAND’s campaign began in response to the assumed withdrawal of 7,200 African Union troops on Sept. 30, the date on which the Union’s original mandate in Sudan was scheduled to end. However, on Sept. 20, the African Union’s 15-member Peace and Security Council declared that it would extend the stay of its peacekeeping force in Darfur for three months, until Dec. 31.

Although the immediate urgency of having U.N. troops in Darfur has decreased because of the African Union’s extended mandate, STAND will continue its call-in campaign.

“Although it is less urgent, there is still quite a lot of urgency,” explained STAND co-chair and College junior Penina Eilberg-Schwartz. “It is absolutely out of the question [to have] no force[s] on the ground.” 

Even with African Union troops on the ground in Darfur, Eilberg-Schwartz argued, it is still not a sufficient response to the severity of the situation in Darfur. She stated that  the African Union is largely ineffective in this situation because it has no mandate to protect.

“We still need something else,” said Eilberg-Schwartz.

STAND requests that students make a call at least once a week to President Bush, their congressional representative or John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.  Although Eilberg-Schwartz anticipated skepticism from the student body as to the efficiency of this campaign, she requested that students “suspend their cynicism for the sixty seconds it takes to make the phone call.”

Last week in a letter to the Review, College junior and STAND member Sarah Rosenthal wrote that former Senator Paul Simon, speaking of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, postulated that “if every Senator had received phone calls from 100 constituents, the United States government would have intervened.” The Sudanese government’s policies of abuse in the Darfur region are often compared to the Rwandan genocide.

Eilberg-Schwartz stressed the potentially substantive effect of the call-in campaign, explaining that President Bush had not even mentioned Darfur until the international community started making noise about its situation.

Eilberg-Schwartz hopes for wider student involvement in planning future STAND campaigns. She said, “We want to be open about the process.”

And they do have plans.

For example, recently STAND was heavily involved in bringing divestment from Sudan to the Board of Trustee’s attention. Eilberg-Schwartz wants the group to continue in that vein and expand their efforts through working for divestment from Sudan at the state level. 

Other STAND campaign plans include its second “Jam for Sudan,” a large musical event that also features a formal dinner fundraiser as well as outreach and education in the local community.

The Oberlin STAND chapter will also be sending student representatives to STAND’s Midwest regional workshop on advocacy and fundraising.


 
 
   

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