Darfur

Please read this piece by Jan Baumgartner about Darfur.

Over the last three years, it is estimated that between 200,000 to 400,000 people have been killed in Darfur with as many as two to three million displaced. Their homes are gone, burnt to the ground. Families have been wiped out. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide is a difficult idea to get one's head around. As is rape, starving children and burning villages. So instead of focusing on the tragedy in Darfur in its entirety, let's take a moment to look at the immediate: hunger and malnutrition, the basic sustenance needed for survival for the millions of displaced men, women and children living in makeshift refugee camps.

In early May, the United Nations World Food Program announced that due to lack of funding, they would be forced to drastically cut its food rations in Darfur beginning that month. As quoted by James Morris, Executive Director of the WFP, "This is one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. Haven't the people of Darfur suffered enough?"

The World Food Program reported that by the end of February, only four percent of donations needed for Sudan in 2006 had been raised. By the forced scaling back of daily food rations, this drastic cut will exacerbate the already dire concern of malnutrition and disease.

Where do you even start?

Is the UN broken as the Bush administration insists? Yes, if they cannot sustain a country like Darfur through their Food Program. What is Mr. Bolton doing about that?

We went to Iraq to "free" the people. To spread "freedom". To protect them from an evil dictator who killed 100,000 of his citizens. Yes, I know the initial rational was that Saddam was an immanent threat to the world with his WMD but, darn it all, he didn't have any so our friends in Bushland changed the reason for invading.

How can we continue to ignore Darfur when there are four times as many dead? Saddam had rape rooms; Darfur has rape camps. Why aren't we invading to spread Democracy and save the people of Darfur? Don't they deserve freedom, too?

Please donate do Savedarfur or Oxfam Call your representative and senators, call the White House, call the UN.

Thanks.