‘If China said stop, the killing would stop’

Local AJC hears Darfur activist

By Deborah Moon

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“There is no reason today we should be having a luncheon on a genocide that is almost five years old; there must be something we are not doing right as individuals, a nation, a world,” said grassroots activist Gabriel Stauring.

“How can we do more, better, differently so we can stop this?” said Stauring, the founder of the national Darfur activism group Stop Genocide Now. He spoke about the ongoing genocide in Darfur on Nov. 8 at the opening lecture in this year’s American Jewish Committee Luncheon Lecture Series.

The event was held in the law offices of Perkins Coie, LLP., and hosted by Portland Area AJC board member Steve Bilow.
   
Formerly an in-home therapist for abused children, Stauring said that all of the publicity surrounding the 10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda made him feel guilty that he had done nothing. When he began hearing reports about mass killings in Darfur that same year, he said he decided he had to do something.

   
“I had no idea I’d be this involved,” said the activist who now devotes himself full-time to a grassroots campaign to raise awareness of the genocide that has killed nearly half a million people and displaced another two million.

Congress declared the situation in Darfur a genocide in July 2004 and in September of 2004, then Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed that declaration on behalf of the Bush administration. Now about 90 percent of all villages in Darfur have been destroyed, said Stauring.
   
“The first thing I did was I sent an email to six friends saying, ‘Did you know this is going on?’” he said.
   
He said in 2005, the general population knew very little about the Sudan government-sanctioned atrocities in Darfur, the poorly developed western region of Sudan. While the world rallied to force a peace treaty between the Muslim Arab government in northern Sudan and the black Christians in the south, he said less pressure has been put on that same government to halt the genocide of the black Muslims in Darfur.
   
Stauring said China, which purchases 70 percent of Sudan’s oil and thus has enormous influence on that nation, is especially susceptible to international pressure now as host of the 2008 Olympics.
   
“If China said stop, the killing would stop,” said Stauring.
   
Noting that most people reacted to the huge numbers of dead reported in the media with the thought—oh too bad, that’s Africa, oh well—he said he decided it was important to put a face on the tragedy.
   
So that year he and other volunteers traveled to refugee camps in neighboring Chad to make Web casts “so people can see the story, see the people,” Stauring said. They returned in 2006 and 2007 and plan to return again in January 2008.
   
“We’d get out of the car and walk through the camp and sit with people and let them talk,” he said. “They all have horrible stories. They’ve all seen the same destruction, death and violence.”
   
Bombing from Sudanese planes is typically followed by Janjaweed Arab militia attacks on the villages to kill as many men and animals as possible. He said rape is used as a “systematic tool of genocide. The effect will stay over generations (because) the raped women are unaccepted and the children born from rape are not accepted.”
   
Stauring showed clips from the Web casts during the AJC lunch. A 16-year-old boy described his happy life in Darfur before the assaults, the terror of his village’s destruction, fleeing three days without food or water to Chad, and the sad life in refugee camps. Stauring said he stayed in contact with the boy, who a year later risked his life to return to a large town in Darfur because he wanted to continue his education, which is not available in the refugee camps beyond primary grades.
   
A 10-year-old boy showed the visitors detailed drawings he created of the destruction of his village and the death of many in his family two years earlier.
   
Stauring was in Portland for a series of Darfur awareness programs, including Camp Darfur, a project he created. The project includes five tents with pictures from five genocides: Armenia, the Holocuast, Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur. The first four tents show difficult images of horror and death, said Stauring.
   
“In the Darfur tent, we show beautiful people who are still alive, who can still be saved,” he said.
   
On Nov. 7, more than 1,200 students from area schools visited Camp Darfur at Lincoln High School. Nov. 8 Stauring used the material to lead three workshops for students and adults.
   
To host a future showing of Camp Darfur in Oregon, contact Katie-Jay Scott, Stauring’s partner at SGN, at katiejay.scott@gmail.com.
   
One presentation of Camp Darfur so moved songwriter Greg Lawson that he wrote the song “For the Camps,” which has become part of Stauring’s presentations. The song includes the following words:   
   
“Once you’ve heard the story, you’ve got to move to end it now.”
   
For information on ways to help end the genocide, visit www.stopgenocidenow.org or www.ajc.org/ProtectDarfurNow, which has a form to send a letter to world leaders urging them to demand Sudanese compliance with international law.