Sudan situation needs our attention

When I was a junior in high school, 18 of the famous Sudanese "lost boys" visited my school. For us, it was an educational experience. I learned first of all that there was a place in Africa called Sudan, and secondly that it was, as The New York Times later informed me, Africa's largest country. Embarrassingly, I had never heard of it.

With ages ranging from 14 to 20, the boys were there not to educate us, but to be educated. They wanted to go to a good high school, and they were hoping to be accepted into my academic magnet school in the coming fall. As a reporter for my school paper, I followed a group of five of the prospective students as one of the seniors gave them a tour. They were excited to see the computers and stared into empty screens, asking question after question. One boy turned to me and said solemnly and insistently, "Education is the key to life."

Wow.

Five students visited a class for seniors called "World Conflicts." They explained the story of Sudan, how the Muslim government based in the northern sector of the country tried to force Islam on southern residents who followed either Christianity or one of various Animist religions. Fighting that began in 1983 resulted in 2 million dead and 4.4 million displaced.

In 1987, nearly 20,000 of those "lost boys" began fleeing the Sudanese villages from which their sisters had been abducted, and where their parents were killed. They began a 1,000-mile hike. They faced lions, drowning, militia gunfire, hunger and thirst on their way to Ethiopia. But soon afterward, fighting broke out in Ethiopia, so the boys moved on. Only 12,000 reached refugee camps in Kenya in 1992.

In the refugee camps, the boys were given meager amounts of food. A greater hope arrived in the year 2000, when the U.S. State Department, together with the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, began working to find homes for the boys. In 2001, more than 3,600 of the boys were placed in American homes.

But many of the boys soon found that, even in America, their past cannot be made whole. As one boy, Angelo Matuyt, told the class, "Even in this land of wealth, there is the sense that I am missing something. My people are dead."

These voices and images all return to me now, because even as the conflict that began in 1983 looked to be waning, a new conflict broke out in the country's Darfur region. This time, 50,000 are dead so far, with 1.4 million displaced. It seems to be a conflict between the government and rebel groups representing black African farmers. However, there are many who say that the black farmers are not combatants in a dispute, but rather they are being exterminated. Secretary of State Colin Powell has termed what has recently been happening in Sudan a "genocide," a word that many believe carries not only moral but legal obligations to act.

In 1994, the Clinton administration avoided terming the killings in Rwanda a "genocide," even though they left 800,000 Tutsis dead in only three months. This was a careful dodge of the obligations that the term had come to bear in the aftermath of the Holocaust, when the U.S. joined the U.N. Convention on Genocide.

Today, America has chosen to become an activist nation in Iraq, now ostensibly no longer because of the potential weapons of mass destruction but instead because Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, a tyrant who practiced ethnic cleansing. If this is to be a defensible choice, the present administration needs either to further its efforts on behalf of Sudan, or explain why doing so would be impossible, and why we are not morally bound to try anyway. In terming what has happened a "genocide," our government is pursuing the first alternative. But for those living in Darfur, one would assume that nothing has changed.

One reason, allegedly, for recent difficulties in pursuing international intervention in Sudan is the country's supply of oil. The U.S. draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council threatens sanctions on Sudan's oil industry if the Sudanese government does not improve its efforts. China and Pakistan, both of which import oil from Sudan, are among the more vocally opposed to the resolution.

Meanwhile, American college campuses, including Penn, must account for their spotty activism. There are many groups on our campus seeking to promote their views on the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but will there be a group that makes tortured Sudan its mission? There is still time to become active. If, however, we don't say anything, we will have to wonder: why were we silent? Did we fail to see communities of poor black people with no control of their country's oil as worthy of our attention?

Danielle Nagelberg is a junior International Relations major from Philadelphia. Schuylkill Punch appears on Tuesdays.

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