Global Day of Action on Darfur
Tens of thousands of demonstrators in cities around the world on Sunday demanded action to stop the killing in Darfur, Sudan.
We are all here because everybody is fed up in watching no action on Darfur, while we have been watching rolling genocide,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told CNN from New York’s Central Park. Organizers there said they were expecting tens of thousands of people.
In addition to the United States, the “Global Day for Action on Darfur” also took place in Canada and across Europe, Africa and Asia. Protesters gathered in London outside Prime Minister Tony Blair’s residence, and in Rwanda and Cambodia, led by survivors of genocides there.
The message: The United Nations should send peacekeepers into western Sudan, with or without its capital, Khartoum’s, approval.
This month, the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution for such a force to replace the African Union troops already there but said the force wouldn’t be deployed until Sudan could be persuaded to accept it.
“The international community has really not done enough,” Albright said. “So today is a day where there are people all over the world putting their voices together to say that Sudan has a last chance to be on the right side of this. Or forever be on the wrong side,” Albright said.
She urged international action against the oil-rich nation, including sanctions that would limit travel abroad by Sudanese leaders and a no-fly zone over the Darfur region. “Other countries have to stop doing business with Sudan,” she said. “Oil is not more important than human lives. I don’t care what country you’re from.”
Albright said the crisis in Sudan differs from that which occurred in 1994 in Rwanda, where nearly a million people were killed in 100 days when Bill Clinton was president.
“President Clinton and I have so many times said how horrible it was that we weren’t able to do something about Rwanda, but the lesson is different. Rwanda was volcanic genocide … this is rolling genocide.”
Asked if the United States should send troops, Albright said, “We don’t have any U.S. troops. They’re in Iraq, and they’re in Afghanistan. We’re stretched so thin we can’t take care of our other responsibilities.”
CNN
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