Genocide Intervention Network www.GenocideIntervention.net

Thanks in part to your phone call, on Tuesday the House of Representatives passed the Darfur Accountability and Divestment Act (DADA) 418 to 1! Later that day, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution authorizing the deployment of an UN–African Union hybrid force of up to 26,000 peacekeepers to Darfur.

Call 1-800-GENOCIDE now and ask your senator to support DADA!

To ensure the government of Sudan accepts these peacekeepers, we must increase the pressure on Sudan's leaders. Now that the House has passed legislation that would put real economic pressure on the government of Sudan, the Senate must act!

Now the Senate has an unprecedented opportunity to pass the most significant piece of legislation to date on Darfur.

Call 1-800-GENOCIDE now and ask your senator to support DADA!

--Sam, Allyson, and the Genocide Intervention Network team

Update: Browse the gallery of submitted photos!

Thanks to the hard work of Darfur advocates around the world, the Global Days for Darfur were a huge success! Tens of thousands of concerned citizens participated in hundreds of activities to rally around the message that time is running out for the people of Darfur and to demand immediate international action to end the violence.

More than 400 events were held in the United States, encompassing 47 states and over 300 cities. These coincided with over 50 international events. Complete media coverage of events can be found on the Save Darfur website.

We know many of you have been taking pictures at these events, and we want to make sure that everyone gets to see them! We've set up an online photo gallery of all of the photos we've received so far, and we want your images to be a part of it.

And submitting the images couldn't be simpler: Just upload your pictures to Flickr.com and add the tags antigenocide and days4darfur. Any images tagged with those words will automatically be displayed in our gallery.

The Details

Flickr.com is a free photo sharing site. We post all of our images there to give others an easy way to access them. If you're not a member of Flickr, you can sign up for free and upload several dozen photos per month.

When you upload your photos, Flickr will give you the option to add tags for all of the images you're uploading at once. Just enter "antigenocide days4darfur" (without the quotes) into that field and the photos will automatically show up in our photo gallery.

Please make sure to include the location of the event in the title or in the description of your photos.

Once you upload your photos, they may take up to an hour to show up in the gallery — but don't worry, they'll be there!

Questions?

If you need any help, please e-mail membership@genocideintervention.net and we'll answer any questions you may have!

—Ivan, Colin and the GI-Net team

P.S. Did you take any videos at a Darfur event? If so, we'd like to see it! Upload your video to YouTube or Google Video and send us the link, and we may include it on our website or in a future newsletter!

April is a month where we bear testimony to some of the most gruesome atrocities of the twentieth century. Ironically, the century that brought us the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also witnessed the Holocaust and genocides in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda.

Our unique goal at the Genocide Intervention Network is to establish the first permanent anti-genocide constituency. Through our membership program we help to ensure that there is always an educated and determined group of activists who can quickly mobilize to pressure our governments to intervene whenever the threat of genocide arises.

As we remember past genocides and work to end the ongoing genocide in Darfur, you can help the anti-genocide movement grow by asking your friends and family members to become members of GI-Net.

Armenia

On the night of April 24, 1915, the Turkish government rounded up the leading Armenian religious, political and intellectual leaders in the capitol of Istanbul and murdered them. These killings were replicated across the country and the entire Armenian community was forced to relocate to the deserts of Syria. In all, at least 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered.

Join the Armenian National Committee of America in their "Click for Justice" campaign.

The Holocaust

April 11, 1933: The Nazis issue a decree defining a non-Aryan as "anyone descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. One parent or grandparent classifies the descendant as non-Aryan ... especially if one parent or grandparent was of the Jewish faith." This was one in a series of laws that prepared the way for Hitler's "Final Solution" — his attempt to destroy the Jewish people. This year Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, fell on April 16.

Cambodia

On April 17, 1975, after a five-year civil war in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge entered the capitol, Phnom Penh. Three and a half years later some 2,000,000 people had been killed or had died of starvation, as massacres emptied out entire cities into the countryside and introduced the world to the term "killing fields."

Rwanda

On the evening of April 6, 1994, Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana's airplane was shot down. The next morning Hutu hardliners killed moderate leaders, beginning a three-month bloodbath that left 800,000 corpses scattered across the "land of a thousand hills" in rivers, homes and churches.

Darfur

How will history document the genocide in Darfur? What will we tell our children when they ask us what we did to help stop it? When and how will it be commemorated?

The answers to these questions lie in how we choose to respond to the genocide today. The only way we can honor the victims of past genocides is through bearing witness to their suffering. However, in Darfur we have the opportunity to actually prevent more innocents from becoming victims of genocide.

We have the opportunity now to limit the number of dead we remember in the future.

Become a member of the anti-genocide constituency. Help stop the genocide in Darfur. Help the world to remember the genocides of the past. Help prevent genocide in the future.

Global Days for Darfur

To call attention to the escalating violence and the continued failure of the international community to adequately respond to the Darfur genocide, activists across the world have come together to plan “Global Days for Darfur.” This week of rallies, marches and vigils will run from April 23–30 and will highlight that “time is running out” for the people of Darfur.

Rally participants will come together to call on world leaders to adopt — and enforce — tough sanctions on Sudan until it allows the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to Darfur. Already, Darfur activists have planned 195 events across the country!

Please support your fellow activists in speaking out for the people of Darfur by joining an event in your area.

If there are currently no activities planned in your community, we hope you will consider starting your own event during this important week.

You can be part of a “human chain” in Duluth, attend a concert and rally in San Francisco, go to a panel discussion at Auburn University in Alabama, or participate in a “die-in” rally and march in Boston. In addition to these activities in the United States, similar events will be held around the world.

Learn more, register an event you are holding as part of the campaign or search for activities that are taking place near to you.

STAND's National Lobby Days: It's High Time for Higher Grades!

Now more than ever, it's important that our members of Congress know that we expect them to stop this genocide.

Join STAND students around the country from April 16–27 in telling your members of Congress to “make the grade.”

Lobby one of your elected officials in a face-to-face meeting at his/her in-district office or use the anti-genocide hotline — 1-800-GENOCIDE — to tell your elected officials that their voters want to see them make the grade on stopping genocide.

Register online and STAND will send you all the resources you need to make your appointment, get connected with other community groups, prepare for your meeting, and follow up afterwards to hold your member of Congress accountable.

Activist Successes

Iowa Divests

On April 5, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver signed a targeted divestment bill (PDF) requiring the state to divest from companies that support the government of Sudan. The bill passed the state House with overwhelming support and passed the state Senate with unanimous consent late last month.

"Genocide should never be tolerated and the state of Iowa should not directly or indirectly be supporting the deadly campaign in Darfur," said state Rep. Dawn Pettengill of Mt. Auburn, who sponsored and managed the bill in the Iowa House.

Iowa is the first state to pass divestment legislation in 2007, and the eighth state to divest overall. Eighteen other states are currently considering a targeted Sudan divestment model.

Genocide Accountability Act

On March 29, the US Senate unanimously passed the Genocide Accountability Act. If subsequently passed by the House, this legislation will close a legal loophole that currently prevents the US Justice Department from prosecuting people in the United States who have committed genocide in other countries.

Other Genocide-Related News

April 24 marks the 92nd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. GI-Net recently joined the Armenian National Committee of America to advocate for the passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (PDF), which calls on the President to officially acknowledge that the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War One was, indeed, genocide.

Denial is often termed “the last stage of genocide.” If we do not have the moral courage to recognize genocides of the past, we cannot expect to break their brutal cycle in the future.

Participate in the campaign to ensure the passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution.

By Ronan Farrow and Mia Farrow, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2007

Read more about Ronan Farrow, Genocide Intervention Network Representative.

"One World, One Dream" is China's slogan for its 2008 Olympics. But there is one nightmare that China shouldn't be allowed to sweep under the rug. That nightmare is Darfur, where more than 400,000 people have been killed and more than two-and-a-half million driven from flaming villages by the Chinese-backed government of Sudan.

That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg — who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic ceremonies — to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?

China is pouring billions of dollars into Sudan. Beijing purchases an overwhelming majority of Sudan's annual oil exports and state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. — an official partner of the upcoming Olympic Games -- owns the largest shares in each of Sudan's two major oil consortia. The Sudanese government uses as much as 80% of proceeds from those sales to fund its brutal Janjaweed proxy militia and purchase their instruments of destruction: bombers, assault helicopters, armored vehicles and small arms, most of them of Chinese manufacture. Airstrips constructed and operated by the Chinese have been used to launch bombing campaigns on villages. And China has used its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to repeatedly obstruct efforts by the U.S. and the U.K. to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter.

As one of the few players whose support is indispensable to Sudan, China has the power to, at the very least, insist that Khartoum accept a robust international peacekeeping force to protect defenseless civilians in Darfur. Beijing is uniquely positioned to put a stop to the slaughter, yet they have so far been unabashed in their refusal to do so.

But there is now one thing that China may hold more dear than their unfettered access to Sudanese oil: their successful staging of the 2008 Summer Olympics. That desire may provide a lone point of leverage with a country that has otherwise been impervious to all criticism.

Whether that opportunity goes unexploited lies in the hands of the high-profile supporters of these Olympic Games. Corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric and McDonalds, and key collaborators like Mr. Spielberg, should be put on notice. For there is another slogan afoot, one that is fast becoming viral amongst advocacy groups; rather than "One World, One Dream," people are beginning to speak of the coming "Genocide Olympics."

Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless, of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur.

Imagine if such calls were to succeed in pushing the Chinese government to use its leverage over Sudan to protect civilians in Darfur. The 2008 Beijing Olympics really could become an occasion for pride and celebration, a truly international honoring of the authentic spirit of "one world" and "one dream."

Mr. Farrow, a student at Yale Law School, traveled to Darfur as a UNICEF spokesperson in 2004 and 2006. Ms. Farrow, an actor, has traveled twice to Darfur and twice to neighboring Chad. She has recently returned from Darfur's border with the Central African Republic.