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

Darfur must be a priority for the next president! Watch the video question below, submitted by anti-genocide activist Danielle, asking each of the candidates to personally divest from companies funding the Darfur genocide.

Then share the video with your friends. The more people who watch the video before 7PM (Eastern) tonight, the more likely the question will be asked in the debate!

Thank you for your continuing support!

--Colin, Ivan and the Genocide Intervention Network team

By Ronan Farrow, June 21, 2007. Published in the Wall Street Journal

In a bare hospital room to the east of Darfur, Suleiman Jamous is living out a nightmare. He is permitted no contact with the outside world. An armed guard is posted outside his door. Were he to attempt to leave, the Sudanese government's intelligence service — notorious for its use of torture and indefinite imprisonment — would arrest him. Next week, he will have been incarcerated for a full year.

His crimes: extending the reach of life-saving humanitarian measures to tens of thousands of displaced people, attempting to unify volatile rebel groups, and courageously fighting against human-rights abuses. Suleiman Jamous has been described as the Nelson Mandela of Sudan, and he is one of the few heroes to emerge from the brutal conflict that has ravaged Darfur for the past four years.

Mr. Jamous, humanitarian coordinator for Darfur's largest rebel group, has been instrumental in providing aid workers with safe access to areas behind rebel lines. He is widely viewed as a key leader of the rebel opposition to Khartoum's ethnic cleansing campaign in Darfur. An elderly statesman who has never picked up a gun, Mr. Jamous commands universal respect among the otherwise fractious rebel leaders who control most of rural Darfur.

Because of this, the government of Sudan has aggressively sought to suppress Mr. Jamous. He has been arrested and imprisoned repeatedly, culminating in his current detainment. Although he is now being held at a United Nations hospital, the U.N.'s hands are tied. The last time they attempted to move him, the Khartoum regime retaliated by suspending U.N. humanitarian operations in Sudan.

Mr. Jamous's absence has been felt acutely. In the 11 months since he was neutralized, humanitarian access has dwindled to its lowest level ever. More than one million Darfuris are now out of reach of aid workers. "There is no doubt that Suleiman Jamous was very important to humanitarian agencies," said the head of a prominent relief organization, who asked that he not be named. He described Mr. Jamous as a champion of "humanitarian principles and human rights," crediting him with securing desperately needed access for aid workers and negotiating the release of numerous child soldiers. "There is no doubt that not having him in Darfur has made access negotiations less certain and more complicated."

Faltering efforts to create unity and peace between rebel movements have also been undermined. Many commanders believe that such efforts will fail without Mr. Jamous's leadership. If Darfur's divided rebels fall into infighting, embattled humanitarians and defenseless civilians will be caught in the crossfire.

Despite his crucial humanitarian and peacemaking role — and despite the fact that the government of Sudan agreed to release all prisoners of war under 2005's Darfur Peace Agreement — Mr. Jamous remains detained. The U.N., the U.S. and the African Union appear to have abandoned Suleiman Jamous. Even the humanitarian groups whose work he facilitated have fallen silent, in well-founded fear of retaliation from the government of Sudan should they advocate for his release.

And time may be running out. For several months, Mr. Jamous has been suffering from severe abdominal pains. Doctors who examined him in December 2006 reported that he needs a stomach biopsy that cannot be performed where he is being held. Khartoum is well aware of both the urgency of his condition and the fact that freeing him could substantially improve the delivery of relief to Darfuri civilians. Still, his release is being denied.

If they are committed to achieving peace in Darfur, the powerful nations of the world and the U.N. itself must bring pressure to bear on Khartoum regarding Suleiman Jamous. The U.S. should charge its Special Envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, with negotiating for Mr. Jamous's release. And people the world over should raise their voices in opposition to his unjust detention.

Speaking on behalf of his fellow South African political prisoners, Nelson Mandela once said: "Despite the thickness of the prison walls, all of us ... could hear your voices demanding our release very clearly. We drew inspiration from this. We thank you that you refused to forget us." Today, Suleiman Jamous is desperately in need of voices of support. Let us not allow him to be forgotten.

Mr. Farrow, currently a student at Yale Law School, traveled to Darfur as a UNICEF spokesperson in 2004 and 2006.

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!

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.