Global Darfur Day
As those closest to this issue work hard to try to stop the horrors happening in Darfur there are also those who are trying to help "clean up" the physical and emotional scars left there. Let us continue to pray for the healing of Darfur.
American-Jewish group treats trauma in Chad refugee camp : Trying to ensure 'Never again'
By Assaf Uni
Goz Amir/Goz Beida, CHAD - When Mohammad Yihya Ahmad, 15, draws the moment the Janjaweed raided his village he cannot help giving the attack a different, better ending. He shows two figures - a boy holding a large dog, and an elderly handicapped man - against the backdrop of the Janjaweed as black shadows, shooting in all directions.
"Just when the Janjaweed arrive," the boy says, "the boy lets his dog go and manages to find an old man and save him."
"Did you have a dog?" we ask him.
"Yes," he says.
"Was your father paralyzed?"
"Yes."
"Did someone manage to save him?"
"No, the Janjaweed killed him."
The dozens of children sitting and drawing last Friday in a straw hut in the Goz Amir refugee camp are taking part in activities sponsored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), an American-Jewish organization helping to treat the psychological and social problems of the refugees in Darfur.
HIAS, a non-governmental agency founded 125 years ago to help refugees and immigrants from Europe, is prominent in eastern Chad. Not coincidentally, it has chosen to focus on the common element of victims of genocide and violence everywhere - survivors' trauma.
(Holocaust survivors, 9/11 survivors and the victims in Darfur appear to all suffer from Survivor's Trauma)
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Women search for wood,
men search for victims
men search for victims
(and once again the U.N. is all talk and no real decisive action)
(excerpts)
For Zakiya, gathering firewood means a five-hour trek and the risk of discovery by Janjaweed militia. In this special report to mark Global Darfur Day, Steve Bloomfield reports from the province of Sudan where 200,000 have died in four years of war, and millions have lost their homes
At 6am today, as on every other morning in Darfur, Zakiya Gibril Adam and 200 other women started walking. They left as the sun crept above the tattered plastic sheets and thatched roofs of their refugee camp, which stretches as far as the eye can see.
When events get started in Britain and 33 other countries for the Global Day of Darfur, marking the fourth anniversary of the start of a conflict which has killed more than 200,000 people and driven millions more from their homes, 25-year-old Zakiya will still be walking. All the firewood around the Kalma refugee camp, 15km east of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, has been gathered long ago. Now the women have to walk for five hours to find more.
What he and many others in Kalma hope for is the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, but that is unlikely to happen soon. A UN resolution passed last August asked Sudan to "invite" a force to enter Darfur. Sudan refused, with President Omar al-Bashir claiming a UN force was nothing more than an attempt by the West to re-colonise Sudan.
So far, though, the outside world is just talking - not acting. Numerous UN resolutions urging action remain unenforced. A no-fly zone was even agreed in 2005, but was never implemented.
John Prendergast, a senior Darfur analyst for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention think-tank, argues that this is a time for the international community to walk softly, and carry a big stick, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it. Instead, he says, the Bush administration is "walking loudly and carrying a toothpick".
Crisis zone: how the conflict unfolded
Western Sudan has struggled with racial tensions since the 1980s, when government-funded Arab supremacist groups began attacking non-Arab Africans. In 2003, rebel groups retaliated, provoking a military campaign with villages bombed from the air and attacked on the ground.
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