Note: This entry is outdated. Please see the update.
updated March 16
The plan: We urge you to please consider joining us for another protest at the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC, on Weds., March 29, 2006. 11:30 AM-1:30 PM.
We will carry enlarged photographs of the victims in Darfur and appeal for an end to genocide. Some of us will risk arrest in nonviolent civil disobedience. Speakers to include two peace activists who visited Darfur and another activist whose grandparents were interned in Nazi concentration camps. Leaflets will also be distributed. All are welcome, but anyone interested in nonviolent civil disobedience (i.e. entering peacefully onto the embassy property) must contact Scott Schaeffer-Duffy at 508 7533-3588 or theresecw@gmail.com.
Together we can draw attention back to Darfur and help save lives.
The Embassy of Sudan is at 2210 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008. (Google map.) This is three blocks north of the Dupont Circle Metro station.
Contact Scott Schaeffer-Duffy for more information: theresecw@gmail.com; 508.753.3588; Saints Francis & Therese Catholic Worker, 52 Mason Street, Worcester, MA 01610.
The situation: At this date, hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Africans are still living in overcrowed, impoverished, and vulnerable camps with little prospect of returning home safely. The Sudanese government continues to bear the bulk of the responsibility for this situation. People are still dying. And yet the world has turned away. The United States is quietly moving closer to the Sudanese government and farther from its 2004 charge that genocide is taking place in Darfur. Dr. Eric Reeves, a leading expert on Darfur, says, “the world is, yet again, knowingly acquiescing in genocide.” He calls the failure to respond a “moral disgrace.”
- “A Tolerable Genocide” (Nicholas Kristof, 27 Nov 2005, New York Times)
- “Now or Never: Why Time is Running out in Darfur” (Eric Reeves, 28 Nov 2005, The New Republic)
- “Genocide in Slow Motion” (Nicholas Kristof, 9 February 2006, New York Review of Books)
Past activities: In the fall of 2004, after reading of genocide in the west Sudanese region of Darfur, the Saints Francis & Therese Catholic Worker organized a Catholic Worker Peace Team to go to Darfur. That team—Brenna Cussen, Chris Doucot, Grace Ritter, and I—delivered $19,000 worth of aid directly to Sudanese people in vast camps for the internally displaced. Our experience corroborated the charges of human rights organizations that the Sudanese government is complicit in a campaign of genocide against Africans in Darfur.
On the advice of Sudanese activists in Khartoum, we organized a protest at the Sudanese embassy in Washington, DC in February 2005. Seven women and men were arrested at that protest after we refused to leave the embassy property while holding signs denouncing genocide in Darfur.
At our trial in May, we brought expert testimony concerning the ongoing genocide and the effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience as a means to end it. We pointed to the similar protests at the South African embassy during the Apartheid years.
We were nonetheless convicted and placed on probation. We are appealing that decision.
We produced an award-winning short film about the trial and genocide in Darfur, and in August we held a five-day fast and vigil against genocide outside the Sudanese embassy.
I’m a student at Thomas Worthington High School In Worthington Ohio A group of us Would like to be apart of your upcomeing Rally in Washington D.C. but A few Parents are concrend about the saftey of it If you could please E-Mail one of the teachers supporting our group to go at one of the above adresses thank you.