Students Rally Against Sudan Violence
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As college students across the country brace for finals week, a group of Yeshiva University undergraduates sought another way to put their lessons to use this weekend.
Having banded together to help raise awareness about the mass genocide in Darfur, eight members of a new student-run organization, Not Now Not Ever, held their first rally to speak out against the violence in Sudan and urge the White House to take action.
The rally drew more than 300 participants to Central Park, many from other colleges and universities in the region.
“This is not just our rally, it is everybody’s rally,” a spokeswoman for Not Now Not Ever, Cindy Bernstein, said.
Speakers at the event included the general secretary of the Darfur Rehab Project, Yahya Osman, and a former Manhattan borough president, Ruth Messinger, who described the conditions in Darfur as “Rwanda in slow motion.”
“There are specific steps to be taken to stop these atrocities,” Ms. Messinger said. “But what is most needed is our indignation, our insistence that this ethnic violence will stop.”
A recent study by the Coalition of International Justice estimated that close to 400,000 people have died in Darfur since 2003, with 15,000 deaths occurring each month.
The student organizers of yesterday’s rally first became interested in the Sudanese conflict last fall during a university-sponsored lecture series commemorating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. Learning about the Holocaust and other atrocities, such as the slaughtering of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, compelled several students to take action, Ms. Bernstein said. “This affects us as Jews because we had our own Holocaust,” she said. “And part of remembering the Holocaust is not ignoring the violence … that has taken place in many parts of the world since then.”
For the rally, the organization’s founding members worked with student organizations from Columbia and NYU, as well as student-led human rights groups from more than 20 schools in the Northeast.
In the coming year, they hope to expand their organization beyond the academic world.
