On Sunday, tens of thousands of people rallied across the globe to protest the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
In the United States, an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, gathered in Central Park to take part in "Voices to Stop Genocide," a rally organized by the Save Darfur Coalition.
Tufts sophomores Elizabeth Gross, Nicole Zeller and Sarah Bettigole were among the protesters. As the respective fundraising coordinator, treasurer, and co-chair of Pangea, the three students chartered a bus to take them and several other Pangea members to the rally in New York.
"Something has to be done about the situation," Gross said, explaining their commitment to the cause.
Violence in Darfur began over three years ago when the Sudanese government cracked down on rebels, most of whom belong to two principal groups: the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement.
In addition to employing its own armed forces to combat these groups, the government has backed an Arab militia, the Janjaweed. Both the armed forces and the militia are accused of targeting civilian populations composed of the ethnic groups that support the rebel movements, primarily the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa.
An estimated 200,000 to 400,000 have died as a result of the conflict, with over two million people displaced from their home. The Bush Administration has officially labeled the situation genocide.
Zeller said that rallies such as Sunday's can help influence politicians to pressure the Sudanese government. "We have to act, to continually call our congressmen,"she said. Protesters at the rally believed the same: "Everybody sent text messages to President Bush,"Zeller said.
This is not the first rally that the three have attended. "We went to the rally in Washington, D.C. last year," Gross said, explaining how she, Zeller and Bettigole began the rallying process.
That rally, the three agreed, had a very different tone than Sunday's. "There was a much larger sense of global community" in New York, Bettigole said. "They played a slideshow of rallies occurring all over the world. There were pictures from South Korea, pictures from Paris, pictures from Sweden...it felt amazing to experience that kind of solidarity."
Gross, Zeller, Bettigole and other Pangea members left Tufts at 5:30 a.m. to catch their bus to New York. "When we got there it wasn't that full, so we were kind of discouraged, but as the day went on the lawn kind of filled up," Zeller said.
Junior Lauren Vigdor was also on the lawn, though she attended the rally with the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur rather than with Pangea. "I went online and signed up for one of the Massachusetts Coalition buses and met up with them at the campus center," Vigdor said. Vigdor's bus consisted of mostly Harvard and UMass students.
Though Vigdor said that it was "great to have thousands of people come together for a cause," she also described the rally as "depressing."
"It makes everything so much more real," Vigdor said.
The rally was physically as well as emotionally challenging, with temperatures in New York reaching nearly 80 degrees. "It was incredibly hot. I was standing in the full sun with limited water. At one point I did think I was going to pass out from the heat and from nausea," Vigdor said. "But it was worth it ... It's really exhausting, but that doesn't make it not worth doing."
Vigdor explained why the protest was so worth the pain: "If Hitler were around today, everyone would think, 'What are we going to do differently?' And yet for some reason, nobody seems to care about Darfur."
Vigdor attributed the worldwide political inaction in Darfur to a mix of forgetfulness of past atrocities, difficulty, and unpleasant politics regarding the oil-rich nation: "As long as Sudan supports us in the war against terror, we're not going to mess with their government, but hundreds of thousands of people are dying," she said.
Many compare the current genocide to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which almost one million people were killed in 100 days. The comparison is what struck Bettigole to take action to save Darfur.
"The summer of my junior year in high school, I was reading an article about Rwanda, and I didn't know anything about [it]," Bettigole said. "It was covered up; no one cared enough to mention it ... then I discovered Darfur in the same way: a small blurb inside of a newspaper that echoed what I'd been reading [about] Rwanda."
Bettigole explained that the urgent need for action in the Darfur region is due to its desperate lack of aid workers. The government of Sudan has permitted a force of just 7,000 African Union workers inside the country, scheduled to leave on Sept. 30. So far, Sudan is refusing to allow United Nations peacekeepers to take their place.
"If aid workers leave, thousands more will die," Bettigole said. "Somebody needs to go in."
Gross believed that the rally showed an upswing in global commitment to Darfur, describing the event as having "a really positive atmosphere."
"There's still a lot of energy about the cause," Gross said.
CORRECTION: facts in the front-page article entitled, "Rally determined: 'We have to act,'" were not properly attributed. This reserach was compiled from The New York Times and the Save Darfur Coalition.
