Help for the hell abroad

"No matter what you call it, (the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan) is indisputably a humanitarian crisis which deserves urgent and tough attention," this editorial board wrote July 8, 2004.\n"One year ago ... the Bush administration declared (that) the situation in Sudan constituted genocide. Yet one year later, where does the international community stand? Have the killings stopped? Can we even point Darfur out on a map?" This editorial board, Sept. 9, 2005.\nTime hasn't been on our side.\nAlmost two years after we first addressed the issue -- and we certainly were not the first to write on the tragedy -- the blood still flows. A government-backed militia is still wreaking havoc on innocents. Hundreds of thousands died; more than 2 million are displaced into the neighboring country Chad. For years the world has done the semantic dance around the word "genocide." Just this weekend Osama bin Laden called for militants to resist U.N. peacekeeping forces, which are, at best, trickling into the region like a leaky faucet.\nThe global community has shown little inclination to cease the genocidal actions occurring in Darfur -- perhaps because there are Chinese oil interests in the region, perhaps because our government's hands are tied up elsewhere, or perhaps because the harsh truth is it's easier for the world to ignore the African continent than other places\nWe're under no illusions that our editorial page has a dramatic effect on U.S. foreign policy or on international policy at large, but that's not the point. All we can hope to do is add our independent voice to the chorus of criticism and encourage local humanitarian efforts to keep active in their noble cause.\nWe'd like to extend our gratitude to local workers who are helping even the smallest bit.\nCongregation Beth Shalom and First Presbyterian Church, together with Save Darfur Bloomington and various groups from IU's ethnomusicology and folklore departments, put on a musical concert last week to raise donations for a refugee project. The project, small but powerful, aims to bring Sudanese women to Bloomington next year.\n"We wanted to put a human face on the situation," said Congregation Beth Shalom member Carolyn Geduld, who is involved in the project. "We thought people in Bloomington could relate to that. So we're going to bring four women in their 20s from the south of Sudan to Bloomington in 2007 to live. Their faces will hopefully remind people of the tragic situation in Darfur and the rest of Sudan."\nIt seems like only small work since it's on a small scale, but it could prove a lifesaver for the four women. Certainly it's nowhere near the kind of assistance that would come if the international community flexed some might and laid down the law in Sudan. But since it seems like that will never happen, local assistance is all we can hope for. The dedicated Bloomington activists deserve our highest praise.