December 14, 2006

Last Saturday, Sylvia Carter Denny, Andrée Bognár and Byron Dann organized a writing campaign to aid those suffering in the Darfur crisis.

By Diane Chiddister

Many Yellow Springers aren’t aware of the escalating humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of the Sudan, according to Sylvia Carter Denny, but when people find out about it, they want to do something. Carter Denny and several others are offering villagers a simple action to take in this holiday season to help turn around a situation described by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as “the largest and most complex humanitarian problem on the globe.”

“There has been a wonderful response,” Carter Denny said Saturday as she stood in front of the Emporium’s Underdog Cafe. Along with Andrée Bognár and Byron Dann, she spoke to passersby about the crisis and encouraged them to go inside, where people wrote postcards that urged elected officials to take action.

The writing campaign began a week ago Saturday, when eight villagers at the Emporium dashed off 35 postcards, which were donated by Dann and Roger Cranos; this week, many more people wrote 106 cards. The group plans to provide postcards and information this Saturday, Dec. 16, as well, from 11 a.m. to noon at the Emporium, and hopes to reach its goal of 300 cards.

The purpose of the campaign is straightforward, Bognár said.

“I feel the genocide has to be stopped. It’s as simple as that,” she said. “We need to push for diplomatic action.”

The Darfur crisis came to her attention when she read columns by New York Times writer Nicholas Kristoff that focused on the brutal conflict’s effects on individual Africans, Bognár said.

The Kristoff columns also motivated Cheryl Keen to become involved in the local group. The international community did little to stop the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago, Keen said, and now individuals must prevent that scenario from happening again.

“How many times can we not pay attention?” she said.

According to the Web site www.savedarfur.org, at least 400,000 people have been killed and more than two million displaced during the three-year-old conflict in Darfur. Currently, more than 3.5 million people are completely dependent on international aid for survival, but escalating violence makes delivering food to refugees difficult or impossible.

“Not since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has the world seen such a calculated campaign of displacement, starvation, rape and mass slaughter,” according to the Web site.

The conflict began in early 2003 when the Sudanese army and government-backed militia groups known as “janjaweed” began fighting two rebel groups, according to the Web site. The rebels’ stated political aim has been to urge the government to address underdevelopment and the political marginalization of Darfur, the Web site said, but the conflict contains longstanding religious and racial resentments as well.

Kathy Robertson showed up at the Emporium on Saturday because she wanted to try to help.

“There’s so much killing in the world today that it’s easy to lump it all together and not do anything,” she said. “But this seems like a step. It’s something to do.”

Rene McKinstry of Oxford thought she was coming to Yellow Springs just for Christmas shopping on Saturday, but she also ended up writing postcards at the Emporium.

“It’s because of their passion,” she said, pointing to Carter Denny and Bognár outside. “That’s why I’m here.”

Postcard writers were encouraged to urge President Bush, Senators Mike DeWine and George Voinovich and Representative Dave Hobson to approve adequate funding to address the Darfur crisis, push for deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, establish a no-fly zone over the area and strengthen the understaffed African Union peacekeeping force already in Darfur.

While writing postcards is one thing people can do, Carter Denny encourages people to use their individual talents or interests to guide them in how to respond to the Darfur crisis.

“The main thing is to get people to do things they love to do,” she said. “I love to talk to people about things I care about. Our children are going to ask what we did about Darfur.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com