HOW U. ILLINOIS FUNDS GENOCIDE
By Brian Pierce, Daily Illini; SOURCE: U. Illinois
Daily Illini via U-Wire
University Wire
April 5, 2006 Wednesday
CHAMPAIGN, Ill.
On July 12, 2004, a fire raged in a small village in western Sudan
known as Donki Dereisa. It was not a unique fire by any means, for
there were blazes all around, a result of exploding ordnance and the
flaming torches of the men on horseback who were attacking the village.
Amid the chaos that struck Donki Dereisa that day, there was no reason
to notice this particular fire — it was merely one of many that was
consuming the food and shelter of the village’s inhabitants.
But this fire proved special, because by the end of the day, it
consumed more than food, more than shelter, and more than personal
belongings. Its flames consumed six young Sudanese children, thrown
in the fire like so many pieces of firewood by militants deaf to
their screams and blind to their terror.
Many, if not most, students on this campus have at least heard of
the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Here in America,
it is a discussion that groans under the weight of statistics:
Four-hundred thousand dead, 2.5 million displaced, four million in
need of humanitarian aid. In Sudan, it is a conflict that cries out
under the weight of lives lost and lives ruined.
The horror of the events in Sudan is so unimaginable that the problem
seems insurmountable. How can we imagine ourselves in the position
of choosing between sending women out to get firewood and risking
rape or sending men out and risking castration or murder?
The answer is, we can’t. The pain is inconceivable. And so we turn
away. We silently accept the deaths of thousands.
The reason why is because we don’t know what else to do. It is
beyond our control, something to be dealt with by governments
and international organizations. According to a recent Zogby
International poll, 62 percent of Americans agree that the United
States “has a responsibility to help stop the killing in the Darfur
region.” Americans want to help, they just don’t know how.
But there are tangible things we can do.
About 100 public companies do business in Sudan with the cooperation of
the Khartoum regime. These companies, mostly Asian but some European,
serve to prop up the economy of a government that commits genocide —
a government that is, simply put, evil.
What students may not be aware of is that their tuition dollars are
going to some of these companies. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
are invested in them through the University endowment.
There is a growing trend across the nation to divest funds in these
kinds of companies, with successful campaigns at Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, and the University of California. While Illinois has
divestment laws that affect the pensions of state employees, our
University could become only the second public university to divest
its endowment, setting an example for other public universities across
the nation.
Pressure must be put on University administration to divest our funds,
or we will be more than inactive in the face of genocide. We will
be culpable.
To learn more about how you can help, you can contact the
president of the campus student organization Action Darfur, Brian
Schwartz, at [email protected]. There is also a nationwide
organization, the Sudan Divestment Task Force, which can be reached
at [email protected].
History is filled with tragedy: a million Armenians dead in Turkey
between 1915 and 1917, two million Cambodians dead under Pol Pot
between 1975 and 1979, almost a million Tutsis dead in Rwanda in
1994. We cannot afford to continue watching these events unfold,
and when it’s all over uttering the empty words “never again.”
Let us follow the example of apartheid in South Africa, when the world
joined together and forced the collapse of a racist and unjust regime,
partly through divestment campaigns at universities like this one.
Let us replace the words “never again” with “not now, not ever.” Let
us do what we can to stop this suffering, let us act here at home,
and let us begin today.