AN EMOTIONAL CALL TO ACTION
By Mark Spencer | Courant Staff Writer
Hartford Courant, CT
Oct 22 2007
There was a bond among the people who gathered Sunday on the steps of
Emanuel Lutheran Church in Hartford, almost as if they were members
of a tight-knit club or a family long separated by time and distance.
But from the haunting stories they recounted of harrowing escapes,
loved ones lost and homes set ablaze, it was clear this was a club
that no one would ever choose to join.
One by one, survivors or the relatives of survivors of genocide,
from Europe to Africa to Asia, made the same appeal:
This is what happened to us, they said, during the Holocaust and in
Armenia, Cambodia, Burundi, Rwanda, Bosnia and southern Sudan. It’s
happening again in Darfur. Please do not ignore it, they pleaded.
"For there in the deserts of Africa, but for a stroke of fate go I,"
said Harry Weichsel, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy with his mother,
only to lose much of the rest of his family.
Sunday’s event was part of a national effort called the Dream for
Darfur Olympic Torch Relay, geared toward putting pressure on China,
host of the 2008 Olympics, to use its influence over the Sudanese
government to stop the genocide in Darfur. China is Sudan’s chief
diplomatic sponsor, major weapons provider and largest foreign
investor.
An Olympic torch was lighted across the street from the church in
Minuteman Park in front of the Hartford State Armory, then passed
from one survivor to the next.
Among those watching was a real Olympian, Hannah Teter, who won a
gold medal in the snowboard halfpipe in Italy in 2006.
She said her experience at the games led her to take to heart an
Olympic ideal, that sport should be at the service of humanity. Teter
began to learn about Darfur after her mother in Vermont sent her an
e-mail about the situation. She flew to Hartford for the day from
California to participate in the event.
Violence has gripped Darfur for more than four years. Arab militias
dispatched by the central government in Khartoum have responded to
rebel attacks by attacking black civilians in Darfur. Hundreds of
thousands have been killed and millions displaced as systematic rape
and the destruction of villages continues.
The U.S. government has labeled the killings as genocide, and this
summer the U.N. Security Council voted to send 26,000 peacekeepers
to the region.
Deacon Arthur Miller, director of the office of black Catholic
ministries for the Archdiocese of Hartford, said despite the efforts,
the killing continues.
"If there was an 11th commandment, it would be, `Thou shalt not be a
bystander,’" said Miller, who helped organize the event. "We cannot
watch this happen and be silent."
Sara Anderson, the first to carry the torch Sunday, is the
great-granddaughter of survivors of the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5
million people were killed from 1915 to 1918. She recalled that her
great-grandmother, who lived to be 93, would speak in a "frightened,
broken whisper" when recounting her past. Her great-grandfather only
survived because he and his father hid beneath rotting corpses to
escape detection.
Fred Jacobs, 86, said he remembers seeing his mother, naked beneath a
coat, being led to a gas chamber at the Auschwitz concentration camp
in Poland.
"It’s a very, very tough time for me here today to hear what is
happening," he said after walking to the podium on frail legs.
Pholla Crahen spoke of surviving Cambodia’s killing fields, and Lagu
Androga spoke of fleeing as one of the Lost Boys of southern Sudan
during another wave of killings in the country in 1990, spending 10
years in refugee camps.
Thiery Iramboma’s parents fled genocide in Burundi in 1972 and raised
a family in Rwanda, where they were killed in a genocide in 1994.
Sponsored by the Catholic church, he arrived in Connecticut in May
after years of living in refugee camps in various countries.
Gabriel Bol Deng, also a Lost Boy, said it was a beautiful morning
in 1987 when, as a 9-year-old tending his father’s cattle, he heard
the sound of a gun shot for the first time and saw smoke rising from
his village.
He was running home when he was stopped by a villager who ignored his
pleas to let him return to his home. The man scooped him up to take
him to safety when more shots rang out and the man fell. He was dead,
and Deng said God put the thought in his young mind to pretend to be
dead, too.
Eventually, aided by strangers, he walked more than 1,000 miles over
four months, beginning a journey that eventually brought him to the
United States. He is now director of H.O.P.E for Sudan.
Each speaker invoked their experiences as a call to action for Darfur,
but perhaps the most powerful speech Sunday was also the shortest.
Miller introduced Mesudin Uzejrovic as a survivor of genocide in
Bosnia.
"I was 16 when I lost my father," he said.
He paused and hung his head, trying to gather himself, but to no avail.
With tears in his eyes, he waved his hands weakly, as if to ward
off the memories, then returned to his seat, covering his face with
his hands.