A question of conscience

What does the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have to do with the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan? Jerry Fowler, staff director of the museum's Committee on Conscience, made the connection very clear in his visit to Phoenix last week.

He reminded listeners of what the U.S. Holocaust Commission wrote in the report it presented to President Jimmy Carter, back when the museum was just an idea: "A memorial unresponsive to the future would violate the memory of the past."

That's why Fowler's been on the road for months, talking to groups and individuals around the country, showing them the haunting photographs he took when he traveled to Chad and saw firsthand the makeshift camps (to call them "camps" is an exaggeration) in which, every day, refugees from Darfur die of disease and malnutrition.

An estimated 100,000 Darfur refugees were in Chad when Fowler visited last spring. Now, he says, there are at least twice that many. Of the time he spent with the refugees, Fowler said that their feelings of having been abandoned were familiar to him; it was the same sense of abandonment that he'd heard Holocaust survivors express.

Meanwhile, Elie Wiesel, along with Sara Bloomfield, director of the Holocaust Museum, met with United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan to urge him to speak out more adamantly on Darfur. For the fourth time in the history of the U.N., the Security Council met outside New York, this time in Nairobi, Kenya, where the Sudanese government and rebel officials signed an agreement to end the civil war in southern Sudan by the end of the year. The trouble is, both sides made a similar promise last year, and nothing came of it. Just a few weeks before the Nairobi meeting, the Sudanese government signed two new protocols, promising, among other things, to "protect the rights of Internally Displaced Persons." A few hours later, government forces stormed a refugee camp.

The situation seems hopeless, and that is exactly why it requires us to act. "Just because something happened doesn't mean it was inevitable," Fowler points out. "It was the product of choices." Fowler advises the following:

Stay informed.
Let the media know you care about this. That way, they'll cover it.
Communicate with the U.S. government.
Make this a community issue.
Support education and relief efforts.

One other thing the commission told President Carter 25 years ago seems apropos: "Looking back on the years since the Holocaust, it's astounding how little we've learned." Let's make it clear that's not the case this time.

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