Archive for March, 2009


March 3rd, 2009

Hello,

My name is Evan Cinq-Mars, and I’m a dreamer.

And that’s what I’ve been asked to do. I’m here to dream ideas that will change the world and how it responds to genocide.

But I won’t be able to do this alone. I’ll need your help to change how the world responds to genocide.

After all, you’re reading this because you care. You have seen how the world responds to genocide and you want to change it.

If you’re like me, you were born in 1989 or just years before or after that.

While you may have been too young to remember, you watched Rwanda burn on the evening news with your parents. You heard of Srebrenica. As you grew older, you learned of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, Slavs, Roma, mentally ill, and homosexuals in your history class. You learned more about the Khmer Rouge, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. You began to understand the scope and brutality of the word genocide.

If you’re like me, you’re watching as the same word has claimed lives of more than three hundred thousand people in Darfur and displaced millions more.

If you’re like me, you’re asking, “How? How is this still possible?”

“Never Again” has become a hollow promise. But it need not be that way anymore. I ask that you share your ideas to change the world and how it responds to genocide so that we can fulfill the promise of “Never Again”. Because something needs to change. The world needs us. The world needs our ideas.

We are here to dream ideas that will change the world and how it responds to genocide.

And we will succeed! In our posts, we will refuse to assume the tragic fate of dreamers and idealists. The dreams and ideas that you will read will not fall to the confines of reality. Instead, we will fuse our dreams and ideas for a better world with practical policy recommendations and realistic next-steps.

That is where my blog posts find their spirit: I believe that our dreams can become a reality. I believe that we can change the world and how it responds to genocide.

Let’s get to it.

The Dreamer

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March 3rd, 2009

Where is the partnership on Darfur?

If you watched or followed Obama’s visit to Canada and the Obama-Harper encounter – and chances are you did – you may have noticed that despite the urgings of STAND members and a number of other voices, the issue of the ongoing genocide in Darfur was not on the agenda. Obama’s visit was hailed as a success, but it did not reflect the hopes of many that Obama’s administration will be the one to push for a real breakthrough on Darfur.
Trade was on the agenda, as was NAFTA and the strengthening of economies at a time when the credit crunch is the most pressing concern for many. The environment and climate change were, of course, a top issue, and rightly so. In their discussion, Prime Minister Harper and President Obama highlighted our mutual interdependence and looked ahead to a strong partnership between Canada and the United States. Foreign policy did come to the fore, but when it did, it was in relation to the controversial mission ongoing in Afghanistan, and the future of Canadian involvement there.

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March 1st, 2009

A Grim Milestone

This month we mark a milestone. The genocide in Darfur is now the longest modern genocide, ever. It is longer than the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the genocides against Bosnian Muslims and Rwandan Tutsis. And yes, it is longer than Holocaust.

February 2009 is the six year anniversary of genocide beginning in Darfur. And it’s still going on.

A realization that we are now marking six years of genocide, which have unfolded and will continue to unfold before our very eyes as we largely engage in business as usual, raises three questions: the first is what does this mean, the second, why should we care, and third, what can we do.

What does this mean?

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