This is a letter from a prominent Sudanese human rights defender.

Service to God is Service to Humanity

To: Every kind and loving heart, to help alleviate the suffering of people through peace and Justice

I am born of Darfur soil. I am Darfurian and I am a Sudanese human rights defender. I am a humanitarian aid worker with 4 years of experience, having worked in South and West Darfur with Internally Displace Persons (IDPs) providing water, medicine, food and shelter.

Since I came to the US five months ago, I have been asking for help with addressing the needs of IDPs. In over 25 events and 30 meetings, I share with my audiences my views about the current situation of IDPs; how IDPs lack essential services and security and how their suffering is vast.

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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

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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One of the biggest challenges of Stand’s work is confronting helplessness in the face of a conflict that is dizzying in its levels of complexity. The feelings of helplessness on not limited only to private citizens but also politicians who don’t know what their realistic options are sometimes.

Well, now’s your chance to weigh in. On the Stand blog we want to hear from you: how does Canada help bring a solution to the conflict in Darfur? How does Canada make sure that poor men, women, and children are no longer slaughtered, raped or forced to flee their homes in Darfur? I want to hear big ideas, crazy ideas, or practical and subtle ideas…anything. Discuss in your campus groups. Send me a post about it. Write up a post in the comments section and then battle it out among yourselves about which solution is more effective.

Below, I have included Stand-Canada’s current policy recommendations. Please engage with them, debate them, and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

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