Montreal’s rally for International Darfur Day brought attention to the inaction of the international community and common misconceptions about the controversy and violence in the region on Sunday.
Held on the future site of Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business Building, hundreds of Montrealers partook in the rally, pressing for what organizers called “effective [United Nations] intervention” in the war-ravaged region of western Sudan.
The rally expressed worries over a possible dramatic escalation of the conflict if the UN does not deploy peacekeepers to Darfur.
The 7,000 African Union peacekeepers that are currently stationed in Darfur are expected to leave the region once their mandate has expired on September 30.
The UN Security Council has assumed the role of peacekeeper and signed a resolution on Aug. 31, 2006, to send a force of 20,000 blue helmets to the region.
The Sudanese government in Khartoum has since refused entry for the international force on grounds that it violates their sovereignty.
The Rally for Darfur is one of several other similar events held in other major cities coinciding with what organizers call Darfur Day.
“The idea is to gather as many people from all kind of backgrounds to tell the people in Darfur that we are in solidarity with them,” said Anne Sainte-Marie of Amnesty International.
Speakers urged action from the Canadian government and people as well.
“As students, we should demand that the Canadian government do something to end the atrocities in Darfur,” said Emily Bennett of McGill Stand Canada.
Fighting between the Sudanese government’s proxy militia and rebels has continued despite the Darfur Peace Agreement signed between the two parties in May 2006.
Estimates of direct and indirect casualties from the conflict that began in February 2003 ranged from 300,000 to as many as 400,000 people with as many as 2.5 million people internally displaced.
Organizers stress that if Darfur can be left unnoticed as Rwanda was a decade ago, we still lack awareness.
According to McGill professor Khalid Medani, focusing on the conflict in Darfur as simply genocide can obscure the real problems in the region.
Invited to speak at the Rally for Darfur, Professor Medani told the Tribune that the fighting is part of a wider political and economic problem.
He went on to explain the problems with this conception.
When violence escalated in February 2003, Khartoum was negotiating a deal with the Southern Sudanese, who demanded greater political autonomy and control over their economic resources, a concession they did not grant to the Darfurians.
Speaking to the crowd at the rally last Sunday, Medani reminded the audience that the majority of Sudanese are opposed to the regime in Khartoum and that the crisis in Darfur is part of a wider problem of political disenfranchisement and excessive economic centralization.
The effort of finding a solution is made more difficult when countries like Russia and especially China (which holds 75 per cent ownership over the oil in Sudan) threaten to veto any resolutions for direct UN intervention in Darfur.
Medani says that the conflict thus broaches another issue, the absence of democracy in the UN, which hampers its ability to mobilize and act as they should in violent crises such as in Sudan.