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Compassion :: Solidarity :: Commitment
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© copyright London Independent
Solidarity with Darfur
As we celebrate with our families and friends this Christmas, we remember the people, children and young people of Darfur for whom peace is not only absent but a virtually unimaginable reality. Yet, the people of Darfur have a right to enjoy peace not only at Christmas but every day of the year.
As Edmund Rice International we have a special responsibility to remember the children and young people of Darfur who cannot access education, health care and who run the risk of being caught up in a war imposed upon them adults and geopolitics.The following is a report by Peter Boehm in the London Independent on December 20th:
The village is still smouldering. A girl combs through the remains of a burnt-down hut with her bare hands, trying to salvage knife blades and rakes that were not consumed by the fire. Two women, with tears in their eyes, have broken down in front of a pile of ash, wailing violently.
A band of youths is patrolling the ruins of Koukou-Angarana, bows and arrows slung over their shoulders, booomerangs and knives at the ready. But their decision to form a self-defence group has come too late. The Arab horsemen who swept through the village on their bloody rampage have long since vanished.
It is a tragically familiar scene in Darfur, the province of western Sudan where more than 200, 000 people have been killed and at least two million brutally forced from their homes - a genocide unleashed and sustained by the Islamist government in Khartoum - but this man-made inferno now sweeping across the plains is taking place across the Sudanese border in Chad. The pattern is identical to events in Darfuer, where the well-armed Arab raiders allied to the Sudanese goverment set villages ablaze, rape the women, and leave a trail of dead black Africans in their wake."