With the election of President Obama, the anti-genocide campaign felt energized, knowing the nation had a president with a strong record on action against the genocide in Darfur.
Now the student voice at the forefront of anti-genocide activism—STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition—is organizing a campaign to pressure Washington’s politicians to take a tough stance on Darfur. The event, Pledge2Protect, is meant to prod Congress into implementing the recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force Report.
The report’s suggestions for Congressional leaders are threefold. First, more funding should be allocated to preventing crisis and responding rapidly to crisis.
Second, the new Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission should prioritize genocide in its work. And Congress should make sure that the director of national intelligence, when testifying to Congress on national security, includes genocide risk as part of the assessment.
Pledge2Protect, from Nov. 6th to the 9th in Washington D.C., offers three distinct ways that students can project their voices to their representative and senators.
Students can produce videos featuring prominent people advocating for action on genocide. Feeding off of that idea, on the conference’s final day, students plan to bring their videos to Capitol Hill as part of a collective lobbying effort.
What may prove most resounding is students’ boldness in flooding the streets of their communities, in which they ask others to join them to symbolize the permanence of the anti-genocide coalition.
The wide range of these tactics suggests that STAND is pursuing several channels to achieve its goals. With an issue as daunting as genocide, it is the diversity of talents and creativity that ultimately sends a powerful message to politicians.
STAND has both college and high school chapters representing different parts of the country, and the students involved in the campaign come from different backgrounds. So that potent mix of young energetic people is precisely the vehicle to national action against genocide.
I saw this enthusiasm firsthand at a STAND conference last March at Harvard University. At that time, the group was working on its “Darfur from Day One” campaign in which STAND sought to passionately target Washington from Day One of Obama’s presidency until Day 100.
Students had a real sense of urgency: genocide policy is not something that politicians can afford to delay—or else, too many people will continue to die, and it will soon be too little to implement any effective idea. What’s most impressive is that, at the same time, these students were expanding their scope to focus on Congo and Burma in addition to Darfur.
That substantial shift certainly strengthens the anti-genocide movement because it evidences that the group is committed to stopping mass killings anywhere in the world—not just in Darfur.
My experience at the Harvard conference leaves no doubt that the Pledge2Protect campaign will be just as enthusiastic. Students from around the country will descend on the nation’s capital with a serious demand: to pressure Congress to implement the recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force Report.
