Ron Walters- Sudan: No Noise in the Black Community

I know that this is a busy season with the elections and other things, but we simply must pay some attention to Sudan. Why?   You remember that a few years ago, it was discovered that slavery was being practiced in Sudan and in other Arab countries in North Africa. Well, in the past few months alone, 30,000 people have been killed by roving bands of armed thugs known as the "Janjaweed," a word which literally means "armed men on horseback."   . .This is serious business because the United Nations estimates that since 1989, nearly 2 million people have died in the violence. This is reminiscent of the genocide that took place in Rwanda during the Clinton administration when the United Nations waited for the U.S. and the U.S. waited on the U.N., giving time and space for the killing to escalate and affect more than 1 million people in a bloodbath that is the shame of the modern world. We should so something. I know there is the old saw that things are so bad here that we should hunker down in this country and take care of the people. But we have always been able to walk and chew gum at the same time, which has enabled us to fulfill our Pan African responsibilities to advocate for the well-being of our brothers and sisters on the African continent or elsewhere in the Diaspora. [more ]