Religious leaders urge weekend of prayer for Darfur |Save Darfur

SAVE DARFUR

Religious leaders in the Save Darfur Coalition urged prayer the weekend of Dec. 9-10 to call attention to the ongoing atrocities in the Darfur region of western Sudan. "Nobody knows the exact number" of those killed in the conflict, said David Rubenstein, executive director of the coalition, although he estimated 400,000 have died in the violence. "There are people dying every day, and at risk of death every day," Rubenstein said during a Dec. 5 conference call with reporters. "They are being burned from their homes and villages." "Mostly, what they need is security," said Rubenstein, adding that "3.5 million people in total have been affected by this conflict, and the systems of survival have shut down." "When the world forgets, God has to be brought to the fray and into play," said Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, during the conference call. It is "a great loss that Muslims have been killed by Muslims" and a "greater loss that they use Islam, religion, as a reason for that," said Sheik Fadhel Al-Sahlani, the official U.S. representative of Iraq's leading Shiite religious authority, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and spiritual leader of the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Queens, N.Y. "In Darfur, unfortunately Muslims killing Muslims in the name of Islam hurts every human being and hurts Muslims," Sheik Al-Sahlani said. Citing the Armenian genocide at the hands of Turkey in 1915, the Nazi Holocaust of Jews during World War II, the systematic depopulation of Cambodia by its rulers in the 1970s and the Rwandan massacres of 1994, Rev. Edgar said "no Western nation ever used the term 'genocide'" to describe them. While Congress termed the Darfur atrocities a genocide in 2004, with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell following suit, the violence against black Africans in southern Sudan by the Arab-led government and government-backed militias has continued.