Action Items

Steps Everyone Can Take to Help End the Genocide

1. Follow up on the momentum from the April 30 rally with phone calls to our Connecticut senators.
2. Call (don't write, or write also) your Congressman/woman; demand to know why he/she isn't publicly demanding robust international humanitarian intervention to protect civilians and humanitarians in Darfur. All Senators and Members of the House voted in July 2004 to call the ethnically targeted human destruction in Darfur "genocide": why aren't they willing to stop it? The US is a signatory to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and is thus contractually obligated to "prevent" genocide.
   
   Why aren't we doing so?
   
   Contact information for members of Congress can be found at a number of web sites, including Congress Merge. A sample script is available which you may use as a basis for a phone call.
3. Lobby the White House and John Bolton, our Ambassador to the United Nations, to demand the United Nations officially recognize the genocide in Darfur for what it is. A United Nations commission stopped short of identifying the genocide in Darfur when it reported in January, 2004.
   
   Sample Letter to the President
4. Write a letter or op-ed commentary to your local newspaper. Contact information for Connecticut newspapers can be found at a number of web sites, including the Connecticut State Register.
   
   Sample Letter to the Editor
5. Support the divestment campaign that is targeting those European and Asian companies doing business as usual with Khartoum's genocidaires.
6. Demand of all UN Security Council members that they support an immediate, formal authorization of a Chapter VII deployment of peacemakers, with all necessary resources, to protect civilians and humanitarian workers in Darfur.
7. Write to the embassies of African countries in Washington, DC, urging them to welcome a transition to a broadly international UN force in Darfur: in the absence of a decision by the African Union Peace and Security Council to ask for UN peacemaking resources, planning will remain weak, and actual deployment delayed unconscionably.
8. Organize a group of ten friends/co-workers/associates that will work with you in support of the above actions, and will:
   • write letters to editors of newspapers — a sample letter is available which may be used as a prototype
   • write op/ed's for local newspapers
   • sign letters to Congressmen/women collectively — a sample letter is available which may be used as a prototype
   • call stock brokers/fund managers/pension managers, demanding to know whether shares of culpable companies are held
9. Contribute to humanitarian organizations on the ground in Darfur, such as
   • Save the Children/USA
   • Doctors Without Borders
   • Oxfam

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