The genocide situation in Darfur is escalating, and American students are the only ones stepping up to stop the violence, according to Mohamed Yahya, a Darfur refugee who found political asylum in the United States in 2002.
Yahya, who also founded the Charlottesville-based Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy, said he "believe[s] if our leaders in the superpowers were doing half of what you [students] do, we could have stopped the genocide years ago. It is students who are making a difference."
Yahya attributed the escalation of violence in Darfur to a lack of action by other countries.
"It is getting worse every day," he said.
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1706 Aug. 31, 2006, which addressed the conflict and raised the peacekeeping presence in the country.
Yahya said he was skeptical about the effectiveness of the resolution because the Security Council has passed resolutions in the past that did little to quell the violence.
According to Yahya, part of the problem stems from the abundance of natural resources, such as oil, that the government uses to financially entangle world powers like China, Russia, Britain and France that would otherwise be inclined to work harder to end the conflict.
The current Sudanese government came to power by coup in 1989, and the genocide began in 1993, Yahya said, noting that the United Nations did not recognize the mass violence as genocide until 2003.
"They started to kill those citizens of Darfur indiscriminately and without mercy," he said.
Since the beginning of the genocide, 150,000 people have been killed, excluding undocumented deaths, Yahya said.
Now is the time for the United States to rise to the occasion and take a stand against the Sudanese government, Yahya said.
"The people of Darfur are waiting for the people of the United States to take action," he said.
Citing previous examples of genocide such as the Holocaust, Yahya said complacency will allow violence to continue.
"History will repeat itself again and again," Yahya said. "We failed to stop genocide in Rwanda, and 800,000 people were killed."
One of the first things the U.S. government can do, he said, is to place economic constraints on the Sudanese government. He urged citizens to write to their senators in support of divestment.
"It is not difficult for our state of Virginia to divest from Sudan," Yahya said.
Money that is made in Sudan comes at the cost of human life, he said.
"This is a blood business and blood business is bad business," Yahya said.
Yahya's speech was part of a weeklong series of events sponsored by Students Taking Action Now: Darfur.
Hy Martin, co-president of the University chapter of STAND, said the purpose of the series is to promote education and awareness as well as to raise money for Darfur.
"We try not only to raise money but also let people know, because Darfur is still a very pertinent issue," Martin said.
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