The Peace Project

The Past and the Present

Two stories from this week:

The new Holocaust museum opened in Israel.

A video projected on a wall at the entrance shows daily Jewish life in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, while visitors can see victims' personal artefacts, including braids of hair cut by a mother from her 11-year-old daughter, before the girl was deported from Germany to her death.

"We gave the victims an identity. We gave them a voice. We gave them a face," said curator Yehudit Inbar.

The names and photographs of some of the victims recorded in a three million page collection of testimonies are displayed, surrounded by a watery abyss, in the museum's Hall of Names.

The estimate of deaths from illness and starvation in Darfur has soared from 70,000 to 180,000. Amnesty International roughly estimates an additional 50,000 people have died from violence.

A UN report earlier this year concluded that while the killings in Darfur did not amount to genocide, killings, torture, enforced disappearances and sexual violence were carried out on a widespread and systematic basis and could amount to crimes against humanity.

The BBC's Susannah Price at the UN says the latest reports from Darfur say lawlessness and attacks by the Janjaweed militia continue to blight the lives of civilians.

The Janjaweed attacked villages, targeted an internally displaced peoples camp and burnt abandoned homes to discourage those who wanted to return, she says.

Please take action to stop this genocide. Call your Senator or Congressman and ask them to support the Darfur Accountability Act, which would impose focused sanctions on the Sudan and support the expansion of the African Union force. Do what you can to give these victims an identity, a voice, a face.

posted by Sammy @ 12:20 PM