Ademola Sadik
Last week, as the Sudanese government rejected a United Nations resolution to deploy peace keepers in the troubled Darfur region of the African nation, concerned citizens in Las Cruces, N.M., demonstrated to display discontent at what they felt was a socially unacceptable decision.
But to assume this demonstration was because of the crisis in Darfur, or to raise awareness of the recent chaos caused by flooding in Ethiopia, or even to decry the apparent unwillingness of some world powers to send troops and restore order to the rubble of southern Lebanon, would be a conclusion jumped to in hasty error. This act of civil disobedience was sparked by the International Astronomical Union’s recent decision to rescind the designation of planethood extended to Pluto in 1930.
It seems priorities are often misplaced. In 2003, rebel groups began attacking targets in Sudan to retaliate for what the dissidents felt was neglect for their region and implicit sponsorship of a militant campaign to erase the black Sudanese. In a country that is largely controlled by the wealthier Arab population, people from the nation’s black ethnic groups, who are called abid (a word that means “slave”), have long complained of being marginalized by society. As desertification encroaches on the already scarce remnants of Darfur’s arable land, tensions have arisen between the nomadic Arabs and the agricultural black Africans over who owns the land for livestock to graze on and for farming. Arab militias have for years been sweeping through black African regions to seize women for sex slavery, kill residents and burn villages to the ground. The U.N. estimates that 200,000 people have been killed, with 2 million more displaced from their homes to refugee camps where they live under siege from militias that patrol the outskirts of their makeshift citadels. Even the bond of shared religion is not enough to keep Arab and African Muslims united, in a land, country and continent where the forced physical and sexual servitude of black Africans by Arabs predates the European slave trade by almost 1,000 years. And to add irony to ignorance, many people in Sudan who consider themselves to be Arab share the exact same physical characteristics as their black neighbors. Centuries of mixing have in part relegated the racial ideals at the center of the conflict from the status of physiological reality to mere psychological identities.
Three years since the situation erupted, there is still an alarming lack of awareness and concern. A telling, albeit unscientific, survey of 10 of my classmates last week found one person who recognized the name “Darfur.” And the host of last Thursday’s “Juke Joint” Open Mic night at the Nyumburu Cultural Center on the campus struggled to pronounce the word.
It is unfortunate that on college campuses such as this, locations of centers of excellence and knowledge, some of the major social issues of our time are unknown. As I helped students move into La Plata Hall on Aug. 26 and 27 as a part of Resident Life’s Arrival Survival Team, villagers in Sudan moved from their recently burned villages to camps where they will reside as refugees in their own country. And as I faced the aggravation of broken elevators and new residents signing out move-in carts for longer than their allotted time period, black African women in Darfur endured the continuation of centuries of sexual predation by their Arab neighbors. I wonder how many university students went to last Saturday’s football game. I wonder how many will attend the upcoming protest rally on Darfur.
Perhaps it is time to re-prioritize what we emphasize in our society. Before we protest the nominal status of an extra-terrestrial body and discuss whether its orbit overlaps that of its neighbor Neptune, we must concern ourselves with situations closer to home. It is upon us to change the world around us. One planet at a time.
Ademola Sadik is a sophomore finance major. He can be reached at asadik@umd.edu.
