You did it! Yesterday Representative John Boozman (R-AR) signed on to HR 4128 in response to your urging. Thanks to your activism we've seen significant movement on this critical legislation. Keep it up!
On Monday, Enough launched a week-long campaign to get 10 new congressional champions for the Conflict Minerals Trade Act, or HR 4128, which was introduced in the House of Representatives last fall. In our first couple days, hundreds and hundreds of activists responded by posting Facebook and Twitter messages asking these representatives to support the legislation. This bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. McDermott (D-WA) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) will help the United States take crucial steps to curb the trade in conflict minerals which are fueling the violence in eastern Congo.
Before it can receive a full vote, this legislation has to pass two powerful committees - Foreign Affairs and Ways & Means. With a narrow window of opportunity remaining in this legislative cycle to move this bill, we're asking for your urgent help to Change the Equation for Congo.
Activists from around the country are taking 5 minutes each day this week to target 10 crucial members of Congress that are essential to advancing the bill. By posting a message on their Facebook walls, we can demonstrate broad grassroots support and generate pressure for them to become co-sponsors. Thanks for continuing to support Change the Equation for Congo with your action on Facebook.
TAKE ACTION on Facebook! - April 23
Click the following links to visit the Facebook pages of Representatives Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), become their Friend, or Fan, and ask them to support HR 4128, the Conflict Minerals Trade Act. You can post your message publicly on their fan pages.
Here's a sample message:
Representative {BLANK}, Change the Equation for Congo! Please co-sponsor HR 4128. Visit http://bit.ly/d44Xxp to learn more.
We hope you'll join us this week and invite your friends to do the same! Remember, check back to this page regularly for daily updates.
To help inspire you to action, writer and activist Omekongo Dibinga has this message on why HR 4128 is important.
Today is World Day Against Cyber Censorship. In a world of anonymous commenting, pirated movies, and 4chan, some may ask, what is cyber censorship? It manifests itself in a variety of forms, and this week The New York Times and others highlighted the removal of certain censorships that prohibited technology companies from exporting their products and services to Sudan, Iran, and Cuba.
If you happened to catch the news stories, you would have seen this couched as the "lifting of certain sanctions" against these countries. The removal of such sanctions ostensibly allowed tech companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter to begin offering locally customized versions of their services in these markets.
It would be logical to assume then that a person going online in one of these countries would have previously been unable to access Hotmail or send their latest Tweet off into the cloud. However, this is not actually the case and that should come as no surprise to anyone who recalls the State Department asking Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance last summer during the Iranian election. The nature of the internet is such that if an online product is publicly available on the web, anyone can access it from any location. That is, as long as their government or internet service provider does not censor the content, in the more palpable form of "cyber censorship" that many of us initially conjure up when we hear the term.
On World Day Against Cyber Censorship, it's important for us to see beyond these more obvious forms of cyber censorship and also examine subtler manifestations that are evidenced in such moves by the U.S. government. By previously barring consumer web companies from customizing their already accessible online products for these regions, the U.S. government was implicitly depriving these citizens of the means of expression that could prove so valuable. While the Obama administration has now realized the national security gains to be had from relaxing certain censorship, we should not forget that this happened only after these tools had been mainstream for years and could have been more effectively used in a variety of conflict zones had they been tailored to the local region when it mattered.
This reality is only more heartbreaking on the eve of the highly controversial Sudanese election. With less than a month before polling begins, it's unlikely that these platforms and services will be optimized for the small percentage of Sudanese civilians that could actually make use of them. Because of the quiet American cyber-censorship that has existed for years, activists and civil society members in Sudan will not have access to highly developed and optimized tools that could aid their efforts to form an effective democracy.
On World Day Against Cyber Censorship, let's call for an end to the notion that any government, for any reason, can or should restrict the right of global citizens to communicate and access information. For whatever reason, to whatever end, access to communication tools are a fundamental human right.
Four years ago, asking the President of the United States a meaningful question would have required serious power, uncommon access, or a lot of luck combined with being in the right place at the right time. Not anymore.
Thanks to CitizenTube and the connective power of the internet, any one of us can reach the president. Yesterday, we did. Following up on last week's State of the Union address, YouTube hosted a community driven "Your State of the Union." Steve Grove, YouTube's head of news & politics, asked President Obama a wide variety of questions, submitted and selected by citizens around the country, if not the world.
At the Enough Project, the challenges in Sudan right now are incredibly important to us. Recognizing that President Obama didn't address the crisis in Sudan at his State of the Union, we were eager to take advantage of the opportunity YouTube offered to engage directly with the president. Seeing the chance to get our concerns about an issue that we feel is underappreciated, we mobilized to get our question to Mr. Obama.
Late last week, we videotaped our question, eloquently delivered by our intern Alison Grady. Then we asked our supporters, fans, partners, and others who care about the message to vote and pass the word.
Thanks to the support of grassroots activists, partners like Genocide Intervention Network, Save Darfur Coalition, Invisible Children, and Change.org, our question was the most popular in the foreign policy category. In response, President Obama gave his lengthiest remarks on Sudan since announcing his special envoy for Sudan last March. (Granted, we were disappointed with the substance, but for this post at least we're staying focused on the positive.)
All of us at Enough are deeply thankful to YouTube for increasing access to the president, to Mr. Obama for thoughtfully responding to our question, and to all of the passionate Sudan advocates who took action and made their voices heard. Sudan advocates, let's keep the momentum going:
An Enough Project strategy paper released today, "Stealing an Election in Slow Motion: Time for Real Consequences" says that Sudan’s national elections scheduled for April 2010 will be neither free nor fair absent significant international pressure on the ruling National Congress Party, or NCP, to dramatically change the electoral landscape. The crackdown by the NCP on December 7 and 14 2009, involving the arrests of senior opposition politicians and the use of tear-gas on protestors, is yet another demonstration that the basic requirements of credible elections, including freedom of expression and assembly, have yet to be met. Credible elections in Darfur are impossible given rampant insecurity and attacks on civilians, the absence of a credible peace process, a disputed census, and the displacement of the majority of Darfur’s population; in the South, elections may fan the flames of simmering inter-communal and political tensions.
If nothing changes before April, U.S. taxpayers will have spent nearly $100 million to support the election of an indicted war-criminal and legitimize the iron-fisted rule of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. In this context, it is time to alter course in bold and specific ways in order to avert what could be the deadliest conflagration in Sudan’s war-torn post-colonial history.
“The U.S. and other donors to the electoral process need to stand up and conclude that the Emperor is as naked as he ever was, and blow the whistle now on this deadly charade,” said John Prendergast, author of the report and Co-Founder of Enough. “A stolen election would be the beginning of the CPA’s end, as the NCP would almost certainly exploit what it would quickly claim was newfound “democratic legitimacy” to prevent southern Sudanese from holding the self-determination referendum scheduled for 2011. If that happens, it would be fanciful to think that anything short of full-scale national war would result.”
"During Sudan's half-century of independence, few spots on Earth have witnessed as much death and destruction, with 2 1/2 million war-related fatalities during the past two decades alone. Although the Darfur genocide that began in 2003 is only one of the conflicts raging in the country, they all stem from the same cause: the abuse of power. The ruling party represses independent voices and supports militias that have used genocide, child soldiers and rape as weapons of war. "
- Writes Enough Co-founder John Prendergast in this weekend's Outlook section of the Washington Post. Click to keep reading "Five Myths About Sudan"
On yesterday's NPR program All Things Considered, Michele Kelemen highlights the growing anger on Capitol Hill over President Obama's handling of the situation in Sudan. We've been covering these developments closely. Here's the Kelemen's report:
As the Obama administration’s Sudan Policy review drags on, the government of Sudan, led by a wanted war criminal, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, clearly looks to Washington and dreams of normalizing relations. So how has President Bashir tried to work its way back into the good graces of the Obama administration? Well, there has been a recent spate of government attacks in Darfur, and a recent report by the Small Arms Survey suggests that most of the new and heavier weaponry appearing in militia clashes in South Sudan likely comes from government stockpiles. Certainly, the government has not given the slightest suggestion that it would hand President Bashir over to the International Criminal Court to face charges. Khartoum has not been on a charm offensive.
Instead of actually changing its behavior, Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party wants to return to America’s good graces the old-fashioned way: by swamping a bunch of high-powered lobbyists in a sea of money to make its case. Thanks to two excellent recent articles in the Washington Post by Dan Eggen, we have gained a much clearer window into the behind-the-scenes machinations by the National Congress Party and of the greedy inside-the-Beltway types lining up to do the party’s bidding. In the process, we have also gained some alarming insight into how the administration is dealing with this mess. As actress Lily Tomlin once said, “No matter how cynical you get, you just can’t keep up.”
The first bombshell dropped when former U.S. National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane of Iran-Contra fame was outed by the Post as having accepted $1.3 million, passed through the government of Qatar, to represent the Sudanese government as it tried to warm relations with Washington. McFarlane somehow forgot that this kind of representation usually requires registering as a lobbyist on behalf of a foreign government, something he did not do for either Qatar or Sudan. Making matters worse, Sudan is still on the state sponsors of terror list. But the niceties of paperwork never appear to have been McFarlane’s strong suit.
Today on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, reporter Gwen Thompkins highlighted the ongoing legal case of Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein. Hussein was arrested by Sudanese authorities for immoral behavior for wearing a pair of trousers at a night club. Hussein's case has since galvanized the Sudanese women's movement.
Ahead of Secretary Clinton's upcoming trip to Africa, NPR has beefed up their coverage of the region.
This morning they ran a compelling piece on the work of Ugandan author David Kaiza. Kaiza, who hails from the Northern Ugandan town of Gulu, gained notoriety in the past for his criticism of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
Expectations are high for this precocious literary figure's first novel, which he's expected to finish shortly. Applause for NPR's piece reminding us that beauty and art continue to flower everywhere, despite dark odds.
John Norris will be joined by Amir Osman from Save Darfur; Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth from the South Sudan Mission; Roger Winter the former Special Representative on Sudan; and Ken Isaacs of Samaritan's Purse.
Keep checking Enough Said for coverage and follow blogger Laura Heaton @laura4enough for her live microblogging via twitter.
