Stephanie Nyombayire and Bec Hamilton, co-founders of The Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net - formerly the Genocide Intervention Fund), will address the question, “Can We Stop Genocide, and If So, How?” at the next Great Decisions lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 7, at The College of Wooster. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Gault Recital Hall of Scheide Music Center (525 E. University St.), beginning at 7:30 p.m.
Nyombayire, a Rwandan student at Swarthmore College, helped to establish GI-Net to raise money for Sudanese refugees. She was chosen from hundreds of applicants nationwide to be one of three students who traveled to the Sudan-Chad border to witness the crisis there firsthand as a “Sudan Correspondent” for MTVUniversity. A Rwandan native, Nyombayire was living in the Congo during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that took the lives of 800,000, but she experienced the horror of the massacre firsthand when she returned home as an 8 year-old to find that it had taken the lives of family and friends. As a result, Nyombayire, whose academic interests include child psychology and international law, has committed herself to fighting these mass killings through GI-Net, which has raised $200,000 and hopes to reach the $1 million mark.
Hamilton, a joint-degree student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School, is also a co-founder of the Darfur Action Group, which mobilizes students to actively condemn the Sudanese genocide and demand that the United States government do the same. The group coordinated a weeklong “Not on our Watch” campaign, and was involved in Harvard University’s decision to divest from companies supporting the Sudanese government. Hamilton has successfully worked to get important legislation passed by Parliament in New Zealand, and in 2005, she worked for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Before attending law school, she worked in the Sudan, where she executed a plan to help thousands of internally displaced persons return to their homes. A graduate of the University of Sydney, Hamilton is the managing editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and a student finalist for the Gary Bellow Public Service Award.
People can easily STOP GENOCIDE by forcing the United Nations to admit genocide or colonization is happening. It may take great resources to end somebody else’s civil war where there is indiscriminate mass murder; but that is not genocide. Darfur is a scene of indiscriminate killings that could use much help.
But West Papua is genocide, and it is a genocide which American corporations are profiting from both in West Papua and across Indonesia, the same corporations who funded the Bush campaign in 2000.
Genocide IS!!!!
intense