Friday, April 28, 2006

Members of Congress Arrested at Darfur Protest

Five Democratic members of Congress were briefly arrested at a protest in front of the Sudanese Embassy. Six citizen activists, along with Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston), Jim McGovern (D-Worcester, Mass.), Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and John Olver (D-Massachusetts), were taken into custody for blocking the entrance to the embassy as part of protests against the ongoing genocide in Darfur.
 
Sudan is governed by a military dictatorship which has been committing an ongoing genocide against non-Arab citizens of the African nation. The sitation in Darfur appears to be deteriorating, with hundreds of thousands of people being driven from their homes by government-allied gangs of brigands. Some aid agencies have reported being forced to leave the country, and the United Nations claims that if the aid network in Sudan collapses, as many as 100,000 people per month could begin dying from starvation, in addition to those being directly killed by the Sudanese state.

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