Wearing green ribbons and clutching red and purple daisies, roughly 45 people pretended to drop dead for 60 seconds in front of the Chinese Consulate yesterday, protesting the five-year, ongoing genocide in northeast Sudan
“What we did here for a minute, more than 200,000 people, they do forever,” Darfur Association of Canada president Eisa Gumaa told a crowd of nearly 100 people, adding China has become the de facto financier of the genocide that has displaced and killed nearly 3 million people in Darfur through munitions supplies, oil finances and diplomatic aid at the United Nation’s Security Council.
Calgary-Mountain View MLA David Swann, who underwent a 14-day hunger strike in 2007 to raise awareness of the brutality in Darfur, called on the federal government to send troops to the region, not only humanitarian aid.
He also said China needs to be held responsible not only for its human rights violations in Tibet but its support of the Khartoum regime.
“This is a vexing problem that the international community is unable to come together on. It involves money, it involves logistics, it involves politics and, so far, China has been able to trump all of this,” Swann said.
Gumaa called for an outright boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games, which Swann referred to as the “flame of shame” and Moustaf Mousa, a Darfuri who moved to Calgary in 2000, encouraged the Canadian government to use its influence as a credible peacemaker to bring an end to the rape and slaughter going on in his homeland.
