I VOTED TODAY ~ IT WAS THE MOST-INFORMED VOTE I HAVE EVER CAST

AND I LOOKED FORWARD TO THIS VOTE LIKE NO OTHER IN MY LIFE
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ONE LOVE ~ from the movie Playing For Change - Peace Through Music
Uploaded by ax12nm

GENOCIDE DOESN'T GO ON FOR FIVE YEARS AND SEVEN MONTHS WITHOUT OUR COMPLICITY

IT'S A CHOICE WE MAKE TO NOT CARE
THAT ENABLES PRESIDENT OMAR AL-BASHIR TO CONTINUE HIS GENOCIDE
ON THE DARFURI FAMILIES

Dear Person of Conscience,

I voted today - because I am volunteering as a poll watcher on election day. I voted to end the genocide of the Darfuri families. Will you also vote to end the genocide? Please consider this request by the Genocide Intervention Network:

Be A Voice For Darfur!

GI-NET is asking you to be a voice for Darfur. Both presidential candidates pledged ‘unstinting resolve' in ending the Darfur genocide. To ensure that the new president makes Darfur a Day One priority, we are asking you to help us deliver one million postcards to his office by January 20^th.

Be a voice for Darfur today. To help us reach our goal of one million, sign the online postcard or order yours today for FREE. We will ship them to your door! Simply collect the signed postcards and put them in the mail and they will be added to the number that will be presented to the new president.

Send a Postcard to the President!

Forward to a friend

and

The following article links are from my SaveDarfur email that came today:

Daily News: Thursday, October 30, 2008

Agence France-Presse: UN peacekeeper killed in Darfur attack. Gunmen killed a South African peacekeeper with the UN-led mission in Sudan's Darfur region and seriously wounded a female soldier in the second deadly ambush against the under-equipped force in weeks. Wednesday's shooting brings to 11 the number of peacekeepers for the African Union-United Nations (UNAMID) force to have died since the mission launched operations on December 31, spokesman Noureddine Mezni said. Attackers opened fire on the two South African soldiers about a kilometre (half a mile) from a military base for the mission in northern Darfur. "Unknown armed men opened fire yesterday afternoon at a water point near UNAMID camp in Kutum. They were evacuated to our base in Kutum. The man died and the female soldier is still alive," Mezni told AFP.

Associated Press: Sudanese president tries to improve image. Facing genocide charges from an international tribunal, Sudan's president has taken several steps recently to shore up his image. But some say the gestures are "too little, too late." President Omar Al-Bashir's latest moves include holding a high-profile Darfur peace conference -- which his opponents called a farce -- and speeding up deployment of international peacekeepers in Darfur. He also arrested an Arab militia leader charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court -- the same court that charged al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur. The government says the militia leader will be tried in a domestic court, but hasn't set a date or outlined the charges. Many are dubious that al-Bashir's moves are more than an attempt to head off an ICC arrest warrant.

Newsweek: Piercing the Silence. Too often, atrocities blur into abstractions. The burned-out villages; the camps for the desperate displaced; the brutalized women--for all that we've seen, read and heard about Darfur, for all the celebrities who've adopted it as their own cause clbre, it's still hard for us to get a real sense of the hideousness that has taken place there. Halima Bashir might be the person who finally pulls us through that barrier.

Reuters: China sends officials to handle Sudan hostage crisis. China sent a team of officials to Sudan on Thursday to seek the release of kidnapped oil workers in the disputed aftermath of rescue efforts after four Chinese hostages were killed. Officials from the Foreign Ministry, Commerce Ministry and China National Petroleum Corpn (CNPC) left Beijing to "negotiate with the Sudanese side on all-out efforts and measures of rescuing a worker still missing," Xinhua news agency reported. The Foreign Ministry said two were still missing. The move appeared to be an attempt to bolster control of a standoff that went badly wrong on Monday, when the four kidnapped Chinese oil workers died in a clash between their captors and Sudanese forces. The killings and confusion have cast a shadow over Beijing's ties with the oil-producing African country, where China is a key investor and supplier of arms.

GENOCIDE STOPS WITH US - LET'S MAKE IT PAST HISTORY

BE INSPIRED: We Have Everything We Need For Peace

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people could change the world.
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead

www.savedarfur.org

www.genocideintervention.net

More at
www.miafarrow.org
This is from Mia Farrow's website:

A third IDP camp being attacked by Janjaweed

This email came from an NGO working in Darfur
"As I write this, Kassab camp (North Darfur), home to 25,000 unarmed civilians and the location of DPDO's women's center, is under attack by Janjaweed forces. Rebel forces are too distant and under-equipped to defend Kassab. UNAMID has only a small presence there. Who will be dead tomorrow?"

Click here to see horrifying pictures of the victims of the slaughter, in August, of the residents at Kalma camp. Yet another camp, Zamzam, was attacked in September. But be warned, these pictures are extremely graphic and NOT for young children.


My friend Nicholas Kristof, who also received this same email, writes
"Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir tends to be at his worst when the world is distracted. These days the U.S. is absorbed by the presidential election, Darfur fatigue has set in, and so he evidently feels a little freedom. So we're seeing attacks on camps of displaced people, where Darfuris have sought protection and assistance after fleeing their villages.

"People often ask me if I find it impossibly depressing to go to Darfur and talk to the victims there. Yes, sometimes. But I find it just as depressing that five years into a genocide, the international community mumbles homilies about human rights and 'never again' even as camps like this are attacked without the world even noticing."

www.unmis.org

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Genocide is Control By Death

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US accuses Sudan of duplicity in Darfur

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudan has violated an embargo on arms transfers to its war-torn Darfur region and disguised planes to look like U.N. humanitarian aircraft, the U.S. envoy to the United Nations said on Tuesday. Speaking at a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Darfur, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Khartoum of a litany of duplicitous actions, all of which he said had been documented by an expert panel of the U.N. Sanctions Committee. They included "violating the limited arms embargo on Darfur, using aircraft painted to resemble U.N. humanitarian aircraft, (and) conducting offensive overflights in Darfur."
He also accused Sudan of "not accepting that there is no impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity" -- a reference to Khartoum's refusal to hand over two men indicted by the International Criminal Court for mass murder in Darfur.

The U.N. under-secretary-general for field support, Susana Malcorra, told the council that her new targets assumed that 60 percent of UNAMID's full mandated strength of 26,000 would be deployed by the year's end.Malcorra said a previous U.N. goal of 80 percent of full UNAMID deployment by the end of this year had been unrealistic. That would be reached by the end of March 2009, she said. "These new revised targets reflect a scaling back of initial extremely ambitious projections," she said. "The new targets are still ambitious but in our view can be achieved."

The United States complained for months about the slow deployment, blaming it on Sudanese obstructionism and U.N. bureaucracy. But Washington's special envoy to Sudan Richard Williamson told Reuters he welcomed the revised targets.
"We're encouraged that we should have at least 3,600 more UNAMID troops in Darfur by the end of this year," he said.

U.N. officials have dismissed suggestions that they have moved slowly with the deployment of UNAMID, which was created in July 2007. They accuse troop-contributing countries of not providing badly needed military hardware like helicopters.
The council also discussed U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's new report on UNAMID, in which he says up to 300,000 people have been forced to flee violence in Darfur this year.

According to U.N. estimates, a recent increase in violence in North Darfur alone has displaced at least 40,000 people.