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Students strive to stop genocide |
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008 |
by McLEAN DOBBINS
Intern News Reporter
The Student Anti-Genocide Coalition may soon have a new chapter at Appalachian State University.
STAND is a nationwide activist group that started in 2004 at Georgetown University in response to the outbreak of violence in the Darfur region of Sudan.
In 2003, fighting broke out in the Darfur region of western Sudan between black African rebels and Arab militias sponsored by the Sudanese government, according to standnow.org.
The
killing of civilians by the Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, has
led the United States to label the actions of the Sudanese government
as “genocide.”
B. Justin Stivers, a senior philosophy and religion major, got the idea to start a chapter at Appalachian
after he went to a STAND conference in Washington, D.C. in September 2007.
After talking with other Appalachian State students who were interested, Stivers decided to begin
holding meetings once a week in November and December. They then developed a constitution and
submitted it to be reviewed by Club Council in the Center for Student Involvement and Leadership in
order to receive club status.
“World peace,” Stivers said when asked about his personal goal for the club. “But more realistically,
what got me going was that people didn’t know about Darfur.”
According to www.standnow.org, “The genocide has claimed as many as 400,000 lives and displaced
more than 2.5 million people. Violence, disease, and displacement continue to kill thousands of
innocent Darfurians every month.”
“There are still areas where this is going on that we don’t know about,” Stivers said. “Educating people
is the first step.”
Stivers plans to go into the Peace Corps after he graduates this May, and would like to go to Africa.
“People think things are always bad in Africa,” Stivers said. “It’s easy to just forget about it.”
With more than 700 chapters worldwide, the goals of STAND are to “actively organize to prevent and
stop genocide wherever and whenever it may occur” and “to establish a permanent anti-genocide
constituency that holds elected officials accountable for doing all that they can to prevent and end
genocide,” according to the organization’s Web site.
The roles of the United States and China are particularly important to the conflict. While the U.S. has
condemned the violence in Darfur, the Chinese government has failed to use its economic influence
with Sudanese oil companies to curtail the fighting, according to the Web site.
“It’s up to us to pressure our government and China about Darfur,” Stivers said.
Several North Carolina colleges have chapters and the Southeast Regional Conference will be held
Feb. 22-24 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stivers said once Club Council approves the club, it will decide on a meeting time and place. Club
Council is currently reviewing the club’s constitution.
For more information about STAND, e-mail Stivers at
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