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April’s Darfur Hero – David Rosenberg

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

David Rosenberg at the 2010 Sudanese Diaspora Summit in Pittsburgh. Photo Courtesy of PDEC

The Darfur Heroes program is a way for the Save Darfur Coalition to honor individuals and groups who have done inspiring and important work in an effort to end the violence in Sudan. This April, Save Darfur Coalition is proud to honor David Rosenberg.

David Rosenberg helped organize “The Way Forward in Darfur and South Sudan,” a Sudanese Diaspora Summit held on March 19 – March 21, 2010 in Pittsburgh. The summit focused on promoting dialogue, a unified Diaspora voice and recommendations on advocacy, capacity building, and the elections in Sudan. David Rosenberg has been a longtime activist in the Sudan movement, and below are his words about his passion for the people of Sudan.

I co-founded the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition (PDEC) in the summer of 2004 after seeing news accounts of the genocide in Darfur. I served as volunteer coordinator of the organization during my last two years as an archivist at the University of Pittsburgh and continued in this role after retiring. Already experienced in other community campaigns, I had been able to bring together diverse constituencies (students, retirees, religious and nonprofit organizations) in signature citywide campaigns which successfully impacted political leaders and media.

PDEC has supported Save Darfur Coalition initiatives in a number of ways. For the “Million Voices” campaign -an initiative to deliver 1 million signed postcards to President Bush demanding his support for a stronger multilateral force to protect Darfuris; PDEC collected more than 15,400 postcards with help from student and religious organizations from Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania and Ohio. PDEC collected an additional 15,000 postcards for the “Be a Voice for Darfur” campaign targeting President Obama, which called for the protection of civilians, sustainable peace, justice for victims, and accountability for perpetrators.

The PDEC cards included 4,704 signatures collected at President Obama’s Inauguration by more than 150 Pittsburghers who were part of the Save Darfur Coalition call to service around the Inauguration and Martin Luther King Day. When actor and activist George Clooney delivered PDEC’s postcards and 235,000 others to President Obama, he urged the president to appoint someone to work on Sudan full-time, an initiative which was influential in the appointment of U.S. Special Envoy Gen. Scott Gration.

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Tags: Activist Stories, Darfur Heroes, darfuris, destroyed villages sign, G20, genocide, inauguration, million voices campaign, Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition, postcards campaign, Save Darfur Coalition, Scott Gration
Posted in Activist Stories, Obama Administration, Omar al-Bashir | No Comments »

If you can read this

Friday, October 9th, 2009

One of our mobile billboards in downtown Pittsburgh

If you can read this you can save lives in Sudan.

That was the message that we brought to world leaders in New York at the U.N. General Assembly and in Pittsburgh at the G20 summit last month. We also brought them your messages – your reminders in photos and petitions to those world leaders: Don’t Forget Darfur.

Take a moment to check out what we accomplished together:

During our street actions in New York we delivered your 45,383 petition signatures to Special Envoy to Sudan General Scott Gration. In the short program before the Darfur/Darfur exhibit began, General Gration told the crowd:

“And this letter that I’ve got from you all is very important. I’ll make sure that the President gets this, and that he understands the concern that America has to solve this problem in a very expeditious way; a concern that we’ll see in these pictures… What you’re doing is so important to bring the visibility and the pressures to bear, so that we can take the appropriate actions in Darfur to make a difference in the lives of people who deserve this and a lot more.”

—Special Envoy to Sudan General Scott Gration

In Pittsburgh, President Obama drove by our street teams—and waved at our activists holding signs along the route to the G20 opening dinner. Also in Pittsburgh we held a live webcast policy briefing on “Sudan and the G20: what the world’s richest countries can do.” In combination with our TV ads, print and billboard ads these actions reminded world leaders that they can all save lives in Sudan.

Check out what we accomplished together during our United Nations and G20 “Don’t Forget Darfur” campaign by taking a few minutes to see our TV and print ads, policy briefing, photos of our street actions, and our new “Don’t Forget Darfur” video on YouTube.

Tags: action, Darfur, Darfur/Darfur, Events, G20, New York City, Pittsburgh, President Obama, Sudan, UNGA
Posted in Events, Sudan's Debt, United Nations | No Comments »

STAND at the G-20 Summit

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Cross posted from STAND’s blog

With the G-20 summit in our backyard last week, we, members of the University of Pittsburgh’s STAND chapter, knew that we had a unique opportunity to deliver our message to the world’s most powerful leaders. This message was that we, as members of developed economies, hold links to all genocides that make us complicit in their implementation and maintenance. These links also provide us with crucial opportunities to debilitate these genocidal regimes

We kicked-off our campaign on Thursday by joining with PDEC, the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition, to put up an art installation directly in front of the delegates’ Thursday night dinner. The installation, which represented villages destroyed by genocide, caught the attention of many local news sources and was featured the next day on the cover of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It certainly caught the gaze of delegates Thursday night as well.

On Wednesday, we participated in the United Steelworkers Conference on Human Rights along with the Save Darfur Coalition. There, we had the opportunity to rekindled discussions that had begun with Sudan Divestment campaign years ago about the capacity for unions and other institutions to draw on their economic investments to leverage their influence on the governments of genocidal regimes. We found the Steelworkers to be very receptive, and some attendees expressed a serious interest in starting up socially responsible investment campaigns.

Later that day, we attended Save Darfur Coalition’s press conference. There, we had the opportunity to pass out press packets to attending members of the press. These press packets detailed how the countries of the G20 are connected the conflicts in Sudan, Burma, and the D.R.C.

On Thursday, we passed our message off to a most impressive ear—that of President Obama. With hands filled with flyers and signs and dressed in neon yellow Save Darfur shirts, the University of Pittsburgh’s STAND members crowded every possible entrance to the venue of the delegates’ dinner. At these entrances we paced backed and forth, awaiting the delegates’ arrival. As we traversed the sidewalks, we passed out flyers and spoke to onlookers and officials about our conflicts and how they relate to the G20. Around 6:00 pm, the delegates passed through the Boulevard of the Allies, a contingent of STAND students waved and cheered. There, they were undoubtedly seen and heard. Obama looked directly at one STAND member holding a sign and waved and passed of a firm nod of affirmation! Hopefully, equally firm policies will affirm our asks in the days to come.

Anna Siegel is STAND’s National Programming Coordinator and a student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Tags: G20, President Obama, STAND
Posted in Students | No Comments »

Pittsburgh and the G20: Sudan

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Mohamed Mohamed Yahya, one of eight refugees from Darfur recently settled in Pittsburgh by Catholic Charities, came to my house with several other volunteers to construct the Darfur Destroyed villages exhibit. The exhibit includes signs of over 610 destroyed villages and is a project of the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition (PDEC). Each sign has the name of a village in Darfur that was destroyed, mostly by the government of Sudan and janjaweed, between 2004-2009. The U.S. State Department now has documented 3,300 destroyed or damaged villages.

As Mr. Yahya worked away putting the village signs on the lawn sign holders, he stopped from time to time to tell us something about the destroyed villages he recognized. “This one means ‘village where you can get almost anything you want.’” Mohamed said. “This one is a girl’s name.” “This one,” he explained “means ‘God.’”

He knew the villages because he and his father had traveled all over Darfur to buy camels and cattle … He was thirty years old in 1999 when he fled Darfur and went to Iraq. A month after he left home, janjaweed killed his father. His mother and ten brothers and sisters are alive, he said, all in an IDP camp in north Darfur. They are one handful of the 2.7 million IDPs and refugees from Darfur’s destroyed villages. It is clear that the arrival of a group of Darfuris to settle in Pittsburgh, the first group we have had here, will continue to present opportunities for our Coalition to deepen our understanding of the Darfur genocide and will put faces and voices to what for many of our fellow citizens remains a remote and almost abstract crisis.

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Tags: Darfur, Darfur Destroyed Villages, Darfuri Diaspora, debt relief, G20, PDEC, Pittsburgh, protest
Posted in Activist Stories, Events | No Comments »

Pittsburgh Rallies for Darfur

Monday, September 14th, 2009

The Pittsburgh Darfur activist community led by David Rosenberg gathered on the steps of city hall to again call for peace in Sudan and hold accountable perpetuators of injustice. City, county, state, and national leaders came with open arms to receive the over 15,000 postcard petitions signed by local concerned citizens pulled from a variety of places including schools, churches, synagogues, and coalition partners.

Political leaders conveyed their shared sentiments about the ongoing crisis in Darfur and Southern Sudan. City Councilman William Peduto announced the City of Pittsburgh’s proclamation honoring the newly resettled Darfuris and “encouraged President Barack Obama to use his influence and that of the United States as head of the UN Security Council to work to finally achieve a solution to the problems of both Darfur and south Sudan.”

More importantly taking the stage were Darfuri refugees from across the nation. In solidarity, Southern Sudanese joined Darfuris in their call for an end to the crisis and issued a joint statement asking world leaders to hold Bashir and the NCP accountable, which have inflicted countless acts of unspeakable horror against their friends and families.

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Tags: action, Darfur, Events, G20, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, rally, South Sudan, Sudan
Posted in Activist Stories, Darfuri Stories | No Comments »

#DarfurDailyNews Rebels say dozens killed in raid in Sudan’s Darfur http://goo.gl/fb/Hgvoo

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