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.

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.

In 2008, to underline the magnitude of the Darfur genocide, PDEC conceived the idea of creating professionally printed signs each bearing the name of one of the destroyed villages in Darfur.  These signs, representing 610 of more than 3,300 Darfur villages destroyed or severely damaged since 2004, have been carried in marches in Pittsburgh and Washington D.C., displayed on college campuses, and exhibited on Flagstaff Hill in Pittsburgh in sight of the G-20 delegates and world leaders who met in the city in September 2009.

Activists with destroyed villages sign. Photo courtesy of PDEC

David Rosenberg, Ph.D., is the co-founder of the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition and a scholar of the French Wars of Religion. He previously worked on community campaigns which focused on memorializing the Holocaust, racial and religious discrimination, and the right of workers to organize into unions.

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.

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.

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.

To bring the Darfur issue to the attention of world leaders, we brought to the fore a series of advocacy events during the days before and during the G20. The first came on September 8 when our friends and allies on the Pittsburgh City Council offered a proclamation to the newly settled Darfuri refugees, and passed a resolution in support of our demand that the G-20 countries defer debt relief to the government of Sudan. Mohamed Mohamed Yahya was among those present to receive the City Council’s official welcome as were Ismail Omar Ismail, Mohamed Ismail, Abdallah Suleiman, Tayb Hamdan, Siddig Nour Ahmed, Alli Abbo, Abdul Mohammed, Mesetwet Gebra Gzabhar from Eritrea, and James Lomilo from South Sudan. This in itself was moving and powerful.

Also moving was the participation of the South Sudanese community in the advocacy work of PDEC and Save Darfur, and the great hospitality they showed to their Darfuri brothers and sisters. The South Sudanese community in Pittsburgh led by Benedict Killang, Isaac Leju-Loding and Kothar Albe, helped prepare food for the break fast (iftar) on the evening of Sunday, September 13, and hosted Darfuri visitors from the Darfur Alert Coalition in Philaldelpha who had generously traveled six hours across state to be with us for these activities.

Our next big event was on Monday, September 14. It was a “Pre G-20 Press Conference and Solemn Walk for Darfur and South Sudan.” On the steps of the City County Building, we handed over 15,635 postcards to representatives of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation. These cards had been collected during the past year by activists from Western Pennsylvania and Ohio as part of the most recent campaign of the Save Darfur Coalition. A joint statement on the G-20 was issued by national Darfuri and South Sudanese diaspora leaders. They requested that the G-20 countries not grant Sudan debt relief until they behaved properly toward their citizens in South Sudan and Darfur.

We also had a news making announcement: we received a permit from the city of Pittsburgh to construct a display of the destroyed village signs on Flagstaff Hill during the G-20. This was a major advocacy coup, as permitting of protests activities was generally snarled in red tape, and the site we were allocated was as prominent a location as one could hope for. It was just opposite the Phipps Conservatory where the G-20 delegates held a reception and a working dinner on Thursday, September 24.

Following the Press Conference, we marched silently, to the beat of drums through the downtown streets of Pittsburgh at lunch time. In the march we carried some of the destroyed village signs. Eight days later, we took all 610 destroyed village signs to Flagstaff Hill, where we the only group to secure a permit for a 10,000 square foot area to display the destroyed villages. Before, during and after the installation, the display attracted tremendous media interest, and caused cars to stop, and passersby to approach. Associated Press photos went worldwide. Access to the area was restricted on the afternoon of Thursday September 24 when President Obama and other world leaders arrived at the Phipps, but we know for a fact that the delegates’ motorcades passed right by and within clear view of the display! Darfur was seen and heard at the G20 by the Pittsburgh community, let’s hope that the world’s leaders heard us too.

David Rosenberg is Coordinator of the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition.

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.

Due to the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition’s advocacy efforts local leaders decried the ongoing atrocities and added their voices to the coalition’s call to action for world leaders convening for the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh next week.

Today was a celebration of something not cited in fact sheets or published in research reports. Today was a community being just that – a community; the only commonality shared today was a unanimous call for peace. The movement found new allies in the city of Pittsburgh with the engagement of new activists pulled from the Pittsburgh government, the faith community, and local students just finding their own voices in change.

by Natasha Ghent-Rodriguez and Will Fischer