Link: In Solidarity: Global Day for Darfur

Link: Please visit Modern Musings for links to posts on the crisis at 25 participating blogs.

UPDATE 4/14/08: Please also check this link at Modern Musings for facts, statistics, videos, petitions, and other ways to get involved in activism.

My other links are to the Wikipedia, for their take on the war on Darfur.

Darfur, the home of the Fur people, is a region roughly the size of France, located in western Sudan.

From the Wikipedia:

There are many casualty estimates, most concurring on a range within the hundreds of thousands. The United Nations (UN) estimates that the conflict has left as many as 400,000 dead from violence and disease.^[5] Most non-governmental organizations use 200,000 to more than 400,000; the latter is a figure from the Coalition for International Justice.^[6] Sudan’s government claims that over 9,000 people have been killed, although this figure is seen as a gross underestimate.^[7][8] As many as 2.5 million are thought to have been displaced as of October 2006. ^[9] (see Counting deaths section, below).

The Sudanese government has suppressed information by jailing and killing witnesses since 2004 and tampered with evidence such as mass graves to eliminate their forensic values^[10][11][12] In addition, by obstructing and arresting journalists, the Sudanese government has been able to obscure much of what has gone on.^{[13][14][15][16]} The United States government has described it as genocide,^[17] although the UN has not done so (see List of declarations of genocide in Darfur). In March 2007 the UN mission accused Sudan’s government of orchestrating and taking part in “gross violations” in Darfur and called for urgent international action to protect civilians there.

After fighting worsened in July and August, on August 31, 2006, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1706 which called for a new 17,300-troop UN peacekeeping force called UNAMID to supplant or supplement a poorly funded and ill-equipped 7,000-troop African Union Mission in Sudan peacekeeping force. Sudan strongly objected to the resolution and said that it would see the UN forces in the region as foreign invaders. The next day, the Sudanese military launched a major offensive in the region. (See New proposed UN peacekeeping force)

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Which global powers bear the most responsibility for the crisis, I don’t know. In the United States of America, we hear a lot about a role played by the People’s Republic of China. Since (1) the U.S. itself is far more capable of projecting economic and military power around the world (and far more accustomed to doing so), since (2) I’m hearing the story mostly through the U.S. media, and since (3) the U.S. (like any world power) has a history of exploiting stories of human suffering to manipulate public opinion at home, personally I feel I need to do more research before I try to write about the international politics.

Those are also three more good reasons to check out 25 writers who have been reading critically about the crisis, all linked in the campaign page on Modern Musings, in large print at the top of this post.