Action Darfur Awareness Week, created by students in the registered student organization Action Darfur, will be hosted on the main Quad from Monday until Friday.

Lining the Quad will be a photo exhibit, which will illuminate in pictures the current crisis in Darfur, Sudan, accompanied by major statistics and quotes from refugees.

Volunteers will be on hand distributing information and collecting signatures for the Million Voices for Darfur campaign. Opportunities will be given throughout the week to write letters or make telephone calls to congressmen or congresswomen.

“Our main goal is to raise awareness,” said Action Darfur president and founder Brian Schwartz, senior in LAS and Business. “The real tragedy in Darfur is that most people don’t know about it.”

Since February 2003, genocide in Darfur, a western region of Sudan, has resulted in an estimated total of 400,000 killed. Government-supported “Janjaweed” militias systematically murder, torture and rape, as well as torch villages, poison water supplies, and destroy livestock. These tactics have been used to clear civilians from areas considered disloyal to the Sudanese government, and prevent them from being able to return.

The violence has resulted in an estimated 2.5 million displaced from their homes and 3.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance. Internally displaced civilians are subject to sexual abuse, inadequate shelter, widespread famine and infectious diseases. Janjaweed militias use rape to continue preying upon civilians after driving them from their homes.

Currently, the peacekeeping effort is mostly comprised of 7,000 African Union soldiers deployed by the United Nations with strong NATO support. In a statement last Friday, President Bush said the current effort “was noble, but it didn’t achieve the objective.”

“I’m in the process now of working with a variety of folks to encourage there to be more troops, probably under the United Nations,” Bush said. “But it’s going to require a NATO stewardship, planning, facilitating, organizing, probably double the number of peacekeepers that are there now, in order to start bringing some sense of security.”

Schwartz said that the primary way students can help is to spread knowledge – which may eventually prompt donation of funds – and to contact state representatives to create political pressure.

On Wednesday at 7 p.m. in 112 Gregory Hall, refugee and former Sudanese slave Simon Deng will give a lecture as part of Awareness Week. Deng was abducted at the age of 10 to serve as a slave to his master Mahmed Ahmed, and his wife Amna. He escaped bondage years later and went on to work as a messenger for the Sudanese parliament. He later became a national swimming champion.

“I thought I could forget and forgive,” he said. “But villages are still being burned, women are still being raped and people are being sold into slavery.”

Deng is currently an activist for the current Darfur crisis, speaking at rallies and telling his story – illuminating through personal experience the need for concern and action.

A total of 12 organizations are helping to sponsor Awareness Week, including International Impact, an RSO that organizes service projects abroad.

Miriam Young, co-president and senior in LAS, said that their most important objective is to spread awareness of the issue.

“Even if for five minutes . people walking by on the Quad stop to look at one of the exhibits and they’re struck by it, that would be a victory,” she said.