c. 2007 Religion News Service
Google, Holocaust Museum Offer Close View of Darfur Violence
WASHINGTON (RNS) An unprecedented look at the devastating crisis in Darfur is a free download away under a new partnership between the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google.
Using the mapping technology of Google Earth, people can _ with a single click _ pinpoint villages and huts that have been burned to the ground and track the steps of the hundreds of thousands of refugees.
“People around the world need to see what genocide looks like,” Daowd Salih, a Darfurian refugee, said at a Tuesday (April 10) news conference announcing the partnership. “It is not about numbers, it is about people.”
An estimated 400,000 people have died in Darfur, a war-torn western province of Sudan, where the Khartoum government is accused of supporting Arab “Janjaweed” militias against black Africans. The U.S. government has called the conflict genocide since 2004.
Links to photos, videos, personal accounts and data are provided on Google Earth’s “Global Awareness” layer by the Holocaust museum. Museum director Sara Bloomfield called it an attempt to create “understanding and empathy” to create a “community of conscience.”
Bloomfield compared Darfur to the Holocaust, saying people either were unaware or skeptical of reports that Hitler and the Nazis were terrorizing Jews before and during World War II.
Partnerships like this one will provide more access to the facts of the Darfur situation and facilitate a greater ability to help, Bloomfield said. Just because genocide is happening far from home is no excuse for ignorance or inaction, she said.
Elliot Schrage of Google Earth said users will get a view of Darfur that they can’t obtain by reading statistics or everyday news reports.
“We are trying to visualize the genocide to spark people to action,” Schrage said.
_ Philip Turner
Nun Facing Prison Time for Protesting Military Training Grounds
(UNDATED) A 71-year-old nun and 15 others will be behind bars later this month, serving 100 days for trespassing at the Fort Benning military base in Georgia.
“I’m not afraid,” Sister Sheila Salmon said during a telephone interview Monday (April 9) from her home in Florida. “I’m not looking forward to it. But I’m peaceful about it.”
Salmon, a nurse and missionary, was among 16 protesters arrested at the fort in November during a demonstration by thousands of people calling for the closing of a military training school.
The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation _ formerly known as the School of Americas _ trains civilians, police officers and soldiers from other nations. Activists contend the graduates have killed and tortured people in Latin America.
“They have killed thousands of people,” said Salmon, noting the rapes and slayings of four church women, including two women from Cleveland _ Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a Catholic lay worker. “It’s all well documented.”
For the past 18 years, protesters have converged on the fort the weekend before Thanksgiving. This year was Salmon’s ninth protest. It was the first time she trespassed.
“I said to myself, `It’s time for me to take a different stance for justice,”’ she said. “I talked to my community about it and I had their backing.”
In an act of civil disobedience, she and 15 others crawled through a hole in a fence surrounding Fort Benning and were immediately handcuffed and arrested.
Salmon, who holds degrees in nursing and public health from Saint Louis and Case Western Reserve universities, joined the Sisters of the Humility of Mary in 1954.
She’s now retired and living in Sebastian, Fla., though she still does community outreach and hospice work. She is to report to a federal prison in Tallahassee, Fla., on April 17. She hopes to be released July 25.
When asked whether she will return to Fort Benning for the next November protest, she said, “Yes. But I’m not going through the fence again. Enough of that.”
_ Michael O’Malley
Quote of the Day: Bishop T.D. Jakes, Dallas Megachurch Pastor
(RNS) “On behalf of decent moral people of all backgrounds, and specifically for women of color, we heard the so-called joke. But now the entire media advertisers and industry executives should deliver the punch line.”
_ Bishop T.D. Jakes, responding to controversial remarks by radio talk show host Don Imus, in which he used racial slurs about the women’s basketball team at Rutgers University.
KRE/LF END RNS
