Daoud Hari spent most of his life working on a family farm in Musbat, a village in Darfur, until his village was bombed by his own government. He escaped to join an estimated 2.5 million other Darfurian refugees.
Hari shared his story with Georgetown students as part of the “Voices from Darfur” nationwide speaking tour on Tuesday night.
The tour, organized by the Save Darfur Coalition, was brought to Georgetown by the university chapters of STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The coalition seeks to raise awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur by sending refugees to speak to students.
Hari spoke of losing family members to the genocide and of his work taking Western reporters into the ravaged region. He was imprisoned and tortured by the Sudanese government for more than a month in 2006 along with Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Slezak.
“I feel so strong when I’m speaking on behalf of the people who are still in Darfur,” Niemat Ahmadi, a Darfur native who has become a prominent member of the opposition to the Sudanese government and spoke along with Hari, told a student who asked about the frustratingly slow pace of action to end the Darfur genocide.
“If you speak only on behalf of yourself, then it’s very easy to get discouraged,” Ahmadi said. “But when you’re speaking for a group of people in need, you gain an enormous amount of courage.”
The death toll as a result of the genocide is estimated to be as high as 400,000 people. Most of the the refugees have fled into nearby Chad.
“I want the audience to be able to put faces on the statistics instead of viewing the refugees as just a number,” NAACP chapter president Elizabeth Gunderson (COL ’10) said.
Over sixty students were on hand to listen to the first-person accounts of the genocide in Sudan. Many of those who were present said they were moved by the horrors that the speakers had witnessed in Darfur.
“A lot of the times what we hear about Darfur never seems real,” Fanny Brito (COL ’08) said. “But I think this is so unique in that we actually get to see the refugees face-to-face. It makes it a lot more personal.”
The original STAND chapter was founded by Georgetown students in 2004, which has expanded to over 600 colleges, universities and high schools.
