CNS STORY: Bishop, Nobel Prize winner join in appeal for action in Darfur crisis

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SUDAN-DELEGATION Oct-28-2004 (560 words) With photo. xxxn

Bishop, Nobel Prize winner join in appeal for action in Darfur crisis

By Catholic News Service

UNITED NATIONS (CNS) -- A Catholic bishop, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and other religious and human rights leaders joined together at the United Nations Oct. 27 in a call for the international community to do more to end the crisis in western Sudan's Darfur region.

The delegation -- which also included Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders and members of the Save Darfur Coalition -- asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to make a firm personal commitment to bring leadership to the United Nations to finally end the violence and suffering in Darfur.

Bishop William F. Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., representing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, joined Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and others in calling for a clear U.N. mandate for the African Union to protect innocent civilians and for other financial and logistical support from the international community.

Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, a Vatican representative to U.N. and humanitarian organizations based in Geneva, recently said 6,000 to 10,000 refugees are dying each month in Darfur because of violence, lack of food and shortage of medicines. More than 2 million people have been driven from their homes, with many living in refugee camps in Chad and Sudan.

Bishop Murphy was undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican from 1980 to 1987. He filled in at the meeting for Bishop John H. Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Fla., chairman of the USCCB Committee on International Policy, who could not attend.

In a written message released by Bishop Murphy, Bishop Ricard called on "Catholics and all people of good will to do everything they can to help bring an end to the reign of terror confronting our brothers and sisters in Sudan."

Specifically, he asked for increased pressure on the Sudanese government to achieve several goals: "saving innocent lives; allowing people to return home eventually in peace and security; protecting those languishing in camps for the internally displaced and those involved in the delivery of humanitarian relief; respecting cease-fire agreements and seeking a negotiated settlement between the government and the rebel groups; and holding responsible those who perpetrated atrocities and crimes against humanity."

Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who won the peace prize in 1986, said at a press conference after the meeting that the group wanted to tell Annan "of our pain, of our anguish, of our outrage at the situation in Darfur," according to an Agence France-Presse report.

"Some of us belong to the generation that has seen the indifference of the world," he said. "For me the indifference of the past in a source of anguish and despair. Therefore, if we speak today, it's because we say: No more indifference."

Among those participating in the meeting were Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid of the Justice Committee for Majlis Ash-Shura of New York; Archbishop Kharjag Barsamian of the Armenian Church of America; Sara Bloomfield of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and Tony Kireopoulos of the National Council of Churches.

Other participants were Ruth Messinger of American Jewish World Service; Hannah Rosenthal of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Franciscan Father Michael Perry, policy adviser to the U.S. bishops on African affairs; the Rev. James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York; and David Rubenstein, coordinator of the Save Darfur Coalition, which is made up of more than 100 national faith-based and humanitarian organizations.

END

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