Historical context, societal imperatives and political accountability for Darfur’s genocide were themes explored Wednesday night in a lecture at the Durham Great Hall of the Memorial Union.

Ellen Kennedy, the outreach coordinator at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, detailed the history of the tumultuous nation as one of power and ethnicity.

“We need to take a stand against the genocide,” Kennedy said.

To date, approximately 400,000 Africans have been murdered, with another 2.5 million displaced, in the Sahara Desert, she said.

Kennedy said the conflict began as a response to the Arab-controlled government and its neglect of the Darfur region when African rebel fighters attacked government targets in 2003. However, she said that this attack then allowed for the Sudanese’s systematic genocide of their African inhabitants – a group that represented 60 percent of the entire nation’s population.

“The government responded with an all-out genocide campaign – not just against the rebels, but all Africans,” she said.

Kennedy said that one source for the conflict was resource scarcity, focused on oil.

She said the region’s oil revenues go directly to the Sudanese government, without any reinvestment in the oil’s region of origin, Darfur.

“The area had been ignored since colonial days,” Kennedy said, explaining that Darfur lacks schools, hospitals and roads. Instead, she said, the Sudanese government uses part of the money from the 250,000 barrels pumped from the region every day to fund ethnic cleansing in the region.

“Genocide, or governing, for them is a very lucrative business,” said Tim Gannon, the Iowa director of the Genocide Intervention Network and a member of both ENOUGH and STAND, two coalitions aimed at ending the genocide in Darfur.

Kennedy said there are numerous organizations, such as the International Rescue Committee, the United Nations and her own group, the Genocide Intervention Network, which have been assisting Darfur’s refugees.

However, she fears that too many Americans are unaware, or don’t care enough, to demand political involvement from their local representatives.

In order to fix this, Kennedy called the audience to action and asked them to contact their respective members of Congress to vote affirmatively on issues concerning genocide.

Currently, there is a bill, the Sudan Accountability Divestment Act, that is being lobbied to limit corporate involvement within Sudan. The act would create policies that would encourage targeted companies to remove their business dealings from the country.