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 Shocked delight as Israel sends aid to Sudan refugees
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From the Jerusalem Post and FYI
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/index.html?ts=1103843261
Shocked delight as Israel sends aid to Sudan refugees
URIEL HEILMAN; Jerusalem Post; Dec 16, 2004; pg. 01
Shocked delight as Israel sends aid to Sudan refugees
Jursalem Post
In what Israeli officials are calling a first, Israel is sending some
$20,000 in aid to Sudan to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis
there.
On Wednesday, Israel joined with several US Jewish groups in sending
$100,000 to support the International Rescue Committee and aid children
in
Sudan and Chad orphaned by the civil war in Sudan's Darfur region.
Sudanese refugees and human rights groups say government-sponsored Arab
militias known as the Janjaweed are killing tens of thousands of black
Muslims in Darfur in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Muhammad Yahya, a native of Darfur and founder of a group called
Representatives of the Massaleit Community in Exile, said his
countrymen are
grateful for the assistance and astonished by its source.
"We have been taught for all our lives, from the primary school to the
university, that you are the top enemy for Muslims and Arabs all over
the
world," Yahya said of the Jews and Israelis behind the $100,000 effort.
Now,
he said, "we realized that what we have been taught all our lives is a
kind
of a rumor. When we have been killed, you are protecting us; when we
are
displaced, you are trying to save us; when our people are murdered and
raped, you are there trying to help us."
Yahya said he is grateful for the American Jewish support and the aid
from
Israel, which Arye Mekel, Israel's consul-general in New York, called
Israel's first humanitarian support to residents of an Arab country
with
which it has no diplomatic ties.
"You are the voice of the voiceless," Yahya said. "We need to support
each
other and stand by you and support you forever."
"I tell my people in Sudan and in Darfur: Please forget about the
rumors
that the Israeli people are our enemy," he said. "They are not enemies
anymore."
Jewish groups collectively have sent more than $1 million in aid to
humanitarian causes in Sudan since the violence in Darfur took a turn
for
the worse in early 2003, according to the American Jewish World
Service,
which supports humanitarian and economic projects in the developing
world.
Earlier this year, the organization helped create the Jewish Coalition
for
Sudan Relief, a collection of some 15 groups. The groups involved in
the new
$100,000 aid package are the Union for Reform Judaism, the New Jersey
MetroWest Federation and UJA-Federation of New York, in addition to the
15-member coalition, AJWS and Israel.
Mekel said Israel decided to send the aid along with American Jewish
groups
to stress that Israel and the Jews work together when it comes to
Jewish
values issues.
"The State of Israel is following the developments in Darfur carefully,
and
as a people who has gone through persecution, we could not sit idly on
the
sidelines through such a devastating humanitarian disaster," he said.
"This
is according to the Jewish values."
The civil war in Sudan has been waxing and waning since 1983, but the
violence escalated in Darfur, a farming region in the western part of
the
country, in February 2003. Since then, an estimated two million
Sudanese
have been displaced as the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab tribesmen armed by
the
Sudanese government, began raping, maiming and murdering their black
African
farming neighbors, according to humanitarian experts. The Khartoum
government has tacitly encouraged the violence and exploited the ethnic
tensions in a bid to control Darfur's water and arable land resources,
they
said.
"These are people who had a functional lifestyle and have lost
everything
they've owned," Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World
Service, said in August after a visit to Sudan. "The nature of life in
these
places is really appalling."
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Mohamed Suleiman
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