The Doha Darfur Funding Conference: To Fund Peace or Genocide

The Doha Darfur Funding Conference: To Fund Peace or Genocide

The National Congress is touring the world these days, sending delegations to different countries from Germany in Europe to South Africa soliciting support and participation of those countries in the Doha Darfur Funding Conference, which is planned to take place next month from the 7th and 8th of April 2013. This conference is coming at a time when the humanitarian situation in Darfur is deteriorating, more people are displaced, killed and wounded by the government and their allied militia and the continuous aerial bombardment against the civilian populations and at a time of a clear established failure of the Doha Peace Agreement, which is part of the piecemeal solution that has never worked in the interest of peace and stability and democracy in Sudan. The conference is scheduled at a time when the Sudan government is hosting an Islamist militant group from Mali that took refuge in Darfur.

There is international consensus that the Darfur crisis has not been resolved from the statements that were issued all over the world to mark 10 years of the Darfur crisis and that was clear in the US Administration’s statement, the recent United Nations expert report and in all of the statements by the humanitarian and human rights organizations. At this very time, a funding conference will be held in Doha, Qatar next April to fund the same government that is committing genocide. Ironically the fund will be administered by the very people who are wanted by the international justice and by the very government that is using its air force to bomb civilian populations in Darfur contrary to all the UN Security Council resolutions and the Congress of the United States and the European Union Parliament. This is raising serious questions about the credibility of the present approach towards the Darfur crisis. We appeal to all countries that are involved in this conference and in particular the democratic countries and the countries who are at this point in time behind those national and international resolutions on the Darfur crisis, to postpone the conference until a comprehensive peaceful settlement and justice and democracy are delivered to Darfur and the Sudanese people, and thereafter, their funds will be meaningful and will serve the correct purposes.

The SRF call upon its membership and its offices worldwide and the Sudanese people in general to engage in a worldwide campaign to postpone this conference for a later date or at least to urge the democratic countries to boycott the conference and to call for a comprehensive peaceful settlement and reconciliation, democracy and rule of law, and ending of impunity as a prerequisite to such a conference.

We call upon all activists worldwide who are behind the anti-genocide movement, are against human rights violations in Darfur and are in solidarity with the Sudanese people to let their voices be heard to stop this conference which will only fund the same genocidal government and it will support and embolden the government to commit more human rights violations and to continue its genocide.


Yasir Arman

Secretary for External Affairs, SRF

March 2, 2013