Dare to care about Darfur

Dare to Care about Darfur
March 3, 2006
Reported by Ann Curry of NBCs Today show

Minutes now before this reporter's flight toward what has been called the world's worst humanitarian crisis: the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan.
Janjaweed attacks, by mostly light-skinned Arabs against black Africans, are stepping up again, now crossing the border into Chad. Both sides of the border are now increasingly militarized and the threat of greater violence looms.
Caught in the middle, some 200,000 refugees who fled Darfur, running from the killing, rape and burning of thousands of villages. Chad is no longer a safe refuge, not even to the people of Chad in this no man's land we are heading to. Meantime in Darfur, some two-million people are also in refugee camps.

There is so much suffering in Africa, why should NBC News venture into this dangerous place and focus on this suffering specifically?
Because there is a direct line from the Holocaust to Rwanda, to Bosnia to Kosovo, and to Darfur — a line that we can not ignore and allow to be crossed and still call ourselves human.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, call it what you will. But above all call it unacceptable. We must stand behind the words "never again."
The plane's doors are closing. May the stories we bring back make you care.