Emory Report homepage   >   Current issue front page

October 25 , 2004
'Crisis in Sudan' panel to discuss situation in Darfur

BY elaine Justice

Four leading voices in the effort to raise awareness of the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan will speak at a public panel discussion on the “Crisis in the Sudan” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 27, in WHSCAB auditorium.

The discussion is one of a series of initiatives under way on the Emory campus to bring attention to the ongoing crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region. The Sudan working group is a coalition of student groups, academic departments and administrative offices that are cooperatively sponsoring programming and conducting outreach and education to bring public attention and help to the region.

Panelists for the Oct. 26 event include Jerry Fowler, staff director, Committee on Conscience, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Deborah Scroggins, journalist and author; Basia Tomczyk, epidemiologist, CDC international emergency and refugee health branch; and Michael Rewald, senior advisor for rights-based
programming, CARE.

Fowler works to carry out the Committee on Conscience’s mandate “to alert the national conscience, influence policymakers and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity.”

In January 2004, the committee issued a “Genocide Warning” regarding Darfur, and in May Fowler visited Sudanese refugee camps in Chad to obtain first-hand accounts of the situation. His publications include the essay, “Out of That Darkness: Preventing Genocide in the 21st Century,” forthcoming in the second edition of Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views.

Scroggins, a writer and journalist from Atlanta, is a former political and foreign affairs reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and a winner of six national journalism awards for her reporting from the Sudan and the Middle East. She is the author of Emma’s War: An Aid Worker, Radical Islam and the Politics of Oil—A True Story of Love and Death in Sudan. The book is about the late aid worker Emma McCune and Rick Machar, the Sudanese warlord she married.

Tomczyk recently led a team conducting a health survey in northeastern Chad. She said Sudanese children in Chad are experiencing a major nutritional crisis similar to those seen in Ethiopia in 1999 and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2000. She also said public health intervention in the region now would save children’s lives.

Rewald has been involved in the field of international relief and development since 1981, having worked in Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia and Bangla-desh. He has worked with CARE for the past 14 years in a variety of positions in country offices as well as at the organization's headquarters in Atlanta. As CARE’s senior advisor for rights-based programming, Rewald leads the organization’s efforts to align its relief and development work with international human rights principles and standards.

The panel discussion is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Mary Jo Duncanson at 404-727-2536 or mary.jo.duncanson@emory.edu.

TOP