Darfur crisis is palpable to them

Ibrahim Hamid's village is no more, all but scrubbed from the map of his homeland.

Fatima Haroun's childhood home was burned to the ground, torched by the same militia group that slaughtered her aunt, seven months pregnant at the time.

Ismael Omer called his family three months ago, only to learn that his cousin had been slain - shot to death in his bed, with his 18-month-old son at his side.

For these three - and the 32 other Sudanese expatriates attending this weekend's Darfur Leaders Network conference in Philadelphia - a cause doesn't get more personal.

Beginning yesterday morning and running through today, this gathering of the Darfur Leaders Network, founded in 2007 under the auspices of the Save Darfur Coalition, is designed to promote a Darfurian peace through negotiation and advocacy. Delegates from Texas to Maine (and seven from Philadelphia) assembled at the Newspaper Guild offices at 13th and Buttonwood Streets to take part. The crisis, which began in 2003, has left hundreds of thousands of Sudanese dead and millions displaced, by United Nations estimates.

"Darfur is in my mind every second, every minute, for the last 15 years," said Omer, who fled Sudan in 1994 during the country's long-running north-south conflict separate from the Darfur crisis. Omer, who now lives in Dallas, was being held for distributing antiwar fliers when he escaped from a "torture house."

"If you call the villages, all they have is bad news," Omer added.

The detachment from home creates a helpless feeling, to be sure - one exacerbated by what some Darfur Leaders Network delegates see as "compassion fatigue" from the international community.

Beyond this, many activists are frustrated over the Obama administration's preliminary stance on the conflict. Scott Gration, the president's special envoy to Sudan, has offered the possibility of lifting economic sanctions on Sudan, in hopes of engaging in bilateral negotiations with the country's leaders.

Even to an organization founded on the principles of consensus-building, such a strategy seems counterproductive. "We know that this government never honors any agreement," said Hamid, a Northeast Philadelphia resident who chairs the Darfur group's steering committee. "If you approach them with the carrot and not the stick . . . they are going to buy time."

With built-in barriers as intractable as these, progress has been hard to come by. Delegate Ali B. Ali-Dinar, grandson of Darfur's last sultan, calls the Darfur Leaders Network's chances of achieving its goals "a long shot."

Of course, the odds are far greater that a cause so grounded in personal tragedies could ever escape the advocates' collective conscience. "They will kill, burn, shoot, rape," said Haroun, one of 10 women in the Darfur Leaders Network. "I will not stop until everything is settled, until my people get their rights, as long as I'm alive."