Utahns rallying against Darfur crisis

As Chuck Bruder puts it, "I'm a shrink by profession, so I try not to think of myself as obsessed" — but for the past four months, he has spent several hours a day thinking about the genocide in Darfur.

He hopes you'll think about it, too.

Like a growing number of Utahns, Bruder is passionate about putting an end to the killings in western Sudan. On Christmas Day, after reading about the crisis, he started SaltLakeSavesDarfur. The group is one of nine Utah groups affiliated with the national Save Darfur Coalition, and one of scores of groups worldwide planning rallies on Sunday, April 29, which has been designated as the Global Day for Darfur.

The Westminster College chapter of the student anti-genocide coalition group STAND will also sponsor a free lecture tonight featuring John Prendergast, senior adviser of the International Crisis Group. The event will cap the college's Darfur Action Week, which included a Darfur Teach-in.

Next Saturday, April 28, Salt Lake diners can donate money by eating at restaurants participating in Dining for Darfur. The restaurants will give 5 percent of that evening's proceeds to the International Rescue Committee, which in turn will send the money on to relief efforts in Darfur and refugee camps in Chad, according to local event coordinator Rebecca Simmons.

The April 29 Global Day for Darfur isn't the first worldwide set of rallies focused on the crisis that has killed an estimated 400,000 people, and terrorized and displaced 2 million more. But previous global attention on the crisis hasn't yet convinced the Sudanese government to let in United Nations peacekeepers — a fact that doesn't discourage Bruder. Like other activists, he insists that public pressure can and will make a difference.

Although other genocides have taken place during Bruder's lifetime, the Salt Lake City clinical psychologist says it was only this winter, when he finally paid attention to the grisly details about Darfur, that the significance hit him.

When Bruder's father was in his 20s, extended family members pooled their money to buy him a one one-way boat ticket to America. If they couldn't all survive Hitler, the reasoning went, maybe at least one person could make it out alive. They picked Samuel Bruder — and later, every last one of his relatives was gassed in Nazi concentration camps.

"My people were exterminated simply for being Jewish," says Chuck Bruder. Six decades later, reading about Darfur, he realized he could no longer live with the notion of genocide — "that people are being killed for who they are. I have to do whatever I can."