A Sudanese refugee is walking barefoot in the halls of Congress to drum up support in the fight against genocide in his home country.
The plight of Sudan’s refugees has been largely ignored on the international level, where United Nations Human Rights officials have taken aim at Israel for maintaining a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria and a maritime blockade on the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza.
The anti-Israel campaign took on a different note in Tel Aviv Monday night, where human rights campaigners protested outside the Opera House to denounce the Cape Town Opera. The demonstrators claim that its appearance for the premier of the Porgy and Bess opera represented support “of Israeli oppression on Palestinians,” according to the South African Artists against Apartheid.
The South African Star reported that the protesters parodied the songs in the opera, singing “Boycott apartheid, boycott apartheid. It's time to tell Israel, no. Palestine, life there is not easy. Fascism is at the door."
Last month, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said, "Just as we said during apartheid that it was inappropriate for international artists to perform in a society founded on discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity, so it would be wrong for Cape Town Opera to perform in Israel.”
Opera official Michael Williams said it was "reluctant to adopt the essentially political position of disengagement from cultural ties with Israel or with Palestine.”
Tutu has not been in the forefront or even the second front of the campaign to stop the genocide in Sudan. While the protest was being staged in Tel Aviv, Sudanese refugee Simon Deng walked barefoot in the offices of Congress members to bring attention to a vote on mostly Christian South Sudan's independence from the Muslim-dominated north.
"There is a great danger of another bloodshed in my country. American people and leaders are capable of preventing it and I will do all I can to make sure Sudan is on their agenda," said Deng, Sudan Freedom Walk's Co-Founder and an escaped slave. “I will visit the offices of every Congressman to ask for support of my people at this pivotal time. I want to make sure that if a war breaks out in Sudan, nobody can say he or she did not know.”
Deng visited the offices of Senators John Kerry, Russ Feingold, Harry Reid and others. He recently marched for 250 miles from New York to Washington to raise awareness about Sudan, conducting the walk barefoot to publicize solidarity with all marginalized Sudanese people.
Sudan's indigenous African peoples have been historically oppressed and marginalized by various Arab minority-ruling regimes in Khartoum. This marginalization intensified when the radical Islamist regime of the National Congress Party (formerly National Islamic Front), led by indicted war criminal Omar Al-Bashir and an extremist cleric, Hassan Al Turabi, seized power in a military coup in 1989.
Deng, who was enslaved for three years by an Arab family in the North, explained, "For more than 50 years, the tyrants in Khartoum tried to exterminate Sudan's African peoples. They did it in the South, the Nuba Mountains and in Darfur. They did it to Christians, traditionalists and even to their fellow Muslims."
