Searching for Jacob

This weekend, the government of Sudan ordered the Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General to Darfur to leave the country within three days. His crime: to publish on a personal website the news that the Sudanese Army had suffered two major defeats in Darfur at the hands of groups opposing the regime.

On Sunday night, 60 Minutes aired a moving segment entitled, "Searching for Jacob". The 13-minute piece follows the story of a young man forced from his community into a camp for displaced persons by attacks of the Arab militias called Janjaweed. To its credit, 60 Minutes does not shy away from a key element of the story: That, despite its public declarations that a genocide is occurring on its watch in Darfur, the U.S. government continues intelligence cooperation with the Sudanese government. That cooperation is certainly influencing the nature of the pressure being put on Sudan to end the genocide.

UUSC has chosen to make our advocacy work on Darfur the focus of our upcoming Justice Sunday program, and of our work at the General Assembly in Portland, Ore. None of us can say, "I didn't know."