Augustus wants action in Sudan

 “While they suffered, the world was partially aware, yet silent,” said Sen. Edward M. Augustus Jr.

Maintaining neutral, remaining indifferent when people are abused, raped and murdered is its own kind of evil, because apathy allows the atrocities to continue, he said.

Today, the world has remained nearly silent as the genocide in Sudan, Africa, has killed nearly 500,000 and displaced another 3 million from their homes, he said.

On March 29, Augustus, along with a group of Shrewsbury High School students, activists from Brandeis University, fellow legislators, citizens, and survivors testified to the Joint Committee on Public Service in order to help end the genocide in Sudan.

“As the speakers before me so passionately recounted, these men, women and children have been raped and robbed, torn from their families, their ambitions and potential ripped from them,” Augustus said.

“While they suffered, the world was unaware and silent – at first. Now, the perpetuation of genocide is slowly coming to light. The silence is being broken, voice by voice,” he said.

Their testimony was meant to move Congress into passing an act to divest public pension funds from companies doing business there in order to end a genocide that “rages without intervention.”

“This is far more than just a divestment issue. It is a positive and effective way that Massachusetts can act against this blatant genocide,” Augustus said.

Six of Massachusetts’ sister states have already successfully divested their state pension funds, over a dozen other states have filed legislation to do the same, and universities across the nation have responded with divestment plans, he said.

Skeptics may assert that one state cannot stand up to a nation, he said, but when people’s collective efforts “certainly create a groundswell.”

“It is crucial that we pass this legislation and cut off the money that is serving as a lifeline for genocide. Companies must not be able to generate profit from such unspeakable acts in Darfur,” Augustus said.

Each time society witnesses the atrocities of war or human rights abuses, people pledge that it will never again happen on their watch, he said.

Yet in the 1990s, the Hutus, the majority tribe in Rwanda, conducted a mass slaughter of the minority Tutsis, slaughtering men, women, and children with machetes, torturing and raping the people whom they called “cockroaches.”

And the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic carried out a policy of ethnic cleansing and aggression, with the intent to destroy the entire non-Serbian population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Augustus said.

Often, there is a “wide and tragic gap” between the pledge, “Never again” and people’s actions, he said.

“For us here in the Massachusetts Legislature, that must end today,” he said.

Last year, the State Senate voted unanimously to condemn the genocide in Darfur (at the center of the killings in Sudan), he said, compelling his fellow Legislators to now act.

“The day has come to act on our values and take action that matches our rhetoric,” Augustus said.

Students have been the heart of the movement to end the genocide in Darfur, he said.

Like they did during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, the youth have been the ones to call attention to injustices in our society and lead the way to take action, he said.

Today, they are gathering again on college campuses across the country, organizing groups like STAND, Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, he said.

In Massachusetts alone, 25 universities and colleges have started their own STAND chapters and made remarkable strides to increase awareness on their campuses, said Augustus. 

“We see the horror of genocide on our televisions, we know the atrocity exists because we read about it the newspapers – yet we are still paralyzed.

“Our inaction reminds me of the words of Edmund Burke: ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,’” Augustus said.

An individual cannot do much on his or her own; together, people can accomplish far more, he said.

This is not the first time that Massachusetts has attempted to divest the state pension fund as an economic sanction upon a nation “content with its own immoral practices,” Augustus said.

In the 1980s, when Massachusetts worked to end apartheid in South Africa using a similar plan to divest, the proposal was met with the same skepticism, he said. 

In the end, however, that bill passed and Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to fully divest all of the state pension’s stock and bonds from firms doing business with the racially segregationist government, Augustus said. 

After Massachusetts divested, 25 states and cities had already begun calling for withdrawal of public funds, he said.

“It is indeed revealing that hundreds of United States corporations decided to work together and discuss the situation in South Africa, a situation that had existed for so many years. Their cooperation conveniently came at a time when states and cities decided that they could no longer fuel a racist policy,” Augustus said.

The pressure exerted by the divestiture from South African businesses and the attention it drew to the abuses of the apartheid government is credited with regime change in South Africa and the end of the nation’s apartheid, he said.

Through their pension funds, Americans today own nearly 50 percent of corporate America, Augustus said.

“…Investment now goes hand-in-hand with social responsibility,” he said.

Hard-working public employees who have a stake in pension funds do not want to retire on “blood money,” he said; they value the preservation of individual rights.

“What is happening in Darfur is repugnant and alien to the American experience of personal rights and freedom from oppression, and the residents of Massachusetts are slowly yet surely refusing to financially support a government that they themselves would never live under.

“We must raise our voices to our government, because they cannot speak to theirs,” Augustus said.