Mark Hanis, founder of Genocide Intervention Network, to speak here next Monday
Mark Hanis, founder and executive director of the Genocide Intervention Network, will speak at St. Thomas at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 20, in O'Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium. He will be joined by Hugh Parmer, executive director of the American Refugee Committee, a humanitarian aid organization that operates refugee camps in Darfur. The event is free and open to the public.
Hanis is Jewish, and all four of his grandparents are Holocaust survivors. When he was an undergraduate at Swarthmore college, he and some of his classmates became deeply troubled by the rising death toll in Darfur, Sudan. They realized that the promise of "never again" after the Holocaust needed to be repeated in Darfur, and they pledged to make a difference.
The U.S. Congress has labeled the conflict in Darfur a genocide. More than 400,000 people have died and 2 million more have been displaced.
The Genocide Intervention Network now has more than 700 chapters at colleges and universities around the world. Its three-fold mission is the educate about the situation in Darfur; to engage people in advocacy for a nonmilitary solution to the crisis; and to raise funds for nonweapons support of the African Union, the limited peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Learn more about the network's goals and activities at this event, which is sponsored by the St. Thomas chapter of the Genocide Intervention Network and the university's Justice and Peace Studies Department, All College Council, and University Lectures Committee, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Hanis will be in the Twin Cities Nov. 17-21 and will speak at 10 locations. For more information, visit the Genocide Intervention Network Web site or contact Dr. Ellen Kennedy, (651) 962-5082. For more information about the network's St. Thomas chapter, e-mail Sarah Hogan, president.
