The UC Sudan Divestment Taskforce prepared for Thursday’s
UC Board of Regents meeting with a memorial for genocide victims at
Meyerhoff Park on Tuesday.
Tombstones with the number of dead from the genocide in the
Darfur region of Sudan surrounded students, who held up pictures of
the regents and recited what they hope to hear the actual regents
say on Thursday.
“We must do all we can as an institution to end this
situation,” said fourth-year sociology student Michael
Garner, posing as UC Regent David Lee.
Since 2003, 400,000 Darfur civilians have been killed and almost
2.5 million displaced, according to the UC Sudan Divestment
Taskforce Web site.
The group plans to bus 200 to 300 UCLA students to the meeting,
where they will meet up with another 200 students from UC San Diego
and other campuses, said Adam Sterling, cochair of the task
force.
In the best case, the regents will take immediate action to
comprehensively divest from Sudan, Sterling said.
But the task force is also willing to accept a decision to
pressure the managers of the funds in which the UC invests to move
away from investment in companies involved in Sudan, Sterling
said.
If there are no substantive changes by the March meeting of the
regents, Sterling says he will expect more immediate action from
the regents, such as direct divestment from Sudan.
The option of “expressing concern” to the fund
managers to consider the issue is a possibility in this area, said
Trey Davis, a spokesman for the UC Office of the President.
“The university staff will present a range of options …
for the regents to consider,” Davis said.
But the regents also have the option of not acting to divest on
Thursday.
“If the university refuses to take action on this issue,
then we will take a more adversarial stance,” Sterling
said.
The memorial was prefaced by a press conference that included
representatives from various politicians and organizations that
endorse divestment.
Justin Arana, a recent USC graduate, also attended the press
conference. Arana went to Sudan in 2005 as a part of an
nongovernmental medical organization.
While visiting an obstretician-gynecologist clinic in a region
that housed many victims of rape, Arana was imprisoned for taking
photographs even though he had been given permits to do so.
“The Khartoum regime does not want the outside world to
know what is going on,” Arana said.
Charged with crimes against the state that left him facing
possible execution, he was released when African Union soldiers
came to physically remove him, and he was forced to leave the
country, he said.
But the AU soldiers do not have the force to end the genocide,
he said.
Arana added that the Darfur region has more oil than all of
southern Sudan combined.
“Divestment is an integral part to ending this
genocide,” Arana said.
Numerous states and universities, including Illinois, Oregon,
Harvard and Stanford, have divested in the past year. Because of
this, numerous asset management plans have been created that avoid
investing in companies that do business in Sudan, Sterling
said.
A joint resolution adopted by the California Legislature, AJR 6,
condemns the genocide.
A resolution passed in 2005 encourages the California Public
Employees Retirement System and the California State Teachers
Retirement System to pressure companies in which they invest to
“not take actions that promote or otherwise enable human
rights violations in the Sudan.”