Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Sudan Genocide Declaration Stirs World, 9/15/04
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec04/sudan_genocide.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is "genocide"?

2. Can you think of a recent situation in which there was the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group?

3. When should the international community intervene in a civil war, or brutal dictatorship?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What did the United Nations' World Health Organization recently report about the situation in Sudan?

The United Nations' World Health Organization issued new figures saying 6,000 to 10,000 people are dying per month there in one of Africa's worst humanitarian crises.

2. What did U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell say about the situation in Sudan?

The report comes a week after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the killings, rapes and other atrocities committed in Darfur amount to "genocide." Powell used the word in remarks before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and based his finding on a U.S. State Department survey of 1,136 refugees living in neighboring Chad. He determined that "the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility, and genocide may still be occurring."

3. What was the Sudanese government's response to Powell's statements?

In response, the Sudanese government claimed that Powell's statement was "flawed, regrettable and dismaying." The government claimed the report was "based on partial observations by an American team that had never set foot in Darfur and interviewed politicized refugees in Eastern Chad."

4. What is the history of the word "genocide"?

The word genocide came out of the violence of World War II and recalls the Nazi attempt to systematically eliminate the Jewish people in the Holocaust. The official definition is the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group. In 1948 the United Nations General Assembly gave genocide a legal definition in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

5. Why have heads of states been hesitant to label situations "genocide"?

Historically, many heads of state have been hesitant to use the label genocide, as doing so would make them legally obliged to act to "prevent and punish" the perpetrators.

Ten years ago, the Clinton administration resisted applying the term genocide to ethnically motivated massacres in Rwanda until 800,000 people had been killed. The former president later apologized for not having acted more quickly.

6. What are the causes of violence in Darfur?

Tension in Darfur between black Africans and Arabs dates back decades. The two groups have long competed over scarce land, water and other natural resources.

However, the situation came to a head in early 2003, when two groups of black Africans from the region openly rebelled against the Sudanese government, demanding inclusion in new power-sharing arrangements.

To suppress the rebellion, the Sudanese government trained and armed Arab militias, according to human rights groups.

"The Janjaweed, armed militias supported by the Sudanese armed forces, are committing massive human rights violations in the Darfur region in the west of Sudan. They are systematically pillaging and destroying the towns and villages of Darfur, forcing the people to flee for their lives," Amnesty International reported.

7. What has the Security Council said about the situation in Darfur?

On July 30, the United Nations' most powerful body, the Security Council passed a resolution demanding that the Sudanese government disarm the Janjaweed and stop the violence within 30 days. If the authorities failed to do so, the Security Council threatened to take action against the government. When the Secretary General's Special representative to Sudan went to investigate the situation at the end of August, he found that the government had not made satisfactory progress. The Security Council is currently discussing how best to respond to this report.

8. What punishment is the United States considering?

How to punish the Sudanese government is a more complicated issue. The United States and the European Union have threatened sanctions in which they would refuse to buy oil from Sudan, thus starving the government of profits from the industry. However, China, which buys a lot of oil from Sudan, has threatened to veto any Security Council resolution that includes sanctions.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Keeping in mind the U.S. commitment to ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, what do you think the U.S. should do about the situation in Sudan?

2. If the Sudanese government opposes any intervention in the region, what should the United Nations do?

3. What would you add to the definition of "genocide"? How would you measure levels of violence and judge when to intervene?

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.