Issue date: 11/16/07 Section: News

Mohamed Yahya urged students of all backgrounds to band together for Darfur. ORACLE PHOTO/SEAN REED

Mohamed Yahya was born in a small village in eastern Darfur and grew up in "a small house built of straw and wood, not like the buildings (people) have here."

Yahya came from a family of farmers but was fortunate enough to attend a university in Cairo, Egypt.

Yahya, who spoke at USF as part of the University Lecture Series Thursday evening, now works as an activist to educate the public about the genocide and humanitarian crisis in Darfur, which has driven over 500,000 people from their homes and has since spilled over into neighboring countries.

The violence stems from a conflict between the government-backed Arab, Janjaweed militia and the tribal Massaleit community, which is comprised of non-Arab Muslims. According to the Save Darfur campaign, 400,000 people have died, and dissent on the United Nations Security council has stalled decisive action.

In 1993, only weeks after Yahya took a break from school to visit his family, his village was decimated by the Janjaweed militia. Those in his family who were fortunate enough to escape fled to Chad with tens of thousands of other displaced Darfurians. Among the 21 members of his family slaughtered by the militia were two of his grandparents. His grandparents were burned alive after being thrown inside their own hut; because they were disabled, they could not flee.

Yahya received word from his mother a week after the invasion of his village. She had escaped along with two of his siblings. In a letter to Yahya, she told him: "As long as you are alive, we will meet again."

The letter that Yahya received in 1993 was the last communication he received from her for a long time.

"Thank God, we were able to find my mother, we were able to find my brother. But that is not the issue. The issue is those who are still in Darfur. We need to save them as soon as possible," he told an audience of about 200 people.

With a strong desire to do something about not only his own family members but also the countless other villages that were destroyed in the initial attacks, Yahya and his colleagues at Al-Azhar University banded together with three goals in mind: to end the genocide, to collect monies to send to anti-genocide programs and to educate the world community about the crisis in Darfur. For more than a decade, these same goals have guided the actions of Yahya and many of his fellow countrymen.

Continued...

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