A group of students has worked for two years to organize a conference about the civil war in the Sudan, a conflict in which more than two million people have died.

Modeled after Macalester’s annual International Round Table, the conference on Sudan is a two-day affair featuring internationally known experts on that part of the world. The conference will kick off next Friday, March 1 with keynote speaker Francis M. Deng, a well-known scholar of the conflict.

“The situation in Sudan cannot be pigeonholed into one dynamic,” International Studies Professor David Chioni Moore said. Moore helped Patrick D’Silva ’03, Lizzie Seefeldt ’02 and J. Quinn Martin ’02 organize the event. “It combines religious, post-colonial, global-economic, post-Cold War and other dynamics. Unfortunately almost all factors bearing on the Sudan seem to work in the worst possible way, and in combination. That is why this conference is so important,” Moore said.

D’Silva, Martin, and Seefeldt have been careful to bring a variety of voices. “There is a lot of rhetoric on the war,” Seefeldt said. “We’ve picked people that will give differing perspectives.”

The conference was D’Silva’s idea. He is currently studying abroad in Morocco, but he will return to respond to one of the conference speakers.

Currently Sudan has a record of human rights abuses as a result of the government’s desire to create an Arab Islamic state at the expense of a large non-Arab population, according to the conference organizers. In the south are the Dinka and the Nuer, two related groups that face both inter- and intra- cultural conflicts revolving primarily, but not exclusively around religion. Slavery, genocide and war are just a few of the issues that the conference will address.

Anthropology Professor Dianna Shandy is a specialist on the Nuer, a group entangled in the net of Sudan’s arbitrary colonial borders. She says that this conference differs from many of the spontaneous lectures on this topic she recalls from her graduate years at Columbia University in that Macalester’s conference will have a group of specialists together for a sustained amount of time and whose goal has been only to be at Macalester in order to address the issues concerning Sudan.

“I am very excited,” she said of the conference.

Though attention to Sudan has grown in the past few years, most of that attention focuses on humanitarian help. Seefeldt, however, said she found it difficult to make meaningful contributions to the Sudan conflict in that way. Lack of time, money, and the assurance that her well-intended efforts would reach the right people, led Seefeldt to change her perspective on the meaning of help. She, Quinn Martin ’02, and Patrick D’Silva ’03, decided that they would use the resources available to them as Macalester students in order to help. They organized a conference raise awareness about an issue they thought did not get enough attention.

Martin became interested in the Sudan through his participation in Macalester Christian Fellowship (MCF) and its interest in religious persecution. In addition to China and Indonesia, he learned that Sudan was a place where Christians are the target of much oppression. From there sprung his interest in that part of Africa. Quinn’s interest led him to find out how very complex the situation in Sudan was. Religious persecution is just one of many issues that face the vast area we call Sudan.

This team of three students has impressed many community members with their well-thought-out proposal for the conference and has gained support from academic departments such as International Studies, Russian Studies, and Anthropology. The offices of the provost, dean of students, dean of academic programs, in addition to the Westminster Presbyterian Church and the Minnesota International Center all provided funding for the conference.

Macalester is not the only community that will attend the Sudan Conference. Area churches have been notified. According to Martin, word is out in major poles of Sudanese immigration, such as Omaha, Neb., Sioux Falls, Wis, and Des Moines, Iowa.