The UW is set to be the scene of a mock massacre today, as students gather from 12:10-12:40 p.m. in Red Square and symbolically "die in" as a representation of the estimated 200,000 Darfurian Muslims who have been killed by the Sudanese Army and Arab militias over the past four years.

Throughout this week, the Save Darfur Coalition at UW (SDCUW) has been participating in the nationwide Global Days for Darfur campaign, an event to raise awareness about the ongoing Darfur genocide. The campaign was organized by the Washington, D.C.-based Save Darfur Coalition, an umbrella organization of more than 180 faith-based and advocacy groups, which aims to raise awareness about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Tuesday, students hosted a bake sale in front of the HUB, and tomorrow SDCUW will provide phones for students to call their state representatives and ask them to support a bill designed to protect states from corporate lawsuits following their divestment from companies doing business with the Sudanese regime.

Students at the UW have been actively campaigning against the genocide in Darfur since 2005, while 600 high schools and even more colleges have also been campaigning for international action to end the genocide.

Junior and SDCUW activist Ben Weintraub has witnessed the Darfur movement evolve since its inception and is optimistic about the impact of this week's events on the UW population.

"It's generally encouraging seeing awareness grow about Darfur on campus over the past few years, and [the die-in] will hopefully add to that," Weintraub said.

Senior Lauren Ciszak helped organize today's event and hopes the die-in will help to promote the Sudan divestment campaign, which aims to deprive the Sudanese government of U.S. taxpayer dollars invested in international hedge funds.

"What we're hoping for is two-fold: first, to raise awareness around campus; hopefully people will see 100 people pretending to be dead and wonder what that's for," she said. "The second thing we're hoping to do is ... gather signatures at a table asking the city of Seattle to divest."

Darfur has been the scene of a bloody ethnic conflict between pro-democracy ethnic Darfurian fighters and Arab government-backed militias known as the Janjaweed since the spring of 2003. The government of Sudan is known to have paid and armed the Janjaweed militias, who use brutal tactics such as mass rape and burning children alive, to depopulate vast areas of Darfur and force the Darfurian population into concentration camps where it can be monitored and prevented from aiding the pro-democracy Darfurian rebels.

In August of 2004, when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the conflict in Darfur was "genocide," the conflict began to gain media attention in the United States and Europe.

Weintraub believes the event will accomplish its goal of raising awareness.

"I think a lot of people are aware of Darfur, but this will bring it to the fore of their consciousness," he said.

Reach reporter Jake Sommer at news@thedaily.washington.edu.