Targeted Divestment of KPERS and KCPER from Sudan

In the Darfur region of Sudan, Africa, the government-backed Janjaweed militia has killed 400,000 Darfurians and displaced another 2.5 million from their homes, yet only limited and ineffective international action has been taken to put an end to these horrors. To put that into perspective, the population of Wichita is around 350,000, and the population of the state of Kansas is 2.6 million, but can you imagine the world merely standing by if the genocide were occurring here?

The best course of action that we can take is to push for targeted divestment (that follows the Sudan Divestment Task Force's targeted divestment model) of the Kansas Public Employee Retirement System (KPERS) and the Kansas City Police Employee Retirement (KCPER) fund from Sudan. Divestment is the exact opposite of investment. With a pension fund such as KPERS, this process involves identifying companies whose revenues go to the Sudanese government (which funds the Darfur genocide), and then selling the pension fund's holdings in any of these companies' stocks. This does not hurt the pension fund in any way, as it simply reinvests its money in other companies. (A copy of the targeted divestment model is available on the Sudan Divestment Task Force's website: www.sudandivestment.org.)

While political pressure and diplomacy have had little to no effect on the Sudanese government's actions, economic pressure has proven remarkably effective in years past, and targeted divestment is the most powerful economic tool we have to influence the government. Targeted divestment has the unique power to stop the genocide because it hurts the companies that investors are divesting from, causing them to pull out of Sudan, which damages the Sudanese economy. After enough companies cease operations in Sudan, the government will realize that continuation of the genocide is not beneficial to Sudan and will allow U.N. peacekeeping forces into their country.

We can stop the Darfur genocide if we work together to divest our own state pension fund from Sudan. However, if we stand idly by, the genocide has the potential to morph into a tragedy of Holocaust proportions. Please join us in our fight against this preventable catastrophe.