Thanks for everything you do! The Avaaz community has responded extraordinarily to refugee Liberata Rumumba's video appeal from eastern Congo, with over 150,000 Euros donated so far to our campaign for European peacekeepers to protect the civilians of Congo, by almost 6000 people.
This has enabled Avaaz to run ads all this week in Brussels and the key European states which could send peacekeepers - Sweden, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands - ads you can see by scrolling down the Congo entries on this blog or clicking the links above. We've followed up the ads with direct conversations with senior officials and politicians in every country.
Meanwhile, crucially, we've been able to commission polls in these countries and in Germany, supposedly one of the principal opponents of an EU deployment to Congo. Those poll results are coming in now and they're very exciting. We'll release them to the media and here tomorrow, before European foreign ministers meet.
Last week UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon spoke on the phone to Belgian foreign minister Karel de Gucht, asking for a European bridging force. But things were looking bleak when, after speaking with European counterparts, de Gucht told the media other states were refusing to commit troops. Late last week, EU High Representative Javier Solana was dismissing the idea, and our information was that the proposal was collapsing.
But late last week our ads ran, and last Friday, Ban Ki-Moon took things up a notch and wrote formally to Solana and Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, asking them to help organise a European force for Congo. The Belgians have decided to make one more push at the foreign ministers' meeting tomorrow.
We're helping to organise a symbolic protest outside this meeting in Brussels, and sending briefings, poll results and ads to government contacts - doing everything we can to get the message through. We'll keep you posted...
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