Students Taking Action Now on Darfur (STAND) scored a victory last week when the California State Teachers’ Retirement System Board voted 9-0 in support of a measure to divest the fund’s holdings from companies with ties to Sudan.

The decision was the fruit of an intercollegiate effort, STAND being one of the contributors. The organization is a national movement with branches on over 200 college and high school campuses. Its mission is to promote financial and political action to alleviate Darfur’s humanitarian crisis.

Twenty students from Stanford’s STAND chapter joined 60 others in front of California State Teachers’ Retirement System’s (CalSTRS) headquarters in Sacramento last Thursday to rally for action. Among the crowd was State Treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, who pushed the Investment Committee to make the ultimate decision.

“We were going to just make our voice heard, but Angelides pushed the issue and CalSTRS took a big first step in tentatively agreeing to divestment,” said senior and STAND leader Ben Elberger in an email to The Daily.

“Action by CalSTRS — the nation’s second largest pension fund with over $141 billion in assets — marks the most significant divestment action to date to address the growing crisis in Darfur,” Angelides told The California Chronicle on April 6.

Elberger also emphasized the strong influence CalSTRS wields over Sudan’s activities. Members of Stanford STAND believe CalSTRS has enormous power to affect company behavior, with consulting firm Conflict Securities Advisory Group estimating that CalSTRS has over $5.5 billion in companies doing business in Sudan.

“We believe that targeted divestment of oil-sector companies can leverage that enormous holding to pressure oil companies to scale back operations in Sudan — depriving the government of necessary oil concession revenue — or to pressure oil companies to demand an end to the genocide from the Sudanese government,” Elberger said.

“At the end, we produced a substantial result,” said Nikki Serapio, a junior and STAND member. “Just recently, the Sudanese government released a propaganda piece decrying the U.S. divestment movement — it appears that we’ve struck a nerve.”

Angelides acknowledged the grassroots student movement as one of the key contributors to the successful approval of his motion.

“The groundswell of support for divestment demonstrated truly served as a wake-up call that American investment funds should not support a regime that has perpetrated systematic attacks against its own citizens,” he said.

The decision is a marked shift for the CalSTRS board, which voted against a different proposal to divest the fund’s holdings in PetroChina, a company with enduring ties with Sudan’s government.

According to Elberger, divestment campaigns have been successful as recently as 2001 in Sudan, when Christian groups across the United States took action to pull investments out of the most prominent oil company doing business in Sudan: Talisman Energy Corp. The campaign was initiated to pressure the Sudanese government to come to the bargaining table to negotiate peace with the south.

On Stanford STAND’s next agenda is urging the U.S. government to help deploy NATO intervention to end the violence against Darfur civilians, said junior STAND member Elissa Test.

“On April 30, STAND, Human Rights Watch and other groups are holding a Day of Conscience for Darfur at the Golden Gate Bridge and the Presidio, in coordination with another major rally in Washington D.C.,” said Test.

Last year, the University Board of Trustees voted unanimously to divest from any directly-held investments in petroleum companies PetroChina, Sinopec, Tatneft and ABB, Ltd., which operate in Sudan.