Mr. Speaker, I commend the House, Chairman Hyde and International Relations Committee for bringing H. Con. Res. 403 to the floor quickly and I urge a unanimous vote for this important resolution. The conflict in Sudan began early last year…
Mr. Speaker, I commend the House, Chairman Hyde and International Relations Committee for bringing H. Con. Res. 403 to the floor quickly and I urge a unanimous vote for this important resolution.
The conflict in Sudan began early last year when the Government of Sudan began arming the Janjaweed militia to suppress local rebel groups. The Janjaweed, with the support of government troops began their reign of terror on the people of Darfur.
The result--ethnic cleansing and the death of thousands of innocent civilians. One million people are now displaced. Village after village attacked, looted and burned. The survivors bear scars of mutilation and rape. Schools filled with students have been attacked and the girls raped.
Thousands of survivors walk days, weeks and sometimes months in the unrelenting sun to seek safety in Chad. They are pursued by Janjaweed and often bombed as they languish on the border.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped in camps inside Darfur. Surrounded by militia and unable to leave to seek water or firewood. Families are forced to make life or death decisions on which family member will go to gather food and risk certain death.
People are living on top of each other in crowed camps. Disease and malnutrition are rampant. USAID now estimates that by fall the world will see catastrophic mortality rates from disease and starvation.
The world has finally found its voice as reports are trickling out describing the reality of Darfur. The headlines in major U.S. newspapers have read like a horror film:
``Sudan militiamen on horses uproot a million'';
``Sudan's hellish humanitarian crisis'';
``Sudan's Darfur is calm because there are no more villages to burn''.
``Sudan starving Darfur refuges''
I would like to read an excerpt from the May 15 Economist:
Her story is typical. . . . An air raid caught her
unawares: as bombs fell, she ran around in confusion. When
the bombers had completed their return pass, the horizon
filled with dust, the ground shuddered, and a host of mounted
militiamen charged through the village, killing all the young
men they could find . . . her 18-month baby . . . killed by
shrapnel.
Two weeks later her oldest son, 15, was made to kneel in
line with other young men before being shot in the back of
the head. Her husband disappeared the same day.
But words are not enough. The international community has been reluctant to act.
Secretary General Kofi Annan should go to Darfur and stand with the persecuted.
I introduced this resolution so Members of Congress would have the opportunity to voice their support for the innocent people in Darfur.
This resolution strongly condemns the Government of Sudan and government-supported militia groups for attacks against innocent civilians, in violation of the Geneva Convention.
The Government of Sudan should immediately disarm the militia, and allow full unconditional humanitarian access to Darfur. The civilians who are languishing in camps should be provided immediate protection.
Why is the world slow to respond when atrocities are taking place before our eyes?
The world has said never again over and over again, yet when it is put to the test and charged with protecting humanity it continues to fail.
Why has the international community become content with the slaughter of innocent human beings?
When will the death of innocent human beings be too much for the world to bear?
We need to be bold and willing to condemn and shame countries that commit atrocities against their own citizens.
It is our moral responsibility to protect humanity and not sit idly by in the face of horror. Those of us in public office have the unique responsibility and the power of our voices to confront evil.
The world is a safer place when the world sides with the opposed.
Today, let our voices be raised for the innocent people of Darfur.
Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record the full Economist story. I urge every Member to read the graphic detail of Khartoums destruction of innocent lives.
[From the Economist, May 15, 2004]
Fleeing the Horsemen Who Kill for Khartoum
Her children's bodies were rotting in the village wells,
where Arab militiamen had thrown them to poison the water
supply. But Kaltuma Hasala Adan did not flee her home.
Leaving her crops and livestock would condemn the rest of the
family to death, she reasoned. So she stayed put for four
months, despite her government's strenuous efforts to
terrorize her into flight.
Her story is typical of western Sudan's black Africans. Her
village was first attacked in January. An air raid caught her
unawares: as the bombs fell, she ran around
in confusion. When the bombers had completed their return
pass, the horizon filled with dust, the ground shuddered, and
a host of mounted militiamen charged through the village,
killing all the young men they could find. During that first
attack, Kaltuma's 18-month baby, Ali, was killed by shrapnel.
Two weeks later, her oldest son, Issa, 15, was made to kneel
in line with other young men before being shot in the back of
the head. Her husband disappeared the same day.
For four wretched months, Kaltuma lived with both ears
strained for the faint drone of bombers, poised to dash with
her three surviving children to a hiding place in a dry river
bed. Then the janjaweed--an Arab militia that kills for the
Sudanese government--rode up to finish the job. They razed
her village entirely. She fled from the embers of her hut and
trekked for four days through the desert. Across the border
in Chad, she found sanctuary in the town of Tine. Thousands
of her neighbours were already there when she arrived.
The UN's humanitarian co-ordinator for Sudan, Mukesh
Kapila, described what is going on in Darfur, an arid region
of western Sudan, as ``the worst humanitarian crisis in the
world''. Human Rights Watch, a lobby group, has accused
Sudan's Arab-dominated government of crimes against humanity.
The government is seeking to purge Darfur of black Africans,
using methods as cruel as they are effective. Perhaps a
million people have fled their homes. Officials deny ethnic
cleansing, of course, but the refugees say they lie.
As Kaltuma tells her story, a crowd gathers to corroborate
it. Osman Nurrudin Sadr says his whole family was killed.
Khadija Yacob Abdallah, a pretty 17-year-old, watched her
parents die and was then gang-raped. All the refugees offer
the same explanation. ``They want to kill us because we are
black,'' says one.
It is a little more complicated than that. Sudan, Africa's
largest country, is the scene of two separate but related
civil wars. One, between the north and south, pits the Arab,
Islamist government against rebels who are mostly black
African and non-Muslim. This war has been raging
intermittently for half a century, but has come tantalizingly
close to resolution in the past year: partly because of
foreign pressure, especially from America, and partly because
both sides, exhausted, wish to stop fighting and share
Sudan's new-found oil wealth.
The other war, between the government and two rebel groups
in Darfur, pits Muslim against Muslim. The divide in Darfur
is ethnic, between Arabs and black Africans. This war flared
up only last year. It was seen at first as a mere sideshow,
but is now too vast and vile to be ignored.
centuries of suffering
The south has been marginalized for centuries. Arab slavers
used it as a hunting-ground for human booty, despite Anglo-
Egyptian attempts to crush the trade in the 19th century.
When independence came in 1956, southerners demanded
autonomy. They were ignored, so they rebelled.
The war paused between 1972 and 1983, but then resumed. The
government used scorched-earth tactics against the main rebel
group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), bombing
villages suspected of rebel sympathies, and arming and
encouraging militias to kill and pillage in rebel-held areas.
Slave raids continued, checked only by the absence of tarmac
roads in the south.
Largely because it involved Muslims enslaving Christians,
the war gripped the imagination of America's influential
Christian lobby. In fact, only a minority of southern
Sudanese are Christians; the rest are cheerfully polytheistic
or animist. Nonetheless, America took an interest, which
increased when the radical Islamist regime in Khartoum hosted
Osama bin Laden in the early 1900s. In retaliation for al-
Qaeda'a attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
in 1998, President Bill Clinton bombed a Sudanese factory he
said was producing nerve gas, but which may have been making
aspirin. The regime was already distancing itself from its
international terrorist associates, a process swiftly
accelerated by the American invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq.
Sudan's rulers rounded up terrorist suspects, shared
intelligence and froze Mr. bin Laden's assets in Sudan,
including a cannabis farm worked by child slaves who had
apparently been brought from a Ugandan rebel group for one
Kalashnikov each.
At the same time, the Sudanese government started to yield
to American pressure to seek peace with the south.
Negotiations have been tortuous, but Vice-President Ali Osman
Taha keeps talking to John Garang, the SPLA leader. If the
government shows bad faith, America threatens to choke it
with sanctions and to bankroll the SPLA.
Since 2001 the two sides have hammered out a series of
agreements that are supposed to culminate in a comprehensive
peace. Last September they signed a security accord, mapping
out how Khartoum will withdraw most of its troops from the
south. This year has seen a written agreement on how to split
the revenues from the oil that lies under Sudanese sand, and
verbal agreements on power-sharing and the future of three
contested areas. Some of these are on the northern side of
the line (see map), but their inhabitants consider themselves
southern.
For an interim period of six years, Sudan is to remain one
country, with Omar al-Bashir, the current president,
remaining in office, and with Mr. Garang, the rebel leader,
as his deputy. Then there is to be a referendum in which
southerners will be offered the choice of staying or
seceding.
the west burns
The trouble with this plan for a new Sudan is that it
involves only the two main belligerents. Peaceful opposition
groups have been left out. Since neither the government nor
the SPLA is remotely democratic, many Sudanese seethe at the
prospect of them divvying up the petrodollars. In Darfur,
that rage has sparked mayhem.
Darfur has seen sporadic fighting for generations. As the
desert has expanded, camel- and cattle-herding Arab nomads
have bickered with black African farmers over dwindling
supplies of water and pasture. Darfur's black tribes complain
that, since the 1980s, they have been pushed out of
government jobs in favor of Arabs. And the region has been
flooded with weapons. Khartoum first armed the janjaweed so
they could ride south and pillage SPLA territory. Arms from a
long-running conflict between Chad and Libya seeped across
the border into Darfur.
Last year, a new rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army
(SLA) appeared in Darfur and won a string of victories. Soon
after, a second group sprang up, the Justice and Equality
Movement (JEM). The government in Kartoum felt vulnerable. It
was terrified that rebel successes in Darfur might inspire
other marginalised groups in the north and east, especially
since the SLA has links with a rebel group in the east.
The government struck back, not only against the rebels,
but also against their ethnic kin. It unleashed the
janjaweed. To swell the militia's ranks, Arab criminals were
released from jail and given horses, $100 each and carte
blanche to loot. (These ex-prisoners are labeled ta'ibeen,
``those who have repented''.)
The janjaweed have clattered into village after African
village, torching the straw roofs of conical huts, killing
young men who might join the rebels, raping women who might
feed them, and stealing everything they can carry off.
Sometimes they brand the hands of the women they rape, to
make the stigma permanent. They have also torched dozens of
mosques and torn up and defecated on copies of the Koran.
Whatever inspires them, it is not Islam.
Their victims have no doubt that the janjaweed enjoy the
state's blessing. When asked what gives them the right to
stop blacks at road blocks, the militiamen reply: ``We are
the government.'' When pillaging, they are often supported
by the air force and by the regular army. ``First the
planes come, then the janjaweed and finally government
soldiers,'' says a refugee. ``They are brothers united on
a mission to kill.''
It was a long time before the outside world took notice. At
first, both America and the UN hesitated to make a fuss about
Darfur for fear of derailing the north-south peace process.
But in March, the UN's man on the spot started making
comparisons with the Rwandan genocide of 1994. That was an
exaggeration, but it prompted Washington to lean on Khartoum
to end the ethnic cleansing. A ceasefire followed on April
8th, supposedly to help aid workers do their job, but was
quickly broken.
Fighting and pillage continue, making it hard to feed the
displaced. The UN does not want to get too close to the
border--the janjaweed do not respect international
boundaries--so it has moved 35,000 refugees deep into Chad.
Tens of thousands remain stranded near the border. Those
unfortunate enough to wind up in camps in Darfur have been
deliberately starved by the janjaweed, according to the UN.
Brave charities such as Medecins Sans Frontieres have
ignored the occasional air raid to dole out medical supplies,
feed the hungriest and vaccinate against a meningitis
outbreak. Most refugees in Chad have depended on food and
water from the locals who, though poor, are startlingly
generous. Supplies are running out, however, and the UN
mission is short of cash.
The rainy season is almost here, when the valleys will fill
with water and it will be impossible to get the refugees into
the half-empty camps that await them. UN lorries lie stranded
because there is no money for fuel and the drivers, unpaid
for six weeks, have gone on strike.
Over 10,000 newly arrived refugees around Bahai, north of
Tine, have been dismissed as ``combatants''--though most are
women, children or old men. For the UN, admitting that they
are refugees would mean being obligated to look after them.
``I'm trying to think of something the UN has done right
here, but I'm struggling,'' says one aid worker with a sigh.
spears and ploughshares
There is more to cheer about in southern Sudan. After years
of enduring the same abuses now being lavished on Darfur, the
south is relatively calm. In Rumbek, the largest town under
SPLA control, where abandoned armoured cars rust outside
buildings gutted by shelling, hardly any shrapnel has flown
for two years.
Half-forgotten tribal traditions are being rediscovered. On
a dusty football pitch known as Freedom Square, thousands of
young Dinka men, coated with ash and clad in glamorous
calfskin skirts, gather to elect a sub-chief. Not long ago
such affairs were subdued, forced indoors by the fear of
aerial bombardment. Now they are gleefully raucous.
War has left the south shattered. Most of the young
warriors queuing behind their chosen candidates have known
nothing else. There is no electricity or running water in the
south, an area the size of France and Germany combined, and
precious few schools, either. Southern children used to join
either the rebels or government-backed militias. They grew up
knowing how to march long distances on empty stomachs, but
not how to read.
Peace, if it lasts, will offer southerners a chance to grow
less poor. In one village, your correspondent saw a group of
SPLA soldiers melting bullets to fashion spearheads for
hunting gazelles. The same men were baffled, however, by a
consignment of ploughshares, kindly donated by a western aid
agency. Unsure what these strange objects were for, they beat
them down to make stools.
Elsewhere, workers can be seen hacking through thorny
scrub. They are clearing a path for a road, heading for a
large rock in the wilderness known as Ramciel, or ``the place
where the rhinos meet''. More accurately, it should be
``where rhinos used to meet'', as they were poached out of
existence some time ago. It is here that the SPLA is thinking
of building the south's principal city. Charles Deng, the
assistant foreman, has big dreams for the place. ``First we
will finish the road,'' he says. ``Then we will build
skyscrapers and ponds, better than London or maybe even as
good as Nairobi.''
Not everyone welcomes progress. An SPLA commander in nearby
Yirol murmured into his beer that he hoped the capital would
be built elsewhere. ``If they build it here then they will
also build schools and our girls will be sent to those
schools,'' he said. ``You know what the means? Their bride
price will fall. My daughters will be worthless to me.''
The end of the war, or of Sudan?
A formal deal ending the war is expected in the next few
weeks, possibly sooner. Since President George Bush is widely
seen as the architect of peace, he is perhaps more popular in
southern Sudan than anywhere else on earth. At the Rumbek
sub-chief's election one young warrior called Thuapon leaps
frenetically in the air, proudly waving a white Barbie-doll
in a pink dress. ``This is a new wife for President Bush. May
God grant him many fertile women with firm bodies and an
election victory without problems in Florida.''
The main outstanding issue concerns the religious status of
Khartoum. The government wants it to remain under sharia
(Islamic law); the SPLA does not. Some fudge is surely
possible. Observers are confident that a deal will be signed.
``If Khartoum were to renege at this point, it would signal
that this whole process was a charade from the beginning,''
says John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, a
campaigning think-tank.
The difficulty will lie in how the deal is implemented.
Unsurprisingly, southerners do not trust the government.
``They just want time to re-arm,'' says James Thucdong, an
aspiring teacher in Rumbek. ``We know this is just a peace of
one or two years. They will never let us become
independent.'' Mr. Thucdong could well be right. There is no
provision yet for what will happen to revenues from Sudan's
oilfields, which lie mostly in the south, should voters
choose secession.
The two sides are unwilling to discuss this issue, but
Khartoum would presumably never let the south go if that
meant losing the petrodollars, too. ``When preparations begin
for the independence referendum, we are going to see major
meddling by elements in Khartoum, aimed at creating chaos in
the south and delaying [the] plebiscite,'' predicts Mr.
Prendergast.
Another worry is that southerners are squabblesome. During
the war, they spent as much time fighting each other as the
government. Mr. Garang may still be the south's key leader,
but his support for a united Sudan will irk secessionists,
who are probably a majority in the south. Other ethnic groups
resent the politically dominant Dinka people, and even the
Dinka are divided.
Once a peace deal is signed, many of the 4m southerners
living in squatter camps around the main cities of the north
will probably decide to pick their way through minefields and
make the long journey home. Tension over scarce natural
resources seems likely. As if to confound the optimists,
there has been a serious outbreak of fighting in the
ancient Shilluk kingdom since March. At least 70,000
people have been driven from their homes after battles
between militias loyal to Khartoum and the SPLA. As usual
in Sudan, most of the casualties were civilians.
many voices, many fears
In Khartoum, the mood is apprehensive. The political elite
is genuinely alarmed at what capitulation to southern demands
might encourage. Says Ghazi Attabani, a former presidential
adviser: ``If the south were to secede, it would be
catastrophic both for Sudan and for Africa. Secession would
not be peaceful. Internal differences in the south would
cause rifts which would make Rwanda seem like a picnic.''
Because of stringent censorship and the physical difficulty
of visiting Sudan's more troubled areas, ordinary northerners
have only a rough idea of what is going on in their own
country. Some are optimistic. ``Of course the people can live
together,'' says Ahmed Omar Othman, a shopkeeper. ``Just look
around Khartoum, we do already. Here, you will find a church
next to a mosque--surely that [proves it]? The real problem
is whether the politicians can work together.''
The record of Sudanese politicians in this are is not good.
Their preferred technique for holding this huge and
multifarious country together--barbaric force--has been shown
not to work. In Darfur, as Mr. Attabani admits, ``There is no
military solution.'' Arming gangsters such as the Janjaweek
is easy; reining them in again may prove much harder. Says
Sharif Harir, chief negotiator for the SLA rebels: ``Even if
Khartoum had the will to stop them, it probably doesnt' have
the power.''