[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 79 (Tuesday, June 8, 2004)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1071-E1072]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                           GENOCIDE IN SUDAN

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 8, 2004

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit for the record a letter 
sent to Secretary General Kofi Annan signed by 45 Members of Congress 
asking Mr. Annan to go to Darfur, Sudan, to end the genocide.
  I would also like to submit for the record an article from the 
Washington Post, ``In Sudan, Staring Genocide in the Face.'' The author 
is Jerry Fowler, staff director of the Committee on Conscience, The 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  We are staring genocide in the face. Will the world fail to act as it 
has so many times in the past? Over the next few weeks I will continue 
to submit stories from leading news sites on this issue. I want the 
world to know that when historians are looking back at the Darfur 
genocide and wondering why more was not done, there will be evidence in 
the Congressional Record that the world knew.


                                Congress of the United States,

                                                     June 4, 2004.
     Hon. Kofi Annan,
     Secretary General, United Nations
     New York, NY.
       Dear Mr. Secretary General: We are extremely concerned that 
     the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, has not received the 
     international attention or response that is needed to save 
     the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. 
     With the rainy season just weeks away, the window of 
     opportunity is closing.
       The situation on the ground is deteriorating at an alarming 
     rate. Urgent, immediate action is needed to prevent the 
     deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Your 
     going to Darfur would call to the world's attention the 
     ongoing slaughter. Precious time is slipping away.
       We greatly appreciate your leadership on this crisis but 
     the situation calls for even bolder action from the United 
     Nations. We urge you to go to Darfur and stand in solidarity 
     with the people.
       The international community must act swiftly. Failure to 
     act will bring certain death to the thousands languishing in 
     camps. The world will wake up 10 years from now and wonder 
     why more was not done to protect humanity. The evidence is 
     clear. We cannot say that we did not know.
           Sincerely,
       Frank R. Wolf; Donald M. Payne; Tom Lantos; Edward R. 
     Royce; Henry J. Hyde; Christopher H. Smith; Sheila Jackson-
     Lee; Peter A. Defazio; Michael R. McNulty; Peter Deutsch; 
     Lois Capps; Chris Bell; Wm. Lacy Clay; Martin T. Meehan; 
     Michael M. Honda; Elijah E. Cummings; James P. McGovern; Raul 
     M. Grijalva; Todd W. Akin; Vic Snyder; Barbara Lee.
       Ken Calvert; Maurice D. Hinchey; Julia Carson; James T. 
     Walsh; Wayne T. Gilchrest; Carolyn B. Maloney; Edolphus 
     Towns; Michael E. Capuano; Mark Steven Kirk; Chris Van 
     Hollen; Jesse L. Jackson; Sue Wilkins Myrick; Betty McCollum; 
     Brad Sherman; Lucille Roybal-Allard; James P. Moran; Henry A. 
     Waxman; Thomas G. Tancredo; Jo Ann Davis; Luis V. Gutierrez; 
     Gerald D. Kleczka; Timothy V. Johnson; Nita M. Lowey; Sam 
     Farr.
                                  ____


                [From the Washington Post, June 6, 2004]

                 In Sudan, Staring Genocide in the Face

                           (By Jerry Fowler)

       In the cool desert dawn on May 16, at the Touloum refugee 
     camp in eastern Chad, 2-year-old Fatima put her hands on her 
     stomach, groaned and died. Her mother, Toma Musa Suleiman, in 
     describing the death to me the next day, said that Fatima had 
     been sick for 10 days. By the time she died, her skin was 
     pallid and felt like plastic--the effects of malnutrition.
       I was seeing with my own eyes what I had been hearing about 
     for several months: Children are dying almost every day in 
     refugee camps in eastern Chad, despite a vigorous 
     international effort to get food, water and other essentials 
     to the more than 100,000 who have fled in fear from the 
     Darfur region of neighboring Sudan.
       They are among the 1 million Darfurians who have been 
     displaced from their homes, most of whom are still in Sudan, 
     according to aid groups.
       Abukar Adam Abukar, a member of a community health team 
     organized by Doctors Without Borders in the Iridimi refugee 
     camp, one of half a dozen such sites, told me that seven 
     children had died there between May 3 and May 14.
       He took me to the dusty flat on the edge of the camp where 
     some of them were buried, in a forlorn line of small mounds 
     of earth.
       Why did Toma and thousands like her leave their homes and 
     walk for days through the desert, risking their own lives and 
     those of their children? Their stories were remarkably 
     consistent. Person after person in the camps told me that 
     they had fled after attacks on their villages by Arab 
     Janjaweed militias, who have burned hundreds of villages and 
     killed thousands of civilians belonging to black African 
     ethnic groups. To make matters worse, the Janjaweed are 
     backed by the Sudanese government, which wants to put down 
     rebels drawn from those tribes. Many of the refugees said 
     that the Janjaweed had stolen their animals and other 
     property and that relatives or neighbors, usually men and 
     boys, had been killed before their eyes. The refugees fled 
     with little more than the clothes on their backs and the few 
     things they could load onto a donkey. Many also said they 
     were attacked from the air by the Sudanese government's 
     Antonov bombers, either in their villages or as they fled 
     toward the border.
       I went to Chad last month on behalf of the U.S. Holocaust 
     Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience, which has issued a 
     genocide warning for Sudan. Having now heard firsthand the 
     refugees' accounts of the terror they faced in Sudan and of 
     being driven into the desert, where their government is 
     blocking assistance from the outside world, I have no doubt 
     whatsoever that mass death will ensue in Darfur unless far 
     more international assistance is immediately allowed to reach 
     the displaced who are still there. In short, I fear the 
     specter of genocide.
       I interviewed refugees spread over hundreds of miles in 
     eastern Chad. One woman, Hadiya Adam Ahmed, had crossed into 
     Chad only two days before and was living under a tree near 
     the remote border town of Bahai. Spread around her were her 
     few remaining possessions: a blanket, some water jugs, a few 
     bowls. She had left home without food and in two weeks of 
     travel had depended on her fellow refugees for occasional 
     handfuls of soaked sorghum for herself and her nine children. 
     Hadiya had two bullet wounds in her right leg. She said she 
     had been shot by a Sudanese soldier when she and a 17-year-
     old girl went to draw water from a well for themselves and 
     others who were fleeing.
       When asked why their villages were attacked and burned, 
     most of the refugees said it was because of their black skin. 
     They believe that the Khartoum-based government of President 
     Omar Hassan Bashir wants to give their land to his Janjaweed 
     allies who, like him, are Arab. Members of the Zaghawa, 
     Masalit, Fur and other black African tribes will simply have 
     to go. Like the Janjaweed, the Darfurians are Muslims. But 
     culturally and ethnically they retain an African identity, of 
     which they are proud. They also tend to be more settled than 
     the nomadic Janjaweed. Racism undoubtedly does play a part in 
     Bashir's support of the Janjaweed, as the blacks are seen as 
     inferior.
       Ironically, the prospects for peace in southern Sudan also 
     contribute to the conflict. Fearing that an end to the 
     generation-long rebellion in southern Sudan will divide 
     access to the country's resources between the ruling elite in 
     Khartoum and the southerners and condemn Darfur to permanent 
     second-class status, some Darfurians launched an armed 
     rebellion in early 2003. Khartoum responded by unleashing the 
     Janjaweed and its own military on the black African civilian 
     population. The result was what a team of U.N. investigators 
     last month called a ``reign of terror.''
       Those who have crossed into Chad are relatively lucky. An 
     underfunded international relief effort by organizations such 
     as Catholic Relief Services and Doctors Without Borders is 
     providing some food, water, shelter and health care. For the 
     displaced Darfurians who are still in Sudan, however, the 
     situation is more dire. Khartoum has severely limited 
     international access to them. And in the unforgiving desert, 
     the stealing of food and animals, burning of homes and 
     blockage of access to wells--in short, the campaign of the 
     Janjaweed and the government--is tantamount to a death 
     sentence. The U.S. Agency for International Development 
     estimates that 350,000 Darfurians will die in the coming 
     months unless the government in Khartoum allows international 
     aid groups dramatically better access to the region.
       That raises the question of genocide. Under the U.N. 
     Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948 in the shadow of the 
     Holocaust, genocide is defined as certain actions undertaken 
     ``with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, 
     ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.'' The actions 
     include ``killing members of the group,'' ``causing serious 
     bodily and mental harm to members of the group'' and--
     particularly relevant to Darfur--``deliberately inflicting on 
     the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its 
     physical destruction, in whole or in part.'' The convention 
     obliges parties to the treaty, including the United States 
     and 130 other nations--to ``undertake to prevent and punish'' 
     the crime of genocide.
       In cases like Darfur, there is always a great deal of hand 
     wringing about what is and is not genocide. But such 
     discussion misses the point: A key element of the Genocide 
     Convention is prevention. It calls for action once it is 
     apparent that genocide is threatened. There is no need for an 
     absolute determination, which is inevitably elusive, that 
     genocide is underway.
       And in Darfur there can be no doubt that genocide is 
     threatened. As former U.S. Ambassador David Scheffer once 
     said of Kosovo, there are ``indicators of genocide.'' 
     Whatever the formulation, there is more than enough going on 
     in Darfur to justify preventive action.
       Time is of the essence. The rainy season will begin in the 
     next few weeks, making access to Darfur--where major roads 
     become impassable with flooding--difficult, if not 
     impossible.
       The government in Khartoum will do whatever it can to 
     forestall any decisive international action. It is well 
     practiced at giving the illusion of taking a step forward 
     while really taking two steps backward. For example, it now 
     is making a show of promising to streamline humanitarian 
     access. But

[[Page E1072]]

     the record suggests that the government simply cannot be 
     trusted. Even as it was claiming that the situation in Darfur 
     was stable, its Janjaweed allies killed several dozen people 
     on May 22. Allowing better access to aid groups will mean 
     little if the militias continue to run rampant in the 
     countryside.
       What is needed now is a U.N. Security Council resolution 
     mandating unrestricted humanitarian access to Darfur and 
     laying the groundwork for the displaced Darfurians to return 
     home safely. The Security Council should invoke the 
     collective obligation to prevent genocide as well as its 
     authority to maintain international peace and security, which 
     is threatened by Janjaweed incursions into Chad and conflicts 
     between the Chadian and Sudanese militaries. A statement 
     issued by the Security Council on May 25, expressing ``grave 
     concern'' about Darfur, is a step in the right direction. But 
     it is no substitute for a formal resolution.
       The United States has been lobbying in the Security 
     Council, but it cannot do it alone. Darfur presents an 
     opportunity for Secretary General Kofi Annan to avoid a 
     repetition of the United Nations' failures during the Rwanda 
     genocide of a decade ago, when warnings of mass murder were 
     ignored. Indeed, in marking the 10th anniversary of the start 
     of the Rwanda genocide on April 7, Annan said that reports 
     from Darfur filled him ``with a sense of deep foreboding.''
       Since then, however, he has said little in public other 
     than to welcome Khartoum's promise to ease restrictions on 
     international relief. His reticence is all the more 
     remarkable because other U.N. officials, such as Mukesh 
     Kapila, until recently the top U.N. humanitarian official in 
     Sudan, have been outspoken in sounding the alarm.
       Annan must say, simply, ``This must stop'' and use all his 
     skill, energy and influence to forge an international 
     consensus to back up that statement. To do otherwise, to 
     welcome empty gestures from perpetrators of the gravest 
     abuses, merely encourages them to continue to murder and 
     pillage.
       During both the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide, warnings 
     were received and ignored. Today we say ``never again.'' The 
     question now is whether we will ignore the warnings while the 
     Africans of Darfur perish and then--once again--say ``never 
     again.'' Or will we act while lives can still be saved?

                          ____________________