[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 119 (Thursday, September 21, 2006)]
[House]
[Page H6902]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1700
                           GENOCIDE IN DARFUR

  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of 
order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Without objection, the gentleman from 
Massachusetts is recognized for 5 minutes.
  There was no objection.
  Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, millions of Americans and millions of 
people around the world are outraged at the genocide taking place in 
Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur have been murdered by 
the Sudanese military and government-supported militias.
  Millions have been forced from their homes, their villages destroyed. 
Men, women and children left homeless have died from hunger and disease 
as they are forced to wander, hoping to find someplace that will keep 
them safe.
  Women and girls, many of them children, have been raped. 
International workers providing humanitarian relief have been abused, 
and some have even been murdered. The world calls it genocide, the 
United States of America calls it genocide, and still it is allowed to 
continue.
  Mr. Speaker, we are once again at yet another critical crossroads in 
how we deal with ending the genocide in Darfur.
  On Tuesday, in his speech before the General Assembly of the United 
Nations, President Bush appointed Andrew Natsios as his Special Envoy 
for Sudan, providing the U.S. once more with a high-ranking official 
charged solely to focus on the crisis in Darfur.
  President Bush also called on the U.N. to act on Security Council 
Resolution 1706, authorizing a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur. 
Yesterday the African Union Peace and Security Council voted to extend 
the mandate of the AU peacekeeping force into Darfur, which had been 
set to expire at the end of next week.
  I wish I could celebrate, Mr. Speaker, but we can't. The situation in 
Darfur grows more desperate every day. Fighting has intensified. The 
Sudanese Government has renewed aerial bombing. Many humanitarian aid 
groups have had to pull out, leaving hundreds of thousands of people 
without food and water.
  Appointing a U.N. envoy is an important step, but only the deployment 
of a U.N. peacekeeping force will bring some measure of security to the 
suffering people of Sudan. We cannot afford to let the AU peacekeeping 
force to remain underfunded, underequipped and undertrained. But the AU 
forces only have 7,000 boots in the ground, and the region of Darfur is 
about the size of France. We need a U.N. force with a strong, clear 
mandate to protect the defenseless people of Darfur on the ground as 
soon as possible.
  Security Council Resolution 1706 does not say that we have to wait 
for Khartoum's permission to deploy it. We need an enforced no-fly zone 
over Darfur, most likely coordinated by NATO, so we can put a stop to 
Khartoum's aerial bombing and its air support of Janjaweed militia 
attacks against villages and refugee camps. We need the United States 
Senate to support the House-passed Darfur Peace and Accountability Act 
so that we can get that critical litigation to the President's desk as 
quickly as possible.
  We need universities and State and local governments to divest their 
public funds from company stocks that do business with the Sudanese 
Government. The Senate should not strip this provision from the Darfur 
Peace and Accountability Act, and I encourage all of my colleagues in 
the House to cosponsor the bill in support of divestment that 
Congressman Barbara Lee of California introduced today.
  Mr. Speaker, the House has acted and spoken in a unified bipartisan 
voice to end the violence and genocide in Darfur.
  I would like to thank my House colleagues Representatives Donald 
Payne, Frank Wolf, Mike Capuano, and Tom Tancredo and so many others 
who have been leaders in calling attention to and taking action on the 
crisis in Darfur.
  But most of all I want to thank the American people, who, in their 
churches, synagogues, temples and mosques, on college campuses and the 
local community centers, have organized and mobilized to make sure that 
the President and this Congress get the message that we have not done 
enough so long as the killing continues.
  Mr. Speaker, we must do more. We must end the genocide. We must 
protect the people of Darfur, and we must do it today

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