[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 170 (Tuesday, December 3, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1772-E1774]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
OBAMA'S MORAL FAILURE IN SUDAN
______
HON. FRANK R. WOLF
of virginia
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record a compelling open
letter that Eric Reeves, noted Sudan researcher and activist and a
professor at Smith College, recently sent to President Obama expressing
his dismay at the moral failure of the Obama administration in
responding to ``the continuing mass atrocities perpetrated by the
current regime in Khartoum (Sudan) . . .''
Reeves notes the contrast between Obama's outspoken rhetoric on Sudan
as a senator and eventual presidential candidate versus the
indefensible silence, appeasement and moral equivalency which has
marked his administration's posture toward a genocidal regime.
In February 2012 I travelled to Yida refugee camp in South Sudan. I
heard devastating firsthand accounts of the violence, terror and
starvation being brought to bear against the Sudanese people by the
regime in Khartoum. I recall speaking with one woman who described
herself and her people as ``forsaken.'' I specifically asked her if
there was anything she wanted me to tell President Obama. She said the
only thing she wanted was for Omar Bashir, an internationally indicted
war criminal, to be arrested.
But rather than working to facilitate Bashir being brought to
justice, this administration seems bent, in the words of Professor
Reeves, ``on throwing a political and economic lifeline to the
regime.''
I can't help but wonder why the Obama Administration views the
Sudanese people as any less deserving of a lifeline.
An Open Letter to President Obama on the Bombing of North Sharafa, East
Jebel Marra (Darfur)
[From Eric Reeves, Nov. 30, 2013]
President Barack Obama,
The White House, Washington, DC
Dear President Obama: The moral failure of your
administration to respond to the continuing mass atrocities
perpetrated by the current regime in Khartoum (Sudan) grows
daily, and has done so for the past five years. Your refusal
to condemn, in the strongest terms, the continuing war crimes
and crimes against humanity committed by the National Islamic
Front/National Congress Party tyranny stands in stark
contrast to your urgent words as a Senator, as a presidential
candidate, and as an elected President. As a senator in 2004,
you called the atrocities in Darfur ``genocide.'' You said so
again as a presidential candidate in 2007 and chided the Bush
administration for its accommodation of Khartoum. Invoking
Rwanda and Bosnia as justification for humanitarian
intervention in Darfur, you said, ``The United States has a
moral obligation anytime you see humanitarian catastrophes.''
You declared further,
``When you see a genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia or in Darfur,
that is a stain on all of us, a stain on our souls. . . . We
can't say `never again' and then allow it to happen again,
and as a president of the United States I don't intend to
abandon people or turn a blind eye to slaughter.'' (Video
recording available at: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=QEd583-fA8M#t=15; all emphases have been added)
And as President you again characterized Darfur as the site
of ``genocide.''
But despite such strong language, your administration has
come to substitute words of appeasement, feigned ignorance of
atrocity crimes, and a grotesque moral equivalence between
Khartoum and its adversaries, one that would put in balance
the regime's genocidal destruction and the actions by the
various rebel groups that have emerged to resist Khartoum's
tyranny. Your first special envoy to Sudan arrived declaring
his strategy for confronting the regime's genocidaires in
words that have become synonymous with diplomatic absurdity:
``We've got to think about giving out cookies,'' said
[Scott] Gration, who was appointed in March. ``Kids,
countries--they react to gold stars, smiley faces,
handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.'' (Washington Post
[el-Fasher, Darfur], September 29, 2009)
In March 2009 the Khartoum regime expelled from Darfur
thirteen of the world's finest humanitarian organizations,
then providing roughly half the total international
humanitarian capacity for millions of people. Your surrogate
diplomatic representative--then-Senator and now Secretary of
State John Kerry--declared in the wake of Khartoum's ruthless
expulsions:
``We have agreement [with Khartoum] that in the next weeks
we will be back to 100 percent [humanitarian] capacity,''
said [Senator John] Kerry. (Reuters [el-Fasher], April 17,
2009)
This was a cruel lie, as Kerry and everyone within the
humanitarian community working in Darfur well knew. Indeed,
this was such transparent mendacity that even now it carries
the stench of supreme expediency.
Your second special envoy, Princeton Lyman, declared in
late June 2011 that there wasn't enough evidence to support
reports of
[[Page E1773]]
massive, ethnically-targeted killings of Nuba civilians in
South Kordofan. But in fact, overwhelming evidence was
pouring out of Kadugli (capital of the region) making all too
clear the nature of atrocity crimes, which amounted to
incipient genocide. Again, this skepticism bears the stench
of unforgiveable expediency, the more so since a UN human
rights report on the events of June 2011 in South Kordofan--
based on evidence gathered by UN human rights investigators
on the ground at the time--confirmed what all sources were
declaring with increasing urgency throughout this terrible
month. Lyman's disingenuous skepticism worked to convince
Khartoum that the U.S. was not particularly concerned about a
reprise of the genocidal campaign by this same Khartoum
regime against the people of the Nuba in the 1990s.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that in the
unseemly rush to secure continuing cooperation from the
Khartoum regime on counter-terrorism intelligence, you and
your administration have repeatedly and willfully ignored
reports of the most conspicuous and brutal crimes committed
by this regime, or at least decided not to speak publicly
about them in any meaningful or consistent way. And here your
almost total silence over the deliberate bombing of
civilians--even as every such military action is a war crime,
and in aggregate constitute crimes against humanity--is most
shameful, and most persistent.
Since 1999 the have been more than 2,000 confirmed reports
of deliberate aerial attacks on civilian and humanitarian
targets in greater Sudan; the actual number of attacks is
very likely many times this, and continues to grow rapidly.
This is unprecedented in the history of aerial warfare: never
before has a military power been able to bomb with impunity
its own civilians relentlessly, systematically, and
deliberately during a detailed and lengthy reporting period,
now extending over 15 years. While most of the attacks have
been by Antonovs, Khartoum has also deployed highly accurate
military jet aircraft, long-range missiles, and helicopter
gunships, which were used with particular destructiveness in
the early years of the Darfur genocide. On any number of
occasions, helicopter gunships have fired on civilians with
heavy machine-guns and rockets from extremely close range.
I write on this occasion moved not by the singularity of a
particular bombing attack that occurred yesterday, but rather
by its horrific familiarity. Radio Dabanga, an
extraordinarily important, indeed singular source of news
from Darfur, reports today that on Friday, November 28, 2013:
[I]n North Sharafa in East Jebel Marra [in the center of
Darfur], an Antonov [``bomber,'' i.e. retrofitted cargo plane
with no militarily useful accuracy] bombed three farmers, at
about 5.30 pm on Friday [November 29, 2013]. The two men and
a woman were riding a horse cart from their farm to their
homes in Sharafa village. The three farmers and their horses
were killed immediately. The names of the three farmers are
Hashim Abakar Mohamed, Mustafa Eisa, and Hanan Saleh Juma.
Such criminal bombings--directly violating a UN Security
Council resolution as well as international law--are a
virtually daily occurrence in East Jebel Marra, part of a
massif in central Darfur serving as stronghold for one of the
rebel groups in Darfur, now linked throughout Sudan in the
form of the Sudan Revolutionary Front. But Khartoum is not
attacking military forces: it is deliberately attacking
civilians in an effort to compel surrender or displacement or
starvation of the remaining rebel forces. There is no other
conclusion to be reached, given the inherent inaccuracy of
the Antonov ``bombers,'' which fly at very high altitudes and
simply roll crude, shrapnel-loaded barrel bombs out the cargo
bay without benefit of any sighting mechanism. Such attacks
continue occur throughout Darfur.
Antonovs are transparently instruments of civilian terror
and destruction--as they are in South Kordofan and Blue Nile,
areas where bombing attacks are also continuously reported,
and with particular authority from the Nuba Mountains of
South Kordofan. There a campaign of civilian annihilation
continues unabated as agricultural production has been
brought to a halt by the fear of continued bombardment. A
similarly grim narrative is playing out in Blue Nile and the
result is some 300,000 refugees fleeing to South Sudan and
Ethiopia, leaving behind more than one million civilians at
acute risk of disease and starvation according to UN
estimates.
Where are the voices of condemnation? Here I mean not the
occasional generic condemnations issued by your
administration, typically qualified (and thus weakened) by
inclusion of some other issue. What prevents your
administration from condemning every attack on civilians by
military aircraft, per se? The U.S. intelligence community
certainly has the resources to confirm via satellite
reconnaissance virtually every attack reported by Radio
Dabanga or Nuba Reports, both of which are well known for
their accuracy and ground-based reporting (many of their
findings have been confirmed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International, the Enough Project, journalists, and intrepid
humanitarians). Would it simply be too embarrassing to reveal
just what we and the rest of the international community are
tolerating? Would it be too shameful to make clear that, on
the basis of geostrategic considerations, Syria is important
while the people of the marginalized regions of Sudan are
not?
Perhaps you will say that the ``hybrid'' UN/African Union
Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) has the responsibility for
reporting and condemning aerial attacks on civilians. But
this would only add to the disingenuousness of your
administration in speaking about Sudan. For as you are surely
aware, UNAMID is a complete failure as a mission,
particularly in fulfilling it primary mandate of civilian and
humanitarian protection: for some 2 million people have been
newly displaced since the mission took up its mandate in
January 2008--overwhelmingly as a consequence of continuing
violence, directed particularly against civilians. You touted
your support for a UNAMID-like mission in 2007, revealing
either ignorance or an expedient desire to appear to be
responding to the crisis by handing it off to an ill-prepared
African Union Peace and Security Council, which had no
dedicated military equipment or soldiers of its own.
Unsurprisingly, the poorly equipped and poorly led UNAMID
mission is routinely denied access to scenes of atrocity
crimes by the Khartoum regime's security forces, as are
humanitarian organizations, which struggle to work within an
increasingly limited range of operations. Because of
uncontrolled insecurity, the highly trained expatriate
component of what was once the world's largest humanitarian
operation is down to 3 percent. Your administration issues
only infrequent boiler-plate condemnations in response to
serious violations of a range of UN Security Council
Resolutions. Despite its elaborate website and nominal
reporting duties, UNAMID confirms virtually no bombing
attacks, no matter how egregiously in violation of
international law. Additionally and symptomatically,
UNAMID has for years said virtually nothing about the
epidemic of sexual violence directed against girls and
women in Darfur, despite the fact that there have been
tens of thousands have been victims during the conflict,
now about to enter its twelfth year. Your administration
has been useless in highlighting these terrible crimes,
which continue to be committed with total impunity.
UNAMID's only virtue would appear to be that it gives the
semblance of an international presence approved by the UN--at
immense cost--and provides an excuse for not responding in
the way you as candidate spoke about so passionately.
UNAMID's impotence, and its failure to deter aerial
bombardment of civilians, is illustrated by another report of
November 28, 2013 from Radio Dabanga:
Ten people were killed in aerial bombardments near Shengil
Tobaya and Sharafa in East Jebel Marra. One attack took place
a few kilometers from the UNAMID compound in Shengil Tobaya,
while a group of 15 people was on their way to Shengil Tobaya
after a visit to the market of Tabit.
A Sudanese Air Force aircraft appeared around 4pm on
Friday, hitting the Toyota Hi-Lux that was transporting the
15 people, at Tangara, 3km west of the UNAMID compound in
Shengil Tobaya. Seven of them died at the spot and eight were
critically wounded. Several of them could not be moved due to
their critical injuries. The relatives of the victims asked
UNAMID to act quickly and transfer the severely wounded
people to a hospital and recover the dead bodies. Yesterday
evening it was unclear whether UNAMID had helped out. The
victims are Abakir Yagoub Mohamed, Ali Ahmed Abdalla, Mohamed
Ali Ahmed, Osman Adam Mohamed and Zahra Ibrahim. (emphasis
added; the UNAMID compound at Shengil Tobaya is a significant
one)
Will you and your administration continue to hide behind
the diplomatic fig-leaf of UNAMID's putative ability to halt
what has become a grim ``genocide by attrition''? In fact,
the genocide proceeds apace in large measure because your
administration has decided, as part of its larger Sudan
policy, to ``de-couple'' Darfur from the largest bilateral
issue between Khartoum and Washington: cooperation on
counter-terrorism. That a senior official of your
administration would use the term ``de-couple'' in speaking
about Darfur and any aspect of U.S. Sudan policy amounts to
declaring that despite the genocidal realities you excoriated
as candidate and as president--when it was politically useful
to do so--you and your administration are willing to set
aside, bracket, and finally ignore this scene of unending
human suffering and destruction.
Indeed, it is difficult not to see a direct connection
between your silence about the ongoing and widespread aerial
bombardment of civilians in Darfur and your decision to ``de-
couple'' the region from what looms as the defining feature
of your Sudan policy: an obsessive desire to retain access to
the counter-terrorism intelligence provided by the regime
that gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden from 1992-1996, the
years in which al-Qaeda came to fruition. Let us recall also
that this same regime continued to assist al-Qaeda long after
bin Laden's departure for Afghanistan, providing funds,
diplomatic cover, and banking conduits.
Your administration's calculations about the value of
counter-terrorism intelligence provided by Khartoum have
occasioned a good deal of skepticism among Sudan experts
outside of government; in any event, these calculations are
certainly made with full knowledge of what the regime
continues to inflict on the people of Sudan. You and your
administration also know that demonstrations beginning in
late September of
[[Page E1774]]
this year were met by the most brutal repression imaginable,
with security forces given ``shoot to kill'' orders that
resulted in some 300 deaths (many killed by bullet wounds to
the chest, back and head) and some 2,000 arrests (many remain
under arrest without charge). Ordinary Sudanese are outraged
at the economic shambles the regime has created, and are
demanding that these hopelessly corrupt and cruelly self-
enriching men be removed from power. And yet your
administration seems to be bent on throwing a political and
economic lifeline to the regime. Your former special envoy
declared in December 2011, after Khartoum's military seizure
of the contested Abyei region (in violation of the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement) and subsequent military
assaults on South Kordofan and Blue Nile:
``Frankly, we do not want to see the ouster of the
[Sudanese] regime, nor regime change. We want to see the
regime carrying out reform via constitutional democratic
measures.'' (Princeton Lyman's response to a question by the
respected Arabic news outlet Asharq Al-Awsat concerning Sudan
and the ``Arab Spring,'' December 3, 2011)
It is the height of disingenuousness and expediency for
your envoy to have suggested that the National Islamic Front/
National Congress Party is in any way prepared to ``carry out
reform via constitutional democratic measure.'' The regime's
response to the September/October demonstrations and
political protests from all quarters provides evidence that
could hardly be more compelling.
And yet at the very moment in which gross mismanagement of
the Sudanese economy over the past 24 years, obscenely
profligate military spending, gratuitous war-making on the
marginalized peoples of the periphery, and massive
sequestration of national wealth by the political elite has
brought about economic conditions that make democratic change
a real possibility, your administration seems intent on
diminishing those economic pressures that the U.S.--to its
virtually singular credit--has brought to bear since 1997,
both through Congressional and Presidential action. Instead
of tightening the very sanctions that increasingly threaten
the survival of a regime that has exhausted its oil wealth in
less than a decade and has no access to international credit
or Forex reserves, we read that business between the U.S. and
the regime is beginning to boom.
The Sudan Tribune reports (October 10, 2013) that Foreign
Minister Ali Karti, after his meetings with U.S. Secretary of
State John Kerry, ``pointed out that several U.S. companies
which applied for licenses to operate in Sudan were granted,
which he said is an indicator that investments and commercial
relations could overcome political difficulties.'' And this
would seem to be borne out by a series of reports from the
Sudan Tribune and others:
White Nile Sugar Company announced on Sunday (November 3,
2013) that it has signed an agreement with the US-based
General Electric (GE) by which it will receive parts and
services for its billion-dollar sugar plant. (Sudan Tribune,
November 4, 2013)
In a revealingly frank statement, Sudan's foreign ministry
undersecretary, Rahmatallah Mohamed Osman, declared in August
2013 that ``U.S. economic sanctions on Sudan contain some
loopholes which could be exploited to boost the economy.''
Why haven't those ``loopholes,'' if they exist, been
resolutely closed?
Typically of dubious reliability, Khartoum's state-
controlled media recently made a specific claim that should
be unambiguously confirmed or disconfirmed:
The managing director of [Sudan's] Kenana Sugar Company
(KSC) has disclosed KSC is currently dealing with 18 US
companies licensed by Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
in the area of production, irrigation, and harvesters despite
the US economic sanctions imposed on Sudan for 16 years. . .
Lately, an American company has submitted a request to OFAC
to import ethanol from Sudan. Moreover, [the] U.S. has
excluded gum Arabic from sanctions for its bad need of this
commodity in nutritional and drug industry. US imports $40
million worth of Gum Arabic annually either directly or
indirectly from Sudan. U.S. may want lift the sanctions
gradually for face saving. (November 9, 2013)
Certainly the account is accurate in pointing out the
exemption in U.S. sanctions made for gum arabic, an exemption
secured over a decade ago through duplicitous legislative
means by Robert Menendez, formerly Congressional
representative from the district in New Jersey where
virtually all U.S. gum arabic processing occurs. Menendez is
now, of course, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee.
The economic sanctions put in place by previous
administrations and the Congress seem to have become
irrelevant by means of ``technical adjustments'' to the
restrictions supposedly enforced by the U.S. Office of
Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The question, President Obama,
is why your administration has allowed this to occur? Is
Khartoum right in suggesting that ``the U.S. may want [to]
lift the sanctions gradually for face-saving''? Or is the
stealth lifting of sanctions part of a larger quid pro quo
with the Khartoum regime? Is it of a piece with the
preposterous claim by special envoy Lyman that this regime
might preside over the democratic transformation of Sudan?
But however enmeshed in the complexities of U.S. diplomatic
and political machinations vis-a-vis Khartoum, the countless
bombing attacks against civilians such as occurred yesterday
near North Sharafa in East Jebel Marra provide a certain
stark moral clarity. Again, one of the regime's Antonovs. . .
. . . bombed three farmers, at about 5.30 pm on Friday
[November 29, 2013). The two men and a woman were riding a
horse cart from their farm to their homes in Sharafa village.
The three farmers and their horses were killed immediately.
The names of the three farmers are Hashim Abakar Mohamed,
Mustafa Eisa, and Hanan Saleh Juma.
Your own refusal to condemn--regularly, forcefully, and
consequentially--such deliberate attacks on defenseless
civilians brings shame on our nation and makes it ever more
difficult to believe that our foreign policy is guided by
anything other than a ruthless Realpolitik.
Sincerely,
Eric Reeves,
Smith College,
Northampton, MA.
____________________