[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 12]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 18084-18086]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 18085]]

     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 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

[[Page 18086]]

     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 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.

                          ____________________