Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006

DARFUR PEACE AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 2006 -- (House of Representatives - April 05, 2006)

Ms. PELOSI. Thank you very much, Mr. Lantos, our distinguished ranking member on the International Relations Committee, also a cochair of the Human Rights Caucus. Thank you for your great leadership on fighting for human rights throughout the world. You have a long history of that. You have personal experience in terms of being the only Member of Congress who escaped the Holocaust, and you have brought that conviction, your ideas, your courage to this fight once again in helping the people of Darfur.

And I want to commend Mr. Chris Smith. He and FRANK WOLF have been such leaders on this issue for so very many years, and all of us who are concerned about Sudan, in particular now, Darfur are deeply in your debt.

I join the gentleman in commending Henry Hyde, as well as Mr. Lantos and Donald Payne, our colleague, who have brought this issue to the forefront in the Congress of the United States. I thank you for authorizing this legislation, for your steadfast leadership in calling attention to the crisis in Darfur.

Mr. Speaker, I bring to the floor a picture of the children, a picture of the children of Darfur. All of us on our trip that Mr. Lantos mentioned, who visited Darfur, 11 members of a bipartisan delegation, all of us wanted to take these children home with us, but that wasn't possible. There were so many of them. And it wouldn't be right anyway, because they wanted to go home. They wanted to go home to their homes which no longer existed.

When we were there, we visited with them. And after a day in the refugee camp, our bipartisan delegation traveled to Khartoum to meet with Vice President Taha. He asked us, he said, ``The Sudanese people want to know, why are you so interested in Sudanese domestic affairs? I know the American people are free-thinking people, but maybe your free-thinking does not create a clear understanding of the facts in my country.''

Vice President Taha was denying what we had seen with our very own eyes that day, refugee children struggling in the heat without shade, without adequate clothing and sleeping in make-shift tents that were made, some of them, from USAID food bags stitched together.

The Darfuris are forced to walk miles outside the camps for firewood and water, with the constant fear that they may be attacked.

As Vice President Taha was denying all of this, we could not help recalling the stories of villages torched, women raped, children kidnapped and men tortured and killed. But even in the horror of all of that, we saw hope in the bright and playful eyes of the toddlers. That hope, however, was diminished in the eyes of the older children. They had really seen too much. They had seen too much.

The camps we visited were homes to over 100,000 people. That was just what we saw when we were there. There are many more. That is just a fraction of the staggering toll of the violence in Darfur. But you can see these camps, and you can see that some of them are made out of USAID food bags.

According to the United Nations, 3 million people are in need of assistance. Two million Darfuris have been displaced, pushed out of their homes and their villages, and nearly 200,000 people have been killed thus far, and that is a conservative estimate.

Furthermore, the full human toll is yet to be exacted. Concentrated in camps with deplorable conditions, when the rainy season comes, Darfuris are now vulnerable to further death from disease. Sicknesses like cholera and dysentery could take tens of thousands more lives.

We have seen variations on this ``problem from hell,'' most recently in Rwanda. And at that time, that short time ago, we promised never again. We have heard never again over and over again.

The humanitarian disaster in Darfur challenges the conscience of the world. It is the systemic destruction of a people. It is genocide.

While we were in the Sudan, back home President Bush reaffirmed that this is, indeed, genocide. When some of us, Mr. Payne, Mr. Joe Wilson and Mr. Clyburn and I met with the President at the White House to thank him for his leadership and report on our trip, we also asked him to appoint a special envoy, special U.S. envoy for the Sudan. This envoy would signal that bringing peace and stability to the Sudan is a priority of the United States, and it is a part of this legislation that is on the floor today. This envoy, U.S. special envoy, is necessary because it will help stop the violence, bring the parties to the negotiating table, and get humanitarian relief to the people who need it.

Essential to stopping the violence is stopping the Janjaweed. I heard Congressman Smith talking about the Janjaweed in his remarks, and after persistent questioning in our meeting with Vice President Taha, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, in a very diplomatic but persistent way, questioned him about the Sudanese government's support of the Janjaweed, which he first denied but later admitted that they had supported the Janjaweed in the past. This was the first admission that we had seen.

Before we went into Darfur, the U.S. military briefed us that the Janjaweed is an extension of the Sudanese military, and they are engaged in state sponsored violence. This must end.

The African Union is to be commended for its efforts to protect Darfur. We saw the AU's camps there where people were getting at least something to eat and perhaps some medical attention for the first time. But so much more needs to be done.

So that is why this legislation on the floor today is so important, because I don't even know if these children are even alive 1 month after we came home, these beautiful children.

Many people in our country have been actively involved in the effort to get more support and humanitarian assistance on the ground. The United Nations dollars for Darfur were running out in March.

Humanitarian workers in Sudan are harassed, their convoys diverted and attacked, and some of these workers have been kidnapped. Humanitarian workers bring no political agenda or no destabilizing intentions to the Sudan. They carry with them hope and sometimes health. They must be protected. Their supplies must not be diverted, and their volunteers must not be detained.

So that is why I am very pleased that we were able to pass, in the supplemental, the President's request for $439 million, and that Mr. Capuano's initiative to add $50 million for assistance was accepted by the House. We hope it will be considered in the Senate.

So this legislation, as was spelled out by Mr. Lantos and Mr. Smith, so I won't go into it again, contains very, very important initiatives to help make matters better. Stop the violence, bring the parties to the table, get the humanitarian assistance to the people.

This brings us back to Vice President Taha's question, why is the United States so interested in Sudan? The answer is that genocide is not the domestic affair of any nation. It concerns the world. And as our colleague, Joe Wilson, said to him, Americans care about people. Our care is reflected in the working done for the people of Darfur here in this Congress, in State legislatures, in corporate board rooms, on college campuses, even on high school campuses and yes, indeed, even in the White House.

This care was spurred by our religious communities which have taken the lead in our efforts. I salute many of the religious leaders who have taken the lead on this. And on April 30, many people will converge, thousands will converge on Washington, and there will be events around the country put together by the Save Darfur Coalition.

Each day that the genocide continues, and each day that we wait, the hope we saw in the eyes of the youngest children can disintegrate into disease, despair and death.

Again, on April 30, Americans of conscience will come to Washington to echo the call, never again. These citizens will demonstrate on behalf of the children of Darfur and demonstrate that, not only is America great, but America is good. And this legislation on the floor today is a reflection of that goodness. I support it, and salute the bipartisan cooperation that wrote it and brought it to floor.

Again, I thank Mr. Lantos for his exceptional leadership on human rights throughout the world and in the Sudan, and Mr. Smith, Mr. Payne and Mr. Frank Wolf for their exceptional leadership as well.

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