Genocide in Darfur

GENOCIDE IN DARFUR -- (House of Representatives - September 21, 2006)

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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