Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007

FAIR MINIMUM WAGE ACT OF 2007 -- (Senate - January 26, 2007)

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DARFUR

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise to address the crisis in Darfur. I wish I could do more than speak out, but at the very least, I will continue to speak out. Today I want to specifically speak to an urgent humanitarian crisis.

On January 17, 14 United Nations organizations, including UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and the High Commissioner for Refugees, issued a joint statement on Darfur. These statements are usually just ignored. They are somewhat repetitious by nature, usually dry as dust, and they languish unnoticed on a bookshelf. This statement is different. This statement is a plea. It is a plea for help, a desperate plea for help. This statement outlines the efforts of humanitarian agencies in Darfur over the last 2 years. It outlines the heroic efforts that have been made to save hundreds of thousands of lives from a brooding genocide.

The statement reads:

In the face of growing insecurity and danger to communities and workers, the [United Nations] and its humanitarian partners have effectively been holding the line for survival and protection of millions. That line cannot be held much longer.

Humanitarian access to those in need has become highly limited. Attacks on both civilians and those trying to help increase by the day. There are an estimated 14,000 aid workers in Darfur, most of them Sudanese, who risk their lives every moment of every day to save innocent people. In recent months, these relief workers have been murdered, raped, and attacked repeatedly. Humanitarian and U.N. compounds have been attacked, their vehicles hijacked, their supplies looted. Sudanese police who should be protecting them have arrested and beaten the aid workers. Sudanese nationals who work for these organizations have been the most viciously attacked targets of violence and harassment.

These atrocities represent a concentrated, deliberate assault on efforts to provide basic services to the poor, innocent people in Darfur--food, water, shelter, and medicine. Actions by the Sudanese Government are compounded by the actions of rebel groups, some of which have also preyed upon civilians and are responsible for these attacks and hijackings. In every case, it is the people of Darfur who are the victims of this violence. A third of the population of Darfur has been driven from their homes. They urgently need humanitarian assistance. But humanitarian organizations are under attack, just as they are. The Sudanese Government has indicated its willingness to accept the first stages of a peacekeeping plan, ever so slowly. But so far there are only a little over 100 U.N. military officers and 33 U.N. policy advisers on the ground in Darfur, an area as large as the State of Texas. Thousands more are needed, and they are needed immediately.

I recently joined Senators Feingold, Brownback, and others in a bipartisan letter to the President raising the issue of these attacks on humanitarian workers. We have asked the President what the U.S. response will be, what our strategy should be in the face of Sudanese assurances, promises that have not been kept. We recognize the State Department and the President want to build on preliminary progress that has been made in at least getting some U.N. peacekeepers on the ground. But that progress has been tragically, deliberately slowed. As we wait and as we debate, people die every day. We must do more.

I believe the United States should be prepared to support additional funding for peacekeeping operations in Darfur.
Congress has the opportunity to do that with a funding resolution for the rest of the year that it will vote on in just a few days. The President should also increase funding for peacekeeping operations in the budget request that he will soon send to Congress. Darfur clearly remains an emergency and must remain a priority.

A little over a year ago, I went to Kigali, Rwanda, with Senator Brownback. We stayed in the Hotel Rwanda, made famous by the film as a refuge for people trying to escape death in the throes of another genocide. I walked down the hill from that hotel to a Catholic Church that I was later told was a sanctuary for only a brief time before the rebels overtook it and killed 1,000 people on the stone floor of the church. That was a genocide about which we should have spoken out more and we should have done something about.

My predecessor, Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, pleaded with the Clinton administration to do more, and President Clinton acknowledges today he should have done more. I salute the Bush administration for calling the situation in Darfur the genocide that it is. But now that we have acknowledged this horror is happening in our time on our watch, we have a responsibility to do something.

We said ``never again' after Rwanda, but the genocide continues. The United States and the world must take meaningful action to show the Sudanese Government that a few hundred peacekeepers from the U.N. are not enough, and we must act now before the thin line of relief workers is severed and the suffering in Darfur grows even worse.

I yield the floor.

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