Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act of 2007
Floor Speech
FLOOD INSURANCE REFORM AND MODERNIZATION ACT OF 2007 -- (Senate - May 08, 2008)
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I rise today to mark the anniversary of one global tragedy and to call attention to another, a tragedy that is occurring even at this moment.
Fourteen years ago this week, the world stood by as 800,000 Rwandans were brutally murdered, largely along ethnic lines, in only 100 days. Despite early warning signs and pleas for greater international attention, we did little more as a nation than watch as this act of genocide was allowed to continue.
Canadian GEN Romeo Dallaire at the time was commander of a small U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda when the genocide began. He desperately tried to get the United Nations to approve a more robust force to end the killings. Despite his efforts, the Security Council voted instead to cut back the United Nations' force. Nearly 2,500 troops were replaced with 450 poorly trained and poorly equipped soldiers. We all know the tragic result. Today the world looks back in shame at the inaction in Rwanda. We all failed.
In 1998, President Clinton visited Rwanda and spoke to those who lost loved ones in those horrible times. President Clinton said:
We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda in 1994.
President Clinton's decision to visit Rwanda was an honorable one. It was the right choice. His words were inspiring in their honesty and accuracy, but his words were also an important reminder that the world cannot allow such a tragedy to occur again.
President Bush visited Rwanda in January and toured the Kigali Memorial Center, which I have also visited, where 250,000 Rwandans are buried in mass graves. President Bush said he hoped the world would ``once and for all'' work to halt the genocide in Darfur.
President Bush will soon be leaving office--less than a year from now. I fear that unless his administration acts, and acts quickly, we will once again fail to stop a genocide in its tragic march. If we want to send a message to the world that the United States will not turn a blind eye to genocide, now is the time to act in Darfur.
Violence began in Darfur 5 years ago. Since that time, I have come to the floor many times to talk about it.
In 2004, the House of Representatives unanimously adopted a resolution calling on President Bush to call the atrocities in Darfur by their rightful name: a genocide. The resolution also urged the President to consider multilateral--even unilateral--intervention. That resolution passed nearly 4 years ago, in July 2004--4 years ago.
A few months later, Secretary of State Colin Powell said:
[G]enocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility and the genocide may still be occurring.
In June 2005, President Bush said he agreed with Secretary of State Powell's determination that what was happening in Darfur was in fact a genocide.
Two years later, President Bush spoke at the Holocaust Museum here in Washington and said that ``genocide is the only word for what is happening in Darfur.'' He went on to say `` ..... we have a moral obligation to stop it.''
Many things have been said by many influential people over the years, but little action has taken place. Five years after this declaration of genocide, where do we stand? What have we done? As many as 400,000 residents of Darfur have been killed, others brutally raped and tortured, entire villages torched, creating a refugee crisis that has forced more than 2 million Darfuris to flee their homes.
This photo is almost surreal. As often described, people who have flown over the Darfur region say it looks as if people have put cigarettes out--the types of burns that you see. The burns, of course, represent huts in villages that have been destroyed. This is a part of Sudan after the Sudanese Government and allied militia forces recently burned a village.
Hundreds of thousands of women and children live in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad. I don't think this photo does justice to the camp, but what appear to be tiny white dots are, in fact, small tents, a sea of small tents. There are 90,000 people who live in the Kalma refugee camp in Darfur--no grass, no trees, 10 reported rapes every single day. The people in camps like this one in Kalma are dependent on us, the entire international community, for the basics--food, water, and shelter. It is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The U.N. Security Council voted last summer in favor of a historic 26,000-member U.N.-African Union joint peacekeeping force. Last summer, they voted for it. That brought a glimmer of hope across the world that finally there was going to be a global response to this terrible situation.
Today, almost a year later, only a third of those peacekeepers have been deployed--a third. Only a third of this peacekeeping force is on the ground while the Sudanese Government continues to thumb its nose at the international community and its forces continue to attack villages in Darfur. Humanitarian and U.N. relief workers face ongoing violence and harassment.
This photo is of a grieving mother whose children were killed in Darfur. Hers is one of the thousands--hundreds of thousands of tragic stories. She said her three children had been burned alive in this region's violence. Just the other day, Sudanese forces were reported to have bombed a primary school in the north Darfur village of Shegeg Karo, killing at least seven little children.
After so many years, after so much violence and human suffering, after so many calls for action, what is holding up the deployment of peacekeepers?
It may be hard to believe, but one significant problem is a shortage of helicopters--hard to imagine, a shortage of helicopters, as the killing, looting, pillaging, raping, and displacement continues. This tragic genocide has been raging for 5 years while we have just stood by and watched. Yet the world's most powerful nations cannot manage to dig up a handful of helicopters. How can that be? Are all our helicopters tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan? Are they all in the shop? Is there truly not one NATO ally that will spare a few helicopters? How about asking the Russians? They are already helping in south Sudan and Chad. The Russian Ambassador visited my office recently and told me he is open to exploring helping Darfur. It is hard to imagine that the United States would be asking other countries to be supplying helicopters, but at the risk of allowing this genocide to continue, we ought to do that.
This tragedy is of historic proportion, and it is our chance to step in and show the world we really care. But what it takes is Presidential leadership--not in 6 months, not in a year, but now.
I know some of my colleagues in the Senate, ones on the floor here--Senator Biden has raised this issue personally with President Bush. Quite simply, I want to put this in the most simple terms because I said it directly to the President himself and to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: If you are not going to do anything before you leave office to stop the genocide in Darfur, then spend a few minutes writing your speech so that a year or two from now, when you visit that terrible place, you can say: We could have done more; I wish we would have.
That is what it has come down to. This administration and Congress will either act soon or, sadly, this genocide will have occurred on our watch.
A few years ago, President Clinton faced the reality of his failure to act in Rwanda. He called it ``my great, great regret in international affairs.'' President Bush, this is your chance. Either do something or face a similar script and a similar speech in years to come, expressing your regret that you, on your watch, did not stop the genocide in Darfur.
We cannot allow ourselves to have to look back years from now to say that happened. We have a moral responsibility as a leader in the world to speak out and act to save these people.
I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
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