Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Hurricane Disasters Assistance Act, 2005

EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR HURRICANE DISASTERS ASSISTANCE ACT, 2005 -- (House of Representatives - October 06, 2004)

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Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chairman, I thank my friend from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) for yielding me time.

Mr. Chairman, it is regrettable that this bill fails to provide even a modest amount for the gravest humanitarian emergency facing the world today, the senseless slaughter of innocent civilians in Darfur.

I want to congratulate the chairman for bringing this bill forward at this time, and I certainly support it, and I support the provisions. I certainly join the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe) in his observations with reference to $100 million for our Caribbean friends who have been devastated. However, both the President and the Secretary of State have called the tragedy in Sudan genocide. And the United Nations has identified it as "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

But we still have the opportunity to support an African Union peacekeeping force intended to put an end to the blood shed and we must not turn our backs.

How can it be that destruction of 400 villages, the murder of 50,000 civilians, and the displacement of more than one million people is not an emergency worth a modest investment to stop the slaughter?

It is true we have provided millions of dollars in humanitarian relief for those already affected by this ongoing horror. But we have not yet adopted the appropriate sense of urgency about ending the murderous campaign of the Sudanese Government and its Janjaweed henchmen.

The USAID estimates that 350,000 more people could die of disease and malnutrition over the next 9 months. The fact is the killing must stop before the farmers and herders can return home to Darfur and resume feeding their families. At the very least, Mr. Chairman, we ought to require the administration to use existing authority to reprogram $93 million in unobligated Iraq reconstruction money now, the operative word is now, to end the genocide in Sudan, as the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Lowey) as proposed and the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Jackson) has proposed, and indeed, I think as the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe) supports.

Ten years ago when 800,000 Africans died in the Rwandan genocide, we vowed, as the world has too often: never again. How is it that the world so quickly forgets what "never again" means? What generated the sentiment "never again" in the children, the women, the elderly? They will not understand if we simply talk, if we simply say at some point in time we will act.

We now have an opportunity to prove that we meant never again, that this Nation, a beacon for human rights, decency and freedom will not stand by, Mr. Chairman, and watch the slaughter of innocent men, women and children. This Nation and the world have a moral obligation to act. Mr. Chairman, we cannot ignore that moral obligation.