Darfur

DARFUR -- (Senate - January 31, 2005)

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I would like to speak to an unrelated issue but one which has been of great concern to me for some time and to many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle; that is, the situation in Darfur.

Last week, the United Nations Commission on Inquiry was expected to issue its report on the Darfur situation in Sudan. Public releases have now been delayed until the beginning of February.

That is unfortunate given the urgency of the crisis on the ground. It is one more delay among so many that have cost lives and delayed justice.

What media attention the Commission's report receives may focus on the question of genocide. That question revolves around whether the tens of thousands of killings, the systematic rapes, the destruction and bombing of villages, the burning of fields, and the poisoning of wells in Darfur constitutes genocide.

I believe it does. Congress has called it genocide in a resolution which we passed on a bipartisan basis last year. President Bush has called it genocide.

The use of that word is significant. President Clinton--and I supported so many parts of his administration--made a serious mistake in foreign policy in not referring to Rwanda as a genocide. Many Americans now are seeing through the movies what happened in Rwanda. They read about it, but it was so far away. This movie ``Hotel Rwanda,'' talks about one man who tried to save so many innocent people during the course of what was clearly a genocide. For reasons I cannot explain, the Clinton administration was reluctant to use the word.

Now comes the situation in Darfur in Sudan. And this administration, to their credit, has used the word ``genocide.'' Why is that important? It is important because civilized countries of the world agreed, decades ago, that if a genocide should occur, we will not stand idly by. Now, why? Because we remember what happened in the holocaust in World War II.

You probably saw the references over the weekend to the anniversary celebration of Auschwitz and some of the surviving prisoners who went back, Jewish survivors who came to that same place where so many lost their lives, remembering what happened 60 years ago, and how they were finally liberated by the Russian soldiers who came to cut the barbed wire and free them. That was a genocide of the Jewish people and others.

We decided after the knowledge of that incident that we would stand as civilized nations and say: Never again. If there is a systematic attempt to kill off a people or a population, we will respond. That is why the use of the word ``genocide'' by Secretary of State Colin Powell, by the Congress, and by the President has such historic significance--not that we are just acknowledging the problem, but we are acknowledging a responsibility to do something about it.

Think about that. If we accept the moral responsibility of recognizing the problem, do we not have an equally great if not greater moral responsibility to do something about it?

That word, ``genocide'' was invented in the killing fields of the 20th century, but it certainly describes Darfur.

The use of the word matters. It carries the weight of history in a way that no other word can.

But calling it genocide by our Government has not stopped the killing in Darfur. It has not triggered a meaningful international response because words, no matter how much they matter, are not actions.

The discussion that emerges from this report should not be about words; it should be about action and what we can do to stop the killing.

A few weeks ago, Sudan reached a landmark peace agreement. You see, this poor country was driven by two conflicts, one in the south and one in the west. Sudan reached a landmark peace agreement relative to the north-south conflict, the conflict that has racked their country for decades.

The Naivasha agreement should be celebrated. But this peace agreement does not include Darfur, a separate region that is facing its own genocidal conflict.

In the last 10 days, over 100 people have been killed and more than 9,000 were injured by Janjaweed rebels, according to the United Nations. Reports from the BBC indicate that the Sudanese Air Force may have bombed a Darfur town, killing another 100 people.

Today, there are approximately 1,400 African Union troops in Darfur, a region roughly the size of France or Iraq--1,400 peacekeepers from the African Union. They cannot stop the killing. In fact, that is not even their mission. They are supposed to be monitors of the cease-fire that has badly broken down. Their mission is just too limited, and their resources and numbers are too few.

Eleven years ago, we failed to act when the machetes came out in Rwanda. Eight hundred thousand people paid for our inaction with their lives in that African nation.

We cannot make the same mistake in Darfur. Americans understand that. When Americans were asked in a recent poll whether they thought the United Nations should step in with military force and stop the genocide in Darfur, three out of four Americans said yes. The support is bipartisan. In fact, Republicans favor intervention even more wholeheartedly than Democrats in this poll.

Almost two-thirds of those surveyed believe the United States should be willing to contribute troops to an international effort to stop the genocide.

Let me just say a word about that. As I would have the troops, 150,000, start coming home from Iraq, and it would take a small fraction of that number to create a presence in the Sudan to make a difference. President Bush demonstrated that in Liberia last year. Just the mere presence of some marines on the ground stopped the killing.

When they come to understand--these African rebels, these killers--that the United States will stand up to them, they back off. African Union troops, 1,400 of them, have not been able to convey that message. Americans believe the world should act, but they do not believe it will, according to the same polls. I hope our actions prove their pessimism wrong.

In Sudan, we have seen violence carried out by the Government, in some cases by antigovernment rebels and by the Janjaweed, the government-sponsored militia whose name translates roughly as ``evil horsemen.''

Now, the Book of Revelations in the Bible reads as follows:

I looked, and there before me was a pale horse. Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

That must be what it feels like to be the people of the Sudan when the Janjaweed ride in.

In the New Yorker this summer, Samantha Power, who has written so forcefully about genocide in the history of the world, and particularly in Rwanda, described a woman named Amina. This 26-year-old mother found the wells of her village stuffed with corpses. One of them might have been the body of her 10-year-old son. She is not sure. She only found his decapitated head. That is one story among 70,000 in Darfur--70,000 stories of men, women, and children who have been killed. And their numbers grow every day.

We have to help stop this. The people of Darfur have borne witness to all four horsemen of the Apocalypse--conquest, war, famine, and death.

The United States needs to forge a long-term strategy toward Sudan that helps that nation build on its north-south peace agreement. It is our responsibility, based on international law, strategic interests, and moral values.

The Convention against genocide spells out our legal obligations. Strategically, Sudan is the largest country in Africa. Its influence extends well beyond its borders. And from a moral perspective, the victims of conflict in that nation demand mechanisms for justice, peace, and reconciliation. We must be our brother's keeper.

Darfur represents a turning point for Sudan, for Africa, and, yes, for the world. If we can collectively respond, however belatedly, we set a new benchmark, not for death and destruction but for conflict resolution and accountability.

President Bush, in his inaugural address, said that our freedom in America is attached to the freedom of other peoples. Some said he went too far, that was too broad a mandate. The United States cannot, in fact, police the world. And the President answered by saying that is our aspiration, our ideal, our goal. It is not a commitment we will do in every country where freedom is being lost every day. I think that is a reasonable response from the President. But certainly in this Darfur region we understand the lack of freedom relates directly not just to tyranny but to death.

There are a series of concrete steps we ought to take. First, I believe the President should name a new special envoy for peace in Sudan. John Danforth, our former Ambassador to the United Nations, showed us how important that position can be. My hope is the President will name another individual of similar stature and ability to direct our efforts.

Second, the African Union has undertaken a noble mission, but it is underfunded and undermanned. We have to work with the African Union to provide whatever logistical or technical assistance is needed to speed up this deployment.

The African Union represents the vanguard of conflict resolution on the continent of Africa. Anything we can offer to help it expand its peacekeeping capabilities will have repercussions and benefits far beyond the nation of Sudan.

Third, the people of Darfur deserve justice. It took too long for the world to pay attention, but the fact is, we have finally awakened.

If there is no accountability in Darfur, what hope is there elsewhere? Otherwise, the message we send is that one may kill, rape, and terrorize with impunity because while the world may call this genocide, it does not act.

The International Criminal Court was founded to address ``the most serious crimes of concern to the international community.'' What can be more serious, more heinous, than the genocide that has taken place in Darfur, that is still taking place in Darfur?

The International Criminal Court was designed just for this terrible moment, and I believe the United Nations Security Council should refer this case to the ICC.

In a recent editorial in the Washington Post, former Bush administration official Jack Smith argued that support for the ICC was inconsistent with U.S. law and administration policy. Smith wrote:

The Darfur case allows the United States to argue that Security Council referrals are the only valid route to the ICC prosecutions and that countries that are not parties to the ICC (such as the United States) remain immune from ICC control in the absence of such a referral.

An ICC referral has the advantages of speed and structure, but it is not the only path to justice. The Security Council could instead authorize the creation of an independent tribunal on human rights and crimes in Darfur as it has for Rwanda and other cases. This will cost more money, and it will probably cost time, but it is an option. What is more important is that the international community pursues accountability in one form or another.

The United States should also share its evidence of genocide with whatever body is named to seek accountability for the terrible crimes in Darfur.

President Bush spoke last week in soaring, inspiring rhetoric about liberty, freedom, and our place in the world. But there is no liberty without basic human security. There is no freedom when armed men sweep down upon your village, raping and murdering its inhabitants. And there is no justice when the world recognizes all these terrible facts and yet does nothing.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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