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Feingold had made a statement about his Africa trip in his editorial for the Christian Science Monitor, US losing the race to engage Muslims. That topic was discussed in the editorials forum. Regarding Darfur, Feingold made floor statements on February 2nd, 2005, which related some of the concerns raised in the Monitor piece to the report on Darfur from the Commission of Inquiry, and the debate over the ICC (S876-877).
Mr. FEINGOLD. Mr. President, the United Nations' Commission of Inquiry on the crisis in Darfur reported to the Security Council on Monday of this week. Like every credible account of what has happened in Darfur, the report makes for grim reading. The Commission pointed to the "killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence" in its discussion of the violations of international law that have occurred in the area, and also found that there may have been Sudanese Government officials and others who acted "with genocidal intent."
This report stands in stark contrast to the positive news that emerged from Sudan last month, when a comprehensive agreement to end the decades-long, devastating north-south civil war was signed. I welcomed that agreement, and I hope it is successful. But the truth is that I have little confidence in the Government of Sudan, and I see no reason to believe that a north-south peace agreement will awaken that government to its responsibility to protect all of its citizens. Just days after the historic peace agreement was signed, I visited the refugee camps of eastern Chad and spoke to Sudanese citizens who had fled Darfur . They spoke of their desperate need for basic security back at home, and they are right. Consistent reports indicate that the violence in Darfur has continued. The Commission of Inquiry's recent report serves to remind all of us, Mr. President, that tragedy persists in Sudan, and the world has not done enough to stop it.
Much of the attention surrounding this report, Mr. President, has focused on the Commission's recommendation that the International Criminal Court, or ICC, take up the Darfur issue with the intention of trying those responsible for atrocities. Just as the question of whether or not to use the word "genocide" was, for some time, a debate that distracted attention from the need to take meaningful action to bring security to the people of Darfur, I fear that a new issue--the question of whether or not the crimes committed in Darfur should be taken up by the International Criminal Court--may soon dominate the debate.
Mr. President, the administration is implacably opposed to the ICC. Frankly, this is a subject on which the President and I share some common ground. I have not supported joining the ICC as it stands. I want more protection for our troops to ensure that they will not be targets of unjust and politically motivated prosecutions.
But I do believe that it was a mistake to walk off in a huff as the ICC was taking shape. It is hard to protect our troops from unfair prosecutions if we aren't at the table to win those protections. I also believe that threatening our allies and trying to bully them into changing their position on the ICC, rather than sitting at the table to work these issues out, was a mistake. There are ways to protect our interests that do not involve infuriating the allies that we need to win the war on terrorism. Certainly there are better ways to protect our interests than to stand in the way of trying people guilty of what our own administration has called genocide.
The American Servicemembers Protection Act, which Congress passed to give concrete form to the objections that many have to the ICC, contains a provision stating:
Nothing in this title shall prohibit the United States from rendering assistance to international efforts to bring to justice Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosovic, Osama bin Laden, other members of Al Queda, leaders of Islamic Jihad, and other foreign nationals accused of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
It seems to me that the crisis in Darfur may be precisely the kind of situation that such a provision was intended to cover. We have an interest--a moral interest and a political interest--in refusing to accept impunity for the grave abuses that have been committed in Darfur and in promoting long-term stability by insisting on accountability. There is no question of American troops or political figures being involved. The legitimate concerns that we have with the ICC simply are relevant to this situation.
The administration's position today, as I understand it, is that we should create an entirely new international tribunal for Sudan. If that is what it takes to bring some justice to the people of Darfur , so be it. But it is not really difficult to understand why other members of the international community would be resistant to creating an entirely new structure, potentially every time that serious crimes against humanity occur, when a structure already exists for the express purposes of dealing with these issues. Particularly when our own administration has been pressing existing ad-hoc tribunals to wrap up their costly but important work, it seems odd to create another ad-hoc mechanism when the ICC exists. Most worryingly, it gives those who would rather continue to wallow in endless reviews and deliberations while people in Darfur die another opportunity to delay reviews and meaningful action.
So I believe that the administration should think about what makes good sense in this case. Efforts to bring an end to the crisis in Darfur have faltered, time and again, due to a lack of multilateral political will. Security Council members were unable to do more than contemplate the possibility of sanctions in the face of a terrible man-made catastrophe. We must continue to build a solid international coalition to pressure the Sudanese regime. I know that many of my colleagues and many in the administration share my frustration with the grace periods, the delays, the empty threats, and the hesitations. It is well past time, then, to do something about that. If we can send a former Secretary of State around the world to encourage others to relieve Iraqi debt, then we can appoint a very senior Presidential envoy to focus on this problem, to drum up support in capitals around the world, to squeeze every drop of potential cooperation from others with intense discussions and negotiations. The Government of Sudan should feel intense pressure every day, not hear mild scoldings and mixed messages every month or so. And the U.S. should not muddle our message by getting tangled up in our contorted position on the ICC.
Now the Commission of Inquiry's report has the potential to prod other states into action. It would be a terrible shame if the United States, once at the forefront of urging action on Sudan, now became a part of the problem.
Senator Durbin, speaking on January 31st (S621-623), also remarked upon the Commission's report on Darfur, the ICC debate, and US foreign policy objectives. He did in fact refer back to Bush's inaugural and SOTU addresses.
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 <sic>1 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.
1 That's the opposite of what Smith argued. "In fact such a referral would be consistent with U.S. policy on the ICC," Smith wrote ( Support War Crimes Trials for Darfur). |
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