Statement Of Sen. Patrick Leahy
The Humanitarian Crisis In Darfur, Sudan
April 6, 2006

Mr. LEAHY.  Mr. President, almost two years have passed since the Congress declared the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan to be genocide, and more than a year and a half since the Administration publicly reached the same conclusion. 

Yet since those declarations, the United States and other nations have failed to devise an effective strategy to bring peace to the desperate people of that remote, war-ravaged region. The human cost of this failure has been staggering.  

Earlier this month, President Bush celebrated International Women’s Day, but there is no cause for celebration for the women of Darfur, thousands of whom have been the victims of rape and other acts of sexual violence inflicted by government security forces and the militias they support.

Through systematic massacres, rape, torture and the burning of hundreds of villages, Darfur has been pillaged and the lives of its people destroyed. 

The Government of Sudan has repeatedly attempted to disguise its role in the violence and it has been impossible to ascertain an accurate death toll, but some where between 200,000 and 300,000 people have died of murder or starvation. 

Many thousands more have ended up in squalid refuge camps after their homes were reduced to ashes by the government-sponsored janjaweed militias.

At the same time that this has been happening, Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has reportedly squandered $4.5 million to purchase a 118 foot, 172 ton presidential yacht so he can entertain foreign dignitaries and create a perverse façade of Sudanese progress and sophistication. 

Just to transport it by land from Port Sudan to Khartoum required severing 132 electric lines, plunging neighborhood after neighborhood into temporary darkness.

It is difficult to conceive of the level of greed, arrogance and twisted logic that would cause the leader of an impoverished country to blithely waste millions of dollars on a ridiculously ostentatious yacht to cruise the Nile River, while thousands of Sudanese children have fallen victim to the janjaweed’s brutality. 

Tens of thousands more are at serious risk of death by starvation, malnutrition, disease and mayhem.   U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland recently stated that Darfur is returning to ''the abyss'' of early 2004 when the region was ''the killing fields of this world.''

The scale of atrocities occurring in Darfur is appalling, and for too long the international community has been doing too little, hoping that somehow the situation would improve.  

Instead, in recent weeks we have seen the violence spread across the border into Chad.  The Government of Sudan is actively exporting the Darfur crisis to its neighbor by providing arms to the janjaweed and allowing them to attack Chadian refugees and villagers, seizing their livestock, and killing anyone who resists.  As a result, 200,000 Chadians have been forced from their homes, displaced in their own country. 

Earlier this month, the Senate unanimously passed S.Res.383, which calls on the President to take immediate steps to help improve security in Darfur.  The resolution proposes a no-fly zone over Darfur and the deployment of NATO troops to support the African Union forces currently on the ground. 

The African Union has done its best, but with only 7,000 troops, inadequate resources and a weak mandate to patrol a vast area, it has been unable to prevent the militias from continuing to attack civilians with impunity. 

I strongly support a role for NATO to bolster the African Union’s mission until a UN peacekeeping mission can be fully deployed, which could take a year or more. 

Only a few nations have the trained troops to contribute, and their numbers are stretched thin among many UN missions.  NATO troops on the ground could reinforce the African Union force with their superior command and control and intelligence gathering capabilities. 

Until recently the Bush Administration refused to support additional troops.  However, in the last several weeks, President Bush has showed a renewed interest in Darfur.  On March 9, at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified that the Administration is committed to the deployment of a larger peacekeeping force. 

Despite this encouraging rhetoric, however, the Administration continues to under-fund the African Union mission. The $161 million requested in the Fiscal Year 2006 Supplemental request for peacekeeping in Darfur will only cover the U.S. share of sustaining the current number of troops. 

It will do nothing to pay for the additional troops that President Bush has finally acknowledged are needed.  With people dying needlessly every week, the President needs to address the Darfur crisis more urgently. 

Earlier this week, I was pleased to co-sponsor an amendment, which was accepted, to the FY 2006 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill to add $50 million in peacekeeping funds for Darfur. 

The funds in the supplemental bill for peacekeeping in Darfur were barely adequate to support the current African Union mission through the rest of this fiscal year.  The additional $50 million will go to training and equipping the African Union force that has done its best despite scarce training and too little heavy equipment. 

There is no question that the Government of Sudan bears a great deal of the responsibility for the crimes against humanity that have occurred, and continue to occur, within its borders and now in eastern Chad.  It has sponsored brutal militias, hampered the African Union peacekeepers, and impeded the work of international relief organizations. 

And, most recently, it has opposed reconstituting the African Union force as a UN force, presumably fearing that the UN could pose a challenge to its own ability to act with impunity in a part of the world that is often beyond the spotlight of public scrutiny.  

But we in this country, the richest and most powerful nation on Earth, have done too little to stop the genocide in Sudan.  Many more lives could have been saved if we and other nations had shown stronger leadership. 

Let us hope that the Bush Administration will match its rhetoric with resources to support the number of troops that are needed to do the job.

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