Ladies and gentlemen,

 

 

Let me say immediately how much I respect what all of you – in your 135-140 organizations representing more than 130 million Americans – have done and are doing for the people in Darfur.

 

Only yesterday, your Internet News noted that Don Cheadle (of the film Hotel Rwanda) and Timberland have launched the Stamp Out Genocide campaign in cooperation with you.

 

Your news section also mentioned some prominent voices who are proposing new action and questioning current strategy. One is former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark, who told Voice of America that the US should immediately deploy approximately 5,000 troops to Darfur, to be complemented by NATO and the African Union (AU). The US and NATO forces would gradually be replaced by an expanded AU presence in the region until a permanent political peace could be achieved.

 

Chapter VII Mandate Option

 

Essentially, I must agree with Clark because China and Russia appear to have immobilized the UN Security Council. Of course, a Chapter VII Security Council mandate would be best – and let’s all push for one – but it seems unlikely to succeed at present. The AU/European Union partnership by itself is unable to stop the Government of Sudan – created killings, gang rapes and starvation.

 

No one in this room needs to be told how bad – and worsening – the situation is in Darfur today.

 

Let me then remind you of one new report: that of the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey and lecture from Humanitarians Dialogue. It concludes that victimization rates for aid workers in Darfur are now at levels not seen since the peak of the Rwanda genocide. In their survey of over 2000 personnel from 17 international agencies, at lease one in five claims to have been the victim of a security incident in the past six months.

 

You will probably all know that the United Nation’s (UN) Jan Egeland warned some time ago that humanitarian assistance to 2.5 million Darfuris might have to stop. Let me cite something Egeland said: “My question is, is (Darfur) a repeat of the so-called ‘safe area’ of Bosnia Again? We help people along, we give them food, we give them medicine, schools, but we do not protect them, or protect our unarmed staff. Then the massacres happen.”

 

By coincidence, I was visited last week in Ottawa by a delegation from Bosnia. With sadness in their voices, they reminded me that approximately 200,000 Bosnians perished in the mid-1990’s before the international community, led by President Clinton and NATO, finally stepped in robustly to stop the killing and raping which had dragged on for more than 40 months. A few years later, when a similar catastrophe erupted in Kosovo, a wiser international community acted quickly; the casualties there – in the 5,000 range – before Slobodan Milosovic threw in the towel but were at least much less than in Bosnia.

 

The vexing question for all of us today is why the lessons of Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda have vanished. How could approximately 50 governments together send approximately 60,000 peacemakers over time to Bosnia and none to Darfur? Are Africans less human than Europeans?

 

Eric Reeves

 

Probably like many of you, I’ve been prodded and informed for years by emails from the Smith College English Professor Eric Reeves, who is now seriously ill with leukemia. Last week, Eric wrote in part:

 

·        “A series of extraordinary dire warnings have recently been issued by various UN officials, a last desperate attempt to force the international community to take urgent cognizance of Darfur’s deepening crisis. Full-scale catastrophe and a massive increase in genocidal destruction are imminent, and there is as yet no evidence that the world is listening seriously. The US in particular seems intent on taking an expediently blinkered view of the crisis.”

 

·        “Even as, there is no possible escape from the most basic truths in Darfur: Khartoum’s National Islamic Front, even more dominate in the new ‘Government of National Unity’ is deliberately escalating the level of violence and insecurity as a form of ‘counter-insurgency’ warfare, with the clear goal of accelerating human destruction among the African tribal population of the region.”

 

And lastly these soul-searching words by Reeves:

 

·        “I’m failing to respond to the conspicuous and now fully articulated truth, the world is yet again knowingly acquiescing in genocide. But as the shadows of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda fall more heavily over Darfur, we cannot evade this shameful truth: We know – as events steadily, remorselessly unfold – more about the realities of ethnically-targeted human destruction in Darfur than on any other previous such occasion in history. So much the greater is our moral disgrace.”

 

Coalition Options

 

What then must we all do now for our brothers and sisters in Darfur? You will of course decide today what direction you as a movement wish to take…

 

Unfortunately, the AU does not have the military capacity or the mandate to do the necessary peacemaking job alone. The Darfuris, moreover, do not have from all indications have confidence in the African Union. Foreign Minister Gadio of Senegal for one has admitted that the AU can’t do the protection job alone.

 

But let me close with an anecdote I heard last weekend at an international conference on Darfur at the University of Western Ontario. The teller was not even certain that it was true. You can decide.

 

As the catastrophe across Rwanda raged in April and May, 1994, Ted Turner, who then ran CNN, was finally persuaded by his then wife Jane Fonda to do something. He ordered every CNN reporter in the capital to hound every politician and Clinton Administration official about Rwanda. Within a few weeks of this journalistic Blitz Krieg beginning, your government finally decided to send troops. Unfortunately, they arrived in Kigali too late to save many lives.

 

I leave you with the question: will history repeat itself in Darfur? If it does, how many Darfurians will die?

 

 

Thank you.

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