Oakland congresswoman pushes divestment in Sudan
By Angela Woodall, The Inside Bay Area
July 16, 2005 — Congress kicked off a national weekend of prayer Friday to call attention to the conflict in Darfur that lawmakers and President Bush have called genocide.
Legislators, religious leaders and officials from non-governmental agencies urged more and faster action to end the violence in Darfur that has left an estimated 400,000 dead and more than a million displaced in the past two years.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, said the weekend of prayer must be backed by action, citing the need for California to continue to mount its $9 billion divestment campaign to pull money out of retirement funds that invest in companies active in Sudan.
“Californians don’t want to have blood on their hands,” Lee said. “They don’t want to support genocide.”
Lee, who traveled to Darfur in January said, “I witnessed this humanitarian crisis – a crisis like none other I have ever seen.”
President Bush was criticized for not doing more to pressure the Sudanese government, which is blamed for provoking the tension in Darfur and arming Arab militias from the pastoralist community that carried out scorchedearth tactics against the non-Arab, black African farmers in Darfur.
Tensions between the two sides have risen in the past decades because of water and land scarcity and demands by the non-Arab farmers for more say in the ongoing negotiations between the North and South, which ended a 20-year civil war that killed an estimated 1.2 million civilians. Other estimates put the number at 2 million.
The Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals said leaders of the movement are not happy with the president’s response to the genocide and urged him to “put Darfur at the top of his inbox.”
Of particular concern were indications that Washington is tightening ties with the Sudanese government in Khartoum, a U.S.-ally in the war on terror.
They criticized a June 23 visit to Washington by Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, to meet with the State Department’s No. 2 official, Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick.
That visit followed the arrival several months ago of Sudanese intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, who was invited by the CIA to share information about the war on terrorism, according to news reports.
Sudan is on the State Department’s list of terrorist-sponsoring states, blocking most U.S. trade and assistance. The State Department has said it will not lift sanctions until the situation has improved.