Senator warns of crisis in Sudan

WASHINGTON, July 06, 2004 (UPI) — The international community must take immediate decisive action to prevent the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan from deteriorating further, or risk another Rwanda, Sen. Sam Brownback said Tuesday.

The senator, a Republican from Kansas, speaking at a news conference in the U.S. House of Representatives after returning from his visit to the region last week, urged the United Nations to remove the country from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and to pass a Security Council resolution condemning the government of Sudan.

“If the international community fails to act,” he said, “the next cycle of this crisis will begin.”

Brownback added that the United Nations must immediately deploy human rights monitors to Darfur. The 279 cease-fire observers supplied by the African Union are not enough to monitor an area the size of Texas, he said.

The protection of civilians and access to humanitarian aid — which has met with some obstruction from the Sudanese government — must be a primary concern, he said, and the U.N. Security Council must be prepared to establish a no-fly zone should the cease-fire continue to be violated.

“The situation in Darfur,” said Brownback, “is … the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. … The potential for a crisis of catastrophic proportions is very real.”

Speaking on Sudan TV Monday, the Sudanese minister of the interior, Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, announced the government’s commitment to ensuring security at Darfur’s refugee camps and the protection of civilians from all hostile acts perpetrated by outlaw groups, facilitating humanitarian aid efforts in the region and returning displaced people to their homes.

On Saturday, the government of Sudan formally committed itself to the disarmament of the Janjawid militias and others operating in Darfur, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported Tuesday.

However, Brownback recommended the United Nations also set a deadline for the Sudanese government to comply with all cease-fire obligations and prepare contingency plans in the event those deadlines are not met.

“Time is absolutely of the essence,” he said. “It can be stopped before hundreds of thousand more die,” he continued. “We have a chance, but it’s a narrow window.”

The situation in Darfur, he said, is “an urgent top priority issue. … We must not make the mistake of 10 years ago in Rwanda.”

Brownback, who visited five refugee camps in the region with Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., last week, emphasized the “horrific scale of disaster” in the area.

“We did not see any men in any of these camps from the ages of 18 to 45,” he said. “… There’s a whole generation that’s missing, and it is ethnic cleansing, and I believe that clearly the seeds of genocide have been sown in Darfur.”

Brownback is on the Committee on Foreign Relations and chairs the Near Eastern and Southasian Subcommittee.

Wolf spoke of victims’ accounts of “killing, raping, stealing and plundering” by the Janjawid, who, he said, operate with “impunity.” He stressed that religion plays no part in the violence and that it is clearly aimed at purging ethnically different darker-skinned Africans. He cited stories by rape victims, told by their assailants that “they were hoping to make more lighter-skinned babies.”

He also read a letter given to them in a Darfur camp, written to “Messrs. Members of the U.S. Congress” and signed by 44 rape victims, urging “the international community to stand by us and not to forsake us to this tyrannical, brutal and racist regime, which wants to eliminate us racially.”

Brownback said the militia were clearly “government-sponsored.”

Villages are typically attacked, said Wolf, by Soviet-made Antonov planes and helicopter gunships, strafing and bombing before the Janjawid arrive on horseback and camels to kill, loot, rape and burn.

Traditionally a nomadic group, the Janjawid are, he reported, inordinately well armed and well supplied, and are even said to have satellite phones. “The militiamen we saw,” he added, “did not look like skilled pilots who could fly planes or helicopters.” He described seeing an encampment of Janjawid at Geneina airport in Darfur “within shouting distance of a contingent of government of Sudan regulars.” Sitting on the tarmac, he added, were two helicopter gunships and an Antonov plane.

An estimated 30,000 Darfuris have been killed so far and over 1 million forced from their villages under what Wolf described as the “government-supported scorched earth policy” in operation in the region. He cited U.S. Agency for International Development predictions that the death toll could reach as high as 1 million by next year. Unsanitary conditions in the camps have already encouraged the rapid spread of diseases such as diarrhea, cholera and dysentery, and malaria and malnutrition are rife, he reported. The impending rainy season, Brownback added, means the disaster is “set up to happen now.”

Brownback praised U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell for their recent visits to the region, but stressed that such visits must continue if sufficient pressure on the Sudanese government is to be maintained. In particular, he recommended that national security adviser Condeleeza Rice travel to the region.

In Addis Ababa Tuesday, Annan, addressing the African Union summit, said, “the brutalities already inflicted on the civilian population of Darfur could be a prelude to an even greater humanitarian catastrophe — a catastrophe that could destabilize the region.”

Speaking to reporters later, Brownback also called on the U.S. government to publicly identify those responsible for the atrocities, including officials from the government of Sudan, and urged the imposition of targeted sanctions, including travel bans and the freezing of assets.

The president, he said, should instruct the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, to seek an official investigation and hold accountable those responsible for the policies of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department declined to comment on Brownback’s recommendations.

The United Nations is drafting a resolution on Darfur, but many say it does not go far enough. Amnesty International warned in a press release Friday that the arms embargo which, according to the proposed resolution, would be applied only to the Janjawid militia, should also be extended to the government of Sudan itself.

“Now the world has seen the pictures and heard the stories,” Brownback said. “We cannot say we did not know when history judges the year 2004 in Darfur.”