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U.S. must act to end Sudanese atrocities

The world must act now to prevent unfolding genocide in Sudan

Date published: 7/10/2004

WASHINGTON--It was the crayon drawings, crude representations of airplanes and helicopters raining fire and death on hapless villagers, that made it all seem real.

These depictions of the horrors being visited on black Africans in the Darfur region of Sudan were eyewitness accounts of children.

Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican who represents Virginia's 10th District, and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., showed the drawings to journalists at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. The congressman and senator returned last week from a visit to Darfur, where they met with villagers who have fled the violence perpetrated on them by the Sudanese government and its proxies, the Janjaweed militias.

Figures cited in human-rights reports and newspaper articles--about 30,000 killed, more than a million displaced, hundreds of thousands at risk of perishing in squalid refugee camps--express the magnitude of the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The children's drawings express some of the substance of it.

Wolf and Brownback heard the same stories over and over from the refugees they met in Darfur: First, planes and helicopters--likely crewed by government forces, not the Arab nomads who make up the Janjaweed--bomb and shoot up the villages, then the militias sweep in and finish the job. Those who survive the attacks flee to overcrowded refugee camps where disease and poor nutrition stalk the weak.

The congressman and senator also heard countless stories of rape. The rapists' intention, they were told, was not just to terrify and humiliate; it was to create light-skinned babies.

As the horrific events in Darfur have unfolded, important people in various parts of the world have debated how to describe the situation. Some use the term "ethnic cleansing"; others speak of "genocide." Bush administration officials are leery of both terms.

It matters how these important people describe the Darfur crisis, because different descriptions correspond to different degrees of urgency--and to different burdens of responsibility on the international community.

As its name suggests, the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide calls upon signatories to suppress genocide, although it does not spell out what course of action is to be taken. According to the convention, genocide is defined as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."

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Date published: 7/10/2004