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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."
In a report distributed to journalists on Tuesday, Wolf and Brownback wrote that the situation in Darfur may very well meet the convention's definition of genocide. "Clearly the seeds of genocide have been sown in Darfur," Brownback said.
After visits to Darfur last week by Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Sudanese government pledged to deploy troops to end the violence and to lift restrictions on delivery of aid to refugees. But Powell said on Thursday that "despite the promises that have been made, we have yet to see dramatic improvements."
To keep pressure on the regime in Khartoum, the Bush administration is circulating a draft resolution before the U.N. Security Council that calls on the Sudanese government to stop the Janjaweed's rampage. The proposal also would impose travel and arms sanctions on Janjaweed members.
But the resolution has been rightly criticized for failing to explicitly extend sanctions to any Sudanese government officials.
"The Janjaweed are not an independent body, but a tool created by the Sudanese government," Jemera Rone, Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch's Africa Division, said in a press release Wednesday. "The Security Council must place the responsibility for the crimes against humanity and humanitarian disaster squarely with the Sudanese government."
In a letter sent to Security Council members last week, Human Rights Watch also urges that the draft resolution be amended to set a deadline for Khartoum to disarm the militias and ensure protection of civilians. The rights group wants the Security Council to stipulate that if the Sudanese government cannot meet those conditions within a specific time frame--a matter of days, not weeks or months--then the council will authorize an international force to intervene in Darfur.
The United States should embrace these recommendations for toughening the draft resolution, even though it will have a difficult time selling them to China--a Security Council member with veto power, not to mention a close relationship with Khartoum because of investments in Sudan's oil sector.
The world cannot stand for a leisurely, half-hearted response to the crisis in Darfur. Rainy season is fast approaching in the region; its arrival will dramatically increase the risk of life-threatening disease among refugees and greatly hinder transport of relief aid.
As Wolf and Brownback have warned, if the international community does not take quick, decisive action on Darfur, the next phase of the crisis--its most devastating--will soon begin.
And if that phase is allowed to play out, there might not be many children left in Darfur to illustrate what they've endured.
RICK MERCIER is a writer and editor for The Free Lance-Star.