THE CRISIS IN DARFUR

DECEMBER 9, 2004

JOHN SHATTUCK:  Good evening, and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library, on this December 9, the day before Human Rights Day.  Thank you all for braving the traffic, which is horrendous tonight, to get here.  I'm John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation.  And on behalf of myself and Deborah Leff, who's the director of the Kennedy Library, we are very pleased to be having this special forum on one of the gravest human rights crises of our time, the crisis in Darfur. 

And we're particularly pleased and honored to be doing this with Amnesty International on the eve of Human Rights Day and the 56th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, a document that I'm sure we all agree has promised more than it has been able to deliver, but that remains the benchmark and the inspiration of the global struggle for human rights.  I also want to just plug-- And you'll see this outside.  Amnesty International is having a celebration of Human Rights Day on Saturday, December 11, at the Boston Public Library, on "Workers' Rights Are Human Rights."  That's from 9:15 to 4:30, and of course, everyone is cordially invited.

Before introducing tonight's forum and our speakers, let me just thank the organizations that have made the Kennedy Library Forums, of which we have many, possible, starting with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which supports the series ongoing that we have on human rights and civil rights, of which this one is a major example; the Open Society Institute, for supporting our roundtable discussions, strategy sessions on these issues; and the sponsors of all of our Kennedy Library Forums, the Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, WBUR, which broadcasts all of our forums, The Boston Globe, and Boston.com.

You've all come tonight because you know the Darfur region of Sudan is in flames.  You know that for more than two years, cynical leaders have been working to enhance their power by using planes, bombs, soldiers, militia, and armed gangs to terrorize the civilian population of Darfur.  More than a million and a half people have been driven from their homes.  They've been held in camps that in some way could be described as concentration camps, because they can't get out of them.  They've been denied access to food and water and shelter.  Many tens of thousands have been killed.  Many crimes against humanity have been committed, including genocide, mass rape, and the systematic destruction of crops and livestock and villages.  Hundreds of thousands are starving, and many are dying.

Now, if this all sounds familiar, it is indeed familiar.  It's what happened exactly a decade ago in some ways in Rwanda, in Bosnia, and then in Kosovo, all crises which I saw firsthand when I tried to mobilize the US government to take action when I was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the Clinton administration.  And I saw the world stand by in Rwanda and do nothing while 800,000 people were slaughtered in the fastest genocide in history.  It later on took up the issue of justice in Rwanda, but the world did nothing to stop that genocide at the time.  For more than two years, the world stood by in Bosnia as more than 200,000 people were killed in another genocide, which was finally stopped by international action led by the United States.  And in Kosovo, the lessons of Rwanda and Bosnia at last, I believe, were learned, and 800,000 people who had been forced from their homes, Kosovar Albanians, were saved.

In Darfur, the world seems to have forgotten these lessons, and I think that's why we're here tonight.  And we're going to discuss this.  And again, the region burns while the world seems to do very little.  Humanitarian agencies, which have heroically continued to work in Darfur, have struggled to bring food and water in.  A few African countries, including Rwanda and Egypt, have offered to send in troops, and are sending in some troops to provide security.  But no real assistance of any significant form, at least in terms of trying to stop the genocide, is coming from the strongest governments in the world, and above all the US government.

So tonight we are shining a spotlight on Darfur.  And there is a basic question, and I think it's the question that we hope to be able to explore during this evening:  What can be, and must be done to stop this terrible human rights crisis?  What is a plan of action, ultimately, that should be put before the leaders of the world?  And to answer that question, we have a very distinguished panel of speakers, all of whom have had intense involvement with the crisis as activists, as analysts, and as travelers.  Let me just briefly introduce them, and then turn the program over to our moderator, our wonderful moderator, Gail Harris, who's seated at the end, the frequent guest host of NPR's and WBUR's The Connection, and other NPR programs, who will ask our panelists to make very brief remarks, and then engage with each other, and she will moderate during that time, and then during the last half hour, to engage directly with you and to take your questions.

Our first panelist, seated next to Gail, is Alex de Waal.  For the last two decades, Alex has been at the forefront of mobilizing international responses to the crises of famine, war, genocide and AIDS in Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and the Great Lakes region of Africa.  He's written two books about Sudan, and has lived and traveled extensively there.  He is now director of Justice Africa in London, and is a fellow at the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard.

Next to Alice is Dr. Jennifer Leaning, who directs the Program on Human Security and Complex Humanitarian Emergencies at Harvard.  Jennifer is a distinguished physician who has conducted humanitarian missions all over the world, most recently in Darfur last spring and early summer, and has been a major media commentator on the crisis.  She is a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and an attending physician at the emergency room of Brigham and Women's Hospital.

Our third panelist is Eric Reeves.  Eric is a professor of English at Smith College who for the last five years has devoted his life outside of his work as a professor to pressing for an international response to the genocide in Darfur.  He publishes a newsletter on the crisis, has written extensively about it in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and many other publications, and has testified before a number of Congressional committees calling for US action to stop the killing.

Our fourth speaker is the Reverend Gloria White-Hammond, one of Boston's most prominent community and humanitarian leaders.  Gloria is the Co-Pastor of the Bethel AME Church, along with her husband, the Reverend Ray Hammond.  Several times over the last four years, she has led coalitions of black ministers from Boston in slave redemption missions to Sudan, as a result of which over 9,000 slaves have been liberated.  Reverend Gloria has a long history of community leadership, especially dealing with the needs of high risk children and youth.  And as a medical doctor, she has served as a medical missionary in South Africa, Côte d'Ivoire, and Botswana.  

Our cleanup speaker tonight is Bill Schulz, the distinguished Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, one of the largest and most important human rights organizations in the world.  Bill is one of our country's preeminent human rights leaders, and has led missions on human rights issues all over the world, most recently to Darfur.  Before coming to Amnesty in 1994, he was president of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  He is an ordained minister and a leading authority on religious freedom and tolerance.  Bill is the author of several books about human rights, including Our Own Best Interests:  How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All and, most recently, Tainted Legacy:  9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights.

So please join me in welcoming to the Kennedy Library stage Alex de Waal, Jennifer Leaning, Eric Reeves, Gloria White-Hammond, Bill Schulz, and our moderator, Gail Harris.  And I turn it over to you, Gail.

GAIL HARRIS:  We're going to begin with about five minutes each, and this is going to be the challenge, number one.  Trying to define this issue in five minutes is going to be extremely daunting.  But we've asked each of our panelists to make that attempt, and so I'm going to be standing here with whips and chains to try to make certain that happens.  And we want to make certain that we have an opportunity to hear from you as well.  So as they are speaking, if you're formulating a question, keep it in mind, perhaps jot it down, and we will give you that opportunity a little bit later.  Alex, let's start with you.

ALEX de WAAL:  Thank you very much.  Let me start by actually reminding ourselves that December 9 should be Genocide Day, because it was December 9, 1948 that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was passed unanimously by the United Nations.  So today is the 56th anniversary of passing that.

I lived in Darfur in the 1980s.  And the people of Darfur taught me a great deal.  The very first thing that I learned, actually on my very first day of field work studying the famine of 1984-85, was that just because you're starving doesn't mean you lose your sense of humor.  I was in a really desperate camp for displaced people, where people were living on next to nothing.  And this was on the site of a camel market.  And while I was sitting, interviewing this desperately poor, very, very hungry old woman, these huge camel fleas the size of your fingernail were crawling up my legs and biting me.  And they have a pretty ferocious bite, camel fleas do.  And so I asked this old lady, "How can you live here?  These things, don't they eat you?"  And she laughed, and she said, "No, no, no, we eat them," which is a pretty bad taste joke, but not as bad taste as actually eating those sorts of things.

But the remarkable thing about that drought famine was the extent to which people were able to survive on their own resilience, their own resources.  And almost my last interview during the research I did in the 1980s was with a woman refugee driven out of southern Sudan.  And I asked her a similar question about her prospects, how she was surviving.  And she said, "Leave it to us.  We won't starve.  We don't just starve.  Someone has to force starvation upon us."  And the verb "to starve" is transitive.  It is not something that happens.  It is something that people do to each other.  Famine in Sudan is a crime, and has been a crime for the last 20 years.  And the form of genocide that we are seeing in Darfur is, I would argue, a famine crime.

Having said that, let me make the controversial statement that I think the international community is actually doing rather a lot about Sudan.  It has got a rather unprecedented level of international diplomatic attention over the last year.  Not all of it has been right, but it has got a lot of attention.  And in particular, I want to commend the African Union, because I think its rather remarkable chairperson, Alpha Konare, has basically got it right on Darfur.  His calculation is this.  First of all, pressure on the Sudan government is unlikely to yield radical changes.  And his argument for that was that in the 1990s, there was much more pressure brought to bear than can ever be brought to bear today.  There was in fact an undeclared war.  This is something I've documented in a recent book on Islamism and its enemies in the Horn, whereby there were actually many thousands of troops from neighboring countries with their knife at the throat of the Khartoum regime in the late 1990s, undeclared.  And that was what forced concessions out of Khartoum, expulsion of Osama bin Laden, etc., etc.  It wasn't action by the UN Security Council.  So he says putting sanctions on these people is never going to recreate that sort of pressure.

The second calculation is that regime change is not an option.  Because what happens if the regime changes?  He says we have two options that are likely to happen.  One, the really radical Islamists, the people who were forced out of power when the Islamist movement split five years ago, they are the only organized force who will come back.  And they will not solve the problem in Darfur, and moreover, they will re-ignite the war in southern Sudan, which is actually at the point of resolution as we speak.  The other scenario, he says, is complete collapse.  He attributes the crisis in Darfur to an intersection of a collapse of governance in that region over 20 years, and the deliberate instigation of the government and indeed the rebels.  And he said we will see that sort of crisis unfolding across all of Sudan if there is not government at all.  Any government, he says, almost any government, is worse than no government. 

So, what do we do to try and get Sudan out of this mess, given that the African Union is not committed to regime change?  Initially when the African Union went into negotiating Darfur, they thought there would be a quick fix.  They thought the political problems could be fixed, and on the basis of that, then you could establish peace, protection, etc.  It didn't work out that way.  And it didn't work out that way because the crisis has unfolded in an escalating way that has meant that the two parties are not even clear why they're fighting.  And in particular, the rebels are hopelessly disorganized in terms of their political agenda.  So early attempts over the summer to get a quick political fix simply didn't work.

And tomorrow the African Union brings the sides together again, for the third time, in Abuja, in Nigeria, to try and move on this.  And this time they are being much more realistic.  They don't expect any settlement to come out of these talks.  What they expect is the foundation for an agenda for negotiating a political settlement over the coming months.  So in the light of that modest expectation, the strategy has reverted to one of securing the north/south peace, this peace that has been painstakingly negotiated over the last two and a half years, and using that as a foundation for trying to address the problems in Darfur.  That is a strategy that was roundly criticized in the Washington Post editorial this morning, and I think wrongly so.  And I think wrongly so because it is an imperfect strategy.  It is not going to deliver a rapid solution, but it is the only strategy, under current circumstances, that can deliver a solution.

Meanwhile, the immediate challenge is stabilizing Darfur in terms of security, providing the troops on the ground, the African Union troops, with the right mandate, the right plan of action, the right logistical backup, and getting the parties, including the rebels, to agree to stick to the agreements that they have already made.  Let me stop at that point. 

GH:  Excellent.  A good place indeed.  Jennifer?

JENNIFER LEANING:  Thank you very much.  The crisis in Sudan, in Darfur, is basically one whereby large populations of civilians are still being hunted down by Arab militiamen and forces of the Sudanese government.  It's still happening.  We have been watching this unfold since February of 2003.  In April of 2004, another anniversary being important, the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, a number of human rights and humanitarian groups, some having been active in the field in Darfur for months, some just getting activated, began to raise public awareness of the unfolding disaster that was befalling the people of Darfur.  And a number of us began to say, "What are we seeing over there?  It's a very remote part of the world, very hard to get good news from it, extremely hard to get good numbers out, a highly complicated political background.  Is there any way we can get a sense of what's going on, and begin to frame that sense in a way that is actionable for US public and US policymakers.  

So, on behalf of Physicians for Human Rights, I and a colleague of mine, John Heffernin (?), went in late May and early June to the Chad/Darfur border.  Human rights people could not get into Darfur via Khartoum, because the Sudanese government was in control of issuing visas and would not have allowed us to get in.  And at that point, they were also still markedly blocking access for even simple humanitarian action, that is, the delivery of food and water and shelter coming in from Khartoum and other points of dispersal throughout Sudan.  So it was really different within Sudan for humanitarian access, let alone a human rights investigation.

So our option was to go along the border of Chad, where at that point about 200,000 refugees had fled from Darfur into Chad, which is the neighboring country to the west, seeking protection and safety, and fleeing from the Arab militia, and to some extent the government forces of Sudan.  We went the north/south boundary area.  It's a vast area, very difficult to traverse by four-wheel drive vehicle, extraordinarily poor and dry.  It was just in advance of the rainy season.  Bleak conditions, even for the few people in Chad that lived there.  And then it was becoming much more difficult, because they were trying to absorb and take care of the 200,000 people that were coming from Darfur.

The stories we heard as we moved up and down from camp to camp, or from the border areas where the humanitarian community had been slow to resettle people, so they were still right on the border, subject to the attack from the Janjaweed, the Arab militia coming in from Darfur-- The stories were remarkably consistent, and filled with jeopardy and pain.  The attacks usually occurred in the morning.  The Janjaweed would come on the village.  You might see a government plane circling overhead earlier.  There would be the cracking of plates, and the running out of houses as people were dispersed from the morning prayers or still waking up.  The Janjaweed and the militia forces would start from one end of the village, go to the other, kill whatever men they could find, or boys, rape the women, steal the cattle and the camels, kill all the other small animals, destroy the irrigation works, burn down the granaries, burn all of the buildings, contaminate the wells with the carcasses of animals or to some extent the bodies of human beings, and then engage in hot pursuit by horseback, vehicle, or plane, across the very open terrain as the people were fleeing, and going to the bush, a hill, another village.  And then they often would come back and finish the job in that village, leaving a complete rubble, scorched earth, impossible to reconstruct scene at the site of that village. And this is how they were moving across Darfur, north, west, and south.

Every family we spoke to-- And the families were usually female headed, with a couple of adolescent or younger women, and some small kids, clustering the scrawniest of goats, because this is their last chance for livelihood, is to hold onto their livestock.  Every family we spoke to had at the time of the attack of their village lost at least five members of their extended family.  The people were numb, completely dignified, very civilized, very contained, and still shocked with what had befallen them.  And although we did not interview all 200,000, we moved fast enough and saw a number of them across various settings, and various travel groups, to come back with the statement that what we think we were seeing, based on a qualitative but fairly seasoned assessment of interviews of people who have suffered trauma in war, we see a pattern of attack that is designed to kill a large number of people, but much more importantly, eliminate people's capacity to live on the land, destroy livelihood, destroy evidence that they'd lived there, and create such fear among the populace that they might never go back, unless major intervention could be launched from the side of the international community.

And on that basis, in terms of our reading of the Genocide Convention-- And it's instructive that Alex began by noting this anniversary date.  On our reading of the Genocide Convention, signed in 1948-- And the United States took long to sign it.  They signed it in 1986.  There is a clause there, where most people who have been thinking about genocide might not rest and define genocide per se.  But there is a clause that says the attempt to destroy the physical conditions of life that make it possible for a group to sustain itself, that action itself constitutes genocide.  And the land and the livelihood is destroyed, and then what we've seen after these attacks is the deliberate obstruction of the government of Sudan from all fronts of any humanitarian aid to be delivered to the population, under considerable pressure, including major efforts on the part of the United States.  That obstruction of access has been eased over the summer, so there are now claims that perhaps 60% of the population that is displaced within Darfur is getting some aid.

The point being, we are unsure of the death rate, but we think it is on the order of scores of thousands, upwards of 100,000 to perhaps 300,000.  And we can go into the details of the estimates.  We know there are 200,000 refugees, and somewhere between one and a half and two million people internally displaced, over half the population of Darfur dead or displaced, and dislocated from their lives and livelihood.  This is a colossal undertaking to redress, but the first steps are to stabilize-- I agree with Alex-- to introduce more humanitarian aid, much higher levels of security, augment the capacity of the African Union, and create a standdown, so that the killing and destruction stops.  And then we can begin to think through the political process of creating stability there, and the chance of return and reparation.

GH:  Thank you, Jennifer.  Eric?

ERIC REEVES:  I'd like to offer several broader generalizations of the crisis in Darfur, rather different from Alex's, and suggest something of what I see as the ominous trajectory of this catastrophe.  Let me say first that I believe that debate about whether or not ethnically animated human destruction in Darfur rises to the level of genocide is over.  Those remaining agnostics have to date presented no compelling arguments about why we should doubt either genocidal intent on the part of the Khartoum regime, or that a quantitative threshold for genocide has been crossed.  Indeed, the scale of the catastrophe proceeding from the deliberate destruction of non-Arab or African tribal populations in Darfur is barely comprehensible.  UN data suggests that there are 2.5 million people displaced within Darfur, and into Chad, and that approximately 3 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance.  My own research, which has sought to canvas all extant literature and data bearing on global mortality in Darfur suggests that well over 300,000 lives have already been lost.  For those interested, I brought copies of the most recent, the ninth iteration of this effort to quantify genocide in Darfur.

The current global mortality rate is roughly 30,000 per month and climbing.  Humanitarian capacity is less than half what is needed for the current phase of the crisis, and dire forecasts from the ICRC and others about food availability in early 2005 suggest that the crude mortality rate will increase rapidly.  The World Food Program reached 175,000 fewer people in October than in September, and fell short of its target of 2 million people by 900,000.  Most of those who received any food received only flour or grain, no oil or pulses (?).  This diet cannot sustain human life.  In camps to which there is humanitarian access, fewer than half the people have clean water or sanitary facilities.  Disease within badly weakened populations will take an ever-greater toll in coming months.

The humanitarian intervention that was dictated by genocidal realities a year ago is nowhere in sight.  The UN Security Council is paralyzed and seems content with passing increasingly meaningless resolutions.  This has had the effect of emboldening the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum.  One recent but telling sign of this is the brazen expulsion of the head of country operations for Oxfam International.  Oxfam had been harshly critical of the most recent security council resolution, and is being punished for its outspokenness by a regime that feels confident there will be no consequences.

UN political leadership-- Kofi Annan, Jan Pronk, Kieran Prendergast-- is moving toward a policy of what I would call moral equivalence, between the Darfuri insurgence and the jennasidare (?) in Khartoum.  This is especially conspicuous in recent statements by Annan, December 3, and Prendergast, December 7, to the Security Council about the nature of recent violence, particularly in the Tawila area of north Darfur.  UN diplomatic strategy has lurched from a policy of making demands of Khartoum, preeminently that it disarm the Janjaweed, to a policy of offering financial inducements if the regime will only complete the long-deferred north/south peace agreement in Naivasha, Kenya.  Seeing that apparent progress or nominal engagement in the Naivasha process works to mute international criticism of its behavior in Darfur, the regime will certainly string out negotiations as long as possible, a strategy that has served exceedingly well over the past year.

The future in Darfur looks ghastly beyond description.  We're fortunate to have Alex de Waal among us, one of the few people knowledgeable enough to suggest ways in which Darfuri society can be put back together.  It will be an enormously difficult task.  Ethnic identities have become much more salient, indeed inflamed, than at any time in Darfur's history, and most of the Darfuris I speak with declare they can't imagine how Arabs and Africans can live together again.

In the near term, without massive humanitarian intervention, supported by all necessary military resources, we may expect the following:  rapidly growing insecurity, which will derive primarily from Khartoum's disproportional violation of a merely notional cease fire; a consequent disastrous attenuation of humanitarian reach; dramatically increasing mortality in the rural populations that are already beyond humanitarian aid.  The African Union forces presently deploying will be overwhelmed by an increasingly difficult security environment, and even when fully deployed will be very badly undermanned and underequipped.  And the Janjaweed militia, which is not a party to either the April 8 cease fire, or the November 9 reiteration of cease fire terms in Abuja, will continue to be unconstrained, indeed supported by Khartoum.  Genocide by attrition will continue for the foreseeable future, and as many as one million people may eventually die as a direct result of actions by Khartoum and the Janjaweed over the past 22 months of conflict. 

GH:  Thank you, Eric.  We turn now to Gloria.

GLORIA WHITE-HAMMOND:  Thank you.  First of all, it's really a pleasure to be in a room with this many people who are interested in Sudan.  For those of us who have been caring about Sudan for a while, it's heartening to see you in the house tonight.  I just want to open with a quote that has been one of my encouragements as I've been involved with Sudan now, looking at it for about the last 10 years, and having traveled to it now six times in the last three and a half years.  This quote is from Henri Dunant, who's the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and it reads, "Last of all, in an age when we hear so much of progress in civilization, is it not a matter of urgency, since unhappily we cannot always avoid wars, to press forward, in a human and truly civilized spirit, the attempt to prevent, or at least to alleviate the horrors of war?"

Much of my effort, again, in the last three and a half years has been to alleviate the horrors of war, primarily in southern Sudan, working with women.  And as is so often the case, the real victims of war are the women and the children.  And so I, with a small group of women, have purposed to serve as channels of hope for women in southern Sudan.  Again, my interest goes back to 1995.  I don't know if this is a crowd that remembers when the story about slavery in Sudan broke, primarily by a reporter who was then at The Boston Phoenix.  I made my first trip in July 2001 because I was interested in looking at this issue, under the auspices of a group based here in Boston, the American Antislavery Group, and a group that's based in Zurich, Christian Solidarity International.  They were involved in what is certainly a controversial program of slave redemption.

And my effort was simply to go and to look, and to be able to talk with some of the people who are returning from the north where they had been enslaved, and subsequently to see what I could do.  With these women returning, what would be next for them?  How would they be integrated into their villages?  What could a group of American women do to support them in their efforts to restore the communities?  Again, I've been there now six times, and my first effort was simply to talk with women, just to tell me what you've been through.  And what I've appreciated is what I hope you all are appreciating just by looking at the news, is that this is not simply a matter of war.  It's about war.  It's about rape.  It's about, for women who are in the north, forced female circumcision.  It's about beatings and burnings (sic) and stabbings of every kind.  And it is an unconscionable tragedy, what women and children have suffered.

What we have done, with their prompting, is supported them by establishing a couple of microeconomic development projects.  We bought two grinding mills which are now in two different villages.  Women will spend six to eight hours a day preparing a meal.  Oh my God.  And with the grinding mills, they're able to do that work in less than half an hour.  It is a small thing, but it's a significant thing, in that it now allows women to participate in literacy programs.

And when we were in the village in July, one gentleman stood up and said how much he appreciated our efforts, because he said before this his wife used to be grouchy.  Now, after being able to have her meals prepared in less than half an hour, his marriage was much improved.  So he thanked us for the contribution that he made to his life.  And then, young girls saying that finally they were able to get back to school.  We have also supported a girls' school, a girls' school with 135 little girls.  And we made our trip there, and met the girls.  They sang a song, which roughly translates as, "It is now our time to be in charge."  So, these are certainly examples of tremendous girl power. 

We've also developed an HIV/AIDS project.  A year and a half ago, we brought a physician who is from southern Sudan, who runs a very busy clinic in southern Sudan.  We brought him here, and he served as a visiting scholar at the BI Deaconess Hospital, developed a very rudimentary effort to address the issue of HIV and AIDS.  We haven't talked about that tonight, but let me just tell you that what people on the ground understand is that their enemy-- Our concern is that once this peace treaty is signed-- And we hope that that will come.  We've had many deadlines, and all kinds of versions of deadlines.  But if in fact this next one obtains, then perhaps by the beginning of the year there will be peace.  What we'll understand is that refugees will be coming back into the country, and our anxiety is that they will bring their HIV with them, and so that the enemy that the government of Sudan represents is nothing like the enemy that HIV/AIDS represents.  And so people are also beginning to think about that, and poise to address that.

We will be going into Darfur in January.  There will be a group of six women.  And again, our effort is simply to talk with women, to find out what we can do to support them, not only in the effort to survive-- And that's important.  They need food.  They need water.  They need protection.  But as one woman said, "We have spent many years now experiencing war and death and dying.  Thank you for coming alongside to facilitate life and living."  And so our effort is to hear what they need, whether it be literacy training, whether it be development around peacemaking activities, or women's health issues.  Again, our effort is to simply support them in whatever the next phase of their life will be.  We know that these- Excuse me.  They are not concentration camps, but they sound-- If you've heard the accounts, they very much sound like they could be.  But these refugee camps, at this point the reality is that they are going to be in place for a while.  And as you've heard, there's really no place for women and children to go back to.  And so, given that reality, our effort as a group of women from Boston is to see what we can do to support them in thriving as best they can in the context of these refugee camps.

My biggest reason in going back is because I feel like I simply can no longer-- I no longer can countenance the systematic abuse and victimization of women and children as pawns in war games.  I will not do that anymore.  And again, I appreciate your presence here tonight, because it says to me that you are people of like-minded faith.  And so, while we're in the midst of doing all the advocacy and putting the pressure on the powers-that-be to go beyond functional hand-wringing and complicity, my commitment is to go forth and do something on the ground, to keep hope alive in a very tangible way for our women, our sisters who at this point are either victims in southern Sudan, or victims in Darfur, and appreciate your support and your encouragement by simply showing up to be here, and hopefully will end up agreeing to do even more.  Thank you. 

GH:  Thank you, Gloria.  Bill?

WILLIAM SCHULZ:  "Is that an Arab tribe or an African tribe?" I asked the 300-pound chief of police of South Darfur province, as we watched a festival of dance performed by dozens of tribes from the region.  "I have no idea," he said.  "I can never tell them apart.  Let me check with the governor."  That was just one of many ironies that I encountered as I participated earlier this fall in the first authorized visit by an international human rights organization to Sudan since the fighting began in February, 2003.

Our mission confirmed much of what we know.  I'm not going to tell you what you know, what we all know.  It also pointed up one paradox after another, symbolized perhaps by the angry Sudanese defense minister, who pounded the table, denounced Amnesty at the top of his lungs.  And then his cell phone went off, and I recognized the ring tone.  It was "Mary Had a Little Lamb."   But then, this is a government, all but one of whose members of the National Commission on Women are males, the chair of whom announced that women in Darfur are too stupid to understand the difference between the Arabic word for rape and the Arabic word for forced robbery.  "And rapes are not going on in Darfur," he said.  "Islamic men do not rape."

For once, the United States has played a largely positive role, if a tardy one here.  But so tarnished is our image, and so shaky our moral credibility, that even our allies in Darfur question our motives.  One European aid worker said to me, "After Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the Sudanese have nothing to fear from America's censure."  Sudanese officials scoff defiantly.  "Your State Department says there are mass graves in Darfur, that it's genocide.  But your State Department said that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."  And yet, in late September at least, the Sudanese government obviously feared what appeared to be America's resolve.  "You will surely bomb us," they told me, "just as you bombed Iraq."  The intervening months, I think, have proven just how hollow that alleged threat was.

And the victims are not just Sudanese.  They are all of Africa as well.  For, as we've heard earlier on the panel, the Darfur crisis has presented the African Union with an opportunity to demonstrate its willingness to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign state, and the African Union has accepted that challenge.  But the international community has failed to provide the African Union with the resources to do its job.  And in that respect it's failed not only the people of Darfur, but Africa itself.  For when the next crisis erupts, who will believe that the African Union is more than a paper tiger.  The African Union, 300 troops to cover a region the size of France, one helicopter to cover all of South Darfur province.

Of course, the crisis of Darfur reflects not just a regional brawl, but the fruits of a totally corrupt regime.  On 30 minutes notice, we were admitted to the National Security Prison in South Darfur, where we met with lawyers who had been imprisoned for the crime of trying to seek redress for their clients, redress from Janjaweed rape and murder, through the legal system, rather than at the point of a rifle.  The moment they had agreed to take the cases of African tribal clients, they were tossed into prison.  But then, this is a government that makes paradox a way of life.  We met a man who had been kidnapped by the rebels, and then released, found his way back to town, reported his kidnapping to the police, and was promptly charged by the police with the crime of having made contact with the rebels.

So, what can we do about this?  Because of course, the people who are suffering are, as usual, all of those caught in the middle, who had virtually nothing to begin with, and now have even less.  While the Congressional Black Caucus was getting arrested, while George Bush was getting reelected, those people stole for 15 minutes the world's attention.  But now that world has lapsed back into a kind of lassitude.  What can we do? 

First, what can the United States government do?  First, it can continue to send high level officials to Sudan.  It is symbolic, but it is important.  And the first thing that Condoleezza Rice should do at her confirmation hearings is to announce that the first place she will go once confirmed as Secretary of State is Sudan. 

Secondly, the United States, which has already supplied some assistance to the African Union should do everything it can to pressure the EU and other supplier nations to provide the African Union with the resources it needs, with communication equipment, with helicopters, with jeeps.  Third, the United States should do what it can to put pressure on arms suppliers to the Sudanese government, not just arms suppliers to the forces at war in Darfur directly, but arms suppliers to the Sudanese government itself, the Chinese, the Russians, our so-called allies in the war on terror.

Fourth, we should engage in conversations with the Arab League, a very important player which has been noticeably silent on this issue.  Fifth, we should at least take seriously the option of oil sanctions.  And sixth, we should push the United Nations Commission, which is allegedly reflecting upon this question of genocide to make its decision quickly.  And of course, seventh and finally, we should provide, and urge our allies to provide, the kind of true humanitarian assistance that is needed, including, for example, to the women and families of Darfur, with the kind of therapeutic resources they need to deal with the trauma of massive numbers of rape and murders of their families.

Let me just conclude with this thought. You know, we often hear proudly sloganized at every opportunity the two words, "Never again."  Well, were we to draw analogies between Darfur today and the Holocaust, we would by now in Darfur be way past the Vanzi (?) Conference.  We would be way past the Kristallnacht.  We would be way past the initial deportations, way past SS thuggery, way past the holding camps, way past the first 40,000 deaths.  About the only thing that remains in Darfur is full-scale Auschwitz.  And until we stop this carnage, anyone, any one of us who has shouted "Never again" ought to be too embarrassed to ever shout it again. 

GH:  Thank you, Bill.  And thank you, all.  Some of you have touched on this.  I wonder if we can explore it a bit more.  And that is the question leading to the, what needs to be done?  Is there a tipping point here?  Because some thought that once Congress declared this to be in fact genocide, once Colin Powell declared it to be genocide, that perhaps then that would be the moment in which something substantive happened. And yet, here we are, these weeks later, with certainly some bleak stories that we've heard just this evening.  If that's not the tipping point, what is?  What can we look for? 

__:  I think we might note that accompanying Colin Powell's genocide determination was the following statement, and I quote:  "In fact, nothing new follows from this genocide determination."  What he meant by nothing new is that nothing followed from the US genocide determination other than to refer that genocide determination to an obviously paralyzed UN Security Council, paralyzed primarily because of China.  China is a net importer of oil.  It imports oil at a very, very high rate.  And that growth increased by 10% a year.  It views southern Sudan rightly as its premier source of offshore oil, at least that it controls, and looks at Sudan almost exclusively through the lens of petroleum needs.  After the second, weaker UN Security Council resolution of September 18, the Chinese permanent ambassador to the United Nations declared quite publicly, "If there's another resolution with any threat of sanctions, we will veto it," end of statement. 

AdW:  We've heard the crisis, the conflict, and the mass killing in Darfur described as genocide, and I believe that's correct.  I think the comparison with Rwanda and the Holocaust is less exact than the comparison with southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains.  A colleague of mine in London, John Rowe (?), in response to, I forget who it was who had called Darfur "Rwanda slowed down," said, "No, this is actually southern Sudan speeded up." 

And I think if we look at Darfur through that lens, a number of important things arise.  The first is that actually what we've seen in-- what is happening in Darfur is uniquely horrible.  But comparably nasty things have happened on several occasions in the last 15 or so years in other parts of Sudan, in-- I won't go into the list, but there are at least three episodes.  And the interesting conclusion that one can draw from that is-- Or rather, one can draw two radically different conclusions.  One is that this is a repeated moral failing.  The world should have intervened to stop the massacres in Barakazol (?) in the late 1980s or the genocide in the Nuba Mountains in the early 1990s.  Alternatively, you can draw the conclusion-- this is the conclusion that is being drawn by the diplomatic community-- that the root to solving this is through a negotiated settlement, because the actual practicality of intervening militarily to stop it with international forces is so remote.  

And one interesting little discussion that was had was about the difficulty that arose when the UN Security Council asked the Sudan government to disarm the Janjaweed within 30 days.  And when the UN envoy, Jan Pronk, went to Sudan, he was widely, roundly criticized for sort of walking back on that commitment, saying, "Let's not have that commitment.  Let's have a much watered down commitment."  And there are arguments on both sides.  The argument on his side is that the government was actually being asked to do something it couldn't do, the fact being that the militias, the so-called Janjaweed-- I don't terribly like using the term, because it means different things to different people-- are much better armed than the government forces there.  In the first six months of the rebellion, the government lost 90% of the military engagements in Darfur.  It was only when it used the militia that it actually stopped the rebellion in its tracks.

And the government is not in a position whereby it simply can go and do this.  It cannot actually forcibly disarm the Janjaweed.  It can only do this by consent.  And yes, in an ideal world, there would be an international military intervention with-- Fifty or 100,000 international special forces would parachute into Darfur and would disarm these people.  But if that is not going to happen-- and frankly, I don't think it is going to happen-- we have to look at the second-best option.  And the second-best option is coming to an overall framework negotiated settlement, which is going to take a little time, and trying to stabilize the human suffering in the meantime. 

GH:  Jennifer? 

JL:  It may not be so obvious to you in the room why a full force military intervention, 50 or 60,000 troops, is not possible.  And that would be very interesting to hear from you if some of you have that question, and we could get into that detail.  Those of us who have been very active in advocacy at the UN and US governmental levels-- And it's gotten very high, because the Bush administration is deeply interested in resolving this.  It's a very important part of the Bush administration's agenda here.  It may have fallen off the radar in the last couple of months, but essentially, in high places they do care.  The head of USAID, the three more senior people in USAID right under him, very senior people in the State Department, very high people in the Office of Management and Budget, people in the Executive Office of the President.  And we in PHR and a number of us around this room on the panel side have been in touch with them, and there's been many other high-level contacts.

The problem is, the United States doesn't have any throw weight.  It's extremely important to realize that we are deeply handicapped politically and diplomatically by our having entered Iraq on terms that the UN and the international community consider, if not illegitimate, at least extraordinarily preemptory and un-thoughtout, and definitely unilateral.  And there is no willingness to follow the US lead, and no willingness to follow the US analysis.  One of the issues that is fascinating at a subtext level, slightly below the political radar, is that those of us who have been calling it genocide have not been saying one way or the other that that therefore forces a military intervention.  The Genocide Convention merely says that once you determine genocide is taking place, a state may call upon the UN, one of its organs, to take action.  That's the language of the Genocide Convention.  The two things that a state is required to do if it makes a determination of genocide are, one, to permit extradition from its country of those people who have been charged with genocidal action by another country.  And the other is to make sure that our laws are compatible with all opposition to genocide.  But there isn't an action that is required of us. 

The problem is that the Europeans, at the civil society level and at the governmental level, have resisted calling this genocide.  There may be very principled reasons, and very principled, empirical basis for that resistance.  But there's also a high political resistance to taking any lead from the United States.  And I think it's really important that we in America realize the consequences of the Iraq war, in terms of the failure to say that people in Darfur-- There is a quite close, tight linkage. 

And one other point I'd like to make:  If that is the case, and if also there are some very important reasons why regime change, as Alex has said, seems unwise, given how complex Sudan is, and the ramifying politics of that action, then we are back to this humanitarian aid, security protection angle with all of that resting on the very tiny wheels of the African Union.  And it is a fundamentally flawed, very difficult place to be, particularly from the perspective of those who are still dying, and languishing in Darfur.  So, a very important issue is to keep the pressure on, so that we do not permit-- we, the United States, we can do this, diplomatically and politically-- we do not permit the ongoing corrupt shenanigans of the Sudanese government and, I would say, certain representatives from the UN to continue.  These lapsed deadlines, this long period of time.  Eric is the one who has been saying for months, time is on the side of the Sudanese government.  Time is not on the side of the people of Darfur.

And there are some of us who feel that, as you said, Bill, we are well into an accomplished genocide here.  There are others who feel that the resilience of these people is such that there will be a capacity to come back.  Regardless, to allow more time to lapse until that action on the ground is going to be a calamity. 

GH:  Yes, Bill? 

WS:  Gail, I just wanted to respond briefly to what Alex said about the government.  I certainly agree that this is a weak government.  It's a divided government.  It's not a government that unilaterally can disarm or stop the Janjaweed or the militias from doing what they're doing.  But it certainly can do a great deal more than it's doing.  It can do something.  It can stop supplying them arms, for example.  It can stop collaborating with the bombings and the attacks.  It can stop tilting toward the militia, denying and excusing militia atrocities.  It can stop denying and excusing rapes by the militias.  It's important, I think, to remember that we talk of the militia, but as Alex knows better than any of us, it's really militias.  There are many different militias here.  And the other thing the Sudanese government is it can prosecute one person.  It hasn't prosecuted a single person on the so-called Janjaweed side of the conflict.

So, there are at least some things that the government can do.  And while I certainly agree that the solution to this will need to be a negotiated one and not a military one, I think that the fact that it has to be a negotiated one reinforces the point a number of us had made about the importance of the African Union being fully supplied.  Because once the negotiation is successful, if it ever is, there are going to have to be troops on the ground that enforce whatever that solution is going to be.  And those troops are not going to be American troops.  They shouldn't be American troops, as Jennifer has just said.  They are not going to be, I suspect, in great number European Union troops.  Who are they going to be?  If they're going to be anyone, they're going to be African Union troops. 

GWH:  I think one of the reasons for, at least for my being pessimistic about this government is, again, the strategy that we're seeing in Darfur is, as we all know, is not new.  And this is more than 20 years ago, the very same strategy of the government colluding with the militia to go into the villages, destroy the villages, take the women, etc.  All of this is so familiar.  And in the last 20 plus years, they certainly have not done anything to arrest that process.  I find myself saying that, at least in Sudan, this is a place where denial is not just a river.  It is in fact what this government does, and does so well.

One of my questions-- There certainly has been a more recent suggestion that perhaps it's time for a regime change at the United Nations.  And I would be interested in getting the comments of my fellow panelists about making a change.

GH:  Actually, before we do that, let me ask you as well, Jennifer mentioned the need to keep up pressure.  And I wonder if you'd speak, Gloria, for just a moment about the role of the American evangelical community in achieving change.

GWH:  In Sudan? 

GH:  Yes. 

GWH:  Okay.  I thought you were going to talk about this most recent election. Oh my goodness. 

GH:  No, no.  We're focusing on Sudan. 

GWH:  Yes, that's right.  That's ...(inaudible)  

GH:  Tempting as it is. 

GWH:  Okay, I hear you.  Well, certainly I think in terms of southern Sudan, I particularly-- The evangelical community has been very, very, very active in terms of southern Sudan, primarily in terms of this whole issue of the slavery, and doing more to recognize slavery and to at least do some work around the abolition of slavery in southern Sudan.  And I think that's been important.  It certainly has by no means been enough, but certainly it has been an important place to begin.

And I want to think that one of the reasons that there has been some movement even to acknowledge the fact that Darfur exists is the fact that there's been a general groundswell on the ground here in America.  And I want to think that part of that is driven by the evangelical church movement to keep this issue alive.  Now, there is much, much, much more that needs to be done.  But I want to say that part of the credit goes to the evangelical church movement. 

GH:  I also want to ask a practical question, which is, we now have all these people who have been displaced.  Gloria spoke to the scorched earth policy, as did Jennifer.  Where could they go?  Let's say the problem was solved tomorrow.  What happens to these people?  They go back.  Their villages-- The wells have truly been contaminated, have been poisoned.  Their fields are-- Who even knows who owns the land anymore?  Where could these people go? 

ER:  I think one of the answers is, they do not have any place to go.  The destruction has been so complete.  A typical village destruction entails not simply the killing of primarily men and boys, the raping of girls and women, girls as young as eight, but the destruction of villages in the form of dwellings, water supplies, irrigation systems, food stocks, seed stocks, agricultural implements.  Mosques are burned, Korans are desecrated.  Fruit trees are cut down.

But even more important than the fact that they would have nothing to return to, these people have no security.  They would go in any event, with nothing, if they had security.  But they don't have security.  And the people in the rural areas-- And one thing we have not touched on yet is the vast number of people who are really quite beyond humanitarian aid reach now.  The numbers range between half a million and a million.  These people are slowly starving.  Alex certainly knows better than any of the superb coping skills of these people.  He observed it firsthand in 1985-1985, in the famine.  But they cannot deploy these coping skills if insecurity reigns.

So what we have to have is-- I would argue, to go back to the issue of intervening force, we need to look at the security tasks in understanding the nature of this intervening force.  It has to protect the camps, the camp environs.  It has to ensure that women leaving the camps to collect firewood are not raped by the Janjaweed. 

It needs to protect humanitarian workers who are operating under intolerable risk.  It needs to create safe corridors for humanitarian convoys.  It needs to protect people who desire to return to their villages, or the former sites of their villages. 

And it certainly needs to, if not disarm, at least neutralize militarily the Janjaweed.  This is something that is simply far beyond the capabilities of the African Union, and we do the African Union no service by not acknowledging this.  This is a first deployment by the African Peace and Security Commission, and it comes three to four years--

END OF SIDE 1

[repetition of material from side 1] 

ER:  This is a first deployment by the African Peace and Security Commission, and it comes three to four years before they planned to deploy.  Romeo Delaire (?), in a recent JFK School of Government presentation argued that it would take 44,000 NATO quality troops to address these various security issues.  That's a consensus figure among the military experts I've talked with.  But that's just to provide security and to augment the efficiency of humanitarian aid delivery, most of which is now being, at least in food, being flown in.  Flying food into Nyala from El Obeid is four to five times as expensive as trucking it in or taking it in by rail.  We have acute security problems right now that make it impossible for people to survive in rural areas, or to return to rural areas, or indeed even to survive in the camps.

WS:  Gail, your question is a profoundly important one.  Eric says they have nowhere to go, but the reality is they're going to go somewhere, and the vast majority of them are going to stay in Sudan, in one place or another.  And they're going to be in an enormously difficult situation there, for the many reasons that he has just eloquently described.  And one of the unspoken aspects of this crisis, or very little spoken, is that even if we do resolve the conflict itself, the war itself, and establish security, we will then be faced with an enormous humanitarian challenge, billions and billions of dollars.  And the great danger is that if the world does manage, the international community does manage to resolve this conflict, that then everyone will assume that the problem is taken care of.  And that's when the real crisis may set in, and the real dying, even beyond what we're seeing now, may occur. 

GH:  I want to put out one more question to the panelists, and invite those of you who have questions and comments, why don't you start stepping towards the microphone.  We have one right here in the central aisle.  We'll be happy to hear from you in just a moment.  Alex, you were about to add to that comment first? 

AdW:  I was just going to say, we mustn't underestimate the local resources, in terms of return, rehabilitation, and construction or reconstruction of some sort of social fabric.  I think the point about security is absolutely key.  If security can be provided, most of these problems can be solved.  People know where they came from.  They know who owned what piece of land.  And they can survive, even without aid.  If security were provided and aid were cut off, that would be a tremendous improvement in the lives of people.  Of course, I'm not advocating cutting off aid.  I'm just trying to weigh the relative weight of the two.

And we must bear in mind that when we talk about the groups involved in this, the militias responsible for this are overwhelmingly drawn from certain of the Arab groups in Darfur, but the majority of the Arab groups in Darfur are actually not involved, are actually neutral in this.  And there's a tremendous resource there, for example, in the largest of the Arab tribes of Darfur, the Rizigat of the south, whose leaders have very studiously, under immense pressure, stayed out of this conflict, and are constantly offering their services, very discreetly, very quietly, to mediate.  And they're saying, "If the space is provided, we can do a tremendous job of putting this back together."  The government won't permit it.  And clearly, along with providing the security, as it were, at a village level, whereby ordinary people can get back on with their lives, apply the skills that they have for survival, there is also the need for removing that prohibition on the communities themselves beginning to sort that out.  Because as they do that, the criminals will become a much weaker and much more marginal force. 

GH:  As there is this ongoing search for a resolution, I'm wondering, does it make a difference in terms of why it's happening?  In other words, some have suggested this is a policy of deliberate Arab-ization of the Darfur region by the government.  Others say, "No, it's simply the consequences of an ineffectual and weak government in Khartoum.  How does that play into it?" 

AdW:  I would say it's more miscalculation than deliberate Arab-ization.  I mean, there has been a deliberate policy of Islamization and Arab-ization in the south.  Darfur is 100% Muslim.  And traditionally the Arab elites-- Arab has two senses.  It's very important to recognize, Arab means two rather different things.  It means the cultural Arabs, who have affinities with Cairo, with the Nile valley, with the Arabian peninsula.  And Arab means nomad, Bedouin.  And the Arabs of Darfur are black African Muslim indigenous Bedouins, who have historically been subject to the same process of cultural political Arab-ization as the non-Arabs, and they've been discriminated against historically just as much as the non-Arabs of Darfur. 

But what has been happening is, some of their leaders have been trying to seize upon this Arab identity as a ticket to emancipation and to power in the rest of Sudan.  So there's no blueprint for Arab-ization coming out of Khartoum.  There are some Arab supremacists amongst these mobilized Bedouin Janjaweed, who would love to see an Arab region.  But theirs is not the same project as the government.  They have a merely tactical alliance.  And the tactical alliance that came about in the heat of this insurgency that was very threatening to the government unleashed this habitual counterinsurgency that is tantamount to genocide.  I think Eric made the point about the clear genocidal intent in the government.  In a way, the government has got so habituated to taking violence to this extreme that we don't even need to seek for intent.  That's just how they do business.  And in a sense, this is what has happened in Darfur.  So we don't need to look deeply for blueprints for Arab-ization.  This is just how they conduct warfare. 

__:  I think Alex is exactly right.  In fact, he wrote quite eloquently in the August issue of The London Review of Books that this is not the ideological jihad against the Nuba people that began in 1992, or even the instrumental clearances in the southern oil regions, but rather this is, I think he said, the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power.  It is genocide by force of habit.  And that's what we're seeing.  We're seeing genocide by force of habit.  I think that raises the question, though, if this is indeed a serially genocidal regime, what kind of peace can ever come to Sudan if this regime remains the dominant political force in Khartoum? 

AdW:  That's the big question. 

GH:  Indeed.  Yes? 

Q:  Hi.  First of all, hi to Bill, and hi to Gloria.  I know both of them.  I'm Jim Moore (?), and for the last four years I was a fellow at Harvard Law School, and worked on technology and international development, and kind of understanding how societies change.  And friends of mine have been running this blog called "Passion of the Present" since last spring, which focuses on this.  And so in that capacity I've spent-- I don't know-- upwards of three to five hours a day kind of reading about this, since last spring.  So I come at it as an amateur, but now as somebody who's looked at it for a long time.

And what I conclude after this many months of looking at it is that the Chinese issue is really, really serious, and that is really the fundamental thing here, and that in some ways we divert ourselves by trying to understand what's going on in Sudan from really the Chinese issue here.  This is a Chinese client state.  The Chinese have gone from a net exporter of oil to a net importer of oil over the last four years.  They're now, as Eric says-- And I want to sort of reinforce what Eric said, and also what Bill said about this.  The Chinese have gone from an exporter of oil to an importer of oil.  Sudan is their success story for establishing an oil base, and a way to bring in oil.  It is also their oil services space for the rest of Africa.  

And I'd like to add one other thing, which is that since 9/11, and since our invasion of Iraq, the Chinese have systematically gone around the world, talking with regimes like the one in Sudan-- Burundi would be an example, and the Saudis is another example-- and saying, "You know, if long term you think it's difficult to sell oil to the United States, if long term you're worried about how the United States is treating you, and about the United States' concern for human rights, we're your guy.  We're willing to buy your oil.  We're willing to invest.  We have two national petroleum companies which are willing to come in and work with you."

And so my question is, how do we deal with this?  Because I think if you buy that- And particularly I think maybe Bill and Eric may buy this.  If you buy that much of this is basically a Chinese support for a regime, like Burma and others that they support, where they care more about stability than anything else, and they will keep these guys in power, how do you deal with this?  What do we do about that? 

__:  I think first we need to recognize the problem.  I think part of the difficulty has been that few have understood how deeply concerned China is about Sudan, and how willing it is to go to the mat to preserve its proprietary interests in the concessions.  It is the dominant participant in oil production in both western and eastern upper Nile, in all the most promising areas.

And I think we also, I must say, should be watching how China performs in other African countries, other developing economies, where their human rights concerns do not exist.  In fact, many have said that the Chinese are content with the present no war/no peace state in southern Sudan, because it keeps the western players out.  It keeps TotalFinaElf out.  It keeps everybody else out, because nobody can tolerate national workers coming back in body bags.  The Chinese can tolerate it easily.  They don't like it, but they can tolerate it.  Until we get serious about seeing how ruthless China is on the international stage in responding to its oil needs in places like Sudan, we're going to have a tough time getting beyond the weakest of Security Council resolutions, certainly as directed against Sudan. 

GH:  In the interest of time, I think we need to move on.  Thank you.  Another question? 

Q:  Yes, hi.  My name is Jesse Sage (?).  I'm with the American Antislavery Group.  And I want to start by thanking all of you for your incredible work, for going on the ground in many cases, and Eric, for years of real leadership on Sudan.  And I actually want to apologize on behalf of all of us.  Because I think the American people, while we've done some good stuff, we've largely failed.  We have not taken to the streets on this genocide.  And we have taken to the streets on other issues very recently.

And so, my first thing I want to say to the whole audience is that if you'd like to take a stand, tomorrow on the steps of the State House here in Massachusetts, we along with many other student groups, including high school students, students at Harvard, BU and Tufts, have a candlelight vigil for International Human Rights Day, calling on our own leaders in America and international leaders to act.  And I think when Americans take to the streets, our leaders are much more likely to respond than if we simply publish reports or write op-eds, not that those aren't extremely important.  So if you want to do something, come on out.  And I can tell you that there's going to be-- Someone from John Kerry's office is coming.  Barney Frank sent a statement of support.  And it looks like one of the state senators from Massachusetts may be beginning to endorse a divestment campaign, because Massachusetts employees, their retirement fund has $1.4 billion dollars, roughly invested in companies doing business in Sudan.  So I want people to know, you can come out at 5:30 to the State House steps, and take a little stand, and light a candle.  Also, there will be a survivor of slavery, and I think it's important to hear from all of you, but also from Sudanese themselves.

But I have two questions, and they're both directed at Eric.  The first, Eric, is, we hear some sentiment that we should relegate the Sudanese to live under the dictatorship that rules Sudan, maybe in part because the Europeans aren't going to step up, because they're upset about American policy.  I'm not sure we need to accept that European abdication.  But in any case, in America we talk a lot about George Bush's America.  So I wonder if you can tell us, who is General Omar alBashir, and what is his dictatorship like?  

And the second question I wanted to ask you is, you've been very active in the past on divestment.  We successfully got Talisman out of Sudan.  Do you see some success in pressuring international, multinational corporations, including PetroChina, the Chinese oil company, through divestment, will that make any difference? 

ER:  Thank you, and I'll try and answer as efficiently as I can, in fact, anatomize the National Islamic Front regime, which is essentially unchanged since it took power by military coup in 1989, deposing an elected government, and aborting Sudan's most promising chance for peace since 1956.  It's essentially unchanged. 

There are some who see moderation.  I see simply a different kind of pragmatism.  The ways in which powers shift within the National Islamic Front are exceedingly complex, an arcane matter.  I suspect Alex and I could go on for many days debating about who's in, who's out, what coalitions there are.  But I don't think it's Omar Bashir's government.  I think the most powerful man in Sudan is First Vice President Ali Osman Taha.  That's important because of his role in Naivasha.    If we see a peace agreement actually take hold in Naivasha, then we will know something very important about collective decision on the part of the National Islamic Front.

On the question of divestment, there is a booming divestment campaign, focused in part in Harvard on shares of PetroChina, part of the dominant Chinese oil presence in southern Sudan.  But there are also a great many other Asian and European companies, held widely in American portfolios, that are supporting this regime.  And I think this is a regime that cannot survive and produce a just peace in Sudan.  So I urge you to look at a web site, www.DivestSudan.org, and learn just about how your own moneys are invested in companies that have chosen, I believe myopically, to invest in the survival of a regime that could not survive without that investment.  Its external debt is $22 billion dollars.  On a per capita basis, Sudan has probably got the most indebted economy in the world. 

WS:  And let me just add that this is a fragile government.  It's a dictatorship, yes, but there were two coup attempts in the eight days that we were in Sudan, and there have been God knows how many other coup attempts.  And this is a divided government.  It's a confused government.  And as Eric has just said, it's divided from the top on down as well.  

AdW:  I would actually disagree that it hasn't changed.  I think that in the first years in power, particularly the first six, seven years after the coup of 1989, it had an ideological ambition for really transforming Sudan into an Islamic state, and exporting that revolution to its neighbors.  And that project failed.  And it failed not because of the US opposition.  It failed because of opposition in Sudan, and in the region.

And that led to the Islamic movement splitting.  And what we have now in power is one wing of that, which is less ideologically ambitious, but arguably more militarized, and with its claws into the security apparatus, more pragmatic.  And one of the ironies about the war in Darfur is that one of the rebel groups is drawn from the other, the more militant, the more ideological wing of that movement.  And that movement is still there.  And its leader is Hasan Turabi, who was the sheik of the Sudanese Islamists.  And my great fear about the call for regime change is that that movement, which is very similar in most respects to those who are in power, they're the people who are most likely to take over if this government falls, and that would not be an improvement. 

Q:  With the exception of Mr. de Waal, I think some of you have shed a lot more heat than light on this subject tonight.  It's been noted, of course, that the European Union is largely skeptical of the claim of genocide.  You may also realize that the African Union is also a little skeptical of that.  At the same time, in September, when Colin Powell was calling it genocide, President Obasanjo of Nigeria was appearing at the United Nations and made the following comments.  He said that "before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and program of a government to wipe out a particular group of people.  Then we will be talking about genocide or ethnic cleansing.  What we know is not that.  What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion.  That's what we know.  That doesn't amount to genocide.  From our own reckoning, it amounts to, of course, conflict.  There is a human crisis there, but no one has really proven that it's genocide."

The other word beside genocide that keeps coming up is the word Arab.  And there seems to be an attempt to link Arab with genocide.  And that may be another political ulterior motive.  Mr. de Waal has drawn a distinction, a very important one, between being a political cultural Arab, and between an ethnic and racial Arab, which most of the Sudanese are not.  

Now, the United States of course turned a blind eye and was oblivious to what happened in Rwanda, in Uganda, in Congo, where there are perhaps 4 million people killed.  All those governments are on board in the so-called US war on terrorism.  But can the United States now see this as a strategic opportunity to draw a line between Arab and African countries, and bring Africa on board in its so-called war on terrorism? 

JL:  I can't speak for the US government's assessment of genocide.  I can speak to the assessment from the human rights community.  And it is based on a very informed reading of the Genocide Convention that the president of Nigeria has not engaged in.  The Genocide Convention and the legal judgment that have come out of the recent war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and Yugoslavia is viewed as a living document that requires the signatory states to intervene to try to prevent the crime of genocide if they see it unfolding.  And for that to be able to happen, to operationalize the Convention, requires being able to look over the boundary of an oppressive or failing state, where it's impossible to get a contemporaneous sense of intent based on documentary evidence, or testimonials, or a juridical process, to look over the boundaries, and identify patterns of death and patterns of attack, and on that basis infer intent.  And this has been judged to be the proper reading of the Genocide Convention by the justices, the tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

Further, the notion of the ethnic division-- what group is it that is being attacked by what group?-- is definitely contested.  I agree with you, it is not at all clear.  But it is not on the attempt to mark a divide between Arab and African that those of us are looking at this so closely.  We are, again, taking up the judgment in Yugoslavia and in Rwanda to say that when members of one group know that they belong to that group, and they can look across and say, "Members of that group are after me," and reciprocally, that group defines themselves as a group as opposed to another group, the internal recognition of difference can be very fine and very fine-grained.

And I can tell you, from having talked to people up and down the corridor of the Chad side of the border, where there are infiltrations, but also much more safety to talk about what they really feel is going on, to a man and to a woman, they say, "We are attacked because we are black African."  It has nothing to do with color.  As Alex has said, you can't tell the difference.  It has a lot to do with culture.  And that has to do with whether you come from an African tribe, whether you speak an African language as your first language, or whether you are identified with Khartoum and the Arab peninsula, and you speak Arabic as your first language.  And the people we talked to in Chad who were refugees said they could tell by looking at the way people rode a saddle, by the way their language, their accent was, by the way they dressed, by what their customs were, what side of the divide they were on.

So I do think that there is, granted, a subtle but definitely a real division between and among these people that is being exacerbated by this conflict, totally being exacerbated and manipulated.  And it is a dangerous, dangerous concept to continue to employ as a means of dividing what's happening in North Africa and the Sahel.  But that's entirely why we need to call it for what we see it is, and to implore and press for nation-states, international institutions to stop it. 

Q:  Yes, but there are many other situations [simultaneous conversation] 

GH:  I'm sorry, I need to exercise moderator's prerogative here.  We're over time as it is.  But thank you.  

Q:  -- that aren't attended to in the same way that it is in America for those reasons. 

__:  I might add one comment.  Bukesh Dapila (?), no apologist for American policy, who was in Rwanda during the genocide, said in March of this year, and I quote, "There is no difference now between Darfur and Rwanda, except for the numbers."  He went on to intimate that he saw all the ways in which the numbers could climb to the levels to which they have now.  I would strongly urge that our last questioner look at data from the Coalition for International Justice, reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, before resorting to the opinions and assessment of present ...(inaudible)  

AdW:  May I make one very brief comment, which is, personally I think what's happening in Darfur meets the criteria for genocide.  What I think is very unfortunate is the way that genocide determination and the language around it has been handled, in such a way that it appears from the viewpoint of the Arab world to be a unilateral US determination that demonizes Arabs.  And it carries with it the implication that Arabs collectively are beyond the moral pale.  And that is the way it's been read in Khartoum, and that has allowed the Sudan government to construct alliance of solidarity across the Arab world with governments that in other circumstances ought to be on our side, if you like.  And I think that the way that issue has been mishandled is very significant. 

GH:  Regretfully, we have time for only one more question.  If you can make it fast, I'd appreciate it. 

Q:  Hello, esteemed panel.  My name is Matt Linton (?).  It's become obvious to the citizens of the United States, because of the Afghanistan conflict, that refugees can put a huge burden upon a government economically.  Can the further displacement of people in countries such as Chad and Ethiopia and the Congo, places like that, could it possibly destabilize the region because of the economic burden of those people? 

__:  That's an especially good question.  There are presently over 200,000 refugees in Chad.  The UN High Commission for Refugees estimates that between 100 and 200,000 Darfuris are poised very close to the border to flee into Chad.  There are already violent disputes over the very scarce resources in that part of Chad, arable land, pasturage, water.  I think if we see another 200,000 refugees flee to Chad, we will have the formula for absolutely massive humanitarian disaster. 

__:  And we are also already seeing violence within the camps themselves.  Two hundred thousand in Chad, 1.2 million or however many in Darfur.  People are not going to sit forever in the conditions in which they're living without some response. 

AdW:  May I make one point, which is, there's also a very serious danger if we look the other way.  For historic reasons, there are probably in the region of one to one and a half million people who originate in Darfur in central Sudan, central and eastern Sudan, who migrated there over generations often.  These people are desperately exposed.  They are intermingled with the regular population.  They are at the bottom of the economic heap.  If the government, for whatever reason, panic or deliberate plan, decides to take this a stage further, that's the place to watch for really, really serious abuses. 

GH:  And for the several more who I know wanted to ask a question, unfortunately we didn't have time to do that.  My guess is if you came down right after we finish, perhaps you can get a personal answer.  So, thank you all.  John Shattuck.

JS:  I think you would agree with me that we have covered an extraordinary amount of territory in an hour and a half, and I'm extremely grateful to our panel, both for their discipline in keeping their answers and their points relatively concise, and above all for their extraordinary knowledge and commitment to this terrible issue that we've been exploring here.  And on behalf of the Kennedy

Library Foundation and Amnesty International, Northeast Regional Office-- Josh

Rubenstein, the director, is here-- I want to thank Bill Schulz, Gloria WhiteHammond, Eric Reeves, Jennifer Leaning, Alex de Waal.  And thank you very much, Gail Harris, for such a great moderating job.  Thank you all. 

END