Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur Region of Sudan

JIM LEHRER:

Now, the Sudan story. More than 30,000 African Sudanese have been killed by Sudanese Arabs in the western region of Darfur.

Penny Marshal of Independent Television News recently traveled to refugee camps in neighboring Chad. We start with her report.

PENNY MARSHAL:

A gray stallion lies dying on a desolate African road, exhausted, defeated, and starving. He has carried his terrified owners across the border into Chad, a ten-day trek, saved their lives and now they want to save his.

But their final destination, Breijing Refugee Camp, has nothing to offer this dying animal or his traumatized keepers. Hundreds of refugees arrive here every day, an exodus far exceeding UN predictions, Breijing, a humanitarian crisis, is turning into a catastrophe out of sight of the rest of the world — out of reach, too.

Our journey to the camp took us through flooded riverbeds, half overturned aid vehicles carrying supplies, which now sit stranded by the river, unable to reach their destination.

Once we were forced to leave our vehicle and proceed on foot. The rains were only just beginning. The rainy season threatens to leave 100,000 refugees completely cut off.

Two-year-old Kharmissa is one of them. Already hungry, ill and destitute, she'll find no respite here; nor will any of the other dying and sick refugee children whose mothers came here seeking help where there is none to be found, for the neat rows of tents on one side constructed by the UN to house 25,000 refugees are now dwarfed by the vast numbers of unregistered, un-housed and unfed arrivals on the other– 11,000 at the last count, rising by 300 a day.

The situation is out of control.

JANE BEAN, Oxfam Relief Agency:

The international community should be hanging their heads in shame because we need resources now to be able to save the lives of these people and all of these people's lives are at risk. They have no sanitation, they have no water.

This is a malaria epidemic zone, the rains are coming. They're completely cut off, they have no shelter. There's 11,000 people sleeping outside with nothing to cover them.

And if we don't do something fast, many of these people will die.

PENNY MARSHAL:

Shanta walked here with her seven children. Now she sits with just these twigs and shelter with her surviving six. Her husband is missing, her brother was shot.

She says she has been here for 14 days and received no food. At the official distribution center, women wait in vain. There is nothing to give them and no one here to explain when at all anything will come.

If the numbers had remained predictable, manageable, then there might have been something to offer them. But the aid agencies have been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of this, and by the speed with which it has developed.

NURSE:

I'm going to ask if that hurts him.

PENNY MARSHAL:

Medical help is only available for children and emergencies. There are three nurses, one for every twelve thousand.

NURSE:

We'd like to know whether they're taking their water from the well….

SPOKESMAN:

Wadi.

PENNY MARSHAL:

At the wadi, or riverbed, the children dig for water, and then they become sick, very sick as a result. Illness is everywhere. Measles, diarrhea, and epidemics are inevitable.

Dead animals lie decomposing in the searing heat, human excrement everywhere.

NURSE:

The eyes are very well.

PENNY MARSHAL:

Salema is six months old. Her mother told me she's scarcely eaten for two months. This not the result from natural famine, but of persecution and war.

It's extremely difficult to assess a conflict when we only have access to one side, but the stories we heard of atrocities were consistent and harrowing.

These four women told me they were raped by government troops. One lay too shamed and broken to show her face. Her village was burned. She was beaten unconscious; then they raped her.

"They left me for dead," she said. "She is with child," confirmed the midwife. "We will care for her." Shenilia is ten. She saw her father shot dead by the Janjaweed. "My mother is still alive, though," she added. That in itself was a surprise.

Celeba another child was shot in the arm. "I thought they'd killed me," she told me. We heard of entire villages bombed, by helicopter gunships and others burned to the ground. Something terrible certainly drove them here to Breijing, where there is nothing to sustain them and no one to offer them comfort. But tonight not one aid worker remains on the site. They've been barred from entering camp now by the local police who want to maintain control. They hope to return soon.

So as the rains come this evening and the storms come now every evening, the 34,000 refugees here are completely alone, beyond our reach with only just enough to keep them alive for the next few weeks.

JIM LEHRER:

Margaret Warner takes the story from there.

MARGARET WARNER:

Responding to the crisis, the U.S. won a U.N. Security Council resolution last Friday, giving the Sudanese government 30 days to disarm and prosecute the Janjaweed militias or face punitive measures.

But there is growing political pressure here for the administration to do more. Both houses of Congress passed unanimous resolutions urging the administration to label the ethnic cleansing underway in Darfur as "genocide."

Several congressmen have been arrested while picketing the Sudanese embassy in Washington. And this week, a coalition of evangelical Christian groups called on the White House to take stronger action.

Is the Bush administration doing enough?

For that, we're joined by Charles Snyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, who's helped shape the administration's Sudan policy; and Rep. Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York. He was arrested protesting outside the Sudanese embassy last month. Welcome to you both.

Secretary Snyder, you got this resolution passed last Friday. What do you expect it to accomplish?

CHARLES SNYDER:

I think it does several things. I think it makes it very clear to the government of Khartoum that it is just not the United States that thinks this is outrageous, but in fact it's the world community.

I think the 13-0 vote says to them even their friends in Latin America, the Arab world and Far East, as well as the rest of Africa are saying this situation has to be reversed right now. It has to be reversed in 30 days. We have to see action on the ground.

This is not a case where words and the promise of compliance will work. There has to be a change on the ground as your introductory footage showed.

MARGARET WARNER:

Congressman Rangel, is this the kind of action you were looking for when you were protesting last month?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

You know, that story that you just told is so horrific, for the first time, I can understand how six million Jews were killed. I never understood the indifference of human beings to see people who don't look like them or who are different from them to die.

I appreciate all that Colin Powell and the State department and the UN are doing, but in my heart, it just looks like we got a million people drowning and what I'm doing is calling 911, trying to get through the bureaucracy to get some help.

It's my understanding that if we do everything that we can, at least 300,000 people are going to die anyway because of the condition that they find themselves.

MARGARET WARNER:

So you don't believe –

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

And of course if we do nothing, then a million people could possibly die.

If we can really take a preemptive strike or ask the UN to help us to strike against the country because they've killed tens of thousands of people, I don't know why the international community cannot just go in there and save these people and let the chips fall where they may.

MARGARET WARNER:

So you don't think this U.N. resolution giving the Sudanese government that 30-day deadline, you don't think that's going to work?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

You know, I'm a grandfather, and I guess I've become more compassionate in my old age.

But if this was happening to one of my grandkids or anyone's grandkids and the word was that we got 30 days to get the monsters, the rapists and the murderers to stop doing it, I just don't see when you're dealing with human life — I'm not talking about those that are appointed to office and they're restricted as to what they can do — but as far as I'm concerned, the silence of the churches in this, I just don't understand why those people that deal with a higher authority don't understand that the most precious thing that we can value is human life.

And their congress is not doing enough, our country is not doing enough, the international community is not doing enough.

We have to save as many lives as we can. And I just don't see how we can just say "You got 30 days" like you do you in court and report back to us and we'll decide what we're going to do in terms of sanctions. People are dying.

MARGARET WARNER:

Okay, Secretary Snyder, the government of Sudan has rejected the UN resolution. Today they mounted this demonstration in Khartoum with 100,000 people, apparently government inspired.

What makes you think that the 30-day deadline will produce anything?

CHARLES SNYDER:

Well, if we were counting on nothing but the resolution, I'd agree with the congressman; we are not doing enough. But the truth of the matter is we're doing much more than that.

As you know, we're leading the pledging, in fact, to do something on the practical side; we've already put $144 million of our own assets on the ground through AID's programs.

We are going to go as high as $299 million. That's not enough. The Europeans are following in with us. We're taking practical steps on the ground.

The African Union, fledgling organization that it is, is trying to step up to this crisis. We are backstopping them every way we can.

We've helped put the beginnings of the cease-fire monitoring mechanism on the ground. We, in fact, were the ones that dragged the rebels kicking and screaming, to some degree, to add us to get them to agree to the cease-fire in the first place.

It makes any action possible by anyone. So we have not been standing idly by counting on this 30 days to create a miracle.

MARGARET WARNER:

But I mean, if people look at the tape we just saw and we saw boxes and boxes of aid, of food or medicine, whatever was just sitting by the riverbed, I mean why can the US or UN not mount some kind of an operation to at least get in there with humanitarian aid now?

CHARLES SNYDER:

There is a 90-day emergency humanitarian plan under way under Jan Eckland of the UN.

It's not just an American plan, it's a global plan. One of the things we've done is we've even reached out to the Libyans, and we've now got a route open from Libya down into Chad to address the refugee problem there. We are leaving no stone unturned in this effort.

This is a huge logistics problem. This is an area as big as the central part of the United States from the Ohio Valley all the way down to New Orleans, in which there are very few roads, very few air fields, and frankly in which the government does not have many resources of an airlift and road transport variety.

All of that has to be put in place, and we are in the process of supporting the African Union to do that, as well as demanding that the government, rather than digging a hole deeper, at least turn around and help us help their own population.

This is going to take dramatic action on our part and we've begun to put the wheels in motion to do that. This 30 days is merely part of the political process. It says to Khartoum, we are going to hold you responsible but in the meantime, we are still taking every action we can.

As the secretary himself has been engaged in phone calls almost on a daily basis with Kofi Annan, the Sudanese vice president and others, heads of state in Europe and foreign ministers in Europe rallying everyone to this cause, because we take the pictures you've shown seriously, at the beginning of this and mean to see that they change dramatically. We picked 30 days because there has to be a deadline. The truth is we're acting now.

MARGARET WARNER:

Congressman Rangel, I take your point that you don't think enough is being done, but do you think that the unanimous congressional resolutions, the protests by yourself and others have had an impact on this administration to get it to act more quickly than it might have?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

Yes, I do. I don't mean to be overly critical of the State Department.

They have to work within the confines that they have and certainly I think the secretary of state and the deputy secretary are perhaps doing all they can with restrictions that they have.

All I'm saying is that if the world knew that six million Jews were about to be killed, you know, we always are talking about the horrendous things that have happened.

This is an opportunity for the world to say, yes, you may have to put your 30 days and your 90 days limits, but if every church, every synagogue, every mosque would send a message out, and again I would hope that my country, the beacon of humanitarianism, would provide that type of outrage and say we're going to do something about it.

Now just maybe State Departments, members of Congress, can't do that much, but I'm telling you that if you knew a million people were going to die you know, the older I get, the more I think that someone is going to ask me just what the hell was I doing when I knew these people were about to be raped and murdered.

MARGARET WARNER:

Let me –

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

The thing is the rainy season, if that comes in, no matter what commitments we get, tens of thousands if not a million people will die because we can't get to them.

MARGARET WARNER:

All right. Let me ask you about the letter this week that came from a large group of evangelical churches to the White House saying essentially what you're saying. Given how important that group is to the president's political base, do you think that's going to have a galvanizing effect?

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

I hope so. We all react politically, but I would hope that most of the people in the United States and the world, they really don't know what's going on there; it's not a front page news story.

And that's why I'm glad that the secretary and I, that Congress, and those that do little bits get arrested, lie on the ground, take to the floor of the House, go to our churches, ask our rabbis, ask our priests, ask our ministers, what is the church doing?

There is no question in my mind that if the world felt as strongly as the secretary does, that we would be able to get the type of international support… it's not just pressure on President Bush or Democrats. It's pressure on the world to say this is happening on our watch.

MARGARET WARNER:

Secretary Snyder –

CHARLES SNYDER:

The congressman is absolutely right on that point. I think the real value of what he and others are doing is exactly that. It says it's just not the diplomats, it's not the people in the pin-striped suits. It's the American public that's outraged by this.

And that's a very important message for us to be sending. It reinforces the diplomatic message we are sending; it reinforces the practical message we're sending to the Europeans to say to them we need your help. Africa needs your help.

We need to do this together and we need to do it now. And in fact the images that are being telecast, the images you showed earlier, but also the images of the protests in the United States feed that. It makes this a very human but very real and immediate crisis.

MARGARET WARNER:

Secretary Snyder, let's just take the next 30 days the advent of the rainy season as the congressman mentioned. What is the U.S. Government's estimate of how many more people are likely to die just in that 30 days?

CHARLES SNYDER:

To tell you the truth, we don't have enough NGO's on the ground to give a real accurate estimate. You've seen the numbers that Roger Winter and others have been using: ten thousand, thirty thousand. We don't know enough yet.

That's partially the government of Khartoum's fault. We are saying to them we need to get the experts on the ground if we are going to stop this and they need to start doing that now. I think if we get more human rights monitors on the ground in addition to that, we'll start to provide the security in the camps and we'll stop these horrific numbers.

The congressman is right; if everything goes wrong, we can get 300,000 people in very serious condition very quickly here. We need to change the dynamics. That's what we are trying to do, change that so we can drive that number down.

At this point, we are not going to be able to save everybody but we can sure as hell save a lot of people. But it is going to take a lot of action on our part and continuing pressure, not just diplomatic pressure, but the kind of public pressure in Europe and here and frankly in African capitals.

MARGARET WARNER:

Thank you Secretary Snyder and Congressman Rangel, thank you both.

CHARLES SNYDER:

Thank you.

REP. CHARLES RANGEL:

Thank you Secretary and thank you for the program.