Washington Shrugged

He Rang the Alarm on Darfur
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

Some day an American president will visit a genocide museum in Darfur and repeat the standard refrain: If only we had known ...

But that excuse will ring hollow, because there was a whistle-blower in the heart of the Bush administration. Roger Winter, whom President Bush had appointed in 2001 to a senior post in the U.S. Agency for International Development, frantically tried to ring alarm bells — but instead the administration turned away.

If there was a hero within the U.S. government on Darfur, it was Mr. Winter. But it was doubly frustrating for him because in 1994 he had the same experience during the Clinton administration, when he was running a refugee organization and desperately trying to galvanize officials to respond to the Rwandan genocide.

In outrage at Bill Clinton’s inaction during the Rwandan slaughter, Mr. Winter abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican.

Mr. Winter, 65, who also served in the Carter and (briefly) Reagan administrations, traveled regularly to Sudan for the Bush administration, trying to end the 20-year war between northern and southern Sudan. On those trips, Mr. Winter encountered the slaughter in Darfur as it began.

In May 2003, long before any newspaper noticed, Mr. Winter warned in Congressional testimony that violence was erupting in Darfur. Then, on Nov. 3, 2003, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum transmitted a message warning Washington that “the situation in Darfur is critical” and adding that “ethnic cleansing ... is underway.”

But Washington shrugged.

State Department officials apparently worried that an uproar over Darfur would derail the north-south agreement in Sudan, a prize achievement for the Bush administration. So they looked away. The State Department was even angry when the Agency for International Development released satellite photos showing the burned villages in Darfur.

Before testifying to Congress, Mr. Winter had to submit prepared remarks to the State Department for vetting. Frustrated by State’s passivity, he used his off-the-cuff remarks to speak passionately — and uncensored — about the horrors in Darfur.

Mr. Winter once took an administration colleague with him to fly over Darfur from Chad, to show him the Janjaweed militias as they burned villages. Administration officials aren’t supposed to invade another country’s air space and buzz militias as they slaughter civilians, but Mr. Winter was desperate to get another administration witness.

“We were trying to get everybody’s attention, including the White House and State Department and everybody else,” Mr. Winter recalls.

When Sudanese forces blocked a road to aid groups, Mr. Winter invited aid groups to join his own convoy and insisted on going down the road to assure humanitarian access.

It was agonizing, he says, to feel that Mr. Bush wanted to do the right thing on Sudan — and yet see the administration acquiesce on mass murder. Later Mr. Winter served as State Department envoy for Darfur, but at State he burned with the same frustration and retired last year, deeply disillusioned.

“Khartoum looked the U.S. in the eye, and we looked away,” Mr. Winter said, adding: “There was no real intention of taking effective action. They saw that. They read us. And so they weren’t threatened.”

Mr. Winter favored — and still favors — a no-fly zone over Darfur. We wouldn’t keep planes in the air, or even shoot planes down. But after Sudan bombed civilians in Darfur, we would later destroy a Sudanese attack helicopter on the ground.

Aid groups worry that such a strike would endanger their efforts. But I think Mr. Winter, who has 26 years’ experience in Sudan, is exactly right that a no-fly zone is the best way to shake up Sudanese officials and make them negotiate seriously for a peace agreement in Darfur.

“What we have done with our handling of Darfur is show Khartoum that in certain circumstances we are a toothless tiger,” he says. “No matter how forceful the words we use, we don’t act. Or we act in ways that the bad guys in Khartoum find tolerable. ... It tells them that they can get away with mass murder.”

The upshot, Mr. Winter believes, is that Sudan is increasingly likely to resume its war against southern Sudan, erasing one of Mr. Bush’s genuine achievements. Mr. Winter says of administration officials, “They’re turning a silk purse into a sow’s ear.”

Mr. Winter admires Mr. Bush for pushing for north-south peace but fears that the administration is simply running out the clock on Darfur. “Where we have gotten to with Sudan,” he says heavily, “is a tragedy.”

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Also See:

• Jay Janson: Early CIA Involvement in Darfur Has Gone Unreported

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, War Crimes, Genocide, Crimes against humanity, Darfur, Sudan, Agency for International Development, Politics, Government, news, commentary, op ed

SAVE DARFUR: What You Can Do Now

Watch the Ad and Pass it On

For the past four years, Sudan's government has broken promise after promise to the international community time while the people of Darfur continue to suffer. Our latest TV ad emphasizes the need to keep the pressure on Sudan to end this cycle of lies that keeps the death toll rising in Darfur.

The best way to keep pressure on Sudan to cooperate is by building our movement and demanding action. By passing on the video of our new ad, you can help grow our cause and move world leaders to action.

Fill out the forms HERE to send a message to your friends and families asking them watch the new ad and build the pressure.

Bloggers, link to this post or grab the code from YouTube, post it and link your post to this page.

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(Hopelessly) Spineless on Sudan

It irritates me that Kristof still holds a slim belief that Bush will somehow, someway, miraculously begin to live up to what he says or has said -- past or present. Perhaps Kristof is trying to appear journalistically neutral.

Whatever the reason, it should be more than evident to anyone with a shred of functioning brain tissue that The Shrub never has and never will live up to his word. His words are a political convenience and nothing more; any professed commitment to honor them evaporates into the thin air of their utterance. What is more, Bush-words spin the truth, twist the facts, mislead, and misinform -- he can never be "taken at his word."

It is time to insist that this incompetent, dangerous, little tyrannical puppet be removed from our government along with his evil puppeteer, the King of VICE (President) Cheney. Sadly, nothing beneficial will be accomplished in Darfur or anywhere else until that happens.


Spineless on Sudan
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

In May 2006, President Bush declared: “The vulnerable people of Darfur deserve more than sympathy. ... America will not turn away from this tragedy.”

Since then, Mr. Bush has turned away — and 450,000 more people have been displaced in Darfur. “Things are getting worse,” noted Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, a human rights campaigner in Sudan.

One of the most troubling signs is that Sudan has been encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other countries to settle in Darfur. More than 30,000 of them have moved into areas depopulated after African tribes were driven out.

In the last few months, Sudan’s government has given these new arrivals citizenship papers and weapons, cementing in place the demographic consequences of its genocide. And if Sudan thinks it has gotten away with mass murder in Darfur, it is more likely to resume its war against southern Sudan — which seems increasingly likely.

Within Darfur, aid groups have increasingly become targets, and in April alone three aid workers were shot and 20 were kidnapped, while hijackers tried to seize aid workers’ vehicles at a rate of almost one a day. As for African Union peacekeepers, seven of them were shot dead the same month — so they’re in no position to rescue aid workers.

The cancer has also been spreading into Chad and the Central African Republic, compounding each country’s intrinsic instability. Last month a 27-year-old French woman, Elsa Serfass, on her first assignment with Doctors Without Borders, was shot dead in C.A.R. as she drove through an area where militias had been burning villages. So Doctors Without Borders has had to suspend much of its work in the area.

Something similar is happening in eastern Chad. Mia Farrow, the actress — who has shown a toughness about genocide that no Western leader has — has just returned from her sixth visit to the region and says that eastern Chad now feels like Somalia.

“Pick-ups with machine guns bolted onto the rear and loaded with armed, uniformed men careen through the dusty streets terrorizing people,” she told me. “No one knows who they are.” While Ms. Farrow was visiting the town of Abéché, an elderly guard at a U.N. compound there was killed and two people were badly beaten.

Then there’s rape. Ever since Sudan began the genocide, it has been using rape to terrorize populations of Africans — and then periodically punishing women who seek treatment on charges of adultery or fornication.

So far this year, at least two young women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. As Refugees International puts it in a new report: “The government is more likely to take action against those who report and document rape than those who commit it.”

Much of the news on Darfur has been a bit optimistic lately, because it has focused on recent flurries of international diplomacy. While it’s true that China is belatedly putting some pressure on Sudan to admit international peacekeepers, at the same time China continues to supply Sudan with the guns used to slaughter Darfuri children. China also just signed a 20-year agreement to develop offshore oil for Sudan, and in April China pledged “to boost military exchanges and cooperation” with Sudan.

Let’s hope that athletes who go to Beijing for the Olympics next year will wear T-shirts honoring the victims of the genocide that China is underwriting.

In the burst of diplomatic activity, one person who stands out is Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. Mr. Sarkozy is pushing to send a European Union force, including many French troops, to stabilize Chad and the Central African Republic. If they arrive by October, as planned, they just might pull those two countries back from the brink of collapse.

In contrast, Mr. Bush has been letting Darfur rhyme with Rwanda and Bosnia. For years, Mr. Bush’s aides have discussed whether he should give a prime-time speech on Darfur to ratchet up the pressure; he still hasn’t. Laura Bush just completed a four-nation swing through Africa, but she didn’t include a visit to any of the areas affected by the Darfur crisis.

Ultimately, the only way the genocide will end will be with a negotiated political settlement — but the only way to get that is to put much more pressure on Khartoum.

So how about if Mr. Bush invites Mr. Sarkozy — along with Gordon Brown, Hu Jintao and Hosni Mubarak — for a joint visit to Chad and C.A.R. to meet Darfuri refugees? Maybe Mr. Sarkozy could lend Mr. Bush and the others a little backbone.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Sudan, Darfur, War Crimes, Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Bush, news, commentary, op ed

The Witness Next Door

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

One of the most unusual people in New Jersey these days is a tall 34-year-old black man named Daoud Hari. Others may lose their tempers at traffic jams on the turnpike, but he’s just glad he’s no longer being tortured.

Mr. Hari has just arrived in the U.S. from Chad and Darfur, where he says he was beaten and told repeatedly he was going to be executed. He is one of just a handful of Darfuris — his lawyer knows of two others — whom the U.S. has accepted as refugees.

I knew Mr. Hari in his previous life, because he interpreted for me early last year. We journeyed together along the Darfur-Chad border through a no man’s land of villages that were being attacked by Sudan’s janjaweed militia.

Mr. Hari helped me interview two orphan boys living under a tree, a 13-year-old girl shot in the chest, a 6-year-old boy trying desperately not to cry as doctors treated shrapnel wounds to his leg and a 15-year-old girl gang-raped by the janjaweed.

It is a different world there. It is the antipodes of New Jersey.

When our vehicle became stuck in the sand in one janjaweed area, we strained side by side to push it out before trouble arrived. We slept in the sand under the stars, we saw gruesome injuries, we witnessed people preparing to be killed, and we saw each other dusty and frightened. In that crucible, I grew steadily more impressed with Mr. Hari’s courage, for as a local person he was at greater risk of immediate execution than a foreigner like me.

He was scared, of course, but what drove him was a relentless determination to get out the story of what was happening to his fellow Darfuris. He was determined to fight genocide with the best weapon he had, his training in English.

Interpreters and drivers are the secret to good international reporting, and they do much of the work, take most of the risks and get none of the credit. Mr. Hari regularly interpreted for other journalists, repeatedly putting himself in danger to get out the stories.

Last August, he accompanied an ace Chicago Tribune reporter, Paul Salopek, into Darfur, but they were seized by an armed faction. Once, he said, a commander ordered his soldiers to execute him, but they were from the same tribe and balked. Another time, he says, a commander untied him and told him to escape — but he refused unless the driver was freed as well. So Mr. Hari was tied up again, and he was beaten as he was interrogated about his work with me and other journalists.

Finally, after more than a month, Sudan freed Mr. Hari along with Mr. Salopek and the driver. Eventually Mr. Hari made his way back to Chad, and the U.S. granted him status as a political refugee. It is disorienting to be with him here, where we are both clean, rested and safe.

Yet even here Mr. Hari is haunted by Darfur. He knows one brother was killed; the other was attacked and beaten, but Mr. Hari assumes he is still alive. Of his three sisters, Mr. Hari last saw one in 2003 and the others in 2006.

He plans to study and is also determined to speak out about Darfur and tell Americans what is happening to his people.

Mr. Hari’s presence in the U.S. underscores a profound difference between Darfur and past genocides: In the past, we could always claim that we didn’t fully appreciate what was going on until too late.

It was only a faint reed of an excuse, for in fact information always did trickle out about past genocides even as they were underway. But this time we can’t even feign ignorance.

A superb new documentary, “The Devil Came on Horseback,” provides a wrenching tour through the eyes of a tormented American military observer there. A handful of books chronicle the killings; one of them, “Not on Our Watch,” has hit the best-seller list with its suggestions for what citizens can do. President Bush has described the slaughter in Darfur as genocide since 2004.

Google Earth has developed a first-rate program to observe the devastation from above. On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, you can see a man whose eyes were gouged out by the janjaweed as well as video from the journey last year with Mr. Hari.

Or, if you live in New Jersey, you can simply turn to one of your newest neighbors, and see the pain in his eyes as he wonders if his sisters are still alive.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

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Turn the Other Cheek at What Cost?

Nicholas Kristof brings us face to face with Genocide. Meet Halima Abdelkarim.

"If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?" -- Rabbi Hillel, from the section of the Talmud called Pirkei Avot (1:14) ["Ethics of the Ancestors"]

The Face of Genocide
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

GOZ BEIDA, Chad

A woman named Marguerite H. wrote to me recently to complain about my columns on Darfur. “While the situation there is dreadful, we have plenty of needs to be filled at home,” she wrote. “You would be better off putting your energy into making a difference here at home.”

So, Marguerite, meet Halima Abdelkarim. Her life is partly in your hands. Watch her story [See Video Below], and see if you still think we should put off helping her until we have solved our own problems.


(Trouble viewing this video? Click here or here.)

Halima, 20, belongs to the Dajo tribe, one of the black African tribes being slaughtered by Sudanese-sponsored Arab militias called the janjaweed. The attacks began three years ago, but the world largely shared your view, Marguerite, that Darfur was a tragedy but not of strategic significance. And so we have fussed a bit but allowed the genocide to spread.

This March, Darfur’s slaughter crossed the border and reached Halima’s hometown in Chad. The janjaweed killed many men and seized 10 women and girls, including Halima and her little sister, Sadia.

Halima says that the janjaweed, many of them wearing Sudanese military uniforms, mocked the women with racial epithets against blacks, beat them with sticks, and gang-raped them all. Halima, who was then four months pregnant, says she was raped by three men and saw two rape Sadia — who was just 10 years old.

After two days of torment, the janjaweed released them. “But Sadia refused to give up her donkey, and so they shot her,” Halima recalled. “I was with her. She died right away.”

The survivors trekked to a shantytown outside Goz Beida. At first they were safe, and Halima gave birth to a baby daughter. But a couple of months ago the janjaweed began to attack them when they left the camp to get firewood.

Still, the world shared your attitude, Marguerite: It’s sad but a long way off, and anyway we have our own problems.

So last month, the janjaweed caught Halima again — in effect, we allowed the janjaweed to capture her again.

Halima was gathering firewood with a large group of women, who were hoping for safety in numbers. But raiders with guns suddenly appeared and caught seven of them.

The men asked what tribe they belonged to, and upon learning that they were Dajo who had already fled their villages, said, “We’re looking for you.” Halima was carrying her infant girl, Noorelayn, and she says the janjaweed threw the baby to the ground.

“You blacks are not human,” she quoted them as yelling. “We can do anything we want to you. You cannot live here.”

Finally, she says, three men raped her, beat her and stole her clothes. Another of the seven who were caught, Aziza Yakub, 17, confirmed Halima’s story, and added that the janjaweed told her while raping her: “You blacks are like monkeys. You are not human.”

The only way for these women to survive is to gather firewood to sell or exchange for food. Only women collect firewood, because, as they themselves say: “The men are killed; the women are ‘only’ raped.”

Halima’s husband doesn’t know about the latest attack. She didn’t tell him about the first one, but he figured out what must have happened during the two days she disappeared. Although he didn’t blame her, he left her for a few months partly to work out his anger at the janjaweed, and partly to cultivate crops to feed his family. The area he went to was attacked this month, with the janjaweed killing many men or occasionally gouging out their eyes with bayonets. There has been no word from him.

So, Marguerite, Halima’s future is up to us. In the last few days, Sudan has bowed to outside pressure and reluctantly agreed in principle to accept some U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. That’s a reminder that pressure can work, but we haven’t applied nearly enough. For the peacekeepers to save lives and the killings to stop, much greater effort will be essential. If you didn’t find yourself too preoccupied, Marguerite, maybe you could make a phone call to the White House or write a letter to your member of Congress.

You have other priorities, I know, and so do we all. But our indifference has already allowed Halima to be gang-raped twice and her sister murdered in the first genocide of the 21st century. So, Marguerite, look Halima in the eye, and decide if you’re willing to turn away as she is slaughtered, or how many more times you’re willing to allow her to be raped.

you missed them, here are my earlier video reports from my trip to Chad.

Photo Credit: Halima Abdelkarim. (Nicholas D. Kristof/The New York Times)

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