Transcript
SUSAN RICE: Overall, in the U.S. and around the world there is far greater acceptance of the responsibility to protect the role of the Security Council, and even specifically for action in Darfur where people are aware of Darfur, than the policies of either the U.S. government or the other Security Council governments would suggest.
. . .it's remarkable to me how anemic and simultaneously constipated U.S. policy is on the question of Darfur, and it's grossly out of step with U.S. public opinion and in fact with the bipartisan view of Congress.
If you step back and look at how the United States government has dealt with the issue of the genocide in Darfur, it's really not a pretty picture. The genocide has been going on for over four years. As Beth said at the outset, depending on whose numbers you believe, as many as 450,000 have died; 2 1/2 million displaced or made refugees. The situation is spilling over into the neighboring countries and seriously destabilizing Chad in the Central African Republic. In just the last week we've had Janjaweed raids into Chad; we've five African Union peacekeepers killed, and humanitarian access, despite numerous agreements to improve it, remains of serious concern.
And, yet, the U.S. government approach in policy has been, over the last three years—since in the first year we didn't pay any attention to the genocide—one that I have characterized as a pattern of bluster and retreat. They scream loud, they call it genocide, they remonstrate, they bang the table and say this has to stop; they threaten action and do nothing. Bluster and retreat.
The most striking example of that was back in November on this very podium. The President's special envoy, Andrew Natsios, came and said very plainly that if by January 1st, 2007, the Sudanese government has not stopped the killing of innocent civilians and accepted unequivocally the deployment of a U.N. African Union hybrid force, then the United States would implement Plan B, Plan B being an unknown or uncertain package of economic sanctions, some of which if implemented might have some significant impact. Well, you all can look at your watches and see that today is April 5th, 2007, four months later. Nothing. No action. Statements by the administration actually walking back this threat. Andrew Natsios quoted as speaking in various forms no longer describing the situation in Darfur as genocide. The Secretary of State in testimony effectively ruled out any more robust U.S. action.
This is not the approach of a government that is serious about stopping a genocide, and yet in effect what we have done—we, the United States; we, the international community—is to allow the perpetrators of genocide, the government of Sudan, to dictate the terms of the international community's response to that genocide, to, in effect, say no, you can't come in to stop it with this kind of force; no, you can't come in with this composition; you can't, you can't, you can't. And instead of being a national community saying "excuse me, but you all are perpetrating the genocide, we're here to stop it, we're not negotiating with you on the means and the methods of stopping it," we've done just the opposite. We've negotiated—for months—going on to a year.
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