Senate Authorizes Humanitarian Assistance for Sudan

On September 23, the Senate approved, by unanimous consent, a bill (S. 2781) that would authorize $200 million in FY2005 for humanitarian assistance for the Darfur region of Sudan.

Sponsored by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), the Comprehensive Peace in Sudan Act contains a number of findings, including:

• According to U.S. and United Nations officials, the government of Sudan has engaged in an orchestrated campaign to remove a significant part of the ethnically African population from North Darfur, West Darfur, and South Darfur;
• As a result of this coordinated campaign, which Congress has declared to be genocide, reports indicate that tens of thousands of African Sudanese civilians have been killed, thousands of women and girls have been raped, and hundreds of villages have been destroyed;
• According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1.4 million people have been displaced in the Darfur region of Sudan, of whom over 200,000 have been forced to flee to Chad as refugees; and
• The government of Sudan has restricted humanitarian and human rights workers’ access to the Darfur region in an attempt to inflict the most devastating harm on those displaced from their villages.

S. 2781 calls upon President Bush to introduce a resolution in the United Nations Security Council condemning the actions of the government of Sudan and calling upon the government to cease support of ethnic cleansing and the killing of innocent civilians.