On April 5, the House approved, 416-3, a bill (H.R. 3127) that would impose sanctions against individuals responsible for genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. The measure was approved by the House Judiciary Committee on March 15 (see The Source, 3/17/06), and by the House International Relations Committee on March 8 (see The Source, 3/10/06). The Senate approved a similar bill (S. 1462) on November 18 (see The Source, 11/21/05). A House and Senate conference committee will now meet to work out differences in the two bills.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) explained that during a bipartisan congressional delegation visit to Sudan, government officials understated the extent of the problem in Darfur: “As Vice President Taha was denying all this, we could not help recalling the stories of villages torched, women raped, children kidnapped and men tortured and killed. But even in the horror of all that, we saw hope in the bright and playful eyes of the toddlers. That hope, however, was diminished in the eyes of the older children. They had really seen too much…According to the United Nations, 3 million people are in need of assistance. Two million Darfuris have been displaced, pushed out of their homes and their villages, and nearly 200,000 people have been killed thus far, and that is a conservative estimate.”
Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) argued that “defending the basic human rights of the world’s most vulnerable populations should be a priority for all of us. Sudan, the largest country in Africa, has been ravaged by civil war intermittently for four decades…This ongoing crisis in the Darfur region in Western Sudan has led to a major humanitarian disaster. Estimates are that up to 300,000 people have been killed in the Darfur region over the past 24 months alone. In 2004, the House, the Senate and the White House declared the atrocities taking place in Darfur as genocide.” Adding that the bill would “impose sanctions against individuals responsible for genocide, support humanitarian operations and promote peace efforts in the region,” she stated, “This is not only an issue of religion or politics. This is a matter of mercy and humanity.”
