Bills before the US Congress declaring genocide in Darfur, Sudan

The ever helpful Eric Jon Magnuson provided links to the two bills concurrently being considered in the Senate and the House of Representatives of the US Congress that are entitled "Declaring genocide in Darfur, Sudan." These are the bills that we are asking our representatives to support. They now need to be moved out of committee and onto the floors of each chamber for a vote. Call your rep!

The text of the bills

I found it moving to read the text of the bills (both are identical):

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

Declaring genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Whereas Article 1 of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that `the contracting parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish';

Whereas Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide declares that `in the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group';

Whereas Article 3 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide affirms that the `following acts shall be punishable: (a) genocide; (b) conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) attempt to committed genocide; and (e) complicit in genocide';

Whereas in Darfur, Sudan, an estimated 30,000 innocent civilians have been brutally murdered, more than 130,000 people have been forced from their homes and have fled to neighboring Chad, and more than 1,000,000 people have been internally displaced; and

Whereas in March 2004 the United Nations Resident Humanitarian Coordinator stated: `[T]he war in Darfur started off in a small way last year but it has progressively gotten worse. A predominant feature of this is that the brunt is being borne by civilians. This includes vulnerable women and children . . . The violence in Darfur appears to be particularly directed at a specific group based on their ethnic identity and appears to be systemized.': Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress--

(1) declares that the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide;

(2) reminds the international community, including the United States Government, of their international legal obligations, as affirmed in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;

(3) urges the Bush Administration to call the atrocities being committed in Darfur, Sudan by its rightful name: `genocide';

(4) calls on the Bush Administration to lead an international effort to prevent genocide in Darfur, Sudan;

(5) urges the Bush Administration to seriously consider multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide should the United Nations Security Council fail to act;

(6) demands that the Bush Administration impose targeted sanctions, including visa bans and the freezing of assets of the National Congress and affiliated business and individuals directly responsible for the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan; and

(7) calls on USAID to establish a Darfur Resettlement, Rehabilitation, and Reconstruction Fund so that those driven off their land may return and begin to rebuild their communities.

Bill Summary & Status pages

To follow the progress of the bills, to see the list of sponsors, as well as to link to the full text, the Congress makes available the following summary pages. You can check these links periodically for updates. [THE COLONS WITHIN THE URLS ARE NEEDED.]

House (H. Con. Res. 467) --
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:h.con.res.00467:

Senate (S. Con. Res. 124) --
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:s.con.res.00124:

Other helpful material to have at hand

Human Rights Watch report on their evidence linking the government of Sudan with the Janjaweed militias.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/07/19/darfur9096.htm

A direct link to the University of Maryland survey of knowledge on Sudan and Darfur, which discussed in an earlier post and referred by Eugene Oregon: http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Africa/html/new_7_20_04.html

Comments

[Katrin]

Jim -- thanks for this post; very helpful. I was talking to some of my friends yesterday who are typically pretty politically aware and astute and was astonished to hear how little they know about the impending catastrophe in Dafur.

I'll put together a message to spread virally mother-to-mother (for all that may be worth) but wonder also who of the much bigger players can get involved -- from MoveOn which not said anything at all to, oh, I don't know -- Oprah? Let's think out of the box here and fast!

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