Stop the nightmare in Sudan

In short, I heard echoes of Darfur, where in 2004 former Senator Sam Brownback (R-Ka) and I were the first members of Congress to visit. Appropriately, this bipartisan legislation, if enacted, extends to all of Sudan existing sanctions regimes included in prior legislation that were specific only for Darfur.

Time and again the people living in Yida told me they were being targeted because of the color of their skin. One woman said “it didn’t matter if you were a woman, a child or a man. I can see that my color is black and that was the reason they were killing us.”

{mosads}The same woman also raised the issue of religion, saying that soldiers armed with AK-47s would come to their villages in trucks with machine guns in the back and say “we don’t want anyone who says they are a Christian in this village.” The refugees pleaded with me to take one important message back to America: bring Bashir to justice.

The sanctions in H.R. 4169 would target countries that fail to execute international arrest warrants against Sudanese officials like Bashir, who, despite facing charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, has continued to travel internationally with virtual impunity.

This is in striking contrast to what happened in the aftermath of the genocide in Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s. The world went to great lengths to detain and try those responsible including Slobodan Milosevik, the former president of Serbia. Unfortunately, it appears that ethnic violence in southern Europe is more concerning to the international community than ethnic violence in Africa.

In addition to horrific human rights abuses and crimes committed by Bashir and his government, Sudan remains on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.  The people of what is now South Sudan were at the tip of the spear in the global struggle against radical Islamic terrorism. It is well known that the same people currently in control in Khartoum gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. Moreover, Khartoum was a revolving door for Hamas and other terrorist groups.

The people of Sudan deserve peace after decades of war. The people of Sudan deserve security rather than terror at the hands of their own government.  The people of Sudan deserve to see those who have brutalized them held to account. Simply put, the people of Sudan deserve strong bipartisan support of the Sudan Peace, Security and Accountability Act. 

Rep. Wolf represents Virginia’s tenth congressional district.