It has been a long, intense day. Our first panel this morning was on the current situation in Sudan and South Sudan featuring Princeton Lyman who as US Ambassador to Sudan helped negotiate and implement the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that led to independence for South Sudan. We reviewed the history of Sudan being ruled from the center to the neglect and marginalization of those on the periphery. Lyman emphasized the ways that the CPA has not been implemented especially the steps toward democracy that are prescribed for both Sudan and South Sudan. In regions near the border - South Kordofan, Blue Nile, Nuba Mountains especially - Bashir has induced famine by indiscriminate bombing of fields and villages forcing people to take shelter in caves and at the same time blocking all food aid from the area. In Darfur, focus on South Sudan has led to increased attacks with 400,000 newly displaced in 2013 - more than 2011 & 2012 combined. And in South Sudan, weak democratic development led to the tragic outbreak of civil war this last December that for now is paused by a cease fire since the end of January. Some of the strategies we want the US government to adopt are to refine sanctions to block all military aid to the Bashir regime (currently only restricted relative to Darfur) and to allow for information and communications technology to enter (currently companies like Samsung won't do business there for fear of violating sanctions with the result that civilians are isolated and unable to communicate about attacks in real time). We also need to step up our support for the African Union peacekeepers, providing resources when requested. In general in both Sudan and South Sudan we need to support the development of civil society - education, etc. And we need to support a comprehensive approach to all the different conflicts in Sudan. The current piecemeal approach works to Bashir's advantage. Bashir must go.
Our next panel brought us up to speed on the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has suffered through the worst war since World War II with over 5.4 million killed since 1998. Recently progress has been made in a few areas. Security has improved since the defeat of the deadly M23 militia in Eastern Congo last year. The trade In conflict minerals (tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold) has been reduced as processes are being developed to certify conflict-free mines in Congo and companies like Apple have made efforts to certify their supply chains for these metals which are critical in technological devices. Intel is coming out with a certified conflict-free computer chip - a first. The progress on this is attributed to a provision in the Dodd-Frank law that requires companies to report the sources of the minerals in their products. Jewish World Watch and the Enough Project were critical in making this happen. Despite this progress, the problem of sexual violence is still pervasive as militias and parts of the Congolese army use rape to terrorize local populations. And governance is a huge problem, especially corruption. Jacques Bahati described how the Catholic Church in many areas provides more education and health care facilities than the government despite the government's billions of dollars of aid and mineral wealth.
After lunch we listened to a panel discuss transitional justice in Sudan and Congo, and the reasons why there can be no justice without peace, and no peace without justice. Creating a process to pursue justice for the victims if war crimes is a critical step toward a lasting peace. The discussion got quite detailed calling for the use of a mixed court process in Congo and a hybrid court process in Sudan. (The difference? A hybrid court would be in international court conducted in the local country with local participation and assistance - Sudan and South Sudan has little in the way of a reliable court system. A mixed court would be a local court with international court assistance and oversight - Congo has a legal infrastructure).
We then were honored by a visit of a couple true heroes of the anti-genocide movement - John Prendergast, who is the co-founder and leader of the Enough Project as well as several other leading organizations working with celebrities like George Clooney. And Gayle Smith who after 20 years as a reporter in Africa became an activist (co-founded The Enough Project) and then a policy maker serving as a Special Assistant and member if the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama. What an inspiration!
After this panel, we spent several hours preparing for our lobbying day tomorrow. We got detailed briefings on the information and "asks" we will present to members of Congress. Then we huddled as a group over dinner and assigned to various roles in our script for our three presentations for staffers of Keating, Markey, and Warren. Thank you to Maggie Quick especially for stepping up as a policy leader.
To top it all off, we took a night monument tour. Herbert was our guide as we visited the Capitol, the White House, the Lincoln, Vietnam, Korea, FDR, MLK, and Jefferson memorials, and drove by many more learning lots of history along the way. Yeah! E.g. I never know that Virginia ceded its part of DC the took it back in 1846 since the government wasn't using it. Finally back to the hotel at 10:15. Need sleep for our big day tomorrow.
A quote to inspire our anti-genocide work:
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