During Thanksgiving Week this year, visitors to Washington’s 15th Street were given a compelling lesson in conscience. Each evening, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum projected images of the continuing tragedy in Sudan onto its walls.

There, from the Museum’s exterior facade, illuminated faces filled with suffering and despair stared out into our eyes, attempting to touch our shared humanity.

The museum’s purpose in projecting these photographs into our consciousness was clear – to draw us away from pleasant reflections about family and friends, forcing us to confront, once again, the escalating genocide in Darfur.

As people of good will everywhere are now painfully aware, the toll that has been inflicted by the government-sponsored campaign of genocide in Darfur is appalling.

At least 400,000 men, women and children have been slaughtered. Two million more have been driven from their villages and into refugee camps.

There they linger – vulnerable to further attacks and totally reliant upon international aid.

These are the images of suffering that challenge our collective morality from the Holocaust Museum’s walls.

A plaque there reminds us of a lesson from the Book of Isaiah. We are all God’s witnesses in this life.

Yet, when we are confronted by an evil as chilling and pervasive as the crimes against humanity that now are being perpetrated in Darfur, our duty cannot be limited to a mere affirmation of the horrors that we have seen. As moral human beings, our only choice is to act.

On this, both Democrats and Republicans in Washington agree.

While I was Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, we successfully pressed both the Congress and the Administration to confront the atrocities being inflicted in Darfur by Sudan’s “janjaweed” militias and their Khartoum allies. We achieved a bipartisan policy consensus that the Sudanese actions amounted to genocide.

Yet, two years later, death, displacement and terror continue to plague the non-Arab citizens of Darfur.

Admittedly, we in the U.S. government have found it especially difficult to match the realities of international politics with our collective desire for a more effective policy toward Sudan. Nevertheless, we have taken some concrete steps toward encouraging the Sudanese regime to act more peacefully.

I was proud, for example, to co-sponsor House Resolution 723 that urged the President to appoint a Presidential Special Envoy to Sudan – thereby helping to assure that Darfur will remain a top priority for our government. President Bush agreed, and former US AID Director Andrew Natsios has undertaken this challenge with both vigor and skill.

On a bipartisan basis, we also enacted the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act [H.R. 3127] that became law on October 13.

Rather than penalizing the Sudanese people as a whole, the Act imposes sanctions upon those officials in the Sudanese government whom the President identifies as having personal responsibility for the genocide.
The United States and the European Union have been leaders in funding the international peace keeping and humanitarian efforts in Darfur.

Although we were not successful in our effort last June to increase U.S. humanitarian aid, I am hopeful that we will accomplish this goal when the new Congress convenes in January.

We were able to increase U.S. funding for the African Union peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur by $50 million. Even more support is justified. While we continue to work toward the creation of a more substantial international force under UN direction, the African Union Mission in Sudan [AMIS] is saving lives.

When my CBC colleagues and I met with Special Envoy Andrew Natsios this week, we stressed our commitment to his diplomatic efforts, as well as our continuing sense of urgency. Although the international debate about ending the killing in Sudan is complex, this much is clear.

If the world’s major powers (including China and the nations of the Arab League) could agree upon the international community’s response to Darfur, we could stop the killing there in short order. Without that international consensus, however, the humanitarian prospects for the people of Darfur will remain grim.

So, our diplomatic challenge is clear. We need to encourage the Chinese (who are major economic allies of the Sudanese regime) to exert influence upon Khartoum to accept a robust and effective UN peacekeeping force.

By now, both the Chinese and our allies in the Arab League should understand the American policy consensus on Darfur. If no international consensus on the specifics of a more effective peace keeping strategy for Darfur is achieved by the first of the year, support in the U.S. Congress for an American response with real military teeth will expand.

Even now, respected Congressional leaders like Congressman Donald Payne of New Jersey (along with Africa experts like former Clinton Assistant Secretary of State Susan Rice) are making a strong case for U.S. and European military action to coerce the Sudanese Government into accepting a strong U.N. peace keeping force.

If Sudan does not agree, they contend, we should give strong consideration to bombing Sudanese targets (like air fields and command and control centers) that have been linked to the perpetration of the genocide.

For all the difficulties and perils that such a policy would entail, it will become increasingly difficult to reject this military option out of hand unless there is real progress toward peace and security in Sudan.

The Administration should make it clear to our international partners that U.S. leaders fully recognize that a peaceful diplomatic and political solution for Sudan is both preferable in the short run and absolutely necessary for Sudan to have a future in the longer term.

Nevertheless, both the Chinese and our allies in the Arab league mustunderstand that the world’s tolerance for their support of the central government in Sudan and its policies of terror has a limit.

That limit has been reached. Those are real human people being murdered in Darfur – not simply images on a museum wall.

We have witnessed and tolerated genocide in Darfur for far too long. Now, we must act.

This holocaust must end.