Testimony of BILL FRELICK
Director of Policy,
U.S. COMMITTEE FOR REFUGEES
on Humanitarian Emergency in Sudan
September 28, 2000
Potential Role of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus
I commend the Congressional Human Rights Caucus for convening today's briefing on the human rights and humanitarian situation in Sudan. The involvement of the Caucus is desperately needed. Seventeen years of virtually non-stop civil war and harsh Sudanese government repression have produced in Sudan one of the world's worst human rights and humanitarian catastrophes. Yet the world has largely ignored the situation. Sudan merits the attention of this and every other body that is concerned about human rights in today's world.
I hope that the interest in Sudan displayed today by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus will be sustained in the months to come. The members of this panel can help provide impetus for a deeper commitment to the emergency in Sudan by Congress, the current Administration, the next Administration, and the United Nations. I urge you to play a leading role in helping to strengthen U.S. policy toward Sudan.
Role of U.S. Committee for Refugees
The U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) is a nongovernmental, non-profit agency dedicated to defending the rights of uprooted peoples worldwide.
During the past 20 years, USCR has been deeply involved in documenting, reporting, analyzing, and advocating on human rights and humanitarian issues in Sudan. USCR has conducted more than two dozen site visits to Sudan over the years. I personally have conducted assessment trips to Sudan on behalf of USCR every year since 1988, including three trips this year, most recently in July. USCR readily shares its analysis and recommendations with Congress. This is the thirteenth time that USCR has formally testified about Sudan to a Congressional panel since 1989, and we remain in regular contact with appropriate Congressional staff as human rights abuses and humanitarian suffering in Sudan continue unabated.
USCR published two major reports on Sudan in recent years: Follow the Women and the Cows: Personal Stories of Sudan's Uprooted People; and a groundbreaking study entitled, A Working Document II: Quantifying Genocide in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains 1983-1998. This year, USCR has published updates on the humanitarian situation in Sudan and is working with sources on the ground in the region to document aerial bombings of civilian and humanitarian sites by the Sudanese government.
Measurements of Sudan's Crisis
By virtually any measurement, the human rights and humanitarian situation in Sudan is cataclysmic:
The current conflict has persisted for 17 years. The country has been embroiled in civil war for 33 of the past 44 years, since independence in 1956.
An average of more than 300 people per day die because of war-related causes in Sudan, according to the best available estimates. Sudan's death toll is larger than the combined fatalities suffered in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, and Algeria. Twice as many Sudanese have perished in the past 17 years than all the war-related deaths suffered by Americans in the past 200 years.
Some 4 million Sudanese are internally displaced, and more than 420,000 are refugees outside the country. One of every nine uprooted people on the face of the earth is Sudanese. An estimated 80 percent of southern Sudan's 5 million people have been displaced at some time during the past 17 years of war.
Sudan's 1998 famine affected an estimated 2.5 million people. Pockets of severe food deprivation persist in southern Sudan to this day.
Annual slave raids by government-allied militia have pressed uncounted tens of thousands of southern Sudanese children and women into slavery.
The Sudanese government regularly blocks food aid deliveries to specific locations and consistently bombs civilian and humanitarian targets in southern Sudan.
The impoverishment of southern Sudan's population—the region of the country that has endured the brunt of Sudan's long civil war—is virtually unprecedented in today's world. Seventeen years of violence and deliberate population displacement by the government have reduced much of southern Sudan—an area the size of Texas—to virtual medieval conditions.
According to most conventional measurements, Sudan is a human rights and humanitarian disaster. These horrors have passed largely unnoticed by the U.S. media. Many U.S. government officials have, shamefully, come to regard Sudan as "old news" unworthy of their sustained attention. The people of southern Sudan whom my staff and I have interviewed over the years have reason to feel abandoned by the international community. They welcome the occasional food aid deliveries that reach their remote locations, but the grind of war and the overriding deprivation it produces remain largely unchanged.
Bombings of Civilian and Humanitarian Targets
Sudanese government planes regularly bomb civilian and humanitarian targets in Sudan that have absolutely no strategic military value, in gross violation of international humanitarian law. Sudanese leader General Omar El-Bashir pledged in April that the bombings would stop. They have not. At least three such bombings have occurred this month. Aid workers on the ground reported 20 bombings last month, and 33 bombings in July. It is probable that many additional bombings of innocent civilian targets go unreported because international aid workers are absent from many locations, such as rebel-held areas of the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan, parts of Western Upper Nile Province in southern Sudan, and behind the so-called Eastern Front battle lines east of Khartoum, the capital.
Aerial bombings by the Sudanese government kill innocent civilians and relief workers, spread terror among the population, force local families to flee their homes, disrupt international aid efforts, and break the will of many people.
Southern Sudan's few schools and health clinics have constructed primitive bomb shelters in a bid for protection when Antonov bombers fly overhead. Not enough bomb shelters exist, however. Sometimes women, children, and men are unable to reach safety in time. Two weeks ago, for example, the government's aerial bombing of a health clinic in the town of Narus, in Eastern Equatoria Province, killed a 2-year-old child and tore off the hand of his 3-year-old brother when the two siblings were unable to jump into an already overcrowded bomb shelter trench. The health clinic was heavily damaged. Stories such as this are strikingly common.
Although the Sudanese government has rained bombs on civilian and humanitarian targets in southern Sudan for years, the international community has done a poor job of documenting these outrages. Information about previous bombings is often piecemeal because of the poor coordination that often exists within UN and non-UN humanitarian circles, and because most international policy makers display relatively little interest in the bombings and their tragic effects on the Sudanese people and international principles. USCR is now working with humanitarian workers on the ground in an effort to improve reporting and documentation of each bombing incident, past and present. The work is incomplete.
At least 63 aerial bombings of civilian and humanitarian sites have occurred so far this year, according to partial data assembled by UN aid workers in the field. At least 65 such bombings occurred during 1999. That is an average of more than five bombings per month. Partial data from UN humanitarian staff indicate that more than 40 bombings occurred in 1998, and at least 22 bombing attacks struck in 1997. Even these fragmentary numbers indicate a minimum of 190 bombing attacks during the past four years. The data also indicate that the frequency of attacks has intensified in the past two years. International aid workers readily acknowledge, however, that these numbers understate the number of bombings because the data refer only to bombings in areas serviced by OLS aid programs. Bombings in areas inaccessible to OLS—often because of Sudanese government restrictions—are numerous but remain uncounted.
A study conducted in 1998 by a former U.S. government official in Sudan, Mr. Millard Burr, concluded that Sudanese government planes conducted more than 300 air strikes against non-military targets during 1994-98. "The aerial sorties number in the thousands, the bombs dropped probably can be calculated in the tens of thousands, and the southern Sudanese villages attacked numbered in the hundreds," stated Burr's 1998 report, published by USCR. "The number of civilian deaths directly attributed to Sudan Air Force attacks is numbered in the several hundreds. Indirectly, however, the number of deaths that can be attributed to the bombing campaign is numbered in the tens of thousands. Once villagers were displaced [by bombings], tens of thousands of aged, sick, and malnourished perished as they moved from site to site to escape the conflict."
The Congressional Human Rights Caucus can take steps to help improve this situation. Congress should push this and future Administrations to condemn publicly each bombing of civilian and humanitarian targets when each attack occurs. The current Administration issues only occasional statements critical of the bombings—and does it only when pushed. Congress should consider earmarking special funds to help aid agencies and policy makers improve research and reporting on this egregious human rights matter. At a minimum, Congress should demand that the U.S. State Department provide monthly or quarterly reports documenting bombings of civilian and humanitarian targets in Sudan.
Massive Population Displacement
The human rights and humanitarian situation in Sudan is grim. More than 4 million people have fled their homes. Most uprooted Sudanese remain within their country, living as internally displaced persons. It is common to find southern Sudanese families that have fled numerous times, frantically staying one step ahead of the violence. Many families have not seen their original homes in years. USCR staff have interviewed southern Sudanese adolescents who have trekked hundreds of miles in search of a functioning secondary school that might enable them to continue their education. Many families have disintegrated and become scattered because of the war, recurring famines, and absolute lack of economic activities in many regions of the country. Displacement has become a way of life for millions of people in Sudan, which has produced more uprooted people than any other country in the world.
During the first nine months of 2000, at least 60,000 additional Sudanese have fled their homes, according to USCR analysis of reports filed by international aid organizations. This estimate of new population displacement is extremely conservative; the total of newly uprooted Sudanese this year might number as high as 150,000 as the Sudanese government conducts its scorched-earth policy to clear populations away from strategic oil-producing areas in the Bentiu region of Western Upper Nile Province. More precise displacement estimates are difficult because of the immense size of Sudan (Sudan is the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River), the remoteness of many locations, and limitations on the mobility of international relief agencies created by the unceasing violence and restrictive Sudanese government policies.
Harassment of Humanitarian Aid Efforts
The international community established a joint program in 1989 to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into southern Sudan. The program, Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), still operates and has experienced numerous successes and failures. More than 30 international relief organizations participate in OLS. A handful of relief agencies deliver aid to southern Sudan independently of the OLS system.
Originally conceived as a program to deliver relief supplies during a short-lived peace agreement, OLS in practice has struggled to provide humanitarian assistance in the middle of a war. OLS officials have been forced to negotiate and plead with the warring parties, particularly the Sudanese government, for the "right" to deliver life-saving relief supplies and conduct modest aid programs on the ground. A Sudanese official told me in December 1989 that his government—which came to power by coup in June 1989 for the expressed purpose of aborting a nascent peace agreement—unabashedly manipulates OLS activities to help achieve the government's political and military objectives.
The Sudanese government's harassment of international aid efforts has long been a serious problem and has cost untold numbers of lives of innocent people in the south and elsewhere. Sudanese officials have blocked, for example, much-needed humanitarian assessments to parts of the Nuba Mountains area of central Sudan, where government planes regularly bomb and authorities are systematically driving hundreds of thousands of Nuba people off their fertile land and into relocation camps. New reports from the field this week indicate that Sudanese authorities are delaying a desperately needed OLS assessment of humanitarian needs in Western Upper Nile Province (see attached map). Aid workers fear that conditions in Western Upper Nile Province are increasingly dire, as tens of thousands of people continue to flee from that area into nearby Bahr el-Ghazal Province. OLS is also prohibited from providing humanitarian assistance to war-affected civilians in the east.
Sudanese authorities require multiple notification procedures before allowing OLS planes to deliver food and supplies to needy populations on the ground. The government has placed entire sections of southern Sudan off-limits to OLS aid flights. Agencies working outside the OLS umbrella have tried to fill the gap by delivering humanitarian relief into restricted locations without the Sudanese government's permission.
Congress should push for more financial and diplomatic support for the expensive but courageous efforts of OLS as well as for the very effective network of non-OLS agencies. OLS sorely needs international help in protecting it from the Sudanese government's manipulations. The United States and other donor governments regularly leave OLS officials to fend for themselves against Sudanese government impediments. U.S. officials have shown little willingness to be energetic in giving OLS the diplomatic protection it needs.
The Sudanese government's harassment of aid efforts peaked again this summer when government planes harassed relief planes while in flight and deliberately bombed relief planes when they landed. Pilots of humanitarian relief aircraft personally told me in July that they monitored Sudanese government radio transmissions between the local airport control tower in the town of Juba (Western Equatoria Province) and Antonov bomber pilots tracking a plane operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Government pilots tailed the ICRC plane and then bombed the site where it landed to deliver humanitarian supplies. At least five times, Sudanese planes have bombed sites while humanitarian aircraft were on the ground there, according to a compilation by one aid organization.
It is also important to understand that the Sudanese government periodically imposes a complete ban on all aid flights when it suits the government's military purpose to do so. A government ban on aid flights to Bahr el-Ghazal Province for three months in 1998 triggered a famine that killed tens of thousands of people. The 1998 flight ban was not an aberration. Sudanese officials consistently regard humanitarian aid as a weapon and have imposed similar flight bans since OLS was established:
The above list is by no means exhaustive. Numerous additional instances of Sudanese government interference in aid efforts exist.
Next Steps for Congressional Human Rights Caucus
The Congressional Human Rights Caucus can, if it chooses, play a constructive and creative role to address some of the problems discussed above. At a minimum, Congress should encourage the U.S. government and the UN to renegotiate the mandate of Operation Lifeline Sudan in order to give OLS more independence from Sudanese government restrictions. Faster and easier flight clearance procedures would help. The OLS mandate, in fact, should be renegotiated to obtain automatic clearance for all OLS relief flights. Access to long-denied locations, such as rebel-held areas of the Nuba Mountains, should also be part of a strengthened OLS mandate.
Congress should take another straightforward step by requiring the Department of State or the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide Congress with quarterly reports documenting and analyzing OLS problems and operations. This new reporting requirement would push the current and future Administrations to become more alert to the week-to-week needs of OLS, particularly in its difficult dealings with Sudanese officials. Regular reports would also highlight for policy makers the links between military, human rights, and humanitarian issues on the ground.
Even bolder steps might be needed. The long history of flight bans and other obstacles posed by the Sudanese government prove that the international community's humanitarian efforts in Sudan are highly vulnerable. The stunning death toll and massive human suffering among Sudanese should make clear to all of us that abusive notions of "sovereignty" cannot be allowed to sanction human rights abuses and deprivation of humanitarian aid. It is only a matter of time before Sudanese authorities again impose another large-scale ban on OLS aid flights, as they have done so many times in the past.
Therefore, Congress should urge the Administration and the UN to be prepared to declare that southern Sudan is a "special humanitarian zone" for purposes of delivering humanitarian relief whenever and wherever such relief is needed. Sudanese government permission for aid flights would not be required. This would parallel the UN Security Council's efforts in Iraq, where the UN in 1991 created the legal authority to ensure humanitarian access throughout the country. The Geneva Conventions and Protocols forbid combatants to starve civilian populations. The world community should not allow the Sudanese government to continue using food as a weapon.
Congress should push the Administration to re-energize its financial support for grassroots reconciliation programs in southern Sudan operated by local churches and other local indigenous leaders. These creative programs have already made a difference by lessening ethnic violence and alleviating other local tensions at numerous locations in the past two years. Grassroots reconciliation between ethnic Dinka and ethnic Nuer, as well as within those two groups, can instantly improve life for hundreds of thousands of people in southern Sudan even as the larger war rages on.
Lastly, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus should take the lead in strengthening human rights monitoring in Sudan. At a minimum, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Sudan should receive the funding he is currently seeking from donor governments to hire staff to expand his monitoring and reporting capacity. It is ludicrous that UN Human Rights Rapporteurs for Sudan and elsewhere are deprived of basic resources that would enable them to do their jobs better.
In conclusion, I thank the Congressional Human Rights Caucus for holding this special briefing. The situation in Sudan warrants all the attention it can get. This briefing, however, is only as useful as you, the members of Congress, make it. I urge you to put these words into action.
