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So I look forward to hearing your remarks and getting into the question and answer session.

With that, I yield back.

Mr. PAYNE. Thank you very much.

And now we will hear about the subject of the escalating crisis in Darfur. Are there prospects for peace? And our witness, as you know, is the Honorable Andrew Natsios, Special Envoy to Sudan and former Administrator for USAID.

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ANDREW NATSIOS, SPECIAL ENVOY TO SUDAN AND FORMER ADMINISTRATOR FOR USAID Mr. NATSIOS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank the committee.

I listened with great interest to the remarks of the members, and there is no question that Congress has been very active legislatively in providing support. The Darfur Peace Accountability Act was signed by the President just as I was arriving on my first trip as Envoy in October. And of course you signed the Executive order, but also for the money that Congress has appropriated. The United States Government has spent $2.7 billion in Darfur, mostly on humanitarian assistance to keep people alive in the camps and also to provide support for the African Union troops.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit my formal written remarks for the record, but since we have limited time, I am going to go through a much shorter summary of those remarks here.

The President appointed me as a Special Envoy for all of Sudan on September 11th in his speech before the General Assembly at the United Nations. This was 5 months ago. The President and the Secretary both gave me a charge to take much more aggressive actions in dealing with this crisis, and that is what we have done.

I have been going myself to Darfur as a USAID official and NGO worker since 1990. My first trip there was during a Darfur war between the poor people and the African tribe and the largest tribe and the Arabs in the late 1980s. That was nowhere near as bad as this, but I realized then this is an unstable area.

The second war took place in the mid-1990s between the Masalit people and the Arabs and now we have a war much more massive than that.

I teach of course at Georgetown University. I am a professor there. I also do this job, and I do want to say that I am very proud of college students across the country who have been mobilizing on this issue. The first organized college campus on the Darfur issue was Georgetown. They started a group called Stand that now has spread to 2 or 300 college campuses. So I am proud of my students at Georgetown and I want to thank President DiGioia for allowing me the time to do this as an extra duty.

I want to go through the assumptions that we have made in developing our policy. The first is, and I know this is difficult for people to accept, but the best way for us to protect the people in Darfur is a political settlement that is negotiated by all the sides, including some of the people who have committed some terrible atrocities because they are going to be there regardless of what happens. We can't expel them. There are a million people in some of the tribes that contributed troops to some of the atrocities. They

are not going to leave Darfur. We have got to find some way of negotiating a settlement so that the tribal peace that has been broken by these atrocities can be put back together.

These people economically are dependent on each other. Without the farmers, the herders can't live and without the herders, the farmers can't live. And now they are at war with each other, and that is very bad for the people of Darfur.

We believe we need coercive measures only when it appears that the negotiations are failing. We are making very small steps, and they are very small steps. It is very frustrating for me, but we are making some progress, if unsatisfactory from my perspective.

War has been dangerously regionalized. It has now poured across the border into Chad and into the Central African Republic. It is destabilizing those countries. What people don't realize is we don't dominate the world economy the way we used to. The gross domestic product of Sudan has doubled in the last 6 years and will double again in the next 6 years. According to the Sudanese Government, oil production per day, barrels of oil, is 356,000 barrels per day last year. It is going to go up to 520,000 barrels this year. Their economy is one of the fastest growing economies. It grew 12 percent just last year. It is one of the fastest growing economies in the world right now, and it is the oil revenue coming in, but also the country around greater Khartoum is industrializing.

So you have two worlds. You have a rapidly growing economy in the greater Khartoum area, the Arab League Triangle, as it is called, and the rest of the country is in one of the poorest locations of the world. The Level 6 development and the rest of Sudan is one of the most depressed I have seen in the world, particularly in the south. Some was neglected for decades even before the war started. The property issues, the livelihood issues, and the security issues of the people of Darfur must be settled peacefully by negotiation in order for the stability to return to Darfur. I estimate that several million head of cattle, sheep, and goats were looted from the African tribes, from the people who are now in the displaced camps. There is 2.4 million in the displaced camps and in refugee camps. If they go back to their villages without their tools, land and villages, they will die. They need those implements for their livelihoods. They need those animals for their livelihoods and they have been looted.

Now in terms of our diplomatic efforts, the focus now very clearly, indisputably, in United States policy is on human rights and on humanitarian issues. We have no military or economic interest in Darfur. I am saying this; I know you all know that. But there are people in Sudan who are demagoguing this issue suggesting-one suggestion from a senior leader is we want to build a military base. That is the most ridiculous charge I have ever heard. What would we do with a military base in Darfur?

The other charge is we want all of the oil in Darfur. There is a tiny little corner that has oil that we know of in the southeastern region. Tiny little area. There is no other oil in Darfur. Some people say there is oil. Maybe there is. The United States is in the international market. Oil is fungible. We can buy it anywhere. We need to buy it on the international market. We have no interest economically on the oil from this country in Darfur. And the

charges that that is the reason motivating American policy by Sudanese leaders is an outrageous demagoguing statement. It is not very helpful.

Another policy is to energize the CPA implementation. We know unless there is peace in Darfur, the people in the south are not going to vote to keep Sudan unified. When that vote takes place under the CPA, they are looking at what happens in Darfur and they are saying they did it to us before, they are doing it to them, they could do it to us again. So I urge the Sudanese Government to understand unless they settle the Darfur crisis, they are only ensuring what the vote will be in 4 years when the Sudanese people in the south under the CPA vote in a referendum on their future. They should be creating the incentives in the Sudanese Government to wanting to have people stay in Sudan.

The charge is made we want to divide the country. That is not true. That is not our policy, but it is the job of the Sudanese Government to keep the incentives to keep the country together. And they are not doing it. It is my view and the President's view that we need to expand the international coalition supporting peace, so we have been actively recruiting Arab League countries and Asian states to support us. Their policies are not the same as our policies. We can get into the discussion of the Chinese relationship if you wish, but we have successfully-I spent a week in Beijing. I have been to Egypt a couple of times now. We support one negotiating process. When I arrived in Sudan, I was stunned by the fact there are seven different negotiating processes going on. Everybody concerned about this in the world had a separate track for resolving this, and that is one way of simply having a forum shopping where the Government of Sudan didn't like one form so they changed to another form and it was chaotic.

So we agreed in the Abuja and the Addis compromise that the AU and the U.N. are in charge of mediation. Our job is to support them. When I met with the rebels in Chad, I told them I am not here to negotiate with you and my good friend, the foreign minister of Sweden, who is the U.N.'s Special Envoy; I have known him for 18 years. I trust him. We talk all the time and Salim Salim for the African Union, former Foreign Minister, Tanzania. They are the two leads on this. Our job is to support them, and I told the rebels they needed to be reasonable and to take their lead in terms of these negotiations.

The Addis and the Abuja compromise is incredibly important to getting 10,000 more troops and another 3,000 police, and we have been supporting it every day since it was agreed to.

And finally, I have been encouraging actively, as well as Secretary Rice and Jendayi Fraser, unification politically of the rebel movements into one unit. The reason we have a peace agreement between the north and the south is because John Garang didn't have any competitors negotiating with the north. Right now, there are 12 to 15 different rebel movements all trying to negotiate separate peace deals with the Government of Sudan. It is simply chaotic, and we can't have a peace settlement with the rebels in this disarray. They must unite politically and they must put aside their egos and tribal rivalries to do what the southerners do.

Let me talk about the current situation. It is deteriorating as we speak, and I am very troubled by it. In the USAID, I don't want to put my old USAID/NGO hat on, but for a moment we use the thing called the GAM rate, the Global Acute Malnutrition rate. It means something in public health. If the rate is under 10 percent, it is acceptable. If it is over 15 percent, it is a crisis. In three camps, Kalma Camp, Abu Shouk, and Kickabia Town, and these are big camps near urban areas, the rates now are 22 percent, 22 percent and 25 percent. They are way above the emergency level. There is extremely disturbing. These are not remote camps that are difficult to get to far away in some remote area of Darfur. These are right next to capital cities. Because of the chaos in the provinces now, and there is chaos, rebel movements fight with each other, the Janjaweed have been out of control. In a couple of cases they have threatened to kill the governor of one of the provinces who represented the central government, and the Janjaweed militia is paid, directed and equipped by the Sudanese Government. So they are out of control in some areas of Darfur.

But to have these kinds of rates in these cities is extremely disturbing to me as a former USAID officer, and it means we have a crisis growing in these areas. We need to watch this closely. Humanitarian access has rapidly deteriorated.

Just to give you some idea of how bad things are in terms of the NGOS and U.N. agencies and the ICRC, in 2005, 24 vehicles were looted in the USAID community. In 2006, 113 were looted. A 400 percent increase.

In 2005, there were 244 attacks against the USAID community. In 2006, it was 423. Almost double. So we are facing a crisis in terms of direct targeting by the rebels and the government. The rebels tend to just loot things. The government is now using violence in their allies. It is very disturbing to me because without the NGOS and U.N. agencies, the 2.4 million people cannot survive in those camps. They can't provide food and health care in those camps without us helping them. The ultimate goal of

all of this is a political settlement that allows them to go back to their home so they can be self-sufficient.

We are willing as a government to be very generous in a reconstruction effort, but there is not going to be any reconstruction effort in Darfur unless there is peace. I told the Arabs that, I told the Africans that, I told the government that. We will only be generous with our other friends in Europe and other countries if there is a peace, negotiated peace settlement that is actually implemented. The Sudanese Government has a history of signing peace agreements and not implementing them. If they are not implemented, they are useless. It is a waste of time.

Finally, in terms of the current situation, there are 350,000 new IDPs since May 2006. This is an extremely disturbing statistic, and it is a result of fighting between the rebels with each other and the rebels and the government and the Janjaweed militia. And this chaos is causing more and more displacement which means more and more suffering.

Let me make some comments. I know the hearing is about Khartoum. John Garang was my friend for 18 years. I went to the south for the first time in 1989, and the southerners are very close to me.

And the peace agreement is something I helped Jack Danforth in terms of negotiating with Colin Powell, and so I am very proud of it. There is a peace dividend for the south. $73 million is going directly into the southern treasury every month. Almost $1 billion was transferred last year. There is a Government of Sudan now. It is very fragile, but it is there. There is no war and famine in the south. There is massive improvements and trade. The food prices in Juba, the capital of the south, have massively dropped since all the roads have been opened up because it was an isolated city with Uganda and Kenya. There are private companies now moving in with trucks and bringing goods in and so life is changing. Two hotels have been built, much to my astonishment, in Juba.

And finally there has been a reduction from 40,000 to 10,000 in the number of militias. They are sort of independent entities, many of which have been created and formed by the Sudanese Government to disable the south during the war. But we still have 10,000 people who are under arms who are not under anyone's direct control formally, and that is what is causing some of the instability in the south and southerners are properly worried about this. I have raised these and other issues with President Bashir in my meetings with the foreign minister, with the vice presidents and with the head of the internal security.

There is an impasse on Abia, which is sort of the Jerusalem of the Dinka tribe in the south. Abia is of central importance. It is the spark that could light and collapse the CPA. It has not been dealt with. I visited Abia and met with the tribal leaders both in the Arab side and the southern side in order to tell them that we need to reengage in the process because negotiations called for under the CPA have been paralyzed. There is little progress on the border demarcation. There are incidents with militias out of control in Malakal. I have visited twice now and there is evidence that militias need to be completely demobilized now. I was promised by the Sudanese Government that was going to happen by the end of December. It has not been done. There are other armed groups in the south that are killing people not in a massive scale. There are incidents and it is not good for trade and for economic growth and for the people of southern Sudan to live under this security.

And finally, without a census being implemented, we are going to have problems having the elections that are scheduled for next year. That is the elections held before the referendums, before the peace agreement in 2011. So we, the Sudanese Government, needs to put $1 million from the treasury, they have the money, into the fund to begin the census process or we are not going to have elections and we need those elections for a stabilization not just for the south but for the whole country. Those elections are important for the Sudanese state.

And finally, there are three central objectives of American policy, and we are watching these on a daily basis to determine if there are any progresses being made, because if progress is paralyzed in these areas we will go to the strategy under Plan B.

Number one, unencumbered humanitarian access and the protection of noncombatants. A critically important issue for us is the effect of this war on the people on the ground.

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