So the Europeans are being very helpful. They have a different decision making process than we do. They have 25 countries that have to decide on things. So it is a little bit harder for them to get consensus, but I think they are fed up and Dr. Solano made some public statements about the need-I think it was he or someone else from the European Union on the issue of sanctions. So we are working with them on a daily basis literally in the field operationally in terms of funding the reconstruction of the south. They are as engaged as we are, and there are a lot of European NGOs and aid agencies now doing work both in the south and in Darfur. Mr. SIRES. Thank you very much.

Mr. PAYNE. Thank you.

Mr. Poe.

Mr. POE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for your energy. I wish when I was in college, some of my political science professors were as energetic and knowledgeable as you are.

Mr. NATSIOS. They tell me I assign too many readings to them. Mr. POE. Maybe I need to audit some of your classes over at Georgetown.

I agree and appreciate everything you have said. And I want to go back to the original question I asked you in my opening statement. How likely in your opinion is it that the United States will eventually use some military action against the Government of Sudan? In other words, is the United States going to swoop in and save the day like we maybe have tried to do in the past in other places?

Mr. NATSIOS. Well, let me just make a general comment that if swooping in was the way this was going to be solved, I would have advocated it a long time ago. The best solution is a negotiated solution because the people have to go back to their villages. We have to get everyone to agree to that. We have to get their land back for them. Their land has been taken by some of the nomads who are at war with them. They need to go back to their villages and be able to farm their land, and they need their animals back. Moving 2 or 3 million animals domesticated from the people who looted them back to the farmers is not going to be easy to do. So I think the best way to do this is through negotiation. There are other options we are considering. I do not want to go over those options in a public setting. It is inappropriate. I would be glad to brief you privately or in a group to discuss other things that are in plan B, but I have to just say to you, the best option is for the Sudanese Government and the rebels to negotiate a political solution to this crisis.

Mr. POE. Okay. I will finish reading the Washington Post article about plan B. Thank you for being here. As a former judge in Texas, if you ever capture these war criminals down there, you give me a call. I will volunteer to go over there and have some hearings. Mr. NATSIOS. Thank you, Congressman. I will remember that. Mr. POE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I yield back. Mr. PAYNE. Well, let me certainly express my appreciation to Mr. Natsios. I think this has been an instructive hearing. I just have a quick question to ask you.

When I met with the secretary general of the Arab League, who came over to a meeting held by former Secretary of State Madeline

Albright, Amr Moussa, I asked him about the commitment that the League of Arab States made to paying, from July to December, the cost of the African Union troops. At that time, he was unaware that I knew that they did not live up to their commitment but said they were going to go back and take a look at it. Have they remitted the cost of the 7,000 AU troops from July to December to the AU?

Mr. NATSIOS. We do not yet have confirmation on the $15 million, Congressman. We will get back to you. I actually walked in the room just after you had had your little discussion. It was discussed, your talk, and Amr Moussa mentioned it to me a couple times. I had to speak to an audience that was really focused on what you had already said. I am not sure they were listening to my luncheon speech at that conference as a result of your comments, but I do appreciate your comments. I think they are appropriate. We will check on them, and we will get back to you, sir.

Mr. PAYNE. I appreciate that very much. I'm sorry if I disrupted the meeting. They were all foreign ministers and diplomats. I opened my remarks with that I was not a foreign minister and certainly was not diplomatic.

Mr. NATSIOS. I think sometimes it is good to disrupt meetings, Congressman.

Mr. PAYNE. However, let me just say that I once again appreciate, I think that you have certainly put in a lot of energy. I don't think there is anyone in the government that is more competent and qualified in the whole question of Sudan, and I commend you for the time and effort that you have put in to it. However-be careful when you get the howevers-I do believe that we have to see better results. People are still dying. They are still in camps. The Government of Sudan is going along as Nero did, fiddling while Rome burned. We have to somehow light up the light of the Government of Bashir, and I still contend that-I don't know about your plan B, but I have a plan C that I think we-you know, need to look at some of the no-fly zones. I think that if we simply did not put any United States troops on the ground but put a few drones up and just took down a couple of Sudanese planes or just destroyed a bunch of them on the ground without putting any of our soldiers in harm's way, you could do it I think probably from Miami, pushing some buttons, that until we really show this corrupt government that diplomacy and sanctions and all of those things are the only thing on the table, then I think we are going to come back a year from now, 2 years from now, and they will still be fiddling. And so that is-like I said-plan C, that if all of your hard work continues to go for nothing, then I think that we just need to take a few places out. With that, at this point, Mr. Natsios and committee members, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the statement of Susan Rice, Dr. Rice, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Without objection. At this time the meeting stands adjourned. Thank you.

[Whereupon, at 12:20 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

APPENDIX

MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING RECORD

STATEMENT SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD BY SUSAN E. RICE, SENIOR FELLOW, THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony on the vitally important issue of the escalating crisis in Darfur. Let me also take this opportunity to thank you, Mr. Chairman, and of course Congressman Payne, Speaker Pelosi and many of your colleagues in both Houses and on both sides of the aisle for your committed leadership in trying to halt the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to enable all the people of Sudan to live in peace, hope and freedom from persecution on the basis of their race, religion or ethnicity. You have every reason to be proud of your record on this issue, and many of us are counting on you to continue to lead to save innocent lives.

I feel compelled to begin with a simple, even mundane observation: Today is the 8th of February, 2007. Thirty nine days have come and gone since the very public deadline Mr. Natsios set on November 20th at my own Brookings Institution. He promised that harsh consequences would befall the Government of Sudan, if it failed by January 1, 2007, to accept unconditionally the deployment of a 17,000 person UN-AU hybrid force and to stop the killing of innocent civilians. January 1 was the deadline for the implementation of the Administration's punitive "Plan B." Yesterday, the Washington Post published a leaked story that the President had approved "Plan B"-a three stage punitive package that could begin with the United States blocking Sudan's revenue from oil sales. If this I "Plan B," it should be implemented swiftly, not leaked. This kind of leak gives the Sudanese advance warning of the United States' possible actions and enables them to try to evade them.

Today, on February 8th, the United States continues to be taunted, and our conditions continue to be flaunted by the Sudanese Government. Plan B is long past its sell-by date and getting staler by the day.

66

Last month, a bipartisan group of 26 U.S. Senators wrote to President Bush saying “We appreciate your Administration's efforts at aggressive diplomacy and negotiation, but it seems clear that the Sudanese are not responding to such tactics." They insist"... the time has come to begin implementing more assertive measures." Yet, when asked repeatedly over the past weeks when "Plan B" will be implemented, the State Department spokesman has been evasive. For example: if we come to the judgment that the diplomatic track we are on right now, tactics that we are employing at the moment aren't producing the results we want to see at an acceptable rate, then you move to Plan B.... So yeah, we're thinking about what happens if this current set of diplomatic tactics doesn't work. But we are not prepared at this point to talk about them."

Why is the Administration temporizing? Why would it, yet again, issue a threat to the Sudanese regime and fail to follow through on it? What damage is done to our interests, to our credibility, to our already diminished international standing by the Administration's seemingly empty threats? Most importantly, how can the Administration explain to the dead, the nearly dead and the soon to be dead people of Darfur that, at the end of the day-even when we declare that genocide is occurring, even when we insist repeatedly that we are committed to stopping it—the United States has stood by for so long while the killing has persisted. This genocide has endured now, not for 100 days, not for 1000 days, but for almost four long years. Last month, the UN reported that the situation in Darfur is deteriorating rapidly. After an estimated 450,000 dead and more than 2.5 million displaced or rendered refugees, December 2006 was the worst month in Darfur in over two years. This nadir followed six months of escalating violence-a period which coincides with Khartoum's bid to expel and, failing that, to constrain the African Union force, to (39)

block the UN deployment and to throw its killing machine into high gear. The rebels' activity has also increased, and their violence has harmed both civilians and humanitarian agents. In those six months: thirty UN and other aid compounds suffered attacks; twelve aid workers were killed, and over 400 were forced to relocate. On December 18, four aid organizations were attacked at a massive refugee camp housing 130,000 at Gereida in South Darfur. All humanitarian operations there have ceased, and no food has been delivered to the camp in over a month.

At the same time, the fighting in Darfur is spilling into and destabilizing the neighboring countries of Chad and Central African Republic. Khartoum has backed rebels that seek to overthrow these governments, and the security situation along their borders is so bad that even the UN is reluctant to deploy forces there without an effective ceasefire. In recent weeks, Sudanese aircraft have attacked rebel-held areas and killed many innocent civilians. These attacks continue, despite the Richardson 60-day ceasefire, which is merely the latest of many to be agreed only to be swiftly violated by Khartoum.

As of this moment, still no Plan B.

The Pattern of Bluster and Retreat

Mr. Chairman, what we are witnessing is part of a three year pattern on the part of the Administration. In short, it talks tough and then does little more than provide generous humanitarian assistance. It blusters and, then, in the face of Sudanese platitudes, intransigence or empty promises, the Administration retreats.

When the rebels started the fighting in Darfur in February 2003, the Administration at first chose largely to ignore it. Despite the rampaging reprisals of janjaweed killers and rapists, the torching of whole villages, the wanton bombing of innocent civilians and massive humanitarian suffering, the Administration was slow to act. It seems to have calculated that pressing the Government of Sudan to halt its customary scorched earth tactics in Darfur ran counter to our interests in obtaining Khartoum's cooperation on counter-terrorism, which had begun abruptly after September 11, 2001, and in cajoling the regime to sign a North-South peace agreement with the SPLM.

By 2004, the human toll was mounting and being juxtaposed against the hollow pledges in many capitals of "never again" that marked the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. With, a presidential campaign underway, Congress and Democratic candidates went on record as characterizing the atrocities as genocide. Then, the Administration determined, belatedly, that its comparative silence was deafening. Secretary Powell and Kofi Annan visited Darfur and obtained empty promises from President Bashir that the Government would disarm the janjaweed, allow unfettered humanitarian access and permit an African Union force to deploy.

Yet, predictably, the killing and dying continued. Over the summer of 2004, Secretary Powell ordered a comprehensive investigation of the human rights violations that drew upon hundreds of first hand accounts. Faced with the evidence, Secretary Powell embraced the investigators conclusions: genocide was taking place. To his credit, he testified that effect, and the President in September powerfully repeated that judgment before the UN General Assembly. And then, again, the Administration did nothing effective to stop the killing.

At the same time, with Western encouragement, the African Union mounted its first ever peacekeeping mission-in Darfur. To seasoned analysts of African peacekeeping capacity, the flaw in this approach was obvious from the start: the nascent AU could not succeed in its mission to secure millions of people at risk in an area the size of France. Hobbled by a weak mandate, an uncertain funding stream, little institutional back-up at a brand-new regional organization, and perpetual troop shortages, the AU was bound to fall short, despite all its best intentions—and ours. It was slow to deploy, but deploy it did-with U.S. and NATO logistical and financial support.

The African Union has been the target of a lot of criticism for its shortcomings in Darfur. I think unfairly so. While we sit here in Washington wringing our hands, the African Union forces have been the only ones who have been willing to take bullets to save Darfurians. They have done so without adequate international support and under constant pressure and restrictions imposed by Khartoum. They have saved thousands of lives and we owe them honor and our gratitude. Their presence also gave the U.S. and others a ready, if cynical, foil for declaring the genocide under control. It wasn't. But they continue to serve nobly in the most trying conditions while others wring their hands.

By 2005, after one year, the AU finally reached a strength of almost 7,000 and pledged to add another 6,000. It couldn't and didn't. By then, it was clear to all who paid attention: the African Union was in over its head. Many experts, I among them, pled for NATO to step in, with US support, to augment the AU force. Those

calls went unheeded, as some African leaders continued to insist on "African solutions to African problems." The U.S. must have found convenient this conspiracy of absolution. But genocide is not and never will be an African problem. It is a human problem, requiring the concerted efforts of all humanity to halt decisively. To date, we have not.

In 2005, Secretary Rice visited Darfur, and Deputy Secretary Zoellick began to lead the U.S. negotiating effort. In early 2006, the AU itself accepted reality and recommended that the UN subsume its force and take over its mission. In parallel, Mr. Zoellick was trying to nail a peace agreement before he left State. His efforts culminated in May 2006, in the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA). This agreement appeared fatally flawed before the ink was dry: it left out two key rebel groups; and the one that signed did so under extreme duress-one day after its leader's brother was killed by the regime. Moreover, Khartoum made little in the way of power-sharing concessions with the rebels; there was no firm requirement, just an unwritten understanding, that the Government would accept a robust UN peacekeeping force. There were rewards pledged for Khartoum like the lifting of U.S. sanctions and a White House visit, but no penalties for non-compliance. As many feared, the ceasefire was broken almost immediately. The rebels fractured. The killing intensified, and the people of Darfur have suffered all the more.

After Mr. Zoellick left State, U.S. policy foundered for a period. But in late August, it seemed back on track. The U.S. succeeded in obtaining UN authorization under UNSCR 1706 of a Chapter VII peacekeeping mission to Darfur. 22,000 peacekeepers with a mandate to protect civilians were agreed, overcoming Chinese reservations. In September, President Bush and Secretary Rice visited the UN General Assembly. They appointed Mr. Natsios Special Envoy and promised tough consequences against Khartoum, if it did not drop its refusal to accept the UN force. Mr. Natsios went to work to try to persuade Khartoum to accept UNSCR 1706. Instead, in November in Addis Ababa, the U.S. joined the UN, African Union and European leaders in preemptively capitulating to Khartoum's refusal to accept the UN force. In an effort to win Khartoum's acquiescence, the U.S. embraced with others a fall-back position: a smaller, weaker, AU-UN "hybrid" force. In December, the UN Security Council, with the U.S. leading the way, effectively abandoned UNSCR 1706 and endorsed the Addis agreement.

This hybrid force would be substantially smaller than the UN's-17,000 vice 22,000. It is to derive its mandate from the AU, which Khartoum has readily manipulated. It is to draw its troops principally from Africa, but overstretched by deployments to numerous hotspots on the continent, Africa has very little peacekeeping capacity to spare. It would enjoy UN funding but suffer from all the "dual-key"-type problems that plagued the UN and NATO in the Balkans in the early 1990s.

The so-called "hybrid” was an ill-conceived and short-sighted expedient to accommodate, yet again, the perpetrators of genocide. Still, Khartoum steadfastly refuses to accept any significant deployment of UN forces, in a hybrid form or otherwise,

in Darfur.

Deadlines have come and gone. The U.S. continues to negotiate, to bluster and retreat. And Darfurians continue to die. This is, by any measure, a collective shame. The American people know it, and by all accounts they don't much like it. According to Newsweek (12/25/06), “65% of Americans support sending U.S. troops, as part of an international force, to Darfur."

The Way Forward

The time for fruitless and time-consuming negotiations has long since passed. The time for misplaced faith in Richardson's ceasefire, or Ban Ki Moon's diplomacy, or Chinese blandishments (rather than the hoped-for admonitions) has passed. These are Khartoum's delaying tactics-to buy time while it continues the killing.

If the Bush Administration is truly serious about halting this four year-old genocide and protecting civilians in Darfur, it must act now to show Khartoum that we are done talking and are now starting to turn the screws.

Step One: The President should issue an Executive Order implementing the financial measures in Plan B immediately. The Order should include safeguards to ensure that revenue flows to the Government of South Sudan remain unaffected. Given yesterday's leak of the contours of Plan B, the President must act now or risk squandering the potentially significant impact of these measures.

Step Two: The Bush Administration should state clearly that these financial penalties will not be lifted unless and until the Sudanese Government permanently and verifiably stops all aerial and ground attacks against innocent civilians and allows the full and unfettered deployment of the Chapter VII UN force authorized under UNSCR 1706. The U.S. should declare the so-called "hybrid" force dead and take it off the negotiating table, where it has languished for three months. The hybrid