Watching and waiting in Sudan

LJWorld.com weblogs Congressional Briefing

Posted by Joel Mathis August 25, 2004 at 7:50 a.m.

U.S. Sen Sam Brownback, R-Kan., has probably been the most vocal American official crying out for action against Sudan, the African nation whose government has reportedly sponsored Arab militias in its Christian south and western Darfur regions. A New Yorker article about that conflict can be found [here][1]Samantha Power writes in the magazine that Virginia Congressman Frank Power "and Sam Brownback, a Republican senator from Kansas, visited Darfur in June and returned with grim refugee testimonies and video footage of torched villages. In July, Congress passed a resolution, introduced by Donald Payne, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey, to describe the killings in Sudan as 'genocide' "the first time that Congress had described an ongoing massacre in such terms."The Senate, however, has failed to follow suit, the Daytona Beach News-Journal [reports][2]."So it was at least an improvement in timing and wording, if not quite in action, when the House of Representatives last month voted 422 to 0 to call the killings in Sudan by the proper word: Genocide," editorial writer Pierre Tristam wrote for the paper. "'I do not think we have ever done that before in the middle of a genocide as it is taking place,' Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator said on the Senate floor a few days after his return from Darfur. 'We have always adopted a resolution afterward, and once the genocide has occurred, we have said: That is terrible; that should not have happened; and, oh, by the way, it was genocide.'"Cheney campaigns in Kansas The text of [Vice President Dick Cheney's][3] Monday speech on behalf of the Kris Kobach campaign can be found [here.][4] Cheney was in Overland Park Monday on the campaign swing. Kobach is a Republican running against incumbent U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore in Kansas' 3rd District.How to contact As always, you can find information to contact members of the Kansas congressional delegation [here.][5] [1]: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040830fa_fact1 [2]: http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/Opinion/Editorials/03OpOPN91081004.htm [3]: http://www.ljworld.com/section/election04/story/179464 [4]: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040824/dctu033_1.html [5]: http://ljworld.com/extra/where_to_write.html#fed