Again, stated simply, the war is about FREEDOM.

Despite attempts of the regime to portray itself as an advocate of peace, their actions contradict their words. If they are serious about peace, then one would expect to see fundamental, not cosmetic, changes in the way they treat their own people. Today, Samaritan's Purse is delivering emergency food and medicine to victims of recent bombings of civilians in Rier and to victims of ground attacks and scorched earth practices in Payeur, both of which are oilfield regions. The National Islamic Front routinely attacks civilians by air and by ground. These actions are brutally prosecuted in the oilfield regions around Bentiu and other areas of oilfield_concessions. Many are killed or abducted in these raids. The Samaritan's Purse hospital in Lui has been bombed numerous times, and I have experienced the terror that comes with such an attack. We have come under shelling attacks in Nuba while delivering food. The UN program, Operation Lifeline Sudan, is routinely and illogically denied access by the National Islamic Front to areas of well-known civilian needs. Some say the war in Sudan is not "winnable," but the morale of the opposition forces is strong. The southern forces have united and have made steady progress on the battlefield for the last five years and more people are joining their ranks. They have little to live for and everything to die for in pursuit of a land of peace for their children. Their overall ability should not be underestimated. They fully intend to push toward their goal, and they will not accept defeat. The National Islamic Front forces, however, are suffering low morale. The majority of their fighters are conscripted. They lack the heart for gritty battle and are known to run once the mechanized advantage they have is lost. I have spoken to many POWs from the National Islamic Front and never once sensed they had a commitment to fight to the death. In fact, they were quite happy to be prisoners of the opposition.

In East Sudan, I met a fifty-three year old, university graduated, former National Islamic Front Major who left Khartoum to fight with the opposition forces of the Northern Democratic Alliance (NDA)/Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA). When I asked him how the opposition could win if their soldiers die, he answered, "our sons will be here to fight for Sudan's freedom." His response reflects their total resolve. The opposition forces will not lay down their weapons until there is a comprehensive and participatory political solution that will lead to guaranteed freedoms. They do not trust the National Islamic Front to keep their word on any agreement because they have broken every agreement for the past thirteen years. The people know conditions will not improve until there is a government committed to respecting basic human rights and liberties. They do not see that happening under the repressive National Islamic Front.

Many see the opposition forces as fragmented, ethnically driven, and incompetent to rule. Some of that is true, but they are committed to a New Sudan, and they represent a better option for stability in this region than the National Islamic Front. Unfortunately, they lack the public affairs capability to share their message internationally. Domestically, they lack the basic tools such as radio stations, newspapers, and schools to educate the population on principles of “rule of law" and democracy. Most of the citizenry is illiterate since virtually all schools have been closed for twenty years. The opposition forces already have the weapons, will, and manpower for the military fight. To achieve freedom, however, they need basic infrastructure such as roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. And they urgently need food.

What the people of Sudan need most is the moral backing of the United States Government to pressure the National Islamic Front. The United States Government's commitment to remain engaged is vital to bring peace to Sudan. Such measures will be signals to the National Islamic Front that change is inevitable.

The Sudanese are denied the basic freedoms that we hold dear-life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Like our own forefathers, they desire to exercise self-determination, to participate in their government, to have freedom of religion and speech, and to improve their welfare. The United States Government should continue to encourage these pursuits and desires of the Sudanese people and lend them our moral and political support in order to find freedom and liberty and to alleviate human suffering.

Thank you.

Mr. SMITH OF NEW JERSEY. Thank you very much for your testi

mony.

And Dr. Reeves, you may proceed.

STATEMENT OF ERIC REEVES, PROFESSOR, SMITH COLLEGE Mr. REEVES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

If you wish to see the face of Sudan's brutal civil war and the immense human catastrophe it has created, then I must ask that you imagine the scene several months ago at Bieh in the heart of the southern oil regions. I must ask that you look into the eyes of the young mothers with children lined up with thousands of other civilians for emergency food aid at the United Nations Food Distribution Center.

It is broad daylight on the morning of February 20th. The U.N. facility is well marked. There is no military activity anywhere near this humanitarian operation. The eyes of these young mothers at one moment hopeful that they and their children will receive desperately needed food aid turn in a flash to sheer terror as helicopter gunships of Khartoum's National Islamic Front regime descend to a low hover and begin to direct heavy machine gun fire and rockets into their midst. Dozens will be killed. Many, many more will be wounded.

We know because U.N. personnel were witnesses. Indeed were so close to the gunships that they could see the eyes of the pilot and gunner.

This is the face of war in Sudan. The attack at Bieh emblematized Khartoum's war on civilians and its conduct of civilian security operations in the oil regions. These are the realities that U.S. policy must confront if it is to bring peace to this savagely torn land. Indeed, an effective Sudan policy is long overdue as present peace negotiations founder for lack of coordinated and effective international support.

The urgency of the task could not be greater, for the ongoing killing and displacement of the Nuer and Dinka people of the oil regions and elsewhere in the south is nothing less than genocide the deliberate destruction of these people as non-Islamicized, nonArabized impediments to further oil development and the consolidation of Khartoum's military grip on power throughout Sudan.

U.S. policy needs a good deal more than Assistant Secretary Kansteiner has suggested. If we are serious about ending the war, which alone will ensure there are no more Biehs, then we must be willing to take on the most difficult policy challenges with fully adequate political and diplomatic resources.

We must tell the Egyptians we will no longer accept their efforts to obstruct southern self-determination, for such obstruction is the primary goal of the joint Libyan/Egyptian initiative. And we must not presume to attenuate the terms of self-determination before meaningful peace talks get underway as the Danforth Report mistakenly does.

No cause unites the people of southern Sudan more fiercely than self-determination as articulated in the IGAD peace process, long supported by the U.S. and its allies. Southern Sudanese will not accept a peace process that denies them meaningful self-determination. U.S. policy must articulate a realistic way of changing the cruel logic by which oil development in Sudan exacerbates the conflict. Every credible human rights assessment of oil development in southern Sudan has reached the same conclusion. The extraction and exploration activities of companies like Talisman Energy of Canada, Petronas of Malaysia, and China National Petroleum Corporation not only provide Khartoum with the means of financing

its war on southern civilians, but require physical security that takes the form of scorched earth clearances in and around the oil concessions.

The House version of the Sudan Peace Act passed a year ago by a vote of 422 to two, provides an effective policy response, but the Senate has failed to bring the bill to conference, and the Bush Administration refuses to see the logic of the bill's capital market sanctions. Secretary Kansteiner's comments this morning on the means of pressuring Khartoum offer a clear example of this refusal. If U.S. policy toward oil development in Sudan cannot move beyond the vague and unrealistic hopefulness of the Danforth Report, peace is unlikely to come. U.S. policy must work vigorously to ensure that Khartoum cannot continue to use the denial of humanitarian access to civilians as a weapon of mass destruction even as we recognize that the key to ending Sudan's crisis is negotiating a just peace.

The U.S. policy must seize upon the opportunity created when Senator Danforth secured an agreement between Khartoum and the SPLM to allow for international monitoring of attacks on civilians. This agreement now over 2 months old has produced nothing on the ground despite clear guidelines for monitoring protocols provided by Human Rights Watch over 7 months ago. As a result, Khartoum's continuing aerial and ground assaults on civilians are not confirmed by an authoritative reporting body.

Again, even a robust policy on human rights monitoring cannot substitute for decisive engagement with a unified, internationally supported peace process that fully commits the parties to serious ongoing negotiations. The difficulties of these policy challenges are exceeded only by the urgency that arise from the genocidal destruction now accelerating in southern Sudan.

If we do not rise to these challenges, it will be a moral failure of the first order and history will judge that failure savagely. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Reeves follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ERIC REEVES, PROFESSOR, SMITH COLLEGE Sudan's ongoing human catastrophe demands of the United States the clearest and most decisive policy response. Indeed, such a policy is long overdue, as present peace negotiations founder for lack of decisive and coordinated international support. The State Department must fashion a comprehensive policy for Sudan, devoting the necessary diplomatic resources; it must work with our European allies to create a clear and unified peace process; and it must respond effectively to the incontrovertible and massively destructive realities of oil development in Sudan. And it must do all this with an appropriate sense of urgency and high-level leadership. For the destruction and displacement of the Nuer and Dinka people of the oil regions and elsewhere in the south is nothing less than genocide the deliberate destruction of these people as non-Islamicized, non-Arabized impediments to further oil development and the consolidation of Khartoum's military grip on political power throughout Sudan. The Khartoum regime has revealed an ongoing willingness to deploy high-altitude bombers, helicopter gunships, and ground assault forces against civilians, including innocent women and children, adding to the unfathomable human suffering and loss of life in southern Sudan-now exceeding two million dead and four million displaced.

These realities lead me to believe that we simply cannot accept as a principle of US policy the limitations articulated by former Senator John Danforth in his recent report to President Bush: "we would not attempt to arbitrate the competing claims of the parties in Sudan." Genocidal destruction does not afford us the luxury of such moral equivalency in assessing the war in Sudan, or the ways of ending it. This is not to argue against engaging in a serious peace process, even with the brutal Na

tional Islamic Front regime. Rather, it is an argument for assessing soberly and realistically what will be required to insure that Khartoum's engagement is in good faith.

For this reason it would be unwise to see in the Danforth report anything approximating to a policy roadmap. Indeed, the report is fundamentally misconceived in its approach-expending US leverage with Khartoum, such as it is, in so-called "confidence-building measures" rather than in holding the regime to a clear time-table and set of benchmarks in a fully credible and unified peace process. This is not to diminish the importance of the issues addressed in the Danforth report. But ending the terrible scourge of government-sponsored slavery, securing unconstrained and ongoing humanitarian access, halting barbarous assaults on civilians, and even sustaining a cease-fire in the Nuba Mountains-all require a just and lasting peace if they are to be truly realized.

To be sure, there is presently particular urgency for humanitarian relief efforts. The National Islamic Front in Khartoum is now deliberately withholding humanitarian aid from 1.7 million people, the latest estimate from UN's Operation Lifeline Sudan. This continues a long and unforgivably cruel policy of manipulating humanitarian aid as a weapon of war. I attach several documents bearing on the present deteriorating situation of Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) which show how Khartoum, even when not explicitly denying humanitarian food aid, manipulates the procedures of OLS to deny emergency food and medical aid to southern civilians. As I have suggested in a recent analysis, Khartoum has begun a process that could result in the total collapse of OLS. But as important as it is to work for an end to Khartoum's manipulation of humanitarian aid as a weapon of war, the most meaningful humanitarian relief can come only when a just peace has been secured.

With such a goal in mind, the US should also commit the financial support necessary for long-term peace-building, and in particular to the strengthening of civil society institutions and capacity to insure that a just settlement will be deeply rooted and sustainable. This represents a modest commitment in light of the massive US expenditures over thirteen years of participation in Operation Lifeline Sudan. Peace will not come easily to Sudan, and it will be sustained only with vigorous commitment to reconstructing a viable civil society. The State Department should be thinking now about how to win the peace that presents itself as a clear, if tenuous, opportunity.

But the opportunity for peace must be seized in effective fashion. Too often the Danforth report has put the horse before the cart, unwilling to see that many important issues simply cannot be resolved without first securing a just peace. At other points, the report attempts to prejudge critical diplomatic issues. This is especially true in its commentary on the possibilities for the southern self-determination referendum that is one of the key features of the "Declaration of Principles."

This "Declaration of Principles" has anchored the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD) peace process since 1994, but more significantly since 1997, when Khartoum agreed to negotiate peace under these key principles. The US has committed itself fully to the IGAD process, as have our European allies. The selfdetermination referendum holds out the possibility of southern secession as one outcome of a vote to be held after an interim period. Thus the Danforth report's unilateral effort to abrogate the terms of self-determination-virtually ruling out the possibility of secession-compromises US commitment to the IGAD effort, and in the process accedes to Khartoum's position on this key issue prior to the peace talks in which self-determination will actually be negotiated.

This redefinition of self-determination is almost certainly an effort to induce a more cooperative effort from Egypt, which has made no secret of its intense dismay at any thought of southern self-determination; but Senator Danforth's redefinition has alienated many southern constituencies, and has left them wondering about the degree of US commitment to self-determination in any meaningful form. Egypt is a critical regional player, but must not be allowed to dictate the terms under which peace is negotiated. The Libyan-Egyptian Joint Initiative must be recognized for what it is: a transparent diplomatic ploy to take southern self-determination off the bargaining table

The logic of the peace process is also misconceived by the Danforth report in its discussion of oil revenue-sharing. Such revenue sharing is conceived of as an engine for peace, rather than as one critically important issue that can be resolved only in the context of a concluded peace. Moreover, Khartoum-almost immediately after the revenue-sharing plan was first reported-peremptorily rejected the idea, both through First Vice President Ali Osman Taha and subsequently Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail.

Here it is extremely important to keep in mind Khartoum's strategic goals in its war on civilians throughout the oil regions. For the most promising oil concessions

lie to the south of the only presently producing operation, that of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (with Canadian, Chinese, and Malaysian partners). Block 5a, which has over recent years seen some of the most brutal civilian destruction of a war now in its 20th year, lies within this more southerly area, and Khartoum has engaged in ferocious efforts to re-secure the concession area for the Swedish, Austrian, and Malaysian partners in this project.

Block 5b, as well as the enormous TotalFinaElf concession (running south almost to the Ugandan border), are also clear prizes for a Khartoum regime that is currently spending more on the war than present oil revenues can fund. The regime has, in effect, heavily committed future revenues from oil concessions presently unsecured. There is no oil revenue to share, given Khartoum's voracious appetite for military hardware; there is even less inclination to do so as long as the regime believes it can control more of the extremely promising oil concession areas lying further south.

But to accomplish this the regime must conduct many further attacks of the sort that the world caught a glimpse on February 20th of this year, in the village of Bieh, just off the newly constructed oil road in the middle of Block 5a. There two of Khartoum's helicopter gunships, in broad daylight and at point-blank range, poured heavy machine-gun fire and rockets into thousands of innocent women and children gathered to collect food from a UN World Food Program distribution site. Permission had been secured by the UN from Khartoum, the location was wellknown, there was no military presence, and the building was well-marked. UN World Food Program workers were present as witnesses. None of this spared the dozens of civilians who were killed and the many more who were wounded, perhaps dying later. Bieh has now been put off limits to humanitarian relief, as has virtually every other relief site in the oil regions of Western Upper Nile Province.

The State Department is already well overdue in assembling and deploying the team of human rights monitors who will investigate attacks on civilians in southern Sudan. The important achievement of the Danforth mission in securing agreement on this issue is being squandered for lack of an effective monitoring regime. I have attached what I believe is a compelling outline of such a regime, offered to Senator Danforth by Human Rights Watch in December 2001-well before agreement was reached between Khartoum and the SPLA/M on this issue in March. The ongoing aerial attacks on southern civilians in the oil regions, reported by various sources, are presently not being investigated, despite the signal opportunity provided by agreement between the combatants.

I have deliberately used the word “genocide” to describe the realities of southern Sudan and to indicate why we may not afford to indulge the moral equanimity that lies behind the refusal of the Danforth report to “arbitrate the competing claims of the parties in Sudan." For whatever the diplomatic exigencies of the peace process, whatever reasonable compromises are necessary to secure a just peace, we cannot lose sight of the nature of the regime in Khartoum. They will not negotiate out of a concern for justice, or because the human suffering and destruction in the south has become intolerable. The National Islamic Front will negotiate only if it sees that there is no alternative—that its very survival politically and economically will be threatened by a refusal to engage in good faith peace talks.

Ideally the pressures on Khartoum will be applied by the US in concert with our key Western allies, though the record of Canada, Europe, and the European Union on Sudan has hardly been encouraging, with the exception of the Norwegians. The Canadian government, for example, has proved singularly impotent in restraining Talisman Energy, the only Western oil company involved in the Greater Nile producing consortium.

Despite the damning findings of numerous human rights assessment missions to the oil regions, including one commissioned by the Canadian Foreign Ministry, Talisman operates without restraint of any sort. Consequently, its airstrips continue to be used by Khartoum's helicopter gunships for attacks on civilian targets; its oil roads continue to facilitate the movement of Khartoum's ground forces; the oil it pumps to the El Obeid refinery supplies all fuel for Khartoum's deadly air assaults; and Talisman-generated oil revenues fund massive additional military purchases, including helicopter gunships, Khartoum's present weapon of choice for civilian destruction. Talisman stands as the very embodiment of western corporate evil in Sudan, and shows no sign of ending its present complicity in genocidal destruction. It was in response to these realities that the House of Representatives passed the Sudan Peace Act with provision for capital market sanctions against oil companies like Talisman Energy. Such sanctions offer a potent means of bringing US capital market leverage to bear in a way that will help pressure Khartoum. Without such leverage, we have no obvious policy options for moving Khartoum to engage in good faith peace negotiations. If we mean to end the most destructive civil conflict in the