Is Darfur Still a 'Genocide'? Sudan Envoy Says Call It What You Want

Thursday was a banner day for politics on cable news, literally. Televisions on Capitol Hill flashed CNN touting, "Cold Beer Over a Hot Topic," while MSNBC's crawl screamed, "Family Feud Over Health Care!" and Fox News teased the night's Hannity with the banner, "Blue Dogs Lie Down!"

But in a wood-paneled hearing room a world away from beers with cops and infighting over health care, a group of senators - Democrats and Republicans - on the Foreign Relations Committee listened intently as Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret.) described his latest visit to Sudan.

Gration is the stout, retired two-star Air Force General who became the U.S. special envoy to Sudan in March. He spoke in the clipped language you'd expect from a military man, and he gave the senators an unvarnished view of the nation and its troubled Darfur region.

"I just returned last week," he said. "I was reminded of the great human tragedy there, the pain and loss that conflict brings."

As the hearing began, the chairman, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), warned that the crisis in Sudan resists easy labels or straightforward diplomacy, two of Washington's favorite tools in problem-solving. The next two hours showed how right he was.

One by one, senators raised questions that had no clear answers. Should the United States negotiate with leaders we've labeled "terrorists"? Should we support election results we don't believe? Is it bad for the Chinese to buy oil from Sudan, even if the Chinese create stability there to protect their investment?

One of the most contentious issues came down to a label -- genocide. Does Darfur still qualify as a "genocide" if the violence there has been muted after international intervention?

"It doesn't matter what we call it," Gration told Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). "We have people living in dire, desperate circumstances. We have women who fear for their lives, who have had their souls ripped out of them...I'm not going to get into a debate that doesn't have to happen."

Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, asked why, with women still being raped in camps, more couldn't be done to protect them, even to allow them just to gather firewood for cooking. Gration said it's a goal. "We have to start with the women...If we return their respect and their dignity, the other parts will come along."

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) asked Gration about the general's earlier statement that Sudan may not actually be a state sponsor of terror, and was designated as such for political reasons. Because of the label, Isakson and others wondered if the embargo that followed wasn't unintentionally hurting the goals for Sudan to build an infrastructure and a functioning economy.

Gration said the designation would have to be revisited at some point.

Finally, when Gration spoke of the importance of having a "foot" in all of the warring factions for negotiating power, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) took issue with the engagement that the Obama administration has offered to the government in Khartoum, asking what evidence we have Khartoum is acting in good faith. "My mandate is to save lives," Gration said flatly. "We need to have a relationship with Khartoum."

Throughout his testimony, Gration described the effects of the expulsion earlier this year of more than a dozen aid organizations and of the car-jackings, abductions and assaults that continue for the volunteers left there.

It tracked with Sen. Johnny Isakson's visit in May, which Isakson told Politics Daily, "defies verbal description."

Isakson told of the scene at a refugee camp of 55,000 people, a tiny fraction of the 4.5 million who remain displaced. "There was no running water. People carried water in enormous jugs. Dead animals were rotting out in the open." Isakson described ditches surrounded by siding that served as make-shift latrines; scarce health care; women and children dying of malnutrition. "It was a bloodless genocide."

It was not lost on the assembled lawmakers that Gration was a two-star general in his former life, and thus in a position of strength to say the UN is imperfect, but essential to our efforts, or to argue in the future for more or less military intervention, and more or less aid from the United States. A former fighter pilot making the case for negotiations with a rogue state has a different ring to it than a well-meaning aid worker who has never been on the other side of a closed-door meeting.

But Gration told the senators he was also once a refugee himself, having fled from the Congo as a boy when his family lived there in the 1960's. "I know what it's like to live in another person's attic," he said. "I've lived in another person's clothes." In the end he said, "We want only what is best for the Sudanese people."

Sudan will hold elections in a year and a half, when the southern region will have a choice of whether to become an independent country or remain a part of Sudan. The senators and witnesses agreed the world community, including the United States, has 18 months to get it right.

As Gration spoke to the senators, the United Nations in New York voted to extend its peacekeeping mission in Sudan. Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, remains wanted by the International Criminal Court for implementing "a plan to destroy" portions of Sudan's Darfur region.

And two miles up Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House press corps had become engulfed by a new international incident when the president chose Bud Light for tonight's "beer summit" between himself, Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley. Bud Light is now owned by InBev, a Belgian company.

Americans, the media warned, like to see the president putting America first.