Bipartisanship on Sudan

What with the convention season starting and the general election campaign already making people testy, we here at danieldrezner.com feel it’s worth occasionally highlighting those areas of policy where both sides of the aisle are in rough agreement. Which brings us to this Rudolph Bush story in the Chicago Tribune about Congressional pressure on Sudan’s humanitarian disaster:

An unusual coalition of Congressional Black Caucus members and conservative Republicans, united by outrage over a surge of ethnic killing in Sudan, is beginning to see some success in its efforts to push the U.S. toward action. Most notably, the House and Senate unanimously approved resolutions late Thursday declaring about 30,000 killings in Sudan’s Darfur region genocide and urging the Bush administration and the United Nations to do the same. The joining of liberal Democrats from the black caucus with such conservatives as Reps. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) could increase pressure on President Bush to adopt the genocide label, a move likely to spur action in the UN Security Council. “I would like to see, and think it’s appropriate, that the administration say this is genocide,” Wolf said. “That would force the Europeans and our friends in the UN to do the same.” Threatening sanctions, the Bush administration and the UN already have called on the Sudanese government to rein in and disarm the Arab militias known as Janjaweed, who have terrorized tribes in the south, pillaging villages and killing and raping villagers…. Human-rights activists and aid workers praised Congress for pushing the issue with rare bipartisan zeal. “You have the Christian conservative groups … along with the Congressional Black Caucus pressing the administration to respond more robustly than it has to date,” said John Prendergast, a special adviser on Africa to the Washington-based International Crisis Group. “That’s an absolutely critical element in the policymaking process.” Prendergast said he couldn’t recall such a broad response from Congress to a human-rights crisis since the fight against apartheid in the mid-1980s. Wolf and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) called the cooperation unprecedented, though the Congressional Black Caucus and religious conservatives have joined forces before to secure funding to fight AIDS abroad. The Sudanese government was less impressed with the cooperation. Ambassador Khidir Haroun Ahmed wrote Thursday in a letter to The Washington Times that “the prevailing perception in Sudan and in the region is that the U.S. Congress is motivated by hatred and bias against Muslims and Arabs.”

I did, however, find this paragraph amusing:

The black caucus and its Republican allies don’t see entirely eye-to-eye on how to ensure that this aid reaches Darfur. Jackson and other caucus members have called for U.S. troops to be deployed immediately in Darfur, while Wolf and other Republicans said they prefer a multinational force, preferably staffed with soldiers from other African nations, Wolf said.