nobody believes in their ideology. nobody thinks that children in america should not have health care -- [applause] or workers should not have rights. [applause] they are a fringe movement, and if the democrats have the guts to go out to organize, if we work together on this thing, we can beat them and beat them badly. [cheers and applause] all right. but we can't do it -- i know it's hard. look, i know, people in my state, all over the country are disappointed. i'm disappointed. all right, but you can't give up. we have to raise that aggressive agenda, make it loud and clear and organize people and educate your neighbors because what we are fighting for is so, so important. it is the future of this country so i just want to thank busboys and poets for hosting this.

thank you very much. thank you all very much for coming out. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> for more information on senator bernie sanders, visit his website sanders.senate.gov. >> up next on booktv.org, rebecca tinsley talking about her book, when the stars fall to earth. the book is based on her

experiences in sudan and interviewed she conducted with the survivors of the genocide. this runs about an hour. [applause] >> well, first of all, thank you very much to the american bar association for so kindly providing a venue today. i would also like to thank mike meyer and martha from the darfur interface network for making this possible and beth grossman. i'm also going to ask your indulgence as an audience. i know there's sudan experts here, and please bear with me if i tell you things you already know, but those lovely people at c-span are here to broadcast this, and therefore, i think that it's our duty to use this opportunity to get across the message about the serial jen sides that have been going on in sudan, so forgive me if i'm telling you things that you already know. i know there's people in the

room that think it's perfectly appropriate as a topic conversation to talk about genocide, but believe it or not, not everybody feels the way we do about that. i'm going to first of all talk to you about what's happening in abya. over the weekend you probably saw that the sudan armed forces occupied the region of abia bringing in 5,000 troops, an unknown number of tanks. they've been basically carpet bombing the city since the 19th of may. 20,000 people had to flee for their lives. i've been getting e-mails from someone we know who works for an agency near the city all morning, and apparently, sudan sudanese war planes are buzzing the communities of the two neighbors states as well the message being to terrify the

local people. now, i would like to first of all deal with the idea that -- i mean when you listen to the diplomats and the politicians from the west, they're sort of expressing surprise that this has happened. well, they shouldn't because it was completely predictable. groups like mine waging peace, they saved darfur, human rights watch, we have all been going on and on and on about how abia was the flash point and went on the point of moo notmy more months and months because it was clear this was going to happen. it was predictable because as long as you appease the or tect -- architects of genocide and treat them as partners of peace, as long as you make sure there's no consequences for bad behavior, then the signal that you send to

those architects of genocide is that they can carry on. the city is in a way a microcome of what's been happening throughout sudan since 1983, and as with most subjects in africa, if i'm going to cover this properly, i'm going to go back a few decades to explain what's happening there today back to the time of the colonial times. that is so often the story in after ray cay. -- africa. basically, sudan until 1956 was part of the british empire. the british drew a border that put 700 different tribes together. now, surely this was never going to go well. as was typical of the colonial power, they chose one ethnic group to do their bidding, to try to control everybody else. that was the people who self-identify as arabs, who live in there and this is a story of

the ethnic groups that define themselves as arab along the nile against everybody else. it's a story of marginalization and a story of climate change because the is saharra is getting soaked with an extraordinary domino effect that a lot of the ethnic groups living here are having to move, and they're moving on to land occupied by people who self-identify as black african. now, you get board of me -- bored of me saying people self-identify. here's what i learned. it does not matter the content of your blood because there is intermarriage everywhere. what matters is how you self-identify, and part of the story of sudan is unfortunately

the racism of some of the arab groups who consider themselves to be racially superior to the black africans who live here in the south. this is the size of texas, and here in darfur, also about the size of texas. the difference is these people are muslim, and these people are christian. the kris chaps in the south basically objecting to the fact that the people in khartoum who are islamists. i don't mean islam, but islam, political islam as practiced by bin laden and his friends. they want to impose the law to the people in the south, and there's a tremendous amount of racism involved in this. what we've had then since independence in 1956 was the mar gypallization -- marginalization of the other groups here who feel they have no stake where the power is in sudan. the people in khartoum have been

rather clever and skillful in the way they have conducted ethnic cleansing. what they've done is typically there's a pattern to this, and it's being repeated to this day, right now in abia. they use their air force to bomb villages in what they call softening up, and this has been followed not by regular soldiers, but by my sish sha -- militias of disgruntled no mads who they pay and arm to do the dirty work. this happened since 1983, and it's happened since 2003 here in darfur where there's a population of 6 million people, half of whom have now been made homeless. that's 90%. human rights watch reckon 90% of the black african villages of darfur have been destroyed and

emptied and there's the death of 300,000 people. massive displacement. now, you may wonder what motivates this. that takes us to something else incredibly topical, of course, and that's kernel gadhafi. he wrote the book some decades ago explaning why all culture in africa was arab and nothing else was of value whatsoever. he's the man who ignited a thousand really ghastly racist throughouts among arabs, and as you know today, he's trying to kill his own population. the other soul mate in all this program of ethnic cleansing is osama bin laden who lived in khartoum for five years, and you know, i think you can define the regime by the friends it keeps. they also defined their best friends as hamas, hezbollah, and

i must add the majority of the world's muslims totally disagree with their adoption of political fundamentalist islam, but there we are. two months ago, the president of the sudan, the regime arab based here in khartoum was asked to define islam, and he said this. it is to cuss, to stone, and to kill. this is not a vision that the majority of the world's muslims would embrace, but shockingly, it is one that has been used and is now being used to oppress the christian people of south sudan and darfur. now, this brings us to why abia is happening. thanks to the incredible work of a lot of american face groups, and i mean, jews, christians, muslims, they shine a light on what was happening in south sudan, the fact that from 83 onwards there's been this

merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing, and they eventually got the united states government to focus on what was happening there. this is an example of what we can achieve when we actually put our minds to it, and when there is international political will. because of america, the people in khartoum were eventually pressured into having peace talks going into a whole negotiation that dragged on for years, of course, but eventually in 2005, they signed what's calls the comprehensive peace agreement which was neither comprehensive nor has it led to peace, but nevermine. they decided on a border around south sudan, but the problem with this is the people in khartoum who run the regime, it would be wrong to think of them as a caricature or african dictatorship. these are very shrewd people. they calibrate exactly the

west's lack of interest in africa. they so well know our lack of commitment, and they also understand we have attention deficit disorder. they get we cannot focus on one international issue, more than one international issue at a time, and we soon lose interest. now, during these negotiations, they were taking -- the people in khartoum were taking a leaf out of the book from the serbia dictator, and therefore the people of khartoum span out all the negotiations realizing frankly that our diplomats, although, you know, with the best in the world,mented to go -- wanted to go home, and up fortunately so desperate were we to get sudan out of the basket, that we postponed some of the most fundamental decisions

including where the border would be. abia is exactly on the border, and it is disputed because the people who live here have been given a decision on whether or not they're going to be part of the south which is now voted for secession or whether they want to be part of the north. here's the problem -- people who are permanent residents here self-identify as black africans and are farmers. however, every year, the tribe who self-identify as arabs who are nomadic come through and graze their animals. they consider themselves residents of abia, and they say they should have a vote, and here's the problem -- who are we to get on the with the prase agreement that we never decided who would vote in the referendum. there's e-mails i'm getting this

morning from people on the ground there. they are saying that this move by the sudan government to occupy the town is not just simply about oil. i should add 75% of sudan's oil is in the south and a lot is con accept traited in -- concentrated here, but it's about more than that. either this is the beginning of what will be an incremental push by the regime in the north to retake areas along the border where there's oil, and they will do that, especially if all the international community offers is more words, and there are no consequences for their actions. remember what i'm saying about a pattern here? there's a pattern of arab racism, but there's also a pattern of western appeasement in all of this, a pattern that we do not because we're so keen to get sudan over with that we

turned a blind eye to all the different aspects of the comprehensive peace agreement that's broken. either this is the beginning of an incremental problem, or it's a bargaining thing, a bargaining chip and some point they say, you know what? we could occupy the town like that, and what we want -- the price for withdrawing again, is going to be that you allow the arab nomads, you allow them to vote in a referendum on where this goes. the e-mails i got this morning advocated abia is being repopulated by arab nomads moving in to claim they are permanent residents. if there's a referendum, there's a majority of self-defining ethnic groups, they will vote to be part of the north which is not what the black africans who

live this who are christians want because they do not want to be part of the north. they have had since 1983 been bombed by the north and having law forced on them, but there is a message here, and that is when we do decide to use our political will as with forcing the secession, we can actually make progress, and the problem is that we are continually signaling our lack of seriousness to the regime as we did in bosnia, and the consequences of that are here to be seen. >> that takes me to having a look at another village in darfur. after it's been bombed, after the waves of arab nomads, have

up vaded. you might ask -- and now i said since 2003 this happened, 90% of the black villages have been destroyed. they are also being repopulated by arab nomadic people from chad and as far as away of niger. to tell people to go home is problematic in all kinds of ways. you may ask yourself why there's not a more international reaction. the united states has passed lots of good resolutions calling for sensible things like going for the money, sanctions, a no-fly zone, other sensible things like tracing all the sort of murky business in charity and connections that the architects of this genocide in khartoum have, and also really good personal stuff and treating them like criminals and travel bans to stop the architects to go to

paris for shopping trips, and believe me, that's what concentrates the mind, not our fine words, but sadly, almost none of those u.n. resolutions have been enforced because we look political will. we did put together a peace keeping force, a joint u.n.-african peace keeping force, but the problem is that these -- the soldiers don't have enough gas to leave and report on incidents that happen all the time. there's been a killing in darfur. you asked me what the secession means for darfur, but it means the world's attention is on south sudan, and in that media vacuum, there's once more an enormous serge in the killing going on in darfur. bear in mind there's a large part of darfur we have no idea what's happening because the sudan government kept the media out, and it's kept humanitarian

groups or out impeded their work so much or scared them so much that they don't say anything. i fear -- hue militaryian workers one day, we're going to find mass graves in darfur where we never got to. just since january 2010, we reckon there have been 266 bombing raids on darfur creating scenes like this, almost no media attention whatsoever. i have here 35 pages of detailed reports of attacks on communities in darfur, the sismatic rape of women, the killing of men and chirp and it's getting no attention whatsoever, but there's the consequence of our attention on the secession in the south. what's the international reaction been? bear in mind, this is muslim killing muslim.

with the south, it was muslim killing christian. what's the arab world have to say about this? almost nothing. there's three reasons for that. the first is the iraq war played so completely into the hands of the sudan regime because they were able to say to the fellow arabs and muslims saying, look, we told you these people hate us and want to destroy the culture, and here they are. it's the new clon yalism, and that's playing well on the streets for those who don't want to deal with the grievances of their own, and that has been used. the other reason a lot of other arab regimes have not given any support to the people of darfur, they are co-religionists. of course, they don't want their turn in the spotlight, and they

don't like the idea of an international precedent that says that u.n. comes in and stops people killing their own citizens, and then thirdly, we come to a rather troubling reason, and the people who live in darfur are wrong because they are black african. why then has the black african community leaders said almost nothing with the exception of rwanda and they, of course, get the point of what genocide means? unfortunately, the same applies that quite a few african leaders don't want their turn in the spotlight, but if you listen to talk radio anywhere in africa, african citizens are absolutely furious that black africans are slaughtered like this in a media vacuum. unfortunately, the tragedy of africa is in the case of quite a few leaders that are disconnected from their people and do not share their people's

concern about what is happening. cast your mind back to rwanda. there was only one african leader at the time, african political leader at the time who had anything to say about rwanda. would anyone like to hasten a guess as to who that was? nelson mendel -- madella, of course it was. he was a religious leader rather than a political leader, and only nelson mandella who had anything to say about this. that's the tragedy of africa. that's the tragedy now in abia although that photograph was taken in darfur. this takes me to the reason that i wrote a novel about darfur.

since i went there in 2004 about the refugee camps, i have written numerous articles and always preaching to the choir. i was inspired by the example the kite runner, a guy who wrote a novel about afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of people who never would read about afghanistan bought the novel and got interested. i thought why not try? i had a rather more important reason to try to write this, and that's because of the women of darfur who actually ask me to write it when i was there interviewing them, and i said to the people i was speaking to, i'm a privileged white woman, how could i possibly ever understand the african experience? you know, when i was born, i won the lottery. i was born white and healthy and in north america, and frankly,

it doesn't get luckier than that, and they said to me, but, yes, you're here. they took me for my imperfections and said we're trying to protect our children. go away and do your best to make our voice heard. that's what i tried to do. the other reason i wrote the novel is i'm so fed up with the western representation of africans as pathetic, defenseless victims, and we do it partly deliberately in the case of some charities. you know the image, the desperate looking child, and it's manipulative to get our money or sympathy, but it couldn't be further from the truth in my experience of africa. the africa that i see in places like rwanda and northern uganda and darfur is people who are

incredibly resourceful and resilient. they are not people who define themselves as victims. they define themselves as survivors. how do you not want to help somebody rebuilding their life saying i'm a survivor? these are people even when there's not a genocide, they face the most incredible daily challenges. we live in a society where we think it's actually appropriate to complain because you had such a tough time finding a parking space. these people have a rather different perspective on life. i also wanted to stress the things we have in common with these people because too often we stress the differentness, the otherness, and that gets in the way of our understanding that this is about the human condition. genocide is not something that just happens in africa because somehow africans are different. they are not. genocide is about the human condition. cast your mind back to the second world war when the nazi leadership were meeting at the

conference in berlin to decide the final solution to the jewish question, and remember that 50% of the people in the room had ph.d.es, and as my -- ph.d.'s, and my mother used to say to me, just remember if you're looking for an easy option to pretend that people who commit genocide is stupid, thaws remember that nazis killed jews all day and went home and listened to bethoove. there's an act of decency and courage and of the remarkable women who saw their own children killed, adopted orphans, people with almost nothing find it in themselves to do that when frankly a lot of people in our society would not be able to cope. the other reason, of course, a good reason to write this novel

is because of the serge in violence in darfur that i've already described, but i also wanted to tackle the fact that i think our racism is one of the reasons that we don't regard these people as quite human enough to empathize with. bear in mind, let's say in the democratic republic of congo where it's estimated by human riewcts watch and the international crisis group that about 5 million people have dieded in the last ten years in an absolute media vacuum. bear in mind in the democratic republic of congo, every hour 48 women are raped, and then think about the amount of news space we give to silly air-headed celebrities, and you see what i mean. i wanted to tell the story of these women because, you know, being a woman in sudan is not a trip to the base bar in itself.

the rates of illiteracy is up to 80%. in sudan, the highest mortal fatality in the world. women have a one of seven chance dying in childbirth compared with in this country, a 1 in 44,000 chance. that, for me, puts it in perspective. these women you see here, although they have because it's a very traditional rural conservative culture, they would never say to you i was raped, certainly not on first meeting. i was there long enough that eventually they stopped using euphemisms like i was beaten, attacked, and assaulted. we got to the heart of the that all the women who survived the genocide, 8 years old, 80 years old, systematically raped, and in is what they mean by genocide being a weapon of war.

the stories i heard were like bosnia, interviews women who survived there and rwanda. the first genocide they are told they are raped, we kill your men, the second genocide is when you rape you and therefore destroy your position in society, and we fracture your society, and your culture and your family. the third genocide, certainly in the case of women in rwanda was when you realize that you have hiv. this is systematic rape. it's accompanied with racial slurs and in the case of these women, they were call abid, which means slave. many of them are branded like slaves. they have no protection in these camps. every time they leave the camp to get firewood, which is a daily necessity, the people who did this to them are waiting just a few miles outside, and we do nothing, but here's what the

president of sudan, president bashir, has to say about rape. he said rape does not exist in islam. we don't have it. in other words, he is saying either the women maiming -- imagined it or they are prostitutes. we collected a petition in darfur. we started it as a petition. one of the people in a camp said to us, well, what do you do in your country when you want to change government policy, to try to stop the people doing this to us? we said we use petitions which was a new notion there, so they very enthusiastically started a petition and we had 60,000 names. because the idea didn't register, we had 60,000 stories by the time they handed in this enormous pile of paper. we submitted to the international criminal court in hague, and they accepted it as

evidence of war crimes. the media has been kept out as i said. we also collected 500 drawings by darfur children that show the genocide. now, bear in mind, that these are kids who never watched television, never looked at military images or military magazines, and so what you're getting here is an unfitterred child's view of what has been happening in darfur, and incidentally, it was -- these 500 drawings, i'm about to show you some, were also accepted by the international criminal court as evidence as war crimes. the context of war crimes. we were able to say to these young people, yes, you are sitting here in a refugee camp, but one day, god willing, you will play a role in bringing to justice the people who killed your father, brother, your uncle. it was quite empowering for them. naturally the government of sudan denies any of this is

happening. it plays into our racist western view of things by saying, oh, these are ancient ethnic hay treads, all the same as each other, moral, you don't have to worry about this. they deny their armor and helicopters are involved in any of this, but that's not what the children say. the governor of sudan says i'm a zionist employed by the state of israel to spread these terrible rumors, and evidently i guess all the children to drew the drawings were pud disappointed in my hands -- puddy in my hands, but i don't think it was that simple. this drawing is interesting because remember what i said about how you self-identify is what matters? this is not a marriage, there has not been for centuries, and if we went there, we would not be able to tell the difference

between someone from khartoum and someone from darfur, but what matters is in the eye of the beholder. this is how people of darfur perceive themselves with black skin, and this is how they perceive the people killing them, with red skin. that is why there's a racial element in all of this that the government of sudan keeps trying to avoid, and we do the same in the west. the beginning of the bosnia war, we denied there was a genocide intent. we did this in 1938 when hitler was invading poland. we denied there was a genocide intent because when we do, there's a moral imperative on us to do something, and, of course, that's the last thing we want to have to do. this drawing is important for several reasons. that image down there, you see -- i'm afraid i didn't --

i'm not good at power points, so i didn't get enough of this drawing on the screen. you see a woman connected by the throat to the woman in front of her and the woman in front of her. this is 2011, this is happening. this is not an image from the slave trade. we are told, and we've heard this from so many people, and there's a pattern there, so i have to think it's credible. we are told that when the arab nomads and sudan armies rolled into the villages after they are bombed, they select the prettiest, youngest women, take them to the airport, fly them to khartoum, distribute them among sudan army officers to do with what they wish, and they are not seen again, and that is happening right now. again, the sudan government denies any of this is happening, but you can see that it is.

these drawings, of course, are really much more eloquent than i could ever be, and i'm so delighted that if we've done one thing, it is to make sure that these are going to be accepted at the international criminal court, and, again the ages of the children doing these are between 8-15. >> finally a reason to buy my novel, is that all of my shairt of the profits go directly to help projects in africa that are helping survivors of genocide rebuild their lives. people like this guy -- we have

in rwanda a school for deaf children. we have a music school. we have a school that teaches rue rwanda orphans, widows, and children to read and write and have marketable skills to feed and educate their children there by breaking the cycle of poverty in africa. we have a school that educates orphans to speak english so they can get to university, and therefore one day have a good job because all of these orphans. remember what i said for every vile act in genocide there's an act of decency? all of the orphans have several other faps at home, some of whom they are not related to, but whom they care for. that's what i mean, about the spirit of africa, and we also have a health clinic, and when i was recently in rwanda, a local woman who has not connected me

with the health clippic said, have you heard the news? there's a wonderful health clinic, and we're getting a maternity unit. i was pleased with this that she said "are". the -- they consulted the local population before the project and what do you want? we thought they wanted a school, 17,000 genocide orphans, of course they want a school. one young man said what's the point of a school if 50% of the children are dead by the time they're 10 from perfectly preventable diseases. the community decided it would be a clinic and because it was there decision, it is therefore ownership. i was delighted when this woman said to me you realize what this means? it means my children and daughters will not die in childbirth which makes it worthwhile. is there a message in all of

this? my rather rambling journey through a genocide that is happening right now in abia, so south sudan, darfur, and timely to the rather more, i hope uplifting stories from rwanda. i think the lesson is that we never learn from history, and that as long as we appease the architects of genocide, we may postpone it, but one day that trouble will come to a neighborhood near us whether it's in the form of genocide on our doorstep or that we must send our young people to fight in a war that may be of limited moral usefulness, i don't know. if for no other reason, please buy the book because the people of darfur deserve to have a voice. i am a very imperfect voice, but at least i'm trying. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you so much, rebecca. we are so lucky to have you here especially with everything going on in abia. it's great to to have your perfective -- perspective on it. there's several questions so we'll take two or three at a time. >> i work here on issues, and you've spoken about the international pressure, and you're absolutely right. i'm from sri lanka as well, and the genocide is near and dear to my heart in looking at around the world. i just my question to you is we were on a white house call last week where we talked about abia and talking about ways in which the u.s. is trying to put

international pressure, of course, on the khartoum government as it relates to the ongoing conflict, and i guess my question to you, i mean, you touched on it a little bit, what should a country like the u.s. especially be doing currently to make sure that the cpa is realized, to be sure the issues surrounding darfur and abia comes to a resolution? there's a number of issues, you know, leading up to july 9th that don't look like they're going to be resolved, and so what -- what are the types of, you know, whether it's attention or decreased tensions, what are the ways in which we directly affect the khartoum government in the ways of which you said that we should that will actually motivate i them to act and feel the pain i suppose? >> are there other questions that we can take? maybe one more. >> hi -- [inaudible]

i was wondering -- [inaudible] what does it mean to them that the international criminal court -- [inaudible] >> i'd like to deal with that one first because we actually had a team in darfur the day that was announced that bashir was indicted. jupelation, absolute jubilation, and they knew the sudan government would kick out huge numbers of humanitarian ngo's as direct consequence, but they still said we need justice. it was a great moment to witness this moment, a clear-eyed understanding that, yes, they would suffer in material terms, but the need for justice was so important, and i mean, i think the equivalent is if you think

of anybody you know in your life who was sexually abused as a child, what that person needs is for someone to recognize that a wrong was done to them, and it is the same if your country, your ethnic group has undergone genocide,. it's the same if your people were enslaved. you need somebody to say something bad was done to you. i'm a big supporter of the icc and the people of darfur were just jubilant when they heard about the indictment. your question, i really should have mentioned this about what we can do. i should have mentioned the fact that some of the maddening experts of this, the way the west reacts is we never appreciate how much leverage we have over regimes like the sudanese, and we did the same in bosnia. we never appreciated all the cards we had. if you look at sudan, they have

something like 30 billion of debt because despite all that oil, they spend it aural on weapons. they desperately want access to the mop tear fund -- monetary fund and world bank and want to be accepted into the community of nations to develop their economy. this is khartoum i'm talking about. they realliment to be taken off -- really want to be taken off the united states list of state sponsors of terror. they want to be in the big boys' club, and what's maddening about our peace meal approach so darfur and sudan is we never appreciate how much leverage we have, and instead we continue to send a signal of lack of seriousness by not implementing all of those u.n. resolutions that were passed way back in 2003 and 2004, the no-fly zone, you know, targeting the architects of genocide by freezing their access, a travel

ban, all those things, and we've never turned the screw on that kind of thing. now we're in the absurd position that we actually have envoys from the u.s. going to the sudanese and saying, you know, if you -- if you continue not to kill so many people in south sudan and behave yourselves, we'll reward you by taking you off the list of state sponsors of terror. it's a completely wrong way of looking at this. they made those commitments in khartoum when they signed the comprehensive peace agreement in 2005, and we should be holding their noses to this rather than continually rewarding bad behavior. another thing that is, you know, certainly is government of gossipped about, and you may have heard this as well is that the british and the americans are getting ready if the sudanese continue to supposedly behave themselves, to vote for what's called chapter 16 which

means they're going to suspend president bashir's indictment for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. yet again we're awarding atrocious behavior rather than realizing that until july when south sudan becomes its own country, this is our wipe doe of opportunity -- window of opportunity to absolutely turn the screws, and, you know, we have this leverage in terms of access to the world bank and the international monetary fund and joining the sort of community of acceptable nations again, and we're not using it. . .

>> the three major ethnic groups in darfur. and he had a natural sympathy for them, therefore, when bad things started happening in darfur in 2003. lots of people shifted across the border, they fled there to chad for safety. and that went all very well. well, it didn't actually go terribly well because the local people weren't wild about having a quarter of a million people arrive in a desperately poor place where they didn't have enough water, let alone anything else. it didn't actually go that well, but at least people were not being bombed and killed there. however, and there's been a sort of a hatred between khartoum and yes mean that for decades. however, recently there's been a refreshment, and the consequence of that is that the military is

now prepared to betray the people of the ethnic group who are within chad in refugee camps and to send them home. home to what? you saw those pictures of what their villages are like. some of those villages being repopulated by arabs. home to what? you know, this is going to be forcible return, and it is not going to go at all well. you know, we just hear really, really dreadful stories about the consequences of this and where it will lead. and, unfortunately, as ever, you know, it seems like a great idea to the diplomats, you know, who live in a higher universe to try and get these two adversaries speaking to each other again and not threatening each other with war. but in real terms there are people on the ground who are going to suffer massively.

>> do you, i hope i can ask this question. [inaudible] do you think we can expect it will take place and possibly -- [inaudible] [audio difficulty] what can we expect in terms of a legacy of continuity, really, because who will try who for various human rights violations in a situation like that? if two countries exist, then no one will move forward on prosecution -- [inaudible] is that, how do you see that situation? >> yes, absolutely. stalemate. um, you know, there's something i should have, i realize i should have mentioned. one of the reasons that we're not getting any action whatsoever, you have to look at the people that compose the u.n. security council, the permanent members. because that is the heart of the

problem. the chinese who by 80% -- who buy 80% of sudan's oil and supply about a million dollars of weapons a day for the khartoum -- [inaudible] don't have great interest in border state sovereignty and not having any kind of precedent that says someone else can intervene if -- [inaudible] the russians are supplying military equipment. all the planes that are today bombing and flying over the surrounding areas on the border, they're all russian airplanes, and a lot of them, the ones that were used in darfur, russian airplanes. a lot of them are actually piloted by russians. and also because of cher any ya, russia doesn't want to set a precedent of intervening in someone else's business to stop them killing their own civilians which brings us to france.

and, you know, you could write a whole book on france's role in africa, and it wouldn't be a very jolly read. but france has, um, big oil interests in sudan, and so they have been slightly disappointing on all of this. which leads us to -- [inaudible] [audio difficulty] and britain and america together with norway are actually the countries that made a comprehensive agreement happen. they stuck the course, and, you know, i was criticizing them for not having ironed out all those little details like where the border was and who was allowed to vote in the referendum. but at least they did make it happen. but there is, there is an underlying problem with both the american and the british attitude to sudan, and it goes to the war on terror.

incredibly, field marshal bashir, he's not a stupid man. he said to both intelligence communities in the washington and in london, i know usama bin laden really well. he lived here for five years. i can tell you what he has for breakfast. and he's managed to spin khartoum's close association both ideological and in terms of friendship with al-qaeda -- [inaudible] in the war on terror, believe it or not. in the height of the kill anything april 2005, the cia sent a private jet to the head of sudanese intelligence as he then was to bring him to the, to langley, virginia, to be debriefed for a whole week. and goodness knows what he told them because his knowledge of al-qaeda was at least 12 years

out of date. but we do know that the sudanese have rather cleverly promised that they will help us spy on al-qaeda in both yemen and somalia. now, the very fact that our people actually believe this is extraordinary given that all these people are ideological bed fellows. but also it goes to our racism because, i'm sorry, but arabic is not a monolithic language. it is different in whatever country you're in. and someone going from khartoum to yemen pretending to be a yes, yemeni, it would be like someone from alabama going to scotland and thinking they were going to fit it. not going to happen. also -- sorry, but they look different. not to the uninitiated, but it is another indication of our racism. is it a country or is it a continent? yeah, you can send someone from khartoum to somalia, and they'll

fit in just right. but here we have this absurd situation, and it undermines everything. those of you in this room who are old enough to remember the cold war will know that we soaz sid up -- cozied up to and propped up less than pleasant dictatorships in our war against communism. and i'm afraid we're back, we're back to the same thing now. your question, where does it leave the icc? >> well, the icc, i mean, do you see it actually moving forward in terms of prosecution, and also just in terms of accountability for human rights violations, what can we expect in that region? >> well, the problem is that, you know f we actually do vote for article 16, then, basically, we're saying that's carte blanche to anybody to do what they want. and it's really hard to know where we go forward from that if there is no accountability f there is no justice -- if there

is no justice. you begin to wonder what the point of this is. there is another thing that i hear often when i'm in africa, and that is that, i mean, a lot of ordinary africans, the africans i'm talking about who are, you know, participate in the radio phone-ins who disagree utterly with their leaders and who are very concerned about genocide. their point would be we're very much behind the icc. but, please, could you indict some white leaders for iraq? so that at least it wouldn't seem that the only people who end up in the dark are africans or people of color. because it lacks credibility if it's seen to be so one-sided. >> are there any other questions? >> i'm not anywhere near as knowledgeable as you, but i have calling this succession -- [inaudible] [audio difficulty] a positive step with sudanese

which stopped determining their government -- [inaudible] to insure that change. >> well, i think the events over the weekend probably change everything. because as i say, this could be the beginning of an incremental creep by northern sudan onto south sudan. and if we don't stand up against that, then it will just happen in chunks. they will move onto the territory and what they want is the oil, let's be honest. in which case, god help us all and god help the people of south sudan who have enough on their plate anyway as it is because it's instantly going to become one of the world's poorest countries in july when it gets independence if not the poorest country in the world. and it has massive problems, not least that most of the educated people in south sudan were either killed or fled, and they now live in the west.

and just as in bosnia, there's very little reason for them to return. so there's a lack of capacity in south sudan. if this isn't an incremental move by the khartoum government -- [audio difficulty] if it is all about repopulating abyei because there's been a majority or arab population joining north, where does that then lead it? it leaves the south sudanese absolutely furious. it leaves an awful lot of people who sacrifice -- i mean, every family lost somebody in that long war, and it leaves the lack of justice. and we are told, i got an e-mail this morning saying that the south sudanese leaders are being very restrained. they're not hitting back. because they are waiting for the international community to do something about it. who knows what will happen. >> any other questions?

one last one. >> i just have one last question you can answer. i think it was interesting when you said that we really hadn't learned a lot about the states and gave a couple other examples of genocide that we just -- [audio difficulty] how much of that do you think is just a willful ignorance, and how much of that is just the complete -- [audio difficulty] we have a museum for the holocaust in washington, and even after going through that, it's still really hard to think of as something, t just so hard to relate something that atrocious with something that massive. so how much of those two factors really play into the neglect of things that are happening like darfur? >> um, you know, my argument is that genocide is actually very simple and that it is part of the human condition, and we're all capable of it given the right circumstances. i think the minute you get on your moral high horse and say, oh, people in my country

wouldn't do something like that, you're on a slippery slope. is it willful ignorance? partly. it's also self-interest. it's also that, i mean, look at the news today. is anybody talking about abyei? no, they're not. they're talking about what's happening in the middle east and new peace process there, they're talking about problems in pakistan with militants there. you know, there's always something bigger that gets in the way. people can wonder -- [audio difficulty] many who recognize it's happening, there's a moral imperative to do something. and so time and again, you know, we deny genocidal intent. we deny the scale of what's happening the way we did with nazi germany, with rwanda, with darfur. all excuses not to do anything. >> [inaudible] >> and then, of course, we get in, we get -- in all these circumstances we get tied into

endless negotiations because we stupidly think that the architects of the genocide are going to be our partners in the search for peace. so you have ludicrous situations as you did in bosnia where slobodan milosevic making serial promises that were broken so quickly that in one case they had to hide under the table they'd signed a peace process on because the serbs had started shelling again within two minutes of the signing of the document. the ink still wet. -- [audio difficulty] i would ask you to think of this, no, this is the human condition. [audio difficulty] you need hate, you need prop propaganda, um, and you can manipulate people because of that. but i would argue it's not enough just to have racial prejudice or hatred of people because they're jews or muslims or tutsis or bosnians.

i think you need fear as well, and that's where you get academic masterminds coming in. they provide that extra element that convinces a man that unless he kills his neighbor, that neighbor will kill his family. so really he's just defending himself. i had a horrible experience my first trip to rwanda in 2004. i went to a prison where there were 5,000 people who'd committed genocide, and rwanda's such a poor country that you only get locked up if you had actually killed a large number of people or if you were a mastermind. so you think, you know, the implications of that is that in the case of someone i know every day when she leaves her house, she looks -- [audio difficulty] because there's so many people who participated. but there i was in this prison surrounded by 5,000 people who

were fairly hard core, and i was interviewing people. and there's a really plummy bbc voice behind me says, i say, are you the person interviewing people? and i turn around shocked, and there wearing the bright pink pajamas is a man who introduces himself as a former professor of english at the local university. and he wants to talk to me about the novels of jane austen because that was his subject. so this is a fairly surreal moment, as you might imagine. [laughter] we both agreed we liked "pride and prejudice" best, incidentally. so i eventually get him around, you know, why are you here? and he said with a bit of pride, oh, i'm one of the masterminds of this. you don't think this happened spontaneously, do you? he said, no, no, in every genocide there are people like me who provide the intellectual pretext for doing this, and we say to a generation of usually

unemployed, disgruntled young men, your role in -- your destiny is to get greater germany, greater serbia to fulfill the promise of your people. young man, arise. and he said, that's our role, you know? and to manipulate and to instill fear. and, naturally, i was taken aback by this. and i said don't, you know, why are you, why are you here? because, you know, in the rwandan system because they are so poor, if you confess, if you say where the body's buried, they will let you out. and he said to me, well, why would i want to go out when i can get food in here and antivirals because i'm hiv positive whereas in 2004 that they had raped and infected were going without food and had no antiretrovirals. and he said why would i leave, you know? much better in here. and i said don't you regret all

this? you were a professor of english, you know? one of the leading lights in your -- [inaudible] [audio difficulty] and he said, yeah, i do regret it. [inaudible] now, the happy aspect of that story is that the politician i was traveling with was so outraged to hear that the international committee of the red cross was giving antiretrovirals to the prisoners but not the women they'd raped and, therefore, the women were dying before they could testify, that he went home to britain, god bless him, lordalton, and he made such a stink that he actually bullied the british government into providing money to provide antiretrovirals for every single person in rue rwana who's infected. so there was a purpose to that particular adventure into alice in wonderland for me. but there was a more important lesson, and that is that this is something educated people do. and we let ourselves off the hook if we think somehow that

we're immune. what we have, we just have more of a veneer of civilization. given the right circumstances, scrape under the surface -- [audio difficulty] >> thank you so much. just a reminder, she's given her books away, but if you do want to make a donation to network for africa, she is accepting donations, and we hope that once you read it, you'll tell your friends about it and encourage them to buy it as well. i think we're going to stop here unless there are any pressing questions, but rebecca is still here, and she can sign your books and take any other questions that you might have. so i hope you'll all join me in giving her a round of applause. [applause] >> thank you all for coming.

>> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> booktv's focus on savannah, georgia, continues all weekend. next, the former president and ceo of simon simon & schuster, k romanos. >> well, we started out working for pocketbooks, the paperback company, back in the beginning. um, and that was sort of in the heydey of the paperback era, and, you know, we had authors like harold robbins, and we had, you know, sort of the great brands of the time. and it was a, it was an interesting time for books

because the industry was transitioning from a sort of a two-world system. there was hard cover publishing, and there was paperback publishing. and in that era they began to merge, so a lot of the books that were getting published in hard cover were actually being published by paperback publishers. and paper -- and hard cover publishers at the same time were realizing that they had to get into the paperback business. [audio difficulty] confusing but interesting transition going on. with us at simon & schuster, people like bob woodward were superstar authors. we had mary higgins clark who was succeeding in both paperback and hard cover. we had jackie collins who was a superstar at the time.

we had, you know, i sort of inherited a legacy of simon & schuster authors then that by applying mass market techniques we were able to take to new levels. shortly after i started, i became in charge of the whole what we call consumer publishing groups, so simon & schuster and pocketbooks were under one management. and that's when we were really able to sort of what we called career development. we would start an author out in paperback, build an audience at a point where the paperback audience was large enough, we would then -- [inaudible] we were building an audience for the author, and at the same time the author was perfecting their writing style and talent. it was a happy time, it was a good time, and it was a fairly easy time for us. >> so you mentioned the whole, i guess, transition, you know, going into paperback books.

now people are starting to do the more electronic -- >> yeah. >> -- e-books. >> it's very interesting to me, and i could say fortunately or unfortunately i'm sitting on the sidelines while this transition plays out. but it's my choice to let others do it. but what i observe is that there's great similarities between how the paperback evolved evolve in the '60s and '70s and into the '80s and changed the business and how i think the electronic publishing phenomenon, the e-book, will do the same in the years, relatively few years ahead of us. >> so some people are saying that this electronic, um, people are saying that these books becoming electronic and people doing most of these things online is a bad thing for the

book publishing industry. >> i can't imagine how it could be. if you think about it, the electronic book is in some ways a perfect product because it eliminates for the publisher most of the negatives of physical publishing. for example, there is, there are no returns of unsold books, so it's not a format where you print the book first and sell it second. it's actually with a business where you sell it first and print it second. it solves the problem of what we call shelf life where new books have a very short period of time to succeed before they're replaced by the next group of new books. in the electronic world, there is no shelf life that can exist and will exist forever as long as there's a demand for it. and it's --

[inaudible] to produce a book, binding, printing, shipping, warehousing. you don't have that in the electronic space, and then there's, there are two other things which are, i think, phenomenal and underappreciated. number one is the fact that in the electronic book, with the electronic book there is no pass along. so you can't buy the book and loan it to your friends, give it to your relatives. and so in theory, mathematically, if, um, you can keep the same number of people reading, so a book that maybe sold 100,000 copies in physical form, if same number of people read it, you should sell more because you're not going to be able to borrow it. you're going to have to buy it

for your own consumption. and number two is that the electronic book should be a global phenomenon. traditional publishing is territorial. north america is a territory, europe, england, france and languages are barriers. there really are no geographic barriers to the distribution of electronic books. and that's sort of the second thing that's phenomenal is there is instant gratification. you want to buy a book on a kindle or an ipad or a nook, you can download it in this 60 seconds. you can be reading it in 61 seconds. i mean, there's no, you know, getting up off the chair, driving to the store, finding the book, paying for it, bringing it home. all of that's gone. so, you know, i don't see any downside from a business perspective. as long as the present-day publishers can manage the

transition and stay in the control of the creation of the content. >> so i guess now are the book publishing industry, do you think they almost waited too long to get on this bandwagon with amazon and google and now all these other people now selling these books? is the publishing industry now playing catch up? >> >> no. the important thing to remember is that the content is still owned by the publisher/author, copyrighted. and the kindle or the ipad or the nook or any of these devices are simply distribution vehicles. they, they don't, they don't own the content. they are virtually little bookstores that you can carry around in your briefcase. um, they haven't taken possession of the content. that's not to say they won't try or that it won't evolve that way, but i think in the present-day paradigm as long as

there are physical books and there's still -- let's not forget, physical books are still the dominant format. most people still read print and ink books. the publisher should be in control of the content for the foreseeable future. >> and something else i wanted to ask you about is a lot of, it seems like a lot of publishers are now creating conservative imprints separately from, i guess, their major lines. why is that? >> simple answer is i think they've finally figured out that conservatives buy books. probably a better answer is that -- at least in my own experience at simon & schuster -- it probably wouldn't surprise the audience to know that most publishing people are liberal. certainly, the publishers and the editors are liberal. and people tend to publish what they like. and what i found at simon &

schuster was we had a sense that there was a huge conservative audience out there wanting to buy books, but nobody wanted to publish them for them. so we'd, basically, found the one conservative publisher i had in a place, and she started an imprint could threshold editions. and some of the best, the biggest successes that companies enjoy inside the last few years have come in that category. >> and, also, what were your -- what were some of your favorite authors while you were at simon & schuster? >> um, they were, many of them were authors that not only i read, but i became friends with, most notably an author named vince flynn who's now a number one best-selling author and an author named brad thor. these are people who when i was actually actively publishing, i participated in developing them, rert of discovering them and