piracy, although he is not effectively against piracy but he made it clear to you that he opposes this and thinks it's bad for puntland. >> guest: i mentioned both the international aid racket is a much more lucrative kleptocratic opportunity than taking pirate ransom, which other officials have been accused of doing in the past. i think now that is complete committed, i think he has been effected. he said a coastal garrisons there. equipped the mayor with technicals, flatbed trucks, weapons. and the pirates are going. eyl is no longer a pirate base. they move all over the place. it's like a game of whack-a-mole. you have to establish more of these garrisons and make it very, very uncomfortable for any pirate to try to launch a mission. >> host: thanks so much for this interview. i think the book is well worth everybody reading.

also important for policymakers to begin to look at this and think about it. you deserve a lot of praise for your courage for getting this done. thanks very much. >> guest: thank you. .. >> the booktv series or and topics list on the upper right side of the phase. >> up next on booktv, rebecca tinsley talks about "when the stars fall to earth" about five children who survived the genocide in darfur. the novel is based on tinsley's

experiences in sudan and interviews she conducted with 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 born nick 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 that there are some sudan experts here and, please, bear with me if i start telling 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 genocides that have been going on in sudan. so forgive me if i'm telling you

things that you already know. i know there are people in this room who think that it's perfectly appropriate as a dinner 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 abyei. over the weekend you probably saw that the sudanese armed forces occupied the region of abyei. they brought in 5,000 troops, an unknown number of tanks. they've been, basically, carpet bombing the city of abyei since the 19th of may. 20,000 people have had to flee for their lives. i've been getting e-mails from someone we know who works for an agency near abyei all morning and be, apparently, sudanese air force war planes are now buzzing the communities of the two neighboring 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 this has happened. well, they shouldn't because it was completely predictable. groups like mine waging peace, save darfur, human rights watch, the international cry -- crisis group, we've been going on to the point of monotony for months and months because it was always obvious this was going to happen. this was predictable. and the reason it was predictable was that as long as you appease the architects of genocide and in a misguided way treat them as if they're going to be your partners in peace, as long as you make sure there are no consequences for bad

behavior, then the signal that you send to those architects of genocide is that they can carry on. abyei is, in a way, a microcosm of what has been happening throughout sudan since about 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 in abyei today, back to the time of the colonial times. that is so often the story in 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 terribly well. as was with typical of the colonial power, they chose one group of people, one ethnic group to do their bidding to try and control everybody else. that was the people who self-identify as arabs who live in khartoum and along the nile.

and since then it has been a story of the hegemony of the ethnic groups that define themselves as arab along the nile against everybody else. it's a story of marginalization. it's also a story of climate change because the sahara along here is moving south in some places as much as 20 miles a year, in other places three miles a year. this is having an extraordinary domino effect in that a lot of the people the ethnic groups who were living here, mainly self-identifying as arab, are having to move, and they're moving onto land occupied by people who self-identify as black african. now, you're going to get bored of me saying people self-identify. but here's what i have learned in my time working in 12 different african countries. 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 christians in the south, basically, objecting to the fact that the people in khartoum who are islamist -- and i don't mean islam, i mean islamist, political islam, fundamentalist as practiced by bin laden and his friends -- they wanted to impose sharia law on the people in the south. and also there's, unfortunately, a tremendous amount of racism involved in this. what we've had then since, um, independence in '56 was the marginalization of all these other groups around here who feel they have no stake in the, in where the power is in sudan.

the people in khartoum have actually been rather clever and skillful in the way that 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 abyei. they use their air force to bomb villages in what they call softening up. and this is then followed not by regular soldiers, but by militias of local, um, disgruntled, poor arab nomads whom they pay and arm, and they do the dirty work. this has happened since 1983 in south sudan with the death of two million out of nine million people who lived there. and it's happened since 2003 here in darfur where there's a population of six million people, half of whom have now been made homeless. that's 90%. human rights watch reckons 90% of the black african villages of

darfur have been destroyed and emptied and the death of 300,000, massive displacement. now, you may wonder what motivates this, and that takes us to something else incredibly topical, of course, and that is colonel gadhafi. he's the man who wrote the book some decades ago explaining why all culture in africa was arab, that everything else was of no value whatsoever. he's the man who ignited a thousand really ghastly racist thoughts among arabs. and as you know today he's busy trying to kill his own population. the other soul mate in all of this program of ethnic cleansing is, of course, osama bin laden who live inside khartoum for five years, and i think, you know, that you can define a regime by the friends it keeps. they also define their best friends as hamas, hezbollah and ahmadinejad of iran, so you're

beginning to get a picture of how they interpret islam. and i must add that the majority of the world's muslims totally disagree with their, their adoption of political fundamentalist islam, but there we are. recently, two months ago the president of sudan, the regime arab-based here in khartoum, was asked to define islam. and he said this: he said, it is to cuss, it is to stone, it is 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 black african christian people of south sudan and of darfur. now, this brings us up to why abyei is happening. um, thanks to the incredible work of a lot of american faith groups, and i mean jews, christians, muslims, they shone a light on what was happening in south sudan, the fact that from

'83 onwards there has 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 called the comprehensive peace agreement which was neither comprehensive, nor has it led to peace, but never mind. and they decided on a notional border around south sudan. but the problem was this: the people in khartoum who run the regime, it would be wrong to think of them as a caricature, sort of african dick to haveship from central casting.

these are very. shrewd people, they calculate exactly the west's lack of interest in africa. they so well know our lack of commitment, and they also understand that we have attention deficit disorder. they get that we can't 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 brook of slobodan milosevic, the serbian dictator who also perfectly understood our attention deficit disorder and, therefore, the people in khartoum span out all the negotiations realizing, frankly, that our diplomats although, you know, with the best will in the world wanted to go home. and, unfortunately, so desperate were we to get sudan out of our in basket that we postponed some of the most fundamental

decisions including where the border was going to be. and abyei is exactly on the border. and it is disputed because the people who live in abyei have been given a decision on whether or not they're going to be part of the south which is now voted for secession by 98% independence or whether they want to be part of the north. and here's the problem. the people who are permanent residents in abyei self-identify as black africans, and they're farmers. however, every year the missrrhea tribe who are self-identifying as arab who are nomadic, they come through, and they graze their animals. they consider themselves residents of abyei, and can they say they should have a vote. and here's the problem, is that so keen were we to just get on with the comprehensive peace agreement that we never actually decided who was going to be able to vote in this referendum in abyei.

there, certainly the 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 abyei, it isn't just simply about oil. i should add that 75% of sudan's oil is in the south and that a lot of it is concentrated in abyei. so there's a lot of reason to be, to be interested in this area. but it's about more than that. um, either this is the beginning of what will be an incremental push by the sudanese regime, 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. you remember what i'm saying about a pattern here. there is a pattern of arab racism, but there's also a pattern of western appeasement in if all of this, a pattern that we do not -- because we're

so keen to get sudan over with that we have turned a blind eye to all the different aspects of the comprehensive peace agreement that have been broken. so east this is the begin -- either this is the beginning of an incremental problem, or it's a bargaining thing, a bargaining chip and that at some point the sudanese are going to say, you know what? we could occupy abyei like that. and what we want, the price for withdrawing again is going to be that you allow the missrrhea who are the arab no mads, you allow them to vote in a referendum on where abyei goes. the e-mails i've had this morning indicate that abyei is being repopulated as we speak by arab nomads who are move anything and who will claim that they are permanent residents. in other words, if there's a referendum, abyei -- because there will then be a majority of self-defining arab ethnic groups -- they will vote to be part of the north which is not

what the black africans who live there who are christian and animus want because they do not want to be part of the north. they have had since 1983 being bombed and harassed by the north, and having sharia law forced on them. but there is a message here, and that is that 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 sudanese regime just as we did with milosevic in bosnia. and the consequences of that are here to be seen in abyei. that takes me to having a look at some -- that's a village in darfur. um, after it's been bombed, after the waves of arab nomads

have invaded. you might ask -- and, now, i said since 2003 this has been happening. 90% of the black african villages have been destroyed. they are also being repopulated by arab nomadic people from chad and as far we as niger. so telling the people of darfur to go home is problematic in all kinds of ways. you may ask yourselves why there hasn't been more of an international reaction. the united nations, to its credit, has passed lots of good resolutions calling for all kinds of sensible things like going for the money, sanctions, a no-fly zone, other sensible things like tracing all the sort of murky business and charity connections that the architects of this genocide in khartoum have. and also really good personal stuff. treating them, actually, like far cocriminals -- narco

criminals, really good personal stuff like travel bounds to stop them from going to paris for shopping trips and, believe me, that's actually what concentrates the minds. not our fine words. but sadly, almost none of those u.n. resolutions has been enforced because we lack political will. we did put together a peace-keeping force, a joint u.n./african union peace-keeping force. but the problem is that the soldiers don't even have enough gas to leave their depots and go and, you know, report on incidents that all the time. that happen all the time. there's been a surge in killing in darfur. you asked me what the secession has meant for darfur. it's meant that the world's attention has been on south sudan, and in that media vacuum there is once more an enormous surge in the killing that's going on in darfur. bear in mind that there's a large part of darfur we have no idea what's happening because the sudanese government has kept

the media out, and it's either kept humanitarian groups out, or it's impeded their work so much or scared them so much that they don't say anything. i fear, a humanitarian aid worker said to me recently one day we're going to find mass graves across parts of 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 daughter you are the if, the system -- in darfur, the systematic rape of women, the killing of men and children. and it's getting almost no attention whatsoever. but that's the consequence of our attention on, um, the secession in the south. but what's the international reaction been? and bear in mind this is muslim

killing muslim. with the south it was muslim killing christian. what's the arab world had to say about this? almost nothing. and there are three reasons for that. the first is the iraq war played so completely into the hands of the sudanese regime because they were able to say to their fellow arabs and muslims, look, we told you these people hated us and wanted to destroy our culture. and here they are, you know? it's the new colonialism. and that plays pretty well on the arab street, especially with, you know, a bunch of dictators who don't want to deal with the very real grievances of their own population, how much better to divert them on to their version of the gay marriage issue in this country which is zionism. and that has been used. the other reason a lot of arab regimes have not given any support to the people of darfur, they're co-religionists is, 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 the u.n. comes in and stops people killing their own citizens. and then thirdly, we come to a rather troubling reason, and that is, of course, that the people who live in darfur are the wrong kind of muslim because they're black african. why then has the 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 being slaughtered like this in a media vacuum. unfortunately, the tragedy of africa is in the case of quite a few leaders, they are

disconnected from be their people, and they 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 anybody like to hasten a guess as to who that was? >> [inaudible] >> nelson mandela, of course it was. desmond tutu spoke out constantly and thoroughly as he has on darfur but, of course, he's not a religious leader. i'm sorry, he was a religious leader rather than a political leader. it was only nelson mandela who had anything to say about this, and that is the tragedy of africa. that's an example of what is happening right now in abyei, um, although that photograph was taken in darfur. which takes me to the reason that i wrote a novel about darfur.

since i went there in 2004 to the refugee camps, i have given endless speeches, and i have written endless articles, and i'm always preaching to the choir. i'm always talking to people who are already concerned. and i was quite inspired by the example of the kite runner. here's a guy who wrote a novel about afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands of people who would never read an article about afghanistan bought the novel and became politicized and interested. and i thought, um, why not try? but i had a rather more important reason to try to write this, and that's because of the women of darfur who actually asked me to write it. when i was there interviewing them and i said to the people i was speaking to, i am 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 any luckier than that. and they said to me, yes, but, rebecca, you're here. so they took me for all my imperfections, and they said we're quite busy trying to stay alive and protect our children. so, please, goaway and do your -- go away and do your best to make our voice heard. and that's what i've tried to do. the other reason i wrote this novel was that i am just 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 with the flies round its eyes, and it's to manipulate us and to get our money or our 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 can you not want to help someone who is rebuilding their life and says i am a survivor? these are people who even when there isn't 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 have such a tough time finding a parking space. these people have a rather different perspective on life. i also wanted to stress all the things that 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're 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.s. and as my mother who was a world war reporter in the second world war, she used to say to me, just remember if you're looking for an easy option to pretend that somehow people who commit genocide are stupid, just remember that nazis killed jews all day and then went home and listened to beethoven. genocide is part of the human condition. but also for every vile act of genocide, i believe there is a corresponding act of bravery and decency and courage. i think of all these remarkable women who have seen their own children killed but have then adopted orphans, people who have almost nothing and yet they find it in themselves to do that when, frankly, an awful lot of people in our society probably wouldn't be able to cope.

the other reason, of course, a good reason to write this novel is because of the surge in violence in darfur that i've already described. but i also wanted to tackle the fact that i think that our racism is one of the reasons that we don't regard these people as quite human enough to empathize with. bear in mind that, say, in the democratic republic of congo where it is estimated by human rights watch and the international crisis group that about five million people have died in the last ten years in an absolute media vacuum. bear in many mind that this democratic republican of congo every hour 48 women are raped. and then think about the amount of news space we give to silly airheaded celebrities. ask you see what i mean -- and you see what i mean. i also wanted to tell the story of these women because, you know, being a woman in sudan is not a trip to the day spa in

itself. the rates of ill literacy somewhere up around 80%. in parts of sudan the highest maternal mortality in the world, one in seven women -- women have a one in seven chance of dying in childbirth. that's a lifetime chance compared with in this country a one in 44,000 chance. that, to me, puts it all in perspective. bear in mind that these women that you see here although they have because of it's a very, um, traditional rural, conservative culture they would never say to you, i was raped. certainly not on the first meeting. i was there long enough that eventually they stopped using euphemisms like i was beaten, i was attacked, i was assaulted, and we got to the heart of it that all these women who had survived had been raped. 8 years old, 80 years old had

been raped. the stories i heard in darfur were exactly like the ones i heard in bosnia interviewing women who had survived rape there and rwanda. the first genocide, they are told as they're being raped, is when we kill your men. the second genocide is when we rape you and we, therefore, destroy your position in society, and ask we fracture your society -- and we fracture your society and your culture and your family. and 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. in the case of these women, they were all called abbis which means slave. quite a lot of them were also branded like slaves. they have no protection in these refugee camps. every time they leave the camp to go 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 baa she, has to say about rape. he said rape does not exist in islam. we don't have it. in other words, he's saying either these women imagined it, or they're prostitutes. we collected, um, a petition in darfur -- we started it as a petition. what one of the people in the camp said to us, well, what do you do in your country when you want to try and change government policy, try and stop these people doing this to us? and we used petitions which was quite a new notion there. so they very enthusiastically started a petition, and shortly we had 60,000 names. but because the idea of a petition didn't quite register, we actually had 60,000 stories by the time they handed in this enormous pile of paper. submitted it to the

international court in the hague, and they accepted it as evidence of war crimes because, as i said, the media have been kept out. we also collected 500 drawings by darfuri children that show the genocide. now, bear in mind that these are kids who have never watched television, they've never looked at military images or military magazines. and so what you're getting here is an unfiltered child's view of what has been happening in darfur. and incidentally, it was -- just these 500 drawings, and i'm about to show you some of them, these 500 drawings were also accepted by the international court as evidence of war crimes, the context of war crimes. so 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, your brother, your uncle which is 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 hatreds, they're all the same as each other, moral equivalency, you don't have to bother about this. they deny that their tanks, their armor, their helicopters are involved in any of this. but that is not what these children say. incidentally, the government of sudan also says that i am a zionist employed by the state of israel to go around spreading these terrible rumors and be, evidently, i guess, all these children who drew these drawings were mere putty in my hands. i don't really think it was quite that simple. but there we go. this drawing, i think, is quite interesting because remember what i said about how you self-identify is what matters. there is intermarriage, there has been for centuries. and for those of us who are the uninitiated f we went there, we

would probably 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 the people of darfur perceive themselves with black skin, and this is how they perceive the people who are killing them, with red skin. and that is why there is a racial element in all of this that the government of sudan keeps trying to avoid. and incidentally, we in the west do the same thing. the beginning of the bosnian war, we denied there was a genocide intelligent. we did this in 1938 when hitler was invading czechoslovakian poland. we denied there was a genocidal intent because the minute we admit there is genocidal intent, there is a moral imperative on us to do something and, of course, that's the last thing that 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 very good at powerpoint, 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 the 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 is a pattern there so i have to think it's credible, we are told that when the arab nomads and sudanese roll into these villages, that they will select the prettiest, youngest young women, take them to the airport, fly them to khartoum, distribute them among sudanese army officers to do with what they wish. and they are not seen again. and that is happening right now. again, sudanese government denies any of this is happening.

but you can see that it is. and these drawings, of course, are really much more eloquent than i could ever be. and i'm so delighted that the 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 between 8 and about 15. finally, a reason to buy "when the stars fall to earth," my novel, is that all of my share of the profits go directly to help projects in be africa -- in africa that are helping survivors of genocide rebuild

their lives. people like this guy. um, we have in rwanda a school for deaf children, we have a music school, we have a school that teaches rwandan orphans and widows, survivors, to read and write and to have a marketable skill so that they can feed and educate their children, thereby breaking the cycle of poverty that blights parts of africa. we also 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 -- do you remember what i said about how for every vile act in a genocide, there's an act of decency? all of these orphans have got several orphans at home, some of whom they may not even be related to but whom they are caring 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 hasn't

really connected me with the health clinic, she said to me, have you heard the news? we've got this wonderful health clinic. and be, um, we're getting a maternity unit. i was really pleased by this that she said "are." the reason she said are is we consulted the local population before we started the project, and said what do you want? we thought they would say we want a school. 17,000 genocide orphans, of course they'd want a school. but as one young man said to us, well, what's the point of a school if 50% of the children are dead by the time they're 10 from perfectly preventable diseases? so the community decided that it would be a clinic, and because it was their decision, there is, therefore, ownership. so i was delighted when this woman who doesn't connect me to the clinic said to me do you realize what this means? it means my daughters aren't going to die in childbirth which really makes it all worthwhile.

is there a message in all of this? my rather rambling journey through a genocide that is happening right now in abyei, just source of -- south sudan, to darfur and finally the more uplifting stories from rwanda. i think the lesson is that we never learn from history 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 is in the form of genocide on our doorstep or the imperative that we must send our young people to fight in a war that may be of limited moral usefulness, i don't know. if no other reason, please, buy "when the stars fall to earth" 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, for all of that. we are so lucky to have you here, especially with everything going on in the abyei. it's great to have your perspective on that. i'm sure there are many questions, so, um, maybe we'll take two or three at a time. >> hi there. i'm robbie, i work with -- [inaudible] work on -- [inaudible] you'd spoken about sort of the international pressure -- and you're absolutely right. [inaudible] the issues surrounding genocide are very near and dear to my heart not just from personal perspective, but also in looking at around the world. i guess my question to you is we were on a white house call last week where the u.s. ambassador who's the special envoy to south sudan was talking about abyei as

well as 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 current ongoing conflict. i guess my question to you, i mean, you touched upon it a little bit is what should a country like the u.s. especially be doing currently to make sure that -- [inaudible] is realized, to make sure that the issues surrounding darfur and abyei come to a resolution? there's a number of issues 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 sanctions, whether it's -- [inaudible] what are the ways in which we can affect the khartoum government in the ways in which you've said that we should that will actually motivate them to act and feel the pain, i suppose. >> are there other questions? maybe one more? >> um, hi. my name's --

[inaudible] i was just wondering -- [inaudible] academic community, but you'll probably have an interesting -- [inaudible] in your various experiences. to what extent are people aware of and what does it mean to them that the international criminal corps has dieted -- [inaudible] >> i'd like to deal with that one first because we actually had a team in darfur, um, the day that it was announced that bashir was being dieted. and group -- indicted. and jubilation. absolute jubilation. and they knew that the sudanese government would kick out huge numbers of humanitarian ngos as a direct consequence. but they still said we need justice. it was an extraordinary moment for us to witness this, this clear-eyed understanding that, yes, they would suffer in material terms, but that 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, if your ethnic group has undergone genocide. it's the same if your people have been enslaved. you need someone to say that something bad was done to you. and so i really do, i'm a big supporter of the icc, and the people of darfur were just jubilant when they heard about the indictment. your question, um, i really should have mentioned this. about what we can do. i should have mentioned the fact that one of the maddening aspects of all of this, the way the west reacts, is that we never appreciate how much leverage we have. over regimes like the sudanese. and we did exactly the same in bosnia, incidentally. we never fully 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've spent it all on weapons. they desperately want access to the international monetary fund and the world bank, and they want to be accepted into the community of nations so they can develop their economy. this is, this is khartoum i'm talking about. they really want to be taken off the united states' list of state sponsors of terror. they want to be in the big boys' club. they don't like being pariahs. and yet what's so maddening about our sort of piecemeal approach to both darfur and south sudan has been that we never appreciated how much leverage we have. and instead we continue to signal our lack of seriousness by not implementing all of those u.n. resolutions that were passed way back in 2003-'4, the no-fly zone, you know, targeting the architects of the genocide

by going after their bank accounts, freezing their assets, a travel ban. all those kinds of things, and we've never turned the screw on that kind of thing. instead, we're now in the absurd position that we actually have envoys from the u.s. going today sudanese and saying, you know, if you, if you continue not to kill so many people in south sudan and behave yourself, we'll reward you by taking you off the list of state sponsors of terror. you know, 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. and another thing that is, you know, certainly has been gossipped about and you may have heard this as well is that the british and the americans are getting ready -- if 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 crime against humanity and genocide. so yet again we're rewarding atrocious behavior rather than realizing that until july when south sudan becomes its own country this is our window of opportunity to absolutely turn the screws, you know? and 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. ask we're not using it -- and we're not using it. and it is just part of our pattern of attention deficit disorder. >> could you discuss a little bit, um, the friendship between the sudan government and the -- [inaudible] goth? is. >> this is a really interesting one, and it's quite distressing. for years, um, the people

running chad, of the si georgia what ethnic group which is, of course, one of the three major ethnic groups in the darfur, and he had a natural sympathy for them. therefore, when bad things started happening in darfur in 2003, lots of people from the ethnic group 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 chadian people weren't wild about having a quart err of a million people arrive in an already desperately poor place where they didn't have enough water, let alone anything else. so 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 ya me that for decades. however, recently there's been a rapprochement, and the

consequence of that is -- [inaudible] is now prepared to betray the people in the 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 story about the consequences of this rapprochement and where it will lead. and, unfortunately, as ever, you know, it seems like a great idea to the diplomats, um, 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, perhaps i can ask a question. given that secession will take place, um, we can expect that it will take place and possibly the indictment by the icc, i mean, i would like to know if you think it actually will move forward or how do you see things actually playing out? the um, what can we expect in terms of a legacy of continuity really? because who will try who for grave human rights violations in a situation like that if the two countries, you know, exist? then no one will really move forward on prosecutions in either country since they are now divided. how do you see that? >> yeah, absolutely. there are um, stalemate. 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 weapons to the khartoum dictatorship. and the chinese have a great interest in not having any kind of precedent that says that someone else can intervene if you're having, you know, killing your own people. the russians are supplying military equipment. all the planes that are today bombing abyei and flying over the surrounding areas on the border, they're all russian, ant november 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 chechnya, russia doesn't want to set a precedent or intervening on

someone's business. 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, leaves us with britain and america. and britain and america together with norway are actually the countries that made the come prehence i peace agreement -- comprehensive peace agreement happen, and great kudos to them. they stuck the course and, you know, i was criticizing them for not having ironed out all those little details about where the border was and who was allowed to vote in the referendum, but at least they did make it happen. but there is an underlying problem with both the american and the british attitude to sudan, and it goes to the war on

terror. incredibly, general -- field martial bashir, he's not a stupid man. he knows how to leverage his position. he said to both intelligent communities in washington and in london, i know osama 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 to make him a valued friend in our, in the war on terror, believe it or not. at the height of the killing, in april 2005, the cia sent a private jet to khartoum to collect the head of sudanese intelligence as he then was to bring him to, um, 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 be somalia. thousand, the very fact that -- 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 from -- going from khartoum to yemen pretending to be a yemeni, it would be like someone from alabama going to scotland and thinking that they were going to fit in. it's not going to happen. also, i'm sorry, but they look different. not to the uninitiated, but it is another indication of our, of our racism that we now think, oh, gee, africa, is it a country or is it a continent? oh, 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 cozied up to and supported, propped up less than pleasant dick dictatorships in our war against communism. and i'm afraid we're back to the same thing now. um, 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 right violations, what can we expect in that region? >> well, the problem is that, you know, if we actually do vote for article 16, then, basically, we're saying that we're giving carte blanche to anybody to do anything they want. and it's really hard to know where we go forward from that if there is no accountability, if

there is no justice. you do begin to wonder what the point of all of this is. there is another thing that i hear often when i'm in africa, and that is that it would -- 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 are very much behind the icc. but, please, could you indict some white leaders for iraq so at least it wouldn't seem that the only people who are in the dark are africans or people of color. because it lacks credibility if it's seen to be so one-sided. >> if there are no other questions -- >> i just had one, not anywhere near as knowledgeable as you, but can you just speak to where

you see the secession going? it seemed like it certainly was a positive step, the sudanese self-determining their government. i'm just curious where you see that maybe in the longer term, the future of that change. >> with well, i think abyei, the event over the weekend probably change everything. um, 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. this 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 get 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 this 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, if it is a bargaining chip, if it is all about repopulating abyei, having a vote and then because there's then a majority arab population joining the north, where does that then lead it? it leaves the south sudanese absolutely tour crouse. it leave an awful lot of people who sacrifice. i mean, every family lost somebody in that long war. and it leaves a sense of a hack of justice -- 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 for you to answer. i think it was interesting when you said we really hadn't learned from a lot of our mistakes and gave a couple other examples of genocide that we just don't seem to have learned from. how much of that do you think is just a willful ignorance, and how much of that is just the complete fact that genocide is so incomprehensible? for example, 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, um, it's just so hard to relate to something that atrocious or that massive. and so how much of those two factors really play into the neglect of they things that are happening like in darfur? the. >> 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? um, 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 if pakistan with militants there. you know, there's always something bigger that gets in the way. people kind of want to avoid ever putting the genocide label on because, as i say, the minute you recognize it's happening, 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 bosnia, with rwanda, with darfur. all excuses not to do anything. 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 the bosnia where slobodan milosevic making serial promises that were broken so quickly that literal hi in the case of -- literally in the case of one peace deal that he signed they then had to hide under the table they'd signed it on because the serbs had started shelling again within two minutes of the ink still wet. it is willful. but i would drag you back to those, to any genocide museum and genocide memorial and ask you to think of this, no, this is the human condition. the circumstances that you need, you need hate, you need prop propaganda, 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 j