- 30/06/2025
Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? (2024)
In 2003, hundreds of thousands of Americans protested about ethnic cleansing in Sudan. Following Obama's 2008 election success, could some of those people, now in office, make a difference?
In 2003, hundreds of thousands of Americans protested about ethnic cleansing in Sudan. Following Obama's 2008 election success, could some of those people, now in office, make a difference?
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00:00When I left Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, being a young correspondent, I felt specifically
00:18kind of responsible in my own little amateurish way for not having told the story of one of
00:26the major massacres of the war adequately, the story of Srebrenica.
00:38And I felt part of a world that hadn't done enough.
00:46You know, I just had a sense of how many lives could have been saved sooner, you know, had
00:51the decision that was belatedly made been made before.
00:54And so my first question was, why didn't we do more sooner about Bosnia?
01:01And that was a question that long ago I had asked myself about the Holocaust.
01:11My high school understanding of the Holocaust could be reduced to Hitler was exterminating
01:16the Jews and therefore we went to war.
01:21And I would later learn that the issue of the extermination of the Jews just didn't rise
01:26within the system in the way that you would have expected or that I would have expected.
01:32What I was struck by when I came back, and this was in the mid-1990s, was the extent to
01:38which our culture was having a surge of commemoration and remembrance related to the Holocaust.
01:48And yet I had just come from this experience where the Bosnian service had attempted to wipe
01:52out of people in Europe 50 years after the Holocaust and the connections weren't really drawn.
02:05And so it was at that point then that I go to the library and thinking maybe there would
02:08be books on the decision makers, on the bystanders.
02:12I'll never forget being at Harvard's huge library and looking at all the books and going back
02:17over the cases that I didn't know a lot about, like the Armenian Genocide, Pol Pot and Khmer
02:21Rouge, what Saddam Hussein had done to the Kurds.
02:25And then coming up to the present in my own recent experiences, it became clear there was
02:31kind of something there that this fulsome consensus about applying the lessons of the Holocaust,
02:40that was living in great tension with what policymakers were doing, and yet the tension seemed one
02:45that was not being grappled with.
02:47And so that's what my book attempted to do, is how do we simultaneously believe we will never
02:51again allow genocide, and then when a genocide happens, what are the stories we tell ourselves,
02:56what are the constraints that impede concrete application of those lessons.
03:01We are the nation that liberated continents, concentration camps, and the death camps still bear witness
03:20that evil is real and must be opposed.
03:33Decent people must never remain silent and inactive in times of moral crisis.
03:39The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans unwilling to witness or permit
03:46the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.
03:53It is easy to say never again, but much harder to make it so.
03:59No other nation has made the advancement of human rights and dignity so central to its foreign policy
04:04because it's central to who we are as Americans.
04:08America truly is the world's indispensable nation.
04:12The one indispensable nation in world affairs.
04:15A shining city on a hill where all things are possible.
04:20We can make a difference, and we will do it.
04:23We are Americans.
04:27Never forget, never again.
04:34Thank you for your attention.
04:46I'm really fortunate to be the only president before.
04:49If you look at the Bush administration,
04:50Sudan became a priority right from the beginning.
04:53On day two, Condoleezza Rice came into the National Security Council,
04:56her convening her senior staff,
04:59and she said that the president had decided he wanted to do something about Sudan,
05:03And there he was specifically talking about the North-South conflict, because that was the conflict of the day.
05:09And so it became a priority for us, and we had to develop policy options for ending that civil war.
05:17I think because his religious faith told him human rights was an important thing,
05:24and it was part of being an American to defend human rights.
05:27And so he wanted, as part of his legacy, to try to end civil wars where there are particularly large amounts of atrocities going on.
05:38In Sudan, a vast land, the third largest in Africa, two decades of civil war had brought countless atrocities and left two million dead.
05:52The country was rich with oil, but that lay in the South.
05:57A land of black Africans, most of them Christian.
06:01The rulers of the country lived in the North, and they were Muslims.
06:06Mostly lighter-skinned Arabs, who used their power to monopolize Sudan's wealth.
06:14In 1989, Omar al-Bashir, an Islamist army general, seized power in a bloodless coup.
06:22Bashir purged the army, imprisoning or executing his rivals.
06:26And set about making Sudan a one-party Islamist state.
06:34Women, suspected of adultery and other transgressions, were publicly flogged.
06:40But as that peace treaty was unfolding, it was very clear that we had another problem in Sudan, and this was the problem of Darfur.
06:59Darfur is a region in western Sudan, roughly the size of Spain.
07:05The people of Darfur are Muslims, but they are also black Africans, and they too had been rebelling against the discrimination of the lighter-skinned Arabs who ruled in Khartoum.
07:16Now that the Christians in South Sudan were about to get their own state, the Darfuris escalated their own fight for independence.
07:27I went to Darfur in the summer of 2001.
07:33A civil war had already started in Darfur, at a very low level, and it was becoming more serious, but we didn't realize it.
07:41While I was there, one of the provincial governors said, we have a problem with a group called the Janjaweed.
07:48And I said, well, what does that mean?
07:50And he said, uh, devil on horseback.
07:52They would go into a village on horseback.
07:56The houses are made of mud bricks, they're round, and they have grass roofs.
08:01Very easy to start them on fire.
08:03You just take a torch around, you go burn the whole village down very quickly.
08:06When the people would come out of their huts, they'd shoot the young men, dump their bodies down the village well, and then they would rape the women and they would steal the animals.
08:31I attended every morning the staff meetings that Colin Powell had.
08:36Once the atrocity started, I would bring it up every morning, and I made a pain of myself, I know that.
08:43But Colin Powell would listen to me privately, would call me in and say, Andrew, what are we going to do?
08:51For nearly two decades, the government of Sudan has waged a brutal and shameful war against its own people.
08:59And this isn't right.
09:01And this must stop.
09:03Today the tragedy in Sudan commands the attention of the compassionate people.
09:09Fire!
09:13Fire!
09:14Fire!
09:15Fire!
09:17Fire!
09:18Fire!
09:19Fire!
09:20Fire!
09:22Fire!
09:24Fire!
09:25Fire!
09:26Fire!
09:27Fire!
09:28Fire!
09:29Fire!
09:30Fire!
09:31Fire!
09:32Fire!
09:33Fire!
09:34Fire!
09:35Fire!
09:36Fire!
09:37Fire!
09:38Fire!
09:39Fire!
09:40Fire!
09:41Fire!
09:42Fire!
09:43Fire!
09:44Fire!
09:45Fire!
09:46Fire!
09:47Fire!
09:48Fire!
09:49Fire!
09:50Fire!
09:51Fire!
09:52Fire!
09:53Fire!
09:54in front of the president to the president what rumsfeld was saying was look we're just taking
09:59a big black eye and we look bad uh and american power looks weak and we have to reassert american
10:08power in the eyes of the arab world and to do that we have to take on i remember he said we have to
10:14take on the biggest arab army and that's iraq the iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax
10:23and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade this is a regime that has already
10:30used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens
10:39though american forces had let osama bin laden escape
10:43and had never achieved real control over afghanistan
10:47the administration immediately turned its attention to iraq
10:53the battle of iraq had ended but the mission was far from accomplished
11:08all along bush officials had assumed that after saddam iraq would remain a functioning state
11:15they had ignored colin powell's prescient warning if you break it you own it
11:24america broke iraq and proved utterly unprepared for what came next
11:29we clearly failed to provide adequate security in the aftermath of the invasion
11:39once the insurgency got started and the security situation declined
11:44we paid a high price in terms of lives and treasure of americans the coalition and particularly the iraqis
11:56iraq and the ever more disastrous war would become the american obsession
12:04in washington there was only iraq
12:07the rest of the world including the conflict in darfur faded from american attention
12:13perhaps a war had been waged on the predicate of course of weapons of mass destruction
12:22that proved false on a terrorist connection that proved false the only argument left for the war
12:28that was still raging was saddam hussein is a person who gassed his own people who committed genocide
12:33against his people that that was kind of it if you're believe that in fact it was about none of
12:45those things ever it was about oil and you think that human consequences should have taken center
12:51stage in the iraq debate therefore is a case for you to make your voice heard where the only reason
12:58again for uh standing up to a government that's brutalizing its people in darfur is the people in
13:03darfur i think a lot of folks when they saw what was happening in sudan and in darfur in the early
13:12stages in 2002 and three thought that this was a counterinsurgency that was just particularly brutal
13:19didn't realize that in fact the regime's key officials from the president on down had said things
13:27and we're doing things that were focused on destroying entire groups of people for their political
13:34purposes there was a meeting held in the summer of 2003 and the instruction was given burn every
13:44village down kill all their leaders rape all the women just destroy them sudanese military was now
13:52moving thousands of troops in with helicopter gunships first what would happen is the helicopter
13:58gunships would go in and start shooting the village up terrorize everyone and then the janja week would
14:04ride into the village crush the opposition simply by destroying the base of operations of the rebels
14:09because the rebels would attack the sudanese military defeat them and then they would fade back into
14:14their own villages and the only way to catch them they assume is to kill everybody
14:17i was able to see the first hand some of the villages that had been destroyed
14:29they were burned to a crisp there was nothing left i mean this was scorched earth this was complete and
14:35total ethnic cleansing at a minimum but then when you go to the areas where the people that survive these
14:42attacks and they tell you what they saw and what they experienced then you realize those
14:47people were targeted for elimination and what i mean by that is that people told you that the
14:52the soldiers or the militia would come in and they were screaming racial epithets at people
14:59and basically telling them that no one will survive this
15:01during the worst of the killing in 2003 and 2004 more than two million darfuris fled their homes
15:20some sought refuge in camps for the internally displaced and many others streamed over the border
15:26to fill huge refugee camps in chad the camps were desperate and lawless places where refugees depended
15:35entirely on relief organizations for food water and medical care
15:43they never had enough to eat disease was rampant tribal social structures collapsed
15:50and the most vulnerable women children and the elderly suffered the most aid agencies were overwhelmed
16:06welcome to uo today our guest is samantha power the author of the pulitzer prize winning book a problem
16:11from hell we are so delighted to welcome samantha power to the university her book is a passionate
16:19normative judgment about what u.s foreign policy should be in her view the system is broken and we all have
16:27to put our heads together to try to fix it so i'm going to try to inspire you to become shall we say
16:32upstanders in a world that is sadly crowded with bystanders nick christoph began writing about darfur
16:47in a way that did that thing that i wished i had been able to do more when i was in bosnia
16:52one column would follow another column would follow another and just the more i read just thought
16:58this sounds really familiar
17:02i reached out to john prendergast who had spent a ton of time in sudan over the years
17:13we flew to eastern chad right along the border with darfur and began sitting down with refugees
17:23in my career i'd never encountered greater concentration of trauma in a refugee camp
17:28looking around the camp itself how few men there were we we then meet this relatively young woman
17:36in her 20s she just incredibly methodically tells us the story of how she moved her children um away
17:45from the village hearing that the janjuweed were coming here and also the sounds of sudanese air force
17:51planes overhead they drop these bombs then the janjuweed come on camels and they just start slaughtering
18:00anybody who's near the well and they just kill and kill and kill
18:09amina and her son muhammad gets separated in this melee
18:13and she runs off and muhammad remains she ducks behind a nearby hillock it's just a scene of carnage
18:27finally as she describes it stoically uh to john and me just like a tear going down her cheek and she
18:34takes the end of her scarf and just kind of wipes the tear and she says i found you know i found my
18:40son and and a pause and she says but i just found his head you know and that's all i found i found his head
18:53i mean john and i just we just sat there in silence uh the interpreter you know kind of asking
19:00or they do you have more questions i mean what do you what do you say to a mother
19:07nearly every survivor of genocide or war crimes or crimes against humanity that i've ever interviewed
19:13at the end of the discussion they want to know what i'm going to do i've just poured my heart out at
19:20great personal expense at trauma don't just write it down and walk away do something
19:30after prendergast and power returned a group of activists convened in new york to draw the public's
19:36attention to what was happening in darfur heart-wrenching stories were emerging in the press
19:44now various groups evangelical churches student organizations liberal synagogues began pressing the
19:52bush administration to act many remembered vividly how washington had stood by and watched hundreds of
20:00thousands die in bosnia and rwanda with the war of choice in iraq increasingly unpopular the slogan
20:09became out of iraq and into darfur
20:14perhaps it would be darfur where post cold war america would finally show its kinder nobler face
20:21after the nazi holocaust we said never again and after bosnia
20:31and after rwanda this week world leaders gathering at the un can stop the genocide in darfur
20:42and tell the world that never again starts right now
20:55i had been to darfur i had seen the suffering those people were undergoing
21:07i had seen the evidence of what the janja weed had been doing totally burning down villages so
21:13people could come back even empty villages they burned out and so i came back and i sent the team to
21:19look at it it was obvious from looking at the evidence subjectively that there was genocide going on by this
21:26point the idea was to do interviews in the refugee camps and try and see not only what crimes were going on
21:37but what were the janja weed saying while they were doing it
21:40they were being called names you know african slave um we're gonna wipe you out um that the women were
21:51being raped and being told that you're you know you're gonna we're gonna have lighter babies here
21:56which was to say we're gonna we're gonna remove your type a person which i think becomes part of the
22:03definition of genocide they were marking the women to degrade them to classify them as
22:11you know part of a group and finally to treat them like animals that was their attitude that these
22:17africans who were in darfur were lesser life forms
22:31there's always been concern that if the united states actually calls particular acts in a country
22:37genocide that it would trigger u.s obligations under the genocide convention my legal advisors said
22:46you know in international law it's tricky it's very difficult here's our advice you could do either
22:52you could call it genocide or not call it genocide and we can give you a legal basis for that and i said
22:58uh i think this is horrible and i uh i'm gonna call it genocide
23:06the concern was that by calling it genocide we would raise expectations that we were going to be
23:12able to do more than we were going to be able to accomplish but notwithstanding that risk
23:19the president gave colin the go-ahead to use the phrase genocide because the president wanted to do
23:26something about darfur mr chairman as i have said the evidence leads the united states to the conclusion
23:33that genocide has occurred and may still be occurring in darfur at this hour the world is witnessing
23:38terrible suffering and horrible crimes in the darfur region of sudan crimes my government has concluded
23:45our genocide the determination of the united states government that it was a genocide galvanized at
23:53least american ngos and the american public and americans working on the ground it was the bush
23:59administration 9 11 had already happened the iraq war was highly criticized and people were very angry
24:05at american government and here the american government seemed to be on the right side of history
24:11it was saying there's a genocide bashir is bad we are going to put as much resources as we can find
24:18into the humanitarian effort and you know my supervisors on up in the u.s government said
24:24tell us what you want to do should we sanction them down this way so should we should we send condoleez
24:28or rice out to read the demarch like what what what is what all can we bring to bear on this problem
24:34and so that i thought that's how the u.s government worked that that was amazing i can't even
24:40explain to my relatives in ohio where darfur is and yet the u.s government is like all hands on deck
24:44on this problem for the bush administration all hands on deck meant stepping up diplomatic pressure
24:52to reach a ceasefire while mounting an enormous humanitarian rescue operation to keep darfuris
24:58alive billions of dollars in food medical supplies and other aid at its height the u.s agency for
25:07international development was delivering 40 000 tons of food every month
25:16when i got there in february of 2005 i wanted to help it's it sounds like a cliche but i just saw
25:22a way in which i could help people and learn a lot
25:27it's very hot and dusty and brown
25:32and when you start to you know adjust your eye to the desert you start to see beauty
25:35a lot of women moving things on donkeys and on their head and i was sitting there and started
25:43talking to local organizations who were working with women talking to the women themselves hearing
25:47their stories
25:51one of the big elements of violence was that women who would leave the camps to go and collect firewood
25:56they would often get raped and attacked and abused outside of those camps so that was happening over and
26:01over and over again some of the women would say i would never go to a police station and tell them i
26:07was raped because the janjaweed are the police the government was attacking them that was totally clear to them
26:13i wrote like 40 cables when i was in darfur trying to explain what i was seeing and living
26:26because i knew that i'd worked in washington but there's nothing you can put in a cable that describes
26:32what you're seeing why this you don't it's just you're not you're not shaking the person's hand you're not
26:38seeing the grimace on their face when they start to talk to you these people are giving you everything
26:45they can because they think if they just say something else you'll change their shitty situation
26:50right you can never communicate that in a cable like um yeah
26:55i condoleezza rice do solemnly swear i condoleezza rice do solemnly swear that i will support and
27:05defend that i will support and defend the constitution of finally i decided i had to go and see for
27:11myself and so i went uh to sudan and i went to dafur
27:15and i went to india hondi rice asked to meet with women alone without no men in the room it's not
27:29a it was a tent and there was almost a fist fight between the secret service and the secret police
27:36the mukaberat in khartoum that said you are not going to meet with these women alone we are going
27:40to be there with you she said we're leaving right now and you will you will regret this if you do not
27:44let me meet with these women i was taken into a tent and there there were about 10 women they had
27:52all been raped just going to get water and they would start to tell their stories and they couldn't
28:00continue and another woman would pick up the story and another woman and another woman and
28:06i am rarely at a loss for words but i didn't know what to say i said something about i'll go back and
28:15i'll see what we can do and but at a moment like that there's very little that you can actually say
28:22she came out very shaken because they explained in great detail how when they were raped how they
28:34were raped who did it and why they did it in great detail and she came out and she said and we've got
28:39to focus on the on the violence against women in fact you know in for arabic there there is no word for
28:47rape the word doesn't exist you'd often hear women say well yes i have a 16 year old son in my family
28:57who survived the attack but if i send him out to get the firewood he'll be killed and it's better for
29:03me to go out and be raped instead of losing the one last male in my family or losing a child or even
29:11losing my husband if their husband was with them they would make that calculus so that's kind of
29:17like a terrible decision but they were making those decisions all the time because if you do not have
29:22firewood you can't cook the food you're given and you can't feed what's left of your family
29:31one thing we know when we study genocide and mass atrocities is that sexual violence and rape is a
29:39key indicator and precursor to mass killing because it scares and terrifies the community
29:48the united states was about to take the chair of the security council and i said i want to come
29:56myself and i want to take the chair of the security council and i want a resolution
30:01that says that rape is not a consequence of war it is a weapon of war
30:07people use it to humiliate and uh to terrorize and we did we got that resolution it means that it's a
30:14different kind of war crime now but it came from that particular moment rape is a crime that can never
30:20be condoned yet women and girls in conflict situations around the world have been subjected
30:26to widespread and deliberate acts of sexual violence
30:29it's essential that you see human toll um and then by the way you can take that back to those rooms
30:37in washington and those rooms and can then feel it in a way that they wouldn't otherwise
30:43at the same time there was a report by a group of u.n experts on the atrocities in darfur to the
30:55security council so there was pressure then to refer the genocide to the international criminal court
31:04i wouldn't join the international criminal court this is a body based in the hague where
31:26unaccountable judges and prosecutors could pull our troops our diplomats up for trial
31:38ever since the victorious allies had convened the nuremberg tribunals to judge and punish nazi leaders
31:45many had dreamed of an international criminal court that would
31:48hold leaders accountable for genocide and other crimes against humanity
31:57after the genocides in the former yugoslavia and in rwanda the united nations had set up ad hoc tribunals
32:05but only in 1998 did the international community establish a global and permanent criminal court
32:13one that would not only punish those who had committed crimes against humanity
32:17but deter others from following the same path
32:23120 nations voted for the international criminal court
32:29among those who refused to join were russia and china and the very nation that for half a century
32:37had been the world's leading advocate for international law the united states of america
32:42the bush administration had been you know waging diplomatic war against the icc
32:52and yet when the europeans brought forward an initiative at the security council asking that
32:57the crimes committed in darfur be referred to the international criminal court you would have never
33:03expected that that would be something that the bush administration would have allowed
33:07but the bush administration abstained which meant that the referral of these crimes went forward and it
33:13meant ultimately that bashir the president of sudan would be indicted for crimes against humanity and
33:17genocide once we said that we were going to prosecute bashir through the international criminal court
33:24bashir said i'm not leaving office because i leave office they're going to capture me and put me on trial
33:28in the egg and i am not going to do that ever bashir not only clung to power he attacked the international
33:37community declaring that the court was conducting a campaign of lies about a conflict sudan had inherited
33:43from colonial days he insisted the indictment was a blatant political attack meant to force him from power
33:51his instincts are going to be survival his instincts are going to be you know keep his foes under
33:58control and down his instincts are if somebody you know hits him with a knife he's going to bludgeon
34:03them with a gun it made a hell of a lot harder to work in darfur because operationally every single
34:11move was a fight for everybody working there
34:14the government definitely started to up their attacks on western ngo workers
34:23they accused some ngos of sharing information directly with the icc
34:28and then they started to find very interesting and uh gross ways in which to intimidate those ngos
34:37the question is do you want justice or peace
34:40you can't have both i'm sorry i thought this through over and over again i've seen the evidence
34:47if you want justice you need to do something else diplomacy is about arranging compromises where
34:54people's interests are protected and you wait you have a process through which you can get your
35:00objectives without more violence if i have a choice between accountability and ending the war
35:07i would end the war because it means more lives will be saved
35:15probably one of the most dramatic meetings on darfur was in the oval office we wanted to effectively
35:22stop the government of sudan's capacity to kill civilians the u.s was in the midst of fighting in
35:29iraq and afghanistan and you have to ask yourself would a third war in a muslim country
35:33be such a constructive move the u.s military obviously want to have nothing to do with this
35:38at this point but to be fair to them and as my own sense was you know what's the military objective
35:45is it the jantui is it the government of sudan forces are we supposed to take over khartoum
35:51president bush wanted to send helicopter gunships in
35:54and condi rice said to do what are going to we're going to defend 3 800 villages
36:02we would need the entire u.s army in the most remote place on earth darfur is a thousand miles
36:08from any ocean how are we going to get the troops in there and then when is it going to end so we she
36:15convinced him that it was very unwise we did a lot of things in darfur but we did not send in the troops
36:24we tried to manage that and diffuse it in another way we had some success not perfect success
36:35i started to get really resentful i thought we did everything that i thought we could do
36:41and it's not changing this was the pinnacle of what everybody could do and be on the right
36:48side of history call a spade a spade get all the resources president bush is watching this space
36:53cole and powell's engaged connelisa rice is engaged the icc indictment's not down and everything's
36:59just staying the same i left because i was burnout i was tired i don't know what the darfur
37:09people think of us now the person and the government that committed a genocide stayed in power
37:16over them and that hadn't happened in rwanda it didn't happen in bosnia after shavarnica
37:25you know so darfur everything just stayed frozen in time after that genocide
37:36do you consider the ongoing situation in darfur genocide yes or no what you just
37:41yes or no senator senator there is very little fighting between the rebels and the government
37:46and very few civilian casualties going on in darfur right now i just told you ambassador i i'm not
37:52asking whether diminished fighting i'm asking whether the situation in darfur today is a genocide
37:58yes or no senator yes or no the situation is very volatile all right there are periods of killings
38:04which could be construed as genocide that took place last you know in the present convention that the
38:09united nations this went on and finally i was senator biden was the chairman of the committee finally
38:15said well is it going on or not and i said well yes it is why won't you just say is genocide still
38:22the operative word yes it is so genocide is being committed in darfur yes all right the genocide was
38:30over um and but yet the you the ngo community felt like unless you use that term you um are somehow not
38:43being tough enough um on the government of sudan i i i i i don't think that genocide if there was a
38:51genocide i don't think it was continuing let's put it that way and i thought we needed to be able to
38:56change how we framed what was going on and what we were doing um but yet we couldn't we couldn't we
39:05were boxed in the wording is important it is important for future events if everything is a
39:12genocide then nothing's in genocide every time some human rights abuse takes place people will say it's
39:17a genocide and then when a genocide really does take place it with the meaning the word will not have
39:22meaning anymore when i first met barack obama it was my book that had caused him to reach out
39:36the fact that there was an american politician who had read a 600 page book on genocide who came away
39:41from that book wanting to understand how we could do better at integrating human consequences into our
39:46decision making wanting to understand what is it about all these people of good faith who go into
39:52public service to try to make the world better and then somehow this conception of national interests this
39:58stoic um kind of cold and clinical conception of what we are in government to do takes over and we
40:06forget about the people who might have drawn us into this enterprise in the first place
40:10foreseeable replacement forces coming by the end of the dinner i you know kind of found myself
40:16volunteering to to go and work with him in a more official capacity and phase four this entire area
40:22so this is just last week 55 000 people this place from the face of injustice this is an extraordinary
40:30though the genocide in darfur was over militias on the ground continued to commit atrocities
40:37and the coalition of activists determined to prevent them continued to grow
40:43by 2006 save darfur had become a national movement embracing politicians journalists religious leaders
40:50and hollywood celebrities save darfur activists staged huge public rallies and bombarded elected officials
40:58with calls and emails demanding action we are here to waste our anger at leaders who are humorous
41:19complacent and unwilling to take risks today the fight against mass atrocities is no longer the
41:26struggle of a few but the conviction of the many this is the first time in the in the history of
41:31genocide that a perpetrator has so known that they've got america looking over their shoulder we need
41:38to protect the people with u.n forces we need to punish the perpetrators of this genocide but there is hope
41:44there is you i know that if we care the world will care if we act then the world will follow and in
41:55every corner of the globe tyrants and terrorists will know that a new day is dawning and that all of us
42:01together have joined hands to ensure that never again will these kinds of atrocities happen
42:08if there is anyone out there who still doubts that america is a place where all things are possible
42:17tonight is your answer
42:29it was in fact a dream scenario i thought that folks who had a history with africa and understood
42:35what was happening in many of these places and their their their level of sophistication of
42:40understanding the situation would make a major impact meanwhile after two years investigating
42:46the darfur case luis moreno ocampo the icc prosecutor had reached a decision on behalf of
42:54the international criminal court he issued an arrest warrant for omar al-bashir an arrest warrant
43:00again omar hassan ahmad al-bashir for genocide crimes against humanity and war crimes
43:16no international organization had ever indicted an acting head of state there was grave risk in taking
43:24such a step unlike many other defendants a head of state had the power to respond
43:30and al-bashir's response was swift and brutal he announced he was expelling 13 of the aid organizations
43:38working in darfur literally cutting the lifeline of millions of his people
43:46he was trying to signal not just to the u.s administration but to the international community
43:51that supports the icc as well i can make it worse right you think you can ratchet up pressure on me
43:58i can increase the pain and make you look powerless it was like a all hands on deck you know fire alarm
44:08emergency what do we do this is a lifeline for a lot of people um and so you know trying to negotiate
44:16a return for humanitarian organizations became priority number one
44:21my first meeting in the oval office as it happened came because of the visit of ban ki
44:28moon to meet with president obama where the staff to the president get to sit down with him first and
44:32say here's what we're trying to get out of the meeting i said simply the president this is a
44:36wonderful occasion for you to put on the record that the expulsion of these groups is unacceptable to
44:43the united states and the president kind of looked at me and he just said well
44:51what do they care you know what i say effectively and and he said are the chinese with us and i said
44:59no sir what about the african union some yes some no but you know not exactly and you know in effect he
45:09was he was saying what is america's voice on its own going to make a material difference here
45:15i think what was striking to me was that president obama had exactly the same values he had on january
45:2319th being the day before he was sworn in as president but you know even just after a couple
45:28months in the job he was really alert to the peril of saying something and then having nothing happen
45:35in response that that's a cost to him and to his voice you know after a bit of back and forth he went
45:43into the meeting with ban ki moon when the press came in he denounced the sudanese government for
45:47expelling these international ngos it is not acceptable to put that many people's lives at risk
45:54the united states wants to work as actively as possible with the united nations to try to resolve
46:00the immediate humanitarian crisis and to start putting us on a path president obama asked me to
46:07be the president's special envoy to sudan it took me a day or two to understand what all that meant and
46:13then i agreed on monday and then basically was on my way to sudan within a week
46:21for me to do my job as the envoy i had to do a delayed justice to save lives and to get the results
46:30that i needed behind the dilemma of accountability versus engagement stood a larger one justice versus
46:40peace united nations ambassador susan rice and national security council official samantha power
46:48convinced that the regime in khartoum only responded to pressure urged the administration
46:53to take harsher measures against bashir special envoy scott gration and other officials responded that
47:00given the millions of lives at immediate risk the united states had no choice but to engage with khartoum
47:06and offer the government incentives to change its behavior president obama by taking the option of
47:13using force off the table had in effect placed himself on the side of engagement there were a lot
47:21of conversations about sort of what does it say to even suggest publicly that there could be incentives
47:27for this kind of a government right what does it what does it say about us about who we are what does
47:32that say about the incentive structure for other bad actors i i i think that that was on people's
47:38minds but carrots for a war criminal it doesn't make anybody feel good right you feel terrible
47:46and when you're getting reports about this horrible thing happened in this village i think it's hard
47:52not to feel like the right thing to do is to say no you know we can't uh don't you know who these people
47:59are only one thing will move them and it's more pressure the idea that peace is possible
48:06with somebody who's been indicted for genocide leading a country really like that's the right
48:12recipe for peace that's never going to work i mean again it's genocide right it's not some low grade
48:17this or that you there there's something very diagnostic about having committed genocide this was a
48:24debate about two sides that both thought we should do something one side believed we should provide
48:29incentives carrots to a genocidal regime the other side saying we should pressure them and provide
48:37stronger responses to the actions that were undertaken that debate was never resolved
48:43as the years passed and obama entered his second term indicted war criminal omar al-bashir not only
48:53remained in place as sudan's president but traveled the world unmolested here he is at an international
49:01economic forum in egypt in 2015 with secretary of state john kerry just behind him was this what
49:09accountability for crimes against humanity looked like the promise of international justice had
49:17never seemed more hollow amnesty international says the sudanese government issues and chemical
49:24weapons on civilians as many as 250 people may have died from the effects of the poison the attacks
49:30happened in a remote part of darfur many of the victims are children some covered in lesions and
49:36blisters others have been vomiting blood the group's investigation indicates at least 30 chemical
49:41attacks since january this is a campaign that has targeted the civilian population and targeting a
49:48civilian population is a war crime in the very tail end of the obama administration like the last two years
49:59there was in the rush to the exits an embrace of the relaxation of sanctions far too quick given how
50:08little sudan had really done to show anything and so i think we're responsible for that that said on one
50:16level it was trying to mix up the policy after years of trying the same thing and expecting a different
50:22result ambassador uh staying in the region sudan the obama administration announced uh yesterday they're
50:29going to ease sanctions on sudan what what is the logic that went into that at this point why now
50:35um it's a great question we uh behind the scenes um have been engaged with the government of sudan
50:43in a in a discreet way you know the the aid groups on the ground that we partner with have described just
50:48a sea change um you know the incentive advocates won massively at the end of the obama administration when
50:58many of the sanctions were removed stunning got nothing in return unbelievable foreign policy
51:04mistake in my view the the status quo is usually what carries the day and so
51:14constantly for these last three administrations i can't really distinguish them they're all the same
51:20is that they've said listen this regime in khartoum is willing to deal with us they give us little bits
51:26and pieces of information for counterterrorism and we think that if we just would you know normalize
51:32relations if we remove them the sanctions if we do this this this this all incentives without them
51:38having to do anything that this will change their behavior i just think it's the very definition of
51:44insanity just doing the same thing over and over again getting no result
51:50i'm the person who wrote the book about the importance of preventing mass atrocity
51:54and i was very alert to the risk that everything i'm saying is just a rationalization because
51:58i'd studied people who'd rationalize their way into staying and so if you care about atrocity
52:04prevention then you're looking to make an impact on that set of issues and when you when you go into
52:12a position of power and the odds are on the one hand more in your favor because you have a relationship
52:18with the president because the president has prioritized these issues
52:22but on the other hand you still have all of the gravity of the u.s government you know kind
52:25of pushing down against a more proactive stance so you don't change the whole world but on a given
52:33day you can change many individual worlds and i think that that's what kept me going that's what keeps me
52:38going now
52:56the cynical lowest common denominator policy that emerged from the bush administration and from the
53:02obama administration's deepest uh debates was about just keeping people alive if our policy objective
53:12ultimately was to deliver aid we did that the policy objective should have been about much more it should
53:19have been about stopping a genocide and creating a consequence for genocide so that it potentially would
53:25be uh uh something that others would think twice about in the future anybody who considering genocide or
53:32crimes against humanity around the world today and looks back on the example of darfur and sees that
53:37there was no consequence to those that committed those atrocities that would embolden them that wouldn't
53:42prevent them from acting we failed we failed to have imagination and vision big enough commensurate with
53:51the horrors that were unfolding on the ground
54:00we saved lives maybe hundreds of thousands of lives through humanitarian assistance but we didn't stop it
54:07we didn't create a dynamic that said we need to reverse this the world needs to stand up and say
54:14people that committed this kind of crime need to pay a price
54:21what is the situation in darfur today it's a disaster you know people have been living in camps
54:30for now uh well over a debt well over a dozen years 15 years in some cases and um with no prospect
54:39of returning to their home villages the the sign the neon sign that's being broadcast to those people
54:46uh devoid of hope in those camps is that you are not welcome to go back to your home
55:00in december of 2018 thousands of sudanese took to the streets to demonstrate against bashir's
55:19government they were health workers doctors lawyers and overwhelmingly women they protested
55:27against rising prices they denounced the corruption of bashir's 30 years in power
55:36though bashir responded with harsh violence the protesters did not back down
55:42after four months sudan's military officers finally deposed bashir they charged him with corruption and
55:50killing protesters seven months later sudan's ruling council announced omar al bashir would be handed over
55:57to the international criminal court where he would face charges of genocide war crimes and crimes against
56:04humanity it was a shocking and oddly encouraging ending though bashir's very ruthlessness his stark
56:14willingness to force suffering on his own people had thwarted the international community and given the lie
56:20to its high-minded calls of never again in the end the sudanese people managed to do what the international
56:28community could not force a dictator from power and make him answer for his crimes
56:39of not being infected with the international community but to be used as a
56:56incredibly difficult for the international community as a nation as a nation as a nation as a nation as a nation as a nation as a nation and for their point of faith
57:07Amen.
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