Attachment to 00-C 32

Congress of the United States
Washington, DC 20515

April 3, 2000

The Honorable William J. Clinton
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We urgently wish to raise with you the catastrophic human rights situation in Sudan.
Seventeen
years of civil war have laid waste to that country and its people: In south and central Sudan, the
homeland of Christians and African traditional believers, two million have been killed, five
million displaced from their homes and separated from their families, thousands sold into slavery
and many hundreds of thousands put at risk from man-made famine. As House Resolution 75 of
June 15, 1999 declared, “the National Islamic Front government is deliberately and
systematically committing genocide in southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and the Ingessena
Hills.” Either America leads the way towards peace at this crucial historical juncture, or the
Sudanese catastrophe will continue its downward spiral.

Your powers to intervene in this horrific episode of human suffering are many, Mr.
President.
Your voice above all others — declaring to the world the reality of Sudan’s agony — will be heard
and heeded in Khartoum. Your personal commitment to the cause of peace in Sudan can be the
greatest asset to an all-too-fragile peace process. An unmistakable signal of your own resolve
will be sent by your willingness to meet with those most committed to the cause of Sudan, those
who know with terrible vividness the horrors of genocidal destruction — leaders such as Nobel
laureate Elie Wiesel, Sudanese Bishop Macram Gassis, UN Special Rapporteur Gaspar Biro and
Reverend Chuck Singleton.

But beyond the moral obligation to speak out for the cause of peace — beyond your ability to
make clear that a just peace for Sudan is a national priority — there are key actions you can take
now that will have an immediate and enormously potent effect.

First and foremost, you can lead the way in redefining the now-corrupted terms on which
American humanitarian aid is delivered to those suffering in Sudan. You are in a position to
insist that we, and our allies, will not allow the dictates of the Khartoum regime to govern when,
where and if food and medical aid are delivered. This vicious reality on the ground now insures
that massive amounts of American aid will never reach those most desperately in need in vast
tracts of the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, Eastern Equatoria, Western Upper Nile and other
areas. Indeed, in the absence of a robustly independent humanitarian aid program, food and
medicine often end up in the hands of the regime in Khartoum that uses them for the benefit of
its soldiers in the field. Action to thwart the Khartoum government’s policies of calculated
starvation of the civilian population is required whether or not the United States decides to
supply food aid directly to southern opposition forces.

In another critical arena, we call on you to enforce fully and vigorously economic sanctions
against the Sudanese regime by amending your Executive Order to curb capital investments in
the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), its contrived subsidiary PetroChina and
other foreign companies now providing massive oil revenues to Khartoum. As Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright made clear several months ago, it is the prospect of new, unimpeded oil
revenues that convinces the otherwise-bankrupt Khartoum regime that it can acquire the military
means to win the civil war outright. A war that the East African Catholic Bishop’s Conference
has declared to be “genocidal” will continue unless oil development and revenues are removed as
the means for the regime to insulate itself economically. This was precisely Secretary Albright’s
point in Nairobi. Her remarks were clearly directed at Canada’s irresponsible corporate presence
in Sudan in the form of Talisman Energy, a 25 percent partner of the regime in the Greater Nile
Petroleum Operating Company project, and are equally applicable to CNPC, a 40 percent
pipeline partner.

Your powers should be used to bar CNPC and its surrogate PetroChina from access to U.S.
capital markets as long as they generate revenues to the Sudanese regime. The fungibility of
money, the scale of CNPC activities in Sudan and the $15 billion debt PetroChina is assuming
from CNPC, thoroughly undermine assertions that PetroChina is “firewalled” from CNPC’s
Sudan operations. This step is ever more pressing in light of the efforts of PetroChina to proceed
with a $5-7 billion Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. Furthermore, we
call on you to appeal, directly and urgently, to Prime Minister Chretien for economic sanctions,
now that Canada has decided to reestablish diplomatic relations with Khartoum. Especially in
light of the new Harker report which reveals that Sudan’s military is using Talisman’s roads,
airstrip and aircraft to stage offensives against Sudanese civilian villages. To fail to take these
steps would leave a gaping loophole in your Sudan sanctions policy, which includes financial
sanctions that you renewed only last October after determining that Sudan is an “egregious”
religious persecutor.

The National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum is ruthless, and its ruthlessness can be
measured
by the extent and savagery of the human destruction it has wrought in order to maintain
dictatorial control of Sudan. America must demonstrate to this regime that there will be no
weakness or lack of resolve on the part of those working to make the Intergovernmental
Authority for Development (IGAD) peace negotiations successful. Diplomatic engagement with
this regime can at present only be with the goal of furthering the IGAD process. Much more
critical to those negotiations will be your efforts to orchestrate as much economic pressure as
possible on Khartoum and its economic allies.

Mr. President, Africa has too often been the neglected continent. We recall your “never
again”
speech at the Kigali airport in 1998, and your commitment last year to Elie Wiesel at a White
House seminar on “The Perils of Indifference” to ensure that such massacres do not happen again
in Africa. The death toll in Sudan is more than twice that of Rwanda, and recent eyewitness
accounts from international aid workers assert that, in a wide swath around the pipeline, the
Sudanese military continues at this time to carry out scorched-earth devastation, by which the
local Nuer and Dinka populations are either killed or forced to flee. Only a few weeks ago the
Sudanese air force deliberately bombed a Catholic primary school in the Nuba Mountains, killing
14 children, while a government spokesman declared to the press that the school was a legitimate
military target. We implore you, then, in the names of countless lost Sudanese, to use your moral
authority, and the means of resolute economic pressure available to you, to advance with utmost
urgency a just peace in Sudan.

Sincerely,

Tom Tancredo
Donald M. Payne
Frank R. Wolf
Joseph R. Pitts
James E. Rogan
Tim Roemer
Roy Blunt
Juanita Millender-McDonald
Peter T. King
Luis V. Gutierrez
David M. McIntosh
Fortney Pete Stark
Dave Weldon
Barney Frank
Christopher H. Smith
Sam Farr
Todd Tiahrt
Curt Weldon
George Miller
Robert B. Aderholt
Spencer Bachus
Barbara Lee
Robert Wexler
William F. Goodling
John Edward Porter