Five members of Congress arrested over Sudan protest in Washington D.C.

Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, April 28, 2006


(04-28) 08:51 PDT WASHINGTON - Five members of Congress, including Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) were arrested today when they blocked the front entrance at the Embassy of Sudan in Washington, D.C. Their protest and civil disobedience was designed to embarrass the military dictatorship's ongoing genocide of its non-Arab citizens.

All told, 11 people were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, including six activists as well as representatives Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston), Jim McGovern (D-Worcester, Mass.), Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and John Olver (D-Massachusetts). They were held in a jail cell for about 45 minutes and then released.

"If you're looking for lack of international morality, Darfur encompasses all aspects," Lantos said before his arrest. "Here we see the slaughter of innocent black women, children and men by a monstrous regime."

Lantos, 78, was first elected to Congress in 1981. Two years later, he founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. As the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, he has pressed the Bush administration to take steps to deter the state-sanctioned murder and rape of hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan's Darfur region.

"We have been calling on the civilized world to stand up and to say, 'Enough,' " Lantos said. "The slaughter of the people of Darfur must end."

Lantos' arrest comes as a diverse coalition of human rights activists is planning to stage major Sudan-related rallies Sunday in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and other cities here and overseas. In recent months, the deteriorating situation in Sudan has become a dilemma for the Bush administration, which formally declared the killings in Sudan genocide in September 2004. Now, activists are trying to put pressure on the White House.

A crowd of about 60 demonstrators cheered as the members of Congress and other activists were arrested by U.S. Secret Service officers. They were taken in a van to a local D.C. Police Station where they were each charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor.

"We cannot stand aside while hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered," Moran said before his arrest.

"Words are no longer enough. It is time for action," McGovern said. "This is the first genocide of the 21 st century. The world has said, 'Never again.' Those words must mean something."

Lantos said it was the first time he has been arrested.

The situation in Sudan appears to be getting worse. Relief workers say that about 200,000 people have been displaced from their homes in the past three months. United Nations officials say that Sudan's tenuous humanitarian aid network could soon break down, triggering the deaths of 100,000 people a month from starvation.

"This is an acceleration of violence, and some aid agencies are being forced to leave," said Alex Meixner, a legislative coordinator for the SaveDarfurCoalition of 164 religious, humanitarian and human rights groups that are sponsoring the Washington rally. "The Khartoum government is starting to increase the tempo of this genocide."

"What we did was symbolic and simple and basically pain-free," Lantos said via cell phone after his release.

"I'm back in my car with my wife, Annette, and our dog, living our life, but the people in Darfur are living a 24-hour nightmare."