No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  Danforth proved to be an inspired choice, obtaining a provisional ceasefire in January 2002. His work, along with that of Jendayi Frazer, the African affairs specialist at the White House, and Walter Kansteiner, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, would eventually lead to the aforementioned Comprehensive Peace Agreement, a set of agreements and protocols that finalized power sharing and territorial arrangements and set into motion a referendum process that would ultimately lead to the South’s secession in July 2011.

  With assistance from the international community the agreement was signed on January 9, 2005. Colin had directed the U.S. effort, intervening personally in the end to get the deal done. Several times the negotiations had almost broken down, but he and Danforth had persevered. We could always tell when the parties were getting close to success. The celebration was apparently to include sacrificing a white cow, so when Colin called to say that the participants had ordered the animal I was excited by the sign of progress but also sorry for the animal that had been selected. The preparations were a bit premature that day, but the negotiations succeeded soon after. Twenty-two years of civil war—one of the longest conflicts in Africa—had ended. It happened, as it should have, on Colin’s watch.

  Unfortunately, the end of the civil war in the South came as another crisis in Sudan further deteriorated. In 2003, in a northwestern region of the country called Darfur, two loosely affiliated rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), had launched a series of attacks on government military posts. The rebels’ chief complaint was that the Muslimdominated central government had neglected and marginalized the region’s black African ethnic groups. The Sudanese government responded by mobilizing proxy militias called the Janjaweed, which carried out widespread and savage killing of civilians and wholesale destruction of villages. Those atrocities, which to date have displaced an estimated 1.9 million people and killed an estimated 450,000, threatened to undo the CPA. In March 2005 the UN Security Council voted unanimously to deploy 10,000 troops and more than 700 civilian police for an initial six-month period to help enforce the CPA in Sudan. The Council’s resolution also signaled that the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) would also reinforce efforts to foster peace in Darfur, though it notably eschewed language that would declare the atrocities there to be genocide.

  The term “genocide” is often used rather loosely and synonymously with mass violence against a people. In international law, though, it has a precise definition, which comprises two components codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. One is the mental element, the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The second is the physical element, which includes five specific acts outlined in the convention. To call atrocities genocide, both legal elements must be fulfilled.

  American slavery, as awful as it was, would not, for instance, qualify as genocide, though hundreds of thousands of Africans died as a result of the American slave trade as well as at the hands of white American slave owners. The Holocaust, on the other hand, was clearly genocide, because at a certain point Nazi Germany’s extermination policy became intentional.

  Because genocide is a powerful term, Colin appointed a group of specialists to assess the case in Darfur. When they returned with a finding of genocide, the situation in Darfur took on new urgency. U.S. policy shifted from implementation of the CPA to include trying to save the people of Darfur.

  It was for that reason that I traveled to Sudan and Darfur. The beauty of Sudan is striking. Khartoum sits at the intersection of the two tributaries that compose the Nile River and is thus lush despite being largely desert. My visit began with a meeting with John Garang de Mabior, the man who had led the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army long enough and well enough to achieve an end to the violence against his people in 2005. Garang was a huge man, well over six feet tall, with skin color so black that it appeared almost blue. He looked a bit out of place in the palace in Khartoum, where he now sat as vice president in accordance with the CPA, which appointed a southerner to the second-ranking post. He was a man of the bush and of armed struggle, yet he was prepared to try to lead his people as a politician. He was warm and charismatic and deeply grateful for what the United States had done for the people of Sudan. His death in a helicopter crash in late July, only six months after the signing of the CPA, left the South without one of its seminal leaders and made the process of ending the Darfur tragedy and finding justice for the Sudanese people a much harder task.

  After meeting Garang we entered the Presidential Palace to meet with the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. In March the UN Security Council had referred the situation in Darfur to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. U.S. support for the action had been a source of intense debate within the administration since the United States is not a state party to the treaty. Though his administration had signed it, President Clinton did not recommend the treaty to the Senate and advised his successor to do the same until the United States’ concerns were fully addressed. President Bush strongly opposed the ICC on the grounds, among others, that its prosecutor is not accountable to any government. For us this was an issue of sovereignty and a step that looked a bit too much like “world government.”

  Yet when the genocide issue of Darfur reached the Security Council, I did not want the United States to let the perpetrators off the hook just to make an ideological point about the construction of the court or the Rome statute. After much back-and-forth and strong dissent from John Bolton, I talked to the President and we agreed that the United States would abstain from voting on, not veto, the resolution. Darfur was referred to the ICC on March 31, 2005.

  So I was about to meet the man who had overseen the genocide in Darfur and who would later be indicted by the International Criminal Court for three counts of genocide, five crimes against humanity, and two counts of murder. Jendayi Frazer, our assistant secretary of state for African affairs, had warned me that Bashir spoke English but retreated into Arabic when he wanted to be difficult. As I shook his hand, reminding myself not to smile, I looked behind me and noticed that with the exception of my personal assistant, Liz Lineberry, and my personal security detail, I was alone in the room. Bashir’s security thugs had held up my delegation, including the ambassador. I was furious and refused to talk to Bashir until my delegation assembled. So we just sat there staring at each other. I loathed him, and I’m sure he felt the same about me.

  Finally Sudanese security men dressed in dark suits and wearing sunglasses burst through the doors, shoving my aides along in front of them. I took a deep breath and delivered the message that we expected the Sudanese government to stop the violence against civilians and cooperate with the United Nations, but I could barely concentrate on what I was saying. Bashir spoke slowly, moving his head back and forth, from side to side. He looked as though he was on drugs. It was a truly weird scene.

  A few minutes later the American press was shoved through the door, where a scuffle ensued but outside of my line of vision. When I got onto the plane, I learned that my press corps had been roughed up. Andrea Mitchell had been manhandled and pulled out of the room when she asked Bashir a question. I got the U.S. ambassador on the phone and told him to go back to Bashir and tell him to apologize or he’d never see me again nor any other U.S. diplomat. He’d just made the U.S. secretary of state his enemy, and that couldn’t be good for him. By the time we landed, the Sudanese foreign minister had apologized.

  But that was only one strange experience. As I left Darfur, I was expected to see the wali, or governor, of the province of Darfur. My visit to a refugee camp wouldn’t leave time for a meeting, though. And frankly, this wali was such a bad guy that we didn’t want to legitimize him. Anyway, as I headed toward the plane I encountered commotion and confusion. Mike Evanoff, the head of my security detail, came over and said that the wali was insisting that
we meet in a reception room inside the airport.

  “Okay,” I said, “it will only take a minute.”

  “But we haven’t swept that room,” Mike pleaded.

  “Well, I’ll have to take my chances,” I said.

  We walked into the room and confronted a bizarre gathering of at least fifty men in white robes yelling “Allahu akbar!” at the top of their lungs and banging long walking sticks on the floor. The noise was deafening, and Mike was tightening up beside me. “Just keep walking,” I said. He drew closer to me, so close that I was finding it hard to move. The wali came over, and we sat down side by side. “I have gifts for you,” he said through a translator. There on the floor were boxes too numerous to count. Mike must have been thinking that one of them had to be a bomb. I finished the encounter as quickly as I could and headed for my motorcade. We’d avoided a diplomatic incident, but not without some risk.

  Nothing had prepared me, though, for the most disturbing scenes of my trip to Sudan. After I arrived in Darfur, we boarded the motorcade and started out into the dusty desert of Darfur to the location of the Abu Shouk refugee camp. As we approached, there were children lining the road holding huge homemade signs that said “Welcome, Secretary Rice.” “Hello Miss Condi.” “Thank you America.” Soon we were at the camp, and as I got out of the car, kids came from all directions trying to touch me and hug me. There were so many of them. I reached out to a few and then walked toward a makeshift meeting tent. On one side was a “kindergarten” with three- and four-year-olds happily playing in the dirt as relief workers acting as teachers led the older kids through their lessons. All I could think was, My God, I pray that these kids won’t grow up here.

  We walked past a group of women learning to make pasta noodles in the hope that they could export them. But the flies that covered the food suggested that it would fail to pass even minimal food safety inspection. I didn’t say anything; I just joined everyone else in marveling at the workers’ industriousness.

  Then at last I was led into a tent with a few women relief workers and about ten female victims of rape. Each woman tried to tell her story, slowly, deliberately, stopping to gather her thoughts and then plunging ahead. A few finished, but most did not. “I went to get some water one morning, and some soldiers came up to me on the road,” one victim began. “They pulled me by my hair for a long time. I kept begging them to stop. They threw me into a tent.” She stopped. She didn’t have to say more about what had happened. The relief worker got up and put her arm around the woman, who started to sob.

  I have never, ever felt raw emotion and pain like that, and I didn’t know what to say to them. Everything that might come out of my mouth seemed either irrelevant or unresponsive to their grief. Finally, I just said, “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”

  I left Darfur so incredibly sad, full of regret, and deeply offended by what I had seen. How could the so-called international community tolerate that kind of misery and barbarity? I reminded myself of the United States’ long heritage of compassion, of providing AIDS relief and food assistance and caring for refugees. As I got into the car, I turned to the USAID administrator, Andrew Natsios, and asked what we could do to help the women. A religious man, Andrew has served the world’s dispossessed for most of his professional life. In 2006, he served as U.S. special envoy for Sudan and was later succeeded by Richard Williamson. Andrew quickly put into place a unique multi-pronged program to address sexual violence in Darfur. One of its most important contributions was that it overturned the notion that adjudication of such cases could happen only after a conflict ended. With a few convictions (including a police officer and a military officer) the program was able to help survivors combat impunity at the community level. After experiencing the tragedy and circumstances of Darfur, my respect for those angels of mercy—relief workers in the hardest of circumstances—grew. It was important to honor their sacrifices and to do my best to help them in their work.

  Those efforts included combating sexual violence on a global scale. As I left Darfur I reflected on whether we could do more to punish those who violated people in this way since, at the time, the international community had not criminalized rape as a weapon of warfare. My initial efforts included developing the Women Leaders’ Working Group. On September 23, 2006, I invited some nineteen women leaders (including the president of Liberia) for the group’s inaugural breakfast meeting. I created the group to promote women’s empowerment and to address issues of great importance to women: education, political and economic development, and access to justice. By the time of the last meeting in September 2008, the group had grown to nearly sixty.

  Ambassador Shirin Tahir-Kheli spearheaded the effort to highlight issues of justice and the empowerment of women. Shirin had been with me at the National Security Council, where she had worked with the First Lady’s staff to commission a state-of-the-art children’s hospital in Basra. Childhood mortality rates in southern Iraq had been persistently higher than in other countries, with cancer rates among children estimated to be eight to ten times higher in Iraq than those in the West. The planned facility in Basra, which would provide much-needed oncology, medical, and surgical care to thousands of children, would become the first new hospital to be constructed in Iraq since the 1980s. Laura Bush and I became the hospital’s sponsors, drawing support from numerous nongovernmental organizations such as Project HOPE and individual and corporate donors organized by the Kuwaiti Embassy in Washington. With the support of the State Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Basra Children’s Hospital opened its doors in 2010, reflecting not only the successful leadership of the burgeoning Iraqi Ministry of Health but also the commitment of Iraqi nurses, doctors, and medical professionals who fill its halls.

  Shirin and I shared a view that efforts of this kind were the best form of diplomatic outreach, reflecting the compassion of the United States. And in championing the empowerment of women we were also building a powerful tool against poverty and injustice. If you want to do something about overpopulation, educate women and they will be less likely to have their first child at twelve or give birth to ten offspring. If you want to do something about human trafficking, educate women and they will be less likely to end up in brothels in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and—yes—even the United States. If you want to do something about poverty, give women a microloan and they can build small enterprises in their villages that will employ people and spread prosperity. Societies that treat women badly are dangerous societies. The empowerment of women is not only morally right, it is also practical in the positive impact it has on so many social ills.

  The most dramatic cases of injustice toward women related, as in Darfur, to those caught up in conflict and war. In time, the women foreign ministers confronted the United Nations and the world with the view that rape was being used as a weapon of war; it was not just a consequence of it. It is a deliberate strategy to humiliate adversaries who cannot protect their women from degradation. Alarmingly, it isn’t always rebels or soldiers who commit rape; many UN peacekeepers had been accused of the same thing. Before our efforts the United Nations had been slow to shine a light on its own transgressions.

  The work culminated on June 19, 2008, when I chaired a Security Council thematic discussion on sexual violence during armed conflicts, and I used the U.S. presidency of the Security Council to pass Resolution 1820. The resolution declared rape a weapon of war, criminalizing sexual violence in warfare and making the acts punishable under war crimes statutes.

  Finally, my experience in Darfur gave me a renewed appreciation of the role the United States has played in advocating on behalf of and resettling refugees caught in the horrors of war and conflict. George Washington promised that “the bosom of America is open to receive … the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.” And it has, assisting in the resettlement of tens of thousands of refugees each year.

  For instance, after the President determines how many thousands of refugees the Un
ited States will admit the following year, the secretary of state personally takes the President’s directive to Congress and reports on the number of refugees the administration expects to admit. When I first learned of the obligation, I couldn’t understand why, unlike many other tasks, this one could not also be delegated. But after my experience in Darfur I gladly and humbly went to work with longtime refugee proponents such as the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who advocated on behalf of displaced people for more than thirty years. I also came to appreciate the efforts of others in Congress such as Representatives Zoe Lofgren of California and Christopher Smith of New Jersey and of celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, who during my term served as the UN ambassador for refugee affairs. Like Bono on matters of Africa, Angelina brought not just celebrity to the cause but real knowledge and passion.

  Like almost everything else, September 11 had a significant impact on this issue. In order to more comprehensively pursue terrorists, the REAL ID Act of 2005 expanded the legal definition of terrorist organizations and barred admission to the United States to anyone who was found to have given material support to terrorist groups. Fortunately, the act permitted the secretary of state, in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security and the attorney general, to conclude that the material-support criterion does not apply to a certain person or group and to issue a waiver. I issued the first waver in May 2006 in order to admit Burmese Karen refugees living in the Tham Hin camp on the border of Thailand. The Karen are a religious and largely peaceful ethnic minority in Burma who have fought for independence from the country’s illegitimate government. They have been persecuted, slaughtered, and driven out of their homeland and into refugee camps on the border of Thailand. Given their past support for efforts against the oppressive military junta, many of the Karen had been denied U.S. immigration visas. Eventually the Karen people found their voice through various representatives in Congress. A few months after I issued the Karen waiver, I would announce that we planned to issue waivers to several other groups of refugees. I later heard the life stories of those who had been released from the squalid, miserable camps near Burma in order to start a new life in the United States, and I was proud of what we had done. It has left me to wonder, though, about the countless refugees around the world who are not as fortunate as to have powerful advocates within our system.