Chris Smith: “I am pleased to rise in support of H. Res. 1588, of which I am the original cosponsor. Madam Speaker, we are all too…”

“I am pleased to rise in support of H. Res. 1588, of which I am the original cosponsor. Madam Speaker, we are all too familiar with the famous quote by the American philosopher George Santayana, who said, ``Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'' The truth of this saying is tragically realized in the case of war and genocide. General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the former United Nations mission in Rwanda, tried unsuccessfully in 1994 to warn the United Nations that huge massacres were imminent in that country. Even he miscalculated the magnitude of the threat. Within a few months, Rwanda was engulfed in genocide, leading to the deaths of nearly 800,000 people. Larry Eagleburger, a former ambassador to Yugoslavia who served as Deputy Secretary of State and then Secretary of State, never suspected that the hostilities in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina would escalate to the slaughter of more than 8,000 people that took place in Srebrenica in 1995. Sadly, we have too many indications about what could happen if the two referenda scheduled to take place in Sudan in January do not take place fairly and peacefully. The 20-year war between the north and the south of Sudan that ended in 1995 took the lives of over 2 million people and displaced a further 4 million.”