Kendrick Meek Quotes

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

The U.N. was there to protect other Rwandese.

As a Jew I cannot sit idle while genocidal atrocities continue to unfold in Darfur, Sudan.

What is most needed in Darfur is an international peacekeeping and protection presence, and this is what the Sudanese government most wants to avoid.

If the president of the United States says that attacks on civilians, starvation, and denial of religious freedom in Sudan are important international issues, they become so.

We can make a difference. We can save lives. We can stop the genocide.

I think it's appropriate for the international community in situations like this to intervene in Kosovo. I am in favor of an intervention. On some level, you have to say that at least somebody is doing something.

The security agencies are prosecuting the government’s war in Darfur.

The international community could not muster the resources or the will to come to the Rwanda’s aid.

I don’t like genocide, but I would not commit our troops [to stop it.]

The Americans are out, and as far as I’m concerned, in Rwanda, that ought to be the end of it.

If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.

The Coalition for International Justice estimated that 450,000 people in Darfur have died since the deadly genocide began some three years ago.

Our campaign is powered by college students who are not about to let the first genocide of the 21st century happen on their watch.

When human rights are systematically abused, it raises the question whether it may be legitimate in some circumstances for the international community to intervene within individual states as well as in conflicts between states.

I think the international community should unite to fight such inhuman phenomena as terror attacks and the murder of totally innocent people.

For President Clinton, according to this discussion I had with him, Rwanda was a marginal problem.

Finally, I am encouraged to note that the Security Council issued a statement today expressing its concern about the massive humanitarian crisis in Darfur and calling on all parties to the conflict to protect civilians and reach a ceasefire.

If there's a clear genocide somewhere, don't we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn't that what we're all about? Isn't that what we've always been about?

We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur.

So I've gone in and out of the U.N., working on counter-terrorism, on U.N. reform, on peacekeeping, peace and security issues, many things through the years but always with a strong interest in humanitarian issues, and human rights issues as well.

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.

If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.

Secondly, the Government of Sudan should commit to the disarmament and control of the Janjaweed militia and ensure that the targeting of civilians ceases immediately.

The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.