Guest column: Rep. Steve Chabot

The crisis playing out in Darfur is one of the greatest human tragedies of our time. More than 200,000 innocent people have been murdered and nearly 2.5 million have been driven from their villages and separated from their families.

As a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I recently traveled to Darfur to assess the extent of the crisis and the role that the United States is playing in alleviating it. I was accompanied on this fact-finding mission by two other members of Congress, Reps. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) and Adrian Smith (R-Neb.).

From the capital city of Khartoum, we traveled aboard a humanitarian flight to Abu Shouk, a refugee camp in northern Darfur. Abu Shouk is one of the largest refugee camps in Sudan, accommodating more than 54,000 displaced persons. There, we heard personal accounts of the brutality and violence suffered by these innocent people.

Read the full column by Congressman Chabot at the Cincinnati Enquirer