STEVE INSKEEP, host:
And let's move north now to Sudan. In the last three days, members of a group called The Elders have been in Sudan. Yesterday, they traveled to the troubled Darfur region where the violence has left 200,000 people dead and even more homeless.
The group's chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, says the trip will enable them to speak on behalf of those whose voices have been muted, during what the United Nations calls the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.
NPR's Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports.
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: The Elders came to this remote town of Kabkabiya to listen and to learn.
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HUNTER-GAULT: But it didn't take long for them to realize that heavy government security was intimidating the very people whose grievances they wanted to hear. And when one of The Elders, former President Jimmy Carter, then insisted on seeing the top tribal elder, a heated exchange between him and the security official followed, causing tensions all around, especially among Carter's Secret Service.
Carter vowed to report the matter to the country's president, but later said the situation wasn't a surprise.
President JIMMY CARTER: I decided that I wanted to see the village chief and the security agent had his strict orders to comply with the agenda that we had worked out ahead of time, the schedule. He was not authorized to that - our entire big entourage, about 50 people, go wandering around in the village in an unanticipated way. So in order to compensate for his restraints, he helped us get the village chief to come and meet with us instead of going to the village chief's house.
HUNTER-GAULT: But billionaire Richard Branson, who's traveling with the elders and is helping fund their mission, put the confrontation in a different light.
Sir RICHARD BRANSON (Entrepreneur; Chairman, Virgin Group): He is a diplomat and, you know, but the truth is that the night before we came, people were taken aside. They were threatened if they talk to us and the only people who were put up to talk to us were the government officials. And I think this government need to realize that's not the way to treat people who are coming up to elections, if it's going to be, you know, go from military state to a democratic state that's the terrible message to send out and they shouldn't have anything to be afraid of. They should let people speak freely.
HUNTER-GAULT: Branson told of villagers who had surreptitiously slipped notes into his and another funder's pocket. It contained a list of grievances, including violence against the uprooted villagers, including the one-page note about a rape a few days earlier of a 10-year-old girl.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
HUNTER-GAULT: Despite the heavy security presence, Nelson Mandela's wife, Graca Machel, a co-founder with him of the Elders, managed to talk with a small cluster of women wrapped in colorful but well-worn togs. Although they spoke in a language Machel didn't understand, their graphic gestures spoke volumes about the brutalizing rapes many of them had suffered.
Ms. GRACA MACHEL (Former President Nelson Mandela's Wife): The major problem here is security. When they go out to look for firewood, they are raped. They are beaten. And I said, what about if we suggest to the African Union to organize in groups to protect you, to take you - them to get firewood outside. They said, no, African Union cannot do anything. They don't protect you even in the presence of them. They don't protect us.
HUNTER-GAULT: Security remains a large concern. The African Union force of 7,000 troops isn't enough to protect the displaced from a rotting Janjaweed militia or from warring rebel factions.
The AU forces have been woefully under-equipped. A well-organized rebel attack against an AU outpost killed 10 African Union personnel over the weekend and left dozens of troops missing in the worst attack on the fort since it was deployed. It took 18 hours for help to arrive for six others gravely wounded because the AU had no helicopters of its own, and the civilian pilot refused to land in the volatile area.
A new hybrid United Nations-African Union force of some 26,000 is due to buttress the outgunned and outnumbered AU troops. But the force is not yet been put together.
General Rodolfo Adado(ph), who heads the AU military mission, says they are needed now. And the elders agree with Archbishop Desmond Tutu saying the world should come to the table and act to resolve the crisis in Darfur.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, NPR News, Darfur, Sudan.
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INSKEEP: Charlayne Hunter-Gault was invited to travel as a journalist with the Elders in Sudan. And by way of full disclosure, we should mention that she is also a trustee, by the way, for the Carter Center. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
