A long way from Capitol Hill

Africa | Former Senate majority leader finds suffering and war alive and well in Darfur, but signs of peace and reconciliation elsewhere in Africa | Priya Abraham

Former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, saw feisty debates during his 12 years on Capitol Hill. But the longtime heart surgeon never saw what confronted him on a medical mission to four African countries last month: a Kenyan tribesman with an arrow driven 7 inches into his skull. Frist operated to extract the intrusion, the result, the Kenyan said, of a land dispute.

The African mission may have been a long way from the Senate floor, but it was not absent political theater. During a three-week tour that took Frist to Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Sudan, he tried to visit President Omar Bashir of Sudan in Khartoum, but Bashir refused to see him. Frist is unpopular with the Sudanese government because he pushed a 2005 resolution as Senate majority leader that branded government violence in Darfur as genocide, he said. The conflict has displaced over 2 million Sudanese and killed 350,000.