Bermuda : on de Rock

Editor's note: NBC's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell was involved in an "incident" this morning in Sudan, as she tried to ask a question during a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir. She recounted it to this blog editor while on the phone from Darfur in western Sudan.

'There is no freedom of the press here'

Andrea Mitchell, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent

Things were not going well from the minute that Secretary Condoleezza Rice arrived in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Her motorcade got separated and her personal advisor, Jim Wilkinson, got slammed against a wall while he tried to bull his way into the meeting. They blocked all the other State Department officials from even attending this meeting between Rice and the president of Sudan. In fact, for the first six or seven minutes of this meeting, Rice and President el-Bashir couldn't talk because the Arabic translator was prevented from getting in. None of the other top officials ever got into the meeting, including U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew Natsios. So already there were apologies from Sudanese officials to U.S. officials. Things were not going well. And at that point, there were already problems over which reporters could go in and whether the American press corps could be part of a Sudanese press pool covering the photo opportunity. The State Department officials were insistent that the Americans be represented, as had previously been agreed to. Sudanese officials wanted to only let a camera in, but not permit any writers from newspapers or television. At one point, Sean McCormack, the assistant secretary for public affairs, said to his Sudanese counterpart, "I'll convey your desires about not permitting reporters to ask questions, but that's all I'll do. We have a free press." And his counterpart said, "There is no freedom of the press here." Which kind of told the whole story.

So by the time we finally did get in, there were Sudanese officials saying, "Don't ask any questions," and American officials saying, "No agreements. No deals." And we went in, and I asked President el-Bashir why, in essence, anyone should believe his promises when his government has said repeatedly that it will stop the violence and then it continues to support the militias that are doing the killing. At which point two guys came up behind me, two of his armed security guards, and grabbed me from behind and started pulling me out the door. I tried to keep my balance so that I didn't go down. And they shoved me out the door. Rice was furious and came back as soon as we got to the airport to leave for the refugee camp. She said she was very sorry that it happened and that she had demanded an apology from the Sudanese government. Within the hour, before we landed in northern Sudan, she received a call from the foreign minister apologizing. It was the third apology from the Sudanese that day. But two of them preceded the incident, which made everyone in the American delegation think that they weren't worth very much, the apologies. One of the comments from Wilkinson was that Diplomacy 101 says you don't mistreat your guests, especially not when you're trying to get them to restore Sudan's status, remove sanctions and take the country off the terror list.

All of this pales, obviously, in the context of why we're here, why Secretary Rice even came to Sudan, which is to try and do something about the horrendous killings, which the U.S. and Rice again yesterday called genocide... the displacement of two million people over the last two years, the burning of villages, the looting of livestock (which is the only means the Sudanese people have to survive). Rice is trying to focus, in this delicate balance, on the possibility for improvement, but many of the players are the bad guys who carried out these policies in the past, including President Omar el-Bashir, my new best friend.