Handwringing over genocide.

• Author: Connell, Dan

As reports of gang rapes, bloody massacres, and village demolitions in Darfur, Sudan, flooded the news media this fall, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to characterize the carnage as "genocide." Both President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry echoed this indictment during the first of three Presidential debates. But what was most remarkable about these charges was not so much who was making them as how little impact they had on the unfolding disaster.

At least 70,000 civilians have been killed, 400 villages destroyed, and more than 1.5 million people displaced in a brutal campaign that has devastated Darfur over the past eighteen months, leading U.N. officials to term this "the world's worst humanitarian crisis."

Though large-scale attacks slowed over the summer after a parade of reporters, diplomats, and relief workers trooped through the area, acts of terror continue. Janjaweed militiamen are raping women and girls as they leave camps to collect firewood, says Dennis McNamara, a senior official in the U.N.'s Nairobi Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance. The U.N.'s special representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, told the Security Council in October that since August there has been "no systematic improvement of people's security and no progress on ending impunity."

In response, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan established a five-member commission to determine whether genocide is being committed. Headed by Antonio Cassese, an Italian judge who served as the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the commission includes members from Egypt, Pakistan, Ghana, and Peru. Its appearance signals a growing international outcry over this slaughter, muted for nearly a year as the bodies piled up, even as punitive action is delayed.

The Dutch foreign minister has raised the prospect of European Union sanctions on Sudan, while Britain, Australia, and New Zealand have offered to send peacekeepers. Congress has called the killing "genocide" and, on September 18, the Bush Administration shepherded a resolution threatening sanctions through the U.N. Security Council.

But for all the public handwringing, precious little action has resulted from any quarter beyond the dispatch of a few dozen African Union monitors to document the deteriorating situation. Nor is it likely to, apart from efforts to send more monitors and to accelerate a belated...