# Posted 5:42 AM by Patrick Belton  

WHAT HE SAID: Writing in the Times about the genocide taking place this very moment in the Darfur region of Sudan, Nicholas Kristof correctly commented "Do we advise such refugees that 'never again' meant nothing more than that a Führer named Hitler will never again construct death camps in Germany?" He spoke correctly.

The government of Sudan is currently engaging in genocide against three of its country's black western tribes, the Reziegat, Salamat, and Ta'aisha. Women of those tribes are being systematically raped; roughly one thousand people are being killed each week; and with seven hundred thousand driven from their homes, Sudan's army is bombing the survivors.

The Pentagon is monitoring the situation closely, but with American might deployed already in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Haiti, America's military cannot be asked to be the only one to respond. The UN's response has been significant, but not enough - the Security Council has not addressed the issue by invoking Chapter VII, although UNHCR in cooperation with the government of Chad has done a great deal to alleviate the immediate human plight of refugees by establishing refugee camps far from the Sudanese border, where refugees in Chad were still being attacked by the Sudanese military. Still, the response by the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, was talmudic, and ridiculous: "I would say it is ethnic cleansing, but not genocide." Still worse, the human rights industry has kept its head equally in the sand: Amnesty International doesn't even mention the genocide in the Sudan on its front page, preferring as usual to pander to its donors with pieces criticizing the United States for the clearly equal crime of executing a dual murderer.

Our friend Zach Kaufman, and director of our think tank's Africa program, wrote in the New York Times recently that "One lesson that should be drawn is that if it is true that the current Sudan resembles 1994 Rwanda, then the United States government should join with others to initiate a humanitarian intervention, assist victims and hold perpetrators accountable. If not, our demands for and promises of 'never again!' will have failed yet again." While the United States cannot bear the sole principal role in counteracting this atrocity at a time when its divisions are already deployed to combating the inhumanity of Fallujah and the Taliban, the responsibility of the international community to make good on its promises of "never again" is clear. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion