The crisis in Sudan is being described by the United Nations as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.

Under cover of a decades-long civil war that has taken two million Sudanese lives, government backed militias known as Janjaweed are engaging in campaigns to wipe out communities of African tribal farmers who live in Darfur. Villages are being razed, women and girls are systematically raped, children are being abducted and food and water supplies are being specifically targeted and destroyed.

The brutal violence and killings have resulted in about 335,000 deaths and the displacement of as many as two million Darfurians. Almost 2 million civilians have fled their homes due to the escalation of violence; many have crossed the border into Chad, but most are internally displaced within Darfur. The refugees and internally displaced people are in dire need of emergency health and sanitation assistance, access to clean water and nutritional supplements. According to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), without humanitarian intervention as many as 1 million civilians may die over the coming months. If this happens, the Janjaweed militias will be facilitating genocide by famine—letting nature do their dirty work.

Mukesh Kapila, the former United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, said on March 19, 2004 that the violence in Darfur is "more than a conflict, it's an organized attempt to do away with one set of people." In April, a report by the United Nations Inter-Agency Fact Finding and Rapid Assessment Mission cited that people of the Fur tribe have been imprisoned in settlements in the town of Kailek with no access to food, water, shelter or sanitation facilities. Eighty percent of the children under five years old were suffering from severe malnutrition, and many were dying each day.

On July 23, both houses of the U.S. Congress unanimously passed a resolution declaring the atrocities in Sudan a genocide, and called on the White House to take stronger action to achieve security, humanitarian assistance, and accountability.

On September 9, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the Government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility -- and that genocide may still be occurring." During the first presidential debate, on September 30, President Bush said, “”In terms of Darfur, I agree it's genocide. And Colin Powell so stated.” The United States, having ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, is legally obliged to stop genocide.

On October 8, as mandated by Security Council Resolution 1556, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan established an International Commission of Inquiry tasked with investigating violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in western Sudan’s Darfur region and determining whether acts of genocide have occurred. The five-member panel had three months to report on its findings.

The panel released their report this February 1, 2005. While they failed to conclude that the atrocities committed in Sudan constitute genocide, the report said that gross criminal atrocities have been and are happening in Darfur and strongly recommended that the UN Security Council refer Darfur to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of those responsible.

The United States has been actively hostile to the ICC for ulterior reasons, but recently abstained on a UN vote that will allow the ICC to begin prosecuting Janjaweed and Sudanese government officials for war crimes. For the latest news updates on Darfur, visit these sites:

www.savedarfur.org
www.genocideinterventionfund.org
www.standarfur.org

The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote that, “ The commonly cited number of 70,000 victims is a monstrous sugarcoating of reality: It leaves out deaths in areas not visited by aid workers, nearly all deaths from violence as opposed to malnutrition and all deaths before March.” Mr. Bush’s Better World 11/21/04