Only ten years after the Rwandan genocide, history threatens to repeat itself in the little known region of Darfur in Western Sudan. Since early 2003, government-supported militia known as the janjawid have raped, killed and pillaged, leaving villages devastated and thousands dead in their wake.

As the janjawid have attacked by land, the Sudanese army has conducted air raids on Darfurian civilian centers. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has warned that the funds supporting relief efforts in Sudan have been exhausted. The region is in dire need of emergency assistance to counter acute shortfalls in food, shelter, clean water and health care.

The latest figures from OCHA have placed the number of internally displaced persons at a staggering 1 million people. In addition, more than one 100,000 have fled to neighboring Chad via the country's eastern border. A ceasefire agreement signed between Darfurian rebels and the Sudanese government in April 2004 has already been broken.

International relief agencies have not been allowed easy access to government-controlled areas in Darfur. While neglecting to provide aid to their own people, Khartoum obstructed international relief services to the citizens of Darfur for months. The government and the

predominantly Arabic janjawid militia now stand accused of methodically wiping

out villages inhabited by people of black origin.

Darfurian refugees say that government-sponsored militia will kill black peoples indiscriminately – armed rebel and innocent civilian alike. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) has cautiously termed these and other statements "serious allegations of a troubling nature." Further, the commission has adopted an undemonstrative resolution that expresses mere concern about the atrocities being committed in the region, recommending among other things that the Sudanese government disband the janjawid, allow humanitarian workers access to the region, promote the rule of law, ensure that refugees and displaced persons return home and ensure that such abuses do not happen again.

Despite the obvious indicators, the resolution does not condemn the mass killings as genocide, nor does it propose any kind of external action to preempt further killings. The United States has registered its dissent by voting against the resolution, citing the commission's failure to condemn what it has termed "ethnic cleansing" conducted by pro-government forces. According to Amnesty International, the commission has responded inadequately to, "a situation that is at the point of spiraling into a full-fledged human rights catastrophe [showing] itself incapable of taking strong and decisive action on [the] humanitarian crisis."

Estimates suggest that more than 1,000 lives are lost in Darfur every week; it is also believed that the lives of more than half of the region's 6 million residents have been disrupted. That the United Nations has maintained a passive stance towards Darfur despite the yearlong carnage is indefensible, especially given the lessons learned from the Rwanda genocide.

Ten years ago, in a situation much like the one evolving in Darfur, the world stood by and looked on as 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were brutally murdered. We have all heard it said that those who forget their past are destined to repeat it. The kind of human tragedy that devastated Rwanda just one decade ago cannot and must not be tolerated a second time round. The red flag has been out for months; Western Sudan is fast deteriorating into a

humanitarian crisis of gargantuan proportions. The time to act is now.

The Refugee Consortium of Kenya, a human rights organization that advocates for refugee protection through legal reform, policy development, civic education and research, applauds the efforts of the few multilateral donors and humanitarian organizations who, despite political resistance and dwindling resources, have provided emergency relief to the Darfurian people. The consortium commends the efforts that have been made to create a lasting peace in the context of the Nairobi Peace Talks.

Nevertheless, the Refugee Consortium of Kenya condemns the Sudanese government for sanctioning ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region, and in so doing, grossly violating international principles of human rights and committing crimes against humanity. It denounces the passive resolution tabled by the UNHCHR and adopted by member States, which fails to propose any definitive action to resolve the situation in Darfur before it degenerates into a complete humanitarian crisis. It reproves the international community for failing to respond rapidly to the State-sanctioned mass murders in Darfur. It questions the United Nations commitment to upholding global standards of human rights and protecting the sanctity of human life. It questions the role of the Sudan Peace Talks being held in Kenya under the

auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in addressing

Western Sudan (Darfur).

As such, RCK calls on:

* Member States to publicly censure the Sudanese Government for sanctioning genocide in Darfur, and to effect economic and political sanctions against Khartoum.

* Members States to actively petition the United Nations to take decisive action towards resolving the crisis in Darfur through political, economic and/or military intervention.

* Member States to continue to fund humanitarian relief efforts in Darfur.

* The United Nations to take decisive action towards resolving the crisis in Darfur through political, economic and/or military intervention.

* The United Nations and international humanitarian agencies to work together to breach the boundaries constructed by the Sudanese Government against the provision of humanitarian relief services to the Darfurian people.

* The UNHCHR to strongly condemn the mass killings in Darfur as genocide, to denounce the Sudanese Government for actions that are in gross violation of international standards of human rights and to seek to prosecute Sudanese government officials for crimes against humanity.

* IGAD to challenge the Sudanese Government's commitment to a lasting peace in Sudan given its sanctioning of the violence in Darfur, and to put pressure on the Sudanese leadership to address the situation in Darfur in honesty and transparency with a view to rapidly bringing an end to the carnage.

The genocide being committed by Sudanese Arabs against their black African brothers and sisters has reached unacceptable proportion. "At what point do we ask the uncomfortable question, why does the U.S. seem to consider it acceptable for such genocidal acts to occur in Africa?" It was a rhetorical question, posed by Africa Action Executive Director Salih Booker on April 7 as the world marked the tenth anniversary of the genocide that left at least 800,000 Rwandans dead. Two week’s later, President George Bush answered Booker’s question in the usual manner: the United States has more pressing business at hand than ending a genocide in progress, this time in the western region of Sudan.

While U.S. diplomats feigned outrage at the U.N. Human Rights Commission's weak response (“grave concern”) to massive ethnic cleansing of Black Africans in Darfur – the committee could not bring itself to even whisper the terms “rape” or “forced removals” – Bush last week vouched for the Khartoum government’s good faith in ending a much longer campaign of genocide against Blacks. As Newsweek reported: President George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan's other civil war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president had withheld his signature, he could have

unleashed severe economic sanctions against Khartoum.

But a southern peace framework seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. "It's frustrating," says a senior State Department official, "but given all the progress, we couldn't say they weren't cooperating." What tantalizes the United States is Sudanese oil reserves, which are at issue in negotiations between non-Muslim Black southerners and the Arabized rulers in Khartoum. American and European companies are anxious to return to their operations in the oil-rich Abyei region, abandoned during the North-South war that claimed 2 million lives. Stability in Abyei weighs far more heavily than the lives of 1 million Blacks in oil-poor Darfur, victims of Khartoum’s “strategy of ethnic-based murder, rape and forcible displacement,” according to a Human Rights Watch report.

In a Euro-American dominated world, Sudan’s rulers are permitted to launch a second genocidal race war, so long as they allow oil to flow from the scene of the first holocaust.

Judy Wakahiu is director of the Refugee Consortium of Kenya.