Posted on: Monday, July 26, 2004

EDITORIAL
Sudan: Will we permit yet another genocide?

Never again, we said. After the West's failure to prevent Rwanda's horrific genocide a decade ago, we now have the opportunity to act decisively to halt the systematic extermination of black tribal populations in the western Sudanese province of Darfur.

In visits to the Sudan three weeks ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan declared that genocide would not be tolerated, and they won promises from the Khartoum government to end the killing.

The promises are empty, and will continue to be empty until real pressure is brought to bear.

The Khartoum government continues to support, rather than suppress, raids by Janjaweed militias, irregular Arab fighters murderously bent on eliminating tribal blacks from Darfur.

In the face of this horror, the United Nations Security Council dithers. It's clear that the United Nations will be marginal to global security if it can't respond to clear catastrophes such as Darfur.

And where countries such as France had a point in the case of Iraq, it — along with Japan, Italy, Spain and Germany — is inexcusably tightfisted in the case of the Sudan.

If nations that frequently scold the United States for unilateralism want the United Nations to be taken seriously, they need to push the Security Council toward sanctions and major humanitarian intervention in Darfur — with great haste, as the situation darkens by the day.