The genocide in Darfur has been going on for three years now. And, for three years, the international community hasn’t done much to stop it. It has threatened, but not enforced, sanctions. It has sent peacekeepers, but with insufficient numbers and a weak mandate. It has decried “crimes against humanity,” but charged no perpetrators. And so the violence continues, with more than 200,000 people killed, two million left homeless, and the conflict now spilling over into neighboring Chad. The Sudanese government, meanwhile, has not even pretended to disarm its murderous Janjaweed militias. In fact, President Omar Al Bashir recently declared the Janjaweed a fabrication. And he has had the audacity to press the United States to lift its eight-year trade embargo on his country. As U.N. Sudan envoy Jan Pronk put it, “The people on the ground are just laughing.”
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