We Need to Do Something About Darfur Now!

From The Independent (UK):

Rasha Ibrahim Adam and her children may be about to die - just as she thought they had all escaped to safety. . . .

She was one of the 50,000 people who swelled the scorched camps for the "internally displaced" in the past month - bringing to about 2.5 million the number of children, women and men now homeless in a conflict that has dragged on for three years without an end seemingly in sight. Until now, that is. Because an end is in sight for the Darfur camps - where at least 300,000 black African farmers have been slaughtered by the Khartoum government and its Arab proxies, the Janjaweed militia, whose name means "devils on horseback". . . .

The 7,000 troops of the African Union, who have been desperately trying to protect the camps, have been told by Khartoum they must leave Darfur at the end of this month when their mandate runs out. Sudan has defied a UN resolution that mandated an improved 20,000-strong blue-hatted UN force to take over.

Instead, it is sending 10,000 of its own troops to the region for what human rights observers fear will be a brutal "final solution".

In a situation already described by the UN as the "world's worst humanitarian disaster" the genocide so long denied by the Arab government in Khartoum may be about to happen.

Why aren't American media outlets covering this story? It pops up every few weeks, but there's no sustained coverage. Say what you want about George Clooney, but were it not for him, Americans might be ignoring this genocide entirely. And given the magnitude of the problem in the Sudan, you'd think we'd put at least as much diplomatic muscle behind this crisis as we did the conflict in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. (Don't get me wrong, the Middle East deserves our attention, but its problems are minor compared to those in Darfur.)

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