Darfur: Shame and Responsibility

Two and a half years after major conflict began in the Darfur province of far western Sudan, it is perversely clear how the future history of this tortured region will be written. Any meaningful account will be guided by a chronology that includes readily discernible signposts of genocidal destruction, beginning in spring 2003; various occasions for empty international condemnation of accelerating ethnically targeted destruction of non-Arab, or "African," tribal populations throughout Darfur; the numerous, belated stages in an inadequate humanitarian response to rapidly growing concentrations of vulnerable civilian victims; serial failures by the UN and Western democracies to confront Khartoum's génocidaires; and desperately expedient reliance upon a glib notion of "African solutions for African problems.