The United Nation’s recent evaluation of the violence being inflicted on Sudanese black Africans as “not genocide” casts light on the ambiguity of the global response to the atrocities occurring in Darfur. Though news of the turmoil between black Africans and Arabs in Darfur has emerged in various news headlines and has garnered the attention of human rights activists, public knowledge of the situation is murky at best. Nearly 2 million people have fled from their homes, and the death toll is nearing 350,000. Though discord has existed between the nomadic Arabs and the farmers of Darfur over land and grazing rights for years, this particular conflict began in early 2003 in a particularly arid and dry region as a civil war spearheaded by the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The Sudanese government admits to having initially sponsored “self-defense” militias in order to suppress the rebellion, but officially denies supporting the janjaweed militias that are responsible for the ethnic cleansing campaign that is currently taking place. Aside from the claim of non-involvement being highly suspect, the Sudanese government has yet to fulfill its repeated commitments to neutralize the janjaweed, which implies its tacit support.

The Sudanese government’s failure to address the conflict is a direct result of the lack of a strategic humanitarian seffort and effective global pressure on Khartoum to stop the campaign of ethnic cleansing. The UN’s recent decision only sustains Khartoum’s current state of impunity, allowing the janjaweed’s campaign of terror to persist.

Though the UN has identified this as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” its feeble assessment of the situation indicates an apparent reluctance to act. The UN defines genocide as state-sponsored systematic killing of a large number of people with the intent to exterminate a particular race or group of people. In this case, the UN has identified "genocidal intent" but does not actually recognize genocide, which is ambiguous and contradictory since the defining quality of genocide seems to be the intent with which the killings are executed. The UN seems to be focusing on Khartoum’s role in sponsoring the militia, but the fact that it is allowing these atrocities to be perpetrated without intervening effectively or requesting international help makes the government equally responsible. Defining the situation as genocide would legally obligate the UN to intervene. The UN’s unwillingness to do so seems to indicate a disinclination to act and comes across as an indifference to the human rights violations and suffering in Darfur.

Though the US has spoken out in opposition to the UN ruling, its active response to Darfur is similarly disappointing. The US Congress ruled in June that the attacks constituted genocide, but failed to take action. So on one hand, we have Colin Powell, on behalf of the US, saying that it is certainly genocide but that we're not going along with the military intervention that genocide would entail. On the other hand, we have the UN voting to say that its not genocide to justify their lack of intervention. If this was a contest in honestly communicating your stance to the world, I guess the UN would win by virtue of their open denial of genocide. But actually, there are no winners here. Only 350,000 losers.

February 9th marked the end of the Sudanese civil war with the signing of a peace agreement that will allow the South to secede after 6 years. Though this appears to provide some sort of respite for the displaced victims of Darfur, there is no guarantee of when the militias will be completely neutralized.

More significant is the length of time that it took the Sudanese government to take any kind of response and the complete lack of military intervention on the part of the US, UN, EU, and other global organizations. By allowing the conflict to run its full course and arrive at its own end, the outside world has let the atrocities in Darfur continue. However, in the interest of human rights, this lack of action constitutes an absolute failure on the part of the global community. Peace may have been made, but it happened without global support and after hundreds of burned villages and thousands of deaths that can never be reversed.