An African Union soldier stands guard in the village of Gos Beina during an AU patrol south of the town of al-Fasher in Darfur, June 2006. Fresh fighting has flared in the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur after government forces and an allied militia launched an attack on a rebel group, denting a fragile May peace deal.(AFP/File/Charles Onians)

More than two years ago, on the Chad-Sudan border, I came across an oasis where 30,000 people from Darfur had taken refuge. There was no international aid available in that remote spot, so they were huddled under trees, shell-shocked, trying to keep their children alive.

I went tree to tree and began interviewing. Under the first tree, I found two brothers. One had been shot in the neck and in the jaw — his jaw was mostly gone — and left for dead in a pile of corpses that included his parents. His brother, shot only in the foot, had managed to escape and had returned at night to bury his parents. But then he found his brother was still alive, so he left his parents’ corpses and carried his brother — traveling only at night for safety — on his back for 49 days to this oasis.

Under the next tree was a woman whose parents had been shot and then thrown into the village well to poison it. The Janjaweed, an armed Arab militia, tracked down the rest of her family several weeks later and shot her husband in front of her. She had managed to escape with her three small children and was trying to soothe their nightmares.

Under the third tree were two little orphans: a 4-year-old girl carrying her 1-year-old brother on her back. The Janjaweed, before their eyes, had killed their parents. Now they had only each other.

Under the fourth tree was Zahra, a woman whose husband had been murdered in front of her. Her two small children were grabbed from her and killed, and she and her two sisters were kidnapped and gang-raped over the next three days. Finally, one sister was shot dead, and the other had her throat cut. Zahra was merely mutilated on the leg to stigmatize her forever as a rape victim, and then left naked in the desert to find her tribe.

Those were the people under only the first four trees I visited. There were trees in every direction, and several tens of thousands of people with stories just like these, stories just as anguished and heartbreaking. That was the moment I fully realized that what was unfolding in Darfur was not just one more tragedy in a world full of them, but a genocide on a substantial scale — and a challenge to us all.

It fits neatly into the historical pattern. In 1915, Armenians were being slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks, and president Woodrow Wilson did not want to get involved. In the Holocaust, President Franklin Roosevelt rejected pleas to try to bomb the rail lines leading to death camps. During the Rwandan crisis, the Clinton administration refused to use the word “genocide” for fear that then it might have to do something. And over the last few years, President George W. Bush has dithered as several hundred thousand people have been killed in Darfur. What we have is a bipartisan and consistent record of inhumanity.

“Never again” becomes more of the same

When I first began to write about Darfur in early 2004, it was a bit before the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. It infuriated me to have somber memorials for the victims of Rwanda without ever mentioning Darfur. We always say “never again” but then define “again” so narrowly that it applies only to German National Socialists named Hitler.

Likewise, since I am part Armenian, I was asked in 2005 to join in the 90th-anniversary commemorations for the victims of Armenian genocide. But what Armenians should have been doing was spending less time remembering atrocities in 1915 and more time trying to stop similar atrocities today. (More recently, they have been doing just that.)

The best way to honor victims of past genocide isn’t to build museums or hold memorials — or even to read indignant articles like this one — but to stop the next genocide from happening. And that’s why we are being tested in Darfur.

The origins of violence in Darfur

What happened in Darfur? Let me back up a moment and explain.

Darfur is the far western region of the African nation of Sudan. It is mostly Muslim but divided between Arab and non-Arab tribes. That distinction is overlaid by a racial distinction, for some Arabs have lighter complexions than the people in the non-Arab tribes, who are completely black. And there’s also the traditional tension between herders and farmers, for the Arabs tend to be nomadic herdsmen while the non-Arabs are mostly settled farmers.

These tensions have been exacerbated by competition for forage and water, the spread of the Sahara Desert and rising Arab nationalism. The Arab government of Sudan has sided firmly with the Arab tribes of Darfur against the non-Arab tribes. Three black African tribes in particular were increasingly pressured and made the subject of violent raids: the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa.

In early 2003, those three tribes banded together and launched an incipient rebellion to demand better treatment and an end to the violence against them. But the Sudanese government went nuts with the rebellion. Sudan decided that the simplest counter-insurgency method was to depopulate rural Darfur of those tribes by using the Janjaweed militia. The government chose as head of the Janjaweed an Arab leader who has been quoted as having expressed gratitude for “the necessary weapons and ammunition to exterminate the African tribes in Darfur.”

It’s eerie now to travel in Darfur — you pass village after village that has been burned out and empty. It’s strange as a reporter, because when I see someone, my instinct is to run. And the other person’s instinct is to run. It makes interviews rather difficult.

The Sudanese government claims that the killing in Darfur, while tragic, is the result of tribal clashes and that the government is not to blame. It’s much the same argument Turkey made about the slaughter of Armenians, and it’s equally ludicrous. The Janjaweed was formed by the Sudanese government, which also paid its salaries. The Janjaweed wear Sudanese military uniforms, and the Sudanese army defers to it.

In November 2005, when I was in Darfur driving back from a massacre site on the Kalma-Nyala highway, there were lots of soldiers about — indeed, one soldier had jumped into my car. We passed a convoy of Janjaweed, the same people who had just massacred children in the village I had left. The Sudanese military paid no attention, and didn’t stop them at checkpoints. In contrast, I was stopped and grilled at every checkpoint.

Scariest of all, the Sudanese government thugs tried to detain my interpreter at one checkpoint. He was from the Fur tribe, so they told me to go on and leave him behind “for investigation.” He was terrified, fearing he would be shot the moment I left. I refused to go, and then they detained me as well. Frankly, if the Sudanese government simply applied the same restrictions to the Janjaweed that they do to foreign journalists, the genocide would be over in a moment.

The question of genocide

Is this genocide? Some are skeptical, because they say there’s no effort to exterminate every last member of the African tribes. And that’s true — in Darfur, men and boys are mostly killed, and young women are frequently raped, but small children and old people are often left alone. The Janjaweed often can’t be bothered to kill them.

Although we associate genocide with extermination, in fact that’s not a requirement. The 1948 genocide convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”

There’s no doubt that is exactly what is happening in Darfur.

Why care about Darfur?

A larger question I’ve wrestled with is why this should be such a priority. Frankly, the number killed in Darfur so far is relatively modest — maybe 300,000 or 400,000 at this writing, and it has taken several years to kill that many. In contrast, somewhere between 1 million and 3 million people die of malaria each year, so the death toll from Darfur is easily within the margin of error of Africans who die of malaria each year. And a mother whose child dies of malaria is just as inconsolable as one whose child is heaved on a bonfire.

It may also be that we can get more bang for the buck by trying to save lives elsewhere. For example, if our sole calculus is trying to maximize the number of lives saved, we can probably do best by supporting vaccination initiatives in Africa, buying mosquito nets to fight malaria or establishing order in Congo — where more than 3 million people have died since 1998 in the most lethal conflict since World War II.

I’ve covered lots of nasty things in my career. I’ve held babies dying of malaria and malnutrition, and I’ve seen soldiers open fire on pro-democracy protesters. And yet what I see in Darfur evokes particular horror, precisely because it is genocide. When a government chooses people on the basis of their tribe or skin color, and kills or rapes them, that is an affront to all of us. It’s an insult to our humanity. And the way we assert our own humanity is to stand up to it.

So, granted, we should do more to save children dying of malaria. We should do much more to stop the heartbreak in Congo. But when children die there, they are in a sense dying because of mosquitoes, and somehow that is less of a breach of our common humanity than when children are speared on bayonets in Darfur. That’s why the gas chambers evoke particular horror, even though 6 million is not in itself such a vast number — the number killed by malaria in about three years — and why it’s particularly incumbent on us to stand up to it.

When inertia becomes deadly

What is truly astonishing is how little we do respond. President Bush, like past presidents, initially mostly looked the other way. He supplied substantial amounts of relief aid to keep people alive, but did very little to stop the killing itself. That relief is hugely important, but it remains deeply unsatisfying.

One Western woman aid worker told me about visiting an area where the Janjaweed were still in control, and she met two African sisters who were obviously traumatized. Finally, this aid worker managed to talk to them on their own. They told how the Janjaweed soldiers had burst into their home and forced them all to become their servants, cooking for them, fetching water for them and sleeping with them. Finally, after many days of this, the father worked up his courage and knelt before the commander and begged him to please let his daughters go. The commander laughed and summoned the daughters — and then cut off the father’s head in front of them.

This aid worker felt utterly helpless because this was happening in an area where the international community was present. These sisters didn’t need food or bandages, but a forceful response.

Why don’t we do more than provide aid? One reason, I think, is a failure on the part of the institution that I am part of: the news media. We in the media have an inconsistent record. We gave lots of coverage to the slaughter of Armenians, Biafrans and Bosnians, but very little to Cambodians or Jews. The New York Times published 24,000 front-page stories during the Holocaust, according to Laurel Leff’s book Buried By The Times. And of those front-page stories, six referred to the attacks on Jews by the Nazis.

Darfur has again been failed, particularly by television. Throughout all of 2005, CBS Evening News only gave two minutes of coverage to Darfur. In contrast, the three major American broadcast networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — gave an average of 28 minutes coverage to the Michael Jackson trial during 2005. I wish that the trial had been held in Darfur, so that genocide might have gotten some exposure.

Explaining America’s lack of action

My hunch is that the Bush administration has failed to respond more satisfactorily to Darfur for three reasons in particular.

First, President Bush was worried to some degree about upsetting the north-south agreement in Sudan, which ended a separate war in Sudan that cost 2 million lives. That was a legitimate concern, and it was magnified because the north-south agreement was a diplomatic triumph for the administration. But ultimately, Darfur ended up risking the north-south deal. The way to assure it is to stop genocide in Darfur, not pretend the genocide doesn’t exist.

The second reason is that Sudan has genuinely furnished important intelligence useful in the war on terrorism — and, awkwardly, the head of Sudan’s intelligence agency has also helped oversee the genocide in Darfur. Granted, our relationship with Sudan cannot be driven solely by humanitarianism, but it also cannot turn a blind eye to genocide.

Finally, perhaps the most important reason for the lack of firm action is that the White House just doesn’t know what to do. And that’s the same problem that presidents have always had in such episodes — there are no good solutions, so we end up doing nothing. In the case of Africa, the reluctance to engage is accentuated by memories of humanitarian intervention in Somalia that turned out disastrously, and a feeling that Africa is always a mess and that there’s nothing we can do to make it better.

This spring, public protests about Darfur increased around the United States, and — presumably in part as a response — the Bush administration became increasingly engaged with the issue. Bush pushed U.N. and European leaders to pay attention to Darfur, and talked about NATO taking action. Crucially, he also pushed hard to get a new peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the rebels in Darfur, and the result in early May was a tentative and fragile peace accord. It was a ray of hope — Sudan pledged to disarm the Janjaweed — and it led to more serious preparations for an eventual U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur. But there was also widespread skepticism because Sudan had broken so many promises before, and because two rebel factions did not sign on to the agreement. All that left the prospects quite uncertain and Darfur as tense as ever.

Shaming those who slaughter

History suggests that the West made a classic mistake by thinking that because it didn’t know just what to do, it shouldn’t even raise the issue. Indeed, one of the striking things about genocide is how ashamed governments are of it. The Nazis kept their extermination policy top-secret, and the Turks still keep their genocide a secret. Therefore, one of our obligations is to shine a spotlight on the slaughter and call attention to it.

In the case of Darfur, whenever we have done that, the level of killing has subsided to some degree. When the Asian tsunami came along in December 2004 and focused attention elsewhere, Sudan promptly stepped up the killing. One lesson from Darfur and other past genocides is simply the importance of making a fuss — and using photos and other intelligence — to embarrass the governments responsible. They do back off, to some degree.

Another lesson is the importance of using force. Today, in the shadow of Iraq, we tend to think of the limits of military intervention. But just a few years ago, we were absorbing the opposite lesson. For all the warnings of disaster, the Kosovo intervention went very well, and the Serbs backed off in the face of an air campaign. Much the same was true of the humanitarian intervention in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the offshore American presence in Liberia. The British presence in Sierra Leone and the international security force in Mozambique were all absolutely crucial to bringing hope to those countries, and the modest French force in Chad is one reason that Sudan has not yet invaded and extended its genocide to all of that country, though it has nibbled at the edges.

The danger is to get bogged down in all the policy measures that the White House could take — smart sanctions, photo-ops at the White House, a presidential envoy, a no-fly zone, consultations with Arabs and Europeans, and so on. All those are important, but what is needed most of all is simply outrage. If there is true outrage at the genocide, then policymakers will find the tools to respond.

The fact is that politicians will always look the other way. It’s easier. But strong citizen pressure can make a difference, partly because there is no counter-argument — there is no constituency in favor of genocide. It’s just a matter of overcoming the inertia of the political system and the chronic obliviousness to suffering abroad.

Then genocide can be overcome.

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Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times. He won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, partly because of writings about events in Darfur.