How does the civil war in the south relate to the situation in Darfur?

They are both responses to central tyranny, but they are not directly related. In the catastrophe in southern Sudan, over 2 million lives were lost in 21 years of conflict, over 4 million are internally displaced and another half a million are refugees. The people of southern Sudan have long demanded the right of self-determination, including the right to secede from Sudan.

In Darfur, the issue isn't secession; it's greater autonomy, greater political and economic representation. The Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement are the two insurgency movements in Darfur. They are fighting against political and economic marginalization and for a secular democracy. The SLA is fighting to protect their people as the Arab militias attack African villages.

Why was the world so slow to react to the genocide?

In October 2002, the Sudan People's Liberation Army signed a cessation of hostilities agreement with Khartoum, and major fighting between the South and the North began to slow down. And on Jan. 9, 2005, the parties signed a comprehensive peace agreement.

The United States so wanted a peace agreement. If you look at the lack of commentary from the key Western negotiators in the North-South peace process -- Norway, the U.K. and the United States -- they were deliberately muting their criticism of Khartoum over its genocidal behavior in Darfur in order to get the North-South agreement completed.

Convinced that the West [really] wanted a North-South peace agreement, Khartoum [figured] that if they could string out a final agreement, the West wouldn't press them on Darfur. The signal Khartoum sent was: "Don't push us too hard on Darfur. We're not quite ready." In December 2003, the U.N. special envoy for humanitarian affairs reported that Khartoum was deliberately obstructing humanitarian aid to areas where the African population was concentrated. Yet, nobody else picked up on it, either inside or outside the U.N.

Back in January 2004, I would have conversations with my contact at USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] to figure out whether we inhabited the same moral universe as the people around us. It was mind-boggling. We could see what was happening in Darfur, and nobody else could see it. If they saw it, they'd have to react.

Have any of the six U.N. resolutions on Sudan had any effect?

No, and we need only look at the first of these, on July 30, 2004, which had only one demand in it: that Khartoum disarm the Janjaweed and bring its leaders to justice. There has been no progress whatsoever in terms of a response from the Khartoum regime. But beyond that, the Chinese permanent representative to the United Nations has made it clear China will veto any real sanctions measures against Khartoum. China is the dominant player in oil development and production in Sudan, and Sudan is China's premier source of offshore oil development.

What is the Bush administration's stance on the genocide?

Bush himself has publicly declared that what is going on in Darfur is genocide. But lately, there seems to be a very troubling policy to lowball the Darfur crisis. We began to see signs of it when [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice had an extensive interview with the Washington Post at the end of March. She was asked repeatedly, "How many troops would be necessary to stop the genocide in Darfur?" Rice said she didn't know. Are we really to believe a woman as intelligent as Condoleezza Rice has no idea what an appropriate force is to stop genocide? Or is it that she didn't want to put a number on it, and subject that number to criticism?

Two weeks later, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick traveled to Khartoum. He pointedly refused to answer the question, "Is genocide still being committed in Darfur?" We already had an answer to that question by the State Department as well as Congress, in a unanimous, bipartisan, bicameral vote. Now the State Department is backing away from its earlier genocide determination, because it becomes more and more embarrassing the longer you declare it a genocide but don't do anything to stop it.

The State Department has issued a document estimating that 60,000 to 160,000 people have died in Darfur. That's an absolute scandal. It's not a mortality assessment; it's propaganda. The document does not provide a single citation or bibliographic reference, not one URL. There is no statistical analysis; there is nothing but bald assertion.

Among actual epidemiological studies of mortality, we have a consensus of 350,000 to 400,000. My most recent assessment has a figure of 400,000. I have written 12 full-scale analyses looking at every bit of data in the public domain, and a good deal from confidential sources, and that includes data from the World Health Organization, the Coalition for International Justice and USAID, as well as from my contacts at the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations.

The Darfur Accountability Act is hardly what you would call silver bullet legislation, but it does ask for serious things to be done. And as Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent column in the New York Times, he has a letter in which the Bush administration talks about its desire that various provisions of the act be stripped out.

This is an extension of the view that we can't push the Khartoum regime too hard or we'll lose the North-South peace agreement. Khartoum sees right through it. It's the wrong signal to send.

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