Was it really possible for Darfur to get worse?

Yes. Even a peace truce has gone terribly wrong in that ravaged region.

Sudan’s government rejects both African Union peacekeepers and UN soldiers in Darfur. With a military offensive underway, the situation in the region looks more dreadful than ever.

Khartoum says it has another plan to achieve peace. This amounts to a new push to quash the remaining Darfuri rebels (some signed up to a peace deal in May), but the latest offensive threatens to kill many more civilians. The UN’s Jan Egeland said in August that the situation is “going from really bad to catastrophic”.

Though it’s not off the radar of the mainstream media, how much do we really hear about it? It took the film “Hotel Rwanda” for Americans to really see that tragedy, but then only to hear our common reaction summed up by Nick Nolte’s character (an American military officer) who said  that Americans look at that on their TV sets and say ‘That’s too bad,’ and then go back to eating their dinners. Sounds awfully harsh, but the reaction, not the quote is what is harsh.

What’s going on in Darfur is confusing, but the African Union (AU) wants the UN to take over its ‘peacekeeping’ mission there, and the government in Khartoum rejects that idea.

Fresh Sudanese soldiers have been arriving in the region, and rights groups, AU officials and Darfur’s rebel groups report that on 28 August a new offensive began, with reports of attacks on rebel-held villages in Darfur.

How do you say that something catastrophic has gotten worse? Amnesty International is going village to village trying to keep track of the rampage.

The Amnesty report said the attackers told their victims, who were unarmed, that they were being punished for not supporting the peace agreement.

Brutalized for not accepting “peace.” That’s how bad things are there.

Last week, the UN’s humanitarian chief Jan Egeland warned that “a man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale” loomed within weeks in Darfur unless the UN Security Council acted immediately.

But analysts say sending a UN force to the region without Khartoum’s consent would be a virtually impossible task – and few options now remain.

Therefore…..what?

While that remains to be answered, you wonder what you can do. Here’s one option.