General Treasurer Frank Caprio joins legislators at a news conference tomorrow to tout a bill to divest state pension funds from companies doing business with Sudan. I applaud this and any other effort to spotlight the worst atrocity taking place on earth, the genocide in that African country’s Darfur region.

Numbers, word images, and pictures tell the story. Yet sometimes it seems no one hears, sees, or cares that violence sanctioned by the Sudanese government has killed 450,000 civilians and displaced millions more.

Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service, has visited camps there and in bordering Chad to see aid efforts and bear witness to the trauma. She told a recent conference at Brown University that she listened to stories of 40 people. Over and over, she said, she heard a story like this:

“First the planes came and bombed my village and they killed my uncle and my next door neighbor’s entire family…

“Then the Janjaweed rode in — the militias, the posses armed by the government — they had horses, they had camels, they had guns…They raped and branded the women. They killed people in front of their families. They slaughtered all of our livestock and they put the bodies of the children and the animals in the wells to poison the water supply. So we fled, and they burned our village to the ground.”

The world cannot plead ignorance. Certainly there’s better news coverage of Darfur than there was of the Nazi Holocaust. “It’s not better enough,” Messinger, a former New York City pol, told me. “The war in Iraq is a crisis and a tragedy for 3,000 reasons, but think about the fact that the war in Iraq is covered on the front page of your newspaper and mine every single day.” Yet millions suffer in Darfur, “and you could die before you see another story, even in The Times.”

But The Times does employ gifted columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has sought to stir the world’s conscience on Darfur.

He recently called again on President Bush to speak out forcefully on the subject, and added: “He could bring victims to the White House for a photo op. He could help the U.N. send a force to protect Chad…while continuing to push for U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur itself. He could visit Darfur or Chad … He could develop targeted sanctions against Sudanese leaders….”

Sen. Jack Reed tells me the sanctions — such steps as pressuring the international community to freeze individual accounts and travel privileges of Sudanese leaders — is the way to begin, would constitute “real pressure,” and send a “very strong signal.”

Messinger said U.S. presidential candidates must be tested. She wants voters to ask them, “What about Darfur? What about genocide?” There’s much you too can do. Donate. Lobby. Wear a Save Darfur wristband. (See www.ajws.org or www.savedarfur.org.)

Actress Mia Farrow was at Brown for the regional conference of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur. (STAND members from Brown back the divestment bill.) Farrow, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, spoke and showed photos of her visits to Darfur.

She told me: Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of writing to political leaders, from the president to Congress to state officials, to say, “We don’t want words to replace action.”

Farrow said, “Remember the book, Horton Hears a Who!, a Dr. Seuss book? Perhaps you read it to your kids. I read it to mine. One voice does matter, and if we all assume that it doesn’t matter, then it won’t matter.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com