01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 30, 2004

NEWARK, N.J.

NEVER AGAIN" is happening again. After the Nazi Holocaust, the international community promised to stop genocide, and it did so after Rwandans slaughtered 800,000 of their countrymen in 1994. But a decade later, ethnic slaughter is happening once more, in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The Islamic and mostly Arab government in Khartoum has murdered some 30,000 black Sudanese -- who are Muslim, Christian and animist -- and swept another 1 1/2 million from their homes. U.S. officials predict that 350,000 could be dead by December. The Sudanese military strafes villages from the air, while Arab Muslim tribesmen known as Janjaweed, armed by the government, do the dirty work on the ground.

The United Nations, founded after World War II to save succeeding generations from war's scourge, has stood by, offering tragic proof of its irrelevance. In a surreal twist, amid mounting reports of the Sudanese government's role as perpetrator of the catastrophe, the United Nations' Human Rights Commission on May 4 re-elected Sudan as a member. The United Nations is not merely heartbreakingly ineffective; it has become a sinister joke.

As early as February, journalists reported the Sudanese government's air campaign against southern villages. At the beginning of April, such experts as Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, A Problem from Hell, were calling for immediate international intervention. (In Power's estimate, 10,000 peacekeepers were required.)

On the same day that the U.N. Human Rights Commission re-elected Sudan to a seat, the head of the U.N. World Food Program, James Morris, called the situation in the Sudan "one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world."

Human Rights Watch, which has been able to send observers into the crisis zone, issued its first extensive report in early April, and a longer one (77 pages) in the first week of May. They give detailed accounts of the Janjaweed militiamen murdering unarmed Darfurians. Some were shot in the back while fleeing; others were fired upon while praying in their mosques. Many young girls were raped and then killed. The reports list whole villages that have been looted and burned, while the inhabitants lucky enough to escape face starvation in refugee camps in Chad.

Where is U.N. Secy. Gen. Kofi Annan? He issued one critical statement almost two months ago, on May 2. He dwelled on the implications of calling something "evil," saying that "when we think of other people as evil, we are perilously close to depriving them of any rights, and releasing ourselves from any obligations towards them."

In other words, rather than calling the slaughter of 30,000 civilians evil, he quibbled about the rights of the perpetrators -- sounding suspiciously as if he were pandering to the government of Sudan.

In the same statement, Annan issued a mea culpa for the United Nations' failure in Rwanda, saying, "We were reluctant to face up to evil when we saw it." What does he think his organization is doing now?

Where is the resolution condemning the Sudanese government? Where are the desperately needed peacekeeping troops?

Kofi Annan refuses to call the ethnic cleansers in Sudan "evil"; he refuses to call what they are doing "genocide." In his semantic wriggling, he recalls the Clinton administration in 1994, which went to great lengths to avoid calling the Rwanda slaughter a genocide, even though it was a deliberate attempt by one ethnic group to wipe out another.

But semantics are hardly the issue. People are dying in staggering numbers, while the organization with the infrastructure and mandate to prevent such catastrophe caters to the genocidal government of Sudan.

Unfortunately, this is typical. It is usually long after the fact that foreign governments and the United Nations even acknowledge that something evil has occurred. At that point, the United Nations proceeds by supporting a flawed trial -- such as those designed in recent years to address atrocities committed in Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Cambodia. But a trial is no substitute for taking preventative action at the time of the crime.

The United Nations has struggled with the issue of relevance ever since it showed no intention of enforcing any of the 18 Security Council resolutions concerning Iraq. In the last decade alone, United Nations inaction in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia and Kosovo represents several million preventable deaths.

And now the body count is rising in Sudan. The election of Sudan to the U.N. Human Rights Commission while Sudan slaughtered its own people should stand as final testament to the United Nations' insignificance.

Garrett Glass is executive director of the Digital Freedom Network, a nonprofit human-rights organization, based in Newark, N.J. He can be reached at g.glass [at] dfn.org.