As those of you who've been reading this page know, outrage is our specialty; indeed, I'm thinking of having a feature called The Daily Outrage. But anger-provoking as the policies of the present administration are, they pale beside what has been going on for years in Darfur and now in the neighboring nation of Chad.
Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times had been a magnificent voice for the people of that tragic region, writing column after column and returning for one visit after another. On the paper's website, he has video clips from his current trip. They offer a shattering look at what is happening while the world largely looks the other way.
To give the devil his due, Mr. Bush has spoken out about Darfur on a number of occasions, and has taken some steps to push the Sudanese government toward ending the depredations of the Janjaweed, the local "militia" (really an arm of the government) that has been responsible for the rapes and massacres that have turned Darfur into another in that depressing parade of synonyms for genocide that the world has permitted to occur. Still, there is much more that the US government could do; just now, it could encourage France, which has a military agreement with Chad, to send forces to the Chad/Sudan border to at least insure the security of that nation.
For those of you who do not have TimesSelect (tm), I want to pass along some links from Kristoff's piece today, to two organizations that permit you to do something about Darfur. They are: http://www.millionvoicesfordarfur.org/ , where you can send a postcard to the President with a few clicks, and www.genocideintervention.net, which has a list of ten things you can do about Darfur.
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