by Mark C. Hackett

Created on: August 19, 2008

In 2003, the Sudanese government began an ethnic cleansing campaign in the western part of Sudan, known as the Darfur region. This latest genocide consists of all non-Arab civilians and rebel forces being slaughtered by the Sudanese military and government-sponsored Arab nomadic tribes known as the Janjaweed. I selected this topic because it is today's largest humanitarian crisis, and the effects of this genocide are not just confined to the Darfur region, but are affecting the entire world. In this paper, I hope to show, and better understand myself, how the atrocities taking place in Sudan are far-reaching, dangerous to both global and local security, and discover why the world is doing so little stop it.

So, to begin, what is genocide? The United Nations, on December 9, 1948, stated that genocide is the following:
"[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." (www.hrweb.org)
Genocide, therefore, is perhaps one of the most base, cruel, and vile forms of hatred that stalks the globe today. It consists or mass murder, rape, stripped freedoms, violence, torture, and abuse. Genocide is a combined form of all of these things. Now, to the genocide that is occurring in Darfur, even as you read this.
Because the genocide in Darfur is only four in a half years old, there have been very few studies done on the situation. Some of the reasons why so few studies have been completed are the insecurity in the region, the kidnapping of many westerners in Sudan, and the Sudanese government using scare tactics to keep as many foreigners out of Darfur as possible. Because of these reasons, there is almost no literature written on the situation in Darfur. There are, however, several organizations and websites, such as the Save Darfur Organization, that offer a good amount of information about the world's newest genocide. Unfortunately, due to violence in the region, these organizations can only make estimated guesses about how many have died, how many have been forced to flee their homes, and how bad the violence

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