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Today, thousands of people are dying in Darfur. Millions more are homeless, and rapidly losing hope of every having a home again.

In the 1940's, a lot of good Germans were professing to be totally unaware of the mass genocide going on around them. They didn't see..didn't see the packed trains, the mass murders, the plumes of smoke from the burning bodies...and when it was all over, they said they did not speak up because they did not know.

Today, it's much easier for us not to speak up about genocide. After all, it's not at our door. It's an ocean and most of a huge continent away, in Darfur. Just like in the 1990's, when it was an ocean and most of a continent away, in Rwanda. But if we believe in the web of human life, we have a mandate not to look away. If we believe in the sanctity of all life, if we believe that we are all connected, we are called to act.

In February of 2003, conflict broke out in the Darfur region of Sudan. The fight began with Sudanese rebels attacking government facilities, as the result of severe economic hardship and years of internal fighting. The government sponsered militia groups known as "janjaweed" militia to retaliate.

Had the fighting been confined to military groups, that would have been no more or less tragic than any other war. But the Janjaweed responded to the rebel attacks by launching wholesale attacks on any village in any area they considered to be disloyal to the government. For the past three years, these attacks have continued and spread. Whole cities have been and are being burned to the ground. Over 400,000 people have been killed and millions more are homeless and starving. Looting runs rampant. Mass rape happens on an unimaginable scale. At least 2.5 million people have lost their homes. At least three million are starving.

Most of the displaced men, women, and children are living in camps, dependent on the help of assistance from international groups such as UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, protected only by a small, determined but vastly inadequate group of African Union peacekeepers. They live on less than subsistance rations and they dare not leave the camp. The women are afraid to gather firewood beyond the camp borders for fear of rape and/or murder. Medicine, despite the valient efforts of Doctors Without Borders and other international groups, is in terribly short supply.

To make matters worse, groups who are trying to help are being forced to withdraw most, or in some cases all, of their personnel due

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