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The responsibility to protect, adopted with such enthusiastic fanfare at the September 2005 UN World Summit, has proved an abject failure in defining international policy in Sudan. On the contrary, impunity continues to be afforded to even the most egregious atrocity crimes committed by Khartoum's National Islamic Front/National Congress Party regime, which has been waging a genocidal counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur since early 2003. This impunity extends to the world's refusal to respond meaningfully to the regime's military seizure of the contested Abyei region—displacing more than 100,000 of the indigenous Dinka Ngok—and the subsequent genocidal campaign against the people of South Kordofan and Blue Nile. Sudan loomed as the test case for the responsibility to protect doctrine as defined by paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit's Outcome Document. In the assessment of this essay, its failure has been complete.

The Darfur genocide has the perverse distinction of being the longest and most fully chronicled genocide of the last century. Our contemporaneous knowledge of what happened and what is happening comes from dozens of comprehensive human rights reports dating from 2003 and earlier, accounts from international humanitarian organizations, and detailed research by policy and advocacy groups such at the International Crisis Group and Refugees International. And there is extraordinary congruence in the accounts. Although some, such as Human Rights Watch, have found it difficult to come to consensus on the question of "genocidal intent," there is broad agreement about the ethnically targeted nature of the crimes and the role of the Khartoum regime in orchestrating the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of some three million Darfuris, overwhelmingly from the non Arab, African tribal populations of the region.

On March 4, 2009, Pre-Trial Chamber 1 of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it was charging Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Long anticipated, the arrest warrant was immediately used by al Bashir's National Islamic Front (NIF) regime as a pretext for expelling thirteen major international humanitarian organizations from Darfur and from other highly distressed regions of northern Sudan. In Darfur the expulsions represented over half the total humanitarian capacity. At the same time, Khartoum also shut down some of the most important Sudanese human service and human rights organizations. In all cases, the explanations offered for expulsions or shutdowns were not supported by any evidence made public. In particular, Khartoum's claim to have evidence that the aid organizations had cooperated with the ICC was patently false.

A review essay on a book by Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Pantheon, 2009).

When the International Criminal Court announced on March 4, 2009, that it was pressing charges of war crimes against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, a set of unintended consequences were thrown into motion. Al-Bashir responded by expelling thirteen of the international humanitarian aid organizations working in Sudan, as well as shutting down Khartoum's human rights organizations & human service agencies. In a country already racked by violence, poverty, & insecurity, the results were disastrous. This article looks at the legitimacy & effectiveness of the ICC in the face of such defiance & unintentional consequences. Adapted from the source document.

Darfur's ongoing agony continues to be attended by an obscene chorus of international mendacity, hypocrisy, and expediency. Not content simply to allow Khartoum's génocidaires to accomplish their ghastly task, the African Union, the Arab League, the Non-Aligned Movement, key Security Council members China and Russia, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have all offered the National Islamic Front regime essential diplomatic and political support—now in the face of formal charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court (July 14, 2008). Indeed, China continues to provide military equipment that facilitates ethnically targeted destruction, as well as the critical commercial and capital investment that underwrites a booming economy in Khartoum and a small surrounding portion of the Nile River valley. Shamed by an international "genocide Olympics" campaign, Beijing has made various gestures designed to show support for Darfur over the past year and a half; some have been significant. But the leverage provided by China's hosting of the Games ended in August, and there can be little doubt that Beijing will resume business as usual with Khartoum.

Not content simply to allow Khartoum's genocidaires to accomplish their ghastly task, the African Union, the Arab League, the Non-Aligned Movement, key Security Council members China and Russia, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference have all offered the National Islamic Front regime essential diplomatic and political support - now in the face of formal charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court (July 14, 2008). Given European and Canadian support for the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), there has been an awkward discomfort with the unambiguous indictments brought by Argentine prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, who found in the course of a three-year investigation strong evidence that Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir 'bears criminal responsibility for the crime of genocide under Article 6(a) of the Rome Statute.'. Adapted from the source document.

As genocidal destruction in the Darfur region of western Sudan enters its fifth year, we must accept not only the overwhelming disgrace of such prolonged human agony but register important shifts in the nature of the destruction—the appearance of new and different threats to the existence of both Arab and non-Arab populations in Darfur. Genocide is evolving in Darfur, mutating, and perhaps only now reaching the point of greatest human destruction.

Examines the persistent international acquiescence to the "genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, & crimes against humanity" being perpetrated by the Sudanese government in Darfur. It is asserted that the Darfuri response to the inadequate Darfur Peace Agreement is central to this international response. Why the Sudanese government continues to defy UN Security Council Resolution 1706 is next considered, offering some reasons, but identifying Chinese diplomatic support of Khartoum, primarily because of oil, to be the key reason to the latter's obduracy. Efforts to pressure China on its complicity in the Darfur genocide in the context of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games are described. D. Edelman