Genocide in Sudan

Six months ago, Ashley Linford knew nothing about Darfur: the daughters raped in front of their fathers, the villages burned, the 400,000 civilians dead. And then, one morning, she happened to glance at a newspaper one of her roommates had left lying open.

There staring up at Linford was a full-page ad, with its photo of a woman, a baby and a dead body. The picture and the text, about the crisis in the Darfur region of western Sudan, shocked and moved Linford. And then she remembered a talk she had attended the winter before, when Paul Rusesabagina addressed students at Utah State University. Rusesabagina was the hotel manager who had sheltered 1,200 Tutsis during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, an ordeal later made into the movie "Hotel Rwanda."

"You feel bad and you sit there and you cry," Linford remembers Rusesabagina gently chiding the students. "But you don't do anything."

And now here was another genocide, one she and her fellow students could either once again do nothing about — or could find a way to help. That very night, Linford started a group called "Aggies for Africa," which has since held a Darfur conflict awareness panel and raised $1,000 at a benefit concert.

That's not much, admittedly, in the face of two million displaced Darfurians and an international crisis that seems intractable. Just this week, for example, the International Criminal Court released the names of the first two Sudanese accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity; the immediate response of the Sudanese government was to dismiss the allegations and refuse to extradite these or future suspects. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has also repeatedly rebuffed the offer of 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers.

Certainly the magnitude of the situation is enough to paralyze even the most well-meaning Americans. But that's no excuse, say people like Dee Rowland, government liaison director for the Salt Lake City Catholic Diocese, who visited east Africa last fall.

We have Iraq to worry about, acknowledges Rowland. And we're overloaded with causes. "But we cannot risk being passive witnesses to this," she says. "We can't let that happen again."