Why Darfur Can't Be Left to Africa

Never is the international responsibility to protect more compelling than in cases of genocide. Genocide is not a regional issue. A government that commits or condones it is not on a par with one that, say, jails dissidents, squanders economic resources or suppresses free speech, as dreadful as such policies may be. Genocide makes a claim on the entire world and it should be a call to action whatever diplomatic feathers it ruffles.

Americans and Europeans can make several excuses for continuing to watch from the sidelines, but none is entirely persuasive. U.S. and NATO forces are overstretched in Afghanistan and Iraq, but NATO announced last October that its Response Force has reached 17,000 troops and is "ready to take on the full range of missions." Western military intervention in another Muslim country could create a new front for jihadist attacks. However, it is hard to see how allowing this fear to deter us from saving Muslim lives would salve anti-American hostility in the Muslim world.

U.S. and European officials have also hailed the new national unity government in Khartoum, which has incorporated southern rebel leaders, as offering hope that the genocide will soon end. This was an optimistic assumption even before the tragic death last weekend of John Garang, the popular southern Sudanese leader and newly inaugurated first vice president. Now it seems even less likely. The Khartoum government is still run by individuals complicit in this genocide. The newly incorporated southern leaders are unlikely to be informed of, much less able to stop, government-backed militia activity in Darfur.

The ultimate excuse for European and U.S. inaction remains the unconvincing notion that the African Union, by itself, can halt the killing quickly.

One day in the not distant future, the A.U. and sub-regional African organizations may indeed have the capacity, as Mbeki envisions, "to deal with conflict situations on the continent." They are already doing much to bring peace to the conflict zones of West Africa and Burundi. (Wealthy donor countries can expedite the establishment of strong African intervention forces by investing even more in building five regional A.U. brigades.)

In the meantime, we should not lose sight of the fact that conflict and genocide are fundamentally different phenomena, even though they may occur in tandem as in Darfur and Rwanda. Genocide, as distinct from conflict, is a crime against all humanity regardless of race, religion or region, and it is the obligation of the entire world to stop it. In Rwanda, humanity -- the U.N., Americans, Europeans and Africans -- failed to halt the killing. In Darfur, despite the African Union's belated best efforts, the world's nations are still failing. This time, our failure lies in accepting the dubious proposition that halting genocide against Africans is solely "an African responsibility."

Susan Rice is a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. She served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1997 to 2001.