o Dallaire, commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda, sent a telegram to his superiors in New York warning of massive slaughter being prepared in Rwanda.
Even before that, there had been dozens of other signals, from UN and aid workers, warning of planned massacres; including a press release by a bishop declaring that guns were being distributed to civilians; reports by intelligence agents of secret meetings to coordinate attacks on Tutsi, opponents of Hutu Power and U.N. peacekeepers; and public incitations to murder in the press and on the radio.
According to the HRW, by January 1994, an analyst of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency knew enough to predict that as many as half a million persons might die in case of renewed conflict and.
Yet neither the UN, nor the world powers in the Security Council were prepared to intervene and stop the genocide when it started.
After a first resolution that spoke fairly clearly about the conflict, the Security Council only issued general statement for weeks that left both the nature of the violence and the identity of its perpetrators unclear.
UN Secretary-General Bhoutros Bhoutros-Ghali talked about Rwandans having "fallen into calamitous circumstances,"
An official of the U.S. National Security Council described the genocide as "tribal killings," an explanation echoed by President Bill Clinton in June 1998 when he talked of "tribal resentments" as the source of troubles in Rwanda. Others talked about a "failed state."
Following threats from the RPF, the Tutsi led militia suspicious of to attack soldiers who stayed longer than was necessary to evacuate foreigners, the French and Belgian troops evacuated foreigners in the country, boarded their planes and flew away. Dallaire would later recall that the evacuation force left him and the peacekeepers "on the tarmac, with the bullets flying and the bodies piling up" around them.
The world did not intervene until one of the fighters, the RPF, became victorious and impose order in the country.
Of course the Organisation of Africa Unity (OAU) was incapable of any response, swaddled as it was, in its policy of non-interference in the affairs of member countries.
The African Union is supposed to be different. But that would barely reassure the black people of western Sudan.
For several weeks, the people have been reeling under the murderous onslaught of a militant group fighting armed and deployed by the Sudanese government of General El Bashir. Over people have been so far killed in the crisis it has left more than 4 million adults and children starving and homeless.
Though the Sudanese government has tried to create the image that it is uninvolved in the genocidal attack on its citizens. The facts do not bear this out. The refugees narrate tales of a sinister cooperation between the military forces of Khartoum and the janjaweed militia. It is easy to see why.
The war in Darfur started last year as a low-level insurgency by two small rebel groups - the Sudan Liberation Army SLA and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) - against the Sudanese government.
The conflict was due to feelings of marginalisation and animosity of the peoples of Darfur towards Khartoum. The Khartoum government was accused of pushing them out of jobs in favor of Arabs, and of siding with pastoral Arabs against the sedentary black farmers in the struggle for dwindling water and arable land.
The government reached for its trusty proxies - the janjaweed and freed criminals (also called the ta'ibeen - the repented ones) to fight against the rebels and the communities they spring from. These have been killing, maiming, raping, pillaging and generally sowing panic and destruction in black Sudanese villages. They are also known to take delight in torching mosques, tearing up and defecating on copies of the Koran found with their victims - as if disgusted that the blacks could claim the same religion with them.
Government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians-including women and children-burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, reports the Human Rights Watch.
Since August 2003, the organisation said, wide swathes of the people's homelands, among the most fertile in the region, have been burned and depopulated. With rare exceptions, the countryside is now emptied of its original Masalit and Fur inhabitants. Everything that can sustain and succour life-livestock, food stores, wells and pumps, blankets and clothing-has been looted or destroyed. Villages have been torched not randomly, but systematically-often not once, but twice.
"The uncontrolled presence of Janjaweed in the burned countryside, and in burned and abandoned villages, has driven civilians into camps and settlements outside the larger towns, where the Janjaweed kill, rape, and pillage-even stealing emergency relief items-with impunity."
The pillage has been going on for months before the UN makes the first public acknowlegement of it - when its representative in Sudan started making comparisons with Rwanda. And the AU was left playing catch up, though one of the much-touted mechanism of the NEPAD is a peer review mechanism.
It is evident that the international community might once again fail to prevent what the US Senate has termed 'genocide."
Though a lot of pressure have been mounted on the Sudanese government, especially by the US and the UK, who have both threatened the use of force, and the UN which has passed a resolution stipulating a time frame for Sudan to halt the carnage, things have not improved much on the fields.
There are evidence that the Sudanese government has started some form of action - it is actively retaliating against people who were interviewed by foreign delegations who visited Darfur to assess the situation over the last six weeks.
According to Amnesty International, the Sudanese government has arrested scores of people over the past weeks for talking with foreign government leaders, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell , French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, and members of the African Union's (AU's) Cease-fire Commission, as well as western journalists.
Meanwhile, Sudan's top female novelist and poet, Kola Boof, in a press statement during the week called on the international community to facilitate the overthrow of the Bashir government.
"There is no amount of U.N. resolutions and sanctions that can ever bring peace and harmony to a nation that is divided by the awful, timeless reality of skin color and the insistence of one group that another group must perish in order for the society to be deemed "pretty" and worthy," she said.
Nigeria is planning to host a tripartite discussion in Abuja on August 23, under the auspices of the AU, between the Sudanese government and the two rebel groups. The rebels however, told the Reuters, that they have not yet received the summons.
During the week, the foreign minister of Sudan, Mustafa Ismail visited Cairo to solicit the support of the Arab League ahead of the review of the UN deadline. "We are looking forward to political support from the Arab group to check any attempt to any attempt to harm Sudan or to impose any sanctions on it."
There are fears that the Sudanese government might not even be able to rein in the janjaweed militia even if it wants to. If the international community does not send enough force to persuade them, and their backers otherwise, then the world would have also failed the dispossessed people of Darfur.
New Jersey Governor Resigns over Gay Affair
New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey resigns, acknowledging an extra-marital affair with a man. News reports indicate McGreevey's affair was with a former aide who had threatened legal action if he was not paid to keep quiet.
Gov. James E. McGreevey began suffering fallout from his bombshell resignation announcement Friday as his former homeland security adviser, Golan Cipel, accused the governor of sexual harassment and Republican leaders called on him to leave office immediately.
"While employed by one of the most powerful politicians in the country, New Jersey Governor McGreevey, I was the victim of repeated sexual advances by him," Golan Cipel said in a statement read by his attorney during a news conference in New York. The attorney added that McGreevey has made Cipel the victim of a "smear campaign."
McGreevey announced his resignation Thursday in a dramatic, nationally televised news conference in which he revealed he had an affair with another man. His spokesman, Micah Rasmussen, vehemently denied the accusations, calling them "completely and totally false allegations from a person trying to exploit his relationship with the governor. The matter has been referred to federal authorities for investigation."
Had McGreevey stepped down immediately, a special election would be have been held to serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in January 2006. The decision to leave office in November allows Democratic Senate President Richard J. Codey to finish the term.
Democrats said GOP leaders were unfairly trying to capitalize on what was McGreevey's personal decision.
Russian Ship Docks IN Space Station
Russian supply craft has docked at the International Space Station, delivering vital supplies to the crew manning the orbiter circling the Earth.
Russian officials say the Progress M-50 vessel docked at Space Station Alpha on schedule early Saturday.
The craft is carrying necessities such as water, food and fuel, as well as letters from home, movies and magazines for the station's two crewmen, American astronaut Michael Finke and Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.
The supply ship lifted off Wednesday from Russia's Baikonour cosmodrome in neighboring Kazakhstan.
Russia has been resupplying the space station since February 2003, when the U.S. space shuttle fleet was grounded after the shuttle Columbia disaster that killed all seven crew members.
Najaf Truce Talks Fails
Truce talks between Shiite militia and Iraqi officials broke down Saturday, raising the prospect of a return to the fierce fighting between militiamen and U.S-Iraqi forces that has shaken the holy city of Najaf for more than a week.
The government's chief negotiator, Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie, said talks were making no progress and that he was leaving Najaf. Aides to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr blamed the United States and the Iraqi government on the breakdown.
Scores Killed in Burundi Refugee Camp
Dozens of attackers raided a United Nations refugee camp in western Burundi, shooting and hacking to death at least 180 people, witnesses and officials said Saturday.
A Burundian Hutu rebel faction, the National Liberation Forces, claimed responsibility for the attack late Friday near the border with Congo, saying that its fighters were pursuing Burundian soldiers who fled to the camp from a nearby military position. The camp sheltered Congolese ethnic Tutsi refugees, known as the Banyamulenge, who had fled the fighting in Congo's troubled border province of South Kivu.
The attackers screamed war cries as they rushed into the camp and set it on fire, said Louis Niyonzima, a local official.
"What we have seen so far are many, many, many bodies of children, women and men," said Eliana Nabaa, spokeswoman for the United Nations mission in Congo. "People were sleeping when the attack happened. People were killed as they tried to escape."
The National Liberation Forces is the last main rebel movement fighting the government in Burundi's 10-year-old civil war, which has killed 300,000 people. War broke out in 1993, when Hutus took up arms after Tutsi paratroopers assassinated the country's first democratically elected president, a Hutu.
Burundi's Tutsi minority has run the country for all but a few months since independence in 1962.
Houston man gets new liver after big ad campaign
Todd Krampitz has undergone successful liver transplant surgery in Houston after an unidentified family donated a loved one's organ specifically to him in response to his ad campaign.
The surgery at Methodist Hospital was completed yesterday.
The 32-year-old man was diagnosed liver cancer and doctors said only a transplant would save his life.
The Kramptiz family decided to mount a media campaign, including two billboards along one of Houston's busiest freeways, and a Web site that detailed his plight.
The Web site also raised awareness about organ donation.
His wife, Julie Krampitz, says "a generous family" donated their loved one's liver to her husband, but she didn't release details on the out-of-state family.
