In Sudan crisis, a duty to intervene?

As public figures representing millions of evangelical Christians, Richard Cizik and Gary Edmonds generally see eye-to-eye on moral issues - except perhaps when it comes to mass killings in 2004.

Staggering reports from the Darfur region of Sudan - where as many as 1 million Africans could die this year - have increased pressure on people of conscience to respond.

Mr. Cizik is so troubled, he says, he is considering trespassing on the Sudanese Embassy steps this month to call for military intervention. "It's just not my style" to practice civil disobedience, says Cizik, a lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals. "But this situation calls for dramatic action."

Meanwhile Mr. Edmonds, secretary general of the World Evangelical Alliance, says he too is concerned about rape, murder and starvation in Darfur, but politics limit what he can say - to the point that he dare not use the label "genocide."

"There are just sensitivities," Edmonds says. To advocate sending troops could alienate both pacifists and supporters of a peace brokered with Khartoum to protect Christians in south Sudan.

Mixed responses even among like-minded groups provide a glimpse of a nation wrestling with a faraway crisis more easily deplored than fixed.

On the one hand, daily protests and a series of high-profile arrests illustrate a growing desire for immediate action. On the other, some charitable and church groups stand with the United Nations in so far refusing to speak of "genocide" - because that would compel a no-holds-barred intervention.

As always, moral arguments weigh against practical considerations. Can the Janjaweed militia be stopped? Can thousands of refugees be saved before the rainy season? Should the US send more troops to the developing world? Can America afford to battle with yet another Arab state?

But for moral watchdogs who invoke comparisons to the Holocaust, one question looms large: Can a moral people stand by and watch one race eradicate another?

"If you see genocide happening and make speeches saying 'never again,' and then say it is happening again, there's a moral imperative to act," says Hadar Harris, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University. "But moral imperatives sometimes don't have the same resonance as political interests do. No one's going to be voted out of office because a million people were killed."

Sudan has for 20 years endured a bloody civil war, but atrocities skyrocketed in early 2003 when, according to Human Rights Watch, government-backed militias wrought revenge upon organizing rebels.

Marauding bands have systematically burned life-sustaining resources from homes to blankets, sending refugees to mountaintops and neighboring countries.

Meanwhile, other sources say Arab newcomers have arrived to till the land, reportedly in exchange for promised ownership, rounding out a process Human Rights Watch terms "ethnic cleansing" being carried out against the African Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups.

Suliman Giddo remembers his native Darfur as an area as large as Texas, where various tribes lived in peaceful co- existence. Now he has lost contact with family. His aunt fled to Chad, but he has not heard from her.

"The game is to undermine peace among the tribes" in a strategy to "Arabize" all of Sudan by 2070, said Mr. Giddo, founder of American-based Darfur Peace and Development group. "It's not like regular war. The government, with the Janjaweed, are killing people and replacing them."

Death tolls for the year have climbed rapidly to current estimates of 30,000, yet the strife went largely unnoticed in the West until this spring and summer.

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