Although people across the globe have heard of Darfur, a region in Sudan that is approximately the size of Texas, few understand the genocidal nightmare erupting there.

Since 2003, Sudan’s dictators and militias, known as the Janjaweed, have committed acts of mass, systematic violence against the Darfurian people, including rape and murder. SaveDarfur.org, in a briefing report from June 2008, reported, “The United Nations puts the death toll at roughly 300,000,” and an additional “2.5 million Darfuris have fled their homes and continue to live in camps throughout Darfur, or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic.”

Genocide is defined as “a criminal act with the intention of destroying an ethnic, national or religious group targeted as such,” according to Alain Destexhe’s book “Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.” The excerpt, found at PBS.org, says “genocide is therefore both the gravest and the greatest of the crimes against humanity.”

In 1948, the United Nations determined that genocide is a crime under international law at the Convention of the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Therefore, if a country were to formally declare that genocide was occurring, the U.N. would be forced to intervene.

The UN has taken that step. OurPledge.org, a website sponsored by Americans Against the Darfur Genocide, reported that in July 2004, Congress unanimously declared that the situation in Darfur constituted genocide. In September of the same year, President George W. Bush and his administration made the claim official.

Since then, the United States has tried to stop this mass violence. According to DarfurScores.org, a project of the Genocide Intervention Network, “the international community managed to broker a peace deal in May 2006, but violence in Darfur actually increased in the wake of this deal.” Clearly, this largely U.S.-brokered attempt was not enough, and the U.S. voiced the need for a multilateral protection force.

The idea was heard, and on July 31, 2007, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1769, which states “the Security Council authorized the deployment of a 26,000-strong joint United Nations-African Union force this afternoon, in an attempt to quell the violence in Sudan’s western Darfur region.”

Unfortunately, this effort has not been enough. These peacekeepers have not been able to accomplish much in the way of stopping the violence. One of the reasons for their ineffectiveness is the stipulation that the peacekeeping forces cannot disarm the Sudanese government’s proxy militias in Darfur.

It seems that more aid is still needed. But then why is the international community not doing more?

Part of the problem is the fact that people are unaware of what is going on in Darfur, as it is often not covered in-depth by the media.

“Darfur has no natural resources that anyone wants, so there is not likely to be much international attention on that area by the public, the media or the international community in general,” said James Scotton, associate professor of journalism. “Maybe if they discovered oil or uranium there it would help, but then there would be a whole new bunch of problems.”