Ending the Darfur silence

THE MOST compelling humanitarian challenge of these times is to stop the genocide in Darfur. In the past three years, more than 400,000 people have been annihilated and more than 2 million driven from their homes by the National Islamic Front regime that rules Sudan and its proxies, Arab militias known as Janjaweed. And all that time -- while helicopter gunships were strafing villages, soldiers were raping women and girls, and Janjaweed raiders were smashing babies' skulls -- the nations of the world did little more than bemoan the complexities standing in the way of a life-saving mission. Now, they are even forcing cuts in United Nations food aid for lack of funding.

So it is heartening that private citizens from around the country are converging on Washington, D.C., for this afternoon's rally to end the genocide in Darfur. Some will see a film on Darfur in the morning at the National Holocaust Museum, a site that is all too fitting. Speakers at the afternoon rally will include clergy, human rights activists and scholars, and members of Congress. Among local figures scheduled to speak are the Rev. Gloria White-Hammond, chairwoman of the Million Voices for Darfur Campaign, Samantha Power, author of ''A Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide," and Representative Michael Capuano, co-chairman of the Congressional Sudan Caucus.

The spirit of the rally is captured in a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that appears in the schedule of Sunday's events: ''In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

In the case of the Darfur genocide, it is not the silence of people but the silence of governments that is certain to echo down the corridors of history.

The campaign to save the 2 million displaced persons of Darfur -- who are still alive but threatened with malnutrition, disease, and unrelenting violent assaults -- must pass to private citizens because the governments of the world will not act to stop this genocide without pressure from below. This must be moral as well as political pressure, and it must come from men and women who share with the people of Darfur a kinship in what was once called the Family of Man.

Despite occasional statements of concern, the Bush administration, the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union, and the Arab League have all found convenient excuses for declining to take the actions needed to assure immediate humanitarian assistance, to arrange and enforce a cease-fire in the conflict between rebels and the Khartoum government, and to begin returning survivors to their torched villages.

Private citizens have to demand action to save their brothers and sisters in Darfur because nation-states have no conscience.