Darfur Sudan

What if the conflict many call the "first genocide of the 21st century" weren't one at all? In the United States, many see the six-year war in Darfur as a bloody campaign by a Sudanese Arab-dominated government against rebellious "African" tribes in western Sudan. Two consecutive American presidents and several activist groups have defined it as genocide. But others, while acknowledging the severity of the violence, question whether it meets the legal definition of genocide.

The U.N. peacekeeping chief told the Security Council on Wednesday that a Sudanese attack this week on U.N.-led troops reinforces concerns that the force may be unable to protect itself or civilians in Darfur. The violence, along with foot-dragging by the Sudanese government and the lack of necessary helicopters and equipment, may doom the peacekeeping effort, Jean-Marie Guehenno told the council.

Sudan's government said Monday that it had appointed a militia leader accused of atrocities in Darfur as the special advisor to its president, sparking outrage from human rights groups. Musa Hilal is under a Security Council travel ban for his alleged role in the two-year targeted attacks on civilians in Darfur, and his assets have been ordered frozen.

As rebels in Chad fought for a second day to take control of the nation's capital, analysts said Sunday that the outcome of the attempted coup could have far-reaching implications for the Darfur conflict in neighboring Sudan.

Two top U.N. officials said Friday that the continuing conflict in Darfur had thwarted a yearlong effort to start peace talks and deploy a peacekeeping force there, while new conflict in neighboring Chad could ignite a regional war. U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guehenno and the special envoy for Sudan, Jan Eliasson, told the Security Council that increasing clashes between Sudanese troops and rebels in western Darfur made it difficult to deliver aid to the area and deploy peacekeepers.

A Southern California human rights activist trapped in an African hotel room in the midst of a gunfight between soldiers and rebels crawls across the carpet, feels something hot under his fingers and flinches. "I touched a bullet," he says, voice and hands shaking. Gabriel Stauring, 41, posted the video footage on his website last week after traveling to the Central African country of Chad to document Darfur refugees for his Redondo Beach-based group, Stop Genocide Now.

President Bush, expressing frustration that the United Nations has had a difficult time raising and deploying a sufficient peacekeeping force in Darfur, said Tuesday that the 1994 Rwandan genocide should have taught the world not to ignore signs of budding brutality. Bush said Rwanda would receive $12 million of the $100-million contribution the U.S. is making this year to U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Darfur.

When filmmaker Steven Spielberg announced last month that he was withdrawing as an artistic advisor to the 2008 Olympics over violence in Darfur, the reaction in Beijing was righteous indignation. Organizers accused him of violating the Olympic spirit by injecting politics into the Games, while the state-run media unleashed a torrent of insults, calling him naive, vain and childish. Now China is taking a new tack.

The U.S. is offering to gradually normalize relations with Sudan if the government in Khartoum settles issues such as the Darfur crisis and carries out elections next year, U.S. and Sudanese diplomats said Friday. Sudan would have to remove obstacles to the deployment of a U.N.-led peacekeeping force, stop violence against civilians in Darfur, release U.S.

Census-takers will soon fan out across Sudan's vast and famously inhospitable terrain in the first nationwide head count in 25 years. But the checklist of questions won't include two hot issues that lie at the heart of this nation's recent history of conflict: religion and ethnicity. The government, led by President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, has decided not to tally numbers for Muslims, Christians and other faiths, nor will it gather data about tribe or ethnic origin.