Fifteen genocides have been committed since 1900.

To paraphrase Article Two of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Genocide includes killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions aimed at a group’s physical destruction and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group or preventing births.

Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity; it is mass killing on the grandest of scales. Victims are most often measured by the hundreds of thousands.

The majority of genocides have shown that the primary supporters of such violence have been the governments of the countries where these actions occur.

The United Nations is one of the few powers both willing and capable of defusing such situations.

The Darfur region of Sudan requires immediate attention. By all reports 450,000 people have already been killed and a further 2.5 million displaced since 2003.

The conflict continues while the rest of the world watches, well aware of the violence, yet basking in ignorance.

The United Nations Convention on Genocide states that anywhere genocide is taking place, an intervention must ensue. However, because America refuses to ratify this convention and therefore apply the word “genocide” to the Darfur situation, it is perceived as toothless. Does the U.S. fear being punished for allowing past genocidal crimes – such as Rwanda in 1994 – or being held responsible to a foreign group?

Terms like “acts of genocide” or “civil war” are used to describe the killing of innocent civilians by countries that want to stay out of the conflict. Avoidance and/or lack of action are having deadly consequences daily in Darfur.

When does neglect become guilt? More pressure should be brought to bear upon those with the power to quell the violence but who purposely avert their gaze. Why is nothing happening? Is it easier (and cheaper) to apologize for the neglect once the violence has ended, than to step up and stop the violence now? This has been undeniably true of genocides during the past century.

Hopefully, with a new decade underway, this will begin to change in the future.

Brendan Forsyth is a sociology student at the University of Winnipeg.