At last, the 'G' word.

Byline: The Register-Guard

For months, the United States and the rest of the world have danced maddeningly around the semantics of how to describe the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan, calling it everything from a "humanitarian catastrophe" to "crimes against humanity."

Finally, Secretary of State Colin Powell on Thursday declared what everyone knows but has been reluctant to say - that Sudan's armed forces and its "janjaweed" militias are committing genocide against black Sudanese.

The reluctance to use the "G" word is about more than semantics. Under the 1948 international genocide treaty, signatories are legally obligated "to prevent and punish" acts of genocide. A decade ago, the United States, along with other members of the U.N. Security Council, refused to acknowledge that the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda was genocide, a failure that allowed up to a million people to be killed in the absence of international intervention.

So far, the Darfur crisis has left up to 50,000 people dead and has created up to 2 million refugees who are still being attacked by militias and who are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

The rest of the U.N. Security Council should now join the United States in recognizing the situation in the Sudan as genocide and taking appropriate action. That action should include swift deployment of the 3,000 peacekeeping troops that the African Union has offered to send to the Sudan. The council should impose economic sanctions, as well as arms and oil embargoes. A U.N. team should also be dispatched to begin a formal investigation of human rights violations.

A few council members, most notably China and Pakistan, remain reluctant to intervene. The Bush administration should continue its leadership on the Sudan crisis and persuade council members to meet their obligations under the genocide treaty. The world can no longer sit back and watch as the slaughter continues in the Sudan.