Talk, talk, talk.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Once again, Africans are dying while diplomats deliver speeches.

Once again, the international community is quibbling over whether the killing of tens of thousands of innocents should be classified as "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" or mere "mass murder."

Meanwhile, nearly 40,000 people have been killed in the Sudan and the lives of at least a million more hang in the balance, as marauding Arab militias continue to sweep through rural villages, shooting men, raping women, kidnapping children and burning buildings to the ground.

Once again, the world appears maddeningly unwilling to intervene in what the United Nations has described as nothing less than the "world's worst humanitarian cri- sis."

The National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, which seized power in a military coup 15 years ago, has been waging war during the past year on the remote Darfur region where some non-Arab residents rebelled against Arab domination. Ironically, the carnage in Darfur began just as a lengthy civil war between Sudan's Arab Muslim rulers and Christians in the southern part of the country was ending.

In addition to supporting the militias, known as janjaweed, Sudan's government has systematically bombed villages, uprooted more than a million exiles, destroyed vital water wells and blocked humanitarian relief to starving and destitute refugees. Even the refugees who have managed to flee to neighboring Chad are subjected to frequent and vicious attacks by the janjaweed and government troops.

Unless the world moves swiftly to halt the killing and provide relief to the refugees, the result will be massive suffering and death on a scale comparable to the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis by the Hutu regime in Rwanda a decade ago.

Yet still, the talking continues.

In the United Nations, diplomats from developed nations, including the United States, assiduously avoid using the "G" word - genocide. The reason: International treaty obligations would require the U.N. diplomats to do more than deliver speeches condemning the Sudanese government. The international body would have to do what it should have done, but shamefully refused to do a decade ago in Rwanda: Demand an immediate halt to the killing, mobilize peacekeeping troops to ensure that happens and provide massive humanitarian assistance to refugees.

So far, the Khartoum regime has done nothing to disarm the militias or end the fighting, insisting that the situation in Darfur has been, in the words of Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir, blown "all out of proportion." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose conscience is rightly burdened by the Rwanda genocide, has threatened military action under U.N. direction. But Sudanese leaders pay no heed, believing that the U.N. lacks the will to make that threat reality.

At last week's G-8 summit, leaders of of the world's most developed and prosperous nations called on the Sudan to bring an immediate halt to "massive human rights violations" in the Darfur region.

Talk, talk and more talk.

World leaders should give careful consideration to the recent words of a frustrated U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell about the situation in the Sudan.

"All I know is that there are at least 1 million people who are desperately in need, and many of them will die if we can't get the international community mobilized," he said. "And it won't make a whole lot of difference what you've called it."