Many religious and human rights leaders -- including Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold in a letter last month -- have urged the President to call the actions of Darfur genocide and to respond accordingly. The crisis in Darfur has now reached its 17th month, as the Sudanese government continues to provide systematic support for militias that are carrying out massive killings, rape, burning of villages, and other inhuman acts of horror against impoverished civilians of the region.

More than a million people have been driven from their homes as a result of the genocide, with countless refugees being forced to flee across borders. The crisis has been heightened by the Sudanese government's destruction of food and water and its deliberate denial of humanitarian assistance to the people of Darfur.

Griswold's letter to the President, which highlighted a resolve on Darfur passed by the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church in June, urged that the United States actively engage allies in an effort to make clear to the Government of the Sudan that if it does not immediately cease the violence and allow the delivery of humanitarian assistance it will face "swift and immediate action from the international community."

The resolution approved by the House of Representatives this week "urges the Bush administration to call the atrocities being committed in Darfur, Sudan by their rightful name: 'genocide'" and urges the administration to lead an international effort to take all steps necessary to end the atrocities. In the event that international consensus cannot be achieved, the resolution urges the administration to "seriously consider multilateral or even unilateral intervention to prevent genocide." The resolution, which was sponsored by Rep. Don Payne (D-New Jersey), has a companion Senate measure sponsored by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) and Jon Corzine (D-New Jersey), which has not yet been acted on.

Demonstrators outside the White House, which included representatives of the Episcopal Church's Office of Government Relations, had a similar message for the President. "These U.S. citizens have resolved ... to set aside all of their differences -- as Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs ... to make [a] solemn, urgent appeal to their president and the world community today to act now," said the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a Baptist minister and former delegate to Congress from the District of Columbia. At the conclusion of the demonstration, the hundreds of participants laid on the ground together to symbolize the ever-escalating death toll in Darfur.

Many international observers have been sharply critical of both the Bush Administration's and the United Nations' response to Darfur, calling both the U.S. government and the UN slow and too timid in making a determination on whether the  atrocities rise to the legal definition of genocide. Both the House resolution passed this week and Griswold's letter last month urged President Bush to exert diplomatic leadership at the UN to bring about a declaration of genocide. Once such a declaration is made, the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide compels the 130 countries that are parties to it, including the United States, to prevent and punish these crimes against humanity. The Convention identifies genocide as actions "calculated to bring about the physical destruction of groups in whole or in part."

While the Government of the Sudan consistently has denied or sought to deflect attention from its support for the militias carrying out the genocide, new Sudanese government documents -- obtained by Human Rights Watch and released this week -- incontrovertibly show that government officials directed recruitment, arming and other support to the militias. Details can be found at: www.hrw.org.

In this climate -- where the Sudanese government has not only sponsored the atrocities but actively blocked international-relief work in Darfur -- the need for delivery of humanitarian aid has been a chief reason observers, including the Episcopal Church, have urged immediate international intervention. Even as the crisis escalates, Episcopal Relief and Development [www.er-d.org] is among the groups that have continued working to provide emergency assistance to assess and meet the critical needs of people in western Sudan.

One of the most tragic ironies of the events in Darfur, as noted by Griswold and others, is that they have come at a time when peace finally has appeared on the horizon in Sudan's 21-year civil war. The Government of Sudan and the principal rebel group in the conflict in May signed the last in a series of peace protocols designed to bring an end to the war, and many are hopeful that a final peace treaty will be signed in the coming months. The Bush Administration -- and in particular its former envoy to the region, Episcopal priest and former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Missouri), who is now the U.S. Ambassador to the UN -- was critical in helping broker this peace process. The achievement of a peace treaty in the civil war threatens to ring hollow, however, as long as the violence in Darfur continues to loom.

International observers have warned that the situation in Darfur has reached a point of dire urgency. As the rainy season has set upon Darfur and the seeds of widespread famine have been sown, humanitarian workers on the ground have cautioned that as many as 350,000 additional people may die if the international community does not take swift action in the coming weeks. "Every day we continue to look past this terrible record of death and destruction," notes the International Crisis Group, "we ensure that it will continue and intensify."