Genocide - Word or Action?

Scott Straus, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, wrote an interesting article on the genocide in Darfur for Foreign Affairs' January/February 2005 issue, "Darfur and the Genocide Debate." Straus notes that for the first time since the Holocaust, the U.S. government has labeled a foreign crisis "genocide." -- the "ethnic cleansing" in the Darfur region, in Sudan. He notes that since the Genocide Convention, which was established by the United Nations after WWII, the U.S. has never publicly termed such a crisis as "genocide", and that analysts have always figured that this was because the U.S., as a signatory to the Convention, would be bound to act under the terms and conditions of the convention (which the U.S. only signed in 1988, but which would have been tested in Rwanda, Bosnia and Sarajevo had the U.S. acted).

Straus notes, however, that in the instance of Darfur, both Colin Powell and President Bush have publicly termed the ethnic murders as "genocide," but that neither the U.S., Europe, nor the Organization of African States is in any rush to get involved. While the politics are never quite as simple as rushing into a foreign intervention headfirst, one has to wonder what the point of such conventions are, and what lessons were truly learned from the Holocaust if we stand idly by while such atrocities occur.