While the bad news is that special envoy Andrew Natsios' findings from his recent trip to Sudan were horrible enough to compel President Bush into action, the good news is that Bush now says that he's working on a plan for the region that might even include deployment of a "credible and effective international force to go into Darfur to save lives."

IIRC, that's more of a public commitment than G.H.W. Bush ever made on Bosnia or Clinton on Rwanda. Perhaps it's not too completely naive for me to see that sort of rhetoric as a positive step? On this, I think, better to have trust and lose than to discount the possibility of U.S. leadership altogether.

[I] is not only the "enemy" who rape women and children. In many cases it is also those who should protect them - policemen, elders from the communities, and soldiers of the national Sudanese Army, as well as rebel fighters from the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army, SLM/A, and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

As predicted, the United Nations is updating its employee manual to address the web log habits of diplomats in the wake of Sudan's expulsion of envoy Jan Pronk.

Princeton Lyman -- a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa , former Assistant Secretary of State -- on Minni Minawi, SLA, JEM, and the rest of the rebels:

Let's be honest. The rebel groups are no great shakes. They've committed humanitarian degradations. They've attacked food convoys. And sometimes their conflicts for power have interfered with the peace process. So there's fault on both sides in terms of what the situation is today.

No, I don't. But I also get uneasy that the debate over genocide becomes a debate without action. We always thought that if something was finally designated as genocide it would trigger the (United Nations) Genocide Convention and the international community would have to act. What we're finding is that in itself doesn't define what has to be done or what can be done. Whether it's genocide, or crimes against humanity, or war crimes, it's a horrible humanitarian situation that needs to be addressed.

This is not a situation that lends itself to a kind of military solution because of the vast territory involved, the ability of rebels to fight in a variety of ways. So the political process remains important...People have called, in various op-eds that you may have seen, for military action by the United States or by NATO. I'm very doubtful that that's possible. I do think we can make this a larger issue with China. And I do think we ought to make it a larger issue with the Arab League, which is supporting the positions of the government.

Who's my new favorite photo-blogging South African soldier/AU peacekeeper working out of El Fasher, North Darfur? Werner Klokow, dat's who.

Interesting turn of events in Rwanda, having to do with how the genocide played out there. The government under Paul Kagame has announced that it will be launching an investigation into France's possible complicity in the killings of 1994. France, you'll remember, helped to fund the Habyarimana government and arm the Hutus who went on to perpetrate the genocide, but has denied knowing that the killings were scheduled to take place. Four years ago, a commission organized by the French parliament reportedly found that while France was guilty of "errors of judgment" in the situation, responsibility lies with the international community and the U.S. more specifically. I say "reportedly" because although their findings are online, they're available only in French, mais non, I don't speak it.

Jan Pronk, the blogging diplomat, packed up yesterday and went home. Again, it was Pronk's musings on his personal blog that morale was dropping in the national army that so angered Khartoum. (The U.N. HR department is, we imagine, putting the finishing touches on that employee blogging policy as we speak.) His expulsion was a decision made by the ruling National Congress Party, and the other members of the government -- particulary those from the southern part of the country -- aren't too happy that they made it unilaterally.

That the government is internally divided is a reminder that using "Khartoum" as a gloss for the Sudanese government under Bashir, as I sometimes do, is probably just as useful as how U.S. news professionals use "Washington" for all things George Bush.

And as it turns out, Khartoum -- about 600 miles from some parts of Darfur -- is actually something of a thriving small city, of over a million people. There's a BMW dealership, the economy is booming, and oil money is flowing. Glistening new supermarkets are now chockablock with Pringles. Bridges, hospitals, and schools are being built. The violence and starvation in Darfur must seem very far away from what's going on in the capital city.

Sudan as a whole is still desperately poor, yes -- the per capita income in 2005 stood at $640. But things are different in Khartoum. Sudan's oil reserves are fueling a growing urban wonderland, a mini and rudimentary Dubai. And even without the U.S., foreign investment rose to $2.3 billion this year. That puts the government in a pretty good position to resist U.S. demands that they stop funding and directing the attacks on some part of their rural population. All of which makes one wonder whether the U.S. Congress really thought that oil sanctions and visa denials were going to be a factor in bringing an end to the violence in the country's remote western region.

Nice photo series by the New York Times' Lynsey Addario, who has also worked in Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Lebanon.

Forces are realigning in Darfur. And yeah, that's as not good as it sounds. What's particularly frightening is that rebels -- reorganizing under the banner of National Redemption Front -- are declaring that the cease fire signed in Nigeria just six months ago meaningless. They're armed up with weapons both taken in conquest from the Sudanese military and brought in from Chad to the west and Eritrea to the east. If the international community is going to persist in this failure to protect the people of the region, they say, then they'll do the job by the necessary means. Khartoum is expected to call on the Janjaweed to respond to the challenge, but more and more the Darfuri rebel groups are engaging directly with official Sudanese military troops, many of whom are black non-Arabs like themselves. Meanwhile, Sudan is supporting anti-government rebels in Chad in their efforts to take power there. So what we're looking at is a well-armed multi-nation conflagration. The choice now seems to be to (a) engage in the political process with all due intensity and commitment or (b) watch while east-central north Africa turns in on itself.

Of course, a political solution depends in some measure on international diplomacy. On that front -- the U.N.'s representative in Sudan has been ordered by Khartoum to pack up and ship out of the country by this Wednesday. His offense? Blogging the full details and particulars of the situation in Sudan, particularly that the "morale in the Government army in North Darfur has gone down" after two recent battles losses.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the idea of a senior U.N. official aggressively blogging the details of a political situation in which he is, at least in theory, supposed to be an unbiased participant. Take his entry from October 1, which begins: "The Darfur Peace Agreement is in coma. It is not dead, but it is dying. There is no intensive care. The life support system does not function." That's certainly a new take on diplomacy. One which it seems like the world might not be quite ready for.

Scott Chacon is a great developer/political activist I got a chance to meet in the Bay Area earlier this week who recently returned from a jaunt to Rwanda. Scott says that if you liked Hotel Rwanda, you'll love Sometimes in April -- an HBO dramatic film shot in Rwanda and starring Rwandan actors. While I'm bit of a Rwanda/genocide movie buff, it was new to me and so I've gone ahead and Netflixed it.

Under the banner of Evangelicals for Darfur, the leaders of two dozen Christian groups -- liberal and conservative alike -- joined forces today to run ads in several major newspapers demanding that President Bush "rally world leadership to put pressure on the government of Khartoum to stop this genocide." While the White House has, of course, been traditionally quite responsive to conservative evangelical interests on abortion and homosexuality, it remains to be seen what the response will be to a call to action around mass killings in East Africa.

Khartoum is claiming that "Dily," the self-identified and pseudonymous Janjaweed fighter that recently interviewed by the BBC, is nothing more than a fraud who is making up stories in the hopes of gaining asylum in the U.K. Dily says that he joined the Janjaweed under pressure from his tribal elders, in support of the government's directive to protect the "Arab lands" that the nomads depended on from encroaching black farmers. Khartoum, Dily says, recruited, trained, directed, and unleashed the force on the people of Darfur, an allegation that officials have of course long denied. But Dily has details, and Darfuris in Britian reportedly validate his story.

A nice thing to do is to start out your day by laying in bed and watching the last half an hour of a documentary about mass killings. That's just what I did this morning, to finish up Ghosts of Rwanda that I had started last night. It's a PBS Frontline show, and it doesn't go heavy-handed on the violence and gore. I really appreciated that at first but as the program went I, I think that they could have done a better job of conveying the enormity of just how many people were slaughtered in Rwanda -- many of them killed by hand by their neighbors. It was 800,000 total, over the course of 100 days. Hard to conceive of, but necessary, I think. They report the numbers in the film but tiptoe around the violence so much that it doesn't help you to understand the logistics of how that many people could be killed in that short of time.

That said, it's a story of (1) what can happen when good people take no constructive action to lessen a bad situation and (2) the enormous value in the bravery of just a few people, even if their actions come to largely naught.

In the first camp are the familiars -- Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, Madeline Albright, the U.N. Security Council and so on. In the second, the unknowns. There's U.N. peacekeeper and Senegalese soldier Mbaye Diagne, who used a big toothy smile to shepherd hundreds of Tutsis past Interahamwe road blocks (until he was killed by shrapnel). There's U.S. embassy consular officer Laura Lane, who fought with her superiors for the chance to stay in Kigali and bear witness to the killings. And relief worker and missionary Carl Wilkens, the only American who stayed in Rwanda throughout the conflict who sassily asked the prime minister (and genocide architect) for help in saving an orphanage full of kids that was surrounded by genocidaires.

Five stars and highly recommended. Netflix it now.

The bored duty officers simply shrugged, mentioning Guantanamo, the U.S. military base in Cuba, where several Sudanese are being held as terror suspects. Disheartened, I resumed eating on the eighth day.