I just read David Luban's piece called "Calling Genocide by its Rightful Name" in the Chicago Journal of International Law, and I highly recommend it. The problem, in a way, is that Raphael Lemkin set the bar too high by tying "genocide" to the Holocaust. Now any time bad guys don't try to eliminate the entirety of a population expressly for who they are, the international community gets into this nit-picking over whether the crimes against humanity involved rise to the level of the G-word.

But even Hitler, writes Luban, didn't intend to eliminate every Jewish person everywhere they existed, from Austria to America. (He may have wanted to, but he never had the intention, which is the key here.) His aim was to do away with those Jewish people within his neck of Europe. Similarly, Janjaweed or GOS don't necessarily have the intention to eliminate every Darfurian. And in some current interpretations of international law, that makes what's happening in Darfur something less than genocide.

If you do some historical reading about Lemkin's quest to define "genocide" for the world, a key piece of it is that he needed to give a name to a crime that was so particularly heinous because it sought to strangle diversity. That's what's happening in Darfur, with little doubt. The offenders there want to reduce the diversity of the human experience. That's why we hear about Janjaweed raping women while saying their goal is to make lighter children.

Again, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I suggest you read the Luban piece. It's real good.