Time to send in the 'System Administrators'. If only we had any...

Nick Kristof's column in today's Times lauds Bush administration diplomacy for having successfully brokered a peace agreement that will hopefully end Sudan's civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian south.   However, he is less sanguine about the prospects for avoiding humanitarian disaster in Sudan's Darfur region, where the government appears to be conducting a deliberate campaign to divert emergency food aid and commit genocide through mass starvation.

I've obtained a report by a U.N. interagency team documenting conditions at a concentration camp in the town of Kailek: Eighty percent of the children are malnourished, there are no toilets, and girls are taken away each night by the guards to be raped. As inmates starve, food aid is diverted by guards to feed their camels.

The standard threshold for an "emergency" is one death per 10,000 people per day, but people in Kailek are dying at a staggering 41 per 10,000 per day — and for children under 5, the rate is 147 per 10,000 per day. "Children suffering from malnutrition, diarrhea, dehydration and other symptoms of the conditions under which they are being held live in filth, directly exposed to the sun," the report says.

"The team members, all of whom are experienced experts in humanitarian affairs, were visibly shaken," the report declares. It describes "a strategy of systematic and deliberate starvation being enforced by the GoS [government of Sudan] and its security forces on the ground." (Read the 11-page report here.)

Why don't our humanitarian friends the French or the Germans do something (since we are rather busy elsewhere at the moment)?

(For more on what international "system administrators" are, see this post.)