As Captain Brian Steidle, former Marine photographer in a United States' observatory unit, said, when talking about genocide, "'Never again' isn't a mantra, it's a foreign policy." However, during his time as an observer in Sudan's Darfur region, he saw the horrors of a contemporary genocide sponsored by the Sudanese government against hundreds of thousands of its black African citizens. Steidle's March 29 talk at the University of Pittsburgh, "Eyewitness to Genocide," was part of his speaking tour around the country aimed at raising awareness of the genocide as a step toward stopping it.

Steidle described a situation in the Darfur region far removed from anything within most Westerners' experiences. According to SaveDarfur.org, after freedom fighter groups representing underprivileged black Africans revolted, but were ultimately beaten down, the government got scared that they might rise up again. The government retaliated, aiming to kill them off and end the threat to their rule once and for all.The government began training and supplying Arab African tribes with weapons and vehicles, and fueled an incredible hatred for and dehumanization of the black African tribes by playing on the existing tensions between farmers and herders within the society.Now, these Arab tribes have formed militias, called the Janjaweed, that systematically burn entire black villages, locking people in their huts to burn them alive, raping women and girls, and otherwise murdering black African citizens. These attacks are accompanied by large-scale looting, after which the Janjaweed divide up the spoils – stolen possessions of the displaced or murdered villagers – among themselves. More recently, the government has been sending the Janjaweed across the border into Chad and attacking the huge Sudanese refugee camps located there. Government helicopters fire rockets filled with fleschettes – tiny nails with fins on one end to make sure that they fly straight out from the explosion and enter their targets point-first – into villages, sending the nails tearing through people. The government also controls cell phone towers as well as the media, so it is able to turn off service to areas right before an attack – thereby seeing that villagers get as little warning as possible.

At the same time, Steidle said, the Sudanese government is doing all it can to prevent food and water aid from reaching the desperately needy; and the people are desperate. One girl he ran into in a refugee camp hadn't eaten for three days, and he gave her his last peanut-butter cracker of the four he had had for lunch – that was her food for the day, he said. He also recalled seeing 12 kids passing a cup around their circle, each taking a sip. The presence of water can make people go crazy, start lapping it up "like dogs" because they need it so badly. Any container, even one of our plastic bottles, can be used to store water, which is such a huge benefit to them. It allows for people to have control over their own bottle full of water, being able to decide when they use it and how they use it. This is unimaginable scarcity, compared to even the poorest in the U.S.And when a Janjaweed militias loots a village, after taking what they can carry in the trucks the government gave them, they destroy the rest of the food to make sure the black Africans stay hungry, intending to kill them via starvation.

Even when Darfur's refugees and internally displaced persons are supplied with food via humanitarian organizations, they must have firewood to cook it, and another component of the humanitarian crisis revolves around this resource. To collect it, the refugees must leave the minimal safety of their camps, and herein lies the problem. If men or boys venture out and are caught by Janjaweed, they will be castrated and left to bleed to death. If the women or girls venture out and are caught, they will be gang-raped but may survive. Therefore, families are forced to discuss who goes out to get the firewood, and more often than not it's the women, whose chances for survival are the highest. Consequently, many women are raped repeatedly while gathering firewood, but must continue in order for their families to avoid starvation.

The government of Sudan denies involvement in all of this, but talking to a Janjaweed officer, Steidle heard a different story.

"'Who gives you weapons?' 'The government.' 'Who trains you?' 'The government.' 'Who supplies you with ammunition?' 'The government,'" Steidle said, recalling the conversation.

Bodies are filled with fleschettes, but the Sudanese government claims that the helicopters that fired the rockets don't exist.Steidle showed a photograph of one destroyed village, which the government claimed was set ablaze from a few shots.However, the photograph showed burn patterns on the ground indicating that the government's story was false; there was no burning between the buildings, nothing there but non-flammable sand. It seems that a government-sponsored Janjaweed militia systematically burned the villages down house by house with the petrol they carry on their trucks.

The New York Daily News estimates that 400,000 people have died in the conflict so far – that's the population of Oakland, California, or 65,000 more people than the population of Pittsburgh. According to the United States Agency for Internal Development, "without humanitarian intervention as many as 1 million civilians may die over the coming months," (quoted via a Weinberg Tzedek Hillel publication, "Crisis in Sudan"). With the international community standing nervously by, partially informed but unwilling to act, and while there isn't a strong public push to deal with the situation, it would be very easy to dismiss the situation as impossibly bleak. But that would accomplish nothing, except to foster a feeling of powerlessness that can, after the fact, double as a feeling of, "There was nothing I could've done anyway."

On the other hand, Steidle argued that there is a very real possibility to turn the situation around. In order to stop the genocide, he said, we need a multinational force to intervene. While he reported that citizens of Darfur actually wanted American troops to come in, he didn't think that international opinion of the U.S. would tolerate a unilateral intervention. U.N. troops, as representatives of the international community, would be ideal, but it might take an unacceptably long time to get these troops out there – so in the meantime, he suggested our NATO allies might make a good starting point. Moreover, no-fly zones should be established in Darfur, so that government helicopters can no longer fire rockets into residential areas. Finally, those responsible for the genocide absolutely must be held accountable.SaveDarfur.org suggests that this could involve economic sanctions and travel bans targeted against individuals, and would ultimately culminate in punishing those Sudanese officials and Janjaweed responsible for "genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression." Another important step is to "disarm and demobilize" the Janjaweed itself, and sever their links with the government.

But how do we, the public, help bring this about? Steidle suggested that the biggest obstacle to intervention is public ignorance, and lack of public push. Therefore, he suggested that we hold our representatives and the media accountable. The media labors under the mistaken and self-perpetuating impression that we care more about Michael Jackson's latest hijinks;Steidle estimated that based on the amount of media coverage each gets, we care 27 times as much about Michael Jackson as we do about the crisis in Darfur. According to BeAWitness.org, during July 2005 Michael Jackson appeared 50 times as often as Darfur in the news. If we tell the media that we would rather hear about Darfur, then they would report on the situation in Darfur and the world's reaction to it – which would in turn help foster more public push.

Public representatives and members of Congress also don't feel that there's much push for intervention, and are unwilling to act without the approval of their constituency. The solution? We can send them handwritten letters, which Steidle suggested end up on the desks of the officials themselves 98 percent of the time. How many would it take? He quoted one public official as saying, if they had received just one hundred letters during the Rwandan genocide, they would have felt qualified to speak up and take action against it. At the same time, we need to direct our frustrations towards politicians in a helpful way.

"I'm not going to go take part in a protest that's, 'Down with Bush, down with Bush!'" Steidle told the crowd. "We've got to play it smart."

Finally, Steidle suggested that we share our knowledge with as many people as possible and join advocacy groups. The more the situation in Darfur becomes public knowledge, the more politicians will feel that it is safe and even beneficial to champion meaningful action against the genocide in Darfur. They want to be empowered to do something like this, Steidle said. They want to, but they need our help.

I am a definite supporter of peaceful means of conflict resolution, but after hearing Steidle speak, I think that there is nonetheless an extremely strong case for multinational military presence and intervention as a way to throw a wrench into the works of the Sudanese genocide machine. At any rate, I know I'm not a supporter of sitting on our international hands while genocide goes on unopposed.

It seems intuitive that human lives have uniform value across the world, but even with the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in the backs of our minds, do we really have a sense of what the word "genocide" means?It is a dreadful truth that we can hardly conceive, don't want to look at, don't want to believe is happening today.Even SaveDarfur.org's estimation of 400,000 killed, 2.5 million displaced, 3.5 million hungry, 10,000 more dying each month doesn't put tortured, desperate, but most of all human faces on the suffering going on outside of our relatively safe and secure daily lives.

Captain Brian Steidle has told us that we have the opportunity to make a difference, to forget our personal cares and worries for a moment and stand up to stop something unspeakably horrible.But will we try to make that difference? There's nothing stopping us besides ignorance and a pessimism that assumes failure is a foregone conclusion before we even take the first, necessary step. We must leave ourselves open to the possibility of changing the world.

For more information, check out http://savedarfur.org/, http://www.globalsolutions.org, and http://www.committeeonconscience.org. To get involved in Pittsburgh, check out the Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition at http://www.pittsburghdarfur.org/.To ask major networks to devote airtime to Darfur, use http://beawitness.org/.

Benjamin Saalbach-Walsh is an opinions writer for The Pulse, and whose mother wants to make a bumper sticker that says, "If you're not part of the solution, you can be."

 talkback to the pulse