"When you are in the human rights business," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), "you have to remain hopeful that somewhere around the corner there will be a remedy that will save these millions of people who are trapped into massive suffering."

Takirambudde was delivering a March 9 lecture, "Darfur: Crisis and Challenges," sponsored by Cornell's Institute for African Development, in the Biotechnology building.

He explored the history of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan, beginning in 2003 when the government of Sudan began sponsoring attacks. The conflict is estimated to have claimed more than 250,000 lives, although some reports assert that the actual total number of casualties due to conflict, disease and malnutrition in the region is closer to 400,000.

Millions of civilians are trapped in camps or in the desolate countryside regions throughout Darfur. Hundreds of thousands also live in refugee camps on the Chad-Sudan border, where, as Takirambudde stated, "fighting is now raging."

Takirambudde's comments are supported by the 2006 U.S. Reports on Human Rights Practices that, earlier this month, declared the genocide in Darfur to be the world's gravest human rights abuse.

Last year the United Nations adopted a resolution to deploy about 20,000 international peacekeepers to assist in bringing an end to conflict in the region, which is nearly three times the size of the state of New York. For comparison, the New York Police Department employs more than 40,000 police officers to patrol New York City alone.

But while more than six months have passed since the U.N. resolution, Takirambudde noted, no action has been taken due to a lack of consent by the Sudanese government, which is required in order to deploy such forces.

HRW is trying to come up with alternative sanctions that can help in bringing peace to the people in Darfur region, said Takirambudde, noting that he views the high level of support and engagement offered by Cornell and by other U.S. universities as encouraging.

He also said that HRW is investigating the idea of creating a highly controlled international escrow account where payments for Sudanese oil would be housed. The funds in the account would be directed toward the reconstruction and development of Darfur and as compensation for human rights abuse, until peace is restored to the region. Currently, revenue generated from the sale of oil is sustaining the government of Sudan. China is one of the major investors in Sudanese oil.

But efforts to stop ongoing genocide like that in Darfur have been at best "too little, too late," said David Wippman, Cornell's vice provost for international relations and professor of law. "We are almost four years down the road, and little in the way of effective action has been in place and little appears to be on the horizon."

Based in New York City, HRW is one of the world's largest international, nongovernmental human rights organizations. Before joining HRW, Takirambudde, a Uganda native, was a law professor and dean of social sciences at the University of Botswana.

Graduate student Sandra Holley is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.