Sudan, a small, oil-rich African country, is systematically terrorizing people based on race and ethnicity -- a policy that includes the murder of infants, the rape of women and the extermination of black African men.

And the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan is only getting worse, said New York Times journalist Nicholas D. Kristof, speaking at Cornell as the Kaplan Family Distinguished Lecturer, April 25, in Call Auditorium. Kristof spoke on the same subject during his last visit to Cornell in 2006.

"The reason I harp on about Darfur is because of the things that I have seen there," said Kristof, "and I want to haunt you with those scenes."

Showing images from Darfur, he related the stories of people he had met at a refugee camp on the Sudan-Chad border in 2004. One boy had carried his brother, who had been shot in the face, across the desert for 49 days with a bullet in his own foot. A woman watched her two children beaten to death on the ground before her. These and other stories reinforced Kristof's point -- that in spite of the $2 billion the Bush administration has spent on relief efforts in Sudan, the response to the genocide has been "incredibly inadequate."

Kristof focused on one of the methods used to terrorize the African tribes: systematic rape.

"Rape victims do not complain to foreigners," he said, "and it disrupts the hierarchy of the victimized tribes, because leaders cannot protect their womenfolk." And when women try to report it or seek medical attention, they are arrested for adultery or fornication. When faced with such a system of torture and murder, "aid is not the ideal response."

Relief efforts in Darfur are quickly deteriorating, he said, because as the region grows increasingly insecure, more aid groups decide to evacuate. Since last May, 11 aid workers have been killed; just in the past few weeks, seven aid groups pulled out of a region near Chad due to the dangers posed by the Janjaweed, the nomadic Arabic-speaking African gunmen.

Action and aid must be delivered quickly because of the rising chaos, Kristof stressed.

"When a government decides that it is going to adopt a policy of genocide," Kristof said, "it rips apart the human fabric so abruptly that the only appropriate response from other humans is to stand up and do more about it."

He recommended that the United States push for more international peacekeepers in the Sudan and create a no-fly zone to put pressure on Khartoum to negotiate a peace settlement.

In late April, Sudan's government did allow about 3,000 United Nations peacekeepers into Darfur.

Chandni Navalkha '10 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.