U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today, has called the Sudanese rampage against Black Africans a “genocide:”

We concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed [Arab militia] bear responsibility and genocide may still be occurring.

The Sudanese government has been sponsoring a campaign of mass rape, mass murder, forced relocations, and forced starvation against Black Africans in Darfur.

The BBC today tried to spin the usual “the U.S. is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t” argument:

Critics point out that Colin Powell first demanded Khartoum stop the violence at the beginning of July.

Two months later, they say, the government still has not met key demands, yet the US is proposing allowing it another 30 days.

US officials have denied they are "going easy" on Khartoum by allowing it more time to comply.

That’s strange. While the U.S. has continually pushed for tough actions against Sudan, the Weasels at the United Nations Human Rights Commission have been expressing solidarity with a government sponsoring rape, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing. The UN last year put Libya in charge of the Commission, despite objections from rights advocates like Human Rights Watch (HRW). Also last year, the UN voted to give well-known human rights violator Cuba a seat on the commission. Obviously the Commission, a group of dictatorships, is unwilling to do anything about atrocities committed against Black people in the Sudan.