The suffering in the Darfur region of Sudan continues, even as the activities of the deaths squads have somewhat slowed.

Lewiston doctor Stephen Sokol is in Sudan, working with several relief organizations to help thousands of refugees who have been driven from their homes and collected into large camps for internally displaced persons – a maddeningly bureaucratic description of people who have escaped genocide but lost most everything else.

In a column published Oct. 2 in the Sun Journal, Sokol described the overwhelming task of confronting people trying to survive in the refugee camps. The conditions are appalling. A single, 25-bed hospital and clinic serves as many as 150,000 people in one camp. Food and water are terribly limited. Violence and crime are endemic. And refugees who leave the camps for food or to find work must elude death squads and bands of armed militia that use rape as a weapon.

The organized violence in which entire villages were destroyed by Janjaweed militia with support from government troops has slowed. Most of their targets are gone. The villages in the region have been destroyed. The genocidal rampage has stopped largely because it has been successful – hundreds of thousands have died and many more have been driven like cattle from their homes and into pens where they starve and die from disease.

The United States has led much of the world’s response to the crisis in Darfur, concentrating on a slow, diplomatic process for ending the slaughter. In many ways, President Bush has done more for the people of Sudan than other western leaders, but his administration’s efforts have centered on working with the Sudanese government and building a negotiated peace between the warring parties. The question is whether or not the Sudanese government can be trusted as a partner for building peace; the hands of many government leaders are stained by the blood of the murdered in Darfur.

Sokol described for us all an apocalyptic world where families live in fear, where the police are afraid to act and where the government is complicit in the suffering of its people.

The United States cannot impose peace, but working with members of the European Union and NATO it should be able to improve stability and improve the delivery of relief supplies to the people who need it. The U.S. must find the will for more aggressive action.