At 8 am eastern standard time, the International Criminal Court
issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al Bashir
for alleged war crimes in Darfur. This was not exactly an
unexpected development. We have known for at least a week that
today was the day that the shoe was to drop. TEN YEARS AGO,
Rwanda was a month into its genocide. It is right that there
should now be so much attention to what should or could have
been done during that 90-day slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans. But
it is wrong that so little attention is paid to the lessons we
should have learned. The first lesson: Pay attention when
hundreds of thousands are at risk. Three times more people have
died over the last 20 years of war in Sudan than were murdered
in Rwanda. Most of those deaths have occurred in the south,
where populations of African descent follow Christianity and
traditional religions. And 400,000 more African Muslim Sudanese
from the west of the country may well die by December in a
famine created by the Khartoum governm