Written by DCist contributor Phil Long.

While our attention remains focused on the damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, many organizations in the District and around the country have worked tirelessly to bring attention to the plight of the Darfur region of the Sudan, whose residents have been subjected to coordinated attacks by marauding gangs sponsored, some say, by the Sudanese government. These series of attacks — which have razed entire villages and provoked massive waves of displacement — have been termed genocide by some, ethnic cleansing by others. Definitions notwithstanding, the crisis in Darfur has tested the international community’s resolve to prevent the type of death and destruction that so shocked the world’s conscience in 1994 with the Rwandan Genocide.