Genocide in Slow Motion

By Nicholas D. Kristof

Darfur: A Short History of a Long War

by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal

London: Zed Books, 176 pp., £12.00 (to be published in the US in March)

Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide

by Gérard Prunier

Cornell University Press, 212 pp., $24.00

1.

During the Holocaust, the world looked the other way. Allied leaders turned down repeated pleas to bomb the Nazi extermination camps or the rail lines leading to them, and the slaughter attracted little attention. My newspaper, The New York Times, provided meticulous coverage of World War II, but of 24,000 front-page stories published in that period only six referred on page one directly to the Nazi assault on the Jewish population of Europe. Only afterward did many people mourn the death of Anne Frank, construct Holocaust museums, and vow: Never Again.