Dr James Moore, one of America's top bloggers, put the world's spotlight on Darfur, Sudan

Photo: Dr James F Moore

Considering today's communication technology, the Internet and free blogging tools, Jim Moore, author of The Second Superpower, comments on the blogging of Darfur and, as insightful as ever, concludes:

"The bad news--very bad--is that we learned a great deal about the limits of public opinion to change history, at least this history. We really did believe that we might be able to stop a genocide. As Ingrid reports, when we started the death toll was reported to be 10,000. Now it is at least 400,000. Probably more. The only thing that limits the actual death toll is that the victims are spread widely across a large geographical area, so they are difficult to completely exterminate. On the other hand, this same dispersal makes keeping an accurate count very diffcult, and terrible things can happen where no one but the victims and the criminals witness.

The good news is that many of us have concluded that we cannot stop particular genocides, but perhaps we can stop genocide. The Genocide Intervention Network has been born of this idea."

Photo: An African Union soldier from Kenya at ZamZam camp for internally displaced people near El-Fashir in northern Darfur, Sudan (by journalist Andrew Heavens at Meskel Square blog)