Here's one of the most concise pieces I've seen detailing the genocide in Darfur:
It seems to me that not enough attention is being paid to the racial component of the killings. This 60 Minutes piece describes the African Arab militias known as the Janjaweed as "racist," which is an apt term but one I've rarely heard, even though it might translate the genocide there into terms that Westerners can better understand. The social categories in Sudan are complicated, as they are everywhere, but that said the genocide there is not unlike the lynchings and other kinds of Jim Crow-era violence that whites used to intimidate, terrorize, and drive off African Americans.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful. —Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer