BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. In the northern African nation of Sudan is gathering yet another contemporary humanitarian disaster. Just as a reported peace agreement brokered by the Bush administration seemed to promise an end to a 20 year north-south civil war, armed conflict erupted in the remote western region of Darfur. As many as a million citizens have fled their homes, and more than a hundred thousand refugees have spilled across the border into neighboring Chad. Survivors tell stories of looting and burning of villages, racially-motivated killings, and rapes. U.S. coverage of Darfur has been limited, but in recent weeks, some scattered alarms are sounding. A February 25th op-ed in the Washington Post called the conflict in Darfur "the un-noticed genocide." But in a National Public Radio interview last Saturday, Refugees International's Ken Bacon sidestepped labeling the conflict.

KEN BACON: I, I hate to dodge this, but I think it's probably too early to tell whether there's actual genocide taking place. Access is very limited. There's been very little press coverage. The government won't let people in, plus it's very insecure. There have been allegations, but we won't know until we can get human rights investigators in there.

BOB GARFIELD:Joining me now is Samantha Power, a former Balkan war correspondent and Pulitzer prizewinning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha, welcome to the show.

SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Explain for us, please, who the principal victims seem to be and who seems to be responsible.

SAMANTHA POWER: I think most of us who have thought about Sudan over the course of the last two decades have thought about the conflict, indeed even the potential genocide there, as being one in which the Muslim government, the National Islamic Front government has taken aim at Christians in the South, and that is where a major peace process has actually taken hold between those two entities. But what you have in Darfur, which has, has confused people, because it doesn't fit the mold of what we understand the ethnic conflict in Sudan to be about, is actually Muslim on Muslim violence. It is ethnically-motivated violence, it seems. It's Arab Muslims who have been armed and trained by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, taking aim at African Muslims who occupy land that I think the Khartoum government would very much like to see in Arab hands. Right now you have about 700,000 African Muslims within Sudan who have been displaced and who are living in horrific conditions, by all accounts. You have another hundred thousand that have made it over the border into Chad. They describe taunts by the militia members in which the threat of extermination is issued. They describe promises on the part, again, of these Arab Muslims that all of the Africans will be, you know, taken out of, of Sudan by the time the campaign is over. So there are very worrying signs about a larger, fairly systematic campaign aimed at the destruction of this African Muslim group.

BOB GARFIELD:Which would suggest that what is afoot now is ethnic cleansing. Nobody seems to have said it aloud, but if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck -- and yet, still hemming and hawing. Why is it happening this way?

SAMANTHA POWER: Well I don't know how much hemming hawing there is really around the phrase ethnic cleansing. I think where we start to get the dance, the what I call the "G-word shuffle" is around the language of genocide. The nervousness comes from a few places. First of all, it's actually just genuinely hard to get in and to confirm with one's own eyes, so one gets nervous about invoking language, inflammatory language. But that is its own red flag. One of the things that people who are intent on committing genocide do first and foremost is they keep outsiders out. The second reason there's a nervousness about using it, especially on the part of aid agencies and I think on the part of journalists and editorial writers is this fear of crying wolf. There is, you know, a stigma associated with the word genocide that one could imagine retaining only if you use it very selectively. The third reason that people are hesitant is that there's of course major confusion about what genocide is, and you know, whether it requires outright extermination of an ethnic, national or religious group. So I think a lot of people just shy from using the word, because they want to leave it to the lawyers after the fact to determine it.

BOB GARFIELD:I want to ask you about the press's role in, in understanding how these conflicts are viewed outside of where they're taking place.

SAMANTHA POWER: One of the problems with, I think, the way we in the press tend to cover conflict is we have traditionally allowed our priorities to be set by policymakers who, of course, are not going to go out of their way to draw attention to conflicts that they may not want to do anything about. In this instance, this Khartoum government's killing and ethnic cleansing of these African Sudanese Muslims is very, very inconvenient. It comes at a time when Washington, it seems, is on the verge of having secured a, a peace agreement between Khartoum and the Christian south that would have been a real feather in the cap of this administration. This is not a place that the Bush administration wants to draw attention to right now, and thus the initiative for bringing this up really has to come in Washington from the people in the press corps to put the administration in a position where it has to respond, where it has to send fact-finders out. And so I think that's one function that the press performs -- is an agenda-setting function in Washington. But the second function, of course, is to get there and to bring not merely secondhand reports but firsthand encounters with people who have experienced these atrocities. The worst thing we in the press can do at a time like this is to accept government assurances, you know, that the violence has ceased and that access can't be granted for our own safety and security, you know, because of lingering rebel forces. That's usually, again, a, a clear signal that there are tidying operations being conducted out of our line of vision. But I think as we look back on our record in the 1990s, we as a profession can be relatively pleased with our staying power when it came to the conflict and the crisis in the former Yugoslavia and quite embarrassed, actually, about how we covered the Rwanda genocide.

BOB GARFIELD:In your book you observe that, I'm gonna quote you here, "During the conflict in Bosnia, U.S. officials had tried to convince journalists that the conflict was the product of ancient tribal hatreds," and in Rwanda you say that reporters in the field, quote, "adopted this frame on their own." And now Amnesty International's report on Sudan suggests that the Sudanese government is characterizing the violence as tribal, telling the outside world I guess oh, don't, don't bother yourself with this - this is the - these are just Sudanese doing what Sudanese do. Will the media once again be suckers for that argument?

SAMANTHA POWER: Well, one hopes not. It became such a standard alibi -- you know, the title of my book is A Problem from Hell, and that was Warren Christopher's characterization of the violence in Bosnia. It was a problem from hell. You know, we'll never make these people like one another. They've been killing one another for centuries. Well, there may well have been incidents of ethnic killing and conflict over the centuries, but it has been a kind of time-tested and quite successful alibi used both by perpetrators and by bystanders.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Samantha, thanks very much.

SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD:Samantha Power is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.