[The Hague, October 26. Image via Getty]

Bosnian mothers and relatives of war victims protest October 26, 2009 in The Hague outside the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at the start of the planned tial of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, who boycotted the start of his UN genocide trial. Neither Karadzic nor any of his legal advisors were present at the ICTYwhen judge O-Gon Kwon started the hearing, which lasted less than 15 minutes. AFP PHOTO / RICK NEDERSTIGT - netherlands out - belgium out - (Photo credit should read RICK NEDERSTIGT/AFP/Getty Images)

[Kiev, September 27. Image via Getty]

An elderly woman cries in front of the Minora Monument on Babiy Yar ravine in Kiev, on September 27, 2008, during a mourning ceremony marking the 68th anniversary of the beginning of Jews mass execution in September 1941. Babiy Yar, place in Kiev, where Nazis shot more than 100, 000 Jews in 1941-1944, became one of the terrible symbols of the Holocaust. AFP PHOTO/ SERGEI SUPINSKY (Photo credit should read SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images)

[Srebrenica, Bosnia; July 10. Image via Getty]

A Bosnian Muslim girl touches coffins of relatives, among coffins of Srebrenica victims displayed at the memorial centre of Potocari near Srebrenica on July 10, 2009. The 534 bodies were excavated from mass-graves in Eastern Bosnia and were identified as Muslims killed by Bosnian-Serb forces in the Srebrenica area. Bosnian Serb troops massacred up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men after capturing Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The 534 identified victims will be buried on July 11 in the Potocari Memorial Center, next to some 3,500 victims of the massacre already buried there. AFP PHOTO ELVIS BARUKCIC (Photo credit should read ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP/Getty Images)

["Ljubelj South", Slovenia; June 5. Image via Getty]

A woman explores on June 5, 2009 the chamber of former World War II nazi concentration camp 'Ljubelj south' where the names of all nazi concentration camps were engraved, some 100 kilometers from Ljubljana. Slovenian President Danilo Turk and his Austrian counterpart Heinz Fischer visited the tunnel and the entrance to the 'Ljubelj south' World War II nazi concentration camp at Slovenian side of the border with Austria. Between March 1943 to May 1945 Ljubelj south in Slovenia and Ljubelj north in Austria were a branch of notorious WWII Mauthausen nazi concentration camps, from which thousands of political internees, the majority of whom were French, were transported to Ljubelj from there. AFP PHOTO/ HRVOJE POLAN (Photo credit should read HRVOJE POLAN/AFP/Getty Images)

She writes:

The evidence the prosecutor has presented is clear and compelling. Millions of people have been displaced; hundreds of thousands have been killed and, at the center of it all stands Sudanese President Omar al Bashir who has been indicted on seven counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity.

One of those crimes, in fact, is the use of rape as a weapon of genocide, which is the laws first use.

Jolie also talks about what continues to happen at the world's attention ebbs and flows from Darfur.

More than 250,000 people from Darfur have lived destitute lives in refugee camps in Chad for six years now. Camps with more than two million internally displaced persons inside Darfur are even worse. Thirty percent of those displaced are school-age children. Girls leaving the camps are raped; boys leaving the camps are killed.

The problem, of course, is that we haven't seen fit to do terribly much about it.

The U.N. Security Council, Jolie says, can choose to intervene after the prosecutor's presentation, or it can sit idly by and allow Bashir to continue killing his own people and thumbing his nose at the international community.

According to the UN Charter, the Security Council exists "to promote the establishment and maintenance of international peace and security." If the results of the Darfur investigation which they ordered don't merit their active engagement, what does?

Today the Security Council member states will be faced with a simple decision - to embrace impunity or to end it.

As they are considering Bashir's fate they are also considering their own.

They are also considering the future of all the residents of Darfur, who Bashir continues to attempt to exterminate.

The Case Against Omar Al Bashir [Time]

Earlier: Darfur: When Assault Becomes A Case For Genocide

[Moscow, April 24. Image via Getty]

Members of Russia's Armenian diaspora hold a demonstration in Moscow on April 24, 2009 to commemorate the anniversary of mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, many calling on US President Barack Obama to honour a pledge to class the massacres as 'genocide.' AFP PHOTO / YURI KADOBNOV (Photo credit should read YURI KADOBNOV/AFP/Getty Images)

Kristof continues:

In Darfur and eastern Chad, you can randomly approach any group of people and find heartbreaking stories. Mr. Clooney was clowning around with a group of boys bathing in the river - taking their photo and showing it to them digitally - and that's when we met the 13-year-old boy with the bullet in his knee.

[NY Times]

David Scheffer, who served under Clinton as the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, writes in the LA Times that, in this case, there is more than enough evidence to show that Bashir is using rape to not just oppress the women in Darfur but to exterminate their ethic groups.

Moreno-Ocampo bases his charge that Bashir is committing genocide through the orchestrated and targeted use of rape as a weapon of war based on two rarely-used ways of eliminating an ethnic group or people:

"causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" or "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

Although the mass-rapes in Darfur are not as fast-acting a method of genocide as killing everyone in the area, they do accomplish several things that might legitimately end the existence of the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups. For one, the brutality of the assaults leaves many women infertile, which means that less children can be born. Furthermore, the women contend that they are raped in order to impregnate them with babies of mixed ethnicity who are not accepted as members of their ethnic group, which means that many of the children aren't considered part of the groups that Bashir is trying to destroy. Furthermore, because of the stigma of rape and having a baby fathered by a Janjaweed rapist, Moreno-Ocampo contends that "infanticide and abandonment are common" in Darfur among rape victims, reducing the children born to the ethnic groups targeted for destruction even more.

Scheffer writes of his experience:

In the 1990s, when I was the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues, I met scores of women who had been raped during the atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and the eastern Congo. In most cases, the experience was devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their physical health. Even if they were still physically able to bear children, these women typically were ostracized from their communities and could not marry their ethnic men. Confronted with these stories, I recognized that mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide.

He also urges the U.S. to continue blocking efforts by China, Russia and the African Union to block the ICC from issuing an arrest warrant for Bashir, which they claim is for the sake of UN peace keepers in the region. Protecting the peace keepers worked really well in Rwanda, right guys?

Rape As Genocide In Darfur [LA Times]

Microloan organization Vision Finance, which started a program in the Rwandan town of Masaka three years ago, says that while the majority of borrowers are female, "four out of five defaulters are men." Jeanine Mukandayisenga, one of the businesswomen in Masaka who benefited from microlending, tells the Post: "They say that women care more about the family, but I do not know if that is true...I think it has more to do with the self-control woman show in hard times. We know how to survive when men despair."

But women aren't just thriving as money managers in Rwanda; women hold 48% of seats in the Rwandan parliament, which, according to the WaPo, is the highest percentage in the world. And it's not like Rwanda is an anomaly. The World Bank says that "in India's great economic transformation of the past 15 years, states that have the highest percentage of women in the labor force have grown the fastest as well as had the largest reductions in poverty." One of the most encouraging aspects of female success in Rwanda is that women are being seen differently by the culture as a whole. "Today, woman are in business; before, if a woman had some money, she would have to give it to the man," Rwandan high schooler Eric Muhire says. "They could not compete against a man. But now, they are competing and doing better."

[Image via The MotherHood]

Earlier: Justine Henin Retires • Basket-Weaving Brings Women Together
Money Doesn't Make The World Go Around, But It Helps

But one among us asked of a man she was seeing, "If I had to become a refugee, could I do it with him?" In my friend's case, the guy flunked and was given the boot. But that question, that standard, has remained with me. If you lost your creature comforts, if Katrina struck your neighborhood, who could make you laugh, care for you, remain curious about you and retain your curiosity?

Why Can't We [Nation]