The first genocide of the 21st century is taking place under our noses in Darfur, and it's "your job" to stop it, a passionate Nicholas Kristof told an audience of about 700 in Bartels Hall June 9 during Reunion Weekend.

"They're throwing kids into bonfires. We are obligated to assert our humanity," said The New York Times columnist, who has visited western Sudan six times since the slayings began.

He delivered the Olin lecture in tandem with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn '81, a New York Times business editor. They were the first married couple to receive a Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 1991 for their reporting on the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The annual lecture series brings speakers of international renown to Cornell to address topics relevant to higher education and the state of the world.

Kristof estimates that over half a million people in Darfur have been killed by the "janjaweed," armed militias tacitly sanctioned by the Sudanese government, and hundreds of thousands more have been raped, mutilated and displaced. One story he related involved two daughters made to witnesses their father's beheading by janjaweed in retaliation for his pleading with them to release the girls. In another, a child died in her mother's arms from lack of food and water, after a harrowing journey to a refugee camp too full to assist them. "What's needed is public outrage," Kristof declared.

He clarified that the source of the conflict is racial, with the Sudanese government in Khartoum favoring, and arming, the country's lighter-skinned Arabs and suppressing, and disarming, its darker-skinned North African population.

"I get a lot of mail telling me Africa has always had problems, that we can't do anything about it," he said. "But nothing gets you quite as much as when a government decides as a basis of policy to choose someone based on skin color and throw their children into bonfires."

The United States has been better than other countries at providing aid to Darfurians, said Kristof, but "it has not been as good at standing up to the Sudanese government to get them to stop." Noting that President George W. Bush was said to have scrawled "not on my watch" in the margins of a document about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Kristof recommended a letter-writing campaign to Congress calling for the United States to pressure the Sudanese government.

"If just 100 people in every congressional district had written [their elected officials before the Rwandan killings], the political wheels would have creaked into action," Kristof said.

WuDunn's talk focused on China's "grab" for new sources of oil and the "unhealthy partnerships" it has formed with rogue nations -- including Sudan, which is a potential source of highly desirable light, sweet crude oil and could provide as much as 5 percent of China's needs, she said. China's narrow self-interest in oil has led it to supply Khartoum with arms and to block any U.N. Security Council actions to stop the slaughter in Darfur, she said.

The United States and other nations must persuade China that "it has a stake in making the international system work," said WuDunn.