The ongoing catastrophe in Sudan is the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today. There are no exceptions. Sudan, which is geographically largest of African nations, bears this ghastly distinction with terrible clarity. Numbers tell only part of the story, but they are sufficient for the moment. A carefully assembled set of data from the U.S. Committee for Refugees shows that almost two million human beings have perished in the most recent phase of ongoing civil war in Sudan. 1 As many as five million refugees have been created, making the refugee problem alone the greatest of its kind in the world. 2 And at the height of the summer famine of 1998, the UN's World Food Program estimated that well over 2 million more human beings, mainly children, were at risk of starvation. 3 And the catastrophe continues: famine, epidemic disease, enslavement, and scorched-earth warfare remain defining features of the landscape in the south, where civil war has been so devastatingly concentrated. Despite its distinction as an abysm of inhumanibSudan is rarely reported on, and even more rarely does this reporting do more than rehash some part of the litany of horrific numbers; a useful context is almost never provided. There are some recent signal exceptions: William Finnegan's superb essay in The New Yorker a year ago, all too aptly entitled"The Invisible War, "4 and Richard Miniter's excellent"The False Promise of Slave Redemption' in The Atlantic Monthly. ~ And there has been some fine investigative reporting around the terribly misconceived cruise-missile attack on the AI Shifa pharmaceutical factory in August 1998, particularly Vernon Loeb's for The Washing~ton Post. ~ Very occasionally there is an editorial of note. But in the main, Sudan remains---even for informed and intelligent Americ a n s a n unrecognized abysm of human suffering while it slides slowly, relentlessly, helplessly toward ever greater destruction. The civil war that is the engine of this destruction shows no signs of abating; indeed, if anything; Canadian and Chinese oil interests in Sudan promise to intensify the war by generating a great deal of hard currency, for the cash-strapped Khartoum regime, one party in the multi-faceted civil war. The regime, dominated by the