Pittsburgh benefited last week from the visit of retired U.S. ambassador Larry G. Rossin, currently serving as senior international coordinator for the Save Darfur Coalition, represented here by the five-organization Pittsburgh Darfur Emergency Coalition.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

Mr. Rossin has experience dealing with tough problems, including as U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and assignments in Haiti and Kosovo. As problems go, Darfur is as bad as it gets. He remains upbeat and has ideas of how to push ahead.

Darfur, which means "place of the Fur people," is part of Western Sudan. Its problems have spilled over into neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic. The adjacent regions of both of those countries share with Darfur excruciating dryness and poverty, isolation and now displaced people and conflict. It is estimated that more than 2.5 million people have been dislodged by the Darfur troubles, which began in 2003, with between 200,000 and 400,000 killed. One must add that whenever numbers like that are rounded off to the nearest hundred thousand it means that no one really knows how many have been displaced or killed. But it's a lot.

Partly because the Darfur problem has been around for a while it receives some attention. On Thursday President Bush said he had considered sending U.S. troops there -- but had rejected the idea. (It might have been the matter of 170,000 U.S. troops in Iraq with more possibly to be sent to enhance the "surge.") On Friday, meeting in Paris, new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and new French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged to do something about Darfur, in the U.N. Security Council or somewhere, joining Mr. Bush in talking about what a terrible problem it was and how something had to be done about it by someone.

Darfur stays in front of a not-awfully-interested U.S. population because of the good work of people like Mr. Rossin and the Rev. Carmen A. D'Amico, pastor of St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church on the Hill, which hosted a public meeting Thursday night. One reason the Darfur issue continues to get attention is that it has been called genocide.

This means, first, that peoples who have been victims of genocide, such as Armenians, Jews and Rwandans, are interested in Darfur due to fellow-feeling and the sympathy of shared pain and grief, and because they don't want their own fates to be forgotten by history.

Second, genocide is something that no one wants to be accused of perpetrating, or of having condoned by inaction. This is what gets Mr. Bush to talk about it, although he has yet to do anything that has any significant impact in Darfur or Sudan.

Although Darfur is a perfectly ghastly problem, it is not easily susceptible to becoming an issue in the U.S. presidential elections because it is too complicated. It is hard to see the candidates making a point in a speech about Darfur, starting by hoisting a map to show where the place is.

Here are some of the reasons why Darfur is so hard.

Like real estate, location. No infrastructure. No roads. No air strips. Not even any cities. Geographically it is in the middle of the roughest part of Africa.

It is in Sudan, a country that has been the epitome of difficult African countries since well before independence in 1956. If anyone saw the movie "Khartoum," remember when the Mahdi, played by Sir Laurence Olivier in black face with an Indian accent, organized the death by spearing of Charlton Heston, playing British General Sir Charles Gordon, on the porch of his office? Sudan is and always has been an uneasy combination of pastoralists speaking Arabic, darker-skinned farmers speaking African languages and others, living in a large country with little water and few resources. The pastoralists, with a general, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, as president now, have been on top pretty much since the beginning. His group's approach to human rights has been very mixed.

Sudan was torn by north-south civil war for decades, ending with a fragile agreement in 2005. Some people speculate that the reason the world hasn't pushed Sudan harder on Darfur is because of the risk of the north-south accord, which was difficult to achieve, coming unglued.

The Sudanese government is quite artful at fending off attempts to influence its behavior through international pressure. It allowed basically clawless African Union peacekeepers to be sent to Darfur. It has bobbed and weaved about allowing in potentially more competent U.N. peacekeeping forces.

Sudan found oil. Chinese companies have staked out most of it. China has also quietly assumed the role of protector of Sudan in the United Nations and other forums. There is some thought that China's wishing to host a quiet and unprotested Olympic games in 2008 will make it susceptible to pressure to push the Sudanese to be reasonable about Darfur. I am skeptical. If one wanted to push the Chinese about something in connection with the Olympics, one could easily think of trying to ensure the human rights of the Tibetans, the Uighars or Falun Gong, under China's own roof.

Apart from giving the Sudanese independence of action, its oil also serves as a deterrent to U.S. involvement in the Darfur affair. All it would take is for someone to suggest that the United States was interested in intervening in Sudan to get its hands on the country's oil -- as it is sometimes suggested with respect to Iraq -- or, worse, that the United States was, in fact, zeroing in on another Muslim country, and our engagement could become unwelcome indeed.

I see some hope in increased French interest in Darfur, since it has military and other resources in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic. I think, for now, however, that the United States has other fish to fry, although the Darfur coalition should definitely keep the heat on Washington on this issue.