Romeo Dallaire says the world's silence over the crisis in Sudan bears haunting resemblance to what he remembers before the massacre in Rwanda a decade ago.

The retired lieutenant general, whose horrific experiences in Rwanda became both an award-winning book and documentary, is now a fellow with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. There, he works on preventing other Rwandan-style crises.

Dallaire says the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan are not any different from the genocide he observed in Rwanda, in which about 800,000 Rwandans, most of them Tutsis, died at the hands of Hutus.

"It is. It's another Rwanda," Dallaire told Canada AM from Boston.

"It's not a matter of whether the scale is totally comparable. It is the whole nature of the abuse of innocent people by another group that is specifically targeting them because of who they are, and where they are."

Since 2003, nearly 70,000 people have died in Darfur and another two million have had to flee their homes as pro-government militia, known as janjaweed, rape, kill and loot non-Arab villages.

Many have accused Sudan's government of directing the militia. But the United Nations has been reticent to call the situation "genocide."

The UN has demanded that the Sudanese government stop the violence in Darfur. But in a six-month review of the crisis, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the Security Council that Khartoum has refused to arrest those responsible for the atrocities.

What's more, his report said, while the government has implemented some promised measures, "the last six months have seen a substantial increase in lawlessness, in particular banditry and abduction, which have dramatically increased since October."

Despite the urgency of his report, Annan has stopped short of recommending that UN peacekeepers move into Darfur, which would require Khartoum's permission.

Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada says UN has to start taking tougher action and begin arresting those responsible for the killings.

"A recent UN commission of inquiry has looked at the situation in Darfur and it's very clearly said there's a need for strong international justice now," he told Canada AM from Ottawa. "We have a tribunal that was established two years ago, the International Criminal Court, which is perfectly poised to play that role.

"If there's not something done very quickly to break that kind of cycle of impunity whereby military and other leaders in Sudan feel they can commit abuses of this sort and get away with it, then the crisis in Darfur is only going to deepen -- and in other parts of Sudan where there's very serious concerns may deteriorate as well."

Dallaire says it seems that there is always a global crisis that seems to take priority over conflicts in Africa. Most recently, the world has been caught up by the tsunami crisis in south Asia. Over the past two years, as the Darfur situation has worsened, the world has been focused on Iraq.

"Everything else seems to fall to the side," he says. "It was the same thing when Afghanistan was going on. We could have committed extensive capabilities in the Congo, but we abandoned the Congolese because we were wrapped up in Afghanistan."

Dallaire says conflicts in Africa never get the attention they merit and therefore the international community never steps in until it's reached a crisis point. It's as if the world believes that Africans "don't count," he says.

"In my estimation, this establishing of priorities of who counts and who doesn't in the world has been exacerbated over the 15 years of conflict. We haven't really come to the plate to respond to that."

Neve agrees that Africa is too often forgotten.

"The fact that Africa constantly fails to attract the level of international attention that it deserves and needs is a woeful concern. And we shouldn't have to wait for crises to reach the level at which the crisis in Darfur has now become.

"There's been ample advance warning going back months and even years that a crisis was mounting in Darfur, just as there was ample warning that a crisis was coming in Rwanda.

"If the international community doesn't start soon to begin to take effective action at early stages to head off crises of this sort, then Africa is going to continue to suffer the kind of inattention it's getting now."

As for the current Darfur situation, Dallaire has his own ideas of what should be done. He says if the UN Security Council cannot get its act together and come with a resolution, "then middle powers, like Canada and Germany and Japan, should join forces with the African Union, beef it up, and go in under that regional power."