Sudan Official Rejects Claims of Genocide

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Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said Sudan agrees with the African Union, which has refrained from calling the atrocities genocide, a crime punishable under a 1948 U.N. convention.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said last month he wasn't ready to describe the situation in Darfur "as genocide or ethnic cleansing" but he did call it "a tragic humanitarian situation" and raised the possibility of international intervention.

Arab militias have killed up to 30,000 people in Darfur, most of them black Africans, and driven over 1 million from their homes in the 15-month conflict.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20040724_105.html

Here's the UN citation:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm