I remember being 17, starting it late at night, reading by a small lamp, and being quickly reduced by what I was reading to a quivering mass in the foetal position.

I remember thinking, 'never again, ' of course. How inhuman must you be to disagree?

Yet even as I was reading, Slobodan Milosevic was setting events in motion in Yugoslavia that would lead to Srebrenica and a decade of horror in faraway villages with hard-to-pronounce names.

Then Rwanda, an incomprehensible slaughter which, having just opted to abandon fellow African disaster Somalia to warlords and its fate after being humiliated there by an ambush on a Black Hawk helicopter, Americans were in little mood to hear about.

'Never again' didn't turn out to mean all that much in those instances, we can say with benefit of hindsight. At least not until far too many had died.

But at the time, it wasn't quite as easy to make the call.

Never mind the hysterical Left of Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn, who tend to see any Western attempts to do anything about . . . well, anything . . . as prima facie evidence of a conspiracy to enslave poor people and take their resources. More moderate folk looked at Yugoslavia and Rwanda and said, how can we act when we don't really know who's done what to whom here?

So when the world came to look at what's happening, still, on the ground in Darfur in southern Sudan . . . and is now spreading to eastern parts of neighbouring Chad . . . there seemed to be more urgency to label the crisis 'genocide'.

It was a word that John O'Shea of Goal, Ireland's Old Testament prophet shaming those in power without fear or favour, who's 100% right 75% of the time, unsurprisingly never shrunk from.

But when in 2004, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell described what was happening in Sudan as 'genocide, ' there was expectation that action would swiftly follow.

And with America tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, some believed that Europe would take the lead in forcing an end to the killing, rapes and pillaging by Janjaweed militia.

Despite the low-end figure of almost 200,000 dead and millions displaced, little was done.

This week, almost two years after Powell used the word genocide, two years of talks and abortive peace deals, the UN has got the Sudanese government . . .

backing the Muslim militias doing the killing of fellow, darker-skinned, Muslims . . . to agree to talk about talking about talks about a UN peacekeeping force to take over from the hopeless African Union peacekeepers who are supposedly in place. With fresh reports of more than 100 Chadian villagers now killed in cross-border raids by the same militias after hitting refugee camps along the border, however, the efforts are beyond pathetic.

Why hasn't the world acted, then, despite responsible parties deploying a word that, on the face of its solemn promises in the shade of Auschwitz, requires the international community to ensure 'never again' applies to people of all hues?

The inconvenient realpolitik of China. Its money has developed southern Sudan's oil fields, is building a 500-mile pipeline to Port Sudan; its version of the AK-47 rifle is toted by the Janjaweed; its defence minister goes on exchange visits with his Sudanese counterpart; its UN Security Council veto protects the Sudanese regime from sanctions or further action; most ominously, it already has troops on the ground in Sudan (as 'advisers, ' voluntarily put there 'in advance' of a UN mission, Beijing claims).

Will the West risk upsetting the global economic applecart to save people in faraway villages with hard-to-pronounce names, even to put troops face to face with Chinese rivals in what the Chinese really see as a competition over the world's remaining oil? At some point we'll have to realise our bluff has been called. We must, eventually, redeem our promise of 'never again' to Elie Wiesel's generation, or abandon all pretence to anything other than naked self-interest.