Do you re-member when you visited the Holocaust Museum with your class in high school? It was just another day off, another bus trip -- until you got inside. The mood turned somber. Suddenly your familiarity with the Holocaust was no longer someone's memoir, or someone's film, but an experience which surrounded you as you stood on a bridge over the shoes of the victims, accumulated in vast numbers. It was no longer a field trip. It hit you somewhere deep that you'd not ever known existed. You weren't a young American student -- the faceless victims weren't European Jews. Suddenly everyone was simplified to human beings. Never again, we pledged.

Yet it's happening. Again. Back when we were kids, it was happening. I don't remember much about being 11 years old, but I know that in that year, Rwandans were hacked to death with machetes by the hundreds of thousands.

I read an article the other day as I ate my breakfast. It was co-authored by Don Cheadle, the star of Hotel Rwanda, and when I was finished reading, I turned the page to check the weather. I was familiar with the stories because I took an African politics class and researched a paper on the genocide. But for those who haven't studied international politics, who lack a basic history of the African continent, what do they think of these stories? Do we all flip past them, repressing knowledge all of them? Do we avoid discussion of them?

This month marks the 11th anniversary of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the worst human rights violation in the history of the African continent, ''the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews.''

The Vermont-sized nation of Rwanda underwent a ghastly campaign of mass devastation when the Hutu majority massacred the Tutsi minority. An estimated 800,000 were hacked to death with machetes. Men, women and children murdered in the streets by their neighbors.

And the world stood by and watched. Actually, the timing of Rwanda was horribly wrong for our government and shot down any hope of an American peacekeeping effort. Given that our intervention in Somalia months before had gone horribly wrong -- with the deaths of Army Rangers a lá Black Hawk Down -- why should we care about Africa? Because after the Holocaust, as the international community vowed never again.

When Rwandans were massacred, the powerful organizations tiptoed around the word "genocide," concluding the atrocities to be "acts"of genocide, rather than genocide. The use of the term "genocide" carries obligation.

And there's such irony. Author Philip Gourevitch illustrates, "In May of 1994 I happened to be in Washington to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ... waiting amid the crowd, I tried to read a local newspaper. But I couldn't get past the photograph on the front page ... dead bodies, the caption explained that these were the corpses of genocide victims in Rwanda." He continues, depicting the paradox he was in as he looked up to see, "Remember" and "Never Again" written on the pins worn by museum workers arriving for work.

When Gourevitch was writing, the museum was just one year old. He articulates, " ... at its inaugural ceremony, President Clinton had described it as 'an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead.' Apparently, all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated ..."

And it was the administration of the same man who, a year earlier, had spoken of the ambiguous insanity ahead. When the insanity surfaced, our government extracted its peacekeepers and all Americans in Rwanda. The Western countries, essentially, saved their own, but no one helped the Rwandans. So they want us to see their reality. They didn't bury all of the dead because they instinctively know that when the dead are buried, so are the truths. At least here they are. And so the bodies that haven't been tossed in mass graves rest above ground, decomposing slowly.

And now, we sit idly again.

Today's African genocide is in the Darfur region of Sudan. According to Amnesty International, farming communities have traditionally struggled for control of the region's resources. In the past couple of years, the government-backed militias have escalated the fighting into a human rights crisis. The militia, Janjawid, is responsible for looting villages, raping girls and killing babies. More than one million have been displaced from their homes. According to Amnesty International, nearly every village in the Darfur region has been attacked and abandoned.

Last year before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Colin Powell testified that the government abuses in Sudan qualify as genocide. I applaud Powell for confronting the situation with the g-word. And as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wrote in the Washington Post this year, "A wise man told me recently that genocide is what they call it after the killing is over; it is usually followed by a solemn promise of 'never again.' Action must be taken while there is still reason to act."

Many influential figures have said that how we handle this determines whether we have truly learned from the world's past ugly ethnic cleansing campaigns. We know of the eloquent capabilities of our lawmakers, but it turns out to be worthless if they cannot deliver through action.

If the international community is so bold as to swear, "never again," it had better live up to the promise. Otherwise, the slogan is a sick mockery of the millions who died, guilty of nothing beyond their ethnicity. It's the slogan of the millions of the able-minded, political muscles who stood by idly and watched.

Maybe that slogan ought to be replaced with, "Sorry, maybe next time."