A 16th-century English diplomat, Henry Wooton, described ambassadors as men who are “sent abroad to lie for their countries.” Last week, diplomats from around the globe beat a path to Khartoum to attend the inauguration of an indicted war criminal, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan.

Among them were senior United Nations officials, paying respects to a man who, by general agreement, rigged his country’s ballot last month. Even the most conciliatory and appeasing foreign election observers admitted the voting process was deeply flawed. Yet, representatives of the international community dusted down their Sunday best to honor a man accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Hypocrisy as usual, you might think, and you would be right. The world wants to do business with oil-rich Sudan, and they are “on our side” in the war against terror, so we avert our eyes to human rights abuses and election fraud.

But there were ghosts at the inaugural banquets in Khartoum — the ghost of Darfur. The arid, war-torn western region of Sudan has recently become invisible. The Sudanese regime systematically denies reporters or humanitarian groups any access to vast swathes of the country. In an area a third of the size of Texas, we have no idea what is being done to civilians by the dictatorship’s armed forces. In an age when we in the United States are bombarded by information 24 hours a day, there are still places where unimaginable horror is taking place without witnesses.

Our human rights group, Waging Peace, gets fragmentary reports from civilians in Darfur. They tell us that their government continues to bomb them, and Khartoum’s Arab nomad proxies are still invading their villages and killing black African men, women and children. Sudanese officials deny access to aid workers, and, according to the U.N.’s own former Sudan rapporteur, Sima Samar, they arrest and torture humanitarian workers.

In February, there were widespread reports of a major Sudanese government air and ground offensive in the Jebel Marra region of Darfur. It is thought that 100,000 people were made homeless by the Sudanese armed forces, and an unknown number of civilians are dead.

The violence continues even now in the Jebel Marra, but the international peacekeepers have only made one attempt to find out what is going on there. It is hardly surprising that the Sudanese regime wants to keep journalists, aid workers and human rights workers away. Since 2003, Khartoum’s agenda has been to eliminate the non-Arab tribes in Darfur. What is surprising is how quietly the United Nations acquiesces.

The peacekeeping mission, UNAMID, a joint initiative made up of U.N. and African Union personnel, has meekly accepted the sovereignty of local Sudanese officials who refuse to let them investigate what is happening in Jebel Marra.

The U.N.’s own panel of experts reported recently that in a 10-month period last year, there were “at least 42 incidents in which a UNAMID patrol was denied passage by a government official, including incidents in which government officials specifically threatened the safety of UNAMID staff and equipment.”

It seems that the international community no longer wants to know what is happening in this vast vacuum of silence. In January 2009, the U.N.’s Office of the Chief of Humanitarian Affairs simply stopped publishing data on how many Darfuris are being killed or are dying in camps as a result of the humanitarian disaster. In an absence of information, it is less likely reporters will analyze or measure what is happening in Darfur, or try to convince their editors to run stories about it.

In keeping with this Brave New World of self-censorship, the U.S.’s envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, has declared that Sudan is no longer engaged in a coordinated campaign of mass murder in Darfur. Given the dearth of information, how does he know? Clearly, his agenda is to get all the parties talking peace, but Gration’s “engagement” with the architects of this genocide has delivered neither peace nor justice.

Equally Orwellian, Ibrahim Gambari, the Nigerian official in charge of the peacekeeping force, is singing from the same appeasing hymn sheet, declaring that UNAMID’s priorities have shifted away from protecting civilians and toward “development.” As usual, American taxpayers will be expected to foot the bill for this exercise in futility, just as they paid for fraudulent elections, and the peacekeeping force that declines to keep the peace.

For the millions of Darfuri survivors living in terror in unprotected refugee camps, it will come as news that their war-ravaged land is ready for development. As an 18-year-old rape survivor in a refugee camp said to me when I visited Darfur in 2004, at the beginning of this shameful disaster, “It’s nice of you to send the aid, but what we really need is for you to take the guns away from the people who are killing us.” There is still no sign of that happening.

Rebecca Tinsley is with Waging Peace, a nonprofit that campaigns against genocide and systematic human rights abuses.