Frustration seems to be growing over attempts to help the suffering people in the Darfur region of Sudan. In the meantime, the violence against the civilian population in Darfur continues.

Last week more than a dozen Republican members of Congress sent a letter to President George W. Bush asking for sanctions against the government of Sudan for its failure to stop the violence.

“The time is at hand to reassert the resolve of the United States that the atrocities taking place in Darfur cannot stand,” the May 10 letter said. “We urge you to do everything within your power to inflict serious economic pain upon those who act as obstructionists to peace, and to take other actions as necessary to halt the continued assault against human dignity in Darfur.”

The day before, another letter from more than 100 members of Congress made an appeal to China to use its influence to stop the violence. China was called upon because of its trading relationship with the Sudanese government and because Sudan exports oil to the Chinese.

Pope Benedict XVI and other Catholic Church officials also have made numerous appeals for the international community to take action to stop the genocide taking place in Darfur. And one senses frustration from them as well.

In his Easter message, the pope mentioned the “catastrophic, and sadly to say underestimated, humanitarian situation” in Darfur, where more than 200,000 have been killed and more than 2.5 million have been displaced and are living in refugee camps.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations and other international organizations in Geneva, said last December that “the crisis under discussion (in Darfur) has provoked debates and international complaints, but the international community has responded with “insufficient effective actions.” He said the No. 1 priority should be concrete actions to end the killing, not wrangling over “political arrangements and commercial interests.”

Such wrangling has been going on far too long. The humanitarian crisis in Darfur has been before the conscience of the world community for four years. It has provoked countless protests and threats of action — along with many public awareness campaigns — but nothing has been effective in ending the killings and rapes in Darfur.

The human rights abuses there have been taking place since February 2003 when fighting escalated between rebel troops and government troops and the Janjaweed Arab militias backed by the government. The Janjaweed has been waging a terror campaign against black Africans to push them from the land.

A peace agreement intended to end the conflict was signed a year ago, but the presence of a relatively small African Union peacekeeping force has not been enough to prevent the violence and to protect civilians. A larger U.N. peacekeeping force has been authorized, but the Sudanese government, headed by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has not agreed to the full deployment of the U.N. force.

President Bush in mid-April threatened to impose sanctions on Sudan unless several conditions were met. The United States wants Bashir to agree to the full deployment of U.N. peacekeeping forces, to end support for the Janjaweed and to allow humanitarian aid to reach Darfur.

A U.N. peacekeeping force seems the best hope to end the fighting, to protect civilians in Darfur and to keep open channels of aid to the millions in refugee camps. But so far neither diplomacy nor threats has been successful in achieving this.

Has the time come for an internationally-sanctioned intervention in Darfur, with or without the agreement of the Sudanese government? Would the international community, acting through the U.N., have the courage to take such action?

The late Pope John Paul II made a case for such an intervention in 1992 during the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. He said: “The conscience of humanity, supported by provisions of international humanitarian law, asks that humanitarian intervention be obligatory when the survival of populations and entire ethnic groups is seriously compromised. This is a duty for nations and the international community.”

The humanitarian crisis in Darfur certainly fits the conditions mentioned by Pope John Paul. The question is whether the international community, with support from the United States, is willing to act.