Human Rights Day

ABC News’ Kirit Radia and Marth Raddatz Report:

Today is International Human Rights day.

To mark the occasion President Bush met in the Oval Office with Darfur peace activist Dr Halima Bashir, who wrote the book "Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur."

"The United States must continue to rally the international community to put pressure on the government," Bush told reporters. "The urgency of the situation is never more apparent than when I had the honor of visiting with this brave soul."

The United States has begged the international community to send more peacekeepers into Darfur for several years, but to date only a skeleton force is in place. The peacekeepers are barely able to defend themselves against attacks, much less protect the throngs of refugees that pack aid camps in search of sanctuary from armed raiders.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said the Bush administration’s inability to resolve the crisis is one of her greatest regrets.

"I have regrets about Darfur, real regrets," Rice told the New York Times Magazine for a November article. "I don’t know that there were other answers. The president considered trying to do something unilaterally — very difficult to do," she said.

Many in the human rights community expressed frustration with the Bush administration’s record on human rights, from its use of enhanced interrogation techniques to what they see as unwillingness to do more to stop genocide in Darfur.

Some have voiced hope that President-elect Barack Obama will do more to focus on restore America’s moral commitment to human rights.

The Enough Campaign, a coalition of groups advocating a greater US effort to end violence in Darfur, wrote an open letter to Obama shortly after his election last month, urging him to bring an end to the violence.

"President-Elect Obama must lead a concerted international peace surge for Sudan, and diplomacy must be backed by well-conceived and consistently escalating pressure on Khartoum and other combatants to create the proper conditions for a lasting peace," the group wrote.

But on Obama’s official transition website www.change.gov there is no mention of Darfur under the Foreign Policy section. And while some hoped the appointment of Susan Rice, a former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Clinton, to the UN Ambassador position with a seat in the cabinet will signal a renewed focus on Darfur, it’s worth noting that Rice was once criticized for failing to spur Clinton to step in to end genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s.

In her own words Rice has said the experience convinced her of the need to take action.

"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required," she told the Atlantic Monthly in 2001.

Susan Rice will certainly have the opportunity to live up to those words.

In addition to the fighting in Darfur, ethnic violence in eastern Congo has escalated as the embers of Rwanda flare up there. Killing and rape have again turned region red with blood, but it remains to be seen if the incoming US administration will do anything about it.