BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This week the United Nations humanitarian chief called on the international community to pressure the leaders of Sudan to accept UN peacekeepers in the troubled region of Darfur. The Sudanese have so far rebuffed the peacekeepers, while aid workers say the violence in and around refugee camps has gotten worse. Lucky Severson has the story today of an American scholar obsessed with the Darfur tragedy and the need to keep the world from forgetting it. His name is Eric Reeves.

Dr. ERIC REEVES (Professor, English Language and Literature, Smith College): Not only are cattle killed or looted, not only are people killed or made to flee, but water wells, precious in this very arid region, are poisoned. They are piled full of corpses.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Images of despair in Darfur in western Sudan -- moms and kids starving, sometimes raped and often murdered. They are victims of a civil war and of what the U.S. government is calling genocide. Few have heard of Eric Reeves, but he has been and early an unrelenting voice of alarm, determined not to let the world look the other way.

Dr. REEVES: These people are at the bottom of the geopolitical pecking order. They're black. They're poor. They're Muslim. They sit over no natural resources. They have nothing going for them in the geostrategic scheme of things. But they are human beings, and they're suffering terribly, and they're being destroyed at an unconscionable rate.

SEVERSON: Reeves is an unlikely player in a modern day tragedy. He's a scholar of the Renaissance, a professor of literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. But when he speaks of suffering in Darfur, it is with the passion of a crusader.

Dr. REEVES: There are many people who believe that somehow African lives are less valuable. Human suffering is human suffering. Human destruction and loss is human destruction and loss. I refuse to accept that these lives are any less valuable than our lives.

SUSANNAH SIRKIN (Deputy Director, Physicians for Human Rights, pointing to map): Every single little red flame here is a destroyed village in Darfur.

SEVERSON: Susannah Sirkin is with the relief group, Physicians for Human Rights. She's worked with Reeves for years.

Ms. SIRKIN: He lives their lives from afar, and he is completely seized with their dilemma and with their tragedy, and as if it was his own life and his own family that is being attacked on a daily basis.

SEVERSON: Sirkin says when she first met Reeves, she was skeptical he had much to offer.

Ms. SIRKIN: His information is extraordinary. He has a vast network of informants and contacts and research sources and material, and it's enormously informative, and certainly it's also a voice of conscience for all of us.

SEVERSON: Reeves has spent so much time championing the cause of Darfur, he has had to take unpaid sabbaticals and refinance his house. But when he has the time, he keeps up his wood turning, in which he lathes beautiful objects of art that sell for hundreds of dollars, which he donates to relief agencies. He says his intense involvement has caused some strains with his family but that they fully support his work.

Professor Reeves has a history of activism. He could have dodged the draft for Vietnam but chose instead to be a conscientious objector. Over the years, he's given thousands of dollars to the international relief agency Doctors Without Borders -- enough to fund three cholera field hospitals at over $20,000 each. He found his calling in 1999 when the U.S. head of Doctors Without Borders lamented the world's short attention span when it comes to the misery and violence in Sudan. Reeves took that as a personal challenge.

Dr. REEVES: And I said something to the effect, well, I'll see what I can do about that. And I had no idea, honestly, no idea of what that meant at the time. But those were the words that I uttered, and I felt obliged to make good on them, and that's what the last eight years, I guess, have been about.

SEVERSON: He says at first it was difficult getting people to take him seriously, but he gradually built up a network of Web and media contacts. Now he sends out a 5,000-word Darfur update each week and peppers major papers relentlessly with op-ed pieces that are both authoritative and compassionate. He says the government in Khartoum has spent thousands of dollars to discredit his reports.

Dr. REEVES: They know who I am, and they don't like what I do, and they don't like people helping me.

SEVERSON: For years, the Sudanese government has attempted to cleanse the country of unwanted ethnic and religious groups. It began in the oil regions of southern Sudan, where the targets were Christians like Panther Alier.

PANTHER ALIER: The attack was in my village. The houses were set on fire. People were shot dead. I saw people falling down, so my life was in great danger.

SEVERSON: Today in Darfur it is the Arabs, the janjaweed militia who are killing the black Africans. To them it is a war over scarce resources like water. But to the Khartoum government it is a chance to exploit traditional differences among tribes.

Ms. SIRKIN: The tribes that we're talking about that have been attacked are settled people. They're farmers. They have lived on their land and in these villages for generations. They're very attached to their homes, and they are being attacked by and large by nomadic people who have cattle.