The ghosts of Rwanda must be spinning in their graves.

The African Union, which is supposed to be putting an end to Africa's latest genocide in Darfur, is about to hand its rotating leadership to Sudan.

With no sign of a rival candidate on the horizon as the continent's leaders prepare to open their annual summit in Khartoum on Monday, Sudan's President Omar El Bashir is about to become the AU's next chairman, succeeding Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian President.

This would make him the chief spokesman for a pan-African organization that is supposed to promote democracy, human rights and development, even though he is under investigation for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity for his government's actions in Darfur.

Mr. Bashir's selection will deal a death blow to the AU's credibility and probably doom any chance of a negotiated settlement to Sudan's civil war in Darfur.

For 18 months, the AU has been struggling to launch its first-ever peacekeeping operation in Darfur with 7,700 soldiers, police and civilian observers.

It has been a disaster, plagued by incompetence and inadequacy.

In the past three years, more than 300,000 people have died in Darfur and more than two million have been expelled from their homes in an ethnic cleansing operation that masquerades as a government-backed counter-insurgency campaign.

Rather than preventing the genocide, the AU's involvement in Darfur has at times left the organization looking as though it is complicit in Sudan's conflict.

Few world leaders or international organizations have been willing to publicly criticize Africa's attempt at peacekeeping. After all, the AU's operations in Darfur were supposed to herald a new era in which African leaders began to solve African problems on their own.

It hasn't worked out that way.

Eighteen months after the AU deployed several hundred military observers -- with no equipment, no vehicles and one hand-held satellite phone for calling headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia -- the Darfur peacekeeping operation remains a shambles.

It lacks the manpower needed to police a desolate war-torn region the size of France. It lacks money, material, transport and supplies. It still cannot protect the 3.2 million people who have been herded into refugee camps in Darfur or the humanitarian aid groups trying to help them.

If anything, the security situation in Darfur has grown steadily worse. In October, the United Nations declared two-thirds of the region a "no go area" for its staff.

"The world is failing Darfur," says Jan Egeland, UN Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. "We're only playing the humanitarian card and we're just witnessing the massacres."

Villages continue to be burned, crops destroyed, wells poisoned and civilians raped, tortured and killed by Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed, who have been armed and supported by the government in Khartoum.

A separatist battle that turned into an attempted genocide has now become a grinding war of attrition.

Diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict is in disarray and will collapse if Mr. Bashir becomes the AU's head. Darfur's rebels, who have been holding intermittent peace talks with AU negotiators in Nigeria, have vowed to abandon the peace process if Sudan gains the presidency.