“People say there are a lot of problems in the world, so why single out Darfur and why target China?” Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president who is now head of the American Jewish World Service, told me recently in her Manhattan office. “But this is the first genocide, since the word was coined, where it was defined as genocide by the American government while it has been happening,” she added, referring to Colin Powell’s statement in 2004 that the Darfur killings were indeed a genocide and a Congressional resolution making the same designation. Messinger is one among perhaps three dozen professional political operatives and freelance agitators who have collaborated closely behind the scenes with the Dream for Darfur team, participating in strategy sessions and connecting Savitt with larger political networks. “Darfur is singular,” Messinger told me. “China is the reason Darfur is happening. And it is happening now. There is nothing fast about the killing in Darfur.”

For those on board with Dream for Darfur, connecting the dots between the Summer Games and hundreds of thousands of African corpses is not much more complicated than that. The brief against China is by and large uncontested (except by China): the Sudan government buys its weapons from China with the foreign currency it makes from selling China its oil. China, meanwhile, protects Sudan from excessive attention in the United Nations Security Council. “The Olympics is a unique lever with the Chinese, and we’re not going to get another one  it ain’t happening again,” Savitt said one morning in January. (She has met five times with Chinese diplomats, who each time, Savitt says, use the opportunity to explain just how much the Chinese people like the Olympics and dislike street demonstrations.) Now every form of opposition to the Beijing government seems to have its Olympic angle; the repression of Tibetan protests earlier this month, for example, immediately led to calls for a boycott of the Games

But Savitt is keenly aware that her approach has to be nuanced, and in her speeches she is careful to say that she is a fan of the Games and that her organization is against a boycott. In a recent conference call with other activist groups, she quickly shot down a suggestion to publish a newspaper op-ed essay asking President Bush to skip the opening ceremonies. “He’s not going to do that, and I’m not in the business of asking for things I know I’m not going to get,” she snapped. The message to Olympic athletes has been so nuanced that it verges on abstruse: they should speak out on human rights issues but steer clear of politics; opposing genocide demands the ultimate in moral outrage from everyone, yet athletes shouldn’t jeopardize their medals. Speaking at a Dream for Darfur rally on Feb. 12 outside the Chinese Mission to the U.N., the Canadian Olympic swimmer Nikki Dryden (1992 and ’96) put it like this: “China sullies everything the Olympics stands for because of what it allows to happen in Darfur, but I would never ask athletes to go outside their comfort zone.”

Savitt’s message to corporate sponsors is less ambivalent but in some ways trickier. “No company wants to be the first whale to spout” is how she put it to me. Dream for Darfur asks that the major sponsors like McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft and Volkswagen take very small but potentially significant actions: to meet privately with Chinese officials to express concern over Darfur, for example, or to take a symbolic stand by calling publicly for officials from Sudan who have been accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court to be banned from attending the Games. “These companies aren’t pushing guns in anyone’s faces” in Darfur, says Ellen Freudenheim, a consultant working on corporate outreach for Dream for Darfur. “We have to be careful in how we frame this. They are not directly responsible. Yet the morality is, You are complicit when you do nothing to try to stop genocide when you can.”

Savitt says that the sponsors are starting to take notice. Even executives at Coca-Cola have privately expressed anxiety about their association with the Games, according to Minky Worden, a veteran China specialist at Human Rights Watch. (On Tibet, Lenovo, the Chinese computer giant, recently said it was following the conflict there “with concern and regret.”) “Everything all these groups are doing has massive popular support from inside China, which isn’t understood here,” says Worden, who speaks fluent Cantonese and is focused on internal Chinese issues  like migrant-worker rights and press freedoms  and holding the Chinese government accountable for the promises it made to the International Olympic Committee in 2001. “Here is the thing: our demands for internal human rights are not something that Chinese people don’t want, nor are they anything the Chinese government hasn’t explicitly promised to do. We’re pushing an open door. These companies are making a huge mistake in thinking the Chinese respect them for saying what they think they want to hear. Just the opposite. The Chinese government respects foreigners who repeatedly and reliably tell them the truth. How hard is it really for G.E. or Microsoft to push for something that the Chinese government already said it is receptive to doing?”