Television cameras will capture the world’s top athletes at their best next week, while commentators will look for hints of a Chinese government crackdown on demonstrators. But for some military planners in Beijing, the Olympics will be a sideshow. Instead they will reassess China’s decision to participate in U.N. peacekeeping missions around the world, and specifically in Sudan, where they fear a major backlash to a planned genocide trial for President al-Bashir.

Other countries are also having second thoughts. As the U.N. Security Council renewed the mandate of its most ambitious peacekeeping force Friday, extending its stay in Darfur for a second year under a shared U.N.-African Union command, it was clear that some nations that chose to participate in international efforts to protect civilians in Darfur from horrific government-backed attacks are reconsidering.

Mr. Bashir should thank the Security Council for creating the force, known as Unamid, in the first place. It allows him to do whatever he wants in Darfur, where Unamid troops can hardly save themselves, let alone any victims of his Janjaweed proxies. Meanwhile, Mr. Bashir gets to present his mere permission of foreign troops in his country as a major concession.

Last week, I asked the outgoing U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, why professional military organizations — such as Blackwater USA, which has expressed an interest — should not be contracted to help Darfur. The idea “misses the point” of peacekeeping, Mr. Guéhenno said. Deploying peacekeepers in places such as Darfur has to be a “sign of the political will on the part of the international community.”

That’s some sign you’ve given us, the people of Darfur must think, as they silently address this imaginary community. Last year, when the Security Council finally agreed to form a hybrid A.U.-U.N. force, it promised 25,000 troops. So far as few as 9,000 have arrived, and Mr. Guéhenno was unable to predict that many more troops would arrive by the end of this year.

As the United Nations recently hesitated about extending the contract of Unamid’s deputy commander, the Rwandan Major General Emmanuel Karake Karenzi, whom a Spanish court has accused of participating in war crimes, Rwanda weighed withdrawing its troops from Darfur if the contract was not renewed. A Rwandan withdrawal would cut the number of Unamid troops, who are ill-equipped and ill-trained to begin with, by nearly a third.

China is Mr. Bashir’s most powerful ally, and sending 300 of its nationals to serve in Unamid is an important signal. But will China stay in Darfur?

Western diplomats say they detect some hesitation in the Chinese military, which is already uneasy about placing engineers, specialists, and troops from the world’s most prominent emerging superpower under the command of blue-helmeted peacekeeping bigwigs. Those in China’s decision making circles who were never too enthusiastic about the enterprise to begin with now have a new argument. Others are simply nervous about the situation in Sudan since the declaration of the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to push for Mr. Bashir’s indictment.

“If the ICC goes ahead, then every troop contributor has to be concerned,” the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya, told me last week.

On Friday, China — helped along by the usual suspects, Russia and South Africa, as well as a European eagerness for consensus — gained another Security Council victory. The resolution that renewed Unamid’s mandate contained a statement saying the council was “having in mind” some of its members’ concerns about the possible implications of Mr. Bashir’s indictment and was “taking note” of those members’ intention to vacate such an indictment.

The United Nations is as good as its members, its fiercest proponents often tell us. The reality is that at times Turtle Bay serves as a carpet under which its members sweep all the problems they don’t want do address. No example is better than Darfur: None of the big powers care to act, so they drop the whole enterprise in the United Nations’ lap and pretend they’re doing something.

Not much would change in Darfur if China withdrew its 300 Unamid troops. In fact, the best-case scenario would be if Mr. Bashir was so provoked that kicked Unamid out altogether. (Alas, he’s too smart for that.) The shock waves would force the world powers either to hang their heads in shame or find a better solution to a problem that America and Mr. Ocampo have defined as genocide.

bavni@nysun.com