It’s coming up to crunch time for Darfur. On Friday at a high-level meeting at the UN there will be nothing else on the agenda. Tomorrow, as heads of state and government prepare to converge on New York for the General Assembly, campaigners will be demonstrating in London and in more than 30 capital cities.

Are you bored yet?

This story has been running for three or four years and you might be thinking that another wrangle (or “high-level meeting”) in that multilingual high-rise on the East River doesn’t sound like new news.

You might be thinking that it’s over three years since the UN Security Council imposed an arms embargo on the militias doing the pillaging, raping, torturing and killing; three years since the Secretary-General set up a commission of inquiry to determine whether the Sudanese forces and their allied militias were carrying out genocide (answer: no, only pillaging, raping, torturing and killing); two years since the UN signed up to the “responsibility to protect” civilians caught up in mass atrocities; 16 months since the African Union came up with the Darfur Peace Agreement, and almost a year since the inception (on paper) of a hybrid UN/African Union force that was – finally – going to put a stop to the bizarre and horrendous spectacle of a population terrorised by savagery arriving on camels and in bomber planes; and that, meanwhile, the story on the ground has got nowhere except worse.

Sing after me: do they know it’s genocide?

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BACKGROUND

• Remembrance Day

• Boom belies Sudan’s pariah status

• China hopes ‘genocide games’ will be avoided

On that last point, as the preparations for the UN talks go on, in Darfur the hostilities have stepped up and the suffering of innocent people continues. The dead now number more than 200,000, and the “displaced”, meaning people who fled for their lives, ten times as many. Four million and more depend on aid agencies. A further half million are out of reach of aid. Refugee camps have a population of more that two million people, and can barely feed them. Darfur is a region where dozens of children under 5 die each day in the course of the largest relief operation in the world.

But tomorrow is the Day for Darfur, and, yes, the “high-level” meeting in New York on Friday is new news, and, yes, the General Assembly that follows from Tuesday is the first and – as far as the eye can see – last chance to establish a ceasefire and the means to make it stick.

Up to now, the “peacekeeping” has been left to an African Union force too small and underfunded to be effective in an area as big as France. The proposal agreed by the five-member Security Council and now to be presented to the General Assembly, is to combine that force with a multinational force twice as large, with police units and a civilian apparatus. The hybrid, which goes under the name UNAMID (UN African Mission in Darfur), is set to be deployed at 55 locations.

But although UNAMID will operate under UN auspices, its components, in fact its existence, will depend on the donations of individual countries.

This is the point of tomorrow’s demonstrations. This is as far as the story goes unless the richer countries (and not excluding poorer ones) stump up. Nation by nation, the Darfur campaigners are rallying to urge their leaders to grab this chance and contribute an honourable share of the troops, police, planes, helicopters, armoured vehicles, and whatever it takes, up to a total of exactly 31,042 personnel.

One can be so exact because, of course, the entire package, to be introduced in stages, had to be negotiated line by line with the Sudan Government. It took six months from the concept to signatures.

The deal is done, but (assuming that the rest of the world comes up with the goods) nations’ leaders will also be urged to keep pressure on Khartoum to stick to the agreement. The Sudanese have a track record of calculated procrastination.

The mood of tomorrow’s march on London will be angry at its place of departure, outside the Sudanese Embassy in St James’s, but perhaps closer to a demonstration of encouragement at its destination, Downing Street. Gordon Brown has worked hard to bring the story to this point.

A ceasefire will be no solution without a political solution. Quite what a political solution would look like in a situation where the aggressor tribes have now started to fight each other is a murky question. And geopolitically the scenarios include, naturally, the one about the West’s real interest being control of the region and its oil. The one about China, which buys most of Sudan’s oil, withholding its veto in the Security Council out of fear of Olympic repercussions, may even be true.

But realpolitik games are a distraction when the immediate reality is of destroyed homes and camps of desperation. The survivors want to go home to rebuild their lives in safety. For the first time in years, it’s possible they will be able to. The next few days will show. So tomorrow is the Day for Darfur.

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