OUTSIDE the town of Kas in southern Darfur is a camp housing about 41,000 displaced, desperate refugees, and all have harrowing tales to tell.

Hawa Ishaq, a mother aged 20, was nearly nine months pregnant with her second child when Janjawid militiamen came to her village of Kaileik in west Darfur. “They beat me until I suffered a miscarriage,” she says.

Kaltum Haroun, another Kaileik villager, said of the Janjawid: “They ripped my four-year-old child from my back and when they saw he was a boy, they killed him in front of me . . . they wouldn’t even let me pick up his body.”

Even inside the camp the refugees fear for their lives. Last week hordes of Janjawid fighters paraded on nearby high ground and, as night fell, they entered the camp and raped the women, killing any men who tried to intervene.

For more than a year the Arab Janjawid — backed by Sudan’s armed forces — have burnt village after village, killing, raping and pillaging as they go. More than one million people are thought to be homeless; most are huddled together in makeshift shelters in camps that are now lashed by heavy seasonal rains. Sanitary conditions are appalling. Disease is rampant. About 200,000 others have fled into neighbouring Chad. Up to 30,000 have been killed in what the UN calls “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. Yet there is probably worse to come and the West is apparently powerless to stop it.

The US Government’s aid arm, USAid, estimates that more than 300,000 people could die in coming months. No one knows the full extent of the crisis because the Sudanese Government has restricted access to the area by humanitarian organisations and aid groups.

Aid workers first have to obtain a visa to Khartoum, the capital, then hang around for several days — perhaps weeks — to acquire a travel permit for Darfur. Once there, they have then to obtain a daily permit allowing them to leave one of the three regional centres and visit the countryside.

”Local authorities can ensure that takes up to half a day, and then we have to be back before the evening curfew. It’s really difficult to know what is going on deep in the bush,” one frustrated aid worker told The Times.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, believed he had secured the Sudanese Government’s agreement to rein in the Janjawid when he visited Khartoum this month. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, who visited at the same time, returned to Washington threatening sanctions unless Sudan ended the bloodshed and eased bureaucratic restrictions on aid agencies.

Mr Powell said yesterday that the global community remained “completely dissatisfied” with the security situation in Darfur and he would contact the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, on the prospect of global action. “The situation remains very, very serious. Not enough is being done to break the hold of the Janjawid,” he said. “Rapes are still occurring. People do not feel safe leaving the camps to go out and forage for food." But President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan demonstrated his well-known contempt for the “international community” by going fishing. The Janjawid, who many now believe are beyond the control of his Government, carried on killing and maiming.

“The situation there is truly horrifying. I have seen as many as seven people living together in so-called shelters no bigger than a bath tub,” said Kitty McKinsey, regional spokesman for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. “The fact that people prefer conditions like that is eloquent testimony for what they are fleeing from,” she said.

The Janjawid were unleashed on the local population last December. The African Muslims of Darfur felt emboldened by concessions that the Government was making to southern Christians to end Africa’s longest civil war and demanded greater rights and equality from the Arab Government in Khartoum.

Despite sharing the same faith, the Arabs had for years treated the blacks with contempt. The brutal National Islamic Front regime, which took power in a 1989 coup, was prepared to make concessions to the southerners because it needed peace to open up Sudan’s vast estimated oil wealth.

The Government was also desperate to lose its pariah status and appease the Christian Right in the US, which had lobbied the Bush Administration to keep it on the list of terror states. However, Khartoum also feared rebellion could spread to others in the north, such as the Christians of the Nuba mountains.

The Government was determined to forestall any moves which might lessen its control.Initially, Khartoum dismissed the conflict as banditry and the age-old rivalry between African farmers and Arab nomads who encroach on their land. But behind that legacy was the Government’s determination that Arabisation rather than Islamisation be the central tenet of their rule.

The Sudanese Air Force was employed to support the Janjawid, whose ranks quickly swelled. The Government equipped them with German G3 assault rifles, supported their raids with barrel bombs rolled out of Antonov aircraft and gave them free rein.

THOUSANDS CAUGHT IN CONFLICT

• Historic tensions between nomadic Arab herdsmen and black African farmers in western Sudan boiled over in February 2003 when two rebel groups — the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Army — began a revolt against the Arab Government in Khartoum
• Aid agencies and the UN claim that the Government responded by setting the Janjawid militia loose. However, Khartoum has denied aiding the militia, who are accused of killing, robbing and raping tens of thousands of Darfur’s black Africans and leaving more than one million homeless
• Darfur in western Sudan is the size of France
• The population of 6.5 million is 90 per cent black African and 10 per cent Arab Muslim
• Since February 2003 30,000 people have been killed in the conflict
• The UN predicts that more than 300,000 people will die in the next nine months, mainly from starvation and disease
• There are 1.2 million internally displaced people and more than 170,000 refugees in Chad
• Nearly half of the 352 villages in western Darfur have been burnt
• Aid to affected population is limited

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