THE little girl lay still under a gauze net keeping the flies off the raw flesh on her back. Her mother said she was seven, and had survived being thrown onto a pile of burning corpses. Among them was her father, who had just been shot dead.

After days of wandering without food or water, the mother and daughter reached a field hospital in one of the teeming refugee camps in southern Darfur. Their ordeal had begun, the mother said, when the family took a short bus trip to their neighbouring village.

Just after the bus had crossed a bridge, it was surrounded by fighters in uniform. They checked identity papers, then the men from the bus were led away. Shots were heard. All the men were killed.

While the women and children watched, the bodies were piled high and set alight. The little girl became hysterical, screaming for her father. This angered the men in uniform, said her mother, and they grabbed her and threw her onto the fire.

Holding up a burnt hand, the woman said she had just managed to save her daughter, but not before the girl’s back was seared. She thought the attackers were Janjaweed, the irregular militia, not the police or army. Not that the army was to be trusted: when she went to their nearby base for help, she was turned away.

No names or other details have been disclosed because the international charity looking after the girl is worried about offending the Sudanese government.

Visas for aid workers now take days instead of weeks or months. Humanitarian relief is no longer stuck in customs and nobody wants to jeopardise the overall aid effort.

However, there is still insufficient help for the million refugees of Darfur: at one camp, Otash, no international food aid has been received at all.

Instead women grubbed in the dirt for a green leaf called khudra. It is poisonous, but can be eaten after being boiled. Sadiya, a widow, said her two children, aged six and four, had not eaten for four days. “We’re all going to die here,” she said.

She sent the children into the nearby town to beg for food. But only the handful of leaves she had gathered stood between them and starvation.

Since a United Nations security council resolution demanding that Sudan disarm the Janjaweed militias, the government in Khartoum has promised steps to end the violence.

But several refugees said the attacks were continuing. “We heard the voices of the guns two days ago,” said one.

Two rebel movements in Darfur claim the government is massing 3,000 Janjaweed fighters and regular troops in eastern Darfur in a rush to finish the military campaign in case Khartoum is forced to accept peacekeepers.

But the rebels themselves insist they can survive. One commander, sitting under a tree and surrounded by fighters draped in ammunition, said the government held only four big towns in Darfur and the main roads. “Ninety per cent of this country is ours,” he claimed.

Paul Wood is reporting on Darfur for BBC Television

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