Demagogue

“What happened in Rwanda, it will happen here,” said Sheik Abdullah Muhammad Ali, who fled here from a nearby village seeking the safety that he hoped the presence of about 200 African Union peacekeepers would bring. But the Sudanese government has asked the African Union to quit Darfur rather than hand over its mission to the United Nations. “If these soldiers leave,” Sheik Ali said, “we will all be slaughtered.”

Rasha Ibrahim Adam and her children may be about to die - just as she thought they had all escaped to safety.

The 38-year-old mother of four children is one of the latest to flee the bombs from the Sudanese government that have dropped on their homes. Today, she finds herself in one of the dusty, benighted refugee camps that litter the region of Darfur. She sits in her once bright red tob - a wrap-around dress - that has been faded by the sand-laden wind that blows across al-Salaam camp on the edge of the town of el-Fasher.

She was one of the 50,000 people who swelled the scorched camps for the "internally displaced" in the past month - bringing to about 2.5 million the number of children, women and men now homeless in a conflict that has dragged on for three years without an end seemingly in sight. Until now, that is. Because an end is in sight for the Darfur camps - where at least 300,000 black African farmers have been slaughtered by the Khartoum government and its Arab proxies, the Janjaweed militia, whose name means "devils on horseback". One of those who died was Rasha's husband, Adam.

It could be an end so terrifying, it defies the imagination.

Mr. Annan said the UN and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will have to drastically scale back their humanitarian operations in Darfur unless the security situation improves.

“Can we, in conscience, leave the people of Darfur to such a fate? Can the international community, having not done enough for the people of Rwanda in their time of need, just watch as this tragedy deepens?” he asked.

On Wednesday, NRF rebels clashed with government forces south of Tawilla. An Antonov plane and two helicopter gunships reportedly bombed Dobo Al Umda Dobo and Dobo Al Madrasa town and the surrounding villages. The number of casualties is unknown.

"If a United Nations force is not deployed soon, something much worse is going to happen here," the SLM/A commander added.

Abdulrahaman Abdallah, a commander of the rebel group's military police, said that without a strong international force here, "the government will go back to its strategy, which is genocide, and inevitably we will go back to the bush."