The United States Agency For International Development predicts that 350,000 people will die of hunger, disease and exposure in the refugee camps of western Sudan in the next few months. In April, Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, had warned that the international community should be prepared to take steps in Darfur “that may include military action”. But nothing has happened.

The president of Sudan, Omar el-Bashir, still insists that foreign governments are blowing the events in Darfur out of proportion, but low-level flights across southern parts of the province report virtually every village burned out. Over a million people are living in refugee camps, and even in the camps the refugees are not safe, as raids by the Janjaweed militia continue. But at least the United States of America and the United Nations have finally criticized the government in Khartoum directly. “I received numerous accounts of the extra-judicial and summary executions carried out by government-backed militias and by the security forces themselves,” said UN special rapporteur, Asma Jahangir, in Khartoum on Sunday. “There is no ambiguity that there is a link between some of the militias and government forces.”

Call it anything

After months of dodging the issue, US secretary of state, Colin Powell, echoed her words on Sunday: “We believe that the government of Sudan did provide support to these militias.” He still avoided using the word “genocide”, but he was clearly aware that president Bill Clinton had evaded the duty of responding to the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago by refusing to call it by the right name: “All I know is that there are at least a million people who are desperately in need, and many of them will die if we can’t...get the Sudanese to cooperate with the international community. And it won’t make a whole lot of difference after the fact what you’ve called it.”

Why did the US and the UN wait so long before putting the blame where it belongs? This is where it gets complicated, because the main reason is that they were afraid of jeopardizing the deal that is finally bringing peace to southern Sudan after 21 years of war.

Every government in Sudan since independence has been dominated by the Arabized Muslims of northern Sudan who account for two-thirds of the country's population — and almost every one of those governments has spent much of its time at war with rebels in the African, predominantly Christian south of the country. The current fighting flared in 1983 after an Islamist faction got the upper hand in the struggle for power among the northern, Arabic-speaking population and tried to impose Islamic law on the whole country.

Problem from hell

Eventually, the growing importance of Sudan’s oil and concerns that the country’s Islamist regime had links with al Qaida focussed US attention on Sudan. An adroit use of sticks and carrots by Washington brought first a more moderate government in Khartoum, and now a peace deal between north and south (signed in Kenya early this month) that provides for a ceasefire, sharing of oil revenues between north and south, and a referendum on southern independence in six years’ time.

But other neglected regions, seeing what the south has achieved, were tempted to play the same game. Everybody in Darfur is Muslim, but there is a deep hostility between its African farmers in the south and the Arabized pastoral people of northern Darfur, who traditionally raided the farmers for cattle and women. So the Islamist faction in Khartoum, now out of power, urged the people of southern Darfur to revolt — and the faction now in power in Khartoum turned the Arabized pastoral people of northern Darfur loose on them.

Now the the US and the UN are condemning the Sudanese government openly, but it’s not clear what they will actually do about it. Overthrow of the present lot in Khartoum will probably re-start the much bigger war in the south. It’s another problem from hell.