SUDAN: Security remains the top priority for refugees in the camps, reports Marie O'Halloran from Darfur
When 1.2 million people fled their villages in western Sudan because of murdering armed militias, they ended up either in Chad or some 137 camps dotted around the Darfur area of Sudan, a region the size of France.
Now they are terrified to leave. An assessment by the Irish aid agency Concern found these displaced families very carefully considering any move outside their camps. If someone has to go for firewood, the eldest female is sent.
As one international worker describes it: "The man will be murdered, the young woman will be raped so 'let's send the grandmother because she'll only get beaten'."
This is the reality for black Africans in the face of a mediaeval-style assault from the Janjaweed, an armed Arab militia who descend on villages, murdering the men, raping the women, burning their homes, looting and killing or stealing the livestock.
In the Krinding camp in El Geneina, a Darfur town, Hawa Mahmoud Mohammad tells her story of how her father and daughter were killed by the marauding militia who came into her village on camels and horses and killed her father and her pregnant daughter.
Leaning on a wooden stick, the partially sighted woman tells how her son was shot at and lost an arm. Surrounded by other women and dozens of children who crowd around, she says she feels safe in the camp.
The facilities are very limited. Of the 10,000 people there, some have plastic tarpaulin roofs on their huts of straw matting, while others have merely the shelter of gorse bushes with some matting. The passageways between the endless rows of dwellings are dirt tracks and when the torrential rains fall, they become mud-logged.
As the women tell their stories, they are asked how many of their husbands were killed by the militia and at least 15 put up their hands. Traumatised, weak and facing an uncertain future, the one thing they are sure of is that because of this conflict, they will never return to their homes.
A conflict which erupted in February last year, it is the latest in Africa's largest country and is connected to what is considered to be the continent's longest running war. A war between the Arab Islamist government of Sudan's North and the mainly non-Muslim black rebels of the south has raged on and off since the country became independent in 1956.
After years of talks and huge international pressure, particularly from the US, Khartoum and the Southern Sudan People's Liberation Army have agreed to settle their dispute and to share the vast oil reserves of the southern area, with a proposed referendum in six years on possible secession by the south.
But just as this war appeared to be coming to an end, the conflict in the arid west flared, resulting in what is currently the world's worst humanitarian disaster. This is an ethnic divide between the government and two rebel groups in Darfur, both sides Muslim.
The government came down hard on an insurrection by the rebels using what international observers have called a "scorched earth and mass murder policy" and nobody was able to get to the areas. There was a "pogrom of massive proportions".
The government has consistently denied involvement but people in the Darfur camps have told stories of villages being bombed from the air and then followed by the onslaught of the Janjaweed on camel and horseback.
Access to the western region had been hugely restricted by the Sudanese government, but international pressure and visits by US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, and the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, have made their mark.
Few agencies had been registered with the government of Khartoum, but within 14 days of Mr Powell's visit, 10 new agencies had been registered and visas for international aid workers, which could be delayed for months, are now being issued within days.
But they have come into a major catastrophe. "One million people in the three areas of Darfur had been directly affected and displaced internally," according to Mr Mike McDonagh, one of the most senior UN personnel in Sudan. "Many people were using their meagre resources to help their relations and they were becoming poorer themselves."
Mr McDonagh, from Clare, continues: "Most of the IDP [internally displaced people\] are farmers, so they are not planting and they will have no harvest in November." The World Food Programme estimates that by then it will have to feed up to two million people for another year.
"That is a million people needing 500 tonnes of food a day" and it is difficult to get in because of the security situation. Mr McDonagh says 800 to 1,000 international aid workers are needed, whether nurses, engineers or nutritionists and for every international worker, there would be some 10 Sudanese aid workers.
Every year 10,000 people die of malaria, but the great fear is that the camps, many with no sanitation whatsoever, will face epidemics of dysentery and cholera following the start of the rains as their dirt track roads become pools of mud.
Normally they are torrential downpours that last about 30 minutes a couple of times a week, but as the Irish delegation of Minister of State Mr Tom Kitt visited the region, the rain fell for much of the evening and the thunder rolled through the night.
Through the co-ordination efforts of the UN, 650,000 people are being fed despite the difficulties. Up to 50 agencies are expected to get involved in Darfur and until the last week, Medecins Sans Frontieres had 150 expats in place, more than all the other agencies together.
Although the aid effort is cranking up, the USAID director believed that regardless of what was done, 300,000 people would die. Mr Kitt said "we shouldn't accept that sense of inevitability", particularly because the aid effort has been scaled up.
There had been a serious deterioration in the humanitarian situation. "All the concentration had been on the north-south conflict and the negotiations for nearly 20 years and the international community took their eyes off the other regions."
Ireland has given €5.6 million in aid to Darfur and millions more are needed, in what Irish officials say will be an extended crisis, with long-term international involvement and a requirement to ensure the aid is properly divided.
But visits by international delegations keep the pressure up, to provide security and more protection for the displaced.
People are scared for their lives, Mr McDonagh says. "I haven't seen such terror since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda." Agencies like Concern are providing the tarpaulins, the basic sanitation, blankets for about 24,000 children and 6,000 women.
"We are giving all these things to people and not giving them what they want most - protection and security," he adds.
The Sudanese government wants the people to move back to their villages. The governor in El Geneina, who met the Irish delegation, says 80,000 people have returned to their homes. Mr Suleiman Abdellah Adam says they want more to return to begin planting their crops for the rainy season, but all the women in the camps are emphatic about never wanting to return.
For most there is nothing to go home to and some of the camps look increasingly permanent. This could be the next big crisis for the region, despite international insistence that there should be no forced returns.