On the last day of their US summit, the G8 powers called on the Sudan government to disarm the Janjaweed militia responsible for massive human rights violations and a potential famine in Darfur. Declan Walsh reports from Nairobi
The G8 meeting said it was looking to the United Nations to avert a "major disaster" in Darfur, where aid officials are warning of a catastrophe in the coming months.
Months of attacks by the Janjaweed, a vicious Arab militia, have forced a million people from their homes in Darfur and pushed another 160,000 across the border into neighbouring Chad.
But yesterday the Sudan government denied it was supporting the horse- and camel-mounted fighters, whom several UN officials accuse of "ethnic cleansing".
"As far as the government is concerned the Janjaweed are bandits. The government is not responsible for their actions," Mr Hassan Abdin, Sudan's ambassador to London, told the BBC's HardTalk programme.
The denial contradicts a raft of reports detailing government support for the rampaging militiamen, whose "scorched earth" campaign of murder, rape and pillage has emptied vast swathes of countryside.
Hundreds of eyewitness accounts, collected by UN and human rights investigators, describe how the national army has helped arm and uniform the Janjaweed and has fought alongside them.
Last month the UN Human Rights Commission accused President Omar al Bashir's forces of creating a "reign of terror", and said some soldiers may be guilty of war crimes.
Now there is a looming humanitarian crisis.
This week the first seasonal rains fell at the southern end of the 600-kilometre border between Sudan and Chad. Soon most roads will be impassable, and massive, remote refugee camps will become inaccessible.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees will become vulnerable to mass starvation and disease, aid workers warn. Up to two million lives hang in the balance, UN humanitarian co-ordinator Mr Jan Egeland warned in Dublin this week at a three-day World Food Programme meeting.
"If we succeed, we will be able to feed virtually all of them; if we fail, hundreds of thousands of people will perish," he said.
The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has flown 170,000 tonnes of tents, plastic sheeting and cooking utensils into Chad to cope with the expected crisis.
"The worst is yet to come," said a World Food Programme representative.
But other aid workers criticise the UN for doing too little, too late. Some say the UN habitually hypes the scale of looming famines to attract donor funding. Others say it has been too slow to respond to a crisis that has been visibly brewing for nine months.
"The international community has failed the people of Darfur," Mr Tom Koene, emergency co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières, told the Security Council.
The relief operation has also been hampered by apparent obstruction tactics by government bureaucrats in issuing work papers and travel permits to aid workers. MSF, for example, sent a fresh medical team to Khartoum in early January, who had to wait until late April before being allowed leave the capital.
Yesterday's denials by the London ambassador will do little to deflect the storm of international outrage against President Bashir's regime, which finds itself simultaneously on the brink of peace and in the depths of war.
Last month Khartoum signed a protocol with the southern SPLA rebels intended to end 21 years of civil war in the south.
But the stream of atrocity reports coming out of Darfur have soured most international goodwill towards the hardline Islamic regime, which came to power in a 1989 military coup.
The emerging famine is "a direct result of the Sudanese government's policy of 'ethnic cleansing' for counterinsurgency purposes", said Human Right Watch in a statement yesterday.
Analysts say the government is supporting the Janjaweed to quell the insurgency by two rebel groups - the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) - who took up arms in February 2003.
But since the military clashes died down last February, the Janjaweed have continued to attack villages where ethnically African tribes live, in what the UN co-ordinator Mr Egeland describes as a policy of "ethnic cleansing".
Yesterday the European Union pledged €12 million to a small African Union peacekeeping force that started deploying in Darfur on June 1st. Ireland, Britain and Denmark made individual contributions on top of the EU aid.
Deaglán de Bréadún writes: A sum of €500,000 from the Irish Government is to be dispersed immediately for the relief of distress in Darfur, Sudan. It is part of a package amounting to €1.5 million in extra funding for the World Food Programme, announced by the Minister of State for Development Co-operation, Mr Tom Kitt.
The money is being channelled through Development Co-operation Ireland in the Department of Foreign Affairs and brings total Irish funding to the WFP this year to €4 million.