Despite the growing international pressure to relieve the plight of 1.2 million Sudanese farmers and their families displaced from their homes in Darfur province by the Janjaweed militias, progress in doing so has been disappointingly slow and lacking in urgency.
International aid agencies say there is still an inadequate response, despite the fact that 940,000 people are being fed and air drops have started. At the United Nations the Security Council has passed a resolution demanding that the Sudanese government should take serious action within 30 days to disarm the militia and prosecute human rights violators. But the sanctions proposed if this is not done are weak and there is little stomach for more resolute measures to enforce compliance.
As a result, the Darfur crisis is being contained not resolved. There is no prospect that those brutally expelled from their villages will be able to return home in time to plant crops for the next harvest. In that case the aid effort will have to be prolonged, with little indication that sufficient resources will be provided to keep them alive for another year.
The Sudanese government said initially that it would not adhere to the 30-day deadline but to a 90-day one discussed earlier - although Sudan's foreign minister indicated yesterday that progress could be made in the shorter timeframe. The government has mobilised its supporters in a fierce denunciation of western intervention - which now appears most unlikely. The 22-member Arab League, which held an emergency meeting on Sunday on Darfur, also rejected threats of military intervention in the region or the imposition of any sanctions on Sudan.
The African Union is pledged to increase its deployment of troops to protect aid personnel at the refugee camps from 300 to 2,000 and is discussing whether to give them peacekeeping duties as well. Such a force is quite incapable of forcing the government to move against the Janjaweed militias which have pillaged, looted, raped, burned, killed and expelled 1.2 million people. In the meantime, the Nigerian president has invited the Sudanese government and rebel negotiators to hold talks in Nigeria starting on August 23rd.
The Security Council resolution invokes Article 41 of the UN Charter in relation to possible sanctions should Sudan fail to comply. This covers economic, transport and communications measures, not the military ones dealt with under Chapter VII of the Charter. In any case measures discussed in Washington and London concerning more robust action have not gone beyond supplying troops to protect the camps from further attack.
There is a lot of bluster and noise here, but not enough action to cope with the scale of this humanitarian crisis. The Darfur crisis has exposed deep cultural, ethnic and political cleavages between Arab and African states as well as profound hostility to western intervention. Sudan's oil resources are another factor in the political equation.