Pressure on the Sudanese government to disarm the Janjaweed militia must be kept up if the millions of people they have expelled from the Darfur region of the country are to have any chance of surviving as refugees or returning safely to their homes in coming months.
Credible demands for sanctions have now been made at the United Nations Security Council if Sudan does not take such action. Its government is trying to delay the tight timetable necessary for international relief to reach those who need it. This should be resisted. Otherwise hundreds of thousands of people will be at risk of dying from exposure or starvation as the rainy season starts. Humanitarian intervention has a strong moral validity despite the political and operational difficulties involved.
The facts about this major expulsion of people are straightforward even if their explanation is complex and contested. In February last year two rebel groups took up arms against the Sudanese government in the Darfur region, which has 6.5 million inhabitants, mainly poor black farmers. For years they have been resisting encroachments on their land and water by nomadic Arab tribes from the northern part of Sudan in a growing competition for resources exacerbated by desertification.
In response the government armed the Janjaweed militia as an auxiliary force and stood by while it embarked on a campaign of pillage, rape, ethnic cleansing and destruction of villages, causing up to 30,000 deaths and the flight of up to 1.5 million people to refugee camps in western Darfur and Chad.
This happened as the government was reaching an agreement with much more long-standing rebels in the south of the country - a development which deflected international attention from the disgraceful and quite disproportionate events in Darfur.
The action proposed so far to force the government to move involves possible arms bans and travel sanctions on leaders of the militia, or on Sudanese leaders if they fail to act within a 30-day deadline. Intervention options floated by major western powers at the UN range from helping delivery of aid, supporting African Union peace monitors logistically, or sending troops to protect refugee camps from marauding militias.
These are modest tasks indeed compared to what is so desperately and immediately needed and are far from the scale of the Iraqi intervention. But they are opposed by those who argue they would interfere with Sudan's sovereignty or set precedents for less acceptable interventions elsewhere.
Since there is no provision for humanitarian intervention in the existing UN Charter there is understandable suspicion that such an initiative will be used gratuitously or cynically to justify powerful states taking unilateral action in future. The people of Darfur must not be made hostage to such fears. Solidarity with them must go hand in hand with demands for UN reform to create a proper legal basis for humanitarian protection.