The rains are starting in southern Darfur. Parched land will very soon be turning to mud, and transport on western Sudan's unpaved roads will become a real challenge. Bringing desperately needed aid to a million displaced people will be even harder as refugee camps are cut off, and the problem of water shortage will turn into one of too much unsafe water, writes Walt Kilroy
The rains will move north to cover the whole of Darfur by the middle of next month, so we are now at the threshold that we have known about for some time. But their arrival is not just important for relief operations: this is the time when people should be planting their crops for the coming year. It is their only chance to do so. Most of those who have been driven from their land have not been able to return, so they are now losing an entire year's food supply. War-induced famine is nothing new in Sudan; we all know what happens next.
Darfur's tragedy is a multiple one. It is not just one which we were warned about and could have acted to alleviate. It is also one which was entirely man-made from the start. This enormous region, which is larger than France and home to perhaps six million people, saw a small-scale uprising against government policies in February of last year. The response was disproportionate, and has turned the conflict into an ethnic one.
Unscrupulous leaders anywhere, from Ireland to Yugoslavia, can turn people against each other. The Khartoum government armed and funded the Arab tribes who live in Darfur. They compete with the ethnically African subsistence farmers for scarce water and grazing resources, as the changing climate makes drought endemic.
This new force, known as the Janjaweed, has engaged in "a reign of terror", to use the words of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. A systematic campaign has driven more than a million people from their homes. The villages and crops of these Muslim Africans are burned, and water sources contaminated. The mass rape of women and girls as a weapon of war has been widely documented; others have been abducted. Men are executed. These attacks on civilians are by definition war crimes, and the estimates for those already killed start at 10,000.
Although the government has denied arming the militia, this is a tactic it has used throughout Sudan. (Such militias recently forced tens of thousands of people from their homes in a separate conflict in Upper Nile state in southern Sudan.) There are, in any case, many witnesses in Darfur who say the Janjaweed and government forces mounted joint operations, where aerial bombing was followed up by regular soldiers and militia on horseback.
Despite a shaky ceasefire between the rebel movement and the government, the attacks on civilians have been continuing. Whether or not we choose to call it ethnic cleansing, the reality is that a million people have been forced out of their homes in a systematic way on the basis of their ethnicity.
What started as a political problem and a human rights crisis has become a humanitarian disaster.
Rates of acute malnutrition among children in some places are above 21 per cent, according to MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières). UNICEF said on Thursday that over half of the displaced, amounting to 600,000 people, "still do not have access to healthcare and two-thirds do not have clean water. The sanitation situation in the camps is abysmal."
The irony is that this situation was created at a time when the Khartoum government has been negotiating a peace agreement with the main rebel movement in southern Sudan, the SPLM/A (Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army). The deal signed just over two weeks ago is a significant step in the process to end 21 years of war in the south, in which an estimated two million people died. Like the fate awaiting Darfur, many of those fell victim to the effects of war-induced famine.
There is something obscene about having to trade in the numbers of expected deaths in order to get attention, like some kind of perverse futures commodity. It's a game which aid agencies are, quite correctly, reluctant to play. Washington's official agency, USAID, is now stating publicly that even if the requested aid gets through, 300,000 people will die. Given the obstacles faced by relief agencies up to now, from government travel restrictions to delays at customs, even that scenario may be optimistic.
Trócaire and the other main agencies from Ireland have been active for months, providing shelter, medicines and sanitation, along with many others.
The Irish Government has committed €2.5 million to Darfur. The overall needs have been put at around $300 million, but even the UN agencies are short of funds. The World Food Programme says it has secured only 30 per cent of what it requires to feed those affected in Darfur this year.
What is the threshold for action, in a world where we obsess about imagined threats and inconsequential health scares? For many months, UN bodies, aid agencies and a small number of reporters have been accurately predicting every step of the Darfur tragedy. In March, the UN official based in Sudan described it as the worst humanitarian crisis facing the world.
Journalists found it almost impossible to get permission to enter Darfur, but we could see the refugees streaming west across the border into Chad, with stories which were harrowing and consistent. The Intermediate Technology Development Group, a partner organisation supported by Trócaire, reported several months ago that more than half the villages in northern Darfur had been emptied. The growing figures for acute malnutrition have been published. And the threat of famine was predicted in a letter to this paper early last month. We were not dealing with the inevitable: we were being presented with a choice.
Yet the world was too busy marking the tenth anniversary of Rwanda's nightmare - something we should have genuinely learnt from, rather than using it as a way to convince ourselves we now care about such things. Political leaders and the media lined up to say "never again", but few would accept that something terrible was indeed happening again. The world slept on, as if the ethnic cleansing alarm had not been sounded once more.
The phrase "a race against time" has been heard often in recent days. There is so much to do. The continuing attacks on civilians must end, and Khartoum must rein in its militia. Ceasefire monitors, who are only now arriving in Darfur, must be deployed quickly and allowed to operate freely. A major relief effort is needed, with full co-operation from the government of Sudan in allowing access to the area. And those driven from their homes must be allowed to return freely and in safety, when they choose to do so.
We are getting quite good at doing anniversaries. Rwanda and Srebrenica are better remembered than they were responded to at the time. Soon we will have another anniversary to mark. Our actions now can still affect what exactly we will be remembering from Darfur 2004, and how we will judge our role in it.
Walt Kilroy is the former deputy foreign editor at RTÉ, and is currently on an internship in Trócaire's east Africa regional office in Kenya