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![]() The crisis in Darfur comes at a time when Sudan’s other war, the war in the south, seems to be on the point of resolution. ![]() Despite much-publicized visits by Colin Powell and Kofi Annan in June, demands by the UN and other international bodies that the militias be disarmed have not been met. 1 A cease-fire between the government in Khartoum and the rebels has broken down the international aid effort has been put in jeopardy by government obstruction and the delay of emergency relief. Recent visitors to rebel-held areas report seeing the remains of young men, victims of extra-judicial executions by Sudanese troops. Many more still inside Sudan-trapped in the impending seasonal rains without assistance-are likely to perish from malnutrition and epidemic disease. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict. Locally recruited militias, armed and commanded by Sudan army officers in combined operations with helicopter gunships, burn and loot villages in rebel areas, raping women and killing men, forcing the survivors to flee west across the border into Chad, or else to seek refuge in government-controlled towns and camps, where they are under the control of those responsible for their degradation. ![]() In response to an insurgency on the part of rebel groups demanding greater political representation in Khartoum, the government of General Omar al-Bashir has unleashed a scorched-earth policy across large tracts of the province. Over the last sixteen months a disas-ter has been unfolding in Darfur, one that is agonizingly familiar to observers of Sudan during the past two decades. Remote from the country’s political heartland on the Nile, it is linked to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, by seven hundred miles of dirt road and a single-track railway. Darfur is a 150,000-square-mile expanse of desert and savannah, with five or six million inhabitants, spreading out from the fertile slopes of Jebel Marra, the mountainous zone in Sudan’s far west.
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