Abdel-Wahid Mohammed Ahmed el-Nur, a leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), called for international military forces to be sent to Darfur. El-Nur, speaking by satellite telephone from Darfur, did not say whether the SLM would be going to the talks in Addis Ababa with the government as the UN announced.

The leader of the other main rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, said there would be no talks with the government until the Janjaweed were disarmed. Aid agencies in neighbouring Chad braced for an influx of 200,000 more refugees from Darfur.

The United States and Europe stepped up warnings of sanctions unless Sudan halts a conflict in its Darfur region.

Germany said Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, agreed in phone talks that “sanctions will be unavoidable if the Khartoum government does not meet its self-set commitments in Darfur”.

China and Russia oppose sanctions

Many countries have demanded Khartoum disarm Arab militias accused of mounting a scorched earth policy against black Africans in Darfur that the US Congress has branded genocide. The UN says some 30,000 people have been killed.

Germany and other European nations that opposed the US-led war in Iraq have found common cause with Washington over Darfur as television images show camps of destitute refugees – among the 1.5 million the UN says have been displaced by fighting.

A US-drafted resolution seeking to threaten oil-producing Sudan with sanctions remains stalled in the UN Security Council by China and Russia – two of the five veto-wielding permanent members.

Khartoum has said it is improving security and aid distribution in Darfur. The Netherlands, which holds the European Union’s rotating presidency, said sanctions were not needed yet but the international community would eventually impose them if Khartoum did not act.

“It’s true that there is an improvement in Darfur, but it isn’t enough,” Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot said after talks with Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail.

“If the situation does not visibly improve, then sanctions will almost surely be brought by the international community,” Bot said. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier began a three-day trip to Africa yesterday with a visit to Darfur, in another sign of European pressure on Khartoum.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Australia was likely to contribute a small number of troops to any UN peacekeeping mission.

“There’s a good chance that we will send some troops to Sudan,” Downer told. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has not ruled out military intervention and Britain’s top commander has said he could send 5,000 troops.

Attempts to reach a political solution in Darfur stumbled last week when the two main rebel groups refused to take part in talks after the government turned down six preconditions.

A key rebel demand is the disarmament of the Arab militias, known as Janjaweed. The rebels accuse the militias of killing and raping villagers and then razing homes. The rebels say the government armed the militias, a charge Khartoum denies, and both sides trade accusations of violating a ceasefire agreed in April.

“It is obvious that the rebels feel that if they agitate enough they can force the hand of the international community and bring about an intervention on the ground,” said a Western observer in Khartoum.

The observer, who declined to be named, said it was going to be almost impossible for the government to disarm or convince militia leaders of the need for disarmament while the rebels carried on breaking the ceasefire.

<B>Cruel and slow starvation</B>

I’m sitting in the dark on the edge of a camp for displaced people in Darfur. I can hear the loud, persistent crying of one child rising above the murmur of the camp as the people settle down for the night.

Tonight the stars are out - that means no rain. Last night was not like this at all.

Then the wind starts and the dust of the Sahara desert whips up, blasting whirling sands in all directions. The people start to run in their long rags, heads bowed against the wind.

Then, the heavens simply open, the wind ferociously hurls drenching curtains of water at everything around. Mothers with their children, whose faces are twisted up in misery, squat grasping the sides of their makeshift shelters - which do almost nothing to keep them dry.

The torn plastic bags that make up the walls of their twig shelters flap madly in the wind. The ground turns into a mire of mud. My TV crew and I run for our shelter 15m away. All night, the rain pounds against our ceiling. The people on the other side of our wall are still sitting, bracing themselves against the wind and rain, where they were at dusk. This is what it is like most nights for them. In the morning we wake up to hear the children crying. In the makeshift hospital here, set up by foreign aid workers, it is so crowded with the sick that some are sleeping on the floors. Among the stench and flies, the children lie wasted, staring into space. Tiny human beings, who were born into the madness of man’s inhumanity to man, into the madness of a spate of killing that has left many of their fathers, brothers, grandparents and uncles dead. And now, they face starvation which is cruel and slow. Most of the children are too far gone to eat. Some have the peeling skin and lesions that come with advanced starvation – their skin is wrinkled, loose around their bones. The mothers sit by powerless.

We travelled to Mornay camp, where we were a month ago. On arriving back, we went to the medical tent. It was strangely quiet inside. Four people were sitting in a circle. A mother was looking down and sobbing silently, rubbing her hands on her face. I realised I knew her. Then it slowly came to me what was going on. Her daughter Nadia, whom we had spent two days with in this tent a month ago, was dying.

The mother, Juma, was saying an awful goodbye. We moved away in their private moment. Ten minutes later Nadia was dead.

The men took her body away to prepare for the burial. Then they emerged at the far end of the graveyard, carrying her tiny body in their hands. They said their prayers and laid her body in the earth. Juma, her mother, sat on the ground. She wasn’t crying any more.

After the funeral I went to pay my respects. Juma had two older women next to her who, perhaps through custom, were telling her to hold her emotions in.

But when she saw me, perhaps remembering the filming we did with Nadia last month, she started screaming “Nadia, Nadia, Nadia”.

She fell on me, screaming, she kept screaming. She kept repeating her daughter’s name. Then the older women started screaming too.

This happens here every day. Darfur is in a nightmare that is alive here today and perhaps somewhere else tomorrow. Racial and tribal tensions, and regional disquiet, have erupted into a war where the civilians are being punished, killed and abused.

We are adults, this is the world we live in and accept. The world we have created for ourselves. Will these things still happen in Africa a century from now? Will it ever change? Why are massacres of civilians allowed to happen in Sudan? Why has no-one even counted the dead?

Money is needed desperately now to save lives. But it has gone this far in Darfur, because no-one really noticed or did anything to stop it. Nadia did not have to die at all.

<B>Nima Elbagir</B>

<B>Hilary Andersson</B>