Global Darfur Day: Women search for wood, men search for victims

At 6am today, as on every other morning in Darfur, Zakiya Gibril Adam and 200 other women started walking. They left as the sun crept above the tattered plastic sheets and thatched roofs of their refugee camp, which stretches as far as the eye can see.

When events get started in Britain and 33 other countries for the Global Day of Darfur, marking the fourth anniversary of the start of a conflict which has killed more than 200,000 people and driven millions more from their homes, 25-year-old Zakiya will still be walking. All the firewood around the Kalma refugee camp, 15km east of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, has been gathered long ago. Now the women have to walk for five hours to find more.

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As celebrities including Elton John, Mick Jagger, Bob Geldof, George Clooney and Mia Farrow call on the international community to do more to protect the civilians of Darfur, Zakiya will be making the five-hour trek back to the relative safety of the camp.

As the women walk, their eyes will scan the horizon, searching for signs of the Janjaweed - militiamen on horseback, armed and supported by the Sudanese government. These are the men who drove the inhabitants of Kalma from their villages, raping and killing anything that moved. The militiamen now live in villages seized from the refugees at Kalma.

Many of the women who walk with Zakiya have been raped while collecting firewood. They return bloodied, bruised and ashamed - often they are shunned by their husbands. Most men don't dare leave the camp; some go to nearby markets, but many have been killed. Yet the women keep rising at 6am, and keep walking for 10 hours a day to find the firewood that their families need to survive.

Camp Kalma has become a prison, with the Janjaweed, backed by Sudan's government, as the jailers. Protection for the inmates is supposed to come from African Union (AU) peacekeepers, part of the African Union Mission in Sudan (Amis), who should be carrying out "firewood patrols". But no one has seen Amis here for several months.

On a straw mat in the shade of a canvas shelter, Eassa Ibrahim Alhaj, one of the advisers to Kalma's head sheikh, talks about the last Amis firewood patrol. "The Janjaweed came on their horses and began shooting," he says.

"The AU ran away. They reached the camp before the women did."

What he and many others in Kalma hope for is the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force, but that is unlikely to happen soon. A UN resolution passed last August asked Sudan to "invite" a force to enter Darfur. Sudan refused, with President Omar al-Bashir claiming a UN force was nothing more than an attempt by the West to re-colonise Sudan.

Attempts to broker a compromise deal, which would see the Amis force of 7,000 personnel bolstered by a further 10,000 as part of a UN/AU hybrid force, also hit the buffers. Even if a UN force does come to Darfur, Mr Eassa will be sorely disappointed, because he has misunderstood the rhetoric of US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. "The American and British people have stood beside us," he said. "American and British soldiers should come here." But American and British soldiers will never be sent to Darfur.

Next door, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a UN force of 17,000 has been deployed - the largest in the world. It is made up of Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalese, Guatemalans and Uruguayans. This is the reality of a UN force, but the Darfurians, who believe they have been failed by soldiers from Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, do not want non-Western protectors.

Peacekeeping forces, say international officials, need a peace to keep. Darfur has a peace agreement, signed in Nigeria last May with Britain's Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, looking on. But it was signed by just one faction of the rebels. There are now at least 15 different rebel groups, and the security situation is far worse than it was then.

In Kalma, loyalties lie with the faction of the Sudan Liberation Army run by Abdul Wahid. The leader who signed the peace deal, Minni Minnawi (who was rewarded with a senior government job in Khartoum), is not popular here. "Our villages are still with the Janjaweed," said Zakiya. "They have stolen everything. Why should Minni sign when it changes nothing?"

Though thousands of people across five continents will today urge their leaders to "do something" about Darfur, few leaders can agree on what that "something" is.

The US, which is alone in labelling the conflict "genocide", is preparing to increase its sanctions on Sudan. Britain is talking up the idea of a no-fly zone, but one non-British Western diplomat in Khartoum was quick to point out that this was being suggested only by Mr Blair.

So far, though, the outside world is just talking - not acting. Numerous UN resolutions urging action remain unenforced. A no-fly zone was even agreed in 2005, but was never implemented.

Towards the end of last year, the US envoy to Khartoum, Andrew Natsios, told Sudan that if it didn't allow a hybrid force in by 1 January, the US would invoke "Plan B". He didn't specify what it was - because it didn't exist. Nearly four months into 2007, Plan B has not materialised.

John Prendergast, a senior Darfur analyst for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention think-tank, argues that this is a time for the international community to walk softly, and carry a big stick, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it. Instead, he says, the Bush administration is "walking loudly and carrying a toothpick".

The Sudanese government has learnt that the West rarely acts on its threats. It continues to arm the Janjaweed, despite previous promises to take away their weapons,

And now it has a new tactic: claiming that the Janjaweed doesn't really exist. At a press conference in Nairobi two weeks ago, the Sudanese Justice Minister, Mohammed Ali El Mardi, claimed that they were just unconnected groups of criminals with no links to the government who sometimes attack villages and steal cattle.

But for Zakiya, the Janjaweed are all too real. Tomorrow she will rise at 6am and start walking, not knowing whether she will make it back to camp unharmed.

Crisis zone: how the conflict unfolded

Western Sudan has struggled with racial tensions since the 1980s, when government-funded Arab supremacist groups began attacking non-Arab Africans. In 2003, rebel groups retaliated, provoking a military campaign with villages bombed from the air and attacked on the ground.