Why Was I in Darfur?

As the crisis in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan moved into the international spotlight this past summer, I was hired to set up a public information/press office for the humanitarian wing of the United Nations in Sudan. I arrived in Sudan from my home in South Africa on Aug. 10 and spent the following two months in the dusty streets and conference rooms of the nation's capital, Khartoum, and traveling throughout the broken landscape of the three Darfur states to the west.

In February 2003, an African Muslim rebellion emerged, and in the year that followed, Arab militias known as Janjaweed, who have been linked to the government, waged a bloody and brutal campaign of violence, killing countless thousands of civilians and driving nearly 2 million innocent people from their rural homes. The majority of the displaced people now live in camps in Darfur and are completely dependent on international humanitarian aid for survival. The Sudanese government erected tough obstacles, nearly sealing the region off from the outside world for months. In March, after continued pressure, aid agencies slowly began to gain entry into the region.

In April of this year, a cease-fire was signed between rebels and the government. In early July, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Darfur, and in the weeks that followed, a handful of African Union cease-fire monitors arrived, and a Security Council resolution was passed calling on the government to end the violence and allow free access to aid agencies. Since then, some steps have been taken to resolve the humanitarian crisis, and the aid agencies have significantly increased their presence.

However, in the time that I was there, despite enormous efforts on the part of the United Nations and the international community as a whole, the violence has escalated rather than decreased. Fighting between rebels and government troops has intensified; tens of thousands of civilians have continued to flee their villages, overwhelming cash-strapped aid agencies; and millions of people continue to live in a constant state of fear.