For Sudan refugees, a long hot wait for world action

Past the Arabs meandering over the fields on horseback and the burned huts overrun with vines, across the muddy rivers and beyond the checkpoints with their snoozy officials and signs in French he can't read, Ahmed Abu Bakr wakes up in his makeshift refugee camp and starts another day of waiting.

"Every day I listen," says Ahmed, who walked for four days without stopping when he left his home in Masterie, Sudan, six months ago and headed to neighboring Chad. "I listen to London."

He is talking about the BBC's Arabic language service that he tunes in to every day at 5 a.m., on the small transistor radio he keeps hidden beneath the folds of his long white robe. "They will tell me what the political situation is and when I can go home."

When he will be able to return home is still unclear. But the political situation appears to be moving ahead with sudden speed after US Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, said the situation in Darfur that Ahmed fled qualified as "genocide." It was the first such declaration by a member of the Bush administration and could put pressure on the government in Khartoum to resolve the 18-month crisis that has left 30,000 people dead and 1.4 million more homeless. Should the United Nations echo Mr. Powell's declaration, member states would be obligated to intervene under a 1948 genocide convention.

In the meantime, Ahmed and hundreds of thousands of refugees like him, forced from their homes by marauding government-backed Arab militias called the Janjaweed, are stuck in a kind of limbo. The rainy season has begun, and at home they would all be out on their fields, fixing the rows of grain, pulling out weeds, and harvesting. Now they are living on handouts from the international community, spending their idle days wondering, alone and collectively, what's next.

Across the border in Sudan, dawn is breaking and Amira Mohammad al-Sheikh's baby Omima is quietly reaching for her mother's breast. Mother and child share a mat, together with Samia and Arafa, Omima's sisters. The empty mat adjoining belongs to Omima's father Adam Abdul Rahman, but tonight he is with his other wife and children, in a different part of the camp. Samia and Arafa's father is dead, killed, says their mother, by Arabs who took over their village of Umduek and chased them away eight months ago.

Amira has no breast milk, but she pulls Omima to her anyway. This is the sixth time the 7-month-old has awoken overnight, hungry, to feed, says Amira, and each time it's the same. She will give her crushed biscuits and water later. The muezzin, who lives next door, is calling out for prayer, using a ram's horn as his microphone. In a few moments, Amira will prostrate herself on a mat outside and pray, she says, for good things to come her way.

Of the 1.4 million refugees, 1.2 million like Amira are in about 150 camps for internally displaced people in western Sudan. Some are extensions of existing villages; some have popped out of nowhere. Some contain a few hundred people, others have tens of thousands. Some are established, with mud walls surrounding the straw huts and little garden plots with planted vegetables and some are new, with families crowded under white plastic sheeting. In the bigger ones, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide everything from water and food to health services and playgroups for the children. In some of the more remote, inaccessible or small camps, often there is nothing at all: just people crouching on the ground, shooing away the flies.

The latest UN humanitarian situation report said food is being provided to 62 percent of the conflict affected population, that 53 percent had received shelter and nonfood items like pots and blankets, 36 percent had access to clean water. The report further noted that there are about 500 international staff and approximately 3,690 national staff currently working in the Darfur operations.

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