“The Worst Crisis in the World”

Our national security correspondent Jonathan Karl blogs about his reporting in Darfur and how the situation there has recently deteriorated. I traveled to the Darfur region of the Sudan three times last year in an effort to document the greatest humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. During each visit I saw hopelessness and despair on a vast scale. (At left, a mother and her malnourished son as they wait to receive aid.)
Last fall I met a woman in Southern Darfur I will never forget. Her name is Haditha; she is elderly and blind. I first saw her being led through a crowd of refugees by a young girl. Haditha was walking with a bucket of mud balanced on her head. I followed and saw her drop the mud at her tattered tent where she used it to build a makeshift wall. She was building the wall of mud, she explained to me, to protect herself from the gunfire she hears each night. Haditha is a victim, of course. She told me her entire family had been killed by the Arab militiamen that ransacked her town and torched her home.  She is strong-willed and determined to survive. She had been building that mud wall for 40 days — by hand, without eyesight, without help. Her fear of gunfire — even inside a refugee camp — showed me just how bad the situation in Darfur had become. People like Haditha had fled their decimated villages in search of safe haven in camps like Kalma. But now she and the others I spoke to didn’t even feel safe in the camps.  There is no safe haven in Darfur. That was months ago. Today, amazingly, it is possible to say the situation in Darfur — the killing that was labeled genocide by the United States back in 2004 — has actually gotten worse. I called the UN’s top humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, to get a status report on Darfur. The news is grim. Egeland told me that attacks on civilians have forced another 200,000  people from their homes during the past two months. Just this week, he said, an attack on a town in South Darfur by the Sudanese Air Force forced 20,000 unarmed people to flee their homes in search of the uncertain safety of refugee camps. (At right, homeless children in southern Sudan.) "The situation on the ground is horrendous and is deteriorating every week now," Egeland told me. "It is the worst crisis in the world right now because it is totally out of control." The new wave of violence has gotten much attention, but thanks in part to a Hollywood actor, the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan is near the top of the news again. George Clooney recently took his father and a couple of video cameras to the refugee camps in Chad, where thousands of people from Darfur have fled to find safety from the violence that has destroyed their homes. Today, Clooney held a press conference at the National Press Club with two U.S. Senators in a bid to draw attention to the crisis. Clooney, like so many others, could not believe that the world’s most important diplomatic organizations were unable to stop the suffering he had just seen for himself. "If not NATO or the UN, then I am not sure what they are there for," Clooney said.  "What is the UN — if not to step up at a time and say this is genocide and let’s stop it?" That’s a damn good question. But the U.N. Security Council recently voted to send a peacekeeping force of 10,700 soldiers to Darfur. It’s probably too little, and it’s certainly too late, but it would be a step in the right direction.  There’s a problem though: the government of Sudan won’t let the peacekeepers in Darfur. Now what?  Sadly, nobody seems to have an answer.