Mia Farrow on the Conflict in Darfur

— -- Q. Where in in the Darfur region of Sudan were you?

A. We went to south and north Darfur and visited refugee camps in both places. Unlike my last visit in 2004 I could not go to west Darfur which is now considered too volatile to visit. Even now the itinerary keeps changing because of the security situation. We went to Gereida and Finna camps which were outside of the town of Nyala. This is the biggest refugee camp with 126,000 people. Also visited a camp called Zam Zam in Nyala which has 30,000 people.

I was unable to visit Kama camp which I visited last time. That was at the time the largest and is now the second largest refugee camp at about 96,000 people. 18 months ago the camps were a sea of pale blue tents provide by the UN which people had pinned to the ground with twigs and whatever else they could find. People were even living under trees and bushes.

Now the improvised nature of the camps had transformed into a chilling permanence. We now see more mud roofs where the tents used to be. The support infrastructure is being provided only by humanitarian workers. Still food rations are below what they need to be and clean water is a huge problem second only to security. There are makeshift schools with a few teachers who try provide some education, this is not nearly enough, there are hardly any teachers or any money to pay these teachers.

There are only the very basic health services in the camps. In camp Zam Zam the hospital is three rooms with one doctor to service 40,000 people. I cannot even tell you how minimal the services are.

There is no ambulance for emergencies, the road into town is at least an hour long over sand. This population of internally displaced people is stopped by the government if they try to travel anywhere outside of the camps. There are also Janjaweed around all the camps that threaten the refugees if they try to leave.

It is an unbelievably volatile, fragile and tragic situation.

Q. What do you think of efforts to solve the problem?

A. The peace agreement is like a one legged dog trying to run. The situation has gone from bad to worse in the sense that even the refugee camps are now split into different factions. The fervor among these factions within the refugee camps and throughout the country is alarming. The different groups have solidified creating an even more volatile situation than the one before. Some of these factions were for signing the peace accord and others were not. This transitional time is extremely volatile.

The Darfur region is now open to a conflict of another kind. Before it was just the Janjaweed and the government that were creating the terrible situation. Now there are splits within the government and the many other factions that I just mentioned, including the Sudanese Liberation Army. Any moment now the region could erupt into complete chaos.

Women and children are of course the most vulnerable in this situation. One hopes that there will be a point of compromise and an eventual implementation of a peace plan.

The situation is being held together by the thousands of humanitarian workers on the ground. If violence leads to these humanitarian workers being withdrawn this entire region will fall completely apart.

Q. What needs to be done?

A. Darfur is the hot potato that keeps being passed around from the UN to the US to the EU and it keeps falling back on the African Union. They seem to be the only good guys on the ground. They have 7000 thousand troops on the ground and 2000 of them are unarmed. The UN need to come in and assist the AU now, there is no time to waste. This situation will not hold for many more months. Without help things will become a Somalia like situation of war lords taking complete control.

Children are already being drawn into the armed conflict. We do not even know what is happening. There were some systems in place like the AU forces were able to provide some security. Now even that has fallen apart. I have heard that the AU forces are under some sort of curfew, not sure if that is government imposed or self imposed, since the African Union forces are also in tremendous danger and are constantly being killed.

Q. A sort of existential question to end things, why do you think this is happening here and now, why do human beings do this, what does this tell us?

A. Why? That is the big question I guess. Well its not just here. This is going on in many other places like Uganda and Congo. There is a sort of a clarion call here. Two things have conjured up our attention. We saw Rwanda and people reacted by saying "I had not realized what was happening." People were more than a little shocked. The statement was made "never again."

What about that? What about "never again?"

Secondly the word genocide has been used to describe what is happening here.

We know in this situation that the Sudanese government was calling upon extremely unsavory characters to conduct their violence for them. People can look at this situation and say this needs to stop. This was not really a tribal or an ethnic conflict, there really were just bad guys and good guys. Things are more complex now and are rapidly becoming even more complicated.

I guess I am trying to explain why we should pay attention to this conflict rather than why it is happening. If we care about human beings and the human race we have to support the people caught up in this conflict, and support the humanitarian workers who are helping them.

Interview conducted by Zunaira Zaki, ABC News