Late in the night of 16 November Kofi Annan chaired a meeting at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa at which he, the AU and the UN Security Council reaffirmed this basic fact. When he promised to bring the government of Sudan and the rebels who are still fighting around the table within weeks, the outgoing UN secretary general was adopting a simple and correct rationale: fix the politics first and the peacekeeping will follow. It’s not a distant hope: the political differences are small. (...)

Allowing in UN troops to police a ceasefire and implement a peace agreement that will help the Congress Party consolidate its place in Sudan is one thing. Allowing in ‘international forces’ – the Arabic term, quwat al dauliya, is the same as the one used for coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – midway through a conflict, with an open-ended mandate, is quite another. The combination of a huge international force – it would take many more than the 20,000 estimated to be needed to enforce a ceasefire – and 8000 Minawi troops with, Khartoum suspects, direct US backing, would in effect bring about a separation of Darfur from the rest of the country.

"Many more people have become armed to the teeth in these recent weeks in preparation for new battles in which the civilian population will inevitability be caught in the crossfire," he told United Press International. "We see a repeat of the buildup of 2003 and 2004 when, really, Darfur was burning. And we see that the relative quiet of 2005 is definitely over." (…) His more poignant comments, however, were made in response to the horrific violence, widespread starvation, refugee crisis and political instability that have led the conflict to be described by many as a full-blown genocide. "How can anybody shoot a 2-year old girl through the neck? How can any man do that deliberately? This is terror. I do not know any word for it; it is defined as terror," said Egeland, referring to a visit to a hospital in western Darfur that led him to describe the situation as one of "inexplicable terror."