Sudan: Seeking Sanctions

Conflict in Darfur, a region of western Sudan about the size of France, has dominated the international agenda in recent months. The crisis is not new, it began in February last year, when the government backed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed began to suppress rebel groups. The government is using the Janjaweed to drive villagers off their land and hand it over to tribes loyal to Khartoum. Some fifty thousand people have died and 1.2 million more have been displaced, many of them across the border to squalid camps in Chad, following a campaign described by the United Nations as ethnic cleansing and categorised as genocide by the US Secretary of State Colin Powell.