Catastrophe foretold

Burning villages, bombers and helicopter gunships scouring the African skies, refugees fleeing as diplomacy continues its maddeningly slow pace: the view from Darfur again points to disaster as the Sudanese government pursues a new offensive against rebel areas - while doing all it can to block the deployment of an effective UN peacekeeping force.

There are certainly plenty of diversions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and, recently, Lebanon. But Darfur, arguably, is the worst of them all, another Rwanda or post-Tito Yugoslavia in the making. Arguments about whether what is happening there constitutes genocide or "just" ethnic cleansing are as irrelevant as whether Iraq is experiencing civil war or "just" extreme sectarian violence: whatever the label, the situation is dire and will probably worsen within days or weeks, warn both the UN and the EU.

Kofi Annan sounded an uncharacteristically tough note yesterday when he served notice that Khartoum would be held responsible for any deterioration in Darfur - where at least 200,000 people have already died and 2-3 million been displaced in the last three and a half years. Still, President Omar al-Bashir is unlikely to be impressed: as last May's fragile peace deal with the Darfur rebels has slowly collapsed, he has opposed the dispatch of UN troops with mounting confidence. His decision to expel the small, ineffective African Union force means he believes he is winning this standoff.

It is untrue to charge, as he does, that the larger, more robust UN presence agreed by the security council would be working for Baghdad-style regime change, another chapter in an oil-driven "crusader war" on Islam, as jihadists and their anti-interventionist allies claim. Sudanese troops are attacking again, with Arab Janjaweed militias targeting black farmers. The idea that they could act as independent peacekeepers is cynical and absurd.

Yet the sad truth is that, assuming he is not deterred by Mr Annan, Mr al-Bashir has little to fear: the Darfur rebels are hopelessly divided; he knows that Russia and China (unlikely to back any sanctions) abstained on last week's security council vote (so did Qatar, the sole current Arab member) and that the UN will not dare to deploy without his consent. No one wants to upset the fragile peace between the Khartoum government and the southern Sudanese rebels. And, in an area the size of France, the logistics would be as complicated as the politics. It is a deeply depressing picture in the face of what the UN predicts could be "a man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale".