  I'm don't know nearly enough to post myself about this issue.But its a very very serious one. I'll leave it up to Mandisi Majavu, you can read his blog urlLink here. &nbsp; Still no peace in Sudan Posted by Mandisi Majavu at July 19, 2004 12:45 PM Four months after the UN described the Darfur crisis as the “world’s humanitarian disaster” little has been done – what some describe as ethnic cleansing has not stopped and peace is still as elusive as before the international community started to show some interest in the region. And according to Jan Egeland, the UN coordinator of emergency relief, the UN started slowly in Darfur where aid workers say 350 000 might die of disease or malnutrition. One would be compelled to conclude that the UN has a serious weakness of slow motion, because just ten years ago we saw the same snail pace reaction to the genocide that took place in Rwanda where about 1 million people were killed in the course of 100 days without the UN intervention. The fighting in the Darfur region started last year, February 2003, between the allied militia groups known as Janjawid and the two Darfur rebel groups – the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudan Liberation Movement. According to Amnesty International, the Janjawid are armed, funded and supported by the Sudanese government. Also, a report by the UN human rights found that the Janjawid have killed civilians, raped them, burnt down villages and poisoned wells. The 18 months conflict is believed to have killed about 30 000 people and has displaced more than a million people.
As things stand, it is believed that about 2 million people are in need of emergency relief in the states of Western Northern and Southern Darfur. The peace negotiations that started last Thursday, 15 July, are reported to have ended up in a screaming match. The Darfur rebels are demanding that before any negotiations can take place the government troops and the Janjawid militias be removed from the Darfur region; a demand the government says it’s totally unrealistic, according to the UN news.
The Darfur rebels are also demanding that the Janjawid be disarmed and people who are suspected of genocide and ethnic cleansing be prosecuted. Meanwhile, on the international arena, Amnesty International has called on the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the Sudanese government and militias allied to it. However, not all Security Council members, especially the members which have close economic ties with Sudan, are enthusiastic about going down that route. Revealing the hypocritical character of the international community, for while everyone seems to agree that the violence and killing must stop in Sudan, no one is prepared to make serious efforts by stopping the sales of weapons to the fighting rebels in Sudan. And so the killing continues. 
