G Jefferson Price III

There’s something wrong with this picture. Here in Khartoum, a building boom is under way with plenty of air-conditioned office buildings, wide, freshly paved boulevards, new cars, and a new enormous shopping mall. Inside the air-conditioned “Afra” mall, a consumer can find just about anything desired. Sudanese shoppers, dressed mostly in traditional white robes for the men and colourful wrapped dresses for the women, look healthy and joyous.

The scent of money engulfs the place, a carefree way of life for the fortunate Sudanese who are well heeled, possibly the beneficiaries of new oil money, investment from the outside, and a mini-boom created by a huge expatriate aid community.

What makes the picture seem grotesquely distorted is the scene a thousand or so miles to the west of Khartoum where, in the past couple of years, as many as 200,000 people have died and two million have fled their homes in a civil war between antigovernment insurgents and the government-supported Arab militia known as the Janjaweed.

Darfur has no Afra shopping mall. It has no roads to speak of. It is mostly desert. No one has money with which to buy life’s essentials. The closest thing to a market is the food distribution site, where monthly rations of cooking oil, salt, and sugar are luxury items, if only for the lives they will sustain for 30 more days.

Aid agencies are busy in their attempts to feed, house, and care efficiently for the millions of internally displaced people in Darfur. As people and whole communities establish themselves in makeshift settlements in the desert they also receive shelter materials, blankets, mats, cooking utensils, water cans and soap.

It seems everyone has a tale of horror — of burned homes, murdered family and friends, raped mothers and daughters and a loss of all that they once owned. Despite the human rights atrocities devouring this vast landscape, the aggressive international campaign to stop the tragedy of Darfur from a year ago seems to have lost its momentum.

A year and a half ago, at the height of the conflict, international attention was riveted on Darfur. Aid rushed in. World leaders, including President Bush, made forceful declarations about the need to end the war. Parties to the conflict signed a cease-fire and mounted a peace process, though the firing did not cease and the peace did not proceed.

Yet, today Darfur is barely visible on Washington’s agenda. Progress on strengthening both the mandate and the size of the African Union force has been painfully, if not deadly, slow. The UN resolutions on Darfur have yet to be enforced.

Last month, the International Criminal Court announced the indictment of individuals responsible for the Darfur catastrophe, but the government in Khartoum responded defiantly, asserting its right to try its own criminals.

Darfur couldn’t seem further removed from public interest or attention.

Last year’s tsunami was a fatal distraction, for Darfur is like a silent, man-made tsunami whose casualties continue to pile up. But, in isolation and with no protection, Darfuris’ current horrors could be only the beginning. And only the outside world can put a stop to it. — The Christian Science Monitor