UN Evacuates From Darfuri Refugee Camp

These are the saviors for the Darfuri refugees?

The United Nations evacuated aid workers and journalists visiting this vast, restive camp for displaced people in Darfur today amid a huge demonstration that suddenly turned violent during a visit by a top United Nations official.

Protestors demanding quick international intervention in Darfur tried to stab an aid worker they suspected of being a government spy. They then approached an African Union compound where eight unarmed soldiers barricaded themselves inside.

"Janjaweed, janjaweed!" the crowd shouted, grasping at a long-time employee of Oxfam, the British aid organization, as he tried to flee the melee in a car. Janjaweed is the term for the local Arab militias who have aligned with the government and carried out brutal attacks on non-Arab villages across the arid countryside of Darfur, a region in western Sudan the size of France.

One young man wielded a knife that sliced into the aid worker's shirt but did not injure him. Elderly women tugged at his legs. Boys wielding sticks and rocks smashed the windows of the United Nations car in which he was trying to flee.

The chaos engulfed one of the most troubled camps for displaced people caught up in the conflict in Darfur, as Jan Egeland, the United Nations' chief humanitarian official, visited the camp. He came to investigate deteriorating conditions after an aid group coordinating humanitarian assistance was evicted last month.

Darfuri refugees have good reason not to trust the UN, which has been an abject failure in dealing with the ongoing genocide in Darfur. The silence by Kofi Annan on the matter has been deafening and the janjaweed have frequently raided refugee camps in Darfur, and even crossing the border into Chad to attack refugees there.