UN Counts Butchers Bill On Darfur

300,000 dead on its watch, and the number keeps on rising.

The conflict in Darfur is deteriorating, with full deployment of a new peacekeeping force delayed until 2009 and no prospect of a political settlement for a war that has killed perhaps 300,000 people in five years, U.N. officials said Tuesday.
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In grim reports to the Security Council, the United Nations aid chief and the representative of the peacekeeping mission said suffering in the Sudanese region is worsening. Tens of thousands more have been uprooted from their homes and food rations to the needy are about to be cut in half, they said.

"We continue to see the goal posts receding, to the point where peace in Darfur seems further away today than ever," said John Holmes, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

The conflict began in early 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against Sudan's Arab-dominated central government, accusing it of discrimination. Many of the worst atrocities in the war have been blamed on the janjaweed militia of Arab nomads allied with the government.

The UN has done nothing to deal with the Islamists in Khartoum because the regime has support from the likes of China and Russia who thwart any effort to bring relief to hundreds of thousands of displaced Darfur refugees to say nothing of the relentless campaign to dispossess them of their lands.