Euan Ferguson (London Observer/July 31): World turns away from Darfur

[Jack Rabbit]

From the London Observer (Sunday supplement of the Guardian Unlimited)
Dated Sunday July 31

The world has turned away - but Darfur's misery goes on
The conflict in Sudan no longer dominates the headlines. But the fallout from the civil war is still a grim reality
By Euan Ferguson

When it's seen from about 3,000 feet up, you realise nature doesn't like geometry. Nature abhors geometry. Hundreds of dry miles of dead rivers and lumpen moonscapes of sprawling rock; loopy tangles of brush in the desert and wavy banks of sand, punctuated with the occasional tree looking frankly startled to find itself still alive: these hot, awful miles roll below in tangles of abstraction. Then you peer a little closer, gazing down at the immensity of Darfur, a part of Sudan slightly larger than France, and suddenly see tiny geometry. Squares, triangles, perfect circles on the ground: all speak of astonishing mankind, and its presence, for so many centuries, in this unconscionable environment.
As we civilised beings fly overhead, men are busy down below trying to kill each other. Insects are trying to bite babies. Women are seeking water to keep their children alive, and men are trying to stop them, and when the water is found it will make men kill each other once more, and it will breed the insects that kill the babies. And it's tempting, as we chew up the miles in our United Nations helicopter - the government airline, Air Sudan, has recently been celebrating its cavalier approach to aircraft maintenance with its 13th crash in 12 months, resulting in a triumphant 120 deaths - to stay at this airy 3,000ft remove, with our cool khaki and our boiled sweets, and simply think big thoughts about the geometry below.

The faint, faint circles of thorns and sand, which denote a village given up on decades ago. The stronger, darker squares of mud walls, pocked at the centre with a tiny hut, showing villages which still live: and there will be smudges of green near by, showing that somewhere under the sand, even if the women and the plants have to dig and scuttle for it, there will some days be water: and then the dark squares broken at the edges, without a hut in the middle, showing the villages ravaged and burnt and ruined. It's all down there, written in the geometry: history and life, and man's curious compulsion to insert his own brutality into a land already reeling from nature.

We can see it from up here. Do we have to go down, into the flies and guns and heat; into the tears and lies and smells and death?

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