A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft.

It was shocking, apocalyptic - a scene of utter desolation and destruction. Attacks like this happen repeatedly, but the scale of this one and the ferocity of it was startling - even to those of us who have been here for some time. These were fairly large villages and clearly relatively prosperous: rich agricultural fields; neatly assembled houses and they were more or less completely destroyed in these attacks. Hundreds upon hundreds of homes had been burned to the ground, and a small fire was still burning in one section of Tiero village.

Evidence collected so far indicates it was a two-pronged attack - very well co-ordinated and premeditated. It happened at first light so the villagers were caught totally unawares. Some of the men would have been at mosque for morning prayers. From one direction came the so-called Janjaweed militia on horseback and camelback - whether these were Janjaweed from Sudan or Chad, it is hard to know. It appears that they consisted of a mix of various ethnicities, not solely Arab, and in some cases the assailants were known to the villagers. The other prong of the attack appears to have been led by an unknown faction of Chadian rebels. They were wearing military uniforms, were very well armed and arrived in vehicles.

Sadly, I don't think we're ever going to know the exact number of those who died as people fled in different directions. Estimates now put the death toll at between 200 to 400. A lot of bodies were buried in common graves simply as a necessity because of decomposition occurring in the intense heat. These communal graves are scattered in all different directions mainly along the roadside where people were killed and then buried by their kin who were able to get back there. Many who survived the initial attack, died in subsequent days from exhaustion and dehydration. Along the route to the villages abandoned belongings can be seen of those who collapsed. People displaced by other raids had been living in the villages alongside local residents. Tiero had a combined population of 4,000 and Marena of about 3,500.

On his recent trip to the Middle East, he was stonewalled by the Iranian foreign minister, snubbed by the Palestinian finance minister, misaddressed by the prime ministers of Israel and Lebanon, and shaken by a mortar shell's near-miss in Baghdad. Back home, a mutiny against his first major reform left him similarly shaken and humbled. . . . [S]o far, his cryptic decision-making style at home and his why-can't-we-all-just-get-along approach abroad has diplomats wondering how effective the new secretary-general will be.

When he met Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir in January, the secretary-general said he looked him in the eye and told him it was unacceptable for the violence to continue in Darfur and that he must live up to his agreement to allow peacekeepers into the western region.

"I made this case as hard as I could. He made his personal commitment to me that he will implement this agreement," Ban said.

A few weeks later, Bashir wrote a letter to Ban gutting his previous commitments to accept the joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. . . . “It’s a question that nags loudly,” Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. “Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference.”

Raising his voice, he demanded that his special envoy for Darfur, Andrew Natsios, and national security adviser Stephen Hadley come up with something stronger.

But it's not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was a genocide, in the sense that there was a concerted attempt by the Turkish authorities to destroy every single Armenian.

The High-Level Mission concludes that the situation of human rights in Darfur remains grave, and the corresponding needs profound. The situation is characterized by gross and systematic violations of human rights and grave breaches of international humanitarian law. War crimes and crimes against humanity continue across the region. The principal pattern is one of a violent counterinsurgency campaign waged by the Government of the Sudan in concert with Janjaweed/militia, and targeting mostly civilians. Rebel forces are also guilty of serious abuses of human rights and violations of humanitarian law. . . . The Mission further concludes that the Government of the Sudan has manifestly failed to protect the population of Darfur from large-scale international crimes, and has itself orchestrated and participated in these crimes. As such, the solemn obligation of the international community to exercise its responsibility to protect has become evident and urgent.

All in all, more than a dozen attempts over the twenty-day period from 26 January through 14 February 2007 were made in Geneva, Addis Ababa and Khartoum to obtain our visas [to travel to Sudan] and secure the cooperation of the Government of the Sudan. Upon our return to Geneva, we continued to offer cooperation, seeking briefings and information from Government officials, but to no avail.