“Sudanese militiamen are moving further and further into Chad and are looting and killing Chadian villagers,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director of Human Rights Watch. “Many of the attackers wore Sudanese uniforms but they’ve formed local alliances, and Chadians are also participating in the attacks.”

Survivors described unarmed villagers being surrounded and then gunned down or hacked to death with machetes by militiamen wearing blue Sudanese military fatigues and turbans. Witnesses described their attackers as Janjaweed and noted that Chadians who had recently migrated to Sudan were among them.

You don't have to do everything in order to do something. I've already mentioned Orwell, who has long been a favorite writer of mine. But this presented me with a serious problem: If you grow up reading Orwell, and you set out to write your own book, you are in trouble: He set the bar too damn high. Some influences can be paralyzing. But a few years ago I came across an essay on Orwell by Lionel Trilling that liberated me, reminding me of Orwell's magnetic ordinariness.

Trilling wrote: "If we ask what it is [Orwell] stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.... He is not a genius--what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do."

With Trilling's words I was able to embark upon writing A Problem From Hell. I was unleashed to do what I could do. I could do no more. But I also knew I should do no less.

For most Darfurians, Abdul Wahid, not Minni Minawi, is the symbol of the "revolution." If either of the two factional leaders has a political vision it is Abdul Wahid, no matter how poor his leadership skills and how chaotic and unreliable his negotiating style. Minawi’s Zaghawa are at most 8 percent of the population of Darfur and are themselves divided; Abdul Wahid’s Fur, historic rulers of the sultanate which gives Darfur its name, comprise 26-30 percent and are more cohesive. If either man has support outside his own tribe, it is Abdul Wahid. Not one of his key negotiators at the inter-Sudanese peace talks in Abuja was Fur; Minawi’s, by contrast, were all Zaghawa.

Particularly alarming is that the Government reverted to using helicopter gunships on various occasions and reports that a white Antonov plane dropped bombs on the village of Joghana (Gereida area in South Darfur) on 24 April. In attacks by militia where there was no clear Government involvement, the Government repeatedly failed in its obligations under international law to prevent them. While there is an abundance of State security forces in Darfur, there is an almost total lack of Government forces addressing the problem of human security.

The credibility of the [Darfur Peace] agreement lies in making sure the undertakings are applied. We must lose no more time. If there is any doubt, everything comes into question.