A conflict in need of fresh thinking

Kaltouma Musa walked home a few weeks ago with her baby on her back, writes Julie Flint. She was exchanging a camp where she had been receiving aid for a rebel-controlled area with no aid - an area marked on UN maps as a no-go zone.

"Home" is Bornyo in the Ain Siro mountains of north Darfur, the first base of the Darfur insurgency. It was destroyed by government troops and the predominantly Arab Janjaweed militia soon after the rebellion began in 2003. Supported by bombers and helicopter gunships, Khartoum's forces burned, raped and looted. Kaltouma escaped, but four close relatives were killed.

Four years on, Bornyo is a ghost village. It lies close to the rebels' front line with the Government and has not been rebuilt. But Kaltouma preferred to return to the nearby village of Ain Siro, building a new hut from the charred remains of the old, than to stay in Kassab camp 30 miles away, risking rape by the Janjaweed every time she ventured out.

Life in Ain Siro is good, Kaltouma told me when I visited Darfur recently. The rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) protect the area as best they can, and respect civilians: the worst abuses of the SLA ended when the rebel leader Minni Minawi was driven out of rural Darfur after signing the Darfur Peace Agreement with the Government in May 2006. The SLA commanders who expelled him have abolished taxes on civilians and no longer bring civilians before military courts. They have put feelers out to Janjaweed tribes, to try to re-establish some of the ties that once bound them in peace.

In the fifth year of its war, it is time to take a fresh look at Darfur. In the newspapers, the stories of death and displacement are unchanged from 2004, when Khartoum unleashed a maelstrom of violence that could be described, with reasonable accuracy, as "Arabs" attacking non-Arabs, or "Africans". Today, that simple picture has been replaced by periods of relative calm punctuated by flares of brutality which are as often among Arabs as between Arabs and non-Arabs.

The war in Darfur has entered a new and much more complicated phase. Finding a solution means dealing with the realities of today - not reading from an outdated script.

Ever since the Darfur Peace Agreement was signed and immediately rejected by most Darfurians, international effort has focused on replacing the African Union forces currently in Darfur with UN peacekeepers.

But in the absence of a political process to negotiate a new peace deal, the hybrid force now being negotiated would have to disarm the Janjaweed before it could begin to protect civilians. Sudan has had only one experience of forcible disarmament - in the Upper Nile area of southern Sudan. It was a disaster: hundreds died.

British policy on Darfur is confused. The Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DfID) want to focus on the diplomatic front while Prime Minister Tony Blair supports a no-fly zone. Most relief workers in Darfur reject all forms of coercive military action, including a no-fly zone. They believe that Khartoum would respond by grounding humanitarian flights, expelling aid workers and increasing military mobilisation. They want strict monitoring of military aircraft to feed into increased pressure on Khartoum to live up to its commitments to end the use of force in Darfur.

The kind of protection force that could have made a difference in 2004 is not what is needed in 2007. As the guard changes at No. 10, the primary focus should be on reviving a peace process that Darfurians will support and that the international community will enforce, throughout Sudan, for as long as it takes. There is no quick fix to Sudan's ills.

Read Chris Bain's article