How to Prevent the Next Darfur

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But those are still just small indications of change amid the continuing carnage in Darfur. A U.S.-brokered peace deal last year between rebel groups and the Sudanese government was not worth the paper it was written on. The U.N. has resolved to send in peacekeepers but has been stymied by Sudan's refusal to accept them. After a U.N. panel revealed that contrary to Sudan's denials, government planes have been transporting arms and military equipment to Darfur, Khartoum said it would accept the deployment of 3,000 U.N. troops. They would complement the 7,000 African Union peacekeepers already on the ground, but even that falls far short of what's needed to police a conflict involving hundreds of thousands of fighters and 2.5 million refugees. So far the Bush Administration has been unable to persuade other Security Council members, particularly China, to support more robust measures.

The pillage of Darfur won't end until the world's powers pressure all sides to agree to a truce and allow for the deployment of a larger peacekeeping force. But that's just a start toward fixing Darfur's problems--and preventing similar conflicts from erupting elsewhere. In the longer term, Darfur and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa need sensible land-use policies and careful water management. And as climate change shrinks the availability of arable land and natural resources, Africa will need the developed world to do its part to curb the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

For Africa, the cost of inaction could be devastating. Philip E. Clapp, president of the Washington-based National Environmental Trust, warns that Darfur may be "an advance warning" of climate-related apocalypses to come. Take rising sea levels: five of Africa's 10 largest cities are coastal, and 40% of Asia's population of 3.9 billion--1.5 billion people--live within 62 miles of the sea. "Darfur is small by comparison with what is projected," says Clapp. "It may be our last warning before the consequences of climate change become so enormous that they are beyond the capacity of industrialized nations to deal with."

For the thousands of victims of Darfur, hope is nearly extinguished. In Touloum, I meet a filthy young man in rags, distractedly unpicking the threads of a knitted woolen cap. Diar, the camp chief, introduces him as Abdoolcarim Abdur, or "Adam." Diar says Adam, 22, saw his entire family cut down in front of him in 2004, and--as has happened to 40% of Darfur's survivors, according to Médecins Sans Frontières--something snapped. Adam became alternately petrified and violent, convinced that another Janjaweed onslaught was imminent. Afraid of his outbursts, his fellow refugees carried him to Chad tied to a door.

Adam tells me he gets terrible headaches from the Janjaweed horsemen in his head. They gallop around and around in his skull. He asks if I can give him a lift back into Sudan. "It's the time of mangoes and guavas," he says. I shake my head, and he wanders off. Watching him leave, Diar tells me Adam is obsessed with going home. Sometimes, when the headaches are bad, he disappears for days. He runs out into the the desert and back toward the war.