How To Spin A Catastrophe

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For two weeks it looked as if a delicate cease-fire might mark a turning point in Sudan's bloodletting. But the calm broke on Nov. 23--a long day full of just the kind of killing, hypocrisy and indifference that have defined the conflict since it began in February 2003. First, rebel fighters attacked police stations in Tawila. In response, a government plane bombed the town, forcing dozens of aid workers to flee. To date, most of the violence, which has killed tens of thousands of people and left more than 2 million homeless, has been carried out by members of the Janjaweed, an Arab militia that has received financial and military support from the Sudanese government to quell an insurgency by the region's non-Arab Muslims.

The day the cease-fire ended, Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir met with TIME at his palace in Khartoum and insisted that the international outcry over his country's rupture was a misunderstanding. There is "no reality," he said, to claims that the conflict is genocide, as President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have said. It is "a tribal conflict," said al-Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 coup. The Janjaweed are merely "outlaws or gangsters who are used to being on horseback and holding arms or guns. They are bandits," he said. "It was started by this rebel group that tried to avenge losses against another tribe. And naturally, when one tribe attacks another tribe, there will be losses."

Two days later, the U.N. suspended much of its relief effort in Darfur because of the continued violence.