While much of the world has closed its eyes to the genocide in Darfur, Catholics are helping refugees and spreading the word about the tragedy.

Along with his sister and her children, Ousman Adam Abdullah now shares the dusty confines of his tent in eastern Chad with the ghosts of his past. Thinking back on the attack that forced him to flee Darfur and separated him from his family members-including a son and three daughters whose fate he does not know-Abdullah recalls much of the ordeal as if it were a dream he can only process in simple sentences.

"They started from the south. There were at least 1,500 soldiers," Abdullah says of the day in 2004. "They had guns and bombs. They even used knives to slaughter people."

More than five years since it began, the conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan continues unabated. Though its battlefields are often marked only by charred villages, the fighting in Sudan-the largest country in Africa-is conflict on a grand scale, having claimed more than 200,000 lives and displaced as many as 2.5 million people since 2003. Inside of Darfur the conflict has brought fear and terror to a generation of Darfurians, while around the world it has sparked a campaign of fundraising concerts, heated protests, and high-level debate.

But awareness alone has done little to stop the violence in Darfur, which the United Nations has labeled the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. At its heart a conflict of ideology, ethnicity, and competition for resources, the crisis in Darfur is one of the most widely recognized-but perhaps least understood-conflicts in the world.

History of hatred
With the arrival in the mid-seventh century of Arabs from the Middle East, Northern Sudan-comprised then entirely of black Africans following traditional religions-gradually began adopting Arabic language and culture, including Islam, from its neighbors across the Red Sea. By the time of Sudan's independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956, Arabs comprised the largest single ethnic group in Sudan and have dominated the country's politics since.

Through the 1960s and '70s, an ideology of Arab supremacy swept across North Africa. When the Sudanese government in Khartoum imposed Sharia law in 1983, Christian and animist rebel groups in the South rose up in what became one of the longest and bloodiest wars in Africa. Nearly 2 million people were killed and 4 million displaced before a peace agreement ended the war in January 2005.

The war between the North and the South, at least in part a religious struggle, has caused confusion over the fighting in Darfur, which is predominately ethnic. Traditionally nomadic pastoralists, the Muslim Arabs of the North have moved south in recent decades, attracted by more arable land and better rainfall as the Sahel-a vast belt of arid land stretching across Northern Africa-grows drier each year and wind-driven sand claims grazing land. Their migration has brought them increasingly into conflict with Muslim, non-Arab tribal groups, such as the Fur (Darfur means "Land of the Fur").

Marginalized both politically and economically by Sudan's Arab government, these western regions became fertile ground for rebel groups. The two most prominent to emerge beginning in 2002 were the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army. In response the government of Sudan unleashed the Janjaweed militia-units composed largely of Arab herders, estimated to comprise as many as 20,000 combatants.

Armed, trained, and in many cases directly supported on military operations by government forces, the Janjaweed (which translates roughly as "devils on horseback") have committed atrocities of rape and murder across Darfur. Their leader, Ali Mohammed Ali, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. The government of Sudan has consistently denied supporting the Janjaweed.

Though the rebel groups of Darfur clash with government soldiers and militia units in an ongoing low-intensity conflict, the fighting in Darfur is not a civil war. The vast majority of those killed are non-combatants, targeted first with intimidation, then with rapes and killings. The aim is to drive all non-Arabs from Darfur-an act that meets the definition of genocide.

"Some Janjaweed came and asked if I had sent my sons to fight with the rebels," said Fatoma Ahmed from the Msleete tribe. "They brought their camels to eat my crops." Harassment and threats from the Janjaweed forced everyone in her village of 200 homes to flee. Ahmed moved to a camp in West Darfur and sells firewood to earn money for food.

Unlike the common image of Janjaweed as ghost soldiers who appear from nowhere, militia members are sometimes familiar to their victims, having lived near or traded with some of the villages they now attack. Promised both land and resources by the Sudanese government, many Arabs are easily recruited. As Arabs, they see themselves as superior to the black-African Muslims of Darfur, the displaced often say.

"The Janjaweed kill us because they want to take our land," says Ahmed Adam Ali. "They said, ‘We don't like black people in Darfur. Sudan is for Arabs, not Africans.'" Of his village's 2,000 people, Ali says, the Janjaweed killed 400, including his brother, and bombers pursuing them on their multiple-week trek-mostly on foot-to a camp in eastern Chad killed 100 more.

It is a complex and multi-layered conflict says Scott LeFevre, regional representative for the Horn of Africa for Catholic Relief Services. "It's important to resist the temptation [to think] that it's a simple solution, and all we need to do is X, Y, or Z and it'll solve the problem," he says.

The conflict in Darfur is having broader regional implications as well. In December 2005 the government of neighboring Chad declared a state of war with Sudan, accusing Khartoum of supporting rebel groups within Chad who seek to overthrow the government. There are about 220,000 refugees from Darfur in eastern Chad, and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) reported that it provided 66,000 emergency food rations in 2006 to Chadians displaced by fighting in the east. This increases tensions between the two countries and further taxes the strained resources of the U.N. The conflict between Chad and Sudan also has begun to destabilize the neighboring Central African Republic, threatening still more conflict in the region.