SUDAN:The hybrid force's lack of resources is costing lives in communities living in fear, writes ROB CRILLYin Madu
THE ELDERS prod their sticks into the sandy soil around the two-foot-deep crater until they find what they are looking for - shards of metal and strips of steel wire, part of the deadly shrapnel that rained on their village.
A week ago an Antonov cargo plane flew over their sand-covered homes. It was low enough for the villagers to see a Sudanese soldier kick two rudimentary bombs from its loading doors.
An eight-year-old boy died and two others - a mother and her three-day-old baby - were injured as flying metal cut its way through the simple stick shelters of Madu.
"After this experience every time we hear an aircraft we go and hide," said Abubaker Ali Yaquob, the local sheikh.
Yet it is not supposed to be like this. On January 1st the United Nations joined forces with a struggling African Union peacekeeping deployment in what was called a hybrid operation to bring peace and stability to Darfur.
Eventually it will comprise 26,000 police and soldiers whose job will be to monitor ceasefire violations and protect civilians and aid workers from attack.
But no one knows when the force will reach full strength. Troop contributing countries are struggling to meet their commitments and the Sudanese government has spent the past five years perfecting the art of obfuscation.
That means only disappointment in rebel-held areas of Darfur, such as Madu, where the prospect of UN peacekeepers had been seen as a panacea.
"That was our impression," said Sheikh Abubaker, sitting beneath a simple thatched shelter to keep off the blistering sun that manages to penetrate the swirling dust outside. "We thought that once the hybrid force was here things would be quiet and peaceful. But we are yet to feel any security around here."
Fighters loyal to Abdul Wahid's faction of the Sudan Liberation Army patrol the village. But no one feels safe. There is not a child in view, remarkable for an African village where children and goats usually provide the background sights and sounds.
For five years rebels have been battling government troops who are backed by the Arab militias known as Janjaweed.
Estimates vary but experts agree that more than 200,000 people have died in the fighting. More than two million people have been forced from their homes, mostly by Janjaweed in the early days when Khartoum pursued a scorched earth policy against populations it believed were supporting the rebels.
Today the conflict has settled into a less dramatic phase. Banditry is rife. Groups once loyal to the government have switched sides and rebel groupings have fragmented. This year the worst fighting has been in west Darfur along the border with Chad.
Rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement seized a handful of towns last December and looked to be closing on the regional capital, El Geneina. Then in February they were called back across the border to Chad, where their paymaster, President Idriss Déby, was under attack from Sudanese-backed rebels. They managed to defend his capital, Ndjamena, but Khartoum used their absence from Sudan to retake the "northern corridor" of towns including Siliea, Sirba and Abu Sirouj.
The tactics were eerily familiar. The Antonovs arrived first, dropping their improvised bombs. Next came the Janjaweed, some on horseback, some in Toyota battlewagons. Their mission was to destroy everything in sight, burning houses and looting marketplaces.
Later came government troops to secure the towns for Khartoum.
It was days before monitors from the United Nations and African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid) arrived from their headquarters in El Geneina. "We feel disappointed," said Col Amgad Morsy, chief of staff for Unamid Sector West. "We don't have the capability. It's a weekly and daily dispute that IDPs [internally displaced persons] come and say, 'Our people are being harassed, our women are raped'.
"What we can do is try to build confidence but it's still the very minimum we can do." There are already successes. Unamid has resumed night patrols of the camps around El Geneina, has arrested a handful of Janjaweed raiders and is escorting women as they collect firewood - all activities that the morale-sapped African Union force eventually abandoned after becoming a target for rebels and government-backed militias.
Unamid is building a base for monitors in Siliea and is running long-range patrols across the territory to show locals that it is serious about their security.
For now it can still only count on 9,000 personnel - barely more than the 7,000 in place when the African Union was in charge - in an area the size of France. Most of the soldiers have simply painted their green helmets blue.
Alun McDonald, a spokesman for Oxfam, said the force had begun to show what it could achieve once at full strength but there was still a long way to go.
"For the average person in Darfur things are not any better than they were before Unamid took over," he said.
"They have made some small differences in the areas where they have deployed in terms of restarting patrols, engaging with community leaders. But bombings and fighting between rebels and government continue just as they always have done."