By this day week, the deadline laid down by the United Nations Security Council for the Sudan government to disarm the Janjaweed militia that has been terrorising the Darfur region of western Sudan will have passed.
As of now, there is little compelling evidence to suggest that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is moving with dispatch to implement the will of the international community. Once again, it seems that the UN will face a test that it is ill-equipped to pass, despite the best will in the world.
Resolution 1556 demands that Khartoum rein in and disarm the Janjaweed and bring its leaders to justice. The Janjaweed is the creature of the government, carrying out its will by proxy, terrorising black African farming people in Darfur and forcing more than one million to flee to neighbouring Chad and refugee camps.
As many observers have reported in recent weeks, Janjaweed members, though less visible, have not been disarmed and neither have its leaders been brought to justice. The UN Resolution requests the Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, to report progress in 30 days - next Tuesday - and threatens that the Council will "consider further action" if its will has not been implemented. Such further action includes measures such as economic sanctions.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the Security Council has the stomach for the sort of tough measures suggested by Article 41. It has been pointed out (in a sharply written piece for a UK newspaper by Mr David Clark, a special adviser in the Foreign Office from 1997 to 2001) that four of the countries which forced the threat of sanctions to be removed - Russia, China, Pakistan and Algeria - have poor human rights records themselves. Two of them, Russia and China, are permanent members of the Council with the power of veto and have commercial ties to the Sudanese government and a strong interest in defending the inviolability of state sovereignty against the humanitarian imperative. Under the circumstances, expecting muscular action is naive.
Sudan anticipates that it will be able to argue that sufficient is being done to alleviate the crisis on the ground. In support of that, it will be hoping that talks taking place in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, will result in the government and Darfur rebels (against whom the government claims the Janjaweed is acting) restoring a ceasefire agreement they made in April but which both accuse the other of breaking. Greater access for aid workers to refugee camps will also assist Khartoum's case. But the world may have to wait a long time for it to undo the injustice it has inflicted on its own people in Darfur.