SUDAN: It started with a simple rallying call to the Janjaweed militias and government soldiers: "Kill the Fur." The fighters, drawn largely from Darfur's Arab tribes, needed little further encouragement from Ahmed Harun, then an interior minister, who had flown from Khartoum to the town of Mukjar on a dry August day to deliver his message.
Witness statements collected by Human Rights Watch told how he urged the nomadic militias to take on the Fur tribe as part of a campaign against Darfur's rebels.
By the time they had finished, the Janjaweed had done much more than try to exterminate one of the region's settled farming peoples. They had raped, murdered and tortured their way through west Darfur's civilian population as part of a scorched-earth policy, according to the indictment delivered yesterday to the International Criminal Court.
They swept through the region of Wadi Saleh, one of the most fertile parts of the Fur's traditional heartland.
Tens of thousands of people were forcibly moved in a policy allegedly managed by Harun and executed by Ali Kosheib, the "Aqid al Oqada" or colonel of colonels in charge of thousands of Janjaweed fighters.
In March 2004, his fighters are accused of driving scores of prisoners out of Mukjar into the desert scrub, where they were shot and buried in mass graves.
Leslie Lefkow of Human Rights Watch said the killings in west Darfur happened during one of the most brutal episodes of the conflict.
"They were both involved in some horrendous summary executions of people in the Wadi Saleh area in 2004, and this is among some of the worst crimes that we've documented in Darfur," she said. "So it's significant that the ICC is going after the people who were part of the picture of those responsible for some very, very serious abuses."
Although the government denies it, their Janjaweed allies - mounted on camels and horseback - were embarked on a scorched-earth policy designed to choke off support for the rebels.
Some of their targets may have been rebel positions but the scores of ghost villages scattered through Darfur suggests the Arab militias were intent on wiping out any source of potential opposition, whether real or imagined.
Today more than 2.5 million people live in squalid aid camps. They are dependent on United Nations agencies and charities for everything - from food and water to medicine and whatever schooling they can find for their children.
Rape has become an everyday risk for women if they dare leave the camps to collect firewood or water.
And the camps themselves often provide little refuge from attack, such is the inability of an overstretched and under-equipped African Union force to protect Darfur's people. They are left to wonder whether they will ever be able to return.
For now, much of the abuses are being carried out away from international scrutiny.
The Khartoum authorities have prevented journalists from visiting Darfur since November, while Sudanese forces have been engaged in a fresh round of attacks in the north of the region.
And aid agencies have found themselves facing a growing burden of red tape.
Yesterday James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust, which campaigns against genocide, said Harun, now a state minister for humanitarian affairs, remained intimately involved in developments in Darfur.
"The indictment of Harun is particularly significant since his department controls NGO and media access to Darfur," he said.
"That a man suspected of a key role in orchestrating crimes against humanity in Darfur is now the man deciding who will be allowed to do what to alleviate the resulting suffering is the height of cynicism."