With 216,000 lives lost to conflict and poverty in the past six months, Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, said the money was crucial to alleviate hunger and disease, and for long-term development in the country where fighting continues in the north and east despite a peace deal.
A UN donors’ conference in Brussels today will call for international donors to provide $681m (£400m) for an “action plan” for the DRC, three times the size of the UN appeal for the DRC in preceding years. We must not let this continue without doing anything about it, otherwise we’ll be condoning the inflicting of terrible suffering.”. It was drawn by his eight-year-old sister who wanted to portray his dreams of escaping the mayhem and getting an education. Dr Sparrow said: “What they drew were unprompted by adults and the themes are the same, and they’re pretty harrowing. These children were showing what happened to their families: their fathers and brothers being killed; their mothers and sisters being taken away to be raped.”The Aegis Trust, which has campaigned against the terror in Darfur, said: “The West must realise that the killings and the destruction have not stopped. The resulting violence has led to the number of refugees in Darfur rising to 1.8 million, with 200,000 more in neighbouring Chad.The pattern is the same as before: clashes between government forces and rebels, followed by raids by the Janjaweed – ethnic Arabs on camels and horses – on African villages leading to another round of killings and refugees.The children’s drawings of the terrible events were collected in refugee camps in Darfur and Chad by Annie Sparrow, a gynaecologist who has been working among victims of sexual violence, a recurrent theme accompanying the murders and mutilations.Dr Sparrow is compiling a book, World’s Smallest Witnesses, with Brian Steidle, a former US Marines officer who worked as an international observer with the African Union force before leaving in protest at what he considers its failure to protect the population.As well as images of violence, some drawings feature a wistful hope of a better life One is of a boy with books flying around his head. Two years after the international outcry over the man-made catastrophe in Sudan, the Janjaweed militia have returned with a vengeance, bringing death and destruction, backed by forces of the Khartoum government.
The massacres and starvation of 2004 in Darfur prompted the dispatch of an African Union monitoring force and righteous indignation from the United Nations.

When a British security contractor was forced out of his car at gunpoint, taken into the hills and beheaded in the nearby province of Farah last year, there were reports that the Taliban insurgents responsible were from Helmand.. Now, 10 UN resolutions later, the UN is at last considering sending its own peacekeepers.The Sudanese government and the rebels – the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) – blame each other for breaching a ceasefire pact. The images are of murder and rape, burning villages, helicopter gunships and terrified, fleeing refugees. They have been drawn by children, some as young as eight, who are victims of a wave of bloody ethnic cleansing in Darfur. There were even claims from the Taliban in 2003 that the world’s most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden, had spent some time on the border between Helmand and the neighbouring province of Nimroz, under the noses of US forces. It was in Helmand that the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, took refuge after the fall of Kandahar, and from which he is believed to have staged a dramatic escape on the back of a motorcycle in early 2002.

Peace and bold political gestures do not stand a chance.Sue Lloyd-Roberts’s film report on the Maoists and Nepal is on BBC2’s Newsnight tonight at 10.30pm. The Taliban never really fell in Helmand province. While the outside world was celebrating the end of the Taliban regime after the fall of Kandahar in 2001, the Taliban were still in control of most of Helmand. So long as the King uses the army to impose his unpopular rule, the war will continue, tourists will stay away and the country’s economic prospects look grim. Other banks and building societies ask for details of your standing orders and direct debits before transferring these on your behalf.While shopping around for good rates of interest is important, there’s little point holding vast sums of cash in your current account.