Khartoum accused the U.N. of producing the figures as a ploy to get the Security Council to take action against Sudan, and demanded evidence to back up the numbers. Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said: “Jan Egeland was here — I met him [and] he never mentioned this number.” Egeland said last week that an estimate of 70,000 was too low, but did not indicate what he regarded as a more realistic figure.

Nearly a year after the U.N. described Darfur as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, there is no sign the scorched-earth campaign against black African villages is over. Hundreds of new refugees are flooding into overcrowded camps, such as the giant settlement at Kalma in south Darfur, which housed fewer than 10,000 people this time last year but now houses 100,000.

Sally Austin, assistant country director for the aid agency Care, said: “When I was there last, three weeks ago, we were seeing between 200 and 250 people arriving per day in two sectors [of the camp] where we work. The new refugees are queueing just to be able to get plastic sheeting to build temporary shelters. They are having to queue to get on food distribution lists — not just queueing for food. We are also seeing people building more permanent structures out of mud, which I think is a sign that people realize they are going to be there another nine months.”

Nearly 2 million black Africans have been driven from their homes in Darfur since the war began, and a further 200,000 have crossed into Chad. Two years of war have transformed Darfur into a landscape of refugee camps — swaths of ghostly, deserted villages and roving armed bands.

The United States, which describes the war as genocide, is pushing for measures that will target individuals accused of major crimes, mainly in the Sudanese military, government and Janjaweed but also in rebel groups.

The U.N. Security Council failed to reach agreement on a new resolution last week. The U.S. blamed Russia and China for blocking a proposal to introduce limited sanctions. Others on the Security Council blamed the U.S. because of its objection to referring the perpetrators to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The U.S., which opposes the ICC, has suggested that the perpetrators face a special tribunal in Africa.

The British government remains hopeful that a compromise can be reached by the end of the week. Rick Grenell, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the U.N., this week described as preposterous a report in the Guardian last week that the United States might allow reference to the ICC to go through.

A British source said Tuesday such a compromise remained a possibility, though hopes were beginning to diminish. The U.S. would need a cast-iron guarantee that its immunity from the ICC would not be affected, the source said.

China, which imports oil from Sudan and has up to 5,000 expatriates working there, opposes an oil embargo but is almost ready for a travel ban and an assets freeze on the main perpetrators.

“I have had nothing but water for two weeks,” said Mohadien. “The food foreigners have sent, I have not seen it. The men who left the village said they would send food back, but no food has come.”

Throughout Niger, the hunger crisis is an affliction of the poor. While people in Terbadeen starve, there is food in the markets of the nearest big village, Abalak, four miles away down a winding dirt track. And in the hotels of the capital, Niamey, breakfast coffee comes with seven cubes of white sugar lining the saucer.

Even here among the poorest, there is a hierarchy.

The village chief, Salaman Mahamadou, a regal, hawk-nosed man in a navy blue robe, still has the best diet of anyone in the community. The villagers share food with one another, watering down the tiny amounts of rice they can afford, but women are served last and the elderly are at the bottom of the pile.

The people of Terbadeen were herders and subsistence farmers, whose wealth was tied up in their cattle and goats. When drought and locusts destroyed the pasture land, the animals wasted away. The villagers tried to sell their surviving livestock, but no one would pay a high price for a skinny, starving goat or cow.

“I sold goats to get some millet before,” Mohadien said. “I had 100 goats and sold 10 of them. The others all died.”

Aid is beginning to arrive in Niger. But until three weeks ago, it was government policy not to distribute free food to the worst-affected communities because of concern that it would disrupt the markets. That has changed, and the United Nations plans to start the first general distributions of food aid next week, targeting 2.5 million people. Even then, it will take time to reach every affected village in a vast, landlocked country where the aid must be brought hundreds of miles by road.

The focus of the aid effort is on helping those most at risk: babies and young children between 6 months and 5 years old. “They are the most vulnerable in the family, nearly always the ones that first show signs of malnutrition,” said Anita McCabe, a spokeswoman for the aid agency Concern.

In Terbadeen, the village chief points at women and holds up fingers to show how many babies they have lost. He gestures at a tall girl in a flower-patterned gown, whose name is Zeinabu. “She lost two children, twins; they were 8 months.” Then, pointing at another: “That is Reshatou. Her baby was 2 weeks old when it died.”

He himself has lost three children, a 2-year-old and twins age 1, who all died last month. Shielded from the sun by a tent spread over a framework of branches, Mahamadou opens the covers of his dinner dishes; a bowl of rice and a bowl of okra sauce.

“Before, I never ate this kind of food. I had 100 cows and I could drink milk, eat meat. Now I have only three left.” Counting on his fingers, he recited the names of the men who remain in the village: “Alqasim, Agali, Musa … “Out of 150 men, just 46 remain. He gestured to the village’s grain silos, a row of hazelnut-shaped domes of mud and straw, all empty.

By the roadside on the way to Terbadeen, parties of children from nearby villages gather weeds to eat. Carrying faded sacks that once held flour, they pluck up small, leafy plants that will be boiled with salt and spices.

“We have nothing else to eat,” said Adama Zachary, a girl of perhaps 15, her hair tied back with a red bandanna. “The locusts ate the millet, and there is no money to buy food in the market.”

Dead cattle and donkeys litter the fields — piles of bleached bones and wrinkled hides. At one spot, there are 11 cattle carcasses, which villagers say were dumped there by a truck heading to market after they all died from lack of fodder.

The scale of the need in this region became apparent Wednesday morning, when 1,500 mothers brought their babies to an aid agency distribution intended to feed 500 malnourished babies. In brightly colored robes and headdresses, long queues of women and babies wound through the heart of a mud-hut village that had been chosen as the distribution point, more than 100 miles south of Terbadeen.

“We’re going to have to rethink this whole strategy,” said one aid worker. “How do you weigh and measure 1,500 children at one time?” Aid agencies here say they need to expand their operations, hiring more local workers to help the small teams of expatriate medical staff and nutrition experts.

Even without a food crisis on this scale, Niger is the world’s second poorest country and struggles to feed its people every year. In the 1970s, when the uranium-mining industry was booming, the government built a network of paved roads, while multistory buildings and lavish villas went up in the capital. But with the end of the Cold War, the country’s main export is no longer in such demand.

“This is a country with adult literacy rates of 17 percent,” said McCabe, the aid agency spokeswoman. “It’s got food insecurity every year, desertification. There are huge problems.”

Investigators hope to complete their work over months rather than years. Sorokobi said trials might take place in Sudan or a neighboring African country, rather than in the Hague, where the court is based. “We are considering the possibility of trials in the region. We are absolutely open to that. It depends on what can be achieved logistically. In order to conduct trials, certain people have to be in custody. They have to be held in certain conditions to ensure their own safety and security, and the safety of victims and witnesses,” he said.

Across Darfur, there have been widespread killings of civilians, mass rape and large-scale destruction of villages by pro-government militias known as the Janjaweed, often backed by government troops and Antonov bombers.

A U.N. commission of inquiry absolved the Sudanese government of genocide, but said there had been serious violations of human rights that should be investigated as crimes. The U.N. has compiled a list of more than 50 suspects, which were forwarded to the ICC. Musa Hilal, a Sudanese tribal leader identified by the U.S. State Department as a “Janjaweed coordinator,” is thought to be among them. Witnesses claim he personally led Janjaweed forces who killed 67 civilians, raped a number of women and abducted 16 schoolgirls in the town of Tawila in 2004.

Hilal has admitted recruiting men for pro-government militias, but denies playing a personal role in the fighting. In an interview with the Guardian last year, he conceded that militia fighters had killed civilians. “Most of the [rebel] garrisons were near the villages, near civilians,” he said. “They stayed near civilians, and war has its consequences. Bullets fly.”

The Sudanese government has refused to extradite war crimes suspects to the Hague. It claims it has already arrested suspects and will carry out its own trials. But the U.N. has said Sudan’s justice system was “unable and unwilling” to address crimes in Darfur.

Women in Darfur have told the Guardian the police refused to listen to their claims. Midwives in the refugee camps said police failed to act despite evidence, including injuries from beatings that often accompanied the rapes. One midwife in a camp near El Geneina said: “If a girl goes to the police, the police tell her: ‘It is better for you not to say anything about this rape.’ We have seen cases where women were injured. One had a cut to her neck from a knife; another was struck on the head by an ax.”

Human rights groups say Sudan prefers to attack its critics rather than deal with alleged war crimes.

Last week, two aid workers from Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) were arrested over a report detailing about 500 cases of rape in Darfur. One was accused of spying and spreading false information. Sudanese officials said MSF had failed to hand over evidence of the alleged rapes, but the aid agency cited patient confidentiality.

The rebellion in Darfur began in 2003. Rebels from black African tribes claimed their region had been neglected by the central government. Khartoum responded with a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign, burning or bombing villages suspected of harboring rebel sympathizers. More than a million civilians were driven from their homes.

This election campaign has been less scarred by violence than previous polls in Zimbabwe, but Mugabe’s opponents claim the ruling party has denied food to opposition supporters and is preparing to fix Thursday’s ballot.

Army officers have been placed in charge of polling stations; ballot boxes have been made of transparent plastic so opposition voters can be identified, and critics say the electoral roll is full of flaws.

From an audit of 10 percent of the roll, one human rights group, FreeZim, estimated that the voters’ roll listed up to 1 million dead people, more than 300,000 duplicate names and 1 million people who no longer live at their registered address.

In an eve-of-election statement, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, Pius Ncube, repeated an accusation that opposition supporters were being denied access to state-controlled supplies of grain. “The legitimacy of this election must be once more called into question,” he said. “To cynically use hunger as a weapon is to stab at the very heart of democracy.”

Zimbabwe’s economy is in crisis after years of misrule and corruption. The country’s decline was accelerated by the chaotic seizure of white-owned commercial farms that began in 2000.

At stake Thursday are 120 seats in Parliament. A further 30 are appointed by Mugabe, giving Zanu-PF a head start over the opposition. The MDC won 57 seats in the last general election in 2000, despite intimidation of its officials and supporters, as well as vote rigging. It has since lost six seats in by-elections. Archbishop Ncube, MDC secretary-general and M.P. for Bulawayo North-east, said the party’s priority was to encourage a high turnout. He told the Guardian: “If people vote in large numbers, to the last man and woman, against Zanu-PF, then it will offset the rigging that will undoubtedly take place.”

The opposition complained that it was largely denied access to state media. During the campaigning, Zimbabwe’s state radio, the main source of news for 60 percent of the population, described the opposition in news bulletins as the “British-run MDC.” Mugabe has sought to portray the campaign as a personal struggle against Tony Blair, claiming that the British prime minister is the puppet-master of the MDC. One of Zanu-PF’s campaign slogans is “Bury Blair.”

Ncube said: “We were denied fair access to the state media, which remained overtly hostile. We had to campaign door to door, person to person. Our supporters have shown resilience, courage and conviction. But this cannot in any way be called a reasonably democratic election.”

The MDC says a decrease in violence has allowed it to campaign across the country, reaching parts of Zimbabwe once thought of as “no-go areas” for the opposition.

All nonresident Zimbabweans have been barred from voting in the election. This has disenfranchised an estimated 3.4 million Zimbabweans — more than a quarter of the country’s population. Most left because of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse and political repression, and would be expected to vote for the MDC.

Wednesday, Zimbabweans working or on holiday in South Africa boarded the Harare bus at Pretoria bus station, determined to exercise their right to vote. “It is imperative that we vote,” said one man, herding his children into the bus queue. “Remember the American elections between Bush and Gore? It came down to just a handful of votes. I want to make certain my vote is counted.”

Another passenger, Idah Mandaza, 55, said: “I know all about the cheating and the rigging. I know all about intimidation and violence. I know I will have to stand in a queue for hours. But I am determined to vote.”

A fresh allegation of “dirty tricks” emerged Wednesday night. According to the Zimbabwe-based activist group Zvakwana, the ruling party has forged leaflets purporting to be from the MDC, instructing people to boycott the election.

Ten months later, his sister Asha Mohammed has given birth to one of the many “Janjaweed babies” born after the mass rape of Darfur women. According to the U.N. and human rights groups, thousands of women were raped as their villages were razed by the government-backed Janjaweed militias that have devastated western Sudan over the past 20 months.

Deeply shaming in a conservative Muslim society, the rapes were intended to inflict a collective humiliation on the region’s black African tribes. Victims say they were accompanied by beatings and racial insults.

Tribal leaders have said that there is no stigma in sex acts under duress, but the pregnancies have torn many families apart. Aadam’s sister Asha, 30, was divorced by her husband, a migrant farmworker who lives in Libya, after he discovered she was pregnant from the rape. Cradling her 7-day-old son Salim, she said: “He told his brothers he was angry with me and stopped sending me money.”

Asha lives in a camp on the outskirts of El Geneina, the state capital of west Darfur, where thousands of refugees from burned villages live in tents and thatched shacks. It is a place where divorce can lead to social exclusion and poverty. But her brother has not abandoned her. She lives with him now, and when she gave birth he persuaded a local family to let her use their hut instead of the ramshackle shelter in the camp. “This pregnancy happened because my sister was taken under duress,” Aadam said. “Because it happened by duress, the community will accept it.”

But it remains to be seen whether the children of rape will be accepted as they grow older. Asha said that she would bring her son up as a member of her own tribe, the Massaleit. “I’m not happy to be pregnant from an Arab, but this baby has come from Allah and I will accept him,” Asha said. “I will raise him as a Massaleit and teach him our language.” In Darfur society, however, tribe is decided by paternity. Asha’s brother said: “The father is an Arab, and so is the child. But no one will do anything to harm the baby. We will only know his true character when he grows up.”

In another of El Geneina’s camps, 16-year-old Salima fears her life is blighted. She was beaten and raped by Janjaweed in a forest clearing as she fled an attack on her home village. Now she is five months pregnant. “Before this there was a man who wanted to marry me. But after the rape, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.” Her mother, Fatna, tries to reassure her. This is a shared trauma, she says, and no woman can be singled out for dishonor. She insisted: “The community will not treat my daughter badly. They will not say bad things about Salima. What happened to her has happened to so many others here too.”

There is no official acceptance of the scale of the rape in Darfur. There is no counseling, scant medical care and little hope of justice. Under Sharia law, which applies in Sudan, rape is treated as a serious crime, punishable with 10 years in prison and 100 lashes. But human rights groups say the authorities have sought to create “the impression of prosecution” rather than justice for the crimes committed.

When 15-year-old Khadija Hassan told police of her rape, they initially called her a liar. “I told them I was not telling lies,” the teenager said, “but after the medical examination at the hospital they accepted my case.” A few days later, police told her they had been unable to trace her attackers. “I am angry,” Khadija said. “I want police to arrest the men who attacked me, to punish them.”

As her father, Hassan Ibrahim, speaks of the rape of his daughter, sudden tears burst from his eyes. “I am so angry about this. If I had the force to do it, I would go and fight the men who did this to my daughter. There is agreement between the attackers and the police. That is why they will not arrest the men.”

In August the Sudanese government established three all-female committees to investigate rape claims. They were to have doctors as members but none was appointed, so no medical examinations were made. The committees, given three weeks to complete their reports, concluded that Darfur had the same — very low — rate of rape as before the conflict. According to the pressure group Human Rights Watch, the committees were used “to put a female face to the official denial of rape.”

In a rare departure from the official line, a Janjaweed commander in El Geneina, Ramadan Dayu Hassan, admitted to the Observer that rapes had taken place, but blamed it on “out of control” elements among his militia. “These were not men from the original Arab tribes who did this, but it may be that there were men who were out of control among our soldiers.”

But the sheer scale of the rape suggests that this was not the work of a handful of militiamen, but a systematic campaign of brutality. In the camps, it is the midwives, drawn from among the refugees, who have the most detailed knowledge of the full extent of the rapes. They insist that the police are failing to act despite a wealth of evidence, including injuries from beatings that often accompanied sexual violence.

One midwife in a camp near El Geneina said: “The police want to cover up the cases. If a girl goes to the police, the police tell her: ‘It is better for you not to say anything about this rape.’ We have seen cases where women were injured. One had a cut to her neck from a knife, another was bruised on the hand by a stick, another was struck on the head by an ax. There are witnesses. The girls are usually in a group when they are attacked, and some of the others escape.”

For the victims, the future holds another painful question: How to explain to their children who their fathers were? In her thatch hut in a corner of a camp, 15-year-old Muna Abaker quietly recalls the horrific circumstances in which her daughter Shima was conceived. She had gone out with a group of girls to collect grass for thatch, when the Janjaweed attacked them. They beat her on the arms and legs before raping her. “I will not hate my daughter,” Muna said firmly. “But I will tell her that her father is unknown to me, that he can never be found.”

The names of some interviewees have been changed.

A cease-fire was agreed to in April, but it has been repeatedly violated by both sides; on Sunday, two policemen were shot dead in a rebel attack on a police post in south Darfur. Peace talks in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, collapsed a fortnight ago over a rebel demand that the Janjaweed disarm before they do.

In the SLA’s camps, there is no talk of peace. Young men from Darfur’s shattered villages have come to find an outlet for their rage. Khalid, who wore a camouflage vest and a long knife at his waist, said: “I am very angry because my father was killed, and one of my brothers, and my uncle. In the refugee camps, I have no work to do. I want to fight.” He claimed to be 15 but looked younger. Rebel officers have refused to let him join up because they say he is too young, but he will not go to live with his mother, who is in a refugee camp in Chad. Instead, he helps fetch firewood and carry water for the fighters.

The war in Darfur began last April, when the SLA raided the town of El Fashir, the capital of north Darfur, where fighters captured some military officers and destroyed a number of warplanes. In retaliation, the regime in Khartoum armed the traditional militias of the Arab tribes in Darfur, which have come to be known as the Janjaweed, and gave them air support to attack the villages from which the rebels drew their backing.

A million people have been driven from their homes and nearly 200,000 more have fled across the border into Chad. But the rebels have not been defeated. Instead, they have found fresh recruits as a result of the government’s onslaught.

One such recruit is Ismail, 22, a tall man in a gray tunic who joined after the Janjaweed killed his family last July. “At the time I didn’t know who the SLA were,” he said at a rebel camp in Darfur. “After they killed my father and mother, and my two brothers, I heard that there were people who were fighting against the government. I kept asking for them until I arrived at a [rebel] camp. Now I’m fighting the Janjaweed.” He was a cowherd before the war. Now he carries an American-made automatic rifle and an ammunition belt with cotton pouches tied around his chest. Looped beneath the belt are strings of leather pouches holding lucky charms. Each talisman protects against a different menace: scorpions, snakes or bullets.

The rebellion is well equipped. There are Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and Belgian-made automatic rifles. The rebels say all their weapons are looted from the Sudanese military, but they admit buying camouflage uniforms on the black market from Chadian soldiers. This may also be a route for weapons.

The backs of their pickups are loaded with drums of petrol, and there are several boxes that they describe as “medicines,” but from their weight appear to be ammunition. Rebel officers call each other on satellite phones, paying with phone cards sent from fundraising offices in Europe and the Gulf. Some funds come from expatriate Darfuri communities, but the war also sustains itself through looting.

The SLA’s strategy is to mount hit-and-run raids, striking at government convoys, checkpoints or towns when they have the strength. The aim is to disrupt supply lines, destroy the Sudanese military’s equipment and steal weapons, ammunition, cars, food and medicines for their effort. They cannot hold on to towns or villages because they cannot fight the government’s air power.

The rebels have attacked mainly military targets, but are also accused of intimidating local civilian leaders who cooperate with the government. In April a tribal leader was abducted and murdered by the SLA after accepting food aid from the government. The rebellion has brought ruin on the people they claim to be fighting for, but the fighters are unrepentant.

One of their officers, Izzedine Yahya Hamid, 25, said the choice was between exile or death at the hands of a government bent on their destruction. “If we fight then our people will become refugees. But if we do not fight, then our people will be killed by the government of [Sudanese president Omar] el-Bashir and the Janjaweed.”

Hamid, a former medical student who spoke fluent English, sketched a map of Sudan on a sheet of paper. He marked Darfur on the map, then pointed to other zones of rebellion: the south, where a peace deal has been concluded after 21 years of civil war; the center, where the Nuba people have clashed with the government; and the east, where the Beja people are threatening fresh strife. Then he drew a circle north of Khartoum to show where the Arab tribes who dominate the country originate from. “We don’t hope to be independent,” he said. “We just hope that Sudan will become a new Sudan, with the Nuba people, and the people in the south and our people all balanced. But not the Janjaweed, because they are criminals.”

For some, the rebellion is an adventure. Many young men in Darfur are accustomed to living a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Living in a rebel encampment is not far removed from this. There is laughter and camaraderie here, and a freedom they do not enjoy in the crowded refugee camps.

But among the younger fighters, there are far fewer smiles and little laughter. A generation is being reared in an atmosphere of hatred and violence. The longer the war goes on, the more brutalized its fighters will become.