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Ethnic violence is ripping apart Darfur in western Sudan. Author Irvine Welsh, the first person to report from the region, sees the tragedy

It's been four years since I last visited Sudan with Unicef as part of the Weekenders team of British writers. Our aim was (and still is) to raise money for humanitarian projects by writing about the countries we visit.

Then, we were in the largely tropical southern part of this vast nation, the size of western Europe. But now I'm in another Sudan, in the Darfur region to the west of the country, witnessing the horrendous and tragic results of a campaign of ugly ethnic violence, which has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

Neighbouring Chad is home to more than 100,000 western Sudanese refugees, while the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Darfur number around one million.

Playing the numbers game is dangerous in this remote, inaccessible area roughly the size of France, but the latest UN estimates - constantly being revised upwards - suggest that around 1.2 million people are now directly affected by the violence.

This conflict has its roots in the long-standing hostility between African pastoralists and tribes of nomadic Arabic horsemen.

The Africans have long blamed the government for turning a blind eye to abusive Arab behaviour over the years. This has involved looting villages, stealing cattle and seizing land as well as rape, murder and the occasional kidnapping of children.

Unlike the situation in the south, which I was familiar with, this is not a Christian versus Muslim schism as all parties here are Islamic. It has led many black Africans to believe that the Khartoum government treats them, at best, as second-class citizens.

The Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) grew out of this sense of discrimination and have waged guerrilla campaigns against government installations, usually from their mountain bases.

Stoic by nature, most of the African farmers simply want to get on with their lives and are disinclined toward this kind of militancy. The on-going abuses were shocking but relatively contained; the flashpoints usually seasonal and focused on established nomadic migratory routes.

Additionally there were mechanisms, however flimsy, for the resolution of such disputes at local level. In some cases African farmer and Arab herdsman were friends and neighbours, not united by lifestyle, but by a common faith and by their relative poverty.

The universal government line is spouted unceasingly from Khartoum to the most remote military and administrative outposts in Darfur: they are the honest brokers, trying to maintain order amongst the local population in face of terrorist attacks from militant rebels.

Yet out of a population of about six million, at least 700,000 Darfur residents are living in camps or have fled to villages to stay with families or friends.

Skirmishes between government troops and the SLA/JEM cannot begin to explain this level of displacement.

Only an understanding of the changing relationship between Khartoum, the Arab militia who have come to be known as the Janjaweed, and the African farmers can do this.