It’s difficult to be a peacekeeping force when there’s no peace to keep. It’s difficult when the international community promises you 26,000 peacekeepers, then struggles to give you 10,000. It’s difficult to make much progress when the number of rebel movements involved in the conflict has risen from a handful to more than 30 in the space of two years. And it’s especially difficult to succeed when government militias take it upon themselves to start killing your peacekeepers.

These are the unenviable challenges facing Unamid, the joint United Nations-African Union force charged with bringing peace to Darfur. Created by UN Security Council Resolution 1769 a year ago, Unamid is somehow expected to end a conflict that has lasted almost as long as the Second World War, killed as many as 300,000, according to the UN (10,000 if you prefer the Sudanese government’s estimate), and displaced around 2.5m people, a third of Darfur’s population. Rarely have expectations and realistic possibilities been so ill-matched.

Under the leadership of Rodolphe Adada, former foreign minister of the Republic of Congo, and its Nigerian force commander General Martin Luther Agwai, Unamid is doing a manful job. I spent three months assisting the mission as a communications adviser this summer and saw at first hand the brave work being done in virtually impossible circumstances. With a force of only 10,000 and no armed helicopters it’s hard to protect six million people spread across an area the size of France. One of Unamid’s simplest yet most important tasks is conducting daily firewood patrols, during which peacekeepers escort Darfurian women gathering fuel to cook meals for their families. The patrols are needed to provide security to the women who are otherwise at the mercy of militiamen who rape them with impunity. Ask the Sudanese government about the use of rape as official policy and they’ll tell you it’s a Western invention unknown to Sudan.

Khartoum does a nice line in Doublespeak. On July 8, seven Unamid peacekeepers from Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana were killed in a vicious ambush, the mission’s worst loss of life in its six months. The attack bore the hallmarks of a well-organised Janjaweed attack. In New York, Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN’s outgoing head of peacekeeping, pointed the finger at Khartoum. A couple of weeks later, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir suddenly popped up in El Fasher, Darfur. “We want to send this message to the world: we are the people of peace, we want peace . . . we are the only ones who can achieve peace in Darfur,” he told the usual rent-a-mob gathering.More empty words, you might reasonably think. The assurances of Khartoum, which has spent the past five years denying a hand in the ethnic cleansing of Darfur, do not count for much. Yet for the first time in several years, there is real hope in the air and it has nothing to do with Unamid.

On July 14, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, formally accused the Sudanese president of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur. Although the announcement had been widely anticipated, it still stunned the political establishment.

Few doubt that Moreno Ocampo has blown a gust of fresh air into the suffocating world of Sudanese politics. Many commentators fear the decision will wreck any chances of peace, failing to note that there is no peace process to spoil. With his back to the wall, there is no accounting what Bashir might do, they argue, ignoring the fact that he has had carte blanche to do what he likes in Darfur since 2003. In fact, although it is early days, the fallout from the ICC’s landmark move towards the indictment of Bashir looks positive. A friend with access to the highest levels of the regime reports unprecedented conversations at the presidential palace.

“The government’s in meltdown,” he reports. “They just didn’t think it would ever happen. They can’t believe it. The four or five people who run Sudan are now saying to Bashir, look where your policies have got us. They’re telling him, you can go to your rallies and demonstrations, you can shake your fist and rattle your walking stick, but you shut the hell up.” And strange to say, Bashir has been unusually quiet. The men in khaki are said to be furious with him. When the Darfur-based rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) launched a bold attack on Khartoum in May, the president initially refrained from using the heavily Darfurian army to defend the capital, preferring the supposedly more dependable state security agencies. JEM came closer than most realise to toppling the government until the army stepped in with tanks and the airforce.

Now a national cross-party committee has been created to address the Darfur issue and end the conflict. Bashir has suddenly rediscovered an interest in Darfur, promising security, schools, roads and water. Window-dressing while the ICC judges ponder Moreno Ocampo’s evidence? Quite possibly, but these are suddenly interesting times. “There’s going to be a real push now for peace,” my palace mole reports. “Bashir’s got nothing to lose.”

Far from emboldening the Sudanese president and destroying a peace process that doesn’t exist, in other words, the ICC’s potential indictment may have been the best news for Darfur in years. Sudan watchers wonder whether Khartoum will finally ditch the president, who came to power in a 1989 coup, noting that the regime dropped the Islamic ideologue Hassan al-Turabi in the late Nineties in a bid to end its international isolation. Turabi, they note, was a far more important figure to the ruling National Congress Party then than Bashir is today.

Unamid’s dangerous and daunting mission in Darfur will continue but the real chance for peace lies in Khartoum. If Bashir the alleged war criminal is unable or unwilling to take it, he may find his time in charge runs out sooner than he’d like.

The genocide publicised by movie stars is over, says Justin Marozzi. What must now be resolved is a civil war with unlimited breakaway factions – and Hollywood cannot help…

It wasn’t the gleaming black helicopter parked on Second Avenue that raised eyebrows. New Yorkers barely blink at such a routine form of transport.

No, passersby were more taken by the improbable banner hanging from its tail: ‘SEND ME TO DARFUR’.

Last week’s publicity stunt in Manhattan, in which a Robinson R44 helicopter was symbolically presented to the United Nations, was organised by the Save Darfur Coalition, the organisation that has done more than any other to keep the issue of Darfur alive. The event marked the first anniversary of UN Security Council resolution 1769, which created the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping mission Unamid, and coincided with a report revealing how the international community has betrayed it by failing to provide the manpower and materiel it needs.

The Darfur lobby has heavyweight support.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, President Jimmy Carter and Graça Machel, among others, have all supported this latest report, endorsed by more than 30 human rights groups, think tanks and NGOs, including the ubiquitous Save Darfur Coalition.

George Clooney, the most bankable Hollywood star of his generation, is also big on Darfur. ‘Many governments have offered expressions of concern, but few have offered the most basic tools necessary to keep civilians safe and for peacekeepers to do their job, ‘ he says. ‘It is time for governments to put their helicopters where their mouths are.’ He’s quite right. Unamid needs helicopters, not to mention another 16,000 peacekeepers.

The failure of the international community to live up to its promises is shameful. The problem is, Darfur has become an emotive campaign in which awkward truths – not least that the genocide is over – have become hostage to a more superficially exciting story.

There are few causes more hip than Darfur these days. Darfur is to the Noughties what HIV was to the Eighties and rainforests were to the Nineties. Inevitably, Hollywood is in on the act, adding its inimitable mélange of glamour, outrage and oversimplification.

Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg, having warned the Chinese president of his concern over the government of Sudan’s policy in Darfur ‘which is best described as genocide’, withdrew as an artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics. Apart from Clooney, other stars such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon, Bono and Mia Farrow have all made commendable efforts to draw the world’s attention to Darfur, publicising a stark and heart-rending narrative. The problem is, the narrative they are peddling is five years old.

The conflict has moved on.

The mass slaughter took place in 2003-2004, when the conflict was superficially explained as Arab nomad versus black African farmer, a fight for land and water. This was when we first heard about the Janjaweed, the governmentsupported assassins on horseback responsible for the killings, burnings and rapes. The UN has estimated that 300,000 Darfurians may have died as a result of the conflict. Khartoum claims an implausible 10,000.

The relative simplicity of those days has long gone. In 2006, there were two main rebel movements sitting at the negotiating table in Abuja: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM). Today, in a development wearily familiar to Monty Python fans (think all-out fight between the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front and the Romans), they have split into as many as 30.

Take your pick from SLM-Minni, SLMUnity, SLM-Mother, SLM-Free Will, SLMPeace, the United Revolutionary Front, JEM, JEM-Peace, JEM-Unity, to name only the better known. Apart from government versus rebels, the conflict now pits Arab versus Arab, African versus African, rebel versus rebel, bandits versus civilians and aid workers, Janjaweed versus peacekeepers, Sudan versus Chad. In short, the rebels have become a major part of the problem, but Hollywood and the Darfur lobby don’t seem to have caught on. Their story is a lot simpler: nasty government versus good-guy rebels.

Given that we live in an age when information has never been so readily and widely available, the level of misinformation about Darfur in 2008 is little short of extraordinary. When I met the correspondent of a highly respected American newspaper during a three-month stint in Khartoum and Darfur this summer, I was amazed when he told me his editor had asked him blithely to ‘Give us an update on how the genocide is going’. The Save Darfur Coalition homepage includes a button asking ‘Is your mutual fund funding genocide?’ The question is posed by Divest for Darfur, a campaign targeting ‘companies that help fund genocide in Darfur’. No one appears to have told any of these people that the genocide is over. What remains is a highly complicated, extremely brutal, low-intensity civil war.

It is arguable that rather than help end this hideous conflict, groups like the Save Darfur Coalition and GenocideInDarfur. net (‘Learn How YOU Can STOP the Violence Complete Anti-Genocide Directory’) have unwittingly helped prolong it.

The exclusive focus on bashing the government has emboldened the rebels, encouraging them to keep up the fight and shun the negotiating table. The peace process, as a result, has collapsed. Though uncontroversial among seasoned Sudan watchers, such a view is politically incorrect in the West, where the debate has been held in the shadows of a glossy campaign long on sentiment and outrage, short on measured analysis.

As Julie Flint, co-author of Darfur: A New History of a Long War, writes on the excellent blog Making Sense of Darfur, ‘In the current hyper-moralized debate over Sudan, anyone who questions Sudan’s critics risks being called an apologist for Khartoum.’ You don’t have to be a fan of Khartoum to ask whether Hollywood has got it wrong.

Personally, I think the government of President Omar al Bashir stinks. I watched a Sudanese official from the infamous Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC) respond to charges that rape has been used as official policy by saying that rape was a Western concept. HAC falls under the brief of Ahmed Harun, minister of state for humanitarian affairs. Last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Harun on 42 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In June, I listened to the straight-faced governor of North Darfur tell a visiting Security Council delegation to Al Fasher that the humanitarian situation was ‘very stable’. Never mind about the additional 150,000 refugees created in the first four months of 2008. Forget the World Food Programme having to cut by 50 per cent its food distribution to refugees because of the deteriorating security situation. It was all a Western conspiracy against Sudan.

Although the Darfur lobby has run one of the slickest media campaigns of modern times, there is a chance, however slim, that the ICC prosecutor’s move last month to indict the Sudanese president for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide will succeed where several years of Hollywood-led advocacy has failed. Reports from Khartoum indicate that with his back to the wall, the president may throw himself into finding a solution to this intractable conflict to stave off a full-blown indictment. Weirdly, against all the odds, it may yet be Bashir, the would-be war criminal, who brings peace to Darfur.

Incidentally, the Robinson R44 helicopter would be completely useless in Darfur. Unamid needs gunships, not four-seater civilian runarounds, but don’t let the facts spoil a good Hollywood drama.