A SUDDEN, angry gust of wind hurls sand and bits of plastic towards hundreds of families huddling together between a cluster of simple yellow washed buildings. Sick and malnourished children are evident in every other family scattered throughout the compound. Inside the overheated rooms fear and terror are almost as tangible as the sour stench from too many people squeezed together in what used to be classrooms in a local school. That same sense of terror resonates in the stories, told by the small groups of elderly men gathering outside.

But it is something else which stops even the more hardened aid workers in his or her hasty gathering of facts and figures. This something is the pain and shame of a number of young girls and women hiding in the deeper corners of the classrooms. Victims of rape who, in all but a few cases, never will be able - or allowed - to describe the source of their grief.

ARRIVING in the small village of Kaas, or in any other of hundreds of similar locations across Sudan’s Darfur region in April 2004, two things were immediately apparent.

First – that the humanitarian operation finally underway had come too late to save tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives already lost or wretched during the previous months of massive and systematic attacks on specific groups of civilians across Darfur.

Secondly – that the challenge facing the growing number of aid workers consisted not only of the urgent need to establish basic shelters and tackle the complicated task of providing food, water and health services across a huge region still at war. No – the biggest challenge in front of a rapidly growing number of aid workers was finding ways to create a degree of protection for the people still targeted by ongoing attacks, murder, rape and looting.

PROTECTION has been an important element in many humanitarian operations before, but rarely has this challenge been so massive and so urgent. For many in Darfur, it became “protection first, then water, food, shelter, health”.

Seasoned relief officials knew very well, that true protection for Darfur’s civilians could only come about through a negotiated political solution to the conflict and that the larger international community would need to ensure this protection using a mix of political and possibly military means far beyond the reach and mandate of humanitarian organisation.

The relief officials also knew that the African Union’s and the United Nations’ Headquarters, in more than one way, were very far away while they, the humanitarian actors, were right there on the ground in Kaas and other localities across Darfur. Even as the AU gradually deployed and the UN Security Council got engaged with Darfur, by far the most widely felt presence working in favour of protection of civilians were the thousands of Sudanese and international aid workers. Darfur thus became the focus of the most intense and extended protection efforts ever undertaken by humanitarian actors.

Protection of civilians has been a crucial element in many emergencies fuelled by war and conflict. In more recent times, a growing dilemma has emerged for anyone involved with the humanitarian response to crisis in Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, Burma, Afghanistan, Sudan, the Middle East, Angola, the West African emergencies, Northern Uganda, Chechnya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just to name a few.

Through the confusion, pain and suffering of these wars and conflicts, this dilemma has grown on everybody involved. The dilemma between an increasingly efficient and professional ”humanitarian aid delivery machine” - and a very limited ability to protect the supposed beneficiaries of this aid (the civilian populations) from systematic and targeted cruelty by warring parties.

OVER the last decade or so, a shift in practise and policy has emerged in response to this dilemma. Particularly, since the beginning of this millennium, humanitarian actors, experts on international law and diplomacy along with a few military thinkers have engaged in developing policies and practises aimed directly at improving the protection of civilians.

Important turning points in this development, include the 2001 publication “The Responsibility to Protect”, the UN 2005 Summit’s Declaration and most recently the 2006, UN S.C. resolution on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict (S/2006/1674), subsequently reported on regularly in the UN Security Council. For better and for worse, the crisis in Darfur has become a major test for this evolution in humanitarian practise and interpretation of international law and politics.