There are some stories you instantly want to forget, but they are often the ones that remain with you forever. In a hushed and claustrophobically hot room in eastern Chad, sitting on a hard mud floor scattered with rush mats, my own worst nightmares were brought to life by another woman's story.
You will have read about the conflict in Darfur, of the rapes and mutilations, of an estimated 200,000 people dead and 2.5 million forced to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families. Despite endless United Nations initiatives, the attention of our Prime Minister and President Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and the campaigning of such celebrities as George Clooney and Mia Farrow, it remains for most of us a distant conflict in a world scarred by many such battles. Jaded from daily TV channel-hopping, we shrug off another genocide.
It seems both intangible and hopeless. Until you find yourself inches from a woman like Hawaye, her baby daughter Nadjva sucking on her malnourished breast as she tells us what drove her from Sudan to the Djabal refugee camp where we sit. 'They came at seven to our village, the janjaweed militia,' she says, the fact that she mentions the time seeming a poignant effort to give some structure to the evil that followed. Her husband was away when the rebels arrived and set about their business - the livestock rounded up, homes torched, men and boys mutilated and murdered, and finally the moment that she replays over and over, when one of the horsemen rode up and, with a machete, decapitated the baby that she held in her arms. She didn't have time to mourn. The murderers took her with them and kept her hostage for 15 days, repeatedly raping and violating her before they moved on.
But for many women, surviving is the worst-case scenario. Hawaye was reunited with her husband, but the fact that she had lived made her guilty of complicity in her 'loss of honour'. He divorced her. She briefly got lucky when another refugee with two children married her, a rare occurrence for rape victims, who are seen as unclean. You are no doubt hoping for a happy ending? When he found out about her ordeal, which she had kept secret in fear and shame, he also divorced her. Taking with him three of their four children. Now she lives hand-to-mouth, discriminated against in a misogynistic culture which refuses to differentiate between rape and adultery, even when the crime is being used as a weapon of war against its own women. Hawaye has no hope for the future and lives solely for her only remaining child, her daughter, haunted day and night by the atrocities she has suffered.
I listened to many other first-hand accounts of similar horrors in the company of eight eminent political leaders and campaigners, all women, who had come to the camps to bear witness to what is happening. Led by Ireland's former President Mary Robinson, and including four of Africa's most inspirational women, there wasn't a dry eye among them by the time Hawaye herself broke down. Nigeria's ex-finance minister and former World Bank vice-president Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Kenya's Dr Musimbi Kanyoro, secretary general of the World YWCA, a global movement of 25 million women committed to female empowerment; Bineta Diop, Senegalese founder of Femmes Africa Solidarite; Asha Hagi Elmi Amin, an exiled Somali, member of the transitional parliament in Mogadishu and the Pan African Parliament, and founder of Save Somali Women and Children; none of them strangers to the brutality of war, all silenced by the horror of what we heard.
I was a mere six hours' flight from London, my mobile phone worked perfectly, yet it felt like a different universe. Arriving at the camps of Goz Beida a few hours earlier, I admit my first feeling was one of confusion. Where were the starving and the desperate? There was even a centuries-past charm about this lush plain littered with well tended grass huts. Although the huge spread of hastily erected tarpaulin-roofed shacks detracted from the view, I'd seen much worse on television. Yet beneath the veneer of order achieved by the dedicated charity staff from the likes of Oxfam and Save the Children, the reality is terrible. Under the fragile layer of grass that the rainy season has produced lies red earth that will soon be cracked and dry. As the leaden skies and torrential rains recede, so the rebels, those real-life horsemen of the apocalypse, will resume their murderous rampages. More women like Hawaye and her companions will have their lives destroyed and their children murdered.
The population of the remote outpost of Goz Beida has swollen in the past four years from 7,000 to upwards of 60,000. Some 15,000 of these are refugees who escaped the mayhem of Darfur before the journey became too perilous, the majority recent arrivals from Chad, no more than 30 kilometres (about 20 miles) away, where rebels, some home-grown, are starting to ape the bloodletting of the militias over the border.
The tragedy here is further compounded by the random nature of this armed struggle, part tribal, part religious, part political, and fuelled by greed for oil revenue. The scale and complexity of the problem is often obscured by the all-inclusive tag 'janjaweed', which simply means 'sinister men on horseback'.
Even in the supposed safety of the camps, undernourished children in rags and women young and old with the shadows of horror on their exhausted faces struggle to coexist with the interchangeable groups of government troops and rival militias. Menacing gangs, impossible to tell apart in copycat army fatigues, wander freely, brandishing guns and machetes. Violence is a daily reality. Women who are forced to stray out of the camps to find firewood are often raped. The night before I arrived, a body was found just outside the charity compound where I stayed.
Despite destitution and lack of food, all that these desperate victims, most of them women and children, are unanimously begging for is security. Here in Europe we could send a force to protect them immediately. The people of Darfur and eastern Chad don't have the luxury of waiting months for diplomacy to take its course: their need is urgent. If we fail women like Hawaye, it is we who should be haunted forever by their nightmare.
How the conflict began
The conflict started in 2003 in Darfur, an arid province of Sudan, Africa's largest country. Rebels began attacking government targets. The government launched a military response. At the centre of the conflict is rivalry for resources, including water, between nomadic herders, backed by Khartoum, and those who farm the land - tribes from which most of the rebels come. Some 200,000 people have died, while 2.5 million more have fled their homes.
While the conflict has tended to be reported in terms of a struggle between the Arab Muslim Janjaweed militia, riding into villages on camels to rape and kill black tribesmen (also largely Muslim), the situation has been more complex. The government admits mobilising 'self-defence militias', but denies links to the Janjaweed despite evidence to the contrary. The UN agreed in July to deploy 17,000 peacekeepers.
· The Global Day for Darfur is Sunday 16 September. For more details go to: globefordarfur.org