GARETH EVANS, INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP: It's pretty dreadful there’s no doubt about that. We've got between 5,000 and 10,000 people dying every month and we've still got 2 million people displaced, we've got no real civilian protection mechanism in place.
Yes, 3,000 African union troops but and about to increase in the next few months to 7,000 but you need at least double that to do any kind of proper job and the will just doesn't seem to be there to do it.

GEORGE NEGUS: With the two rebels groups now seeming to fight each other as well as the government, do you and your group, describe the situation there as genocide?

GARETH EVANS: No, I don't like to use the genocide word, I much prefer to use atrocity, crimes to describe genocide as crime against humanity, war crimes or anything else. I think you git caught up in a legal cul-de-sac.

GEORGE NEGUS: You said before Gleneagles, in fact you wrote a letter to the G8 leaders before Gleneagles. They did come out with what appears to be 1.5 pages on Darfur. Do you think that's done anything to help solve the problem? Or are they just words they felt they must utter?

GARETH EVANS: I think probably just that. The focus was overwhelming on the development agenda, that's fine, but you don’t get very far with development if you haven't got security. The belief has tended to be on the part of the rich nations that by throwing this particular ball to the African union and giving them some support around the edges, they were doing all they needed to do.
That's the similar sort of thing that has been said about the Congo and several other part of Africa which are almost equally alarming in terms of the deaths and the misery that is being caused.
Frankly it needs a much better hands on response by the internationals than that and we've got to keep up pressure until it happens.

GEORGE NEGUS: Is your problem as a group lobbying for greater effort where Darfur is concerned and other places as you say, like the Congo, being hampered by fact that the entire world, it would seem, led by the Americans and the British and Australia, if you like, are currently preoccupied with the whole situation in Iraq and terrorism and therefore a place like Darfur is unfortunately just in the too hard basket?

GARETH EVANS: There's some truth in that. I mean they're completely different sorts of problems requiring completely different sorts of solutions, but people like to have excuses and the excuses of resources being deployed to Iraq and the political focus being deployed to other parts of world, when you've got a so-called competent regional organisation able and willing to do the job on the ground, it's just too easy for the internationals to cop out in the way that they have.

GEORGE NEGUS: Is the problem exacerbated by the fact that the Americans on the one hand say they need Sudan in their fight against terrorism, at the same time they seem to be sitting on their hands where genocide or atrocities, as you call it, this daily death rate continues. Is that almost a double standard?

GARETH EVANS: Well, we've seen plenty of those around the place. There's no doubt that this priority that's been given to the so-called war on terror has been at the expense, I think, of a lot of other forms of useful pressure and commitment that could have been applied.
You've just got to be prepared to do all of these things, not just be selective about it because it will come back to haunt you if you're not.

GEORGE NEGUS: Would you go so far as to say a bit of regime change wouldn't go astray in Khartoum at the moment?

GARETH EVANS: There's already been a regime change to some extent, and this is what's complicated it because you've just had the north south settlement and remember that that has involved the death of 4 million people over 20 years.
That's now at last been resolved with a new government being composed with some of the key people from the south there. So I'm not suggesting we're talking about anything like a forcible military intervention to raise the ground in Khartoum and start again.
What I am talking about is real, serious pressure being put on the Khartoum government to accept the logic of its own rhetoric that they're not controlling the situation, you've still got a huge number of people at risk of death and they have got to be more cooperative in allowing in foreign troops to do a proper physical protection job and the AU has got to support them as well.
Coercive intervention is not going to possible on that scale.
There's all sort of difficulties in Sudan. You've got the Chinese playing an obstructive role because of their energy interests. When it comes to the security council itself, you've got some of the other players, like the British who have been pretty good on a lot of these issues in the past, genuinely preoccupied, I think in Iraq, maybe for all the wrong reasons but they are.
So what we have to do is just keep up this kind of drum beat of attention. The Americans are the key to it, as with so many other things. They have had a kind of commitment to the north/south issue because they've had this Muslim Christian dimension and now the Christian right in the states is saying, well maybe if Darfur continues to deteriorate in the way that it is, this will upset the settlement that's been so painfully constructed and maybe we ought to do some more about Darfur.
And in that context my organisation, among others, is fiercely lobbying not just the government but also the main Christian organisations in the US to get that force mobilised. So there's a number of different ways you can work at these things but it's a frustrating business.

GEORGE NEGUS: Can we move to London. Were you as shocked like most people that those bombings occurred or like a lot of people, you thought maybe it was a case of not if but when?

GARETH EVANS: There was absolutely no doubt about that. This was absolutely inevitable. When you look at the nature of contemporary terrorism, the kind of people who are engaged in it, the kind of open society that London and so many other Western cities are, unfortunately this was a tragedy waiting to happen.
The only glimmer of comfort is that it didn't involve the use of nuclear devices or something which would have involved casualties in the hundreds of thousands, not just the hundreds as we've seen.
So no, it's hideous to know how you tackle this given the nature of this particular problem but it was going to happen. It could happen in many other places as well.

GEORGE NEGUS: Speaking of that, what about Australia? As a member of the coalition of the willing and as involved as we are and have been in Iraq, do you think we're a potential target? Do you think we could be the next cab off the rank where a terrorist attack is concerned?

GARETH EVANS: We've already been the target in a sense, in Indonesia with some people with that kind of semipolitical agenda.

GEORGE NEGUS: On our soil?

GARETH EVANS: Of course it's possible. All the security arrangement in the world, I mean you can't lock up people on public transport and particularly if they employ devices of the kind that we've seen here, they're not all that difficult to obtain.
But I'm not suggesting that Australia is any more at risk than 20 other countries and we also have to bear in mind that part of the issue here is not just any kind of qazi-rational political agenda for those against whom they have a political grievance, we are talking, I fear, unfortunately, about a generalised hatred of the West and modernity, and indeed of kafrs of all kind, I mean including so-called Muslim unbelievers and less than truly committed to the faith.
This is a very extreme and very generalised hostility to large chunks of the world that we're dealing with. If it takes this particular form, it's very, very difficult to know how to respond to it.

GEORGE NEGUS: That being the case do you think that George Bush is right when he has said in the last 24 hours that what happened in London justifies continuing the effort that the Americans and the coalition of the willing are making in Iraq?

GARETH EVANS: Well, I don't think that's an extremely helpful way of approaching it. The truth of the matter is Iraq is one big political grievance out there, Israel/Palestinian is another big political grievance, what happened in Afghanistan is another. You can multiply them around the place and regrettably the language of those political leaders who just talk the language of war and just talk the language of forcible response, I think misses a lot of the sophistication and complexity and multilayered response that's really necessary to deal with this.

GEORGE NEGUS: We'll leave it there. I felt inclined to talk to you as Senator Evans but it sounds like there's enough going on in the world to keep your crisis group going for a long time.

GARETH EVANS: Regrettably that's true George.

GEORGE NEGUS: Nice to talk to you. Thank you.