For at least 18 months now, Western governments have quietly stood by as the non-Arabic-speaking black farmers of the Darfur region in western Sudan have borne the brunt of a vicious ethnic-cleansing campaign carried out by state-sponsored bandits known as the janjaweed. Why then have the governments of the United States and the European Union (EU) only now begun to express concern over the fate of the people of western Sudan and demand that the Islamist military regime in Khartoum bring the janjaweed under control? The answer - as it most often is when rich countries threaten to intervene in the Middle East and Africa - is access to invest in and extract profits from Sudan's burgeoning oil export industry.