Much of the world acts as if there's a hierarchy of conflicts

There are moments as foreign secretary when it is your duty to confront the darkest corners of humanity.

- DAVID LAMMY

This week, I bore witness to what will go down in history as one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of our lifetimes.

On the Adré border between Chad and Sudan, I met with groups of Sudanese people – mostly women and children, who were fleeing mass murder and rape just over the borderline, a few hundred metres away, driven by ethnic hatred. I visited a malnutrition clinic, where children fought to save their lives from starvation. The death toll caused by the past two years of conflict in Sudan is too high to count. Eighty-eight per cent of the refugees here in Adré are women and children.

The women refugees I spoke to in a World Food Programme tent had lived through the killing of their husbands and brothers. One had burns on her arms; another was beaten while she was pregnant, leaving her baby disabled. They asked me: what is the world doing to help us? What more will the world do to stop this senseless killing and death?