WITNESS: Five years on, what good can reporting Darfur do?

Opheera McDoom is the Reuters correspondent in Sudan. She was one of the first foreign correspondents to begin covering the Darfur conflict in 2003, witnessing all the twists and turns the story has taken over the years. In the following story, she gives some of her own impressions of covering the war which swept western Sudan's Darfur region as the conflict's fifth anniversary passes without any resolution in sight.

By Opheera McDoom

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - An elderly Darfuri woman stood in front of the charred remains of her house. She tapped me on my shoulder and held out a wizened hand full of seeds.

"How am I supposed to eat this?" she pleaded.

Totally humbled, I was speechless, unsure how to help.

Now her face haunts my nightmares.

It will be five years on Tuesday since war broke out in Darfur, since rebels seized a town and prompted a Sudanese counter-insurgency reckoned by foreign experts to have killed 200,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes.

I have been writing on Darfur for 4 1/2 years.

More than ever, I am wondering how much difference my reporting can make.

Despite the world's largest aid operation and global media attention, people are still dying, foreign peacekeepers have not been fully deployed and the woman in my nightmares cannot eat.

Camps housing villagers driven from their homes have become semi-permanent -- massive, chaotic suburbs of major towns where tensions can explode at any moment.

Darfuris seek to return to their farms, but fear the militiamen riding in on horses or camels.

Far from getting nearer to a solution as time goes on, the Darfur conflict seems to get ever more complicated.

The war is entwined with another in neighboring Chad. Rebel factions have fragmented beyond recognition and Arab tribes have turned on the government that mobilized them.

Armed groups tear through towns in unmarked camouflaged vehicles carrying heavy weapons. Ragged fighters hang off the sides. No one knows who is who anymore.

The only law comes from the gun.