Little Support for Refugees on Streets of London

Seventeen-year-old Mousa Abkar fled his scorched village in Darfur to a safe haven in Barnsley, hidden for 21 days alone in the hull of a container ship. The rest of his family had been killed or lost following an attack by the Janjaweed militia last year.

Yesterday his struggle in the face of adversity remained solitary in one sense, as he set out on a fresh leg of his journey in exile - a brisk walk from the Sudanese embassy in London to Downing Street.

For support was sparse for Mousa and his fellow refugees during the global day for Darfur march in London. Hundreds of Sudanese refugees took part - all wearing smart blue berets in a symbolic call for UN peacekeepers to be allowed into the region to halt the genocide which, they say, will be inevitable if the African Union's 7,000 outgoing troops are not replaced.

But take away the dark faces and glazed eyes of those who have recently fled the violence, and yesterday's protest - coordinated with dozens of demonstrations around the world - was reduced to a trickle. It seemed the endorsement of George Clooney and Tony Blair had failed to persuade more than a few Britons to give up their Sunday afternoon to march against "the first genocide of the 21st century". As demonstrators marched through central London to join religious leaders gathered in Whitehall to pray for an end to the conflict, some passers-by grimaced at the sight of closed roads.

"It seems as though some lives are less equal," said Daniel Brown, from the Aegis Trust, which helped to organise the protest. He was disappointed at the local turnout. "Somehow we seem to care less about black Africans. Do people matter less because they don't have televisions - because they don't drive cars? There's an inherent racism there."

"If people hearing this have seen Shooting Dogs or Schindler's List or Hotel Rwanda, they should have a cold sweat running down their back. It's happening again: it's happening in slow motion, and no one should say, 'we didn't know.'"

Tim Hancock, the campaigns director for Amnesty International, which also helped to coordinate the march, admitted that many people were unaware of how serious the crisis was.

One protester, Ruth Coppard, from Sheffield, a child psychologist who works with victims of Darfur's ethnic cleansing, said: "I don't think some people have any idea of the extreme situation these people have gone through - and it's getting worse. They've seen things I wouldn't want in my head."

Another protester from Darfur, Abdu Abu Bakr, 30, reached Britain two weeks ago, also via a container ship, after losing his family in an attack and spending a year being tortured.

"I found people dead on the street; inside burnt houses; but I couldn't find my parents among all the bodies," he said. "Maybe the general public here is not aware what is going on. But they can learn."