On Thursday, South African President Jacob Zuma made a surprise announcement that he had decided to withdraw the 800-odd South African National Defence Force (SANDF) troops who have been participating in UNAMID -- the hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, Sudan -- and its predecessor AMIS (the African Union Mission in Sudan) since 2004. Zuma gave no explicit reason for his decision.

Since he announced it on the day of South Africa's budget speech, perhaps it was essentially a cost-cutting measure. Or perhaps he intends redeploying the overstretched SANDF elsewhere. But the announcement would surely have been welcomed most enthusiastically by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

One could say Zuma thus did him, wittingly or unwittingly, another big favour -- following on the refusal of the South African government to arrest al-Bashir on International Criminal Court (ICC) charges last June when he participated in the African Union (AU) summit in Johannesburg.

For al-Bashir has been trying hard to persuade the United Nations (UN) to terminate UNAMID and has gone further by making its life as difficult as possible.

This has included restricting its movements and its armaments -- which has often prevented it from protecting itself, let alone civilians -- and denying visas to replacements.

This is in line with Khartoum's insistence, for the past few years, that the war is over in Darfur and so the peacekeepers are no longer necessary. Zuma apparently bought this line because the statement from the presidency ended by saying; "President Zuma has thanked all members of the SANDF for their participation in bringing peace in Darfur."

That peace has broken out in Darfur is not a view shared by the UN or much of Sudanese civil society. Just this week, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) issued a new appeal for assistance for a new flood of internally displaced people (IDPs) from the latest fighting.

Late last month, OCHA's Sudan chief Marta Ruedas had "expressed grave concern over the impact of the ongoing hostilities in Darfur on thousands of civilians who have been forced to flee their homes amid the conflict that began two weeks ago.

Initial reports indicate that about 19 000 civilians have fled into North Darfur state, and up to 15 000 into Central Darfur state, following fighting in the mountainous Jebel Marra region that straddles three Darfur states."

And there are still about two million IDPs in Darfur, of which over 200 000 were displaced in 2015 alone, according to the Sudan Democracy First Group (SDFG), a coalition of civil society organisations. It says there has been a steady increase in violence against civilians during the last months of 2015.

And UNAMID itself had expressed concern about the "alarming escalation of violence" in 2014. In particular, it identified attacks by the government's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia -- a successor to the notorious Janjaweed -- as a factor in the displacement of 215 000 civilians in just three months.

In a report last September, Human Rights Watch said: "The RSF has killed, raped and tortured civilians in scores of villages in an organised, deliberate, and systematic way."

The SDFG believes al-Bashir is taking advantage of "Darfur fatigue" -- regional and international exhaustion with the seeming never-ending crisis there and the distraction of newer crises, especially that in neighbouring South Sudan -- to try to resolve the Darfur question in its own very violent way while the world is not looking.

On December 28 2015, Sudanese Vice President Hassabo Abdel Rahman, who is in charge of the Darfur portfolio, was reported by the Sudan Tribune as telling a meeting of IDPs that "the year 2016 will see the end of displacement in Darfur".

He gave them two options; to move out of the camps to other areas, or to go home. The IDPs met in January and expressed their concern that they could not leave the camps until their safety from attack by the RSF and other forces could be guaranteed.

"The government's determination to dismantle the camps of the internally displaced persons and push out the UN and AU hybrid mission in Darfur is intended to create a cover for further crimes against civilians," says the SDFG.

Khartoum is fighting three main rebel groups in Darfur: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Sudan Liberation Movement-Minni Minnawi (SLM-MM) and the Abdul Wahid faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA-AW). The latest fighting has been with the SLA-AW in its stronghold of Jebel Marra.

The SDFG says overall violence in Darfur intensified after the breakdown in peace talks between the government and JEM and SLM-MM last November.

It believes the government is conducting a scorched earth campaign of indiscriminate aerial, artillery and tank bombardment of villages in Darfur to make them completely inhospitable to the rebels.

These tactics, described by Sudan expert Eric Reeves of Smith College in the United States as "genocidal counter-insurgency" in Huffington Post, have been a signature of government military operations wherever it is fighting rebels.

Getting rid of the IDP camps appears to be a related tactic as the government considers them to be safe havens for rebels too. And when there are no more IDP camps, there will also be no more pesky international humanitarian workers present to see what the government is up to.

Likewise with UNAMID, even though it has never been effective anyway. In its report last month titled "Walking the talk or fleeing the scene: The pressing need for an effective role of UNAMID in Darfur", the SDFG lamented that "the lack of the political willingness to back the use of military force resulted in the catastrophic failure to perform the civilian protection part of UNAMID mandate".