This is a blog in three parts. Here's the first.

See evil, hear evil, speak no evil

A few years ago, in South Sudan, there was a conversation between United Nations staff about the possibility of being thrown out of the country. It wasn't about how terrible that might be, how it would bring an abrupt and violent end to work in progress, but rather how wonderful.

South Sudan is a terrible working environment - surely one of the worst in the world - especially beyond the relative comforts of Juba, the region's capital.

The challenges to life and work are intense and relentless, with every disease from measles to yellow fever, sudden outbreaks of conflict between armies or their proxies, ammunition dumps exploding after lightning strikes, arbitrary arrests of staff, drunken Kalashnikov-toting soldiers wandering the streets looking for trouble, and food in the rainy season reduced to a combination of bread-with-added-grit, onions and processed cheese.

Yet most people stayed. We felt lucky each day we received a U.N. security report dominated by Darfur just to the north. There were robberies, kidnappings, hijackings, shootings, assaults and attacks on camps sheltering the displaced, and over a year or more, it got steadily worse.

This tempered our enthusiasm to leave the country - if international staff in Darfur could resist that kind of pressure, we could surely put up with our own problems. Thoughts of having rash words with a governor were put to one side; thoughts of trying to be thrown out abandoned.

It has now been three weeks since the issuance of an arrest warrant for the Sudanese president by the International Criminal Court (ICC) - surely the perfect example of doing the wrong thing for the right reason - and the supposedly coincidental expulsion of 13 international aid groups from northern Sudan and closure of three national non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

From the perspective of the Sudanese government, of course, these agencies have been trying very hard to be thrown out. Khartoum claims they have been passing information to the ICC, which counts as treason if you are a Sudanese national and espionage if you are a foreigner.

The Sudanese Humanitarian Aid Commission has gone further, stating that these organisations had "evil goals and hidden agenda". The Sudanese envoy to the African Union alleges this agenda was "intelligence purposes rather than humanitarian activities".

Only three of the expelled groups - Medicins Sans Frontieres, Mercy Corps and Oxfam - have rejected the accusations directly, while other have organisations highlighted their humanitarian credentials of impartiality, independence, neutrality. The denials - whether explicit or implied - are strong enough and not surprising.

Most NGOs delivering aid in Darfur have been incredibly cautious not to upset the Sudanese government. A quick trawl through the Darfur pages on NGO websites will unearth phrases like: "refugees in the past accused the pro-government Janjaweed militias" (CARE) and "government responsible by arming Janjaweed militia who are now accused of unleashing terror on the local population" (Oxfam).

But most websites describe the situation as a kind of "antiseptic" conflict in which which no one is responsible but a lot of people have died and continue to die (mostly due to knock-on effects of disease and starvation).

It is much easier for advocacy and research organisations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and International Crisis Group to voice their beliefs about who's to blame. This is important and much-needed work, but there's a reason they can speak out: they are not on the ground.

They don't have huge humanitarian programmes to carry out, staff to protect and people to save on a daily basis. The relief groups that do just don't have the freedom to comment on something they are so intimately involved with.

MSF is one of the few that has tried both to talk and not talk about Darfur at the same time. Following its recent expulsion, MSF France said: "We have been taken offstage and mistaken for human rights activists that have lobbied for justice and for the ICC."

Yet one of MSF's core values is that, alongside life-saving medical interventions, it acts as a witness to the situations in which it works (temoignage in French). MSF has in fact been doing that - as well as advocating - perhaps not to the ICC nor for justice, but certainly to the wider world for better humanitarian intervention.

An MSF presentation to the U.N. Security Council in 2004 stated that a "scorched earth policy" was being carried out "by Janjaweed militias backed by the government of Sudan".

This isn't the first time MSF has been in trouble with Khartoum. In 2005, the head of its Dutch section was arrested for what the Sudanese government said was a false report about rapes the government claimed weren't happening.

MSF and other organisations tiptoeing around these issues should not be criticised lightly - their caution is a fact of NGO life.

They are constantly asking themselves: where do you draw the line? When does your position become untenable? When do you have to speak out? And when should you try to be thrown out?

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