When Catherine the Great toured the Ukraine and the Crimea in the 18th century, the story goes, bureaucrat Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin constructed elaborate fake villages in order to impress her.

Now, there’s a 21st century twist on the Potemkin village: Potemkin refugee camps! The Washington Post reports that before U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s visit to a Sudanese refugee camp, the corruptocrats did the next best thing to erecting a facade…they simply evacuated 3,000 villagers from the miserable camp and made them disappear:

MESHKEL, Sudan, July 1 — After U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan visited one of the best-maintained refugee camps in this war-rattled region of western Sudan on Thursday, he climbed back into an SUV and headed down a bumpy desert road.

He was scheduled to tour a scene of even greater desperation in what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, this time a camp that has not received any international aid.

But when his convoy arrived at the settlement, the 3,000 people who had been living there Wednesday afternoon were gone. Instead, there was only a muddy field with a few soldiers stepping through the muck.

In a move that befuddled U.N. officials, the Sudanese villagers in the camp were moved overnight and in the morning, said Jan Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs. They were loaded into government trucks “apparently to be dumped,” he said, at the gates of the already overcrowded Abu Shouk camp, 12 miles away, where 40,000 people live in a stretch of open desert. A U.N. team confirmed that the villagers had been moved to Abu Shouk.

The Sudanese government’s social affairs minister, Ahnoun Mohammed Ebrahim, said the villagers were moved to protect them from possible flooding and disease in the low-lying area when the seasonal rains come. He dismissed suggestions that they were transported to lessen the impact of the crisis for Annan’s visit to the Darfur region, where more than 1 million people have been left homeless by a government-backed Arab militiamen terrorizing the area.

“Every day we move people,” Ebrahim said to reporters.

Call it the Sudanese Shuffle.

More on the U.N.’s abysmal failure to address the crisis in Sudan here and a critical look at the U.S.’s role here.