Darfur's Deep-Founded Disaster

Darfur has gone on for so long that camps for displaced people are taking on an air of permanence, relief workers are barely holding their own, and there is no prospect of any of these people going home, no matter how much the world protests.

Aid officials call Darfur the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.

It is also one of the most complex, reports CBS News foreign correspondent Allen Pizzey.

The simple version is that ethnic Arabs are conducting genocide against black African tribes people across an area of Sudan almost the size of Texas. But, in fact, violence has become so endemic that the two million people who are now displaced and homeless have enemies on all sides.

Two or three militia groups have splintered into more than a dozen that range from the Janjaweed to tribal-based warlords and — political factions all fighting each other, adds Pizzey.

The sprawling, overcrowded and ever-growing camps serve as their recruiting grounds.

There is nothing the aid agencies, which feed two million people, can do about it.

And, as it that wasn't enough, a few days ago a United Nations assessment team had to flee for their lives from a bombing raid by the Sudanese air force.

"We have no communication with them," Chris Czerwinski, of the World Food Program, tells Pizzey.

The 7,000 African Union soldiers who are there as peacekeepers can barely protect themselves.

The latest plan calls for an additional 3,000 troops from the United Nations. That is supposed to be grow into a 21000-strong joint UN-African Union force, if the Sudanese agree and the international community gets its act together.

"Put your money where your mouth is, because they keep saying Darfur is huge," said Radia Achouri, a spokesperson for the U.N. mission in Sudan. "It's a problem. We need to do something about it. Well, prove it. Because the international community also has to prove that it is serious about Darfur."

If the world does not act, the camps will be the best part of the crisis because the longer politicians argue about what to do, the worse the security situation becomes, and the number of people that aid cannot reach grows larger by the day.