I once spoke to a journalist who had covered the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. He said that he and his colleagues kept heading into harm's way, because they believed that once the world knew of the horrors they had witnessed, the world would be stirred to act. They filed their reports and waited. Soon enough, they understood. The world knew what was going on - and yet it did nothing. For some of those reporters, this experience broke their faith in the power of journalism. For others, it broke their faith in their fellow human beings. I suspect the aid workers and United Nations staff who signed a collective statement on the plight of Darfur in January are going through a similar heartbreak right now. Fourteen different UN humanitarian bodies, including the World Food Programme and the World Health Organisation, issued an unprecedented cry of despair. They explained that their workers had "effectively been holding the line for the survival and protection of millions, [but] that line cannot be held much longer". Under attack themselves, these UN workers could no longer reach the people they sought to protect and feed. "In the last six months alone," they wrote, "more than 250,000 people have been displaced by fighting, many of them fleeing for the second or third time. Villages have been burnt, looted and arbitrarily bombed and crops and livestock destroyed. Sexual violence against women is occurring at alarming rates. This situation is unacceptable." I'm sure that when