As the Christmas faithful remind us to tend to the less fortunate this week, it might be time to look at the limitations of charity and relief work.

Humanitarian work is the one thing the United Nations has the potential to be good at. However, due to the temporary nature of humanitarian relief – especially in Africa, where wars travel across the continent like a contagious disease – it is limited in its scope. Without the backup of a viable political structure, long gone from the U.N., it has very little effect.

“This has been one of the worst years for humanitarian workers,” the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, said recently. Sudan is the most well-known case. The death toll in the Darfur region is inching closer to the 100,000 mark, and there are 10,000 new deaths there each month.

Mr. Egeland has called on the press and donors to also pay attention to Somalia. In addition, war has flared in the Congo again, and the same situation that exists there – a seemingly endless conflict that keeps on moving across national borders and through tribal enmities – also plagues the western part of the continent.

Humanitarian workers like Mr. Egeland perform heroic acts by bringing food to faraway refugees, with doctors who tend to those who might be saved, and volunteers who set up shelters. Donors keep them afloat as they move on from crisis to crisis, trying to alert the world to the next catastrophe.

Mr. Egeland, a Norwegian national, points to the Sisyphean nature of the job. “We’re putting plasters on these wounds, but we are not healing them,” he told me. Darfur is a case-in-point. China wants to do oil business with Sudan. Russia sells the government warplanes. Algeria shields its fellow Arab League member from world condemnation. Pakistan joins in, and the result is a split at the Security Council, the U.N. body responsible for dealing with such crises.

To highlight the Sudan crisis, America took the council to neighboring Kenya last month. But like generals who always fight the previous war, the divided council reached a resolution that promised a future peace agreement in the decade-old north-south war, while the current burning crisis is in Darfur, in the western part of the country.

As a result, according to Mr. Annan’s special representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, “Some in the [Sudanese] government interpreted the resolution as softer, so they became more assertive,” with a huge new military buildup in Darfur. Realizing the outside world will not save them, the rebels increased their attacks as well.

After two British aid workers were killed, Mr. Egeland started withdrawing relief workers from some areas of Darfur. If his men and women cannot operate safely, he warned, the death toll will increase from 10,000 to a 100,000 each month.

The tendency at the U.N. is to blame that care more about their business with Sudan than about human rights. America is also to blame, they say, since it refuses to threaten human rights violators with trials at the new International Criminal Court, a body Washington vehemently opposes.

True enough. “Council members indeed act according to their national interests,” says Dore Gold, the former Israeli U.N. ambassador whose excellent book “Tower of Babble” documents the U.N.’s shortcomings. “The one who should rise above those national interests, however, is the secretary-general. Sometimes he has to come in to the Security Council, knock on the table and say, ‘A genocide is about to take place. We have to intervene.’ If he does not do that, he leaves unresolved crises, with all the consequences of that.”

Instead of shouting at the top of his lungs about Sudan’s genocide, Mr. Annan refused to even utter the word. His representative, Mr. Pronk, tried to coax the Sudanese government by negotiating diplomatically. Now, he describes the perpetrators in Khartoum and the rebels who fight them as equally responsible for the catastrophe, making no moral distinctions.

Meanwhile in Darfur, the humanitarian work toll increases. Mr. Egeland’s Band-Aid treatment is the only one the U.N. can offer. And without any political solutions to back them up, even his workers are leaving. And Sudan, as Mr. Egeland tries to tell us, is only one story on a continent where there are millions of horror stories.

Mr. Avni covers the United Nations for the Sun. He can be reached at bavni@nysun.com.