Madam, - The crisis of aid being kept from those in dire need by corrupt and cynical leaders has now reached catastrophic proportions. Robert Mugabe has just blocked aid to the hungry in Zimbabwe in an effort to remind people who is in charge as he faces a run-off election.
In a country where there is 80 per cent unemployment, his actions have disastrous consequences for millions depending on food.
Instead of anger and revulsion from the international community there is paralysis. There is no outcry. No wading in to help. World leaders have sat on their hands.
There are three other emergency points where millions are facing death and where there appears to be scant interest in helping. The Burmese junta has set a new benchmark for inhumanity by turning away ships with aid and flatly refusing to allow aid workers to go to the centre of the disaster zone to help the sick and starving. Again the silence from the international community is shameful.
In Darfur, aid workers are similarly powerless to come to the help of the malnourished and the vulnerable because of bombing by the Sudanese air force, and the murderous exploits of the Janjaweed.
Drought in Ethiopia puts the survival of four million people at risk. But once more an uncaring government, indifferent to the appalling scale of suffering, resists help by drastically cutting the numbers of international aid workers admitted.
Lack of interest in the plight of the poor means they too can act with impunity.
Cruelty and corruption are nothing new in the Third World, but there are grounds for believing that leaders emboldened by the West's passivity have become even more merciless and grasping.
The delivery of aid has run into insurmountable problems not because of a failure in generosity on the part of donors, nor because of logistics or lack of personnel, but because of obstructive, ruthless leaders who put their interests first.
This presents us with the obscenity of millions being deprived of critical lifelines because tyrants are allowed to do what they wish, and there is no political will among the strong to protect the weak. - Yours, etc,
JOHN O'SHEA, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.