Madam - When you state in your Editorial of August 10th that the response of the international community to the crisis in Darfur has been "disappointingly slow and lacking in urgency", you are being too kind.
The response to this disaster, which has killed 50,000 people to date and is claiming hundreds more lives each day, has been pathetic. The United Nations has proved once again that it is bereft of ideas and incapable of protecting civilians caught up in armed conflict.
The members of the Security Council should hang their heads in shame that they could allow politics and diplomacy take precedence over the lives of innocent women and children. A million people died in Rwanda 10 years ago because the UN could not decide what to do and now another million people in Darfur are staring into the abyss.
There has been much debate about whether or not this is genocide - it has been described as such by the US Congress but the UN has not gone that far. It has also been described as "ethnic cleansing", "a crime against humanity" and "a war crime", but no matter what you choose to call it, the stark reality is that thousands of innocent people are dying needlessly.
The UN was established for just this kind of crisis and has failed spectacularly to do its job. Unless it undergoes root and branch reform, it will continue to be a talking shop for career diplomats - expensive to keep, good to work for, but irrelevant to people who need protection.
The danger of such a weak UN is that it sends a message to despots around the developing world that they can get away with any manner of bad behaviour, any number of human rights abuses. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN O'SHEA, GOAL, PO Box 19, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.