Madam, - The latest UN Security Council resolution on Darfur looks good on paper but will make little or no difference on the ground. It is simply not credible to refer cases to the International Criminal Court when there is no provision to arrest alleged war criminals.
In that sense your Editorial of April 4th is right to qualify your support because once again this represents a pathetically inadequate response to the real issue - the terror endured by the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Darfur forced to remain in camps and unable to return home.
Once again, echoing Rwanda just over ten years ago, no real action to protect people has been taken - such as massively increasing and changing the mandate of the African Union monitoring force to allow it to operate as a peacekeeping/enforcement body. The killing and raping will go on, and the risk of famine looms. Darfur is Rwanda in slow motion, with starvation and disease real weapons of human destruction; and the final death toll will greatly exceed that in Rwanda if radical action is not taken to protect the civilian population on the ground where it matters.
The total number murdered in Darfur, either through starvation and disease or as a result of attacks on villages which have also involved systematic rape, is now estimated at more than 300,000. But when you remember that Darfur is the size of France, that the Sudanese regime has proved itself capable of notorious brutality, and that large swathes of the region are inaccessible to humanitarian agencies, this could be conservative.
As Mr Conor Lenihan begins a fact-finding mission in Darfur the need vastly to expand and re-equip the AU force will quickly become obvious to him.- Yours, etc.,
RONAN TYNAN, Esperanza Productions, Blackrock, Co Dublin.