Madam, - This week's UN report confirms that crimes against humanity have been committed in Darfur. And while not many people believed the UN would speak of genocide given the highly political way in which the inquiry was constructed, there was hope that it might call these systematic crimes by their proper name because that would have put the Security Council under legal pressure to mount effective intervention to protect civilians.
That the report may instead lead to a dispute between the US and Europe over the International Criminal Court - is a disgraceful distraction. Neither party has the will to support intervention to stop the killings.
Darfur has become the Auschwitz of our time and our failure to stop the massacres, the destruction of villages and the systematic rape of thousands of women (well documented by a number of international human rights groups) is a singular indictment of the international community - not least because it has now been going on for almost two years.
Starvation and disease were always the preferred methods of the Darfur genocide by the Sudanese regime and but for the considerable pressure exerted to force them to allow humanitarian aid supplies to continue the death toll would already be much higher. However, as the conflict intensifies in the region, and the world appears to have lost interest, the regime will have another opportunity to complete its "final solution" over the coming weeks and months unless something is done to stop it.
Silence and inertia in the face of genocide and crimes again humanity amount to complicity. - Yours, etc.,
RONAN TYNAN, Esperanza Productions, Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin.