The inability or stubborn refusal of the international community to learn from past mistakes is mind-boggling.

Time and time again, the United Nations has waded in to situations with no apparent understanding of what is happening, and with a totally inappropriate and tardy response which wreaks havoc on local populations.

The tragedy that is Sierra Leone - the poorest country on earth despite its rich diamond deposits and breathtaking scenery on which a thriving tourism industry could be built - is symptomatic of a much wider malaise. The ineffectiveness of the UN in its present format, and the inability of the international community in general to police life-threatening situations, has once again been proved. The cost of this ineffectiveness is the lives of innocent people.

For advice on where they are going wrong, world leaders don't have far to look. Survivors of the various debacles of recent years could soon put them right, as could any of the millions of refugees and displaced people forced to wander the face of the earth as a consequence of bad decisions made in the corridors of power.

The survivors of Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Somalia - the list is a long and sorry one, telling a horrifyingly unchanging story. In each case, many thousands of innocent lives were snuffed out while the people with the wherewithal to save them dithered and pontificated in some far-off conference hall.

Surely it has to sink in soon that the only way the international community can deal effectively with the excesses of dictators and the effects of natural disasters is to form an international rapid response force. Such a force should be given both the manpower and the resources to come to grips with a developing situation before it becomes life-threatening.

As usual, calls for a strengthening of the UN mandate in Sierra Leone have fallen on deaf ears and it has to be asked why this should be. Is it, as I suspect, that the major powers - US, UK and EU - are just not sufficiently interested in the welfare of the people of developing countries and are tired of the seemingly continual civil wars? It seems that it is only when pictures of starving African babies hit the TV screens that any interest is aroused in the West.

In Sierra Leone, this lack of Western interest has manifested itself in a badly thought-out peace agreement, which is being policed by a smaller than necessary force of relatively inexperienced troops from countries such as Ghana, Guinea, Jordan and Kenya, none of which could be accused of being a superpower. The peace deal was brokered between rebel leader Foday Sankoh and the Sierra Leone government with the backing of the US, UK and France.

It is interesting and perhaps instructive to note that these countries have not allowed their troops to form part of the peacekeeping force. True, the British have sent in troops, but only in order to evacuate their own expatriate civilians.

The whole notion of brokering an agreement with such an evil man as RUF leader Sankoh is sickening beyond belief. This is the man in whose name young children were drugged and made to fight in the war, resulting in all manner of unspeakable atrocities. Many thousands of people were brutally murdered and raped, young girls were taken as "comfort girls" by RUF "troops" and, of course, the thousands of cases of innocent people having limbs hacked off have been well documented.

In Freetown a few months ago, I met orphans in a GOAL programme who told me of terrible atrocities they had witnessed, and in some cases been forced to commit, often just for the "enjoyment" of their RUF captors. One boy told me he had been forced at gunpoint to hack out the foetus from a pregnant woman's belly to settle a bet between RUF rebels as to whether the woman was carrying a boy or a girl.

It is widely acknowledged in Sierra Leone that Foday Sankoh is a repugnant war criminal - witness the mass demonstrations by brave citizens outside his house in Freetown. So why then, instead of being brought to trial for his horrible crimes, was he rewarded with eight seats in government and, unbelievably, control over the diamond-mining region of the country?

The mind boggles at the immorality of doing business with a man like this, who has wreaked such havoc and caused so much misery and terror amongst the people of his beautiful but unfortunate country.

UN officials have been quoted in the past few days making indignant remarks about RUF forces breaking their word as laid down in the Lome agreement. What do they expect? These are monsters, not gentlemen of honour. They are only out for what they can get and have shown that they don't care who gets hurt in the process.

It is long overdue for the international community to get its foreign policy act together. Far too many people around the world have been massacred needlessly because the world's leaders didn't have the guts to come to their aid. Someone, somewhere in the world, must take the first step towards making the UN the force it was intended to be when it was set up in the idealistic days following the second World War. How many millions of innocent men, women and children must face violent death or else be forced to leave their birthplace for an uncertain future before someone starts the ball rolling to overhaul the policing of world crises?

It would appear that the so-called superpowers don't have the will, or are too busy defending their own vested interests, to bother. So perhaps this is a job for one of the smaller countries. I can see no reason why a representative of the Irish people, who have had their own difficulties down through the years (though not perhaps on the same scale), cannot be the initiator of such a move.

The Irish Government should be in the vanguard of the movement to establish an international force. It is not just the lives of millions of innocent people that depend on it, but the future of the UN as an organisation worth bothering about. Certainly, the likes of Foday Sankoh are able to treat the UN with utter contempt.

Meanwhile, in the short term, the people of Sierra Leone are being forced to go without badly needed humanitarian assistance due to the fact that the aid agencies, GOAL included, have had to put their programmes on hold and evacuate expatriate staff for their own safety. God knows what we will return to.

John O'Shea is director of GOAL, a charity specialising in Third World aid.