Sir, - Can we possibly believe that the people who run the world are sane? Tom Hyland has been keeping anyone who wanted to know informed about East Timor for years. While he told us about the repression of the East Timorese, Britain among others was enjoying the profits from arms sales to the Indonesians, presumably to help them to do the job better. It even seem to have offered them an invitation to the latest arms fair.
Meanwhile East Timor reaches the stage of "free" elections. It is patently obvious that there could be serious trouble. So the UN (including, of course, of those same arms-selling nations ) stands back and waits till a large proportion of the population is slaughtered. (After all, they wouldn't want to offend a good customer.) Then it wonders if it might send a peacekeeping force (i.e. a force which might mitigate the effects of the above-mentioned arms).
Having decided (country now in flames and a large part of the surviving population having fled) to send a peace-keeping force, it announces that it will take a week to work out the details.
Is this kind of world organisation the best that two millenia of Western civilisation can produce? - Yours, etc.,
Rosalind Beattie, Kilmashogue Lane, Dublin 16.