Sir, - In the ideal world of international jurisprudence, military action over Kosovo should be taken only with full UN Security Council backing. In the real world of Slobodan Milosevic's mass genocide, this is not acceptable.
In Kosovo at the moment, every Kosovar Albanian male over the age of 10 is in extreme danger of summary murder by Milosevic's paramilitaries on the grounds of being a KLA sympathiser. Already there are reports of the rounding up of hundreds of men in western Kosovo. In view of the massacre of some 8,000 kidnapped Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995, one has to ask how many Kosovar Albanians would have to die before international jurisprudence would sanction effective intervention.
Vincent Browne states (Opinion, March 24th) that under the UN Charter, there is a right of lawful intervention - where the treatment of the nationals of the state concerned is so shocking to the conscience of mankind as to require intervention "in the interests of humanity". He then employs preposterous arguments to deny that such a right of intervention exists in Kosovo.
In the real world it is entirely probably that one of the five members of the UN Security Council will always have a strategic interest in preventing international intervention in an area of concern to it. Does Mr Browne imply that therefore a Nazi-style holocaust is to be permitted rather than the breach of unanimous UN Security Council approval?
Mr Browne's constant concern for legal niceties and his emphasis on the failure of Western intervention in regard to other areas of disaster leads him to the dishonourable conclusion that military action against Milosovic should not be attempted. As John Sweeney of the Observer implied on Mr Browne's radio show recently, people have a right to live in dignity and security whatever the multiples of murder involved in different countries and despite the strategic and legal considerations of distant bureaucrats and journalists safely removed from the horrors of the situation on the ground. - Yours, etc., Valerie Hughes,
Ireland-Kosovo Solidarity, Belgrave Mews, Rathmines, Dublin 6.