Tsunami disaster in Asia

Madam, - Some of the most unsavoury journalism I've read in recent days has come from two columnists in your paper who have used…

Madam, - Some of the most unsavoury journalism I've read in recent days has come from two columnists in your paper who have used the catastrophic situation in Asia as an opportunity to attack the UN.

Mark Steyn's special brand of undergraduate raspberry blow- ing is probably not worth reacting to, but the marginally less facetious musings of Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, January 11th) deserves some comment.

Mr Myers seems to blame the UN for many of the world's ills, accusing it of being "an otiose, indolent, corrupt and morally inert slug". He goes on to say that "wherever the US was not involved and the UN was - the Congo, Rwanda, Bosnia - there were massacres and ceaseless war" and that "after the tsunami, Kofi Annan couldn't be found. No doubt he was still unwrapping his Christmas presents from Libya and Sudan as the US, the Australians and the Japanese spontaneously stepped into the breach".

First of all the UN is underfunded, overstretched and at the mercy of the vagaries of its member-states. Secondly, the UN has often had to go in and clean up a mess that superpowers have either exacerbated and then abandoned (Somalia and Haiti) or largely shied away from until it was too late (Rwanda and Bosnia). To suggest that the UN blithely looked on as these tragedies unfolded is an untruth.

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Finally, it appears to me that Kofi Annan, rather than being some monster cracking open a yuletide beer with a few despots as the tsunami struck, is actually a hard-working, intelligent and sincere man who is conspicuously present in Asia assessing the situation and forcing the West to keep its gaze fixed on the disaster. To suggest that he is somehow AWOL is misleading, to put it mildly, and I find his presence infinitely preferable to that of Jeb Bush and a soon-to-retire Colin Powell.

There is no doubt that the UN needs a serious overhaul and that Asia needs far more assistance than it is getting at the moment, but what Mr Myers seems to forget is that the UN is not some external bogeyman but a mirror of ourselves, and therefore can only be as strong as the input of its member-states.

If that input is cynical, manipulative or guided solely by self-interest, than the shame is our own. - Yours, etc.,

ENDA KILROY, Whitehall, Dublin 9.

Madam, - May I commend Kevin Myers on his excellent Diary on UN incompetence and corruption? Perhaps the reason that we in Ireland are so obsessed with UN primacy is that it perfectly reflects the corruption and incompetence we love in our politicians. - Yours, etc.,

JOHN O'CONNOR, Moira, Co Down.