Letter: What about the children of Angola and Albania?

NICK COHEN and Marcus Tanner's article 'Random compassion' (August 15) applies even more to our own media. I know a country where the civil war is killing and wounding hundreds of children daily, and where Britain's culpability, though minor, is greater than for Bosnia. Yet this larger human tragedy receives not even 1 per cent of the coverage lavished on Bosnia.

The country is Angola, where more than 1,000 people are killed every day in a civil war started by the Unita rebels . Unita obtained much of its armaments and most of its support directly from South Africa, via the intervening state of Namibia, which South Africa illegally occupied until 1990.

This occupation began in 1919, when Britain handed over Namibia's League of Nations class 'C' mandate to South Africa, which soon broke the mandate's terms.

Yet all these facts are swept under the carpet, and silence reigns. I sincerely wonder if there would be such silence if all those innocent Angolan victims, involving tens of thousands of children, happened to be not black but white?

Len Clarke

Uxbridge, Middlesex