Over the weekend 108 people (34 of whom were children) were killed by Government forces in Houla, Syria. President  Assad’s bloody repression of his people goes on unabated and unchecked amidst dithering by the international community.  It looks like it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better (if it ever does get better) and thousands more innocents will lose their lives as the world watches on helplessly. Already, it has been estimated that some 13,000 innocents have lost their lives in the last year alone.

The United Nations Charter allows action to be taken to safeguard “human rights and fundamental freedoms” and to  prevent the kind of slaughter occurring on a daily basis in Syria. The problem, as ever, seems to be political will. Any action needs the support of the UN’s Security Council and one of the Council’s members, Russia refuses to support any intervention by the UN. Syria is an important trading partner of Russia and Russia, like most countries, sad to say, puts its economic and political interests above any other interest: certainly well above the lives of a few thousand innocent civilians.

In the past we’ve seen unilateral action taken to prevent this kind of tragedy and the West’s invasion of Iraq comes swiftly to mind. That was different though, wasn’t it? There was a threat to oil supplies when Saddam was strutting his stuff in the Middle East. Sadly for the Syrian people their country ranks number 31 in the oil producing league (one place below North Dakota) and so, as with Zimbabwe where innocents continue to be slaughtered by a deranged megalomaniac, their suffering doesn’t really seem to matter. Money talks, human lives do not.