STOP any dozen "average" people in the street and ask them what action should be taken about Monrovia and they'll probably reply that, whoever he is, Bolton Wanderers should sign him!

Ask the same question about Liberia and maybe a glimmer of understanding will flit, momentarily, across their features.

They might then say: "Isn't that the African country shown on the telly where an assortment of madmen are running around, firing automatic weapons while thousands of innocent civilians perish through starvation and disease or are butchered indiscriminately by undisciplined, heavily-armed militiamen?" Or something along those lines.

The fact is Monrovia and Liberia are inexorably entwined -- the former is the capital of a country ravaged by civil war for almost 14 years as the rebels of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy try to depose the unpopular president, Charles Taylor.

It is, sad to say, just another part of the continent of Africa where internal conflict has led to terror, violence and death on a scale which we, in the "civilised" West, cannot possibly understand, even though television stations do their best to help us by bringing newsreel footage of the atrocities into our front rooms.

Some of the latest scenes -- particularly one of an exotically-dressed rebel fighter, doing a disco dance as he raked the opposition's positions with automatic gunfire -- could best be described as tragi-comedy, particularly as they were juxtaposed with pictures of desperate civilians, caught in the fierce fighting and dying of hunger and disease.

I know I have asked this question before but why is this madness allowed to continue? How can people in the Third World find the money to arm themselves with all manner of sophisticated weaponry yet can't feed themselves?

Why are the aid agencies forever asking for help to avert yet another humanitarian crisis when everyone, knows that there is another one, just as terrible, waiting around the corner?

Why don't the same aid agencies lobby the United Nations and urge it to do something positive about Africa apart from endless debates and hand-wringing. Maybe I'm being unkind, or at least unreasonable here, but I was led to believe that the United Nations could halt a civil war which has cost the lives of 100,000 Liberians. Fourteen years is a long time for the world's governing body to sit on its collective backside and do nothing to halt the slaughter and misery.

Soldiers from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Mali will finally be deployed to end the violence. Where is George Dubya during all this? Well, three United States warships are lying off the Liberian coast with 2,000 troops on board but President Bush wants to give the Africans a chance to sort out their own backyard before he goes in. He may well have lost his appetite for another crusade with Americans still returning to the States from Iraq in body bags. Anyway, being the world's policeman should be the UN's job, not America's. Trouble is, the one seems ineffective without the other.