It is right to be shocked by the horrific suffering Baby P was put through. Civilians in Congo, including children, continue to suffer torture, hunger, rape and deaths just as terrible. Over 1000 have died each day for 15 years. The war in Congo also has an uncomfortable amount to do with us.

It is right to be shocked by the horrific suffering Baby P was put through. Civilians in Congo, including children, continue to suffer torture, hunger, rape and deaths just as terrible. Over 1000 have died each day for 15 years. The war in Congo also has an uncomfortable amount to do with us.

Congo's first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered in 1961 in a coup organised by the Belgian and American governments, with the British government urging them on to secure cheap diamonds and copper from Congo's province of Katanga.

These countries' governments and companies dealt profitably with the corrupt dictatorship of Lumumba's killer, Colonel Mobutu, whose overthrow in 1997 did not end Congo's civil war.

UN and Human Rights Watch reports show dozens of western companies have profited from the civil war by dealing with armed groups in Congo, which get them cheap supplies of diamonds, gold, uranium and coltan (used in mobile phones and laptops) by looting, raping, killing and using Congo's people as forced labour at gunpoint. These groups have included invading Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian forces and their militia proxies, some trained in the 1990s by US and British-based mercenary companies such as MPRI and Sandline International.

Before his murder, Lumumba wrote to his wife: "History will one day have its say. It will not be the history taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris or Brussels but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets."

In 2000, Yaa-Lengi Ngemi wrote a book titled Genocide in the Congo: In the Name of Bill Clinton, the Paris Club and the Mining Conglomerates, So it is! It's not pleasant reading and not much has changed in eight years. The least we owe the people of Congo after decades of profiting from their suffering is to send troops to protect refugee camps and aid to refugees, so the next chapter of their history might be slightly less horrific.

Duncan McFarlane, Beanshields, Braidwood, Carluke.