The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 17 June 2006

Readers respond to recent articles published in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Spectator</span>

issue 17 June 2006

Al-Bashir’s immunity

From Ralph Blumenau

Sir: Peter Oborne’s powerful piece about the ethnic cleansing in Darfur and eastern Chad (‘Darfur’s terrible export’, 10 June) has only one strange omission. Here, as in almost all media reports, we are told that ‘the Sudanese government’ is actively helping the murderous Janjaweed, but the dictator who heads that government, Omar Hasan Ahmed al-Bashir, is not named. It is as if one had never referred to the crimes of Saddam Hussein, but only to those of ‘the Iraqi government’. Why is al-Bashir being given this cloak of relative anonymity by our media? For the genocidal misery he has inflicted upon his people for years, he should be every bit as much a candidate for the Hague tribunal as the likes of Milosevic.
Ralph Blumenau
London W11

The loss of Catto

From James P. Carley

Sir: In his piece ‘A don who embodies the idea of a university’ (10 June) Alan Duncan did a brilliant job of evoking Jeremy Catto, a man whose career is living proof that the Research Assessment Exercise is not a suitable indicator of the worth of college tutors (at least in the Humanities).

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