29th July 2005
You suggest in News & Curiosities (August) that I know nothing about the theatre because I praised, during my stint as the Sunday Telegraph's theatre critic, a play called The Countess which closed after a relatively short period of time. The premise of this anonymous diary item was that my appointment, among other things, demonstrated that my newspaper is no longer "serious" about the theatre. One can only conclude from this that you believe that all critics must say the same things about all plays, and that a play that closes after a short period is necessarily bad. I thought Prospect was about freedom of expression and daring, just occasionally, to be different.
Tim Walker
Sunday Telegraph
Butt's shirking
8th August 2005
In his idolisation of those martyrs who have gone before him, Hassan Butt (August) unwittingly provides a fine example of shirk—the sin of worshipping something other than Allah. Shirk is actually Islam's greatest sin. Ironic, isn't it, that some of the loudest exponents of religious traditions often turn out to have a rather poor understanding of them?
Name and address withheld
Respect for the Prophet
31st July 2005
I was troubled by Ayaan Hirsi Ali's reactionary article (August, Prospect online) and the extraordinary length given to the interview with Hassan Butt—compelling though it was. Surely we need an "intelligent conversation" here and not Daily Mail-esque rants. Apart from a few westerners, I cannot imagine more than a handful of Muslims thinking of Hirsi Ali as a "reformer." Is it not still reasonable to hold that belief and understanding can interact with each other—as in St Anslem's formulation? Or must we accept the Enlightenment claim that faith is a matter of will and has nothing to do with the intellect? Hirsi Ali's utter lack of respect for the Prophet will only further misunderstanding between people.
Khalid Mir
Woodford Green, Essex
Who cares about Britain?
2nd August 2005
Your leader (August) is based on a fallacy. We can't "offer our new citizens a clear sense of the country they are joining" because there is no clear sense. Our essence is our lack of definition. We are a tolerant people with an open society. You shouldn't conclude from the press's huffing and puffing that Britons have strong views on politics or constitutions or citizenship. The silent majority is silent because it doesn't, by and large, object to much at all. We are, for example, basically secular, and so accept all forms of worship. But it would be wrong to conclude that we are weak. We will protect this attractive society with every resource. The one thing that is very un-British is to try to enforce our ideal on anyone else: its attraction is everlasting and self-evident. Better we stay at home in the future.
Inigo Streets
Frant, East Sussex
Pointless uranium
2nd August 2005
In his letter criticising David Fleming's article (August), Dixon Porter fails to mention his association with Rio Alagon, a Spanish mining company recently acquired by Berkeley Resources of Australia. The company has applied for licences for six uranium projects, one near the reservoir formed by a dam downstream from the confluence of the rivers Aragón and Tagus near Cáceres.
Uranium mining in Spain ceased in 2000 when the price of uranium sank to $13/kg and the higher-grade ores were approaching exhaustion. Rio Alagon now submits that with the rising price of uranium, open pit mining of the lower-ore grades could be commercial. But the fact that ores below 0.01 per cent grade require more energy to extract than is obtained in the subsequent overall nuclear fuel cycle casts doubts on the viability of their projects.
As David Fleming points out, in the case of mining a fuel, rather than a valuable commodity like gold, it is the energy balance that is decisive. An energy source that consumes more fossil fuel than it provides as electrical energy is completely pointless.
John Busby
Bury St Edmunds
Iranian election fraud?
5th August 2005
I would like to ask Michael Axworthy (August, Prospect online) how he knows that "a large majority of the 60 per cent who turned out in the last round of the elections voted for Ahmadinejad." Other writers, such as the distinguished Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, say the "election results" only reflect what the governing mullahs and supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini decide they want to tell the people and the rest of the world. I find it strange that Axworthy gives not one jot of evidence for his assertion that the election results were valid when it is known that the entire electoral process is controlled by the mullahs with absolutely no transparency.
John Clements
Edgware, Middlesex
Wanting to do it all
30th June 2005
I agree with much of Natasha Walter's article (June), particularly about the need for equal parental leave and the tendency of women to underrate themselves. But she is as selective in her evidence as her opponents, and makes several assumptions which are patronising to women.
First, she considers it a bad thing that talented women are not entering science—regardless of whether this is the result of unfair discrimination or of free choice. Socialised choice is still free choice.
Second, she assumes that money is the "natural" objective in seeking a job, and that women are only discouraged from high-pay private sector jobs by family considerations. This does not explain why women are more likely to choose demanding public sector jobs such as medicine.
Third, there is a very simple solution for the female merchant banker—hire a nanny. Yet many women would baulk at this. At the risk of calling on one of those pieces of "common knowledge" that Walter so decries, women are often poor delegators. This applies even with regard to husbands—women see themselves as more organised and conscientious. We don't so much want to have it all as to do it all.
Walters is right to protest against workplace situations which neither men nor women find satisfactory, but aiming to achieve as many female boffins and fat cats as male seems like a pretty poor ambition for womankind.
Katherine Mill
Oxford
Rieff on Ethiopia
29th June 2005
It's hard to take David Rieff (July) seriously as an observer of humanitarian emergencies. In his essay on the failure of Live Aid, he seems to set out to present a bold case for doing nothing at all in the face of the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s. But as the piece goes on, he proves to be no more consistent on this front than he was previously over the case for intervention in the Balkan wars. Although happy to castigate most aid agencies in sight (other than his favoured Médicins Sans Frontières), Rieff in the event funks arguing that emergency food aid should have been withheld from Ethiopians starving under the Mengitsu regime.
He is quite wrong to claim that agencies like Oxfam see no political dimension to hunger. In Oxfam's case the lesson was learned decades before Rieff felt obliged to take up his pen: their very first aid consignments to relieve civilian distress in Nazi-occupied Europe came up against the British government's adamantine refusal to allow supplies through. In Churchill's view these would only serve to prolong the war.
One suspects that Rieff is the kind of pundit who comes over all tough on the printed page but, if ever confronted in real life with relievable human suffering, might relent and in practice do the decent thing. So, for example, he has to acknowledge that Oxfam got emergency food supplies into rebel-held areas of Ethiopia as well as into those under the control of the Mengitsu regime. But Rieff's account of Ethiopian resettlement is seriously deficient. The dilemma faced by aid agencies over resettlement was this: was it better to lobby the government internally while maintaining vital feeding centres or to denounce the regime at the cost of winding up relief operations on the ground? The Manhattan-based writer thinks the calculation is easy, but only because he makes little effort to understand the complexities.
Paddy Coulter
University of Oxford
Nyerere's achievements
27th July 2005
Jonathan Power's understanding (July) of Tanzania, the country he once laboured to advance, is weirdly distorted. Nyerere's African socialism was never mainly about economics. It was about nation-building in a newly self-governing polity that could easily have fallen apart, and about creating a moral and ideological cement to bind together people who had little in common. Since it is now fashionable to trash everything connected with the word "socialism," it is important to appreciate the great achievements of Nyerere's 23 years in office:
1) After suppressing an attempted coup after indep-endence, Nyerere ensured that the army remained under tight civilian control; the military probably had less political power than any other force in Africa, where military dictatorships were virtually the norm in the 1970s and 1980s.
2) A society containing well over 100 ethnic or tribal groups was welded into one where loyalties are voluntarily focused on the nation. Several policies contributed to this, including fostering Swahili as a national language and ensuring that the brightest pupils, bound for higher education, were taught together in boarding schools outside their own regions so as to ensure that friendships developed among people of different origins.
3) Racism against the Asian minority was kept tightly controlled. Compare Kenya and Uganda, and also Zanzibar, where Nyerere's writ never really ran.
4) The one-party state was at best a partial democracy, but people did have a choice in local elections and could criticise officials without fear. Power claims that the jails filled up, but to judge from the Amnesty country reports at the time, that is an exaggeration. Nyerere's claim that a people with no historical experience of multi-party democracy would not be well served by factions competing for votes through various forms of electoral bribery and/or intimidation deserves to be taken seriously when compared with the experience of other African states of that period.
In sum, the country avoided civil war, ethnic violence, dictatorship and most excesses of brutality of the state. It is a record few African states can match.
There were big failings. The villagisation policy was one, the failure to deal with corruption was another. A third was the extravagance involved in building a new capital city. However, as Power notes, corruption never reached the volume, nor penetrated into the soul of the leadership, as badly as in much of the rest of Africa. If the new economic reforms succeed in raising living standards for the mass of the population, they will have had the advantage of building upon the sound structure of Tanzanian society, which avoided most of the political disasters that defined Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
Laurence Lustgarten
Oxford
