St Petersburg 1
18th June 2003
Duncan Fallowell (June) wonders about "white nights" in St Petersburg. The name reflects the fact that the Russian aristocracy used to speak French. "Nuits blanches" are sleepless nights, usually associated with merrymaking.
Peggie Rimmer
Geneva, Switzerland
St Petersburg 2
30th May 2003
As authors of a recent historical guide to St Petersburg, we found Duncan Fallowell's article rather odd-especially his description of the Engineer's Castle as the pivotal building of the city. We tried this description on several people who are professionally concerned with St Petersburg and they have reacted in the same way. In what sense is it pivotal? Historically? No. Paul I built it out of fear and was murdered in it 40 days after he had installed himself there. Thereafter it became an engineering college. Architecturally? No. Each side is built in a different idiom and the colour, incidentally, is not "flame red" but murky terracotta with sand-coloured window frames (it flames, it is true, in the evening sun.) Topographically? It cannot be held to compete with the Winter Palace, with Palace Square-or with the Admiralty, sitting as it does at the apex of the Trident which was the pivot of the early city plan.
Kyril Zinoivieff & Jenny Hughes
London W4
France in the Ivory Coast
11th June 2003
A small correction to Tim King (May), who mentioned French troops "practising for the Ivory Coast. Or any other pro-French dictator who needs some support." Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo is not a dictator (although not perfect) and, far from the French "supporting" Gbagbo, the demonstrations which King mentions were by government supporters against French protection of opposition politicians.
Tim Budds
Erith, Kent
Kampfner won't recant
8th July 2003
A few years ago John Lloyd discussed with me his plans to start a media institute with the aim of improving journalistic standards. I readily agreed on the need. However, in singling me out for opprobrium (July) he has hit on the wrong target. Lloyd was unhappy about a piece I wrote in the New Statesman arguing that commentators like him who had supported humanitarian intervention in Kosovo have, willingly or otherwise, made compromises with the neoconservative advocates of pre-emption and US primacy which drove the war in Iraq. In several areas of policy, although by no means all, these groups have coalesced. I used the analogy of concentric circles. I expected the piece would provoke argument, but not fury. However, I will not recant because I-and many people on different sides of the spectrum who contacted me afterwards-believe the thesis was sound. This was not a witch-hunt of supporters of the war. I respect their views. Lloyd is entitled to disagree with me, not to call me mendacious.
John Kampfner
New Statesman
Blair and Iraq
10th July 2003
The absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ("The American contract," July) has sent many people in Britain into a frenzy. (The media seem far less interested in the mass graves, with thousand of dead, that are being uncovered.) Yet there can be no question that Iraq did have WMD in 1998 when the inspectors were expelled. That is why France, Germany, Russia, whatever their view about going to war, still believed that the weapons continued to exist. And I recall Robin Cook, who was foreign secretary in 1998, denouncing Saddam as an imminent danger to the world on the basis of the same intelligence that he now derides.
Maybe these weapons will still be found, but even if not, there is every reason to believe that the overthrow of Saddam was right, not only for the sake of a civilised Iraq, but also to stop him meddling elsewhere.
George W Bush does not come out of the war with much credit because he acted, in part, from a personal vendetta-after the assassination attempt in April 1993 on George Bush Snr in Kuwait. And people seem to forget that Bush's road map to peace in the middle east was not his own inspiration. It was Tony Blair's persuasion which led to the agreement being announced, after Bush's visit to Northern Ireland. The press should at least give Blair credit for that.
Derek Coombs
Chairman, Prospect
GM food and butterflies 1
20th June 2003
Peter Pringle's essay (July) highlights a common problem in the discussion of genetic modification. Some genetic modifications may involve environmental damage. But this is not the issue. The issue is how the environmental damage compares to what would result from other means of achieving the same result. My hunch is that GM corn is kinder to monarch butterflies than organic farming. Genetic modification offers predictabilty and control, while traditional spraying by the organic farmer is indiscriminate and inefficient.
Rupert Marlow
London SE1
GM food and butterflies 2
27th June 2003
In reporting how independent science has helped resolve concerns about crop biotechnology, Peter Pringle undervalues the significance of America's uniquely supportive regulatory, political and media environment. In the US the agencies-the environmental protection agency, the food and drug administration and the department of agriculture-are well established and trusted by the public. Stakeholders have to accept these agencies, especially the first two, as "ring holders" in the biotech debate.
In Britain, the sterling efforts of the new food standards agency and the agriculture and environment biotechnology commission to produce pertinent science are tainted by association with a government which is assumed to be pro-biotech. This politicisation ensures that, whatever the scientific outcome of Britain's three-year field trials programme-the world's first serious attempt to study the potential environmental impact of a GM crop-its findings can be safely dismissed by any NGO who finds them inconveniently conflicting with their preconceived beliefs.
Robert Blood
Freiburg, Germany
Who is the soft touch?
20th June 2003
The problem of young offenders acquiring fake medical notes is exactly the opposite of Peter Davies's description (Letters, July). It is not that probation staff encourage offenders to "get a note from your doctor, or you will be found in breach." Many offenders who know they are going to be breached because they have flouted the requirements of their court order find it too easy to persuade doctors who may not have seen them for some time that they were ill on a particular date some time in the past. Those same doctors then issue a retrospective sick note which makes the breach impossible. Such practice makes a mockery of the probation service's primary task of protecting the public from reoffending and harm. The BMA should formally discourage it.
Andy Stelman
Assistant chief probation officer
African lament 1
10th June 2003
RW Johnson's rancorous piece (June) brought home to me just why a certain kind of English-speaking liberal is detested in South Africa. Like Johnson, I too am an Oxford-educated South African academic. But my perception of South Africa, where I have resided for most of my life, is utterly opposed to his. Where he sees declining standards, collapse and decay, I see a country struggling, with some success, to provide clean water, health services, education and housing to a population that has for centuries systematically been denied them. Johnson's only allusion to past history in Africa-"whites have behaved badly"-is a breathtaking simplification.
Richard Whitaker
University of Cape Town
African lament 2
14th July 2003
RW Johnson's lament on the bleak prospects for whites in Africa is laced with the bitter conviction of a man who knows how the world will end. At the gates of a heavenly mansion, surveying the hell-ish streets below, Johnson's Africa is a kind of purgatory. Lurching endlessly between disaster and renaissance, reports from the continent have been freighted with this sort of rhetoric for centuries.
Life is not like this-and nor is Africa. Johnson infers that Africa's problems have a common cause: the old bugbear of African nationalism. Yet African societies are today more open, less demagogic and more receptive to competing ideas than ever before. The continent's best rogues are yesterday's men: Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobutu S?s? S?ko in the former Zaire, Daniel arap Moi in Kenya. From Cape to Cairo, there is media liberalisation, an explosion of cellular phones, and enthusiastic take-up of e-mail and the internet even in remote villages. In recent years, sceptical publics have for the first time unseated ruling parties in Senegal, Ghana and Kenya. The deification of independence leaders has passed, while the growing influence of civil society and private business cannot be curbed.
To accuse Thabo Mbeki of aggressive nationalism is to retreat into the old phantasmagoria. Since the end of apartheid, the average income of white South African households has risen by 18 per cent. The average black household has become 15 per cent poorer. This cannot be desirable, but it does reflect Mbeki's priorities. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost as free trade deals are struck with the US and EU, and South African companies are listed on the stock exchanges of London and New York. If Pretoria were in Europe, its public finances would qualify for the euro.
The only evidence of honest whites fleeing a corrupt black nationalism is Zimbabwe. Yet contrary to the fervent reports of a race war, Mugabe's feud with the farmers is a very personal quarrel. Under the Lancaster House deal brokered by the British at independence, Mugabe reluctantly guaranteed the commercial farmers seats in parliament and a place in cabinet. To liberal applause, Whitehall sanctioned the skewed distribution of resources and opportunity which remains a source of so many of Africa?s problems. That settlement cannot excuse Mugabe's conduct, but it does explain the reluctance of Mbeki and Obasanjo to indulge the western appetite for heroes and villains.
The "vast irrational convulsion" which Johnson describes does not so much exaggerate Africa's problems as belittle them. Far from making novelist JM Coetzee a "non-person" in polite society, his 1999 Booker prize winner, Disgrace, beguiled Africans black and white with the multiple transgressions of its plot. After a decade reporting from Africa for editors of various political hues, I have come to suspect that the Afro-optimists are as blinkered as the Afro-pessimists. On a continent uniquely burdened by clich?s, ambiguity is a welcome trait-as Mbeki implicitly acknowledged last year when he cited Disgrace as an instance of South African achievement.
Mark Ashurst
London WC1
