Home > The Magazine > The Week

Saturday 22 November 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Letters

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Sir: Michael Gove should be wary of accepting the standard Rwandan narrative, given his advocacy of democracy as a cure for Africa’s ills (‘An act of evil that recalled the atrocities of the SS’, website only, 5 January). The French, according to the narrative, are culprits because the Hutu perpetrators of the massacre of Rwandan Tutsis were allied to and had received military assistance from France. The shame is that French policy made ‘democratic’ sense and was, in effect, sabotaged by London and Washington.

As soon as the Ugandan-based Tutsi insurgents started making significant inroads into Rwanda, the nightmare prospect arose of the 15 per cent minority Tutsi ‘masters’ once again ruling over the 85 per cent Hutu ‘toilers of the soil’. This should have triggered London into backing the Hutu-based Rwandan government, possibly even providing covert military assistance. London and Paris could have then jointly approached Washington to pressure Uganda, then America’s ‘model’ African state, into withdrawing its support for the Tutsi insurgents.

By upholding the authority of the Hutu-based Rwandan government, there would have been no genocide of the Tutsis, nor the subsequent ‘revenge’ genocide of fleeing Hutus in the Congo. Moreover, a Hutu-run Rwanda would not have conspired to take over neighbouring parts of the Congo, unlike the military of Uganda and Tutsi-run Rwanda who, along with their client Congolese rebel factions, have wreaked much havoc. The West, furthermore, would have been well placed to persuade a Hutu-run Rwanda to respect its Tutsi minority, and to urge the Tutsi-dominated military of neighbouring Burundi to end their rule over the Hutu majority. Alas, it was not to be, and today we find Gove supporting minority rule in Rwanda, the antithesis of democracy.

Yugo Kovach
Twickenham, Middlesex

Michael Gove’s piece can be read at www.spectator.co.uk
Wrong year, Rod

Sir: Rod Liddle is quite right to forewarn us of the dreary and right-on nostalgia for 1968 that will fall upon us this year (‘Stand by for a year of nostalgia for 1968’, 5 January). However, Rod overestimates the way rock music was affected by the political events of ’68. He tells us, ‘1967 gave us Woodstock, which... had a certain joie de vivre’. Not quite, Rod. The Woodstock festival actually took place in 1969, and with hindsight can be seen as the ‘peace and love’ movement’s final stand.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 Next page

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.