Letters | 12 January 2008

Forgotten Army Syndrome

Sir: Boris Johnson is to be praised for his intention to honour the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan (‘How, as mayor, I would help our brave troops’, 15–29 December).

Unfortunately, I believe he is up against Forgotten Army Syndrome. Burma, during the second world war, was an undeserved victim of this syndrome as well. It took 50 years before at last a fitting tribute was paid to the 14th Army Burma Veterans: at the VJ Day parade at Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park on Saturday 19 August 1995. It was tremendous and moving for the veterans, most of whom were by then in their seventies and eighties, to at last march past the Queen and great crowds of cheering, clapping people, including many children, all shouting, ‘Well done! Well done!’ How long, I wonder, before the Afghan veterans are similarly honoured?

Harold James
Kathmandu, Nepal

The Rwandan narrative

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.