Letters to the Editor | 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). As he willingly has given of his time to generations of undergraduates, so too does he ‘waste’ valuable research hours helping postgraduates bring their projects to fruition and into print.

His own offerings are inevitably articles, but what he has written about the religion of Henry V, say — slight in quantity but deep in quality — will be read for generations after most of the hefty tomes which weigh so deeply in the opinion of those who assess have been consigned to the dustbins of history. Those rooms at Oriel, cluttered with books, CDs, bottles of ‘whisk’ and a roaring gas fire even in summer, are what will first come into our mind’s eye when we think of Jeremy, but it is the articles to which we’ll return again and again.