Island Paradise
MR. GEORGE BROWN'S letter on p.105 makes sorry reading. In the leading article to which he refers (leading articles in newspapers are always unsigned) we reported what Mr. Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, and Mr. Brown, a leading member of the Opposition, had said after their visit, in the company of the Bahrain Police Com- mandant, to the penal island of Jidda. There they spoke to the two prisoners sentenced in the same fake-trial as the three on St. Helena, but kept in Bahrain. Mr. Heath found them 'perfectly well and . . . lively', and Mr. Brown added that they 'had no major complaints'. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Brown that political prisoners might feel it unwise to make major complaints to such breezily transient visitors in the presence of their gaolers. Nor does he seem to understand that he might have a duty, irrespective of the conditions under which the prisoners are being kept (and it is most unlikely that what he saw was what was normal before world-wide publicity was given to this case), to say something about the rigged trial in which these men had been 'sentenced', and at which the British Government actively connived. Nor does Mr. Brown have anything to say, irrespective of the conduct of the Sheikh of Bahrain, of the British Government's part in the affair in arrang- ing for the illegal transfer of three prisoners to St. Helena and their wrongful imprisonment there for the past four years. If Mr. Brown can justify his statements in Bahrain in our columns or in the columns of any other journal we will be glad to withdraw what we said about them; but until he does so we cannot but continue to think them cruel and contemptible.
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