Sir: Reading Victoria Brittain's letter, one is reminded of George
Orwell's 'generation of unteachables hanging around our necks like a necklace of corpses'. Several of the 'radical movements' which she and her Guardian colleagues reported 'without cyn- icism' during the 1980s are guilty of atroci- ties on a huge scale.
In Angola, the Stalinist MPLA — one of Ms Brittain's favourite governments, as Guardian readers will know — is conserva- tively thought to have massacred 125,000 people by 1987. This total greatly increased after they rigged the country's elections and wiped out the opposition, killing thousands in the capital city alone.
In Uganda, President Museveni's Nation- al Resistance Army butchered 150,000, according to a former leading member who was found murdered three months after speaking out (New African, November 1989).
In Ethiopia — where another of Ms Brit-
LETTERS
tam's 'radical movements' had seized power — at least 500,000 died in the terror (Sun- day Times, 11 December 1994). An even greater number starved to death as a result of Mengistu's 'radical' social reforms.
Ms Brittain warns that the politics of the 1980s were extremely 'complex' and that it is 'difficult' for those who were not familiar With such 'complexities' at the time to understand them now. What are the 'com- plexities' surrounding her current apologet- ics for Ghana's former chief of secret police?
Paul Bogdanor
Christ Church, Oxford
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