LETTERS Ghanaian complexities
Sir: Stephen Glover has now twice used the pages of The Spectator ('Whose backing Brittain'), 30 August and 'An odd couple indeed', 27 September) to abuse my work as a journalist, to question my judgment, to call me a liar, and to dethand that my editor sack me for a friendship with a former Ghanaian government official, Kojo Tsikata.
There are two major problems with Mr Glover's analysis. Firstly, the politics of the 1980s were extremely complex and it is dif- ficult for anyone who did not follow them at the time to understand those complexi- ties 15 years later. Secondly, he is writing about an area which is the subject of a pro- longed libel action. It is obvious that all Mr Glover's information is coming from one party to this action. (Is he really a regular reader of Journal do Angola?) Mr Glover writes as a critic of media ethics, but ethical journalists believe in getting both sides of a story.
Mr Glover has based his personal attack on material supplied by the Ghanaian opposition and their friends here. He also uses personal intercepts illegally supplied directly or indirectly by the former MI5 officer, David Shayler. These files have not been seen by me.
Mr Shayler has stated that the £750,000 or so spent by MIS in tapping my phone, following me, planning to have the FBI arrest my daughter so they could more freely burgle my home, was unnecessary as they knew that the large sums of money in my bank account were for lawyers' fees for Mr Tsikata.
Mr Tsikata was at that time the main negotiator for the ECOWAS countries attempting to halt the Liberian civil war. He was also regularly briefing Anthony Lake at the White House, the state depart- ment and the former United States presi- dent, Jimmy Carter. Mr Tsikata's original role as special adviser to the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) includ- ed being both head of security and princi- pal diplomatic troubleshooter behind the scenes. His role in Ghana's evolution from the PNDC military government to the pre- sent constitutional democracy was key.
Mr Glover's latest article tries to smear Mr Tsikata, and by extension me, using the grim final scene of the affair of the murder of three High Court judges and an army officer in 1982. Did his Ghanaian and other sources not tell him that Amartey Kwei had the previous night asked to see a Catholic priest and a government official, confessed to them he had invented every word of his testimony about Mr Tsikata, expressed his remorse for having dragged Mr Tsikata's name into the murder ease and asked to see the head of state? Or did he leave that part of the story out because it rather spoils the sensational effect of his introduction? And why did he ignore the facts that: 1) Kwei was the only person who had implicated Mr Tsikata; 2) Mr Tsikata had two alibis which contradicted Kwei's charges; 3) the 28-page summary of the affair by the Attorney Gen- eral detailed the inconsistencies in Kwei's statements; 4) the only witness cited by Kwei against Mr Tsikata — Lance-Corpo- ral Amedeka, one of the killers in Kwei's team, who Kwei claimed had brought him a coded note from Mr Tsikata — vehemently denied that he had brought any note from Mr Tsikata to Kwei; 5) When Mr Tsikata appeared as a witness at the trial of Kwei and his group none of them challenged his denial of Kwei's statement involving him. These facts perhaps spoil his story too.
Turning to my journalism, Mr Glover scorns it with innuendoes about left-wing conferences' and 'the loony Left'. As editor of the Guardian's Third World Review in the 1980s it was my job to know and report the major events, trends and personalities in the Third World. The voices of South African children tortured by the apartheid regime, which I reported from the Harare conference Mr Glover refers to so sneer- ingly, were typical of the perspective we gave space to while others did not. The ANC of South Africa, Swapo of Namibia, Yoweri Museveni's guerrillas in Uganda, the MPLA in Angola, are governments treated with some respect by the Western press today, but in the 1980s only the Guardian reported them without cynicism.
This was a period of major upheaval in the Third World with the overthrow of pro- Western regimes by radical movements in Iran, Ethiopia, Grenada, Nicaragua, Upper Volta and Ghana. Mr Glover untruthfully describes my short interview (16 April 1982) with Kojo Tsikata as a 'nauseatingly gushing piece', though he is unable to sup- port these adjectives with a single quotation from the article.
Mr Glover says, 'Further enquiries sug- gest that it is extremely likely that Ms Brit- tain was aware of the origins of the money.' His 'further enquiries' did not extend to speaking to me or examining my bank statements which the allegedly incurious Guardian has done. The clear implication is that I was lying to my editor. Mr Glover has not produced a shred of evidence that I did know, could have known, or should have known where the money was coming from.
Given that Mr Glover is my only source to date on an alleged bank transfer from Ambassador Amoo-Gottfried into my account he will also have to swallow the 'inconceivable' fact that I did not speak to him about it when I was in Beijing during the UN Women's Conference of 1995. The phone conversation which Mr Glover must have got from the MI5 phone taps was merely to do with a possible trip to visit the Great Wan — did Mr Glover not get this detail? Again Mr Glover's sources let him down here: his dates of my trip are wrong by two weeks.
Mr Glover has said that I 'betrayed the standards of journalism which we should all defend'. It is surely his own standards which should be questioned.
Victoria Brittain
Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1
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