Sir, - While it is always pleasant to be flattered - G. T. Dempsey referred (December 22nd) to my "generally excellent" and "courageous" reporting - it would be wrong to allow the writer to get away with statements which are untrue.
For example, G. T. Dempsey quotes my article following the Luxor massacre ("Poverty and despair that may help explain the inexcusable", The Irish Times, November 22nd), as saying that "Arabs recall the deaths of . . . more than a million children who have died because of UN sanctions against Iraq . . ." He then suggests that I am, in effect, adopting the views of "uneducated Arab slum-dwellers" (not my words).
Oddly, he has deleted from my sentence the crucial sourcing of the million dead to official "UN estimates" (from UN agency reports). Why did he omit these words from his quotation of my report? Saddam Hussein is a cruel and wicked dictator, but that does not clear the US - which has been the driving force behind UN sanctions against Iraq - of responsibility for the consequences. In blaming Saddam, rather than the US-devised punitive system which starves Iraqis and leaves Saddam untouched, Mr Dempsey merely reiterates the US State Department and Israeli line.
Mr Dempsey also claims that Israel has complied with "scores of UN resolutions over the decades". This would surprise the European diplomat I was talking to recently who wrote his doctoral thesis on Israel's non-compliance with UN resolutions. He told me that Israel has not complied with a single one; I certainly cannot recall one in the decade I have been working in the Middle East. What are these "scores of resolutions" which Mr Dempsey says Israel has abided by?
The most obvious examples of Israeli non-compliance are UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338 and 425. Resolutions 242 and 338 require that Israel withdraw from Arab territories it seized in the 1967 war, i.e. the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Resolution 425 demands an immediate withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Even today, Israel is announcing further Jewish settlement building in the occupied West Bank in total violation of UN resolutions. - Yours, etc.,
From Lara Marlowe
Paris, France.