Sir, - Thank you to Lara Marlowe and The Irish Times for the extensive coverage given to Algeria.
An Algerian asylum-seeker who had fled the army there spoke recently in London of his compulsory military service with the commandos of the 3rd Military Region and of how he had been injected with a substance he thought was cocaine (it made him feel like Rambo).
The recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme contained similar reports. The presenter said she would not apologise for showing us the gruesome remains of the villages attacked - so that we could not say we didn't know what had happened - and we were duly shown shocking scenes of blood-spattered rooms with severed heads and mutilated bodies.
We may, however, have felt we were only watching Rambo, the film. As Jean Baudrillard stated in the book This Time We Knew (Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia), "we seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between real violence and simulated violence". Just over two weeks later another 1,000 villagers had been similarly massacred. And every night more terrorised villagers and Algerian civilians await a similar fate.
Perhaps at the start of this 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our best contribution here could be to first, for once, come clean: 80,000 deaths is a price we are willing to pay for Fortress Europe's oil and gas bills - and £33 million of Irish exports annually, as Lara Marlowe commendably pointed out. - Yours, etc.,
From Valerie Hughes
Belgrave Square North, Dublin 6.