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On Easter Sunday, April 23, Republican Sinn Féin held their annual Easter commemoration at Milltown Cemetery. It was also the first time that the Comdt-General Tom Maguire Republican Flute Band paraded.
Republican Sinn Féin through our paper wish to congratulate all the members of the band for their sincere dedication. In a short number of weeks through hard work and many long hours the Comdt-General Tom Maguire RFB came together.
On Easter Sunday it was a very moving experience to see and hear them on parade, something that filled everyone in attendance with great pride. Republican Sinn Féin salutes everyone involved and wishes them every success for the future. We also call on everyone to support them in anyway they can through donations and with their collections.
Through the band the name of Comdt-General Tom Maguire will be carried on in the hearts and minds of our young generation with love and pride and in memory of a great Irishman.
SEOSAMH Ó LEOGÁIN
Republican Sinn Féin
229 Falls Road, Belfast
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A chara
Renagh Holohan' report in the Irish Times on President McAleese's visit to Hungary recently made for very interesting reading.
Particularly interesting was her report of a visit to an Irish pub in the town of Gyur where the accompanying minister Jim McDaid noticed a beer mat showing a map of Ireland without the Six Occupied Counties and drew in the missing counties.
Why did he alter this map? It is said that one picture is worth a thousand words. So is it possible that seeing his country sundered before his eyes, he eventually realised the dreadful mistake that he, Fianna Fáil and all the rest of them in Leinster House made in having Articles 2 and 3 removed from the Free State Constitution for the "Good Friday Agreement".
Instinctively the minister tried to recover the Six Occupied Counties on the beer mat but will he help restore the legitimate claim to them in the 26-County Constitution? It seems that Jim McDaid is not alone in failing to realise that the Six Occupied Counties are now seen to be part of the "UK".
Mr Andy Pollock, who is currently Director of the Centre for Cross-Border Studies in Armagh, complained that as far as the rules and regulations governing the business of ordinary living are concerned, such as banking, insurance, telephones and health services, the Six Occupied Counties seems "as foreign a place as the remotest corner of Greece or Portugal".
One can understand now why all the great patriots, Tone, Emmet and Pearse, gave their lives for the 32-County Republic, so that one day Irish citizens north and south would be living in a United Ireland, united in every way.
Instead as the beer mat of Budapest illustrates, we are now a reduced nation, having squandered away our birthright for a "pig-in-a-poke" agreement.
MATT LEEN
Tralee, Co Kerry
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I want to congratulate Brendan (Darkie) Hughes, Belfast, for speaking out publicly against former Republicans for betraying all those who made the supreme sacrifice for Irish freedom.
They died on hunger strike rather than wear a pair of socks belonging to the enemy, England. Now the men who said at their gravesides: "We will never accept British rule in Ireland" are implementing British rule.
Brendan Hughes was an inspiration to young Republicans in the 1970s. The sacrifices he made cannot be for Stormont, Leinster House or Westminster, only for British withdrawal.
So join with us Brendan and we can achieve the Ireland that all Republican men, women and children gave their lives for -- a 32-County socialist republic.
DAVID CLEARY
Limerick
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As you are no doubt aware, in March an article about myself and the Clan na Gael appeared in the Irish Independent and other papers.
Needless to say this article was pure rubbish -- your support group, the Irish Freedom Committee held a lovely banquet in New York and none of the events mentioned in the papers happened.
I am writing to publicly thank the New York Irish Freedom Committee, especially John MacDonagh and Rand March, for their support in the aftermath of the "Blood Money" article. It is times like this when you find out who your friends are.
DOROTHY ROBINSON
Lamberville
New Jersey, USA
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In Minneapolis, our city fathers built an incinerator using many of the same arguments your politicians/business leaders are using.
The incinerator came online many years after our city-wide recycling programme was established. The inaugural "test burn" consumed all the "recycled" newsprint collected from our homes for years -- in violation of the social contract inherent in the policy of recycling collection.
Our leaders had many arguments including "no market for the newsprint" and "needing a clean fuel for the test burn" (so they could boast clean emissions before ever burning anything so toxic as plastics etc).
Don't let them put one in, for its existence will be further justification for doing nothing about controlling the waste stream. The tipping fees become an important source of income for the city/business collective.
We have no beverage container deposit law here (the first step you should investigate!) which leaves our streets strewn with cans, bottles and plastic, and it is obscene to see the wasteful packaging for our food and other products here. In your country biscuits are minimally packaged, sensibly. Here, our "cookies" are placed in plastic trays, wrapped in two or three plastic sleeves and the whole thing covered in another sheet of plastic with perhaps a piece of cardboard stiffener to boot.
JIM FARRELL
Minneapolis, USA
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The propaganda campaign associated with the Balkans continues unabated with distortion of fact and gross misrepresentation more often than not the order of the day.
Nusreta Savic (Irish Times, March 31, 2000) rebukes that paper for publishing letters from contributors she has alleged to have denied the existence of rape camps in Bosnia Herzegovina. "I have just," she said, "spent two weeks in Ireland where it was brought to my attention that contributors to your paper denied the existence of rape camps in Bosnia Herzegovina."
"As an example," she continues, "I refer to a letter to your paper stating that no human rights agency has been able to corroborate the existence of rape camps ('Irish Times', October 17, 1994)."
There is gross deception there. The letter-writer did not make this statement and this fact would have been known to Nusreta Savic and to the persons who had referred the letter to her. The statement came from a spokesperson with the UNHCR and was contained in an article in the 'Independent on Sunday' on January 10, 1993. Accredited to that source in the letter to the 'Irish Times' on October 17, 1994.
Other statements in the 'Independent on Sunday' article of January 10, 1993 disavow rape camp allegations. For example, the International Red Cross stated that it "has received no first hand testimonies of rape camps".
Anne Warburton (EC Mission to Bosnia) said in the same article that she "was aware that the reported atrocities were of a kind you don't readily give credence to".
Maja Somalot of the BBC's Southern Slovakian Service which has received regular reports from Bosnian radio of rape, points out in the 'Independent on Sunday' article that both sides in the conflict have reported sexual assaults. The conflict, she said, is a "very modern war to the extent that some events seem to have been staged for the media".
The Independent on Sunday article summarises thus: "Observers, aid agencies and those with expert knowledge of Bosnia agree that all the allegations must be greeted with caution".
After extensive investigations into the issue of rape in Bosnia, the BBC (Newsnight, January 14, 1993) questioned the veracity of Bosnian government allegations in respect of rape camps stating that "There was no evidence to support such claims."
Amnesty International in its report of January 1993 states: "There is no concrete evidence to support Bosnian government claims of a Serbian official sanctioning of rape as mode of warfare."
The report on rape in Bosnia issued by the United Nations on January 29, 1994 evidences not the grotesque figure of 50,000 or even 20,000 rapes but a figure infinitesimally less than those figures. Under the leadership of the Special Rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowieki, and pursuant to the Commission on Human Rights resolution 1992/S-1/1 and 1992/S-2/1, a second commission of inquiry went to Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia to investigate rape reports. Based on their evidence, approximately 2,400 women, Muslim, Serb and Croatian had been raped.
Members of this Commission who travelled to Sarajevo received from the Bosnian (Muslim) government all of the data available on rapes. The Bosnian government was able to provide data on exactly 126 cases. Regardless of this some Western media outlets continued to inflame public opinion with reports to the effect that Serbs had raped 60,000 Muslim women.
It is distasteful to put the subject of rape in this enumerative way but it is essential to do so in the interests of truth in this largely, as Gore Vidal has put it, "fictional world".
To advance the preposterous argument that Serbian men raped 60,000 Bosnian Muslim women is to imply that Serbian men are preternaturally inclined towards raping women not of their particular race.
This is racism of a kind equivalent to the demagogic message propagated in the DW Griffith epic
The Birth of the Nation to the effect that black men represented a very real threat to the entire race of white women in the United States given their genetic predisposition towards drunkenness and rape.
JOHN KELLY
Mullingar
Co Westmeath
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