Letters
Dr Norman's illusions
Sir: As I know little or nothing about Namibia I am not ready to dispute what Dr Norman writes ('Two essays in illusion', 31 March) of the situation there, but I cannot accept his remarkable understatement of the issues in Central America. 'Many of the existing governments subject to subversion are not themselves very creditable.' The death squads in El Salvador and the murder of Archbishop Romero — are they in his eyes 'not very creditable'? Yet he regards the removal of the Misquite Indians in Nicaragua from the Atlantic war zone, Penetrated by the Contras of Somoza's National Guard and Pastora's Arde, where non-combatants are a serious encum- brance, as an 'outrage'. Tomas Borge, the Minister of the Interior, has frankly admitted that the removal was clumsily ,done without proper explanation, but I ri.ave talked to an American nun who had iived under the Somoza regime and had visited the Indians in their temporary Quarters and she told me that they have never before been so well housed, well fed and well cared for. Dr Norman writes on Nicaragua that 'a unitary Marxist state' is 'in course of construction'. 'Unitary'? With the Foreign Minister a Catholic Priest, the Minister of Culture a Catholic priest, and a Jesuit priest to charge of education and health? Graham Greene Antibes
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