Madam, - In the course of his article headed "Adams looking finer every day wearing peacemaker mantle" (Opinion, November 20th), David Adams mentions my interview with David Dunseith on BBC Radio Ulster's Talk Back, but his assumptions about my views are not correct.
My reaction to Gerry Adams's description of unionist hardliners as the Afrikaner wing of unionism was that this comparison was a throwback to comparisons of unionists to Afrikaner nationalists that were commonly made in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the siege mentality and inflexibility of both unionists and Afrikaner nationalists. This was not an endorsement of this comparison, let alone a description of it as the only legitimate comparison, as David Adams seems to think.
I then went on to explain that the readiness of Afrikaner nationalists to negotiate during the 1990s had undermined the basis of the comparison, so that during the early stages of the Northern Ireland peace process unionists were being urged to emulate Afrikaners. This was most strikingly conveyed by the assertion that what Northern Ireland needed was a unionist de Klerk.
What Gerry Adams was doing in his New York speech was invoking a previous negative stereotype of Afrikaners to criticise people he considered hardline Unionists. A listener raised the use of negative stereotypes of other ethnic groups, such as the Serbs. I responded by noting that in the recent conflict between Georgia and Russia, the existence of a negative stereotype of the Russians dating from the Soviet era had made it easy for a number of Western politicians to blame Russia for a conflict that had in fact been initiated by Georgia. In saying sadly that this was the way of the world, I was not seeking to endorse such cynical exploitation of people's prejudices but simply to acknowledge that demonisation of whole nations can be an effective political ploy.
I was not saying I liked this reality. - Yours etc,
ADRIAN GUELKE,
Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict,
School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy,
Queen's University of Belfast.