Letter: The British Army camps were not genocide machines

THE BRITISH concentration camps set up in the Boer War were copied from the Spanish prototype in Cuba in 1898, were badly run and resulted in many deaths, mainly from disease. But to mention them in the same breath ("No need to apologise", 10 January) as the Nazis, Auschwitz et al - planned mass genocide, murder machines - is a gross insult to the British Army and Britain.

Similarly, the old tale that the Boers (Afrikaners) are "stuck there" in South Africa, is belied by the thousands who emigrated when it suited them - to Paraguay, Britain, and Australia. It was black South Africans who were trapped in South Africa; denied passports by their Boer masters and penniless through serfdom.

As the author of two books and four UN documents on South African government propaganda during the apartheid era, I fear Jan Morris has been taken in - like many other good people.

LEN CLARKE

Denham, Middlesex