Madam, - Lara Marlowe (Books, March 29th) concedes that The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002 contains lucid passages, but otherwise blasts it as "downright silly", "incomprehensible gibberish", "outrageous", "nonsense", "offensive", "rubbish", etc. These judgments are founded on misrepresentations of what my book actually says.
She accuses me of blaming the French for everything. I do not, of course, blame the French for everything, merely for the policy they have actually followed and the misleading theses they have circulated - criticisms which I explain and document.(That my book is "impeccably documented" is affirmed by the doyen of French experts on Algerian politics on the back cover.)
She accuses me of advocating that Algeria "return to the glory days of Boumediène" when I actually say, regarding how Algerians should relate to this era in their history, that "it is not a question of the Algerians going back to that time".
She wonders how my book "can take rigged elections seriously", when I explain not only that all the elections in Algeria have been rigged, but also how and why they were rigged, the truth being more interesting than she seems willing to recognise.
She quotes the following sentence: "The crucial way in which this conflict has been mediated by the violence itself has been left to one side, since it would be impossible to do justice to it here", as if "here" refers to the entire book, when it clearly refers to the limitations of a particular chapter dealing with other issues.
Her charge that my book fails to discuss the violence is simply untrue. A section of the book is entitled "The descent into violence"; the armed Islamist movements are analysed in some detail; the massacres of 1997 are discussed repeatedly, notably in a careful consideration of Nesroulah Yous's account of the Bentalha affair; as is the behaviour of the Algerian army and its intelligence services.
Her heated criticisms of my discussions of the contrast with Ireland's history since 1921, of the thesis that the violence in Algeria is a civil war, and of the character of the Algerian constitution likewise all depend on quoting me out of context and misrepresenting my arguments.
Finally, she damns my book for failing to be "the definitive analysis of Algeria's recent history". But I make clear in the preface (has she not read even this?) that my book is a collection of studies written between 1987 and 2002 and that "while they offer elements of a perspective on this period, they do not pretend to be a proper history of it".
In short, Ms Marlowe caricatures both the objectives and the contents of my book, the greater part of which - the analyses of the FLN, of the FIS, the identity question, the problem of establishing constitutional government, the Kabyle riots, the role of the European Union - she wholly ignores. - Yours, etc.,
HUGH ROBERTS, Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt.