Letter: Bahrain views

Brigadier Peter Sincock
Saturday 12 December 1998 00:02 GMT
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Sir: Fran Abrams' articles do little but rehearse the well known mouthings of those Bahrain dissidents allowed to continue their unsavoury activities in London.

Bahrain has been a staunch friend to the United Kingdom for many years and for your respected newspaper to repeat the invective preached by these dissidents against their own tolerant government does little to repay our many friends there. British forces were stationed in Bahrain until 1971 serving our own interests in the region and since Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 the Bahrain government has been generous in its support for the world's stand against the madman in Baghdad.

Bahrain is not an oil-rich state and it has in the last three years suffered 41 deaths and eight million Bahrain dinars (pounds 13m) of damage caused by foreign-financed extremists.

Instead of attacking those attempting to improve relations between the United Kingdom and the Gulf countries it would be better to lobby for a tightening of our immigration laws to prevent such undesirables causing trouble here, and perhaps risking their quarrels spilling over on to our streets.

Brigadier PETER SINCOCK

Heytesbury, Wiltshire

The writer is a former British defence attache in the Gulf

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