Kurdish ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘terrorists’? It depends on your frame of reference

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Turkey has vowed to widen its offensive against Syrian Kurds. (Getty)

Your editorial, in connection with the Turkish armed incursion into Syria, said that “the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, tweeted in response to the news: ‘We will not leave the blood of our martyrs on the ground and will continue our struggle until we root out terror.’”

I strongly suspect that the Kurdish fighters are motivated by parallel sentiments, hence the endless self-reinforcing idiotic pointless mutual slaughter. Similarly with the Palestinians and Israelis and many of the other inter-factional conflicts around the globe.

Either all are “freedom fighters” or all are terrorists. There is no rational basis for discriminating between the frames of reference, only prejudice, self-interest, arrogance, witless machismo or misperception.

The affected non-combatants on all sides are certainly terrorised. I feel sympathy for all involved in proportion to the kill ratio and wonder how long this madness can continue. It is possible to live in peace – isn’t it?

Steve Ford
Haydon Bridge

Lost baggage

There is one way that your readers can try to get their lost bags back (Letters, 23 Jan). It worked for me, admittedly a while back, but I doubt that things have changed. The airline lost three out of four bags on a trip from Quebec City to London. Two turned up a few days later but there was no news of the third.

A month later I was in Montreal and on impulse went to the warehouse that I had been told lost bags went to. They were surprised to have a visitor but showed me round. We first walked down a long room with shelving on each side for the lost hand luggage, all very neatly laid out. The most pitiful sight was the row upon row of lost teddy bears. The next room had shelves for November and December lost hold bags, thousands of them. The last room had the January hold bags, the month of our flight. They were surprised that I wanted to walk along all the shelves and even more so when I found my bag. The one thing lacking was any effort to look for address labels and reunite bags with their owners.

It would be very easy for all the airlines to form a company that issue barcodes to travellers who register an email address. All they would have to do is scan durable labels and tags on lost bags, and teddy bears, which carry the barcode and automatically send emails that tell the travellers where their bag is. The airlines do not lose bags or teddy bears – they are stored and then dumped.

Jon Hawksley
London

Roads should not be built through the Amazon jungle

My response to the article, “Peru approves law to fell stretches of pristine Amazon rainforest for new roads” by Harry Cockburn on 23 January.

Peru should not be allowed to build roads through one of earth’s greatest treasures, the Amazon jungle. The invasion into the jungle will catalyse a series of events that could cause its extinction. It is a hotspot for biodiversity and is home to millions of endemic, endangered, and exotic species. The Amazon jungle, also called the “lungs of the plants” is irreplaceable due to the fact that it produces a large proportion of the oxygen for the world. The Amazon jungle is already threatened by climate change and deforestation. Creating roads will lead to the invasion of the civilization and easier access for bacteria and invasive species. It will also cause habitat fragmentation, road-kills, hunting and deforestation.

For the sake of our futures, we need to preserve the Amazon jungle in the efforts to preserve our earth as a whole. I hope that the world will stand together to see the importance of the Amazon jungle, protesting and petitioning to the government of Peru to carefully consider their decision, before they make an irreversible mistake.

Karen Lin
Toronto, Canada

The courage to oppose Brexit

In The Second Coming, WB Yeats wrote that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

The body of moderate, one-nation Tory MPs are now in thrall to a relative handful of opportunistic, rampant right-wingers who appear entitled to make party policy on the hoof.

Even more dramatically, a large majority of Labour MPs voted Remain in the recent referendum and yet they seem petrified of a tiny number of Bennite left-wingers who are happy to join the far-right in pressing us to leave the EU.

What is wrong with these people? Why did they ever want to be members of Parliament if they haven’t the courage to oppose a measure which will cause huge damage to our country? Their hour has come. Now is the time for “the best” to demonstrate their “conviction”.

Robert Curtis
Birmingham

Christianity no longer dominates the moral landscape

J Longstaff’s letter about morals was rather hysterical. Would the Christian Church – the “traditional provider of morality” be the same Church that fought tooth and nail against gay equality and the right of women over their own bodies and Sunday trading? The C of E can’t really play the victim card here: no one has said that the Church can’t voice an opinion – all that has changed is that it doesn’t dominate the moral landscape anymore.

Mark Thomas
Histon

Commenting on J Longstaff’s letter regretting the erosion of “British values” linked to a decline in the influence of Christianity on society, I must point out that when Britain was a major world power and the Church played a much bigger role in people’s lives, the old and destitute ended up in the workhouse. Prostitution was rife as a means of survival for many working-class women and any woman unfortunate enough to become pregnant out of wedlock, often a lowly maidservant impregnated by the master’s son, was ostracised and dismissed without a reference.

Violent crime caused by drunkenness and need was commonplace, even though prison sentences were harsh with punishment rather than rehabilitation the main objective. The good Christian and British values that were embraced by polite society were as far from Christ’s teaching of love and compassion as one could get.

I am not a Christian, nor do I follow any religion, but if I was given the choice of living in our modern secular world, for all its deficiencies, or living in the Britain where the Church was a dominant influence, I would opt for the far more compassionate present day.

Patrick Cleary
Honiton