Sir: Brian Pocock letter 5 April believes that there is no parallel to be drawn between the Second World War

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Sir: Brian Pocock (letter, 5 April) believes that there is no parallel to be drawn between the Second World War and the Holocaust on the one hand, and current events in Kosovo on the other. His argument is that the current conflict has been confined to the former Yugoslavia, without the invasion of neighbouring states. But this ignores the fact that what distinguished Nazi Germany and made its policy truly evil was its policy of genocide, or ethnic cleansing.There is the similarity to what is happening in Kosovo, and it is that to which the international community has to put a stop.It may be argued that what the Serbs are doing now is worse than anything the Nazis got up to before the Final Solution in 1942.Further, I do not understand what possible use there is,at this stage, in lamenting the failures of Western foreign policy.For all the faults that Clinton (and Blair) and company have committed thus far, there is one overwhelming fact that has to be faced: the Albanian Kosovars are being murdered en masse, and the only way to put an end to that is to intervene in such a way, ground troops and all, as to defeat the perpetrators and, indeed, to destroy the Milosevic regime.JEFFRY KAPLOWLondon SE3. DARK AND dirty American and British secrets as well as Libyan secrets may well be revealed during this trial. Many questions will arise over the next two years - the time likely to elapse before a verdict is given There will be much obfuscation and duplicity. Scots should steel themselves for an imperfect outcome to the trial.

The suspects may well finally go free, and we will still only know part of the truth. The Scotsman ON THE face of it, all sides are happy: the relatives of the 1988 Pan Am 103 crash victims, because the impending trial is what they had fought for all along; Britain and America, because Libya has finally agreed to hand over the suspects; and not least the Libyans, because the long nightmare that began in 1992 is about to end. But couldn't the different parties have reached the same understanding a long time ago? In the end, Libya's defence of its two citizens in the face of adversity has been vindicated by the international community's decision to hold the trial in a neutral country.Khaleej Times, UAETHE TRIAL itself is unlikely to be sensational, but will feature a wealth of technical detail and evidence which will tax the understanding of the three judges who will hear the case without a jury. The presentation of the case by prosecutors will also be far from easy.

As Professor Robert Black has already reminded us, many of the most important witness statements were gathered a decade ago, and there is no guarantee that these witnesses will be traceable, even alive, today. Yet the trial will go ahead, and for anyone with a belief in the primacy of justice, that will suffice for now.Daily Herald, ScotlandTHE WORLD is being asked to believe that Abdel al-Megrahi and Al-Aman Khalifa Fahima were acting on their own. This is pretty hard to believe in a government like Libya's, where all authority flows from the leader downward. Is it believable that Khadafi, chafing under the sanctions, is throwing two underlings to the wolves? It's all too believable, given his well-known mercurial nature.Boston Herald. WHEN I think of all those hot afternoons endured at defence conferences entitled "Whither Nato?", and the long speeches on "The Alliance and Its Options for the 21st Century" - what a waste of time it all was. The debates inevitably turned on the impact of the Eastern European enlargement of Nato on Russia, about which we would argue incessantly.