In the minds of some RUF the ceasefire does not apply to Guinea.”He said it was crucial to tackle the Sierra Leone conflict as part of a regional phenomenon. But he added that the British military operation does not extend to Guinea, which has some United States support.It is accepted that the main body of the RUF is supported by the Liberian president, Charles Taylor. While refusing to speculate that President Taylor’s gameplan is to move the RUF’s focus to Guinea, Brig Richards admitted that Britain was concerned about the activity in Guinea.. More Than 120 years after Australia’s most infamous folk hero, Ned Kelly, was felled by a hail of police bullets, the country is seized by a row that is as divisive as any the legendary outlaw and bushranger has yet provoked. More Than 120 years after Australia’s most infamous folk hero, Ned Kelly, was felled by a hail of police bullets, the country is seized by a row that is as divisive as any the legendary outlaw and bushranger has yet provoked.
Some Australians eulogise Kelly as a charismatic Robin Hood figure who championed the downtrodden underclass in a harsh colonial society; others dismiss him as a thug and common criminal. He and his gang did, it is true, steal horses, rob banks and kill three police troopers during two years on the run in rural Victoria.Now Peter Carey, one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, has added fuel to the debate with a portrait of Kelly in his latest novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, that is downright sympathetic.The book, just published in Australia and available in Britain in January, re-creates the tale of the Irish-Australian bandit who captured the public imagination during his lifetime and has since become the nation’s most potent and subversive icon.

Written entirely in Kelly’s voice, the lyrical, largely unpunctuated narrative is presented as a series of letters addressed to an unborn fictitious daughter whom he will never see.While the work has received widespread critical acclaim, Carey has been lambasted for glamorising a man of ambiguous morals and – despite the book’s ironic title – for tinkering with history.Ned Kelly clearly still makes some people froth at the mouth. Peter Ryan, the English-born Police Commissioner of New South Wales, has described the national fixation with Kelly as symptomatic of “the black heart of nothingness that sits at the heart of the Australian character”.One columnist with The Australian newspaper, Frank Devine, claimed that Kelly would have gone on to become “the Pol Pot of north-east Victoria”. He poured scorn on Carey and the late artist Sidney Nolan, who produced 27 paintings of Kelly in the late 1940s, that awoke Carey’s interest in the outlaw.In a reference to their Irish ancestry, Mr Devine wrote: “It was a continuing shock to watch somebody with a name like Nolan more or less validating Nedophilia with a series of paintings of the wretched horse thief and cop killer… Now a chap with a name like Carey has taken Nedophilia a step further with a regrettably scintillating novel.”In the Sydney Morning Herald, meanwhile, Andrew Riemer called the novel “an elaborate essay in revisionism” and observed that Carey “does not seem in the least troubled by our tendency to invest so much emotional and ideological capital in a horse thief and murderer”.The Booker Prize-winning author, who lives in New York, shrugged off the criticism yesterday as “a storm in a polystyrene cup”. Carey told the Independent on Sunday: “Just as you can always find someone to take a loud, indignant public position against abortion or Asian immigration, you can always find someone to rant about Kelly in this way.”As for the people, I do believe the majority take the line offered by the old song: ‘those that blame him are but few’.”The controversy reflects the fierce passions that Kelly still evokes and the place he occupies at the heart of Australian culture and mythology.Wanted for horse stealing, he and his younger brother, Dan, vanished into the bush in 1878. Their father, a former Irish convict, had died young, and their mother was wrongly imprisoned. Joined by two friends and aided by numerous supporters in the region, they evaded the authorities for two years.

The gang robbed banks, tearing up mortgage papers and distributing money to impoverished families, and declared an independent Republic of North-East Victoria. The three troopers were shot dead after they ambushed the quartet at Stringybark Creek.Kelly was captured after a final showdown with police in the township of Glenrowan. He was hanged in Melbourne jail in 1880, just before his 26th birthday.Over the decades, his exploits have been celebrated in songs, poems, plays and novels Mick Jagger starred in a much-derided film in 1970. Kelly has been found not guilty or to have been unfairly tried in periodically-staged retrials; pieces of the suit of armour that he wore at Glenrowan are exhibited in museums around Melbourne.He resonates, it appears, in every corner of Australian society; bikers sport tattoos of Kelly on their hairy torsoes, while the Yarralin Aborigines of the Northern Territory have incorporated him into their Dreamtime stories.