The Evening Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • 7

A 7 FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 1983 Other Voices Tlie Evening Sun Central America may be the 'Afghanistan' of the U.S. What the. U.S. confronts is seen as more akin to the Soviets' experience than to Vietnam He fights apartheid U.S. moves to exile S.

African poet the intervention and covert Central Intelligence Agency assistance to the rebels as justification for their continued presence. All this has lessons for the United States. In El Salvador, too, the insurgency won't go away. Honduras is being militarily bolstered as Pakistan was after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The Two CASES, two human situations: consider what they say about official United States attitudes toward people Andrei Berezhkov, the 16-year-old son of a Soviet diplomat in Washington, was the subject of intense U.S.

concern when a letter with his name said he wanted to stay in this country. He was not a noted Anthnnv opponent oi political tyranny. He had few ties to America; international law made Lewis No ANALOGIES are exact, but the Soviet Union's problems in Afghanistan may provide a more instructive parallel than Vietnam to United States policy in Central America. The Afghan revolution of April 1978 succeeded because the Marxist-inclined factions were able to exploit increasing disaffection with so cial and economic The Kremlin did not trig- Mohta ger the revolution ivienta but 0 course wel. corned the gratuitous extension of "socialism." Yet before long, the ideological militancy of President Hafizullah Amin led to the disintegration of the revolutionary coalition, as both the nationalists and the conservative tribes and mullahs who originally supported it became alienated from the new government.

When widespread insurgency showed that the country was turning hostile to the Soviet Union, the Russians tried to eliminate Amin. The attempt misfired, however, and then, in nervous impetuosity, the Kremlin launched the ill-fated military intervention. Today, even though the government installed by the Russians has retracted many socialist measures, it has not gained domestic legitimacy. The presence of "foreign infidels" has turned the insurgency into a holy crusade. Thus, what was a local irritant has become a running sore and an international embarrassment.

The Soviet Union will not be defeated by the Afghan rebels, but the intervention has been a strategic and political disaster. It led to the shelving of the second strategic arms limitations accord, creation of the United States Rapid Deployment Force and an increased American presence in the Indian Ocean, and constituted a near-fatal blow to detente. Moreover, it shattered the claims of communism as a principal supporter of peace, anti-imperialism and nonalign-ment. It revived the arms race in the subcontinent and invited overwhelming condemnation from the Islamic community and the United Nations. Clearly, too, Afghanistan has become a quagmire for the Russians, who now use Western alarm at Contras the Nicaraguan counter revolutionaries are being trained and armed as the Afghan rebels and refugees were.

Cuban support to the Sandinista government and Salvadoran guerrillas is as marginal as the outside backing for the Afghan rebels. A naval quarantine not frighten the Sandinistas into abdication but would probably strengthen their resolve and internationalize the conflict. Of course, the parallel problems of the two may prove diplomatically convenient. Members of the United Nations Security Council will undoubtedly accuse the United States of interference against sovereign Nicaragua, just as the United States went to the Security Council to condemn the Kremlin's actions in Afghanistan. And the United States will probably draw on the same defense that the Soviet Union used.

Privately, both may be thankful for the other's veto and will persist with old policies, ignoring international opinion. In a better world, both superpowers could profit from studying the other's experience. They might find themselves in agreement that defiant nationalism lis stronger than military power used to coerce small nations. They might even acknowledge to each other that all problems are not wholly or largely due to the other's conspiratorial malevolence. They could both disengage with dignity by letting regional powers who have vital interests in peace and stability in their areas "circle the wagons" against all political and military interference.

This is the role that the Contadora countries Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama seek to play in Central America and the countries surrounding Afghanistan could work out for South and Southwest Asia. In both Afghanistan and Central America, the superpowers have fueled, not smothered, next-door nationalism. They would risk much less if they learned to live with it. J. S.

Mehta was India's Foreign Secretary from 1976 to 1979, and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in Washington, in 1981-82. He is professor for world peace at the University of Texas, in Austin. any U.S. intervention difficult. But two assistant secretaries of state involved themselves in his case before finding, as they did, that he was leaving voluntarily.

Dennis Brutus is an African poet renowned as a campaigner against South African racism and a refugee from South African justice. He has lived in the United States for 12 years and is a tenured professor at Northwestern University. But the Reagan administration is trying to expel him. Its lawyers have scoffed at fears for his safety if he is sent near South Africa. They have offered a judge secret evidence to support their argument that he does not deserve asylum.

Brutus has a distinction that makes him a hated symbol to the white rulers of South Africa, and a heroic one to the critics of their regime: He has actually succeeded in bringing about some change in one aspect of apartheid, the official system of racial discrimination. Segregated sport was his target. He was a teacher in Port Elizabeth, South A ftnn irt tit 1 0KAo iTrtiAti tin taat iha 0 Ik tor tmvwr miita, ui uic xvuva ttuu uv vuv charter of the International Olympic Committee and discovered that it called Touching seems to make a difference for exclusion from tne games oi any country tha; discriminated on the grounds of race or religion. He began campaigning in international sports groups to bar South African teams. The results have been startling and .01.

1 xl extremely painiui to sports-ioving oouin 1 1 Ti i. 1 Is isolation a hidden form of child abuse? Ainca. lis lectins nave ueeu n.cyi uut ui the Olympics for years, and out of official international competitions in cricket and rnchv and other eames. And it all was in spired by the efforts of this one man. 1 In an attempt to meet the objections of sports federations and governments abroad, soutn Atrica nas taicen steps to 1 1.

1A i. 1 least at the level of international competition. Observers differ about the extent of the change. Critics call it a facade, not affecting the discrimination tnat runs 1 i J'll Definitions of child abuse and neglect are changing, amid considerable controversy. The issue came to the fore in April and May of this year with the testimony of Dr.

Jim Prescott before U.S. Senate and House Appropriations committees. This was more than an airing of grievances against the National Institute on Child Health and Human Develop-CharleS ment. It happens that Prescott, a former Innoc president of the iniieb Maryland Psycholog- ical Association, was fired earlier this year from his post at the child health institute after an article by him on the topic of child abuse appeared in the controversial magazine, Hustler. Scientific issues of very great importance are involved.

Apparently, these changes in the definitions of child-neglect and child-abuse are coming about as scientific evidence of several kinds is becoming clearer and more interpretable. With primate and with human infants, who are raised in social isolation and who have an insufficient amount of body-to-body contact with others, there may be a permanent change in brain electrical patterns, plus lesions in certain areas of brain tissue, in addition to marked pathology of social behavior. Isolation-reared chimpanzee infants matured into violent, anti-social crea- tnrougn eaucation ana ail oi me in aoutn y-v 1 1 XI i. 1 Xi. i.

i. AIIR.il. unlets digue ilia i uic aiiciui meet international standards has, at a minimum, exposed the cruelties and ab surdities oi tne racial policy. For Dennis Brutus, the result of his campaign was repression: nrst tne om- cial silencing called "Danmng," tnen lm-'prisonment on Robben Island. He was shot in the back while trying to avoid ar-rest in Johannesburg.

After his release from prison in 1965 he was put under house arrest, then given a one-way exit UP ing some deliberate mischief. Other scientists said "impossible" and dismissed the evidence and conclusions as unsound without replicating the studies. The implications of what was being found were far too broad and serious to receive easy acceptance. Says Prescott, we are producing more criminals "by the manner in which we are raising our children than we will be able to house in all the prisons that we can build." For some people, of course, scientists like Prescott and Ainsworth will always to be heretics. They say, "What was good enough for me is good enough for my kid." It is not difficult to see how the inter-generational cycle of abuse and neglect is Isolation-reared chimpanzee infants matured into violent, anti-social creatures now deeply a part of common cultural assumptions, how it perpetuates itself and even deepens.

Some medical people, child-care specialists and juvenile counselors know better, having observed these things close at hand. The generation gap is widening. What is Prescott's solution? "Every pregnancy should be a wanted pregnancy and every child should be a wanted child." Charles Innes, a member of the Maryland Committee for Children is studying for degree in early childhood development. i. EMCEE permit.

He reacnea tne united states in 1971. His problem with American immigra-- tion law is of the kind usually called "technical." He was born in 1924 in what was actually then Rhodesia, though he and ft was taken to neighboring South Africa as an infant and was treated bv its courts as DOWN a subject. While Rhodesia was formally under British control, he traveled with a British passport. When it became inde- pendent Zimbabwe in 1980, he failed to get a Zimbabwe passport soon enough and U.S. authorities cried foul.

A former South African secret agent, Gordon Winter, has said that his government rated Dennis Brutus "one of the 20 most dangerous South African political firniMfl AtiAivaofl T3rnf lie KaIiovoq that tures, who were poor reproducers and, poor parents. In human infancy as well, it has been shown that the needs for tactile stimulation and for affection may be very critical to normal growth and to the attainment of maturity. If child-neglect can produce what is, in effect brain-damage, corresponding to the deep-conditioning of af ectionlessness and sociopathic character-defects, this then is a revolution in our perspectives on child-abuse. Prescott is suggesting that the evidence points in such a direction, to the effect that developmental needs of the newly-born and young child for touching and body contact are indeed far more Critical than had been assumed. How could such a finding cause a revolution? For a first thing, here is a species of child-abuse which leaves no visible evidence, in terms of obvious scars or bruises, overt misdeeds of parent or caretaker.

The scars borne by neglected children are chiefly of an internal and emotional nature, and the damages which they have received due to the indifference of the parents are manifest only later and in the long-run as an impaired ability to form enduring relationships. The neural-anatomical, neuro-physiologi-cal and behavioral evidence of the bad parenting is there. It is relatively subtle, nonetheless, the damage is not less but more serious, insidious on the one hand and on the other, broad in implication. Prescott's is not the only voice raised in alarm, nor by any means the only learned and scientific voice to be speaking of these things. In 1968 and 1971, Dr.

John Bowlby, a British child-development scientist, commissioned by the United Nations, published his series, "Attachment and Loss," which pointed a finger at the sensitivity of the first three years of life. Drawing together the methodologies of ethology, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, he found evidence to indicate how human bonding takes place between infant and mother, when it takes place and what can go wrong. Bowlby's work seemed to confirm Jean Piaget's picture of early childhood development of stage-by-stage unfold-ment Bowlby predicted a correlation between the phases of childhood development types of learning with critical phases of neural-anatomical growth. Dr. Mary D.

Ainsworth later described the bonding process and its aberrations in more detail and made films. The evidence was not well received within the scientific community, however. The idea that infants and young children could be so sensitive and deeply and irreversibly impressionable was not popular with the medical establishment or with the fraternity of persons in child-care prof Child psychiatrists denounced Bowlby and Ainsworth as if they were perpetrat anywhere in Africa, he would be a likely target of South African assassins. Accents onnnciKla fnr roront nnlitiral miirriprs in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and its sol- tion: "How did this all come about?" Waesche then capsulizes one of the reasons: the recognition by the city's business community back in the 1950s that the downtown core was dying and would not survive without major surgery. The result was the tearing down of 33 acres to produce Charles Center.

And it was the momentum and the success of Charles Center that exploded into the miracle of the Inner Harbor. He also speculates on the growth of service industries with their legions of young professionals as a possible basis for the economic success of downtown attractions. But most important, Waesche recognizes the port of Baltimore as the underpinning of its economy and describes its features as viewed from a boat ride down the Patapsco. All in all, from a Baltimorean's point of view, this article is no less complimentary than its predecessors, but it teaches the prospective visitor a great deal more. Last week the food section of the Washington Post devoted almost its entire front page and many columns inside to four articles on the culinary delights of Baltimore.

The lead story, on Lexington Market was a colorful account of the market's origins and an honest appraisal of what it is and isn't isn't Disney Haussner's, the famous Highlandtown institution, rated a story, as did Bertha's (of the mussels). The fourth article recounted a tour of some of Baltimore's food-producing industries, including McCormicks, Tulkoff's horseradish factory, the Eagle Coffee Co. and Moore's Edgemonte Candies. 1 1. nnlr hi1aI AAlinNAe On the facts, it is a compelling case for asylum.

But in a hearing that began 1 A. iU twtA lit VAciima ctiAi4ln with Baltimore THE DAZZLING ARTICLES on the new Baltimore that have appeared with such frequency in national and international publications are, of course, welcomed and enjoyed by Baltimoreans. The fact is, however, that many of them are the result of a one-shot visit by someone who has never seen the city before. This doesn't necessarily detract from their accuracy the Inner Harbor is, accurately, quite a spectacle but the articles often lack historical depth and city-wide breadth. That pattern is happily broken by the latest article in Inflight, an airline publication circulated by United Airlines and, with a different title, by other, smaller carriers.

Entitled "Reborn Baltimore," the article is by James F. Waesche, and that is probably what makes it different Waesche was for several years editor of Baltimore magazine, hence knows a great deal more about his city than the usual fly-in experts. This is not to say that Waesche downplays the brilliance of the renaissance, nor does he write of slums and unemployment But he does have historical perspective and knowledge of what makes the city tick. While citing the usual attractions with the usual enthusiasm, he asks the ques 5" '9 83 1UU I1IVII Mr the Reagan administration has opposed American refuee for Dennis Brutus. Rally way? PrAnlror tfiA assistant cAprA- Wn C0LT VstlVai'l'l WAV tary of state for African Affairs, said re- "Minhtlina tha 4RP tolavieinn nrotrram: "Mr.

Brutus is being treated like anybody else. We have laws, and they must be applied." But political con- ciiorarinns are not exacuv uuiuiuwu when American officials think about ing someone asylum as the case of An- Ll.nM ettAino Tf tha I TnitoH States does finally expel Dennis Brutus, a ..1. nrill luiliovo that tha reason UVk bvvuiuyi. a tion rule but and successful opposition to apartheid. Is that the message we want to send? "AFTER LAST YEAR LET 5 MOPE THE COLTS NEVER REACH Ml -SEASON FORM.