Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 23

rm fy ri yt't i i i 's'T'rt'" i rn m'T ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Sunday, May 29, 1994 D3 Op ED PAGE Mandela Wields Moral Authority To Intervene in Rwanda By Charles Krauthammer SYNDICATED COLUMNIST ordinated force (see: Somalia). A small mobile U.N. legion would be ready to go anywhere and quickly. But what to do for Rwanda today? The best answer is a regional force drawn from African countries. Three African states Ghana, Senegal and Ethiopia have already volunteered troops for Rwanda peacekeeping.

One wishes, however, that one particular African state the leading African state were on that list too. South Africa is sub-Saharan Africa's regional superpower, an advanced industrialized country with a powerful army and the proven ability to fight far from home. It is doubly blessed by having such an army now commanded by 'the man who carries more moral authority than any national leader on the planet, Nelson Mandela. As the leading Black African state, South Africa should be granted the authority and most urgently encouraged to lead an African response to an African tragedy. Only South Africa has the power and prestige to head a regional intervention into Rwanda.

It would be objected, of course, that the new South Africa, barely weeks old, has other problems. This would be yet another added to a full plate. True. But all countries have problems and Rwanda's neighbors all have full plates. Which is why they turn away and Rwandan genocide goes on unchecked without the most minimal outside effort to do anything beyond evacuating Whites.

Moreover, intervention need not mean active participation in Rwanda's civil war. Entering Kigali with the intention of stopping the war and separating the combatants is too ambitious and difficult an objective. The most urgent need, as the relief agencies on the scene have insisted, is far less dangerous and costly: the establishment of havens for the feeding and protection of those threatened with massacre. The outside world could help by lightening the economic burdens of leadership. South Africa is already reducing military expenditures.

Why does not the world community, through, say, a financial pool established by the G-7 countries, create a fund for those units WASHINGTON For all of the hyperbolic use of such terms as genocide and holocaust to describe Bosnia the worst violence on earth today is occurring in Rwanda. Unlike Bosnia, where the combatants are fighting over 4 or 6 or 9 percent more territory, in Rwanda the issue is not territory but existence. This is a tribal war of extermination, of mass murder at a Hit-lerian rate. Between 200,000 and 400,000 have been massacred in seven weeks as many as have died in all two years of the Bosnian civil war. Yet Bosnia has a vocal, articulate constituency.

Rwanda has none. Bosnians are White, European, familiar. Rwandans are Black, African, foreign. For Western intellectuals, Sarajevo evokes Spanish, Civil War romance. Kigali evokes nothing more than Heart of Darkness nihilism.

It is a curious humanitarianism, however, that advocates humanitarian intervention on grounds of familiarity, race and romance. What counts is the scale of the violence and the suffering. Rwanda is the one unequivocal case of genocide occurring in the world today and genocide demands intervention. But by whom? The best answec, but unfortunately of use only to future Rwandas, would be a small U.N. army, as first proposed by U.N.

Secretary-General Trygve Lie in 1948. The fact is that where individual Great Powers have no interests, they will in the end not intervene. It is the godforsaken places that need a U.N. army made up not of units cobbled together from existing national armies but of individuals enlisting under the U.N. flag in a U.N.

uniform. Such an intercession force could be rapidly deployed to danger zones on order of the Security Council. No need with each crisis to canvass for a new set of volunteers. No need to patch together Malaysian and Moroccan, Pakistani and Italian units into some rickety unco South Africa was given trusteeship over the former German colony of Southwest Africa (today Namibia). Why not grant the majority Black government of South Africa trusteeship over some of the wreckages of the post-colonial era? If South Africa declines to lead in Rwanda, America should step in as the last resort.

But this time we do it right: in and out in 90 days. No nation-building fantasies, just rescue and protection. Create the havens, then turn them over to the multi-national African force. Genocide demands no less. of the South African army dedicated to peacekeeping? One could even imagine South Africa being given eventual trusteeship of a place like Rwanda.

At the time of Somalia's crackup, trusteeship was raised as a way of establishing effective and internationally recognized authority over failed states like Somalia. But tinged as it is with the memory of imperialism, trusteeship by the Great Powers would not have a chance of gaining worldwide support. Trusteeship by a country like South Africa would. And there is precedent. After World War the White government of Five Long Minutes in 1945 European Right Wing Cannot Be Pigeonholed wounding many of her crew.

Immediately following this, the fifth suicide plane came in from astern, but was splashed by the fantail guns at some distance. Five minutes of furious action -1-one plane a minute shot down and three men killed and 21 wounded. One of the dead was our ship doctor who was needed for the wounded. The Daly was damaged and forced to retire after she was relieved by another destroyer. The other ship in company with the Daly during the fast and costly attack scored one splash and took a suicide into her bow.

(This ship was later sunk by suicide planes near the end of the Okinawa campaign.) The two destroyers made their way back to the base under their own power. During the entire trip, the sky was lit by tracers, but the Japanese left the "519" alone. JOHNW. DRAKE Los Alamos THIS STORY tells of five minutes aboard a destroyer and was the last minute of life for three of my shipmates near Okinawa. It was the 28th of April, 1945.

My ship the Destroyer Daly, DD519, was on radar picket duty. The weather was perfect with the ever present danger of an air attack. During the late afternoon a large group of enemy planes dropped from the sky in a suicidal attack on the Daly. So began the most exciting five minutes of my life. Our port side guns and main battery splashed two, a minute later the starboard guns splashed another.

The fourth, attacking from starboard, was on fire and vertical. It came through the rigging midship, its wing hit the superstructure and its large bomb blew up on the port side waterline. This plane had a heavy bomb, and when it blew up death and destruction hit the "519." The shrapnel tore and ripped the ship, killing and William Pfaff SYNDICATED COLUMNIST PARIS People talk about a revival of the Right in Europe, but there is no European Right, as such. There are a number of rightist movements more of them than there are European countries and they are individually different. Some are nationalist, some racist, some fascist, some populist, some entirely reasonable.

Some greatly resemble protest movements on the Left. You have to make distinctions to talk sensibly about the rightist movements in West Europe alone, leave aside the East. Italy now has a government resulting from wholesale rejection of the corrupt system previously in power, following an electoral campaign of television-driven populism, northern separatism, and a neo-fascism that prefers to be called post-fascism. France has a structured and clearly defined right-wing movement whose issues are nationalism and hostility to immigration and immigrants. It is stuck at something like 10 percent of the national vote, and has greatly declined since parties of both the Left and moderate Right adopted policies meant to limit immigration.

Germany has an all but completely unstructured racialist "skinhead" Right that is violent, even murderous, together with a legal nationalist Republican Party, which wins some 7 percent to 13 percent of votes locally but has failed completely to take off nationally. It also has lost ground since German courts narrowed the grounds for appeals for political refuge. The German Republican party of Franz Schoenhuber won 7 percent of the last vote for European Parliament deputies an election that is not taken very seriously anywhere in Europe, even in Germany, since the European Parliament has few powers. Schoenhuber himself is thought by 13 percent of Germans in a recent poll to merit an enlarged political role in the future. This, as in France, and in the case of Britain's "skinheads" and National Front, remains within the general pattern of political opinion in these countries over most of the postwar half -century.

Italy is the only place today that has a modern Right, and for that reason is the only seriously interesting case to examine. Raise Rates At Airport's Lot The rightist coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi won an overwhelming victory in Italy's parliamentary election this spring, making the argument, yet to be proven, that as a highly successful business entrepreneur and manager, Berlusconi can create an uncorrupt and dynamic Italy. His allies in the separatist Northern League said that the north of Italy makes the wealth that the politicians of southern Italy dissipate, and that this must end. Berlusconi's other ally, the neo-fascist party called the National Alliance "post-fascists," according to its leader also ran against the corruption in past governments, but its electorate was distinguishable from those of Berlusconi and the Northern League by its interest in authoritarian and nationalist themes. It wants a strong and idealistic Italy.

Berlusconi is considered by fascist voters to be "consumerist," appealing to merely materialistic interests. The Alleanza Nazionale got 13.5 percent of the votes in the legislative election last month. It now is represented in all of the new Berlusconi government's ministries with either the ministry itself (five of them) or a ministerial undersecre-taryship. However, only 1 percent of all Italians consider themselves fascist. The party's leader, Gianfranco Fini, has since Communism's collapse led the National Alliance toward the center and away from the old emphasis on social and economic state corporatism and the implausible militarist and imperialist themes of the Mussolinian past.

The principal risk to Fini is that his party will gradu- GIANFRANCO FINI, leader of lli(y'l MO-fucist urtv ally cease to be distinguishable from Berlusconi's larger movement. There already is a threat of split-off by "true" neo-fascists. The "post-fascists" are free-traders and free-marketers, with a positive view of Europe and less hostility than in the past toward the United States and NATO. Unlike past fascists, they are not overtly anti-parliamentarian; they say they are against corrupt parliamentary politics, not against parliamentary government. That they might become so in the future is unlikely unless the parliament of which they are newly elected members betrays the public's confidence as thoroughly and shamelessly as did the previous parties and politicians in power.

But in that case it would not only be the fascists or post-fascists who will turn against the system. And it would not only be they who profit, or suffer, from the crisis that follows. generate $1.02 million a year fees paid by off-airport parking lot operators. Waid said basing fees on a percentage of gross is standard in the industry. A review of the current rates and charges imposed by the 31 medium-hub airports (the category into which Albuquerque falls) shows only four other airports that charge a percentage of gross fee.

This can hardly be considered an industry standard." In addition, Albuquerque International is the only medium-hub airport to charge a percentage of gross plus trip charges plus dwell charges. We have no objection to the principle underlying users fees of all kinds: i.e., that those who derive the benefits of public facilities have a responsibility, to share in the costs of the facilities. We do, however, object to paying more than our fair share. We seek public support of Councilor Brash-er's bill or any other measure that eliminates the unfair competitive advantage now enjoyed by the city airport parking structure. JOHN LORENTZEN Park Shuttle Albuquerque RE: "COUNCIL MAY Cut Airport Lane Fee" We would like to address three points raised by Assistant Aviation Director Joe Waid.

Waid stated the Commercial Lane Users Fee fulfills a commitment the city made when it sold bonds for the new parking structure, the road system serving the terminal, and landscaping. The bond sale actually calls upon the city to exercise prudent airport management by considering all revenue-generating sources and the city-owned airport parking structure, in particular, to generate revenues to pay back the bonds. This means the city should look first to its own facility and only secondly to private enterprises. Waid said the flat fee measure proposed by Councilor Michael Brasher would result in an annual loss of $300,000 which would have to be offset by another revenue source, and probably the airlines would have to pick it up. Rather than asking the airlines to shoulder yet another financial burden, wouldn't it be much simpler for the city to raise the daily rates at the airport garage? The city-owned parking structure averages about 2,800 vehicles a day.

A one-dollar-a-day increase would Determined Dreamers Awake to Nightmare Jose Armas A HISPANIC PERSPECTIVE Education Is Tool For Success an hour to make such things as license plates and furniture, is getting complaints from "legal" convicts who say that "illegal" inmates are taking their jobs. The "legals" are demanding that the feds stop this invasion. "Illegal" convicts are stealing "legal" convicts' jobs, they assert. Federal prison officials may have to start asking for "papers" of the convicts. We keep forgetting that the United States of America was created by determined dreamers.

Has our American dream dissolved? Have the children of these dreamers forgotten their ancestors' heroic efforts to establish a new life and build a strong America? Or do we care? We are relentless in lashing out at the immigrants we exploit to improve our own quality of life. But, the immigrants still believe in the dream those with papers and those without quietly put up with our inhumanity to pursue that elusive dream. skilled, too competitive. The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group, has just released a study which finds that immigrants Asians, Indians from India and other foreigners, are beating out our native-born professionals by getting top-paying jobs in science, medicine, engineering, math and computer science. And they don't like that.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door. Immigrants are in our prisons today. Metro Court Judge Marie Baca explains that probably 95 percent of undocumented immigrants who come to court will plead guilty rather than get legal advice or attorneys to contest charges. Since they don't understand the system or the language, many end up going to jail. In today's climate of immigrant witch hunts, even our convicts are jumping on the bandwagon.

Our patriotic inmates are demanding a distinction between "legal" and "illegal" convicts. It seems that the federal prison industries program, which employs about 16,000 federal prisoners at $1 Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe FYom the inscription at the foot of the Statue of Liberty The first immigrants to our shores were misfits, outcasts, failures. These failures built a most successful country. But that was Today, we pursue and batter our immigrants. After all, too many are poor and uneducated.

Maybe they do care for our children and wash our clothes, but they work for slave wages, and do our dirtiest jobs. They live in crowded housing or under trees or burrow into the sides of ditches. No matter that they live as paupers to make our lives easier, we still blame them for just about everything. We have forgotten: Everyone, except the Native Americans, were "illegal aliens" here in the beginning. They opened the doors.

We have slowly been closing those doors, because well, because things were different then. accuse immigrants of taking more than they give. Never mind that we know both intuitively and through published facts that that isn't so. An Urban Institute study released last week says that immigrants pay $30 billion more in taxes than they use in public services. We ignore the facts.

Instead, we work hard to pursue them, to drive them further underground, and to make their lives more miserable. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed On the one hand, we don't like these people for being too poor and uneducated. But then we jump to the other side of the fence and complain they're too educated, too punishment. Ideally what it means is that parents get involved in all facets of their children's education (homework, extra curricular activities, etc.) While, for whatever reasons, this may not be possible, if parents would at least learn from Sabino's parents and help their children realize that McDonald's can only employ so many of them, and that their best hope for a successful future can best be guaranteed through education, then we will once again be on the road to educating America's children. SISTO MARTINEZ Mora I WAS happy to read your article about Sabino Molinar (Student a Success in Any Language), not so much because it's another immigrant-done-good story, but because it reinforces a contention of mine about why we are having problems with education in the United States.

Unlike Sabino's parents, many of today's parents no longer stress the importance of education as a tool for success to their children. To these parents, school is just a dumping ground for their children while the parents go to work. When we ask for parental support, some parents automatically interpret this to mean allowing corporal Jose Armas is an Albuquerque free-lance writer. I.