News Herald from Port Clinton, Ohio • 4

OPINION THE FIRST AMENDMENT Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. The News Herald. Port Clinton, Ohio Friday. October 14. 1994 A4 Rwandan genocide shows life losing value President Clinton showing sound leadership Commentary John Omicinski Other Voices Wouldn't it be funny if events abroad, instead of an improving economy at home, saved the Clinton presidency? It could happen.

ernment that might bring peace to Rwanda. Directors of the genocide convinced followers that the machete and the AK47 would produce a final solution they could not hope for at the ballot box. "The killings were neither random nor spontaneous," reports British journalist Robert Block in the New York Review of Books. "Nor were most of the victims killed as a result of the country's civil war. "The truth is that between 500,000 and one million people, mostly Tutsis, were hacked to death, burned alive, or shot by their friends and neighbors throughout the country as part of a sinister political operation that had been intricately planned for years." Block's analysis of the Rwanda genocide concludes that the main killers were youthful members of a militia called Interahamwe trained and indoctrinated by the Hutu-dominated Rwanda government.

"The militias," he writes, "were the instruments of Hutu extremism, but what inspired them, what set off the genocide, was a dangerous racial ideology systematically spread by the Habyarimana government. Its main tenets were that Hutus were destined to rule Rwanda, that Tutsis were murderous outsiders bent on the destruction of the Hutus, and that any Hutu that did not share their view was a traitor "Using fragmentation grenades, machetes, truncheons, and wooden boards with nails sticking out of them, Rwandan extremists matched-the efficiency of the Nazi's industrialized method of genocide." 1 And compared with the Nazis', the-Rwandan genocide was carried out with lightning speed. The conflict isn't over. Unless puit ished, it will burst again into flame. The performance of United Nationp and U.S.

diplomats so far in the wake of Rwanda genocide has been shameful. The Rwandan cycle of violence and fear can be broken if the leaders of the mass killing are punished. Genocide in that tiny, benighted country cannot go unchallenged. If that happens, then the big countries who failed to stop the Bosnia slaughter will have failed a second time. When that happens, Washington will have forfeited any claim to moral -leadership, and life in the world is likely to get nastier, more brutish, and for many, much shorter.

John Omicinski writes for Gannett News Service, 1000 Wilson Arlington, Va. 22229-0001. WASHINGTON Something awful happened in the tiny African country of Rwanda, and in its wake, something awful is happening to the world community. Life is losing its value on mankind's philosophical stock market. Events in Bosnia, Cairo, Ethiopia, Somalia, China, India, Mozambique, Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union and our own United States have been advertising that fact for years.

Rwanda marks a modern milestone in this sinister trend. Unless the big countries (no longer can they be called "great change their blase attitude toward the Rwandan genocide, people responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths are going to get away with it. A city that not so long ago proudly opened a Holocaust Museum is allowing another holocaust to go unpunished. If that happens, life on this globe will get a little bit cheaper, a little bit easier to snuff out. It will become a little bit safer for everyone to carry out mass killing.

And mankind will be diminished a little bit more. The 1994 Rwandan genocide cannot be explained away as an aberration. Doing that would allow us all to turn the page or head out to the mall. To do that would set us all a step backward toward the caves. Neither can Rwanda be tossed aside, with the flick of a cocktail napkin, as an historical tragedy that was just waiting to happen in the volatile Hutu-Tutsi tribal mix.

That's what they said about the Serbs and Muslims and Croats in Yugoslavia. It wasn't true there, either. Someone has to start genocides. Someone has to toss the match into the gasoline and keep the firefighters away while it burns. The Rwandan killings started April 6 after a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Maj.

Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, was blasted from the sky near Kigali. The opening phase of the genocide was planned down to the last detail. Executioners had lists of Tutsis or Hutus sympathetic to a coalition gov Few Americans give Mr. Clinton much credit for a growing economy, a falling jobless rate and a dinunishing federal deficit.

And maybe they shouldn't. Maybe we're seeing the business cycle at work (though everyone would be blaming him if the cycle were in its down phase). But surely the president deserves credit for showing sound leadership lately in dealing with foreign crises. Consider Haiti. His decision to send U.S.

troops there was criticized both by isolationist conservatives, and by liberal purists, for whom the use of U.S. military force in almost any situation is sinful. Yet the intervention so far is achieving what Clinton set out to achieve and with niinimal bloodshed. The two top military commanders resigned and soon will leave the country. The Port-au-Prince police chief is gone.

Haiti's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, returns Saturday. Ross Perot accuses Clinton of manufacturing crises in Haiti and now Iraq to rally voters to the Democrats. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party may or may not benefit politically from these crises. But he certainly didn't create them. They were the work of Gen.

Cedras and Saddam Hussein. As for Ollie North's talk about America's I I mmm MUJg wr tfSoNESCAWAUFTER I 1 wrawa. REPUBLICANS. V- rp WINS I Commentary Race relations still a baffling matter to most By DEBORAH MATH IS Tribune Media Services WASHINGTON In the sticky matter of understanding race relations, there are those who get it, IftSWH Family values ploy of politicians "hollow" military, just look at the buildup in the Persian Gulf. Those forces look pretty solid and, if you're an Iraqi military commander, pretty frightening.

The Louisville Courier-Journal Republicans killed Superfund revision Add Superfund revisions to the shameful record Republicans have this year in killing good legislation. The bill represented a carefully crafted compromise that eventually won the support of both industry and environmentalists. What's more, it would have simplified Super-fund settlements, moving the action and money out of the courtrooms and back to cleanup where it belongs. When Republicans started demanding votes on amendments intended to destroy the compromise, the Democratic leadership pulled the bill. The Republicans biggest objection? The retroactive liability portion of the bill, the very heart of why Superfund was created in the first place.

It held polluters responsible for dumping hazardous wastes before the bill was created in 1980. Republicans have a lot to answer for with voters on this model legislation. Who's going to pay for cleaning up those sites? How much more will it cost without this legislation? The compromise bill by the Democrats would have cut costs by at least one-fourth. Republicans often have branded Democrats and this administration, in particular, as extreme tree-hueeers. more concerned Rossie's Scene Dave Rossie those who are trying to get it, those who don't get it, and those who caift.

The first three categories hold graduated degrees of hope that Rodney King's simple profundity "Can't we all just get along?" will not be forever adrift as a rhetorical question but will ultimately be stilled by a substantitive, quantitative "yes." (Don't sniff. That hope is not to be snubbed; it's essential in these days when sides are being chosen again.) Take the man who called in to a radio talk show. He described himself as an octogenarian who, many years ago, lived near the spot where Washington's white world stopped and turned the corner into blackland. With a tinge of ruefulness, he recalled how, back then, segregation had the day, meaning whites stayed out of black neighborhoods and establishments by choice, while blacks stayed out of white ones. BUT and the conjunction was foreboding the blacks and the whites got along beautifully, he said.

Granted, freedom was an exclusive property in those days, but another one we were always so polite to one another, saying, 'Hello, George, how are you this morning? and tipping our hats. In the old man's view, things were better then. Now, he says, he's confused about all the to-do between the races and wants to know, is desperate to know Can't we all just get along? He doesn't get it, but I sensed that he wants to. Is trying to. There, in that want and desire, lies the hope.

Which is more than poor James Philip of Illinois has to offer. He doesn't just not get it; he, quite possibly, can't. Philip asserted that "some of them do not have the work ethics that we have" "them" being black people. Furthermore, he claimed, black people cover for one another's tran-gressions. His stupidity not yet spent, he explained: "I'm not politically correct.

I don't try to be." By the way, did I say that Philip is running for re-election to the Illinois State Senate, where he is its president; a holder of the public trust; a policy-maker whose proposals and votes affect the "them" he holds in such low esteem? I doubt he sees this as a problem. Write Deborah Mathis, Tribune Media Services, 435 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 1500, Chicago, III. 60611: cuss a plan code named Gemstone. The plan called for, among other things, electronic surveillance of the Democratic National Convention that summer in Miami; break-ins to gather Democratic campaign documents; the organization of kidnapping teams to grab radical leaders and take them to Mexico; formation of mugging squads to beat up anti-Nixon and anti-war demonstrators; the hiring of prostitutes to lure Democatic politicians aboard a yacht equipped with video cameras to record their pecadillos, and sabotaging of the air conditioning in the hall where the Democrats were to convene.

The author of Gemstone: G. Gordon Liddy. This is the same G. Gordon Liddy who masterminded and botched the Watergate burglary and the burglary of Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist's office. The same Gordon Liddy who volunteered to assassinate columnist Jack Anderson, whose access to White House secrets was driving Nixon to distraction.

The same G. Gordon Liddy who went to prison for his crimes. Those are values? As for Limbaugh, he is simply a chronic and documented liar, which makes him no worse than most politicians. But an exemplar of values? Give me a break. Wasn't Charles Manson a family man? Dave Rossie writes for the Bing-hamton (N.Y.), Press and How you can tell it's election time: Lawn placards.

Bumper stickers. Newspaper and television ads. Campaign speeches. Photographs of men kissing babies and hugging children they never have seen before and, with any kind of luck, will never see again. But the surest sign of all? The words "family values." Family values are the forest tent caterpillars of the American language.

Every couple of years they emerge from the mouths of pious politicians to nibble at our sensibilities. To say that they are invoked most frequently by the worst humbugs among us, is to belabor the obvious. The term is invaluable, not because it has any real meaning, but precisely because it doesn't. It is the political equivalent of tofu, a politician can emulate Humpty Dumpty and make it mean whatever he or she wants it to mean. And it sure beats grappling with issues.

If you doubt it, consider some of the loudest proponents of family values. Assuming their preaching and practicing are in synch, may we assume that: Bigotry is a Robertson and Falwell family value? Racism is a Helms family value? Lying is a Limbaugh family value? Trashing the Constitution, lying to Congress and accepting illegal gifts are North family values? Burglary is a Liddy family value? In fact, family values is a euphemism, nothing more. The values, often as not, are nothing more than personal biases. Family is tacked on because it is one of those politically unassailable code words, such as mother, flag, God and country. Recently I received a letter from a reader who took me to task for my lack of reverence for his two heroes: Rush Limbaugh and G.

Gordon Liddy. If the man had been honest enough to say that he reveres those two radio babblers because their far right points of view mesh with his own, I would have respected him for it. Live and let live, I always say. Well, almost always. But he didn't.

He admires Limbaugh and Liddy, the man wrote, because he shares their values. Indeed. Let us examine the values of one of those men my pen pal admires. In March of 1972, a group of then President Nixon's aides and advisors gathered in the White House to dis about owls and jobs. Yet, on every piece of environmental legislation the adniinistra-tion has actively sought consensus first.

This administration realized that prolonged fighting between industry and environmentalists was leading nowhere. Superfund provided the most obvious example. Two successive Republican aciministrations virtually ignored Superfund. This administration tried to craft a bill that has support from industry and environmentalists and that would put Superfund to work as it was intended. The Tennessean, Nashville, on the Superfund YOUR OPINIONS We want to hear from you.

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