The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 307

liTI INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY JUNE 20 2003 wwwheraldcom The Miami Herald JOHN KNIGHT (1894-1981) JAMES KNIGHT (1909-1991) ALBERTO IBARGUEN PUBLISHER I TOM FIEDLER EXECUTIVE EDITOR JOE OGLESBY EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR I MARK SEIBEL MANAGING EDITOR From China with love BY MARY McCARTY The peace process died in Israel JERUSALEM When I want to get a handle on how Israelis are thinking I head for the Mahane Yehuda market in downtown Jerusalem The open-air stalls are manned mostly by Jews whose families emigrated from Arab countries who tend to vote for right-wing or religious parties and have the reputation of being anti-Arab Mahane Yehuda has been the target of several bomb attacks and a Palestinian terrorist blew up a bus near the market last week I went to the market expecting to hear rants against the latest bomb outrage and total skepticism against any return to a peace process Recent violence by Palestinians and Israelis against each other has seemed to make a mockery of a new peace plan endorsed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders and President Bush less than two weeks ago Yet what I heard in Mahane Yehuda confounds the stereotypes and shows why the peace process yet died Most of the dozen merchants I met support Prime Minister Ariel tough stance toward the Palestinians and distrust Palestinian intentions Yet two-thirds of the people in my unscientific survey were still willing to give back much or all the West Bank and Gaza for real peace Typical was Avner Hooja 46 the West Bank and Gaza for peace But these pragmatic Israelis believe peace is possible because they trust Palestinian intentions The Palestinian refusal to close a deal with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak who once offered to return nearly all the West Bank and Gaza has soured them on Palestinian leaders Like spice-dealer Paz they want guarantees that peace would be reaL Such guarantees can come only from the United States and the Europeans Peace may require a proposal like that of Republican Sen John Warner of Virginia who wrote to President Bush last week He suggested that NATO troops be dispatched to the West Bank to help implement a peace plan I have found Mahane Yehuda to be a bellwether of Israeli opinion This message: The people are willing but they are scared and their own leaders reassure them Only one leader can do that His name is George Bush wwwphlllycom But an astonishing poll in Israel's largest newspaper last Friday showed that 67 percent of Israelis oppose such "targeted even as a majority of 54 percent labels leadership Gidon Paz squeezing fresh juice from oranges in his tiny shop cheered on attacks on Hamas leaders long as they try to kill us we should kill he insisted Then he added that for peace I would give back all the territories and dismantle all the What would constitute real peace? from the Americans and Europeans of our security and that they would immediately intervene for any small terror Paz replied And that caveat summed up my visit to Mahane Yehuda Right-wing merchants here are open to a two-state solution which indicates that Sharon has more political leeway for negotiations than many outsiders believe if he wants to use it These merchants are willing to go far beyond what Sharon is proposing Polls consistently show that a majority of Israelis would give back most of Capital punishment in the age of DNA exonerations They were in the orphanage and they are sisters still Not biological sisters of course They started life as orphans in the same city in southeastern China My daughter Ni-Ni was 10 days old when found at the gates of the Guilin Social Welfare Institute The other girls had similar histories They slept in six neat rows of cribs in the same airy sun-lit nursery Their parents hailed from different regions of the United States and had never met before converging at Airport We referred to each other as our But we became so much more sharing two weeks of non-stop togetherness in November in China As one of the mothers Robin Williams of Sedalia Mo put it of the things I treasure most from our trip are the friendships with the other families I believe we owe it to the girls to keep in touch as much as possible After all the girls were sisters in the orphanage and they are each liidc to Recently we had a joyous reunion with two of the other mothers and daughters Susan Semb of San Diego invited us to her home in Richmond Ind where she was visiting Lisa DeLong made the trip from Indianapolis It felt so natural to be together as if known each other all our lives "They have I exclaimed at my first sight of Evie DeLong and Katie Semb whose parents have taken to calling by her Chinese name Ping Evie was nearly bald when we saw her last head had been shaved for lice They had learned to walk and had made the quantum leap from baby to toddler Ni-Ni who was 14 months when she joined our family had changed the least She is learning simple sentences the vast majority of which begin with Did the girls have any memory of each other or of us? Impossible to tell The salient point that they remember but that we remember and honor where our daughters came from We think about their mothers a lot was five weeks old when she was Lisa said thought about that when Evie had been with me for five weeks and I imagine giving her They say a prayer for birth mother every night We compared notes about the four other little girls in our group who are by all reports flourishing We hatched a plan for a group reunion in Indianapolis next year These seven little girls are growing up as American kids They will have fewer tangible memories of their birth place and the stunningly beautiful mountains of Guilin than their American-bom parents So why make all this effort to get them together to relive a past they will never remember? Because they started life as sisters And that's one link impossible to break mmccartycoxohloconi Cox News Service represented in the political process Many states do restore voting rights to ex-felons after they leave prison But once you make it out Juneteenth all over again Technically you may have regained voting rights but no one tells you This lack of notification puts thousands of Americans in the same position as the slaves of Texas: On paper they have rights but if no one tells them they can exercise those rights they remain second-class citizens On this Juneteenth 465 millions Americans can't vote because of laws that have explicitly racist history It's time that felony disenfranchisement laws go the way of poll taxes and literacy tests so that next Juneteenth we can celebrate another victory on the road to democracy racial equality and true emancipation Joseph "Jan" Hayden is lead plaintiff In Hayden PafaJd a lawsuit challenging felon-dlsertfranchlsement statutes in New York He works for Demos a non-partisan policy organisation The Philadelphia Inquirer many executions as he did as governor of Texas and with as little doubt about guilt and as much faith in his own righteousness DNA testing proves as Cuomo has long maintained that capital punishment is nothing less than willingness to take innocent Any politician knows that or ought to About B0 former prisoners many of them once on death row have been freed by DNA testing Some confessed Some were fingered by witnesses None of them committed the crime for which they were convicted I asked Cuomo if he felt he had saved lives He demurred But the fact remains that he set a standard for political courage that the vast majority of American politicians cannot even begin to meet Some of them of course genuinely favor capital punishment I am convinced of sincerity for instance But when faced with the choice they would prefer the death of the occasional innocent person than that of their own careers They are not soft on crime They are hard in the heart Washington Post Writers Group whose parents emigrated from Iraqi Kurdistan and who was expertly cleaning glistening salmon bouri mullet and mako shark always vote Likud he said "but I want peace and I am not against negotiations started OK but as far as I can see there is no cure for terror As far as concerned they can have an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza if they stop the terror Fayez Burr a spice dealer from an old Jerusalem family scooped green cumin and yellow saffron into packets as he complained that Mahane Yehuda had become an armed camp" In the last two years the entrances to its alleyways have been sealed off by fences with guards at the gates who check all bags and purses Burr too was willing to give back the West Bank and Gaza for "true He was the only one of my sample who thought last assassination attempts against Hamas leaders were a mistake because do then do something and nothing changes" hours) one of them confessed He said that he and two other men had picked up Fusco at a roller rink and driven her to a nearby cemetery There two raped her and a third the one who confessed strangled her They then dumped the body They were sentenced to more than 30 years in jaiL What followed has become depressingly familiar The confession was recanted The three men insisted on their innocence and spurned plea bargains After their convictions their case was joined by sympathetic lawyers and organizations Altogether four DNA tests were conducted on semen found in the dead woman The last conducted about two years ago and using more advanced techniques eliminated all three men None of them had raped Fusco This was precisely the sort of crime that in another state at another time might have resulted in the death penalty the rape and murder of a young woman But Cuomo who was New York governor at the time opposed capital punishment Seven times during his three terms he vetoed death penalty bills He was pilloried can Americans come true While this 138-year-old tale might at first seem like ancient history echoes of the Juneteenth story resonate in the struggles people of color face today Getting rights on paper Juneteenth reminds us is a far cry from getting them in practice That's what makes Juneteenth such a bittersweet holiday It honors a great advance for African Americans gaining the rights of citizenship especially the right to vote Yet it also marks the beginning of an era in which whites imposed countless discriminatory laws like poll taxes literacy tests and grandfather clauses meant to keep blacks powerless Many of these overtly discriminatory state laws have been called out as racist and unconstitutional and have been wiped from the books However there is at least one notable exception: felony-disenfranchisement laws Felony-disenfranchisement laws are state rules that strip voting rights from citizens convicted of certain CERNOBBIO Italy Here on the shores of Lake Como Mario Cuomo is attending an international conference I sought out Cuomo because of something that just happened back in his home state Three men were freed on bond after serving 18 years in jail for a rape and murder they probably did not commit Cuomo long opposed the death penalty The New York case is an example of why The crime back in 1984 was just the sort that often draws the death penalty A 16-year-old girl Theresa Fusco was found raped and murdered The previous year another girl Kelly Morrissey 15 had disappeared while heading for a video-game parlor She had been friend Some months later a third young woman Jacqueline Martarella 19 disappeared in the same Long Island area The police arrested three men and after a lengthy interrogation (18 for that and it was used against him by George Pataki in his 1994 winning campaign hard to say that he lost on account of it and Cuomo does not claim as much but it helped his adversaries paint him as a hopeless liberal soft on crime and all of that Here in Europe the death penalty has been almost repealed There are many explanations for that including that in recent history it has been abused for political reasons Nazis communists etc When it was eliminated it still was supported by majorities in most countries but that is not the case today The difference between America and Europe is that politicians did what they are supposed to do: lead In America politicians have followed the polls the money the talk-show bom-basters anything but their own conscience Cuomo understands He was a politician himself Still he points out that political conservatives who think government can do anything right trust it to take a life Only when it comes to capital punishment does the system operate perfectly Such is the thinking of George Bush himself No one has presided over as crimes If you commit a crime these laws say you lose the vote Without federal guidelines for them their harshness varies by state The most extreme states such as Florida Alabama Mississippi Kentucky and Virginia bar ex-felons from voting for life Is it coincidence that the harshest disenfranchisement laws are mostly in former slave states? Not in the slightest Like poll taxes and literacy tests the ostensibly race-neutral disenfranchisement laws were created to keep blacks from voting In 1896 for example Mississippi lawmakers set only a narrow range of offenses bribery burglary theft arson perjury forgery embezzlement bigamy and money or goods under false made you lose the vote Why not murder or rape? Because ex-slaves were far more likely to commit petty property crimes than serious offenses Southern lawmakers were not shy about their intentions End legacy of bias in law and practice Thursday many African Americans celebrated Juneteenth the bittersweet anniversary of June 19 1865 when the last remaining slaves were freed Some people assume that slavery in America dent Lincoln Issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 But Lincoln lacked the power to enforce his edict in the Confederate-controlled South and slave owners In remote states like Texas continued to exploit their human chatteL For two and a half years no one told the slaves that they were no longer a white property Only when a regiment of Union soldiers arrived In Texas with news of demise and the power to back It up did promise to Afri said one delegate to the Virginia convention of 1906 eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State In less than five The laws worked One Alabama historian found that by 1903 the laws had excluded nearly 10 times as many blacks as whites from voting Sound familiar? Today on policies especially Draconian drug laws disproportionately target people of color Only 14 percent of illegal-drug users are black but 74 percent of those sentenced for drug possession are black One in three black men will be jailed at some point This translates directly Into loss of political power Blacks are denied the vote because of criminal records five times more often than whites Fully percent of African-American men are permanently disenfranchised and many more have lost rights temporarily Latinos also are affected given that 16 percent of Latino men enter prison in their lifetime This leaves communities of color vastly under.