Newspaper Page Text
August 31, 1984/The Maroon Tiger/Page 11
———F eatures
The Children Disappear, Their Govts. Don’t
By Jonathan Power
London - At 9:40 p.m. last Jan.
29, uniformed members of the
security forces of El Salvador
burst into the house of
Marianella Garcia Villas, presi
dent of the country’s human
rights commission. She was not
at home, but staying at her house
were seven friends, including
three of their children, aged 5, 7,
and 13. They were questioned
about the whereabouts of Mrs.
Garcia Villas. They said they
didn’t know.
The soldiers beat and tortured
the adults in front of the
children, who screamed and
implored them to stop. Next, the
children were beaten in front of
their parents. Unable to extract
the information they required,
the soldiers took them all off to
the national police station. The
children were then taken away
with no explanation as to their
whereabouts. Thanks only to
Amnesty International, they
were traced to a juvenile reform
center.
On this coming Dec. 1,
Amnesty will start a worldwide
campaign on "disappearances”
to help the thousands who are
picked up by the police or the
army and are not seen again for
years, and sometimes never.
Amnesty has decided to single
out for special attention the
disappearance and the torture of
children.
This month an unusual group
of elderly Argentine ladies, the
abuelas (grandmothers) de Plaza
de Mayo, arrived in London.
They have been campaigning to
locate 67 missing children in
Argentina. One of the women,
Maria Laura Iribar de Jotar, told
of how last year she finally traced
her two small granddaughters to
a juvenile court in the province
of Buenos Aires just as adoption
formalities were being com
pleted with the family who had
been looking after them.
The grandmother had last seen
the children — Tatiana, then 4,
and Laura, then aged 2months —
together with their parents on
Oct. 17, 1977. That was the day
they had disappeared, victims of
the Argentine armed forces
policy of secret kidnappings.
A week after their parents’
arrest, Tatiana and Laura were
found crying in a street. They
were taken to social workers and
then registered in separate
orphanages as being of un
known name. No effort was
made to locate the family.
In 1978 the children went to
live with a couple that wished to
adopt them. Their grandmother
had been combing court
registers, visiting adoption
centers, keeping her eyes and
ears open. On March 19, 1980,
her persistence was rewarded.
During a routine visit to the
juvenile court of San Martin she
stumbled across them.
This extraordinary group of
Argentine women has many
more stories to tell of this ilk.
Most of their efforts haven’t
been as productive as those of
Mrs. Iribar de Jotar. Children are
rarely reunited with their
parents. Babies born in prison to
political prisoners are removed,
and “disappear” at birth. But by
working together,
demonstrating, and lobbying,
the “grandmothers” keep up
each other’s morale and remind
the world not to forget Argen
tina and its children.
To some it mightseem facileto
harp on the cases of children. But
it is clear, from reading through
hundreds of Amnesty dossiers,
how often children do feature in
Amnesty’s work.
It is fair to say that no other
Amnesty case has achieved as
much publicity, and thatfew had
such political consequences as
the revelations that then
Emperor Bokassa of the Central
African Empire had ordered, and
perhaps participated in, the
massacre of about 100 children.
The case changed French policy
in Africa, created the first all-
African human rights commis
sion of inquiry, helped people
forward a mood that was already
gathering pace in Africa to take
human rights and democracy
more seriously, and probably
helped undermine the bid by
Valery Giscard d’Estaing to be re
elected president of France.
Amnesty achieved all this, not
because of any spectacular
research project. It was merely a
stone they lifted while checking
out, in a routine way, the reports
of a riot.
Children in Amensty’s day to
day work are usually not a special
concern. But doesn’t the way a
government treats its children
indicate in a fairly direct way the
nature of the beast?
The Soviet government has
used the process of separating
children from their parents in
carefully calibrated religious
persecution. The children of
activist Baptists, Pentacostals and
Adventists have been “taken
into care” because their parents
ignored the government's rules
about officially registered
religious activity.
East Germany, too, uses the
children of political prisoners to
punish their parents. Political
prisoners, once they have served
their sentences, are often allow
ed to emigrate to West Germany,
teut on occasion the children are
held back for a few months.
Amnesty has evidence of 10
children whom the authorities
have refused to allow to leave.
The South African govern
ment has often detained
children. It is known that
children aged 14 and 15 have
been imprisoned in the isolated
maximum security prison,
Robben Island. The authorities
are under no legal obligation to
give information to the parents
of children detained incom
municado.
In the great debate that has
arisen in the human rights arena
about whether certain
governments are dictatorial or
merely “authoritarian,” the
question of the treatment of
children has not been central.
It should be.
The writer is editorial advisor to
the Independent Commission
on Disarmament and Security.
Freedom Of Speech: Reality Or Myth
By Shade Oluwasanmi
The practice of supervising,
restricting or prohibiting the
expression of intellectual con
ception or the dissemination of
ideas is as old as the organization
of - society itself. Someone
holding authority or claiming
authority was always ready to
object to the free circulation of
ideas as a threatening danger to
existing institutions, religious or
political. The two earliest
authorities recognized by men
were that of the ruler, whether of
the family, the clan or the state,
and that of the priest, the
representative of the accepted
religion. Both were equally in
terested in retaining control over
the direction and the expression
of thought. It is probable that in
those days the contention for an
authoritative control of opinion
rested chiefly upon the risk that
heretical utterances might in
terfere with the public peace.
This sort of control could come
under what is nowadays known
as totalitarian governments, for
example Russia and Idi Amin’s
Uganda, where the party in
contol, (in Russia, the com
munist party) or the head of
state, had the sole say in the role
of government, and criticism
against it was forbidden.
Free speech is argued to be
important because, first, it
enables everyone to get at the
truth of a matter by allowing all
possible positions to be
presented and, thereby, giving a
choice. Secondly, it allows an
individual to participate in his
government. In times of stress
and strain these procedures are
helpful when tempers become
shorter and the margin of
tolerance shrinks.
It is always easy to be in favor
of free speech when the speaker
is saying something harmless or
something unopposed. The
problem of free speech under
the umbrella of the first amend
ment comes up when the
speaker is expressing ideas that
people hate or fear, or is speak
ing in the hope of destroying the
freedom of others. A period is
now being faced where right
wings and racial extremisms are
very present forces. The Ku Klux
Klan and the J.B. Stoner’s of the
United States wrap themselves in
the first amendment as well as in
its white sheets. They use the first
amendments as an excuse to say
that blacks are half human and
half animal, that they as Africans
have never had any civilization
that they can talk about, and that
they are not as mentally capable
as whites. Also a host of mesianic
and paranoid crusades, societies,
and private armies, such as the
religious societies led by Jim
Jones and the private white
armies being trained for racial
war, are claimingthattheirweird
visions are entitled to free ex
pression and their mob scenes to
tender loving care by the police.
An important issue to be
examined is how much protec
tion the courts ought to give to
speakers whose words are
despised, or whose methods
deviate from orderly and
responsible political action. The
question about the role of the
court and freedom of speech has
been so intermingled that they
have become inseparable. The
most significant ruling that came
about as a result of the division
between permitted and non-
permitted speech was the clear
and present danger rule. This
rule said that people could be
punished if their speech would
immediately lead to a definite
dangerous act. Utterances were
punishable whenever they have
a reasonable tendency to under
mine governmental stability.
When this rule came under
attack, a modified rule known as
the balancing theory of free
speech was substituted for it. The
word ‘present’ was substituted
for ‘probable.’ Judge Hands of
the Supreme Court ruled that
time and substantial evil were
functionally related; that if the
evil is small but quite probable,
then the speech is to be
prohibited, and that if the evil is
great and held to be probable,
then although the event is
forecast to occur in the very
indefinite future, this speech is
to be punished or prohibited.
The court thus balances the
benefits of free speech against
the possibility that the speech
will create undesirable evils such
as endangering the security of
the nation.
As is evident, the issue of free
speech has been placed in the
hands of the Supreme Court.
There can be no national stability
where there is unlimited
freedom of speech. Such
freedom could cause chaos. For
a government to function
properly there can be no acts to
undermine it, either in actions or
speech; harmony must be main
tained at all costs. The two
extremes with regards to speech
can create two types of govern
ment, and the complete
freedom of speech exists when
the government is wholly
dependent on the will of the
people with no power of its own.
There has to be a medium. The
government should have power,
but it should also allow the
people to express their opinions.
In every day life, the laws such as
those dealing with libel and
fraud prevent absolute freedom
of speech. Spoken or written
material that defames a person’s
character without absolute proof
is punishable by law. All these
laws do is prevent friction in a
society maintaining the privacy
of the individuals. Whether we
like it or not, absolute freedom
of speech is a myth.
*Ms. Oluwasanmi is a 1983
Political Science Mass Com
munications graduate from
Spelman College.