Horrors from elsewhere

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Jon Ward

Neither the struggle itself nor this culmination of it got much coverage here in the U.S., where we've been busy gossiping about who's under the president's desk in the Oval Office, rather than what's on top of it.

Do we know of the government and its death squads that brutalized South Africa for more than 34 years? Do we even care? Here's a rundown, in case you do:

The armed liberation movement led by Mandela tried to adhere to the human rights standards of the Geneva convention to which it had subscribed, and was mostly successful. Throughout the report we see horrifying evidence of the murderous methods and goals of former President P.W. Botha's apartheid state. From the 1970s and into the 90s, the government "knowingly planned, undertook, condoned and covered up the commission of unlawful acts, including extra-judicial killings of political opponents and others, inside and outside of South Africa."

There was widespread use of torture, abduction, arson and sabotage. Everyone from the minister of law to the police commissioner was involved in murdering opposition activists. Increased military repression by the so-called security forces was routine.

Up to 40,000 people were held without trial, from 1986 to '89 alone, during government imposed "states of emergency," according to human rights groups.

They did whatever they thought necessary to protect the power privilege of a racial minority, stopping at no moral or legal boundaries.

Racism was the core of the political order, and this stance was endorsed by every person, company, and nation who did business with the South African government, a group that includes England, a nation now carrying on a very similar oppression of a minority in Northern Ireland.

But the atrocities didn't stop with the government: its enforced racism created an atmosphere dehumanizing to blacks in which they were an enemy who could be legitimately victimized, even by the average citizen. You didn't have to work for the military police to commit gross atrocities with impunity. Those who opposed could be killed.

Fortunately, as we were sitting on our couches watching TV or reading the paper, we may have caught a headline saying the good guys in fact eventually won, freedom fighters black and white, and without stooping to their enemy's brutal level.

Then again, maybe you didn't hear, and maybe it seems so far away and unreal that you can't really care. After all, it's mixed in with a lot of other dramatic, violent television content, almost all of which is fake. It's entertainment and we are desensitized to it.

But this is real. While we bicker and whine about bullshit political correctness issues here, while we worry about how nice our car is, and the pros and cons of artificial breasts, people are murdering each other - their own countrymen -in hordes all over the world: Bosnia, the Gaza Strip, Northern Ireland and Rwanda, to name a few.

And while that may make a profitable miniseries, we should be glad we only watch it on TV.

Jon Ward is an astronomy and creative writing senior. His column, Who's the Bull Goose Looney? appears every Thursday and he can be reached via e-mail at Jon.Ward@wildcat.arizona.edu.