Editorials
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
EDITORIALS: Consider the wall Comething there is that doesn't love a wall." At the literal level, Robert Frost's "something" was weather, the freezing and thawing that move the earth and...
...The intense November offensive by the FMLN guerrillas and the massive counterattack by the Salvadoran military merely confirmed what Salvadorans have known all the time: the country is ruled by the gun and divided by walls of the mind...
...0 No democracy...
...Daunting tasks...
...but at least ones Lech Walesa and his comrades in resistance can tackle with a foundation built on mutual trust and lengthy political debates, many of them carried on in prison and in the underground out of the public glare of TV cameras and the sometimes mischievous interpretations of the news media...
...However powerful a symbol the end of the wall may be, to our mind a sturdier one (and a surer measure of what is needed if Eastern Europe is to free itself from an ideological straitjacket and a bureaucratic morass) is the record of Poland's Solidarity movement...
...SAVE EL SALVADOR While the wall was cracking in Berlin, barricades were going up all over El Salvador, particularly in its capital, San Salvador...
...And there is something in us that hates such walls, that wants to bring them down...
...in cementing the alliance of Western Europe and the U.S...
...The symbolic role the wall has played in the cold war...
...A vast chasm lies between the rich and the poor, between the haves and the majority...
...economic and military assistance...
...Having successfully resisted the government's efforts to crush it, Solidarity has accepted, without being overwhelmed, the enormous responsibility of both running the government and managing the economy...
...The biggest losers, as always: civilians...
...His attorney general, Mauricio Eduardo Colorado, follows him up by threatening the Catholic bishops of the country for persisting "in keeping alive the questionable ideology of the church of the poor," and calls on the pope to remove them...
...military advisers and $4.5 billion of U.S...
...The FMLN murders mayors and government officials...
...But the breaching of the wall should not be infused with more meaning than it can realistically bear...
...Embassy to see it...
...after the murder of over 70,000 Salvadorans, mostly noncombatants, mostly the victims of right-wing death squads...
...Despite the courage shown by so many East Germans in recent months from the refugees of summer, held so long in Hungary, to the nightly vigils in Leipzig it represents as much gift as achievement, a culmination of events taking place and ideas being promulgated elsewhere...
...For a decade, San Salvador has also been a divided city in a divided land...
...No victory...
...he must do the same for France and the Soviet Union...
...President Alfredo Cristiani admits the army may have had a hand in the assassination of the Jesuits...
...Private citizens in casual conversation do not even mention certain names...
...Chancellor Helmut Kohl was right to reassure Poland on that point...
...involvement, remain enchained in all three...
...There is no peace, no victory, no democracy in El Salvador...
...The current policy vacuum in Washington may have the unintended effect of braking the momentum of events, but finally George Bush must join with other Western leaders in devising a policy that provides financial aid and technical assistance to Poland, Hungary, and East Germany while keeping NATO intact, maintaining the 1992 schedule for European economic integration, and reassuring Mikhail Gorbachev and his government of our continuing support and benign interest in the evolution toward democracy both in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union...
...Vast shanty towns where women and children walk for hours to fetch water or wood for the fire (contrasted to the bunkered compounds and armored luxury cars driven by the elite...
...But, of course, he meant something more...
...all with impunity...
...The East Germans must still construct a genuine political culture and a functioning pluralistic democracy...
...Absent acceptance of that goal in San Salvador as well as Washington and of any vision of how to pursue it, our aid is only multiplying casualties...
...Our diplomats say the Salvadoran military has been "professionalized...
...Second, by refusing to arrest the pace of events in the militarily strategic GDR, Mikhail Gorbachev once again confirms a limited autonomy for the evolution of Eastern Europe...
...To express one's thoughts freely in El Salvador for example, to call for a negotiated settlement and an end to the war is to arouse suspicion and court death...
...It is time we determine why...
...after the displacement of one in ten Salvadorans and the exile of perhaps a fifth of the total population, we can only conclude that U.S...
...Christian Democrat presidential candidate Fidel Chavez Mena, following the Jesuits' murders, warns: "This is only the beginning of acts against political leaders, union members, and peasants...
...members of the army and right-wing death squads murder centrists and leftists...
...Congress should suspend future aid until a new policy can be formulated...
...support, the army would collapse...
...For, as the people of Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans have good historical reason to know, events can have their own dynamic...
...State Department dwell...
...Large segments of the countryside under guerrilla control...
...After ten years of civil war...
...In this situation, drama can be the enemy...
...In what deep closet does the U.S...
...They describe a policy goal, not the facts...
...policy toward El Salvador...
...Colorado, of course, holds the office that investigates assassinations...
...The Bush administration should cut off military assistance now, and the U.S...
...Moreover, the dramatic, picturesque, and telegenic joining of East and West Berlin are part of a beginning, not an outcome...
...after a containment policy that included U.S...
...Salvadorans, despite ten years of heavy U.S...
...No peace...
...Congress should begin by looking at the condition of the majority of Salvadorans and examining that people's desire for peace...
...Seventy thousand dead, but a stalemate...
...No rush to support the army...
...With it came the necessity of reexamining U.S...
...No rush to join or repulse the guerrillas...
...Breaching the wall in 1989 has captured our imaginations as much as building it did in 1961...
...The country is imploding economically, politically, militarily...
...Political institutions are threatened from outside and from within...
...The high drama of Berlin in November cannot be taken as an unqualified promise of good things to come...
...Rule is by the gun...
...First, by bringing down the wall, the East Germans have confirmed their government in an accelerated pace of political reform...
...citizens with the cold-blooded assassination of six Jesuits and two helpers last month...
...That fact is seldom reported in the U.S...
...In November, the largest offensive of the war by the FMLN, but neither side gains an advantage...
...At the literal level, Robert Frost's "something" was weather, the freezing and thawing that move the earth and finally topple the most solid human constructions...
...It was the same message Oscar Romero had delivered ten years before to political leaders: "If you do not concern yourselves with the poverty of our people as though they were your own family, you will not be able to save society...
...And in politics, when the opposition has not been driven underground by death squads, private bodyguards are necessary at all times...
...That, in fact, was the message of murdered Jesuit rector Ignacio Ellacuria the day before his death...
...What is our purpose in sustaining it...
...Joy, a sense of liberation, a befuddling realization that they had done it were written on the faces of the East Germans who found themselves walking through the barrier that seemed to divide them forever from family, friends, and freedom...
...This is not to make light of the historic event made possible by the spontaneous act of the East German people walking out on their government (in contradistinction to Berthold Brecht's satiric fantasy the government, growing unhappy with the people, dismissed it and appointed a new one...
...they can come to dominate politicians, political systems, and finally the people themselves...
...The Jesuits were not their first victims...
...That realization came crashing down on U.S...
...in the iconography of division, destruction, and nuclear threat...
...Government soldiers everywhere in the cities and towns 57,000: tense, suspecting, intimidating, arbitrary, a law unto themselves...
...There can be no democracy where the majority of the people are in social, economic, or political chains...
...Euphoria must give way to solid thinking and careful reflection...
...but all one has to do is spend a few hours outside the U.S...
...involvement, an armed camp on a hair trigger...
...policy has been a massive failure...
...For one thing, the end of the wall prematurely raises the question of German reunification, a destabilizing issue in the unexpected rush of events...
...The death squads have been increasingly active since the March election...
...At the moment, perhaps three are discernible...
...And so, in Berlin, with a suddenness hard to credit, a wall has come down...
...Medical workers, educators, church and human rights workers across the country are threatened, put on death lists, detained by the army...
...Good fences do not make good neighbors when their only purpose is to divide, to wall us off from one another, to symbolize and enforce our separation...
...A million Salvadorans have voted with their feet: they have fled...
...in spymaster George Smiley's bone-cold vigils under its shadow all of these must give way to new meanings...
...The six so-called democratic elections heralded by the U.S...
...Assistant Secretary of State Bernard Aronson concedes that "the right-wing death squads probably did come out of the closet...
...The army remains a rogue beast...
...in the last decade are largely cosmetic a veneerocracy...
...Without U.S...
...Third, Smiley has lost his wall a possibility that may have been foreseen by his prescient creator, John le Carre, in last year's The Russia House, which sketched a more nuanced international intrigue pitting peacemakers East and West against cold warriors everywhere...
...after ten years of U.S...
...in public, it's bulletproof vests for candidates...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 21
