Report Card
Doughty, Roger
REPORT CARD KWSttfMW^M Exiles on the Edge HONDURAS: A CRISIS ON THE BORDER by the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights 36 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036. 117 pp. $6.00. El...
...The refugees are further endangered by historic animosity between Hondurans and Salvadorans, which makes the visitors unwelcome in local villages, and by Hon-duras's failure to ratify United Nations conventions on the status of refugees...
...The Honduran military regards them as Salvadoran rebel sympathizers...
...Harnessing Our Power EMPOWERMENT OF PEOPLE FOR PEACE by Mary S. White and Dorothy Van Soest Women Against Military Madness, 3255 Hennepin Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55408...
...The Honduran government, this report suggests, seems to be most concerned about denying Salvadoran guerrillas a base—but neither Honduras nor the United States has furnished evidence showing that the guerrillas actually use the refugee camps...
...The 19,000 Salvadorans living at camps inside the Honduran border are in a particularly precarious position, according to the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights...
...strategic objectives" and must "share responsibility" for their plight...
...In September 1984, Honduras unveiled a plan for the mass repatriation of all Salvadoran refugees...
...Although Honduran officials insisted that the plan would be wholly voluntary, the Lawyers Committee points out that many Salvadorans face persecution at home...
...The challenge for peace activists is to transform the popular desire for an end to nuclear terror into an effective political movement...
...Few people are able to tap this power on their own...
...As Mary S. White and Dorothy Van Soest of Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) write, "If change is to take place it will grow from the grass roots—at the level of the individual, the small group, local organizations, and communities...
...Their short book, Empowerment of People for Peace, is designed as a guide for "going to peace...
...The U.N...
...Most require the support of a group, which provides a forum for discussion and exchange of information...
...White and Van Soest suggest patterns of organization, delineate problems commonly encountered, and offer a list of books, films, and slide shows that can serve as discussion starters...
...3.00...
...there have been many reports of harassment, intimidation, and even death at the hands of the armed forces...
...The Reagan Administration, writes the Lawyers Committee, has consistently viewed "the security of the refugees as secondary to U.S...
...The camps are, in fact, in the area where the United States and Honduras conduct joint military exercises...
...Perhaps the most useful aspect of this pamphlet is its step-by-step guide to forming a peace group...
...37 pp...
...since repatriation has always been an option available to refugees, it is doubtful that a program to ship them back will be "voluntary...
...The authors focus on addressing the needs and concerns of the individual who does not know how to move from anger and fear to action...
...High Commission for Refugees, which administers the camps, wields little legal authority and has often been prevented by the Honduran military from investigating incidents of abuse...
...Empowerment of People for Peace is a concise, well-written manual, likely to be especially valuable to those just beginning to work for peace and disarmament...
...El Salvador's civil war has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have poured into neighboring countries...
...But even outside El Salvador, the refugees' safety is not assured, both because the impoverished nations of Central America have difficulty absorbing them and because political and military dangers continue to haunt them...
...The key, they write, lies in "empowerment," defined as "a process of discovering within ourselves and in others the capacity to bring about change...
...One of the many paradoxes of the 1984 elections was that while poll after poll identified overwhelming support for a nuclear freeze and arms control, Americans voted in near-record numbers for a President who promises four more years of rampant militarism...
Vol. 49 • March 1985 • No. 3
