DATELINES
Boroughs, Don L. & Bruggers, James & Johansen, And Bruce E. & Barnett, Tracy L.
DATELINES Torturers Saved by the Bell, Almost BUENOS AIRES For three years, President Raul Alfonsin stood up to the armed forces of Argentina, trying military officers for crimes of kidnapping...
...I was told we had 'had enough' on sanctuary," says Catlin...
...In a culture that highly values the interconnections among all beings and the earth, cassette players, sunglasses, and blue jeans have assumed a new importance...
...They," in this case, are World-Herald publisher Harold W. Anderson and editor G. Woodson Howe, who are known as "Andy" and "Woody" around the newsroom...
...Known as punto final (Spanish for the punctuation mark "period"), the bill gave the courts sixty days to begin the last trials of human-rights violators...
...I'm not saying it's a perfect life," says Norberg-Hodge, "but by modern Third World standards, they are really quite well off...
...In addition, Overbay maintained that the religious concerns raised by Kipp were not mentioned in earlier meetings with other tribal leaders...
...We see the Project as a two-way educational process," says Norberg-Hodge...
...While weather conditions are extreme and terrain rugged, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks wildlife manager Jim Pozew-itz says the area has always been able to do one thing well: grow wildlife...
...The sixty-day clock began to tick on December 24, when the president signed the bill into law...
...But they've shut us out...
...Last year, the U.S...
...Tucked up in the Himalayas, the Ladakhis have worked out a sustaining relationship with their harsh terrain...
...But legislators who opposed the bill suggest that Alfonsin's "reasons of state"— never made public—involve the military chiefs of staff threatening to quit if the legislation did not pass...
...Through education and such cultural events as this play, the Project hopes to broaden the Ladak-his' view of Western civilization but preserve what is environmentally, socially, and spiritually sound in the culture...
...courts have yet to spell out the extent of those rights...
...He says reporters have little freedom to initiate story ideas or to write with any sense of style...
...Polls showed as many as 70 per cent of the people opposed the bill...
...To try to block the plan, the Blackfeet filed an appeal last year at the Regional Forest headquarters in Missoula...
...Readers Take on One-Paper Town OMAHA, NEBRASKA For the past half-century, newspaper readers here have chosen from a single-item menu: the Omaha World-Herald, which circulates about 200,000 copies in Nebraska, western Iowa, and southern South Dakota...
...To add to the confusion, the U.S...
...The group was born at a meeting in the north Omaha home of Frances Mendenhall, a dentist who has long been active in Physicians for Social Responsibility...
...Forest Service Steps on Blackfeet MISSOULA, MONTANA "Our culture, our race, our religion is centered on nature in its pristine state...
...Here is put to the test," said Emilio Mignone, a lawyer representing the groups, "the dignity of the magistrates that make up the judicial power of the nation, who should work day and night in these two months to carry out an obligation of justice...
...The article brought a call from reporters at the newspaper, who asked for anonymity and said the reportage in question had made it as far as the city desk but not beyond...
...Under an 1855 treaty, the Blackfeet, a once powerful Northern Plains tribe, held ownership rights to Badger-Two Medicine...
...Catlin is also critical of management's top-down style of running the paper...
...DATELINES Torturers Saved by the Bell, Almost BUENOS AIRES For three years, President Raul Alfonsin stood up to the armed forces of Argentina, trying military officers for crimes of kidnapping and torture and the deaths of 9,000 Argentinians from 1976 to 1983...
...Forest Service released a plan denying the area protection as wilderness and opening the door to stepped-up oil and gas activity...
...The newsletter is financed completely by donations of time and money, costing about $110 per issue to publish and mail...
...What we are trying to do is show them there is something else even more modern than polluting factories and white bread and agricultural chemicals—and that something is bringing them back to the very essence of what the Ladakhi culture is all about...
...Calling itself "the next best thing to a second newspaper," WHAMO publishes a monthly newsletter that has grown from a single sheet with hand-scrawled headlines to a publication of six legal-sized pages with a more professional look and an occasional advertisement...
...Norberg-Hodge would like to see it stay that away...
...It's time to reunite all the Argentines," the president said on December 5, as he introduced the bill he later signed...
...As travelers came, bringing glimpses of an exciting new way of life, people began to think they had to move into the capital and earn an income so they could be modern...
...It is very like the bread we have here, but it costs three times as much as the white bread, so the poor people have to eat white bread, while the rich people buy brown...
...It is very strange," the young man says...
...Other suspects who come to light through future testimony will be saved by the punto final, but hundreds of cases are still alive, thanks to fast work by Argentine human-rights activists and civilian judges...
...She often encounters reporters and editors bearing the latest newsroom gossip...
...Omaha may have SAC, but St...
...Tracy L. Barnett (Tracy L. Barnett is Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Tri-City Herald in Washington state and the Ames (Iowa) Tribune...
...She and her Ladakhi colleagues have taught villagers to build their own solar panels, windmills, and small hydroelectric generators, enabling them to remain on their farms and get energy in a decentralized way...
...The appeal also criticized the Forest Service for overlooking a key element of the Blackfeet religion "which deals with centrality, necessity, importance and sacredness of the land itself—and, in this case, the Badger-Two Medicine...
...But now there is an outcry from human-rights organizations and the courts, who want justice to stay alive in their country...
...She says talk among fellow activists usually came down to: What are we going to do about the World-Herald...
...One court even set up temporary chambers in the country's interior to speed the calling of witnesses from remote areas...
...They retained certain aboriginal rights to use the land for hunting, fishing, and, according to the Blackfeet, the practice of their religion...
...James Bruggers (James Bruggers is a graduate student at the University of Montana and writes for the Great Falls Tribune...
...Far too often, they say, the World-Herald's solidly Republican editorial policies seem to leak onto its news pages, whether in story selection, editing, or placement...
...The mountains of Badger-Two Medicine are sacred to traditional tribal members and serve as a place for vision quests, sweat lodges, fasts, and other ceremonies that would be valueless if held among roads, clearcuts, or oil wells...
...Among the verdicts handed down in such cases are several acquittals, as well as prison sentences ranging from a few years to life...
...She was drawn to the local people and stayed on...
...Next to Alaska, the Glacier ecosystem supports the country's most viable populations of grizzly bears, bald eagles, and wolves, all of them listed as threatened or endangered species...
...Louis has a major employer in the McDonnell Douglas Corporation...
...Still a stronghold of traditional Tibetan Buddhism— perhaps the only one remaining—Ladakhi culture demonstrates principles ideal for a modern, post-industrial society...
...The final outcome of the cases that beat the clock is impossible to predict...
...On January 9, eleven organizations jointly presented the military tribunal, which hears cases first, with about 1,000 new ones...
...the Dalai Lama has encouraged "all enlightened Ladakhis" to support it, and the Swedish Parliament awarded it and Helena Norberg-Hodge the 1986 Right Livelihood Award, its alternative Nobel Prize...
...Alfonsin's troubles began when the court that convicted the generals also recommended trying the men who directly managed the junta's state-terrorism apparatus...
...They feel they must become modern as quickly as possible...
...Two weeks after the December 5 speech, 50,000 protesters gathered in Buenos Aires to march against it...
...This was the world the anthropologist stepped into twelve years ago, when she arrived with a German film crew...
...A profound sense is growing, especially among the young people," she says, "that their own culture is backward and terribly inferior...
...The federal courts canceled their traditional January vacation, and many ordered the military tribunal to deliver up all the cases currently in its jurisdiction...
...As a dentist," she says, "if a patient comes to me who knows a lot about dental care, I'm going to do my best to work with him and learn from him...
...Two years later came prison sentences for five former junta members...
...Don L. Boroughs (Don L. Boroughs is a freelance writer who lives in Buenos Aires...
...Allowing development, they feel, would destroy their religion...
...The young man belongs to a small theater company performing here in his remote Himalayan homeland...
...So, in 1983, they started what may be the first activist group in the United States formed specifically to monitor the performance of a newspaper...
...Alfonsin's government drew praise from around the world...
...Never before had an Argentine government been judged according to its own laws...
...Many readers dependent on it for their news think it abuses its monopoly position...
...Whatever his reasons for backing the punto final, Alfonsin certainly did not do it to improve his falling popular support...
...WHAMO's point: The military's contribution to the local economy is no excuse for uncritical coverage...
...Mendenhall thinks the World-Herald needs an ombudsman on its own staff to field both public complaints like WHAMO's and dissent from within...
...During the bitterly cold winters, they retreat into their adobe homes and tell stories, make music, and celebrate life...
...In one of several actions which diminished the tribe's holdings to fewer than one million acres, the Blackfeet ceded the area to the Federal Government in 1895...
...Bruce E. Johansen (Bruce E. Johansen is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska at Omaha...
...The Project has the backing of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi...
...WHAMO's roots are in the peace movement, and it often takes the Herald to task for its "lapdog coverage" of the Strategic Air Command, which is headquartered in Bellevue, an Omaha suburb...
...When Alfonsin took office in 1983, one of his first acts was to introduce legislation canceling the amnesty the preceding government, a military junta, had granted itself and commence the historic criminal proceedings against the generals...
...While we are bringing information about alternatives to the Ladakhi people, we are learning from them new ways of living more in harmony with our own surroundings...
...Accusations accumulated against hundreds of men at almost every level of the armed forces...
...the curious villagers ask the youth who has just returned to his isolated home here in the Himalayas...
...Its April 1986 issue, for example, juxtaposed the paper's "loving history" of SAC with a series of articles "Tracking Pentagon Waste" published by the St...
...The brothers have asked that the case be passed along to the Forest Service's office in Washington, D.C., where it will be decided this spring by President Reagan's newly appointed Forest Service Chief Dale Robertson...
...Kipp is one of several Blackfeet who are fighting a national-forest management plan that would allow development on land they believe is sacred...
...Sometimes even World-Herald staff members contribute, but under pen names...
...Their determination may hold up against military pressure, where the president's has crumbled...
...The supreme court's ruling on the appeal of the punto final's constitutionality and greater military pressure on Alfonsin are also wild cards...
...They cluster in villages dotting the desert plains around glacial melt-water streams, divert the water in mud and stone irrigation ditches, and grow what they need in the short summers...
...If we lose that, we are a lost nation," says George Kipp, a leader of the Blackfeet Indians...
...Before an astonished audience, he plays out a drama presenting a picture of the West different from their imaginings—a picture that might help Ladakh avoid some of the pitfalls that have befallen other pre-industrial societies as they blindly and uncritically enter the age of technology...
...What's at stake, says Kipp, is the survival of his people— a tribe of 12,700 plagued with poverty, 80 per cent unemployment, and pervasive health problems, including alcohol abuse...
...Within a week, the human-rights groups appealed to Argentina's supreme court, claiming the law is unconstitutional...
...The newsletter has lately branched out into criticism of the paper's arts coverage and labor issues...
...Largely the vision of Swedish anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge, it aims to ease the transition into the Twentieth Century...
...Forester James Overbay denied the appeal on grounds that the Blackfeet were addressing issues beyond the scope of the forest-planning process...
...So far, the civil judges have passed the test...
...In terms of newspaper geography, the paper dominates the Midlands of America, between the Des Moines Register and Denver's Post and Rocky Mountain News...
...On Christmas Eve, he signed a law stopping the initiation of human-rights-abuse cases...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...They have bread in America they call organic whole wheat...
...Oil and gas development poses the greatest potential environmental threat to the park since it was established seventy-six years ago, says Glacier National Park resource manager Gary Gregory...
...But his determination to bring the military to justice broke down last year...
...He recalls, to his friends' amazement, that in America, clothing made of natural fibers like Indian wool costs more than modern synthetic material, and houses of stone and wood cost more than those of cement cinderblocks...
...The Ladakh Project has introduced nonpolluting, renewable technologies "that can help cushion them from nature without disrupting those fundamental relationships between individuals and the land," says Norberg-Hodge...
...The struggle involves a tract called Badger-Two Medicine, 100,000 acres of roadless wilderness bordering Glacier National Park...
...Concern grew in the ranks...
...Their appeal claimed that Forest Service officials do not understand traditional Blackfeet ways and are denying their religious freedom under the First Amendment and the Native American Religious Freedom Act...
...The area of Badger-Two Medicine, located near the Overthrust Belt—an underground formation which has produced oil and gas fields along the Rocky Mountains from Canada to Mexico—is thought to contain significant petroleum reserves...
...they call it WHAMO-the World-Herald Attitude Monitoring Operation...
...The government denies that "military blackmail" led to the punto final...
...Shortly afterward, the area was opened to tourism and things began to change...
...More than a few World-Herald reporters have quit after similar experiences...
...What may save the region from complete cultural transformation is the Ladakh Project...
...Roger Catlin, a life-long Omahan, resigned in favor of a job at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut after he was denied permission to follow a Salva-doran refugee family on a secretive trip through Nebraska...
...Both have declined repeated invitations to WHAMO meetings, as well as requests to contribute to the newsletter...
...In one 1986 edition the newsletter took the World-Herald to task for failing to cover fully the workplace-safety problems of 2,800 meat packers who have been on strike at Iowa Beef Processors in Dakota City, Nebraska...
...I'd try even harder if I were the only dentist in town...
...We would rather talk with them than about them," says Mendenhall...
...One reason the Forest Service has been remiss in its assessment of the Blackfeet religion is that the religion is unconventional in comparison to Christianity [but] this does not make them any less a religion," the appeal stated...
...Tibetan Society Bridges the Future LADAKH REGION, INDIA "Young man, what is it like in America...
...Staff morale is rotten," she says...
...Developing the land would be comparable to tearing down a white man's church or temple, says Kipp's brother Woody...
...The relentless influence of Western development has recently intruded like a McDonald's restaurant suddenly appearing in a wooded mountain glen...
...Named after two high-mountain streams flowing east from the continental divide, the area is part of the Lewis and Clark National Forest...
...He checked the newspaper's files and could find "only one twelve-inch local story by an intern, several months earlier...
Vol. 51 • April 1987 • No. 4
