_ Contradicting U.S. president Reagan’s claim that the
luman rights record of several Latin American regimes.

icked by Washington have improved, the Inter Ameri-
an Commission of Human Rights said Oct.9 there have
veen “‘no significant changes”’ in human rights viola-

“ons in the past 12 months.

_ The commission will present its report to the Organ-
Wation of American States, Nov. 15.

‘ One military regime supported to the hilt by Reagan is
wuatemala where mass killings by the army are
Commonplace. New York Times correspondent Allan
“\airn, a specialist in Central American affairs, wrote
this after.a three month visit to Guatemala and the story
"ecently appeared in the journal ‘‘Notices of Guate-

‘mala’

* * *

There is a village in northern Guatemala that maintains
4 list of townspeople who have been executed by the

amy. In June, this year’s roster passed the 400 mark;

Nearly half of them women and children. The latest en-

ee aman suspected of giving food to the guerrillas, had

N chopped into tiny pieces. _

He

Thousands murdered.

UATEMALA

To Americans, this may look like manic savagery. But
American policy-makers should reflect long and hard on

’ the mandate they have been sending before they go

hurling epithets at Guatemala generals.

For years, Washington has been asking Guatemala
both to defeat the guerrillas and honor human rights. By
assuming that both goals can be pursued at once, the
United States has done more than misjudge Guatemalan
reality. It has discouraged the Guatemalan elite from
facing the need for a political settlement. And it has kept
Americans from confronting the prospect that the mas-
sacres may not be mere acts of irrational excess but

tactics needed to achieve a policy goal endorsed by the.

United States. :
It might be possible to pursue both counterinsurgency
and human rights if the guerrillas were few and isolated.

But as peasants, guerrillas and army troops will atest,

that is not the way it is in Guatemala.

It is one thing to ask an army to honor human rights
when its main problem is distinguishing between the
guerrillas and the people. But it is something else again
when the gerrillas have so many civilian collaborators,’
old men, women and children among them, that in entire
towns and districts, for all intents and purposes, the
guerrilla are the people.

When asked about army killings of unarmed civilians,
Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Guetamala’s military ruler, re-
plied: ‘‘Look, the problem of the war is not just a ques-
tion of who is shooting. For each one who is shooting
there are 10 working behind him’’.

His press secretary, Francisco Bianchi, explained.
‘‘The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators”,
he said. ‘‘Therefore, the Indians were subversives,
right? And how do you fight subversion? Clearly, you
had to kill Indians because they were collaborating with
subversion. And then they would say, ‘You're massacr-
ing innocent people’. But they weren’t innocent. They
had sold out to subversion.”

On April 1 the Montt Government adopted a con-
fidential security plan that acknowledged, *“‘The man-
power, armaments and equipment of the Guatemalan

1
y
f

Army round-ups.

Army are not sufficient to cover the different fronts
presented by arms subversion’’. According to Edmond
Mulet, a politician close to the young officers who led the
March 23 coup, “‘it was difficult to fight without the
support of the people. People were tilting to the left, to
the guerrillas, and the army noticed.”

“It's very hard’’, complained one soldier in a dusty
village. ‘There are so many of them, they re more popu-
lar than we are’’. Very few of the guerrillas were armed,
he said, ‘‘but we have to kill them”’.

The Guatemalan military has been charged with the
task of defeating.a class uprising. Yet thé United States
has become convinced that this somehow can be done in
a way that is painless to the North American conscience.
Keep the peasants in their place but don’t violate their
human rights. This concept enraged Guatemalan milit-
ary men, and they have a valid point. j

If the United States is serious about wanting to defeat
the Guatemalan guerrillas, it must face up to what that
implies. It is a commitment not just to an expensive war
of attrition but also to a blood bath. It will be a blood bath
not because the Guatemalan soldiers are irrational but
because their enemy is a large portion of their own
people, and to defeat them they must kill them. Neither
Government handouts nor sophisticated counter-
insurgency plans offer a way around this ugly truth.

By ingenuously demanding the impossible — military
victory with human rights — the United States frees the
oligarchy, which dismisses the rights complaint and runs
with the military mandate, from pressure for nego-
tiations. This demand helps Americans forget that they
are allied with a Government whose survival depends on
its ability to kill its citizens.

‘International Focus

Tom Morris

| — buy ’em

Ifyou can win .

nounced that $20,000 will be
secretly smuggled into Poland
this week to bribe police and

against unions, strikes, the
under-privileged and _ political
dissenters.

Joining

under the ground,” he said. The
the American
Friends Service Committee,

“Shovel for Laos”
drive is being assisted by a
Canadian International

gle

The staunch trade unionist,
Who rarely misses a chance to
‘Say he proudly holds a card in
the Actors Guild of America,
Says he’s appalled that the Po-

the ghost of Solidarity.
Ronald Reagan, whose first
Major act as president was to
Smash a nation-wide strike by
decertifying the Professional
Air Traffic Controllers
Association (PATCO) has now
IMposed further economic
Sanctions against the Polish
Overnment.
As this happens, U.S. De-
fence Secretary Weinberger,
M a leaked position paper,
Urges the re-creation of U.S.
Secret forces for overt and
Covert operations against
Third World states... and
tern Europe. The docu-
Ment says CIA operations will
€xploit political, economic
and military weaknesses within
the Warsaw. Pact and disrupt
enemy rearguard operations.”
_ Driving in the fast lane with
agan and Weinberger is
Solidarity’s man in Canada,
Zygmunt Przetakiewicz, run-
Ring his roadshow out of the

building in Toronto. ;

The head of Solidarity In-
formation Office, starting to
©ok more and more like the

€xiled King of Albania, an-

Ish parliament has dissolved -

tario Federation of Labor

permit underground Solidarity
leaders in the country to shop
at special stores that accept
foreign currency. _

Przetakiewicz’s sights are
set high, he’s no piker. Warm-
ing to his new role as an inter-
national smuggler, he contends
the money will undermine
Polish law enforcement and
bring down the government.
Just imagine what $50,000
would do!

Foreign currency stores, as
anyone who has visited Poland
will tell you, deal mainly in
goods purchased abroad with
foreign currency and are more
in the luxury line — Scotch
whiskey, foreign cigarettes,

etc.
The thought that Solidarity’s
‘“‘underground leaders’’ are

deprived of good scotch and
the clean taste of a Marlboro
will surely swell the collection

plates being passed around in”

Canada by Solidarity’s flak

men.-

Przetakiewicz then deliyers
us of a lesson in democracy
from his year or so in this coun-
try about the freedom of our
courts and police as he justifies
his bribery program for Po-
land. ‘‘There aren’t any free
courts (in Poland’’, he chatters
— never having noticed the
kind of class justice police and

courts dispense in Canada

The man, you see, has never
taken part in a strike in this
country or watched scab-herd-
ing, been arrested for picket-
ing, faced the courts, endured
injunctions. He’s been very
busy running around as a self-
styled Polish patriot and
watching the traffic from his
Don Mills office window.

Having failed as a trade
unionist, he'll -probably also
bomb out as an international
smuggler.

A shovel
for peace

When a U.S. Marine in
Beirut was killed by a (U.S.-
made) Israeli cluster bomb it
prompted even Ronald Reagan
himself to comment.

But do we know that in one
Laoation province alone,
Xieng Khouang, 4,700 people
have been killed or injured
from U.S. bomblets which lit-
ter the earth since 1964? To
this day, Laoation farmers and

their families are being blown -

up as they till the land — a land
where two tons of bombs were
dropped for each inhabitant.
One American Quaker re-
ported recently he counted 50
bomblets on the surface of the
ground in an area no larger
than a tennis court. ‘‘There’s
no way to tell how many lay

Canadian Quakers are urging
supporters to help send 850
‘peace shovels’’ to Laos in a
reconstruction and reconcilia-
tion effort.

The shovels, less dangerous
than a hoe, the traditional tool
of farming in Laos, will enable

‘farmers to lift the bomblets to

the surface. They will help
make reusable the one-third of
the country’s land which today
sits idle because of bomb
danger.

This campaign will also help
remind Canadians of what
happened to that beautiful

country during decades of

‘undeclared war’’ and the re-
sponsibility we all have to as-
sist in its recovery.

Development Agency (CIDA)
grant, the first such govern-
ment aid granted to post war
Laos. The CIDA grant is a

good step, but it also points out —

the fact that Ottawa has not
yet permitted CIDA to extend
aid to Vietnam and Kam-
puchea.

Want to help? A $13 dona-
tion will ship one shovel to
Laos and you can do so by
sending your money to: Cana-
dian Friends Service Commit-
tee, 60 Lowther Ave., Toronto
MSR 1C7. :

The Nobel
Peace Prize

It’s fitting that two people
described as disarmament
campaigners took the 1982
Nobel Peace Prize, another
sign that the issue of peace is
paramount and pressing.

It’s especially fitting since
other nominees included
Reagan’s special Mideast
envoy Phillip Habib who set
the stage for Sabra and Shatila
and Lech Walesa whose pro-
fessed admiration for Ronald
Reagan sort of leaves him out
in right field. Now let’s see the
Norwegian parliament, who
makes up the selection com-
mittee, vote against new
NATO rockets in Europe.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE— OCTOBER 22, 1982—Page 9