radio station in Berkeley, California], he described in detail how they
weren’t even making the most perfunctory efforts to check the
credentials of people who were applying for political asylum.
At about the same time, a document was leaked from the US
interests section in Havana (which reviews applications for asylum
in the US) in which they complain that they can’t find genuine
political asylum cases. The applicants they get can’t really claim any
serious persecution. At most they claim various kinds of
harassment, which aren’t enough to qualify them. So—there are the
two cases, side by side.
I should mention that the US Justice Department has just made a
slight change in US law which makes our violation of international
law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even more
grotesque. Now Haitian refugees who, by some miracle, reach US
territorial waters can be shipped back. That’s never been allowed
before. I doubt that many other countries allow that.
Nicaragua
You recall the uproar in the 1980s about how the Sandinistas were
abusing the Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. President
Reagan, in his inimitable, understated style, said it was “a campaign
of virtual genocide.” UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was a bit
more restrained; she called it the “most massive human rights
violation in Central America.” What’s happening now with the
Miskitos?
Reagan and Kirkpatrick were talking about an incident in which,
according to Americas Watch, several dozen Miskitos were killed
and a lot of people were forcefully moved in a rather ugly way in the
course of the Contra war. The US terrorist forces were moving
into the area and this was the Sandinista’s reaction.
It was certainly an atrocity, but it’s not even visible compared to
the ones Jeane Kirkpatrick was celebrating in the neighboring
countries at the time—and in Nicaragua, where the overwhelming
mass of the atrocities were committed by the so-called “freedom
fighters.”