Word: humanizes
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Square One Steve Tesich's futuristic off-Broadway satire of life in a totalitarian state seems outdated by history, but the human impulse to impose orthodoxy persists, so this witty and touching work is likely to be topical again all too soon...
...level, the debate concerns intellectual honesty. At least one human- rights organization believes the Kuwaiti government in exile may be orchestrating exaggerated tales of horror for political gain. "The situation is bad enough when you consider just the tragedies that can be objectively verified," says Andrew Whitley, the executive director of Middle East Watch, headquartered in New York. "There is no need to inflate the statistics...
...human-rights organizations are quarreling among themselves. Middle East Watch, for example, contends that the recent report by Amnesty International detailing human-rights abuses in Kuwait is overdrawn. But the problem is one of degree only. When Middle East Watch says Amnesty's high-range estimate of perhaps a thousand murders exaggerates the toll by about 400, that still leaves 600 victims of Iraqi brutality. And no one disputes that Iraq has regularly tortured Kuwaitis. Again, the only difference involves numbers...
...Human-rights reports are political documents. They are embraced or ignored depending on the interests of nations. Amnesty, for one, has regularly detailed the torture, detention and murder of Iraqis -- by Iraqis -- but the U.S. hardly cared about such atrocities during the years when Washington's Middle East policy dictated accommodating Saddam. So when the President says Amnesty's report has "really made an impression on me," he is reacting in a new context. Had he been applying a consistent human-rights standard all along, he would have been just as exercised about last year's Amnesty report on Iraq...
...most Haitians remain optimistic. Says Jean-Claude Bajeux, a professor of theology and the head of Haiti's Ecumenical Human Rights Center: "He knows he alone can't change the country, and we can't ask him to make the changes with a magical wand." If the people remember that, then not even the army can stop Aristide's avalanche...