OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
October 4, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansas (USPS 605-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Staffer-First Hall, Lawrence Ks. 60055, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer semester. Subscribes to mail are $15 for six months or $25 for a year outside the county. Student subscribes are $3 a semester through the student activity book, *POSTMASTER*. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $25 for a year outside the county. Student subscribes are $3 a semester through the student activity book, *POSTMASTER*.
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM
Managing Editor
Editorial Editor
MICHAEL ROBINSON Campus Editor
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
Business Manager
DAVE WANAMAKER        MARK MEARS
Retail Sales           National Sales
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LYNNE STARK
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JOIN OBERZAN
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PAUL JESS
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Anti-terrorism
Way back in January 1981 when the American hostages were released from Iran, President Reagan talked tough on terrorism.
Talk, as Reagan has discovered by now, comes a lot cheaper than action. The newly inaugurated Reagan vowed in 1981 that such a thing as the Iranian hostage debacle would not happen again.
But his tough talk hardly stopped terrorism. Planes continued to be hijacked, and American military bases overseas continued to be the targets of bombings and similar acts. One American military man was kidnapped in Italy. Reagan called the kidnappers "bums" but did little more.
The administration, perhaps in fear more than anything else, now is preparing anti-terrorism legislation.
The legislation reportedly includes a reward fund to pay tipsters for information about terrorists.
Another part of the legislation would allow the federal government
to seek prosecution of people who take refuge in the United States after committing terrorist acts.
federal jurisdiction over terroristic conspiracies also would be expanded.
These steps are all well and good, but they should have been taken much sooner.
One reason for the administration's fear is that the 1984 Olympics are fast approaching. Problems are certain to develop when dozens of countries that normally despise each other gather in under the supposed spirit of friendly competition.
Reagan appears to be taking a pragmatic approach to terrorism now. The tough talk probably will continue, but at least some basis for action — the new legislation — will be behind the words.
For candidate Reagan, the tough talk came easy. For President Reagan, stopping terrorism committed against the United States and other countries has proven to be much more difficult.
Compromise is wise
A compromise recently worked out by the Senate Judiciary Committee to settle a controversy over membership on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission should improve the work of the commission.
The compromise, which has yet to be approved, enlarges the commission from six to eight members and creates staggered terms for commissioners, according to congressional sources.
The controversy over membership on the commission was prompted by President Reagan's attempts to replace five commission members from the Carter administration with appointees of his own. Two of Reagan's nominees have received Senate approval. All five Reagan selections side with the president on civil rights issues, and some senators have said that Reagan was trying to stack the commission with his own people.
The compromise means that Reagan would have only four, not
five, appointees on the commission; one of the three nominees would not be eligible. In addition, future changes in commission membership could be made only when members' terms ended; members currently serve terms at the whim of the president.
Recent actions by the commission give Reagan justification for his nomination of conservatives. The commission is supposed to be an independent watchdog agency, but has lacked a conservative viewpoint in its consideration of issues ranging from women's rights to affirmative action, from the federal budget to busing. A more balanced view is needed, considering this country's emphasis on the rights of representation and of free speech.
The compromise, if approved, should strengthen the independence of the commission by making it more of a watchdog and less of a political poodle.
A ghoulish enterprise
The selling of kidneys and other human body parts is a business venture we earnestly hope will fail. There are too many pitfalls for society.
Despite what promoters say, the buying and selling of still-living organs is a ghoulish enterprise. Putting a dollars-and-cents value on body parts can erode respect for life itself, and that must not be allowed to happen.
about commercializing organ donations, proposals in Congress to forbid the sale of human body parts are unnecessary at this time. We know of only one firm actively soliciting for donors and a doctor who would like to get such a venture started.
Public aversion to selling organs, even when people are desperate for money, may be a greater deterrent to the sale of body parts than any law.
Despite the misgivings we have
—New Castle (Pa.) News
LETTERS POLICY
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff designation. The Kansan also invites individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansas office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LAWRENCE : A ONE COLLEGE TOWN?
Injustice in South Africa Government reforms only hide apartheid
The Reagan Administration's policy of "constructive engagement" in South Africa could very well have been designed in Pretoria. In exchange for what the administration calls progress toward the elimination of apartheid, U.S. relations with the region are more friendly and extensive they have been for years.
The ultimate folly of such a policy for the United States is that favor is being won with the wrong people.
The so-called reforms applauded by the Reagan administration are merely cosmetic changes in a system deeply entrenched and jealously guarded by white South Africa. That this is the view of the black majority, which will inevitably hold power in South Africa, is made clear by recent explosions of violence there.
Perhaps most pervious, because it camouflages a very basic aspect of aparthief, is the latest so-called reform. The Appeal Court of South Africa recently ruled that black migrant workers who have been continuously employed in one job for 10 years or in various jobs for 15 years now have rights of permanent residency in white South Africa even though they cannot to be home lands each year to renew their work contracts. They can no longer be deported to the homelands if they lose their jobs.
To regard this as a reform, however, is to ignore the basic injustice of a system that requires a court ruling to allow an individual the right to reside wherever he pleases in the country of his birth.
It also is dangerous since it divers attention from the South African regime's relentless pursuit of apartheid.
To then use such decisions as justification for closer diplomatic relations is ludicrous.
As the world applauds its magna-
nimity in granting urban blacks — whose labor it needs — rights of permanent residence, South Africa continues to follow its homelands policy, denying blacks any citizenship rights in South Africa and forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of them from land designated for whites. Euphemistically referred to as separate development, the homelands policy is seen by many as the ultimate success and international acceptance of the white domination of South Africa.
The policy is so simple and surrounded by such deceptive rhetoric that I fear a world that has proved itself extremely willing to accept a fail accomplish in other instances will do so again. For
FRANKLIN WILLIAMS
President of the Phelps-Stokes Fund
instance, when Goa and Tibet were taken over by larger neighbors, India and China, the world was outraged. But today who cares? More recently, in the wake of the furor over Israel's occupation of Lebanon, demands that it withdraw immediately evolved into protracted negotiations offering Israel inducements to withdraw.
South Africa is counting on a similar international reaction to its homeland policy, under which no blacks are considered citizens of South Africa. They all are regarded as citizens of an ethnic homeland. That many of them have never even visited these so-called homelands matters not at all. The white government has decided that it is there and only there that they have any citizenship rights.
Ten homelands, making up 13 percent of the land, have been created. Most of them consist in of noncontiguous, fragmented areas and are unable to support economies
that would make them self-sustaining.
Even though their economies are so dependent on the rest of South Africa, four of the homelands have been declared independent. No country in the world, except South Africa, has yet recognized this pseudo-independence. Last late year, however, the United States took what is perhaps a first step toward changing that when American diplomats made their first visits to the homelands.
While the anti-apartheid movement has not succeeded in shaping world opinion about racism in South Africa to the point where strong international actions have been taken, it has kept the issue before the public. In the absence of an informed cadre of activists to prick the conscience of the world and its leaders, it is doubtful that policy statements such as the Reagan administration's recent condemnation of apartheid as "morally wrong" would be made.
But I wonder if the vigilance of the dedicated few will be enough to counter pragmatic world opinion when the homelands scheme has been fully implemented and the government is in power, political rights to the ineffectual number of blacks remaining citizens of the republic.
It is more probable that the protesters will be viewed as radicals standing in the way of the new, established order. Who will listen to their protest that by allowing 20 million people to be evicted from the land of their birth the world acquiesced in racial and human injustice of monumental proportions?
Copyright 1983 the New York Times. The Phelps-Stokes Fund is an educational institution.
Reagan angering far right
WASHINGTON — It has been suggested that today's liberals think the problems of 1983 can be solved with the solutions of 1933 and that conservatives agree on all but the year. They prefer 1833.
With some accuracy, they point out that the Ronald Reagan who ran for president in 1976 and 1980 would have nothing but scorn for the kind of "measured" diplomatic actions taken by the Ronald Reagan who was president of the United States when the Russians blasted the straying civilian plane out of the sky.
The conservatives who have been damned President Reagan ever since the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 067 illustrate the point. To many of them, the Russian action was close to an act of war, which in days of muzzling charges would have been answered by an American president with something approximating a tit for a tat.
Some of the conservatives said Reagan should expel most or all of the Soviet diplomats in the United States. Others advocated making a Soviet admission of guilt and payment of reparations
ARNOLD SAWISLAK United Press International
a condition for continuing arms control negotiations. A third suggestion was to slap a new embargo on sale of U.S. grain or high technology equipment to the Soviet Union.
Instead, Reagan, after the toughest kind of outraged rhetoric, closed U.S. airports to Soviet airliners and sent Aeroflot's employees — all three of them — back to the Soviet Union.
This so infuriated many of the New Right conservatives who backed Reagan in 1980 and 1984, whom he publicly denounced the president
led Reagan in 1980 and earlier that a number of them publicly denounced the president. This is not the first time Reagan has angered conservatives. Many of them objected loudly when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court; others complained that she sloughed his advisers and that his conservative advisers and was handling himself with moderates and even liberals. Then too, there was talk of conservatives leaving the Reagan reservation.
Will they do it? Maybe. Some of the most vocal conservatives like their counterparts on the left set such great store by ideologs but put themselves rather caught in their link to power their compromise their values.
Can they hurt Reagan? Probably not much. A decade ago, conservatives who had backed Richard Nixon in his drive for the White House became disillusioned by his decision to open diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communists.
Also there are plenty of conservatives who may agree that the president didn't do much in this case but who won't repudiate him publicly. The most pragmatic of them hold or have held public office, and know from that the dramatic actions that seem easy to people on the outside almost always become harder to apply when they have to confront real problems on the inside.
Arguments for MX missile defy logic
WASHINGTON — The attitudes that threaten to prevail in Congress today are similar to those that gripped European and American leaders at the turn of the 20th century. The peace movement was strong during this period, just as it is today. The political elite sang of disarmament. Yet these leaders had no intention of denying themselves the freedom to build all the arms they desired.
So it is with the majority in Congress who support the MX missile on the ground that it will encourage progress at the arms control talks in Geneva. This defies logic.
The type of "arms control" they want in exchange for voting for the MX is even more mind-boggling — a "guaranteed build-down" that would remove two or three old nuclear weapons from the arsenals of the superpowers for each new one built.
Consequently, arms escalation would become what some congressmen have called "the engine to fuel arms control." George Orwell wrote in *The New York Times* that Build-down is simply a new way to insure continuation of the old rules.
This is then called arms control — and we move on to the next round in the arms race. Build-down is a general's dream. It is analogous to trading old Volkswagens for new Rolls-Royces and sleek Ferraris.
In contrast, the term "nuclear freeze" accurately reflects the intent and substance of the proposal it represents. It treats technological advancements in weaponry as the
MARK HATFIELD
Republican Senator from-Oregon
greatest danger of the arms race and the first priority of an arms control agreement in leading to reductions.
There is talk in the Senate of reconciling the freeze with build-down. Only magic could make this possible. Weapons might be built on both sides while a freeze is being negotiated while weapons are desirable to be removing some weapons than to fail to impose any constraints.
reach partial or full deployment, while a nuclear freeze could be negotiated within a year.
But there is a catch. New weapons systems desired by build-down advocates will take many years to
Three members of Congress recently suggested modifications to make build-down more acceptable to freeze advocates. These include restricting on structure and destined for capability. They are flawed in two crucial resales.
Surprisingly, the sponsors acknowledged that rough strategic planning can be accomplished putting useful can be accomplished through spending for new weapons.
maintain confidence in existing weapons systems, is easily verified. Unlike the freeze, build-down conspicuously overlooks the single most important factor contributing to destructive capability.
The second flaw lies with the build-down proposal's formula for measuring destructive capability. The formula takes into account throw-weight, the number of warheads and bomber capacity. But one glaring omission — missile accuracy — renders it virtually useless. When the accuracy of a missile is improved by a factor of two, its capacity to destroy a specific target increases as though its explosive power were increased by a factor of eight.
Accuracy is not verifiable, but missile flight testing, which is necessary to improve accuracy and
The historian Barbara Tuchman described the mentality that spurred the second international conference on arms limitation at the Hague in 1907 by saying, "political leaders told the public only what sounded virtuous . . . disarmament must be discussed, if only to prove to the public its impracticability and their own honest intentions."
In 25 minutes, they agreed to call for "further serious study" of disarmament. Agreement on the acceptable instruments of war consumed six weeks. They agreed to meet again in eight seasons. Seven years later, World War I had begun. Fortunately, they weren't able to conclude the war in less than an hour — as we are today.
Copyright 1983 the New York Times. Mark Hafft is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and chair of the House Budget Committee. Kennedy nuclear freeze resolution.