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Thursday, April 11, 1991 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
War unresolved
Saddam prolongs fighting in attacks on Kurds, but United States should stay out of civil action
he war with Iraq is over.
President Bush announced last week that the United States officially had saved the Kuwaiti people from the wrath of Saddam Hussein.
Thousands of Kurds, a nomadic group living in northern Iraq, have been wiped out by Iraqi forces.
But the war is far from over for the Iraqi people.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing for the northern border of Iraq. During their journey, they suffer from hunger, sickness and harmful exposure to the cold of the mountainous border region.
They are now the victims of Saddam's efforts to rape and pillage his own country to stay in power.
The Bush administration has refused to order U.S. military forces to intervene in the Iraqi civil war. Instead, the United States is providing relief to Kurdish refugees with food and medical supplies.
This is a wise decision on the part of the Bush administration. The U.S. government should provide as much aid as possible to the Kurdish rebels so they can survive against or flee from the ruthless attacks by their own government.
The Iraqi people are being inflicted with the same kind of bullying as Kuwait was, but the Iraqi situation is different because it is a civil war. The U.S. government should not get involved militarily in a civil war. Korea and Vietnam are two disastrous examples of what can happen when the United States puts its nose where it does not belong.
Whether the United States should have gotten involved in the gulf war is debatable. But the U.S. government had international laws to fall back on when it entered Kuwait.
Bush is making the right choice by sending food and medical aid to Iraq. By staying out of another war, the government is discouraging war itself.
Carol Krekeler for the editorial board
Iron Curtain rises
Eastern Europe must find place in world arena
The Soviet Union began to clamp its iron fist on eastern European countries when it seized freedom from eastern Germany in 1946.
But the era of Soviet domination in the East is over.
One by one, the Warsaw Pact nations (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and East Germany) have regained their independence.
The Soviet Union's inability to manage its own republics and its obvious loss of control in the satellite nations indicated to eastern Europe that the opportunity for escape was at hand.
The Iron Curtain has been pulled open.
In 1898, Communist leadership resigned in Czechoslavakia. The rest of the nations grasped the chance to follow suit.
The new question facing these nations is what will be their role in the world political arena?
Denied access to participating in the affairs of the rest of the world and prohibited from completely controlling their own fates,
the nations have a new-found freedom thrust upon them.
Their position with the Soviet Union in the future will be of great interest.
But their relationships with the United States will prove to be a crucial turning point in East-West relations.
These nations are being denied entrance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO nations argue that security in the East would be weakened.
But eastern Europe is aware of the possible growth that establishing new ties with the United States will provide.
And the United States is catching on to the potential advantages new alliances could offer.
Economic prosperity on both sides in the form of investment for the United States and industrial and technological growth in the East are among the benefits.
And the United States would be wise to consider its options.
Tiffany Harness for the editorial board
Administration lacks concern for fostering minority growth
On April 11, 1990, student activism at the University of Kansas reached a high point.
That day about 500 students occupied Strong Hall demanding to speak to the chancellor The Sigma Alpha Epsilon incident, in which a Black woman was physically and arbitrarily pushed out of her report office and incited this mass protest. The incident quickly grew to include a potpourri of concerns
From GLOSK to KJIK, every special interest group was represented that day, and everyone had an agenda to push.
The students who organized the protest, Black students, also had an agenda that day. That agenda included things such as better recruitment and retention of Black students, increased Black faculty and staff, a multi-cultural center and a redefining of the office of minority affairs.
In the past year, there has been at least one positive development as far as Black and other students of color were enrolled. In the spring 2014 was the hiring of a new director of the
These issues and many more were of great concern to Black students at that time. Unfortunately, a year later, many of these issues have yet to be addressed. The University administration has become an expert at dragging its feet.
Cory
Anderson
Guest column
Guest columnist
office of minority affairs. Unfortunately, a very competent and creative individual is forced to work in the same repressive and underfinanced position as his predecessors.
In the area of recruitment of Black students, the office of admissions has taken two steps backward. Both of the older, more experienced minority student recruiters have left the office and have been replaced by a graduate teaching assistant and a recent KU graduate.
These two people no doubt are committed to their jobs, but unfortunately they lack the resources and the experience to be immediately able to perform the position of Minority Recruitment Coordinator remains vacant.
All of these issues are important to Black students. If inaction is the way the administration chooses to show its concern for Black students, then the future for Black students on this campus is indeed bleak. We
marched, protested and dialogued ourselves into a very uneasy frustration.
We are tired of waiting for change. And today, one year later, we intend to make that feeling known, once again, in front of Strong Hall.
Personally, I find it more and more difficult to recommend this University to prospective Black students. The apathy of our administration is appalling. I would hesitate to subject anyone to the climate that Black students are subjected to on this campus.
I will graduate in May, and this column and today's protest are my last effort to impress upon this administration the importance of recruiting and supporting Black and other minority students.
I would implore the administration to listen to the voice of reason and look to history for a lesson on the commitment of Black students.
In 1969, Black students at Cornell University protested these same issues. Those students used guns and force to take over their administration building. Those students got what they wanted.
Cory Anderson is an Omaha, Neb., senior majoring in journalism.
Other Voices
Smokers knew risks
In a new twist on the old Flip Wilson line, "The devil made me do it," some smokers are trying to convince the nation's highest court that "Philip Morris made me do it."
The courts have reasoned that because of a federally required warning label on every pack of cigarettes, smokers cannot argue that they were given no warning of the dangers of their habit.
For years, a few longtime smokers have tried without success to hold tobacco companies liable for their destructive habit. So far, the federal court system has refused the right to sue tobacco companies.
In contrast, state courts have been moving in the opposite direction.
A current case before the Supreme Court should resolve this smoldering issue. The court decided to hear a case involving Rose Cipollone, who died of lung cancer in 1984 after smoking a pack of cigarettes each day for 42 years.
In 1987, a trial court awarded
her family $400,000 in damages against Liggett Group, a cigarette manufacturer. After an appeals court threw out the award, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case this fall.
Smokers cannot credibly argue that they have been kept in the dark about their habit. For the past 25 years, cigarette makers have been required to print warnings on cigarette packs.
For the past 30 years, the media have carried stories on new studies documenting the dangers of smoking cigarettes.
Even if a smoker somehow manages to avoid all the dire warnings, perhaps by living in a cave, you think plain common sense would help breathing hot, tarry smoke into his lungs would not be healthy.
If the Supreme Court allows tobacco companies to be sued because of bad decisions made by smokers, the court will have struck another blow against personal responsibility.
From the Delta Democrat Times, Greenville, Miss.
Whether a person smokes or not
is in the end, a personal choice
An opposing Voice raises funding questions
The student group Voice was recently denied financing by the Student Senate, one of only four groups so excluded. Moreover, while the other three groups were denied on consideration of their functional uniqueness, Senate had to devise other criteria for Voice. In doing so, the issue of the financing of Voice reaches beyond the details. For the rest of the matter is a compelling lesson on where the University as an institution stands in relation to intellectual diversity.
For newcomers, Voice is a KU peace group formed in response to the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf and pursuing an agenda that promotes regional cooperation, with its spider grip on our society, economy and government.
Senate denied Voice financing on three "borderline" considerations: that the group was partisan, reactive and controversial. 'Partisan' was clearly a mismiser because there was no electoral candidate or party nominee to win and rally around — even if they wanted to, which they did not.
"Reactive" means that because the war was over, there was obviously nothing left for Voice to do.
Cynthia Ingham
Guest columnist
Hadn't the glorious liberation of Kuwait been accomplished? Hadn't the Army Corps of Engineers repaired the emir's palace? What more was needed to vindicate the New World Order?
The end of the war has demonstrated in brutal terms that militarism must be opposed more strongly than ever. It may take time to sink in, but this war has shamed the United States, and no amount of flag-waving by military officials will do the damage that fact Reactive? Voice's work has only begun.
Finally, Senate was leered of financing Voice because it was too "controversial." Twice during the year, Voice was told that it would have had a better chance at financing if Voice had presented both sides of the issue and hadn't taken such a strong position to the ultimate sin! Voice was not nice!
Here it is, folks, the new catechism for intellectual legitimacy on the eve
of the 21st century: feel good fairness. Surely this must cause shivers down the spine of every activist group on campus. Is there a pro-torture position in Amnesty International? Do Students Against Hunger sometimes present the case for哭鸣? Or, more seriously, should Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas allow room for the idea that homosexuality is not a legitimate lifestyle? By its very name, American Friends of Palestine has taken a position. How can this be?
It can be because Senate has decided on a threshold of acceptability that Voice doesn't reach and that other groups apparently do. The Voice crime was compounded by another: its position was probably lower than the average. Not only was Voice staring things up, but it failed to adjust its positions when it seemed the group wasn't swimming with the tide.
In a sense, Senate's action is a continuation of the popular mentality running rampant during the Persian Gulf War. Don't offend anyone by taking a position. In the vast comfort zone, you might say what's right and what's wrong? Niceness takes precedence over controversy, because controversy
'The end of the war has demonstrated in brutal terms that militarism must be opposed more strongly than ever.'
makes people feel bad. What's the nice response? Support the troops. Don't question the war, don't ask, don't think.
Intellectual diversity requires controversy as the force of opinion-making. Intellectual cowardice, on the other hand, fits well with niceness as its ethical fulcrum. But prettending one can escape individual responsibility for moral decision is a fool's game.
Senate's action is a mere symptom of a corrosive attitude within universities: a pustule, so to speak, amid the leprosy of intellectual cowardice.
Free thought certainly has not been stifled by this financing denial, but the masonry is there — any time you want to have a building what constitutes acceptable opinion.
Cynthia Ingham is a Lawrence graduate student in U.S. history.
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