What you see is a grainy image of a Panama City
monument that needs
a bit of maintenance. It's about something that
happened 60 years ago,
in April of 1943.
At that time in Warsaw, Hitler's armies were on the
retreat in Russia
but they still held all of Poland and the Third Reich
was determined
to send all the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to
the death camps.
Badly outnumbered, weakened by years of starvation and
with hardly any
weapons, the people rose up and did battle with the
mighty Wehrmacht
for six weeks. Only about 200 of the combatants
survived to tell the
story of how people without hope --- they knew they
were likely to die,
and only intended to take as many of the hated Nazis
as possible with
them to the grave --- can face down overwhelming force
and yet inflict
terrible casualties on those who are supposed to be
the easy winners.
My generation gets tired of stretched out World War II
analogies. How
many times have we heard that the White House's
favorite villain of
the moment is Hitler reincarnated, or that anyone who
questions the
wisdom or morality of a given war is a new version of
Neville Chamberlain?
The argument wears awfully thin when stretched too far
and used too
many times.
How come the public debate never touches on the
significance of another
work of public art, the world-famous statue of Mother
Russia, standing
atop Volgograd's Mamayev Hill with her sword drawn and
pointing westward?
That work commemorates a battle that concluded a few
months before the
Warsaw Ghetto rose in revolt, when Volgograd was
called Stalingrad.
The 20th century was a time of atrocious wars and
awful tyrants, and
the most terrible battle of the century's most
terrible war was fought
between the armies of the nations led by the epoch's
most terrible tyrants,
Hitler and Stalin. If you don't know history, you
might presume that
nobody would fight and die for such monsters. But
fight and die they
did --- Mamayev Hill changed hands more than a dozen
times in the battle,
and the casualties on both sides on that one
relatively little spot
are calculated in six figures. Of the hundreds of
thousands of soldiers
whom Hitler sent into Stalingrad, fewer than ten
percent came home alive.
In terms of absolute numbers, the forces that Stalin
threw into the
fray suffered comparable losses.
These lessons of history do not put my mind at ease as
American and
British forces prepare to fight their way into
Baghdad, a sprawling
city of five million inhabitants, to take out the
Hitler surrogate of
the moment.
I do, however, expect that by the end of the fighting
Saddam will be
taken out in a box. Then, I fear, the real problems ---
the attempt
to install and maintain an American protectorate in
the Middle East
in an epoch when colonialism is a discredited idea of
the past ---
will begin.
I sure hope that I'm wrong about all of this, that my
fears are grossly
exaggerated.
This issue of The Panama News presented me with an
ethical dilemma that
also has its parallels harking back to the Second
World War. I think
that we will be the only Panamanian news publication
that does not feature
a photograph of Shashana Johnson, the 30-year-old
American soldier and
mother of a small child who was taken as a prisoner of
war by the Iraqis.
Because she was born in Panama, the daughter of the
West Indian community
that is the largest part of this country's English-
speaking community,
there are good reasons to argue that her photo, rather
than the photo
of Panama City's tribute to the combatants of the
Warsaw Ghetto, should
be at the top of this page.
The problem is that the photos that all the other
papers are publishing,
and the videos you have probably seen on CNN or Fox,
are the products
of a war crime. It's a clear violation of the Third
Geneva Convention
for Iraq to show off prisoners of war to the world
press. Yes, I join
with all Panamanians and all Americans in hoping for
Shashana Johnson's
safety, dignity and prompt return. I will not make
that point by participating
in her abuse by Saddam Hussein.
The medical profession had a debate a few years back
about whether to
use data collected in cruel Nazi experiments in which
Jewish concentration
camp inmates were immersed in vats of ice water, so
that doctors could
find out how to revive German sailors and pilots who
were rescued from
cold seas. Many doctors argued that it's unethical to
use data collected
in such a way, no matter the good that may come of it,
and no matter
that nothing can be done for the victims. The data
were used, and now
kids who fall through the ice and remain submerged for
half an hour or
more are regularly revived. But in the case at hand
now, no lives can
or will be saved by the use of pictures that are the
product of an Iraqi
war crime.
Our Opinion section touches on angles of the war that
don't get much
coverage by AOL/Time/Warner/CNN et al. For example, we
feature Amnesty International's and Human Rights Watch's takes on the POW issue. Professor Norman Girvan's column this time is about the
Greater Caribbean
region's reactions to the war. We republish an
analysis by one of our
sister Latin American English-Language papers, AM
Costa Rica, about
the Tico anti-war movement.
In our Spanish News section, Willy Carrera reports from Houston about how
undocumented Latin American
immigrants want to fight for America in this war. Our
Spanish Opinion
section includes the official White House list of countries that are part of
the pro-war coalition
(does Panama's name appear?) and the Editorial joins the arguments about whether Panama is or
should be neutral.
Meanwhile, things ARE happening in Panama. I did a bit
more reporting
than usual for this issue --- I took in a book
presentation and photo
exhibit by the folks at the San Lorenzo Project, I covered a business executives' forum on ethics, I reviewed the latest production at
the Theatre Guild of Ancon and dinner at El Trapiche and caught a Smithsonian lecture on central Panama's tree distribution. And that's not
counting the places
where I went with my camera.
I hope that you find my efforts worthy. I know from
some of the mail
I receive that many of you do. (On our Letters page this time, however, former President
Guillermo Endara finds
fault with my Opinion column in the last issue, and I
would not be surprised
if I heard from people who disagree with my column on the CEMIS project in this issue.)
But of course, this is the second issue in March (OK -
-- at the end
of March), which is one of our two fundraising months.
I'd really like
to get The Panama News back into print publication,
which will allow
us to generate the income to pay for more content and
give you a better
publication. If you think that's a worthy cause,
please donate generously
by sending your check to:
Thanks for the help that you give.
