Nation Topics - Activism | The Nation

Could an American citizen be sentenced to jail simply for making a speech? If the speech is in defense of Pennsylvania death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and the speaker is an activist in the struggle to save Abu-Jamal from the executioner's needle, the answer may be yes. C. Clark Kissinger, head of Mumia-support activities of the New York City-based Refuse & Resist!, an organization that's leading the international campaign to gain a new trial for the former Black Panther, will find out on December 6, when he faces a parole hearing in federal court in Philadelphia.

Technically, the issue is parole violation, but the charge for which Kissinger was convicted this past April--failure to obey a lawful order (to move) during a sitdown protest at the Liberty Bell--led to his being fined $250 and placed on one year's probation with what his lawyer, Ron Kuby, calls the stiffest terms he's seen for such a minor violation. Those terms, which were also imposed on eight other protesters, include surrendering his passport, having to file income and expense reports for himself and his wife, providing a list of anyone he contacts who has committed a crime and having to get permission from his probation officer whenever he wants to leave New York City or Long Island. "You have to remember that Philadelphia is ground zero for the Mumia case," says Kuby. "This is clearly an attack on Mumia and on Mumia's supporters. It is aimed at preventing Clark and others from doing any support activities at all."

"I turned in my passport, and I report to my parole officer," says Kissinger, "but when it comes to First Amendment stuff, I have refused to cooperate." He says he has not complied with an order to avoid any contacts with felons, saying, "In my line of work, most of the people I see have been arrested for something!" Nor has he filed any financial information about his family, a requirement Kuby's office says is simply an effort to gain information on the operations and funding of Refuse & Resist! As for his travel restrictions, Kissinger says, "Whenever it's been a request for something personal, like visiting my sick mother in Massachusetts, it's granted by my parole officer, but whenever it's something political, he has referred it to the sentencing judge, Federal Magistrate Arnold Rapoport, and he's always refused me permission." That's what happened in August when Kissinger asked for permission to go to Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention to make a speech at an officially sanctioned Mumia demonstration. When no permission was forthcoming, Kissinger simply went and gave the speech. Shortly after that, his probation officer notified the magistrate, claiming Kissinger had violated the terms of his parole--thus setting in motion the hearing to have it revoked.

The move comes as other Mumia support activities have also been facing what they say is harassment. Several weeks ago, following a regular weekly protest on Philadelphia's Broad Street, Ernst Ford, one of the organizers, says he found himself being followed home by a police car. As he began unloading signs from his truck, he claims, one policeman approached him saying, "Mumia's gonna die, and so are you." Ford and the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia, sponsor of the protests, filed a complaint with the police, but so far they haven't heard back. The police department declined to comment, saying that "the investigation of the complaint has not been completed."

The international Mumia group is itself having problems, including facing a review of its charity registration by the state, which includes a request for ten years' worth of financial records--a review made more difficult thanks to a suspicious burglary of the organization's headquarters earlier this year. Computers and expensive stereo equipment were left untouched, but a drawer of financial papers was rifled.

While partisans debate whether a victorious George W. Bush would nominate Supreme Court Justices who would overturn Roe v.

The throngs of Vietnamese who hailed Bill Clinton as "the antiwar President" demonstrated that they as a people remember something that we as a people have chosen to forget. It is time to restore our memory of that great antiwar movement by tens of millions of Americans, a movement that began with the first US acts of war in 1945.

Yes, 1945. In September and October of that year, eight troopships were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from Europe to transport US-armed French soldiers and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted seamen on those ships immediately began organized protests. On arriving in Vietnam, the entire crews of the first four troopships met in Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the US government for using American ships to transport an invasion army "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

The movement kept growing. In 1954, when Vice President Nixon suggested sending American troops to replace the French because "the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war or govern themselves," thousands of letters and telegrams opposing US intervention deluged the White House. An American Legion division with 78,000 members demanded that "the United States should refrain from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as combatants in the fighting in Indochina or in southeast Asia." On the Senate floor, Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado declared, "I am against sending American GIs into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man's exploitation in Asia." A Gallup poll revealed that 68 percent of those surveyed were against sending US troops to Indochina. Because of the American people's opposition, the US war had to be waged by four administrations under the cloak of plausible deniability.

We have been depriving ourselves of pride about the finest American behavior during that war. In most wars, a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Tens of millions of Americans sympathized with the Vietnamese people's suffering, many came to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives.

But in the decades since the war's conclusion, American consciousness of the Vietnamese people, with all its potential for healing and redemption, has been systematically obliterated. Ironically, it was after the war that demonization of the Vietnamese began to succeed, thanks in part to the national beatification of POWs and the myth of POWs as martyrs still being tortured by Vietnam. Soon those who had fought against the war became, as a corollary, a despised enemy. They also became the villains in another myth, developed from the 1980s to the present: the spat-upon veteran. As Vietnam veteran and sociologist Jerry Lembcke has shown in The Spitting Image, there is not a shred of evidence of this supposedly widespread phenomenon.

In fact, Vietnam veterans and active-duty soldiers and sailors became the vanguard of the antiwar movement. At home, veterans led the marches and demonstrations, including the 1971 assembly of a half-million protesters headed by a thousand Vietnam veterans, many in wheelchairs and on crutches, who paraded up to a barricade erected to keep them from the Capitol and hurled their Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars and Silver Stars at the government that had bestowed them. In Vietnam, fraggings and mutinies helped compel the withdrawal of most of the ground forces, while rebellions and sabotage put at least five aircraft carriers out of combat. (Who today can believe that 1,500 crew members of the USS Constellation signed a petition demanding that Jane Fonda's antiwar show be allowed to perform on board?)

As the antiwar movement spread even into the intelligence establishment, the American people got access to the most damning truths in the leaked Pentagon Papers. As Senator Mike Gravel noted in 1971, only a person who "has failed to read the Pentagon Papers" could believe we were fighting for "freedom and liberty in Southeast Asia."

But we as a nation have forgotten all that, just as we have forgotten our government's pledge to help rebuild the country it destroyed despite all our opposition.

International solidarity is the key to consolidating the legacy of Seattle.

On a bitingly cold October night two years ago in Laramie, Wyoming, a biker came upon a young man, unconscious, his sweet face ruined by a rain of blows, bound to a fence with ferocious tightness. Rushed to a hospital, he lingered for five days in the twilight world between life and death, never regaining consciousness.

Even before his death, this young man, Matthew Shepard, had been molded into an icon whose name and image were known to the world. Overnight, he became the centerpiece of a Princess Diana-like cascade of candlelight vigils, more astonishing because of their spontaneity, the inspiration as well for prayer meetings and angry protests. Meanwhile, Laramie was also being remade, tagged by the media as a town without pity.

In the months that followed, the Matthew Shepard story was ceaselessly retold and re-spun. There were stories dissecting the murder and re-creating the events leading up to it. There were biographical sketches of the victim--everyone's brother, everyone's son or secret lover; accounts that constructed, and afterward tried to tear down, the myth of innocence despoiled. There were renderings of the killers, hapless and shiftless characters, caught by the police even as Matt lay dying, young men whose biographies could have been lifted straight from Boys Don't Cry. And there were stories about the place itself, variously portrayed as Our Town and living hell, where these events occurred [see Donna Minkowitz, "Love and Hate in Laramie," July 12, 1999].

The print reporters and TV crews came and went, migrating with the seasons like whales--on the scene in the aftermath of the killing; back again for the killers' days in court. In their wake came those who saw in the tragedy the stuff of film or theater, as well as celebrities like Elton John and Peter, Paul and Mary, resuscitated for the occasion, who charged $42,500 for a benefit concert that wound up losing money.

Beth Loffreda arrived in Laramie a few months before the murder to take up a teaching job at the university, and she's still there. Losing Matt Shepard benefits greatly from the long-view perspective, as well as from Loffreda's personal struggle to come to terms with her adopted hometown.

In the tradition of Melissa Fay Green's Praying for Sheetrock, another beautifully told tale of love and violence in small-town America, Beth Loffreda has crafted a richly layered narrative that encompasses both the deed and the community where it occurred. Laramie is as liberal as things get in the pridefully insular world of Wyoming, a state with fewer than half a million souls, little known to the rest of the nation. The state university is there, its faculty listing slightly to the left, and there are trace elements of "Bo-Bo" life, decent cappuccinos and stylish pottery on offer. But Laramie can't be confused with Austin or Madison--its values are far less worldly, its tacit code of conduct narrower and more rigid. To those who belong, Laramie embodies the best of the American past: unforced hospitality, concern for one's neighbors. Yet many people who live there are treated as if they don't belong. Latinos and Native Americans talk about themselves as outside the pale--exotics if not threats, the subject of unapologetic stares and sometimes worse. Though Wyoming calls itself the "Equality State," the people who live on the wrong side of the tracks in Laramie, their trailers fronting unpaved streets--among them, the men who killed Matt Shepard--are similarly excluded.

Longtime Laramie residents recite that their town "is a 'live and let live' kind of place--we don't get into other people's business," yet there isn't much breathing room for difference. For those who don't fit into the corseted little universe, the pathway to survival entails leading a "don't ask, don't tell" life. When Matt Shepard walked into the Fireside Bar dressed to the nines, his patent-leather shoes gleaming in the light, he was violating the code, to shudderingly terrible consequence. In this sense, the killing was as predictable and overdetermined as the one in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Determinism misses the mark, though, for the linkages between place and event are tricky to fashion. Matt Shepard cannot, of course, explain himself. His killers and their girlfriend-accomplices have gone mute, after bouts of braggadocio that obliterated their credibility. This vacuum has been filled with myriad, and sometimes ghoulish, speculations: The killing was a simple robbery or a hate crime; an act tacitly condoned by the prevailing mores; the result of the killers' loveless childhoods; the impulse of someone on a meth high; a way for the murderers to obliterate the dark shadow of the "wuss within." While there is some truth to be extracted from many of these explanations, the mix is unknowable; the reason Matt Shepard was so brutally put to death most likely remains obscure even to the killers themselves.

Losing Matt Shepard is a powerful meditation on the distortions inherent in the ways we comprehend the world. Comprehending the minute particulars is critical to understanding, and reductionism is always perilous; but there's no avoiding the need to simplify reality in order to make meaning. "We make that move too easily--that move from the narrow strip of fence where Matt died to the big cultural and political weather fronts grinding along overhead," Loffreda writes. "That move is necessary, I think, if we want to change that weather, but the trip should be hard, something we can't map out easily in advance."

This tension, between the larger world and the world in a grain of sand, plays itself out in Laramie, which in the wake of the murder becomes a green room--a place of double consciousness where one's values and actions are constantly under scrutiny, an intrusive probing that leads residents to reframe their own stories, to spin their lives to the media and ultimately to themselves.

In recent years scores of gay men have been even more brutally murdered than Matt Shepard, to no public notice. In the early 1990s, Steve Heyman, a University of Wyoming professor who advised the campus's gay group, was found dead, apparently tossed from a moving car; no one outside Laramie paid any attention. But Shepard's story, replete with its widely circulated, indelible and misleading symbols--the crucifixion that really was a more prosaic hogtying; the setting, in a place far less remote than the camera angles depicted--came to represent all the other incidents of gay violence. It served as a Rorschach blot, a way to filter America's uneasiness about homosexuality, to comprehend our love-hate relationship with community.

Organizations at both ends of the ideological spectrum turned the murder to their apparent advantage. The appearances of a defrocked minister and his tiny flock, and Matthew Shepard: Burn in Hell banners (more wittily, a sign reading Save the Gerbils), were offset by the theatrics of a handful of students whose outsized angels' wings kept the preacher's signs out of camera range. National gay groups made Shepard the centerpiece of their fundraising campaigns, though Loffreda points out that they gave nothing back to the gay people of Laramie itself. SOFAITH (Society of Families Anchored in Truth and Honor) seized the moment to assail gay "behaviors" and policies supportive of gays. A Denver-based theater troupe descended on the town, interviewing hundreds of residents. Out of those interviews came The Laramie Project, first staged in Denver and then on Broadway [see Elizabeth Pochoda, "The Talk in Laramie," June 19]. As theater, it's as flat and featureless as the prairie, stultifyingly innocuous, entirely unrevealing of character or motivation, without insight. The play's weaknesses have less to do with the talent of the playwright than with the raw material. Laramie's residents were suffering interpretation fatigue by the time the tape recorders were turned on. They had polished speeches for the tape recorders but little of consequence to say.

Losing Matt Shepard ends with the political push, ultimately successful, to pass a bias-crimes ordinance in Laramie. At the time of the murder, a hate-crimes bill was stalled in the state legislature, for all the familiar reasons, and the killing swayed few if any lawmakers' votes. Soon after the murder, the Laramie City Council issued a proclamation expressing its sympathy to Matthew Shepard's parents and urging that "the healing process" begin--pop psychology become politics--but a handful of citizens, straight and gay, wanted a more concrete response. Eventually the council passed a measure calling for police training and better record-keeping. The detective who developed the case against the killers, himself a model of compassion and forensic intelligence, dismissively characterized it a "feel-good" gesture. Yet in Laramie--a town so conservative that a gay assistant professor feared acknowledging her sexuality for fear of jeopardizing her chance for tenure; a place so fearful of gay-bashing that the phone number for the AIDS hotline is unlisted, to discourage threatening calls--this tiny political step makes a difference. It puts Laramie on record as committed to protecting the most basic liberties of gay men and lesbians. In these times, and in this place, that's cause for cheer.

If you are the parent of a newborn, beware. Fourteen to eighteen months from now your child will be programmed to nag for a new toy or snack every four hours, "branded for life" as a Cheerios eater or a Coca-Cola guzzler and placed in the loving care of a market researcher at the local daycare center.

That, at least, was the view of early childhood development presented by the 400 children's-market honchos at the third annual Advertising & Promoting to Kids Conference, held in New York City on September 13-14. Conference-goers attended sessions on topics like Building Brand Recognition, Marketing in the Classroom and The Fine Art of Nagging ("40% of sales of jeans, burgers and other products occur because a child asks for the product"). They cheered winners of the Golden Marble Awards for best breakfast-food and video-game commercials.

The marketing confab was held as the government released a report documenting the growing commercialization of public schools and also as the Federal Trade Commission blasted media companies and the advertising industry for deliberately marketing violent films and products to children. Although kids have been targets of marketing for decades, the sheer amount of advertising they are exposed to today is "staggering and emotionally harmful," says Susan Linn, a Harvard Medical School psychologist who studies media at the Judge Baker Children's Center in Boston. Linn and other child psychologists, educators and healthcare professionals led a protest outside the Golden Marble Awards to draw attention to the effects of the $12-billion-a-year kid-ad industry, including the epidemic of obesity in children and increasing violence in schools. "It's appalling that creativity is being rewarded in the service of manipulating children," Linn says. "We hope this is the beginning of a national movement to challenge this."

In fact, this fall has been a good one for grassroots opponents of corporate commercialism. The Madison, Wisconsin, school board voted in August to terminate its exclusive beverage contract with Coca-Cola, making it the first school district in the country to cancel an existing marketing deal [see Manning, "Students for Sale: How Corporations Are Buying Their Way Into America's Classrooms," September 27, 1999]. The board cited "overwhelming public opposition" as the reason for its decision. That action came hard on the heels of successful campaigns to stop proposed school-marketing deals in Oakland and Sacramento, California; Philadelphia; and the state of Michigan, where a cola contract involving 110 school districts was shot down. In October the American Dental Association passed a resolution urging its members to oppose the marketing of soft drinks and junk food in schools, and the American Psychological Association, under pressure from many of its members, agreed to form a task force to examine whether it is unethical for psychologists to advise companies that market to children. Meanwhile, ZapMe!, the in-school marketing company, abandoned its educational business after failing to convince enough schools to accept its offer of free computers in exchange for delivering student eyeballs to advertisers.

"We're seeing a dramatic increase in local resistance to all forms of corporate marketing to kids," says Andrew Hagelshaw, executive director of the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education, in Oakland. "The issue has finally hit critical mass with the public." Hillary Rodham Clinton has jumped on the bandwagon. Citing a "barrage of materialistic marketing" aimed at young children, the Democratic candidate for senator from New York wants the government to ban commercials aimed at preschool children and to prohibit advertising inside public elementary schools. Anticorporate activists welcomed Clinton's proposals but said they don't go far enough. Opponents of a New York City school board plan to finance free laptop computers for students through in-school advertising say her proposals won't protect millions of high school students. Nor would the proposals apparently affect the commercial in-school TV program Channel One, whose market is primarily middle school students.

Corporate lobbyists are already putting the heat on members of Congress who might support legislation reining in children's advertising. Hagelshaw believes the real battles will take place in local school boards and state legislatures, which may be more receptive to anticommercial arguments. There's never been a better, or more important, time for local activists to step up the pressure on corporate exploiters of children.

In their hunger to take back the White House, the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons have swallowed the mellow prose of Texas scripted for them by George W.'s handlers--but at the state level, the antigay hate campaigns of the Christian right are picking up steam. "In 2000 there have been and are more gay-bashing initiatives on the ballot than ever before," points out David Fleischer, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force organizer for state and local politics.

In Nevada, an amendment to the state Constitution banning same-sex marriage, backed by the Southern Baptists (who have pledged $1 million to pass it) and the Mormon Church, won 60 percent approval in the latest polls. In Nebraska, an even worse measure bans civil unions and even legal status for domestic partnerships, which threatens benefits afforded to same-sex couples by private companies doing business there (like Qwest and Wells Fargo). In Maine, the Christian Civic League (a Gary Bauer spinoff) and the Christian Coalition are spending heavily to defeat ratification of a gay civil rights law already passed by the legislature. The progay forces are woefully underfunded in all three states.

But the most critical battle is in Oregon, which has seen forty antigay initiatives (four statewide, the rest local) in the past twelve years. This year's Measure 9 is a viciously broad version of the "no promo homo" amendments Jesse Helms has been trying to pass in Washington for years: It bans public school "instruction of behaviors relating to homosexuality and bisexuality...that encourages, promotes or sanctions such behavior." Sponsored by professional antigay crusader Lon Mabon and his Oregon Citizens Alliance--who were behind the previous referendums--this thought-police measure would have a devastating effect on the ability of the state's schools and colleges to teach about HIV or antigay discrimination and menaces the livelihood of openly gay teachers. Mabon makes it quite clear: He has said that the measure is designed to defund "any place that there is a cultural diversity program or multiculturalism or AIDS education [in which] homosexuality is presented as being normal and acceptable.... Any AIDS education like what occurred at Portland State University or at the local level could not be done. Any speakers that come in, if they are homosexuals, they could not stand up in front of a class or an assembly and talk about a pro-homosexual lifestyle."

Mabon-sponsored referendums aimed at banning civil rights laws protecting gays were defeated in 1992 and 1994, but it will not be so easy this time. In previous years the gay-bashing measures were the only controversial ones on the ballot, and a broad-based progressive coalition fought back effectively; this year, there are twenty-six different ballot questions, and the official guide mailed to every voter is 400 pages, the size of a telephone book. Moreover, there are seven other initiatives of major concern to progressives: two antilabor "paycheck protection" measures; three on tax and budget cutting; and two anti-environmental proposals.

"It's very shrewd of the right wing," says Paddy McGuire, who ran the Clinton campaign in Oregon in 1992 and 1996 and is now chief of staff to the secretary of state. "For $100,000 you can put damn well anything on the ballot--9 is the only one of these measures where signatures were mostly gotten by volunteers, while the others were gathered by paid workers at $1.50 a signature. It's going to take around a million bucks to defeat each one of them--that's $5 to $6 million we won't spend to elect progressives to office." The strategy to sap progressive energies through referendums was the brainchild of Bill Sizemore, the 1998 Republican candidate for governor. Sizemore has turned his strategy into a lucrative business: He runs Oregon Taxpayers United--which is funded by wealthy GOP conservatives and the oldtime timber barons and fronts for the ballot measures--and on the side he runs a signature-collection firm that rakes it in for petition drives.

"We're stretched thin," worries Josh Kardon, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden's chief of staff. "The governor [liberal Democrat John Kitzhaber] is tied up fighting off the two measures aimed at his budget. Wyden's tied up trying to raise money for state legislative races--we're in spitting distance of taking back one or both houses. Because we're so diluted, trying to explain in a short time why Measure 9 is bad for kids is going to be tough."

All the more so because "we have less than half the staff the campaign that defeated the 1994 antigay referendum had, when they spent $1.7 million," says No on 9 campaign manager Kathleen Sullivan; by mid-September the group had raised only $300,000. Both the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council are putting major resources into 9's passage. The No campaign does have strong support from the PTA as well as the state AFL-CIO, whose president, Tim Nesbitt, points to "an alliance between Lon Mabon and paycheck protection, which the OCA has endorsed." As the state's leading Democratic pollster, Lisa Grove, points out, "Passage of 9 would have implications beyond Oregon--if they can win here, they'll try it elsewhere." Money for TV ads is desperately needed. To contribute, make out checks to: No on 9, PO Box 40625, Portland, OR 97240; or log on at www.noon9.org.

Although most Israelis, even those who consider themselves members of the left, are blaming Yasir Arafat for escalating the current violence, some are trying to voice a different position. They have organized a number of small protests calling for Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and against the shooting of demonstrators.

In addition, about fifty Israeli scholars and community leaders--Jews and Arabs--have published a petition in Israel's daily Haaretz stating that war must and can be avoided. The petition was initiated by sociologist Baruch Kimmerling. Signers include Ruchama Marton, the founder of the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights; Dalia Kirstein, director of the Center for the Rights of the Individual; and Gila Svirsky, former director of the Israeli and Palestinian feminist group Bat Shalom. Also signing were literary figures David Grossman, Yitschak Laor, Yigal Shwartz and Orly Lubin; economist Arieh Arnon; and three Palestinian citizens of Israel who teach at Ben-Gurion University, Ismael Abu-Saad, Thabet Abu Rass and Ahmad Saadi. The petition demands:

§ An immediate and unilateral Israeli commitment to evacuating the provocative settlements and zones that are to be included in the Palestinian state--including those in the Gaza Strip, Hebron and the Jordan Valley.

§ That Israel accept Palestinian sovereignty over all Arab neighborhoods and mosques inside Jerusalem, while Israel will maintain sovereignty over the Western Wall. The city, within this framework, will be completely open to all residents.

§ That Israel declare a strong commitment to insuring equal rights in every area to all Palestinian and other citizens of the state of Israel, and that it stop shooting at demonstrators.

§ A release and exchange of all prisoners on all sides.

We believe that only the acceptance of this package and the immediate cessation of all violence by all populations on all sides can serve as the basis for rebuilding trust among Jews, Palestinians and the Arab world.

A new era has begun in Serbia, not only because Slobodan Milosevic has at last been expelled from office but because the deed was accomplished by the Serbian people acting in solidarity and without recourse to violence to seize their political destiny. The world will not soon forget the spectacle of Serbian riot police embracing demonstrators or the ballots spilling from the windows of the Serbian Parliament building.

Six months ago, such developments were unthinkable: Serbia's opposition had grown battle-weary and despondent, outmaneuvered by a repressive regime and fractured by internal divisions. Much of the credit for the energy, creativity and wherewithal of the protests belongs to Serbia's youth movement, Otpor, which aggressively advocated coalition-building, nonviolent civil disobedience and the importance of winning police and military support. The popular rebellion in Serbia bore the hallmarks of Otpor's strategy, as well as the youth movement's exuberance and optimism.

Still, the politics of coalition-building are complicated and perilous. Can groups, individuals and institutions that once supported Milosevic's ruling party or that launched and sustained the rhetoric of war really be trusted to help lead Serbia into the new era? For how long will the eighteen opposition parties that united behind Vojislav Kostunica continue to cooperate in the absence of a common enemy? Given Serbia's deeply divided political scene, Kostunica, a nationalist democrat from the center right, was a canny choice for presidential nominee: Uncorrupted by regime ties or mafia connections, Kostunica has a reputation for personal honesty and integrity. An anti-Communist, he also has a history of fierce opposition to Western interference in Serbian affairs. He has denounced the Hague war crimes tribunal as a political tool, he had strong wartime ties to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and he decried the Dayton agreement of 1995, favoring more substantial Serbian territorial claims in Bosnia. As for the Serbian offensive against Albanians in Kosovo, Kostunica once told the Chicago Tribune, "Their leaders asked for Kosovo to be bombed. How should we behave? How would Americans behave?"

These views appealed to Milosevic's former constituency as well as to the substantial nationalist opposition that has long felt that Milosevic betrayed Serbian territorial aims and soiled the country's international image. Many ordinary Serbs share an abiding distrust of the international community, especially the United States, which they feel punished the people for the actions of a leader many of them despised. At the same time, although he wears his nationalism proudly, Kostunica says that it entails neither chauvinistic intent nor "Greater Serbian" aspirations. Kostunica has always opposed the deployment of paramilitaries, and he is a democrat who favors a free press, a truth commission and the rule of law. His impressively level-headed command of the peaceful rebellion speaks for his commitment to nonviolent conflict resolution within Yugoslavia.

And yet there is an antinationalist segment of the Serbian opposition, however small, that embraces the country's new leader very cautiously. These civil society leaders, many of whom weathered the Milosevic years in Serbia's sizable NGO community, worry that Kostunica will bring with him certain elites who fell from Milosevic's favor in the mid-nineties. After all, among Kostunica's close allies are the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Serbian Orthodox Church, both of which helped produce the nationalist rhetoric that Milosevic seized to bolster popular support and to fuel the war machine. Serbian nationalism in all its varieties will not soon disappear, and the student movement in particular has a crucial role to play in keeping Kostunica, as well as his future challengers, honest and in helping a meaningful political life to take root at last in Serbia.

Meanwhile, the practical challenges are monumental. Yugoslavia's economy is a shambles. Not only did NATO bomb key factories last year; not only did sanctions create a vacuum since filled by an all-pervasive black market; not only does Serbia lack a banking system and access to foreign banks; but Milosevic and his cronies established an elite class of gangsters and paramilitaries whose ill-gotten wealth will be difficult to simply wish away. To neutralize the power of organized crime, the holdings of war profiteers and mafia lords may have to be legalized, or at the very least, these characters, who have played such a nefarious role in Serbia's financial and cultural life for the past decade, must be persuaded to invest their wealth constructively. In a society whose institutions, from banks and hospitals to schools and courts, have been neglected or co-opted, and where the flight of the professional classes became a virtual hemorrhage, the road to recovery will be long indeed. Although the easing of sanctions and the promise of aid will help, the people of Serbia must survive a very difficult period of adjustment.

At the end of this period, however, Serbia, the largest and most populous nation in the ex-Yugoslav region, could once again become a forceful neighbor. This is just one reason that it is so important for Serbia to reckon with its recent history and rebuild its relationships with the other ex-Yugoslav republics on a foundation of humility and cooperation. The status of Montenegro remains an open and vexed question, with some of Milo Djukanovic's followers still straining for independence and Milosevic's party officially governing Montenegro on the federal level. And against the will of the Albanian majority, Kosovo remains nominally a part of Yugoslavia; with a reputable government in Belgrade, the international community will eventually withdraw.

The question of reconciliation with the past, specifically Serbia's role in the Yugoslav wars, is also a critical one, and it will most likely be resolved on local terms or not at all. Many Serbs believe they have been demonized by the world media and unfairly singled out for punishment for the Bosnian war. Thus, stern rebukes from abroad often meet with hostility. Although Kostunica has unfortunately vowed not to cooperate with The Hague, he may offer war crimes trials on Serbian soil. One hopes the new freedom of expression Kostunica promises will allow journalists and academics to explore recent history publicly and candidly. This internal process will be delicate, painful and contentious, but it offers the possibility of deep and lasting change.

It took twelve years for the FDA to approve mifepristone--also known as
RU-486--and most of that time had less to do with medicine than with the
politics of abortion. Still, the late-September decision was a
tremendous victory for American women. In approving RU-486, the FDA
showed that science and good sense can still carry the day, even in an
election year.

The long delay may even backfire against the drug's opponents. In 1988,
when mifepristone was legalized in France, it was a medical novelty as
well as a political flashpoint. Today, it's been accepted in thirteen
countries, including most of Western Europe; it's been taken by more
than a half-million women and studied, it sometimes seems, by almost as
many researchers. By the end of the approval process, the important
medical professional organizations--the AMA, the American Medical
Women's Association, the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists--had given mifepristone their blessing; impressive
percentages of Ob-Gyns and family practitioners said they would consider
prescribing it; thousands of US women had taken it in clinical trials
and given it high marks, with 97 percent in one study saying they would
recommend it to a friend. Against this background of information and
experience, the antichoicers' attempt to raise fears about the drug's
safety sounds desperate and insincere.

In a normal country, RU-486 would simply be another abortion method, its
use a matter of personal preference (in France it's the choice of 20
percent of women who have abortions, while in Britain only 6 percent opt
for it). But in the United States, where abortion clinics are besieged
by fanatics and providers wear bulletproof vests, mifepristone's main
significance lies in its potential to widen access to abortion,
especially in those 86 percent of US counties that possess no abortion
clinic, by making it private--doctors unable or unwilling to perform
surgical abortions could prescribe it, and women could take it at home.

It is unlikely, however, that Mifeprex, as the drug will be known when
it comes on the market, will prove to be the magic bullet that ends the
war on abortion by depriving antichoice activists of identifiable
targets. The nation has been retreating from Roe v. Wade for a
quarter-century, and a good portion of the patchwork of state and local
regulations intended to discourage surgical abortion will apply to
Mifeprex as well: parental notification and consent laws (thirty-two
states), waiting periods (nineteen states), biased counseling and
cumbersome reporting and zoning requirements. States in which
antichoicers control the legislatures will surely rush to encumber
Mifeprex with hassles, and small-town and rural physicians in particular
may find it hard to prescribe Mifeprex without alerting antichoice
activists. Doctors are a cautious bunch, and the anticipated flood of
new providers may turn out to be a trickle, at least at first. Abortion
rights activists should also brace themselves for a backlash from their
hard-core foes: Just after the FDA's decision was announced, a Catholic
priest crashed his car into an Illinois abortion clinic and hacked at
the building with an ax.

But in the long run, Mifeprex will make abortion more acceptable. In
poll after poll Americans have said that when it comes to terminating a
pregnancy, the earlier the better. Mifeprex, which has been approved for
the first forty-nine days after a woman's last menstrual period--when
the embryo's size varies from a pencil point to a grain of rice--may
well prove not to arouse the same kinds of anxieties and moral qualms as
surgical abortion. Then, too, Americans are used to taking pills. That,
of course, is what the antichoicers are afraid of.