Shcharansky

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The release of Anatoly Shcharansky was a great human rights event. It was thus very disappointing to see The Crimson devote only a few lines to the story in the "The Real World" section.

I understand that yours is a student newspaper with primarily student concerns. At the same time, I could not help but wonder how much coverage you would have given to the release of Nelson Mandela from his South African jail. The lack of coverage of the Shcharansky incident is indicative of what seems to me to be a general policy of not devoting much space to the discussion of human rights issues in the Soviet Union. University events such as the ones that the Democratic and Republican Clubs co-sponsored to alert students to Soviet atrocities in Afghanistan, and the Hillel Committee for Oppressed Jewry's 24-hour rally and letter writing on behalf of Soviet refuseniks, receive woefully little attention in your newspaper.

On your editorial page, aside from the occasional swipe at American policy in Central America, almost all of your foreign policy editorials deal with the South Africa issue. Many people legitimize this by pointing to the "fact" that Harvard could put real pressure on the South African government, whereas no such pressure could be placed on the Kremlin, for example. There is no foundation for this belief. The Soviet government is very attuned to daily occurences on important American campuses. It is eager to avoid embarrassments such as large university rallies fully covered by student newspapers protesting human rights violations in the Soviet Union.

Of course, The Crimson is not alone in its gross over-emphasis of the South Africa issue at the expense of other human rights causes. This is true of many campus organizations, and many more outside Harvard. It is time for all such organizations to ask a simple question: Is South Africa the only brutal and repressive regime on earth today? Or perhaps we should address an even more general question to liberal newspapers such as yours: Are only countries allied with the United States guilty of human rights abuses? If one's sole source of information was The Crimson, the answer to that question would be yes. Steven Schwartz '86