Selective Condemnation

"YOU are hereby ordered for induction to the Armed Forces of the United States," read the memo I received in the mail last Friday. "You are to report at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School on 11/18/89 at 8:00 a.m." I quickly tossed it in the trash.

The memo, sent by Harvard's Committee on Central America (COCA) to 900 male undergraduates, was cleverly designed to play upon the public outrage generated by the brutal murders of six Jesuit priests last week by right-wing death squads in El Salvador.

Granted, COCA's underlying intention of calling our attention to the atrocities of the past week is, by itself, noble. No one with sympathy for the people of El Salvador can justify what happened. Why, then, was I so quick to throw out the memo? And why do I feel so compelled to denounce COCA's strategy?

It is obvious that COCA's action breached a central university rule that no student organization may distribute printed material without that material including its own name, and may have violated federal law by forging the signature of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass).

More significantly, however, COCA's distribution of the memo was an irresponsible attempt to generate hysteria among undergraduates when, given the current inequities in our system of military service, there was clearly no need to do so. It also represented another example of COCA's highly selective and skewed portrayal of current events in Central America and of the United States' role in them.

AS one who has been intensely interested in Latin American political and economic affairs for several years, I had considered joining COCA before coming to Harvard. I read with interest COCA's description of itself as an organization devoted to proclaiming and preserving the sovereignty of the legitimate governments of Central America. Yet after attending its introductory meeting during my first week here and reading some of its literature, I gradually came to the realization that COCA was no such thing.

Instead, it became clear that COCA was, frankly, engaged in spreading specious and patently false propaganda. Don't be misled by its use of words like "self-determination"--COCA members are interested in no such thing.

In fact, it seems the sole purpose of this organization is to protest U.S. military involvement in El Salvador and Nicaragua. At the same time, COCA completely ignores encroachment by the Soviet Union and its Cuban allies on the domestic affairs of these countries, or claims that such interference is some how morally justifiable.

What I had originally envisioned as an organization devoted to championing the democratic vision of some of the region's leaders (President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica and former Argentine President Raul Alfonsin), was in fact one devoted to spreading the propaganda of its Marxist ideologues, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega.

NEVER have I heard COCA unconditionally denounce the Sandinista government for its human rights abuses or for its reliance on the military assistance of the Cubans and the Soviets, which began, one may recall, during the Carter years--that is, before the U.S. decided to fund the contra rebels. Never have I heard COCA question the legitimacy of a Nicaraguan government that prohibits independent polling of its citizens and has done everything it could to squash the free speech of the opposition, as the editors of La Prensa would attest.

COCA members certainly did not respond with public outrage and denounce Ortega's recent decision to halt the year-long ceasefire in Nicaragua, an act which drew widespread condemnation from the democratic leaders of this hemisphere. And I doubt that COCA members will make any noise if Ortega, as he has done in the past, intimidates the currently united democratic opposition and subverts the electoral process in order to keep himself in power.

For that matter, they did not raise a voice in protest earlier this month when the Marxist guerrilla front in El Salvador began an offensive that prompted the latest wave of violence in the decade-old civil war.

Of course, the fact that COCA seems not to have weighed such moral ambiguities and complexities in their superficial analysis of the ongoing crises in Central America should come as a surprise to no one. After all, its existence, like that of most other activist organizations on this campus, relies less on reasoned discourse between its members than on lock-step conformity to a single viewpoint and the drowning out of opposing beliefs.

HOWEVER, what was most immediately repugnant about the COCA memo I received last week was the attitude it conveyed and, more particularly, the scare tactics it employed to conjure up images of another Vietnam War. Yet these scare tactics seemed woefully misguided--after all, Vietnam was a time when thousands of elitist students burned their draft cards and graciously let the poor and minorities do the fighting for them.

In essence, the message I got from the fake draft notice was that we should be terrified, not because the ongoing civil war in El Salvador represents a tremendous human tragedy, but because we Harvard students might somehow be drafted to fight in some highly improbable U.S. war in the region.

Never mind the fact that, regrettably for fairness' sake at least, the draft does not now exist and that our troops for any war would predominantly come from poor and minority backgrounds.

Maybe if COCA members would mention one word concerning the hypocrisy of trying to terrify Harvard students into thinking that they may have to fight in a war which, were it to actually occur, would almost certainly never involve them, I could have some respect for their strategy. Maybe if they would be as outspoken in their condemnation of human rights abuses perpetrated by the left as they are of those committed by the right, I could admire what they did last week. But they haven't and I can't.