Involuntary disappearance within the Latin American region has been a frightening phenomenon over the past decade. Here I will deal with the two salient cases of Chile and Argentina, with briefer reference to other countries.

Involuntary disappearances, in the sense I will use the term, involve the arrest or surreptitious kidnapping of persons thought to be out of sympathy with the regime in power, carried out by agents of the government or by semi-legal organizations abetted by, if not fully responsible to, the authorities; the disappeared person is not heard from again, and the fact of his or her arrest, incarceration, or assassination is, in the situations we are dealing with, routinely denied by the agencies of government. In numerous instances, especially in Chile, the person's very existence is officially denied until government documents attesting to the person's birth, identity card number, etc. are brought forth.

At the bottom of the Persian Gulf, controlling the Western approaches to the waterway now so crucial to the wellbeing and existence of the Western world, stands the virtually unknown country of Oman. Once, two hundred years ago, the legendary seafaring empire of Muscat and Oman, it stretched from Mozambique and Zanzibar to Pakistan. Today, it is a vast land span of a thousand miles of sea line with a small population of approximately 1.5 million Omanis and about 100,000 Pakistani and Indian laborers.

Only ten years ago—in 1969 and 70—Oman was one of the most backward countries in the entire world. The old sultan kept his people in medieval times. The gates to Muscat, which lies in an easily encompassable half-moon surrounded by jagged mountains, were closed every night at seven, and anyone caught outside was summarily shot, for why would he be outside if he were not making trouble? Poverty was Oriental in its intensity, and the modern world—whether sun glasses or cigarettes or bicycles or the most minimal of health care and education—was banned, often on pain of death.

On May 22 the University of Chicago named Robert S. McNamara winner of the first Albert Pick, Jr., Award for International Understanding. Under the terms of the award the sum of $25,000 and a sculpture will be presented to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to international peace and understanding. The citation recognizes McNamara's contribution as president of the World Bank for the last decade and pointedly ignores his seven-year service as secretary of defense during the escalation of the Vietnam war. Implicit in the university's choice and its defense of that choice is the assumption that McNamara has paid his dues and made up for Vietnam.

The award matters because it is part of a groping for a national recollection of Vietnam. We congratulate ourselves on our ability to make movies like The Deer Hunter or novels like Dispatches. A reception by President Carter for veterans and Congress's belated passage of Vietnam Veterans’ Counseling legislation also contribute to our self-satisfied awakening.

I must describe J. Patrick Dobel as a “fanatic.” I do not mean all the offensive overtones that word has in ordinary speech. By “fanatic” I mean only a person who is not open to any revision of former opinions he held, and held sincerely, and at that point held for what he believed were good reasons. It can then come to pass that such a person defensively protects the righteousness of his view by now allowing no forgiveness to anyone who at that earlier time judged and acted differently. In other words, to forgive—no longer to exclude Robert McNamara from our ongoing political community—would be to admit that the author in some measure was wrong, or might have been. Or it is to admit that he too contributed unknowingly to the tragic outcomes for which McNamara and others were also responsible.

Mr. Dobel is right—as a society we act as if the war in Vietnam was just a nasty little mistake. This not only excuses those who, for a variety of good and evil reasons, unwarrantedly perpetuated that war; but, more important, it dishonors those who conscientiously served there and those who conscientiously refused to serve there. If there is any forgiving to be done, people in those two groups must lead the way; they alone know what such forgiveness might mean.

Mr. Dobel is also right in stating that Vietnam continues to lie uneasily on our national conscience. Our inability to explain why we were in Vietnam and why we stayed there indicates the moral limits of our political self-understanding. We simply lack the moral means to recognize and understand what we did there. But then it would be a mistake to single out Vietnam—have we recognized or understood any better what we did to the Indians or that we were a slave nation?

Leon Trotsky said that those who yearned for the quiet life had no right to be born in the twentieth century. The lover of the quiet life certainly had no right to be in Southeast Asia in the past year. The speed of events, many of them unexpected and “irrational,” has left a trail littered with hasty analyses and wrong predictions (to which this article will no doubt contribute its fair share). It is plain enough, however, that the dust has not yet settled; neither the Kampuchean question nor the recent thrust of Sino-Vietnamese relations have run their course. It is also undeniable that too little is known about the internal dynamics of decisionmaking that resulted in the first and second open inter-Communist wars in history.

The Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea demonstrated the role and value of conventional warfare—a point to remember in an age when war by conventional means appears to many as a thing of the past. It is natural for regimes fighting guerrilla wars to be mesmerized by those struggles, but it is worth noting how few governments have been toppled by guerrilla wars and how many have been overturned by other means. Even in the military theorizing of the Communists, the guerrilla's place is at the beginning of revolutionary wars; the end game is still reserved for conventional military means.

Another Holocaust.” “Fearful Tragedy.” “Looming Catastrophe.” Cambodia increasingly evokes phrases such as these—belatedly. Brief images of the emaciated and the starving, the dying and the dead flicker across the non-Communist world's TV. screens. They are only the tip of the iceberg.

Two hundred oil specialists from around the world met in Vienna late last fall to talk with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. As owners of two-thirds of world oil reserves and seven-eighths of oil exports, OPEC's members can make the future they want come true. Their conference in Venezuela last month only confirms this.

OPEC's headquarters is a squat, square building along the Danube Canal almost in the shadow of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Thirty-five countries sent official representatives, and though the United States sought no invitation, twenty Americans were on hand—about half from oil companies, the others researchers and scholars. The speeches were somber, even gloomy, reflecting troubled waters ahead.

It has been twenty years since the Tibetan uprising. Last March, Tibetans and their American supporters rallied outside the United Nations building to commemorate that uprising against Chinese troops occupying the Tibetan homeland.

Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and honorary president of the International League for Human Rights, was there calling for support of resolutions passed three times by the U.S. General Assembly, in 1959, 1961, and 1965. The U.S. called “for respect for the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their right to self-determination.” The rally, Baldwin said, was to protest the “subjection of six million people to foreign rule” and to uphold “the right to live in your own house.” The nonagenarian champion of civil liberties expressed some hope: “It may be that autonomy, semi-independence in Tibet, may be granted when China settles down into the modernization it seeks.”

On the heels of Andrew Young's departure from the United Nations amid much publicity concerning U»S. failure to involve the Palestinians in Middle East negotiations, heads of state and representatives from ninety-two countries and three independence movements convened at the Sixth Summit Conference of Non-Aligned Nations hosted by Dr. Fidel Castro at Havana, Cuba.

The Havana Declaration of September, 1979, adopted by the Non-Aligned Conference—perhaps the most powerful of Third World forums—censured the Camp David accords as a U.S. attempt to “obtain partial solutions that are favorable to Zionist aims and underwrite the gains of Israeli aggression at the expense of the Palestinian people.” In an international environment in which the United States increasingly finds itself in the minority on the majority of world issues, Third World attitudes toward the Camp David accords—of which the Havana Declaration is but the latest evidence—merit serious consideration.

Now is the time to consider how we will react to the next genocide. Although the hope that the judgments at Nuremberg would deter genocide and similar crimes against humanity in the postwar world, genocides have occurred without sanction since 1945. The best-documented cases I have studied include the attempted annihilation of Buddhism in Tibet by China (1950-59), the selective genocide of the Hutus in Burundi by the Government of Burundi (1972), the genocidal slaughter of Hindus in East Pakistan by the Government of Pakistan (1971), and the extermination of the Ache Indians of Paraguay from 1971 onward with the toleration or complicity of the Government of Paraguay.

Under the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia it has been estimated that about 2 million, or three out of ten Cambodians, were killed or died due to the regime's policies. Whether these murders, termed “auto-genocide” by Anthony Paul, fit the definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention is open to question.