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TRIBAL DIVISIONS EXTEND TO U.S.
( St. Louis Post-Dispatch ) Richard Cohen;Copyright Washington Post Writers Group;
04-20-1994

The film, aired on several of the television networks, was shot from afar. It showed some women begging for their lives in Rwanda' s capital city of Kigali when, suddenly, a man stepped forward and beat them to death. The victims were presumably Tutsi, members of the minority tribe, and the killer was presumably a majority Hutu. The viewer could be forgiven for thinking of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the classic novel about Africa and evil.

What a reassuring, but false, thought. My mind flashed immediately to a similar piece of film. It shows a man killing a group of huddled and terrified people with a crowbar. Africa again? Not on your life. It's Europe, this century. The man with the crowbar is killing Jews. Behind him can be seen grinning German troops.

Now let's run some pictures that don't exist - not because the events did not happen, but because no one filmed them. Imagine Bosnia - the rape of Muslim women by Serbs, random and capricious execution, torture too horrible to describe here and not administered, mind you, to elicit information or in punishment of a crime, but on the basis of nothing more than ethnic hatred. This is Europe, this year - the former Yugoslavia, the present condition of mankind.

Now some more pictures. We see the awful consequences of the killing of Palestinians by the mad Baruch Goldstein in Hebron. We see Israeli Jews slumped dead on the seat of a commuter bus, killed by an Islamic zealot. Our camera pans to South Africa, where blacks are killing blacks. This is a fight between Inkatha and the African National Congress, we are told. Yes, but it is also a fight between the Zulus and the Xhosas - and, before that, the "white tribe of Africa," the Afrikaners who imposed apartheid.

It is oh-so-comforting to think of Africa as being oh-so-different. But the Europe of 50 years ago and of today has been just as infected by murderous tribalism. So, to a lesser extent, is America. In this city, a black man was chased onto a busy highway by a gang of whites and killed when he was struck by a car. In Washington, a congressional aide was allegedly killed by a black person on account of nothing more than race. What is this but tribalism?

Of course, the tribal wars of Africa do not have an exact parallel here. America's tribal madness is episodic, marginal and extremely fluid. Once tight-knit ethnic groups have simply oozed into the greater society. The Germans of the American Midwest once established their own school, instructing in the German language, but that is mostly a memory. In this city, the Yiddish-speaking Lower East Side is gone - second and third generations to the suburbs, Park Avenue and, of all things, the Republican Party.

Our most pronounced "tribal" division remains racial. It produced the Civil War and some of the most awful examples of violence by Americans to Americans. Some black and white spokesmen advocate abandoning the struggle for an integrated society, but that would be both sad and dangerous.

The frustrations of African-Americans and the anxieties of whites, as well as the confrontational rhetoric coming from both sides, have produced a bunker mentality - a withdrawal into same-race compounds, symbolic or real, from which the other race is excluded. The goal of integration is more and more rejected by blacks, often with a sigh of relief from whites.

The other day I was politely chided by a caller for being an old- style integrationist. Guilty, I said - and worried, too. The re-segregation of American society (to the extent it was ever integrated in the first place) is a worrisome development. The bitter and hateful language of some black leaders (not to mention the garbage heard on some white- oriented talk radio shows) is hardly a step on the path to progress.

Some of this language is truly tribal in nature - talk about the inherent evil of whites, the essential nature of blacks or the implication that the sins of one's ancestors are blood debts owed by their descendants. This represents the Balkanization of American discourse, a fight across generations, the living settling the scores of the dead, as in present day Bosnia.

Those pictures from Rwanda did not just show Hutu killing Tutsi, but people killing people. Such a thing probably can't happen here. But if the "probably" is to become "certainly" it will be because as a nation we acknowledge our own tribal rifts and stand up to the demagogues who exacerbate our differences. Conrad, after all, wasn' t really writing just about Africa. His heart of darkness is not a place. It's the human condition.

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