Repression

Ginny Cook Smith, incest survivor, could have been a guest on "Oprah" or "Geraldo" if Jane Smiley had not made her up.In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Thousand Acres," Ms. Smiley tells this story: the adult Ginny stretches out on her childhood bed, and suddenly images cascade forth. Her body trembles as the teen-age memories of her rapes rush back.The way Ginny first denies the incest but then remembers it bears an uncanny -- and, Ms. Smiley says, unintended -- resemblance to a tale told with numbing frequency on the afternoon talk shows: an adult recovering a long-buried memory of sexual abuse.

LAGOS, Nigeria -- Almost a year after Nigeria's military government announced the latest plan for a transition to democracy, many civilian politicians are back on the streets organizing for national elections scheduled for 1998.The previous transition, by another military government, ended abruptly in 1993, when the country's military rulers annulled a presidential election widely believed to have been won by Moshood K. Abiola, a businessman now imprisoned.Ignoring those who are skeptical that the current leader, Gen. Sani Abacha, wants a genuine transition to civilian rule, 18 political groups have responded to the lifting of a three-year ban on party politics in June by organizing political meetings, complete with songs and slogans about democracy.

GENEVA -- China again evaded international censure of its human rights record yesterday, winning a pre-emptive procedural maneuver to block debate by the United Nations' main rights forum. Splitting 22-18, with 12 countries abstaining, the member countries of the U.N. Human Rights Commission rejected an attempt to bring China to account for what the Clinton administration says is a deteriorating human rights climate for political dissenters, practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, unregistered churches, Internet users, ethnic minorities and disfavored academics and journalists.

MOSCOW - Nobel laureate Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of communist repression, has died of heart failure, Russian news agencies reported. He was 89. Stephan Solzhenitsyn told the Associated Press his father died late yesterday, but he declined to comment further. The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia's nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile - only to be as distressed by communism's damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.

Theodore Kornweibel Jr., the author of "Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925," is a black history professor in the African Studies Department at San Diego State University. That alone will be enough to make some people ignore his book.Black studies departments and black history are now viewed by some of my fellow conservatives as some noxious by-product of the surge toward political correctness. "Black history now involves just bashing the white man," one caller said in a voicemail message.

WASHINGTON - Decades of autocratic rule by Middle East leaders have failed the Arab world, bringing poverty and hopelessness to one of the world's most volatile regions, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday. In a shift that could reshape this country's relations with some of its closest Arab partners, Powell specifically rejected the long-term U.S. policy of ignoring political repression in oil-rich Persian Gulf states in exchange for reliable supplies of cheap crude oil. "I no longer think that is affordable and sustainable," Powell said in a major speech he said was meant to lay out a new U.S. orientation to promote democratic and economic reform across the region.

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- When the Turkish government lifted its ban on the letter "W," it seemed like a breakthrough. After decades of repression of Kurdish ethnic identity and a deadly war with separatist rebels, the Islamist-led government made moves toward democratic reform in recent years, part of Turkey's bid to improve its chances of joining the European Union. Letters that appear in the Kurdish alphabet but not the Turkish one were no longer banned from print. Emergency military rule was lifted.

BIJELJINA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright waded into Bosnia's crucial national election campaign yesterday, working both overtly and behind the scenes to promote candidates who pledge to rebuild the Balkan nation torn apart by 3 1/2 years of war and divided since by lingering ethnic hatreds.Although elections have been held in Bosnia since the fighting ended in late 1995, the coming vote -- scheduled for Sept. 13-14 -- will mark the first time that ethnic Croats and Serbs have had a genuine choice between candidates.

A LOT of criticism has been heaped since Sept. 11 on the royal family that rules Saudi Arabia. No one should be surprised by that - least of all the ailing King Fahd and his family of obscenely wealthy princes. The Saudis are protected by America - which drives Osama bin Laden nuts - but they aren't enthusiastic about giving up much in return. Not much attention has been paid to President Hosni Mubarak, the ruler of Egypt, the other country that produced terrorists who acted against America on Sept.

SEOUL, South Korea - When Jung Yeon San and his extended family fled North Korea, they had to escape their own identities as well as from the authorities. Jung and his family, traveling in small numbers from 1997 to 1999, walked across a frozen river from North Korea into China. To avoid being sent back, they sometimes resorted to hiding in boxes. In 2001, three years after leaving the North, Jung finally reached Seoul, the end of an arduous journey that is typical of the experiences of an increasing number of refugees finding their way to the South.