Refine Search

Watching the World

Persecution in Turkey

● On June 16 two of Jehovah’s Witnesses were arrested in Ankara, Turkey, while talking about their Christian beliefs. More arrests followed with the end result that 23 were imprisoned in Ankara and awaiting trial at last report. They were charged with “making propaganda . . . with the aim to change the political, social and economical order of the state according to religious rules.” This is unwarranted since on March 24, 1980, the Supreme Court of Appeals in Turkey ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses cannot be punished, as their religion does not violate the law.​—See Awake! of June 8, 1981, pages 25-7.

In view of the fact that the decision by the Supreme Court of Appeals was final and binding for all courts, these new arrests raise questions about constitutional rights in Turkey. The arrests occurred after some newspapers started a malicious campaign against the Witnesses. The “High Council of Religion in the Department of Religious Affairs” in speaking of Jehovah’s Witnesses said, “This movement, which in no country is being accepted as a religion . . . is a Christian order under Jewish influence.” However, the facts show that Jehovah’s Witnesses are an accepted Christian religion actively engaged in their worship, now in more than 200 countries and islands of the sea worldwide. In spite of this, 23 of Jehovah’s Witnesses continue to endure suffering, being unjustly treated as common criminals.

Vatican Chides Liberationists

● In a strongly worded essay released in September, the Roman Catholic Church denounced the more radical versions of the doctrine known as “liberation theology.” For the last 15 years Roman Catholic priests and nuns, especially those in Latin America, have been using the doctrine as a justification for their active involvement in the political arena. “Liberation theology” champions justice for the poor, but it is based on concepts borrowed from an atheistic political theory​—Marxism. While the Vatican statement condemned social injustices in Latin America, it decried the use of Marxist analysis by churchmen as the remedy for the oppressed and cited it as a betrayal of Catholicism.

On the other hand, there is Concilium, a group of prominent Roman Catholic theologians from Europe, Latin America and the United States. At their June meeting in the Netherlands, they called for a more active church role in politics and protested against high church officials who censor “liberation theology.” Thus, the battle line appears drawn between the Vatican and a growing number of prominent Catholic liberals.

UN Future Gloomy

● “The United Nations has fallen upon hard days,” writes former Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in the journal Foreign Affairs. As the UN prepares to celebrate its 40th anniversary next year, he sees a gloomy future for the organization. “It goes through its paces in a workaday routine that is increasingly ignored or condemned and that threatens to become increasingly irrelevant in the real world,” the former UN leader said. “It is moving into fields of operation in which clashing interests threaten to tear it apart.”

Bank Crisis

● Banks in the United States are failing at the fastest rate since the 1930’s, reports the Los Angeles Times. “Although the U.S. banking system is generally sound and chances of a major disaster are remote,” states the article, “developments in recent years have made the system increasingly risky.” Eight of the largest banks in the United States have lent more than their entire net worth to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela. A series of defaults by these nations could push the banks over the brink into insolvency. If the debt crisis becomes much worse, experts fear that financial, political or social upheavals will follow in the debtor nations.

● Although in March Brazil reached its highest positive trade surplus in history​—one billion dollars—​still this was not enough to pay even the interest on its foreign debt of a staggering $100 billion. The president of the Bank of Brazil, Oswaldo Colin, says in Jornal da Tarde that the recent increase of 1 percent in international interest rates “has already eaten up the trade surplus of one month.” The trend toward increased interest rates adds to the already overwhelming burden of developing countries trying to repay. Some financial specialists conclude that the “foreign debt problem is out of control.”

European Unity Call

● A call for European unity is being sounded by distinguished people from the world of letters and art, including the 1979 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Odysseas Elytis, reports Athens News Agency. They hope that a united Europe “will cease to be a passive observer of international developments and will gain the necessary confidence and strength to play an important role in the struggle for world peace.”

Japan’s Crime Rise

● “Crime, Delinquency Highest Since 1940s,” blares the headline in Japan’s newspaper The Daily Yomiuri. The annual report of the NPA (National Police Agency) of Japan announced that crime in this affluent country continued unabated in 1983. A Justice Ministry’s Research Institute for General Legal Affairs group found that more than half of the delinquents in Japan are from broken homes. Juvenile offenders for the most part are between 14 and 15 years old. According to the NPA, in areas where traditional neighborhood ties remain strong, the crime figures are lower.

Abused Children

● Violence against children has become “an unforeseen blast of wickedness” that is sweeping through Italy, says the weekly L’Espresso. There are 15,000 acts of brutality against children each year, including 600 sexual abuses. These chilling figures do not reveal the extent of the problem, according to Judge Dosi of the Juvenile Court in Rome. He says: “The statistics on this phenomenon tell us so little that we call them ‘the obscure number,’ obscure because it hides a more complex and diffused reality.” What drives parents to abuse their children? “First of all the bad relationship of the couple; then the difficulty to live up to the role of parent,” are two basic reasons the report lists.

Lesbian “Marriage” Annulled

● The 41-year-old pastor of the Altonaer Peace Church in Hamburg, Germany, performed a marriage ceremony last April for two lesbian women. As a result, the telephones of Lutheran churches all over Northern Germany were constantly ringing. “Upset Church members phoned their pastors, threatening to resign membership,” reports the German newspaper Schwäbische Zeitung. An official statement issued by the Lutheran Church of Northern Germany said that the church did not approve of the “marriage,” since “the Church is unable to wed a lesbian couple.” The marriage was declared null and void.

42 Million Blind

● WHO (World Health Organization) reports that there are more than 42 million blind people in the world, including 28 million with greatly restricted vision who cannot see far enough to count the fingers on a hand at three meters (9 ft). It estimates that by the year 2000 this number will double. According to WHO, 75 percent of cases of blindness could be avoided “with appropriate public health measures.” O Estado de S. Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper, says that “of every thousand blind persons, 36 are Brazilians.”

Wife-Beating Arrests

● At first, Minneapolis police thought that arresting men for beating their wives was “a waste of everybody’s time,” says Police Chief Anthony Bouza. But since policemen have stepped up the number of arrests of wife-abusers, the number of repeat offenses has been cut down. What inspired the new policy, says The Express of Easton, Pennsylvania, was a study conducted by researchers Lawrence W. Sherman and Richard Beck. The study concluded that the rate of repeat abuse against wives was only 10 percent when police made arrests, 19 percent when police counseled the couple and 24 percent when the assailant was sent away for several hours.

Pandas in Peril

● Giant pandas​—one of the world’s rarest animal species—​are in grave danger. At least 12 of these shy creatures starved to death in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, states China’s monthly magazine China Reconstructs. The death figure is alarming when compared to the estimated world number of a thousand live pandas. The home of the giant pandas in Sichuan province’s Wolong Nature Reserve lost 30,000 hectares (over 74,000 a.) of arrow bamboo trees. The trees withered and died, leaving the giant pandas without their main food source. Rescue operations launched by the Chinese government are scheduled to last for ten years.

Unwed Mothers

● England and Wales registered 99,000 illegitimate births in 1983​—a 10-percent increase over the previous year. This figure, nearly double of that for 1977, represents one in six of total births. The report of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys reveals that almost one third of the births were to girls in their teens and a further third to mothers aged 20 to 24 years. “The younger ones realise rushing into marriage would be a mistake,” says a spokesperson for the National Council for One Parent Families in the Daily Mail of London, “and the older ones are independent career-minded and confident they could bring up a child alone​—or at least without being married.” The World Health Organization estimates that 13 million babies are born each year to teenagers between 15 and 19 years of age.

‘Test-Tube’ Skin

● In 1983 two brothers, aged six and seven, were severely burned. Their condition was grim, with third-degree burns over 97 percent of their bodies. Now, a year later, The New England Journal of Medicine reports that the doctors at Shriners Burn Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, have succeeded in covering more than half of each boy’s body with grafts of healthy skin tissue grown in laboratory dishes. The surgical team took fragments of the boys’ remaining healthy skin, ground them into millions of cells, adding substances that helped the cells grow into sheets of skin. The skin was transferred to pads of gauze that were grafted over the burns. It took two to four weeks to cultivate a square yard of skin for each boy.

Remarkable as it is, Dr. Mansour of St. Barnabas Hospital Center, Livingston, New Jersey, cautions: “It is a very experimental procedure, and we really don’t know the longstanding effects.”