It appears to have taken six years to kill nine million human beings in Nazi Germany and in the countries it occupied. It appears to have taken one day to inflict catastrophic disaster on more than three million Cambodians.“

With these words Freedom House three years ago filed an appeal with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights for an inquiry into events in Cambodia. The U.N. High Commission for Human Rights took three months to respond to that appeal—negatively. During these three years, a few books and articles have focused our attention on Cambodia, but governments have, for the most part, remained silent. In July, 1977, the House International Relations Subcommittee initiated a congressional inquiry into the events in Cambodia, and Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, eloquently denounced what was taking place in what is now called Democratic Kampuchea.

Martin Luther King, Jr., led many of us to recognize that pilgrimages of the mind can take place in turmoil as well as in tranquility. My own journey to understanding the connection between the transcendent and social change was facilitated by King's call to “the Movement.” That journey was shared by countless other churchmen of the 1960's. I have engaged in extended conversations with hundreds of Christian clergy who responded to King's call and were arrested for their nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. Structured interviews took place in settings as varied as a Selma parsonage, an Atlanta jail cell, a Midwestern farmhouse, a penthouse suite atop the National Council of Churches building in New York City, and a sharecropper's cabin in Philadelphia, Mississippi. What follows is an abridged “profile” of these men of the cloth. The profile sharply challenges some common stereotypes.

Yousef el Sebai, editor of Egypt's daily newspaper, Al-Ahram, and a confidant and supporter of Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat, was gunned down by radical Palestinian terrorists in the lobby of the Nicosia Hilton Hotel on February 18. The gunmen claimed Sebai was killed because “he published good things about Israel.” Their self-proclaimed mission was to murder Sebai “for the liberation of Palestine.”

Just as American entry into the Vietnam war delayed but did not fundamentally affect its outcome, American withdrawal from Vietnam changed the tactical but not the fundamental environment in which Vietnam's role in Southeast Asia must be seen. Toward its three immediate neighbors, Vietnam remains a rival, distrusted and disliked. Its position of power in the peninsula, which has been growing over the last four hundred years, continues to grow at the expense of neighbors who resist as best they can.

Vietnam's actions have always been constrained by the overall domination of the area by China. Vietnam's desire has been and remains primarily to protect its own independence vis-a-vis China while maintaining the necessary friendly relations, given the reality of China's dominant power in the region. This explains Vietnam's counterbalance of Chinese influence by drawing on Soviet support and, now that the French and American wars are over, attempting to draw on support from any Western nations willing to respond.

In a century of unexampled economic and technological progress, with the most educated and sophisticated population ever known, much of the world still writhes under the torture, brutality, and forced labor exacted by tyrants of both Right and Left. In more than half the world's nations governments are masters and people are subjects, and to seriously criticize the masters is dangerous to both life and limb. This world needs a great many things, including a more adequate distribution of food, energy, and medical care, but surely a high priority must be given to the eradication of tyranny. The opinion leaders of the democracies must strive as dedicatedly to, end public enslavement in the twentieth century as their predecessors strove to end private enslavement in the nineteenth.

International agreements, of the United Nations as well as of the West European and Inter-American regional organizations, affirm commitments to such personal liberties as freedom of thought and religion, of opinion and expression, of assembly and association, and of emigration. But these liberties, until recently considered central to the concept of human rights, are under increasing threat within the U.N. system.

In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, followed in 1966 by the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Both focused on these values. Forty-eight nations have ratified the Covenant, including nearly all the Communist and some radical leftist Third World states—but not, paradoxically, the U.S., even though this, more than any other U.N. convention, reflects the Western civil liberties tradition.