Miami Herald, Published Thursday, June 21, 2001

Many in prison are more deserving of attention that Berenson receivedOPPENHEIMER REPORT

I may be alone on this one, but I can't get excited about the case of Lori Berenson, the New Yorker whose three-month-long trial on terrorism charges in Peru is making big headlines around the world.

While I agree that Berenson deserved a fair trial, I can't help but feel infuriated by the attention that we in the U.S. media are giving to her case while we ignore the plight of thousands of people -- including other Americans -- who are rotting in prisons around the world in cases that are much more outrageous than hers.

OTHER PRISONERS

``Only in Peru, there are about 700 prisoners who are totally innocent, who didn't have anything to do with terrorism,'' says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch/Americas in Washington, D.C. ``Berenson's case does not belong to this group of people who were innocent beyond any doubt.''

Amnesty International has not even taken up Berenson as a prisoner of conscience. Asked why, an Amnesty official said that the group's definition of prisoners of conscience is ``people who have been detained because of their beliefs, and have not used or advocated violence.''

In Cuba, thousands of prisoners never had a chance to get independent attorneys, let alone an open trial, or a chance to speak with foreign reporters, as Berenson has. Many Cuban prisoners, in fact, didn't get a trial at all.

CUBA'S CASE

``I'd love the media to give 10 percent of the attention devoted to Lori Berenson to Cuba's estimated 450 political prisoners, who are rotting in jail in cruel and inhuman conditions, for the sole crime of not sharing the official ideology,'' Vivanco says.

He was referring to cases such as Dr. Elias Biscet Gonzalez, president of Cuba's Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, who was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of ``insulting the symbols of the homeland'' for hanging a Cuban flag sideways on his balcony at a 1999 news conference.

Berenson, 31, an MIT dropout and daughter of two college professors, arrived in Peru in 1994 after spending time in Nicaragua during the leftist Sandinista revolution, and in El Salvador, where she worked as a private assistant to a Marxist guerrilla leader during that country's peace talks.

According to Peruvian prosecutors, she rented the safe house where police in 1995 found an urban guerrilla unit of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA. The house was raided after a 12-hour gun battle with its occupants.

She says she didn't suspect what was going on upstairs, despite the fact that the rebels had sealed off all windows with wood and nails.

But prosecutors argue that it's unlikely that anyone who spoke fluent Spanish and had spent time in Sandinista Nicaragua and among Salvadoran guerrillas would suspect nothing about the 20 guerrillas living upstairs.

This is a typical example of New York-centric journalism: a New York newspaper runs the story, the New York-based wire agencies pick it up, and the rest of the world echo it as if it were equally important everywhere else.

N.Y. JOURNALISM

You will argue that Berenson is getting all this coverage because she's an American.

But, according to State Department figures, there are about 1,900 U.S. citizens in prisons around the world, including another 27 in Peru. Many of them were tried under much more dubious circumstances, or not tried at all.

Take the case of the U.S. scholars in China. This week, the House Committee on International Relations held a hearing about five Chinese-American scholars arrested in China -- including Li Shaomin, a Princeton Ph.D. who is a U.S. citizen -- who have been imprisoned there on dubious charges of espionage.

They didn't get a fair trial, yet little has been written about them.

And why was there hardly a mention in the U.S. press about Ernestino Abreu Horta, the 76-year-old Cuban-born U.S. citizen who was arrested in Cuba in 1998 and sentenced to 15 years in prison on charges of attempting to start an uprising against Fidel Castro?

He never got a public trial, and -- until he was returned to Miami in February because of health problems -- he was virtually ignored by the U.S. press.

The bottom line is that while I welcome the attention devoted to Berenson, I wish others such as Cuba's Biscet, or the five Chinese-American scholars, would get similar attention. They deserve it, even if they're not New Yorkers.

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