Amnesty International club protests Guatemalan atrocities

A nationwide call to bring an end to Guatemalan human rights abuses came to College Green yesterday through the efforts of the University's chapter of Amnesty International. The Guatemalan Student Campaign of America -- part of the larger Amnesty International goal of preserving human rights -- seeks to end human rights abuses in Guatemala. "I want to see women and children not scared of having their doors broken down by armed men, and trade unionists and activists able to question their government without wrongful imprisonment," said College freshman and Amnesty International President Mark Kahn, who helped organize the rally. As part of the rally -- which took place took place at colleges throughout the country over the last month -- students made 140,000 "worry dolls" to send to Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu to represent the 140,000 people killed or who have disappeared during the 36-year civil war that has racked the small Central American country. According to legend, Guatemalan children used to tell one worry each night to a doll they would put underneath their pillows before going to bed. The children believed that by morning, the dolls would take away their worries. As they fashioned worry dolls on Locust Walk from clothes pins and pipe cleaners, College freshmen Abby Penniman and Edisa Revilla explained that they've "been studying the human rights violations in Latin America in our History class and wanted to make a contribution." According to Kahn, efforts like sending worry dolls and letters have met with great success. "We might send 200,000 to 300,000 letters to a president's desk and [as a result] they could get food, care or respite from execution to political prisoners," he remarked. During a poetry reading sponsored by the Philomathean Society, students and professors read works by prisoners and protesters from around the world in an attempt to make passing students aware of the Guatemalan plight. Amnesty International and Philo member Josh Marcus noted that the poetry reading "has a way of moving others to realize that real people are suffering. "People sometimes forget that the statistics and photos we see of human rights abuses have real lives attached," added Marcus, a College junior, who introduced each of the 30 poetry readers. The event also included speeches by Political Science Professor Henry Teune, who spoke on human rights, and English Professor Al Filreis, who read a poem about a Holocaust survivor. College sophomore Tanya Saigol said she hoped the rally would impact students. "It can be anyone who could be imprisoned," said Saigol, a Pakistani native who volunteered for the reading. "Here in America we take for granted that things like this won't happen."