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Dark Dealings Discredit Nobel Peace Prize
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10715 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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1 / 1986 |
1,594 Words |
| Author
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Claudio Campuzano
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At his "homecoming" press conference in Moscow--complete with his psychiatrist-in-attendance--"Double Dipper Defector" Vitaly Yurchenko testified to his suffering before his "escape".
Perhaps your newspaper of choice spared you the gory details but the CIA not only forced him to sunbathe, it also made him "go for sports; even play golf."
Worse still a CIA official took him to a "French restaurant" said Yurchenko and "forced me to eat French food in Georgetown…I was at the end of my tether--it was freedom or death."
For the bewildered journalists there was an explanation from Dr. Nikolai Zharikov, a physician and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. According to his diagnosis, Yurchenko suffered "an acute organic damage of the brain" as a result of having been fed "psychotropic drugs" and now showed signs of emotional instability including "special psychotic states." He also had trouble with motor functions and cried easily, the doctor said.
Enough Soviet officials were present at the press conference to make sure everybody got it right, therefore the good doctor must have known what he was doing when he publicly destroyed with such thoroughness his patient's credibility. Yurchenko's future seems to be ordained. It's not back to the KGB for him but rather down to the Soviet Institute of Psychiatry which is where problem personalities--be it political dissidents or confused spies--are straightened out.
There Yurchenko is bound to run into Professor Marat Vartanyan, a leading apologist for the Soviet practice of throwing dissidents into mental hospitals. "Mental instability," said then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov speaking on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, "is one of the reasons for the emergence of individual persons whose actions do not fit either in the moral or the juridical framework of Soviet society." Not seeing it quite that way, the World Psychiatric Association was threatening the Soviets with expulsion in 1983. The Soviets decided to withdraw before this came to pass.
But this has not affected the standing of Prof. Vartanyan with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the organization that was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize--and of whose Soviet chapter he is a prominent member. As Conn Nugent, the executive director of IPPNW explains, the organization is "a federation of doctors' groups in 41 nations, each of which determines its own composition and structure…But the international organization focuses exclusively on nuclear war."
Now I don't know about you, but I would find it very difficult to associate myself for a common purpose, no matter how trivial, with somebody whom I knew to be systematically beating his wife. It's not only that I don't' approve of wife-beating, but I would be afraid that this individual's violence might be visited upon me if we happened to disagree. Far more distasteful for me would be to share the task of educating "all people to the horror of nuclear weapons" (IPPNW's goal, according to Nugent) together with an individual who--to put it bluntly -could and would send me to the nuthouse if I were a political "deviate" in his back yard.
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