The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Good evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Jim Lehrer is off this holiday week. On the NewsHour tonight, the top toys and how they're selling, the origins of the refugee crisis in Central Africa, Charlayne Hunter-Gault begins a three-part series, a David Gergen dialogue with Jaroslav Pelikan, author of "Mary Through the Centuries," and a second look at Paul Solman's tour of a Chinese art exhibition. It all follows our summary of the news this Christmas Eve.NEWS SUMMARY

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Demonstrators for and against Serbian President Milosevic clashed violently today in the streets of Belgrade. Gunfire broke out when bus loads of pro-government workers confronted anti-government protesters on their 35th day of marches and rallies. At least one anti-Milosevic protester was shot when a man fired into a crowd of demonstrators. Police detained the gunman and then struggled to control the melee that followed. In a speech to supporters today President Milosevic accused opposition leaders of being foreign lackeys intent on destroying Serbia. In a written statement Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott blamed Milosevic for inciting the clashes and urged him to recognize last month's election victories of opposition party candidates. In the Middle East today, after meeting for three and a half hours, Palestinian leader Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu failed to reach an agreement on pulling Israeli troops out of Hebron. The leaders met in Gaza to discuss problems in the last West Bank city still under Israeli control. They left their summit without talking to reporters. An Arafat spokesman said the gap of disagreement between the two sides was narrowing. U.S. envoy Dennis Ross was there to push both sides towards a deal.

DENNIS ROSS, U.S. Envoy, Middle East: This was a very, very good meeting between the two leaders. They had a thorough discussion. They have made real progress. In light of the progress that they have made, they have instructed their negotiators to follow up on that progress and to work intensively. A measure of that is that they, the negotiators, will meet tomorrow morning.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Israeli troops were set to pull out of Hebron in March, but the move was postponed after a series of suicide bombings in Israel. In the West Bank town of Bethlehem today thousands of Palestinians and pilgrims flocked to Manger Square, the site Christians recognize as the birthplace of Christ. The traditional Christmas Eve Scout Parade entertained onlookers, and Santa Claus distributed candy to children in front of the Church of the Nativity. In Lima, Peru, the Red Cross today said 106 hostages were being held by guerrillas at the residence of the Japanese ambassador. That is 34 fewer than the 140 said to be remaining after Sunday's release of 225. A Red Cross official said the new count was based on talking to everyone still being detained. As the standoff entered its seventh day relief workers delivered Christmas cakes along with holiday meals. Journalists outside the compound hung Christmas lights on their equipment and put up a plastic Christmas tree. One of the Americans released Sunday night described how the hostages passed the time watching television until the power was shut off.

DONALD BOYD, U.S. Aid Official: Surfed through the channels, and the Germans wanted to watch the German channel, and the French wanted to watch the French channel, and we tried to go back and forth between international soccer games. We even saw some of the soap operas, but then people inevitably would go back to the news. So we were aware that the world was aware of what was going on. We had no appreciation, however, for how much it affected them emotionally as it did us.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The rebels have demanded the release of 300 of their jailed colleagues. In his only public statement on the crisis, Peru's president, Alberto Fujimori, rejected that demand. Today he sent a message to Pope John Paul II promising to make the greatest efforts to resolve the crisis peacefully. In South Africa today two explosions killed two children and an adult in the small town of Worcester 60 miles northeast of Cape Town. Sixty-seven others were injured when the blasts ripped through crowdsof Christmas Eve shoppers. Police reported three pipe bombs went off near a pharmacy in a crowded supermarket. South African President Nelson Mandela condemned the bombings and asked residents to help find the criminals. Back in this country a federal judge in San Francisco late yesterday enjoined the state of California from enforcing Proposition 209 on the grounds that it is probably unconstitutional. The proposition, approved by voters last March, prohibits race or gender preferences in state and local government programs. The injunction will be in force until a trial is held on a lawsuit challenging the measure. California Attorney General Dan Lundgren said the state would appeal the court order. President Clinton got in a little Christmas Eve golf, then did some last- minute shopping at a suburban Washington mall. He will celebrate a low-key family Christmas at the White House tomorrow. The President and Mrs. Clinton released a videotaped holiday greeting to the nation today.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: Christmas is an opportunity for all of us to give thanks for the blessings we share as families, friends, and Americans, but, most important, it is a time for children. And I hope that during this holiday season we will remember our nation's neediest children and extend the spirit of giving to them with our love, our prayers, and our generosity.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: May the spirit of Christmas and the magic of the wonderful season be with you and your loved ones throughout the holidays and in the new year to come. Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! And God bless you all.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to a Christmas toy story, the crisis in Central Africa, a David Gergen dialogue, and China's imperial treasures. FOCUS - TOP TOYS

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: First tonight, it's Christmas Eve. And that means presents, and that means toys. This shopping season had its own special craze as Charles Krause reports.

TICKLE ME ELMO: [laughing] That tickles.

CHARLES KRAUSE: It's red, it's furry, it laughs a lot, and it's become one of the hottest toys in America this holiday season. The toy is known as Tickle Me Elmo, a popular character on Sesame Street who laughs when he's tickled.

TICKLE ME ELMO: [laughing] Oh, boy. That's tickles.

CHARLES KRAUSE: In the 26 shopping days since Thanksgiving parents across the country have been scavenging through store after store, trying to find one of the few remaining Elmos in stock. Most stores ran out weeks ago, but that hasn't stopped parents from looking for Elmo anyway.

CHARLIE MAJDI, Toy Store Owner: On average, we get about thirty, thirty-five calls a day, people looking for it.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Tyco, the company that makes Elmo, expects to sell more than one million Elmos by the time the Christmas season ends tonight. And Tyco says it's been trying to produce Elmos as fast as it can. But for many parents of the preschool set, it wasn't nearly fast enough. There have been reports of mothers running alongside delivery trucks, even mothers fighting with one another to get their hands on Elmo.

ROSEANNE TAYLOR, Chicago Shopper: I grabbed it, and as I was taking it to me, another lady tore it out of my hand. It's ripped. And she ran off in the store somewhere. I was so upset.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Other parents have resorted to throwing money at the problem. Elmo's typical retail price is $28, but in recent days the doll has fetched far more, sometimes for charity. For example, "Washington Post" columnist Bob Levey auctioned off two Elmo's just today and raised $1,500 to benefit Children's Hospital in Washington.

BOB LEVEY, Washington Post Columnist: This is by far the most that I've ever raised by way of auctioning a Christmas gift, sure, way, way out there.

CHARLES KRAUSE: Indeed, Elmo became so chic this holiday season that he even ended up modeling diamonds at Cartier's on 5th Avenue in New York. Clearly, Elmomania caught the toy industry off guard, but there have been toy crazes like Elmo before. In 1983, Cabbage Patch dolls sparked an even bigger hunt. Then who can forget the nearly overpowering demand for Power Rangers in 1994? But Cabbage Patch dolls and Power Rangers belong to Christmases past. This year it's Elmo who'll light up the lives of a million kids across America, the lucky ones whose parents managed to get ticklish little Elmo home and wrapped and under the tree for Christmas.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: For more on Elmo and the toy market we're joined by Gary Jacobson, a toy industry analyst and senior vice president at the New York investment firm Jeffreys and Company. Thanks for being with us on this Christmas Eve.

GARY JACOBSON, Toy Industry Analyst: [New York City] Thank you very much.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How did this toy--how did Elmo become such a phenomenon?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, it started off by being in short supply, and then the media hopped onto it and really made a tremendous promotion out of it, and that's how it all happened.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Why in short supply? Didn't the toy company anticipate that it would be a big seller?

GARY JACOBSON: Not really. Tyco initially started to ship Elmo back in the September-October time frame, and it was on the shelves, and it was selling reasonably well. And then all of a sudden, right after Thanksgiving, it just took off, and the hysteria started.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But it wasn't quite all of a sudden, was it? Wasn't it the result also of a very intelligent promotional campaign?

GARY JACOBSON: Absolutely.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Tell me about it. How did it happen?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Tyco started doing the talk show route where they sent Elmos to everybody and Rosie O'Donnell put it on her show, and it got a great reception on the show. And then it really took off from there. Everyone had to have an Elmo.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is this different from other toys? I mean, all toy companies, I would think, try to promote their toys on talk shows. So why did this one make it, and some other toys don't?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, what's different is that it did make it, and it got on the air, and people liked it. It started with a great product. You know, Elmo is tickley, and he's red, and he looks like fun, and, you know, after you tickle him and he starts to shake, kids love it, and it was a good product, and people just seemed to take to it. And that's why it ended up on the show circuit.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So not just any product can be promoted and get to be a big item. It has to have something intrinsically attractive?

GARY JACOBSON: Absolutely. All the countries try, and it's very few that actually succeed to this level.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What else is big this year?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Nintendo 64 is sold out everywhere. That's even rarer than Tickle Me Elmo.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Tell us about Nintendo 64.

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Nintendo launched its next generation of video games, the Nintendo 64, and it's been a tremendous, tremendous success. And, again, they started off with a great machine and great games, and you can't find it anymore. It's in very short supply.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Did they--again, did they not anticipate, or did they do this on purpose, keeping it in short supply?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, actually it's a combination of the two. They knew that demand would probably be over 5 million units. They just couldn't make it fast enough. They could only make about a million, two hundred thousand units. That's what they've shipped. That's what they sold through. And hopefully sometime in 1997, they'll be able to catch up with demand.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And what else is big?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Holiday Barbie is a perennial favorite. She's already in the certificate area, where, you know, you can't buy Holiday Barbie anymore, but they'll give you a beautiful certificate and Mattel will mail Barbie to you during the first quarter.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Anything else?

GARY JACOBSON: That's about it. You know, there are some Star Wars figures in the boy's action area, but it's generally been a good holiday season.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How does Barbie remain a perennial favorite? I gather that Monopoly is another favorite. How do they do it?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Barbie is 36 years young this year, and, you know, what's happening now is little girls who played with it as a kid are now moms, and they want to look to buy things for their children that they played with, and Barbie fits that. It also has good play value, and Barbie does lots of lots of different things, whether it's a teacher, or an astronaut, lots of role playing that Barbie gives to a small child.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How important are these toys to their companies, starting with Tickle Me Elmo?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Tickle Me Elmo, despite all the press, is not that important to Tyco. It represents about 5 percent of its revenue this year. It'll be about 35 or 40 million dollars in revenue. Tyco is the third largest toy company in the world, should do about 800 million in revenue. So it's nice, but it's not critical to Tyco's success.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: How about Nintendo 64?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, Nintendo 64 is what Nintendo's all about. The success of that product is crucial to Nintendo's long-term survival. And it looks like it's going to be a great success for Nintendo.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And the toy industry worldwide, how big is it? How important is it?

GARY JACOBSON: Worldwide the toy industry is about a $35 billion industry. About 1/3 of that is in the United States, which is always amazing because the U.S. only has about 4 percent of the children, so there really is a huge global market that these toy companies are going after. Nintendo is all around the world. Its biggest market is Japan, and the Nintendo 64 is very important to its success.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What's changed in the toy market? Is something driving toy sales differently than in the past?

GARY JACOBSON: Yes. It really has. The toy industry is becoming very much kind of two different successes. One is the perennial hits like a Barbie and a Monopoly, and then the other is the adventure of phenomenons, like a Star Wars or a Batman that are, you know, you have a movie and you have a TV show, and there's a tremendous amount of promotion, there are tie-ins, and it becomes one, big huge event, and that leads to some really incredible numbers for some of these toys.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Can you predict for us what the big seller will be next year?

GARY JACOBSON: Well, next year I can give you a couple. I think there are some good boys action products in 1997, Star Wars, Batman, and Jurassic Park. For girls I think we're going to see "Anastasia," which is a new animated movie, in November that should be big for them. Also, "Little Mermaid" is being re- released. There's going to be a lot of great product out in the marketplace in 1997.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And tell me what happens to Tickle Me Elmo now.

GARY JACOBSON: Well, I will predict that by February you and I and everyone will be able to buy Tickle Me Elmo for $28 at every Toys R Us store in the country. But I think Tickle Me Elmo will be around for a number of years, and who knows, maybe again next Christmas, he'll be in very short supply again.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is the Cabbage Patch doll the most direct antecedent of Tickle Me Elmo?

GARY JACOBSON: In a much bigger magnitude it probably is, and believe it or not, Cabbage Patch is still around doing some very, very good numbers ten, fifteen years after it started. Cabbage Patch should do over $100 million in revenue this year, which is three times what Tickle Me Elmo will do.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And I gather that people shouldn't get rid of their old dolls or even their old Tickle Me Elmos or anything else. The original Cabbage Patch dolls are selling for many thousand of dollars, I hear.

GARY JACOBSON: Absolutely. There's a tremendous collector market across all toys out there, and it just keeps growing and growing.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, thank you very much and have a wonderful holiday.

GARY JACOBSON: Thank you, and a happy holiday to you also.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Thank you. SERIES - ORIGINS OF CRISIS

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the origins of the crisis in the heart of Africa, a David Gergen dialogue, and China's imperial treasures. Charlayne Hunter-Gault begins a three-part series tonight on the background of the refugee crisis in Central Africa. She looks first at Rwanda and Burundi and the deep roots of the conflict there between Hutus and Tutsis.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: [music in background] In the spirit of the holidays, Marie Rose Melique is trying to remember how to play the "First Noel." [music in background] It was long ago and far away that Marie Rose Melique, now in her thirties, first took piano lessons in a place called Rwanda, a place she remembers for its beauty and its community. [music in background]

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: When I think about Rwanda, I remember also in the olden days, Rwanda was representative of Africa, and Rwanda was a beautiful country which was developing in 10 years, because when Adi Ama took power Rwanda was down, but when he took power, people, there is this which they call community, before they were doing community work together, so Rwanda was developing quickly, quickly, quickly.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: What did it look like? What do you remember it looking like, the physical place?

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: The physical place, it was, Rwanda really was looking like Europe.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Give me specifics.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: Rwanda, which make it really a big beauty, it has green grass, and it has soil which it has good production.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It was a beautiful place.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: It was a beautiful place. It was a beautiful place.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: But that Rwanda, like Marie Rose Melique's piano lessons, is fading fast in her memory, overshadowed by a long arc of tragedy that cuts wide and deep and reaches as far away as the quiet, pleasant Maryland suburb near Washington, D.C., where sometimes, but only sometimes, Marie Rose can forget. But for each moment that allows her to forget, with her husband and their three children, there are many more that make her remember, like the relentless television coverage of refugees like these.

SPOKESMAN: The last week has seen more than a thousand new arrivals.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: They are Hutus, who fled Rwanda after a Hutu-led genocidal campaign against the Tutsi minority in 1994. When the surviving Tutsis rested control of the country two years later, fear of reprisal drove even innocent Hutus out of the country into Zaire. Some of them are members of Marie Rose Melique's family, and she has no idea where they are today.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: I lost totally contact with them since this Rwanda government has a fight in Rwanda, and they fleed, I don't know where they are--in the bushes, I don't know.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: The current crisis that has produced these and countless other refugees in Central Africa has deep roots and many causes, but much of it stems from the problems of minority rule at the expense of the majority. It is the problem that grips the entire Great Lakes region, from the giant heart of the region known as Zaire, a country about 1/4 the size of the United States, to the two smaller neighboring nations, Burundi, slightly larger than Maryland, and Rwanda, slightly smaller than Maryland. In Rwanda and Burundi, the problem is expressed in the relationship between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis. Marie Rose Melique remembers it well because she, like many of her countrymen, is both Hutu and Tutsi.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: Father was a Hutu, and my mom was a Tutsi. And they both come from Rwanda, and my mom come from the, in the family of the chief of the Tutsis. I can say come from the royal family, my mom, and my dad come from the Hutu side. By that time, my father, as a Hutu, they used to be the servant of the Tutsis.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Melique remembers the history of both peoples, when they both had kingdoms in Rwandan. The Hutus, who arrived in the region first between five hundred to a thousand B.C., lived by planting and harvesting. Their large family groups were little kingdoms unto themselves, often located on a hilltop or mountainside. The Tutsis, also known as Watusis, were nomads, who arrived later, probably from Ethiopia. They had one king who ruled over a much larger expanse of territory. Zairian Professor George Nzongola argues there is basically no ethnic difference between Hutu and Tutsi and that to the extent there is a distinction, it is one of caste.

GEORGE NZONGOLA, Zairian Professor: In Rwanda, the Tutsi and the Hutu are the same people. They are all the Bantu people, which means that they belong to this large grouping of Bantu-speaking communities which go from seven regions of Cameroon, Sudan, Uganda, all the way to South Africa. They have the same culture. People used to be Tutsi or Hutu, depending on their proximity to the king. If you were close to the king, you owned wealth, you owned a lot of cattle, you are a Tutsi. If you are far away from the king, you are a cultivator, you don't own much cattle, you are a Hutu. And within the same lifetime an individual could be a Tutsi or Hutu.

OLARA OTUNNO, International Peace Academy: T'isn't true that throughout the ages they fought each other and killed each other. No--

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Olara Otunno, a former Ugandan diplomat, heads the International Peace Academy, an independent, non-partisan institute that promotes prevention and settlement of armed conflict between states. He has been intimately involve in peacemaking in the region.

OLARA OTUNNO: Even though there were deep inequities within these societies, in fact, the two communities lived side by side with each other.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: My brother married a Tutsi woman. All my brothers have Tutsi women because Rwanda it was living in harmony, for Hutu marrying Tutsi, Tutsi marrying Hutu, there was no inequity.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Still, periodic violence, some started by Tutsis, some by Hutus, mars the landscape of the region's history. The Tutsi minority almost always ruled in pre-colonial times. And while tensions existed, they were contained.

OLARA OTUNNO: You know, the traditional leaders in both countries, the monarchies in both countries, interestingly enough, both of which were Tutsi monarchies, managed this relationship a good deal better. They had sense of creating balance, a sense of reaching out, a sense of avoiding the extreme in both Rwanda and Burundi.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Sir Brian Urquhart, a former U.N. Secretary General with past experience in the region, adds that even when tribes fought, there were limits to the violence until the colonial period.

BRIAN URQUHART, Former UN Official: There had always been military expeditions, wars between tribes; the whole warrior tradition really demanded that, which was more or less kind of self-controlling in a way, when you didn't have serious weapons, and you didn't have a lot of political support from other places.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: It was in 1885 that the major European powers met in Berlin and divvied up Africa. Rwanda-Urundi went to Germany, which established a policy of ruling indirectly through local authorities. During World War I, Belgium's stronger colonial army took Rwanda-Urundi from Germany forces, ruling at first under a League of Nations' mandate, then as a U.N. trustee. With Tutsis in control through their king, their power was enhanced as the Belgians institutionalized inequality, as one writer put it.

BRIAN URQUHART: This was an extension of European power politics. They were carving up unknown continent for the benefit of four or five or six colonial powers for largely economical prestige reasons, with no knowledge or regard at all for the people who lived there.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: Tutsis are the one who are supposed to travel all over the world. Tutsis are the one who was having all the opportunities during that time. The colonial has told them they are the more intellectual--they, you know, they were born to rule.

OLARA OTUNNO: They corrupted Tutsi in both countries to work with the colonial power to rule both countries and gave a stronger sense of exclusion and oppression to the Hutus.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: In the late 50s and early 60s, independence loomed large all over the continent, and Nzongola argued that during the time the Belgians helped provoke what would soon become genocide.

GEORGE NZONGOLA: Now when the struggle for independence began in Africa, when Africa nationalism became an important force, the Tutsis, because of their better education, were in the forefront of the independence struggle, so the Belgians told the Hutu, well, look, you want independence, but after us, you go and have the Tutsi as your rulers, do you want that? The Tutsis say, well, hell, no. So, now this, you know, the seeds of division were sown in that process.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: In 1962, Rwanda-Urundi gained independence and became the separate states of Rwanda and Burundi. In Burundi, the Tutsi minority took power. In Rwanda, it was the Hutu majority. Arguably, the first genocide was by the Hutu majority against the powerful Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1964. But it soon followed in Burundi that the Tutsi minority unleashed a pogrom against its Hutu majority. This wave of killing would continue on and off for the next three decades. Periodic attempts at power-sharing were made, but no durable representative governments were created. Into this violence-filled vacuum stepped extremist elements from both sides. And many argue that this accounts for the latest, most virulent phase of the conflict. Chester Crocker served as assistant secretary for African affairs from 1981 to 89 during the Reagan administration.

CHESTER CROCKER, Former Assistant Secretary of State: There's an assumption when we talk about ethnic conflict in places like Rwanda or, for that matter, Belfast or Bosnia, that people are genetically born to hate each other. And I have trouble with that. I think there's a lot of the specific conditions we have to look at closely to understand what leads to the active violent phase of ethnic conflict.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: One condition that may have helped ignite the violence was new movement in both Rwanda and Burundi towards a political solution to their conflicts. The plane carrying both countries' presidents was shot down in Rwanda, presumably by extremists opposed to the peace process. Following their deaths, the latest Hutu-led genocide started. Crocker cites the Hutu extremists' use of hate radio in Rwanda for escalating the conflict into genocide.

CHESTER CROCKER: With hind sight, of course, there were, the bad guys were plotting, who were plotting a campaign of going to get Tutsis in every part of the country in Rwanda and planning the way they were going to do it through the use of radio and other kinds of communication techniques to unleash this awful tragedy on the country.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: The other volatile element in the mix was a population that had more than doubled in the last decade, some 400 people per square mile.

BRIAN ATWOOD, Administrator, USAID: The result of that were land disputes, not between Tutsis and Hutus exclusively, but between Hutus--among Hutus as well.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Brian Atwood heads the U.S. Agency for International Development.

BRIAN ATWOOD: You then had the problem of being able to produce enough food. This was a country that was fertile and should have produced enough food for its own population, but because of environmental deterioration, that became a problem as well. And you put--superimpose on that extremist elements that in some cases get ahold of parts of the government, and you had, as a result of this convulsion, you had about half the population either dying as the result of genocide or displaced or in refugee status. This is an incredible situation. It's the worst situation since the Holocaust.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Among the tens of thousands of victims of the genocides of Rwanda was Marie Rose Melique's brother, the governor of a province. He was Hutu, and she says he was killed in 1992 by Tutsi-led extremists who specifically targeted Hutu intellectuals and moderates.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: I couldn't sleep. I was crying all night. In the morning I went to work and I couldn't call. I went to work. I told my supervisor that my brother has just been assassinated, so they give me three days.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: A sister and two sons, ages 18 and 19, were also killed. In the most recent genocide another sister, a gynecologist, escaped, only to die later after working with other refugees in a camp near the border.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: She get the malaria. She didn't have anybody who was taking of her, and she was hospitalized, without any medicine, and she was paralyzed, and she died.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Marie Rose Melique has no idea what has happened to still another sister, the tall Tutsi-looking one, or family members from the refugee camps. There has been no contact for months. In November, when Zairian rebels attacked the Hutu militias in the camps, Hutu refugees broke away from the camps, where the Hutu extremists had held them hostage to their ambitions. Some refugees fled into the dense Zairian rain forest. Others took their chances of returning to a beckoning Rwanda, as the post- genocide government once again called for reconciliation over retribution. In Burundi, military strong man Pierre Boyoya maintained the control he seized in an earlier coup, despite a boycott and calls by regional leaders and others for a return to civilian rule. Close watchers of the region warned that violence could reignite at any point in any place, until the root causes of the problem are addressed.

OLARA OTUNNO: Why not address the issue of how you share power, real power sharing, how you make both communities feel included, how you reassure the Tutsi that their security is guaranteed, that the fact of being minority doesn't mean that they can be wiped out, and how do you assure the Hutus that they, being the majority in both countries, will share in the military, will share the land, will share in education, and have economic and social opportunities within their country, that they will not be second class in their own country? But one has to address the root causes that feed on their fear.

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Meanwhile, Marie Rose Melique is struggling with how to make her children understand those mistakes and teach them a lesson she learned many years ago back home in a different Rwanda.

MARIE ROSE MELIQUE: I'll be able to make them understand. I say in the United States it has been 200 years ago. Before they become united, they used to fight, people died. And those people also, they are fighting, they are dying. One day they will come, and they will get along. They will understand each other.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We'll have our next report in this series on Zaire on Thursday. DIALOGUE

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Jaroslav Pelikan, professor emeritus of history at Yale University. He is president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and author of "Mary through Centuries."

DAVID GERGEN: And when you think about Mary during these Christmas seasons, how do you think about her? There is such a rich interpretation. How do you personally think about her?

JAROSLAV PELIKAN, Author, "Mary Through the Centuries:" Well, as a historian, I take it to be my job to cure people of their amnesia, and that means that in connection with various things that arise, I try to remind them of the riches that are theirs in their tradition. And so a "Hail Mary" is not just a football pass, Madonna is not just a pop star, but rather in this rich tradition, we have the one who combines elevation, and radiance, and sorrow already in the Christmas story, "a sword shall pierce thy soul." And so the full range of human experience as it is embodied in her, and it's as unsentimental a portrait as you can find, despite all the sentimentality at Christmas time. If there's a difference between healthy emotion and sentimentality, Mary is a perfect illustration.

DAVID GERGEN: Now, I'm curious about Mary because, as you say, she occupies such a small space in the New Testament that the scenes in which she appears could be written down in just a few pages, and yet in the years since she has suddenly become this major dominant figure in Christianity, second only to Christ. What happened?

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Lots of different things. The doctrine of Mary is a very democratic doctrine. She clearly drew the devotion of common people from the beginning. Besides, every time an issue arose concerning Christ, who He was, how the Divine in Him was related to the human in Him and so on, every time such a question arose they had to ask about Mary because she had given birth to Him. When St.. Augustine at the beginning of the 5th Century worked out for the western church ever after the idea of original sin, then he said, but of course there has to be one exception--Mary. Well, why is she an exception? What makes her an exception? And before you knew it, you had a whole chapter about that So that- -because I'm very much interested in that phenomenon in general, it's really my shtick, the relation of continuity and change, and how--Cardinal Newman says how an idea has to change in order to remain the same; that if I--I don't have a single cell that I had when I was 10 years old, yet I am the same. I am the same because my cells have changed, and my identity and memory has maintained its continuity.

DAVID GERGEN: So the interpretations of Mary have changed over the years but will--

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Have changed, that's right.

DAVID GERGEN: --maintain her own identity, as a paradox.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: That's right. And each builds upon the preceding ones, is made necessary or possible by preceding ones, and takes up into itself themes from all over the place. The doctrines move, most of the devotion to Mary is in the eastern church. As a Slav, I've always been especially devoted to the study of the Christian east, and most of it has come from east to west, rather than the other way around. So it's done all of that, and then each time there's any kind of change in the development of the church, she's there, and then she also becomes such a favorite subject of poetry, music, paintings, statutes, and all the rest.

DAVID GERGEN: Let's walk through a couple of the interpretations. The one I found the most interesting in the early Middle Ages was Mary interpreted as the second Eve. Tell us about that.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Well, in the New Testament, Christ is interpreted as the second Adam. What was lost in the first Adam through sin was regained in the second Adam. The Garden of Eden, the Garden of Gethsemane; the wood of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the wood of the cross; and a whole parallelism of first and second Adm. But, of course, at the center of the story in Genesis is Eve. She's the one who is addressed by the tempter and is told that she may eat, even though God had forbidden it. And so quickly the conversation arose as to what's the parallel to Eve. And there you have the spirit, the tempter--in this case Gabriel, a spirit, comes to the woman and says, "This is the will of God." The first one lies when he tells her that and she believes it. The second tells the truth, and she believes it. Eve was not coerced into sinning. Mary is not coerced into obeying. So as by the free will of one came sin, so by the free will of the second came salvation.

DAVID GERGEN: So you had the disobedient. Eva versus the obedient Mary, which is one of the problems that feminist theologians have bad problems in the 20th Century, the obedient woman, was just the one who was deferential.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Which is only half the story. And plus there's a very interesting twist to that in the Genesis story. After the fall, God says to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between her seed and your seed. And then the Latin translation says "she" will crush your head. That's not in the Hebrew, but it was in the Latin very early. And so it became the theme that Mary crushed the head of the serpent, that she was the valiant woman, the battler who went to war. She was the role model for Joan of Arc, which is not exactly the submissive, docile, obedient woman.

DAVID GERGEN: So that's the other part.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: That's the other half.

DAVID GERGEN: We have to remember that in the 20th century.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: That's right. And the dialectic between those two, the paradox between those two is one of a whole series of paradoxes. Virgin, yes; supreme example of a mother, yes. Neither without the other. Always. What God has joined together, let no one put sunder. And so those belong together. So it is also with these.

DAVID GERGEN: That's very interesting. There's another interpretation I wanted to ask you about briefly, and that is the mother of God. In the "Ave Maria" prayer, Mary is called the mother of God, and we don't think about what this is, but you say that that notion was the biggest quantum leap in history about--and the thinking about Mary.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: That's right. Because it does not say mother goddess, but mother of God, or more precisely, bearer, the one who gave birth to the One who was God is the way you'd unpack the sentence. And the question was, the One to whom she gave. birth. Did she give birth only to the human aspect of Jesus, or did she give birth to a person; to a human nature or to a divine human person? And if she gave birth to a divine human person, then she is the mother of the divine human person, she is the mother of God.

DAVID GERGEN: And Christ shares that divinity with God.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: And, therefore, she is the mother of God.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: That's right.

DAVID GERGEN: And that elevates her.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Certainly. And then she becomes the first example of how our nature can be elevated and transformed. Do you want to see what we're going to be like eventually, by the grace of God, start with her because in her, the grace of God was present fully. The Ave Maria begins with, "Hail Mary, full of grace." The rest of us have grace, but she is filled with it, and therefore she is already in that process of metamorphosis into participation in the divine nature.

DAVID GERGEN: One other interpretation briefly: you also describe her as a bridge builder to other religions and other cultures.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Well, she is a Jewish maiden from Nazareth, descended from David. She is the most important woman in the Koran; maybe the most important description of any character, male or female, in the Koran is in Sora 19 which has the title "Mary." She is the mother of the Church, and identified with the Church, so that across all of these divisions between the eastern and western churches, between Christianity and Islam, between Christianity and Judaism, there she is on both sides of each of those chasms.

DAVID GERGEN: Dr. Pelikan, thank you for joining us this Christmas season.

JAROSLAV PELIKAN: Thank you for having me. SECOND LOOK - ANCIENT TREASURES

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: We close tonight with the splendors of Imperial China. We first aired this story last summer when the traveling art exhibition was in New York. Since then it has visited Chicago and San Francisco and opens soon in Washington. Here is a second look. Paul Solman of WGBH-Boston is the correspondent.

PAUL SOLMAN: In Taiwan, an unusual protest--over an art show. Treasures from the imperial collection, the emperor's personal stash, collected over centuries and shown only sparingly at home, were leaving to tour America. It didn't sit well with budding Taiwanese and eventually several works stayed behind. But the imperial collection has been on the road before, packed on trucks back in 1931 by President Chiang Kai-Shek and taken inland away from the invading Japanese. After World War II, before the Communists took over, the collection made its final trek offshore to Taiwan. Now, it's barnstorMing America. The U.S. tours started this spring at New York's Metropolitan Museum, which is where we were introduced to the splendors of Imperial China, a chance, amid the anxiety over China these days, to breathe easy for a few minutes and maybe get a clue about the Chinese by looking long and hard at their art. Much of this show is instantly likeable, and once you read the labels understandable. This is a good luck pillow for a would-be mother to ensure she has a boy. There are depths to plumb, however, of a very different culture.

WEN FONG, Metropolitan Museum of Art: The mentality indicates that this is a religious icon, so now--

PAUL SOLMAN: This is really art historian Wen Fong's exhibit since it was he who coaxed these rare delicacies out of Taiwan.

WEN FONG: This is the portrait of the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

PAUL SOLMAN: To Wen Fong, there are basically two styles in Chinese art, and this is one of them, the Imperial style, pretty as a picture, colorful, decorative. It's symbolic, Fong says, of a civil, courtly, orderly world. The key symbol, the emperor, portrayed as the great stabilizer of society. In the Imperial style, it turns out, the ruler is literally a mountain lording it over the earth, and that's the way the artist must portray him.

WEN FONG: Everything is monumentalized--the body, the way it sits there. It sits like a mountain, not just any mountain, a cosmic mountain.

PAUL SOLMAN: Fully five feet tall, this monumental scroll in the year 1100 or so mirrors the portrait, says Fong. The host mountain, symbolizing the emperor, sits atop a harmonious, hierarchical world of descending scale and status. This, it seems, is the Confucian view of order, from top to bottom, from landscapes to portraiture. Now for all the symbolism, Fong says the artist captured the likeness of Tai Tsu here pretty well. In the Imperial style, though, the artist plays second fiddle to politics. The whole point of portraits like this is to convince his subjects of the emperor's absolute authority.

WEN FONG: The brush work itself has no individual personality, if you will.

PAUL SOLMAN: So you don't see the artist's expressiveness her?

WEN FONG: No, no. The artist is totally subsumed in this Imperial statement.

PAUL SOLMAN: So is this propaganda?

WEN FONG: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's this the Imperial propaganda. The emperor is the center of the universe is what it says.

PAUL SOLMAN: If Imperial portraits were already strongly propagandist in the 10th century Sung Dynasty, by the time of the Ming dynasty four centuries later, they were almost entirely so. Religious icons really, whose style reflects, according to Fong, the rigidity and inwardness that's typical of absolutist rule.

WEN FONG: This is a very telling picture in some ways because it symbolizes a whole culture, an entire people turning inward for the remaining of the Imperial history up until modern times. Talk about autocracy, the Imperial system, there's only just really basically one direction you can go, that is, more becomes more absolute than ever before.

PAUL SOLMAN: China's emperor's turning inward, it's a standard explanation of why after inventing everything from gunpowder to the clock, China lost its technological lead and was surpassed by the West. To Fong, that's the message of the increasing decorativeness and lifelessness of the Imperial style. But then there is the other style of Chinese art, personal, private, sometimes even subversive, and to an average westerner, dauntingly subtle, even when Professor Fong extols its virtues.

WEN FONG: This is one of the greatest, almost legendary, pieces in Chinese history.

PAUL SOLMAN: This may be the first personal masterpiece in Chinese art. The mad script, black and white calligraphy, of 8th century Zen monk Qwai Su, who tended to drink while drawing, the text is about Qwai Su, himself, but it's the brush work that matters.

WEN FONG: And then he really at this point, you know, you can visibly see that he just takes off.

PAUL SOLMAN: Calligraphy, says Fong, is the beginning of the personal side of Chinese art, although that's a lot for some in the West to swallow.

PAUL SOLMAN: Why is this art? Isn't it sort of like penmanship?

WEN FONG: Well, it's so beautiful and so, you know, free and spontaneous, it, uh, it really is an exemplar of this critical notion that in order to create you have to be totally free without any constraint. So art really becomes artless, and this is so natural, you know, the brush just absolutely floats along and never leaves the paper and moves on and with this rhythm or the Chinese call the chi, this breath of life.

PAUL SOLMAN: Painting as a mystical experience. The artist in touch with a universal life force. Perhaps the most obvious parallel in the West is action painting in which artists like Jackson Pollock strove for a spontaneity that would tap into the mystical realm of reality. In that sense, the art here is the very act of making it almost like a dancer or a musician. The show's next breakthrough of the personal style, Fong thinks, Chow Meng Fu's study of bamboo from around 1300. For the first time, the brush work of calligraphy was applied to nature. That means the expressiveness of the artist's painting style is more important than what's being painted. Fong points to the outline of that big rock. Look closely and you may be able to make out the artist's presence in the long dragged strokes, where the hairs of the brush separate to create a famous calligraphy effect, flying white, but whether you see it or not, Fong says, the artist is doing something abstract.

WEN FONG: This is sort of the starting point for all new type of art in China, in Korea, in Japan, the only really two ways of drawing something, only is to represent nature as closely as possible to what eye sees, the visual representation, the other is almost acting it out, that I stand for this tree, this bamboo, and this bamboo is me.

PAUL SOLMAN: One nice thing about art, the longer you look, the more you find, especially if you've never looked before. For example, this is the philosopher, Lao-Tze, founder of Taoism, riding on an ox. But why does yet another major painting in this show have no color, because, Fong says, the artist is going after something as mystical, as essential as the philosopher, himself.

WEN FONG: There's a saying that ink has five colors.

PAUL SOLMAN: Ink has five colors.

WEN FONG: Ink has five colors. It is by eliminating the colors you are able to concentrate and to imagine what goes with it, so it is really this rhythmic quality that really matters here.

PAUL SOLMAN: For Wen Fong, the most personal, most interesting painting in the show might be Ni-Tsung's Empty Pavilion. It seems Ni-Tsung, born in 1301, was a rich scholar artist who fled his estate because of Mongul tax collectors and civil unrest in the 1340's. Exile became the theme of his work.

WEN FONG: In this picture is the empty pavilion. That's a representation of his abandoned home. So there's infinite line for peace, for beauty, and survival. The whole thing is, is--hides a message, conceals a message of survival in a hostile world.

PAUL SOLMAN: In fact, this painting conceals more messages than you can shake a brush at. To aficionados, those dark, little arcs on the upper right branches, are painted with the brush tip perpendicular to the paper, which suggests the artist working very much within himself. The contours of the trees and rocks, though, are painted with the side of the brush in an angle to the paper considered a more aggressive outward gesture and the lines start and stop abruptly, meant to convey the tension of Ni-Tsung's time. Now, if this level of detail seems obscure to us, it's vital to Chinese scholars, and that's even more true of the 17th century's Chu Ta.

WEN FONG: In these innocuous-looking flowers and vegetables, they are loaded with political messages.

PAUL SOLMAN: Flowers, for example, can be symbols of bureaucrats who sold out. Often accompanying poems amplify the image. To many of us, I imagine, just a pair of sagging melons, to connoisseurs, a suggestion of Chu Ta's dual identity, he was a prince who became a monk, the dual identity of imperial rule, Manchu versus Chinese, even the dual identity of the universe, as expressed by the opposite forces of Yin and Yang, from which everything is said to arise. It's this sort of subtlety, often mystical, that defines Chu Ta and the personal style of Chinese art. Now after straining to decipher all this, it was something of a relief to come at last upon Chu Ying's Pavilion in the mountain of the immortals dated 1550.

PAUL SOLMAN: This I can really relate to, beautiful colors, fantastic abstraction of the mountains in the background, how come I can relate to this--and not a lot of what we've seen so far.

WEN FONG: But this is consumer art in late Ming period, lot of rich merchants and patrons of art and so it's, it's all escapist art.

PAUL SOLMAN: The island of immortality, a fantasy for a merchant class that had everything money could buy except of course eternal life.

PAUL SOLMAN: So this is art for bourgeois people like me?

WEN FONG: Exactly.

PAUL SOLMAN: This is more accessible than much of what Fong likes best in his exhibit, but even the Ni-Tsung, he believes, can be deeply appreciated by westerners, even a bridge of understanding and sympathy between us and the Chinese. That's because, Fong thinks, we can all respond to the mystical essence of art. We just have to know the vocabulary and then work at it.

WEN FONG: It always takes effort and study.

PAUL SOLMAN: Any work of art?

WEN FONG: Any work of art. Work of art is, is also acquired taste, acquired understanding.

PAUL SOLMAN: And so the more I look at the Ni-Tsung.

WEN FONG: Looking is everything. Looking is the secret. RECAP

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Again, the major stories this Christmas Eve, demonstrators for and against Serbian President Milosevic clashed in bloody confrontations in the streets of Belgrade. Palestinian Leader Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met but failed to reach agreement on pulling Israeli troops out of Hebron. And the Peruvian hostage crisis entered its seventh day. Another hostage, the Uruguayan ambassador, was released tonight, bringing the total to 105 Peruvian and foreign officials and businessmen being held by leftist rebels. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Elizabeth Farnsworth. Thank you and Merry Christmas.