The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. LEHRER: Good evening. Leading the news this Columbus Day Monday, at least 25 more people died as the riots continued in Algeria. The unrest in Yugoslavia also grew. We'll have the details in our News Summary in a moment. Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in New York tonight. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: After the News Summary, we'll have back to back focus segments on three of the world's current hot spots, Algeria, Yugoslavia, and Estonia, then a look at the American Civil Liberties Union, and different editorial views on why it has become a focal point in the election campaign. We'll be joined by New York Times Columnist Anthony Lewis and Wall Street Journal Editor Robert Bartley. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. LEHRER: Machine guns were used to break up demonstrations in Algeria today. The Associated Press said at least twenty-five people were killed, dozens more were wounded. The demonstrators are Islamic fundamentalists protesting government economic policies. Tonight President Chadli Benjedid tried to end the riots by speaking to the nation on television. He promised broad political reforms but said his program of belt tightening would continue. He said the government would take a firm line against sabotage. Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: In another world hot spot, Yugoslavian authorities imposed urgent measures in the Tenth Southern Republic of Montenegro, but protests fueled by economic crisis and ethnic tension continued. In a hastily called speech Sunday night, President Raif Deserevich was not specific about the measures, but they could include increased police patrols and firm action against public protesters. Police did use violent tactics for the first time over the weekend to disperse Montenegran students and workers demanding dismissal of local party leaders. Meanwhile, protest marches and rallies continued throughout much of the South. We have a report on one of them from Gary Rado of Independent Television News.

GARY RADO: One of the biggest demonstrations to date took place at Graguivatz, some hundred miles South of Belgrade. Ignoring the atrocious, rain lashed conditions, the crowd gave noisy declarations of support to their fellow Serbs in the Province of Kosovo, said to be persecuted there by the majority ethnic Albanians. The speakers on a platform dominated by a portrait of Tio received scant attention wielding pictures of Yugoslavia's new strongman, Slavidan Milosovitch, the Serbian Communist Party leader who's made Kosovo the rallying call in an appeal to age old nationalist feeling. The authorities said a total of 200,000 people braved the deluge to protest. The figure is probably exaggerated, but it was one of the largest ever demonstrations in a country where ordinary people have only just learned how to bring their grievances out into the open.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: At one demonstration, a regional official resigned on the spot, and then left the scene in tears. Meanwhile, a major shake-up stemming from the slow progress of reforms has resulted in the resignation of the two top leaders of Czechoslovakia. They are Czechoslovak Premier Lobamir Strugal, who headed the federal government for more than 18 years, and Slovak Premier Peter Kolatka, who had held the office for almost 20 years. The shake-up comes in the wake of similar government reorganizations in the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Poland.

MR. LEHRER: The Palestine Liberation Organization has decided to declare an independent Palestinian state. A PLO official of Tunis said the decision was made Friday. He said the declaration would be based on a 1947 UN Security Council resolution which proposed dividing Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. Parts of the state would presumably include land now occupied by Israel. A spokesman for the Israeli Government said the PLO can declare whatever they like, it won't change anything.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Prospects for peace in Angola and independence for Namibia brightened today as negotiators from four nations substantially narrowed the gap on their differences. According to U.S. officials, South African, Angolan, Cuban, and U.S. negotiators have all but agreed to step up the pace of the withdrawal of 50,000 Cuban troops from Angola in twenty-four to thirty months. In exchange, South Africa will pull its troops out of Namibia, clearing the way for a UN supervised election. In Sri Lanka, police and military sources report that Tamel rebels today killed at least 47 villagers, hacking and shooting them to death in their sleep. It was the worst violence since Indian peacemaking troops arrived in the island nation a year ago.

MR. LEHRER: And finally in the U.S. Presidential Campaign today, Gov. Dukakis spoke of housing, Vice President Bush crime. Bush did his speaking to a group of Italian-Americans in Trenton, New Jersey.

VICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, GOP Presidential Nominee: Like so much in the area of crime, it starts with an attitude, an attitude in the community, that says, we're going to take back our streets, an attitude in the family and in the society that says an unyielding "no" to drugs, and an attitude in City Hall and the State House and in the White House that won't tolerate crime, that stands for firm sentences and judges which will uphold them, that is tough on criminals so that they can't be quite so tough on innocent people.

MR. LEHRER: Dukakis was in New York, speaking in Levitt Town on Long Island. He proposed a new housing plan to let first-time home buyers use individual retirement accounts and other tax deferred pension savings for down payments. He also attacked George Bush's claim that housing is up.

GOV. MICHAEL DUKAKIS, Dem. Presidential Nominee: Remember what he said? He said, "Housing is up." And he's right, friends. Housing is up. It's up so much, it's almost out of sight for the average American family. The price of housing in this country has raced ahead of young people's wages and has made it impossible for them to buy homes in the communities that they grew up in. Mr. Bush has no housing program. He has no solutions. He has no new ideas.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That's our News Summary. Still ahead, what's behind the trouble in Algeria, Yugoslavia, and Estonia, and the ACLU as political hot potato. FOCUS - SEEDS OF UNREST

MR. LEHRER: Spreading protest and violence in two countries, Algeria and Yugoslavia is where we begin tonight. Algeria is first. Judy Woodruff has that story. Judy.

MS. WOODRUFF: Algeria is the North African country remembered by many Americans for playing the middleman role in the release of U.S. Embassy hostages from Iran in 1981. Over the past week, crowds of young Algerians have been rioting in the streets of Algiers, which is the capital city. Many of them have been Moslem fundamentalists, demanding the decoration of an Islamic republic. The conflicts with police and soldiers have brought deaths estimated at more than 200. The clashes have also inflicted heavy damage to property in three heavily populated sections of Algiers. Algeria's troubles began when the government stopped borrowing money from foreign bankers. Wages were frozen and shelves emptied in the stores. Last Tuesday, the government warned that the people would have to tighten their belts even more. That started the violence. A state of emergency was declared on Thursday, then a curfew was imposed, and the army came out to enforce it. Tonight Algeria's President went on national television there to promise reforms, but to warn that austerity measures must continue. Joining us now forsome analysis is I. William Zartman, a Professor of International Politics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies here in Washington. Dr. Zartman is President of the American Institute of Ma Grab Studies, and was recently President of the Middle East Studies Association. Dr. Zartman, just how serious is this situation for the country of Algeria?

I. WILLIAM ZARTMAN, Johns Hopkins: Well, it's very serious. I think it's serious particularly for President Chadli Benjedid because he's about to face his third election and he's not closing out his second term on a very positive note. He's raising a lot of opposition from his population, because there's a tremendous gap between expectations and realizations of his government.

MS. WOODRUFF: We just heard and saw some of the austerity measures that precipitated all this. How did all that work? Take us back a few months and fill us in on that part of it.

DR. ZARTMAN: Well, I have to go back a little farther than a few months. One really has to back to the beginning of his first term when he came into power after 13 years of President Guari Bumadien, who was an austere leader of a Socialist Algeria, dominated by a socialist state government and economy. And the people wanted change. They wanted liberalization. And Chadli Benjedid came in on that platform, as it were. He didn't run against anybody, but the army put him into power to liberalize. And just as he began to liberalize, the oil prices fell down.

MS. WOODRUFF: Liberalize meaning what in the Algerian context?

DR. ZARTMAN: Liberalize meaning first of all providing consumer goods, liberalize the economy, dismantle the tremendous centralized heavy structure dominated by the oil empire. And then liberalize politically a bit too, not to several parties, but at least to give people a greater sense of expression and sense of participation. And all that now has been very difficult because Algeria has run out of money.

MS. WOODRUFF: We've had the oil crisis for Algeria in the meantime and that's made things --

DR. ZARTMAN: And that means that --

MS. WOODRUFF: -- much more serious.

DR. ZARTMAN: Much more serious -- and it means that it's very difficult for Algerians to have consumer goods, the consumer goods they want. It's very difficult for the government to live up to its promises of particularly opening up the economy and providing more for its people. And now he's clamped down austerity measures just at a time when people are expecting something more.

MS. WOODRUFF: How much of the fault can be laid at the feet of the government though? How much of this was out of his control, and how much could he have changed?

DR. ZARTMAN: Well, the oil prices he can't change, and to a large extent he's victim of expectations simply that came in with him and brought him into power. The liberalization measures, the privatization measures, for example, that he's carrying out are designed to make a better life for Algerians, a better economy, and that's not his fault. He's off on a correct path. In fact, he's facing many of the same kind of protests and challenges that Gorbachev is doing with his perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union.

MS. WOODRUFF: What do you mean by that?

DR. ZARTMAN: We mean that as soon as one starts opening up the framework of state control which has kept down protest expression, political freedom, one opens up the whole population to reactions, criticisms that go beyond small liberalization and start attacking the basis of the state.

MS. WOODRUFF: So how legitimate then are the complaints that we're now seeing turn into violence? I mean, the people really do have something to complain about.

DR. ZARTMAN: People really have something to complain about, they've been complaining for a long time that their prices are very high, that their goods are scarce, that tomatoes from the countryside don't get into the city. Those complaints are real. There's probably not too much in the short run that the government could have done about it.

MS. WOODRUFF: What role then do the Islamic fundamentalists, how do they fit into all this?

DR. ZARTMAN: Well, that's another element. In Algeria, with a single party dominance, politics is squeezed out of society. You only carry out politics in the party. There is no way of legitimate expression of grievances and criticisms. The only way left is through the mosques, through a religious expression, and therefore, people who want to express opposition to state policies, to the state, to the party, have to use an Islamic voice. And Islam becomes the legitimizer of criticism against the government.

MS. WOODRUFF: But you're not saying that the struggle there is really completely, is completely about religion and about --

DR. ZARTMAN: No. No. The struggle is not about religion at all. It's -- they're all Moslems in Algeria, and the question is rather that the Islamic expression of political demands is the only legitimate avenue open.

MS. WOODRUFF: And you started to say that the prospects for President Chadli are not positive at this point.

DR. ZARTMAN: Well, this doesn't enhance his reputation, let's put it that way. He's not likely to have another candidate run against him. That doesn't happen in Algeria, but what's likely to happen is the hardening or the sharpening of the debate that goes on within the Algerian circles between the hard liners, the state controlled people, the people who harken back to the socialist rigidity of the Midian and the people who want to reform and continue liberalization.

MS. WOODRUFF: And what does all that spell?

DR. ZARTMAN: It spells -- it's hard to tell who's going to come out, but it spells continued maneuvering, perhaps instability, difficulty for Chadli, as he he approaches his new term.

MS. WOODRUFF: Implications for the United States?

DR. ZARTMAN: Well, the United States I think would be much happier with a continuing liberalization, with openness, privatization in Algeria, and if Algeria is going to go back and debate that all over again, it opens itself up to economic policies that the United States, the world community at the present time, doesn't favor. There are also implications around in international relations. If the hard liners come into power around Chadli and surround him, we're going to have a difficult time in the settlement over the Sahara with Morocco, and therefore, in cooperation among North African states, which is now building.

MS. WOODRUFF: Dr. Zartman, we thank you for being with us.

DR. ZARTMAN: Thank you.

MS. WOODRUFF: Jim. FOCUS - YUGOSLAVIA

MR. LEHRER: Now to another country hit by unrest, the maverick Communist nation of Yugoslavia. A combination of new economic troubles and ethnic rivalries as old as the country, itself, has brought Yugoslavia to the edge of martial law. A former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Lawrence Eagleburger, is here to help us understand what is happening there and why. He will follow this background report from Gary Rado of Independent Television News.

GABY RADO: The laborers sitting on a park bench in Central Belgrade are a city institution. They're the Vukofsi. They're men of Vukof Park waiting to be offered unskilled work by local residents or small businesses. Yugoslavia's unemployment stands at 15 percent. Some of these men do have jobs, but they need to moonlight to supplement the family income. Inflation is Europe's highest, at present running at 200 percent. It's a rate which makes it necessary to raise prices more than once a week, leaving ordinary people totally bewildered about the present and uncertain about the future. In order to get relief for Yugoslavia's $21 million foreign debt from the International Monetary Fund, the government froze wages earlier this year, while allowing prices to continue soaring. In the current wave of unrest, the wages freeze is likely to be scrapped to stave off the anger of the workers. Mira Malitchavich, a cafe manageress, lives in a two room flat with her son and her mother. She says 3/4 of the family's regular income of 80 pounds a month, the Yugoslav average wage, goes on food. It's only with the money her mother makes by selling her crochet work that the three of them are able to buy clothes and pay for luxuries.

MIRA MALITCHAVICH: [Speaking Through Translator] In this situation that we're in now, something has to be changed. There has to be some kind of solution, and we all hope for the better future.

MR. RADO: When the Yugoslav President, Reif Disdonovich, made his broadcast to the nation last night, he promised rapid action to reverse the slide in living standards. But at the same time, he warned that the unrest must stop and threatened what he called extraordinary measures to stamp out the protest movement. The promised action will include a major shake-up in the party leadership to be decided when the Plainem meets here in a week's time. It's already been announced that a third of the leaders will go and the deepening crisis could result in even more resignations. The country is today alive with rumors of where the unrest will next break out and what measures might be taken against it. The biggest demonstration so far has already been planned for next week with a million people due to take to the streets of Belgrade after the Plainem.

SVETOZAR STOJANOVIC, Politics Professor, Belgrade University: Well, it's difficult to predict. I think there will be some import changes, but they won't be enough, I think. I think what is needed is really an extraordinary congress of the Communist Party. I'm not in the party but it's a ruling party anyway. What we need is an action program, really, an operative program, not just slogans or something like that. So it could be important as a sign that this democratic pressure is succeeding, but only as the first symbol or sign. It could be a beginning of a long process, but nothing more than that.

MIHAJLO KOVAC, Political Commentator: I think that all these happenings finally gave us a new democratic experience. It will be unknown in our newest history in Yugoslavia, in our socialistic system, and I think that it could be a quite new experience for the politicians also because the people showed to political leadership that there is a big strength of public opinion.

MR. LEHRER: Now to Lawrence Eagleburger. He is President of Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm in New York City. He was formerly Undersecretary of State For Political Affairs and served as Ambassador to Yugoslavia. He joins us from public station WEDH in Hartford, Connecticut. Mr. Ambassador, welcome.

LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER: Thank you.

MR. LEHRER: Do you agree with what the man just said on the tape, that there are democratic pressures at work here, and that the people are finding that they have power?

LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER, Former U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia: There are a whole set of pressures at work here, one of which is the pressures for democracy, yes, but I think the fundamental question is an economic question. Yugoslavia really ever since the death of Tito has been unable to make central decisions on its economy. Each of the republics can veto the decisions of the central government, and as a consequence, the economy has deteriorated substantially, and what's come from that is a rise in nationalist feeling and particularly amongst the Serbs.

MR. LEHRER: And so you think -- if it hadn't been for the economic problems, you don't think the nationalism would have risen quite so dramatically?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: I don't think it would have risen -- well, with one exception, I don't think it would have risen at all. The exception is that there clearly is tremendous pressure on the Serbs in the Kosovo, which used to be the old heart of Serbia and is now much more Albanian than Serbian. So there is an issue there which has been the trigger which has led to a lot of Serbian reaction, but without the economic problem, I think it would been much more containable?

MR. LEHRER: What's your analysis of the economic problem? In other words, what caused it? You say it's deteriorated. Spell that out. Give me some details.

MR. EAGLEBURGER: Well, I think you start with an assumption which I make at least that Yugoslavia inherently is a fairly rich country.

MR. LEHRER: Fairly rich country?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: Rich, fairly rich country, and, in fact, has done well in most of its post war history, but what's happened now is with the pressures of the debt, and they have a heavy debt, with the pressures for trying to derive the economy toward a more market-oriented economy, all of these pressures have worked really to cause the situation to deteriorate because the central government hasn't been able to make the kinds of tough decisions which, in fact, the Algerian Government has recently made, for example, the kinds of tough decisions that would begin to turn the situation around and make it a more productive society.

MR. LEHRER: Give me one example of a kind of decision they've been unable to make.

MR. EAGLEBURGER: Well, for example, when it comes to the debt and the problem of how they take care of the debt, the country makes a fair amount of hard currency, but each of the republics has a certain control over some of that currency and each of the enterprises within that republic. And where the problem has arisen here is that they have been supporting unprofitable enterprises which use up hard currency, rather than being able to get the sort of central control over this particular item for example that would have given them a better chance to begin to reduce their debt. They have enterprises which continue to operate despite the fact that they are losing money hand over fist largely because the central government hasn't been able to move in and force them to become more productive.

MR. LEHRER: And these are, you're talking about state-owned enterprises, right?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: Well, the Yugoslavs have an argument about that. They say they're owned by the workers, themselves. They are certainly not as state-owned as in the Soviet Union, but on the other hand, neither are they the free enterprise system that we have here.

MR. LEHRER: Is the reason for the failure of the central government to come in and do something about this a political failure, they don'thave the clout over the republics, or what?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: It is basically constitutional. When Tito was still alive, the system permitted each of the republics a great deal of autonomy because of their nationality issue, but when Tito died and they developed this collective presidency both within the state and within the party, what you've got is a situation in which no one was preeminent, they changed the leadership once every year, and what you have is the republics, each one of them able to veto the decisions of the central government. So that what you have in the North, for instance, with Slovenia, Croatia, and to a lesser degree Serbia, is largely developed areas or fairly well developed areas which have to support substantially those areas to the South, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina. And what you get is a drain away from the areas that are productive toward trying to support the areas in the South which are not anywhere near as productive.

MR. LEHRER: But, of course, that's how all countries operate. That's how the United States of America operates, through a central government. You have some parts of the country at one time are a little better off than others, and everybody kind of shares the burden.

MR. EAGLEBURGER: Certainly so, but when it comes to the ability of the central government of the United States to make fundamental decisions on economic policy it can do so. I would argue that the central government in Belgrade has less real authority over the total Yugoslav economy than does the United States Government over our economy.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Then what happens now, Mr. Ambassador? Do you expect this to continue to grow and to continue to get tougher? Where is the solution?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: I think the solution lies in a recognition on the part of all of the republics that they are going to have strengthen the mechanisms of the central government so that it can have a more coherent economic policy both domestic and foreign. Now whether that will come or not I think is a hard question to predict at this point. One of the interesting things about the Serbian party leader, Mr. Miloshavich, is that while is he is relatively authoritarian politically, on the economic side, he is as market-oriented as anybody I know in Yugoslavia, and is pushing very hard for the kinds of reforms that most of us in the West think would help the Yugoslavs begin to get out of their situation. And I think he is using the nationalities issues to some degree to try to strengthen his position so that he can try to force the central government into a more firm stand. Now he is playing with fire when he does this and whether it will explode in his face or not I think remains to be seen, but under the best of circumstances, Yugoslavia is going to spend the next several years trying very hard to begin to impose some of those austerity measures that we keep talking about and by the way, when those are imposed, that is not going to be politically easy either.

MR. LEHRER: I mean, that's the fire you're talking about, right?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: That's correct. There is clearly in my judgment going to be a good bit of unrest in Yugoslavia for some year to come.

MR. LEHRER: And it will be, I mean, will it be like this, or do you expect it to become more violent, do you expect people to start dying in large numbers? What would the army do? What do you mean?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: I suspect that it will continue about like this. I do not think it will get much worse. The one thing I think you can count on is that if it does begin to get a lot more serious, the army will step in probably under instructions from the central government. I don't mean that it would overthrow the central government, but the army would step in to maintain order. What has got to come and I think will come over time, whether the time is sufficient or not, I'm not sure, but what will come over time is that the central government will regain authority over the economy of the country because the republics will recognize that it has to and will begin to get this thing sorted out, but it's going to be a long and very difficult process.

MR. LEHRER: Where do you believe that the people of Yugoslavia, do you think that the economy just got so bad that it forced it on them, or do you think there was some leakage from perestroika, from the Soviet Union, and the whole Communist world that said, hey, this is the time to move, and we have some power?

MR. EAGLEBURGER: This whole process preceded anything the Soviets have done. And I would argue fairly strenuously that, in fact, perestroika and glasnost hit Yugoslavia sometime ago. This is a country that broke with the Soviets in '48 and has since then one step forward, two steps back sometimes, but has moved toward some form of moderate political democracy and certainly some economic democracy. I am not by any means saying that it's a Western European country. So a lot of this developed before that. The Achilles Heel of the whole thing is the fact that because of the nationality issue, the decision making process in Yugoslavia is so diffuse that it is almost impossible to make seriously really difficult decisions by the central government and then make them stick in the republics.

MR. LEHRER: All right. Lawrence Eagleburger, thanks again for being with us tonight.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We go now to another part of the Communist world where the pressures for change are more than either its rulers or the Soviet Union had bargained for. The Baltic nation of Estonia, along with its neighbors, Latvia and Lithuanian, have tried to maintain as much separate identity as possible since they were incorporated as Soviet republics more than 40 years ago. Now the pressures for reform inside the Soviet Union have intensified the desire for more independence in the Baltic countries. Brian Hanrahan of the BBC prepared this report from Estonia.

BRIAN HANRAHAN: To wave the Estonian flag in Estonia used to be the fast way to a prison sentence, but now it's the emblem of the new Estonian Independence Party, which mounts a daily picket outside the courthouse. They're demanding the release of dissidents locked up when so such party and no such demonstration would have been permitted, and their presence tolerated by the authorities is a symbol of the extraordinary changes sweeping the country. The local newspapers dare to challenge the official line that Estonia voluntarily joined the Soviet Union. And they give voice to a deep rooted feeling that Estonia has been treated as a colonial outpost, with its clocks set on Moscow time and its language relegated to second class status. The schools point up the divisions between the Estonians and the Russian immigrants which run right through society. The Russians send their children to one set of schools, the Estonians to another. Estonian children must learn Russian. Few Russians bother to learn Estonian. And the two communities don't mix happily.

FEMALE ESTONIAN STUDENT: The first difficulty is because of language, because they don't study our language, and the second I think is that they don't follow our traditions, but make us to follow theirs.

MALE ESTONIAN STUDENT: The thing I don't like at all is that Russian gangs are on the streets in the evenings at night. It's the worst thing for me.

MR. HANRAHAN: What do they do?

MALE ESTONIAN STUDENT: They beat the students.

MR. HANRAHAN: What draws the Russians are the state-owned factories which create jobs for them. Built without any concern for local feelings, they symbolize the control that Moscow still exercises over almost every aspect of daily life. They cause so much resentment that even the Estonian Communist Party now supports the demand that Russian immigration must be stopped.

ARVI JURISTE, Journalist: Over the past 40 years or so, there has been an avalanche of immigration into Estonia, which has considerably brought down the living standard in this country.

MR. HANRAHAN: In what way?

ARVI JURISTE: Well, in order to find that out, you could just drop at any of the shops here and see the shelves are empty and cues are everywhere and as for the capital city, Telin, itself, there is an acute shortage of housing and because of some obscure regulations, it's been the immigrants who have been privileged in receiving new housing, whereas, the life long residents of Telin have been waiting for a new flat for years on end.

MR. HANRAHAN: So far, the only tangible economic benefit of the new tolerance is a boom in selling and making the former Estonian flag. But a group of economists wants to fashion this new found nationalism into economic independence. Their blueprint would put local industry under local government, and by breaking the stranglehold of the Moscow bureaucrats, it would be advancing Mr. Gorbachev's policies of encouraging industrial initiative and discouraging the central planners. Perched on the border of the Soviet Union, Estonians have long been able to peer enviously at the forbidden world outside. Finland and its TV transmitters are only 40 miles away, and Dallas, Dynasty and now Sins are followed as eagerly here as in the West, and doing more damage to intercommonal relations along the way.

ANDREAS RAID, TV Producer: The aerials are directed into different directions, and I've heard a lot of trouble when Russian speaking citizens turn it in their way toward Moscow, and the others see it on the picture at once, go to the roof, and change it to Finland, and that's caused trouble, of course.

MR. HANRAHAN: Finnish and Estonian are overlapping languages, and the Estonians have no problems in understanding the mixture of soft soap and hard sell that fills their living rooms. Their exposure to the consumer society helps explain why economic reform took off so quickly here and why political change is following a pace. The popular front is emerging as a major political force, riding the tide of national feeling. Through rallies it presents itself as a Democratic counterbalance to a local government still too anxious to please Moscow. But its leaders would rather not get too far ahead of the rest of the Soviet Union, and they shy away from talk of genuine independence.

EDGAR SAVINSAAR, Popular Front: [Through Translator] We are trying to help all the 15 republics in gaining democracy and in making all the republics more democratic, and at the end of changing the Soviet Union like it is now up to some kind of federation of free republics.

MR. HANRAHAN: Nationalism presents a peculiar challenge to the Communist Party, which tried long and unsuccessfully to suppress it, but with elections emerging as a fact of life, the new party leader is trying to ally Estonian Communists with it. At times, it seems as if the Nationalists and the Communists are in league to avoid alarming Moscow. They are both arguing that more local control must be seen as just filling in the details of the broad reform programs already approved.

ARVI JURISTE, Journalist: Central authorities would retain some control of the foreign policy and the state defense, whereas, all other aspects of the management of the society would be up to the republics, themselves, and I think people in Estonia at the moment are quite realistic about that.

MR. HANRAHAN: The Estonians pioneered some of the early economic reforms before they were successfully exported to the rest of the Soviet Union, but now they appear to be involved in something much more ambitious, a test of how well Communist rule stands up to democratic pressure. The conservative hard liners will want proof that Communism can win before they allow the idea to spread, and the Nationalists have lived in the system long enough to know that if they're too successful, they could lose everything. FOCUS - CARD CARRYING CONTROVERSY

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Next tonight, a look at renewed controversy about the American Civil Liberties Union. Vice President George Bush has made it a major issue in the Presidential campaign, and we'll debate that in a moment. But first, a little history. The current controversy started after Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis boasted of being a card carrying member of the ACLU.

VICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, GOP Presidential Candidate: The Governor of Massachusetts said, here's his quote, "I am a card carrying member of the ACLU." Those were his exact words. He's the one that said that, not me, and I am the one that proudly says I am not a card carrying member of the ACLU.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: From that moment on, the ACLU became a major theme in the Presidential debate, but it was not the first time the ACLU has invited the wrath of highly visible critics who have taken the ACLU to task for its fervent defense of its ideals and for what they call its liberal leftist philosophy.

VICKI MARANI, Washington Legal Foundation: They are for the legalization of prostitution. They are for the legalization of the manufacture, distribution, sale of pornography. They are for the manufacturer, distribution, sale, and use of drugs that are currently illegal, drugs such as cocaine, heroin, and crack.

SEN. ALAN SIMPSON: The ACLU does does not stand in the mainstream of America.

SPOKESMAN: It is, in fact, the legal arm of the liberal left.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All of this in stark contrast to how the ACLU sees itself.

IRA GLASSER, Executive Director, ACLU: Well, the ACLU is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization which defends the bill of rights and the rights that the constitution protects for every man, woman and child in this country.

BURT NEUBORNE, ACLU Advisor: We like to think of ourselves as the enforcement arm of the constitution.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The American Civil Liberties Union came into being in 1920, the brainchild of a St. Louis social worker, the late Roger Baldwin. He was the eldest of seven children born to descendants of the Mayflower. From the beginning, the ACLU took as its mission the protection of the minority against the majority, a position that ACLU Advisor Burt Neuborne says flies in the face of its mostly conservative critics.

BURT NEUBORNE, ACLU Advisor: Yes, and it's ironic, because I think the ACLU is probably truly the most conservative institution in American life. I mean, our role and job is to protect and conserve traditional values that are imbedded in the constitution. And we protect those values wherever we find them.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Starting with seeking to protect the rights of trade union members and those of conscientious objectors to World War I, like Baldwin, himself. But it was the fight for the right to teach evolution in Tennessee's public schools, the Scopes monkey trial of 1925, that gave the ACLU its first big and successful case. Just two years later, the ACLU was back in the headlines for its defense of Saco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder. They lost that one, but other major cases followed, the trial of the Scottsborough boys, nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the South, and the famous censorship cases over the books Ulysses and Lady Chatterly's Lover. To the consternation of both the right and the left, the ACLU has taken cases identified with each side.

BURT NEUBORNE: Well, there's an interesting contradiction in American political life. Conservatives seem to understand that the government should stay off the back of businessmen, but they don't seem to understand that the government should stay out of people's bedrooms and should stay out of people's libraries and should leave them free to live their personal lives. Liberals, on the other hand, understand that the government should stay out of your bedroom, but they're perfectly happy to put the government on the back of every businessman in America.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The ACLU's history includes defending Henry Ford's right to advise his workers not to organize, draft card burners during the Vietnam War, Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, and the rights of the Ku Klux Klan to march in black neighborhoods. And more recently, it's taken on such clients as former Reagan Aide Lynn Nofsiger, arguing that lobbying activities are protected by the First Amendment, and Oliver North, arguing that his First Amendment rights against self-incrimination were violated by the Iran-Contra Hearings. But the most fervent critics of the organization, conservatives on the right, argue that it's the ACLU's single-minded defense of civil liberties that has taken it to radical extremes far outside the mainstream of American society. Washington Legal Foundation Counsel Vicki Marani.

VICKI MARANI, Washington Legal Foundation: Their typical client is terrorists like the terrorist PLO group. They went to court in order to allow the PLO to maintain a mission in Washington, D.C.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser.

IRA GLASSER, Executive Director, ACLU: We take those cases, and there is no question that we take those cases because of what we think, because we think rights are indivisible, because we think if the government can ban the PLO from speaking because of what they are saying, because what they are saying is offensive to most of us, then what happens is the government gets the power to decide which speech is offensive and which speech it will permit. And that is a power which then gets used against other people. The first target of the violation of rights is never the last target.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Oddly enough, a conservative Republican, Ed Gaynor, thinks of himself as a case in point. Gaynor was kicked out of the Baldwin Long Island Fire Department when he failed to get his chief's approval to distribute leaflets during the fire election commission.

EDWARD GAYNOR: Who was going to do anything for the little person who ran for such a low office of the fire commissioner except civil liberties.

MS.HUNTER-GAULT: Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you, a staunch Republican, right to life conservative would use the ACLU?

EDWARD GAYNOR, Former ACLU Client: Never, never, no. When I first got into this, people came to me and asked me to run for fire commissioner, I never thought it was going to take this road. But then early on I could see that there were certain walls being thrown up and I certainly wasn't going to back down and the other side didn't either. But I understand the constitution instinctively. I haven't read it since high school, but as soon as the chief published these rules that said you had to give him a copy of your campaign literature in advance for editing and review, instinctively you know that that's wrong. And people told me, you're never going to win, you're not going to win, but I think with the help of the ACLU, we did prove our point.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The ACLU insists that most of its 6,000 clients a year are people like Ed Gaynor, who can't afford to hire lawyers.

IRA GLASSER, Executive Director, ACLU: Most of them are handled at the local level. Most of them involved ordinary people whose rights are violated by their employer, by the post office, by the school board, by the local police.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But critics like the Vice President have aimed their attacks on the positions rather than the people the ACLU represents, claiming they undermine traditional values.

VICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, GOP Presidential Candidate: I don't want my 10 year old grandchild to go into an X-rated movie. I like those rating systems. I don't think they're right to try to take the tax exemption away from the Catholic Church. I don't want to see the kiddie pornographic laws repealed. I don't want to see "Under God" come out from our currency. Now these are all positions of the ACLU, and I don't agree with them.

IRA GLASSER: The implication was that the ACLU would like to see his 10 year old granddaughter be able to go to see Deep Throat. That, of course, is nonsense. The ACLU has never sued, never filed a lawsuit to challenge the rating system. The ACLU has objected to the current kind of rating system that the movies use, because it is a kind of system which is not very informative to parents, which restricts parental choice and which occasionally has given rise to censorship.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Glasser also takes exception to the charge about child pornography.

IRA GLASSER: Well, the ACLU is not for the sale and distribution of pornography. The ACLU supports laws that make it a crime to sexually exploit children and to use children in the making of pornographic films or movies. What we oppose are laws which make it a crime for anyone to depict child nudity, for example, because laws like that reach too broadly. They would also, for example, make it a crime, a law like that would make it a crime to, for a legitimate publisher to publish a sex education book.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: As for repealing "In God We Trust".

IRA GLASSER: That is a policy they love to quote. Well, everybody doesn't believe in God. For those of our citizens who are atheists, the phrase "In God We Trust" is as much an endorsement of somebody else's religion as anything else. So we, as a matter of abstract philosophical position, we think that that is improper. We have never filed a lawsuit to challenge it. It is not the most important thing in the world, and I've never even talked about it until now.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: But critics of the ACLU said it's the organization that has gone too far.

WILLIAM DONOHUE, Heritage Foundation: I'm saying to some extent that the ACLU has contributed to undermining a sense of individual responsibility in our society because, again, they've made a fetish of the rights of the individual to such an extreme that they almost never mention responsibility.

BURT NEUBORNE, ACLU Advisor: Well, that's a criticism that demonstrates I think a misunderstanding of what our job is. If you were criticizing a judge for being too extreme, if you were criticizing the people who make the final decision about how much freedom there is in this society and say that that person is too absolutist, he doesn't seem to understand how to balance, he doesn't really understand that there are lots of values in the society, that would be a valid criticism. But the ACLU's job is not to make the judgments about how the society should live.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Joining us now to look at the controversy over the ACLU and whether it has any place in the Presidential campaign are two opinion makers who see the issues very differently, Robert Bartley, Editor of The Wall Street Journal, responsible for the paper's editorial pages, and Anthony Lewis, Columnist for The New York Times, who joins us from Boston. Starting with you, Tony Lewis, is this a legitimate campaign issue?

ANTHONY LEWIS, New York Times: I think not. I think it's clear that George Bush and the people who put him up to this, his handlers, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, simply picked this out as another way to try to portray Gov. Dukakis as a somewhat, somehow an alien, a radical, strange fellow, when of course, in fact, he's a sort of suburban centrist in his general outlook on life. I think that's the intent behind the raising of an issue that's hardly at the center of the problems facing the United States in the world today.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What do you think, Bob Bartley?

ROBERT BARTLEY, Wall Street Journal: I believe this is a free country and I believe in freedom of speech, and I believe that candidates can raise the issues that seem salient to them. And if they're not legitimate issues, the voters will tell them so. What's happening in this case is the voters seem to think this is a legitimate issue and the ACLU and Tony Lewis are crying foul. They want to censor this campaign. These are the big advocates of free speech. We shouldn't talk about this. I just don't understand the attitude at all.

MR. LEWIS: Well, I'm for free speech entirely and I would certainly respect Bob Bartley's right to write all the the editorials he wants about the ACLU and Michael Dukakis. My point was simply that in my opinion, it wasn't raised because it was the central issue facing the country, it was raised because it was a convenient way of, without actually seeming to do so, to attack Gov. Dukakis as not in the mainstream, not a patriot like these other issues.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Is that it, he's being attacked as not being a patriot?

MR. BARTLEY: I have a certain sympathy for that, because I don't believe Gov. Dukakis is any kind of a suburban centrist. I believe that he is one of the most left wing people to run for the Presidency of the United States ever. And it is true that he is postured as some kind of a centrist for tactical advantage and the pledge issue and the ACLU issue are ways you talk about that. And I think it's perfectly legitimate for his opponents to raise the issues that seem salient to them.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: In other words, you're saying that raising the ACLU issue is as good a device as any for delineating the positions of the two candidates?

MR. BARTLEY: Well, it'scertainly a useful issue on the long list of issues on which Gov. Dukakis has a very left wing record. Now politicians are allowed to change. If he wants to disassociate himself from that, that's okay. But so far he doesn't seem to have done so.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Tony.

MR. LEWIS: Well, I thought we here to talk about the ACLU, and I'm not going to be here as a campaign spokesman for Michael Dukakis, but I happen to live in Massachusetts, and I know his record as Governor. And it's a rather centrist record, especially in his second term. He's been very pro business, et cetera, et cetera, but I didn't that's what we were here to talk about.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, we just sometimes tend to go with the flow, but we'll keep it within the ballpark.

MR. BARTLEY: Well, let's talk about the ACLU --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. We'll do that in one second. But you said something that intrigued me, that voters are saying that the ACLU is at the heart of the issue. What is your support for that?

MR. BARTLEY: Well, when Bush raised the issue, he seemed to gain in the polls. And we're here tonight talking about it. Tony Lewis didn't come down here to talk because it's not an issue. He came down here to talk because it is an issue.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right, Tony, you said you wanted to talk about the ACLU. Let's talk about this point within the context of this political discussion that Vice President Bush is saying that the ACLU starts to the left of the mainstream. What's your reaction to that?

MR. LEWIS: My reaction is that at the heart of the ACLU's purpose and function in the 60 odd years since it was founded has been something right at the center of the constitution that Mr. Bartley spoke about a moment ago very correctly, and that is the right in this country of people to speak freely, whether it was the teacher, Mr. Scopes, or Roger Baldwin in World War I, or all the others that have been protected, from Oliver North to the Ku Klux Klan, to radicals of one kind or another, free speech is at the heart of our society and from my point of view, that's the real purpose, the basic purpose of the ACLU.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Is that mainstream?

MR. LEWIS: Well, it's mainstream if the constitution is mainstream, but we all know that repeatedly in American history there have been severe clamp downs on free speech. Those who are unpopular get beaten up, I'm speaking psychologically, they are not liked, and their speech is often stopped. And then the courts and those who defend free speech have to speak up for them. That's our system. And at times, as during the McCarthy period, we have suffered from a clamp down on free speech. Then we've recovered in good part because the ACLU and other such organizations are in there defending the unpopular people. They are unpopular.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Bob Bartley, mainstream if the constitution is mainstream.

MR. BARTLEY: Well, the first thing I'd like to say is that there has been a lot of change in the ACLU since the late 1960s and they've become an increasingly liberal or radical organization. They've become increasingly involved in politics. They've evolved a number of their positions. For example, they now favor what I would consider racial quotas. They used to teach that the constitution was color blind. And one of the best measurements of their political activism, and something that was left out from the explanatory material here, was their participation in the savaging of Robert Bork. Now they lobbied against Justice Bork. Now they come here tonight and say, oh, we don't do anything except help these little people. Well, they participated in that anti-Bork campaign and they did -- Norman Dorsen, their president, said at the time, they were doing this because Bork was outside the mainstream.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So your bottom line is that they are, all of that tells you what?

MR. BARTLEY: My bottom line is that they shouldn't yell "foul" if they are going to oppose Bork for being outside of the mainstream, if then the people who nominated Bork come here and say, we think they're outside of the mainstream, now that's one of the things the election is about and come 10 o'clock at night on November 8th, we'll know which of those positions is correct.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Tony Lewis the ACLU has changed from what you described a few moments ago according to Bob Bartley.

MR. LEWIS: What I find interesting is that some of the positions, the one just mentioned by Bob, and some in your introductory matter, are ones in which the ACLU's function was to argue a case, as Mr. Glasser said earlier, but which, in fact, the courts have agreed with and other institutions have agreed with. Judge Bork was rejected by the United States Senate, rejected I think because the Senate felt that his positions, his very open, declared positions, were outside the mainstream of constitutional law in this country. And the same thing for example with whoever the speaker was in the beginning who spoke about the ACLU's defense of the right of the PLO to speak.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: That was the representative from the Washington Legal Foundation.

MR. LEWIS: Right. She mentioned that and for example, the defense of the PLO's right -- treaty right, a treaty signed by the United States to have an office at the United Nations -- that was sustained by the courts and in fact, the Reagan Administration decided not to appeal the decision. So it couldn't have been too far outside the mainstream.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: You just don't agree with that?

MR. BARTLEY: Well, this is not something the Bush campaign made up. Whether or not the ACLU is simply an organization interested in civil liberties has been a matter of controversy for some years now. In 1985, there was a whole book written about it, "The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union" by William A. Donohue.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: We quoted him in the tape piece.

MR. BARTLEY: A professor. And there's an introduction written to it by Aaron Woldofsky, one of the most prestigious political scientists in the country explaining why he quit the American Civil Liberties Union in the early 1960's. He said, "In recent years, it's become part of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the movement against ageism and other isms devoted to diminishing equalities in American life," quite different from merely protecting the constitution.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. We're not going to be able to resolve this one. Let me just ask you, Tony Lewis. How do you think Dukakis has handled this? Do you think he's been vigorous enough in his defense of the ACLU, or has he fueled the criticism by taking a low key approach to it?

MR. LEWIS: Well, he, in fact, has disagreed as Governor with a number of positions taken by the ACLU. He disagreed vigorously, for example, on the pornography question. But I think he could and should have come out for the principle of civil liberties more strongly without necessarily endorsing everything the ACLU does as virtually no one does. I --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think that's hurt him in the minds of the voters, that he hasn't been more clear on a position?

MR. LEWIS: Oh, I don't think it's had a major effect. You ask me what I would like. I said that because go back. If you go back, and I just really want to say this, Charlayne. Go back to 1939, when Felix Frankfurter turned out to be a conservative, was nominated to the Supreme Court, they were attacking him then because of his ACLU membership on the ground that that made him, in the words of one Senator, "suspected of Communism". And all of these issues, whenever there is an unpopular thing they will attack the ACLU, and you know, they're not right on everything but they're there defending the individual and the liberties that the constitution puts in. That's a good thing.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Final word. Good thing?

MR. BARTLEY: Well, I think that they do do some good. I have to admit that in individual cases we have editorially praised them, but I think that the voters of the United States are going to make a judgment, and the judgment is whether or not the legal system has gone too far in this direction. And I think probably most voters think that it has and we need to swing back a little bit. And we don't need to elect someone who describes -- brags about being a card carrying member of the ACLU.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: All right. Well, we'll just have to see how this one plays out in another arena. Bob Bartley, thank you for being with us. And Tony Lewis, from Boston, thank you for joining us. RECAP

MR. LEHRER: Again, the major stories of this holiday Monday, at least 25 persons were killed as the army opened fire with machine guns on Islamic demonstrators in Algeria, and in Yugoslavia, anti- government protests spread and intensified. Good night, Charlayne.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Jim. That's our Newshour for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow night. I'm Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Thank you and good night.