The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

MR. MacNeil: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer in Washington.

MR. MacNeil: And I'm Robert MacNeil in New York. After the News Summary this Thursday, we cover the opening of the museum of the Holocaust in Washington, we have a Newsmaker interview with Czech President Vaclav Havel, Correspondent Spencer Michels reports on what gay Americans expect of President Clinton, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault revisits an Irish nurse working in Somalia. NEWS SUMMARY

MR. MacNeil: A museum was dedicated in Washington today to the memory of the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. President Clinton and 12 other heads of state attended. The ceremonies took place on a cold, drizzly day. Mr. Clinton was joined by the two men who have served as chairmen of the Holocaust Memorial Council, Elie Wiesel and Harvey Meyerhoff in lighting an eternal flame that will burn outside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The President spent more than two hours touring the museum Monday night. He said it would remind generations that the struggle against the basis tendencies of our nature must continue forever and ever.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I believe that this museum will touch the life of every one who enters and leave everyone forever changed, a place of deep sadness and a sanctuary of bright hope, an ally of education against ignorance, of humility against arrogance, an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead. If this museum can mobilize morality, then those who have perished will thereby gain a measure of immortality.

MR. MacNeil: We will have more from today's ceremony right after the News Summary. Jim.

MR. LEHRER: There was more fighting in Central Bosnia today. U.N. peacekeepers said they were unable to stop the Muslim-Croat battles despite a truce agreement. Paul Davies of Independent Television News reports from the town of Vitez.

MR. DAVIES: With the cease-fire in effect, British soldiers serving with the U.N. force in Vitez have been discovering the true extent of killing and destruction during four days of bitter fighting between Muslims and Croatians. This is Vitez, but when soldiers from the Cheshire regiment inspected outlying villages, they discovered whole communities destroyed. This is the Muslim village of Selichi. Fighters from the Croatian army, the HBO, attacked the village, destroying its mosque and driving its residents away. Livestock was slaughtered and so were many civilians in a form of ethnic cleansing now familiar to the British soldiers.

LT. MARK JONES, U.N. Peacekeeper: What they've done systematically throughout here, they've just gone in, a whole band of them, and about fifteen to twenty of them, they go from house to house. They chuck grenades through the windows which tends to set a light in the place. Everyone runs out of the back and they just shoot them dead. That's the way it works.

MR. DAVIES: With the cease-fire people have been returning to what is left of their homes. These are fighters from the Muslim army. Muslim and Croatian generals have agreed to give up captured territory. The Vitez area is to become a de-militarized zone. But the British still have to deal with the hundreds of Muslims made homeless by the fighting. Many had turned up outside the gates of the Cheshires' base seeking protection.

MR. LEHRER: U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali today warned against the use of force to end the fighting in Bosnia. He said the U.N. peace plan negotiated by Cyrus Vance and Lord David Owen still had a chance to work. The Serbs have thus far rejected that plan.

MR. MacNeil: Texas Rangers began removing charred bodies from what remains of the Branch Davidian Compound near Waco today. The county medical examiner said at least 35 bodies have been located, some holding weapons, but he had found no evidence yet of bullet wounds. Yesterday a Justice Department spokesman claimed that several of the bodies had bullet wounds. Authorities believe more than 80 cult members and their leader, David Koresh, died in the fire that ended the standoff between the cult and federal authorities. At a Senate hearing today, Attorney General Janet Reno said she would look for new ways to handle such a situation in the future.

JANET RENO, Attorney General: I want find the best experts that I can who are creditable and reliable on the issue of cults to see what can be done in terms of improving negotiation techniques, if it's possible, in terms of trying to develop plans and strategies for dealing with the recurrence of this situation that led to this horrible tragedy. I want to again review with police experts, every police expert that I can find, on what is an appropriate means of trying to relieve such a standoff as existed here to make sure that we consider every possible angle. I want to investigate, at this point, I know a lot has been done, but investigate to see just what the state of the art is on, on improved, non-lethal means of ending something like this.

MR. MacNeil: Reno also said the government had information that the cult had enough food and water in their compound to hold out for as long as a year.

MR. LEHRER: The House of Representatives passed a $4 billion extension of unemployment benefits this afternoon. Funds would have run out next week without the new money. The extension was originally part of the President's $16 billion economic stimulus plan. It died in the Senate yesterday following a monthlong Republican filibuster.

MR. MacNeil: Alabama Governor Guy Hunt today was convicted of illegally using political funds for political use -- personal use. Hunt was immediately stripped of his office and Lt. Gov. Jim Fulson was automatically elevated to governor. The jury deliberated for just two hours before convicting Hunt of taking $200,000 from an inaugural fund to pay off personal debts and taxes and buy things ranging from cattle to a marble shower stall. Hunt faces up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He promised a legal battle to clear his name and regain the governorship.

MR. LEHRER: And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to remembering the Holocaust, Vaclav Havel, gay politics, and Charlayne in Somalia. FOCUS - REMEMBRANCE

MR. MacNeil: First tonight, the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial museum. More than 7,000 people, many survivors of Nazi, Germany's World War II death camps, gathered in washington for this morning's ceremony. The museum was built with private funds and will be operated by the federal government. Among the speakers were President Clinton, Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, and the chairman of the museum's council, Harvey Meyerhoff.

HARVEY MEYERHOFF, Holocaust Memorial Council: This building tells the story of events that human eyes should never have seen once, but having been seen must never be forgotten. Our eyes will always see. Our hearts will always feel. But it is not sufficient to remember the past. We must learn from it.

ELIE WIESEL, Founding Chairman, Holocaust Memorial: My words are here engraved in stone at the entrance of this edifice, and those words are: For the dead and the living we must bear witness. For not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we are doing with those memories. Fifty years ago, somewhere in the Carpasian Mountains, a young Jewish woman read in a Hungarian newspaper a brief account by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Astonished, this maid, she wondered aloud, "Why," she said, "are our Jewish brothers doing that? Why are they fighting? Couldn't they wait quietly" -- the word was "quietly, until the end of the war?" Frebrinkhoff, Unar, Beljitz, Helnow, Berkinow, she had never heard of these places. One year later, together with her entire family, she was already in a cattle car traveling to the black hole in time, the black hole in history named Auschwitz. But Mr. President and distinguished guests, these names and others were known to officials in Washington and London and Moscow and Stockholm and Geneva and the Vatican. Most governments knew. Only the victims did not know. What have we learned? We have learned some lessons, minor lessons perhaps, that we are all responsible and indifference is a sin and a punishment, and we have learned that when people suffer, we cannot remain indifferent. And Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia, last fall. I cannot sleep since, what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. [applause] People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done! This is a lesson. There are many other lessons. You will come. You will learn. We shall learn together. And in closing, Mr. President and distinguished guests, just one more remark. The woman in the Carpasian Mountains of whom I spoke to you, that woman disappeared. She was my mother.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Here on the town square of our national life, on this 50th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, at Eisenhower Plaza on Raul Wallenberg Place, we dedicate the United States Holocaust Museum and so bind one of the darkest lessons in history to the hopeful soul of America. As we have seen already today, this museum is not for the dead alone, nor even for the survivors who have been so beautifully represented. It is perhaps, most of all, for those of us who were not there at all to learn the lessons, to deepen our memories and our humanity and to transmit these lessons from generation to generation. Now with the demise of communism and the rise of democracy out of the ashes of former Communist states, with the end of the Cold War we must not only rejoice in so much that is good in the world but recognize that not all in this new world is good. We learn again and again that the world is yet to run its course of animosity and violence. Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia is but the most brutal and blatant and ever present manifestation of what we see also with the oppression of the Kurds in Iraq, the abusive treatment of the Bahai in Iran, the endless race-based violence in South Africa, and in many other places we are reminded again and again how fragile are the safeguards of civilization. On this day of triumphant reunion and celebration I hope those who have survived have found their peace. Our task with God's blessing upon our souls and the memories of the fallen in our hearts and minds is to the ceaseless struggle to preserve human rights and dignity. We are now strengthened and will be forever strengthened by remembrance. I pray that we shall prevail. NEWSMAKER

MR. LEHRER: Czech President Vaclav Havel was among the other heads of state at the Holocaust Museum ceremony today. He's the playwright who led communist Czechoslovakia to democracy in 1989 and then went on to become President of Czechoslovakia, and then later of the Czech republic when the Czechs and Slovaks split into separate countries earlier this year. I talked with him this morning at his Washington hotel before the ceremonies at the Holocaust Memorial.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. President, welcome. What does the Holocaust mean to you and your people fifty years later?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] This is a memory which is still alive because our Jews like Jews in other European countries were affected by the Holocaust. We had a concentration camp in Therazine to which they were first brought and then they were sent to Trablinka and other concentration camps, and it seems to me that one dimension is particularly alive in our society when it comes to this horrible tragedy, and that's the memory of the appeasement policies, of the policy of the democratic nations that were not aware of the emerging evil and were unable to prevent it, and there was a certain indifference to the danger at the stage when it was becoming into being. When Hitler came to power my country granted asylum to many German democrats. But later, it lost its freedom as a result of the appeasement policy.

MR. LEHRER: Is it something that is discussed in terms of we must be careful, it could happen again?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] It is my impression that many people in my country, at least those who are sensitive and who have perception, realize certain parallels between the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing principle of the kind that is now being practiced in the former Yugoslavia. The principle of collective responsibility, the principle of persecution based on the national principle purely is now appearing again, and I think that the memory of the Holocaust is a kind of a warning memento to everyone.

MR. LEHRER: It's a memory but it's going on, is it not, the ethnic cleansing and all of that that's going on in Bosnia, it can't be stopped, or at least it has not been stopped.

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] That is why I think that it is necessary to take more resolute action with a view to preventing the suffering of the people there and to prep with a view to defending democratic values and preventing an expansion of the conflict.

MR. LEHRER: Whose responsibility is it to do that?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] In the moral sense, it's the responsibility of all citizens, of us all, it will concern us all, and we all should take our share of responsibility. In a political or a technical sense it's for the United Nations to act first and foremost.

MR. LEHRER: But why is it not happening? Why, why are we, the big we, not taking our responsibility and stopping this?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] A number of things have happened, have already been taken, but they are not effective enough and they have been somewhat reluctant. This is related to the extreme complexity of the task. It's tremendously demanding from the technical point of view to enforce peace in that region. Certain restraint or caution might be seen, may be seen, especially on the part of the European Communities, in the Security Council too, but it seems now that a general consensus is coming into being about taking stronger action.

MR. LEHRER: Stronger action meaning air strikes? Stronger action meaning lifting the arms embargo for the Bosnian Muslims, is that what you mean by stronger action?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] There are several ways of taking stronger action, and it's necessary to consider which alternative would be most effective. I think that lifting the arms embargo for Bosnia would not be the right method. I think that that would rather lead to an escalation of the conflict. It's necessary rather to disarm them than to add armaments to that region.

MR. LEHRER: Then what does that leave?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] Probably it's necessary to stop the inflow of the armaments from Serbia to the Serbia republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and to, to achieve enforcement by the Serbs of the negotiated cease-fires. Maybe that would require an action to be taken against their artillery.

MR. LEHRER: Some Americans are beginning to say publicly, hey, wait a minute, why is it that the United States must always lead the way in these kinds of things? Do you believe as a practical matter that nothing will happen unless the United States does more and leads the way?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] The United States is a large power, the most important democratic power today and in today's world everything is interconnected and everything concerns everyone, and it's entirely logical that as a nation based on certain democratic values, freedom, it has to take its share, a major share of responsibility for what is going on in other parts of the world. This, I think, is very understandable.

MR. LEHRER: Do you feel that, that the Czech republic has done all it can, both in, in a public moral way and a practical way to, to stop what's going on in Bosnia?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] The Czech republic is not in a position to inspire a solution or to enforce one, carry one out, but if in the International Community a solution is agreed to, the Czech republic will undoubtedly support such a solution and should there be a way for it to participate it would participate to the extent of a possibility that would mean probably through some support activities, because our weapon systems are obsolete and are not compatible with those of the NATO, but there are ways in which it could help and take part.

MR. LEHRER: Well, what about you personally? You are an international symbol of peace and resistance you, your own position is much larger than say the size of your country might rate. Do you feel you're doing all as an individual to raise cain throughout the world to those where it might matter about doing something about this? Is your conscience clear, in other words, that you have done everything you can do?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] I have been trying to do all that I consider my duty to do. Of course, to the extent of my possibilities, the position of a president of a nation is different from the position of an independent intellectual so that I have to be careful about what I say. I have to realize my responsibility to the citizens of my country and the other constitutional institutions, nevertheless, the responsibility ensuing from that function must not limit me and must not prevent me from saying what I think, and I have expressed that on many occasions. And this does not apply only to this warning conflict in the former Yugoslavia, but other matters as well.

MR. LEHRER: What is there about human beings that causes them to kill each other over ethnic reasons, to cleanse each other for ethnic reasons, to rape one another for ethnic reasons?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] There are probably some demons dormant in human soul and in human communities and the modern times are a period of a great challenge to suppress those demons because already given the global nature of today's civilization those demons possess a much wider power than in the earlier periods, and the threat to the human race is much more serious because of the existence of modern weapons, et cetera.

MR. LEHRER: It's obviously, it's been widely suggested and their consensus is that, that the end of the Cold War unleashed a lot of these demons that had been suppressed for 40 years. Do you agree first of all that that's true?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] It's somewhat more complicated. The countries that lived under Communist rule had no historical chance to flood to live together in peace to work together, to build supernational structures based on democratic principles, build civil society. There were periods when there was a prominent tension or a prominent conflict, let's say, between France and Germany. This is no longer true now because the period between the times of Araner and DeGaulle and today has learned those nations to work together in peace. The nations that lived under communism for whom history stopped in a way, they are not given the historical chance and have to learn to do that now.

MR. LEHRER: Is the world equipped now to deal with these global demons that are coming out? Do we have the mechanisms in place to handle this?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] In my view, the solution is basically simple and I have been trying to repeat time and again that the solution lies in a new self-understanding of humanity. Man has to become aware of his broad responsibility. Modern man has lost his metaphysical certainties and has been distant from a model order to call upon him to think in a forward looking manner, to think of his children, and this applies to, also to a variety of nations. It applies to the environment of plundering of the air, the environmental threat, and when you look into these problems, we see that there is a lack of responsibility and background. People are pursuing their particular interests through the interests of their communities or groups or corporations without being aware of their broad responsibility, and they think only within the limits of the horizon of their own life. They don't think about what comes after they are gone. A politician can forget that what they do does not apply only to their term of office but that they are influencing future developments as well and are influencing the world in which their children will live or will not live.

MR. LEHRER: Do the rest of us on the outside have a responsibility to tell those people enough, you, Bosnian Serb, do not have the right to kill you, Bosnian Muslim, and vice versa, do we have that right to interfere in their, what they consider to be an internal conflict, some of them do at least?

PRESIDENT HAVEL: [speaking through interpreter] I think that this is not just our right, it's our duty. Again, I would point out to the tragedy of the Second World War, to the Holocaust tragedy, then too there were people who said that that does not concern us and we have no right to intervene and remained silent to watch Hitler's accession to power, and the expansion of his totalitarian system. They were trying to, to maintain correct relations with him, make compromises, and they thought they were working for peace and preventing war, but in the end, that kind of behavior led to the most horrible war that mankind has lived through in their overall history.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. President, thank you very much.

MR. MacNeil: Still ahead, gay politics and another talk with an Irish nurse in Somalia. FOCUS - POLITICS OF CHANGE

MR. MacNeil: Next tonight, getting ready for this weekend's march in Washington for gay rights. Organizers hope more than 1/2 million people will participate in Sunday's demonstration. The march was planned two years ago but took on added importance in the gay community after President Clinton's plan to end the ban against gays in the military ran into congressional and public protest. We have a report from Spencer Michels in San Francisco.

MR. MICHELS: Recent Yale graduates and now San Francisco roommates Katie Dwight and Seth Ubogy are traveling East this week for the gay and lesbian march on Washington.

SETH UBOGY: In my opinion, they're the largest grassroots demonstration of power possibly since the civil rights movement, so it's something I just wouldn't miss out on.

MR. MICHELS: As gay activists, Seth and Katie expected the November election to signal a change in federal policy toward homosexuals. Bill Clinton had given them hope.

SETH UBOGY: When, in his acceptance speech, one of the first words out of his mouth was AID, you know, I felt a rush of excitement. Certainly there were elements in our community that were thrilled, that were ecstatic about his victory, and now they're having second thoughts.

KATIE DWIGHT: He's addressed a couple of issues but he hasn't really taken a strong, forceful step. He's brought up gays in the military but then he's sort of waffling on it. And he has yet to really come out strongly for civil rights, to really come out and say, yes, lesbian, gays are a part of this country.

MR. MICHELS: At an up scale restaurant across town other gay activists paid $100 each for a pre-march cocktail party to benefit San Francisco supervisor Carol Migden. She's a lesbian who is on the Democratic National Committee. Like many of these San Franciscans, she's going to the march too.

CAROL MIGDEN, San Francisco Supervisor: We have a sexual responsibility to really set the pace and to have the country understand that we mean business, this isn't just a party.

MR. MICHELS: Migden praised President Clinton for his meeting last week with gay and lesbian leaders in the White House, a first, but she is critical the President won't attend the march.

CAROL MIGDEN: We are disappointed. I'm disappointed that he won't be there. It's a million people. I think if it was a pro-choice rally or an anti-apartheid march, or something of that magnitude that was an important civil rights issue that concerned all Americans he would be in attendance.

MR. MICHELS: At a news conference, Bill Clinton explained that presidents don't usually participate in marches.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: [April 16] I don't see how any serious person could claim that I have snubbed the gay community in this country having taken the position I have not only on the issue of the military but of participation in the government. I have, I believe, it's clear taken a strong against discrimination than any of my predecessors.

MR. MICHELS: Outside the White House, gay and lesbian leaders who met with the President refused to criticize him. Their attitude was upbeat.

TOM STODDARD, Campaign for Military Service: This meeting symbolized the entry of lesbian and gay people into the mainstream of American life, and it is the President of the United States who through his moral leadership permitted that to happen.

MR. MICHELS: Politically active gays and lesbians were elated when Bill Clinton was elected. They had raised more than $3 million and worked gathering votes for him, believing he would aid their cause. At this Washington inaugural gathering, Sen. Ted Kennedy addressed the group.

SEN. EDWARD KENNEDY, [D] Massachusetts: One in every seven votes cast for Bill Clinton, more than the margin of victory was cast by a gay or lesbian voter.

CAROL MIGDEN: We felt affirmed that we had a President who talked about AIDS, a commitment to an AIDS czar who talked about limiting, lifting the ban, talked about the sort of federal lesbian/gay rights issues.

MR. MICHELS: Same feeling today, or a little tempered?

CAROL MIGDEN: Lightly tempered, still a good feeling. I do think the President has encountered a few setbacks. Perhaps he wasn't prepared for the level of resistance he encountered. I think many lesbian and gay activists aren't stunned by the resistance. We've been living with it our whole lives. We've come to expect it. We know it's there. But we're going to surmount it.

MR. MICHELS: While the gay community centered here on San Francisco's Castro Street is not completely satisfied, President Clinton remains a beacon of hope. And hope for a long time was in short supply. These candlelight marches, expressions of grief and remembrance, have always had political overtones. They are one way of expressing anger at what gay political activists perceive is the federal government's failure to address the AIDS pandemic. The personal urgency of AIDS has propelled many gays and lesbians to become more political according to Paul Boneberg who heads up the group Mobilization Against AIDS.

PAUL BONEBERG, Gay Political Leader: The first thing people do is grieve. Then they become angry, they become political. You can't, you can't start them with the politics, until they know people who died, they're not willing generally to take action. When I began gay politics I was fighting for equal rights for lesbian/gay people. Now I'm fighting for that but I'm also fighting for the lives of people I care about.

SPOKESMAN: [on phone] What I probably should do is send you our basic treatment packet.

MR. MICHELS: For the past eight years, activists like those here at Project Inform have lobbied frantically for new drugs and more AIDS research. So much has depended on the outcome that some workers have resorted to acquiring unlicensed, experimental or discarded drugs for desperate patients. Now at last they believe the new administration's agenda includes the political and bureaucratic changes they have worked for. Project Inform's Brenda Lein is lobbying to streamline the federal scientific bureaucracy as part of the AIDS agenda.

BRENDA LEIN, Project Inform: The scientific community relies on publishing and a scientific journal. In order to get credibility among their peers, that's their "kudo." A lot of times technology isn't shared but could move the whole field of AIDS research and cancer research forward. Right now, it's so driven by competition but there's no directed effort. There's no overall plan.

MR. MICHELS: For many AIDS activists, the agenda is topped by more support for hospitals and clinics where HIV is treated. A national magazine recently named San Francisco General Hospital the nation's top AIDS center. J.B. Molaghan is head nurse in the AIDS clinic.

J.B. MOLAGHAN, NY Nurse Practitioner:The numbers are increasing in our clinic. We still are seeing anywhere from 2,000 patients a month as opposed to 300 patients a month in 1986. We're in the same physical plant that we were. So there are a lot of needs that we have. We need states.

MR. MICHELS: Besides better treatment facilities, the AIDS agenda also includes new money and more innovative research, full funding of the Emergency Ryan White Act to help cities combat AIDS, increased emphasis on AIDS vaccine development, legalization of needle exchange, and increased housing for people with AIDS. San Francisco Health Department Director, Ray Baxter, acknowledges that politics is the key to realizing that agenda and was vital to funding this new $12 million San Francisco AIDS research center. Baxter believes the AIDS agenda must also include explicit sex education.

RAY BAXTER, Health Department Director: Prevention programs around HIV have been very limited by a set of moral sensitivities that have really limited what it can do. We have not had frank, open discussion about the use of condoms, about what unsafe is, and what safer sex is, about how people get AIDS. It's all kind of masked in a gauzy, generalized kind of message.

MR. MICHELS: Activists argue that sex education must reach beyond the schools. For them, the streets are the classroom.

MR. MICHELS: Why are you giving out free condoms?

MAN: Because it's our job. We're for safe sex here.

MR. MICHELS: These workers are handing out free condoms and encouraging people to sterilize their needles with bleach. Such programs are controversial and funding them has been difficult according to Mike Shriver, who heads San Francisco's 18th Street Outreach Program.

MIKE SHRIVER, 18th Street Services: Those providers that have been doing innovative programming for the last ten years finally have gotten a shot in the arm. You have a President who cares, and those things that you're doing now that have been controversial but effective I'm going to help support is the message that we're getting from President Clinton.

MR. MICHELS: Shriver however tempers his enthusiasm for the new President.

MIKE SHRIVER: What was most telling for me with President Clinton was that with his first 100 appointments not a single one of those appointments was an out lesbian or gay man.

MR. MICHELS: Eventually the President did nominate San Francisco supervisor Roberta Achtenberg as assistant secretary of Housing & Urban Development, the first openly identified lesbian ever to be named to such a high job. Shriver and others see that appointment as a step in the right direction, but even Achtenberg warns that Clinton won't comply with every demand from the gay community.

ROBERTA ACHTENBERG, H.U.D. Nominee: It's great to know that Bill Clinton is a friend to gay people, but he's not the leader of our movement, nor is his election as President the culmination of our liberation movement.

SETH UBOGY: I think it would be a dire mistake for this community to rely upon the kindness of liberals and straight liberals at that. We've got somebody in there who we consider a friend as opposed to a foe but he is more of a tortoise's pace than the hare's and yeah, sure, it's time to light a fire under his feet.

MR. MICHELS: Clearly, lesbian and gay political leaders face a new challenge, how to deal with a friendly administration. Do they confront as at this San Francisco march to end the ban on gays in the military, or do they lobby quietly for their demands.

PAUL BONEBERG: You don't attack your friends. You work with them. It would I thinktake extraordinary circumstance for lesbian and gay people to be picketing, protesting, disrupting, having civil disobedience around President Clinton, around Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Boxer.

MR. MICHELS: As gay people from across the country prepare to make a capital pilgrimage this weekend, they face a turning point in gay political history. With friends, as well as enemies in high places, they must decide between traditional electoral checkbook politics for the confrontational tactics of the last two decades, or some combination that will best advance their agenda. FINALLY - RETURN TO SOMALIA

MR. LEHRER: Finally tonight, another report by Charlayne Hunter- Gault from Somalia. That East African nation is now occupied by a multinational force and an army of aid workers after a brutal civil war and famine claimed more than 300,000 lives. Charlayne recently returned to Somalia and revisited one woman making a difference.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Out of a dusty back alley in Baido Michele Mackin emerges to confront another day. But most of her days have a way of confronting her in the most unexpected ways. Michele is a 26-year-old nurse, maybe the farthest away she has ever been from her home in Belfast, Ireland. She runs this special therapeutic feeding center for children up to 15 years old. It's a long-term care program set up to bring children like these back from the brink of starvation, incapacitating disease, sometimes but not always death.

MICHELE MACKIN, Concern: These children here are starving and there's more sickness.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: When you first got here and confronted this did you have to talk to yourself?

MICHELE MACKIN: I went home and I cried. Staying here, I went home and cried.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Indeed, Michele Mackin seems irrepressible as she moves around in the closed, dark room, heavy with the smell of sickness and disease. Some of the children are lucky enough to have a parent at their side but often they are alone, except for Michele and her staff of Somalia caretakers who believe that the first and most effective step in giving these youngsters a fighting chance is feeding them. Now the rest of the children in here are -- these kids are on the mend, is that right?

MICHELE MACKIN: Yes, some of them are. Some of them are not still so good, not great.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Michele Mackin no longer works in Baidoa. After six months there, Concern transferred her to Mogadishu, and from here she supervises five feeding centers in schools, coordinating a staff of Somali nurses and teachers who run centers like this one, where some 2,000 children are fed every day.

MICHELE MACKIN: [talking to worker] Does she feel hungry? Does she feel like eating?

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: The Pan Africa Center also has care facilities for children still affected by malnutrition and disease. The number of critically ill patients has dropped dramatically here and elsewhere in the last couple of months. Now Michele's staff of teachers and volunteers are concentrating on education. Military volunteers also help work with the children here. The main courtyard of the Pan Africa Center is decorated with a mural dedicated to Valerie Plates, Michele's colleague and friend at Concern who was killed not long ago by bandits only a few miles from the center in Mogadishu where she works. This mural was painted by Somalis as a memorial to her work here. At the end of a long work day the other day, we met Michele at Concern and reminisced about Valerie and about Michele's work since we last saw her in December.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: When you left Baidoa three weeks ago, how much different was it from when we were there visiting you in December?

MICHELE MACKIN: Well, the difference is famine is over, thank God, and -- but there are still very malnourished children coming in and out of the therapeutic centers and still around in the streets. The reason for that is that disease is now causing a lot of children to be sick and being sick, of course, means they're unable to eat and of course of getting malnourished, so the main causes of their malnourishment is through illness and not through lack of it, because the food distribution has started and which, they've covered most of the surrounding villages in Baido and farther afield, and it means that people have now left Baido and actually went back to their centers and their villages which they had originally come from. I actually saw some of my mothers and children. I went out on some food distributions and some women were in line with their children and they were once with me very sick and malnourished and I had given them their ration cards to go back and they did so. That was good to see.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So when you left, you felt that you were getting a handle on the situation?

MICHELE MACKIN: Definitely, definitely. But again I think there's still a big problem with disease and we're worried about the rains coming. That was their biggest worry before I left. We were trying to get the centers fixed up, the American army and Australian army had done some work within the centers rehabilitating them for the bad weather to come.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What is the outlook from a health standpoint?

MICHELE MACKIN: From a health situation, I don't think the outlook at the moment is very good. I don't think it's very good. I worry about it because I worried about it more when I was in the middle of it, and I seen these children, and I seen the conditions which they had to live in. They're still sleeping out in cardboard huts surrounding the centers, the feeding centers, and I mean, how could anyone not, you know, pick up some form of disease, even starting with pneumonia, chest infections, and a lot of children have very weak chests.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What about the security situation? It had started to improve when we were here in December, and then we had the tragedy of Valerie Plates, your friend and colleague. What impact did that have on everything and how has the situation improved or changed since then?

MICHELE MACKIN: Well, since troops arrived in they have done a great job. I'm not knocking the fact that they haven't done a good job but I don't feel I'm any safer as an individual going out every day, and in fact, I feel a little bit more aware of the fact that, you know, someone could shoot you any time, and when Valerie was shot, it really was a matter of time, you know, before one of us was shot or someone was shot again, and it was very hard on all of us, and especially those of us who were closer to Valerie, and for someone like Valerie so young to lose her life in such a way, I mean, it wasn't her war. She wasn't out here to fight, and she lost her life for it, and it made me very angry and I felt disheartened, very disheartened about going in to work. I just felt I had lost a little bit the day Valerie died, you know.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What would make this a more secure place?

MICHELE MACKIN: Well, there's still no law and order here. I mean, the troops are here, yes, and I still have to get a full military escort to travel as far as Afgoy.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Which is what, just a few miles down the road?

MICHELE MACKIN: It's just a few miles down the road. And I cannot travel that road, and on my own. I don't think that our situation has improved by, by security it hasn't. I mean, if it has, then we'd be able to travel freely, and we can't do that, and until I see that and until the day that I am able to travel along the main road without a full military escort of guards and army around me, then I'll say, yes, there's been a change in security and talking to other NGO's and fellow colleagues, I mean, we all feel that another incident could happen like Valerie's and Sean Devereaux's, et cetera, et cetera, you know, the other, two other guys shot as well as the ICRC, and I mean, it is possible, very possible.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: What about your observations of the Somalis, so you think that they are ready -- you've dealt with the sickest and the most in need -- do you feel that they have really put the fighting and the war -- are they able to put that behind them now and begin to repair their country, make the necessary commitments and relationships to stop the fighting permanently?

MICHELE MACKIN: There are still a lot of people around who -- PAR and the clan business, you know, the one clan against the other clan -- it's still very, very strong, and --

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Do you see it in your work?

MICHELE MACKIN: I have seen it. I have seen it.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Give me an example of something that you've encountered.

MICHELE MACKIN: Well, a young baby was handed to me nine days old and I had to find a mother for it, the child's mother died, and I looked around for a few days anyway and eventually I found a lady who was in one of the other feeding centers, and she'd had a big family and she was really a secure family around her, she was lovely, healthy, and I spoke with her and asked her would she take the child down if I paid her to do so and breastfeed the child because that what it needed, otherwise it would have died, and she said she would, and I thought it was a great achievement, you know. I was delighted, and the child is beautiful and healthy, healthy fat child, and I give the child to her and the child responded perfectly well to this woman and she breast fed the child and nursed itself for a months. The child thrived, was starting to thrive really well. But I hadn't seen the child for a couple of weeks, and that is nothing really unusual because sometimes they don't always come in and out of the centers. And then a member of the staff brought the child to me at seven and a half pounds in weight, lighter than what it was when it was born and almost, well, almost dead. What had happened was the mother found out that the child had came from a clan which her clan did not get along with, and instead of handing the child back to me then, she took the child home to the village surrounding the feeding center, and she starved it to death, and the child came to me, and it died within a few hours. To me, I mean, that is very strong feelings of some form of hatred amongst each other and amongst even the clans within towns. And if a woman could do this to an infant child, I mean, what could another man do to another man? I mean, I feel that the people have a lot to learn and I feel that they have a long way to go before they'll ever get themselves sorted out.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Are most of your experiences stories like that, or are they, are there any ones that give you a greater sense of hope?

MICHELE MACKIN: Yes, there are ones that give you a greater sense of hope, you know, like I said, you know, going out and seeing people go back to their villages. You know they're happy there and there's no more shooting going on and they're not losing their children and you look at the statistics and you realize that the children are not dying every day, and you know, that gives me a sense of hope, and you see the shops opening again and people selling things and starting up their businesses all over again. I mean, that gives me a sense of hope. But there's other things that I just, at the moment, I think everything is at a bit of a standstill in Somalia. I don't -- we haven't progressed any farther by security by no chance and we haven't -- they're still -- the feeding centers are still there. I mean, the schools are still there, but everything at the moment to me seems to be at a standstill, and I don't know how much farther we can progress unless the security situation even gets better.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Are there any lessons that you've taken away from the experiences you've had so far, anything that you learned?

MICHELE MACKIN: I think I'm a harder person than what I realized I was. Maybe I've just got used to the situation but it still breaks my heart when I see a little child, you know, sitting there with no mother and father around it, but I think I've accepted the situation here and I realize I'm a little more tolerant than what I was.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: So what's next for you when you finish here?

MICHELE MACKIN: I don't know, maybe another emergency wherever that may be.

MS. HUNTER-GAULT: Well, Michele Mackin, thank you for joining us and best wishes in the future.

MICHELE MACKIN: Thank you very much. RECAP

MR. MacNeil: Again, the main stories of this Thursday, President Clinton led an emotional dedication ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, a Texas medical examiner said at least 35 bodies have been recovered from the remains of the Branch Davidian Compound near Waco, Texas, the House passed a $4 billion extension of unemployment benefits. Good night, Jim.

MR. LEHRER: Good night, Robin. An editor's note before we go tonight. Our live coverage of last night's Senate debate ended up giving the Democrats much more air time than the Republicans. Well, that was certainly not our intention. Our plan for equal, back-to- back interviews with leaders George Mitchell and Bob Dole fell apart when they got tied up on the Senate floor and were late arriving at our studio. They understand what happened. We trust everyone else does too. We'll be back tomorrow night with Gergen & Shields, among other things. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.