The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Victor Zorza

[Tease]

VICTOR ZORZA: The danger of war between East and West is far less, and far less important, than what is happening in the Third World -- or what is not happening in the Third World.

JIM LEHRER [voice-over]: Tonight, with journalist Victor Zorza, an unusual personal view of the Third World.

[Titles]

LEHRER: Good evening. Four years ago we interviewed Victor Zorza, a leading journalistic expert on the Soviet Union and communism. We talked to him and his wife for 30 minutes, but not about East-West relations or international politics. It was a highly personal conversation about the death from cancer of their 25-year-old daughter in an English hospice -- a place where the terminally ill go to die in peace and comfort. Victor Zorza dropped his professional Soviet-watching shortly afterward to write a book about the hospice movement and to organize a national push for their acceptance in this country. Then his life took another turn. He underwent heart surgery and doctors told him that he probably did not have long to live himself. So he decided to spend his remaining time doing what he had always wanted to do -- to seek out and live in one of the remote corners of the underdeveloped world, and then write of his experience. He ended up a year ago in a village of some 300 people high up in the Himalaya mountains of India. In better health and with a series of articles for The Washington Post he returned to the United States recently for a visit, and Robert MacNeil sat down with him for a second cconversation with Victor Zorza.

ROBERT MacNEIL: You are known as one of the acknowledged experts in the West on the Kremlin, on East-West relations, Sovietology. You've been writing about that all your professional career. Is that now irrelevant? Doesn't that matter any more?

Mr. ZORZA: Increasingly over the years I've come to the view that the danger of war between East and West is far less, and far less important, than what is happening in the Third World -- or what is not happening in the Third World, the failure of things to happen in the Third World. And it was this that increasingly over the years made me want to go there and write about that.

MacNEIL: Well, what is not happening in the Third World that so concerns you?

Mr. ZORZA: Nothing is happening in the Third World. Now that I've been there and seen it, there is so much that needs to happen. There is the misery, the poverty, the despair. All that. Something needs to be done. At least -- and before anything is done, we have to know about it; we have to understand it. Not that we can do anything about it. It's the people there that must do things about it, but it's one world.

MacNEIL: Of all the millions of villages around the world in South America or Africa or in Asia, how was it you chose a village in the Himalayas?

Mr. ZORZA: Well, I had decided to go to India in the first place, and I had indeed gone to the south of India because someone told me that the climate was better and easier, that there was one area where it was more moderate. And I found on my arrival that what to those people was moderate was quite unbearable to me. And after traveling around the villages -- from one village to another -- and staying in some, in the end I wound up in the Himalayas looking for a cooler place, and I found it at the time, but then later it got hotter, almost as hot as it had been in the south, but by then I had become acclimatized, and I was able to bear it.

MacNEIL: Did you make an effort to find a village that was representative of the Third World? Did you look at statistical incidence of certain disease or malnutrition or anything?

Mr. ZORZA: I did at first, yes, but, you see, traveling around I found very soon that there is not even a typical Indian village, never mind a typical Third World village. Everywhere it was different, but they had some things in common -- poverty and misery and distress and ignorance, illiteracy. All these things are common to all the villages, and as far as I'm concerned, every Indian village is typical wherever you go.

MacNEIL: Describe your village.

Mr. ZORZA: Well, to get there you have to travel for about a day along varying different roads from the nearest town. You get to a point where you get off the motor vehicle that you're traveling on, and you clamber down a very -- that's all in the hills, obviously. You have to get down a very steep hillside to the river. At that point there is no bridge, but they have got some makeshift contraption -- two cables stretched across the river and a kind of orange-crate thing suspended from it and a pulley -- and you pull yourself along across this cable to the other side of the river. Now, there it's flatter; it's a kind of river meadow. But very soon the ground starts climbing again and you with it until you get into the hills. It could be several hours before you get to the village. And by then it's quite a steep climb. And there is hardly a level piece of ground there. Level ground is too valuable. You surround it with walls; you terrace it, and you grow things on it. And so the houses are mostly built into the sides of the mountain. The back of the house is usually built into the side, and the front usually -- where I am -- faces the village square. The village square has a temple on it, and so one side -- where I am -- has houses, but the other comes to a sharp stub where they've built up the sides, and there is a sheer drop from the square down below onto other houses. But those other houses below, incidentally, are the houses of the untouchables. They are segregated. And they're not supposed to --

MacNEIL: The lower-caste people in the Indian system.

Mr. ZORZA: Yes. Yes.

MacNEIL: You give us a vivid picture, in what I've read of your writings from the village, of life there through stories about certain characters -- certain people who live in the village. Tell us about the drummer.

Mr. ZORZA: Well, he is a very central character. He drums the reveille at half past four every morning; it's very important that everybody should get up before daylight because they have to be in their fields by daylight. Otherwise they would be wasting very valuable daylight working time, and there isn't that much of it because they've got to get through as much work as possible before the sun gets really hot. So they have to be there by daylight. Hence. Then he drums the curfew again at 10 o'clock at night.Now, again, why 10 o'clock? Because people have to get to sleep in order to be able to get up early if there is a revelry going on -- as sometimes there is in the village. It can also be a happy place. Then people don't get to sleep and they're not ready to get up to work. So the curfew is fairly strongly enforced, so I was told, but I had in fact seen no need to enforce it; people do go to bed. Or they sleep on floors. I am the only one who has a bed there. Now, he also drums several times in the course of a day in front of the temple for the temple services. He has a hut near the temple; it's a platform, really, with a roof. He's the only man in the village who hasn't got walls in his house. He has no private life, and he's got a family -- two sons -- and he's got a wife.

MacNEIL: And he lives there and he announces -- like ringing a bell, in other words? He beats his drum to tell people services are beginning in the temple and everything.

Mr. ZORZA: Yes. He is also the village barber, and he is obliged to give anyone a shave who comes to him in exchange for a pancake kind of thing baked out of very coarse grain.

MacNEIL: Now, you told a story about him becoming a landowner and changing his whole life.

Mr. ZORZA: Yes, you see, I don't want to give the impression that nothing is being done for these people. The government in India tries very hard. I don't know that it achieves much in those sorts of circumstances, but for instance, he was given government land. He was landless. He is in fact owned by the village. He was bought by our village from a village further back in the hills.

MacNEIL: He was bought?

Mr. ZORZA: Bought. For, I suppose, the equivalent of I'd say $200 or $300, 20 years ago. What would be $200 or $300 now.

MacNEIL: So he didn't have any land, and the government gave him some land?

Mr. ZORZA: Right. In order to make it possible for this person who had been bought, and therefore was virtually in a position -- in the relationship of slavery to the rest of the village, to have some kind of life. But -- and he worked that land, those two sons of his and he built a terrace round it; they really worked very hard for several years to bring it into the kind of state where it would yield something. And almost as soon as it did start growing things, a rich farmer came and said, "You get out; that's not yours." And the drummer had the government deed that showed his ownership, but the farmer said, "That's nothing to do with me. I bought that land from the previous owner. Get out." And he beat him up and he got out. And, you know, I told him, "Why don't you go to court?" and "This is a simple case. You've got proof." And he said, "To court? That means three days to get to town, to stay in town, to bribe the clerk to get the documentation." You see, that proof is not itself sufficient. There are all sorts of other documents that would need to be got.

MacNEIL: You also said in your stories, as I recall, that while he was busy looking after his land -- a low-caste person who suddenly had been given some land -- he stopped doing the other things that the village had bought him to do, and the villagers really wanted him back doing what they had bought him to do.

Mr. ZORZA: Well, yes, they wanted him to do the drumming. They wanted him to do the shaving. Another of his jobs is to escort the village wives when they go back home. Usually the wives in our village come from other villages and they do that in order to prevent too much inbreeding, because the village is like one big family -- or at least each caste is; there is no intermarriage between the castes. So the wives usually come from other villages. They very often go home for festivals, holidays, family visits, and then it's the duty of the drummer or his sons, if the husband or a member of the family is not available, to escort the wife. When he got the land he and his sons spent so much time on it that they somewhat neglected their duties, and that the village resented very much because it had bought them; it felt entitled to their services, and very soon those pancakes that he was getting for shaving people were very much harder to come by. They had been paid a kind of wage in kind. At every harvest time they would go around the houses of the farmers and people who owned land, and would be given a small amount of grain in payment for the services they had performed. That too began to dry up. So on the one hand they had land and they were growing their own grains; on the other hand the income that they had had before was beginning to be drying up.

MacNEIL: So what does this tell you? That whether the government in a country like that is trying very hard to bring about change and modern conditions, it's very hard to resist the -- or to go against the --

Mr. ZORZA: Yes, and that is why progress is so terribly slow, you see. I don't think that you can do it by -- even just by giving land. Agrarian reform is not enough. You need political reform; you need social reform, as well as economic reform. It's only by a combination of all these things that one could ever make any kind of progress.

MacNEIL: You told a story of a youngish man who broke his leg and what happened after that. Can you tell us? Who was he?

Mr. ZORZA: He was one of the poorest men in the village, and he was fishing. He tried to supplement his income by fishing. They fish by walking in the river with a net, and he slipped on a stone. And so far as I could find, he only cut his knee -- [unintelligible] that position -- but apparently things got into the wound; there did appear to be some kind of break in the leg, and it grew together in a very unfortunate fashion so that he was limping. Now, when I saw what had happened, I had heard that things like that could be put right by breaking the leg again and putting it together and regrowing it. And I tried to arrange for him to go to a hospital. And at first he agreed, but then when I tried to find him to make the final arrangements, I could never find him. And he kept -- I found out he was avoiding me. And finally I ran him down to earth when he was working in his fields -- in his one field -- and I found that he just didn't want to go. He said, "How can I go? What will I do with my wife and children?" In fact, the usual method, or the usual system, there is that if you go to a hospital you bring a member of your family with you or several members of the family because the hospitals only provide medical service.

MacNEIL: They have to cook for you and change your --

Mr. ZORZA: They have to cook and clean and look after you. And he said, "Well, how can I bring all these people? Where will I get the money?" And he didn't want to go. And then I said, "Well, perhaps that could be arranged," because, you see, I knew people in town, and I said, "Well, probably it could be taken care of. You can leave your people here and come to town on your own." He said, "To town on my own?" And he would -- no, that was the worst thing I could have suggested. And he just refused.

MacNEIL: So what happened to him with his broken leg?

Mr. ZORZA: He's still got a broken leg. And that means his work is much less effective. He did have more than that one field where I found him. He had a field by the river which was irrigated and therefore much more valuable, but this is now several times as far for him as it used to be because he limps. So he's trying to adapt the field by his house -- to terrace it, even though this one has no water -- in order to work this. And obviously it, you know, on several occasions when I've been to see them he was out, and the wife said, well, she didn't know where that evening's meal was going to come from, and that was for, you know, a crowdednight -- if he doesn't come and if he doesn't go and borrow something or beg something from someone, they were going to have no meal that night. And that's the terrible thing about the village. The insecurity, the lack of security from day to day, almost, from meal to meal for some people.And that goes back to the lack of security from season to season, from harvest to harvest. Because you don't know whether the rains are going to come, whether they're going to be sufficient, and only that will produce a harvest. And then you don't know whether the harvest will be good enough for the year around. So they suffer from a certain kind of, I suppose, material insecurity, much as we suffer from emotional insecurity here, but in a way the two are the same.

MacNEIL: Tell us about your efforts to get them to recognize the value of having a privy.

Mr. ZORZA: Now, well, it wasn't that I -- I had a very selfish interest there. I needed a privy.

MacNEIL: What do they use?

Mr. ZORZA: They go into the fields and do whatever is necessary. And I was expected to do the same. And I -- you see, that happens immediately. As soon as the drummer drums at half past four in the morning, when it's still dark, but then it starts getting light, and I used to get there -- it was light by the time I got there, and I found it really quite impossible to perform. So finally I found that I'd walked for 40 minutes before I felt comfortable, but during that walk -- certainly the last part of it -- I got so far away from the village and to such wild and really beautiful country -- I was climbing towards the nearest peak in the village; I'd given myself that as a little objective. And I found that really, wherever I looked the views were so fascinating and, you see, by then the sun had started coming over the range and you could see it striking the sort of edge, and some shafts of sun coming through.By the time I got to my peak, I was so happy I had almost forgotten why I'd got there. So finally that was the place that I chose.

MacNEIL: But this was a problem for you as a person from a developed country used to privacy in these matters. It obviously wasn't a problem for them. Why is it a problem for them, and why should it bother you as an observer of their ways?

Mr. ZORZA: Well, the fact is that I had suffered myself a lot from stomach illness, certainly in the south, a little less so in the north -- in the Himalayas -- and certainly, people die like flies sometimes. They certainly have died in my village through diseases which are contracted because of the dirt, because of what's contained in the excreta. And I tried to get them to build -- to allow me to build a privy hoping that perhaps that might also teach them the value of a privy. But I do confess my interest was really primarily selfish. And they wouldn't allow me. They said, "Well, if we do that, there'll be dirt in the ground." And I said, "You mind dirt in the ground, but you don't mind the dirt on top where you leave it yourself?" And they said, "Ah, well, you see, if we just leave it on top then the sun will dry it into powder and then the rains will wash it away and we are clean again. But if we allow you to dig a hole, and to keep putting the stuff in there all the time, it will accumulate."

MacNEIL: You finally got a rich man in the village who was willing to have you build a privy on his land, and I found the reason fascinating.

Mr. ZORZA: Well, the reason was that he thought -- he didn't want to use it, but he knew that this very strange creature, who was an object of some curiosity and perhaps authority, also, in the village -- if I do that on his land, then he will be left with this object of interest and it will be like something very remarkable that he owns. So finally --

MacNEIL: It will bring him prestige to have your privy on his land?

Mr. ZORZA: Exactly. Even though he doesn't use it. So finally it was he who persuaded the village council, which had originally refused me permission, to grant permission to build a privy on his land.

MacNEIL: How does relating the life and customs in a village such as that one -- how does that relate to the efforts in the West to help the Third World? How do you think?

Mr. ZORZA: When I went there I thought that I was going to find ways of helping people, or learn about the most effective ways, and so on. What I found is that -- what I found is just how ignorant I am, and how much I fail to understant what's going on. And certainly I know what the Western aid programs are designed to do. I know roughly what they've achieved, and so on, but I just cannot for the world of me see how 500,000 villages -- half a million villages in India, how those can be reached by the kind of programs that are being arranged by Western aid now. No, the answer has got to come from within. We have a role to play, but I don't know what it is, and I suspect that all these experts in Western aid don't really know, either, because they've been at it for many years.

MacNEIL: Why is it important that they be reached? I mean, after all, these people have been living like that for thousands of years. Some of the things you've described sound similar to what one could read about in life in the Bible. And they have lived that way. Why is it suddenly important now that they be reached?

Mr. ZORZA: We live at a time of the very rapid spread of communications. Already the villagers are beginning to know that there are different kinds of life, that there is a far greater degree of prosperity in the cities -- there's a tremendous, massive movement into the cities -- and especially outside India, too. You know, the ordinary things of daily life and comfort to us are to them dreams -- unattainable, but they do know something of it. And the kind of misery that they are suffering now is, as you said, much the same as it was in biblical times, but in relation to what's going on in the West, they know that they can and should live better lives.And I am convinced, having seen what life is like, that it cannot go on endlessly; that sooner or later, some leader will arise, locak, national, who will harness their despair to some destructive purpose. And I don't believe that the kind of troubles that will start, that they could be contained to India or to India and Pakistan, if the trouble starts between them. India is only a symbol here.

MacNEIL: You are going back to your village in the Himalayas. How long do you intend to stay there?

Mr. ZORZA: As long as I can stick it out.I find it much easier now than I used to, but I don't really give myself -- I don't look ahead more than a year at a time. I've been there for a year, and I'm going there for another year.

MacNEIL: Well, Victor Zorza, thank you very much for joining us.

LEHRER: That's all for tonight. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.