
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 26, 1990                   TAG: 9003262171
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

INVASION'S TOLL SEEKING FACT OF PANAMA CASUALTIES

THE U.S. invasion of Panama scored a quick military victory and eventually flushed out the autocrat Manuel Noriega. But the expedition's success was clouded by claims that Washington's casualty reports were too low and that many thousands of innocent Panamanians had been killed.

Such claims were trumpeted by Jesse Jackson and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Some contended that Washington covered up the extent of the killing to mute criticism.

Too often such contradictions are not cleared up, and there lingers an aura of suspicion and mistrust. Fortunately, in this instance there was a follow-up by a third party, a U.S. human-rights group; and its findings are, in their way, reassuring.

According to the U.S. military, 516 Panamanians, 202 of them civilians, died in the course of last December's invasion. Physicians for Human Rights, based in Boston, sent three doctors to investigate the expedition's human toll. Their report "found no evidence to support estimates by some in Panama and the United States that several thousand civilians died." (It appears that one source of such assertions was a former cabinet member loyal to Noriega.) Indeed, the physicians thought that the overall toll may have been much lower than the 516 listed by the Pentagon.

Even in a small, short war, reliable casualty figures are hard to come by. The three human-rights investigators concluded that the count of civilian dead could have been 100 or so higher than 202. But they conceded that many of these may have been military personnel in civilian clothing, such as members of Noriega's "dignity battalions."

One of the three doctors, Paul Wise of Harvard Medical School, said that "a significant number of the civilians were killed in association with looting." Public order broke down during the invasion, and there ensued an outbreak of thievery, then violence as Panamanians formed vigilante groups to try to stop the looting.

This is not a whitewash of the operation. Wars do more than kill and injure people. The invasion, says the human-rights report, "inflicted substantial physical and psychological damage upon Panamanian society." Relief efforts, it adds, "thus far have been inadequate." If the United States fulfills its obligations, it will be paying a long time for the damage to Panama from its invasion and, prior to that, its efforts to force out Noriega through economic pressure.

What will be the bill? For those who care to dig through budgets, someday a sum of sorts can be figured.

Part of the cost, however, cannot be calculated in dollars; it is being paid by citizens of other countries in the region as well as of the United States. It stems from all the years the U.S. government helped keep Manuel Noriega in positions of power and pelf so he could feed us information and, supposedly, promote our interests. It is possible to make a rough count of casualties of war; but some other bodies are buried so deep that no outsiders can find them.

by CNB