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THE NEW TRIBALISM: Defending Human Rights in an Age of Ethnic Conflict : THE UNSUNG

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ZWELAKHE SISULU, South Africa.

Sisulu is the editor of New Nation, a black-run, anti-apartheid weekly newspaper. He was arrested in 1986 and jailed for two years without trial or charge. His father, Walter Sisulu, is the former secretary general of the African National Congress and his mother, Albertina Sisulu, is co-president of the United Democratic Front, an anti-apartheid coalition.

“If apartheid is dead, please give us the corpse, because we want to bury it once and for all.”

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LARISA BOGORAZ, Russia.

Bogoraz became an early champion of human rights in the Soviet Union after her first husband, Yuli Daniel, was sentenced to a labor camp for publishing abroad. In 1968, Bogoraz was among the seven men and women who marched in Red Square to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, an act for which she spent four years in internal exile. She later married dissident Soviet writer Anatoly Marchenko, who died in Chistopol prison in 1986 after a prolonged hunger strike.

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“The concept of individual justice and responsibility is the only sound foundation on which to build a civil society.”

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MARIA JULIA HERNANDEZ, El Salvador.

Hernandez is the first director of Tutela Legal, the Roman Catholic Church human rights office in San Salvador, founded in May, 1982. She participates in most of the office’s field investigations, including those into the murders of six Jesuit priests at Central American University in 1989 and the massacre of scores of villagers at El Mozote in 1981.

“We do not seek revenge, we seek truth.”

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