Tuesday, May 1, 2007
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com

5

EMMARIE HUEToTEMAN
The blame of a killer

A fter two young men
entered Columbine High
School eight years ago,
shooting teachers and fellow stu-
dents before killing themselves,
the nation struggled to under-
stand such a senseless act. Where
did they get
their guns? You can't
How long
had they rationalize
planned it? an irrational
What mov- action.
ies did they
watch to get
ideas? Why were they so angry?
Who could have known this would
happen?
In the wake of the recent shoot-
ings at Virginia Tech, we've
rehashed these same old questions,
trying to find that one thing that
distinguishes a regular loner from
a killer in the hopes of preventing
another tragedy.
We've read his violent poetry
and plays. We've listened as his
classmates and professors have
e described his sullen demeanor,

his high school "hit lists" and his
harassing behavior. We've watched
the disturbing videos where he held
a gun to his head, blaming "you" for
what he did.
And, in a twisted way, we've
agreed with him. Many of his
classmates and professors, faced
with a personal tragedy most of
us could never fully comprehend,
have begun to blame thetmselves.
They rationalize that, because they
noticed how quiet he was or read
his unsettling plays, they should
have known that he would turn
violent. They say that they should
have done something.
But they did do something.
When two young women report-
ed that he was harassing them in
2005, Cho Seung-Hui underwent
a psychiatric evaluation and was
released. A few of his classmates
tried to reach out to him without
any success. His professors report-
ed his disturbing work on numer-
ous occasions to the counseling
services, to the police and to the
university. At least one professor

even took him out of her class and
tutored him individually to protect
her uneasy students. But beyond a
couple instances of harassment, he
did not seem to be violent.
When his students expressed
guilt for not foreseeing this trag-
edy, Professor Edward Falco, who
taught Cho last semester, respond-
ed, "There was violence in Cho's
writing - but there is a huge dif-
ference between writing about
violence and behaving violently.
We could not have known what he
would do."
Falco was right. While ittmightbe
easy to see the warning signs after
the fact, there are plenty of people
who write violent prose or are sul-
len introverts, but never go on a
killing spree. Eight years after Col-
umbine, we're still studying suicide
notes to understand the distinction
between the two.
In many ways, we've become
proactive since Columbine, install-
ing metal detectors in schools and
enforcing zero-tolerance policies
toward any hint of violent behav-

ior. We've cringed when someone
wears a black trench coat or reads
"The Anarchist Cookbook." But
what now? Will teachers recom-
mend any student who writes
violent prose for psychiatric evalua-
tion? Will people start shying away
from South Korean loners? Will we
blame Marilyn Manson again?
Through the constant media
attention to every detail of Cho's
life leading up to this crime, we've
shown off how much we know
about him now. Two weeks too
late. The news networks specu-
lated on the warning signs long
before even knowing the names of
the victims. And as they've inter-
viewed his classmates since that
Monday morning, they've asked
a thousand times, "What did you
know about him?"
Unfortunately, short of extreme
actions like overbearingguncontrol
laws or the incarceration of anyone
with a mental health issue, it is
impossible to prevent such crimes.
We can enumerate the warning
signs until we think we understand,

but these are not the 19th century
days of phrenology. We know it's
ridiculous to measure a man's skull
to see if he's a criminal, so why are
we looking for another trait that
can tell us that?
For me, the most unsettling part
of the aftermath of this tragedy has
been that Cho's classmates at Vir-
ginia Tech feel somehow responsi-
ble for this horrifyingmassacre. In
our struggle to make sense of this
crime, we've almost convinced
ourselves that it was a rational act,
something that we can understand
and prevent in the future. We've
pointed out all those minute clues
that, together, foreshadowed this
event. And unintentionally, we've
encouraged those at Virginia Tech
to look at the warning signs and
feel compelled to say, "I should
have known."
But "you" couldn't have known.
Emmarie Huetteman is the
summer associate editorial
page editor. She can be reached
at huettemeOumich.edu.

GARY GRACA
Sub-Saharan Africa blues

J ust in case you missed the
invitation, the world threw
an election extravaganza last
week. In South Carolina, the eight
Democratic presidential hopefuls
got together for the first time to
show off the familiar debate waltz.
Across the
Atlantic, the Forget
expected
showdown France, the
between important
the Left-
ist brunette election was
bombshell in Nigeria.
Smgolene
Royal and
the right-wing Napoleon-look-
alike Nicolas Sarkozy has finally
become a reality. While these were
the big stories, some place called
Nigeria had a presidential election
too. Believe it or not, they have
those over there.
Despite being overshadowed
by events in the Western (and
therefore more important) world,
Nigeria's presidential contest last
Saturday was supposed to be a

decisive step in the democratic
fate of a country and a continent.
It's a shame that no one seemed to
care. Without help and pressure
from the West, especially Ameri-
ca, Nigeria's election devolved into
a sham that could have been easily
prevented.
Much like the rest of Africa,
Nigeria seems to have everything
going wrong. As a colonial patch-
work of more than 250 different
ethnic and religious groups vying
for the same limited resources, the
sub-Saharan nation is a genocidal
time bomb waiting to explode. To
add to the combustible mix, Nigeria
is plagued with the same intense
poverty and wealth disparity that
has come to characterize the conti-
nent. Tack on millions more living
with HIV/AIDS, volatile neigh-
bors and one of the highest rates
of political corruption in the world
and you would expect the world to
write off Nigeria the same way it
did Rwanda and now Sudan.
Unlike the rest of Africa, howev-
er, Nigeria has two things holding

it together: oil and democracy. As
the continent's largest oil producer
and the sixth largest in the world,
Nigeria has the one resource that
can force people to work together.
After a longhistory of military rule,
a grass-roots democratic movement
in the 1990s brought on a fledgling
democracy with catch-all parties
and an internationally respected
leader, President Olusegun Obasan-
jo. The hope was that Nigeria could
become a source of stability in the
heart of Africa and a success story
for a troubled continent.
But that bubble of hope may
have busted on Saturday. In its
first attempt to transfer power
from one civilian leader to anoth-
er, Nigeria's presidential election
ended in a bizarre twist: Every-
body lost. Sure, it may be true
that Umaru Yar'Adua of the Peo-
ple's Democratic Party won, but
intimidation, ballot stuffing and a
generally fraudulent election dis-
credited his victory. After a violent
reaction from opposition parties,
statements of condemnation from

the international community and
a lawsuit that will take the elec-
tion to the courts, the continent's
one source of stability is now a big
question mark.
It didn't have to end this way
though. A week before the presi-
dential elections, Nigeria held
regional elections marred by simi-
lar scandal. A week later the inter-
national community allowed the
same thing to happen. If it were
serious about promoting democra-
cy, the West would have used the
threat of sanctions or the reward of
loan forgiveness to force Nigeria to
postpone the election or pressure
Obasanjo to fix the irregularities.
But God forbid that America
should lift a finger to help. With
more than 60 million ballots stored
in South Africa to prevent tamper-
ing, transporting the ballots back
to Nigeria presented a problem
that delayed the polls from open-
ing for two hours in many places
and gave other areas an excuse to
keep polls closed all day.
Ironically, when the Union of

IslamicCourtswere fleeingSomalia
at the beginning of the year, Amer-
ica was able to mobilize fighter
planes to bomb Somalia, but those
planes were unavailable to trans-
port ballots from South Africa to
Nigeria. Despite all his democratic
rhetoric in the past, President Bush
let an opportunity to actually pro-
mote democracy slip away.
With Nigeria's future in ques-
tion, nobody wins. The country
itself could become engulfed in
violence and the continent could
lose the best thing it has going for
it. Meanwhile, the rest of the world
seems all too intent on not caring.
When the Western world gets over
itself enough to stop gawking at
Royal's high heels or Hillary Clin-
ton's power suit, maybe it will real-
ize that promoting democracy isn't
best done with the barrel of a gun.
Free and fair elections might be
a good place to start.
Gary Graca is the summer
editorial page editor. He can be
reached at gmgraca@umich.edu.

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