RUTHFULLY YOURS

By Kejal Vyas in Irapa, Venezuela and Sara Schaefer Muñoz in Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago

Struggling to find basic staples in her own country, Mariana Revilla and five neighbors here took to crossing a treacherous 60-mile gulf under the cover of night to the island of Trinidad.

On her last trip, they made a good haul, securing seven tons of flour, sugar and cooking oil from the former British colony in exchange for fresh shrimp from home. But on the way back their rickety 46-foot boat capsized, leaving Ms. Revilla and her companions clinging to the wreckage for nearly two days before she and two others ran out of strength and drowned, according to survivors. Her stepfather says her 3-year-old daughter, Isabel, keeps asking, “Where is my mama?”

As Venezuela’s economy crumbles, an increasingly desperate people are doing all they can to get food and medicine. Here that can involve great peril.Venezuelans make trips as long as 10 hours to hawk shellfish, plastic chairs, house doors, ceramic pots and even exotic animals like iguanas and brightly feathered macaws. They are exchanged for basic goods—rice, detergent, diapers—that Caracas is increasingly unable to provide.“It’s thanks to Trinidad that we have any food here,” said 49-year-old Angela Caballero, a resident of this town on a peninsula that extends toward the island. “If that didn’t come, we’d be dead.”

If you’ve ever been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, chances are that you visited the glass pavilion containing the Temple of Dendur. One of only three such temples outside Egypt, it was built by the Roman emperor Augustus around 10 B.C. as part of an effort to cultivate the local Nubian population. This month marks its 50th anniversary overlooking Central Park, where it provides an unforgettable glimpse of Egypt’s ancient culture for millions of tourists who will never travel to the Middle East.

But more important, at a time when the U.S. is questioning the nature of its longstanding relationships with countries across the world, the temple is a symbol of international cooperation. In the 1960s, 50 nations united to save 22 irreplaceable monuments—including the Temple of Dendur—set to be submerged during the construction of Lake Nasser. These countries were motivated not by their own national interests, but by an understanding that mankind has a common interest in protecting historic monuments.

With a final investment of $16 million, the U.S. became the largest contributor to the $100 million preservation project. As a demonstration of gratitude, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser gave the Temple of Dendur to the U.S. in 1965. After a competition led by the newly created National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, President Lyndon Johnson decided that the 2,000-year-old temple should go to the Met.

The Middle East’s fragile cultural heritage was in the news again this week. On Wednesday Islamic State blew up the historic Grand al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, obliterating a cultural and religious site that had stood since 1173. Religious fundamentalism, illicit excavation, black-market trade and simple neglect have destroyed historic sites in the Middle East at an alarming rate. Wednesday’s bombing underscores the most urgent problem: ISIS and its affiliates have turned cultural destruction in Iraq and Syria into propaganda, even as they sell looted works of art on the black market to raise money for arms.

Why should we worry about a bunch of old monuments when the human cost of the unrest is so high? There are two reasons. First, the Middle East is the cradle of civilization. As our forebears recognized when they acted to save the cultural heritage of Lower Nubia, these monuments are integral to our collective human story. Architectural monuments illuminate the complexity of our common past. So much has already been lost. We have a moral obligation to save what remains.

Otto Warmbier’s family and friends laid him to rest on Thursday, at a funeral in Ohio, after North Korea’s Kim regime destroyed Otto’s life and devastated his family.

Warmbier went to North Korea in late December, 2015, a 21-year-old American college student, on a short package tour. He was arrested there on Jan. 2, 2016 and accused of taking a propaganda sign off a wall in his Pyongyang hotel in the early hours of Jan. 1. On Feb. 29, 2016, Warmbier was presented publicly to deliver a forced “confession,” and just over two weeks later, on March 16, 2016, again on camera, he was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor. It took more than a year before his family, or the American public, heard any further news of what had happened to him.

As we learned only this month, shortly after Warmbier received North Korea’s hideous sentence he suffered brain damage so extensive that when North Korea finally released him early last week, at the demand of the Trump administration, he arrived home on June 13 to his family in Cincinnati in what his American doctors called a condition of “unresponsive wakefulness.” He was unable to see, speak or make any sign of conscious response. By North Korea’s much belated account, provided via U.S. envoys to Otto’s parents early this month, Otto had been in that condition, in North Korean custody, for well over a year. Surrounded by his family, six days after his return, Otto died this past Monday.

This awful display of Pyongyang’s raw and manifold official cruelties leaves a stricken family in Cincinnati mourning their horribly murdered son. It ought to drive home to all Americans the unrelenting monstrosity of North Korea’s totalitarian Kim Jong Un regime.

Yet, there’s a qualifier that keeps creeping into the U.S. press coverage of this story, a touch of ersatz journalistic due diligence, which suggests that too many American reporters have yet to grasp the full extent of North Korea’s totalitarian horrors. This qualifier, to which too many journalists seem wedded in mentioning Otto’s “confession,” is that they’re not sure whether Otto was coerced.

To pick just one of many examples, in an NBC news article about Otto, published today, up pops that phrase: “it was not apparent whether his confession was coerced.” Or, as NPR put it on Feb. 29, 2016, immediately after North Korea first released Otto’s “confession”: “It’s unclear whether Warmbier, 21, spoke of his own volition or whether he was pressured into making the statement.”

Actually, there is nothing unclear about it. Isolated from family, friends or any form of genuine defense, held under terrible threat, in utterly hostile surroundings, Otto gave a forced confession. He was clearly coerced. As his father, Fred Warmbier, accurately told the press last week, Otto was “brutalized and terrorized” by the North Korean regime.