YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: POPULATION-TRENDS

REFUGEES AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION In the absence of massive new refugee influxes on the scale experienced in recent years, the world's refugee population decreased from 14.5 million to 13.2 million in 1996. More than one million refugees returned to their country of origin, which reflected the increasing focus on repatriation as a solution for many of the world's displaced people. Similarly, the overall population of concern to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) fell to some 26.1 million, of whom 3.4 million were returnees, 4.6 million were internally displaced persons (persons who were in a refugee-like situation but had not crossed an international border), and 4.8 million were others of humanitarian concern, for the most part victims of conflict. UNHCR continued to implement its distinctive international protection mandate in respect to those persons, which involved promoting, safeguarding, and developing principles of refugee protection; strengthening international commitments; and promoting durable solutions, be they in the form of voluntary repatriation, local integration, or resettlement. For the most part of 1996, there was little change in the humanitarian crisis affecting the African Great Lakes region, where more than two million Rwandans and Burundians had fled their countries in 1994. Large-scale return movements from Zaire, where many had settled, to Rwanda began in December 1996 as conflict engulfed eastern Zaire. At one time, in mid-December, the number of persons crossing the border between Zaire and Tanzania was estimated at as many as 15,000 each hour. Following this development, the government of Tanzania, having determined that the conditions in Rwanda allowed people to return in safety, took steps to begin the repatriation of the approximately 535,000 Rwandan refugees on its territory. In southern Africa operations for the voluntary repatriation of some 1.7 million refugees from Mozambique concluded after 17 years of conflict and devastation. In contrast, in West Africa renewed violence in Liberia postponed efforts to repatriate some 750,000 Liberian refugees. In nearby Mali, however, political stability allowed for the repatriation of more than 100,000 Malian refugees from Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Niger. The Horn of Africa and East Africa, emerging from years of prolonged conflict, saw the return of some 27,000 Ethiopian and 25,000 Eritrean refugees from The Sudan. An estimated 500,000 Somali refugees had returned to Somalia from Kenya and Ethiopia during the past few years. In former Yugoslavia, as a result of the cessation of hostilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, an estimated 250,000 people--mostly internally displaced persons--had, by the end of 1996, settled or resettled in areas where their ethnic group was in the majority. Reconstruction activities, such as UNHCR's shelter project, which repaired some 20,000 homes, were gathering momentum and helping to create conditions favourable for the return of refugees and displaced persons. Many of those who returned, however, especially the Bosnian Serbs, continued to face many political, psychological, and practical obstacles. In the Caucasus, where some 1.1 million refugees and displaced persons fled as a result of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the region of Nagorno Karabakh, UNHCR continued to promote and facilitate local solutions, pending the result of ongoing peace negotiations. In the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the far-reaching geopolitical changes following the breakup of the former Soviet Union had resulted in an estimated nine million people moving within or between countries of the CIS. Of these, some 2.3 million internally displaced persons and approximately 70,000 refugees were victims of conflicts. Recognizing the scale and complexity of these movements, UNHCR, together with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, held a regional conference in Geneva on May 30-31. A "Program of Action," a comprehensive framework for managing migratory flows as well as for developing institutional capacity to prevent mass displacement, was drawn up. While implementation of the program essentially rested with the CIS countries, UNHCR and the IOM began developing a three-to-four-year joint strategy to guide their activities in the region. In Western Europe the number of people seeking asylum continued to decline, partly as a result of visa requirements, reinforced border controls, and restricted social benefits in some countries. The rate of recognition of those applying for refugee status had dropped from 42% in 1984 to some 10% by the mid-1990s. Afghan refugees, who began streaming out of their country after its invasion by Soviet forces in 1979, continued to constitute the largest refugee caseload of concern to UNHCR, with 1.4 million persons in Iran and 820,000 in Pakistan. Despite the continuing civil war in Afghanistan, however, approximately 130,000 refugees returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan and Iran in 1996, which brought the total number of returnees to some 3,890,000. As of September, Kabul, along with Jalalabad and the remainder of the eastern areas of Afghanistan, had come under control of the Taliban forces, who quickly enforced strict Islamic rules. This violent and sudden change in the control of these important population centres resulted in large-scale internal displacements and renewed refugee outflows into Pakistan. Many of those who fled included women, to whom the Taliban denied access to education and the freedom to work outside their homes. Efforts to engage the parties in a negotiation process continued, as did rehabilitation projects to encourage returns and reintegration in peaceful areas of the country. In Iraq armed conflict in August 1996 between two opposing Kurdish factions resulted in significant population displacements, both within Iraq and into Iran. The majority of those persons, however, returned to Iraq after October. In Yemen the influx of new arrivals from Somalia increased during the first quarter of 1996, mainly as a result of security problems and renewed fighting in Somalia. Most asylum seekers traveled by boat to Yemen from Boosaaso, in northeastern Somalia, in dangerous conditions caused by the prevailing monsoon season. In Southeast Asia the successful conclusion of the Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) for Indochinese refugees ended more than 20 years of international humanitarian efforts to resolve the aftermath of the conflict in that region. Since 1975 some 1,075,000 Vietnamese and Laotian refugees had fled their homelands, and the majority had resettled in other countries. By the end of 1996, Vietnam had received back almost 100,000 Vietnamese since the implementation of the CPA in 1989; just over 6,000 Vietnamese remained in camps in Hong Kong. UNHCR continued to advocate the voluntary return of some 40,000 Muslim refugees from Myanmar (Burma), who were in Bangladesh, and for solutions for the approximately 85,000 Bhutanese stranded in southeastern Nepal, two situations intimately linked to the political will of the governments concerned. In the Americas and the Caribbean at the beginning of 1996, there were more than 1.5 million refugees and returnees of concern to UNHCR. Of this total, however, only some 82,300 continued to be in need of material support from UNHCR. This stood in sharp contrast to the situation that had prevailed in the region less than a decade earlier, prior to the 1989 International Conference on Central American Refugees and the profound political changes that had taken place in large parts of Latin America. The only major refugee situation that required sustained attention was that of the Guatemalan refugees, some 38,000 of whom remained in camps and settlements in Mexico. Reconciliation in Guatemala, however, ending 36 years of civil conflict, was expected to help to resolve the situation, as was the recent agreement of the Mexican government to allow those not wishing to return to settle in Mexico. In North America, despite the tendency toward further immigration restrictions, the United States and Canada increased their efforts to address the issues of asylum requests resulting from sexual violence and discrimination based on gender. The U.S. Congress in September approved a bill that would make it more difficult for illegal aliens to cross the nation's borders, speeded the deportation of criminal aliens, and restricted some public benefits to legal immigrants; such immigrants could be deported if they received public benefits, including child care, for more than 12 months. (UNHCR) This article updates population. Education Primary and Secondary Education. The importance of literacy education was emphasized in a study of social and economic conditions in 162 countries. The report concluded that industrialized nations should redirect aid for less-developed countries into literacy programs. According to the study's authors, the reduction of illiteracy could empower underprivileged nations to become partners of wealthy countries and reduce the gap between rich and poor societies. Innovative methods for promoting literacy were being adopted in various parts of the world. Following its success in Australia, a literacy project for less-privileged children, entitled First Step, was introduced for experimental use in the United Kingdom. Another approach to literacy training imported from Australia appeared in the British Link-into-Learning centres, which were designed to provide adults with sufficient reading and writing skills to obtain work and help their children with school tasks. In Uganda a program named REFLECT, which engaged learners in creating their own written materials, was credited with enabling 60% to 70% of the course participants to become literate; previous programs had achieved only 12% success. A Finger Phonics scheme that associated letter sounds with finger movements gained popularity in Canada and the U.K. Within Russia debates ensued over the role that minority-group languages should assume in schools that had used Russian as the primary medium of instruction for more than five decades. Ever since the republics at the end of the 1980s won the right to direct their own educational systems, advocates of using local languages in schools had vied against proponents of maintaining Russian as the dominant national tongue. Provincial leaders argued that their languages would be lost if not given a key role in the curriculum. Throughout Eastern Europe increasing numbers of youths were attending bilingual schools that offered an opportunity to study foreign languages that had been forbidden under communist regimes prior to 1989. English had become the most popular language to learn. In his state of the union message to Congress on Jan. 23, 1996, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton urged an educational technology initiative to improve education, proposing that every U.S. classroom be equipped with computers and connected to the Internet by the year 2000. The president also recommended that states and local districts adopt national standards to assess students' academic progress, supported the right of parents to choose the public school of their choice, encouraged organization of charter schools, and emphasized the need for values and character education. Although there were proposals in the U.S. Congress to reduce federal spending for education by 17%, the reductions in the bill that passed Congress totaled 9%. The 1996 bill allocated $400 million for the AmeriCorps national service program, $69.5 million less than fiscal 1995 and $417 million less than the president requested. It granted $350 million for Goals 2000 education initiatives, $22 million less than 1995 funding, and allocated $3,570,000,000 for Head Start funding, $36 million more than in 1995. Spending for programs assisting public-school children was set at $7.2 billion, $1 billion more than Republicans had sought. The total allocation for education was $25,323,000,000, compared with $26.8 billion in fiscal 1995. A National Educational Summit, the second such conference held in the U.S., met on March 26-27, 1996, in Palisades, N.Y. Like the earlier conference in 1989, the 1996 meeting--attended by leaders in business, government, and education--focused on U.S. students' academic deficiencies, particularly in mathematics and science, in comparison with students from other industrialized countries. Calling for improved academic achievement, the summit recommended that state and local districts establish specific standards for basic academic subjects, especially in English, science, and mathematics. Addressing the summit, President Clinton called for assessment of academic competency through standardized state competency testing in basic academic subjects. Critics of the summit, deciding its focus was too narrow, contended it should have considered broader issues, including school choice. Critics also alleged that comparisons of U.S. students' academic achievement with those of other countries rested on invalid criteria. In the 1996 election campaign, the Republican and Democratic platforms and positions differed on educational policy. The Republicans promised abolition of the Department of Education and an end to federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The two major parties continued to differ on "school choice" and using vouchers to provide parents with public funds for their children to attend their school of choice. While Republicans supported vouchers for both public and private schools, Democrats opposed them for private schools. The charter school movement in the U.S. experienced continued growth in 1996, attracting support in 25 states of the U.S. as an alternative form of school organization. Though public schools, charter schools provided an alternative to those conventionally established and maintained by a local district. Charter schools exhibited the following characteristics: (1) the state authorized organizations to establish and operate charter schools and issued a waiver freeing them from many regulations governing public schools; (2) the school was "public"--that is, nonsectarian and supported by public funds; (3) the school, through its charter, was responsible for students' academic progress; (4) the school was one of choice for educators and parents; the choice, however, was within the public, not the private, sector. While the charter school movement gained momentum, the trend to privatize public-school operations and services experienced setbacks in 1996. The board of education of Hartford, Conn., for example, canceled its contract with Educational Alternatives, which had previously operated the district's schools. With regard to curriculum and instruction, constructivism continued to be popular, especially in elementary schools. Constructivism emphasized learning by problem-solving rather than by receiving information. Students constructed their own knowledge base from direct interaction with sources in the environment. Through social interaction, they actively created meaning out of their individual and group constructions of reality. The 28th Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll for 1996 revealed public attitudes toward public schools in the U.S. According to the poll, 43% of the respondents gave their local public schools high marks, an A or B, for overall educational performance. This ranking remained consistent with previous polls in that respondents rated the performances of their local public schools higher than those of public schools nationally. In rank order, the major problems facing public schools were identified as drug abuse, lack of discipline, violence and gangs, and lack of adequate financial support. Concern about the quality of mathematics instruction was voiced in the U.K. after tests of 13-year-olds in nine nations showed that pupils in England correctly answered only 53% of math problems, compared with 79% by pupils in Singapore. Youngsters in Taiwan and South Korea also earned high scores. The author of the study, David Reynolds of the University of Newcastle, suggested that the dominant method of teaching mathematics in England since the 1960s concentrated on the brightest pupils and neglected the others, which thereby produced overall low test results. He advocated changing to the "whole-class" teaching system used in the East Asian countries, Germany, and Switzerland, a system that challenged all pupils to reach a minimum standard of attainment. Observers of Great Britain's programs for training non-university-bound adolescents charged that the nation lacked adequate provisions for vocational training, so many young people seeking jobs were unable to carry out such simple tasks as basic mathematical calculations. As a result, according to critics, the economy was locked into a low-quality, low-pay production system. Advisers proposed restructuring the government's Youth Training Scheme to emphasize communication and number skills, information technology, and other general abilities required by industry. Computer-literacy instruction advanced in China, where urban schools were increasingly providing such training. The number of Chinese families owning personal computers rose in 1996 to more than one million, a figure expected to reach five million by the year 2000. At the same time, schools emphasized training children in the use of the abacus, the traditional method of calculating sums by moving wooden beads along wires set in a wooden frame. Proponents of the abacus asserted that in contrast to computer instruction, abacus training equipped children to visualize calculations and thereby fostered speed and accuracy in mental arithmetic. The operation of schools by religious groups gained attention in Canada and China. Legislators in Canada's Newfoundland province voted to eliminate from the provincial constitution its unique system of providing public funds to pay the costs of schools operated by seven Christian denominations. Critics of the vote feared that it might encourage legislatures in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan to remove the constitutional protection for the public funding of Roman Catholic schools in those provinces. In December the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Ontario did not have to finance non-Catholic religious schools even though it had paid for Catholic schools for more than a century. In China local communist officials introduced a policy of permitting Christian churches to operate primary schools in regions too poor to finance children's education. To pay the cost of erecting the first of such schools in Guangdong province, Christians in the village of Baiwan solicited the aid of Hong Kong's Christian Council to raise the $150,000 needed to build a modern four-story concrete school, furnish it, and pay teachers' salaries. The Baiwan school offered a secular curriculum, was tuition-free, and was managed by a board composed of local Christians and non-Christians. Following the reunification of Germany in 1990, officials in the five eastern German states sought to devise a satisfactory means of implementing the central government's West German mandate that religious education be provided as a regular school subject. The solution in four of the states (Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania) was to offer students a choice between traditional religious instruction (Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism) as in western Germany or a nonreligious ethics course. The fifth state, Brandenburg, in 1996 created an integrated course entitled "Lifestyle, Ethics, and Religion," focusing on the comparative study of religions and philosophies rather than indoctrination in a single faith. Steps intended to enhance students' welfare were adopted in Japan and Israel. Japanese authorities focused attention on the issue of students' being terrorized by classmates. Although reported incidents of bullying had declined to 7,000 by 1996, compared with 22,000 several years earlier, officials still considered pupil harassment a serious problem that called for heightened teacher vigilance and prompt disciplinary action. In past years critics had claimed that Israel's tradition of including eight subject fields in national diploma examinations placed too great a burden on the high-school juniors and seniors who needed to pass the tests in order to gain admission to a university. To reduce the emotional pressure on students, Israeli Education Minister Amnon Rubinstein in 1996 established a system by which an annual lottery would be held to determine which five subjects the year's examinations would comprise and which three would be exempt. In the 1996 lottery the exempt fields were Bible, Jewish history, and mathematics. An objection to the plan was voiced by the country's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who contended that failing to test students' command of Bible and Jewish history would be ignoring Israel's cultural roots. In response, defenders of the plan asserted that students' high-school grades in the exempt subjects would be sufficient evidence of their knowledge in those fields. Higher Education. In Eastern Europe the renovation of the region's postsecondary institutions continued in the aftermath of the fall of communist governments. Since 1990 most of eastern Germany's 60 higher-learning institutions had been reformed to fit western Germany's pattern of higher education. Staffs in the eastern sector were reduced to 60% of their former size, and 20,000 academics were left without jobs. In early 1996 the total enrollment in the 60 institutions reached 198,000 students, which indicated rapid progress toward the 10-year goal of doubling the 1989 total of 134,000 students. Within the next five years, officials expected to provide enough places to accommodate approximately 35% of the college-age population, the same proportion as in western Germany. Throughout Romania during the early 1990s, hundreds of private institutions sprang up to serve students not accommodated in public universities. In 1996, however, serious doubts were voiced about the quality of education provided by private colleges. Only 73 private institutions had earned state accreditation, and no more than 5% of their graduates had passed government-administered examinations. Although the four universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina had remained open during that country's civil war, not until the signing of a peace accord at the end of 1995 were officials able to start repairing the wartime damage. In 1996 what was described as a "stampede" of new and returning students descended on the institutions, located in Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka, and Tuzla. Before the war the University of Sarajevo had enrolled 30,000 students, a number that dropped to 7,000 by late 1995 but then rebounded to 15,000 in the fall term of 1996. The shelling of Sarajevo during the war seriously damaged all 26 of the university's schools, which placed officials in the difficult position of providing classrooms and offices with limited aid from Western nations. The institutions in Mostar and Tuzla were endeavouring to repair similar damage. Although the World Bank agreed to finance elementary- and secondary-education programs in Bosnia, it did not support higher education. In contrast to the liberalization of education in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government increased efforts to strengthen communist ideology on campuses by establishing a China Foundation for Marxism Studies, designed to support the teachings of Marxism and Leninism and the philosophy of Mao Zedong. This plan to counter the declining popularity of communist theory in postsecondary institutions included new rules giving each university's Communist Party control over instructional matters, a reversal of liberal policies in the 1980s that accorded university presidents ultimate responsibility for their institutions' affairs. The heads of five of Hong Kong's seven universities were appointed to the 150-member committee charged with directing the 1997 transfer of the British colony to Chinese sovereignty. Observers speculated that the composition of the preparatory committee, with its 94 delegates from Hong Kong and 56 from China, reflected the intent of the Chinese government to permit Hong Kong's business and educational communities the freedom to operate as they had under British rule. The South African government sought to improve the nation's higher education by spending $231 million on universities and high-level technical institutions in 1996. The amount surpassed the 1995 allotment by 21% for universities and 31% for technical schools. At the same time, the nation struggled to overhaul its traditional dual-track higher-education system, which under apartheid had maintained one track for whites and the other for the black and Coloured population. France's minister of education, Franois Bayrou, spent the early months of 1996 meeting with university representatives to find solutions to the problems underlying the student strike over university funding that shut down half of the nation's 90 universities in late 1995. Statistics compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development indicated that France spent less per student on its universities than did any of the OECD's other 25 members except Italy. Bayrou charged that the OECD figures were faulty but admitted that many politicians, including some Cabinet members, believed the country's universities were failing in their mission and perhaps could not be satisfactorily reformed. Many educational systems continued to cope with the task of producing graduates who could find appropriate employment in a changing job market. The recent economic boom in India had resulted in a severe shortage of experts in such fields as business management, computer software, financial services, telecommunications engineering, and television programming. The greatest need was for graduates skilled in the use of computers. To meet the demand for such specialists, enterprising educators opened a host of private colleges, and policy makers called on established higher-education institutions to update their curricula, reduce the number of students in general courses, and increase the number of students in technical fields. A Russian survey revealed a marked rise in graduates choosing careers in economics, computers, law, finance, and the humanities as the nation's economy began to demand more workers schooled in such specialties. The popularity of careers in engineering and teaching declined because of lower wages in those occupations. Proposals by Greece's education minister, George Papandreou, to modernize Greece's antiquated higher-education system set off student riots that extended from late 1995 into 1996 and resulted in $20 million in damage to institutions in Athens alone. For years critics had charged that Greek universities were woefully behind the times, still operating like the 19th-century French and German institutions on which they were modeled. Since the 1930s Greek institutions had provided free tuition and textbooks, had not required students to attend class, and had virtually guaranteed a degree to applicants who scored high on entrance examinations. The riots stemmed from students' fear that the reforms would require them to help pay for their education and would alter their study habits and fields of study. In the 1990s many university graduates proved ill-equipped to fill the needs of the nation's economy, a situation Papandreou's plans were designed to remedy. His proposed changes were also stimulated by the fact that other members of the European Union were refusing to recognize Greek diplomas until proper reforms had been instituted. The status of women in higher education continued to improve. Konai Helu Thaman, a Tongan specialist on Pacific Islands education and culture, became the first woman appointed to a professorial chair at the University of the South Pacific, the institution that provided higher education for a number of Pacific Island nations. Women assumed the three most visible leadership posts in Australian higher education when Amanda Vanstone was appointed minister of education, empowered to negotiate educational issues with Fay Gale, president of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee, and with Carolyn Allport, head of the academics' National Tertiary Education Union. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Virginia Military Institute's all-male enrollment policy unconstitutional. Following this decision the Citadel, Charleston, S.C., announced that it would admit female cadets. This ended the all-male policy at the last two public institutions of higher education in the U.S. that had practiced this form of discrimination. In Canada the University of Montreal established a fellowship program enabling women who took maternity leave from doctoral programs to return later and complete their studies. Prospects for the education of women in Afghanistan dimmed in late 1996, however, as Taliban military forces captured the capital city of Kabul and imposed strict Islamic rule that included closing girls' schools and confining women to their homes. University enrollment trends became a concern in a variety of countries. Following steady growth since the 1970s, the enrollment in Canadian universities in 1996 declined by 0.4% to 574,300 students. Analysts speculated that the decrease was caused by a combination of higher student fees, reduced government grants, and uncertain job prospects following graduation. The drop in applicants motivated higher-education officials to devise innovative student-loan programs, refine student services, and focus on attracting the students most likely to succeed in university studies. Australian university officials predicted that by the year 2010 the number of fee-paying foreign students in Australian institutions would have increased fivefold over current figures. The anticipated number should reach 200,000 and account for 26% of all students on Australian campuses, compared with 10.6% in 1993. The countries expected to send the most students in the future were China, India, Indonesia, and Iran, displacing the recent leaders--Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Forecasters focusing on future worldwide university enrollments estimated that over the next 15 years, the number of students studying outside their own countries would increase more than 130% to 2.8 million, with more than half of the total coming from Asia. Evidence of corruption in academia surfaced in Italy and Kenya. The Italian case concerned appointments to university professorships on the basis of political favouritism rather than professional competence. Although medical faculties were cited as particularly affected by this practice, observers contended that nepotism and cronyism were widespread in the assignment of candidates to tenured posts in other disciplines as well. As one effort to correct abuses, an administrative tribunal in Rome nullified 45 appointments to senior tenured positions in medical schools in the wake of a suit brought by four professors who had been turned down for chairs in general surgery. Political analysts accused Kenya's president, Daniel arap Moi, of having destroyed the nation's higher-education system by preventing freedom of inquiry and expression. Moi maintained executive control over the country's five public universities by appointing each institution's vice-chancellor, who in turn controlled the appointment and dismissal of all university personnel. To eliminate potential opposition, Moi's government arrested dissidents and outlawed faculty associations and student unions. Despite a $55 million World Bank investment in Kenya, such basic educational supplies as chalk and paper were seldom available to the schools, library holdings were outdated, and subscriptions to scholarly journals had lapsed. In the U.S., President Clinton called for expanding work-study programs, providing $1,000 merit scholarships for the top 5% of high-school graduates, and making $10,000 a year of college tuition tax-deductible. He reiterated the need to develop retraining programs for unemployed and underemployed persons through vouchers to community colleges. The Republican platform in the election campaign attributed rising tuition costs in higher education to the colleges and universities themselves. Robert Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, would have allowed low- and middle-income families to invest up to $500 per year in a savings account and earn tax-free interest to help pay for a child's college expenses. The Democratic Party platform emphasized education as a key issue. Clinton, the Democratic nominee, proposed creating a $1,500 tax credit and a $10,000 tax deduction for a family's expenditures for higher education. He also proposed devoting $1 billion over a five-year period for the AmeriCorps national-service program. The Democratic platform also endorsed, in contrast to the Republican, continued federal funding for the arts and the humanities. In the U.S. the "cultural wars," the decade-long debates over multiculturalism in the curriculum, continued. The debates focused on whether the curriculum should promote a common cultural core and if that core should remain centred in Western history and culture. (GERALD LEE GUTEK; ROBERT MURRAY THOMAS) See also Libraries and Museums. This article updates education, history of; teaching. Religion (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) During 1996 religious groups were pitted against governments on issues ranging from freedom of belief and practice to public policy matters such as abortion. In some cases faith groups found themselves in disagreement with one another on such subjects as evangelism and the significance of the Holocaust. Christians found themselves debating some core beliefs, including the identity of Jesus and the existence of hell. Leaders of more than 40 Christian organizations met in Washington, D.C., in January to draw attention to the plight of persecuted Christians and to urge the U.S. Congress to take up their cause. They reported that in places such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, the Middle East, and northern Africa, Christians faced arrest, torture, imprisonment, and extrajudicial executions for practicing their faith. The House of Representatives and Senate adopted resolutions deploring such persecution in September, with the Senate calling for "a thorough examination of all United States policies that affect persecuted Christians" and for the appointment of a special presidential adviser on religious persecution. Two of the high-profile cases that involved persecution of Christians during the year were the abduction and murder of seven Trappist monks in Algeria by terrorists who called themselves the Armed Islamic Group and the conviction of Robert Hussein Qambar, a Muslim convert to Christianity, on a charge of apostasy by an Islamic court in Kuwait in May. Hussein left the country in August rather than face an appeals hearing in September. France in 1996 had 172 groups classified as religious sects, according to a report released by the nation's Parliament in June. The government subsequently organized a watchdog group to recommend police investigations of the sects whenever it found them warranted. The parliaments of Belgium and Switzerland launched similar investigations. In Germany the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) called for a ban on members of the Church of Scientology working in government jobs and asked for a government investigation of the group in October. Such a ban had already been initiated by the state of Bavaria. The youth branch of the CDU urged a boycott of the film Mission: Impossible because its star and director, Tom Cruise, was a Scientologist. While German officials called the church a threat to democracy, leaders of the church said Germany was using fascist tactics against it. Roman Catholic Archbishop Norberto Rivera Carrera drew fire from Mexican officials in October when he said that if the government "openly denies fundamental human rights, then one has to deny it obedience." It was unclear to what he was referring, but Armando Lpez Campa, director of religious affairs at the Interior Secretariat, said the remarks may have violated a legal ban on using pulpits to preach against the laws of the country. On the first day of the year, the Israeli Supreme Court disbanded government religious councils in Jerusalem and the town of Kiryat Tivon because they excluded Reform and Conservative Jews; the court also ordered a Conservative and a Reform representative appointed to the religious council in Haifa. In July a Reform leader accused Sephardic Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi-Doron of sanctioning the murder of Reform Jews; in a radio broadcast the rabbi said the biblical figure Phinehas had committed a "pure act" when he killed another Jew for having an intimate relationship with a Gentile woman. During the broadcast the rabbi described the victim as "the first Reform Jew." In Sweden the government took the first steps to distance itself from the state Lutheran church by revoking the law requiring that children born to at least one Lutheran parent automatically become members of the church. After 2000 the church rather than the state would appoint its own bishops. During Russia's presidential campaign all the major candidates, including Communist Gennady Zyuganov, actively sought support from the Orthodox Church. Zyuganov visited monasteries and dropped atheism from his party's platform. Ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky declared himself a believer and renewed his marriage vows in a widely publicized church ceremony. Pres. Boris Yeltsin appeared as often as possible in public with Patriarch Aleksey II, who all but officially endorsed his reelection. Although only about 10% of Russians attended services regularly, opinion polls found that they rated the Orthodox Church as the institution they most respected. In the United States, Pres. Bill Clinton was denounced by leaders of several religious groups for his veto of a bill banning a late-term abortion procedure. Top leaders of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church said the veto was "beyond comprehension for those who hold human life sacred," and leaders of Clinton's own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, urged him to repent and "express publicly your personal regret" for the veto. On the other side, 36 religious leaders in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice said they supported the president's action. Where religious people had differences on such matters, they said, "the government must not legislate, and thus impose, one religious view on all our citizens." The Southern Baptist Convention unleashed a firestorm by adopting a resolution at its annual meeting in June in New Orleans calling for increased efforts to bear witness to Jewish people and appointing a new home missionary seeking to evangelize Jews in the U.S. The action was widely denounced as insensitive by mainstream Jewish organizations. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in July described the presence of crosses at the site of the Nazi Birkenau concentration camp in Poland as an "insult" and a "blasphemy" and urged their removal, thereby drawing criticism from Poland's Roman Catholic bishops. The Polish church's Commission for Dialogue with Judaism said the cross was regarded by Jews as a "sign of fear and hatred," while Poles considered it a symbol of "liberation from occupying powers." The National Institute for Healthcare Research and the John Templeton Foundation of Philadelphia awarded grants to 11 medical schools to help teach future physicians to consider the spiritual as well as physical condition of patients. And the National Institutes of Health financed a $28,797 study at the University of New Mexico on the effect of prayer on alcoholics and drug abusers. In a book titled Timeless Healing: The Power and Biology of Belief, Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute of Boston's Deaconess Hospital, wrote that "our genetic blueprint has made believing in an Infinite Absolute part of our nature." Other research focused on the success of church attendance and religious-based programs on preventing or reducing crime and substance abuse. A study by Harvard University economist Richard Freeman found regular church attendance