World

Death of an Idealist
By ROBERT REINHOLD Published: August 27, 1993

To Amy Biehl's relatives, friends and professors in California, the death of the idealistic, apparently fearless, 26-year-old Fulbright scholar was an act of stupefying senselessness. If her killers thought she was an enemy of black aspirations in South Africa, they could not have made a bigger mistake. The blond, blue-eyed white woman was a fervent advocate of democracy in Africa. "She had been all over Africa," said Prof. Kennell A. Jackson, an associate professor of history at Stanford University, where he supervised her senior thesis. "She knew all these people. She knew what dance to do in Zimbabwe. If that mob had five minutes to talk to her, they would have had a totally different impression. This is what the word tragedy means." After 10 months in South Africa, Ms. Biehl was to have returned to her parents' home in Newport Beach before starting doctoral studies at Rutgers University. Her parents and three siblings gathered today in their two-story Spanish-style home there and told reporters that they wanted no revenge, no deepening of racial clefts in South Africa. "It is probable that people will try to make a political and racial issue out of this and we regret that, as Amy would," said her father, Peter Biehl, 50, the marketing officer for Agripak, a packaging company in Salem, Ore. Her mother, Linda Biehl, a manager at the Neiman-Marcus department store in Newport Beach, agreed. "Amy's wish was that we all work together as people," she said, "and that racial issues and violence are not the answer." Also present were Amy's sisters, Kimberly, 27, and Molly, 23, and her brother, Zach, 16. "She gave everyone the benefit of the doubt no matter what race," Zach Biehl said. Her interest in Africa dated at least to her undergraduate days at Stanford, where her 1989 honors thesis dealt with the role of Chester A. Crocker, Under Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Reagan Administration, in bringing about elections in Namibia. Professor Jackson said it was first-class history, and he still gets requests for the document. "She was so engaged, so intrigued by learning all this information about Africa," he said. "She was very interested in the process of democratizing and in women's roles in free elections. If she had an ideology, that is what it was." 'Touched a Lot of People Miss Biehl had worked for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, which is affiliated with the Democratic Party and promotes democracy internationally, from 1990 to 1992. "She touched a lot of people here and overseas," said Kenneth D. Wollack, president of the institute. "We can only hope that somehow people can turn this into something positive." Larry Diamond, of the Hoover Institution and the Center for African Studies at Stanford, saw Miss Biehl just three weeks ago in South Africa and found her animated and excited. "It may sound hokey," he said, "but she really believed in the transforming power of democracy. If the demonstrators who killed her had known who she was, they probably would have spared her life. But they saw white skin."
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