Coverage in US 1987-1993
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Sep 21 1987
^PM-Costa Rican President
^Costa Rican Leader Says U.S. Will Be Isolated As Long As It Supports Contras
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) _ Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez said today that the United States will be isolated as long as it supports the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Arias Sanchez is visiting the United States to promote a Central American peace plan that he negotiated. The agreement, signed Aug. 7 in Guatemala, calls for the signing nations to democratize their governments and for an end to aid to insurgent forces.
The Reagan administration has announced that it will seek more aid for anti-government Contras before a Nov. 7 deadline for compliance with the peace agreement signed by the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatetmala and El Salvador.
The White House feels that aid to the rebels should continue until compliance with the accord by the leftist Nicaraguan government is verified.
The accord calls for the signatories to put in force provisions of the accord on or before Nov. 7, with verification by an internationl commission coming 30 days later.
"I just hope they (U.S. officials) wait until Nov. 7 not only to ask for more aid for the Contras, but to allow (Nicaragua) to comply (with the accord)," Arias Sanchez said.
"As long as Washington supports the Contras, Washington will be isolated," he said. "There is no other country in Latin America that supports Washington in that."
Arias Sanchez, 46, spoke at a news conference at Kansas State University prior to a lecture in the series named for Alfred M. Landon, former Kansas governor and the 1936 Republican presidential nominee.
On Tuesday, he is scheduled to address an informal gathering of House and Senate members on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Wednesday he will speak at the opening session of the United Nations.
The United States is currently providing $100 million in mostly military aid to the rebels fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. That aid runs out at the end of the fiscal year.
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Sep 21 1987
^AM-Arias Sanchez-Peace
^Costa Rican Presidents Warns Contra Aid May Derail Peace Plan With AM-Contra Aid
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) _ Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez warned Monday that a White House request for more aid to Nicaraguan rebels may derail a Central American peace initiative.
Arias Sanchez, the architect of the peace initiative signed Aug. 7 in Guatamala by five Central American presidents, said continued U.S. aid to the Contras might provide an "excuse" for one or more of the Central American leaders not to comply with provisions of the accord.
Arias Sanchez also contended that the United States is steering a wrong course in aiding the Contras because it provides the Sandinista government with "the excuse to abolish freedom in Nicaragua."
He spoke at a news conference before he delivered a Landon Lecture at Kansas State University.
The peace plan calls for the presidents to allow democracy to flourish in their countries and for the cessation of aid to armed insurgent groups.
The Reagan administration has announced it will ask Congress for more aid for the Contras. The $100 million in mostly military aid being provided runs out at the end of the fiscal year.
The White House says aid to the rebels should continue until it is clear the leftist Sandinista government will stand by the accord.
The accord calls for its provisions to be "put in force, simultaneously and in a public way" by Nov. 7. Thirty days later, an international commission would verify compliance.
"I have asked the Reagan administration that before the seventh of November, we should not do anything so that any of the Central American countries could use an excuse not to comply with what they agreed to in Guatamala," Arias Sanchez said.
Arias Sanchez, who will also meet with congressmen and address the United Nations, said he has fundamental disagreements with the rationale the Reagan administration has for its continued support of the rebels.
"The Contras have been used as the excuse to abolish all individual liberties in Nicaragua," he said. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan 22 1988
^AM-Owen-Dole
^Former Dole Finance Chairman Denies Wrongdoing
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ The former national finance chairman of Bob Dole's presidential campaign said Friday he was "irritated" with himself for being careless about the appearance of his financial dealings for Elizabeth Dole's blind trust.
David Owen stepped down as finance chairman Jan. 14 after reports about his financial ties with the blind trust began appearing in newspapers, although he contended that he had done nothing wrong.
Dole, R-Kan., said at the time that "if there's an appearance of bad judgment or misjudgment or somebody's got a problem, he ought to just step aside."
Owen said in a written statement Friday that the perception of impropriety - not any actual wrongdoing - was causing him trouble.
"As I reconstruct, to the best of my ability, my actions in each and every one of the areas where questions have been raised, I am renewed in my knowledge that my behavior was proper," said Owen, who served as the trust's independent financial adviser.
However, he said he was "frustrated to realize that I should have been more careful with the appearance of some activities."
"As I place in perspective the many questions that have been raised regarding several of my business and financial activities, I am both reassured and irritated with myself," he said.
The Office of Government Ethics has said it is investigating whether the blind trust's managers failed to insulate the trust from people associated with the Doles.
Owen, who has had extensive financial dealings with the Doles dating back to 1979, said he never discussed the transactions of the trust with them.
The blind trust was established in January 1985 after Mrs. Dole became transportation secretary. She dissolved the trust Jan. 15 and transferred management of the money to a Maryland bank.
Trust documents reveal that since 1985, the net worth of the trust increased $429,221, or about 35 percent, to $1.67 million.
Owen said the gain showed his "advice to the trust was effective, as well as faithful to the interests of the trust's owner."
The statement released by Owen's spokesman, Bill Hoch, did not answer specific questions that have been raised about his role regarding the trust, such as a report that he made a $139,000 commission from a sale to the trust of an Overland Park, Kan., office building.
Owen was not present when his statement was distributed, but Hoch said the businessman "will have more to say as time goes by."
Owen said any loans made by the trust to enterprises with which he was involved have been repaid with interest, although he did not cite any specific cases.
Records show Mrs. Dole loaned an Owen company, Golfun Productions Inc., $250,000 in 1984, which was repaid about the time the controversy about Owen arose.
In another transaction, Owen has acknowledged that he contacted Dole's Washington office last year about a business associate's efforts to extend a military housing contract worth $1.4 million at Fort Leavenworth. Dole aides then contacted a base commander to insist that the decision on where to house officers off base be "fair and proper."
Owen has said he receives about $7,000 a month as a consultant for the housing contractor, Darol Rodrock.
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Feb 13 1988
^PM-Arias Plan
^Costa Rican Ambassador Calls for U.S. Concessions Toward Nicaragua
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ To promote peace in Central America, the United States should immediately lift its trade embargo against Nicaragua and stop blocking loans to the Sandinista government, said Costa Rica's ambassador to this country.
Ambassador Guido Fernandez said Washington's tactic of financing Contra rebels to force the leftist Sandinista government to allow democracy in Nicaragua has failed and that other means should be used to achieve that goal.
"The Contras have received $300 million from the United States from both official and unofficial sources ... but they have made no gains," Fernandez said in a speech Friday night at Rockhurst College.
The presidents of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala signed a regional peace plan last August in Guatemala City.
It calls for an end to outside support for insurgencies in Central America and calls on the signatories to take specific steps to allow democracy to flourish in their countries.
The plan also calls for cease-fires, amnesty for political prisoners and an end to the use of one country's territory to launch attacks on a neighbor.
Fernandez said Washington should make concessions now that the U.S. Congress has denied President Reagan's request to send military aid to the Contras.
"Now that we have withheld the stick, why not use the carrot more?" Fernandez asked.
The Reagan administration has said it is following a two-track policy toward Nicaragua by applying military and diplomatic pressure. But Fernandez said he has only seen the use of military pressure by Washington.
"Where is the other track of the two-track policy?" he asked. "We would like to see it."
Fernandez said the United States should immediately lift its trade embargo against Nicaragua. He said in comments after his address that Washington should stop blocking loans by the Inter-American Development Bank to Nicaragua.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias was awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for being the architect of the peace plan. Many members of the U.S. House said they voted against military aid to the Contras earlier this month to give Arias' plan a chance to work.
Fernandez said that if the United States grants the concessions he mentioned, they always could be reversed if the Sandinistas fail to live up to the plan's provisions.
As part of the plan, the Sandinistas and the Contras have initiated meetings to agree on a cease-fire. Fernandez said that if a cease-fire is established in Nicaragua, the United States should then negotiate directly with the Sandinistas to address U.S. security concerns.
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Apr 5 1988
^AM-Skulls Found
^Neighborhood Leader's Home Had Torture Devices, Severed Head
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ A man whose business cards said he had "poison" in his head and who organized a community crime watch program had torture devices in his house and a human head buried in his yard, police say.
Police worked in a cordoned-off area Tuesday with shovels and a backhoe to dig up Robert Berdella's back yard, where the head was discovered during the weekend.
A human skull also was found in Berdella's house, police said, along with another human skull that appeared to be very old and was discarded as evidence.
"We're investigating the possibility he may be linked to ... unsolved cases of missing persons," said Rick Pilgrim, a police homicide detective.
Berdella's secret life came to light Saturday after a man who police say was held captive and sexually abused by Berdella leaped out of a second-story window of Berdella's house. The man, who had lash marks on his back and was wearing only a dog collar, sought help from neighbors.
Berdella has been charged with nine felonies. Officials said the 22-year- old victim had been held for five days. He was hospitalized in stable condition Tuesday with injuries to his throat and to his eyes from an unknown chemical, officials said.
Police said they found photographs in Berdella's brick and wood-frame house that showed people being tortured, including the man who escaped Saturday. The photographs were taken in the house, which had torture and bondage devices, said Sgt. Troy Cole. He refused to describe the devices.
Berdella's neighborhood is in a lower-middle class section of midtown Kansas City, with two-story houses, no more than 30 feet apart. Berdella moved to Charlotte Street about 16 years ago.
Michael Calderon, a neighbor, said Berdella told him about five years ago he was using his home as a half-way house for runaways and that young men often visited the house.
"I thought he was a father figure to those kids and I got adjusted to the fact that there were boys at his house," said Calderon.
Berdella also organized a neighborhood watch program.
"He led us to believe he was a nice guy, a leader in the community," Calderon said. "He was very active and made us feel like second-class residents because we were not active."
Berdella owned a curio shop called Bob's Bazaar Bizarre. Replicas of skulls, faces of dragons and demons as well as ornaments from foreign countries were among the items he sold.
His calling card, according to The Kansas City Times, read: "I rise from death, I kill death, and death kills me. ... Although I carry poison in my head the antidote can be found in my tail, which I bite with rage."
Paul Howell, the father of a missing youth, said he suspected something was wrong almost four years ago. Howell said his son was last seen with Berdella before disappearing in 1984.
When Berdella appeared for a court hearing Monday, Howell lunged at him and had to be restrained. Berdella pleaded innocent to seven counts of forcible sodomy, one of felonious restraint and one of first-deg----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jul 24 1988
^PM-Another Look: KC-Gangs
^Kansas City Group Fighting LA Gangs' Infiltration
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ With Los Angeles gangs spreading their drug-dealing to Kansas City, a citizens' anti-crime group is fighting to keep the city's youth from falling prey to the lure of flash and money.
Members of two gangs - the Bloods, who identify themselves by wearing red clothing or red bandannas, and the Crips, who wear blue - have been infiltrating Kansas City for months.
On May 13, a member of the Crips was arrested after he arrived in Kansas City by train from Los Angeles, allegedly carrying more than 20 pounds of cocaine worth $1.2 million.
Police in dozens of cities are alarmed that the Los Angeles gangs are exporting their drug trade. Earlier this month, 50 law enforcement officers from 11 cities in the Midwest and the West attended a two-day conference in Kansas City to develop a national strategy to fight the gangs.
But long before, members of the 11-year-old Ad Hoc Group Against Crime began drawing their own battle lines in the anti-gang, anti-drug war.
Ad Hoc has had success in helping police solve murders, rapes and robberies. Now the group is also focusing on keeping the young from becoming casualties of drugs.
Ad Hoc, a grass-roots organization whose 240 members are mostly black, was created in 1977 to ease tensions between blacks and police. It has since grown into a citizens' anti-crime group meeting monthly, and anyone is eligible to join.
Drugs have been a problem for years, but Ad Hoc founder Alvin Brooks says that now, some streets "have been taken over by pushers."
In one housing development he cited, small groups of young drug dealers, many wearing blue and red, lounge in the shade of trees. Parked nearby are shiny, new luxury sedans, incongruous among the rows of drab, three-story brick buildings.
A police officer patrolling the area said some of the young men wearing blue or red were Crips and Bloods.
To a youngster raised in a poor neighborhood, a drug dealer driving a luxury car with a pocket full of cash can be someone to admire. A teen-ager working as a lookout, decoy or courier for a dealer can earn more in a day than he could in a week in a minimum-wage job.
Ad Hoc has approached the dealers head-on. For more than two years, it has conducted harassment campaigns against suspected drug houses, in some cases rolling caskets past, carrying signs and warning with bullhorns that pushers should leave.
"We did not feel at any time that we were encroaching on the rights of drug dealers," Brooks said, "but felt they were encroaching on the rights of the community, by their drug-dealing."
Hoping to show the unglamorous side of drugs, Ad Hoc is organizing trips to penitentiaries and to courts for drug trials. Earlier this month, 24 youths joined in the first prison visit; Brooks hopes 400 will do so by summer's end.
"This is not so much to scare the kids, but to let them see and hear what their idolized status-symbol role models are doing to the community, and to see the end results of drug dealing," said Brooks, who is Kansas City's director of human relations.
Ad Hoc, which is supported by private donations, plans to begin instructing parents how to recognize signs that their children are becoming involved with gangs or drugs.
The group recently opened a youth drug abuse hotline, and although it hasn't been publicized, volunteer workers answering the telephones have been overwhelmed with calls, Brooks said.
The phone line exists so callers can report suspected drug users, ask questions about drugs, and discuss their own problems.
In late June, Ad Hoc counselors, some of whom are reformed drug users, began visiting the homes of children identified as just getting involved in drugs, to try to get the parents and children together to discuss the problem, Brooks said.
Brooks said some parents may consider the counselors intrusive, but that the effort had to be made.
"We can not wait around until drugs strike a person and he or she is destroyed," he said. "We have to at least broach the subject."
Ad Hoc workers try to help teen-agers find jobs and expose them to organizations such as the Boy's Club.
The presence of gangs raises the stakes, and Brooks said killings could increase unless action is taken.
"We're aware of the amount of drugs and guns out there in the streets of Kansas City, and a spark can ignite it all," he said.
Capt. Sylvester Winston, who heads the police department's homicide unit, has a particular interest in seeing Ad Hoc's efforts work.
Winston, who has been a member of Ad Hoc almost since its inception, says at least 50 percent of the homicides in the city are directly related to drugs.
About 80 percent of all homicides in the city have been solved in the past year, due in part to Ad Hoc's help, Winston said.
Ad Hoc, he said, has a close relationship with the police and great respect in the community.
Asked if he feared it might turn into a vigilante group, Winston said members realize they must obey the laws but added, "(It) could if dope dealers keep killing our kids." ree assault. He failed to post the $500,000 bond.
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Jul 25 1989
^AM-Major Con
^Kansas Man Made Up Tales of Being POW Rescuer, General, CIA Officer
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) _ Robert S. Lyons wooed ladies with tales of his exploits as the nation's youngest major general, his work for the CIA and National Security Council, his rescue of hundreds of POWs from Vietnam.
He showed acquaintances copies of a publication called the Pentagon Gazette, with a cover picture of him in an Army shirt with general's stars on the epaulets. The newsletter claimed to be a special-edition tribute to one of "Washington's well-known, best-kept secrets."
But on Monday, the 35-year-old water purification unit salesman pleaded guilty in federal court to falsely impersonating a federal officer.
His guilty plea was in connection with a story he had told a girlfriend - that he was an Army general working for the CIA and the NSC, and that he needed $1,000 to get out of the CIA, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Leon Patton.
"He told the woman he was trying to disassociate himself from the CIA, that he needed $1,000 to cover bad checks he had written, and that they were holding that over his head to keep him in the CIA," Patton said.
The woman gave him a check on Jan. 31, and Lyons has since repaid the money, he said.
Lyons, contacted by telephone Tuesday, did not want to discuss the case.
"I really don't have nothing to say," he said before hanging up.
Patton said Tuesday the whole thing came undone when Lyons told his girlfriend he had been convicted in the Iran-Contra arms deal, had lost his military retirement, and that because of the possibility of terrorist attack he was under protection of the Secret Service.
The government found out about Lyons when the woman contacted the Secret Service to check the story, Patton said.
Lyons did serve in the Army, Patton said, and was given an honorable discharge - as a private.
Officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., have seen the bogus copy of the Pentagon Gazette and they were not impressed.
"That's the first thing that got me, was what this guy was wearing on the front of the Pentagon Gazette - an open-collar shirt with a gold chain around his neck," Lt. Col. John Garlinger said Tuesday. "No military officer, I don't care if he's a second lieutenant or a general, will wear an open-collar shirt with a gold chain around his neck."
Garlinger got a copy of the bogus newsletter from the owner of a uniform store in Leavenworth, the town on the edge of Fort Leavenworth. Lyons had plunked down a copy of the newsletter at the store as a way of identifying himself as a general to buy a general's uniform, he said.
The five-page edition of the Pentagon Gazette carried around by Lyons, dated August 1988, said he "successfully brought back 285 live POWs and the remains of over 300 missing POWs and MIAs" from Vietnam in 1983, an event supposedly overshadowed by the dedication of the Vietnam veterans wall and memorial in Washington, D.C.
Bob Sturm, the police chief in Mission, Kan., the Kansas City suburb where Lyons lives, said Lyons also wore a general's uniform into a print shop in town to get the article printed.
"You can lie and be creative about it and sometimes get by," said Garlinger. "But this kind of stuff in the Pentagon Gazette is so outrageous."
"Obviously, however, he did convince some folks that he was telling the truth," he said.
Sentencing for Lyons is set for Sept. 25. he faces a maximum of three years in prison and fines of $250,000.
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Jun 14 1990
^PM-Paupers' Graveyard
^Paupers' Graveyard: Only the Dead Know Hart Island
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ The city couldn't provide them homes when they were alive. But after the two men died - killed when their cave beneath a razed building collapsed - they were given a final resting place on a grassy, quiet island.
Quiet because only the dead reside on Hart Island. About 700,000 bodies are buried on the 100-acre island. A paupers' graveyard for 121 years, it is among the most intensively used pieces of real estate in New York City.
Miguel Marrero and Jose Diaz were buried Wednesday, 34 days after the shelter they dug collapsed in a rainstorm.
The body of a third man who died with them was claimed by his family. But because the bodies of Marrero and Diaz lay unclaimed in the morgue for more than two weeks, they were sent to Hart Island.
A ferry bearing a stack of 14 pine caskets containing the bodies of Marrero, Diaz and other indigents chugged to the island in Long Island Sound, about a mile from the borough of the Bronx.
Diaz's and Marrero's names were written in black marker on their rough-hewn caskets. Another casket had the markings UNK WHT M, for unknown white male.
The bodies headed for Hart Island are not embalmed and the caskets are thin. That way, nature can reclaim them and the burial plots can be used again in a few decades, in a macabre recycling program.
"A box sometimes falls apart as we're moving it and a body rolls out," said Jerome DiSisto, a corrections officer accompanying the burial detail. "If that happens, we just get an empty box, put the body in and that's all."
Capt. Gene Ruppert, another corrections official, said an average of 1,500 adults are buried each year on the island, in addition to 1,500 infants, most of them stillborn. A quarter or more of those buried are believed to have been homeless.
The Corrections Department manages the island and all burials are performed by inmates, who earn 50 cents an hour, department spokesman Tom Antenen said.
The few buildings on the island, such as a onetime insane asylum, are overgrown with vegetation, except for a recently abandoned prison barracks, which still has fences with concertina wire.
Every plot of 150 bodies has a white marker. The location of each body is recorded in case a relative comes to claim it. About 90 bodies are exhumed each year.
Al Saunders, a city employee, uses a backhoe to dig the trench where the caskets are laid two across and stacked three high. He has buried thousands of coffins since 1984 - and has had to dig a few up.
"It isn't the nicest job going, but it has to be done," he said. "You have to develop a callous attitude, because how much death can you see without it having an effect on you?"
Saunders said one of his predecessors became so preoccupied with death he had nightmares and quit.
The prisoners, many shirtless in the sun, hoisted Diaz's casket into the trench, then put three more inside. No words were said as Diaz and Marrero were buried. The inmates reached for the next casket and the next until their chore was done.
Saunders dropped the soil onto the common grave with his backhoe. The prisoners smoothed out the loam with rakes and shovels.
Diaz and Marrero were known as Mike and Joe, according to a New York Newsday article that appeared shortly after their deaths.
"They were good people," one friend, Daisy Aldebedo, told the newspaper. "They got high, but they worked for their money. They never robbed anyone."
The city planned to build low-income housing on the lot where Diaz, Marrero and the third man, Benjamin Olivera, were killed.
There are an estimated 70,000 homeless people in New York City. In recent weeks, hundreds of homeless people have been evicted from train stations and bank-machine vestibules.
City shelters have a reputation for violence, and many homeless people shun them because of rules that residents must be drug- and alcohol-free, said Marjorie Valleau, a spokeswoman for the city Human Resources Administration.
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Jul 2 1990
^AM-Marcos-Cowboy Attorney
^Gunning for Justice Lawyer Notches Another Win With Marcos Verdict With AM-Marcos Trial, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Cowboy attorney Gerry Spence can cut another notch onto his six-shooter - he won an acquittal for Imelda Marcos on racketeering and fraud charges Monday, adding to his long list of courtroom triumphs.
Many of the successes of the lanky, silver-haired attorney have been played out before juries in courtrooms of the High Plains and the mountains of his native Wyoming. Although a nationally known attorney, this was Spence's first trial in New York, and it was a rough one. He often wrangled with U.S. District Judge John F. Keenan during the three-month trial. The judge complained about Spence's manner and cross-examinat ion of witnesses.
After one acrimonious blowup with Keenan, Spence told him he "never felt so unwelcome in any courtroom. The jury adores you, judge, and they hate me."
But after the jury acquitted the former Philippines first lady of looting her homeland's treasury to buy real estate, jewelry and art, Spence said he had always known the jury would be on his side.
Spence, who wore a Stetson cowboy hat and boots to court and came to New York with a reputation of being virtually unbeatable, had trouble as soon as the trial began.
He stumbled during his what he later conceded were the worst opening arguments of his career. His colleagues said he blundered in cross-examing several government witnesses, ignored or misread earlier testimony and elicited answers that were unexpected and damaging.
Uncharacteristic behavior for a lawyer who Time magazine once called "The Fastest Gun in the West." The magazine said a key to Spence's success was his exhaustive preparation.
The lawyer, who has offices in a log cabin in Jackson, Wyo., has had a long string of successes, many of them described in his book, "Gunning for Justice."
In a lawsuit against Penthouse, held in a courtroom in Cheyenne, Spence referred to the magazine's publisher, Bob Guccione, as an arrogant New Yorker.
He pointed out the New York publisher to the jurors as "the gentleman sitting over there in the velvet pants," a type of attire rarely seen in the Cowboy State.
In a 1979 lawsuit against Kerr-McGee Corp., an energy conglomerate, he repeatedly referred to the corporation's lawyers as "the men in grey."
Spence made his national reputation by winning that lawsuit on behalf of the family of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear plant worker who had become contaminated with plutonium.
But Spence found that the shoe, or the cowboy boot, was on the other foot in the Manhattan courtroom.
Court officials and other lawyers scoffed at his cowboy attire. Spence said felt "great irony" at the ridicule.
Other lawyers on Mrs. Marcos' four-lawyer team, of which Spence was the leader, said his rambling opening statement and shambling courtroom manner had got him off to a bad start and that things had steadily deteriorated.
At one point, the other Marcos attorneys pressured Mrs. Marcos to drop Spence, who was hired for a $5 million fee not long before the trial opened April 3.
During the dispute Mr. Spence attributed the problem to a difference in styles.
"In high-profile cases, there's a lot of conflicting interests," he told The New York Times at the time. "I'm here because she wants me here."
In the end, Spence said prosecutors just didn't have the evidence to compel the jury to convicted Mrs. Marcos.
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Aug 14 1990
^AM-Ortega
^Ortega Says His Life After Electoral Defeat Is 'Rich'
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Daniel Ortega says he doesn't miss being president of Nicaragua and is enjoying his new role as a leader of the political opposition.
Ortega, who was defeated in elections Feb. 25 after ruling his Central American nation for 10 years, said in an interview Tuesday that his Sandinista National Liberation Front was revamping itself to appeal to a broader range of Nicaraguan voters.
The Sandinistas this month began holding "public debates" in Nicaragua for people to tell Sandinista leaders what they did wrong and what they did right during their rule, Ortega said.
"The door is open for everyone to talk," the former president said.
The criticism will lead to a reformation of the party's policies and objectives, with an eye on the country's next elections, in 1996, Ortega said.
He said it was too early to tell if he will be the Sandinista's presidential candidate.
Ortega came to New York this week to maintain ties with supporters here - he gave a speech in a church Monday night to 2,500 people - and to contact publishers for a book he plans to write.
The book might be a work of fiction based on fact, he said, drawing on his own experiences.
Ortega acknowledges that the Sandinistas committed several errors, which sent many Nicaraguans over to the side of U.S.-supported Contra rebels who fought for almost a decade to overthrow the leftist government, at a cost of some 40,000 lives.
In the days after the Sandinistas toppled Anastasio Somoza in July 1979, the dictator's supporters, the Somocistas, were targeted to have their large land holdings redistributed to the poor.
"Some landowners were affected who weren't precisely Somocistas," Ortega acknowledged.
"The urgent demand for land made us act in a hasty way, giving a very negative impression to rural people," he said. "This gave the Contras the opportunity to say the Sandinistas want to take land away from everyone."
Ortega said the Sandinistas also mistreated the Miskito Indians, who opposed the government and were forcibly removed from their homelands in northeastern Nicaragua in the early 1980s. The Miskito and other Indian tribes joined the Contra's armed resistance to Sandinista rule, largely because of the relocation program.
Ortega appeared relaxed during the 45-minute interview, conducted in Spanish at the apartment of a friend of his former foreign minister, Miguel D'Escoto, who also came on the trip to the New York.
The apartment on New York's exclusive Upper East Side, decorated with a Picasso and other priceless artworks, seemed an incongruous setting for the former revolutionary.
Ortega, who robbed banks in his early teens to get money for the anti- Somoza insurrection, wore a blue blazer and necktie.
"It's unprecedented for a revolutionary who fought a dictatorship with weapons to later win power and then become the opposition ... within a democratic context that he himself helped create," he said. "So I think this is a rich experience."
The Sandinistas have organized two strikes since President Violeta Chamorro was inaugurated April 25, imperiling her new government and raising fears that the Sandinistas would try to wrest power away from her.
Ortega said the Sandinistas will not use forcible means. "If we are going to return to running the government of Nicaragua, it will be through elections."
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Aug 28 1990
^AM-Gulf-US-Dissent
^Some Suspect U.S. Would Fight War to Benefit Oil Companies
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ The deployment of troops to the Persian Gulf has given rise to scattered protests that are focusing more on economics than on the political concerns expressed during the Vietnam era.
Many of the demonstrators say the soldiers are risking their lives for oil companies and that the financially strapped nation cannot afford the deployment.
"Hell no, we won't go, we won't die for Texaco," 200 protesters shouted Saturday outside the White House, echoing words used by demonstrators during the Vietnam War but adding a twist: the name of a U.S. oil company.
Opposition to the Vietnam War in the '60s and '70s and to U.S. military policy in Central America in the '80s focused on whether the United States had the right to interfere in the politics of other nations. Opponents of U.S. gulf policy, a minority according to opinion polls, are centering their arguments on the morality of intervention for economic ends.
"We have to tell each other that we will not kill and we will not die for Exxon, for Gulf Petroleum," peace activist Becky Minnich said last week during a meeting of 100 dissidents in Minneapolis.
The argument might get a sympathetic ear.
An Associated Press poll conducted earlier this month said 86 percent of Americans believed the oil companies took advantage of the Iraqi invasion and unfairly raised gasoline prices. The survey of 1,004 adults had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, speaking at a news conference in New York last week, called the U.S. military buildup "aggression designed simply to dominate oil."
Another of the protesters' arguments is that America - $4.16 trillion in debt - cannot afford a massive troop deployment costing billions of dollars.
"They now run up a military bill to the top of the sky and take it out of federal housing money for Brooklyn," wrote Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer Prize- winning columnist for New York Newsday.
Many protesters don't believe protecting Middle East oil from Iraq is worth American lives.
"I kissed my son goodbye today," college professor Alex Molnar wrote in a letter to Bush published in The New York Times. "He is a 21-year-old Marine. You have ordered him to Saudi Arabia. ... For what? Cheap gas?"
Images of soldiers boarding transport planes for the Middle East have become a daily staple of television news, but not all are going willingly.
One serviceman, Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Paterson, said he will not fight a war over oil and has filed for conscientious objector status to prevent his deployment to the gulf.
The AP poll said 64 percent of Americans supported deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia to help defend it against a possible Iraqi attack, while 22 percent were opposed. But the poll said 52 percent of Americans opposed using ground forces to push Iraq out of Kuwait. Thirty-two percent favored such a move.
If the United States is drawn into a war to force Iraq out of Kuwait, which is the intent of the economic embargo, the few voices of protest in the U.S. will likely grow.
Among the scattered voices raised in recent days:
- In Amherst, Mass., about 15 protesters elicited a few honks in support from passing motorists, but also the shouted comment: "Get out of America."
- At Westover Air Force Base, Mass., where planes being used to supply troops in the gulf are based, two people were arrested on charges of disturbing the peace Monday during a small demonstration.
- In San Francisco, 15 protesters at the Federal Building held signs saying "Shed No Blood for Oil" and promised to continue holding pickets there until the troops come home.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nov 5 1990
^PM-Queer Nation
^Militants Use Confrontation to Fight Anti-Gay Violence
^LaserPhoto NY307 sent Nov. 1.
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ It was a quiet night at King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut bar - if quiet is the word for an East Village saloon where tattooed toughs gather to booze, play pool and listen to heavy metal.
Gradually, a very different crowd filtered in. They wore T-shirts with the legend "Queer Nation" emblazoned over a map of the United States, and settled in under the ultraviolet-lit painting of a skull on fire.
A beefy pool player was about to take a shot when he noticed a pair of the newcomers standing beside him. His jaw dropped.
The two men were kissing, mouth to mouth.
"Oh no 3/8 Oh no 3/8" the man with the cue cried, retreating in revulsion to the other side of the table. "Stop that."
They ignored him. This was why they had come - to agitate, to confront people they blame for an increase in attacks on homosexuals. They are Queer Nation - one of several militant gay organizations which have discarded polite persuasion in favor of grab-them-by-the-lapels defiance.
There are Queer Nation chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Providence, Toronto, Boulder, Colo., and Ithaca, N.Y. Four-hundred people attend bi-weekly meetings in New York.
Where groups like the Gay Men's Health Crisis responded to AIDS by lobbying for help and by providing services to sufferers, the new generation - ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - takes to the streets.
ACT-UP has thrown bagels and noodles at a hotel where President Bush was appearing, blocked Wall Street, disrupted services in St. Patrick's Cathedral - all protests against what it claims is political, business and religious indifference to the epidemic.
It is "a whole new attitude," said Randy Shilts, a national correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of the critically acclaimed account of the AIDS crisis, "And the Band Played On."
The new militants are "rebelling against straight society but also against older gay people," said Shilts, 39.
It is a pattern that repeats itself in many social movements - radicalization followed by retrenchment and new radicalization, said Jim Jasper, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University.
"The newcomers become disappointed in how ossified the old groups are" and take their own action, Jasper said.
---
"Any faggot gets within a one-foot range, I'm going to knock him out," the pool player declared loudly to anyone who would listen.
But more militants crowded into the little room, outnumbering the regulars. "We're here and we're queer, we're here and we're queer," they chanted.
The chanting grew so loud it drowned out the heavy metal music and the pool player, who was shouting "Shut up, shut up" to no avail.
Later, outside the bar, the homosexuals singled out a skinhead who had shouted a slur. They shouted "Homophobe" and pointed their fingers at him.
They left. "We'll be back and we'll be stronger," they chanted. And: "We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous - get used to it."
---
It is safe to say that the 50 demonstrators who visited King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut on that summer night - and had staged a "kiss-in" at the Alcatraz bar down the block earlier in the evening - won no converts. They didn't expect to.
"We are breaking down the barriers of unspoken segregation," said Queer Nation spokesman Jay Blotcher.
"It isn't going to happen in a week. This harkens back to the Woolworth counter in the South and the blacks coming back again and again and again. Like them, we are a disenfranchised minority fighting for our rights."
Queer Nation's founders were active in ACT-UP, and remain members. "We felt that there were other issues, such as the increase in violence against gays and lesbians, that had to be addressed," said co-founder Alan Klein.
Two of the four men who helped found Queer Nation had themselves been victims of gay bashing, and Klein said the group was formed because the men felt there was no organized response to attacks on homosexuals.
The group organized its first demonstration in April, when a thousand marchers protested a pipe-bombing outside a gay bar that injured three people.
Through Sept. 30 of this year, there have been 88 anti-gay crimes in New York City, said Capt. Charles Senzel of the police department's bias unit. Police said there were 47 such crimes for all of 1989 and 43 for 1988.
But the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, which provides legal help and counseling for victims of gay bashing, gave much higher figures. It listed 425 anti-gay crimes in the city through the end of September, compared to 338 for all of 1989, according to David Kirschenbaum, a spokesman for the group.
Police said privately the wide discrepancy may be due to the fact that police have to prove an attack was based on the victim's sexual orientation.
"Our message is gays and lesbians will no longer be silent victims," Blotcher said. "We are here and we're a force to be reckoned with."
Another group, the Pink Panthers, patrols streets to protect gays. The members carry no weapons, but walkie-talkies, cameras and whistles. The purpose of the cameras are to photograph gay bashers the patrols apprehend.
The group claims 200 members - all trained in self-defense, according to founder Gerri Wells - and is patrolling Greenwich Village.
"We will hold people for the police and we will bash back if necessary," said Ms. Wells, a lesbian. "We will use equal force (to hold a gay basher fighting to escape)."
The Panthers have not detained anyone since the group was formed in June but patrols have appeared as gays were harassed on four or five occasions, she said. The culprits ran when the Pink Panthers arrived, she said.
"Everyone has a right to defend themselves," said Inspector Paul Sanderson, head of the police department's bias unit. "The local patrols are good as long as they don't get out of hand. If they grab someone who's been beating up homosexuals and hold him until officers arrive, that's the kind of citizens' action that's needed."
"If I walk with my lover down the street, I face physical or verbal abuse," said Klein. "That's intolerable. I have to make important choices. I have to confront that bias. We have to fight for our rights and I think that can't be compromised."
The militants are not always so confrontational.
Queer Nation goes to shopping malls to distribute leaflets which note that gays have existed for centuries and which list some famous people who were homosexual. The leaflets are partially aimed at gay youths who may be despondent or even suicidal about their homosexuality, Blotcher said.
"There's no positive reinforcement from society for them," he said. "All you're told is you will live a life of alienation and disappointment. Adolescents crave acceptance, and this puts some of them over the edge.
"There's nothing out there to tell the kids, 'Hey, it's OK,' and that's why we do this."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
May 4 1991
^PM-Blade Runners
^Rollerblading Craze Cuts a New Figure on City Streets
^LaserPhoto NY4 of May 3
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ The weekend joggers and cyclists who once reigned supreme on park sidewalks across the nation are being elbowed aside by a new breed of knee-padded, Lycra-clad creatures who whiz by on polyurethane wheels at 30 mph.
These high-tech roller skaters are ushering in a booming new leisure fad - rollerblading, also known as in-line skating.
Their skates - molded boots with four or five wheels in a row - have also created a booming new leisure industry. Retail sales rocketed from $150,000 in 1984 to about $10 million in 1988 and are expected to double to $300 million in 1991, said Mary Haugen, a spokeswoman for Rollerblade Inc.
For roller skaters, the advancement in skate technology adds a whole new dimension of thrills and fun to their pastime.
"It's an unbelievable rush," said Max Langstaff, who spent a recent balmy day skating in New York's Central Park. "It's a cross between ice skating and downhill skiing. Imagine skating down a hill, it's like ... aaaahhhh 3/8"
As rock music blasted from a portable stereo, hundreds of people gathered on a recent Sunday to watch skaters speedily weave through a sloping obstacle course of cones. The crowd cheered when skaters, some on only one skate, others going backward, negotiated the course without knocking over a single cone.
Bladers as they're called propel themselves much like speed-skaters on ice, swinging their arms.
In-line skating has also become a hit in California, and in the Midwest where the two largest manufacturers of the skates are based: Rollerblade Inc. in Minnetonka, Minn., and First Team Sports in Blaine, Minn.
Rollerblade Inc. got its start in 1980 when two brothers, Scott and Brennan Olson, both high school hockey players, sought a way to keep in shape during the summer.
They sold their first pairs of the skates out of their parents' basement.
In 1984 the Olsons sold the company, which began promoting in-line skating as a new sport in 1986.
At Peck & Goodie, a skate rental and sales shop near Central Park, customers can rent skates for $10 for two hours, or buy a pair for $95 to $320.
New skaters making their way through Central Park traffic look like ducklings trying out their legs for the first time.
Many of the park's hard-core skaters go by nicknames like Blur, Blade and Gladiator. Some travel far to compete in rollerblade races.
"It was only last year that we started to see competitors come out, class athletes, so racing is still at a rough stage now," said Steve Novak, also known as Thud, a monicker he earned crashing into a car while skating.
Now the sport is poised to go international.
Nordica, a large Italian manufacturer of ski boots, bought half of Rollerblade Inc. in March and will market the skates in Europe and Japan, said Nordica spokesman Adalberto Muzio.
Suzanne Winick of New York began skating when she bought some blades last November.
"It's great," she said. "When you find a road that's smoothly paved you feel like you're on a sheet of ice. You just go."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sep 24 1991
^AM-Guatemala-Castro
^Guatemala President Says Castro Wants to Halt Aid to Guerrilla Movements
^LaserPhoto NYR24
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano said Tuesday that Cuba has halted aid to guerrillas in the Central American nation and Fidel Castro wants to stop supporting other Latin American rebel movements.
Serrano said he believed Castro's assertion that Guatemalan guerrillas, who are engaged in peace talks with the government, no longer get Cuban aid because there is no evidence of it.
"I am optimistic and I strongly believe that we are going to have a peace agreement," Serrano said in a meeting with executives and editors of The Associated Press.
Three decades of fighting between guerrillas and the Guatemalan army have claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Serrano, elected in January, was in the United States to visit the United Nations and President Bush.
In February, Serrano rebuffed a U.S. offer to restore some of the military aid suspended over Guatemala's poor human rights record, saying there were strings attached.
The human rights group Americas Watch said that during the first six months of Serrano's administration, "government forces continued to commit torture, murder, and disappearance with impunity."
Serrano listed several advances he says his administration has made in bringing human rights violators to justice. He cited the recent arrests of 13 military officers and enlisted men in two murder cases.
"It is difficult but we are making great progress," he said.
Anne Manuel, who co-wrote the recent Americas Watch report, said Tuesday the developments were "positive" but noted that no member of the security forces stands convicted of a human rights violation.
"There's a very, very long road between ordering someone to stand trial and conviction and punishment," Ms. Manuel said.
Serrano said that during an Ibero-American summit in Guadalajara, Mexico, in July, Castro assured him he no longer supported Guatemalan guerrillas.
Serrano said Castro indicated Cuba "was not interested in supporting these types of groups" because he "was looking for a better understanding among Latin American countries and it is one of the obstacles they have."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Oct 6 1991
^BC-AP Arts: Nicaragua
^Documentary Tracks Down People Who Were in Photos of Sandinista Revolution
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ In 1978, a relatively unknown photojournalist named Susan Meiselas went to Nicaragua and landed in the middle of one of the biggest stories of the day - the opening salvos of the Sandinista revolution.
Now, 13 years later, Ms. Meiselas and co-producers Richard Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti look back at the revolution that toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza - and which, after fighting off a U.S.-backed insurgency for a decade, was rejected by Nicaraguan voters last year.
In "Pictures of a Revolution," shown at its world premiere Friday night at the New York Film Festival, the filmmakers tracked down the people who appeared in Ms. Meiselas' war photos more than a dozen years ago and let them tell their story.
The documentary, received enthusiastically by the packed house at Lincoln Center, conveys the crushed hopes of Nicaraguans and the feeling that the tens of thousands who died in the revolution and ensuing Contra war lost their lives needlessly.
The film flashes Ms. Meiselas' photos showing urban guerrilla warfare amid footage of the locations as they are now. The photos show danger and acts of heroism - a man with a .22-caliber rifle urging on his comrades against Somoza's National Guard, another hurling a Molotov cocktail.
The footage of present-day Nicaragua shows only bleak poverty.
"I thought better things would come (after the revolution), now I don't," says a woman in the film, wiping away her tears. "It's hard to even find food now."
The filmmakers tracked their subjects down to Miami, Toronto and to shacks lining dirt roads in Managua and other towns. One former National Guard officer and later a Contra commander, Mike Lima, was found in Florida working as a security guard.
"We killed for nothing, we died for nothing," says Lima, explaining that he now sees the Sandinistas and the Contras were puppets for the Soviet Union and Washington.
Some of the former Sandinista combatants also expressed frustration that little was gained because of their sacrifices, although one said it was enough that the National Guard was defeated and he would no longer have to fear their knock on the door.
Another Sandinista says the gains the revolutionaries tried to make were hamstrung by the U.S.-backed Contras and Washington's economic embargo. In her narration, Ms. Meiselas wonders how the Sandinista government would have fared without the intervention.
Ms. Meiselas told the audience after the 93-minute film that the filmmakers had no idea what they would find when they sought the people she had photographed years ago.
"You feel the despair, even among the ones who were most loyal (to the Sandinistas), who were most hopeful," she said. "We didn't think that was going to happen."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sep 21 1987
^PM-Costa Rican President
^Costa Rican Leader Says U.S. Will Be Isolated As Long As It Supports Contras
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) _ Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez said today that the United States will be isolated as long as it supports the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Arias Sanchez is visiting the United States to promote a Central American peace plan that he negotiated. The agreement, signed Aug. 7 in Guatemala, calls for the signing nations to democratize their governments and for an end to aid to insurgent forces.
The Reagan administration has announced that it will seek more aid for anti-government Contras before a Nov. 7 deadline for compliance with the peace agreement signed by the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatetmala and El Salvador.
The White House feels that aid to the rebels should continue until compliance with the accord by the leftist Nicaraguan government is verified.
The accord calls for the signatories to put in force provisions of the accord on or before Nov. 7, with verification by an internationl commission coming 30 days later.
"I just hope they (U.S. officials) wait until Nov. 7 not only to ask for more aid for the Contras, but to allow (Nicaragua) to comply (with the accord)," Arias Sanchez said.
"As long as Washington supports the Contras, Washington will be isolated," he said. "There is no other country in Latin America that supports Washington in that."
Arias Sanchez, 46, spoke at a news conference at Kansas State University prior to a lecture in the series named for Alfred M. Landon, former Kansas governor and the 1936 Republican presidential nominee.
On Tuesday, he is scheduled to address an informal gathering of House and Senate members on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Wednesday he will speak at the opening session of the United Nations.
The United States is currently providing $100 million in mostly military aid to the rebels fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. That aid runs out at the end of the fiscal year.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sep 21 1987
^AM-Arias Sanchez-Peace
^Costa Rican Presidents Warns Contra Aid May Derail Peace Plan With AM-Contra Aid
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) _ Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez warned Monday that a White House request for more aid to Nicaraguan rebels may derail a Central American peace initiative.
Arias Sanchez, the architect of the peace initiative signed Aug. 7 in Guatamala by five Central American presidents, said continued U.S. aid to the Contras might provide an "excuse" for one or more of the Central American leaders not to comply with provisions of the accord.
Arias Sanchez also contended that the United States is steering a wrong course in aiding the Contras because it provides the Sandinista government with "the excuse to abolish freedom in Nicaragua."
He spoke at a news conference before he delivered a Landon Lecture at Kansas State University.
The peace plan calls for the presidents to allow democracy to flourish in their countries and for the cessation of aid to armed insurgent groups.
The Reagan administration has announced it will ask Congress for more aid for the Contras. The $100 million in mostly military aid being provided runs out at the end of the fiscal year.
The White House says aid to the rebels should continue until it is clear the leftist Sandinista government will stand by the accord.
The accord calls for its provisions to be "put in force, simultaneously and in a public way" by Nov. 7. Thirty days later, an international commission would verify compliance.
"I have asked the Reagan administration that before the seventh of November, we should not do anything so that any of the Central American countries could use an excuse not to comply with what they agreed to in Guatamala," Arias Sanchez said.
Arias Sanchez, who will also meet with congressmen and address the United Nations, said he has fundamental disagreements with the rationale the Reagan administration has for its continued support of the rebels.
"The Contras have been used as the excuse to abolish all individual liberties in Nicaragua," he said. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan 22 1988
^AM-Owen-Dole
^Former Dole Finance Chairman Denies Wrongdoing
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ The former national finance chairman of Bob Dole's presidential campaign said Friday he was "irritated" with himself for being careless about the appearance of his financial dealings for Elizabeth Dole's blind trust.
David Owen stepped down as finance chairman Jan. 14 after reports about his financial ties with the blind trust began appearing in newspapers, although he contended that he had done nothing wrong.
Dole, R-Kan., said at the time that "if there's an appearance of bad judgment or misjudgment or somebody's got a problem, he ought to just step aside."
Owen said in a written statement Friday that the perception of impropriety - not any actual wrongdoing - was causing him trouble.
"As I reconstruct, to the best of my ability, my actions in each and every one of the areas where questions have been raised, I am renewed in my knowledge that my behavior was proper," said Owen, who served as the trust's independent financial adviser.
However, he said he was "frustrated to realize that I should have been more careful with the appearance of some activities."
"As I place in perspective the many questions that have been raised regarding several of my business and financial activities, I am both reassured and irritated with myself," he said.
The Office of Government Ethics has said it is investigating whether the blind trust's managers failed to insulate the trust from people associated with the Doles.
Owen, who has had extensive financial dealings with the Doles dating back to 1979, said he never discussed the transactions of the trust with them.
The blind trust was established in January 1985 after Mrs. Dole became transportation secretary. She dissolved the trust Jan. 15 and transferred management of the money to a Maryland bank.
Trust documents reveal that since 1985, the net worth of the trust increased $429,221, or about 35 percent, to $1.67 million.
Owen said the gain showed his "advice to the trust was effective, as well as faithful to the interests of the trust's owner."
The statement released by Owen's spokesman, Bill Hoch, did not answer specific questions that have been raised about his role regarding the trust, such as a report that he made a $139,000 commission from a sale to the trust of an Overland Park, Kan., office building.
Owen was not present when his statement was distributed, but Hoch said the businessman "will have more to say as time goes by."
Owen said any loans made by the trust to enterprises with which he was involved have been repaid with interest, although he did not cite any specific cases.
Records show Mrs. Dole loaned an Owen company, Golfun Productions Inc., $250,000 in 1984, which was repaid about the time the controversy about Owen arose.
In another transaction, Owen has acknowledged that he contacted Dole's Washington office last year about a business associate's efforts to extend a military housing contract worth $1.4 million at Fort Leavenworth. Dole aides then contacted a base commander to insist that the decision on where to house officers off base be "fair and proper."
Owen has said he receives about $7,000 a month as a consultant for the housing contractor, Darol Rodrock.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Feb 13 1988
^PM-Arias Plan
^Costa Rican Ambassador Calls for U.S. Concessions Toward Nicaragua
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ To promote peace in Central America, the United States should immediately lift its trade embargo against Nicaragua and stop blocking loans to the Sandinista government, said Costa Rica's ambassador to this country.
Ambassador Guido Fernandez said Washington's tactic of financing Contra rebels to force the leftist Sandinista government to allow democracy in Nicaragua has failed and that other means should be used to achieve that goal.
"The Contras have received $300 million from the United States from both official and unofficial sources ... but they have made no gains," Fernandez said in a speech Friday night at Rockhurst College.
The presidents of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Guatemala signed a regional peace plan last August in Guatemala City.
It calls for an end to outside support for insurgencies in Central America and calls on the signatories to take specific steps to allow democracy to flourish in their countries.
The plan also calls for cease-fires, amnesty for political prisoners and an end to the use of one country's territory to launch attacks on a neighbor.
Fernandez said Washington should make concessions now that the U.S. Congress has denied President Reagan's request to send military aid to the Contras.
"Now that we have withheld the stick, why not use the carrot more?" Fernandez asked.
The Reagan administration has said it is following a two-track policy toward Nicaragua by applying military and diplomatic pressure. But Fernandez said he has only seen the use of military pressure by Washington.
"Where is the other track of the two-track policy?" he asked. "We would like to see it."
Fernandez said the United States should immediately lift its trade embargo against Nicaragua. He said in comments after his address that Washington should stop blocking loans by the Inter-American Development Bank to Nicaragua.
Costa Rican President Oscar Arias was awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for being the architect of the peace plan. Many members of the U.S. House said they voted against military aid to the Contras earlier this month to give Arias' plan a chance to work.
Fernandez said that if the United States grants the concessions he mentioned, they always could be reversed if the Sandinistas fail to live up to the plan's provisions.
As part of the plan, the Sandinistas and the Contras have initiated meetings to agree on a cease-fire. Fernandez said that if a cease-fire is established in Nicaragua, the United States should then negotiate directly with the Sandinistas to address U.S. security concerns.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Apr 5 1988
^AM-Skulls Found
^Neighborhood Leader's Home Had Torture Devices, Severed Head
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ A man whose business cards said he had "poison" in his head and who organized a community crime watch program had torture devices in his house and a human head buried in his yard, police say.
Police worked in a cordoned-off area Tuesday with shovels and a backhoe to dig up Robert Berdella's back yard, where the head was discovered during the weekend.
A human skull also was found in Berdella's house, police said, along with another human skull that appeared to be very old and was discarded as evidence.
"We're investigating the possibility he may be linked to ... unsolved cases of missing persons," said Rick Pilgrim, a police homicide detective.
Berdella's secret life came to light Saturday after a man who police say was held captive and sexually abused by Berdella leaped out of a second-story window of Berdella's house. The man, who had lash marks on his back and was wearing only a dog collar, sought help from neighbors.
Berdella has been charged with nine felonies. Officials said the 22-year- old victim had been held for five days. He was hospitalized in stable condition Tuesday with injuries to his throat and to his eyes from an unknown chemical, officials said.
Police said they found photographs in Berdella's brick and wood-frame house that showed people being tortured, including the man who escaped Saturday. The photographs were taken in the house, which had torture and bondage devices, said Sgt. Troy Cole. He refused to describe the devices.
Berdella's neighborhood is in a lower-middle class section of midtown Kansas City, with two-story houses, no more than 30 feet apart. Berdella moved to Charlotte Street about 16 years ago.
Michael Calderon, a neighbor, said Berdella told him about five years ago he was using his home as a half-way house for runaways and that young men often visited the house.
"I thought he was a father figure to those kids and I got adjusted to the fact that there were boys at his house," said Calderon.
Berdella also organized a neighborhood watch program.
"He led us to believe he was a nice guy, a leader in the community," Calderon said. "He was very active and made us feel like second-class residents because we were not active."
Berdella owned a curio shop called Bob's Bazaar Bizarre. Replicas of skulls, faces of dragons and demons as well as ornaments from foreign countries were among the items he sold.
His calling card, according to The Kansas City Times, read: "I rise from death, I kill death, and death kills me. ... Although I carry poison in my head the antidote can be found in my tail, which I bite with rage."
Paul Howell, the father of a missing youth, said he suspected something was wrong almost four years ago. Howell said his son was last seen with Berdella before disappearing in 1984.
When Berdella appeared for a court hearing Monday, Howell lunged at him and had to be restrained. Berdella pleaded innocent to seven counts of forcible sodomy, one of felonious restraint and one of first-deg----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jul 24 1988
^PM-Another Look: KC-Gangs
^Kansas City Group Fighting LA Gangs' Infiltration
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) _ With Los Angeles gangs spreading their drug-dealing to Kansas City, a citizens' anti-crime group is fighting to keep the city's youth from falling prey to the lure of flash and money.
Members of two gangs - the Bloods, who identify themselves by wearing red clothing or red bandannas, and the Crips, who wear blue - have been infiltrating Kansas City for months.
On May 13, a member of the Crips was arrested after he arrived in Kansas City by train from Los Angeles, allegedly carrying more than 20 pounds of cocaine worth $1.2 million.
Police in dozens of cities are alarmed that the Los Angeles gangs are exporting their drug trade. Earlier this month, 50 law enforcement officers from 11 cities in the Midwest and the West attended a two-day conference in Kansas City to develop a national strategy to fight the gangs.
But long before, members of the 11-year-old Ad Hoc Group Against Crime began drawing their own battle lines in the anti-gang, anti-drug war.
Ad Hoc has had success in helping police solve murders, rapes and robberies. Now the group is also focusing on keeping the young from becoming casualties of drugs.
Ad Hoc, a grass-roots organization whose 240 members are mostly black, was created in 1977 to ease tensions between blacks and police. It has since grown into a citizens' anti-crime group meeting monthly, and anyone is eligible to join.
Drugs have been a problem for years, but Ad Hoc founder Alvin Brooks says that now, some streets "have been taken over by pushers."
In one housing development he cited, small groups of young drug dealers, many wearing blue and red, lounge in the shade of trees. Parked nearby are shiny, new luxury sedans, incongruous among the rows of drab, three-story brick buildings.
A police officer patrolling the area said some of the young men wearing blue or red were Crips and Bloods.
To a youngster raised in a poor neighborhood, a drug dealer driving a luxury car with a pocket full of cash can be someone to admire. A teen-ager working as a lookout, decoy or courier for a dealer can earn more in a day than he could in a week in a minimum-wage job.
Ad Hoc has approached the dealers head-on. For more than two years, it has conducted harassment campaigns against suspected drug houses, in some cases rolling caskets past, carrying signs and warning with bullhorns that pushers should leave.
"We did not feel at any time that we were encroaching on the rights of drug dealers," Brooks said, "but felt they were encroaching on the rights of the community, by their drug-dealing."
Hoping to show the unglamorous side of drugs, Ad Hoc is organizing trips to penitentiaries and to courts for drug trials. Earlier this month, 24 youths joined in the first prison visit; Brooks hopes 400 will do so by summer's end.
"This is not so much to scare the kids, but to let them see and hear what their idolized status-symbol role models are doing to the community, and to see the end results of drug dealing," said Brooks, who is Kansas City's director of human relations.
Ad Hoc, which is supported by private donations, plans to begin instructing parents how to recognize signs that their children are becoming involved with gangs or drugs.
The group recently opened a youth drug abuse hotline, and although it hasn't been publicized, volunteer workers answering the telephones have been overwhelmed with calls, Brooks said.
The phone line exists so callers can report suspected drug users, ask questions about drugs, and discuss their own problems.
In late June, Ad Hoc counselors, some of whom are reformed drug users, began visiting the homes of children identified as just getting involved in drugs, to try to get the parents and children together to discuss the problem, Brooks said.
Brooks said some parents may consider the counselors intrusive, but that the effort had to be made.
"We can not wait around until drugs strike a person and he or she is destroyed," he said. "We have to at least broach the subject."
Ad Hoc workers try to help teen-agers find jobs and expose them to organizations such as the Boy's Club.
The presence of gangs raises the stakes, and Brooks said killings could increase unless action is taken.
"We're aware of the amount of drugs and guns out there in the streets of Kansas City, and a spark can ignite it all," he said.
Capt. Sylvester Winston, who heads the police department's homicide unit, has a particular interest in seeing Ad Hoc's efforts work.
Winston, who has been a member of Ad Hoc almost since its inception, says at least 50 percent of the homicides in the city are directly related to drugs.
About 80 percent of all homicides in the city have been solved in the past year, due in part to Ad Hoc's help, Winston said.
Ad Hoc, he said, has a close relationship with the police and great respect in the community.
Asked if he feared it might turn into a vigilante group, Winston said members realize they must obey the laws but added, "(It) could if dope dealers keep killing our kids." ree assault. He failed to post the $500,000 bond.
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Jul 25 1989
^AM-Major Con
^Kansas Man Made Up Tales of Being POW Rescuer, General, CIA Officer
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) _ Robert S. Lyons wooed ladies with tales of his exploits as the nation's youngest major general, his work for the CIA and National Security Council, his rescue of hundreds of POWs from Vietnam.
He showed acquaintances copies of a publication called the Pentagon Gazette, with a cover picture of him in an Army shirt with general's stars on the epaulets. The newsletter claimed to be a special-edition tribute to one of "Washington's well-known, best-kept secrets."
But on Monday, the 35-year-old water purification unit salesman pleaded guilty in federal court to falsely impersonating a federal officer.
His guilty plea was in connection with a story he had told a girlfriend - that he was an Army general working for the CIA and the NSC, and that he needed $1,000 to get out of the CIA, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Leon Patton.
"He told the woman he was trying to disassociate himself from the CIA, that he needed $1,000 to cover bad checks he had written, and that they were holding that over his head to keep him in the CIA," Patton said.
The woman gave him a check on Jan. 31, and Lyons has since repaid the money, he said.
Lyons, contacted by telephone Tuesday, did not want to discuss the case.
"I really don't have nothing to say," he said before hanging up.
Patton said Tuesday the whole thing came undone when Lyons told his girlfriend he had been convicted in the Iran-Contra arms deal, had lost his military retirement, and that because of the possibility of terrorist attack he was under protection of the Secret Service.
The government found out about Lyons when the woman contacted the Secret Service to check the story, Patton said.
Lyons did serve in the Army, Patton said, and was given an honorable discharge - as a private.
Officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., have seen the bogus copy of the Pentagon Gazette and they were not impressed.
"That's the first thing that got me, was what this guy was wearing on the front of the Pentagon Gazette - an open-collar shirt with a gold chain around his neck," Lt. Col. John Garlinger said Tuesday. "No military officer, I don't care if he's a second lieutenant or a general, will wear an open-collar shirt with a gold chain around his neck."
Garlinger got a copy of the bogus newsletter from the owner of a uniform store in Leavenworth, the town on the edge of Fort Leavenworth. Lyons had plunked down a copy of the newsletter at the store as a way of identifying himself as a general to buy a general's uniform, he said.
The five-page edition of the Pentagon Gazette carried around by Lyons, dated August 1988, said he "successfully brought back 285 live POWs and the remains of over 300 missing POWs and MIAs" from Vietnam in 1983, an event supposedly overshadowed by the dedication of the Vietnam veterans wall and memorial in Washington, D.C.
Bob Sturm, the police chief in Mission, Kan., the Kansas City suburb where Lyons lives, said Lyons also wore a general's uniform into a print shop in town to get the article printed.
"You can lie and be creative about it and sometimes get by," said Garlinger. "But this kind of stuff in the Pentagon Gazette is so outrageous."
"Obviously, however, he did convince some folks that he was telling the truth," he said.
Sentencing for Lyons is set for Sept. 25. he faces a maximum of three years in prison and fines of $250,000.
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Jun 14 1990
^PM-Paupers' Graveyard
^Paupers' Graveyard: Only the Dead Know Hart Island
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ The city couldn't provide them homes when they were alive. But after the two men died - killed when their cave beneath a razed building collapsed - they were given a final resting place on a grassy, quiet island.
Quiet because only the dead reside on Hart Island. About 700,000 bodies are buried on the 100-acre island. A paupers' graveyard for 121 years, it is among the most intensively used pieces of real estate in New York City.
Miguel Marrero and Jose Diaz were buried Wednesday, 34 days after the shelter they dug collapsed in a rainstorm.
The body of a third man who died with them was claimed by his family. But because the bodies of Marrero and Diaz lay unclaimed in the morgue for more than two weeks, they were sent to Hart Island.
A ferry bearing a stack of 14 pine caskets containing the bodies of Marrero, Diaz and other indigents chugged to the island in Long Island Sound, about a mile from the borough of the Bronx.
Diaz's and Marrero's names were written in black marker on their rough-hewn caskets. Another casket had the markings UNK WHT M, for unknown white male.
The bodies headed for Hart Island are not embalmed and the caskets are thin. That way, nature can reclaim them and the burial plots can be used again in a few decades, in a macabre recycling program.
"A box sometimes falls apart as we're moving it and a body rolls out," said Jerome DiSisto, a corrections officer accompanying the burial detail. "If that happens, we just get an empty box, put the body in and that's all."
Capt. Gene Ruppert, another corrections official, said an average of 1,500 adults are buried each year on the island, in addition to 1,500 infants, most of them stillborn. A quarter or more of those buried are believed to have been homeless.
The Corrections Department manages the island and all burials are performed by inmates, who earn 50 cents an hour, department spokesman Tom Antenen said.
The few buildings on the island, such as a onetime insane asylum, are overgrown with vegetation, except for a recently abandoned prison barracks, which still has fences with concertina wire.
Every plot of 150 bodies has a white marker. The location of each body is recorded in case a relative comes to claim it. About 90 bodies are exhumed each year.
Al Saunders, a city employee, uses a backhoe to dig the trench where the caskets are laid two across and stacked three high. He has buried thousands of coffins since 1984 - and has had to dig a few up.
"It isn't the nicest job going, but it has to be done," he said. "You have to develop a callous attitude, because how much death can you see without it having an effect on you?"
Saunders said one of his predecessors became so preoccupied with death he had nightmares and quit.
The prisoners, many shirtless in the sun, hoisted Diaz's casket into the trench, then put three more inside. No words were said as Diaz and Marrero were buried. The inmates reached for the next casket and the next until their chore was done.
Saunders dropped the soil onto the common grave with his backhoe. The prisoners smoothed out the loam with rakes and shovels.
Diaz and Marrero were known as Mike and Joe, according to a New York Newsday article that appeared shortly after their deaths.
"They were good people," one friend, Daisy Aldebedo, told the newspaper. "They got high, but they worked for their money. They never robbed anyone."
The city planned to build low-income housing on the lot where Diaz, Marrero and the third man, Benjamin Olivera, were killed.
There are an estimated 70,000 homeless people in New York City. In recent weeks, hundreds of homeless people have been evicted from train stations and bank-machine vestibules.
City shelters have a reputation for violence, and many homeless people shun them because of rules that residents must be drug- and alcohol-free, said Marjorie Valleau, a spokeswoman for the city Human Resources Administration.
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Jul 2 1990
^AM-Marcos-Cowboy Attorney
^Gunning for Justice Lawyer Notches Another Win With Marcos Verdict With AM-Marcos Trial, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Cowboy attorney Gerry Spence can cut another notch onto his six-shooter - he won an acquittal for Imelda Marcos on racketeering and fraud charges Monday, adding to his long list of courtroom triumphs.
Many of the successes of the lanky, silver-haired attorney have been played out before juries in courtrooms of the High Plains and the mountains of his native Wyoming. Although a nationally known attorney, this was Spence's first trial in New York, and it was a rough one. He often wrangled with U.S. District Judge John F. Keenan during the three-month trial. The judge complained about Spence's manner and cross-examinat ion of witnesses.
After one acrimonious blowup with Keenan, Spence told him he "never felt so unwelcome in any courtroom. The jury adores you, judge, and they hate me."
But after the jury acquitted the former Philippines first lady of looting her homeland's treasury to buy real estate, jewelry and art, Spence said he had always known the jury would be on his side.
Spence, who wore a Stetson cowboy hat and boots to court and came to New York with a reputation of being virtually unbeatable, had trouble as soon as the trial began.
He stumbled during his what he later conceded were the worst opening arguments of his career. His colleagues said he blundered in cross-examing several government witnesses, ignored or misread earlier testimony and elicited answers that were unexpected and damaging.
Uncharacteristic behavior for a lawyer who Time magazine once called "The Fastest Gun in the West." The magazine said a key to Spence's success was his exhaustive preparation.
The lawyer, who has offices in a log cabin in Jackson, Wyo., has had a long string of successes, many of them described in his book, "Gunning for Justice."
In a lawsuit against Penthouse, held in a courtroom in Cheyenne, Spence referred to the magazine's publisher, Bob Guccione, as an arrogant New Yorker.
He pointed out the New York publisher to the jurors as "the gentleman sitting over there in the velvet pants," a type of attire rarely seen in the Cowboy State.
In a 1979 lawsuit against Kerr-McGee Corp., an energy conglomerate, he repeatedly referred to the corporation's lawyers as "the men in grey."
Spence made his national reputation by winning that lawsuit on behalf of the family of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear plant worker who had become contaminated with plutonium.
But Spence found that the shoe, or the cowboy boot, was on the other foot in the Manhattan courtroom.
Court officials and other lawyers scoffed at his cowboy attire. Spence said felt "great irony" at the ridicule.
Other lawyers on Mrs. Marcos' four-lawyer team, of which Spence was the leader, said his rambling opening statement and shambling courtroom manner had got him off to a bad start and that things had steadily deteriorated.
At one point, the other Marcos attorneys pressured Mrs. Marcos to drop Spence, who was hired for a $5 million fee not long before the trial opened April 3.
During the dispute Mr. Spence attributed the problem to a difference in styles.
"In high-profile cases, there's a lot of conflicting interests," he told The New York Times at the time. "I'm here because she wants me here."
In the end, Spence said prosecutors just didn't have the evidence to compel the jury to convicted Mrs. Marcos.
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Aug 14 1990
^AM-Ortega
^Ortega Says His Life After Electoral Defeat Is 'Rich'
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Daniel Ortega says he doesn't miss being president of Nicaragua and is enjoying his new role as a leader of the political opposition.
Ortega, who was defeated in elections Feb. 25 after ruling his Central American nation for 10 years, said in an interview Tuesday that his Sandinista National Liberation Front was revamping itself to appeal to a broader range of Nicaraguan voters.
The Sandinistas this month began holding "public debates" in Nicaragua for people to tell Sandinista leaders what they did wrong and what they did right during their rule, Ortega said.
"The door is open for everyone to talk," the former president said.
The criticism will lead to a reformation of the party's policies and objectives, with an eye on the country's next elections, in 1996, Ortega said.
He said it was too early to tell if he will be the Sandinista's presidential candidate.
Ortega came to New York this week to maintain ties with supporters here - he gave a speech in a church Monday night to 2,500 people - and to contact publishers for a book he plans to write.
The book might be a work of fiction based on fact, he said, drawing on his own experiences.
Ortega acknowledges that the Sandinistas committed several errors, which sent many Nicaraguans over to the side of U.S.-supported Contra rebels who fought for almost a decade to overthrow the leftist government, at a cost of some 40,000 lives.
In the days after the Sandinistas toppled Anastasio Somoza in July 1979, the dictator's supporters, the Somocistas, were targeted to have their large land holdings redistributed to the poor.
"Some landowners were affected who weren't precisely Somocistas," Ortega acknowledged.
"The urgent demand for land made us act in a hasty way, giving a very negative impression to rural people," he said. "This gave the Contras the opportunity to say the Sandinistas want to take land away from everyone."
Ortega said the Sandinistas also mistreated the Miskito Indians, who opposed the government and were forcibly removed from their homelands in northeastern Nicaragua in the early 1980s. The Miskito and other Indian tribes joined the Contra's armed resistance to Sandinista rule, largely because of the relocation program.
Ortega appeared relaxed during the 45-minute interview, conducted in Spanish at the apartment of a friend of his former foreign minister, Miguel D'Escoto, who also came on the trip to the New York.
The apartment on New York's exclusive Upper East Side, decorated with a Picasso and other priceless artworks, seemed an incongruous setting for the former revolutionary.
Ortega, who robbed banks in his early teens to get money for the anti- Somoza insurrection, wore a blue blazer and necktie.
"It's unprecedented for a revolutionary who fought a dictatorship with weapons to later win power and then become the opposition ... within a democratic context that he himself helped create," he said. "So I think this is a rich experience."
The Sandinistas have organized two strikes since President Violeta Chamorro was inaugurated April 25, imperiling her new government and raising fears that the Sandinistas would try to wrest power away from her.
Ortega said the Sandinistas will not use forcible means. "If we are going to return to running the government of Nicaragua, it will be through elections."
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Aug 28 1990
^AM-Gulf-US-Dissent
^Some Suspect U.S. Would Fight War to Benefit Oil Companies
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ The deployment of troops to the Persian Gulf has given rise to scattered protests that are focusing more on economics than on the political concerns expressed during the Vietnam era.
Many of the demonstrators say the soldiers are risking their lives for oil companies and that the financially strapped nation cannot afford the deployment.
"Hell no, we won't go, we won't die for Texaco," 200 protesters shouted Saturday outside the White House, echoing words used by demonstrators during the Vietnam War but adding a twist: the name of a U.S. oil company.
Opposition to the Vietnam War in the '60s and '70s and to U.S. military policy in Central America in the '80s focused on whether the United States had the right to interfere in the politics of other nations. Opponents of U.S. gulf policy, a minority according to opinion polls, are centering their arguments on the morality of intervention for economic ends.
"We have to tell each other that we will not kill and we will not die for Exxon, for Gulf Petroleum," peace activist Becky Minnich said last week during a meeting of 100 dissidents in Minneapolis.
The argument might get a sympathetic ear.
An Associated Press poll conducted earlier this month said 86 percent of Americans believed the oil companies took advantage of the Iraqi invasion and unfairly raised gasoline prices. The survey of 1,004 adults had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, speaking at a news conference in New York last week, called the U.S. military buildup "aggression designed simply to dominate oil."
Another of the protesters' arguments is that America - $4.16 trillion in debt - cannot afford a massive troop deployment costing billions of dollars.
"They now run up a military bill to the top of the sky and take it out of federal housing money for Brooklyn," wrote Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer Prize- winning columnist for New York Newsday.
Many protesters don't believe protecting Middle East oil from Iraq is worth American lives.
"I kissed my son goodbye today," college professor Alex Molnar wrote in a letter to Bush published in The New York Times. "He is a 21-year-old Marine. You have ordered him to Saudi Arabia. ... For what? Cheap gas?"
Images of soldiers boarding transport planes for the Middle East have become a daily staple of television news, but not all are going willingly.
One serviceman, Marine Cpl. Jeffrey Paterson, said he will not fight a war over oil and has filed for conscientious objector status to prevent his deployment to the gulf.
The AP poll said 64 percent of Americans supported deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia to help defend it against a possible Iraqi attack, while 22 percent were opposed. But the poll said 52 percent of Americans opposed using ground forces to push Iraq out of Kuwait. Thirty-two percent favored such a move.
If the United States is drawn into a war to force Iraq out of Kuwait, which is the intent of the economic embargo, the few voices of protest in the U.S. will likely grow.
Among the scattered voices raised in recent days:
- In Amherst, Mass., about 15 protesters elicited a few honks in support from passing motorists, but also the shouted comment: "Get out of America."
- At Westover Air Force Base, Mass., where planes being used to supply troops in the gulf are based, two people were arrested on charges of disturbing the peace Monday during a small demonstration.
- In San Francisco, 15 protesters at the Federal Building held signs saying "Shed No Blood for Oil" and promised to continue holding pickets there until the troops come home.
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Nov 5 1990
^PM-Queer Nation
^Militants Use Confrontation to Fight Anti-Gay Violence
^LaserPhoto NY307 sent Nov. 1.
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ It was a quiet night at King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut bar - if quiet is the word for an East Village saloon where tattooed toughs gather to booze, play pool and listen to heavy metal.
Gradually, a very different crowd filtered in. They wore T-shirts with the legend "Queer Nation" emblazoned over a map of the United States, and settled in under the ultraviolet-lit painting of a skull on fire.
A beefy pool player was about to take a shot when he noticed a pair of the newcomers standing beside him. His jaw dropped.
The two men were kissing, mouth to mouth.
"Oh no 3/8 Oh no 3/8" the man with the cue cried, retreating in revulsion to the other side of the table. "Stop that."
They ignored him. This was why they had come - to agitate, to confront people they blame for an increase in attacks on homosexuals. They are Queer Nation - one of several militant gay organizations which have discarded polite persuasion in favor of grab-them-by-the-lapels defiance.
There are Queer Nation chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Providence, Toronto, Boulder, Colo., and Ithaca, N.Y. Four-hundred people attend bi-weekly meetings in New York.
Where groups like the Gay Men's Health Crisis responded to AIDS by lobbying for help and by providing services to sufferers, the new generation - ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power - takes to the streets.
ACT-UP has thrown bagels and noodles at a hotel where President Bush was appearing, blocked Wall Street, disrupted services in St. Patrick's Cathedral - all protests against what it claims is political, business and religious indifference to the epidemic.
It is "a whole new attitude," said Randy Shilts, a national correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of the critically acclaimed account of the AIDS crisis, "And the Band Played On."
The new militants are "rebelling against straight society but also against older gay people," said Shilts, 39.
It is a pattern that repeats itself in many social movements - radicalization followed by retrenchment and new radicalization, said Jim Jasper, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University.
"The newcomers become disappointed in how ossified the old groups are" and take their own action, Jasper said.
---
"Any faggot gets within a one-foot range, I'm going to knock him out," the pool player declared loudly to anyone who would listen.
But more militants crowded into the little room, outnumbering the regulars. "We're here and we're queer, we're here and we're queer," they chanted.
The chanting grew so loud it drowned out the heavy metal music and the pool player, who was shouting "Shut up, shut up" to no avail.
Later, outside the bar, the homosexuals singled out a skinhead who had shouted a slur. They shouted "Homophobe" and pointed their fingers at him.
They left. "We'll be back and we'll be stronger," they chanted. And: "We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous - get used to it."
---
It is safe to say that the 50 demonstrators who visited King Tut's Wah-Wah Hut on that summer night - and had staged a "kiss-in" at the Alcatraz bar down the block earlier in the evening - won no converts. They didn't expect to.
"We are breaking down the barriers of unspoken segregation," said Queer Nation spokesman Jay Blotcher.
"It isn't going to happen in a week. This harkens back to the Woolworth counter in the South and the blacks coming back again and again and again. Like them, we are a disenfranchised minority fighting for our rights."
Queer Nation's founders were active in ACT-UP, and remain members. "We felt that there were other issues, such as the increase in violence against gays and lesbians, that had to be addressed," said co-founder Alan Klein.
Two of the four men who helped found Queer Nation had themselves been victims of gay bashing, and Klein said the group was formed because the men felt there was no organized response to attacks on homosexuals.
The group organized its first demonstration in April, when a thousand marchers protested a pipe-bombing outside a gay bar that injured three people.
Through Sept. 30 of this year, there have been 88 anti-gay crimes in New York City, said Capt. Charles Senzel of the police department's bias unit. Police said there were 47 such crimes for all of 1989 and 43 for 1988.
But the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, which provides legal help and counseling for victims of gay bashing, gave much higher figures. It listed 425 anti-gay crimes in the city through the end of September, compared to 338 for all of 1989, according to David Kirschenbaum, a spokesman for the group.
Police said privately the wide discrepancy may be due to the fact that police have to prove an attack was based on the victim's sexual orientation.
"Our message is gays and lesbians will no longer be silent victims," Blotcher said. "We are here and we're a force to be reckoned with."
Another group, the Pink Panthers, patrols streets to protect gays. The members carry no weapons, but walkie-talkies, cameras and whistles. The purpose of the cameras are to photograph gay bashers the patrols apprehend.
The group claims 200 members - all trained in self-defense, according to founder Gerri Wells - and is patrolling Greenwich Village.
"We will hold people for the police and we will bash back if necessary," said Ms. Wells, a lesbian. "We will use equal force (to hold a gay basher fighting to escape)."
The Panthers have not detained anyone since the group was formed in June but patrols have appeared as gays were harassed on four or five occasions, she said. The culprits ran when the Pink Panthers arrived, she said.
"Everyone has a right to defend themselves," said Inspector Paul Sanderson, head of the police department's bias unit. "The local patrols are good as long as they don't get out of hand. If they grab someone who's been beating up homosexuals and hold him until officers arrive, that's the kind of citizens' action that's needed."
"If I walk with my lover down the street, I face physical or verbal abuse," said Klein. "That's intolerable. I have to make important choices. I have to confront that bias. We have to fight for our rights and I think that can't be compromised."
The militants are not always so confrontational.
Queer Nation goes to shopping malls to distribute leaflets which note that gays have existed for centuries and which list some famous people who were homosexual. The leaflets are partially aimed at gay youths who may be despondent or even suicidal about their homosexuality, Blotcher said.
"There's no positive reinforcement from society for them," he said. "All you're told is you will live a life of alienation and disappointment. Adolescents crave acceptance, and this puts some of them over the edge.
"There's nothing out there to tell the kids, 'Hey, it's OK,' and that's why we do this."
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May 4 1991
^PM-Blade Runners
^Rollerblading Craze Cuts a New Figure on City Streets
^LaserPhoto NY4 of May 3
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ The weekend joggers and cyclists who once reigned supreme on park sidewalks across the nation are being elbowed aside by a new breed of knee-padded, Lycra-clad creatures who whiz by on polyurethane wheels at 30 mph.
These high-tech roller skaters are ushering in a booming new leisure fad - rollerblading, also known as in-line skating.
Their skates - molded boots with four or five wheels in a row - have also created a booming new leisure industry. Retail sales rocketed from $150,000 in 1984 to about $10 million in 1988 and are expected to double to $300 million in 1991, said Mary Haugen, a spokeswoman for Rollerblade Inc.
For roller skaters, the advancement in skate technology adds a whole new dimension of thrills and fun to their pastime.
"It's an unbelievable rush," said Max Langstaff, who spent a recent balmy day skating in New York's Central Park. "It's a cross between ice skating and downhill skiing. Imagine skating down a hill, it's like ... aaaahhhh 3/8"
As rock music blasted from a portable stereo, hundreds of people gathered on a recent Sunday to watch skaters speedily weave through a sloping obstacle course of cones. The crowd cheered when skaters, some on only one skate, others going backward, negotiated the course without knocking over a single cone.
Bladers as they're called propel themselves much like speed-skaters on ice, swinging their arms.
In-line skating has also become a hit in California, and in the Midwest where the two largest manufacturers of the skates are based: Rollerblade Inc. in Minnetonka, Minn., and First Team Sports in Blaine, Minn.
Rollerblade Inc. got its start in 1980 when two brothers, Scott and Brennan Olson, both high school hockey players, sought a way to keep in shape during the summer.
They sold their first pairs of the skates out of their parents' basement.
In 1984 the Olsons sold the company, which began promoting in-line skating as a new sport in 1986.
At Peck & Goodie, a skate rental and sales shop near Central Park, customers can rent skates for $10 for two hours, or buy a pair for $95 to $320.
New skaters making their way through Central Park traffic look like ducklings trying out their legs for the first time.
Many of the park's hard-core skaters go by nicknames like Blur, Blade and Gladiator. Some travel far to compete in rollerblade races.
"It was only last year that we started to see competitors come out, class athletes, so racing is still at a rough stage now," said Steve Novak, also known as Thud, a monicker he earned crashing into a car while skating.
Now the sport is poised to go international.
Nordica, a large Italian manufacturer of ski boots, bought half of Rollerblade Inc. in March and will market the skates in Europe and Japan, said Nordica spokesman Adalberto Muzio.
Suzanne Winick of New York began skating when she bought some blades last November.
"It's great," she said. "When you find a road that's smoothly paved you feel like you're on a sheet of ice. You just go."
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Sep 24 1991
^AM-Guatemala-Castro
^Guatemala President Says Castro Wants to Halt Aid to Guerrilla Movements
^LaserPhoto NYR24
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano said Tuesday that Cuba has halted aid to guerrillas in the Central American nation and Fidel Castro wants to stop supporting other Latin American rebel movements.
Serrano said he believed Castro's assertion that Guatemalan guerrillas, who are engaged in peace talks with the government, no longer get Cuban aid because there is no evidence of it.
"I am optimistic and I strongly believe that we are going to have a peace agreement," Serrano said in a meeting with executives and editors of The Associated Press.
Three decades of fighting between guerrillas and the Guatemalan army have claimed more than 100,000 lives.
Serrano, elected in January, was in the United States to visit the United Nations and President Bush.
In February, Serrano rebuffed a U.S. offer to restore some of the military aid suspended over Guatemala's poor human rights record, saying there were strings attached.
The human rights group Americas Watch said that during the first six months of Serrano's administration, "government forces continued to commit torture, murder, and disappearance with impunity."
Serrano listed several advances he says his administration has made in bringing human rights violators to justice. He cited the recent arrests of 13 military officers and enlisted men in two murder cases.
"It is difficult but we are making great progress," he said.
Anne Manuel, who co-wrote the recent Americas Watch report, said Tuesday the developments were "positive" but noted that no member of the security forces stands convicted of a human rights violation.
"There's a very, very long road between ordering someone to stand trial and conviction and punishment," Ms. Manuel said.
Serrano said that during an Ibero-American summit in Guadalajara, Mexico, in July, Castro assured him he no longer supported Guatemalan guerrillas.
Serrano said Castro indicated Cuba "was not interested in supporting these types of groups" because he "was looking for a better understanding among Latin American countries and it is one of the obstacles they have."
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Oct 6 1991
^BC-AP Arts: Nicaragua
^Documentary Tracks Down People Who Were in Photos of Sandinista Revolution
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ In 1978, a relatively unknown photojournalist named Susan Meiselas went to Nicaragua and landed in the middle of one of the biggest stories of the day - the opening salvos of the Sandinista revolution.
Now, 13 years later, Ms. Meiselas and co-producers Richard Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti look back at the revolution that toppled dictator Anastasio Somoza - and which, after fighting off a U.S.-backed insurgency for a decade, was rejected by Nicaraguan voters last year.
In "Pictures of a Revolution," shown at its world premiere Friday night at the New York Film Festival, the filmmakers tracked down the people who appeared in Ms. Meiselas' war photos more than a dozen years ago and let them tell their story.
The documentary, received enthusiastically by the packed house at Lincoln Center, conveys the crushed hopes of Nicaraguans and the feeling that the tens of thousands who died in the revolution and ensuing Contra war lost their lives needlessly.
The film flashes Ms. Meiselas' photos showing urban guerrilla warfare amid footage of the locations as they are now. The photos show danger and acts of heroism - a man with a .22-caliber rifle urging on his comrades against Somoza's National Guard, another hurling a Molotov cocktail.
The footage of present-day Nicaragua shows only bleak poverty.
"I thought better things would come (after the revolution), now I don't," says a woman in the film, wiping away her tears. "It's hard to even find food now."
The filmmakers tracked their subjects down to Miami, Toronto and to shacks lining dirt roads in Managua and other towns. One former National Guard officer and later a Contra commander, Mike Lima, was found in Florida working as a security guard.
"We killed for nothing, we died for nothing," says Lima, explaining that he now sees the Sandinistas and the Contras were puppets for the Soviet Union and Washington.
Some of the former Sandinista combatants also expressed frustration that little was gained because of their sacrifices, although one said it was enough that the National Guard was defeated and he would no longer have to fear their knock on the door.
Another Sandinista says the gains the revolutionaries tried to make were hamstrung by the U.S.-backed Contras and Washington's economic embargo. In her narration, Ms. Meiselas wonders how the Sandinista government would have fared without the intervention.
Ms. Meiselas told the audience after the 93-minute film that the filmmakers had no idea what they would find when they sought the people she had photographed years ago.
"You feel the despair, even among the ones who were most loyal (to the Sandinistas), who were most hopeful," she said. "We didn't think that was going to happen."
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Nov 25 1991
^AM-Burma-Suu Kyi
^Nobel Peace Prize Winner's Captors to Receive Book of Her Writings
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Burma's military rulers can expect a package in the mail soon: a collection of writings by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for more than two years.
The writings have been compiled and edited into a book by Mrs. Aung San's husband, Dr. Michael Aris. Titled "Freedom From Fear and Other Writings," it will appear in bookstores Dec. 10.
Aris, who hasn't seen his wife in nearly two years, said Monday he sent complimentary copies of the book last week to her captors "in the sincere hope that they, too, will read the book and hear its message ... of love and hope."
Suu Kyi, placed under house arrest in July 1989, probably is unaware of the book's publication and may not even know she won the Nobel this year, Aris told reporters.
Suu Kyi, 46, was the leader of the opposition party that won national elections by a landslide in May 1990 even while she was under house arrest. Military authorities in the south Asian nation have refused to relinquish power.
They have kept her incommunicado and Aris has had no contact with her for 16 months. He believes his wife, daughter of Burma's assassinated national hero Aung San, is in her home in Rangoon "totally alone, surrounded by armed guards."
"Since I received her last letter (on July 17, 1990) I have had absolutely no news of her whatsoever," said Aris, a Briton and visiting professor of Tibetan and Himalayan studies at Harvard University.
Aris, 45, wrote an introduction to the book and supplied many of the photographs from a family album.
The book includes excerpts of speeches she made before being placed under house arrest, as well as essays, letters and interviews.
Aris said the junta is willing to release his wife, but only if she goes into exile abroad - which she has refused to do.
"With the publication of her writings it can at least be said that her voice has been liberated," Aris said.
Vaclav Havel, the playwright and president of Czechoslovakia, nominated Suu Kyi for the Nobel. He wrote in the book's foreward that "by dedicating her life to the fight for human rights and democracy in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi is not only speaking out for justice in her own country, but also for all those who want to be free to choose their own destiny."
Aris said all he and the couple's two sons have heard of her lately are rumors.
"However, knowing her as I do, I know that her spirit is indomitable," he said. The two were married in 1972 in London, where they met in 1966.
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Dec 9 1991
^AM-Soviet-Reaction
^World Powers Focus on Nuclear Question in Changing Soviet Union With AM-Soviet-Republics, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
Undated (AP) _ World leaders kept a nervous eye Monday on the disintegrating Soviet Union, expressing concern about its nuclear weapons and whether the republics might erupt in warfare.
European Community leaders interrupted their summit in the Dutch town of Maastricht to discuss the breakup of the Soviet Union. They decided to send an envoy to the new commonwealth of Slavic republics, created on Sunday by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia.
British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said in Maastricht the EC would make clear to the commonwealth that agreements made by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev with the West - including arms control and foreign debt - "can't just be shrugged off."
Britain and France held a separate meeting and proposed a conference of European nuclear powers and the United States.
Washington called for the Soviet Union's massive nuclear arsenal to be placed under a unified command.
"We do not want to see a proliferation of independent nuclear states," State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said.
Most of the weapons are stored in Russia, but some are based in Ukraine, Byelorussia and Kazakhstan. The White House said it did not know who controlled the nuclear arsenal, but expressed confidence it was in safe hands.
Uncertain about Gorbachev's status, Washington declared its willingness to work with "whatever government emerges or whatever form of confederation emerges."
The State Department, although applauding the establishment of the new commonwealth, said there were no immediate plans for formal diplomatic relations.
Others expressed concern that the former Soviet republics would turn on each other, letting simmering ethnic tensions explode as they have in Yugoslavia, where thousands have been killed in a continuing civil war.
"The old Soviet Union is dissolving," Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlueter said in Maastricht. "It would be deeply tragic if the Soviet Union ends up like Yugoslavia."
In Germany, the conservative daily Berliner Morgenpost said in an editorial prepared for Tuesday's editions that the new Slavic commonwealth "may be more cooperative and easy to assess than Gorbachev's faded dream union."
Canadian External Affairs Minister Barbara McDougall said it was amazing how much the Soviet Union had changed without violence.
"We will look forward to working with the republics and to hearing more about the kind of form they see this taking," Ms. McDougall said in Ottawa.
In Tokyo, the Asahi newspaper quoted a senior foreign ministry official as saying the Japanese government was concerned that chaos would prevent the establishment of a unified government structure.
On the issue of foreign aid, Japanese officials said Monday that if the recent commitment by Russia and seven other republics to jointly accept responsibility for repaying the Soviet Union's external debt remains in effect, decisions on aid and debt relief should go forward.
In Jerusalem, Israel radio said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir expressed concern about the continuation of Jewish immigration. More than 300,000 Soviet Jews have come to Israel since mid-1989 under relaxed Soviet emigration policies.
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Jan 5 1992
^AM-UN-Salvador
^Salvadoran Government Fails to Arrive at Talks Date
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Negotiators for Salvadoran guerrillas scolded the government Sunday for failing to show up for a scheduled meeting on their U.N.-brokered peace accord.
Under the peace agreement signed on New Year's Eve, the rebel and government sides in El Salvador's civil war were to have met Sunday to negotiate a timetable for demobilizing the guerrilla army of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, known as the FMLN.
Four FMLN negotiators appeared at U.N. headquarters at dusk Sunday and headed for a negotiating room, where Alvaro de Soto, the U.N. mediator, was waiting for them. But the government delegation did not show up.
"The government owes an explanation to the nation and to the international community as to why they were not here ready to begin this meeting today," said Roberto Canas, the FMLN spokesman.
Mauricio Sandoval, the government spokesman in San Salvador, said negotiators were arriving Sunday night in New York for talks Monday. He gave no explanation for their delay.
El Salvador's 12-year civil war has claimed more than 75,000 lives. Other issues remaining to be resolved include land reform, reducing the size of the Salvadoran army, and incorporating rebel fighters into a new civilian police force to replace the current militarized police force that has committed many human rights abuses.
The Dec. 31 agreement sets a deadline of Friday for the U.S.-backed government of Alfredo Cristiani and the rebels to negotiate a timetable for implementation.
It the talks do not produce "positive results" by Friday, both sides must submit to binding arbitration by the new U.N. secretary-general, Butros Ghali. Any unresolved matters are to be presented to Ghali on Jan. 14.
The final peace pact is to be signed in Mexico City on Jan. 16.
The peace pact - the fruit of 21 months of U.N.-mediated negotiations led by former Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar and de Soto, his Peruvian compatriot - provides for a definitive cessation of hostilities Feb. 1.
Joaquin Villalobos, the leader-among-equals of the five-member general command of the FMLN, arrived from New York in Managua on Sunday to meet with Sandinista leaders, and said the peace process was "irreversible."
"We are now before the harvest of all these years of fighting, and we hope that peace and stability in El Salvador will also be carried over to Nicaragua," Villalobos said.
Nicaragua is technically at peace but skirmishes and tension continue among the conservative Nicaraguan government, the leftist Sandinista movement it ousted in 1990 elections, and former Contra fighers.
In San Salvador, Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas said in his Sunday homily that a Catholic priest, Jose Ignacio Meza, had disappeared and was presumed kidnapped Friday in an area east of the capital. No other details were immediately available.
Priests frequently have been targeted by right-wing troops or paramilitary forces in El Salvador.
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Jan 5 1992
^AM-Yugoslavia
^U.N. Envoy: Croatian Truce Could Pave Way for Peacekeepers Photos ZAG1,XZAG2
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A U.N. envoy on Sunday raised expectations that up to 10,000 peacekeepers could be sent to Yugoslavia, saying warring factions in secessionist Croatia appear to be finally honoring a cease-fire pact.
In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, a senior Croatian commander also was optimistic about the truce, the 15th to try to end the six-month civil war.
"If it holds for the next two weeks, the chances are (good) it will turn into a permanent cease-fire," said Gen. Imra Agotic after meeting with Col. Mile Glumac, a federal army negotiator. The two men agreed to meet again Thursday in Pecs, Hungary, 20 miles from the Croatian border.
U.N. officials have said they would not send peacekeepers until a firm truce is reach in Croatia, where republic fighters have battled the Serb-led federal army and ethnic Serbs opposed to secession. Previous truces collapsed almost immediately.
Thousands of people have been killed, and special U.N. envoy Cyrus Vance said Saturday more than 600,000 refugees have fled fighting since Croatia declared independence June 25.
Vance met Sunday with U.N. Secretary-General Butros Ghali, and said Ghali on Monday will deliver a report on Yugoslavia to the Security Council, which has authority to send a peacekeeping force.
Vance, who returned from Yugoslavia last week, did not disclose details of the meeting with Ghali. But it was clear Vance's report focused on possible deployment of a peacekeeping force, which officials said could be as large as 10,000 soldiers.
Vance said specific details about a possible peacekeeping force would be addressed in Ghali's report to the 15-nation Security Council.
The New York Times, quoting diplomats and other officials, reported in Monday editions that Ghali would ask the council to send about 50 military observers as quickly as possible to Yugoslavia.
Asked if he was optimistic about peace, Vance broke into a smile. "I am pleased the cease-fire appears to be holding and I hope that this will continue."
Ghali also grinned and appeared upbeat as he left the meeting, but did not talk to reporters.
Vance, a former Secretary of State, said he would try to reach top Yugoslav officials and military leaders later Sunday to encourage them to abide by the truce, agreed Friday.
Asked when officials would be confident a cease-fire was holding, Vance said: "I think that we have to see for more than a couple of days, three, four, five days - I really don't want to put any countdown. We have to see."
U.N. peacekeepers are stationed at various trouble spots around the world, including the Iraq-Kuwait border, southern Lebanon and Cyprus.
In Croatia, Sunday was one of the most peaceful days in months. Businesses reopened in some towns, and people ventured from bomb shelters.
"The sunny weather reflects the mood of the people," said Darinka Zoric of Biograd Na Moru, 120 miles southwest of Zagreb. "Everybody came out from their cellars Saturday frightened like mice. Everybody agrees that the only thing that matters is that we're alive."
The 33-year-old lawyer said the people in the town of 20,000 spent the weekend cleaning up after five days of heavy artillery attacks, sweeping away glass shards and covering blown-out store fronts with sheet metal.
In nearby Zadar, some restaurants and cafes opened Saturday for the first time in days. Public lighting, off since August, was turned back on late Friday in Osijek, an embattled Croat-held city in eastern Croatia.
The Serb-led forces once held about a third of Croatia, but Croatian troops have recently regained some territory along the 350-mile battle front.
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and top army commanders have been weakened by army desertions and growing economic problems. On Sunday, the Belgrade-based newspaper Politika, close to the Serbian government, accused thousands of ethnic Serbian refugees of living off Serbian aid while refusing to fight.
A Croatian Defense Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, suggested fighting could increase after Monday, when the Orthodox Christian Serbs celebrate Christmas.
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Jan 6 1992
^PM-Yugoslavia-UN
^U.N. Chief Sending 50 Observers, But No Peacekeeping Force Yet With PM-Yugoslavia
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Secretary-General Bhutros Ghali said today he is immediately sending 50 U.N. truce observers to Yugoslavia but is not ready to dispatch a larger peacekeeping force.
In a report to the Security Council, Ghali said the 50 U.N. military liaison officers would work with both sides to maintain a cease-fire that began in secessionist Croatia on Friday.
But he said he would not recommend deploying thousands of peacekeeping troops until he was convinced Yugoslav leaders had accepted a plan calling for a continued cease-fire, creation of demilitarized zones and eventual withdrawal of all Yugoslav federal forces from Croatia.
The Security Council has the authority to send peacekeepers to areas of conflict.
Thousands of people have died in fighting that began after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from the Yugoslav federation June 25. An estimated 600,000 people are refugees.
Serbia, the largest republic, has opposed independence for Croatia and other republics unless ethnic Serb areas are allowed to remain a part of Yugoslavia. But the Serb-dominated federal army has been weakened by desertions and Serbia is struggling with economic problems stemming from the war.
Ghali said he was still wary of the situation in Yugoslavia, even though "there has arisen in recent days a glimmer of hope that the situation might improve." He said he was unconvinced that all leaders in Yugoslavia supported the concept for ending the war that was outlined on Dec. 11 by his predecessor, Javier Perez de Cuellar.
Without singling out anyone by name, Ghali said, "Public statements made as recently as the past two days by certain leaders of the Serb communities in Croatia have given cause for some concern."
A U.N. official said Ghali was referring to Milan Babic, the leader of Serb insurgents who have declared a Serb republic in the Krajina region of western Croatia. Babic derailed an effort by Vance to get a truce in place last month.
The U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, cited Babic's vow not to disarm his fighters until Croatian militiamen also laid down their weapons.
At one time, the Yugoslav army and Serb militants controlled more than a third of Croatia's territory. But Croatian troops have recaptured some territory in recent weeks.
The 50 liaison officers being sent to Yugoslavia would be attached to the headquarters of both the federal army and Croatia's national guard as well as to units of the opposing forces.
The officers will "promote maintenance of the cease-fire by facilitating communication between the two sides and by helping them to resolve difficulties that might arise," Ghali said in his report to the Security Council.
Ghali said a peacekeeping force "could not be established in Yugoslavia without sustained evidence of the willingness and ability of the leaders on both sides to ensure that a cease-fire is respected."
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Jan 6 1992
^AM-UN-Salvador
^Salvadoran Talks Reportedly on Track
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Salvadoran government and rebel negotiators, facing a five-day deadline to iron out their differences, renewed U.N.-mediated talks Monday to arrange a definitive cease-fire in their nation's civil war.
Both sides appeared willing to comply with an accord signed Dec. 31 that calls for them to settle outstanding issues - including a timetable for demobilizing the leftist guerrilla army - by Friday or have U.N. Secretary- General Butros Ghali arbitrate the issues.
Roberto Canas, a spokesman for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, appeared optimistic that the final peace accord would be signed as scheduled Jan. 16 in Mexico City.
Canas said the heads of state of the countries backing the peace process - including Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico and Spain - should attend the signing ceremony.
"It will be a very strong signal that the international community is clearly supporting and guaranteeing compliance with the accord," Canas told reporters as he entered U.N. headquarters.
A news release Sunday from the office of Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said the presidents of Venezuela and Colombia and Spanish Premier Felipe Gonzalez would attend the signing ceremony.
He said $1 billion in international aid would be needed in the next five years to rebuild El Salvador. An informal cease-fire will be formalized on Feb. 1 to end the war that has left an estimated 75,000 people dead.
Although the Salvadoran government delegation failed to appear at the United Nations on Sunday, as specified in the Dec. 31 agreement, the talks still appeared to be on track, said a U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"But it remains to be seen if they resolve the remaining issues themselves or have the secretary-general decide them," the official said.
Chief Salvadoran government negotiator Oscar Santamaria said his delegation had advised the U.N. days ago that it planned to reconvene the talks Monday.
One of the issues left unresolved by the Dec. 31 agreement was land reform. The chief U.N. negotiator, Alvaro de Soto, has disclosed that agreement has been reached on a transfer of rural lands, giving special treatment to former combatants on both sides.
"Facilities are to be given in terms of credit for them to be able to farm this land, and a draft agrarian code is to be sent to the legislative assembly within 12 months," de Soto said.
Another issue is the creation of a new civil police force. De Soto said last week that both parties agreed most of the students in a planned police academy will be people who were not members of the FMLN or government security forces.
"Neither of these two former combatants, of either side, will overwhelm either each other or the independents in the new national police," he said.
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Jan 10 1992
^AM-UN-Salvador
^Late Talks On Salvador War Inconclusive
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Salvadoran government and rebel negotiators were unable to settle the fine points of the agreement ending their 12-year civil war Friday night, and extended the deadline through Sunday.
Under a Dec. 31 agreement ending the war, the two sides had agreed to submit any unresolved issues to the U.N. secretary-general if they failed to finish by midnight Friday. But at the last minute both sides decided to move the deadline.
The two were stuck over a timetable for demobilization of the rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, and terms for the rebels' integration into a new civilian police force, said mediator Alvaro de Soto.
"I'm not terribly concerned," de Soto added. "One of the characteristics of the Salvadoran peace process has always been suspense. I'm going to change my name to Alvaro de Hitchcock. It's always a cliffhanger."
On Sunday, unresolved issues will be automatically turned over to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for arbitration. Both sides must accept Boutros-Ghali's dictates, which he must announce by Tuesday.
Earlier, rebel spokesman Roberto Canas said there was disagreement over the future size of the Salvadoran armed forces.
He accused the government of overstating the number of men in the military. The government claims it has 63,175 men in arms, he said, and has proposed a 50 percent reduction over two years.
The government has not previously reported the size of its armed forces, but estimates put the number at about 55,000. There have long been reports that some corrupt officers list "phantom" units in order to pocket their supposed salaries.
Government negotiators did not speak to reporters Friday. On Thursday, they seemed optimistic both sides would resolve the issues without U.N. arbitration.
But some observers said the FMLN wanted the timetable for rebel demobilization left for the United Nations to settle. The rebels, who would like to keep their weapons as long as possible, see U.N. officials as somewhat sympathetic to their stance.
The peace accord was signed two minutes before the end of 1991, as Javier Perez de Cuellar finished his 10 years as U.N. secretary-general. A Peruvian, Perez de Cuellar had taken great interest in ending the war, which has claimed 75,000 lives.
Another issue left unresolved by the Dec. 31 agreement was land reform. But de Soto, the chief U.N. mediator, said last week agreement had been reached whereby former combatants from both sides will be favored by a land distribution.
De Soto also said earlier that both sides had agreed on the shape of the civilian police force that will replace the militarized units that have been blamed for human rights abuses. But it appeared late Friday some differences remained. De Soto did not specify what they were.
Despite an informal cease-fire declaration, some fighting has continued in El Salvador. At least 11 rebels were killed and 16 soldiers and two rebels wounded Wednesday, the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military reported.
Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani downplayed the violence, while acknowledging that "renegades" among the leftist rebels or extreme rightists in the armed forces may continue to use violence for political ends.
"The government is committed to combatting any group, of whatever ideological stripe, that tries to perturb the peace," Cristiani said at a news conference in San Salvador.
Next Thursday, the day the final peace accord is to be signed in Mexico City, will be declared a "Day of Peace" in El Salvador. A 190-foot-tall cross commemorating peace will be erected "where it will be visible from anyplace in the capital," Cristiani said.
The Mexico City ceremony will be attended by Perez de Cuellar, Boutros- Ghali, and the presidents of Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela and Costa Rica, as well as Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of Spain.
Mexico invited President Bush, but the White House said he will be unable to attend. Mexico also invited the pope, but there has been no Vatican response.
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Jan 13 1992
^PM-UN-Salvador
^U.N. May Send 1,000 Peacekeepers to El Salvador
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has proposed sending 1,000 peacekeepers to El Salvador to monitor an end to the 12-year-old civil war, the U.N. said today.
The announcement came as government and rebel negotiators worked to resolve differences over a peace accord to end the war, which has claimed 75,000 lives.
The presence of U.N. peacekeepers would "permit the Salvadoran people to feel sufficiently secure during the delicate phase of transition from armed confrontation to national reconciliation," the U.N. chief said in a report to the Security Council released today.
In his report, dated Friday, Boutros-Ghali asked the Security Council for authorization to have 631 members of a U.N. "police division" deployed in the Central American nation. He also asked for 372 military observers to be deployed as a formal cease-fire is implemented from Feb. 1 to Oct. 31.
Human rights groups have accused government security forces of killing suspected leftists. Boutros-Ghali said the U.N. peacekeepers would work with government forces to "deter intimidation, reprisals or other violations of the civil rights of all sectors of the population."
Under an accord signed Dec. 31, El Salvador's existing security forces are to be disbanded and a new civil police force created. The U.N. police division would be phased out as the new civil police assume their responsibilities, Boutros-Ghali said.
The Security Council was scheduled to meet this afternoon but it was not clear if it would discuss Boutros-Ghali's proposal.
Salvadoran government and rebel negotiators met until dawn today after setting a third deadline to reach agreement on a timetable for demobilizing the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels and reducing government forces.
Observers said the peace accord would be signed Thursday in Mexico City despite the delays in reaching a final agreement. Under the pact signed Dec. 31, both sides must agree on a broad peace accord or have Boutros-Ghali decide issues for them.
The negotiators and U.N. mediators were to meet again this afternoon to try to resolve their differences before a midnight deadline. The initial deadline for the peace accord was midnight Friday, but it was delayed twice - until midnight Sunday and then for another 24 hours.
Francois Giuliani, Boutros-Ghali's spokesman, said because the U.S.-backed government and the leftist rebels have agreed to allow the U.N. chief to decide any unresolved issues, failing to meet the deadline does not threaten the outcome of the talks.
"You can't say they're in trouble," Giuliani said, adding it was possible the deadline would be extended again. "These talks have a history of going to the wire."
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Feb 1 1992
^PM-UN Summit
^Leaders Pledge to Seek Nuclear Cuts; Stronger U.N. Peacekeeping Role With AP Photos
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ The Security Council met in an unprecedented colloquium of world leaders and hailed the Cold War's end. But the tightly scripted affair did not escape criticism that the old order still reigned.
Economically powerful Japan on Friday repeated its suggestion that it deserves a fixed seat on the 15-member council, joining the permanent five of Britain, France, the United States, Russia and China - all nuclear powers and World War II victors. And Venezuela criticized the quintet's veto power over resolutions.
Japanese officials also said Japan should have a say in future U.N. peacekeeping plans, or it couldn't guarantee it would keep up with donations to the cash-strapped world body.
At the end of the one-day summit, the leaders passed a declaration stressing the need to maintain collective security, arms control and "preventive diplomacy" that could head off future conflicts.
But the declaration was non-binding, and whether the summit succeeds in making the world a safer place depends on the council's will to pursue those goals.
The only followup measure established by the Security Council calls for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to issue a report July 1 on his recommendations for making the United Nations more effective and for improving U.N. peacekeeping, which could include creation of a standing U.N. army.
The meeting marked the first time that heads of state gathered to represent their countries in a Security Council meeting, and the event showed how much the world has changed in the United Nations' 46 years.
In a final symbolic burial of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin claimed the defunct superpower's seat. He suggested creating a common global nuclear defense using U.S. "Star Wars" technology and Russian expertise and proposed reductions in multiple-warhead missiles, considered the world's most threatening nuclear weapons.
President Bush, who has also proposed nuclear arms cuts, hailed the diminished nuclear threat between the superpowers but said the world is still threatened by proliferation of nuclear weapons to Third World nations.
"The threat of global nuclear war is more distant now than at any time in the nuclear era ... but the specter of mass destruction remains all too real," Bush told the leaders gathered around a huge circular table in the council's chamber. Above the leaders was a mural depicting the phoenix of peace rising from the ashes of World War II.
"Our presence today is a turning point for the world and the United Nations," said Prime Minister John Major of Britain, whose nation holds the rotating council presidency and who called the meeting.
"Are we to mourn for the old order?" asked French President Francois Mitterand. "Certainly not. Liberty has grown in the world. We must continue to help it."
Mitterrand said France was ready to assign 1,000 soldiers to a U.N. rapid- deployment force that could be sent to trouble spots within 48 hours. The plan was supported by Yeltsin and several other leaders.
The summit declaration also cited commitments to democracy and human rights - a provision opposed by China and some other non-aligned nations.
China's Premier Li Peng, making his first appearance at such a forum since the bloody crackdown on China's pro-democracy movement 2 1/2 years ago, said it was "neither appropriate nor workable" for a small group of nations to set human rights standards for the world. He was received cordially by other leaders but did not mingle after the summit.
Thousands of people opposed to China's government for its military crackdown and its control over Tibet gathered near the United Nations but were kept away by police.
The summit underscored the high profile the United Nations has assumed after years of being considered ineffective.
"Gone are the days, I hope forever, when the United Nations was the last body you would turn to for effective action," Major told reporters after the summit.
After its pivotal role in the Persian Gulf War, the United Nations has had a string of diplomatic successes - including mediating release of Western hostages in Lebanon and arranging truces in Croatia, El Salvador and Cambodia.
Boutros-Ghali said he expected the United Nations, which had a shortfall of more than $800 million last month, will overcome its cash problems in several weeks.
The rotating Security Council members are: Austria, Belgium, Cape Verde, Ecuador, Hungary, India, Japan, Morocco, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
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Feb 20 1992
^AM-UN-Cambodia
^Largest-Ever U.N. Operation Envisioned For Cambodia
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Thursday proposed sending a 26,000-member peacekeeping mission to Cambodia. It would be the world body's largest and costliest operation to date.
The mission's objectives would be to demobilize all factions in the Cambodian conflict and oversee the national elections slated for April 1993.
Cambodia's government and the three guerrilla groups opposing it signed an accord in October that called for a cease-fire and established an interim government. Since then, all sides have been pressing for the United Nations to hurry troops to their country.
"Unless we go there in force ... the peace process which is very precarious, very fragile, may begin to disentangle," said Yasushi Akashi, the United Nations' official overseeing the peace plan.
Cambodia has been devastated by more than two decades of war. The last 13 years of the conflict pitted the Vietnamese-installed government against three rebel groups, including the Khmer Rouge, who savagely transformed Cambodian society during their 1975-78 rule.
The 15-nation Security Council was expected to vote on Boutros-Ghali's $2 billion plan next week.
It calls for:
-Deployment of a 15,900-member military peacekeeping force;
-Sending more than 7,000 civilians to register voters and monitor the elections;
-Creating a police-monitoring group of 3,600 to ensure law and order and protection of human rights;
-Demobilization of all military forces in Cambodia.
In signing the peace accord in October, the four factions agreed only to a 70-percent demobilization. The factions would have to agree to any aspect of the proposal that goes beyond last year's accord, a UN official said, on condition of anonymity.
But Akashi said "it will be very hard for anyone to contradict the wishes of the Security Council."
He said all four factions genuinely want peace and to "shift from the battlefield with arms to the parliamentary battlefield." But he noted that a small advance force of UN peacekeepers already has encountered problems with the Khmer Rouge, who have restricted access to areas under their control.
Akashi did not say which countries were being asked to contribute personnel to the proposed force.
As many as 31 countries are to contribute to a 14,000-member peacekeeping force for Yugoslavia proposed by the secretary-general earlier in the week.
The Cambodian elections next year are to choose a 120-member constituent assembly that would write a new constitution and then become the country's legislature.
The new government would then be able to create a new national army to replace the one demobilized under the U.N. plan, Akashi said.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says more than 360,000 Cambodian refugees may return to their country. Boutros-Ghali said the returnees should be provided with shelter and food for 12 months and about five acres of land per family, after making sure it is clear of mines.
A 700-member battalion of Thai army engineers under United Nations command moved into Cambodia on Thursday to help clear mines. Soldiers from France and New Zealand also will help in the mine-clearing operations.
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Apr 8 1992
^AM-US-Iraqi Refugee Rights
^Lawyers Human Rights Group Urges Protection of Iraqi Refugees
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer-
NEW YORK (AP) _ More than 100,000 Iraqi refugees risk being abandoned by the international community to the "predatory forces of Saddam Hussein," an author of a study by a human rights group said Wednesday.
Arthur Helton of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights said he would meet in Geneva on Thursday with representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and others to present the report and try to pursuade them to extend relief efforts.
Two million Iraqis, most of them Kurds, fled to Turkey and Iran last year as rebellions against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein failed in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
All but 54,000 of them have returned after being promised protection by U.S.-led allied forces and food and housing aid, according to the report, released Wednesday.
Up to 200,000 Iraqis are displaced from their homes inside Iraq, in addition to 40,000 who recently fled because of Iraqi artillery fire.
Helton said the refugees face abandonment because the UNHCR plans to withdraw its representatives from Iraq at the end of April, an agreement between the United Nations and Iraq that allows relief efforts expires in June and because an agreement with Turkey that allows allied forces to use Turkish air bases to conduct air reconnaissance over northern Iraq also expires in June.
Clashes between Kurdish rebels and Iraqi forces have been escalating, and Helton said a long-term commitment is needed to protect Kurdish civilians as long as Saddam's troops remain a threat.
"Without virtually an indefinite commitment, the fears by the Kurds that they'll eventually be abandoned may well be realized," Helton said in a telephone interview before departing for Geneva. "A large number who have been lured back into their country may fall victim to the predatory forces of Saddam Hussein."
The allies' agreement with Turkey was extended by six months last December, according to Lt. Cmdr. Jim Satterfield, a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department. He refused to say whether Washington intended to ask Turkey for another extension beyond June 30.
The agreement that allows the U.N. to help refugees has already been extended twice, a U.N. official said. The official also refused to say whether an extension would be sought.
Helton led a Lawyers Committee delegation to Turkey, northern Iraq and Iran in December and January and edited and helped write the report.
The Lawyers Committee is a public interest law center that promotes human rights and refugee law. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Apr 26 1992
^AM-Mexico-Explosion-Reax
^Stricken Neighborhood Cynical About Government Investigation With AM-Mexico-Explosions, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
GUADALAJARA, Mexico (AP) _ Despite Sunday's government announcement that some officials would face criminal charges in connection with last week's deadly sewer explosions, survivors expressed skepticism that those responsible would be punished.
At a shop a half-block from homes destroyed in the disaster, a half-dozen residents and rescue workers gathered around a small television, hissing as Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga announced results of his investigation.
"They have now blamed some people," said Fausto Rojas Ramirez, owner of the shop. "We will have to wait and see if anyone will be punished."
The government said 11 people - four of them local officials of the government oil monopoly Pemex - were to blame for Wednesday's series of explosions, which killed at least 190 people and injured 1,470.
For one neighborhood resident, Juan Manuel Rodriguez, blaming just four Pemex workers was not enough. He joined the hissing when the attorney general also said use of the volatile chemical hexane was also partly responsible for the tragedy.
"They're trying to dilute Pemex's responsibility," said Rodriguez, sitting on an upturned soft drink case.
Others questioned why the government also blamed Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Dau Flores.
"He had barely been in office a few weeks," said Hector Gomez, a rescue worker with a face mask dangling from around his neck and hard hat in hand.
Outside, Francisco Macias and his wife, Lena Lopez Ibaritos, had stacked on the corner of the blasted street some possessions - a dining room set, cookware, a set of earrings - salvaged from their wrecked home.
"For us, the most important thing is the rebuilding," Macias, a retired jeweler, said as he watched soldiers with pickaxes and shovels dig through the blasted streets looking for bodies. Other soldiers formed bucket brigades to carry the dirt to dump trucks.
Across the street was Macias' house. What had been interior doors and walls were on the exterior. The front of the house had been sheared away. Neither Macias nor his wife nor 9-year-old daughter had been home during the explosions.
Macias expressed faith in the government, saying the news conference showed the Salinas administration "doesn't want to hide anything."
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Apr 27 1992
^PM-Guadalajara-Blasts
^Probe Finds Bad Planning, Apathy Led to Explosions
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
GUADALAJARA, Mexico (AP) _ Negligence and poor planning by state, city and government oil company officials were behind the sewer-line blasts that killed 191 people in Mexico's second-biggest city, a federal probe has concluded.
Before dawn today, seven officials were taken to the Jalisco State Penitentiary outside Guadalajara where they had been ordered detained by a magistrate.
The four Pemex and three municipal water and sewer officials were among 11 officials and private businessmen sought for questioning pending determination by a judge on whether they should be charged with negligent homicide.
Investigators say the 11 were directly responsible for the disaster, which they found occurred after gasoline leaked for several weeks from a pipeline owned by Pemex, the government oil monopoly.
An eighth official, the Jalisco state secretary for urban development Aristeo Mejia, suffered a heart attack and was taken to the Mexican-American hospital. Guadalajara's mayor is seeking an injunction to stay his detention, and there was no news today on the other two businessmen.
Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga on Sunday ordered the 11 to appear before a magistrate.
Morales Lechuga said the official negligence stemmed from a failure to evacuate residents after strong gasoline fumes were reported coming from sewers, and from the lack of swift action to repair the problem.
Pemex has denied responsibility, but on Sunday offered more than $30 million to help rebuild the devastated working-class neighborhood.
Wednesday's blasts injured 1,470 people, damaged or destroyed 1,422 homes, 450 businesses and 600 vehicles, and gouged trenches in five miles of streets, according to the probe, whose results were detailed by Morales Lechuga.
Residents of the stricken Reforma neighborhood were skeptical about whether justice will be done.
"They have now blamed some people," said Fausto Rojas Ramirez, a shopowner in the district. "We will have to wait and see if anyone will be punished."
The latest body was discovered Sunday evening - that of a 10-year-old boy.
The probe found that a water main had sprung a leak, eventually corroding and causing a leak in the gasoline pipeline below. The gasoline entered the city sewer system, where it mixed with volatile chemicals including hexane.
Morales Lechuga said three cooking-oil companies that use hexane in the manufacturing process would be investigated.
On Sunday, police prevented residents from entering one evacuated district near the pipeline break, saying the ground was still saturated with gasoline.
Pemex has claimed the pipe was ruptured by the explosions. However, it issued a statement late Sunday promising $32.8 million to help with reconstruction and to "mitigate the disgrace."
Officials last week estimated the blasts' damage at $300 million.
Mexicans, who have repeatedly suffered environmental and natural disasters in recent years, have harshly criticized officials for the disaster and blamed both Pemex and lax government precautions.
Before the explosions, residents had complained of a strong smell of gasoline, which they said they reported to city officials. The city dispatched officials to investigate.
Crews removed covers from some manholes to ventilate the sewer system, but assured residents there was no danger.
Morales Lechuga said Mayor Enrique Dau Flores and the state secretary of urban development did not act on the reports of leaking gasoline. The mayor took temporary leave from his post after the explosions.
The investigation "established that the loss of life could have been avoided if these public officials had acted ... by evacuating residents from the area of highest risk," Morales Lechuga said.
By accusing Pemex, one of Mexico's most powerful institutions outside the presidency, Salinas may have minimized political damage to his Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Lingering anger over the government's inadequate delivery of disaster relief after a 1985 earthquake in Mexico City dealt the party a serious blow in 1988 presidential elections. More than 10,000 people died in the quake.
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Apr 28 1992
^PM-Guadalajara-Blasts
^Mayor Surrenders, Evacuees Tested for Lead in Blood
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
GUADALAJARA, Mexico (AP) _ Eight officials were jailed and the mayor surrendered after investigators meted out blame for a series of sewer line explosions that killed at least 191 people and left thousands homeless.
The governor said hazardous facilities would be moved out when the city rebuilds the neighborhood devastated by Wednesday's blasts, which federal officials say resulted from a leak in a gasoline pipeline owned by Pemex, the state-owned oil monopoly.
Mayor Enrique Dau Flores turned himself in late Monday.
Dau Flores had initially obtained a temporary restraining order against his arrest, but on Monday made statements to federal law officials and then to a federal judge who will decide if there is enough evidence to file charges.
By law, the judge must decide by late Wednesday. Seven defendants - four from Pemex and three from city water and sewer departments - were arrested Monday and appeared at a preliminary hearing at the state prison outside the city.
They stood in green prison jumpsuits as the judge read charges including negligent homicide, causing damage and injury to others, damage to public communications and violation of federal environmental laws.
Defendants are assumed guilty and must prove their innocence. The judge said the average sentence for negligent homicide is about five years.
Late Monday, police arrested state urban development secretary Aristeo Mejia after he was released from a hospital.
Last Wednesday's explosions were caused by a gasoline leak from a corroded pipeline owned by Pemex,
Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga on Sunday accused Dau Flores and Mejia of failing to act before the explosion on residents' complaints of a strong smell of gasoline.
Pemex has denied responsibility for the blasts. However, the monopoly said Sunday it will give about $30 million for reconstruction - one-tenth the officially estimated damage of $300 million.
Jalisco Gov. Guillermo Cosio Vidaurri late Monday announced that plans to rebuild shattered neighborhoods would include "the relocation of hazardous plants."
Between 8,000 and 15,000 people living in the 80 blocks around the sprawling Guadalajara plant have been evacuated. Officials say gasoline soaking the ground could explode.
Red Cross workers at refugee centers continued testing the blood of people evacuated from an area soaked with the leaded gasoline that leaked from a government-owned pipeline.
They said they feared people had inhaled lead in the dusty air raised during the explosions.
Armando Marchaud, spokesman for the emergency relief effort, said it may be more than a month before residents are allowed to return to their homes.
^AM-Burma-Suu Kyi
^Nobel Peace Prize Winner's Captors to Receive Book of Her Writings
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) _ Burma's military rulers can expect a package in the mail soon: a collection of writings by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for more than two years.
The writings have been compiled and edited into a book by Mrs. Aung San's husband, Dr. Michael Aris. Titled "Freedom From Fear and Other Writings," it will appear in bookstores Dec. 10.
Aris, who hasn't seen his wife in nearly two years, said Monday he sent complimentary copies of the book last week to her captors "in the sincere hope that they, too, will read the book and hear its message ... of love and hope."
Suu Kyi, placed under house arrest in July 1989, probably is unaware of the book's publication and may not even know she won the Nobel this year, Aris told reporters.
Suu Kyi, 46, was the leader of the opposition party that won national elections by a landslide in May 1990 even while she was under house arrest. Military authorities in the south Asian nation have refused to relinquish power.
They have kept her incommunicado and Aris has had no contact with her for 16 months. He believes his wife, daughter of Burma's assassinated national hero Aung San, is in her home in Rangoon "totally alone, surrounded by armed guards."
"Since I received her last letter (on July 17, 1990) I have had absolutely no news of her whatsoever," said Aris, a Briton and visiting professor of Tibetan and Himalayan studies at Harvard University.
Aris, 45, wrote an introduction to the book and supplied many of the photographs from a family album.
The book includes excerpts of speeches she made before being placed under house arrest, as well as essays, letters and interviews.
Aris said the junta is willing to release his wife, but only if she goes into exile abroad - which she has refused to do.
"With the publication of her writings it can at least be said that her voice has been liberated," Aris said.
Vaclav Havel, the playwright and president of Czechoslovakia, nominated Suu Kyi for the Nobel. He wrote in the book's foreward that "by dedicating her life to the fight for human rights and democracy in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi is not only speaking out for justice in her own country, but also for all those who want to be free to choose their own destiny."
Aris said all he and the couple's two sons have heard of her lately are rumors.
"However, knowing her as I do, I know that her spirit is indomitable," he said. The two were married in 1972 in London, where they met in 1966.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dec 9 1991
^AM-Soviet-Reaction
^World Powers Focus on Nuclear Question in Changing Soviet Union With AM-Soviet-Republics, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
Undated (AP) _ World leaders kept a nervous eye Monday on the disintegrating Soviet Union, expressing concern about its nuclear weapons and whether the republics might erupt in warfare.
European Community leaders interrupted their summit in the Dutch town of Maastricht to discuss the breakup of the Soviet Union. They decided to send an envoy to the new commonwealth of Slavic republics, created on Sunday by the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussia.
British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said in Maastricht the EC would make clear to the commonwealth that agreements made by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev with the West - including arms control and foreign debt - "can't just be shrugged off."
Britain and France held a separate meeting and proposed a conference of European nuclear powers and the United States.
Washington called for the Soviet Union's massive nuclear arsenal to be placed under a unified command.
"We do not want to see a proliferation of independent nuclear states," State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said.
Most of the weapons are stored in Russia, but some are based in Ukraine, Byelorussia and Kazakhstan. The White House said it did not know who controlled the nuclear arsenal, but expressed confidence it was in safe hands.
Uncertain about Gorbachev's status, Washington declared its willingness to work with "whatever government emerges or whatever form of confederation emerges."
The State Department, although applauding the establishment of the new commonwealth, said there were no immediate plans for formal diplomatic relations.
Others expressed concern that the former Soviet republics would turn on each other, letting simmering ethnic tensions explode as they have in Yugoslavia, where thousands have been killed in a continuing civil war.
"The old Soviet Union is dissolving," Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlueter said in Maastricht. "It would be deeply tragic if the Soviet Union ends up like Yugoslavia."
In Germany, the conservative daily Berliner Morgenpost said in an editorial prepared for Tuesday's editions that the new Slavic commonwealth "may be more cooperative and easy to assess than Gorbachev's faded dream union."
Canadian External Affairs Minister Barbara McDougall said it was amazing how much the Soviet Union had changed without violence.
"We will look forward to working with the republics and to hearing more about the kind of form they see this taking," Ms. McDougall said in Ottawa.
In Tokyo, the Asahi newspaper quoted a senior foreign ministry official as saying the Japanese government was concerned that chaos would prevent the establishment of a unified government structure.
On the issue of foreign aid, Japanese officials said Monday that if the recent commitment by Russia and seven other republics to jointly accept responsibility for repaying the Soviet Union's external debt remains in effect, decisions on aid and debt relief should go forward.
In Jerusalem, Israel radio said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir expressed concern about the continuation of Jewish immigration. More than 300,000 Soviet Jews have come to Israel since mid-1989 under relaxed Soviet emigration policies.
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Jan 5 1992
^AM-UN-Salvador
^Salvadoran Government Fails to Arrive at Talks Date
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Negotiators for Salvadoran guerrillas scolded the government Sunday for failing to show up for a scheduled meeting on their U.N.-brokered peace accord.
Under the peace agreement signed on New Year's Eve, the rebel and government sides in El Salvador's civil war were to have met Sunday to negotiate a timetable for demobilizing the guerrilla army of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, known as the FMLN.
Four FMLN negotiators appeared at U.N. headquarters at dusk Sunday and headed for a negotiating room, where Alvaro de Soto, the U.N. mediator, was waiting for them. But the government delegation did not show up.
"The government owes an explanation to the nation and to the international community as to why they were not here ready to begin this meeting today," said Roberto Canas, the FMLN spokesman.
Mauricio Sandoval, the government spokesman in San Salvador, said negotiators were arriving Sunday night in New York for talks Monday. He gave no explanation for their delay.
El Salvador's 12-year civil war has claimed more than 75,000 lives. Other issues remaining to be resolved include land reform, reducing the size of the Salvadoran army, and incorporating rebel fighters into a new civilian police force to replace the current militarized police force that has committed many human rights abuses.
The Dec. 31 agreement sets a deadline of Friday for the U.S.-backed government of Alfredo Cristiani and the rebels to negotiate a timetable for implementation.
It the talks do not produce "positive results" by Friday, both sides must submit to binding arbitration by the new U.N. secretary-general, Butros Ghali. Any unresolved matters are to be presented to Ghali on Jan. 14.
The final peace pact is to be signed in Mexico City on Jan. 16.
The peace pact - the fruit of 21 months of U.N.-mediated negotiations led by former Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar and de Soto, his Peruvian compatriot - provides for a definitive cessation of hostilities Feb. 1.
Joaquin Villalobos, the leader-among-equals of the five-member general command of the FMLN, arrived from New York in Managua on Sunday to meet with Sandinista leaders, and said the peace process was "irreversible."
"We are now before the harvest of all these years of fighting, and we hope that peace and stability in El Salvador will also be carried over to Nicaragua," Villalobos said.
Nicaragua is technically at peace but skirmishes and tension continue among the conservative Nicaraguan government, the leftist Sandinista movement it ousted in 1990 elections, and former Contra fighers.
In San Salvador, Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas said in his Sunday homily that a Catholic priest, Jose Ignacio Meza, had disappeared and was presumed kidnapped Friday in an area east of the capital. No other details were immediately available.
Priests frequently have been targeted by right-wing troops or paramilitary forces in El Salvador.
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Jan 5 1992
^AM-Yugoslavia
^U.N. Envoy: Croatian Truce Could Pave Way for Peacekeepers Photos ZAG1,XZAG2
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A U.N. envoy on Sunday raised expectations that up to 10,000 peacekeepers could be sent to Yugoslavia, saying warring factions in secessionist Croatia appear to be finally honoring a cease-fire pact.
In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, a senior Croatian commander also was optimistic about the truce, the 15th to try to end the six-month civil war.
"If it holds for the next two weeks, the chances are (good) it will turn into a permanent cease-fire," said Gen. Imra Agotic after meeting with Col. Mile Glumac, a federal army negotiator. The two men agreed to meet again Thursday in Pecs, Hungary, 20 miles from the Croatian border.
U.N. officials have said they would not send peacekeepers until a firm truce is reach in Croatia, where republic fighters have battled the Serb-led federal army and ethnic Serbs opposed to secession. Previous truces collapsed almost immediately.
Thousands of people have been killed, and special U.N. envoy Cyrus Vance said Saturday more than 600,000 refugees have fled fighting since Croatia declared independence June 25.
Vance met Sunday with U.N. Secretary-General Butros Ghali, and said Ghali on Monday will deliver a report on Yugoslavia to the Security Council, which has authority to send a peacekeeping force.
Vance, who returned from Yugoslavia last week, did not disclose details of the meeting with Ghali. But it was clear Vance's report focused on possible deployment of a peacekeeping force, which officials said could be as large as 10,000 soldiers.
Vance said specific details about a possible peacekeeping force would be addressed in Ghali's report to the 15-nation Security Council.
The New York Times, quoting diplomats and other officials, reported in Monday editions that Ghali would ask the council to send about 50 military observers as quickly as possible to Yugoslavia.
Asked if he was optimistic about peace, Vance broke into a smile. "I am pleased the cease-fire appears to be holding and I hope that this will continue."
Ghali also grinned and appeared upbeat as he left the meeting, but did not talk to reporters.
Vance, a former Secretary of State, said he would try to reach top Yugoslav officials and military leaders later Sunday to encourage them to abide by the truce, agreed Friday.
Asked when officials would be confident a cease-fire was holding, Vance said: "I think that we have to see for more than a couple of days, three, four, five days - I really don't want to put any countdown. We have to see."
U.N. peacekeepers are stationed at various trouble spots around the world, including the Iraq-Kuwait border, southern Lebanon and Cyprus.
In Croatia, Sunday was one of the most peaceful days in months. Businesses reopened in some towns, and people ventured from bomb shelters.
"The sunny weather reflects the mood of the people," said Darinka Zoric of Biograd Na Moru, 120 miles southwest of Zagreb. "Everybody came out from their cellars Saturday frightened like mice. Everybody agrees that the only thing that matters is that we're alive."
The 33-year-old lawyer said the people in the town of 20,000 spent the weekend cleaning up after five days of heavy artillery attacks, sweeping away glass shards and covering blown-out store fronts with sheet metal.
In nearby Zadar, some restaurants and cafes opened Saturday for the first time in days. Public lighting, off since August, was turned back on late Friday in Osijek, an embattled Croat-held city in eastern Croatia.
The Serb-led forces once held about a third of Croatia, but Croatian troops have recently regained some territory along the 350-mile battle front.
Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and top army commanders have been weakened by army desertions and growing economic problems. On Sunday, the Belgrade-based newspaper Politika, close to the Serbian government, accused thousands of ethnic Serbian refugees of living off Serbian aid while refusing to fight.
A Croatian Defense Ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity, suggested fighting could increase after Monday, when the Orthodox Christian Serbs celebrate Christmas.
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Jan 6 1992
^PM-Yugoslavia-UN
^U.N. Chief Sending 50 Observers, But No Peacekeeping Force Yet With PM-Yugoslavia
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Secretary-General Bhutros Ghali said today he is immediately sending 50 U.N. truce observers to Yugoslavia but is not ready to dispatch a larger peacekeeping force.
In a report to the Security Council, Ghali said the 50 U.N. military liaison officers would work with both sides to maintain a cease-fire that began in secessionist Croatia on Friday.
But he said he would not recommend deploying thousands of peacekeeping troops until he was convinced Yugoslav leaders had accepted a plan calling for a continued cease-fire, creation of demilitarized zones and eventual withdrawal of all Yugoslav federal forces from Croatia.
The Security Council has the authority to send peacekeepers to areas of conflict.
Thousands of people have died in fighting that began after Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from the Yugoslav federation June 25. An estimated 600,000 people are refugees.
Serbia, the largest republic, has opposed independence for Croatia and other republics unless ethnic Serb areas are allowed to remain a part of Yugoslavia. But the Serb-dominated federal army has been weakened by desertions and Serbia is struggling with economic problems stemming from the war.
Ghali said he was still wary of the situation in Yugoslavia, even though "there has arisen in recent days a glimmer of hope that the situation might improve." He said he was unconvinced that all leaders in Yugoslavia supported the concept for ending the war that was outlined on Dec. 11 by his predecessor, Javier Perez de Cuellar.
Without singling out anyone by name, Ghali said, "Public statements made as recently as the past two days by certain leaders of the Serb communities in Croatia have given cause for some concern."
A U.N. official said Ghali was referring to Milan Babic, the leader of Serb insurgents who have declared a Serb republic in the Krajina region of western Croatia. Babic derailed an effort by Vance to get a truce in place last month.
The U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, cited Babic's vow not to disarm his fighters until Croatian militiamen also laid down their weapons.
At one time, the Yugoslav army and Serb militants controlled more than a third of Croatia's territory. But Croatian troops have recaptured some territory in recent weeks.
The 50 liaison officers being sent to Yugoslavia would be attached to the headquarters of both the federal army and Croatia's national guard as well as to units of the opposing forces.
The officers will "promote maintenance of the cease-fire by facilitating communication between the two sides and by helping them to resolve difficulties that might arise," Ghali said in his report to the Security Council.
Ghali said a peacekeeping force "could not be established in Yugoslavia without sustained evidence of the willingness and ability of the leaders on both sides to ensure that a cease-fire is respected."
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Jan 6 1992
^AM-UN-Salvador
^Salvadoran Talks Reportedly on Track
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Salvadoran government and rebel negotiators, facing a five-day deadline to iron out their differences, renewed U.N.-mediated talks Monday to arrange a definitive cease-fire in their nation's civil war.
Both sides appeared willing to comply with an accord signed Dec. 31 that calls for them to settle outstanding issues - including a timetable for demobilizing the leftist guerrilla army - by Friday or have U.N. Secretary- General Butros Ghali arbitrate the issues.
Roberto Canas, a spokesman for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, appeared optimistic that the final peace accord would be signed as scheduled Jan. 16 in Mexico City.
Canas said the heads of state of the countries backing the peace process - including Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico and Spain - should attend the signing ceremony.
"It will be a very strong signal that the international community is clearly supporting and guaranteeing compliance with the accord," Canas told reporters as he entered U.N. headquarters.
A news release Sunday from the office of Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said the presidents of Venezuela and Colombia and Spanish Premier Felipe Gonzalez would attend the signing ceremony.
He said $1 billion in international aid would be needed in the next five years to rebuild El Salvador. An informal cease-fire will be formalized on Feb. 1 to end the war that has left an estimated 75,000 people dead.
Although the Salvadoran government delegation failed to appear at the United Nations on Sunday, as specified in the Dec. 31 agreement, the talks still appeared to be on track, said a U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"But it remains to be seen if they resolve the remaining issues themselves or have the secretary-general decide them," the official said.
Chief Salvadoran government negotiator Oscar Santamaria said his delegation had advised the U.N. days ago that it planned to reconvene the talks Monday.
One of the issues left unresolved by the Dec. 31 agreement was land reform. The chief U.N. negotiator, Alvaro de Soto, has disclosed that agreement has been reached on a transfer of rural lands, giving special treatment to former combatants on both sides.
"Facilities are to be given in terms of credit for them to be able to farm this land, and a draft agrarian code is to be sent to the legislative assembly within 12 months," de Soto said.
Another issue is the creation of a new civil police force. De Soto said last week that both parties agreed most of the students in a planned police academy will be people who were not members of the FMLN or government security forces.
"Neither of these two former combatants, of either side, will overwhelm either each other or the independents in the new national police," he said.
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Jan 10 1992
^AM-UN-Salvador
^Late Talks On Salvador War Inconclusive
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Salvadoran government and rebel negotiators were unable to settle the fine points of the agreement ending their 12-year civil war Friday night, and extended the deadline through Sunday.
Under a Dec. 31 agreement ending the war, the two sides had agreed to submit any unresolved issues to the U.N. secretary-general if they failed to finish by midnight Friday. But at the last minute both sides decided to move the deadline.
The two were stuck over a timetable for demobilization of the rebels of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, and terms for the rebels' integration into a new civilian police force, said mediator Alvaro de Soto.
"I'm not terribly concerned," de Soto added. "One of the characteristics of the Salvadoran peace process has always been suspense. I'm going to change my name to Alvaro de Hitchcock. It's always a cliffhanger."
On Sunday, unresolved issues will be automatically turned over to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for arbitration. Both sides must accept Boutros-Ghali's dictates, which he must announce by Tuesday.
Earlier, rebel spokesman Roberto Canas said there was disagreement over the future size of the Salvadoran armed forces.
He accused the government of overstating the number of men in the military. The government claims it has 63,175 men in arms, he said, and has proposed a 50 percent reduction over two years.
The government has not previously reported the size of its armed forces, but estimates put the number at about 55,000. There have long been reports that some corrupt officers list "phantom" units in order to pocket their supposed salaries.
Government negotiators did not speak to reporters Friday. On Thursday, they seemed optimistic both sides would resolve the issues without U.N. arbitration.
But some observers said the FMLN wanted the timetable for rebel demobilization left for the United Nations to settle. The rebels, who would like to keep their weapons as long as possible, see U.N. officials as somewhat sympathetic to their stance.
The peace accord was signed two minutes before the end of 1991, as Javier Perez de Cuellar finished his 10 years as U.N. secretary-general. A Peruvian, Perez de Cuellar had taken great interest in ending the war, which has claimed 75,000 lives.
Another issue left unresolved by the Dec. 31 agreement was land reform. But de Soto, the chief U.N. mediator, said last week agreement had been reached whereby former combatants from both sides will be favored by a land distribution.
De Soto also said earlier that both sides had agreed on the shape of the civilian police force that will replace the militarized units that have been blamed for human rights abuses. But it appeared late Friday some differences remained. De Soto did not specify what they were.
Despite an informal cease-fire declaration, some fighting has continued in El Salvador. At least 11 rebels were killed and 16 soldiers and two rebels wounded Wednesday, the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military reported.
Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani downplayed the violence, while acknowledging that "renegades" among the leftist rebels or extreme rightists in the armed forces may continue to use violence for political ends.
"The government is committed to combatting any group, of whatever ideological stripe, that tries to perturb the peace," Cristiani said at a news conference in San Salvador.
Next Thursday, the day the final peace accord is to be signed in Mexico City, will be declared a "Day of Peace" in El Salvador. A 190-foot-tall cross commemorating peace will be erected "where it will be visible from anyplace in the capital," Cristiani said.
The Mexico City ceremony will be attended by Perez de Cuellar, Boutros- Ghali, and the presidents of Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela and Costa Rica, as well as Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of Spain.
Mexico invited President Bush, but the White House said he will be unable to attend. Mexico also invited the pope, but there has been no Vatican response.
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Jan 13 1992
^PM-UN-Salvador
^U.N. May Send 1,000 Peacekeepers to El Salvador
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has proposed sending 1,000 peacekeepers to El Salvador to monitor an end to the 12-year-old civil war, the U.N. said today.
The announcement came as government and rebel negotiators worked to resolve differences over a peace accord to end the war, which has claimed 75,000 lives.
The presence of U.N. peacekeepers would "permit the Salvadoran people to feel sufficiently secure during the delicate phase of transition from armed confrontation to national reconciliation," the U.N. chief said in a report to the Security Council released today.
In his report, dated Friday, Boutros-Ghali asked the Security Council for authorization to have 631 members of a U.N. "police division" deployed in the Central American nation. He also asked for 372 military observers to be deployed as a formal cease-fire is implemented from Feb. 1 to Oct. 31.
Human rights groups have accused government security forces of killing suspected leftists. Boutros-Ghali said the U.N. peacekeepers would work with government forces to "deter intimidation, reprisals or other violations of the civil rights of all sectors of the population."
Under an accord signed Dec. 31, El Salvador's existing security forces are to be disbanded and a new civil police force created. The U.N. police division would be phased out as the new civil police assume their responsibilities, Boutros-Ghali said.
The Security Council was scheduled to meet this afternoon but it was not clear if it would discuss Boutros-Ghali's proposal.
Salvadoran government and rebel negotiators met until dawn today after setting a third deadline to reach agreement on a timetable for demobilizing the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels and reducing government forces.
Observers said the peace accord would be signed Thursday in Mexico City despite the delays in reaching a final agreement. Under the pact signed Dec. 31, both sides must agree on a broad peace accord or have Boutros-Ghali decide issues for them.
The negotiators and U.N. mediators were to meet again this afternoon to try to resolve their differences before a midnight deadline. The initial deadline for the peace accord was midnight Friday, but it was delayed twice - until midnight Sunday and then for another 24 hours.
Francois Giuliani, Boutros-Ghali's spokesman, said because the U.S.-backed government and the leftist rebels have agreed to allow the U.N. chief to decide any unresolved issues, failing to meet the deadline does not threaten the outcome of the talks.
"You can't say they're in trouble," Giuliani said, adding it was possible the deadline would be extended again. "These talks have a history of going to the wire."
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Feb 1 1992
^PM-UN Summit
^Leaders Pledge to Seek Nuclear Cuts; Stronger U.N. Peacekeeping Role With AP Photos
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ The Security Council met in an unprecedented colloquium of world leaders and hailed the Cold War's end. But the tightly scripted affair did not escape criticism that the old order still reigned.
Economically powerful Japan on Friday repeated its suggestion that it deserves a fixed seat on the 15-member council, joining the permanent five of Britain, France, the United States, Russia and China - all nuclear powers and World War II victors. And Venezuela criticized the quintet's veto power over resolutions.
Japanese officials also said Japan should have a say in future U.N. peacekeeping plans, or it couldn't guarantee it would keep up with donations to the cash-strapped world body.
At the end of the one-day summit, the leaders passed a declaration stressing the need to maintain collective security, arms control and "preventive diplomacy" that could head off future conflicts.
But the declaration was non-binding, and whether the summit succeeds in making the world a safer place depends on the council's will to pursue those goals.
The only followup measure established by the Security Council calls for Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to issue a report July 1 on his recommendations for making the United Nations more effective and for improving U.N. peacekeeping, which could include creation of a standing U.N. army.
The meeting marked the first time that heads of state gathered to represent their countries in a Security Council meeting, and the event showed how much the world has changed in the United Nations' 46 years.
In a final symbolic burial of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin claimed the defunct superpower's seat. He suggested creating a common global nuclear defense using U.S. "Star Wars" technology and Russian expertise and proposed reductions in multiple-warhead missiles, considered the world's most threatening nuclear weapons.
President Bush, who has also proposed nuclear arms cuts, hailed the diminished nuclear threat between the superpowers but said the world is still threatened by proliferation of nuclear weapons to Third World nations.
"The threat of global nuclear war is more distant now than at any time in the nuclear era ... but the specter of mass destruction remains all too real," Bush told the leaders gathered around a huge circular table in the council's chamber. Above the leaders was a mural depicting the phoenix of peace rising from the ashes of World War II.
"Our presence today is a turning point for the world and the United Nations," said Prime Minister John Major of Britain, whose nation holds the rotating council presidency and who called the meeting.
"Are we to mourn for the old order?" asked French President Francois Mitterand. "Certainly not. Liberty has grown in the world. We must continue to help it."
Mitterrand said France was ready to assign 1,000 soldiers to a U.N. rapid- deployment force that could be sent to trouble spots within 48 hours. The plan was supported by Yeltsin and several other leaders.
The summit declaration also cited commitments to democracy and human rights - a provision opposed by China and some other non-aligned nations.
China's Premier Li Peng, making his first appearance at such a forum since the bloody crackdown on China's pro-democracy movement 2 1/2 years ago, said it was "neither appropriate nor workable" for a small group of nations to set human rights standards for the world. He was received cordially by other leaders but did not mingle after the summit.
Thousands of people opposed to China's government for its military crackdown and its control over Tibet gathered near the United Nations but were kept away by police.
The summit underscored the high profile the United Nations has assumed after years of being considered ineffective.
"Gone are the days, I hope forever, when the United Nations was the last body you would turn to for effective action," Major told reporters after the summit.
After its pivotal role in the Persian Gulf War, the United Nations has had a string of diplomatic successes - including mediating release of Western hostages in Lebanon and arranging truces in Croatia, El Salvador and Cambodia.
Boutros-Ghali said he expected the United Nations, which had a shortfall of more than $800 million last month, will overcome its cash problems in several weeks.
The rotating Security Council members are: Austria, Belgium, Cape Verde, Ecuador, Hungary, India, Japan, Morocco, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
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Feb 20 1992
^AM-UN-Cambodia
^Largest-Ever U.N. Operation Envisioned For Cambodia
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Thursday proposed sending a 26,000-member peacekeeping mission to Cambodia. It would be the world body's largest and costliest operation to date.
The mission's objectives would be to demobilize all factions in the Cambodian conflict and oversee the national elections slated for April 1993.
Cambodia's government and the three guerrilla groups opposing it signed an accord in October that called for a cease-fire and established an interim government. Since then, all sides have been pressing for the United Nations to hurry troops to their country.
"Unless we go there in force ... the peace process which is very precarious, very fragile, may begin to disentangle," said Yasushi Akashi, the United Nations' official overseeing the peace plan.
Cambodia has been devastated by more than two decades of war. The last 13 years of the conflict pitted the Vietnamese-installed government against three rebel groups, including the Khmer Rouge, who savagely transformed Cambodian society during their 1975-78 rule.
The 15-nation Security Council was expected to vote on Boutros-Ghali's $2 billion plan next week.
It calls for:
-Deployment of a 15,900-member military peacekeeping force;
-Sending more than 7,000 civilians to register voters and monitor the elections;
-Creating a police-monitoring group of 3,600 to ensure law and order and protection of human rights;
-Demobilization of all military forces in Cambodia.
In signing the peace accord in October, the four factions agreed only to a 70-percent demobilization. The factions would have to agree to any aspect of the proposal that goes beyond last year's accord, a UN official said, on condition of anonymity.
But Akashi said "it will be very hard for anyone to contradict the wishes of the Security Council."
He said all four factions genuinely want peace and to "shift from the battlefield with arms to the parliamentary battlefield." But he noted that a small advance force of UN peacekeepers already has encountered problems with the Khmer Rouge, who have restricted access to areas under their control.
Akashi did not say which countries were being asked to contribute personnel to the proposed force.
As many as 31 countries are to contribute to a 14,000-member peacekeeping force for Yugoslavia proposed by the secretary-general earlier in the week.
The Cambodian elections next year are to choose a 120-member constituent assembly that would write a new constitution and then become the country's legislature.
The new government would then be able to create a new national army to replace the one demobilized under the U.N. plan, Akashi said.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says more than 360,000 Cambodian refugees may return to their country. Boutros-Ghali said the returnees should be provided with shelter and food for 12 months and about five acres of land per family, after making sure it is clear of mines.
A 700-member battalion of Thai army engineers under United Nations command moved into Cambodia on Thursday to help clear mines. Soldiers from France and New Zealand also will help in the mine-clearing operations.
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Apr 8 1992
^AM-US-Iraqi Refugee Rights
^Lawyers Human Rights Group Urges Protection of Iraqi Refugees
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer-
NEW YORK (AP) _ More than 100,000 Iraqi refugees risk being abandoned by the international community to the "predatory forces of Saddam Hussein," an author of a study by a human rights group said Wednesday.
Arthur Helton of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights said he would meet in Geneva on Thursday with representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and others to present the report and try to pursuade them to extend relief efforts.
Two million Iraqis, most of them Kurds, fled to Turkey and Iran last year as rebellions against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein failed in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
All but 54,000 of them have returned after being promised protection by U.S.-led allied forces and food and housing aid, according to the report, released Wednesday.
Up to 200,000 Iraqis are displaced from their homes inside Iraq, in addition to 40,000 who recently fled because of Iraqi artillery fire.
Helton said the refugees face abandonment because the UNHCR plans to withdraw its representatives from Iraq at the end of April, an agreement between the United Nations and Iraq that allows relief efforts expires in June and because an agreement with Turkey that allows allied forces to use Turkish air bases to conduct air reconnaissance over northern Iraq also expires in June.
Clashes between Kurdish rebels and Iraqi forces have been escalating, and Helton said a long-term commitment is needed to protect Kurdish civilians as long as Saddam's troops remain a threat.
"Without virtually an indefinite commitment, the fears by the Kurds that they'll eventually be abandoned may well be realized," Helton said in a telephone interview before departing for Geneva. "A large number who have been lured back into their country may fall victim to the predatory forces of Saddam Hussein."
The allies' agreement with Turkey was extended by six months last December, according to Lt. Cmdr. Jim Satterfield, a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department. He refused to say whether Washington intended to ask Turkey for another extension beyond June 30.
The agreement that allows the U.N. to help refugees has already been extended twice, a U.N. official said. The official also refused to say whether an extension would be sought.
Helton led a Lawyers Committee delegation to Turkey, northern Iraq and Iran in December and January and edited and helped write the report.
The Lawyers Committee is a public interest law center that promotes human rights and refugee law. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Apr 26 1992
^AM-Mexico-Explosion-Reax
^Stricken Neighborhood Cynical About Government Investigation With AM-Mexico-Explosions, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
GUADALAJARA, Mexico (AP) _ Despite Sunday's government announcement that some officials would face criminal charges in connection with last week's deadly sewer explosions, survivors expressed skepticism that those responsible would be punished.
At a shop a half-block from homes destroyed in the disaster, a half-dozen residents and rescue workers gathered around a small television, hissing as Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga announced results of his investigation.
"They have now blamed some people," said Fausto Rojas Ramirez, owner of the shop. "We will have to wait and see if anyone will be punished."
The government said 11 people - four of them local officials of the government oil monopoly Pemex - were to blame for Wednesday's series of explosions, which killed at least 190 people and injured 1,470.
For one neighborhood resident, Juan Manuel Rodriguez, blaming just four Pemex workers was not enough. He joined the hissing when the attorney general also said use of the volatile chemical hexane was also partly responsible for the tragedy.
"They're trying to dilute Pemex's responsibility," said Rodriguez, sitting on an upturned soft drink case.
Others questioned why the government also blamed Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Dau Flores.
"He had barely been in office a few weeks," said Hector Gomez, a rescue worker with a face mask dangling from around his neck and hard hat in hand.
Outside, Francisco Macias and his wife, Lena Lopez Ibaritos, had stacked on the corner of the blasted street some possessions - a dining room set, cookware, a set of earrings - salvaged from their wrecked home.
"For us, the most important thing is the rebuilding," Macias, a retired jeweler, said as he watched soldiers with pickaxes and shovels dig through the blasted streets looking for bodies. Other soldiers formed bucket brigades to carry the dirt to dump trucks.
Across the street was Macias' house. What had been interior doors and walls were on the exterior. The front of the house had been sheared away. Neither Macias nor his wife nor 9-year-old daughter had been home during the explosions.
Macias expressed faith in the government, saying the news conference showed the Salinas administration "doesn't want to hide anything."
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Apr 27 1992
^PM-Guadalajara-Blasts
^Probe Finds Bad Planning, Apathy Led to Explosions
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
GUADALAJARA, Mexico (AP) _ Negligence and poor planning by state, city and government oil company officials were behind the sewer-line blasts that killed 191 people in Mexico's second-biggest city, a federal probe has concluded.
Before dawn today, seven officials were taken to the Jalisco State Penitentiary outside Guadalajara where they had been ordered detained by a magistrate.
The four Pemex and three municipal water and sewer officials were among 11 officials and private businessmen sought for questioning pending determination by a judge on whether they should be charged with negligent homicide.
Investigators say the 11 were directly responsible for the disaster, which they found occurred after gasoline leaked for several weeks from a pipeline owned by Pemex, the government oil monopoly.
An eighth official, the Jalisco state secretary for urban development Aristeo Mejia, suffered a heart attack and was taken to the Mexican-American hospital. Guadalajara's mayor is seeking an injunction to stay his detention, and there was no news today on the other two businessmen.
Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga on Sunday ordered the 11 to appear before a magistrate.
Morales Lechuga said the official negligence stemmed from a failure to evacuate residents after strong gasoline fumes were reported coming from sewers, and from the lack of swift action to repair the problem.
Pemex has denied responsibility, but on Sunday offered more than $30 million to help rebuild the devastated working-class neighborhood.
Wednesday's blasts injured 1,470 people, damaged or destroyed 1,422 homes, 450 businesses and 600 vehicles, and gouged trenches in five miles of streets, according to the probe, whose results were detailed by Morales Lechuga.
Residents of the stricken Reforma neighborhood were skeptical about whether justice will be done.
"They have now blamed some people," said Fausto Rojas Ramirez, a shopowner in the district. "We will have to wait and see if anyone will be punished."
The latest body was discovered Sunday evening - that of a 10-year-old boy.
The probe found that a water main had sprung a leak, eventually corroding and causing a leak in the gasoline pipeline below. The gasoline entered the city sewer system, where it mixed with volatile chemicals including hexane.
Morales Lechuga said three cooking-oil companies that use hexane in the manufacturing process would be investigated.
On Sunday, police prevented residents from entering one evacuated district near the pipeline break, saying the ground was still saturated with gasoline.
Pemex has claimed the pipe was ruptured by the explosions. However, it issued a statement late Sunday promising $32.8 million to help with reconstruction and to "mitigate the disgrace."
Officials last week estimated the blasts' damage at $300 million.
Mexicans, who have repeatedly suffered environmental and natural disasters in recent years, have harshly criticized officials for the disaster and blamed both Pemex and lax government precautions.
Before the explosions, residents had complained of a strong smell of gasoline, which they said they reported to city officials. The city dispatched officials to investigate.
Crews removed covers from some manholes to ventilate the sewer system, but assured residents there was no danger.
Morales Lechuga said Mayor Enrique Dau Flores and the state secretary of urban development did not act on the reports of leaking gasoline. The mayor took temporary leave from his post after the explosions.
The investigation "established that the loss of life could have been avoided if these public officials had acted ... by evacuating residents from the area of highest risk," Morales Lechuga said.
By accusing Pemex, one of Mexico's most powerful institutions outside the presidency, Salinas may have minimized political damage to his Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Lingering anger over the government's inadequate delivery of disaster relief after a 1985 earthquake in Mexico City dealt the party a serious blow in 1988 presidential elections. More than 10,000 people died in the quake.
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Apr 28 1992
^PM-Guadalajara-Blasts
^Mayor Surrenders, Evacuees Tested for Lead in Blood
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
GUADALAJARA, Mexico (AP) _ Eight officials were jailed and the mayor surrendered after investigators meted out blame for a series of sewer line explosions that killed at least 191 people and left thousands homeless.
The governor said hazardous facilities would be moved out when the city rebuilds the neighborhood devastated by Wednesday's blasts, which federal officials say resulted from a leak in a gasoline pipeline owned by Pemex, the state-owned oil monopoly.
Mayor Enrique Dau Flores turned himself in late Monday.
Dau Flores had initially obtained a temporary restraining order against his arrest, but on Monday made statements to federal law officials and then to a federal judge who will decide if there is enough evidence to file charges.
By law, the judge must decide by late Wednesday. Seven defendants - four from Pemex and three from city water and sewer departments - were arrested Monday and appeared at a preliminary hearing at the state prison outside the city.
They stood in green prison jumpsuits as the judge read charges including negligent homicide, causing damage and injury to others, damage to public communications and violation of federal environmental laws.
Defendants are assumed guilty and must prove their innocence. The judge said the average sentence for negligent homicide is about five years.
Late Monday, police arrested state urban development secretary Aristeo Mejia after he was released from a hospital.
Last Wednesday's explosions were caused by a gasoline leak from a corroded pipeline owned by Pemex,
Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga on Sunday accused Dau Flores and Mejia of failing to act before the explosion on residents' complaints of a strong smell of gasoline.
Pemex has denied responsibility for the blasts. However, the monopoly said Sunday it will give about $30 million for reconstruction - one-tenth the officially estimated damage of $300 million.
Jalisco Gov. Guillermo Cosio Vidaurri late Monday announced that plans to rebuild shattered neighborhoods would include "the relocation of hazardous plants."
Between 8,000 and 15,000 people living in the 80 blocks around the sprawling Guadalajara plant have been evacuated. Officials say gasoline soaking the ground could explode.
Red Cross workers at refugee centers continued testing the blood of people evacuated from an area soaked with the leaded gasoline that leaked from a government-owned pipeline.
They said they feared people had inhaled lead in the dusty air raised during the explosions.
Armando Marchaud, spokesman for the emergency relief effort, said it may be more than a month before residents are allowed to return to their homes.
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