UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Friday, February 10, 1995
78
U.S. veterans try new tactic to learn more about MIAs
The Associated Press
HANOI, Vietnam — U.S. veterans have a new plan to solve the MIA puzzle. They are helping Vietnamese find out what happened to their own MIAs.
The Vietnam Veterans of America has asked its members to turn over battlefield souvenirs that could help locate the remains of more than 300,000 Vietnamese MIAs. By contrast, there are 2,211 Americans missing in action from the war.
For months the group has been collecting photos, letters, identification cards and other items taken two decades ago from dead and captive Vietnamese.
The group brought its first batch of war artifacts to Vietnam last May, along with maps showing where Americans buried enemy dead. One set of maps enabled the Vietnamese to uncover a mass grave with partial remains of 95 Vietnamese killed in a battle in southern Vietnam's Tay Ninh province.
"We want the families on both sides to be able to rest knowing the fates of
their loved ones," Thomas Corey, national secretary for the VVA, told Vietnamese officials yesterday at the start of the group's 10-day visit.
The veterans plan to turn over their latest batch of artifacts to Vietnamese officials on Monday. Their hosts hinted a two-way exchange might take place but gave no details.
"We hope during this visit we can hand over documents that can help you continue your activities," Nguyen Quang Tao, president of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations, told the Americans.
Many Vietnamese have expressed resentment at being pressured to locate American war remains while so many of their own soldiers remain missing. One aim of the Veterans' Initiative is to encourage cooperation by offering something in return.
"We hope that by our example, your former soldiers will use their recollections to find any information they can on our missing veterans," said Vernon Valenzuela of the VVA.
Corey, who was shot in the neck during the war and is paralyzed from
the shoulders down, said, "Over the years we've been lied to, not only by our government but by the Vietnamese government. It's very important to us that when we go back to the States, we go back with new information."
In the last few years, Vietnamese authorities have joined with U.S. teams in digging for war remains and have turned over documents on prisoners and aircraft shoot-downs. The result has been a dramatic warming in relations.
The two governments recently opened liaison offices in each other's capitals, and American businessmen and tourists are flocking to Vietnam.
However, many families of American MIAs believe the Vietnamese still are withholding remains and information, and some accuse Hanoi of holding live American prisoners.
The U.S. government says full diplomatic relations cannot be established until Vietnam provides more answers, especially about Americans believed to have died in Vietnamese prisons.
Costner's casino angers Sioux tribe
The Associated Press
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Kevin Costner, who played in the sword-sympathizing soldier in the hit film "Dances With Wolves," is drawing fire from tribal leaders with a new project, a $100 million resort casino.
Costner and his brother, Dan, already own one of the 86 casinos that have sprung up in Deadwood since 1988, when South Dakota legalized slot machines, poker and blackjack in the Black-Hills town. The new resort, scheduled to open in 1997, would dwarf the other casinos and compete with those operated on reservations by South Dakota's nine tribes.
"It's the old theory of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," said Mike Jandreau, chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in central South Dakota. "The casinos, for us, are the opportunity to extract some revenue that we cannot get in any other fashion."
using Indian people." Jandreau said.
He charged that Costner is trading off his fame at Indian expense with the Dunbar resort, named after Lt. John Dunbar, the movie character who befriended a band of Sioux Indians.
"It's just a continued, pure-capitalistic, immoral process to continue
Costner never shared with the Sioux any of his multimillion-dollar profits from the 1990 "Dances With Wolves," which won seven Academy Awards, Jandreau said.
Efforts to reach Costner for comment yesterday through his talent agency in Los Angeles were unsuccessful. Costner has been inaccessible lately. He's making the trouble-plagued movie "Waterworld" in Hawaii, which is expected to cost at least a record $160 million, and he's being sued for divorce.
Dan Costner, who lives in Deadwood, declined to be interviewed, but he said in a statement that the Dunbar's effect will hardly be noticed during the town's summer tourist season.
"The strong, positive, measurable impact on Deadwood and the surrounding communities' economies will be felt in the traditionally off-season periods. The enhanced presence of year-round business conferences and resort-seeking travelers at those times represent the change in dynamics." Dan Costner said.
South Dakota voters rejected that plan in 1993, but the Costners revived the project last year after the state Legislature approved a $2 million tax break. The state also provided $1.75 million for water and sewer lines and $1.6 million for an outdoor amphitheater.
When the Costners first proposed the resort, state lawmakers complied with a request to raise bet limits from $5 to $100 and allow more machines in Deadwood casinos.
"We're just not getting any credit," said Brian Drapeaux, executive director of the Northern Plains Tribal Gaming Alliance.
Help for the Costnists angered Indian officials, who had long and difficult negotiations with state officials for agreements on tribal casinos.
"We've done it all without any state money, bringing outside investment into South Dakota and creating jobs with it, and then we get slapped in the face by watching Kevin Costner come in and be able to do his thing with all this assistance from the state."
Instead of benefiting investors, tribal casinos provide money for social services and economic development on reservations — the poorest areas of the nation, Drapeaux said.
Despite the resentment, Drapeaux noted that the Dunbar could sweeten the pot for the tribes. Under federal law, casinos on reservations can automatically match the numbers of games and gambling machines state lawmakers approve in Deadwood.
THE NEWS in brief
WASHINGTON
Civil rights leaders hope re-enacted march will aid Black districts
Civil rights and labor leaders announced plans yesterday to re-enact the historic 1965 voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, hoping to ignite a national wave of resistance to the legal assault on majority-Black congressional districts.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was beaten by Alabama state troopers on "Bloody Sunday" 30 years ago, said the new march would serve as a reminder of how far the nation has come and how far it has to go to create a truly interracial democracy.
"We must never forget that there was a time when millions of Black Americans could not register to vote and participate in the democratic process," he said.
The "Bloody Sunday" attack at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, and the 54-mile march to Montgomery, Ala., that commenced a week later led to passage of the Voting Rights Act. It also is credited with changing the political face of the South.
The law also led to registration of millions of Black voters and the election of thousands of blacks to local, state and federal offices. It was the tool the Justice Department used after the 1990 Census to force Southern states to create 17 majority-Black districts.
Those districts have been challenged in five states since the Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that white voters' rights may be violated by congressional districts drawn to maximize minority voting strength.
Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said the legal challenges, which are pending in the Supreme Court, were motivated by the color and race of the representative.
BRUSSELS, Belgium
BRUSSELS, Belgium Military discontinues required service
Belgium will end compulsory military service on the last day of this month.
About 800 men serving Belgium's required six-month stint in the military will be sent home March 1, and no more people will be drafted, the government said yesterday. Women were not drafted.
The move is designed to create a fully professional military, said Defense Ministry representative Pierre de Lame. The armed forces has about 46,000 people serving the country.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Garbo finally may get final resting place
Greta Garbo may get a final resting place near the acting school where she was discovered in 1922.
Since her death in 1990 at age 84, Garbo's cremated remains have been kept at a funeral home in New York. Since then, her niece and sole heirs, Gray Reisfield, has turned down several suggested resting places near Garbo's hometown of Stockholm.
But a new idea appears to have Reisfield's support—moving the remains to the Hedvig Eleonicra cemetery, a few blocks from the Royal Dramatic Theater in central Stockholm.
Garbo, whose real surname was Gustafsson, attended
acting school at the theater in 1922, along with Mimi Pollack, a childhood friend of hers. Garbo was discovered there by director Mauritz Stiller, who cast her in his film "The Saga of Gosta Berling."
She went on to star in more than two dozen films but was most identified with saying, "I want to be alone," in the 1932 film "Grand Hotel."
Garbo stopped making movies at age 36, choosing instead a reclusive life in a luxurious New York apartment.
WICHITA
Former Kansan indicted for alleged fraud
WICHTA — A former Kansas church builder, who became nationally known during Jim Bakker's PTL scandal, was indicted by a federal grand jury yesterday for alleged bankruptcy fraud.
Ronald Roe Messner, 59, of Rancho Mirage, Calif., was charged with four counts of making false statements in two 1990 bankruptcy filings, one count of engaging in a transaction with money obtained from bankruptcy fraud and two counts of concealing assets from creditors.
Conviction could bring a federal prison sentence of 33 to 41 months.
"Mr. Messner apparently believed that bankruptcy was a game of hide your assets from your creditors," U.S. Attorney Randy Rathbun said. "Our evidence will show that he hid assets and had third parties cashing checks for him, and then he lied under oath about it."
Messner has claimed he was owed millions of dollars by PTL when the television evangelism empire built by Jim and Tammy Fave Bakker collapsed.
After Mrs. Bakker divorced her jailed husband, Messner married her.
The indictment alleges that one month prior to filing his bankruptcy petitions, Messner contacted a business partner and said he was going to claim he had transferred all of his assets in the partnership to the partner. In exchange, the man was supposed to help Messner financially in the future.
BELFAST, Northern Ireland Suspicious slow talks of compromise
Both sides stressed that talks to meet a political compromise in the British-ruled province would continue.
Peace negotiations yesterday between Britain and the Irish Republican Army's political allies only lasted minutes because of suspicions that the negotiating room was electronically bugged.
Security officers for the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party were conducting a precautionary sweep of the Stormont Parliament Building east of Belfast where the talks were to be held. Their electronic scanner detected a signal coming from a piece of office equipment in one of the rooms.
"The advice from my security team was that there was a listening device," said Martin McGuinness, leader of the Sinn Fein team.
McGuinness said the talks would resume once confidence had been restored.
Quentin Thomas, the civil servant leading the six-member British delegation, assured Sinn Fein it wasn't being bugged but agreed to postpone talks.
Sinn Fein and Britain began their talks Dec. 9, 100 days after the IRA halted its 24-year campaign against British rule of Northern Ireland. Yesterday's meeting would have been the sixth meeting.
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