Monday, April 26, 1999
The University Daily Kansan
Section A · Page 7
Nation/World
NATO considers sanctioning Serbs
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In a summit-ending show of solidarity, NATO leaders promised military protection and economic aid to Yugoslavia's neighbors for standing with the West against Slobodan Milosev.
"If Mr. Milosevic threatens them for helping us, we will respond," President Clinton promised.
Before ending the three-day meeting with the allies in the military operation against the Serbs in Yugoslavia, Clinton telephoned Boris Yeltsin yesterday and urged the Russian leader to press Milosevic to accept a peaceful resolution to the crisis.
On the central issue of forcing Milosevic's forces to withdraw from Kosovo and allow hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees back to their homes, Clinton said, "The alliance leaves Washington more united even than it was when we came here."
The 19 NATO leaders agreed in their 50th anniversary summit to move toward an oil embargo to hinder Miloosev despite Russian objections and French misgivings
about forcibly searching ships at sea.
Defense Secretary William Cohen said the allies agreed it was important to cut
allow the supply of fuel going to Yugoslavia's "war machine." He said the NATO leaders expected specific recommendations from their military officials shortly.
The NATO leaders agreed to intensify air attacks against Yugoslavia. But there was no agreement — and scant public discussion
of the possibility of introducing ground forces.
Yaltin: Spoke with Clinton about Milosevich yesterday.
But in Russia—one of NATO's nonmember "partners"—Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov said, "We will have to pay more attention to defense" if a ground war is launched. He also suggested there would be a review of Russian relations with the NATO nations.
in one of their final acts, NATO's leaders sat down with the representatives of the "frontline states" — Yugoslavia's seven neighbors, all feeling the fallout from the combat in Kosovo — and promised to stand by them.
"The nations of the region have risked, and even faced, armed confrontation with Serbia by facilitating and supporting our campaign to end the bloodshed in Kosovo," Clinton said
Summing up the three-day meeting, NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said,"The most important message that you are going to get from this summit is the determination of all the allies and all the partners to reverse the situation in Kosovo.
Clinton and Yeltsin talked for nearly an hour by phone. Russia has expressed outrage about NATO's airstrikes in Yugoslavia and has threatened to ignore a Western oil embargo. Yeltsin briefed Clinton on former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdyn's mediation efforts in Belgrade, which NATO officials say have failed to produce results warranting a halt to the bombing.
Clinton believes Russia is very serious about trying to resolve the Kosovo crisis, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger said. Clinton urged Yeltsin to continue peacemaking efforts and said the two leaders would stay in touch. They did not discuss NATO's threatened blockade of oil shipments, officials said.
Berger said Russia would not be exempt from the embargo. "Obviously, any regime that we establish has to apply to everybody," Berger said on CNN's Late Edition. "I would expect that the Russians would comply."
The 19 allies met in a summit finale with leaders of two dozen other Central and Eastern European countries that have banded in partnership with the alliance. Russia stayed away.
Anxious about inflaming tensions with Moscow further, the allies said they were trying to avoid a confrontation at sea over blockading oil supplies to Serbia. The summit authorized NATO military commanders to draw up plans to inspect ships suspected of carrying oil to Milosevic. Russia and Libya are Yugoslavia's main oil suppliers.
Chavez campaigns for new constitution
The Associated Press
CARACAS. Venezuela — The centerpiece of President Hugo Chavez's agenda for a "social revolution" in Venezuela — his proposal for a new constitution — went before the people Sunday in a nationwide referendum.
Some 11 million Venezuelans were eligible to vote on whether to form an assembly to rewrite the constitution and whether to approve the terms Chavez has laid out for electing the assembly's members.
Chavez's opponents fear he will use a new constitution to install an authoritarian regime. But the president contends the change is needed to overhaul a corrupt political system that has impoverished most of Venezuela's people.
"It's about the country's challenge to bring legitimacy to the democratic process and to reclaim the essence of what a democracy should be, generating security and justice for the people," he said moments before casting his ballot amid a throng of admirers.
A former army paratrooper who staged a bloody coup attempt in 1992, Chavez has alarmed the political opposition by saying the proposed assembly also should dissolve Congress and the Supreme Court.
Accompanying Chavez to the polls Sunday were other leaders of his unsuccessful revolt, including Zulia state governor Francisco Arias and secret police chief Jesus Urdameta.
Many scholars say Venezuela's 1961 constitution could be reformed without a costly and time-consuming constituent assembly. The country has had 25 institutions since 1811, and some of Chavez's opponents believe adopting No. 26 will do little to address Venezuela's fundamental malaise.
But the proposed constitution has come to symbolize Chavez's vow to shake up a system that most Venezuelans believe has failed them.
"What I want is for him to put the corrupt in chains and justice for poor people," said Rosa Garcia, a 56-year-old grandmother in Caracas.
Critics fear that debilitating Venezuela's old power brokers will only lead to more power for Chavez, who has said that among other things, the proposed assembly should extend his term to up to 14 years. It was not clear if Chavez forces would control the assembly, which would be elected in July.
While taking his oath of office Feb. 2, Chavez stunned Venezuelans by labeling
Rachel Kesselman/KANSAL
the current constitution "moribund." He then called for the dissolution of the other two branches of government, threatened to declare a state of emergency and rule by decree, and instituted a plan to increase the role of the army in society.
"The whole world knows that, despite what the president says and thinks, his is a government with an undeniably totalitarian slant," wrote Luis Pinerau, the interior minister under former President Carlos Andres Perez, whom Chavez tried to overthrow seven years ago.
Chavez and the Supreme Court have been locked in a power struggle about his proposal to revamp the constitution. After the court ruled that the proposed assembly would not have the authority to dissolve Congress and the judiciary, Chavez called the ruling irrelevant.
Chavez's ascent to power is seen by many as a warning sign in a region that has failed to reduce poverty and corruption.
"It would be like me decreeing the sun won't rise in the morning," he said last week.
Columbine's tragedy elicits possible copycat school attacks
Districts ban trench coats, fear they could hide weapons
The Associated Press
Dozens of students around the country have been suspended and arrested since the Columbine High School massacre for making what were regarded as threats to carry out convict attacks.
Schools have been evacuated, locked down and closed as a result of the incidents, which have taken place in big cities and small towns alike since the attack in Littleton, Colo., on Tuesday.
"We have no tolerance whatsoever for threats," said Police Chief Thomas Bauer of Oak Creek, Wis., where two 16-year-old boys were arrested for allegedly threatening a study hall supervisor. One youth mentioned the Colorado shootings; the other one held his hand in the shape of a gun and yelled, "Pow!"
"If you say it, it's our intention that you apparently meant it, and you will be seeing the district attorney," Bauer said.
An 18-year-old student in Greenville, S.C., was put under house arrest and forbidden to go near his school Thursday after allegedly telling a teacher that he would "pull a Colorado on all of you." Police said he called the shootings the funniest thing he had ever heard of.
Three teen-agers in Cherry Hill, N.J., were suspended after witnesses said they wore black trench coats and pantomimed shooting guns and throwing bombs in a school hallway.
Trench coats like the ones worn by the two gunmen were banned in Denver and two other Colorado districts since the attack for fear they could be used to hide weapons. They also were banned at a high school in Fredericton, Canada, because they made some students uncomfortable.
Bennett Leventhal, a child psychologist at the University of Chicago, suggested that some schools were overreacting. He said that statistically, schools were extremely safe.
"Most schools are far better equipped with social workers, teachers, counselors, than the police," he said. "They don't need the police just because there was a shooting in Colorado this week."
Students who threaten violence should be taken seriously. Leventhal said.
Threatening letters, bombings linked to racial violence in Britain
The Associated Press
LONDON — Britain's ethnic minorities may be facing a wave of racially motivated violence, police said Sunday, a day after a neo-Nazi group claimed responsibility for a nail bomb that injured seven people. The bombing in an area of London heavily populated by immigrants was the second of two attacks in eight days that have injured a total of 46 people, prompting fears of a systematic campaign to terrorize minorities.
"We retain very serious fears that this could be a continuing series of vicious attacks," said David
A neo-Nazi organization, Combat 18, claimed responsibility for Saturday's afternoon explosion on a busy street in Brick Lane, home to a large Bangladeshi community. Authorities said the blast was caused by a nail bomb planted in a parked car.
Vaness of the Metropolitan police force. "We cannot in any way rule out the fact that those attacks might be taken to locations outside the London area."
The group was also among four self-styled, far-right organizations that claimed to have planted a nail bomb that exploded April 17, injuring 39 people in Brixton, a racially mixed south London neighborhood.
In addition, several black lawmakers reported receiving threatening letters signed by "White Wolves" — the same signature that appeared on a document detailing a bombing campaign that was faxed to a radio station a week before the Brixton attack, a newspaper reported.
London's Sunday Telegraph quoted the document as stating that all "non-white and Jews" still in Britain by the end of the year would be exterminated. The newspaper, quoting unidentified sources, said police dismissed the document as a prank.
Police Commissioner Sir Paul
Condon said the Brixton and Brick Lane attacks — both with crude nail bombs placed in large bags — appeared linked.
"Clearly, this is a racial crime," Condon said.
The victims from Saturday's bombing — all but one of them Bangladeshis — suffered slight injuries, police said.
Britain's state-funded Commission for Racial Equality said the bombings were an apparent reaction to an official inquiry into the bungled police investigation of the fatal stabbing of a black London teen-ager in 1993. The report, released in February, said the London police force
was riddled with racism.
Five white youths suspected of killing the teen-ager, Stephen Lawrence, have never been successfully prosecuted.
Commission chairman Claude Moreas told Britain's GMTV that far-right elements "don't like the idea of lifting the rock and seeing racism underneath. Those elements are creating a backlash."
Ethnic minorities, mostly descendants of immigrants from former colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, comprise only seven percent of Britain's population but are mostly concentrated in innercity districts.
One of the biggest Asian community newspapers in Britain also received a threatening letter from the so-called "White Wolves," its editor said Sunday.
Siddy Shivdasani said Eastern Eye received the letter the day before last week's Brixton bomb but the staff thought nothing of it because the paper is sent five or six racist letters every week.
"Then the following day the Brixton bomb happened and on the Monday we got a call saying we would be next," Shivdasani said. "We're convinced it's the same people behind both bombs who've also been threatening us."
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