NATION AND WORLD
University Daily Kansan, April 22, 1985
Page 2
NEWS BRIEFS
Fire sweeps through theater
MANILA, Philippines — A mysterious explosion sparked a fire yesterday that swept through a theater where hundreds of movie-goers were watching the film "Perfect Crime," killing 44 people and injuring 53 others, police said.
Authorities said most of the victims died in the stampede to get out of the building after the explosion. It was one of the worst hares in the Philippines since World War II.
The fire, which railed for an hour, swept through Cinema 2, one of two movie houses on the second floor of a commercial building in Albay province. 229 miles south of Manila.
Union founder urges protests
GDANSK, Poland – Solidarity union founder Lech Walesa, addressing a crowd chanting, “We shall win, we will shin,” yesterday called for May Day protests to demand the release of more than 100 political prisoners in Poland.
"We have not learned how to defend our (opposition) leaders. They are being spat upon and we have to defend them." Walesa told about 500 cheering supporters who waved the Solidarity V-for-victory sign in the northern seaport of Gdansk.
Sources in the outlawed Solidarity trade union estimate there are 107 political prisoners in Polish jails.
Ties to S. Africa denounced
NEW DELHI, India — The 101-nation Non-Aligned Movement yesterday urged the United States and other Western powers to cut diplomatic ties with South Africa and impose economic sanctions for stalling South West Africa's independence.
The movement made the plea after a three-day conference on South Africa's occupation of South West Africa, known as Namibia.
The conference also requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to put into action its 1978 resolution recognizing the guerrilla South West Africa People's Organization, or SWAPO, as sole representative of the Namibian people.
Poll calls law students liberal
WASHINGTON — The next generation of lawyers supports a woman's right to an abortion and the death penalty, but is split over prayer in public schools, according to a new poll by the American Bar Association.
Lauren Reskin, an attorney who helped compile the survey results, said law students were more liberal than practicing lawyers on almost all social issues.
Compiled from United Press International reports.
Ortega offer could sway vote on aid
By United Press International
WASHINGTON — A senior White House official denounced a cease-fire offer from Nicaragua yesterday as a propaganda initiative intended to sway votes in Congress this week on aid to the rebels fighting the leftist government.
"What we're seeing is propaganda, disinformation and an attempt by some members of Congress to represent the Sandinistas," said one senior administration official.
Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega conveyed the cease-fire offer in a document handed to Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Tom Harickn, D-Iowa, who held talks with the Sandinista leader in Managua over the weekend.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION officials said the offer could dim hopes of averting a stinging repudiation of President Reagan's Central America policy when Congress votes tomorrow on $14 million in humanitarian aid to the Contra rebels.
Kerry and Harkin said Ortega offered a
cease-fire, restoration of civil liberties and an end to press censorship if the United States agreed to resume talks with the European government and end its support for the rebels.
Three other U.S. legislators, previously undecided about the $14 million request, left Managua yesterday. Two vowed to vote on the bill, which they said would have said he had reservations about the request.
"My vote is cast in stone. I don't want any aid going to the Contras, Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, said. "That is not the way to address the problems down here."
Ortega also offered to help keep Latin America a nuclear-free zone and to ask the Red Cross or the U.N. High Commissionerette lettre refugees from the Nicaraguan conflict.
Kerry and Harkin, who later tried to sell the proposal to Senate Democratic leaders, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill that Ortega's plan provided a framework through which a peaceful resolution could be found to the conflict in the region.
But the White House and the State Department insisted that any move toward
resolving the Nicaraguan conflict must involve direct talks between the Sandinistas and their political opposition — a condition missing from the Ortega plan.
ROBERT SIMS, deputy White House press secretary, noting the rebels earlier had offered a cease-fire in exchange for permission to be excused Ortega of dealing in diversionary tactics.
"Their problem is not with us, it's with the opposition in their own country." Sims said.
A planned meeting yesterday between Reagan and about a dozen key senators was put off to give Senate Democrats more time to decide what type of agreement, if any, to strike with the White House over aid to the rebels.
TOP ADMINISTRATION officials, including Robert McFarlane, national security adviser, George Shultz, secretary of state, Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary, and William Ciayre, director of the CIA, held their discussions on a resolution that would be submitted pending before both houses of Congress to lift a ban on military assistance to the rebels.
White House officials said that if the original resolution came up for a vote, Reagan would suffer an embarrassing foreign policy defeat.
ROBERT DOLE of Kansas, Senate Republican leader, said he expected bipartisan support in the Senate for a measure that would provide the rebels with $14 million in humanitarian aid and rule out military support in any form.
"We think we can resolve this issue on tomorrow with pretty broad bipartisan support," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Dole also said he understood a compromise measure would ease curbs on non-military assistance that the CIA or other agencies could provide to the Contras, and would continue working for another look at so-called lethal aid if the policy did not have the desired effect.
9 ex-military leaders on trial in Argentina
In the House, Democrats remained constant of having the vested needs to deny Republican powers.
— that he has said was vital to maintaining pressure on Managua to talk peace with the Contras.
By United Press International
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Nine former military junta members, including three former Argentine presidents, go on trial for alleged mass murder torture and illegal detentions.
The hearings follow 16 months of legal wrangling in which the defendants lost a Supreme Court appeal to remove the case from civilian courts.
President Raul Alfonsin ordered the Military Supreme Court to place the former commanders on trial shortly after he took office in member 1983 after eight years of military rule.
But military judges balked at passing judgment on their peers, contending they did not have enough time or evidence to reach a decision.
THE ARGENTINE Supreme Court last year ruled civilian courts could take up the cases, and a six member federal court of law would rule on the public phase of the trial beginning today.
Hearings may go on for months. Prosecutors say they want the trials to end before
The trials mark the first time former military presidents are being made to
answer for human rights abuses in Argentina. The maximum penalty for each defendant is 25 years imprisonment
The nine former junta members, who governed Argentina between 1976 and 1982, are blamed for the disappearance of 9,000 believed to have been tortured and executed.
Argentine prosecutors say they will concentrate on 709 human rights cases, calling up 2,000 witnesses.
"IF I WANTED to try them for all 9,000 cases, this trial would never end," said 52-year-old district attorney Julio Strassera, leader of the prosecution.
He said some of the state witnesses would be former military officers who had knowledge of the human rights abuses that arose from their service and that he suspected leftist guerrillas in the 1970s.
"It is true that the subversives murdered, robbed and kidnapped, but this did not justify the state to employ the same methods," he said. "I think we are as much as the subversives." Spraasner said,
A key defendant is former President Jorge Videla, the retired army commander who toppled President Isabel Peron in 1976 — a year marked by economic chaos, bombings, assassinations and kidnappings by leftist guerrillas.
Ethiopian Jews flee abuse, guerrillas say
By United Press International
KHARTOUM, Sudan — About 3,000 black Jews, known as Falashas, have abandoned their homes in central Ethiopia because of government persecution and have fled to rebel-held territory near the Sudanese border, a guerrilla spokesman said yesterday.
Gethachew Jebessa, a spokesman for the Ethiopian Peoples Democratic Movement, a small guerrilla movement, said that the Falashas wanted to immigrate to Israel because of heightened persecution by Ethiopian authorities following a secret operation that evacuated up to 10,000 Falashas through Sudan to Israel.
"They said life was agony for them in Ethiopia since most of their fellow Jews left for Israel. They said they could not see any longer and came to us," Jebsaa said.
Diplomats have estimated that as many as 5.000 Falashas had decided to stay in Ethiopia.
IN LONDON, meanwhile, Israeli President Chaim Herzog disputed a report that Zionist groups paid ousted President Jaafer Numeiry and other former
Sudanese officials $56 million to allow the airlift of Falashas, which began late last year.
Similar charges have been made by civilian political parties in Sudan, and two have demanded that Nuremey be tried for high treason for the decision.
A committee investigating corruption within the Numeiry regime has found no proof of the claims so far, a source close to the ruling military council said yesterday.
Numiery was in Egypt, en route back from a visit to the United States, when he was deposed April 6. He has remained in Cairo.
The ruling Military Council has made no formal announcement on a policy of Falasah migrating through Sudan, but has announced it will to continue to allow refugees to cross the border from Ethiopia.
The Falasha evacuation, code-named "Operation Moses," has been condemned by the Ethiopian government, which claimed that a kidnapped and forced to march into Sudan.
Jebessa said the 3,000 Falashas now under control of the rebels complained bitterly of harassment and rejection inside government areas after Operation Moses.
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