I
Friday, March 4, 1994
NATION/WORLD
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Shaky truce maintained in Bosnia
Additional U.N. troops requested for security
The Associated Press
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — French peacekeepers fired a warning burst from a machine gun yesterday to quiet another truce violation along the Sarajevo front, and U.N. officials appealed for nearly 11,000 more soldiers.
Yasushi Akashi, chief of the U.N. mission in the former Yugoslavia, said the troops were needed to secure truces between Serbs and the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo and between Croats and Muslims in central and southwestern Bosnia.
He said both cease-fires generally were holding but expressed concern about increasing violations.
"We very much need not only the full compliance by the parties of the agreements they have already accepted or reached, but also we ... need additional resources, additional personnel," he said in Zagreb, Croatia.
Akashi said he needed 4,600 more soldiers for Sarajevo and 6,050 for the rest of Bosnia.
With the United States declining to commit troops without an overall peace accord, and Britain, France and Canada reluctant to send more troops, it was unclear where Akashi might get additional peacekeepers.
The U.N. mission's military chief, Gen. Jean Cot of France, said reinforcements were needed immediately to avoid "losing what has been done."
Cot had harsh words for the U.S. decision not to commit ground troops unless the Bosnian factions work out a peace settlement. That policy is "not very courageous," he said.
The United States does have a large contingent of warplanes in the NATO force that patrols Bosnia's skies. Two U.S. F-16 fighter jets shot down four Serb warplanes that U.N. officials said had bombed a Bosnian government armys factory Monday about 45 miles northwest of Sarajevo.
A NATO threat to use warplanes to bomb Serb artillery around Sarajevlo ended the shelling of the besieged capital by forcing the Serbs to remove their tanks, howitzers and mortars.
The ultimatum on Sarajevo bolstered a U.N.-mediated truce that generally has held for three weeks.
A U.N. representative, Maj. Joe Labandeirau, said Serb troops had opened fire with small arms on gov-
ement troops at the Jewish Cemetery in downtown Sarajevo early yesterday. French peacekeepers in the area then fired a warning volley of machine-gun fire.
That followed an incident Wednesday in which Serbs shot four rocket-propelled grenades at government troops near the cemetery, prompting a gun battle. U.N. officials quoted Serbs as saying they fired the grenades because government soldiers were violating the truce by reinforcing trenches.
Labandeira said that three more grenades had been fired yesterday but that peacekeepers had not determined who was responsible.
Despite recent Bosnian Serb concessions, including a promise to allow the airport at Muslim-held Tuzla in northeastern Bosnia to reopen for U.N. aid flights, Serb forces continued attacks in some areas.
U. N. officials said Serb forces were pounding government-held areas in northeastern Bosnia around Brcko, where the Serbs seek to widen a corridor linking their territories in the east and west.
Serbs also launched a strong infantry attack on government troops in the northwestern Bhilac pocket Wednesday, but government troops were able to control it.
Phone tips reach out, lead to Jews' alleged attacker
The Associated Press
NEW YORK—Largely following a series of leads provided by an unidentified 911 caller on the Brooklyn Bridge and dozens of others like him, police arrested the alleged gunman who attacked a van full of young Hasidic Jews on Tuesday morning within 18 hours.
The suspect, Rashad Baz, 28, of Brooklyn, was charged with 15 counts of attempted murder and ordered held without ball after his arraignment Wednesday.
Baz, a livery cab driver from Lebanon, is accused of firing at least nine bullets from two high-powered pistols at the van in what victims and witnesses said had been an unprovoked assault.
Two other suspects — Hial
Mohammed, 32, and Bassam Rey-
atl, 27, both Jordanians living in Brooklyn — were charged with hindering prosecution, with ball set at $20,000 each. They were thought to have helped the Baz dispose of the guns and the car he used.
The on-the-scene description by the cellular caller, combined with two others, produced a description of the blue Chevrolet with its passenger side window smashed. Police gave out the car's description and a hot line number at a televised news conference. After that, police were flooded with tips.
Another caller provided an accurate license plate number. It was traced to a Brooklyn car service owned by Reyatl, Baz's boss.
Ransom set for painting
This tip led to Bass's arrest at his residence at 2:30 a.m. the next day.
The Associated Press
OSLO, Norway — A lawyer connected with anti-abortionists said yesterday that one of his clients would arrange the return of the famed Edward Munch painting "The Scream" for $1 million.
The statement by Tor Erling Staff on national radio was the second time the country's small anti-abortion movement has been linked to the theft of the painting last month.
"The man who contacted me is not the thief, but someone who has the possibility to produce the painting," he said.
Staff filed a court appeal in an unsuccessful attempt to halt the deportation of 12 American anti-abortion campaigners on Feb. 11, the day before the painting was stolen from the National Museum.
Bipartisan package far short of Clinton's universal coverage
'Bare-bones' health bill proposed
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON Thirty lawmakers proposed a bipartisan, bare-bones health reform bill yesterday to help workers with serious illnesses keep their insurance and to help Congress avoid a stalemate.
The 15 Democrats and 15 Republicans said they had plucked the common elements from the Clinton proposal and rival plans and had repackaged them in a consensus bill that would not add a single dollar to federal spending or the deficit.
It would come nowhere near President Clinton's goal of guaranteed coverage for all Americans.
Rep. Michael Bilirakis, R-Fla., one of the bill's authors, said that no more than a third of the Congress had backed any single reform bill but that 297 House members separately had backed the proposals grafted onto the
consensus plan
"The bottom line is to (get) a bill through the Congress this year," Billraiks said. "The way it is right now, everything is so splintered, we're just going to look like fools up here."
Thirty-three Republican senators, meanwhile, left on an overnight retreat to Annapolis, Md., to hash out their differences on health reform behind closed doors. House GOP leaders and the governors of South Carolina, New Hampshire and Utah joined them.
Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., said it wasn't a bill-drafting session. Sen. John Chafee, R-R-L, said, "I can tell you now, having taken a few soundings, that there won't be unanimity."
"We'll get closer than the Democrats," Dole said, and he added, "I think we can do better" than the stripped-down reform plan that Rowland and Bilirakhs had advanced.
Rep. Roy Rowland, D-Ga, a former family physician, said their bill had "not one new dollar" in it. He called it a "cut-and-paste" job.
It would limit pre-existing condition exclusions in employer health benefit
plans and would allow workers to keep coverage when they changed jobs. But it would not outlaw pre-existing condition clauses in policies sold to individuals.
The bill would discourage malpractice lawsuits, require patients with grievances to try alternative dispute resolution first, strictly limit lawyers' fees and put a $250,000 cap on awards for pain and suffering. It also would cut red tape and encourage the spread of community health centers to help the uninsured.
It would allow the self-employed to deduct 100 percent of their health insurance expenses from their taxes instead of 25 percent.
That would cost $8 billion over three years, but the bill would pay for that by forcing the Postal Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority and other agencies to put aside more money for future retiree health benefits.
Rowland and Bilirakis got 100 colleagues to sign a letter to Clinton in October urging him to abandon his all-or-nothing approach to health reform and try some interim steps first.
Israel frees 400 Palestinians in attempt to curb violence
The Associated Press
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank
ISRAELAIT, occupied west bank — Israel freed 400 Palestinian prisoners yesterday in a further effort to soothe simmering violence over the Hebron mosque massacre, while Jewish extremists grew more defiant of efforts to rein them in.
The government has released 1,000 prisoners in the past three days. Yet there has been no sign that outraged Palestinians in the occupied territories would stop protesting or that their leaders would return to stalled peace talks.
"This release won't change the hatred between us and the settlers," said 19-year-old Yasser Shabarati, a Palestinian activist freed yesterday.
As part of efforts to salvage the peace process following the massacre last Friday by a Jewish settler, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's government has ordered the army to disarm 18 militant settlers and banned them from Palestinian areas.
The crackdown has focused on Kach and Kahane Lives, militant Jewish anti-Arab movements inspired by the late extremist Meir Kahane. The mosque gunman, Baruch Goldstein, was a Kahane follower.
Settler leaders yesterday called on the extremist Jews to resist being disarmed.
The national news agency titem reported that radical settlers in Hebron and the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba in the West Bank have said they won't surrender their weapons if attempts are made to disarm them.
But Rabin has dismissed that idea and rejected a PLO demand for U.N. troops to protect Palestinians
The PLO, as a condition for *pursuing negotiations*, has demanded Israel dismantle some of the 144 Jewish settlements that are $4 source of special friction. These include three in Hebron, where 455 Israeli live among 80,000 Palestinians.
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