MONDAY,AUG.27,2001
NATION&WORLD
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN - 7A
Missing student returns safely to U.S. after visit to Africa
Mother of Yale student says State Department should have done more
The Associated Press
NEW YORK—A Yale University student missing for more than three weeks in South Africa, where she was studying on a Fulbright grant, returned to the United States yesterday.
Natasha Smalls, 20, told her parents on July 26 that she had been released from a psychiatric hospital in Zimbabwe where she had been injected with medication.
She also told her parents that she had been assaulted in March. Smalls had been studying at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa.
Glory and Robert Smalls had made arrangements for their daughter to return on Aug.1 to New York, where they live, but she never arrived.
They criticized the State Department for not doing more to help.
"I felt that if I was white, they would have reached out more,"
Glory Smalls said at a news conference at Kennedy Airport. The Smalls are black. Natasha Smalls was kept in a separate room from reporters before being taken to an undisclosed hospital.
State Department spokeswoman Michelle King said that both the South African and Zimbabwe consulates were notified of the disappearance and cooperated in the search.
"Of course, we're very happy that she has returned safely," King said, not responding directly to Glory Smalls' claim that race was an issue.
The parents also claimed that Yale officials were slow in coming to their aid.
A Yale spokesman, Tom Conroy, said the State Department already was trying to find Smalls when the school contacted the agency after learning of her disappearance on Aug. 8.
"We immediately contacted the State Department, knowing that the State Department would have the expertise to try to locate her in South Africa," Conroy said. "We cooperated with the State Department from then on."
"We immediately contacted the State Department, knowing that the State Department would have the expertise to try to locate her in South Africa"
In addition, Yale officials met
Tom Conroy
Yale spokesman
with Smalls' mother and with Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, who helped the Smalls locate their daughter, Conroy said.
Two Yale employees who were in South Africa on unrelated business also helped, Conroy said, without saying how they assisted.
"I'm just glad that my daughter's here," Glory Smalls said. "I thank God that my daughter's here. People just don't know what I've been through for the last month. It was like a living hell."
BOGOTA, Colombia — A U.S.-backed program for aerially eradicating drug crops has failed, a front-running Colombian presidential candidate said yesterday, just days before the Bush administration's first high-level visit.
The Associated Press
Colombian cocaine battles failing
Elsewhere yesterday, the army announced that U.S. trained counterdrug troops seized a jungle refinery where leftist guerrillas were allegedly making gasoline used to process cocaine. It was the first such report of a rebel refinery.
"Today there is more cocaine being produced, more trafficking, more traffickers and larger areas under cultivation," Horacio Serpa, a former interior minister who is leading polls ahead of May's elections, wrote in an editorial in Bogota's Cambio news magazine.
"New and alternative formulas are needed along with a recognition that the [counterdrug] policies applied to date have been a failure," wrote Serpa, a member of the opposition Liberal Party.
The spraying of cocaine- and heroin-producing crops and U.S. troop training are part of a $1.3 billion drug-fighting pro
gram approved under the Clinton administration. That program is reportedly undergoing a review.
Top State Department, White House and Pentagon officials are scheduled to arrive Wednesday to discuss future U.S. support for the drug war with President Andres Pastrana's administration.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is also considering a stop in Bogota next month, officials have said.
The visits come as U.S. policy in the world's leading cocaine-producing nation is being questioned from many angles.
Environmentalists said the spraying was toxic and pushed desperate farmers to cut down more virgin Amazon forest.
Peasant farmers said the spraying was killing food crops as well as coca and opium poppies — and making their families ill.
U. S. officials insisted the spraying was safe and that only large-scale coca plantations run by drug traffickers were targeted. They stressed that Washington was also providing cash assistance to small farmers who agreed to voluntarily eradicate their drug plots.
But in his column, Serpa claimed there had been "indiscriminate fumigation" of peasant drug plots, and that accords with small farmers were not working. He called for an "urgent evaluation" of the strategy.
He said Colombia should renegotiate its counterdrug aid from Washington while continuing only to spray large-scale coca plantations following environmental impact studies and with international auditing.
Some voices in Washington were reportedly urging the Bush administration to turn U.S. aid — currently earmarked for counterdrug operations alone — against the country's guerrillas. Critics worried that could draw the United States directly into Colombia's brutal 37-year civil conflict.
Underscoring the rebel links to the drug trade, the army said the refinery seized by its troops near the town of Puerto Asis was an abandoned government installation capable of making 2,000 gallons of gasoline a day for cocaine processing. Coca farmers use gasoline and other chemicals to convert coca leaves into semi-processed cocaine.
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