UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, April 9, 1997
9A
Zaire rebel heads for the capital
The Associated Press
MBUJL-MAYI, Zaire — Rebel leader Laurent Kabila, savoring victory in central Zaire, set his sights on the capital yesterday and claimed a startling advance — denied by the government — to within 160 miles of Kinshasa.
"Where else is there to go?" Kabila told a cheering crowd of 50,000 supporters in Mbuji-Mayi, Zaire's diamond mining center about 600 miles from the capital.
The rebels, whose six-month sweep through Zaire shows no sign of slowing, are also within a few miles of Lubumbashi, Zaire's second-largest city, in the far southeast.
In Kinshasa, President Mobutu Sese Seko yesterday declared a state of emergency for the country and appointed military governors throughout Zaire.
Leon Kalima said it meant in principle that political demonstrations would be banned.
The brief television announcement did not give details, but Defense Ministry representative
Large-scale demonstrations had been expected tomorrow by supporters of newly appointed Prime Minister Etienne Tshisekedi, a longtime opponent of Mobutu who has called for marches to press for more power for the prime minister's office.
About 100 Tshisekedi supporters demonstrated for a second day in Kinshasa yesterday, trying to stop Parliament from possibly voting to oust him. On Monday, a much larger protest of some 3,500 people was broken up with tear gas and tanks.
Angie Kuhn/KANSAN
The government representative said Mobutu had declared the state of emergency because of the situation. "It appears Mr. Kabila wants to continue the war." he said.
Speaking in Mbuji-Mayi, Kabila told the crowds that his troops were 160 miles northeast of Kinshasa, near the city of Bandundu,
and said they would press on to the capital city to oust Mobutu, Zaire's dictator for nearly 32 years.
But Kalima, the representative, denied the rebels were anywhere near Bandundu, calling the report an attempt to manipulate the media. He said a small group of longtime Mobutu opponents in Bandundu had circulated a statement there announcing their support for Kabila.
Speaking later to reporters, Kabila said rebel troops had encountered stiff opposition from Mobutu's Presidential Guards in Lubumbasht.
However, he said the soldiers would be defeated.
In South Africa, government and rebel delegations finished their first face-to-face talks on Tuesday without achieving a cease-fire. But they agreed they should halt fighting to continue negotiations in the future.
"Both parties agreed on negotiations to bring about a peaceful political solution to the conflict," the sides said in a joint statement. "This necessitates a complete cession of hostilities."
Kabila said he would allow the 66-year-old president, who is suffering from prostate cancer, to remain in Zaire, but said he would have to live as a civilian in Gbadolite, his home village.
"He can go there to die," Kabila said.
Abortion pill rights given to scientist
Creator of RU-486 hopes move will lessen consumer pressure
The Associated Press
PARIS — The European pharmaceutical giant Hoechst, threatened by boycotts from American anti-abortion groups, has unloaded its remaining rights to the abortion pill RU-486.
The company gave the rights yesterday to one of the drug's creators, Edouard Sakiz, who plans to form a smaller company that will be less vulnerable to consumer pressure.
The move was a further attempt by the French drug company Roussel-Uclaf — a Hoechst subsidiary —
to distance itself from the controversial drug. Just two years ago, in the face of boycotts, it ceded U.S. rights to RU-486 to a nonprofit American group.
Sakiz said his new company would have nothing to do with the U.S. market.
The $3.5 million in annual sales of RU-486 — also known as mifrerestone — was not worth risking Hoechst's $1.63 billion in U.S. business, Hoechst spokeswoman Catherine Euvrard said.
"Roussel-Uclaf no longer has the means to withstand the boycott threats," she told reporters in Paris.
An American anti-abortion group last week threatened to boycott Allegra, a Hoechst antihistamine, Euvair said.
The Washington-based National Right to Life Committee, which
threatened the boycott, had no comment.
About 200,000 women have ended pregnancies with the RU-486 since it debuted on the French market in 1988, and it also is sold in Sweden and Britain. In the United States, RU-486 is expected to received full approval and begin distribution by the year's end.
Alexander Sanger, from the American group Planned Parenthood, said he hoped the transfer of Hoechst's rights to the drug would make RU-486 more available worldwide.
But Sakiz, who did not pay for rights to the drug, said he only would distribute the drug to countries that followed strict guidelines for its use, a requirement that would exclude most developing countries and Russia.
"Roussel-Uclaf no longer has the means to be able to withstand the boycott threats."
Catherine Euvrard
Hoechst spokesperson
The new company is expected to make little or no profit from RU-486, though any profits from the drug would go toward medical research, Sakiz said.
Police brutality taped in Brazil
The Associated Press
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The scenes were sickeningly familiar: a grain amateur video showing police randomly beating, punching and kicking defenseless residents of a slum.
The footage was broadcast on national TV news Monday, a week after like video showed police torturing suspects and killing one in a slum in Diadema.
The latest video also coincided with the release of a report on police violence in Brazil by Human Rights Watch/Americas, which added its voice to a rising call for police reform.
A slum resident shot the film before dawn on March 23 in the Rio district known as Cidade de Deus — "City of God" in Portuguese. He said he was looking for police violence because police had earlier beaten and extorted money from his brother.
Six officers are shown ordering passersby to line up facing a concrete wall. The troopers walk down the line, beating some of the men with nightsticks, slapping and punching others or kicking them in the kidneys.
One youth is ordered to extend his hands, palms up, as a trooper beats them with a stick and another hits him from behind.
Gov. Marcello Alencar of Rio de Janeiro said the officers were under arrest at the state police barracks. He said they would be expelled from the force.
The incident was not isolated.
"The fear is constant.I see it every day."
Vera Lucia Flores Leite mother of missing girl
More than 30 cases of abuse are documented in a 120-page report, "Police Brutality in Urban Brazil," released yesterday.
"Brazilian police frequently beat, torture and commit summary executions of detainees, in large part due to ... impunity," Human Rights Watch/Americas said.
In one example, the top police official in the northern state of Rio Grande do Norte, Maurillo Pinto de Medeiros, remained in office despite evidence that he coordinated a death squad responsible for dozens of homicides, incidents of torture and one forced disappearance, the group says.
Some policies encourage violence, it says. In Rio, 92 police troopers were promoted for bravery after encounters that left 72 civilians dead.
"The fear is constant," said Vera Lucia Flores Leite, a mother whose 16-year-old daughter disappeared in 1990 with 10 other people when police invaded a party in the rio slum district of Acari. "I see it every day."
American sees severity of North Korean starvation
For additional international and national news stories, turn to page 7B
The Associated Press
TOKYO — Their rations reduced to five ounces of rice a day, rural North Koreans stripped grass and weeds from the fields and bark from the trees — feeding them to their starving families before the eyes of a stunned American lawmaker.
— from the few trees not cut down for fuel.
In a four-day tour of North Korea, Rep. Tony Hall had one of the most revealing looks yet at the starvation in the secretive communist nation: orphans whose growth was stunted by hunger and diarrhea; children going bald for lack of nutrients; rural families desperately feeding on bark
"I was stunned by what I saw ... and by how much worse conditions have gotten since I was there last August," Hall said yesterday in Tokyo after returning from North Korea.
spokesman Hans Olsen said in Geneva.
"Evidence of slow starvation on a massive scale was plain wherever we made an effort to look." he said.
On the same day Hall described his findings, the United Nations announced the first deaths in North Korea's two-year food crisis. The North Korean health ministry told U.N. workers that 134 children died of malnutrition in 1996. UNICEF
U. N. and relief agencies long have warned that North Korea, where floods devastated farmland the last two summers, faces famine without large-scale aid.
The United States financed the fact-finding tour by Hall, a Democrat from Ohio.
U. N. officials have said that 20 million North Koreans go to bed hungry every night, that disease is spreading and that malnutrition threatens the entire nation.
Hall said he demanded to see certain places, made unannounced
stops in villages and inside homes and used a Korean-speaking doctor from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to make sure that he saw a true picture of the crisis.
Many North Koreans told him the government recently had cut their daily rations to between about three and five ounces of rice a day, barely 500 calories.
In nurseries, clinics and hospitals, Hall said, he saw the alliments caused by bad water and inadequate food, with children affected most. Hospitals were running short of fuel and medicine.
A UNICEF representative who visited the city found that 10 children had been hospitalized for malnutrition and that another 140 were showing signs of starvation.
Hall urged world leaders to do more to help feed North Korea, despite what he called the faults of its repressive government and massive military. North Korea has spent huge amounts of money on arms while reducing spending on food rations for its people.
On Monday, the United Nations appealed for $126 million in emergency aid for North Korea for the next year, most of which would be used to feed its 2.4 million children
younger than 6.
South Korea is withholding large relief shipments until North Korea agrees to four-party peace talks with it, China and the United States.
Japan has refused to open its vast reserves of surplus rice to North Korea, angered by new evidence that North Korean agents kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970s.
Since 1995, Washington has given $18.4 million in cash, food and medicine to North Korea, according to the State Department. That is more than any other country has donated — but according to Hall, it is not nearly enough.
UPPER CLASSMEN
Do you remember your first year at KU7? Would you like to make this a better experience for future freshmen and transfer students? If the answer is YES, then you should definitely apply to become a
PEER MENTOR!
We are currently accepting applications for Fall '97 positions for all of those interested in becoming a mentor. For more information call 864-4073 or stop by 410 OAC in the Kansas Union to pick up an application. Deadline is Monday, April 14.
M
The deadline is Friday, April 18 at 4:00 pm.
It runs Tuesday, April 22, 1997
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A unique panel presentation on the plight of refugees in Haiti and Africa
Featured Speakers Bryant Freeman Leonardo Villalon
WHEN AND WHERE:
Brought to you by Amnesty International and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority
KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING AFTER GRADUATION? HAVE YOU CONSIDERED AN MBA AT KU?
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