UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, April 1, 1997
7
Rwandans prepare to trudge home
Zairians chase away hungry, ill refugees resting at aid camp
The Associated Press
LULA, Zaire — Banished from the outskirts of rebel-held Kisangani, nearly 20,000 Rwandan refugees set out yesterday for a temporary camp where they planned to gather strength for the long journey home.
Rebel leader Laurent Kabila has been restricting the flow of food and medicine for the refugees, hoping to discourage them from settling down. The refugees, many of them ill and malnourished, are part of the 170,000 Rwandan Hutus who scattered after the rebels overran their camp at Tingi-Tingi on March 1.
After days of talks with international aid officials, Kabila agreed to let the refugees stop long enough to regain their health. But U.N. aid workers said restrictions on food shipments were tantamount to starving them to death. "First I want food, then I want to
. "First I want food, then I want to
return to my country," said refugee Cecile Mulimundo, 70, the dirty rags wrapped around her body slipping from her frail shoulders.
The rebels, who seek to oust the 31-year dictatorship of President Mobutu Sese Seko, are pressing westward after capturing most of eastern Zaire. They vow to seize the capital, Kinshasa, by June.
Rebel fighters took Kisangani, Zaire's third-largest city, on March 15, and, according to the British Broadcasting Corp., they took the town of Kamina yesterday with no resistance from government troops. Kamina is 260 miles northwest of Lubumbashi, Zaire's second-largest city.
At the United Nations, an official said peace talks between representatives of the rebels and Zaire's government were to begin in South Africa this weekend.
The refugees at Lula got their first food shipment last week since the fall of Kisangani. Another load of supplies went out by rail on Sunday, but it is not clear how much more they will get — if any.
The refugees are Rwandan Hutus, among an estimated 1.2
million who fled their country to escape retribution for a 1994 massacre of a half-million Tutsis. Most have returned home, although 400,000 are still in Zaire.
At Lula, four miles south of Kisangani, the stench of human excrement, sweat and disease was trapped under the dense forest canopy as exhausted people started to move to their new camp 12 miles farther south.
Stretched out behind them for more than 25 miles were tens of thousands more.
One gaunt man dropped his walking stick at the side of the road and folded onto the hard ground. A grimace covered his face. He — and many of the other 100,000 refugees along a railroad line south of Kisangani — probably will die before reaching the rest of the group.
Not far away, a woman with a festering leg lay on the ground, clasping a shrunken infant who clawed at a blanket and cried soundlessly. The woman placed a shriveled breast into the baby's mouth to calm him, but no milk would flow.
The refugees have covered more than 300 miles in seven months since being forced into the interior
by Rwandan Hutu militiamen retreating from the Zairian rebels.
The rebels permitted 5,000 of the weakest refugees to stay at Lula for a day or two longer, but by yesterday afternoon the rest began to arrive at the new camp, where old workers are to feed and care for them before sending them home.
Under a shelter of bamboo and leaves, Ngaruchaiya, 39, held a baby in his arm. His wife, Mirambaza, 38, tended another child, running her fingers across a gaping sore on his chest and stomach.
"There is no hope," Ngaruchya said. "I am hopeless. I don't know if my other children will survive."
Israeli-Palestinian talks may resume
The Associated Press
ZURIF, West Bank — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that peace talks with Palestinians could resume soon, his most optimistic comments since two weeks of violent protests in the West Bank and a suicide bombing in Israel.
Peace talks stalled this month after Palestinians became angered by a series of decisions by Netanyahu — a smaller-than-hoped-for West Bank pullout and the construction of a new
Jewish neighborhood in disputed east Jerusalem.
Netanyahu
His comments, which came amid signs that the West Bank protests were losing steam, were an apparent departure from his harsh rhetoric against
Yasser Arafat. There was no immediate reaction from the Palestinian leader, who has refused to meet with Netanyahu during the recent crisis.
Many Palestinians have been wounded and one killed in the West Bank riots, which Israel said had been orchestrated by Arafat's Fatah group.
In the village of Zurif yesterday, Israel's army destroyed the home of the suicide bomber who killed three Israeli this month in an attack in a Tel Aviv cafe. Near the city of Jenin, Palestinian teen-agers stoned Israeli jeeps and Israel's soldiers responded with rubber bullets, injuring at least six.
Israel's Channel 2 TV said Israel President Ezer Weizman was arranging a summit between Netanyahu and Arafat.
The Arab League, after an emotional appeal by Arafat for help, adopted a resolution on Sunday recommending
Arab states freeze relations with Israel. Delegates said the decision was up to individual states.
Netanyahu called the resolution a step backward from peace, but emphasized he was committed to continuing the peace process.
Under the Israel-PLO accords, Palestinians have autonomy in the Gaza Strip and about a quarter of the West Bank. Israel is to make three more pullouts from West Bank land by next year. But the Palestinian demand for statehood and key questions such as the future of Jerusalem have been left for final status talks that are to conclude by 1999.
Netanyahu said his recent proposal to speed up the process and push for a final settlement by year's end was still on the table.
The Palestinians have not responded to that offer. But Israeli media reports said Netanyahu might visit Washington at the end of the week to discuss the proposal.
Arafat was asked upon returning to Gaza from the Arab summit in Cairo whether a new U.S. initiative could end the crisis.
"We hope so," he said.
In Zurif, the army imposed a curfew yesterday before the demolition of a one-story home where the Tel Aviv suicide bomber, Moussa Ghneimat, 28, had lived with his wife and four children.
Dozens of soldiers ringed the home and neighbors watched from the rooftops as a large pneumatic hammer mounted on a buldozer cut through the cement roof and knocked down the walls, leaving the adjacent home where Ghneimaf's parents live standing.
"For us, Moussa is a hero and a martyr," said 17-year-old Abdel Khader Ghneimat, a cousin. "The demolition of his house only gives us more conviction to continue with the struggle."a
Wife may succeed dead Guyanan leader
The Associated Press
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — When he — a Guyana man born of indentured Indian immigrants — asked for her hand in 1943, her father threatened to shoot him.
When she — a Jewish woman from suburban Chicago — accompanied her new husband home to Guyana, his family was furious that he had taken a foreign bride.
Five decades after nurse Janet Rosenberg first met dentist Cheddi Jagan, then studying for his doctorate at Northwestern University, she is now set to follow her husband on one final step of their remarkable odyssey — this time, succeeding him as president after his death in office March 6.
Jagan is getting ready to move out of Guyana's wooden presidential mansion, State House. Few doubt she will be moving back in as president after elections due by January, given the adoration with which many Guyanese regard her.
Part of the Jagans' popularity and success stemmed from the fact that as a couple, they experienced firsthand the kind of racial tensions that divide the country.
As fiercely protective of her husband's legacy as she was of him, Jagan calls it a duty and a labor of love to further her husband's political accomplishments.
The Jagans' mutual devotion and shared communist ideology — she is even more hard-line than her late husband, whose Marxism mellowed over the
"It's not for me to decide," she said, sitting on the verandah of State House. "It is for the party."
"It's not forme to decide. It is for the party."
JanetJagan
NATURALWAY
Guyana presidential candidate
years — kept them together despite the racial and political pressures on their marriage.
Janet Jagan endured three years of house arrest and five months in jail with her husband in the 1950s, when he first won an election in this Caribbean country, the only English-speaking nation in South America.
But many Guyanese, including members of her own party, say she was the real power — and that if one weren't in her good graces, one couldn't reach her husband.
She has been accustomed to hearing that since the 1940s, when she was criticized by Guyana's rich whites, she said.
"There was much hatred and malice against me because I was a White person (married to a non-White) but also, they claimed that I the brains behind Jagan that wrote all his speeches," she said. "They were trying to say only White people had brains."
On the other side, Black Guyanese of African descent accuse Jagan of favoring her husband's Indian people, who are a majority in Guyana.
- 820-822 MASS. * 841-0100 *
www.cjnetworks.com \natural way!
Recycle your
NATURALWAY
Daily
$1 OFF COUPON
K.U. STUDENTS ONLY
WORLD'S GREATEST
HAIRCUT
$795
reg.
$8,95
Kansan
REG. $45
HELENE CURTIS
PERMS
$2995
COMPLETE WITH CUT!
Long Hair Extra
SNIP N'CLIP
FAMILY HAIRCUT SHOPS
ORCHARDS SHOPS
842-5151
(14th & Kasold)
Open Nights and Sundays — Just Drop In
- NATURAL FIBER CLOTHING
* NATURAL BODY CARE
* 820-822 MASS. * 841-0100 *
www.cLIENTCOOP.com \nnatural way\a
Long Hair Extra Open Nights and Sundays — Just Drop In!
What Better Way to Celebrate a GREAT Season than with a fine cigar?
Check out our walk-in Humidor at 925 Iowa
3 Convenient Locations
2104 W 25th 925 Iowa 625 N 2nd
In Holiday Plaza Hillcrest Center North of car wash
(with walks in Hurricane)
WAY TO GO HAWKS!
3 Convenient Locations 925 lowa Hillcrest Center (with walk-in humidor)
TOBACCO EXPRESS
Surgeon General's Warning: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide
Congrats on a Good Season 'Hawks
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES!
New Donors
Earn $20 Today,
Up To $40 This Week!
By donating your life-saving plasma!
By donating your life-saving plasma!
Walk-in are welcome.
Nabi Biomedical Center
816 W-24 • 749-5750
(Behind Laird Noller Ford)
Hours: M-F 9am-6:30pm Sat 10am-2pm
complete Car Service • High Tech Rep
• Old Fashioned Service
• Transmission Specialists
802 Lynn
Lawrence, Kansas
842-0865