UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday. April 17. 1995
5B
IRA weapons are found near Dublin
Despite cease-fire, army still has all its guns and explosives
The Associated Press
Cutting through the complex rhetoric of a slow-blooming peace process, the signs suggest how fragile the truce could prove if Britain sticks by its demand that the IRA disarm first for democracy's sake.
CROSSMAGLEN, Northern Ireland — Last year, when IRA sharpshooters were picking off soldiers and police, mock warning signs boasting, "Sniper at work" appeared along the twisting roads of this bitterly disputed borderland.
Now the signs say "Sniper on hold," a token of a cease-fire that has held seven months but also a warning that the Irish Republican Army still has all its guns and explosives.
Yesterday, Irish police found a trove of IRA weapons near Ballyjamesdumf, about 85 miles northwest of Dublin. The cache included three home-made mortar tubes, nine detonators and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition.
Britain's negotiators insist pro-British "unionists" from the province's Protestant majority simply will not talk to the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party while the facing the threat of resumed IRA violence.
IRA tactics have shifted but the goal remains "Brits out" of Northern Ireland so the province can unite with the Irish Republic. IRA supporters say it will not
give up its arsenal in advance because talks might not produce an acceptable deal.
"People here are impatient for talks to start, and they can't understand why they haven't started," said Jim McAllister. Sinn Fein's most prominent and popular figure in South Armagh, a region of rolling farmland with few pro-British Protestants.
His argument is simple: Guns don't kill, people do.
Pointing across the town's broad square to the army's armored security tower, McAllister said: "If the IRA dumped all their equipment in front of the barracks there on a Monday, they could get new stuff on Tuesday. You've got to solve the problem, not tinker with symptoms."
Before the cease-fire in September, the IRA's South Armagh units were recognized as the outlawed group's most technically competent and determined. The British army surrendered the roadways to the IRA after curbside bombs claimed too many soldiers' lives.
Plagued by damaging splits in the past, the IRA seems determined to stay united. Any hint of disposing of weapons would be divisive, and there is evidence hard-liners are waiting their chance.
Instead the army operates from hilltop surveillance and listening posts, moving supplies and troops by helicopter.
Security sources on both sides of the border estimate the IRA has enough equipment for a decade's worth of renewed attacks, most buried in Ireland.
Assassination suspect questioned
U.S. says Aristide's government involved
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The suspect arrested in the assassination of an ultranationalist politician was a small-time marijuana dealer and probably only a tiny cog in the plot, a former policeman said yesterday.
The Associated Press
No other details have emerged about Claudy Lacroix, the first person arrested in the March 28 slaying of lawyer Mireille Durocher Bertin,35 a leading critic of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Bertin and a companion were hit by dozens of bullets in an ambush while driving on a busy downtown street of Port-au-Prince.
Her assassination embarrassed both Aristide and the U.S. government, coming just days
before a visit by President Clinton celebrating the U.S. led effort to restore Aristide to power.
The United States had uncovered details of a plan to kill Bertin nine days before the shooting and informed the government. U.S. officials said Aristide's interior minister, former Brig. Gen. Mondesir Beaubrun, was identified as the mastermind of the plot.
Aristide has defended Beaubrun, who denies the allegation.
Bertin was a prominent adviser to the military leaders who topplied Aristide in September 1991, and had been one of Aristide's most vocal critics since he returned from exile last October.
Lacroix was arrested at his home Friday by Haitian police. They are being assisted by U.N. officers and the FBI, which sent investigators to examine Bertin's body at Aristide's request.
On Saturday, U.N. spokesman Eric Falt said Lacroix was being interrogated, but he declined to give any details about him or list possible charges.
A former police officer told The Associated
Press yesterday that Lacroix lived in the neighborhood where the killing occurred. The officer, who worked for the former military regime and now is unemployed, described Lacroix as a small-time crook and mariana dealer.
"If he is involved, he probably only played a small part," the officer said on condition of anonymity.
Bertin was killed just days after she announced the formation of an opposition political party.
When Aristide returned from exile, he disbanded the Haitian army and the paramilitary police force that killed up to 3,000 of his supporters during three years of military dictatorship. Crime has risen in the resulting security vacuum as Haiti prepares for June legislative elections.
Before the slaying, the multinational force in Haiti discovered a plot to kill dozens of coup supporters, and arrested six people accused of being involved.
Shanghai revolutionizes Chinese television
the elections, already postponed twice, will be a crucial test of its fledgling democracy.
The Associated Press
SHANGHAI, CHINA — Billy Joel music videos, the Super Bowl, Hollywood hits, the latest financial reports and on-the-scene local news coverage. Channel-surfing in China has never been this good.
Shanghai, China's largest and most cosmopolitan city, is leading the nation in transforming television from a propaganda tool of the ruling Communist Party into an entertainment source that is offering viewers more choices than ever.
While the programming is still staid by Western standards, it represents a significant loosening of government controls on television, which is state-owned and operated.
Most of China's 600 million television viewers, about half of the total population, content themselves with limited programming on two or three channels offering sappy, slow-moving Chinese soap operas, variety shows performed by the military and lectures on electrical engineering.
Shanghai's Broadcasting and Television Bureau is trying to liven up local programming in an effort to keep viewers from abandoning televi
"Even we in the television industry had the same feeling as the masses: There just wasn't much to watch on television."
"Even we in the television industry had the same feeling as the masses: There just wasn't much to watch on television," said Wang Jianguo, vice director of the administrative office at Shanghai's Oriental Television.
Wang Jianguo vice director of the administrative office at Shanghai's Oriental Television
sion for other forms of entertainment, such as going to karaoke bars.
"As Shanghai becomes more affluent, the amount of television viewing has declined rather than increased," said John Kaye, director of television services for the audience estimate company Nielsen SRG in Hong Kong.
Shanghai's efforts in the past two years have resulted in 12 channels offering everything from
ESPN to Carnegie Hall concerts to tips on where to get the best buys in town.
Things foreign and Western are no longer forbidden in China, and such programs give Chinese viewers the opportunity to be part of the international pop culture, introducing them to sports stars such as Michael Jordan and singing groups like Sweden's Roxette.
But Oriental's Wang is quick to assert that the new programming poses no threat to Communist Party rule.
"China's media organs are still the mouthpieces of the party and the government," he said.
Shanghai's ability to make such quick progress has been helped by the fact that it is one of only five cities in China with central government permission to import foreign movies and programming without higher approval.
In November, China's first music television channel went on the air, part of Shanghai's extensive cable network system.
But the real evidence of Shanghai's leading role in China's television revolution is the establishment of the nation's only nongovernment-financed TV station, Oriental Television. Although the Shanghai government provided start-up money, the station has gotten no further government funds and is responsible for its own profits and losses.
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