NATION/WORLD UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, January 22,1997
9A
Chechens' minds set on freedom despite official Russian control
War-torn Grozny hopes to rebuild city and lives soon
The Associated Press
GROZNY, Russia — Back in the Kremlin, Russian leaders vow never to let Chechnya secede. On the muddy, bomb-cratered streets of Grozyn, the people of the Chechen capital feel they already have.
They see Monday's elections for a new president and parliament as a fitting conclusion to an independence drive, something earned in 20 months of fierce guerrilla resistance and validated by the final withdrawal of the Russian army only three weeks ago.
Ramzan, a traffic officer, hasn't been paid since June. But he's out every day directing cars through the pulverized city in the belief that his next paycheck will come from a free Chechnya, which Muslim separatists call Ichkeria.
"When we become independent,
"I think Chechnya left Russia long ago."
Lechi Dudayev Mayor of Grozny
then the Ichkera government will be able to pay me," says Ramzan, who gave only the one name.
Chechnya's formal status remains a thorny issue to be hashed out by politicians, diplomats and mapmakers. People like Ramzan, however, are confident that independence is coming soon Up in his spartan office in the middle of the devastated capital, Grozny's mayor says he, too, is certain that Chechnya will no longer be part of Russia after the elections.
"I think Chechnya left Russia long ago," says Lecchi Dudeyari, a young man for whom political rebellion is a family tradition. His uncle, the late
Dzhokhar Dudayev, declared Chechnya independent in 1991.
Russia fears that giving Chechnya independence would encourage other ethnic groups with similar notions of seceding. But independence poses many problems for the Chechens too, problems for which they have no easy answers.
The republic is flat broke and can hardly expect help from cash-strapped Moscow. Most of Grozy has been reduced to a giant pile of rubble. There are few jobs, particularly for men. With Chechnya's industry largely wiped out, many men — young and armed from the war — have turned to crime.
Apartments lack running water. Wild dogs roam the city, searching for snacks in garbage piled in the streets. The banking system seems to consist largely of money-changers circulating in the stalls of Grozny's main market.
So far, Chechens have employed their survival skills mostly on an informal, small-scale basis. They pin most of their future hopes on reviving Chechnya's oil industry and collecting handsome fees for crude that moves through a pipeline running
from oil-rich Azerbaijan, across Chechen territory, and on to Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossisk.
For the oil industry to flourish, though, it will require cooperation with Russia. Therein lies the rub with Chechnya's plan to turn its back on Moscow.
"We don't have any financial resources," said Mayor Dudayev. "But we believe the elections will give us a strong government that will be able to make the right decisions."
Supreme Court eyes discrimination case
Teacher claims firing was racially based
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court, eying a politically charged affirmative action dispute, wants to hear from the Clinton administration before deciding whether to tackle the case.
The court asked administration lawyers yesterday whether they thought a New Jersey school board illegally fired a white teacher rather than an equally qualified African-American colleague. A response could take months.
The case became a rallying cry for Republicans in Congress who seek to dismantle many affirmative-action programs.
The justices, increasingly hostile in recent years to race-based policies, are being asked by the Piscataway Board of Education to reverse rulings that said its effort to preserve diversity amounted to racial discrimination.
New Jersey law requires that tenured teachers be laid off in reverse order of seniority, but two teachers — Sharon Taxman and Debra Williams — had started their jobs on the same day nine years earlier.
The affirmative-action dispute dates to a 1989 decision by the local school board to eliminate a teaching position in Piscataway High School's business department.
Taxman is Caucasian; Williams is African-American. Both were equally qualified.
The school board laid off Taxman because Williams was the only minority teacher in the 10-teacher business department.
The board never had discriminated against African-American employees, and in 1975 it had adopted a plan that favored racial diversity when candidates had equal qualifications.
Soon after her layoff, Taxman filed a racial-bias complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
She said that the board's action violated an anti-bias law known as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The case drew national attention after the Bush administration supported Taxman's complaint with a reverse-discrimination lawsuit against the school board.
When President Clinton took office, however, the Justice Department tried to switch sides and support the school board.
By the time a federal judge ruled for Taxman, she had been rehired. She was awarded $144,000 in back pay and damages, and the board was ordered to treat her seniority as if she had never been laid off.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge's ruling by an 8-4 vote last August.
The appeals court said Title VII prohibited any race-conscious decision-making if it was not taken to remedy past discrimination.
- Rejected the religious-freedom appeal of a former Indiana substitute teacher who says he wrongly was fired for discussing religion with students and silently reading his Bible in class.
In other matters yesterday, the court:
Voted to throw out a federal law requiring small shares of Indian reservation land owned by individual tribe members to revert to the tribe when the owners die.
Gulf War syndrome report released
Investigation proves correlation exists
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Gulf War veterans who were near a release of nerve gas in Iraq show a higher rate of muscle and bone ailments than those farther away, a top veteran official said yesterday.
The Veterans Affairs Department identified 81 Gulf veterans who were part of a March 1991 weapons demolition team as having the ailments, which may have been caused by blowing up shells later found to contain deadly sarin nerve gas. Of that group, 31 percent have been diagnosed with muscular skeletal conditions at a higher rate than veterans who were farther away, according to physician Kenneth Kizer, the VA's top health official.
But test results on these 81 soldiers cannot be generalized to the entire Kamisiyah group or considered definitive, he said.
Nevertheless, they bolster the arguments of veterans and lawmakers who argue that exposure to chemical weapons during the Gulf War may explain various ailments suffered by thousands of veterans. The ailments, known collectively as Gulf War syndrome, include headaches, insomnia, muscle aches, joint pain, stomach disorders and chronic fatigue.
scene of the demolition operations. The soldiers thought they were blowing up conventional munitions. Last year, the Pentagon confirmed some warheads contained sarin.
In several other categories, the problems with those at Kamisiyah were not appreciably higher. Results were slightly lower for individuals in categories such as mental disorders, nervous and circulatory system ailments and respiratory and digestive troubles.
The VA has conducted diagnostic examinations on more than 52,000 Gulf veterans. Of those,1,978 were within 31 miles of Kanisiyah, the destruction site, and 81 were at the
Of the 81 veterans at the site, 30.9 percent reported muscular skeletal and connective tissue alliments.
The veterans in the VA study reported their ailments because they believed they were ill. Comparisons of various subcategories of Gulf veterans may be of limited value to the nearly 700,000 American troops who served in the conflict.
"This information gives one perspective, or a partial snapshot," Kizer said.
In a sign of the Pentagon's increasing sensitivity to veterans' complaints, Bernard Rostker, the Pentagon official in charge of Gulf War issues, said he ordered a staff paper removed from the department's Gulf War home page because it discounted low-level exposure as the cause for Gulf War illnesses.
Rostker also responded to statements in December by two Marines and an Army major that authorities had ignored alerts about chemical weapons detection. In one case, Rostker said troops were ordered to don their protective gear in response to a preliminary warning that was later found to be a false alarm.
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