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Tuesday, September 6, 1988/The Battalion/Page 11
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Bangladesh flood victims seek
pure water, medical treatment
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BAILTALI, Bangladesh (AP) —
Barefoot women, among the mil
lions of homeless in flooded Bangla
desh, clambered from boats Monday
onto the only strip of this village still
above water and surrounded army
officers who doled out food.
They pushed each other in the
light rain to get at the giant cooking
pots. They stuffed fistfuls of cooked
rice and lentils into their own pots
and bowls, or into the folds of their
mud-stained saris.
Floods have submerged three-
fourths of the nation and claimed at
least 406 lives this summer, accord
ing to official figures. Daily tallies in
Dhaka newspapers put the death toll
at 1,015.
More than 92,000 people are
known to suffer from diarrhea and
5,715 more from dysentery, the
Health Ministry said.
Taslimur Rahman, joint secretary
of the ministry, told reporters in the
capital of Dhaka that people get the
diseases by drinking impure water,
I often the very flood water that ma-
| roons them.
Officials say water purification
tablets are being distributed but resi
dents of BailtaTi, a village of 2,000
people 55 miles southwest of Dhaka,
said they had not seen any.
“The water that is available to
drink is the flood water. We have no
option but to drink it,” Injul Haq
Majumder, a 37-year-old teacher,
told reporters who arrived by heli
copter.
He translated his reply from En
glish to Bengali for villagers who
crowded around. A dozen men
nodded vigorously in agreement.
Only two short strips of road, to
taling about 500 yards, remained
above water in Bailtali.
One was covered with makeshift
shelters of bamboo poles and palm
thatch, and the other was bare as two
air force helicopters descended
through the rain, except for the
food kettles.
More than 100 small fishing boats,
carrying two to 10 people each,
bobbed beside the roan in flood wa
ters that had engulfed power lines
and left only the tips of poles and a
few loops of wire visible.
People throughout Bangladesh
are huddled on tiny outcroppings of
muddy earth like those at Bailtali.
“Almost all the districts are like
this,” Information Minister Mahbu-
bur Rahman told a dozen foreign
journalists who accompanied him on
the flight.
Rahman said 50 of the country’s
64 districts and 25 million of its 110
million people have been directly af
fected by floods that began in June
with the annual monsoon, then
eased, but worsened again last week.
By his definition, “directly af
fected” included anyone who had
lost relatives, a home or business,
crops or other property.
Rahman said it was too early to
put a cost on the damage and re
construction, but called the loss co
lossal, with homes, agriculture, com
munications, bridges, culverts,
educational institutions, all damaged
or washed away.
Floods are an annual monsoon
event in Bangladesh, a disaster that
accompanies the blessing of rain for
the crops, but Rahman and other of
ficials said those of 1988 are the
worst in memory.
East year’s floods killed about 300
people, Rahman said, but Dhaka
newspapers put the 1987 toll at
1,500.
Because the floods come regu
larly, people seek higher ground or
take to boats as soon as the water
starts rising, thus averting greater
loss of life. The government says
most who drown are small children
and elderly people.
Bangladesh, whose per capita an
nual income of $150, is one of the
world’s poorest nations. Rivers run
through it like veins, making it a sort
of giant drain pipe for flood waters
that pour south into the Bay of
Bengal.
Los Angeles officer slain
in gang drive-by shooting
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A plain
clothes officer was shot dead in the
year’s first gang-related police slay
ing, and authorities said joint local
and federal efforts were not stop
ping the violence that may make
1988 the bloodiest ever.
Officer Daniel Pratt was shot in
the face during a drive-by shooting
Saturday night in south-central Los
Angeles.
He and his partner were pursuing
a car believed to be involved in an
other such shooting minutes earlier
that wounded three, police said.
Pratt, 30, died later at a hospital.
The six-year veteran leaves behind a
pregnant wife and three children.
A 20-year-old gang member be
lieved to be the triggerman was ar
rested Sunday.
With flags outside police head
quarters standing at half staff Sun
day, Police Chief Daryl Gates la
mented the department’s loss.
“Here was a fine officer and fam
ily man, with a child he’ll never see,
dead because of some no-good, mis
erable sons of bitches out there that
society allows to roam the streets,”
Gates said.
Pratt is the first police officer
killed in a drive-by shooting, a tech
nique that has been used frequently
by gangs members in the past few
years. A police officer in 1987 was
killed in a gang gun battle.
Eleven people were slain in gang
shootings in the last weekend of Au
gust, and more than 200 people
have died this year. The death toll
should climb to an all-time high of
more than 400 by year’s end, making
1988 the bloodiest year ever for
gang crimes, officials said.
1 here were a record 387 gang-re
lated murders in Los Angeles county
in 1987.
The violence has left law-enforce
ment officials struggling to end the
rampage.
Police launched a full-scale assault
in March. Twice since then, the Los
Angeles Police Department has
marched 1,000 officers into the most
gang-infested areas of the city on
weekends.
Overall crime rate declined, but
the gang murder rate continues to
climb.
“We’re in a holding action. We’re
keeping the flames from spreading
'but we’re not putting them out,” said
Robert Philibosian, former county
district attorney and head of the
state task force on gangs and drugs.
While the carnage mounts, Los
Angeles gangs continue to export
their drug trade to Seattle, Kansas
City, Arizona and Philadelphia as
they expand their rock cocaine-traf
ficking network.
“It’s going to take years. The FBI
has worked at stopping the drug
problem for 30 years and still hasn’t
stopped it,” Lawrence Lawler, the
new FBI chief for Los Angeles said.
“It’s a form of life to some people. It
may be an entire generation before
this goes away.”
Kurdish guerrillas
Iraqi soldiers kill
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) —
Kurdish guerrillas claimed Mon
day they killed or wounded 7,000
Iraqi soldiers who they said at
tacked their mountain strong
holds in northern Iraq with chem
ical weapons.
The guerrillas also said 1,900
civilians died and some bases
were lost.
Iraq denied the claims.
In Baghdad, Iraqi authorities
displayed thousands of Iranian
weapons they said were captured
in offensives before a cease-fire
took effect Aug. 20 in the 8-year-
old war with Iran.
Also on Monday:
—Iran accused Iraq of violat
ing the cease-fire by bombing vil
lages in northwestern Iran with
fighter-bombers.
Iraq denied it.
—The head of the U.N. ob
servers, Gen. Slovko Jovic, said
after a visit to the southern front
that “there are some minor prob
lems that we are trying to resolve.
Many of the problems we have
been able to solve.”
He did not detail the problems.
He spoke in an Iranian TV inter
view, monitored in Nicosia.
—U.S. officials abruptly post
poned for at least five days the
scheduled pullout of the missile
cruiser Vincennes from the Per
sian Gull region after at least one
Arab government raised last-min
ute objections, U.S. military
sources said.
The vessel was to have ended
its patrol duties with the U.S.
Joint Task Force Middle East on
Sunday and was earlier reported
to actually have left.
—In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the
foreign ministers of the Arab gulf
states urged the five permanent
members of the U.N. Security
Council to help push along the
peace talks between Iraq and Iran
that began Aug. 25 in Geneva.
The five permanent members
are the United States, the Soviet
Union, China, Britain and
France.
According to the Kurdish
guerrillas, most of the civilians
were killed in 65 villages they say
have been attacked with chemi
cals.
“Most of the Kurdish civilian
casualties are from constant Iraqi
E oison gas attacks on their vil-
iges and settlements,” a spokes
man for the Kurdish Democratic
Party told The Associated Press
in a telephone interview.
Baghdad’s official Iraqi news
agency said Iraq “strongly denied
fabricated allegations reported by
The Associated Press on the use
of chemical weapons in north
Iraq.”
Texas, Illinois top contenders
for $4.4 billion supercollider
DALLAS (AP) — Texas and Illinois are the top con
tenders for the site of the federal government’s $4.4 bil
lion super-conducting supercollider and the thousands
of jobs the atom-smasher would create, U.S. News &
World Report said Monday.
The magazine quoted unidentified sources whom it
characterized only as “savvy bettors” as saying Arizona,
Colorado, Michigan, North Carolina and Tennessee
trail in the race for the project. The supercollider labo
ratory would be a scientific research park with office
space and support buildings for an estimated 2,500 to
3,000 people.
Physicists hope to use the proposed 53-mile-round
underground particle accelerator to study subatomic
particles — nature’s fundamental building blocks.
The tunnel would be 10 feet to 12 feet in diameter
and would contain two pipes through which beams of
subatomic particles, protons, would circle and then col
lide at enormous speeds achieved by the use of electric
ity and 10,000 superconducting magnets.
Scientists have said the resulting collisions of protons
would, for a fraction of a second, produce high-energy
conditions similar to those that may have existed at the
creation of the universe.
Texas has promised the Department of Energy $1
billion to help pay for construction and the laboratory’s
electricity bills. Illinois has offered the use of the Fermi-
lab atom smasher in Batavia as its bid booster, which
would save the Department of Energy $500 million, the
magazine said.
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