The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current, September 06, 1988, Image 11
N Tuesday, September 6, 1988/The Battalion/Page 11 tifeh Bangladesh flood victims seek pure water, medical treatment id |;. It 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. c 3 ?? QUESTIONS BUT NO ANSWERS ?? We are a group of faculty who are united by their common experience that Jesus Christ provides intellectually and spiritually satisfying answers to life’s most important questions. We are available to students and faculty who might like to discuss such questions with us. We are FACULTY FRIENDS. Noel Addy Accounting David Church Physics Richard M. Alexander Mechanical Engineering Larry Claborn Veterinary Physiology Danny Ballard Health & Phys. Ed. Dan Colunga Computer Science Richard K. Anderson Economics Jerome Congleton Industrial Engineering George Bates Biochemistry L. 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