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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 12, 1989)
enc )r$ )f’6 it 'g” search irvices ing des; idits, it by and avery iand and ffered jgram De Klerk ready for negotiations on black rights PRETORIA, South Africa (AP) — President F.W. de Klerk told mili tant anti-apartheid leaders Wednes day he was ready to negotiate on black voting rights, but they de manded more concessions before se rious talks begin. The three-hour meeting with An glican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and two other church leaders came a day after de Klerk announced his decision to free eight longtime secu rity prisoners, including seven lead ers of the outlawed African National Congress. “I hope today’s meeting will be looked on as a milestone on the posi tive road ahead,” de Klerk said after the talks. But Tutu, the Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the Rev. Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, said de Klerk declined to give clear-cut responses to their de mands. “We made it clear we need re sults,” Chikane said. “Without re sults, we can’t have negotiations.” The clergymen demanded the lifting of the state of emergency, le galization of the African National Congress and other banned groups, the release of all detainees and polit ical prisoners, the lifting of restric tions on political activity, and clem ency for prisoners on Death Row. “If these things happen, we’ll say to our people: give them (the gov ernment) a chance. They are se rious,” Tutu said. However, the clergymen said they would press on with calls for tougher economic sanctions against South Africa unless de Klerk complied with their demands. De Klerk, who became president in August, said the clergymen were reluctant to trust his pledges to ne gotiate a new, just political system. “We are really no longer arguing about the fact that all South Africans must have a vote, that all South Afri cans must become involved in all de cisions affecting their life,” he said. “What we must now start talking about is how do we structure that.” De Klerk opposes a one-man, one- vote system and black majority rule. He has not specified what role he en visions for blacks in the national gov ernment. The president said his govern ment planned to consult with a wide range of South African leaders as part of a step-by-step process to ne gotiate a new constutition. He declined to say when the eight prisoners would be released, but other government officials said it could be within days. Nelson Mandela, the African Na tional Congress’ best-known impris oned leader, is not among the eight, and de Klerk said his status was not discussed at Wednesday’s meeting. Mandela is widely expected to be released within the next few months. The decision to release the eight prisoners unconditionally was widely praised overseas and in South Af- cheese! Erich Bechtel, a photographer for AR Photography gets ready to take the Moses Hall group photo Wednesday afternoon. Photos of groups such as dormitory residents are being taken at the Ad- Photo by Frederick D.Joe ministration Building through November. Individual students’ pic tures are being taken by Yearbook Associates at AR Photography at 707 Texas Ave. South. Chemical weapons continue to worry leaders; A&M expert predicts bilateral weapon ban soon By Todd Connelley Of The Battalion Staff iy $ik if# 00 $1K s, ft id $S ir ss Without warning, a cloud of mist drifts si lently onto the battlefield, soldiers drop their weapons and stagger helplessly to the ground, then the wind shifts and carries the deadly cloud toward a nearby village. President George Bush has asked for an in ternational agreement to ban chemical weap ons — the weapons capable of producing such scenes in warfare — but Dr. Ron Hatch ett, of Texas A&M’s Mosher Institute for De fense Studies, said that though an agreement will probably be reached soon, verification and ease of production will be tough obstacles to overcome. The use of chemical weapons has been a controversial area since 1868 when the first conference was held to ban “weapons that are poison or asphyxiating.” However, it wasn’t until World War I that chemical weapons made an impact on the world. The trench battlefields of France served as laboratories for the latest advance ment in weapons. After being released from a small canister, the deadly mist spread across the ground, eventually reaching the trenches where soldiers believed they were safe. Such tales of horror prompted the Geneva Protocol, a unilateral ban in 1925 on the use (not stockpile) of chemical weapons. How ever, not all nations signed and the agreement has been ignored over the years, especially in wartime. Bush called for a new ban on chemical weapons in a speech delivered to the United Nations two weeks ago. Problems the Bush administration would have in enforcing the ban include the reluc tance of countries like North Korea, Libya, Iraq and others suspected of having chemical weapons, to give up what they call “the poor man’s nuclear weapons.” Hatchett said that such a ban will face many barriers even if an agreement is reached. “In any other arms control negotiations, verification is simply a matter of identifying the number and location of obvious military hardware — planes, missiles and tanks,” Hatchett said. “In this situation, you have to verify the activities going on at chemical weapons plants that may be masquerading as, for example, a pesticide plant. “One of the most frightening aspects of chemical warfare is that the very same chemi cals used for manufacturing these weapons are the same chemicals essential for day-to- day living.” In addition to calling for a ban on chemical weapons. Bush directed his speech to the So viets. Bush proposed to cut 80 percent of the 30,000-ton U.S. arsenal of chemical weapons if the Soviets agreed to cut thei^ 70,000-ton stockpile by the same amount. The Soviets re sponded by proposing both to unilaterally wipe out their stocks and cease all chemical weapon production. Hatchett, who served as personal represen tative for the Secretary of Defense on conven tional arms control from 1983-88, said he be lieves the logic behind the Soviet move is the fact that they are better trained for a chemical environment. “They can afford to do it,” Hatchett said. “They don’t need chemical weapons as a means of mass destruction. If, for example, they are attacked by a European country, they aren’t, concerned with the property of chemical weapons that spares buildings. They will retaliate with another weapon with mass destruction capabilities, in this case nuclear weapons. “Another reason they might have coun tered the way they did goes back to the core roblem with banning nuclear weapons. If th countries reduce stockpiles to zero, it really doesn’t matter because you can reconstitute those stocks so quickly. t: “So, maybe it’s a free offer. They can de stroy these old stocks because they know it can be replenished so easily.” Hatchett said he believes a bilateral agreement in banning chemical weapons be tween the United States and the Soviet Union will be reached within the next six to eight months. Discovery of jumbo jet’s engine part fuels search ALTA, Iowa (AP) — The discov ery of a key engine part from a jumbo jet that crashed in July inten sifies the search of Iowa cornfields for other pieces to the puzzle of what caused the DC-lO’s rear engine to fly apart, officials said Wednesday. "We don’t know yet whether this is the golden nugget we’re looking for,” Jim Burnett, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said. “But we’re glad we found it.” Officials of General Electric Co., which made the engine in 1972, said the discovery of the fan disk of the crippled DC-10 that crashed July 19 while trying to land at the Sioux City airport is important to the investiga tion into what happened to United Flight 232. “This is the key to the whole search,” Jerry Clark, a flight safety investigator for GE, said. Clark spoke at the Storm Lake airport as workers loaded the fan disk onto an airplane headed to a GE engine plant in a Cincinnati suburb for in spection. One hundred searchers hired by Student 6 Y’ celebrates centennial By Mia B. Moody Of The Battalion Staff The Student ‘Y’ Association, the second oldest stu dent organization at Texas A&M after the Corps of Cadets, will celebrate its 100th anniversary Friday and Saturday with a reception and banquet. “The Student YMCA has been a vital part of Texas A&M since 1889,” David Mendoza, Student ‘Y’president, said. “In fact, it used to coordinate vis its from TWU women, show weekly movies and pro vide chapel services for A&M students.” Mendoza, a graduate student from Beaumont, said the name. Student YMCA, was changed to Stu dent ‘Y’ shortly after women were accepted into A&M to allow women to join the organization. Today, many of the functions previously assumed by the YMCA have been taken over by other groups, such as the Division of Student Services, the All Faith’s Chapel and the Recreational Sports Depart ment, Mendoza said. Celebration of the centennial will begin Friday with a reception in 205 and 206 MSC for former and current Student ‘Y* members. Student leaders are in vited to attend the event, Mendoza said. Saturday at 9 a.m. the organization will dedicate a plaque to founders of the YMCA in the name of J. Gordon Gay, former Student YMCA secretary and founder of A&M Fish Camp. “Mr. Gay was ahead of his time,” Mendoza said. “According to his son, he provided support services for minority students during a time when blacks didn’t have many privileges.” Saturday at 7 p.m. the Student *Y’ will hold a ban quet in 201 MSC. The keynote speaker is Norris Lineweaver, vice president of the Management Re source Center of the south Texas cluster of YMCAs. In addition to Lineweaver’s address on a commit ment to lead, Rachel Boatright, editor for A&M's Student ‘Y’-Centennial publication, will present an overview of the history of A&M’s Student ‘Y’. GE will walk newly harvested fields in northwest Iowa this weekend. Flight 232 crashed while trying to land at the Sioux Gateway Airport after its tail-mounted engine disinte grated in flight, throwing parts that severed all the plane’s hydraulic lines. The jumbo jet cartwheeled across the runway in a fiery crash that killed 112 people; 184 people survived. Farmers have been recovering small pieces of the No. 2 engine for several weeks, but investigators said the key to what happened is appar ently the 290-pound titanium disk that holds fan blades. But on Tuesday Janice Sorenson was running a combine through corn a half-mile from her house on her farm about 10 miles north of Alta. Alta is about 80 miles north west of Des Moines. “I felt a resistance against the combine, so I backed up, and I looked and I could see the fan blades protruding from the ground,” So renson said. She said the disk “was buried be tween 6 and 8 inches. It was all in one piece Jhut there were pieces of fan blades that had been broken off.” What she had found was about two-thirds of the fan disk assembly, which looks like a windmill. Burnett said it is too early to as sume that a flaw in the disk caused the crash. “The metallurgical exami nation of the disk itself, if in fact the f >roblem originated there, should in act reveal the cause,” Burnett said. “Hopefully, it is something that will answer a lot of technical ques tions and might do so in short or der,” he said. It is unlikely, he said, that the NTSB will reveal results of tests be fore a hearing that begins Oct. 30 in Sioux City. In Evandale, Ohio, GE plant spokesman David Lane would not theorize about what might have gone wrong with the disk, which probably was made in the early 1970s, but said GE was eager to see the part. “This is a very significant find, in our eyes,” he said. Sorenson said she knew immedi ately what the piece was because GE had distributed pictures to farmers. “I was shocked and I was very happy for GE because they put a lot of time in it,” she said. “Hopefully it will solve some of the problems they’ve been looking for.” GE lawyer Stephen Gadd said So renson will receive a portion of the $50,000 reward it offered for the disk equal to the percentage of the disk she recovered, plus separate re wards for each fan blade. The com pany is paying up to $1,000 each for recovered blades. Clark said he hopes the weekend search will yield results now that fields no longer have 10-foot stands of com. Community discusses ban of Halloween HARLINGEN (AP) — Parents’ complaints that Halloween activities in schools promote witchcraft and Satanism have prompted the school district here to considering limiting observance of the holiday. Janet Magee, director of chil dren’s education at the 800-member, non-denominational Christian Fellowship Church, has spear headed the effort to take Halloween symbols out of the schools, because it is a “satanic holy day,” she said. “I asked the school board to ban Halloween because it’s a religious holiday,” Magee said Wednesday. Tuesday night, the Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District appointed a committee to examine Halloween’s role in the schools. About 200 members of area churches showed up, some wearing orange anti-Halloween buttons. Committee members said they were not ready to decide on whether to ban Halloween. Harlingen school Superintendent T. Carl McMillan said at a Wednes day morning meeting he advised principals that “in situations where they were coming on strong with witches and witches’ brews and all that kind of stuff, perhaps they might want to tone it down a bit and concentrate on pumpkins and that sort of thing.” “He agreed to take the yucky stuff out,” Magee said Wednesday. “Man, that’s a major step.” But she wants all Halloween witches, witches’ brews, ghosts and goblins and what she calls “the dark side” out of the schools, and hopes the school board makes the decision at its next meeting. “The Christian religion is not al lowed the same privilege in the schools,” she said. Parents are more wary of witch craft since the discovery of 15 bodies last April about 25 miles to the south in Matamoros, Mexico. Some of the victims were muti lated in ritual sacrifices in a distorted form of the Afro-Cuban palo may- ombe religion. Law enforcement officials at first said the victims were killed in satanic rites. “The witches, cauldrons, brews and body parts are all part of ritu alistic sacrifices and the symbols of a religion,” she said. “Those things were found very close to home, 30 minutes from where we live.” McMillan, however, said Hallow een always has been seen as a spoof of an old superstition. “And kids have always looked on it as a fun time and a spoof rather than anything serious like this,” Mc Millan said.