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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 13, 1996)
World Pac Wednesday • November! Humiliation, anger fuel student movement in Zai KINSHASA, Zaire (AP) — In the underground corridors of a University of Kinshasa dormitory, hundreds of young men sleep head-to-foot on mats lining damp cement floors. There is no running water and only sporadic electricity. The stench of overflowing toilets is tol erable only when overwhelmed by the sweet-and-sour smell of man ioc leaves and pilipili peppers boil ing on open fires. Here, bright students with dreams of becoming engineers, doctors and lawyers have become leaders of a movement to over throw the government. The movement was provoked by ethnic Tutsi rebel attacks on eastern Zaire and anger over a gov ernment too weak to counter those attacks. But it was born in the humility of living in constant filth and hunger. "I’m ashamed for you to see this, our villa in the hills,” said Dave Tanda, a 30-year-old law stu dent and protest leader. “It’s each man for himself here.” The students want parliament to oust Prime Minister Leon Kengo wa Dondo. They say Kengo, whose mother is a Rwandan Tutsi, has been soft on Rwanda, Zaire’s tiny neighbor to the east with a Tutsi- led government accused of sup porting the Tutsi rebels who have taken over parts of eastern Zaire. Thousands of students in the past two weeks have taken to the streets, often commandeering public buses and private cars. Their violent clashes with drivers and soldiers have killed three stu dents and one soldier. The students had planned to march Tdesday, but the capital was calm — perhaps because universi ty officials threatened to cancel final exams, already delayed by several months, if students didn’t stay put. Student leaders say they deplore the attacks on ethnic Tlitsis — most of whom have fled the capital — and issued a declara tion calling on their peers to forget their “xenophobic sentiments” and join their cause to peacefully oust the government. "We don’t want Kengo out because he’s a Tutsi. We want Kengo out because of his indif ference to our poverty and suf fering,” said Fox Kabundi, 31, a movement leader and graduate student in physics. There are more than 15,000 stu dents at University of Kinshasa and some 20,000 students at 11 other state-run, vocational col leges in the capital. Crumbling dorms and class rooms are overcrowded. Hundreds of students often share one textbook and one pro fessor who, if paid, earns the equivalent of $30 a month. The university’s vice chancellor, Lumpungu Kamanda, under stands the students’ cause is born of frustration over their conditions and over politics — including a six- year wait for multiparty elections promised by President Moubutu Sese Seko. Students say they are the voice of 45 million Zairians who have lived under Mobutu’s dictatorship for 31 years. The government Monday closed the business and engineer ing schools, suspected of harbor ing more radical students. Soldiers threw out some 700 business school students in a pre-dawn raid. Zaire update Refugee camps Rebel fighting near Goma, Zaire has kept all but a trickle of supplies from reaching the city. Hospital workers try to get by without electricity or running water. More than half the staff has fled. ZAIRE Aid arriving in Goma Monday is enough to teed 2,500 people for a week, a fraction of Goma's 80,000 remaining residents, many of whom have had no access to fresh food for 10 days. There is no hope of getting aid to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled west without food or water. Route of refugees ««•> rHW.ASI I INC,'I Lake inton is pre Kivu l 00< ! grount /V^. o usanc^Tic The fighting between Tutsi rebels and Zairian troops has uprooted more than 1.1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees, nearly 150,000 Burundian Hutu refugees and an unknown number of Zairians. r M #»Cyangugu 351 killed in New Delhi jet collision mi al Africa itional open ct more tha Refugees in Zai ^^^Bresidenti itmurry said n nade die i ^ ^ BURUNDI tions with •kamanyola »tien of Cc ie lead role ■>. About a e expected t< CHARKHI DADRI, India (AP) — A Saudi jumbo jet climbing from New Delhi’s airport collided with a Kazakh plane coming in for landing Tuesday, creating twin fireballs that turned the sky red as dawn and scattered the bodies of up to 351 people over farm land below. If the death toll is confirmed, the crash would be the third-deadliest in aviation history. Wreckage dropping from the sky gouged big craters and left body parts, baggage and clothes strewn across six miles of wheat and mustard fields near the town of Charkhi Dadri, about 60 miles west of New Delhi. The first people to arrive at the scene said the dusk air was filled with an unbearable stench of burning flesh. “I saw 60 or 70 bodies, but only about 15 were identifiable,” said Manjit Singh, a 19-year-old college student who sped to the site on his motorcycle after seeing the collision from his home. The faces of the rest of the victims were horribly disfigured and charred, he said. Rescue vehicles tried to navigate the area’s poor roads, arriving at the crash site after the first curious vil lagers. Within a few hours, thousands of people gathered in the dark and solemnly watched the search. “We have collected 200 bodies so far from all over the field,” said Mohammed Akhil, the police officer in charge of the operations. The Saudi Arabia-bound Saudi jet liner with 312 passengers and crew members had been in the air for only seven minutes when it collided with a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin-76 cargo plane, which was on a landing approach, aviation officials said. Seventeen foreigners were on board the Saudi jfetliner, including two Americans and a Briton, Press Trust of India news agency reported. The plane arriving from Shymkent in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan was carrying 39 people, 28 Kazakh passengers and an 11- member Russian crew. All aboard the two planes were believed killed. There were no reports that anyone on the ground died. Hours after the crash, the crum pled fuselage of the Kazakh plane rested in a field. The jet’s wings had been sliced off. A few charred bodies lay on the ground. Local district administrator T.V.S.L. Prasad said workers were trying to extricate bodies from the plane. The American pilot of a C-141 Air Force transport plane who was bring ing in supplies for the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi witnessed the crash’s fiery aftermath from 20,000 feet. “We noticed out of our right-hand (side of the plane) a large cloud lit up with an orange glow, from within the clouds,” the 30-year-old captain told reporters in a conference call from the Indian capital. “The glow intensity of the cloud became dimmer and the two fireballs descended and became fireballs on the ground,” said the pilot, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The total number of passengers and crew members was reported by the local news agency, which quoted civil aviation authorities, and was confirmed for The Associated Press by an airport police official. The U.S. Embassy could not con firm that two Americans were on board; the British Foreign office said one of its citizens was believed killed. Nine Nepalese, three Pakistanis, a Bangladeshi and a Saudi were also on the Saudi plane, which had taken off from New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. The Indian government announced a judicial inquiry into the cause of the accident. The weather in New Delhi was nor mal for this time of year. The skies were clear, albeit polluted. Smoke from fireworks set off in recent days to celebrate the Hindu holiday of Diwali had thickened the haze. At about 6:40 p.m. local time, as the sun was setting, the Saudi plane was cleared to climb to 14,000 feet, while the Kazakh aircraft was authorized to descend to 15,000 feet, said H.S. Khola, the director general of civil avi ation. Suddenly, he said at a news conference, “the radar blip of both aircraft was lost.” Tuesday’s crash appears to be the third-deadliest air accident ever. In-flight collision A Saudi Airways jumbo jetliner collided with a Kazakh Airways airliner. Hundreds are feared dead. Saudi Airways Boeing 747 Wy/.M Type: Operating crew: Accommodation: Length: Height: Maximum speed: Four-turbofan heavy commercial transport 3 Up to 452 passengers 231 ft. 10 in. 63 ft. 5 in. 604 mph Kazakh Airways Tupolev Tu-154 Type: Three-engined medium/long stage commercial transport Operating crew: 3 Accommodation: Up to 180 passengers Length: 157 ft. 1 3/4 in. Height: 37 ft. 4 3/4 in. Maximum speed: 590 mph Charki Dadri 500 km AP In 1977, two Boeing 747s operated by Pan American and KLM collided at the airport on Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands, killing 582 people. In 1985, a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountain on a domes tic flight, killing 520. Until Tuesday’s crash, the third- deadliest crash was a 1974 accident outside Paris involving a Turkish DC- 10 that killed 346 people. ■he U.S. ft NRA takes global measures to battle U.N. arms Hen 3,000 Id remaii serve at initiative areret uli troops b£ NEW YORK (AP) — The National Rifle Association, on guard against global gun control, is going global itself. The potent Washington lobby is trying to win a seat this week as an accredited advocacy group at the United Nations, where it will campaign against a possible U.N. push for tighter regulation of the firearms trade worldwide. The U.S. gun owners’ organization was alarmed when the General Assembly last December ordered a U.N. study to investi gate ways "to prevent and reduce the exces sive and destabilizing accumulation and transfer of small arms and light weapons.” The study group, the U.N. Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms, began its work in June. “We had members con cerned about what was going on at the United Nations,” said the NRA’s chief Washington lobbyist, Tanya Metaksa. The association applied for status as a non-govern- mental organization partic ipating in U.N. activities and obtained pre liminary approval from a committee of U.N.-affiliated NGOs. Final approval must come from the U.N. Economic and Social Council at its meeting later this week. Such status would allow NRA repre sentatives access to U.N. headquarters and give them the right to submit papers and otherwise lobby participants at U.N. meetings. What direction the U.N. inquiiy eventu ally may take remains unclear. The General Assembly might simply adopt a non-bind ing resolution urging governments to better control the domestic and international trade in small arms. Or it could promote a treaty on arms smuggling that would require signatory nations to better regulate the market. The panel, comprising representatives of 16 nations, including the United States, will submit its report in mid-1997. Any rec ommendations would be submitted to the 1997-98 assembly session. “We had members concerned about what was going on at the United Nations.” Tanya Metaksa Washington lobbyist, NRA the U.S. fo Since the late 1980s, the Colombia: n arriving a ernment has sought U.N. action on: trafficking. The Colombians feel besi,— by a flood of assault rifles and hancigr smuggled in from the United States,ie II ly by Colombian drug traffickers. In a report to Secretary-Ge:I Boutros Boutros-Ghali in MiR Colombia plainly blamed the relat | freewheeling U.S. gun market. Nations that produce and allowte & of light weapons must “face up to:| responsibilities in this area and ...coni their governments to a policy of strict^ hit ion of the sale, pt sion, bearing, impoi! I export of such weap it said. The Colombian sade got a boost last when Japan, where criminal underworld is armed with smut U.S. weapons, duced the resolul establishing the expj panel and pledp support it financialhl The NRA cm/ntl with a letter campaign, urging meinbt write to the Japanese diplomatic here to denounce the U.N. initiativel Japanese reported receiving some 2f| postcards, a panel member said. With NGO status, the NRA would guaranteed a hearing before thei whose periodic meetings thus fail | involved only invited NGOs and acadd Colombia’s representative in' study group criticized the U.S.! lobby’s U.N. activism. “The NRA has influence in the LL States. Why should they involve themst with international problems?” Gtt Uribe de Lozano asked in a telephone#! view from Bogota. “They’re showing world they’re really involved in theinlffi tional trade.” Although the NRA relies heavily member contributions, it also recei substantial support from gun mantil turers through advertising in the ass ation magazine. 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