The Post-Crescent from Appleton, Wisconsin • 11

SUNDAY, JUNE 14.1992 SUNDAY POST-CRESCENT, APPLETON-NEENAH-MENASHA, WIS. A-11 if 4Dn Disorder is the order of the day By Donald M. Rothberg Associated Press diplomatic writer "It's going to be more disorderly. It's going to be more unstable." A few current reasons to agree with Schlesinger: A savage civil war rages in Yugoslavia. Border disputes and ethnic warfare break out across the former Soviet Union.

Unrest persists in countries from Peru to Thailand, from Afghanistan to Haiti. Saddam Hussein still rules Iraq and yearns for nuclear weapons. In Algeria, democracy was tested and found wanting when Islamic fundamentalists were the big winners in that country's first national election. Even as Bush and Yeltsin talk about substantial cuts in their vast stocks of multi-megaton missiles, the world worries more than ever about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of regimes that might not hesitate to use them. The picture is not unrelievedly dismal.

Gone is the grim East-West confrontation, replaced by the promise of unprecedented cooperation between Washington and Moscow. Already, the two former adversaries have joined to sponsor the first face-to-face negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. They also worked together to broker a peace agreement in Afghanistan. The trouble spots serve as reminders that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the swift defeat of Iraq did not leave the world trouble free. In place of the Soviet Union is a chaotic grouping of new nations, some with nuclear arms, struggling to throw off the stultifying economic legacy of communism and make the shift to free market economies and democracy.

So far, capitalism has brought little more than rising prices and unemployment. The former Soviet republics are seeking Western aid and investment. But American voters are looking inward this election year and politicians are worried about making any major commitments of aid to the former Soviet Union. U.S. businesses also are cautious about commitments in a region whose uncertainty is as great as its potential.

Through the Cold War, military might mattered most. The United States and Soviet Union targeted their nuclear missiles on each other. Their armies never clashed but the two superpowers fought proxy wars throughout the world: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan. But with the death of communism, economic power replaced tanks and missiles as the measure of global influence. Money talks in the post-Soviet world.

By that standard, Japan and a unified Germany were the new superpowers. At least for a while. Wait long enough in this topsy-turvy world and nothing is quite the way it once seemed. Japan is discovering the business cycle and retrenching. Germany is over its head in debt and rising interest rates trouble its economic partners.

The global trend is to trading blocs that could end up as giant economic rivals. A uni fied Europe competing against an Asian bloc and a U.S.-dominated Western Hemisphere. The dream of a united Europe was jolted by Danish voters who rejected the idea of political and economic union in its first electoral test, suggesting that European unity could be a case of leaders getting too far ahead of the people. The world is discovering that the stodgy old men who ruled from the Kremlin were not risk-takers. They possessed terrifying military power but avoided placing it into direct confrontation with the West.

They imposed stability over a region the world now knows teemed with ancient hatreds. The heavy hand of Moscow is gonfc and Azeris and Armenians are free to resume their blood feuds, as are the Croats, Bosnians and Muslims of Yugoslavia. Ironically, the lifting of the Iron Curtain may allow U.S. troops to enter Eastern Ej-rope for the first time since World War if, this time on a dangerous NATO mission to end the fighting in Yugoslavia. WASHINGTON Disorder forms a troubling backdrop for the upcoming summit between President Bush and Russian President Boris N.Yeltsin.

The two presidents call each other George and Boris and want the world to know they art friends and allies. The Cold War is over. j'We can see a new world coming into view," Bush told the nation one week after the fighting stopped in the Persian Gulf. "A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order." Then why doesn't the world feel safer? The new post-Soviet world is anything but the orderly place envisioned only a year ago by Bush Constant and unpredictable change have made old measures of power obsolete and new ones questionable. "It's not going to be orderly in the wake of the Cold War," said James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary and CIA director.

jEast FROM PAGE 10 Perot race changes campaign strategy i By John King AP political writer i- Mi viv bUl vailing in the region," he said. The re-emergence of nationalism since then, he said, has been "the most bitter experience of my entire life." Havel, in Davos, also spoke for individuality to be respected in all things. "Things must once more be given a chance to present themselves as they are, to be perceived in their individuality," he said. "We must try harder to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality from the outside.

It is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experience. Human uniqueness, human action and the human spirit must be rehabilitated." The leaders see in their countries' experiences some things that might be of use in the West. Havel lists "commercial television culture" as one of the threats facing mankind. Because of its location and its own strong cultural heritage, Goencz said, Eastern Europe might be able to synthesize Western popular culture and a fresh wind of change from the East. Havel, who is preparing to seek reelection, noted that voters East and West including Czechoslovakia -are disgruntled with their leaders.

He said it is the politician who must change. "A politician must become a person again he must believe not only in sociological statistics, but in real people," he said. "It is not that we should simply seek new and better ways of managing society, the economy, and the world as such. The point is that we should fundamentally change how we behave." prison, and Zhelev, who was punished for suggesting that fascism and communism were much the same, offer similar but more limited analyses. In interviews, both said they were using their offices to fight a system with the characteristics of the machine.

"I am concerned with this terrible, ominous machine, which crushes the spirit, the idea of the individual," said Zhelev, the only one of the three to have won a popular election. More than two years after Bulgarians threw off their communist government's near-slavish devotion to Moscow, the danger persists, Zhelev said. u'This machine has the miraculous ability to rise like a phoenix" even among the strongest anti-communists, he said. Each president struggles against the inertia bred by the communist era and with an opposite extreme demands to punish communists and those who collaborated with them. The demands could lead Eastern Europe to repeat the error that gave it nationalist, fascist and communist terror refusal to see people as individuals, but as representatives of a race or class that is collectively guilty.

"He who seeks justice through finding out and proving collective guilt is a communist, no matter what political party he belongs to, or what faith he professes," Zhelev said. People finally must learn from those past mistakes, he said. Associated Press Newsteatures photo WORKERS DISMANTLE a red star, symbol of communism, March 23, 1 990 in Budapest, Hungary. The distinguished, gray-haired Goencz, his dark-brown eyes sparkling, said he learned to judge people as individuals while sitting in prison. "It was very rare when there were no informers close by," he said.

"I have yet to meet an informer who was happy doing his job. He was either blackmailed or threatened into it, or paid, or they promised him something." Goencz calls for historical research to reveal the full picture of communist evil, but fights strenuously against a witch hunt. Like all thinkers, the presidents have a surer hand on the past than the future. But they stress that in the future all societies must exhibit concern for both the dignity and responsibilities of people as individuals rather than representatives of a group. Goencz recalled the brotherhood that Hungarians felt toward their Romanian neighbors traditional rivals while watching the revolution against Nicolae Ceausescu unfold in December 1989.

"I felt that a new era was beginning in this region, and that there would be peace and friendship pre Disaster FROM PAGE 10 dren in the suburbs of Framingham. He recently retired. The owner of the club, Barnett We-lansky, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12-15 years in prison. Stricken with cancer, he won a governor's pardon after serving 3 Vi years and died about two months later. "He had all the licenses.

Everything was in order. But someone had to get shot for this," says Dr. Daniel Weiss, Welansky's nephew who was working in the Melody Lounge that "I pulled a chair over. I got up, lit a match to see. 1 cupped it with one hand and turned the bulb with the other.

I got off the chair, put the match on the floor and stepped on it. "I was only five or 10 feet away and vaaaaa-boom. When I turned around there was a sheet of fire going down the wall. It wasn't just a trickling little smoldering thing. It was something like blast furnace, like a flame coming out of a flamethrower." He said there was no way he might "I was only five or 1 0 feet away and vaaaaa-boom.

When I turned around there was a sheet of fire going down the wall. It wasn't just a trickling little smoldering thing. It was something like a blast furnace, like a flame coming out of a flame-thrower." Stanley Tomaszewski busboy at Cocoanut Grove killed 575 people, also prompted protection standards that are universal today. Among them, standard doors are always placed next to revolving doors to prevent the kind of jam at Cocoanut Grove that began when a fleeing patron's foot got wedged in the moving door. "Officials estimated the resulting pileup at the door cost 200 lives.

And public buildings must now be designed with well-marked, easily accessible exits, and with emergency lights that function separately from the regular lighting system. Codes were also changed to bar the use of flammable materials in decorations for public places, and the catastrophe began the move to make sprinklers mandatory in all entertainment spots. The fire also prompted medical breakthroughs in the treatment of burn victims, which came at a time when, with the United States at war, hospitals in Boston were already researching ways to improve such treatment. At Massachusetts General Hospital, which treated many Cocoanut Grove burn victims, doctors pioneered a simple gauze dressing soaked with petroleum jelly and a mild antibacterial. Previously burn treatment involved a painful process using tannic acid to create protective scab tissue over the burn.

Those treatments and other lessons learned from Cocoanut Grove were quickly adopted by the Army and Navy, and doctors believe they helped save many lives during the war. Clifford Johnson, a Coast Guardsman who sustained third-degree burns over more than 50 of his body and second-degree burns over another 25, was one of the most impressive medical success stories. Until then it was rare for somebody to survive with much less severe burns, but Johnson lived and married a nurse he met when he returned to the hospital after his initial treatment. Tragically, Johnson died 1 4 years later in a fiery car accident. Victims injured in the Cocoanut Grove fire also received a drug that had not been used widely before -penicillin.

As Weiss said, the improvements came at "a helluva price." Today a parking lot and a motel cover the spot once occupied by the Cocoanut Grove. There is nothing to mark the spot, but a loose collection of fire officials and Cocoanut Grove history buffs want to place a plaque on the site to commemorate the fire. And others are still interested in learning more about the blaze. Howard Emmons, a retired Harvard University professor of engineering and applied science, is interested in using a computer to do a modern-day investigation of the fire. "Whether it can tell us much about the past, I don't know," Emmons says.

Fire survivors still tell of nightmares, fears of crowds, wariness when in large public buildings, and a tendency to always map out exits. Louise Pontbriand, 69, who lost four friends and was injured in the fire, says she went into nursing because of Cocoanut Grove. Collins went on to become a public relations officer with the fire department and once created a stir by halting a Symphony Hall concert when he was passing the building and noted chairs blocking an exit. Cocoa-nut Grove was too strong a memory for him not to say something. For Tomaszewski, the former busboy, 50 years have finally brought him some relief.

"The phone calls, I'm happy to say, have almost ceased." WASHINGTON Ross Perot's challenge has turned the Electoral College into an intriguing jigsaw puzzle, forcing both President Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton to rethink the traditional strategies for capturing a majority. Perot not only leads early polls in several major states, including electoral giants California, Texas and Florida, but shows enough strength virtually everywhere to confound conventional wisdom. A case in point: Minnesota. It's the one state Walter Mondalf won in 1984 and one of the 10 Dukakis carried in 1988. Indeed, Minnesota last voted Republican five presi; dential elections ago, in 1972.

But a mid-May poll showed Bush ahead there, because Perot and Clin ton split the anti-Bush vote. Polls in Massachusetts and West Virginia were similar, and Republic cans say New York could look much the same this fall if Perot holds sup-port among conservative Democrats and independents. in "If I'm George Bush or Bill Clinton, I basically have to throw out rriy Electoral College strategy that I spent the last two years working on because it's all meaningless said Republican pollster Neil Newt house. "It literally becomes a 50 state race." Newhouse gets little argument from the Clinton and Bush campaigns. "Nobody in our lifetime understands how to do a real three-way race," says Bush campaign political director Mary Matalin.

Perot leads polls in four big states that went Bush's way in 1988: Calir fornia, Texas, Florida and Ohio. While it's too early to know whether Perot can hold such strength through a summer of scrutiny, the numbers if nothing else prove Bush vulnerable. 1 The Perot factor also could bring into play, for either Perot or Clintotj, Southern states that have voted Republican in the last three or more presidential elections, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia among them. Because of this, many Democrats are urging Clinton to move away from his early strategy of targeting so-called Reagan Democrats and middle-class, suburban voters in far vor of trying to energize the party's traditional base of urban, blue-collar workers and minorities. "A three-way race changes the arithmetic substantially," argues two-time Democratic candidate Jesse Jackson.

"Perot's candidacy creates a more competitive race and therefore makes votes that are being dismissed or taken for granted very valuable. With increased comperr-tion for the suburban vote clearly the balance is in urban America." Although Clinton promises to make appeals to black voters arc1 other core party groups, he has rebuffed suggestions that he do so at the expense of targeting predominantly white suburban voters with a more moderate message than Democratic candidates past. No one is sure just how Perotls challenge will play out. Both the Clinton and Bush camps say they can go no further than preliminary targeting while waiting out the summer to see if Perot holds the broad appeal that has vaulted him atop national polls. Perot aides, too, are reluctant to talk strategy.

But it is clear the Texas computer magnate starts off with his eye on three of the biggest prizes: California, Texas and Florida. Perot aides also expect him to have natural appeal in the Midwest and West and anywhere the economy is sour. Several months ago, Bush's electcn ral strategy was nothing if not predictable: try to repeat 1988, when he won 40 states and 426 of the 538 electoral votes. Clinton's, though less settled, was nonetheless somewhat predictable: win the states won by 1988 nominee Michael Dukakis and target those where Dukakis got 48 or more in losing. All told, those states carry 235 electoral votes just 35 short of the magic number.

But now, all bets are off. "I bet we go through 10 maps before we get to September," said the Bush campaign's Matalin. "It certainly complicates the targeting process," said Clinton manager David Wilhelm. "At this point, you take nothing foj granted." they crouched, gasping, fearing they were going to die, someone from outside broke down the door. Behind them the tragedy was swiftly concluding.

you could hear was people kind of screaming. Then I didn't hear any more," Gray recalls. mix-up in reservations put the Grays at a table meant for somebody named O'Brien near the orchestra, by a back exit. The Grays and their friends all survived, but they learned later that four people named O'Brien perished. "The fire had taken its terrible toll in about 40 minutes.

The victims included residents of 25 states, famous cowboy star Buck tones, 53 military personnel, and scores of couples young and old. Newspaper accounts originally pointed to a 16-year-old busboy as having lighted a match that set the fire. He insisted he stomped out the match and Fire Commissioner William Reilly concluded he was "unable to find the conduct of this boy was the cause of the fire. A 1 970 fire department report came to the same conclusion, that the origin was unknown. "That busboy, Stanley Tomaszewski, now 66, still says today his match could not have triggered the inferno.

Here is how he described the crucial seconds: V'The light in a (fake) palm tree in a corner was out. The bartender on duty said to fix it. There happened to be a couple who was sitting there having cocktails. I guess they didn't want to be in the limelight, and the guy reached up and turned the bulb. have ignited the lace-like material hanging from the ceiling without knowing it.

And some patrons later recalled that the walls in the Melody Lounge were extremely hot prior to the blaze, suggesting a possible electrical origin. But barring any confirmed cause of the blaze, and given Tomaszewski's proximity with that match, he was forced to spend much of his life deflecting the hate of those desperate for a target for their grief. Once he was spit upon. Many times he received threatening phone calls. "Liar.

Killer," the anguished and anonymous voices called out over the decades. Tomaszewski proudly refused to leave the area or change his name, as some suggested. He worked his way through college, and then got a job as an auditor and raised three chil- night. "I was outraged. He never did anything out of line." While many blamed Welansky for a locked door and other problems confronting patrons trying to flee, there is still much bafflement over the way the fire killed dozens of people before they could move from their seats.

A Harvard University study provided some insight three years after the blaze, finding that the imitation leather used extensively throughout the nightclub contained acrolein, which under great heat emits deadly vapors. Some scientists also felt the Cocoanut Grove was so packed with people drinking alcohol that their collective breaths contributed to a volatile environment. The fire, second only to the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago that yVideo filmed his own murder. The tape, along with FBI enhancements, helped authorities apprehend and convict the two killers. Wisconsin officials hope a video camera never has to be used for that here, and the possibility that it might gives little consolation to the officers who spend nights alone on highways.

"It might be a comfort to know if something does happen the (assailant) will be caught, but it won't help your family," Jones said. The uses and value of the camcorders may turn out to be more than anyone imagined, and the Wisconsin State Patrol will be in on the ground floor of determining the future uses of the equipment. "That's what we're here for to learn," said Trooper Randy Kind. It may sound like a pie-in-the-sky dream that every squad car eventually has a video camera, but then again radar sets, cellular phones, microwave radio transmissions and protective vests were all experimental at onetime. "Like any new technology, there is skepticism until it proves itself," Hansen said.

missiles, out of its total of 176 long-range missiles. Further mutual cuts in the number of long-range, or strategic, missiles are expected to be discussed at next week's U.S. -Russian summit in Washington. Differences between the republics could complicate President Boris Yeltsin's negotiations with President Bush. Ukraine has been subservient to Moscow for most of the past 600 years.

After the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev last fall, Ukrainians voted for independence, hastening the breakup of the Soviet Union. Since then, Russia has reasserted claims to the disputed Crimean peninsula, strengthening Ukrainian fears of a territorial grab by Moscow. Days after Ukraine signed the START protocol, Ukrainian lawmakers and soldiers were voicing strong reservations about Kravchuk's nuclear-free pledge. Col. Vitaly Lazor-kin, an adviser to the defense minister, told a Kiev conference on Ukrainian security the republic might need nuclear weapons to defend itself.

Col. Alexander Stykr of the the Donetsk Military College said that Western pressure on Ukraine to disarm was intensifying. "At present, nuclear weapons are the guarantee of our independence," he said. "Ukraine will get rid of nuclear weapons only when it has guarantees." Parliament deputy Stepan Khmara said Kravchuk made "a giant political mistake" in agreeing to non-nuclear status without Western security guarantees. Western military observers at the Kiev conference were surprised by the strong opposition to Ukraine becoming nuclear-free.

"I think we all thought that question was resolved," said Col. Richard Cohen, a British officer from the NATO international staff. Cohen reminded Ukraine that it could not technically control the nuclear weapons on its territory. Former Soviet long-range missiles are under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which includes all former Soviet republics except the Baltic states and Georgia. Russia holds the nuclear button, but has promised to consult with the other nuclear republics before using the weapons.

Asked whether Ukraine will try to develop such technology on its own if Russia continues to stall, Hricht-chenko replied: "There are possibilities theoretically to do so." jN ukes FROM PAGE 1 clear weapons well into the next century even if its parliament ratifies the START agreement to eliminate them in seven years. Ratification is expected because President Kravchuk will insist on it, Pikhovshek said, "but the issue is whether it will be implemented." "Kravchuk will keep telling the West that he will probably give up the weapons tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he said. "And the goal of this is so Ukraine will not be treated as another underdeveloped country of Europe. "In order to wrest financial aid, he "lust threaten the West as much as Possible with the unpredictability of his foreign policy." "Kravchuk vacillated for months before relinquishing the battlefield weapons, which alarmed the West. Now, he keeps adding conditions.

Most recently, he said Ukraine cannot become nuclear-free without Western financial help and technical assistance in destroying 130 SS-18 FROM PAGE 1 has are assigned mainly to the 3:30 p.m. to midnight shifts, when most drunk driving arrests occur. And while those numbers represent a small percentage of the 385 uniformed state troopers in the state and the 63 in the Fond du Lac District, supporters hope the program eventually expands as the benefits and cost savings can be shown. "It could lead to more OW1 arrests and getting them off the road," Hansen said. "If we can prove it's cost-effective and cost-efficient, the obvious way to go would be to buy the equipment" for all patrol cars.

"It would be nice to give one to everybody, but logistically when you have 385 troopers, until we can prove it is really saving our time," the state money won't come. A few years ago, a constable in Texas had his video camera running when he made a stop to check on a possible drug possession, and he.