The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 2

Montreal, Monday, February 6, 1989 A-2 30,000 Afghan children could die WhylRe UJ from malnutrition, experts warn bs lettering about language Y'r -A" m- 'f git 1 V' 'i, Iff 4 nitimJn nf ii iii ir Two teenage girls in the Afghan militia tote rifles during Richard French booed at rally for proposing curbs on English Washington Pott KABUL More than 30,000 children run the risk of major illness or death as a result of malnutrition amid the deteriorating food and health conditions in the Kabul area, according to doctors and international relief officials. Already living on the edge, these children, along with nursing mothers and pregnant women in the poorest sections of Afghan society, are viewed by health experts as being least able to withstand the rigors of the Afghan winter and the food shortages that are affecting the capital as the last Soviet troops pulled out yesterday. Can't get to villages "Three years ago, 62 per cent of the children were malnourished. We think it now may be 80 per cent, and it is increasing day by day," said Dr. A.

J. Jalalzar, head of the department at the Indira Gandhi Children's Hospital dealing with malnutrition. "The war is affecting everything. We cannot give vaccinations except in Kabul. We cannot even get to nearby villages.

We have nothing left in the hospital. Before, we could give enough food powdered milk, wheat, things cooked in protein rich oils, some meat, powdered eggs. Now we have nothing to give them." Children have been coming into the hospital with increasing signs of acute diarrhea, inability to withstand the cold, and low blood sugar, their bodies having used up all the internal reserves normally used to fight for survival. No vitamin supplements Jalalzar said there is an acute need for milk products, powdered eggs, protein-rich oils and meats, and antibiotics. The children, he said, are essentially suffering from a severe lack of sufficient protein, and there are no longer vitamin supplements to help.

Stocks of a multivitamin tablet supplied by the United Nations ran out six months ago, he said, and there are no liquid supplements for the young children who cannot take tablets. Orr and French met the press separately after the meeting. "French got a rough ride as he had the courage to come out and support the Liberal Party and it's comprehensible that people did not agree," Orr told reporters. Yesterday's meeting, chaired by Graeme Decarie, chairman of the history department at Concordia University, was one of a series of regional Alliance Quebec sessions designed to drum up opposition to Bill 178. Opponents of the law are being urged to send protest postcards to Quebec and to join in protest demonstrations scheduled for Quebec City and Ottawa this month and March.

Meeting next Sunday French had been invited to address the gathering since it was held near his Westmount riding. A similar meeting in Pointe Claire next Sunday will be addressed by former environment minister Clifford Lincoln. Like French, Lincoln, also resigned from the cabinet. Both Orr and French said they do not advocate civil disobedience, but they respect an individual's right to After the attack police and Ban-daranaike's security guards opened fire on the assailants, causing pandemonium among the crowd. Bandaranaike was whisked to safety along with Lanerolla.

Despite the attack, Bandaranaike went on to address a rally at Anurad-hapura in launching the SLFP's campaign. attempted break from the jail. Vasconcellos said the officer who ordered the jailing will be punished. The jail holds mostly petty criminals awaiting trial or transfer to a state prison. By late afternoon, the survivers were back in their cells.

According to Vasconcellos, the rebellion began at about 8:30 a.m. when Dantas opened a door to throw in two thieves, and 63 prisoners being held in an area designed to hold 25 escaped on to the adjacent jail patio. Dantas was held hostage until police managed to free her and herd most of the prisoners into the isolation cell, Vasconcellos said. One prisoner was shot when the inmates were being moved to the cell. Vasconcellos said he arrived an hour later and ordered the prisoners freed.

By PAUL NUSSBAUM Knight-Ridder Newspapers LOS ANGELES It's 2 a.m. and, once again, the quiet streets of downtown Los Angeles have been abandoned to the police and drunks and English students. Just below Dodger Stadium and just beyond Chinatown, at Evans Community Adult School, an Afghan immigrant named Za-man Stanizai is teaching the intricacies of personal pronouns to Mitsuo Sakai, Natalia Villagomez and Salvador Delgado and their bleary-eyed classmates. This class will adjourn in half an hour but two doors down, teacher Terry Chung has just started the 2 a.m.-tc6 a.m. shift.

Twenty-four hours a day, this goes on an unending language assembly line that can't begin to keep up with the demand. Nearly 14,000 adults from 80 countries are taking English classes at the Evans school. Throughout Los Angeles, 220,000 adults are enrolled in English-as-a-second-language classes, with 25,000 more on waiting lists. In California, home to one-fourth of the United States' foreign immigrants, English sometimes seems like a lost language. About 28 per cent of the state's 4.5 million public schoolchildren come from homes where English is not the primary language, and 700,000 of them are considered "English deficient." English not needed More than half of the students in the vast Los Angeles school district come from non-English-speaking homes, and 163,000 students are English-deficient, more than in any other school district tatheU.S.

Spanish, Cantonese, Japanese, Armenian, Vietnamese, Farsi, Tagalog, Korean all can be heard on any downtown L.A. street corner. And in the ethnic enclaves of East Los Angeles, Chinatown, Little Tokyo and Koreatown, English is as unnecessary as in Mexico City or Seoul. With so many people speaking so many tongues in California and in other states with large immigrant populations, English has become much more than just a language. It has become a battleground and a political cause.

Who learns it and how quickly? How is it taught? Who has to speak it, and where? In an atmosphere that is often tinged with resentment, fear and anti-immigrant backlash, English has become the focus of political and legal battles: In Monterey Park, a swiftly changing Los Angeles suburb where 52 per cent of the residents are of Asian descent and 30 per cent are Hispanic, the angle-dominated city council ordered that all businesses display signs in English that describe the establishments. Five other suburban cities have also ordered limits on non-English business signs. And Monterey Park, whose mayor has urged a four-year moratorium on all immigration to the United States, has been embroiled in a battle over the number of foreign-language books in the public library. Gateway to U.S. A municipal court in the heavily Hispanic Los Angeles suburb of Huntington Park ordered its employees to speak only English on the job, except when acting as translators.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the rule, saying that it heightened racial animosity and encouraged discrimination. A Florida grocery store employee was suspended for speaking Spanish. A Los Angeles insur-ance company ordered its workers to speak only English, except to non-English-speaking customers. Cafeteria workers at the University of San Francisco medical school were forbidden to speak languages other than English on the job.

Legal challenges or threats of legal challenges eventually caused the employers to relent Increasingly, states have passed laws or adopted constitutional amendments establishing English as their official language. The most recent three to do so Arizona, Colorado and Florida followed California's 1986 lead. They brought to 16 the number of states that have named English as their only official language, up from just three in 1983. The issue is most acute in California because the state has become the immigrant gateway to America. In the Los Angeles school district, six of every 10 students are Hispanic, and one in 10 is fluent in Korean or Mandarin Chinese or one of 77 other languages.

In Santa Ana, in near by Orange County, more than half the 38,000 public school students speak no more than limited English. The "official-language" movement is seen by many especially immigrant groups and civil-rights advocates as a xenophobic reaction to the large number of newcomers arriving in the United States. "There's a lot of concern about the effect of changing demographics, and it's almost like language has become a scapegoat for the frustrations that people are feeling," said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Centre in Los Angeles. "There is a high level of uncertainty about the economic future; people are worried about their jobs, and the high immigration adds to the frustrations. "But the frustration is being channelled in a counterproductive manner.

It's setting the stage for very negative confrontations." Opponents of the official-language movement, such as Kwoh, contend that the effort has fostered racist and anti-immigrant attitudes, while doing nothing to help people desperate to learn English. Proponents of the movement, led by a Washington-based group called U.S. English, argue that installing English as the official language will help unite diverse cultures and prevent the development of a linguistically divided nation similar to Canada. "The bottom line is we're losing our country," said Barry Hatch, a Grade 8 social-studies teacher who is also the controversial mayor of Monterey Park, and who sees his battle for English as a rearguard action against the decline of western civilization. "They're buying up our property.

They're taking western culture out and replacing it with eastern culture and Latin culture. They're taking us over. If their language is set up, all the rest will crumble." Symbolic value Since California voters gave 73-per-cent approval to English as the state's official language, there has been little obvious change in language policies or practices. Tests for drivers' licences still are given in a variety of languages. Federal law still requires that non-English voting ballots be made available in cities with large immigrant populations, and bilingual education remains a fixture in public schools.

But the English wars in the state and around the country have produced some significant and, opponents say, ominous changes. "The constitutional amendments for official language have a very powerful symbolic value," said Stanley Diamond, acting director of U.S. English and director of the successful "official-language" movement in California. "The message is, if you want to be able to function in this state, you'd better be able to function in English." That message has increased discrimination against Hispanic, Asian and other minority workers, according to advocates for immigrants. "This is elevating to a new level of respectability discrimination on the basis of language," said Mary Carol Combs, director of the English Plus Information Clearinghouse, a Washington-based coalition of 80 language and civil-rights groups formed to counter the English-only movement For many immigrants, like those in Zaman Stanizai's late-night class, the official status of English is less important than its economic rewards.

For them, English is the passport to prosperity. And there is now another incentive: the new immigration law requires applicants for per manent residence to pass a test of English-language ability and civics knowledge or prove that they are taking English and civics classes. Mitsuo Sakai works six days a week in a machine-repair shop and drives an hour each way to attend class at Evans. The Japanese immigrant struggles to get by on three hours' sleep on class nights, but, as he says with a small shrug, "I need more speak English. Much more customers." Salvador Delgado spends 12-hour days as a nursing assistant, and "this is the only time I can go to schooL" To the once-illegal im migrant from Mexico who is seek ing permanent U.S.

residency under the new immigration am nesty law, the equation is clear "If my English improves, I can go for RN (registered nurse). I can make more money. (Continued from Page A-1) threat to French of other languages on signs. The real threat to French lies not in signs, he said, but in such things as the dominance of American pop culture and the failure to integrate newcomers into Quebec's French mainstream. Lifting the prohibition against languages other than English on exterior signs could constitute a modest step toward a more moderate language debate, he said.

He told the more than 500 people at yesterday's meeting that besides ending the language standoff, his proposal might help encourage much-needed immigration to Quebec. 'Age-old dispute' Since Quebec needs to attract immigrants and wants to encourage their integration into the French-speaking mainstream, the province could present a more welcoming face by allowing the use of Portuguese or Chinese, for example, along with French on outdoor signs. "Language legislation has not been really directed at languages other than English anyway and we are currently involving these groups ther than Engiisn anyway ana we ire currently involving these groups rally in Kabul yesterday. in an age-old dispute between the two linguistic groups," he told reporters after the meeting. "This is strictly a personal suggestion and I am not embarking on a crusade about it," he said.

"It also does not change my principles, which I have demonstrated in the National Assembly. "But if we want a dialogue where we can make some modest progress, this might be it Right now we're stalemated at the dead centre of a confrontation of principles." Alliance president Royal Orr was "not too thrilled" at French's proposal for bilingual signs, but said that at least it showed French was trying to think of ways to get out of the linguistic impasse. Orr said Alliance Quebec sticks to its principle that treating one group differently from another is "unacceptable." He drew repeated applause for his denunciation of Bill 178 as "wrong, insulting, pointless and frivolous." He also disagreed with French on the notwithstanding clause. Abolition of the clause is one of the reforms along with firmer means to promote minorities and protect linguistic and cultural groups he will push for at la, who was wounded. Bandaraike was thrown a few yards when unidentified members of what were called gangs lobbed grenades and gasoline bombs at a rally of some 5,000 people at Higurakgoda in the north central region of the country.

Police said 33 persons were injured, with 10 reported in critical Cannibalism victims to be exhumed in Colorado DENVER (AP) The case of Colorado's frontier cannibal, Alfred Packer, will be literally dug up again as scientists plan to exhume remains ot his five companions this "summer to find out how they died, Packer admitted "living off the flesh of these men" for nearly 60 days while snowbound in the Colorado mountains in 1874. But he insisted he killed only one of them, Shannon Wilson Bell in self-defence. "We want to establish, if we can, what actually happened when these people died," said James Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University in Washington. Starrs said the case is significant because Packer was the only person prosecuted in the United States for cannibalism. I Packer was first convicted of killing his companions, but appealed his hanging sentence and won a new trial and a reduction to manslaughter.

He received a 40-year sentence and, after 17 years, was paroled. He died in April 1907 at age 65. Packer first confessed that two of his colleagues froze or starved to death and were eaten by the group; a third died "accidentally;" a fourth was killed by Bell; and Packer then Jtilled Bell in self-defence. constitutional hearing in Frederic- sutu 11 8ue ne ton, N.B., this week. prepared to bear the consequences.

Sri Lankan party leader escapes bomb attack fYimMRO Sri Lanka ITiPW that it was an aide. Vasa de Lanerol- condition. COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (DPA) that it was an aide, Yasa de Lanerol- advocate such action if she or he is 18 prisoners die in Brazil after 50 packed into tiny ceil 250 St. Antoine Montreal, Quebec H2Y 3R7 Opposition leader Sirimavo Ban-daranaike escaped a bomb attack at a political rally yesterday, then went on with the launching of her Sri Lankan Freedom Party's campaign for the Feb. 15 general elections.

First reports said the 72-year-old former prime minister had suffered minor leg injuries in the attack. However, police later reported TELEPHONES Accounting Service Advertising Circulation Service General Information West Island Boutique Public Relations 282-2628 282-2750 282-2929 282-2222 694-4989 282-2790 NEWSROOM Business Section City Desk Ombudsman Sports Section West Island Bureau 282-2817 282-2892 282-2160 282-2824 694-4981 CLASSIFIED Regular Classified 282-2311 AutoReal Estate 282-2327 CareersJobs 282-2351 The Gazette, Second Class Mail Registration number 0619 delivery, call 282-2929 of the Quebec Press Council PRICES Singl copy price Metropolitan Montreal Outside metropolitan area Sundqr to Friday Saturday 50c $1.00 50c $1.25 Horn delivery rata (MONTHLY) Payment to carrier Monday to Sunday Saturday and Sunday Metropolitan Montreal $13.00 $6.50 Payment in advance (7 days a week) Annual $139 Semi-annual $74 Payment in advance (Saturday and Sunday) Annual $75 Semi-annual $38 Carrier delivery only. Rates for out-of-town delivery and other services available on request. For convenient home The Gazette is a member SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) Eighteen prisoners died after they were jammed into a tiny cell as punishment following an attempted jail break yesterday, authorities said. Several of the 18 died of asphyxiation, while others were trampled to death by cellmates after more than 50 prisoners were packed into a nearly cell, said Sao Paulo state prison system official Guilherme Santana.

Another eight prisoners were injured in the cell, which had no window or ventilation. One was shot to death, said Carlos Vasconcellos, who is in charge of the Parque Sao Lucas jail where the incident occurred. The prisoners were forced into the cell after grabbing prison guard Teresa Dantas in an early-morning.