The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 2

A-2 Monday, April 1 1, 1994 SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER fUl oranes LfU wig ar too npiM Hie 4w Machine guns and arullery pound city; killings spread to the countryside EXAMINER NEW8 8ERVICE8 KIGALI, Rwanda Battles between rebels and government forces raged in Rwanda's capital of Kigali Monday, and tribal bloodletting, in which tens of thousands have been killed, spread to the countryside. The rain-drenched central African city reverberated to the thud of exploding artillery shells and mortars. Heavy machine gun fire cracked through dirt streets. A French military commander, helping to evacuate several hundred trapped Westerners, said rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front were on the edge of the capital, 1.5 miles from the French School in Rwanda Patriotic Front rebels fire mortars toward Rwandan government troops Saturday about 50 miles north of resign N.Y. schools superintendent, chief, reaches compromise with mayor ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK New York City's schools chancellor, Ramon Cortines, has withdrawn his resignation after reaching a compromise with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani Cortines, former San Francisco schools chief, said Friday he was resigning after less than a year as head of the nation's largest school system because of differences with the mayor over education spending.

Giuliani had named former Rep. Herman Badillo to be the district's fiscal monitor, and Cortines said that would undermine his position. Under Sunday's agreement, Badillo will remain in the post, but with a title that does not include the word "monitor." Sunday's meeting between Cortines and the Republican mayor was arranged by Gov. Mario Cuomo, a Democrat. He said he had called the two Saturday and suggested they could resolve their differences without either conceding any authority to the other.

The nation's largest school system has a $7.3 billion budget New York City has about 1,000 public schools and 1 million students. Cortines, who ran San Francisco schools from 1986 to 1992, has held the New York job for seven months. His resignation was to be effective June 30. His predecessor, Joseph Fernandez, was ousted after losing a battle with the school board over a proposed multicultural curriculum and his plan to distribute condoms in high schools. I ff SMS 11 An American woman carrying a child includes a secret $6 million deal in which Egypt shipped artillery, mortars, land mines and assault rifles.

The Egyptian deal was underwritten by a financial guarantee provided in 1992 by France's largest state-owned bank, Credit Lyon-nais. The influx of arms also has included a $5.9 million deal with South Africa, which shipped automatic rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers. France has supplied Rwanda's tiny army of 5,000 with a range of arms including artillery, armored cars, machine guns and 120mm mortars. Thousands of other weapons, ranging from Belgian FN machine guns to Romanian Kalashnikov assault rifles to Russian Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers, have been shipped into Rwanda by European and African arms dealers drawing on huge stockpiles of excess U.S., Russian and European arms. '1 i i stilt steps from a U.S.

military plane after Much of this trade has been financed through barter, with Rwandan coffee and tea traded for weapons, analysts said, In the case of the Egyptian arms deal, for example, Credit Lyonnais agreed to accept future tea harvests as collateral for the $6 million deal Egypt actually took delivery of $1 million in Rwandan tea before fighting damaged the country's fragile tea bushes. Since 1990, thousands of people have died in Rwanda in a flare-up of the ethnic and social tensions that have plagued the former Belgian colony since its independence in 1962. Foreign sources estimate 10,000 to 20,000 people have been killed since fighting flared last week. "The renewed round of violence in Rwanda should give all of the arms suppliers pause to think about the responsibility they bear," said Stephen Goose, Washington Party I vii 'f S. Africa, France, Egypt and U.S.

among suppliers By David Wood NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE WASHINGTON The slaughter in Rwanda, where rampaging soldiers are gunning down government officials, U.N. peacekeepers, priests, nuns and aid workers, is being fueled by thousands of weapons and tons of ammunition shipped into the tiny African nation by France, South Africa, Egypt and the United States. The arms shipments to the small East African nation are part of a relentless and accelerating global flow of small arms. In Rwanda, the result has been mounting anarchy and chaos since 1990, tens of thousands of deaths, and the violent thwarting of a U.N. peacekeeping effort During the 1980s, U.S.

military sales to Rwanda totaled $2.3 million. The sales apparently stopped two years ago. President Clinton and other Western officials have deplored the carnage in Rwanda. But no country, including the United States, is making any systematic effort to control or even to monitor the cascade of small arms there or anywhere else, senior U.S. officials recently acknowledged.

The flow of arms to Rwanda APSAVVIO AZIM the capital of Kigali --i APQULLAUME BONN arriving in Nairobi, Kenya. director of Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit, international organization. Goose directed a detailed study last year of the arms flow into Rwanda. His report, published in January 1994, included the first public disclosures of the Egyptian and South African arms deals. South African documents detailing its 1992 deal with Rwanda suggest the scope of the arms flood.

A state-owned weapons company agreed to ship 20,000 assault rifles, 20,000 hand grenades, 2 million rounds of machine gun ammunition and 270 mortars. According to Pentagon documents, the United States sold $2.3 million worth of military gear to Rwanda from 1981 to 1992. Last year, the Pentagon budgeted an additional $600,000 to send Rwanda military gear. But Pentagon officials said Friday the money was never spent "In addition, the likelihood of engaging in cannibalism is related to the extremity of the situation," he wrote. Those who died early would not have had the same opportunity to engage in cannibalism because it took more time to break down the social taboos.

"Cannibalism clearly provided a source of nutrition, and it is obvious that the members of the Forlorn Hope, who wandered for 33 days, having taken only six days' rations, would not have survived had they not consumed those who died. "On the other hand, the two family groups with the highest sur-' vival rates (the Breens and the Reeds, all of whose snowbound members survived) are considered not to have engaged in cannibalism." McCurdy drew no firm conclusions from his study on who or which groups might resort to eating their fellow travelers to survive, except that the more extreme the privation, the more likely it seemed. "What happened to the Dormer Party I would characterize as people being tested to the extreme by extremely severe circumstances," be said. While factors of age, sex and social grouping may not point to who may engage in caibalisra, McCurdy concluded, those factors may indeed determine who in similar circumstances in 1546 or 1334 Lves or des. 1 downtown Kigali where trapped Westerners were assembling for evacuation.

A French convoy came under fire from unknown gunmen as it made its way from a downtown compound toward Kigali's international airport French paratroopers returned fire. No one in the convoy was injured. Terrified residents As a fine drizzle settled over the lush, green hills surrounding Kigali, Belgian paratroopers began escorting several hundred terrified Belgian residents to the airport To avoid some of the heaviest fighting on the main approach road to the airport, the convoys snaked through muddy side streets Uttered with bodies and echoing to the moans of the dead and wounded. A woman, with both of her legs sliced off at the thigh, cried out for help. None came in a city where five days of fighting showed no signs of abating.

Bodies were strewn in the streets and the city of 300,000 was full of a "strong, penetrating" stench, Baid Patrick Gasser, deputy head of the Red Cross in Kigali, He estimated 20,000 people had died throughout Rwanda and thousands more had been displaced throughout the African nation. More than 1,000 bodies were piled at Kigali's central hospital, and the Red Cross asked people to dig mass graves, he said. Patients bayoneted Gangs of Hutu tribesmen hunted down and killed any members of the minority Tutsi tribe they could find. In Kigali's main hospital patients watched in horror as soldiers came in and bayoneted to death two Tutsi men. Spanish missionary nuns told of gang killings in Kibuye, a town 50 miles west of Kigali The town's hospital was attacked, a nun said on Spanish national radio, monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp.

"We have just received general absolution, the parish priest came, and they have just gone to kill the refugees in the parish church, and they are killing the refugees in the town hall" said the nun, who was not identified. The bloodshed is an especially grisly episode in the feud between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, which has wracked Rwanda and neighboring Burundi for decades. The latest killing started after President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart, President Cyrien Ntaryamira, were killed in a rocket attack on their plane last Wednesday. Habyarimana's fiercely loyal presidential guard then unleashed a campaign of terror against all Tuteis, suspected of involvement in the assassinations. The Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front abandoned a precarious cease-fire and launched an offensive to rescue 600 of their best fighters pinned down in the capital where they were encamped as part of a now-collapsed regional peace accord.

Rebel leader Alexis Kany-arengwe told Reuters in rebel-held territory: "Our forces are advancing government soldiers do not have the will to put up resistance so we shell know in days what the resolution is," Kanyarengwe, a 57-year-old former interior minister from Habyarimana's government, said the front rejected an interim government set up in Kigali "They are just a screen for the kSers, We do not accept their legitimacy," he said. of the Donner ASSOCtATEO PftfSSnWU Ramon Cortines has settled his dispute with the mayor of New York Lessons By Larry D. Hatfield Of HC EXAMNER STAFF Cannibalism is what most people remember about the doomed Donner Party, but a Davis scientist says other factors in their 19th century struggle in the Sierra Nevada may have more relevance to contemporary famines and forced migrations such as those in Bosnia and Somalia. In what is believed to be the first epidemiological study of the Donner Party, Dr. Stephen A.

McCur-dy concluded that families in the ill-fated pioneer group had a much higher survival rata than those traveling alone, that women were less likely to die than men and that the highest mortality rata was among those under 6 or over 35 years old. "Although the Donner Party disaster occurred nearly 150 years ago, it retains contemporary relevance because the factors associated with increased mortality likely have a biologic basis or are due to enduring behavioral characteristics," McCurdy wrote in a report on his study in Monday's edition of the Western Journal of Medicine. Two ruk factors for mortality observed in this study age and male sex cannot be altered or mitigated, but they may be used to identify high-risk groups in starvation-affected populations." He added that the observation that family structure appeared to be a key to survival "also suggests intervention strategies for similar disasters. Specifically, measures to keep family groups intact so they may draw on their internal support network may improve survival" While he didnt know enough specifics about famine relief effort in Somalia to comment on them, McCurdy said in an interview, "What I'm making is more a general point (that) when international or private relief efforts are made in places like Somalia or Bosnia, they should keep these issues in mind that who is at the highest risk for dying. "In Bosnia today, for instance, families are being split up, and children are being packed off, away from their parents.

I guess that may be good for the children who make it out, but if they don't make it out and art left without their parents or family group and wa might not even know about most of them they're stuck. Their chances for survival are much The same reduced survival chances may also be created for the parent left behind when a relief agency tries to save the child, McCurdy suggested. "A parent separated from a child may no longer have the psychological drive, the light within, to fend for Just himself or herself," ha said. He said he believed that some parents in the Donner Party might have survived while their single contemporaries perished because of their need to save the family as well as themselves. "In some folks, there burned an indistinguishable light at they went through hell and back to keep themselves and their family alive," McCurdy said.

While the basis for the improved survival for people traveling with family members was unclear, he wrote, "It appeared that members of family groups formed strong support networks, saving food and other provisions for their members rather than sharing them with the group." In the interview and the article, McCurdy cited other epidemiological parallels between the historic. Donner Party and modern political and social upheavals. In Holland's "Hanger Winter" in World War II and in the siege of Leningrad, two major "nutritionally stressed" populations suffered a disproportionate death rate among the young and the old, as did the Donner Party. More recent experience in gee camps in Somalia's famine underlined his findings about the Donner Party a death rata of 74 percent for children 5 years and younger was two or three times the rate for older children, for example. Women's ability to survive better than men all five women and only two of the 10 men of the "Forlorn Hope" group that tried to snowshoe out of the Sierra survived, for instance could be mostly biological Women have lower nutritional needs and higher body fat than men, McCurdy wrote, adding, "Sex -related behavioral differences that is, performance of high-risk or strenuous task may also play role." McCurdy's study had less firm conclusions on the Donner Party's cannibalism.

He noted the strong social stigma attached to eating human flesh made information unreliable there almost certainly was cannibalism during the sirge of Leningrad, for instance, but almost nothing has been written about it.