Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 3

U.S. and foreign datelines are Page 2A. Page 3A Monday, January 4, 1993 Senate starts early on cabinet Little German lom recruits Meiinonites by Dan Stets Knight-Ridder Newspaperse Kenyan boss shows how elections fail BY REMER TYSON Free Press Africa Bureau NAIROBI, Kenya Africa's dictators under assault by apostles of democracy have discovered a way to retain power. They hold multiparty elections, manipulate government money and power and watch their fickle opposition self-destruct. That's what happened in Kenya when President Daniel arap Moi and his ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) last week gained five more ALZWEDEL, Germany Even as Germany is trying to close the door on most foreign immigrants, this little medieval town is actively recruiting one group from abroad: Mennonites from the former Soviet Union.

By Adam Clymer New York Times Washington Although none of President-elect Bill Clinton's cabinet choices can be nominated until he takes the inaugural oath on Jan. 20, Senate committees will start conducting informal confirmation hearings this week. Democrats hope that most can be confirmed by the full Senate on the 20th or the next day. But Republicans who are irritated over the Democrats' defeat of John Tower, President George Bush's choice for secretary of defense four years ago, could make things difficult. Democrats still control the Senate, but the chamber's rules make delays easy.

Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, secretary of the Senate Republican conference, is coordinating Republican research on Clinton's choices. He and other Republican leaders expect to discuss their plans today. Committees to begin hearings Wednesday; GOP might drag feet On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Ronald Brown, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee who has been selected to be secretary of Commerce. On Thursday three or four hearings will be held.

The Labor and Human Resources Committee will hear from Robert Reich, a Harvard lecturer nominated to be the secretary of Labor. The Commerce Committee will hear Federico Pena, the former mayor of Denver, who has been chosen as secretary of Transportation. The Veterans Affairs Committee will hear Jesse Rrrwti pvpnrtive director of the Dis abled American Veterans, Clinton's choice for secretary of Veterans Affairs. And the Armed Services Committee may hold a hearing that day on Rep. Les Aspin of Wisconsin, Clinton's choice for secretary of Defense.

Warren Christopher, the nominee for secretary of State, will go before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 13 and 14. Carol Browner, the selection to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, will go before the Environment and Public Works Committee next Monday. On that same day, Rep. Leon Panet-ta of California, Clinton's choice as budget director, is expected to go before Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Senate Finance Committee expects to hold three hearings that week. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the committee's current chairman, is up for secretary of the Treasury. The first group of 68 Mennonites arrived a few Weeks ago, and 300 more are expected within the next three years in Salzwedel, a town of 23,000 people situated just east of what used to be the Iron Curtain. Local government officials have special reasons fof recruiting the Mennonites, whom they hope to settle in the now largely vacant former border area between eastern and western Germany.

In part, it is because the Mennonites, whose faith dates back to the 16th Century, are known for their pious ways and love of hard work. But there is another reason as well. "These are not really foreigners at 'y jllambur); "Kpt- Cieeh, TSt KRT Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi years of power in the country's first multiparty elections in 26 years. Moi, 68, has exercised autocratic rule in Kenya since he became the country's second president in 1978. He formally established a one-party political system that, in reality, had existed since 1966 under Kenya's first president, Jomo Ken-yatta.

To one degree or another, the same thing that happened in Kenya took place late last year during elections in Ghana, Angola, Cameroon and the Seychelles. It is likely to happen this year in elections called in Mozambique and other African countries. This turn of events perpetuating authoritarian rule casts doubt about a wave of de-mocracy that It, 'J I- i-v' if; t. V- ---J A. Knight-Ridder Tribune Knight-Ridder Tribune As manipulative as one-party rulers such as Moi have been, they have been assisted greatly by ineptness and mistakes by their opponents.

all. They are Germans whose ancestors migrated from Germany 200 "years ago," said Eva Schiener, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry of Sachsen-Anhalt, the eastern German state in which Salzwedel is situated. It is questionable how German and how religious many of the new arrivals are, but they are receiving one benefit of which most immigrants in Germany can only dream. They were recognized as German citizens upon arrival and will have new passports in their hands within a matter of months, an achievement that can take years, even decades, for non-ethnic Germans born in the country. They also will receive unemployment benefits about $500 a month until they find work.

The adults are in intensive German-language courses and the children are in a regular German school. Usually 1 only one spouse of a couple has German ancestry. "I'll do whatever I can here, whatever they give me. I don't care," said Hans Huebert, a 49-year-old welder frcm Kazakhstan who is one of the new 'arrivals. The plan is to encourage the Mennonites to move to farmland largely vacant now.

The government will help them get started with small grants, but the Mennonites will have to build their own houses and take on mortgages to buy property. Like hundreds of thousands of others who have fled to Germany this year, Huebert said his primary motive was economic. "It is no longer possible to live there," he said of the former Soviet Union. "Everything is terribly expensive and the work isn't steady." The other new arrivals come from Russia, the Urals and even Siberia. They are descendants of German Mennonites who began settling in Russia in 1789 at the invitation of Catherine the Great.

The Mennonites trace their history back to the "16th-Century Swiss Anabaptist movement. Many migrated to the United States more than '200 years ago; those from northeastern Germany rnoved east to Prussia and East Prussia, from where they accepted the Russian queen's invitation. This house in Rosewood, is the only remnant of the black town burned down by the Ku Klux Klan on Jan. 1, 1923. The house was spared because the only white person in town lived in it.

Anniversary of evil 23 race killings leave 2 women seeking justice 1 4 -4 Knight-Ridder Tribune Lee Ruth Davis, 77, of Miami is one of the last survivors of the KKK massacre. "They were hunting down black people just like they were rabbits." Davis' cousin, Minnie Lee Langley, 88, also witnessed the attack. seemed to be rolling through the continent after the collapse of one-party governments in Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union. But some representatives of Western countries see flawed elections as part of the tortuous path that Africans must take on their way to democracy. In Kenya, irregularities and violence were rife in events leading up to the election campaign, in the campaign itself, in voting, and in counting of ballots.

Still, as manipulative as one-party rulers such as Moi have been, they have been assisted greatly by ineptness and mistakes by their opponents. In Kenya, for instance, Moi received only about 38 percent of the vote. But that was enough to defeat three opponents who divided the majority because they couldn't agree on a candidate, or even where a party office should be established. Those were issues that caused a split between Moi opponents Kenneth Matiba and Oginda Odinga, who became candidates for different parties. Then, former Vice President Mwai Kibaki formed the Democratic Party that split the votes of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyus, between himself and Matiba.

The three found unity only after Moi's victory. They came together to announce they rejected the election results because of fraud. That post-election announcement turned even staunch supporters sour. "As far as I am concerned, the three are solely responsible for the mess that we are now in," said Samuel Njuguna, a parliamentary candidate on Odinga's party ticket. "All along we called on them to form a joint opposition to dislodge KANU and restore democracy, but they did not listen because each of them was blinded by ambition." The trio's announcement that they rejected the election results after they lost almost certainly will prove to be a big boost for Moi's new government.

Matiba, Odinga and Kibaki won seats in parliament, but their leadership is tarnished. In Ghana, Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings got a similar windfall. Rawlings opponents predicted his repressive military rule had been so unpopular he couldn't win an election. But differences among opposition leaders let victory slip away.

Rawlings won with 58 percent of the vote. In Angola, guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi thought he would win hands down in the election against Jose Eduardo dos Santos, head of the former one-party, Marxist-Leninist government. But during the campaign, key members of Savimbi's Union for Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA) split away, and when it appeared he might lose, Savimbi charged the election was a fraud and resumed fighting Angola's civil war. Only after several of his top military assistants were gunned down by Angolan police did Savimbi learn that he was in a runoff with dos Santos. Savimbi is almost certain to find himself weakened further when President Bill Clinton takes office.

Clinton is expected to cut off aid to Savimbi. In Cameroon, President Paul Biya came out the winner and his opposition crippled. In the tiny islands nation of Seychelles, President France-Albert Rene abandoned his one-party socialist state and pulled off a surprise victory over former President James Mancham. ALA- A Atlantic jf) FLORIDA rmmmmknU Gulf of Mexico Miles iff Detroit Free Press Despite what Navy says, warship's sailor didn't sail Associated Press REDMOND, Wash. The U.S.

Navy was proud to announce to hometown folks that Jeffrey Livingston was serving on a warship off the coast of Somalia in support of Operation Restore Hope. The news surprised a lot of people, including Jeffrey Livingston. "Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Jeffrey Livingston of Redmond, recently arrived off the coast of Somalia aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk," said a Navy news release dated Dec. 22. I Problem was, Livingston was discharged from the Navy on July 24.

"Oh, no," groaned Jeff Landis at the Navy's Fleet Home Town Newspaper offices in Norfolk, Va. Livingston, 22, had been an aviation electronics technician on the Kitty Hawk. He had been scheduled for discharge in September, but was released early because of military cutbacks. Jeff Livingston's reaction? "I can't believe they did this," he said. "Well, yes lean." BY LORI ROZSA Knight-Ridder Newspapers ROSEWOOD, Fla.

The sinful past of Rosewood is locked up tight in John Rutledge's house. Preserved carefully in a box, his chronicle, "Rape at Rosewood," is unpublished. He wrote it to be read. That was 30 years ago. Now he says to ever publish it would be too painful for the families of the men he wrote about.

Those men, with the help of the Ku Klux Klan, burned the small black town of Rosewood to the ground in 1923 in one of Florida's most vicious racial attacks. Survivors say dozens of men and women were killed in a rampage that began on New Year's Day. "They committed murder," said Rutledge, a retired Levy County school principal. "And their families still live here, and there's still a lot of prejudice here. I don't think it would do any good." The survivors of Rosewood disagree.

The years have whittled that sad list to two. Lee Ruth Davis, 77, of Miami, and her cousin, Minnie Lee Langley, 88, of Jacksonville, believe they are the only people left who witnessed the violence. Now they want the story told. More than that, they want Florida to own up to its history, acknowledge the atrocity, and do something to right a 70-year-old wrong. "We had all our property there, and they took everything they didn't burn.

They took our chickens and anything else we had in Rosewood," Langley recalls. "They even took it off the map." Langley and Davis will ask the state Legislature to reimburse them for the property loss and to memorialize the massacre. They want Rosewood back on every map and prominently placed in history books. Little is prominent now. There's a 6-by-14-inch steel sign, white letters on a green background, planted on the north When Levy County's pencil factories and turpentine mills were running full bore, this area of north Florida was a thriving place.

It was built and inhabited by black homesteaders who hoisted the cedar logs onto railroad cars and tapped the trees for pine oil to make a living. When the call rang out that a black man from Rosewood had raped a white woman in Sumner, the Klan showed up in droves. Davis remembers being hurriedly shuttled to the home of Wright, the white grocer. "He had all the women and children he could find come into his house to hide," Davis recalls. "They were hunting down black people just like they1 were rabbits." She stayed with a Gainesville family for six months, until her father, who survived the massacre, came to get her.

She didn't return to Rosewood until 1976, when Ed Bradley took her and Langley there for a "60 Minutes" segment on Rosewood. "I didn't ever want to go back," Davis said. "I didn't know what I would see, or how I would feel about it." side of State Road 24. A two-story white clapboard house on the south side of the road was the only building left standing after the fires of the Rosewood riot finally went out. Doyal Scoggins lives in that quaint house now.

It was built by John Wright, who ran a general store out of his home. He was the only white person to live in Rosewood. That's why it was spared when the Klan galloped through with torches on Jan. 1, 1923. "When I moved here a few years ago, I took a Florida history course at the community college, hoping to learn more about what happened here," Scoggins said.

"The instructor didn't know a thing about it." In his 1 1-volume work, "A History of the South," historian George Tindall catalogs the racist assaults of the early 20th Century. "The last serious affair was at Rosewood, Florida, where a white mob in search of an alleged Negro rapist ran amok through the Negro community, burned six houses and a church, and left five Negroes and two whites dead," Tindall writes. "What's taking place in there is a betrayal of Russia. Russia is weak now, and America is using that. George Bush wants us to be oppressed, a second-rate power." VALENTIN PAVLOV, a Communist Party protestor outside the Kremlin, commenting on President George Bush's visit and the signing of the START II treaty.

-V.