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INGREDIENTS FOR GENOCIDE: Burundi seems headed for same fate as Rwanda

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nullby MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

BUJUMBURA, Burundi–The driver’s father was a Hutu, but his mother was a Tutsi, and that ethnic mix is a recipe for murder in this country–where all the ingredients of a Rwandan-like bloodbath are beginning to boil.

Afraid he was a marked man, Selemani Hakizimana drove fast and furious through the Hutu-dominated villages along the winding road to this jittery capital city, where the outnumbered Tutsis have an uneasy hold on power.

“I must drive fast, I cannot stop,” he said. “These are Hutu villages; if I stop, they will kill me because they will see that I have Tutsi blood.”

The ethnic hatred that’s ripped apart Rwanda–leaving a half million dead from genocidal attacks and more than a million in refugee camps–runs even deeper in neighboring Burundi, a former Belgian colony of 6 million.

“In Rwanda, a Hutu and a Tutsi can marry,” Hakizimana said. “Not in Burundi.”

As in Rwanda, the Tutsis comprise only about 15% of the population; unlike in Rwanda, however, they have always held the military and political upper hand.

But now that a Tutsi rebel army has gained power in Rwanda, the Hutus of Burundi have seen the value of revolution. In the last month, 3,000 Burundians have died in political killiings, mainly Tutsis.

In reply, Tutsi students began rioting earlier this week and virtually shut down the city for two days. All businesses closed, as did the airport. Fifteen people have died.

Yesterday, in a televised talk, Burundi’s acting president warned the nation against going down a Rwandan path.

“Think twice before you act,” said Silveste Ntibantunganha. “Rwanda should be example for us all.”

June 2, 2008
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AFRICAN EPILOGUE: Dreams of Death

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null by MICHAEL O. ALLEN
Amidst lesser mountains, Kilimanjaro sat mysteriously in the distance, its brooding, mammoth expanse shrouded by clouds that streaked the rising sun. It was barely dawn at this wildlife reserve, and the elephants were headed out to the swamps.

I must confess that the burden I had carried in my heart to Amboselli National Park, in Kenya, lifted at the sight of that first baby elephant. It loped along goofily, trying to keep pace with its mother.

Twelve more gray pairs followed, then a herd of wildebeest and a span of gazelles, warthogs, and buffalo. Cattle egrets paced with hippopotamus, munching grasshoppers while scampering from underfoot.

This visit last month to the wildlife preserve was my attempt at a vacation. Yet I held little hope that it would banish the nightmares that had been creeping into my sleep or erase memories of the horrors I had witnessed as reporter covering the tragedy in Goma, Zaire, and Rwanda.

A dozen zebras heading to a pond for a drink looked warily at three Maasai warriors approaching in the distance. A pack of hyenas, accompanied by two jackals, ate a baby wildebeest under the gaze of a council of vultures peering from the trees.

Here on the plains under the shadow of Kilimanjaro, the laws of nature were apparent. Animals engage in their own Darwinism. But how to explain the unnatural carnage of the prior month—the gruesome slaughter of 500,000 Tutsis by the majority Hutus, and the mass deaths of refugee Hutus from politics and disease?

Humans, when we deign to acknowledge our place in the animal kingdom, think we are better, more evolved beings than the beasts cavorting on the plains. The scriptures assures us, after all, that we are created in the image of God.

When, with the world’s complicity, a Rwanda happens, it gives us pause. It gave me nightmares—nightmares that started at one site of the carnage, and which have plagued me until I arrived home, in New York, this week.

Inexplicably, the nightmares began shortly after I arrived with other reporters to stay at the CentreCQ Cristus, a Jesuit retreat in Kigali, Rwanda, a few weeks ago. I say “inexplicably” not to diminish the horror of what happened at Centre Cristus, but it’s not clear to me why the story of what happened there affected me more than the horrors I actually witnessed.

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June 1, 2008
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City Urged to Scrap Homeless Shelter Plan By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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March 21, 2002

Opponents of a proposed 400-bed homeless shelter in Williamsburg rallied against the plan last night, calling on Mayor Bloomberg to cancel it.

“What they’re creating is a warehouse for homeless men,” said Jose Leon.

Opening the East Williamsburg Industrial Park facility, at an old factory at 89 Porter Ave., is the first half of a plan to close the 800-bed 30th Street men’s shelter at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. The city will build a second 400-bed facility in the Bronx.

The Giuliani administration signed a $180 million, 22-year contract with the Manhattan-based Doe Fund to operate the shelter, immediately drawing the ire of Brooklyn elected officials and community activists, who sued the city.

Marty Needelman, a lawyer with Brooklyn Legal Services, said the city used subterfuge to avoid input from the community. But the city maintained the plan did not require review because, in part, the Doe Fund is a nongovernmental firm buying a building from a private seller.

“It’s a bad precedent,” Needelman said. “If the city can get away with avoiding the land-review process through this technicality on a $180-million project, then they can do that on a lot of other projects and undermine one of the critical features of the City Charter.”

Lower courts have ruled against the project opponents, but they have filed notice that they intend to appeal.

Even the Coalition for the Homeless — which fights to get the city to live up to its obligations to provide shelter, housing and services for the homeless — is opposed to the project.

“It’s an incredibly shortsighted and poor policy,” Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, said of the plan. “Our position has been that that money would be much better spent to open permanent housing for the rising number of homeless men.”

But George McDonald, founder of The Doe Fund, which finds work and provides treatment for homeless men, said the coalition should be working with The Doe Fund, not fighting it, on this project.

“This is a replacement facility, not a new shelter,” McDonald said. “In a system like we have in New York City, you have to have tranistional facilities. You can’t take somebody right off the street and put them in permanent housing.”

But Assemblyman Vito Lopez (D-Williamsburg) asked why it has to be Williamsburg, which has a waste-transfer station that processes 40% of the city’s trash daily and a 200-bed homeless shelter in nearby Greenpoint.

He said he had heard a bio-tech medical research facility is being installed in place of the Manhattan homeless shelter that would be closed down.

“Instead of giving us the homeless shelter, give us the bio-tech research facility,” Lopez said. “It would be a very positive thing for our community because it would create hundreds of jobs.”

Linda Gibbs, commissioner of the city Homeless Services Department, said the project is a necessary service.

“It is not a matter of making a choice between providing permanent housing, or a homeless shelter,” she said. The city has an obligation to provide shelter for anyone who needs it.”

March 21, 2002
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Ground Zero Yields African Burial Ground Relics By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Thursday, November 15, 2001

Even as the grim recovery work at Ground Zero continues, another casualty of the World Trade Center terror attacks has emerged: the controversial African Burial Ground project.

Officials say that some 100 boxes of burial ground artifacts were recovered from a laboratory in the basement of 6 World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the attacks. But it is unknown how many more relics are missing.

Meanwhile, on the back burner, again, is the much-delayed plan to rebury remains of Colonial-era black New Yorkers and their artifacts — personal items found on top of coffins and scattered around the burial ground — at the lower Manhattan site from which they were excavated 10 years ago.

The artifacts recovered Oct. 12 from 6 WTC make up “a sizable portion” of the collection, but it is unclear how much of the total the 100 boxes recovered represents, said Cassandra Henderson of the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for the project.

She said recovery workers got into the ruins a month ago and collected artifacts, files filled with documents, thousands of photographs and computers used by archeologists in analyzing and conserving the artifacts. The recovered material must be cleaned up, studied and catalogued again — and searches done on the files contained in the recovered computers — to determine exactly how much was lost and how much was found, she added.

Construction workers clearing a site for a federal office building at Broadway and Duane St. in 1991 found skeletons and remains determined to be those of hundreds of enslaved African-Americans who lived in that part of Manhattan and buried their dead there from 1712 to 1794.

Agency Under Fire

Despite having spent $20 million to research the remains and artifacts, the General Services Administration has angered activists and community groups who charge that the agency dragged its feet in scheduling a reburial of the unearthed remains.

Charles Barron of the Committee of Descendants of the Afrikan Ancestral Burial Ground says the agency reneged on a promise to rebury the remains Aug. 17, the anniversary of the birth of back-to-Africa activist Marcus Garvey.

“All those artifacts and the remains would have been buried by now,” he said. “Instead, much that is valuable may now be lost, or damaged.”

The agency said it never promised an Aug. 17 reburial. Henderson insisted it wants “to focus totally on the African Burial Ground and honor the remains.” But she conceded it “will be very difficult to do that right now in New York City, with all the concerns we have.”

Barron was not buying that.

“I believe in nothing the GSA says. If they are concerned about all of that, those bones would have already been reburied by now,” he said.

November 15, 2001
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Storm Drains Focus Of Attack on W. Nile Virus By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and LISA L. COLANGELO, Daily News Staff Writers

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May 16, 2001

The city stepped up its war against the West Nile virus yesterday, targeting storm drains where mosquitoes breed.

Thirty teams of workers fanned out across the five boroughs and dropped larvicide pellets into 8,000 storm drains.

By the end of the month, about 145,000 storm drains will have been treated with larvicide. The teams are marking the treated drains with white enamel spray paint as they go.

Larviciding targets mosquito larva and is a crucial first step in preventing the spread of West Nile virus. The city already has done small scale larviciding in ponds.

Be afraid, skeeters — be very afraid!

“It’s too early in the season to know yet how vigorous the virus is going to be in our area,” said Sandra Mullin, assistant commissioner at the city Health Department. “But we’re doing all that we can, like we did last year, to try to minimize the breeding of mosquitoes.”

The virus, which claimed seven lives in 1999 and two last year, is transmitted to people by mosquitoes. The virus has not yet been detected in the city this year. Five infected birds were found in New Jersey this month.

Crews from the Housing Authority — along with the city’s Environmental Protection, Parks, Sanitation and Health departments — are doing the larviciding work.

The one-year contract was apparently not lucrative enough to draw in bidders earlier this month, including Clarke Mosquito Management, which handled the city’s $4.6 million mosquito control contract last year.

Today the Health Department will find out if anyone bid on contracts to handle both larviciding and adulticiding — the use of pesticides to kill adult mosquitoes.

Scientists and environmentalists say it is a more effective way to control mosquitoes than spraying pesticides.

“If you do larviciding early on, you’ll be less likely to need adulticides later on,” said Dr. Stephen Ostroff of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It makes no difference to me whether it’s done by the city or done by a private contractor, as long as it is done correctly.”

Clarke was the only company to bid on the city’s original three-year, multimillion mosquito control contract last month.

But the Health Department rebid the contract after Clarke was slapped with a six-figure fine by state environmental officials for using untrained and unsupervised workers to spray pesticides in the city last summer.

May 16, 2001
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SUBWAY VOTE POSTPONED A Transit Authority committee has postponed a vote on proposed subway By MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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May 16, 2001

Transit Authority committee has postponed a vote on proposed subway service changes, including the controversial plan to shorten the G line.

New York City Transit and Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials will instead consider a new proposal that community groups opposed to the TA plan offered on Monday, leaders of the groups said yesterday.

The TA meeting, originally scheduled for tomorrow, will instead be held May 24.

The subway service changes had initially been on the agenda of the MTA board in March, but were taken off the table at the request of Gov. Pataki, and have been under discussion ever since.

John Leon, a consultant to the Noble Street Block Association in Greenpoint, which has led the fight over G train service, said the group had submitted a plan proposing the G train remain as it is, and the F train continue to use the 53rd St. tunnel between Queens and Manhattan.

“This should make the Queens riders happy and, of course, it would make Greenpoint-North Brooklyn G riders happy as well because their train would continue to go to Continental Ave.-Forest Hills,” Leon said. The MTA has proposed ending the G line at Court Square in Long Island City.

Tina Chan, transportation chairwoman for the Queens Civic Congress, said the communities’ proposal — which would have the new V line go through the new 63rd St. tunnel instead of switching the F to the 63rd St. tunnel— answers all of the agency’s concerns while keeping vital subway services to Queens.

“The F train needs to service quite a few important stations on the west side of Queens, such as the Queensboro Plaza, Court Square, and there are quite a few important facilities along the line such as Citibank, LaGuardia College, the School Construction Authority,” she said.

“Most important is that a lot of F train commuters transfer to the No. 6 train at the 53rd and Lexington Ave. station,” she said.

“If you reroute the F train to the 63rd St. tunnel, people would lose that transfer. In order for them to transfer, they are going have to walk out of the station from 63rd St., walk about four blocks to the 59th St. station. We feel that’s just not a viable transfer at all.”

Present at the meeting Monday where the proposals were presented were MTA Executive Director Marc Shaw, TA President Lawrence Reuter, and other TA and MTA staff.

Representatives of the Straphangers Campaign and the Regional Planning Association, an independent planning group, helped the opponents draft the alternate plan.

“The MTA representatives looked at it very objectively and the TA president said he would check it out,” Leon said. “He wasn’t as enthusiastic so we have to wait to see what his ultimate decision is.”

Tom Kelly, spokesman for the MTA, said the community groups made “suggestions” rather than a proposal at Monday’s meetings.

The TA will continue meeting with community groups and listening to their suggestions, he said.

May 16, 2001
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Finding MIA’s Kin Stumps U.S. Army By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Sunday, May 13, 2001

The United States government believes that Charles Arce of Brooklyn kept faith with his country. He went to Korea with the Army more than half a century ago and almost certainly died there.

Now, his country would like to keep faith with his memory and his family. But it isn’t easy to do so many years later.

One trail of Charles Arce’s family petered out at a Brooklyn Bridge entrance, where the family’s 41-43 Sands St. residence is now a parking lot.

Similarly, the 130 Fulton St. residence of Ramon Arce, an uncle listed with the Army as Charles’ beneficiary, no longer exists.

Visits to three other Brooklyn locations where his family lived before Arce enlisted with the Army to fight in Korea proved just as futile.

It has been more than 50 years since Pfc. Charles Arce, seven weeks short of his 20th birthday, went missing in action and was presumed killed in the brutal battle of Unsan in the early months of the Korean War.

As arduous and painstaking as the task of finding and recovering the remains of nearly 8,200 American servicemen missing in action from the Korean War has been, finding their living relatives is proving just as difficult, said Therese Fisher, director of genealogy at The American History Company.

The Army hired the company, which does genealogical research and publishes history books, to track down the relatives as part of the overall outreach of the U.S. Department of Defense to contact them.

Access to North Korea has improved in recent years and joint American and Korean teams have been recovering remains of servicemen in areas where American units fought during the war.

But finding relatives is another matter, said Maj. Horace Bowden, operations officer for the Repatriation and Family Affairs Division of the U.S. Army Casualty and Memorial Affairs Operation Center.

“After 50 years, the trail has gone pretty dark,” Bowden said.

The Army’s database has about 2,500 families. The identification process includes using mitochondrial DNA, meaning samples collected from the mother’s side of a serviceman’s family, to identify recovered remains.

Some of those remains may belong to Charles Arce, but the Army needs to make contact with his relations to verify that.

“Just because we’re looking for Charles Arce’s family doesn’t mean we have a set of bones, or remains that we believe to be his,” Bowden cautioned.

Army spokeswoman Shari Lawrence said the work of recovering remains and trying to connect them to family is extremely important.

“It’s a commitment we make to our soldiers that, if they’re injured or killed, that we will bring them home as quickly as possible,” Lawrence said. “It’s an obligation we have … whenever we know where they are and we can identify them as Americans, we will bring them home.”

Arce’s mother and father, Pedro and Dolores, came to Brooklyn from Puerto Rico in 1920. Born in Brooklyn on Dec. 21, 1930, Arce enlisted in the Army on Sept. 8, 1948. He soon found himself on the Korean peninsula as the Cold War turned hot when North Korea’s Stalinist government mounted an invasion of South Korea in June 1950.

The United States, heading the United Nations forces, jumped in to head off the aggression.

China, wary of U.S. forces so near its territory, sent human-wave attacks to aid the North Koreans. In fact, Chinese soldiers routed Arce’s 8th Calvary Regiment and the 1st Calvary Division on Nov. 1, 1950.

Arce was declared missing in action the next day. Very few American soldiers survived the battle over the next few days.

“It appears no one ever saw him killed,” Fisher said.

Arce was automatically promoted to the rank of corporal in 1953, but then was declared dead on Dec. 31 that year.

Complicating the search is a disastrous 1972 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, part of the National Archives, that destroyed about 80% of personnel files of anyone discharged from the Army between Nov. 1, 1912 and Jan. 1, 1960. The Army wasn’t even able to provide a photograph of Arce.

Fisher, whose company boasts a 100% success rate finding families of servicemen so far, said the missing records are crucial. She is left to trying to track down the family the old-fashioned way — using the telephone book. She has called most people named Arce in Brooklyn without luck.

Anyone with information about Arce or his family should call the Army at (800) 892-2490. For anyone with information about relatives of other MIA servicemen, the Navy’s number is (800) 443-9298; Air Force is (800) 531-5501 and the Marine Corps is (800) 847-1597. Families of American civilians missing in combat should contact the State Department at (202) 647-6769.

Original Story Date: 05/13/01

May 13, 2001
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HIGH-TECH BOOST FOR COLLEGE Kingsboro gets 425G By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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Sunday, May 6, 2001

Kingsborough Community College students will soon be learning in the “smart” high-technology classrooms of the future.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn, Queens) secured the initial $425,000 in a federal appropriation for the equipment — high-resolution plasma screens — and recently went to the campus for a demonstration.

“This essentially allows the boundaries of the classroom to be extended beyond the four walls to the Internet, to distance learning, or just about anything a creative professor would possibly want,” Weiner said.

Three 52-inch screens should be installed this year, school officials said.

They hope to eventually have a total of 30 screens, if the school gets the $2.25 million it wants for the program.

Prof. Delores Friedman, who teaches early childhood education, demonstrated how the technology can be used to enhance the instruction of kindergarten teachers.

With cameras operated by remote, a kindergarten class session can be observed, filmed and archived so the teacher can return to it later and analyze the session, using it as a learning tool, for instance.

“We can observe unobtrusively the kind of discoveries that children make,” Friedman said.

“Things we learn theoretically about children we can now see come alive on the screen. This opens up so many possibilities.”

Although meant to be used primarily for students in the early education program at the school, the screens will have wide application for students in any subject area.

Biology Prof. Maria Ortiz, for instance, demonstrated cell division and 3-D DNA animation on the screen.

“The type of dynamic process that goes on in biology is most effective when you can actually show the student the process as it is occurring,” she said.

Provost Stuart Suss, who teaches history, said the equipment will enhance instruction of modern students who respond to visual presentations.

“If I was teaching about World War I and I wanted to demonstrate to my students what gas warfare was like, there are videos that dramatically and accurately portray that,” he said.

“This gives me another tool for teaching the subject matter.”

Original Story Date: 05/6/01

May 6, 2001
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Drowned Girl’s Dad Asks, Why? By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer

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nullSunday, May 06, 2001

Wilner Jean Paul held the photograph of his daughter and tried to fathom the rest of his life without her.

“I’m lost. I’m lost,” he said inside his Brooklyn home. “I have to find out the reason Sheila died.”

A day had passed since Sheila Jean Paul, 13, and a 12-year-old classmate drowned in the treacherous waters off Canarsie Beach Park. She and eight other students from Intermediate School 68 on E. 82nd St. played hooky Friday in the 92-degree weather.

“Why didn’t the school call and tell us my daughter was not at school?” asked Jean Paul, a 49-year-old gypsy cab driver. “I still haven’t heard from her school. Nothing.”

A correction officer out fishing with a buddy pulled two boys to safety in his motorboat. Four more were rescued by cops from the currents of Paerdegat Basin, and one boy swam to shore by himself.

Cops found Sheila’s body at the foot of a bridge. They later found the body of Neville Chambers, 12, at the mouth of the basin in the 54-degree water, 500 yards from where they found Sheila’s.

Jean Paul had never been to the place where his daughter drowned, and he had many unanswered questions: Was it a beach? Where was the lifeguard or security?

At Canarsie Beach Park, the children reached the water by walking along a garbage-strewn path girded by wild grass overgrowth, bursting onto an area that would be sandy when the tide is out but deluged by water as high as 8 feet when the tide is in.

Neftali Feliciano, 56, a certified scuba diver who has been fishing in the waters there for more than 20 years, had his rod, line and hook set yesterday.

“This is what they call milky water,” Feliciano said. “I’m a trained, experienced swimmer and I would never swim here. The water is muddy and too filthy. You see a lot of people fishing but you never see anybody in the water swimming.”

At his apartment in a two-family home, Jean Paul stared at photographs of his daughter and cried, talking about how Sheila dreamed of becoming a doctor.

“I just wanted her to be something for her future, something for her life,” he said.

May 6, 2001
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Teach Them to Be The Bravest — Green By MICHAEL O. ALLEN and MICHAEL R. BLOOD, Daily News Staff Writers

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Friday, May 04, 2001

Public Advocate Mark Green urged the city yesterday to establish educational programs for firefighting at two high schools and two community colleges to increase the number of minority group members in the FDNY.

In a city where minority groups now represent the majority of the population, the Fire Department remains overwhelmingly white and male.

Mark Green at yesterday’s press conference on minorities in the FDNY

In a letter to Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, Green, a Democratic mayoral hopeful, released statistics showing that blacks and Latinos make up 7% of the FDNY, as compared with 40% in Los Angeles’ fire department, 29% in Chicago and 30% in Philadelphia.

In 1999, blacks and Latinos accounted for 22% of those who took the firefighter exam and 18% of those who passed.

Green also said more needs to be done to increase the number of women in the department.

Currently, women represent less than 1% of the FDNY workforce.

The city “needs to create a pipeline of qualified minority and women applicants,” he said.

“The best way to permanently change the applicant pool is … to create at least two citywide high schools for fire sciences and a minimum of two fire science programs at CUNY,” Green added.

Mayor Giuliani’s office had no comment. In another development yesterday, about 30 demonstrators rallied outside FDNY headquarters in downtown Brooklyn to oppose firefighter candidate Police Officer Edward McMellon.

A handful of Muslim firefighters and their supporters oppose the possible hiring of McMellon because he was one of four cops who gunned down unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo in his Bronx vestibule in February 1999.

“Why does the fire commissioner want to hire McMellon to become a firefighter and save lives after he took my son’s life?” Diallo’s father, Saikou, said at the rally.

The group also demanded that the department hire a Muslim chaplain. FDNY Islamic Society President Kevin James noted that the agency has two Jewish, two Protestant and three Catholic chaplains, but no Muslims.

May 4, 2001
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