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The Prince George
Citizen
MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1986
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40 CENTS
Marriage and suicide 2 Davis' gold is tainted 13 Victor Borge's dynamism 23
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Fall kills two on Mount Robson
All dead aboard airliner
KHARTOUM (AP) - The military governor of Upper Nile Province in the Sudan said today that all 60 people aboard the Sudan Airways airliner shot down by rebels died in the crash.
The governor, Col. Simon Manang, said he would make rebel leader John Garang “pay the price for his savage deed.”
Manang told the official Sudan News Agency most of the victims of Saturday’s attack were women and children.
He said the Fokker Friendship aircraft was hit by a Soviet-made surface-to-air missile as it took off from the provincial capital of Malakal for Khartoum. The plane crashed about six kilometres from the airport, he said.
Manang’s statement was the first confirmation that all 57 passengers and three crew members on the twin-propeller airliner had been killed. He did not specify whether all victims were Sudanese.
A western diplomat who saw the passenger list said it appeared no foreigners were aboard. The diplomat refused to be identified.
The government suspended flights to rebel-controlled areas in the south on Sunday and declared three days of mourning.
The official news agency quoted witnesses as saying the missile struck an engine of the aircraft, which burst into flames.
The attack followed warnings from the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army that it would fire on any plane flying over areas it controlled.
In Switzerland, the International Red Cross announced it had cancelled flights of Emergency food supplies to southern Sudan.
Spokesman Serge Caccia said the flights, started last Thursday, would be grounded permanently if the Red Cross confirms the rebels plan to attack relief flights.
But in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, a spokesman for the International Committee for the Red Cross said his group’s officials in Nairobi are trying to start the flights again.
Garang, the rebel leader, is a U.S.-educated former colonel in the Sudanese army. He recently claimed his forces control about 90 per cent of the south. However, the government still holds the key towns of Juba, Wau, Torit, Kapoeta, Yei and Malakal.
The rebels’ SPLA Radio, monitored Sunday in Kenya, made no mention of the attack.
In London, the BBC said a later rebel broadcast said the SPLA would attack planes carrying relief supplies to the south, where an estimated two million people face starvation because of food shortages brought on by the rebellion.
The rebels have claimed that the government uses the relief flights to ferry military supplies.
Citizen news services
A mountain-climbing instructor and a veterinarian were close to the summit of Mount Robson, 260 kilometres southeast of Prince George, when they fell to their deaths last week.
Ken Nelson, 42, and Mark Strother, 28, who lived in the Munroe area northeast of Seattle in Washington state, fell about 1,000 metres down the face of the 3,954-metre peak.
“Their tracks led to about 100 feet from the summit,” said Wayne Van Velzan, Mount Robson Provincial Park supervisor.
The mountain, first scaled in 1909, is the highest in the Canadian Rockies.
The pair might have lost their balance when hit by something or they just simply slipped and toppled oft their perch on the southwest face of the mountain, Van Velzan said.
They appeared to have fallen down an extreme slope below a ridge of “gargoyles” or snow and ice formations, he added.
They were last seen Aug. 12 after which the weather on the mountain for two days was described as “windy and stormy.”
Lana Stephens, sister-in-law of Nelson, said four Munroe-area residents left on Aug. 10 for a four-day climb on Robson. The lure of the mountain started for Nelson last winter when he was skiing in the Banff, Alta., area, she said.
Two of the four, John Klister and Missy Costa, decided they couldn’t continue Tuesday, Menzies said.
They last saw Nelson and Strother at 1 p.m. Tuesday climbing into the lingering clouds hovering over the mountain that overlooks the scenic Fraser River.
They climbed up the south face, which on a clear day, is the side of Robson that motorists see from Highway 16.
When Nelson and Strother failed to return on Friday, police were contacted. The bodies were found late Friday afternoon.
Stephens said Nelson, who owned a real estate company, taught mountain climbing in the Munroe area. He was to have left for Nepal in October to climb the Himalayas.
Strother was going to lead an expedition up Mouht McKinley in Alaska, Stephens said.
Van Velzan said about two dozen climbers have tackled Robson this year and about half that number nave actually made it to the top.
On relatively clear days it takes at least two days to reach the top of the mountain, which is plagued by bad weather even during the summer.
The mountain last claimed victims in 1984 when two climbers perished.
During the helicopter search for the missing Washington men, seven climbers were spotted on the summit Friday, having ascended the north face.
Registration for the climb at the provincial park headquarters is optional ana Van Velzan said the Washington climbers had not done so.
Fire fighters gain control
Fires that flared up and were fanned by 50 km-h winds last week are under control or in the process of being cleaned up, fire control officer Bob Read said today.
Included are 11 new fires reported over the weekend.
Problems arose when the high winds fanned slash burning fires out of control.
To date, the Prince George forest region — which covers the northeastern third of B.C. — has had 225 fires reported since April 15, when this year’s forest fire season started.
Read said a 420-hectare fire 100 kilometres northwest of Prince George has 140 firefighters on the line, containing it.
H E R M A N
Assessing the damage
Citizen photo by Dave Milne
An unidentified man tries to salvage what’s left of an aluminum boat which was smashed Sunday afternoon after a motorhome driven by Bernice Mary Snider, 36, of Prince George, rolled into the ditch on Highway 16 west, about 36 km west of Prince George. Snider is in satisfactory condition in Prince George Regional Hospital. Two passengers in the motorhome were treated for minor injuries and released. An investigation continues.
Tamils staying — PM
'Are you gonna be able to afford a car by the time I n$ed to borrow it?"
by NELSON WYATT The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said Sunday that Canada will always welcome refugees seeking a better home, commenting a day after a group of Sri Lankans apologized for misleading officials about the voyage that brought them to the choppy coast of Newfoundland last week.
“Canada was built by immigration and refugees and those who arrive in lifeboats off the coast of one of our shores will not be turned away,” Mulroney told reporters in Ottawa.
New Democratic Party Leader Ed Broadbent and federal Liberal Leader John Turner, who were both in Truro, N.S., on Saturday, agreed that Canada did the right thing in welcoming the refugees.
But Mulroney said the government brought in new legislation in June designed to tighten up immigration procedures and promised to tighten up that legislation even more if required.
“And it is not the presence of 155 frightened human beings searching for freedom and opportunity that is going to undermine Canada's immigration policy,” he said.
At a news conference in Montreal on Saturday, a spokesman for 30 of the 155 Tamils rescued by fishermen Aug. 11 said they feared they would be deported back to strife-torn Sri Lanka if they said they began their voyage in West Germany and not southern India as they initially claimed.
“We deeply regret not having been open and forthright at the outset,” said refugee Wijayanathan Nalliah, a 46-year-old accountant, at the news conference hosted by the Eelam Tamil Association of Quebec. “We pray for forgiveness.”
Despite lying to Canadian officials about where their journey started, the Tamils will not be deported or face any disciplinary action, an aide to Mulroney said in Ottawa.
The Tamils wanted to leave Ger-
many because they were denied refugee status, were forced to live in camps, were not allowed to work and had their movements restricted, Nalliah said.
Fishermen plucked them from the ocean after they had been adrift for two nights and three days in open lifeboats. Ottawa has given the Tamils permission to stay for one year while their requests for asylum are reviewed.
West German police said Friday that a West German-owned, Honduran-registered coastal freighter
— the Aurigae — was used by refu-gee-smugglers to carry the Tamils to Canada from West Germany, and that the refugees paid about $3,400 Cdn apiece for the trip. The captain of the ship has denied any involvement in refugee smuggling.
Police are holding two Tamils and a Turkish man in Hamburg, a northern port city, on suspicion of smuggling refugees without travel
Province backing
Hansen
VANCOUVER (CP) - British Columbia has pledged to follow the lead of Nova Scotia and donate “at least” $15,000 from provincial government coffers to Rick Hansen’s world tour, Premier Bill Vander Zalm said.
Vander Zalm’s announcement Sunday followed an earlier pledge by McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada to raise a minimum of $250,000 for Hansen’s Man-in-Motion Tour.
“I challenge all the provinces and all the premiers of all the provinces to be generous to Rick Hansen,” said Vander Zalm.
The premier also said the federal government should match the provinces’ total.
Vander Zalm said he would wait until he knows how much other provinces are donating before anouncing B.C.’s total donation.
documents. The two Tamils have admitted involvement, police say.
Ninety-three of the refugees came to Montreal Thursday while 61 went to Toronto. One was in hospital in St. John’s, Nfld.
“We were pressured and warned not to divulge our point of departure or to give away those who helped us and any other information related to our voyage,” Nalliah said. He said the pressure came from the Aurigae’s captain.
He said the 155 were collected in several vans at points in West Germany and taken to a dry dock at Stade, 40 kilometres west of Hamburg, where they boarded the ship.
They sailed on July 28, and were let off the ship in the two lifeboats Aug. 9 with two barrels of water and gas.
Nalliah said most of the refugees spent the nightmarish, 12-day voyage in the dark, cramped cargo hold, although some of the Tamils with families were billeted in cabins on the vessel.
“We were lying and sitting all the time,” he said. “There was no room to walk.”
He said they were denied adequate food and water, and much of the food they were given — such as bread and jam — was mouldy. They were also denied access to toilets and were forced to use buckets.
In Toronto, two Tamil refugees told of a suicide pact in which a young mother and father planned to jump into the sea with their 11-month-old baby when their dwind-ing supply of milk powder was gone.
The two said in an interview with the Toronto Star that the toilet pails slopped onto the floors and fouled the air in the cramped sleeping hold.
The smell was so bad, the two said, that some people didn’t go to the toilet during the entire ordeal, deliberately limiting their food intake to control their body functions.
TORY BANKING ON VANDER ZALM
VANCOUVER (CP) - The Progressive Conservative party of British Columbia got a new leader Saturday with none of the hoopla and expense that attended last month’s Social Credit party leadership convention.
Instead, the Conservative’s provincial executive held a special meeting and unanimously elected 40-year-old Jim McNeil to take over from former Victoria mayor Peter Pollen, who recently announced his resignation for health reasons. Pollen was leader
for a little more than a year and had been acclaimed.
McNeil said the best thing that’s happened for his party is something outside its control — the Social Credit cabinet appointed by new Premier Bill Vander Zalm.
McNeil, an Abbotsford, B.C. school principal, takes over the moribund party that has not elected a member to the provincial legislature since leader Vic Stephens was elected 1978. He was defeated in 1979 and Brian Weldwood was elected leader — a position he held
until 1982 when he defected to the separatist Western Canada Concept.
There is one Progressive Conservative representative in the legislature — Graham Lea. But Lea was elected as a New Democrat. He left the NDP after he lost in the 1984 leadership race. Lea formed his own United Party, flirted briefly with the provincial Liberals and then jumped to the Conservatives earlier this year.
He has already said he won’t run in the next provincial election.
Six bands protest fish rules
VANCOUVER (CP) - Waves of protest spread along the Fraser River this weekend as fishermen from six B.C. Indian bands defied a ban on salmon fishing.
“This is Indian land, and you have no business being here,” Vincent Harris, grand chief of the Seabird Island band, told a federal fisheries officer. “This was a free country before you guys came.”
Six bands in the 24-band Sto’lo tribal council joined the protest along the Fraser River from Mission to Spuzzum on Saturday.
But no nets were seized and no one was arrested.
“We are reviewing the evidence. There may be some charges laid,” Fred Fraser, the fisheries area manager, said Sunday.
About 60 natives gathered on a bluff overlooking the river near Rosedale to support tribe members who had cast their nets in violation of a 24-hour fishing closure that was announced Thursday. The clo> sure cut one day off the bands’ normal three-day-a-week fishing.
On Saturday, a fisheries helicopter swooped down near the protestors, and Fraser confronted Cheam band Chief Sam Douglas and other band members.
Douglas- said band members would refuse to pull in their nets.
In addition to the Thursday closures, the Indians are disputing a catch limit of 500,000 sockeye placed on the native food fishery in the Fraser River this year.
The council has asked for an increase to at least 600,000 because of an unusually large salmon run this year, which has been estimated by the Pacific Salmon Commission at 3.6 million.
Douglas said partially due to federal legislation allowing many nonstatus Indians to claim status, his band has grown from 103 members 10 years ago to about 200 this year and it needs more fish to feed them.
.. .and in tomorrow's Citizen.. .
Ottawa is facing a money crisis, and the only way to get out of it is to introduce a mini-budget this fall, which may raise taxes for the average Canadian. Read about it in Tuesday’s Prince George Citizen.
Also planned:
■ A controversy involving Alex Baumann at the world swimming championships.
■ A wrap-up of tonight’s city council meeting.