THE BEHREND BEACON 3 million southeast residents sought shelter inland by Linda Kleindienst Knight-Ridder New.paper. TALLAHASSEE. I Li. - 'When Li/ Gallagher left her St. Augustine home to escape the oncoming fury of Hurri cane Floyd, she had no idea ‘s here she would end up. "We just said, "Go north and west. — she said on Wednesday from a Tallahassee-area shelter where she found refuge. Millions of other coastal d‘Aellers front South Florida to North Carolina's Outer Banks had the same idea. As a result, the largest e acuation in U.S. history, according to federal emergency managers, turned into the nation's biggest traffic jam. More than million e \ aCIieCS fled homes. con dominiums, and resort hotels. heading for the closest highways to mo \ e ay. ay font a raging storm the site of Texas. Instead Of a quick escape. however, man \ found gridlock. hi Florida alone. about I.; million residents were ordered out of the path of possible storm surges. high winds and drenching rain on Monda . \ and TLICS(II, - almost Hine Mlles as many people as the D-I)a\ invasion force that stormed ashore at Normand‘.. In rc ic wing how Florida handled the largest es acuation in its piston - and the I irst of an entire coastline Jeb Bush said he found Olth one ma jor glitch: traffic flow - We normalk ha \ e a lot of traffic in this state. - Bush said. - But ire has c serious inlrastruc ture needs in general. and that play s out in a dramatic \\ a\ during an enter- But Bush said the C) acuation order accomplished IK purpose h), getting people out ul 11ovd'', ))ith time ti) spare. -We gave people enough ail allee notice and their lies Acre not in leopard). - he said. - That's the most important thing. The) e)acuitted... In G et)nl i a , about 500.000 re,ulenh, 11 1 / 4 .!. the vcgiow, (Jul leading 11, th into the North Carolina mountains,. In Georgia. eas,thound lanes, were con- N, cried to \A estbound to speed the exo- dus of ears. 13) Wednesday, an estimated 850,000 South Carolina residents also were on the move, some spending up to 17 hours in traffic. Go‘. Jim Hodges was criticized for waiting to() long to turn Interstate 26 into a one-spay high way inland. Pat V:\ lie said it took his hrother-in-law 10 3/4 hours to get from Charleston to Greens ills - a trip that Puerto Rico grandly welcomes freed prisoners !lector obar L os A mic k, Time., SAN JUAN. Puerto Rico. - Vilified in the United States as unrepentant terrorists. hut revered by nian i in this Caribbean island as patriots, a group of Puerto Rican nationalists freed from prison President Clinton were w eleomed here Saturday as heroes. Local officials lionited them as saviors of Puerto Rican honor. Air port security guards posed for pic tures with four of the activists. who just hours earlier had been locked up in federal penitentiaries. Children presented them v ith kisses and bou quets of flowers. But the activists themselves, part of a group of 16 offered clemency last month, seemed subdued. Most did not promise to continue the mili tant struggle for Puerto Rican inde pendence that landed them in prison nearly two decades ago, when they were linked to more than 100 bomb ings on U.S. soil. Instead, as a throng gathered at the airport chanted "Freedom, free dom for the patriots now!" and other slogans, the freed inmates hinted that they were being silenced by the strict conditions of release placed on them by the Clinton administration. "My jail has now become a cell with invisible bars," said Adolfo Matos, 48. "And the words I speak will be like those of a caged bird." Under the conditional clemency offer by President Clinton last month, the activists may not associ WORLD AND NATION Satellite view of Hurricane Floyd as it approached the Carolina coast usually lakcs 3 3/4 hours. don't think the politicians had a clue.'' he said. "The \ e\ acuated e\ervhod‘, and the . \ . ., had no plan Imr the nunthers. - Charleston Nltt or Joseph P. Riles Jr. \\ as more blunt. "What you're doing is running the risk ul killing Inv people. - he said in an uncharacteris tic attack on Hodges, a lellovt Demo- At Ica,t 401,Mn North Carolina re , ,idctlN mam, ordered to Clr acti ate Ihe Uutcr Bank for the ,econd time ihh, month. In Florida. resident, the Jackson area humper-to-bumper traffic on all ma jor escape routes on Tuesday. includ ing Interstate 10. the only major east west hiChwati in North Florida. At one point. state officials asked Central Florida residents to help relieve sonic of the congestion h).. avoiding north bound Interstate 95 and using Florida's Turnpike. ate \\ nit uthet Minh. a requirement that pre \ cut them Irom speak ing to one . tinothcr. "1 he reed prison ers must also report . ILlCllay to the Probatitm ( )dice in San Juan. Nine of the 12 prisoners released Frida Irom a \ ',trick of U.S. jails said then ss ould resettle in Puerto Rico and mans ,u - rived here on ON. ern ight nights. "We arc going to take some time to see all that We' ye missed these pears being absent, — said Carmen Valentin, 53, NA, ho served much ()flier 19 years in prison in Dublin, Calif. Valentin and the others left behind a political climate that had become overwhelmingly hostile to their cause. Their fate became tied up with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's presumptive hid for U.S. Senate in New York as Republicans charged that the president's aninesty oiler was a sly attempt to improve her standing with the states Puerto Rican voters. There was little if any mention of Mrs. Clinton on Saturday as the former prisoners . arrival was covered live on local television and radio. Some reporters were dispatched to remote. provincial villages to cover the emotional scenes as the released prisoners were reunited with family members they hadn't seen in a uen- Lration Mattis, rcprie ed from a 70-year sentence, traveled to his native town of Lajas. On the southern end of the Lajas Mayor Marcos Irizarry told a local paper that Matos was, "a hero who never killed anyone or stole any For some. the trip from Jacksonville Beach to"Fallahassee, normal]) a three hour drive, took as long as 12 hours. Jackson) i Ile Mawr John Iklaney asked the Florida HighwaN Patrol to turn one Of I-10's eastbound Lines into a 5) esthound route. hut patrol officials said police agencies didn't have the per sonnel to guarantee that drivers would he heading in the right direction. By law l'uesday, however. the state lolled out tankers to help refuel west bound motorists who had run out of gas. "\\ you undertake the largest evacuation in the state's history, there will he lessons learned,'' Bush said. \ c called e\ erg emergenQ manage ment officer to get MI ormation tram them and a sense of how we're doing. We'll he looking at evacuation routes and how we time and go about evacua tions." Bush net On Wednesday with some of the 500 evacuees who spent the night in a Tallahassee shelter. Most had left thine. What he did wi.ts, defend his country. — The mayor's welcome was not unusual: even the pro-statehood daily El Alumlo greeted the news of the first activist's arrival Friday night with the headline: "He's Homer' The \varin reception for the con victed terrorists may seem. on the sur face, paradoxical; only a small frac tion of voters on the island has sup ported independence in recent refer endums. But Puerto Rico has a long tradition of embracing its most radi cal militants as symbols of national honor even while rejecting their stated Residents of the island have been American citizens since 1917, but can't vote in presidential elections and have no voting representative in Con gress. Even many political moderates believe that the U.S. Congress has ex traordinary power over the island's local affairs. The sense of victimization has been heightened by the ongoing contro versy over the U.S. military presence at Vieques Island, which the navy uses as a bombing range. The prisoners themselves, given sentences of up to 88 years for what some consider a purely intellectual crime. "seditious conspiracy," have become national martyrs to many. "There's a tremendous groundswell for these people because they're seen as defending the culture," said Roland Fernandez, a sociologist and author of The Disenchanted Island. "It's all about dignity and respect." Such sentiments helped fuel a long running campaign on the prisoners' SEPTEMBER 17, 1999 their homes in the wee hours of 'rues dm. Russell and Lynda Kessler left their home in Edgewater, near Or lando. at 4 a.m. and needed six hours to reach Tallahassee. Along the way. Kessler said. "We stopped at every rest area to see if we could find a motel and, of course. we couldn't." Part of the problem. he said. was a lack of signs along the road to help them decide where to go. Wednesday evening. Bush took an aerial tour of I- It) and the connect ing roads between Jacksonville and Tallahassee to get a firsthand look at the e ac uat ion process in reverse - as residents of northeast Florida re turned to their homes. "I think we have the best emergency system in the country, - Bush said. "We have the most experienced, sadly. And be cause of that, we have a very good stein. But there's always more that \\e can do. We'll learn from this and make it better.'' behalf here and elsewhere. This year, their supporters submitted 75,000 signatures to the White House de manding their freedom. Alter Clinton offered conditional clemency last month, more than 100,000 people marched in San Juan to call for their unconditional re lease. At the same time, sentiment in American political circles could not have been more different. Although prosecutors never linked the prison ers to any deaths or injuries, the clemency offer was seen as a surren der to terrorism. Last week, the U.S. House voted, 31 1-41, to condemn Clinton's action. The Senate will vote on a similar resolution Monday. A draft text con demns the President for making a "deplorable concession to terror ists." Elizam Escobar, freed from a 68- year-sentence he was serving in Oklahoma, was one former prisoner to express the defiant tone that made the inmates famous during their tri als in the early I 980 s, when many declared themselves "prisoners of war" and refused to participate in any legal proceedings. Escobar promised to comply with the conditions of clemency, but also said he would "do everything pos sible to behave in a way that is wor thy of Puerto Rican history. We will try to open new trenches in the struggle." PHOTO NOAA WEBSITE Evidence points to systemic killings in Timor by Doug Struck and Keith B. Richburg The Washington Post KUPANG, Indonesia - Jani thought he was safe on the ferry. After three days of terror in East Timor, the boat would take him and two college friends to refuge, he thought. Then the militiamen hoarded. No young men may leave East Timor, they announced as the boat prepared to de part. Jani, 27, tried to hide; the mili tiamen caught his friends. "Are there any others'?" the militia demanded. Jani recalls. "No, no other young men," replied his friends in a last gift of kindness. They marched Armando Gomez, 29, and Armando DiSilva, 30, to the front of the boat and killed them be fore 200 refugees. Gomez's body was dumped in the sea: DiSilva's on the ground by the dock. Jani raced through the boat. "Please help me," he whispered to the other refugees. A mother motioned to him to hide between her and her chil dren. The searching militiamen walked by. The account of Jani. now a fearful refugee in western Timor, adds to the mounting evidence that victims of the murderous rampage in East Timor, fol lowing the territory's overwhelming vote for independence from Indonesia, were systematically culled from the others. Young men, political opponents, Roman Catholic clergy and anyone else suspected of favoring the indepen dence opposed by the militias were targeted, in a chilling echo of the tech niques of systematic killing seen in Kosovo. In the capital, Jakarta, on Monday, the top U.N. official for human rights said she had gathered consistent and credible evidence that members of the Indonesian armed forces and police engaged in a "well-planned and sys tematic policy of killings, displace ment, destruction of property and in timidation- that could lead to prosecu tions before an international tribunal. Mary Robinson, the U.N. high corn missioner for human rights, said Presi dent B.J. Hahibie agreed in a Monday meeting on the need for an interna tional commission of inquiry, the first step toward establishing a hill-fledged criminal tribunal, similar to the war crimes panels set up after the genocide in Rwanda and the massacres in the former Yugoslavia. She said it's urgent for an interna tional peacekeeping force to he de- ployed quickly to begin amassing evi dence because "there has been some burning of bodies and dumping of bod ies into the sea" as the perpetrators of East Timor's massacres attempted to "cover up tracks." But she said the scale of the abuses was so massive, and the witnesses so numerous, in Darwin, Australia, and in the refugee camps of western Timor, that a committee of experts should eas ily find enough evidence for prosecu tions, and members of the armed forces, or TNI as it is called here, likely would be implicated. "I don't know how far up the scale that can be traced," Robinson said, - but certainly there will be account ability on a significant number wear ing army uniforms or in a position of local authority." Besides the killing and the forced expulsion from East Timor's cities, Robinson said relief agencies told her of, "very worrying allegations of rapes of women," in refugee camps in west ern Timor. She said those accounts must he verified. The move to begin an international inquiry into the Indonesian military's conduct in East Timor is a delicate one for Hahihie, given his precarious rela tionship with the armed forces and his need to secure military backing if he is to have any chance of being re elected next month when the People's Consultative Assembly, one of two Indonesian parliaments, convenes to choose the country's next president. No member of the armed forces attended Habibie's meeting Monday with Robinson at Merdeka, the presi dential palace. Marzuki Darusman, chairman of Indonesia's National Human Rights Commission, attended the session, and said the initial inquiry commission will likely involve Indonesian investiga tors hut also have international ex perts: the panel, he said, could he given "a certain status or recognition bv the U.N." Here in Kupang, the militias "had names of all of the (pro-independence) party members, and they were killing them one by one," a refugee said. "The militias had names, pictures, addresses. They had lists," Jani said. "They went to the houses and to the port and to the police headquarters, and they took people who were pro independence." "At night, the militias would come to the houses," in Dili, the capital of East Timor, a third refugee said. "They were looking for young men. The mi- "Do you want to live or die?" -Indonesian militiaman litias knew that most of the young people there were for independence. If they found us, they would kill us." All of the refugees spoke in secret ith a reporter, and all pleaded that their MI names not he used. The mi litias that terrorized them in East Timor reign over the refugee camps here in western Timor, and move freely in the town. Accounts from the camps say the militias are searching for opponents; the refugees fear the killing lists still exist. The fear is pervasive, even though western Timor was supposed to he a place of safety. Refugees here shun foreigners, and several refugees stopped in mid-interview because they said they were scared. Foreigners and local journalists aren't allowed inside the camps. Foreign aid workers do not enter; Indonesian officials who make toUrs of the refugee camps insist that no foreign reporters accompany them. But in clandestine conversations, refugees described the campaign of terror that followed the announcement of East Timor's vote for indepen dence. With a turnout of more than 98 percent, independence was approved by 78.5 percent of the voters. The fires that soon engulfed so many homes in Dili were not set ran domly, but were used to drive people from their homes, said a 23-year-old student. "They threatened us with guns and machetes, and we heard all the men were going to he killed and the houses burned. They came at night to our house, hut I ran out and hid in an empty Red Cross house, - he said. The next night, his home was burned. His family fled, and he doesn't know where they are. The refugees also said Indonesian soldiers encouraged and sometimes participated in the violence. Jani said he heard soldiers at the port order the militiamen onto the boat before it left. "The military told the militias to go ahead and get the pro-independence people on the boat. They said, 'lf you don't do it, we will,' " he said. The accounts also include acts of bravery. A 24-year-old seminarian named Mario fled to a church in Dili after his house was torched and his family scattered. In the days after the referendum results, the militiamen prowled past the church and used any pretense for violence, Mario said. "I saw them kill a man with hedge clippers," he said. "They put the blades around his neck and squeezed them together." More than 100 refugees were gath ered at the church when a militiaman aimed his weapon at them. Mario said he stepped in front of the gunman. "The gunman grabbed my collar, yanked me toward him and held a pis tol to my head," said Mario, 24. The militiaman asked, "Do you want to live or die?" told him, 'As you wish.' I think he was surprised by my answer, and he let me go. He said, 'Someday you will be a priest.' I told him, 'Then we can live in peace.' " PAGE 6
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