Copyright 1996 Agence France Presse Agence France Presse
January 24, 1996 24:08 GMT
SECTION: State and regional
LENGTH: 1334 words
HEADLINE: Colombian president urged to resign, health minister bows out
DATELINE: (new series)
BODY:
By Jose Luis Varela
BOGOTA, Jan 24 - Explosive new charges that President Ernesto Samper knew Colombia's Cali drugs cartel helped fund his 1994 campaign have cost him a cabinet minister and sparked new calls for him to step down.
Samper hotly denied the allegations in a brief statement late Monday night that followed a televised interview in which his former campaign manager and ex-defense minister, Fernando Botero, said the president knew full well of payments made to the campaign by Colombian drug lords.
Tuesday, amid calls for Samper's resignation from the opposition and within his own Liberal Party, Health Minister Augusto Galan tendered his own resignation saying he believed Botero and could not remain in the cabinet as such.
Galan's brother, politician Luis Carlos Galan, was slain by drug traffickers back in 1989. His cousin Alfonso Valdivieso happens to be attorney general, leading investigations of officials with alleged ties to drug lords, including Samper.
Vice President Humberto de la Calle warned that a prolonged crisis would hurt the country, and called for a swift official response to the allegations.
"The citizenry expects the truth and only the justice system, and especially attorney general, can establish the legal weight of doctor Botero's testimony," he said in a statement from Madrid, where he is serving as ambassador.
The president's denial failed to still the clamor for his resignation.
An influential voice in the Samper's Liberal Party, former trade minister Juan Manuel Santos, declared that the president "had no other option than to resign."
Andres Pastrana, the conservative party leader and loser of the June 19, 1994 elections, also called on the president to step down and be replaced by De la Calle. Pastrana had been the first to accuse Samper of taking drug money, levelling the charge in his concession speech two days after the election.
Another former rival in the 1994 presidential race, Enrique Parejo, also called for Samper's resignation.
By Zeno Park
SEOUL, Jan 24 - South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae-Jung on Wednesday said he hoped to win enough seats in April parliamentary elections to block President Kim Young-Sam from prolonging his stay in power.
Kim told journalists that he shared the widely-held view that no party would win a simple majority in the hotly contested elections to form the 299-seat National Assembly.
"The most important (thing for us) is to gain one third of the seats. That means we can block an amendment to the constitution to a parliamentary government system," Kim said.
The ruling New Korea Party (NKP), he claimed, may be seeking to shift from the current presidential government system to a parliamentary one "to open the way for Kim Young-Sam to become president through a parliamentary system."
Kim Young-Sam has repeatedly denied that he is seeking to change the constitution, which limits his term to five years. But opposition figures charge he may try to stay in power by bringing in a Singaporean-style prime ministerial-presidential system.
"So I think the most decisive issue is whether the (main opposition) National Congress for New Politics (NCNP) can gain one third of the seats," he said.
Political commentators agreed that a totally different political map could be drawn after the elections as a result of political realignment.
Kim Dae-Jung, who made a U-turn back to politics after the opposition showed strongly in local polls last year, has said that he might use the Assembly elections as a platform to make a fourth try for the presidency in 1997.
Opinion polls carried out this month showed that the ruling NKP, which curently has 166 of the 299 seats, was heading for a serious setback and would lose its majority status.
Some of the opinion polls, including the one conducted by Dong-A Daily's News Plus magazine early this month, even suggested that the NKP might lose its position as the largest party in the Assembly to Kim Dae-Jung's NCNP.
Kim Dae-Jung said that the NCNP might gain some 120 seats out of 299 seats.
He said he worried that the ruling NKP might join forces with a second opposition party, the United Liberal Democrats (ULD), and other splinter groups to revise the constitution to shift to a parliamentary cabinet system.
The ULD, which is headed by a veteran politican and another presidential hopeful Kim Jong-Pil, has been campaigning for constitutional change for that purpose.
He said that the opposition would campaign in the April elections on two of what he called "hot issues."
The two issues are the investigation of the 1980 massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Kwangju and President Kim Young-Sam's alleged use of part of his predecesor Roh Tae-Woo's slush fund for electioneering in 1992.
Kim Young-Sam has said he has not personally received a single penny from Roh, although Roh bankrolled the ruling party's political activities at the time when he was party president.
Roh and his predecessor Chun Doo-Hwan have been jailed on charges of leading a 1979 military mutiny and of milking millions of dollars from businesses while in office.
Prosecutors on Tuesday indicted Chun and Roh and six others on treason charges for their roles in the May 1980 Kwangju massacre, which occurred as Chun was cementing his power following the military mutiny in December 1979.
Kim Dae-Jung on Wednesday accused the government of trying to close the case prematurely, criticizing the prosecution for what he called a cursory investigation.
The prosecution circumvented Kim Dae-Jung's linkage to the Kwangju massacre to avoid bringing Kim Dae-Jung into the limelight because of the April elections, he said.
Kim, 70, was arrested at the time of the massacre and sentenced to death by Chun's military junta on false charges of fanning unrest in Kwangju to topple the government.