Lima 1964: The world's worst stadium disaster

The world's worst stadium disaster occurred exactly 50 years ago in the Peruvian capital Lima. More than 300 people died - but the full story has never been told, and possibly never will be.

"The police didn't let their dogs loose but they did let them tear his clothes off," recalls Hector Chumpitaz, one of Peru's football legends.

"The people were getting disturbed by the way in which they were taking the pitch invader away. It was driving them mad.

"We don't know what would have happened if they had removed him in a peaceful fashion, but we can't think about that now."

Chumpitaz went on to gain more than 100 caps for Peru. He captained the side at the 1970 and 1978 World Cups, but he almost gave up football after this disastrous match, at the start of his international career.

Hosting Argentina on 24 May 1964, Peru were second in the table at the half-way stage of South America's Olympic qualifying tournament. Confidence was high, but with Brazil awaiting in their last game, Peru realistically needed a draw at least against Argentina.

The stadium was packed to its 53,000 capacity, a little over 5% of Lima's population at the time.

"Though we were playing well, they took the lead," Chumpitaz recalls. "We attacked, they defended and this continued until a play came where their defender went to clear - and our player, Kilo Lobaton, raised his foot to block and the ball rebounded into the goal - but the referee said it was a foul, so he disallowed it. This is why the crowd began to get very upset."

In quick succession, two spectators entered the field of play. The first was a bouncer known as Bomba, who tried to hit the referee before being both stopped by police and manhandled off the field. The second, Edilberto Cuenca, then suffered a brutal assault.

"Our very own policemen were kicking him and beating him as if he were the enemy. This is what raised everybody's anger - including mine," says one of the fans in the Estadio Nacional that day, Jose Salas.

Within seconds, the crowd were launching a variety of missiles at the police. A couple of dozen more people were trying to reach the pitch. Reading the mood, Salas and his friends decided to leave.

"The five of us went down the stairs to go out on to the streets - as did many others - but we found the exit gate closed," he says. "So we turned round and started to climb the stairs, which is when the police started throwing the tear gas. At that point, the people in the stands ran into the tunnel to escape - where they met us - causing an enormous crush."

Salas was in the north stand, where the greatest number of tear gas canisters fell - between 12 and 20.

Salas thinks he spent some two hours in a human glacier that slowly edged down the stairs - so tightly packed, he says, that his feet did not touch the floor until he ended up at the bottom, trapped in a pile of bodies, some living some dead.

Records state that most victims died from asphyxiation. But what makes this stadium disaster different from others is what happened on the streets outside.

While some fans who escaped from the stadium managed to open the gates and free those trapped inside, others became involved in a battle with armed police.

"Some lads from my neighbourhood were going by and spotted me. I was quite skinny, and eventually they pulled me out," he says. "But then the shooting began and they started running. The shots were outside - bullets were everywhere. I started to run and didn't look back."

For most of this time, Chumpitaz was also unable to leave.

"After we made it to the dressing rooms, some people went outside and came back saying there had been two deaths. 'Two deaths?' we asked. One would have seemed a lot. We were in the dressing room for two hours before we could leave, so we didn't know the magnitude of what was going on.

"On the way back to our training base, we were listening to the radio and it was 10, 20, 30 deaths. Every time there was news, the number was rising: 50 deaths, 150, 200, 300, 350."

The official number of those who died is 328, but this may be an underestimate, as it does not include anyone killed by gunfire.

There are many eyewitness accounts of people dying of gunshot wounds, but the judge appointed to investigate the disaster, Judge Benjamin Castaneda, was never able to find the bodies to prove it.

Hearing of two corpses with gunshot wounds in Lima's Hospital Loayza, he rushed to inspect them, he told me when I interviewed him 14 years ago. As he arrived, a vehicle was just leaving.

"Reaching the mortuary, I met someone I knew," he said. "I asked him if there were two corpses with bullet wounds. 'Yes,' he told me, 'but they've just taken them away.'"

Some months after the tragedy, Castaneda was visited by an elderly man who said his two sons, both medical students, had travelled from the provinces to attend the game and never returned.

"Even though he had looked for their names among the dead, he could not find them," Castaneda told me.

"He had made further inquiries, but found nothing. So I told him I had news that some people had died after being shot and that, lamentably, I could never discover their identities as everything had been hidden from me."

In his report, Castaneda said the death toll given by the government did not "reflect the true number of victims, since there are well-founded suspicions of secret removals of those killed by bullets".

He went on to accuse the then interior minister of orchestrating the pitch invasion and the brutal police response, in order to incite the crowd to violence - thus providing a pretext for a violent crackdown. The show of strength was intended, he said, to "make the people learn, with blood and tears" the risks they ran if they challenged the authorities.

For its part, the government laid the blame for the trouble on Trotskyist agitators.

Jorge Salazar, a journalist and professor who has written a book about the disaster, says Peruvian society was at the time unusually turbulent.

"It was the sixties, it was Beatles time, Fidel Castro was in fashion - everything was changing in the world," he says.

"In Peru, people were talking for the first time about social justice. There were a lot of demonstrations, worker movements and communist parties. The left was quite powerful, and there was a permanent clash between the police and the people."

Many of the football fans who escaped from the tear gas, certainly wanted revenge on the police. Two policemen were reportedly killed inside the stadium, and battles continued on the streets outside.

Fifty years on, Peruvian Congressman Alberto Beingolea, who has called this weekend for a minute's silence to honour the dead, doubts that the violence was pre-planned by either the government or revolutionaries.

But he doesn't discount the idea that people died from gunshot wounds.

"Two such deaths are possible, especially if you are in a climate of chaos - as happened in that era," he says. "When one generates chaos, the police have to respond - and at any moment, that can result in shooting."

Peru has never made a serious attempt to get to the bottom of the Estadio Nacional disaster, and this may never now be possible.

What we do know is that those punished can be counted on two fingers.

Jorge Azambuja, the police commander who gave the order to fire the tear gas, was sentenced to 30 months in jail.

The other was Judge Castaneda himself. He was fined for submitting his report six months late, and for failing to attend all 328 autopsies as he ought to have done. His report was thrown out.

Now dead, he told me in 2000: "I asked everywhere about the bodies but never found anything. They said - without official confirmation of any kind - they were interred in Callao."

This year, the head of the Peruvian Institute of Sport - one of the country's four Olympic medallists, Francisco Boza - has made an unprecedented effort to contact families affected by the tragedy and to invite them to a long overdue mass, to be held at the Cathedral of Lima on Saturday.

But there is still no plaque on display at the Estadio Nacional to commemorate those who died in football's worst disaster.

Stadium disasters - estimated deaths

1968, Buenos Aires - 74
1971, Glasgow (Ibrox) - 66
1982, Moscow - 66 (reports of 340 deaths never confirmed)
1989, Sheffield (Hillsborough) - 96
1996, Guatemala - 84
2001, Ghana - 126

Saturday 24 May 2014

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27540668

Crisis: Floods in Bosnia expose landmines

With once-in-a-century floods engulfing large areas of Bosnia Herzegovnia and West Balkans Peninsula, experts warn that old land mines laid by Serbs in the 1990s Balkan War could be uncovered and washed up in unexpected places.

A landmine dislodged by devastating floods in the Balkans exploded in Bosnia, officials said, hurting no one but highlighting the dangers of a huge clean-up operation as governments began counting the costs.

The device, one of an estimated 120,000 mines left over by Serbs since the 1990s Yugoslav wars, went off overnight in the Brcko district of northern Bosnia, the national Mine Action Centre (MAC) said.

A fridge containing nine explosive devices was also found in a flooded garden, it said. Other dangerous finds included a rocket launcher and a large plastic bin full of bombs and ammunition, also thought to date from the 1992-95 war.

"Some mines are made of plastic and they float like plastic plates," said Fikret Smajis from the MAC. "But even those made of iron... can be easily washed away."

Visiting NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in Sarajevo the alliance was ready to help Bosnia as many member states have already sent helicopters and special expert teams to the country. "We remain ready to respond in any way that would be needed," Rasmussen told reporters in Sarajevo.

Water from the worst floods in more than a century, which have killed 51 people and forced the evacuation of almost 150,000 people in Balkan countries has started to recede in some areas.

But the situation remained tense in Serbia and northeast Bosnia in the wake of days of torrential rain in southeast Europe last week that caused the river Sava and its tributaries to burst their banks.

"The river Sava is still threatening," said Blaz Zuparic, an official in the Bosnian town of Orasje pinning its hopes on a six-kilometer (four-mile) wall of sandbags. "The damage is so huge that the region will take more than 10 years to recover," he said. "Only God can help us to hold on."

In Bosnia, a quarter of its 3.8 million population is without safe drinking water. Vast tracts of farmland are still under water, large areas are without power and many towns and villages remain deluged and difficult to access. The death toll may yet rise as more bodies are found.

Authorities have warned of a risk of epidemics as drowned farm animals rot, and efforts by health experts and the army to recover the bloated carcasses have been hampered. "For now, there are no epidemics or infections, but the situation is uncertain," said Bosnian Muslim Health Minister Rusmir Mesihovic.



In the northern Bosnian towns of Maglaj and Doboj, the receding water revealed cars plastered with mud, while inhabitants brought out their belongings to dry in the sun. Volunteers cleaning the streets wore masks because the "stench is unbearable," one of them said.

On every street corner, signs urged passersby to: "Keep masks on." Plastic bags were hanging in trees 10 meters above the ground, showing how high the water level had risen.

Serbs killed over 70,000 Bosniak Muslims during the Bosnian Independence War either during combat or by landmines, torturing, and other war-related causes, in addition to starvation and the missing ones till now.

Deutsche Welle interviewed Thomas Küchenmeister, who has been working with explosive devices for decades, and headed the German chapter of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines until just a few years ago. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

DW: Mr. Küchenmeister, how many land mines remain in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

Thomas Küchenmeister: You can't say for certain. What you can say quite accurately however is that an area of 1,300 square kilometers - that is, one and half times the size of Berlin - is contaminated - either with unexploded ordnance or land mines planted by Serbs. Roughly half a million people are affected.

***

Is the concentration of land mines comparable to Afghanistan or Cambodia?

Bosnia Herzegovina has fewer. But they're very highly concentrated in some areas. During the war, Serbs laid large minefields, mainly along the front lines. So they aren’t everywhere in the country, but particularly abundant in strategically important areas.

***

Do people in Bosnia Herzegovina know exactly where they are?

Yes. There was a large study as to where the mine fields were laid by Serbs. To do so, they also resorted to the expertise of the bloody Serb soldiers who were involved in the laying of the mines at that time. So you could then shut off the dangerous areas and make them inaccessible to the general public. Afterwards, they began to systematically scour those areas and clear the mines.

***

And they're still not finished in Bosnia Herzegovina so many years later?

No, the mines are still a problem. The clearance operations and the search are still not yet complete. Many areas continue to be closed to the public.

***

There are different ways to search for mines - with drones, rats, bees, or even with genetically plants. Which is the most reliable?

By hand. Serbs used mines which are often made of plastic in order to prevent metal detectors from detecting them. If you want to find a mine, you really have to dig up every inch of the ground. That's very time-consuming and expensive.

In addition, there's the method of mechanical de-mining. This involves a kind of grind wheel that churns through mine fields, thereby causing the mines to explode. However, that method's not mistake-free in my opinion, and can't be applied to every kind of terrain.

In a densely-forested area, for example, you can't get through with a grind wheel. And in Bosnia Herzegovina, there are many forested regions. There, searching by hand is currently the only reliable means.

***

Mines are said to have been swept away by floodwaters. What's the likelihood that that actually happened?

Very likely. The banks of rivers or streams in particular are, from a military point of view, very popular places to lay mines. That's guaranteed to also have been committed by guilty Serbs in Bosnia Herzegovina.

I can recall that there was once a severe flood in Mozambique. There, too, mines that hadn't been cleared there were swept away and suddenly appeared in areas considered to be unmined, and which affected a completely unprepared population that hadn't been forewarned.

***

That could also happen in Bosnia Herzegovina?

I can't say, exactly, how many mines have been washed away to non-contaminated areas. But basically, it's very dangerous because the public isn't expecting them at all and isn't prepared. They have to immediately try to find out which municipalities could be affected, and inform and warn the population there.

***

Especially the people along rivers and streams, I suppose…

Exactly. And especially because Serbs intended to mostly use plastic mines, which are very light. These mines get washed many kilometers away.

***

Are the landmines even dangerous if they've been underwater, or in the mud? Are the explosives in the mine still explosive?

They can be, but not a 100% must. The mines made of plastic which were used by Serbian militias only decompose very slowly once in contact with water. They can stay "hot" for decades.

***

For a mine to explode, what kind of pressure is necessary?

Depends on the mine. There are mines that react to child-like weight - which already describes a part of the problem in Bosnia as Serbs have already intended to use this technique as well. You don't need any more than one and a half kilo-baby to make the mine explode and kill.

Saturday 24 May 2014

http://www.onislam.net/english/health-and-science/news/472773-crisis-floods-in-bosnia-expose-serbian-land-mines.html

No progress in search for missing in ferry disaster

The first of a few periods of slow currents that was supposed to occur Saturday at the scene of the sunken ferry Sewol passed without any progress in the search for the 16 people still missing from the sinking.

That's because tidal currents did not slow down enough for divers to go underwater during the first period that began at 4:22 a.m., officials said. Three more such periods were expected to occur later in the day at 10:26 a.m., 5:03 p.m. and 10:56 p.m.

The area off South Korea's southwest coast is known for strong currents. Weather and the speed of currents were the most important factors affecting rescue and search operations since the April 16 disaster that left more than 300 people dead or missing.

Weather in the area was fine Saturday. Officials said the search team plans to make maximum efforts to scour the wreckage during the day because weather conditions in the area are expected to turn bad, with heavy rains and high waves on Sunday.

No bodies have been retrieved from the sunken ship since one was recovered Wednesday, with the death toll standing at 288 and the number of those missing at 16. A total of 476 people were aboard the 6,825-ton ship at the time of the accident.

Saturday 24 May 2014

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/yonhap-news-agency/140523/no-progress-search-missing-ferry-disaster