Word: fijians
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...century ago, the International Meridian Conference did Fiji a favor. The conferees laid out the international date line along the 180th meridian but put an eastward kink in it to keep the people of the far-flung islands of the Fijian archipelago on the same page of their day planners. Now Fijians are calling that good turn a bad one. Repudiating the date line as an artificial construct, they claim their country, which straddles the 180th line of longitude, will be the first to greet the year...
...this case, by the time the Israelis had aimed their guns and let fly from less than six miles away, the Shi'ite guerrillas and the Katyusha launcher had gone. Instead the shells slammed down across the area and exploded inside the compound of a battalion of Fijian peacekeepers, where more than 600 refugees had been sheltering for a week, hanging out their laundry on the fences and tethering their livestock nearby...
...while U.N. officials frantically tried to get the Israelis to stop. Even after the official request had been made and acknowledged by Israel, one to two minutes into the barrage, the guns kept firing. Says U.N. spokesman Timor Goksel: "We asked Israel several times to stop firing on the Fijian headquarters, telling them that we had civilian victims, but in vain...
Blue Helmets in Lebanon reserved their strongest criticism for the shelling of Qana. Polish General Stanislaw Wozniak, commander of the U.N. force, rejected Peres' claim that army units "weren't aware that there were civilians" at the Fijian camp. "They knew we were sheltering civilians in this U.N. post," Wozniak said. "Simply, you don't attack civilians. You don't attack U.N. positions." U.N. officials insist Israel realized that some 5,000 Lebanese civilians had taken refuge from Israeli attacks at several peacekeeping posts. "I don't want to believe it was deliberate," Captain Lindvall said of the slaughter...
...yards of a U.N. facility. Lipkin-Shahak said his troops were also under orders to respond to Katyusha attacks. "We told the U.N. we planned to fire," he said. But when the shelling of Qana began, Time Beirut bureau chief Lara Marlowe heard a U.N commander radio a panicked Fijian soldier that headquarters had asked Israel to stop the bombardment. The firing continued. Only after several minutes of shelling did Israel officially warn the U.N. it was was targeting Qana. Yet in an interview with TIME on Friday, Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, former chief of staff, insisted the troops...