[HCDX] Shortwave Station Gets Eviction Notice

[Hermod Pedersen <hermod.pedersen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From the Tico Times:

"The university is just defending its rights to its property," said
Luís Alberto Varela, the university's lawyer to the Tico Times. "It didn't 
just give
them two weeks to leave; they've had a year and a half."

As early as April 12, 2002, past RFPI director Debra Latham received a
letter from Rector Martin Lees saying the university would be
terminating the 1992 International Cooperation Agreement with RFPI's
Oregon-based umbrella organization, World Peace University, Inc. The
notice gave the station until July 10, 2002 to leave, amounting to a
90-day informal eviction notice - recourse provided for While no one
contests the university's ownership of the land, RFPI CEO James Latham
says a cloud of confusion is still swirling around the station as to
why the university is trying to remove the station from its two-story
building and adjacent transmitter, built through RFPI fundraising.
"When [University for Peace President] Maurice Strong first came in
1999, he said he was very happy with Radio for Peace, one of the only
independently funded joint projects," said Latham.

The agreement doesn't require reasons for termination, but Varela says
there should be no confusion. He cites an outstanding $14,000 debt
owed by Radio for Peace to the university for installation of
telephone and Internet structure and illegal use of radio frequencies
as reasons that have been communicated.

"It has fallen on deaf ears," he claims.

Latham says an arrangement was in place to repay the debt, incurred in
2001, in the form of cash or radio time for UPaz, but that the radio
wasn't given time to provide the services in kind.

Arcelio Hernández, lawyer for RFPI, says principles are going to be
the radio's defense in future legal action.

"The radio entered the premises under an agreement," he says, noting
that former Costa Rican President Rodrigo Carazo was one of the
founding members of the University for Peace who extended the
invitation to the radio in 1985 and is still active on the station's
board, as well as President Emeritus of UPAZ. "And it remains that its
most recent actions, sending an armed guard to lock the gates so
people can't get their cars out, are hostile acts, and don't coincide
with the ideas of peace."

"They haven't given real reasons for eviction," Hernández says. "We
could be looking at repression of freedom of the press."

Varela says that's nonsense, and that a letter from the university to
Foreign Minister Roberto Tovar stating that the "current activities of
RFPI are inconsistent with the international emphasis currently being
developed by the university" wasn't a reference to programming, but to
the irregularities in frequency operation.

"These things came up in other administrations," he said. "They just
decided to focus attention elsewhere."

http://www.ticotimes.net/newsbriefs.htm

(Tico Times via Glenn Hauser, DXLD -- shortend by Hermod Pedersen, HCDX web 
editor) 


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