"The university is just defending its rights to its property," said
Lu�s 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 Hern�ndez, 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," Hern�ndez 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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