ANGER THAT WON'T BE STILLED
THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, HUSBANDS AND WIVES OF 
THE VICTIMS OF FLIGHT 103 CAN'T LET UP IN THEIR CAMPAIGN FOR JUSTICE

  SIX YEARS and three months have passed since a bomb ripped open a Pan Am 747 approximately 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, and spilled her son, Mark, into a moonlit sky. Helen Tobin is just now getting around to replacing the rug in Mark's bedroom. She hopes to get to the curtains and bed soon.

  "It's taken me this long," Tobin said. This long to convert Mark's bedroom into a guest room, this long to acknowledge with something as tangible as new furnishings that he's not coming home to Hempstead. "There are still times," Tobin says, "when I'm up all night, crying."

  Six years and three months have passed since 270 people came to rest amid the bits and pieces of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, but very little has been settled for the fathers and mothers and wives and husbands of the dead. The sense of incompletion that haunts them takes many forms. The rooms of some of those killed - "murdered," their relatives prefer to say - remain largely unchanged.

  A public memorial donated by the Scottish people remains in a warehouse in Pennsylvania. Two Libyans indicted in 1991 for planting the bomb remain in the embrace of Moammar Gadhafi and out of the reach of justice. Organizations of family members continue to form, splinter and re-form, amid bitterness and disappointment. Their friends and relatives gently prod the most active family members - people like Tobin and Susan Cohen and Bert Ammerman - to move on. How can they, they ask?

 Nothing has been given to them to blot up even a small portion of their pooled anger. "When a child is murdered, I don't believe you ever come to the end of the grieving process," said Cohen, who lost her only child, Theodora. "This is a lifetime sentence. But to have a crime like this without justice is the worst imaginable outcome."

  And so she and other surviving family members fight for whatever justice is possible. "Everybody is getting worn down," Tobin said. Her car bears a bumper sticker with the surviving families' motto, "Pan Am 103: The truth must be known." "But we're still fighting."

  The families are fighting for financial compensation from what is left of the now-defunct Pan Am, which federal courts have found engaged in "willful misconduct" in ignoring basic security measures. Pan Am's lawyers have offered parents of the 35 Syracuse University students on the plane - "non-dependent" survivors, not entitled to compensation for future earnings - $275,000 for the loss of each son or daughter, a sum many of the parents insist they will not accept.

  The families are fighting for the Clinton administration to force Libya to surrender two alleged intelligence operatives, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, indicted by the British and U.S. governments. If there is a trial, the families say, perhaps the world will discover whether the Libyan and Iranian governments participated in the chain reaction of terrorism that ended with the timed detonation of an explosive-packed Toshiba radio inside the 747.

  "I've listened to two presidents now say, `We won't rest a day until the people who were responsible for this terrible crime are brought to justice,' " said Ammerman, who lost a brother. "There must be a lot of tired people in Washington, because that plane went down in 1988 and there's no indication anyone will be brought to justice."

   Two weeks ago, the Clinton administration promised a small group of families that it would seek to turn up pressure on Gadhafi to surrender the two indicted Libyans for trial. President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, told the group - and publicly announced later - that the United States would ask the United Nations to declare a global boycott of Libyan oil. At the same time, the FBI placed the two Libyans on its Ten Most Wanted list and offered a $4 million reward for their apprehension. UN diplomats expressed strong skepticism that Britain, France and other U.S. allies who buy Libyan oil would ever agree to a boycott.

  But Cohen, who attended the meeting with Lake and met directly with Clinton a year ago, saw some reason for hope in these announcements. "The proof will be in the pudding, but at least the administration is making some effort to move forward, which is more than the Bush administration ever did," said Cohen, who lives in Cape May Courthouse, N.J. "At least they're not ignoring us."

  That interpretation wasn't universally shared by those who share her grief. Bert Ammerman, for example, called it "a complete smokescreen."

  Six months after the tragedy, the original group of families, "The Victims of Pan Am Flight 103," split into two organizations because of sharp differences over strategy and goals. Since then, the divisions have become wider and more numerous. Cohen, who belonged to the second group formed, the Families of Pan Am 103 / Lockerbie, is part of an effort to form yet another group, Justice for Pan Am 103. Ammerman is forming a fourth organization, Terrorism Watch / Pan Am 103.

   In theory, all the groups have the same goal. But their organizers disagree, sometimes bitterly, about strategy and style. For five years, Ammerman served as president of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, the largest group of relatives. He was accused during that time of being taken in by empty promises from the Bush administration. But Ammerman says it is now Clinton who is succeeding in duping survivors. Clinton, he says, knows full well that U.S. allies will never authorize a global boycott of Libya. And Ammerman says administration officials have made it clear in private meetings with family members the United States will not impose a unilateral military blockade of Libya.

  Like Bush before him, Clinton is unwilling to pay the price of alienating U.S. allies and risking a military conflict in the Mideast, Ammerman argues. "Without a single American life at stake, we committed the military in Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia," Ammerman said. "Obviously, the lives of American citizens are less important to this administration than the lives of Haitians, Somalians and Bosnians."

   Even the memorial to the 270 dead of Pan Am 103 has become controversial among the survivors. The memorial, a cairn consisting of 270 stones arranged in a cylinder, has been stored in a warehouse while families fought to have it placed at Arlington National Cemetery. It should be Arlington, they argued, to symbolize that their family members were, in a sense, casualties of war. "They were killed because they were Americans," Tobin said. The Clinton administration has approved the placement of the cairn at Arlington, and it will be dedicated Nov. 3. "The victims are buried all over the place, so the cairn is important," Tobin said. "This will be a place to center."

   But some survivors worry that too much energy has been poured into the memorial, and that families will settle for ceremony and speeches instead of justice. "The cairn speaks to the needs of everyone involved, including myself," said Aprhodite Tsairis of Franklin Lakes, N.J., who lost her daughter, Alexia. "But it's also a nice way to make the families feel that they've won something, which we have not."

   Proving to terrorists that the murder of American citizens will not go unpunished, she said, is the only act that can give some meaning to her daughter's death. But Tsairis is becoming more convinced every day she'll have to live with "the empty chair feeling" that permeates her home, and the knowledge that the people who murdered her daughter and 269 other people will never pay for that crime. "Once the cairn is dedicated, a large number of people are going to walk away from this," Tsairis said. "And once Pan Am starts paying out money, another large group will walk away. It's human nature."

   Without continued pressure from family members, she says, the White House will have no incentive to pay the political price of demanding justice. That's why, she says, families shouldn't let go of their anger yet - not even after six years and three months. "I don't think this issue will survive another administration or another few years. There's only a small window of opportunity left."

Willaim B. Falk, ANGER THAT WON'T BE STILLED THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, HUSBANDS AND WIVES OF THE VICTIMS OF FLIGHT 103 CAN'T LET UP IN THEIR CAMPAIGN FOR JUSTICE., Newsday, 04-13-1995, pp B04.