SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1017 (84), Tuesday, November 2, 2004
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TITLE: Officials Shun Rally for Tolerance
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: City officials and law enforcement officers invited to a rally Sunday afternoon against racism and prejudice against different nationalities failed to show, but sent a policeman with a digital camera to snap the protestors.
More than 500 people took part in the rally, marching from the Sportivnaya metro station through the city center to Sakharov Square.
The police followed them insisting that they walk only on the sidewalk so that the scanty traffic on Unversitetskaya Naberezhnaya was not disturbed. A policeman equipped with a digital camera was taking snapshots of the protesters on their way to the square.
"It feels very unpleasant," a British citizen who was only willing to be identified by his first name, Peter, said and pointed out at the policeman with the camera.
At Sakharov Square, the crowd shouted "shame," in a comment on city authorities' indifference to racism and prejudice.
The organizers had sent invitations to Governor Valentina Matviyenko, Legislative Assembly speaker Vadim Tyulpanov, presidential representative Ilya Klebanov and city police bosses, but neither they nor their representatives showed up.
The protest, initiated by groups of foreign students studying in St. Petersburg with the support of city human rights advocates and liberal political parties the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, and Yabloko, was intended to draw authorities' attention to racism and its tendency to develop into violence, the protesters said.
"We have organized a meeting spontaneously to convince the governor to release information on the recent assassination of a Vietnamese student [Vu An Tuan]," said Fam Kuang Tung, head of the Vietnamese student initiative group, at the protest.
Tuan, a 20-year-old first-year student at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, was walking to Petrogradskaya metro station on Oct. 13 after attending a friend's birthday party at the Pavlov Medical Institute dormitory when about 18 people wearing black clothes attacked him about 10 p.m. He was stabbed to death.
"We haven't been given any details about the investigation yet and we think the only way we can achieve something is if we act strong and united," Tung said.
Human rights groups say officials are hiding from the problem, trying to make it appear insignificant.
Yuly Rybakov, co-head of the city anti-fascist center, said there are more than 30,000 members of extremist groups across Russia, including about 3,000 who belong to 17 racist organizations in St. Petersburg.
"It looks like the authorities are quite comfortable about the existence of such groups so they try to keep them going, thinking that they may mobilize them against democrats if a serious [political] crisis occurs," Rybakov said at the protest.
A sense of xenophobia is developing in society at a worrying speed, he said.
"Three people have been killed in the country on grounds of ethnic hatred this week alone," he added.
Police representatives said Friday that they have been collecting evidence and have narrowed down a circle of suspects involved in Tuan's slaying.
"Because the crime was committed late in the night, despite witnesses being present, it quite difficult to draw portraits of suspects," Interfax quoted the police as saying Friday. "In two weeks [we] have succeeded in creating a sketch of one suspect, a young person aged 15 to 18, of average height and with no discriminating features."
City and federal authorities have repeatedly denied that foreign students are the victims of race attacks.
Matviyenko is among those who are convinced Tuan's slaying was just another attack by "hooligans," with no racism involved.
"We have found no proof that the suspects belong to some sort of an extremist group or that they committed the crime on the grounds of national hatred," Interfax quoted her saying Friday. "There is only the fact that a group committed an act of hooliganism."
She repeated a promise that such crimes will be solved. "Many facts have been uncovered and the investigation is still going on," Matviyenko said.
Vladimir Lukin, national human rights ombudsman, who took part in Sunday's protest, said similar protests will be held each year on Oct. 31, the birthday of Nikolai Girenko, a St. Petersburg expert on extremist groups who was slain on June 20. An extremist group claimed it was behind his assassination.
"The authorities don't pay enough attention to this issue," Lukin said at the meeting. "But ... it looks as if a minor avalanche is being formed that could snowball and destroy the government itself."
"The courts in Voronezh have already made a very serious ruling in relation to the recent assassination of an African student, convicting the suspects on grounds of national hatred. I think the same should be done here. The court should call fascism by its real name to reveal its ugly face to the public."
Girenko had regularly given expert evidence against extremists in court.
Matviyenko said Friday it had not been proven that Girenko's slaying was committed by racists or skinheads.
TITLE: Ukraine Election a Dead Heat
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KIEV - Less than 1 percentage point separated Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko in preliminary results from Ukraine's presidential election Sunday, as a runoff between the two candidates looked set to be decided by who picks up the left-wing vote.
With 94.24 percent of the vote counted as of Monday afternoon, the Central Elections Commission gave Yanukovych, who has the backing of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and the Kremlin, 40.12 percent and Yushchenko 39.15 percent, Interfax reported. The commission said that the remaining votes would not bring victory in the first round to any of the contenders and set the date for a runoff between Yanukovych and Yushchenko as Nov. 21.
Western poll observers said the election failed to meet "a considerable number" of standards for free and fair elections, a conclusion that a delegation of official CIS observers disagreed with.
The bitterly fought election campaign has featured concerns over whether the country will forge closer links with Europe, and eventually look to join the European Union and NATO, or build stronger ties with Russia.
Neither Yanukovych or Yushchenko claimed outright victory in the first round of voting Sunday, though Yushchenko's campaign said it would submit more than 70 complaints on voting violations to the Central Elections Commission, a staffer at Yushchenko's headquarters, Nikolai Katerinchuk, told reporters Monday. To win in the first round, a candidate would need more than 50 percent of the vote.
"We do not agree with the first results of the elections. We believe there was fraud," Anatoly Grytsenko, a campaign organizer for Yushchenko, said. 'We might go to court, we might ask parliament to intervene or we might organize mass protests. But I believe the best way is to win the second round - and we can do it."
The joint mission of foreign observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or PACE, and NATO said Monday that the elections "did not meet a considerable number of OSCE, Council of Europe and other European standards for democratic elections."
Hanne Severinsen of PACE called the election campaign the "most dirty" she had witnessed in an interview with Ukraine's independent Channel 5 television.
OSCE chief observer Bruce George said the election was a step backward compared with Ukraine's parliamentary elections in 2002.
Observers from Washington-based nonprofit group the International Republican Institute voiced similar conclusions Monday.
However, Western observers' criticisms referred mostly to the campaign before the vote, which was marked by state media bias in favor of Yanukovych, and the state's obstruction of opposition activities. Sunday's vote itself came in for less direct criticism.
"The voting process is evaluated as positive as a whole," Gert Heinrich Arens, head of the OSCE mission to Ukraine, told journalists Monday.
Campaign staffs of both major candidates held their own exit polls, each giving their candidate the lead. But while Yanukovych's campaign claimed a lead of less than 3 percentage points, Yushchenko's people claimed a lead of 13 percentage points, Interfax reported.
The official tally evoked a much stronger reaction from Yushchenko's camp.
"I am sure that the most criminal technologies are being used now [to rig the vote] where authorities planned to apply them," Interfax quoted Yushchenko as saying Monday as votes were being counted across the country.
But he called Sunday's vote "a victory of the democratic forces in Ukraine."
Yanukovych told a news conference Monday that the vote numbers were an expression of the public's trust in the authorities.
His campaign representative on the Central Elections Commission, Stepan Gavrish, on Monday dismissed the criticism by foreign observers as "emotional" and "sarcastic."
"I am absolutely convinced that there was no single case of the prime minister misusing any advantages of his office," he said, Interfax reported.
Although the combined vote on Sunday for Communist Pyotr Simonenko and Socialist Aleksander Moroz was only 11 percent, how their supporters vote in the runoff will become critical. Both Yushchenko and Yanukovych campaigns said Monday that they would seek to join forces with the Communists and Socialists. The remaining ballots were split among 20 other candidates, with only one of them, Natalya Vitrenko, getting more than 1 percent. Two percent of voters cast their ballots "against all."
The official turnout was about 75 percent, 6 percent higher than in the 2002 parliamentary elections. Most observers said the higher turnout was a sign of growing interest in politics and civil society in the country.
More than 63,000 out of an expected 200,000 Ukrainians voted outside the country, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry told Interfax on Monday.
Nabi Abdullaev reported from Moscow.
TITLE: Ustinov Urges Detaining Terrorists' Relatives
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said Friday that authorities should be allowed to detain relatives of terrorists by force as a "counter-hostage-taking" measure, prompting harsh criticism from some politicians, including Kremlin loyalists.
Ustinov was speaking to the State Duma, which summoned senior law enforcement officials to report on the investigation into the Sept. 1-3 Beslan school hostage-taking and their efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks.
Ustinov said the current law makes it hard to combat terrorism effectively and proposed a bill that would allow authorities to detain terrorists' relatives forcefully during a hostage crisis and use them as a negotiating tool.
"Detaining relatives and showing terrorists what may happen to their relatives could help save people's lives, so let's not close our eyes or put a diplomatic face on it," he said. "When you live by the sword, you die by the sword."
Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov welcomed the proposed bill, noting that the law now allows relatives to be used as a negotiating tool but their participation is only voluntary.
Although Ustinov's speech was met with applause, several senior Duma deputies fiercely criticized his remarks afterward as inappropriate and unconstitutional.
"It is not appropriate for the prosecutor general to propose such a thing. This raises the question of whether Mr. Ustinov is the right person for the job," said First Deputy Speaker Lyubov Sliska, whose pro-Kremlin United Russia party controls the Duma.
"His main task is to ensure that the law is observed, and he proposes that we violate the law," she said.
"I believe that Ustinov's statement was an emotional one - otherwise I cannot find words to describe it," senior Communist Deputy Sergei Reshulsky said. "This is a proposal for extrajudicial prosecution."
"Ustinov's proposal not only goes against the Russian Constitution but international law. How can someone propose that parliament approve punishing a person for a crime committed by other people?" said independent liberal Deputy Viktor Pokhmelkin.
Yabloko leader and former Deputy Grigory Yavlinsky warned in a statement that the proposal is an attempt to restore the Soviet prosecution system of the 1930s that effectively became the legal machine for Stalin's purges.
Authorities detained dozens of relatives of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov during the Beslan crisis and later released them. Investigators had accused Maskhadov and warlord Shamil Basayev of masterminding the hostage-taking. Basayev has claimed responsibility for the attack, while Maskhadov has denied any involvement.
Ustinov also told the Duma that he will submit a bill permitting authorities to seize all property and money directly or indirectly connected to terrorists. "If suicide terrorists know that their relatives will not get any reward for terrorist attacks, this might stop some," he said.
Federal Security Service director Nikolai Patrushev told the Duma that 80 suicide bombers have been trained abroad to carry out attacks in Russia. He did not say how the FSB gathered the information about the possible attackers but said that "some of them have been neutralized."
Patrushev accused governments in Middle Eastern countries of directly supporting suicide bombers. He also said that about 10 al-Qaida members are active in the North Caucasus and called for a new system to fight terror.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev told the Duma that his ministry is seeking legislation for stricter controls on registration and to boost security at nuclear facilities and munitions depots. "Cases in which hundreds of people are registered in one apartment must become a thing of the past," he said.
Authorities have acknowledged that some terrorists obtained registration documents by bribing police officers before their attacks, and Nurgaliyev said his ministry's internal affairs department is actively trying to root out corrupt officers. He said 75 corrupt officers in the police's passport and visa services department have been nabbed so far this year. In all, about 2,000 corrupt police officers have been caught in 2004, he said.
Regarding Beslan, Ustinov said the identities of all but five of the dead hostages have been established - two boys, two girls and an adult. At least 330 hostages died. Fourteen of the 32 hostage-takers have also been identified, including two Arab mercenaries, Magomad and Farukh, he said.
TITLE: Greenpeace Claims Win Over Vodokanal
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Greenpeace said Friday it had won a court case against Vodokanal that means the local monopolist water supplier must release documents on the ecological conditions of its project to build waste incineration plants in a suburban area of the city.
However, Vodokanal representatives insist that the court case is not over yet because no official court ruling has been issued in writing yet. Nevertheless it says it says it will release the technical documentation on one of two plants.
The environmentalists filed a lawsuit in June after Vodokanal, over the course of almost a year, repeatedly refused to release the information.
Greenpeace is concerned about the Northern and the Southern sewage disposal facilities that Vodokanal plans to build.
Vodokanal told the court that documentation for the Southern facility has not been drafted yet, so cannot be released. Paperwork for the Northern facility was filed in 1997, but because the estimates in it are rather rough, Vodokonal believed Greenpeace would "draw the wrong conclusions" and for this reason did not want to hand over information, a representative said.
The court ruled that the water utility was violating the rights of citizens and public organizations to receive ecological information, which under federal law cannot be withheld.
"The right to have a free access to ecological information is one of the main conditions for public organizations to operate," said Greenpeace spokesman Dmitry Artamonov in a statement by the environmental organization, issued Friday. "Unfortunately this has been breached quite often."
"As a result people don't know about the state of environment and cannot participate in a process to make decisions that directly [influence] their health and life," he added. "The court case is important not only for our future work with Vodokanal, but also sets up a good precedent for further battles with unscrupulous authorities and businesses that are hiding environmental information."
However, Vodokanal saw the court case as being at quite a different stage.
"There is some sort of rubbish going on," Spokeswoman Vera Izmailova, said Monday in a telephone interview. "The court hasn't made any decision."
"There is a feeling that this is an underhand British plot of some sort. Everybody knows there is no alternative to burning waste," she added.
Vodokanal says the city needs plants to burn waste because St. Petersburg is running out of areas to store it. About 110 hectares of city land is covered with sludge from both residential buildings and industrial plants. City Hall used to spread about 10 hectares with the waste each year before its first waste incinerator was built on Bely Island in 1997.
TITLE: Avrora May Be Removed for a Survey
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The famed historic cruiser Avrora, one of the symbols of St. Petersburg, may leave its permanent moorage in the Neva River for two months next year to undergo a technical examination in a dock.
"The cruiser was to have undergone a scheduled survey in 1997, however, that didn't happen because there was no money for it," the ship's captain Anatoly Bazhanov said Monday in a telephone interview. "Therefore, it's high time for the Avrora to have one."
However, Bazhanov said a final decision on the survey would be taken only at the beginning of next year, when the Defense Ministry, in charge of maintaining the ship which belongs to the navy, develops its budget plans for 2005.
The Avrora has been a symbol of the October Revolution since 1917 when on Oct. 25 according to the old-style calendar it fired the shot signaling the start of the storming of the Winter Palace, which became the start of the Bolshevik uprising. At the same time, the ship is considered a symbol of the navy.
The cruiser was built at the city's New Admiralty shipyard and commissioned in 1903, and it fought in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War and in the Second World War. In 1948 the Avrora was docked at its permanent moorage in front of the Nakhimov Navy College in the center of the city. In 1956 a branch of the Central Navy Museum was opened on board of the ship.
Since that time the ship has become a tourist attraction, where adults and children can see and touch the historic guns, the ship's wheel, and accessories of sailors' everyday life. In Soviet times the city's best elementary school students also conducted solemn initiation ceremonies for Young Pioneers on board of the ship.
The Avrora underwent partial repairs in 1957-1958, and in 1966-1968. In 1984-1987 the ship underwent a major overhaul after which it was recommended that the ship undergo a survey at least every 10 years. However, no such survey has occurred since 1987.
Pavel Smolev, head of the Avrora's reconstruction project of 1987, was quoted by Delovoi Peterburg as saying that when the overhaul was done in the 1980s the ship was in a sorry state. It had spent 84 years in the water and had sunk several times.
Several ideas of how to preserve the ship were examined.
Thus, some experts offered to put the Avrora on a special pedestal, but that would have meant the old ship would keep rusting, and it would have eventually collapsed.
Then it was decided to completely replace the part of the cruiser below the water line. That part of the ship has been coated with special chemicals, which will protect it for 300 years in the freshwater of the Neva.
Bazhanov said, however, that a technical examination in a dock does not necessarily imply actual repairs, which are done only if necessary.
During such examination the part of the ship under the waterline is cleaned and painted.
Bazhanov didn't know how much that might cost, but Delovoi Peterburg suggested 10 million to 12 million rubles ($34,800 to $41,700) would be required.
Any survey is likely to be performed in the city's Severnaya Verf shipbuilding plant, where the Avrora underwent repairs in 1987, he said.
The Avrora has lost none of its popularity with tourists since the end of the Soviet Union in the country, he added.
"Every day we get 15,000 tourists," Bazhanov said. "In all the years of working as a museum the ship has hosted 27 million people."
TITLE: Putin Plugs Nuclear Convention
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday pushed for passing a United Nations convention on combating nuclear terrorism, saying the document should help coordinate global efforts to prevent mass destruction weapons from falling into terrorists' hands.
Putin voiced hope that the current session of the UN General Assembly would consider Russia's draft of the convention.
"It must create conditions for averting any attempts by terrorists to get hold of nuclear weapons or any other nuclear materials," Putin said in a letter to Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, excerpts of which were released by the Kremlin.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, concerns have grown that terrorists might try to acquire material for a dirty bomb - a device that uses conventional explosives to scatter low-level radioactive material over city blocks.
It has no atomic chain reaction and requires no highly enriched uranium or plutonium which are kept under tight security and difficult to obtain. Instead, the radioactive component is of lower-grade isotopes, such as those used in medicine or research.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency - the UN nuclear watchdog - estimates as many as 110 countries do not have adequate controls over radioactive devices that could be used to build a dirty bomb.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Crime Rate Rises
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city's crime rate grew by 15 percent for the first nine months of this year compared to 2003, the St. Petersburg prosecutor's office has said.
More than 51,000 crimes were committed in St. Petersburg in that period, Interfax said last month.
This year more than 22,000 thefts were registered in the city, which is 40 percent more than last year. There were also more than 2,000 robberies, 47 percent more than for the same period last year.
The number of street crimes increased by 30 percent, and rose to more than 15,000. The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the increase was caused by the lack of street police patrols and the indifference of the population.
At the same time the number of murders went up by 12.7 percent to a total of 658.
Kyoto Protocol
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Federation Council ratified the Kyoto Protocol and sent it to President Vladimir Putin for the final stamp of approval, The Associated Press said.
The upper house of parliament voted 139-1 with one abstention to endorse the protocol, which aims to stem global warming by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
Last Friday the State Duma also ratified the document.
The Kyoto Protocol calls on industrialized countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, thought to be the cause of global warming, to previously agreed target levels by 2012. Russia's target is equivalent to its 1990 emissions levels. As a result of the collapse of Soviet-era heavy industry following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the country now produces about 30 percent less than that amount.
Police Pay Solution
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Financing the police from regional budgets would be a useful measure to increase the effectiveness of law enforcement in the city, said Governor Valen-tina Matviyenko, quoted by Interfax last month.
"This is a very serious problem in St. Petersburg today. The salary of a policeman is 3,500 rubles ($120) [a month] and because of this it is hard to find professional people," Interfax cited Matvi-yenko as saying.
She said she has approached the government with an offer to amend the federal legislation to make it possible to finance the police from regional budgets.
New Vehicle Licenses
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Transport Ministry is developing a series of increased safety measures to be introduced on the country's public transport in the near future, Interfax has reported.
Yevgeny Moskvichyov, head of the ministry's department overseeing state policies in road maintenance, municipal and public transport, said at a news conference Monday that the list of suggested measures includes amendments to federal legislation, such as introducing licensing for vehicles that can carry more than 8 passengers. Moskvichyov said that only 320,000 public transport vehicles have licenses out of a total of more than 700,000 vehicles.
A special license is proposed for vehicles carrying schoolchildren.
TITLE: Gere Fronts Russia AIDS Campaign
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Hollywood film star Richard Gere joined with charity campaigners and media figures in Moscow on Wednesday to call for the creation of a "Creative Task Force" in Russia to combat HIV/AIDS.
Gere, attending a Eurasian media forum on HIV/AIDS, said the group, which has already signed up Russian rock star Andrei Makarevich of Mashina Vremeni, plans a $30 million campaign including HIV/AIDS awareness programs at schools and educational programs for journalists.
Program sponsors include UNAIDS, Transatlantic Partners Against AIDS, the U.S.-based Kaiser Family Foundation and Gazprom-Media.
The number of registered HIV-positive people in Russia now stands at 300,000, up from less than 40,000 in 1999. Many experts believe Russia and the CIS, along with China and India, are the regions of the world with the fastest growth in HIV cases.
"Today it is 1 percent, but it can quickly become 5 percent, then 10 percent," Gere said.
Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal Center for Prevention and Combating HIV/AIDS, said that the 128 million rubles ($4.5 million) provided annually by the government to fight AIDS was not enough, as official figures were an underestimate of the real problem.
The most affected areas of the country are Moscow and its surrounding regions, and the Volga and Ural federal districts, he said, adding that a majority of HIV-positive people in the country are aged between 15 to 24.
Andrei Fedorov of the Council on Security and Defense said that HIV/AIDS has become a serious problem for Russia that threatens national security. "About 7 percent to 8 percent of Army conscripts could soon be HIV-positive, if the disease spreads at its current rate," he said.
Olga Sedurina, a reporter with AvtoRadio who has reported extensively on HIV and AIDS in Russia, urged journalists to write about AIDS "in an interesting way."
"You need to show the human face of the disease. Journalists must not exploit people with AIDS, but rather try to understand the problems they face."
TITLE: Ten Detained Over Distribution of Leaflets
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Police have detained 10 men for distributing leaflets linking several opposition politicians to Chechen terrorists, Interfax reported last week.
A police spokesman said the suspects were detained Oct. 26 for distributing the leaflets in the Avtozavodskaya, Medvedkovo, Dubrovka and Pechatniki metro stations.
Moskovskiye Novosti posted the leaflet on its web site. It shows images of State Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, former SPS leader Irina Khakamada, former Rodina co-leader Sergei Glazyev and Boris Berezovsky dressed in fatigues together with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.
Khakamada is shown wearing a black headscarf similar to those worn by female suicide bombers during the Dubrovka crisis.
The leaflet reads: "Participants in negotiations to destroy Russia."
The suspects said they found an ad on the Internet offering money from an unidentified person to paste the leaflets in the metro stations, a police source told RIA-Novosti, adding that 1,080 leaflets were confiscated from one man.
TITLE: Opposition Plans Congress
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Hundreds of politicians, business leaders, human rights advocates and journalists will meet in December to unite public opposition to electoral changes that President Vladimir Putin has proposed in response to recent terrorist attacks, organizers said.
Politicians ranging from Western-oriented reformers to Communist Party members will set aside differences and hold a "Civil Congress" on Dec. 12 - Constitution Day - to protest what they call the Kremlin's unconstitutional initiatives.
Garry Kasparov, a world chess champion and a member of the Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group formed by liberal opposition leaders, said authorities are unwilling to "to participate in an open and fair electoral process."
"The main goal [of the congress] is forming the broadest opposition to Putin's and the Kremlin's attempts to usurp power and annul ... democratic institutions in Russia," Kasparov said.
TITLE: Putin Ally Is Top Court Marshal
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin has appointed an ally from St. Petersburg to head the Court Marshals Service, a key instrument in the Kremlin's legal battle with Yukos.
Putin appointed Nikolai Vinnichenko as head of the Court Marshals Service late last month after dismissing Arkady Melnikov, 65, the Kremlin said in a statement. Melnikov had headed the service since November 1999.
Vinnichenko, 39, was prosecutor of St. Petersburg until September this year.
The Court Marshals Service, an arm of the Justice Ministry, has left investors gasping by parading contradictory decisions and statements on the fate of Yukos assets as the Kremlin steps up its campaign to wrest control of the company from its core shareholder, Group Menatep.
"The replacement of the retirement-age [court marshals] head with a younger and probably more ambitious St. Petersburg prosecutor may result in a more aggressive stance from the [court marshals] service towards Yukos," said Steven Dashevsky, head of research at Aton brokerage.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who controls Menatep, has been in jail for more than a year and is standing trial for tax evasion, fraud and leading an organized criminal group - charges he denies.
The confrontation between Khodorkovsky and Putin has placed Yukos' assets under threat after court marshals froze shares in Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' main unit, and reportedly asked the Federal Property Fund to sell off those shares for about $4 billion, less than half of the lowest valuation of the Siberian oil producer.
Those actions have helped make Yukos shares the most volatile in the country, spike world oil prices and provoke suspicions that some officials might be playing the Yukos share market with insider information.
"On the higher levels there may have been some unhappiness with how badly some of the attacks on Yukos were carried out," said Yevgeny Volk, director of the Heritage Foundation Moscow office.
"There is also a question about allegations of insider trading, with big share price movements following different announcements by the Court Marshals Service."
Like the president, Vinnichenko studied law at Leningrad State University.
He was made deputy prosecutor of St. Petersburg in 1997 and in 2001 was made federal inspector for the city under Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov, who studied with Putin and is now the head of the Federal Drug Control Service.
Vinnichenko was made prosecutor for St. Petersburg in April 2003 but resigned in September amid speculation that he was in conflict with Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, and perhaps even with deputy chief of the presidential administration Igor Sechin.
Russian newspapers have reported Vinnichenko is a long-term acquaintance of Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's chief of staff, and Dmitry Kozak, Putin's envoy in southern Russia. Both men are also St. Petersburg lawyers.
"He may know Putin, as they both worked in St. Petersburg and they certainly had similar acquaintances. Putin is putting someone he knows he can trust in this position," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, president of the Panorama think tank.
"He is a lawyer by education but he is probably closer to the St. Petersburg Chekist group, though these groups are of course very fluid."
TITLE: Russia Ranked Near the Bottom of Press Freedom Index
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia ranks 140th out of 167 countries on a new press freedom index released by Reporters Without Borders. Russia is up from 148th in last year's index, though media analysts have questioned the accuracy of the assessment.
Russia's low ranking, only 27 spots ahead of last-place North Korea and behind Azerbaijan (136) and Kazakhstan (131), was based primarily on the deaths of two journalists and attacks on 25 others the organization has registered so far this year, Soria Blattman, head of the organization's Europe Desk, said by telephone from Paris on Thursday.
She said journalists in Russia face constant insecurity, especially in the regions.
The two journalists killed in Russia were Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov, who was gunned down as he left his office in northern Moscow on July 9, and Reuters photographer Adlan Khasanov, who died in a May 9 bomb blast that killed Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov and several others in Grozny.
"When you can kill the American editor of the Russian Forbes magazine in central Moscow, you can imagine what can happen to journalists in the regions investigating corrupt local politicians," Blattman said. "There is a lack of political will to deal with this problem."
But while the index represents a positive step in highlighting dangers facing journalists in Russia, the report's methodology - sending out questionnaires to partner organizations, journalists and human rights activists - is unsound and can lead to distortions, some media analysts said. "It's not a logical report. Free speech in this country is in a catastrophic state and has become worse since last year, but you can't judge the situation by sending out four questionnaires," said Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalists in Extreme Situations, referring to the number of questionnaires Blattman said Reporters Without Borders used in its research on Russia. "Nigeria is ranked No. 117, but I think most experts would tell you we're better off than Nigeria."
Ruslan Gorevoi of the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a partner organization of Reporters Without Borders, concurred with Panfilov, calling the situation in Russian media "more than critical" and said the research methods made it easy for the government to dismiss the findings and rob free-speech advocates of valuable ammunition in their defense of journalists.
"If they conduct their research in other countries the way they do in Russia, then what sort of confidence can we have at all in this index?" said Gorevoi, whose group monitors media freedom from 24 offices across Russia.
Blattman acknowledged that some partner organizations do not agree with the research methods, though she said methodology was not the key factor in Russia's rating. "With Russia, it's all about the numbers, not the methodology," she said. "Twenty-five attacks and two deaths: If it wasn't for these, Russia would probably rank a lot higher."
Eight countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia and Switzerland - tied for first place in the index.
TITLE: Yabloko Finds Itself at Crossroad
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Yabloko is stepping up its opposition to President Vladimir Putin in hope of winning over new voters as it struggles to stay alive with very little money and virtually no coverage in the mainstream media.
The liberal political party finds itself at a crossroads a year after its main donor, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was thrown into jail and 10 months after it suffered a stinging defeat in State Duma elections. The direction it picks will determine whether it can reemerge as a viable political voice or will be relegated to the scrapheap of liberalism's short history in Russia.
The good news is that support for the party appears to be swelling as one-time liberal rivals come calling and former supporters return to the fold after growing disenchanted with Putin's ever-growing grip on power.
Still, Yabloko leaders are clearly worried at the party's once-humming headquarters in an elegant three-story mansion on Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa in central Moscow.
"Our financial situation is extremely bad," Yabloko deputy leader Sergei Mitrokhin said in a recent interview in his office.
"There are a lot of businesses that are ready to help us because they believe in our policies, but they want us to get the Kremlin's approval for their financing," he said. "They are afraid of losing their businesses if they give money to a party that opposes the Kremlin."
Mitrokhin said Yabloko is barely making its monthly rent on its headquarters and has no money for regional branches, which are financing themselves or closing down.
Yabloko also has laid off a number of staff at its headquarters because there is little money for salaries, he said.
In its fight to remain relevant, Yabloko is strengthening its criticism of Putin, Mitrokhin said.
"We have decided that President Putin's course is leading the country into a deadlock. We cannot close our eyes ... and will oppose Putin until he changes his policies," he said.
The aim of the sharpened attack on the Kremlin, Mitrokhin said, is to broaden the party's appeal and attract other opposition-minded voters.
Yabloko, which worked closely with the Communists to challenge alleged fraud in the Duma elections, is looking to team up with any political party that opposes the Kremlin's course "except for fascist parties," Mitrokhin said.
He said Yabloko can count on 85,000 members, 10,000 more than before the Duma elections. After the party's defeat, Mitrokhin said, many voters decided to join the party to show their support. Yabloko has two deputies in the Duma, both of whom won their seats in individual races.
The big question is whether Yabloko will be able to drum up enough support from a public that is spoon-fed the Kremlin line on state television and is naturally wary of politicians, especially a party that for years has run on a platform of civil freedoms. Such freedoms are the foundation of Western democracies but have little resonance with most Russians.
Yabloko's voice is all but lost since the party gets no airtime on the main television channels, which are under the Kremlin's control, said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank.
"It is easy to be forgotten when you do not appear often in the mainstream media," Pribylovsky said.
Mitrokhin said Yabloko is countering "political censorship in the media" by publishing articles stating its position on its Yabloko.ru web site and in pamphlets handed out to people in Moscow.
Yabloko is fighting an uphill battle because there is little demand for liberal parties, said Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.
"There is no desire for civil liberties. People were given these liberties from above during perestroika and the early years of [President Boris] Yeltsin, but they never had to fight for them," Lipman said.
This, even more than Yabloko's financial woes, severely limits its chances of gaining more popularity, she said.
"People are very passive and have little trust in any political initiatives. They prefer to stand still and to mind their business," she said. "Money is a problem, but the main problem for Yabloko is the public's attitude."
The legal difficulties of Khodorkovsky, who has acknowledged funding Yabloko since its creation in 1993, threw the party into a financial crisis ahead of December's Duma elections, and it failed to pass the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in parliament.
Khodorkovsky was arrested Oct. 25, 2003, on charges of fraud and tax evasion in a case widely seen as punishment for his political and business ambitions. Khodorkovsky's Yukos is on the verge of being broken up by the state.
On Monday last week, the anniversary of the arrest, Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky issued a statement criticizing the prosecution of Khodorkovsky, his partner Platon Lebedev and Alexei Pichugin, a former Yukos security chief who is accused of organizing a double murder in 2002.
Yavlinsky insisted on proper medical examinations for Lebedev and Pichugin, whose health is said to have suffered in jail; protested "the unconstitutional prosecution of citizens for political reasons"; and called for an open dialogue between the authorities and society over a way out of the situation, "which was a result of the criminal privatizations of the mid-1990s, for which the authorities bear the main share of responsibility."
"Ignoring these demands not only discredits our country but engenders more and more distrust and even the alienation of citizens from the key state institutions and destroys Russian statehood," Yavlinsky's statement said.
Going into the elections, Khodorkovsky also funded the Communist Party and the liberal Union of Right Forces, or SPS - posing a very real threat to the pro-Kremlin United Russia party's plans to form a two-thirds majority in the Duma. United Russia went on to gain two-thirds of the Duma and is now moving to win control of all regional legislatures as well.
Irina Khakamada, a former co-leader of the liberal SPS party, echoed Yabloko's concerns earlier this month, saying the opposition could count on the support of various businesses a year ago but now businessmen are afraid of going against the Kremlin. "None of us has any money left," Khakamada said at a conference of opposition politicians. "Only those that sell themselves to the Kremlin get money, but nobody funds those who don't because they are simply scared."
She urged the opposition to create a democratic party that incorporates Yabloko's platform. "They have always proclaimed freedom and democracy, and they always had a strong social position," she said. "It must be broadened now to attract everybody ... including the left and the softer left who do not want to be in the Communist Party anymore. In other words - all the opposition."
Yevgeny Yasin, who served as a liberal economics minister from 1994 to 1997, told the same conference that Putin's plans to scrap the popular vote for governors and individual races for Duma seats have created an opportunity for liberal parties.
"However true claims may be about the passivity of our society, I should say that the 'small issue' of people being stripped of their right to choose their regional leaders has changed the situation because for the first time people's rights have been truly affected," he said.
"The share of the voters who were prepared to vote for democratic parties was 15 percent, and now it is 30 percent," he said, citing surveys by the respected Levada Center polling agency. "I am not claiming that this situation will remain the same and that this is a permanent change."
Mitrokhin, who held one of Yabloko's 17 seats in the last Duma, will get a chance to test the accuracy of the survey on Dec. 5, when voters in Moscow's Preobrazhensky single-mandate district vote for a deputy to fill the seat vacated by Alexander Zhukov, named deputy prime minister in March. Mitrokhin is running on the Yabloko ticket against economist Mikhail Delyagin, a member of the nationalist Rodina party, and a United Russia candidate named, curiously enough, Alexander Zhukov.
Mitrokhin said he is not optimistic about getting back into the Duma.
"For Surkov, I'm Enemy No. 1," he said, referring to Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration who coordinates the Kremlin's work with United Russia and oversees the Kremlin's relations with the Duma. "The Kremlin is likely to use its administrative resources against me."
TITLE: Putin Backs Plan to Slash The Number of Institutes
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin last week backed a plan to cut the number of state-funded scientific institutions by at least two-thirds, while increasing funding for science by more than 50 percent.
The plan, developed by the Education and Science Ministry, envisages that the state will fund only 800 research institutions by 2006, down from a total of 2,388 now. Federal spending on science will increase from 46.2 billion rubles ($1.6 billion) in 2004 to 70 billion rubles in 2006 and 110 billion rubles by 2008.
"We intend to conduct an effective restructuring of the state science sector," Putin said at a session of the Presidential Council for Science, Technology and Education.
The ministry has said that while the number of state scientific organizations has grown significantly since 1990, they account for only 34 percent of all patents issued in the country.
Innovative products account for only 6 percent of Russian exports, and scientific research is in little demand on the domestic market, Putin said Tuesday.
Putin said Russia had to become "a knowledge-based economy" rather than one that relies on natural resources.
The ministry's plan, titled the National Concept of Participation in Managing State Scientific and Research Organizations, envisages the privatization or transformation into nonprofit partnerships of hundreds of mostly non-academic institutions.
Under the plan, a copy of which has been obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, the government seeks to retain ownership of "strategically important" institutions and ensure they are staffed and equipped well enough to conduct "fundamental" research.
Each scientist in the state-funded institutions will be allocated an annual research budget of at least 700,000 rubles ($24,000) by 2008, the plan says.
The government would also own 100 percent of the shares in some of the privatized institutions, but will not fund them, the plan says.
Some top academics initially protested the reform because they feared it would severely downsize the Russian Academy of Sciences, but the concept's final version leaves the academy's property largely intact.
"Our task is to preserve the Russian Academy of Sciences; preserve
its most valuable elements; and preserve it as a system adjusted to the conditions of current and future life," Putin said.
TITLE: Khakamada Party Named
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Liberal politician Irina Khakamada announced the creation of a new political party Saturday, saying she is trying to bring liberal parties back onto the political stage, The Associated Press reported.
The new party, which still must be registered, will be called Our Choice and will uphold traditional liberal values but also strive to protect social guarantees, she said.
Khakamada said her new party has 12,000 members but it hopes to boost that to 50,000 within six months, Itar-Tass reported. Under the law, political parties must have 10,000 members.
Meanwhile, 10 minor left-wing and left-center parties announced on Saturday the creation of a new political coalition, Patriots of Russia.
TITLE: 1854 Crimea Charge of the Light Brigade Remembered
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BALACLAVA, Ukraine - Britain's Prince Philip and an array of soldiers and dignitaries commemorated on Oct. 25 the charge of the cavalry Light Brigade, whose doomed assault against Russian cannons in 1854 was immortalized by the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson.
The incident was one of the grimmest offensives of the Crimean War; of the more than 600 soldiers who charged against Russian cannon, 110 were killed. In addition, 475 horses were lost, a significant blow to the cavalry.
The plunge into what Tennyson characterized as "The Valley of Death" was due to a confused order and the charge came to be seen, through the poem, as the epitome of courage and obedience despite mistakes of command.
"Was there a man dismayed?/Not though the soldiers knew/Someone had blundered," the poem reads. "Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die."
The prince and group of military top brass and civilian dignitaries were to mark the 150th anniversary of the charge in a ceremony at an obelisk above the valley.
In a separate commemoration, Lord Cardigan, a descendant of the Light Brigade's cavalry commander, was to mark the charge in the area where the Russian cannons were positioned. A bugle to be sounded at that ceremony is believed to have been the one used to start the charge.
TITLE: Airlines Up Prices to Cover Fuel Costs
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian airline operators started raising ticket prices this week in an attempt to compensate for increasing fuel costs and the lack of domestic aircrafts.
Aeroflot, the country's largest operator, implemented a $10 to $15 "oil tax" on ticket prices Monday, deeming the step necessary due to the record-breaking world oil prices.
"It was an unavoidable step, since fuel prices are rising, and fuel is becoming a heavier load on our expenditure," said Aeroflot commercial director, Evgeny Bachurin, on Thursday. Fuel makes up 30 percent of all Aeroflot's expenses right now, Interfax reported.
The November price increase is just the tip of the iceberg for aviation, media sources reported. Business daily Izvestiya pronounced the price hike by the domestic airlines a pre-agreed on measure designed to counter the rising fuel prices. However, the airlines will make price increases at different times in order to avoid probing by the Federal Anti-monopoly service, as reported by news website Fontanka.ru.
St. Petersburg-based carrier Pulkovo said Monday its prices will remain unchanged for the moment, despite widespread concerns that the aviator's recent Boeing-lease deal may also prompt it to follow suit with a price increase.
Last week, Pulkovo and International Lease Finance Corp. signed a five-year lease contract for two Boeing 737-500s.
"The jets will enter service next March and June," said Boris Gudkovich, Pulkovo's deputy general director of finance.
Struggling to accommodate growing passenger traffic with the limited number of available domestic aircrafts, the country's carriers have begun importing Boeings and Airbuses to boost their fleets, despite steep 40 percent import duties and value added tax surcharges.
While Aeroflot and Transaero enjoy a tax break from such duties, other airlines - including Pulkovo, Sibir, Krasair, Volga-Dnepr and VIM-Avia - have resorted to importing leased jets despite the high costs.
"All our calculations and business plans take into account the duty payments. But they are no longer an issue with fuel priced at $500-600 per ton, when it used to be $200. They have dissolved in the new fuel economy," Gudkovich said.
With a lack of domestic aircraft available, Pulkovo is having to choose from foreign jets to expand its fleet, Gudkovich said.
Annually the domestic airline industry produces only a handful of jets, which, furthermore, trail foreign planes in terms of fuel efficiency.
Yet, the creation of one united aircraft manufacturing company in Russia, proposed as a solution to the problem, would only lead to a decrease in aircraft manufacturing, said the head of defense and industry department at Energy Ministry Yuri Koptev recently.
"According to estimates, by the end of 2007 the amount of people employed in the aviation industry will drop from 513,000 to 460,000 people. And only half the aircraft manufacturing plants will be left in operation," said Koptev, as reported by news website Gazeta.ru.
Paul Duffy, an independent, Moscow-based aviation analyst, said a Boeing 737-500 could cost up to $180,000 per month to lease.
Staff Writer Lyuba Pronina contributed to this report.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Production Up in Oblast
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The manufacturing growth in the Leningrad Oblast has been calculated at 10.2 percent over the last nine months, said the regional administration's press service.
In the automobile industry the production has grown by 80 percent, domestic chemical products have shown a 43 percent increase, while paper and paper goods production grew by 28 percent compared to last year.
"Such growth has been prompted by the switch to modern technologies and new equipment installation," said the city authority's press service.
Nokian Boosts Profits
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Finnish Nokian Renaat reported a 48 percent revenue increase in the third quarter. The gain was largely due to rising product demand, which allowed the company to increase prices, Bloomberg reported.
Revenues grew to $25.6 million in the third quarter, compared to 13.5 million euro during the same period last year, the company said.
Nokian sales increased in all the major markets the company sells on - in Scandinavia, Russia, North America and Eastern Europe.
The financial rewards are also being reaped from booming winter tires sales, and the company's expansion in Russia, some experts said.
"The demand for winter tires for autombiles and sports cars continues to grow," said the company's press release.
In August the company reported that it did not have the capacity to accommodate the growing demand for its products.
Nokian is building a factory in St. Petersburg, hoping to capitalize on low resource costs in Russia. The new factory is supposed to produce over 1.5 million tires already by the end of 2006.
Daimler Eyes City Plant
FRANKFURT (SPT) - DaimlerChrysler is still considering whether to set up a car plant in St. Petersburg, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported Monday, citing company sources.
With Russian government sources currently in Stuttgart to participate in a German-Russian investors conference, and DaimlerChrysler starting to buy land near St. Petersburg, investment plans look positive.
However, a Daimler spokesman in Frankfurt remained cautious: "We are in a very early stage of discussions."
For the record:
Gillette production center was re-opened after renovations in St. Petersburg Wednesday. The renovations included expanding the center, with investments nearing $20 million, said Governor Valentina Matviyenko at the opening. The center - Petersburg Products International - has become the largest manufacturer of double-edged razor blades in Europe, said director general Salah Atvia.
n The SAS Group, which operates the Radisson SAS hotel chain, plans to increase its presence in the city hotel and aviation industries, said the group's acting vice president Gunnara Rejtana after a meeting with city officials Friday.
Another meeting is scheduled for later this month, during which specific proposals will be discussed, said Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
TITLE: Toyota Aims at Top Producer in 2006
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG - Toyota is planning to become the world's leading car manufacture in terms of production by 2006, ahead of current leader General Motors, according to Itar-Tass press agency reports.
With a projected 20 percent rise in manufacturing levels on 2003, the Japanese car maker aims to assemble 8.4 million vehicles in 2006, thus topping General Motors' scheduled 8.24 unit output for the same year.
Japanese daily, Nihon Keizai, reported Toyota's production figures on Saturday, adding that the rise in output has been made possible due to great demand for Toyota vehicles in the North American and Asian markets.
On the expanding Russian market, Toyota has also seen a rapid rise in the amount of sales. From being the third car manufacture on sales in 2002, Toyota increased its market share by 3.19 percent to 13.5 percent of the total market, according to company figures quoted by Interfin Trade financial group.
The number of Toyota cars sold in 2003 reached 26,472 units, and this continual growth has stimulated the company's interest in opening a production plant in Russia.
Although no concrete figures have yet been released, St. Petersburg local authorities have alleged that Toyota was considering the Leningrad Oblast as one of a number of sites for a plant with an annual production of 15,000 cars.
It is thought that the Japanese car giant is considering the manufacture of popular models Corolla and Camry in Russia, and the first units to come off the production line could be made available in 2008.
TITLE: Porsche Dealership Opens in the City
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Porsche opened its first Northwest showroom in the city last week. No longer do locals lusting after a chance to spend 97,000 euros on the brand new 911 Carrera model have to travel far to satisfy their desire for vehicular luxury.
The entering of a Porsche dealership comes as no surprise on the Russian luxury car market. Industry experts are already saying that domestic demand for ultra-luxury sports cars, which includes the Porsche models, is quickly growing and that by the end of 2005 Russia will become one of the top countries in the world in sales volume of such cars.
"The interest in sports cars is very high, especially among the business elite representatives, who lead an active lifestyle," said Porsche's Rusland subsidiary director Dimity Dubrovsky.
And the headliner of the Porsche showroom is the new 911 Carrera, rated even by the competition as one of the ultimate sports cars. "It's as a one hundred-percent sport car," said Alexei, a consultant at the city's Audi dealership RusAvto, who did not provide his surname.
He said that while the interest's been increasing in sports cars, it was not just the top business people, but especially the city's "golden youth" who make up the main customers, as they look to sports cars for excitement and prestige.
Sigma Sports, the dealership, which is going to be operating the new Porsche salon in the city, is part of the Sigma group that also includes Sigma Motors, the Volkswagen city dealer, and Sigma Service - the official Skoda dealer.
TITLE: Building a Car For the People
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: "Viva has a short name, since it costs less than a long name," joked the general director of General Motors-Avtovaz in St. Petersburg, John Milonas, at the launch of the company's new vehicle, the Chevrolet Viva saloon.
The joke, at last week's Auto and Automechanics exhibition, aptly fitted the company message, relevant to the new car and GM-Avtovaz's established robust, off-roader, the Chevrolet Niva. Milonas promoted a company philosophy reminiscent of Volkwagen's origins: make a car locally, affordably, and for the people of the country.
"Our duty is to provide the Russian residents with affordable car transportation," Milonas said at the Wednesday news conference that launched the Viva. And part of that duty, as Milonas sees it, is for the company to be wholly involved in its domestic setting and market.
After two years in operation, GM-Avtovaz's factory in Tolyatti has 1,300 employees. Taking into account all the people involved in the making, selling, and servicing of the joint venture's Chevrolet Niva and Viva brands, the total soars to 12,000.
Today 95 percent of Niva and Viva spare parts come from Germany.
Milonas promised that the figure will decrease to less than 60 percent by the same time next year. Distancing the company further from Germany's Opel - the supplier of the engine for one version of Niva, and the maker of the Astra T-3000 model that formed the basis for Chevrolet Viva - Milonas emphasized how Russian the new Viva will be.
"We will completely Russianize [the Viva] in the coming year," he said, meaning Opel's once-popular Astra salon model will be adapted so that it is suitable for Russian road and climate conditions, and become the Viva.
Producing the cars in Russia allows GM-Avtovaz to produce a Russian price tag, and Milonas does not see that as a disadvantage in terms of marketing the car as reliable or prestigious.
"We feel we must offer this country a choice ... and we are able to say to you that we can produce a Viva of the quality as high, or higher, than in Europe," began Milonas with passionate assurance. "We are in this country and we feel part of this country."
The director pointed to the weekend dacha traveller, the poor dirt tracks through the countryside and the growing middle-class as factors that will make GM-Avtovaz products not only useful but necessary: "Every Russian, in 10 years time, will need a Niva."
"If you buy a Japanese car cheap in Vladivostock, by the time you finish with the repairs in the first year you might as well buy two Nivas," said Milonas.
The messages of adaptation to the domestic market and affordability have not fallen on deaf ears. More than 45,000 Nivas have already been sold this year, in line with company targets of 55,000 cars by the end of 2004. Next year, with the Chevrolet Niva (with Avtovaz and Opel engine versions) being joined by the Viva models, production at the Tollyatti plant could surpass 75,000 cars. "And we can increase that, depending on how the market reacts," Milonas added.
The market, in this case, is not limited to Russia, where GM-Avtovaz already enjoy a 60 percent share among the made-in-Russia cars. The company also announced plans to export its Niva models to the countries of the CIS, "and Europe as well, but the Russian market remains our priority," Milonas said.
As for the Viva, the "smart little car", there are not plans for European exports, because the company claims they "cannot satisfy local demand - and it would not be sensible to sell outside, yet," Milonas added.
The Viva will be offered to the Russian consumer in three options: the standard version L, at around $11,400, the upgraded version GS, at around $14,790 and an in-between LS model.
The company also announced that an automatic gearbox version of the Niva should become available in 2006, and a diesel version the year after.
TITLE: Communications Success Starts in the City
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Stephen Gardner is the commercial director at PeterStar, one of the leading telecommunications companies operating in northwestern Russia. Gardner has more than 10 years in the telecommunications business and can certainly compare experiences. He has worked in the U.S., the UK, Moscow, and now St. Petersburg.
His first post was at Cable & Wireless, followed by one at the company's affiliate in St. Petersburg, Baltic Communications. After staying in the city for two years, he was transferred to PeterStar and left for London to work for PeterStar's parent company. Later, he moved to Vienna to work for Metro-media International Group, one of the company's major shareholders. After the group was restructured, he returned to St. Petersburg to work for PeterStar again.
When Gardner first came to St. Petersburg, PeterStar was a very small company. "There was the process of taking a small company and making it large, and I was part of the integral management team," he said. "As a commercial director, I was guiding a lot in terms of customer acquisitions. Up until this year, PeterStar had all of its growth solely from customer acquisitions, building up our customer base. It's only during the last year that we've acquired several companies - BCL, Comset, Pskov Telecom," Gardner said.
PeterStar is 11 years old now and has almost $71 million in revenues. It has invested approximately $150 million in to its network over the years. PeterStar owns over 2,000 kilometers of digital network and has a 70 percent market share of the business telephone market among alternative operators in the city.
Gardner said that in St. Petersburg, there are forces that kick-start your career. "You're immediately put in a position that would have taken you a long time to reach in any other corporate environment, such as in the U.S. for example."
"Earlier on it gives you access to a lot of greater experience and it gives you significant exposure to different businesses and different business people."
"Being a telecom executive, I probably would not have had the chance to have dinner with the chairman of Hewlett Packard, the 11th largest company in the world," Gardner said. "Because of the intense focus on the business environment, as an expat you have a greater exposure in terms of having a voice in working over business issues and helping the business community here. That can happen through AmCham [the American Chamber of Commerce] or other business associations."
"Being an expat over here will really help to accelerate your career."
While working at Metromedia, Gardner would often travel to Moscow to run the company's sales and marketing operations. He noticed a significant difference between the business environments in the two Russian cities.
"Although there are greater opportunities and a quicker career path in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, depending on the industry, you can also develop a really successful business," Gardner said.
"Living in St. Petersburg and working for a telecommunications operator, I feel as if I were in the center of the world. I live here with my family - my wife and a 15-month-old son. And I feel that I face the same career opportunities and challenges that I would face if I were in Moscow."
Talking about St. Petersburg's future and development outlook, Gardner says that the software, intellectual platform and IT sides are very strong components of the city's development.
"The tourism sector has significant opportunities as well, and I don't only mean hotels and restaurants, but also the service sector, which is still very much in its infancy," he said. "Those are probably the two areas that I'd look toward."
Among other opportunities Gardner sees for the city are the planned completion of the ring road, the development of the cultural and financial sectors, and growth potential in the real estate sector.
Gardner also highlighted the developing of the canals and water taxis as considerable changes for the city's future.
He believes that living in St. Petersburg has two more advantages. "City congestion is not that great, so there's almost no traffic jams. And parking is not a problem at all, yet. I can park my car within 20 meters of my apartment."
And he could not be happier about it.
TITLE: Retail Business Catching Up With Industrial Firms
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Two-fifths of the country's top 200 private companies are involved in wholesale and retail business, a new survey has found, suggesting that the service industry is making inroads against traditional powerhouses like oil and metals.
Although heavy industry still ranks highly among the 200 largest private companies listed in the November issue of the Russian Forbes magazine, 76 service and trading firms also made a strong showing.
"Some names appear on our list that almost nobody has written about so far," said Forbes editor Maxim Kashulinsky. For example, Telman Ismailov's AST Realty, with estimated sales of $1 billion in 2003, ranked 13th on the list.
Electronics retailer Eldorado, with $1.3 billion in sales, was 10th on a top-10 list otherwise dominated by oil, metals and automobiles. TNK-BP, with sales of $12 billion, was No. 1, followed by Russian Aluminum and steelmaker Yevrazholding.
The sizable presence of the service industry in the ranking - supermarket chain Pyatyorochka (17), mobile operator MegaFon (23), and pharmaceutical wholesaler SIA (25) - points to a trend, said Alex Kantarovich, a senior strategist at Aton.
"Ultimately, rising incomes, albeit from a very low base, mean that consumption-oriented companies will grow to account for a more significant proportion of the economy," he said.
But heavy industry hardly has to fret for its domineering position, he added.
"Metals production has a high capital intensity, so the companies tend to be large," Kantarovich said. "Metals companies have proved to be excellent in terms of cash flow generation, so little surprise thus far that the owners preferred to keep businesses private."
The Forbes survey, which appeared for the first time this year and is set to become annual, compares sales of private companies whose shares are not traded on exchanges. Joint-stock companies were ranked only if they had no more than 10 shareholders.
Forbes' criteria filtered out a great many companies that appeared in Expert magazine's October survey of Russia's 400 largest companies.
TITLE: Yukos Given the Next Tax Bill
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Yukos, already groaning under the weight of a multibillion-dollar back tax bill, is about to be hit with an additional $5.7 billion claim, Kommersant reported Friday.
If the report is correct, the total tax claims against the oil major and its main units would amount to more than $14 billion.
Yukos already owes $7.5 billion in back taxes and fines for 2000 and 2001.
On Thursday, the Federal Tax Service concluded a probe of the company's tax payments for 2002 and found it failed to pay 160 billion rubles, Kommersant reported, citing a person close to the presidential administration.
Vedomosti also reported last week that the 2002 claim is close to being served and cited an unidentified tax official as saying the bill would be "comparable" to other years.
The tax service and Yukos both refused to comment on the reports.
Investors have said they expect the tax claims against Yukos to approach the value of the company's main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, which the Justice Ministry has said must be sold off to cover tax claims.
Media have reported the unit may be sold off for as little as $4 billion. But an additional multibillion-dollar tax claim may affect the Yugansk sale price, analysts said.
"If it is true, then it means that the authorities won't sell off Yugansk for $4 billion and that this unit may be sold at a higher price," said Sergei Suverov, head of equity research at Bank Zenit.
Yugansk was valued at $16 billion to $19 billion by J.P. Morgan, an investment bank hired by Yukos, Interfax reported Friday.
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, which was hired by the Justice Ministry in August, earlier said the unit was worth $14.7 billion to $17.3 billion, after a $951 million tax claim and other liabilities.
Igor Shuvalov, a top aide to President Vladimir Putin, said last week that it was not clear that the unit would be sold and that it would be "bad" to sell off the unit. The Kremlin's position, Shuvalov said, is to "preserve Yukos as a corporation."
Presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov said that if Yugansk is put up for sale, it should not be sold for less than its expected sales this year, or $17 billion, Interfax reported.
Yukos' dollar shares rose 11.5 percent on the RTS Friday, but traders said there was no clear trigger for the rally, according to Reuters.
Adding to the company's woes Friday, Yukos lost an appeal against a $193 million collection charge levied by court marshals for 2001 back taxes, Interfax reported.
And on Sunday, Chinese media reported that China National Petroleum Corp, or CNPC, the state-owned energy conglomerate, is suing Yukos for not fulfilling its export contracts.
Yukos agreed to export 3.86 million tons of crude to CNPC this year, but stopped supplies at 2.85 million tons last month because it said it could not afford to pay for rail deliveries.
It was not clear what amount of compensation CNPC is seeking or where the lawsuit was filed.
TITLE: Central Bank Reserves Hit Record High
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Foreign currency and gold reserves had the largest weekly gain in six years, rising to a record $105.2 billion, and nearing the country's total foreign debt.
The Central Bank said Thursday reserves surged $5.1 billion in the week ending Oct. 22, the largest jump since July 1998, when the Central Bank received $5.6 billion, most of it from the International Monetary Fund, in a futile attempt to stave off the collapse of the ruble.
"That is a big number," said Tim Ash, emerging markets economist at Bear Stearns in London. He said Central Bank intervention, petrodollar inflows and falling net capital outflows may all have contributed to the gain.
The bumper gain reflected massive dollar-buying intervention as the Central Bank tried to fight off market pressure for the ruble to appreciate, driven by record oil export revenues.
Reserves are up more than 35 percent this year.
Significantly, the Central Bank withdrew its dollar bid Oct. 22 and has since allowed the ruble to rise by 1.2 percent against the U.S. currency.
The massive inflows have thrust the Central Bank into a policy dilemma: Can it continue to keep buying dollars to defend competitiveness, risking higher inflation? Or should it let the ruble rise and take a short-term hit to growth?
"The market is inundated with dollars," said Peter Westin, chief economist at Aton brokerage. "The Central Bank isn't just buying up export dollars. It is banks and companies shifting their assets to rubles because all of a sudden the ruble is more interesting."
(Reuters, Bloomberg)
TITLE: Steelmaker Mechel Lists on NYSE
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: NEW YORK - Steelmaker Mechel became Russia's first metals firm to list on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday after it placed about 10 percent of its stock there at the top of the expected range.
Mechel raised $291 million from the initial public offering, making it the second largest by a Russian company and values it at $2.9 billion.
Russia's No. 5 steel producer, which already had a Moscow listing, said it placed 13.9 million shares in American Depositary Shares at $21 each. The price range was $19 to $21.
The move comes at a time when many Russian firms, encouraged by strong growth on the local stock market and booming consumer demand, are looking to foreign listings or closer ties with Western firms to fund expansion.
Mechel joined the club of at least six Russian companies - mainly telecoms - that trade on the NYSE.
The company has an option to place additional shares and boost its liquidity, as it has approval from shareholders and Russia's market watchdog to have up to 40 percent of its stock trading abroad. Mechel officials, contacted in Moscow, would not comment on whether the company was considering such a move.
Analysts said Mechel's decision would largely depend on the outcome of a long-delayed tender for a 17.8 percent stake in steel giant Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, or MMK, expected later this year. Mechel owns 17 percent of MMK and is expected to bid. The government expects to raise up to $800 million in the tender.
"If shareholders decide to raise additional money, they have a pool of shares they can use any time they like," said UralSib metals analyst Slava Smolyaninov.
The NYSE placement underwriters, led by UBS Investment Bank, have an option to purchase an additional 6.2 million ADSs to cover any over-allotments.
Mechel, set up last year to unite several plants in central Russia, includes Mechel Steel Mill, Russia's sixth largest steel plant and the group's biggest asset.
Steel production at the mill, which also has assets in Eastern Europe, grew about 22 percent to 2.9 million tons in the first half of this year.
Mechel, which has expanded production on strong Chinese demand, posted net income of $254.5 million under U.S. GAAP for the first half of 2004 - compared with $143.5 million for the whole of 2003.
(Bloomberg, Reuters, MT)
TITLE: Scrap the Electoral College System
TEXT: Widespread fears that this Tuesday's U.S. presidential election will produce yet another disputed outcome instead of a clear winner dominate these final days before the vote.
Every forecast predicts that it will be an exceptionally close race, yet both the candidates and the news media are focusing exclusively on just the small number of toss-up states - no more than 12 and perhaps as few as six - that either President George W. Bush or John Kerry, the Democratic senator, could very well carry.
In the remaining three-quarters of the 50 states, where the statewide winner can be predicted long before the polls even open, the final victory margins will be utterly meaningless and neither candidate is devoting any campaign time or advertising dollars to them. Everyone acknowledges, for example, that Bush will carry his home state of Texas by well over 1 million votes and that Kerry will carry both New York and California by similar margins.
A shift of half a million votes one way or the other in any of these states would matter not one whit, for under the U.S. Constitution's winner-take-all electoral college system, winning a statewide relative majority is all that matters. A margin of 547 votes - Bush's advantage over Al Gore in Florida in 2000 - is constitutionally indistinguishable from a margin of 547,000 or 1,547,000.
This odd and fundamentally anti-democratic state of affairs attracted very little public comment before the 2000 presidential election. Under the Constitution's original design, each state is allocated electoral college votes equal to its total representation in the U.S. Congress. Every state, irrespective of its population, has two senators, while seats in the House of Representatives are allocated proportionally, ranging from a minimum of one to a current high of 53 for California. Individual states' electoral college votes thus range from three to 55, with the national total being 538. A simple majority of 270 wins the presidency.
In the two largest toss-up states, Florida and Ohio, which have 27 and 20 electoral votes respectively, the statewide winner could well be determined by no more than 5,000 to 10,000 votes, or even fewer.
In these states and in the smaller toss-ups (Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Wisconsin), every vote will count, and the Democratic and Republican parties are pulling out all the stops to challenge any apparent or imagined voting irregularities.
It is easy to see how undemocratic the electoral college is in the abstract. Individual voters in the smallest states have greater electoral college representation than do Californians, a disparity that duplicates the allocation of senators. But there has never been any serious effort to reform how the framers of the original Constitution designed the Senate so as to protect the political interests of the smallest states against those of the largest.
Likewise, no attempt to abolish the electoral college and replace it with direct popular election of the president has ever made significant headway. Even in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when Gore lost notwithstanding his nationwide lead of more than 500,000 popular votes, no serious debate about amending the Constitution took place.
But the Florida vote-counting debacle in 2000 - or a 2004 reprise of it - should be enough to make anyone question whether a few hundred highly prized votes there or in Ohio should be able to trump hundreds of thousands of constitutionally meaningless votes in California, New York and Texas. Yet strangely, many American political commentators, and some U.S. citizens, appear eager for a drawn-out vote-counting tussle in an all-determining toss-up state, just as fans of motor racing watch for multi-car pile-ups. But a U.S. presidential election is not spectator entertainment.
All the bitter partisan squabbling about questionable election practices, particularly in Florida and Ohio, would seem trivial if the votes cast there counted for no more and no less than the millions of numerically superfluous votes in states such as California, New York and Texas. If true voter equality is not a powerful enough reason to implement direct popular election of the president, avoiding scandalously contested outcomes every four years should be.
Even if another Florida does not occur on Tuesday, a different electoral college disaster looms on the horizon: the real possibility of a 269-269 tie. With current projections showing a likely Bush-Kerry split of 234 to 228, without the six toss-up states, multiple scenarios of various state-by-state results would produce an absolute tie. If that happens, the individual electors - party functionaries who actually cast each electoral vote - would emerge from obscurity as competing kingmakers who could name their price.
Maybe only that bad a democratic train wreck could finally motivate Americans to abolish the electoral college and ensure that their president is actually the candidate who receives the most votes.
David Garrow is presidential distinguished professor at Emory University Law School and writes regularly about the U.S. Supreme Court. This comment first appeared in the Financial Times.
TITLE: Yukos Case a Paradigm for the Wrong Approach
TEXT: It's the first anniversary of Mikhail Khodorkovsky being put behind bars on pre-trial detention.
His imprisonment has become a symbol of contemporary Russia not only because of his exclusive role as Political Prisoner No. 1, but also because his example is a highly visible case of Kremlin policy's style - using power and strength to achieve its goals.
The officially declared goals are not all that important - any regime promises stability and prosperity. The differences lie in the means employed to achieve them. As is well known from world history, including Russia's history, the means in many cases dictate the end result that is achieved - it just all depends on the wishes of the higher strategists. The means employed by the Kremlin in Khodorkovsky's case over the last year give little cause for optimism. And in addition, they suggest to the regional administrations that they adopt similar faulty methods. The administration of St. Petersburg has not been untouched by this.
One of the most negative consequences for Russia of the "Khodorkovsky affair" has been the rapid degradation of the court system. It has reached the point where a few days ago Valery Zorkin, the head of the Constitutional Court, said that court reform had failed. In his opinion, it has led to total corruption of judges and their dependence on the government.
By the way, President Vladimir Putin too, de facto acknowledged this during his public appearance on the events in Beslan. Only he did not name the reasons behind such a rapid degradation of this third arm of power. But the reason is simple: "a fish begins to stink from the head." Seeing how in Khodorkovsky's case the General Prosecutor's Office fulfills the orders of the Kremlin to install 'the dictatorship of the law,' other bureaucrats and judges interpret this as an indication that anything is allowed and act accordingly.
Bureaucrats in the regions have already ceased to treat judges as an independent branch of power. In Smolny there was sincere incomprehension when journalists and several deputies of the city's Legislative Assembly protested about the annexing of the institution of justices of the peace to executive power. "You see it will be simpler to support justices of the peace by providing them with all they need," they said as they decided to create a department within the administration for the justices of the peace.
The foundations of the Russian economy are harmed not only by the destruction of independent judges but also by facilitating the directly dependent relationship between business and the administration. The cynicism of the authorities as they bankrupt and seize Yukos completely is just symptomatic of their whole attitude, and we can especially see it in the shameful handling of Yuganskneftegaz.
Yevgeny Yasin was right to say in Yezhenedelny Zhurnal that "One year after the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky the economic atmosphere of the country has seriously changed for the worst. With the circle of trust reduced, leading bureaucrats and entrepreneurs eye each other with suspicion. The latter, making themselves appear friendly, show readiness to work in partnership on projects of social responsibility, but do not intend to invest large amounts. The risks have grown. The proof of this is the renewed outflow of capital." The large foreign companies behave much braver (certain that if in trouble, they will be protected by their governments), and they continue to invest in Russia. But you can't base a whole country's economy on them. This is not to mention the multi-party political system. How can we speak of opposition parties, when, according to Irina Khakamada, entrepreneurs are afraid to finance parties other than those loyal to the Kremlin for fear of losing their businesses.
The relationship between business and the administration is getting worse not only at the federal level, but also at the regional one. The St. Petersburg administration, seduced (or forced) by the federal trend, risks crossing the line in rationally assisting business. If it is just about justifiable for gas station operators to pay their taxes in St. Petersburg (which Governor Valentina Mativiyenko made the foundation of her 'social partnership between business and government' policy), the standardization of bread prices raises some doubts.
Current plans by Smolny to eliminate trading points at bus stops seems to be nothing less than crude arbitrariness, not based on any convincing analysis that it will benefit either the city or the citizens. The bureaucrats' arguments for their decision just don't stand up to criticism. And all this is going on after Smolny said it is taking steps to improve support for small businesses. Just one of these steps will do so much harm to entrepreneurs that no support program will be able to compensate.
I have to again agree with Yasin: "Putin's proposal [regarding the appointment of governors] of Sept. 13 completes the picture in putting the definitive touch to the way the elite intends to rule. A prosperous Russia as a civilized democratic country will not develop from this, even if the authors are certain that it will. They just don't have the imagination to make sure of it."
Our imagination draws a sorry picture. The oil factor will soon run out of steam and then no power vertical will be able to help Russia. Economic growth cannot occur in conditions when the government behaves like a greedy knight - fighting inflation not by stimulating production but by reducing the amount of money in circulation. And entrepreneurs fear the security services more than they fear their competitors.
Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.
TITLE: The Betrayers
TEXT: On Sept. 14, 2001, as the Twin Towers in New York were still smoking, this column spoke of the coming response: "Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: It breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs."
Almost 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks: a vast crime, a deep-dyed evil. The whole world rose up against it in condemnation and solidarity. The perpetrators claimed justification in the immense suffering their people had long endured at the hands of the West and West-backed tyrants, a death toll running into the millions. But the people of the world - including the Muslim lands - rejected that argument. There is no justification for shedding innocent blood, we all said, not even as "collateral damage" in a self-proclaimed "pre-emptive" war to avenge and protect your people, not even if you believe God Almighty has endorsed your cause. The terrorists' justifications were rightly thrust aside, and they were branded betrayers of our common humanity.
But the eggs laid by Osama bin Laden have hatched in George W. Bush's brain. He has perpetrated his own vast crime on the world. We now know that up to 10 times as many innocent people have been killed as a result of Bush's invasion of Iraq than died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The most conservative estimates of innocent Iraqi deaths place the figure at 15,000; credible reports from independent, anti-Hussein groups in Iraq put the civilian death toll at more than 30,000. Even today, occupation forces are killing twice as many Iraqis as the brutal insurgency spawned by Bush's war, Knight-Ridder reports.
The Sept. 11 attacks have been endlessly analyzed for their symbolic value - a monstrous theater piece aimed at unhinging the American psyche. It is largely forgotten that they were also a military action, an attempted "decapitation raid," targeting the "command-and-control centers" of the American regime: its military headquarters, its financial hub, and its political leadership (the aborted attack on the U.S. Capitol). This is precisely the same strategy that Bush would later employ in his "pre-emptive" assault on Iraq - while offering the same justifications for shedding innocent blood in "regrettable but necessary" military actions to avenge and protect his people.
But we know that the Iraq war had nothing to do with Sept. 11 or fighting terrorism. We know - from the mouth of Bush himself, and from the investigations of his own appointees - that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attack on the United States. We know that Bush's "war of choice" has turned Iraq into a terrorists' paradise, where entire nuclear plants and tons of high explosives have been carted away by sinister forces from sites left completely - and inexplicably - unguarded. We know that Bush's signed orders permitting widespread torture have inflamed vengeful anger at the United States all over the world.
We know too there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; they were destroyed in 1991, as Bush's own inspector confirmed last month. We know that Bush ignored the manifold doubts and caveats of pre-war WMD intelligence - including the "crateloads of evidence" on disarmament supplied by Hussein's defecting son-in-law in 1995, as Time reports - and instead used fabrications supplied by ideologues and con men to weave a conscious deception about "imminent threats."
We also know this war was planned long before Sept. 11. In September 2000, a militarist faction led by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other top Bushists published their blueprint for establishing U.S. military and economic hegemony over world affairs. To further this goal, they cited the urgent strategic need for planting a U.S. "military footprint" in Iraq - whether Hussein was still in power or not, whether he had WMD or not. All they needed was an excuse - a "catalyzing event" like "a new Pearl Harbor," as they wrote in 2000 - to rally the American people behind the faction's program for a gargantuan military buildup and aggressive war.
The last strand of Bush's shredded arguments for war - the "liberation of the Iraqi people" - can be dismissed as a cynical sham. Many of the same people now "liberating" Iraq from Hussein's tyranny fully supported Hussein while he was committing his worst crimes. Cheney and Colin Powell led the efforts of Bush's father to prevent Congress from punishing Hussein for gassing Kurdish civilians, the Los Angeles Times reports. After the Gulf War, Bush I allowed the defeated Hussein to use helicopters and heavy weapons in his horrific repression of Kurdish and Shiite rebellions, the Washington Post reports; Bush also used U.S. military forces to block the rebels from seizing weapons to defend themselves.
Almost all of the mass graves uncovered since Hussein's fall were dug with the direct connivance of the Bush family and its retainers - the same group who have now forced the "liberated" land into the hands of a neo-Baathist thugocracy on the verge of civil war. The Iraqi people have never been anything but so much bloody mulch for the geopolitical ambitions and personal fortunes of the Bush faction.
George W. Bush has laid his thousand eggs of murder in Iraq. Each one will hatch and in its turn breed more hatred, vengeance, death and terror: an endless cycle, a self-perpetuating engine of evil fueled by human blood. Even if Bush is removed from office, the engine will grind on and on for decades. This is his legacy to the world. Whatever happens in the election, he will be joined forever with the betrayers of humanity. His name, like bin Laden's, will be cursed for generations.
For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Tehran Legislators Back Uranium Enrichment
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran - Defiant legislators - shouting "Death to America" - unanimously voted Sunday to approve the outline of a bill requiring the government to resume uranium enrichment, a move likely to deepen an international dispute over Tehran's atomic activities.
Nevertheless, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Hossein Mousavian, said in an exclusive interview that a compromise could still be reached with European negotiators to avert the risk of United Nations sanctions.
Britain, France and Germany have offered Iran a trade deal and peaceful nuclear technology - including a light-water research reactor - in return for assurances Iran would indefinitely stop enriching uranium. Uranium enriched to a low level can be used to produce nuclear fuel, but if enriched further it can be used to make nuclear weapons.
While legislators were discussing the bill, Mousavian ruled out an indefinite suspension of enrichment activities. But he suggested Iran would consider halting the building of more nuclear facilities, which it would need to produce enough fuel for additional power plants.
Washington has accused Iran of trying to build atomic weapons and has pushed for the case to be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions if Tehran doesn't give up all uranium enrichment activities before a Nov. 25 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog.
"I see the chance of a compromise before November as 50-50," Mousavian said.
"We have rejected two possibilities: cessation and unlimited suspension," he said. "We told the Europeans if your target is cessation, it will be impossible. But we are flexible if your proposal is balanced."
Tehran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes.
Mousavian said some progress was "definitely" made during Iran's talks last week with Europeans, who he said "showed flexibility and understanding."
However, those negotiations could be hampered if Iran's government obliges calls by legislators to push ahead with enrichment.
Parliament Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel said Sunday's vote by the conservative-dominated Parliament in favour of the outline of a bill that forces their government to resume uranium enrichment sent a message to the world.
"The message of the absolute vote for the Iranian nation is that Parliament supports national interests," he said. "And the message for the outside world is that Parliament won't give in to coercion."
No date was set for discussing details of the legislation and the outline did not include a deadline for the government to resume uranium enrichment.
TITLE: Candidates Highlight Security as Race Ends
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MIAMI - In the closing hours of their bitter campaign, President George W. Bush and challenger Senator John Kerry charged through the critical battlegrounds of Florida and Ohio on Sunday, going from hushed church services to raucous campaign rallies with promises to keep America safe.
Kerry said that if elected he would undertake an unprecedented "flurry of activity" to protect national security that would include quick Cabinet appointments. "I'm going to make America safer and I have some very strong and real steps to take quite immediately to make that happen," Kerry said in an interview.
Bush emphasized a similar theme. "If you believe America should fight the war on terror with all her might and lead with unwavering confidence," the president said, "I ask you, come stand by me.
"If you are a Democrat who believes your party has turned too far left in this year, I ask you, come stand with me," Bush said.
Strategists on both sides said Tuesday's election likely will hinge on which party is successful in getting their voters to the polls after two vastly different and costly campaigns to increase turnout.
Kerry senior adviser Mike McCurry said the Democratic campaign was no longer concerned with generating big turnouts at rallies, but was focused instead on having Kerry make quick stops to attract local media coverage that might help voters decide.
A rash of polls suggested the race for the popular vote was essentially tied after the costliest political advertising campaign in history-more than $600 million spent by Bush, Kerry, their political parties and allied groups.
The election's outcome also was uncertain in the battleground states, the eight or so states where Bush and Kerry are vying for at least 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. The campaign's final weekend was clouded by war and terrorism-a videotape by Osama bin Laden and the deaths of eight U.S. Marines in Iraq.
Nonetheless, Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser called the race for Bush. "We're ahead," he told reporters in Cincinnati, Ohio, the last campaign stop Sunday. "We will win Florida and Ohio. We will take at least two or three or four states that were won by [Democrat Al] Gore in the last election."
Bush made a pitch for Hispanic voters in Miami, promising Cuban-American voters that he would push for freedom in communist Cuba. "We will not rest-we will not rest, we will keep the pressure on until the Cuban people enjoy the same freedoms in Havana they receive here in America," Bush said. The crowd responded with cries of "Viva Bush."
The president began the day at The Church of the Epiphany, a Roman Catholic church where the pastor, Monsignor Jude O'Doherty, all but endorsed Bush. "Mr. President, I want you to know that I admire your faith and your courage to profess it," the priest said in a long tribute to Bush. "Your belief in prayer and dependence on God has to be an example for all of us."
Kerry, who is Catholic, worshipped in Dayton, Ohio, first at a Catholic Mass and then-for the fifth consecutive Sunday-at a predominantly black church, the Shiloh Baptist Church.
Quoting the Bible and criticizing Bush without naming him, Kerry said, "There is a standard by which we have to live. Coming to church on Sundays and talking about faith and professing faith isn't the whole deal."
Bush campaigned from one end of Florida to the other, with rallies in Miami, Tampa and Gainesville before flying to Ohio for an evening rally in Cincinnati. Kerry dashed north from Ohio to New Hampshire and then was appearing in Tampa at a rally.
Both sides said Sunday was eerily quiet on the campaign trail. Senior advisers in both camps dropped off and raced home to take their children trick-or-treating on Halloween. Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, are being accompanied by their three grandchildren. Elizabeth, 7, wore a costume as the Grim Reaper at a rally in Romulus, Mich., and was introduced by Lynne Cheney as "John Kerry's health plan."
Cheney said Kerry's first response to bin Laden's new videotape was to take a poll to find out what he should say about it. A spokesman for Kerry's campaign did not deny polling on the bin Laden videotape, but suggested Bush had done the same. Bush's campaign strategist denied asking any poll questions about the al-Qaida terrorist.
Bush told NBC News, meanwhile, that bin Laden is "not going to intimidate or decide this election" and said, "We are systematically destroying al-Qaida."
"Because we've taken decisive action, al-Qaida's being dismantled. And we'll eventually get Osama bin Laden. In the meantime, we're destroying his network, slowly but surely, systematically destroying it."
Asked about former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's comment that troops in Iraq bore the responsibility for missing explosives, the president said: "I never blame our troops. I'd be glad to blame myself. I'm the person that has committed our troops into combat." But he added there is "a lot of conflicting information about ammunition sites" and said U.S. troops have secured or destroyed 400,000 tons of munitions.
Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, raced through Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where he was knocking on doors in a Columbus neighborhood. He also was to do telephone interviews with Hawaii newspapers; Cheney was heading for a rally in traditionally Democratic Hawaii.
In a written statement late Sunday, Edwards hit back at Cheney's criticisms of Kerry, asking: "What has he done to protect our troops beyond his empty rhetoric and hollow promises?"
With little new to say after months of speeches and millions in commercials, both candidates hoped to energize their supporters to get to the polls. The two sides have get-out-the-vote operations which are groundbreaking in their size and expense.
The Bush campaign has built a web of neighborhood volunteers who take directions, largely by e-mail, from his Arlington, Va., headquarters. Kerry will depend on a conglomerate of labor, party and liberal issue-driven groups that target and motivate voters with armies of paid workers.
Four years ago, Democratic nominee Al Gore had 90,000 people with specifically assigned jobs working to get out the vote on Election Day. This year, Kerry has 47,000 in Ohio alone-250,000 nationally. The growth of the Republican operation is just as big, if not bigger.
A spate of new state polls showed Bush and Kerry knotted in their top targets: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and New Mexico.
Both men sweated it out in other states. Polls showed Bush doing slightly better than expected in Michigan, Iowa and New Jersey. Kerry was within striking distance in Arkansas, Missouri and Colorado, though Bush still led in GOP-leaning states.
Associated Press Writer Nedra Pickler in Dayton, Ohio, contributed to this report.
TITLE: Russia's Youzhny Wins St. Petersburg Open
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG - Home favorite Mikhail Youzhny trounced Slovakia's Karol Beck 6-2 6-2 in the St Petersburg Open final on Sunday to claim his first title of the year.
Fourth-seeded Youzhny, Russia's 2002 Davis Cup hero, delighted a large crowd at the 11,000-seat SKK stadium as he dominated the unseeded Slovak from the start.
The Russian was far more consistent from the baseline and with his serves, breaking Beck twice in each set to seize control of the match. He wrapped up the contest in 62 minutes with an emphatic ace for his second ATP title.
"A final is never easy," said the 22-year-old Muscovite, who handed Russia their first Davis Cup title when he became the first player in history to overhaul a two-set deficit in the fifth and deciding rubber to beat France's Paul-Henri Mathieu.
A runner-up here in 2002, Youzhny became the third Russian to win the St. Petersburg Open in its ten-event history after Yevgeny Kafelnikov in 1995 and Marat Safin with back-to-back titles in 2000 and 2001.
Although Beck was overwhelmed, Youzhny wobbled momentarily at the start of the second set, pausing to re-tie his shoelaces and gather himself during his opening service game.
"It's true, I did break him early in the first set, but in the second he was leading 1-0 and had 0-30 on my serve," said Youzhny.
"It could have been a whole lot tougher if I had lost that game."
Beck conceded he had been handed a reality check by Youzhny.
"It was a very tough day for me," said Beck, who was playing in his first ATP final. "Mikhail played unbelievable tennis and I tried to play too riskily and made a lot of mistakes."
But the 22-year-old Slovak, who began his athletic career in ice hockey before switching to tennis at the age of 13, was delighted with his overall performance in the tournament.
Ranked No. 53, Beck upset No. 5 seed, and last month's Kremlin Cup winner Nikolay Davydenko of Russia in the second round and No. 7 seed Michael Llodra of France in the semifinals.
"Going into the final I knew that Mikhail would be the favorite and I was giving myself about 40-60 percent chance of winning," said Beck, whose previous best at an ATP event was reaching the quarter-finals.
"Well, today it was more like 1 in 99 chance for me to win. Still this was a wonderful week for me here."
As Youzhny celebrated victory with his trademark of placing a racket on his head and giving a military salute, the crowd yelled in delight and battled eagerly for tennis balls Youzhny hit or threw into the stands.
Youzhny's win made amends for his 2002 final defeat in the event by France's Sebastien Grosjean and he thanked the St. Petersburg crowd for the support it gave him.
"I played a great match, but I think the crowd played a big part today," Youzhny said. "There were so many spectators cheering for me that it probably helped me to play even better."
Youzhny, who won his maiden crown on clay in Stuttgart in 2002, said: "Definitely this win means a lot more to me - but not because this is Russia.
"Then, I was young and was moving up the rankings very quickly. Now, it's a totally different story," added Youzhny, who was troubled by injuries at the start of the season.
"I've been playing really well in the second half of the year, so things are looking good for 2005. But after what I have been through the last two years I don't target the top 10 or top 20 rankings. I just want to take my game to a higher level."
Youzhny was playing in his second final this season after losing to Safin at the Beijing Open in September. He is having his most productive season. He has a 39-26 record and has reached the quarterfinals or better in nine ATP Tour events. Since reaching the quarters at the Athens Olympics, his record is 20-6.
In the shock result of the tournament, top seed Safin was knocked out of the St. Petersburg event in the quarterfinals on Friday.
Less than a week before, Safin had won the Madrid Masters title in Spain, placing himself in contention for the season-ending Master's Cup in Houston, Texas, later this month.
The 6-4, 6-1 defeat by Llodra was an ill-tempered affair with Safin contesting line calls and at one point even smashing his racket on the court's blue carpet.
Llodra kept his play brisk and clinical, coming to the net often, as Safin's mistakes mounted, keeping the Russian rooted to the baseline. Only forceful cross-court backhands seemed to work for Safin but too many hit the net. At 4-1 down in the second set, Safin placed his face in his hands, and after just one break against Llodra in the first set, the second set barely lasted 15 minutes.
Safin could not contain his irritation at the umpire after a string of close line calls and at times used more energy on-court in tantrums than in play.
To applause from a restless crowd, a cleaning woman was called on court to collect the debris of a racket Safin pounded into the court in frustration.
"You know, all the decisions against me came on important points," said a tired-looking Safin. "At one point I even asked Llodra, and he agreed [with me], but the referee overruled it."
Safin's sluggish showing was in contrast to his fiery win over David Nalbandian of Argentina in Madrid less than a week earlier. He later admitted that he was tired but had not given in to the Frenchman.
"I have no right to give up. I am upset, and I didn't give up."
Safin's mood carried over to the doubles semi-final, partnering Irakly Labadze of Georgia against a pairing of Julian Knowle of Austria and Nenad Zimonjic of Serbia and Montenegro, which the CIS pair lost in straight sets later on Friday. In a lighter moment, Safin partnered Governor Valentina Matviyenko in a publicity stunt ahead of serious play on Thursday.
In the two-set match Matviyenko and Safin played doubles against vice governor Sergei Tarasov and Labadze.
Asked whether the match, which was a one-set-all draw, had depleted his energy levels, Safin joked "it probably got to me."
The official doubles title was won by the French pairing of Arnaud Clement and Llodra, beating Dominik Hrbaty of Slovakia and Jaroslav Levinsky of the Czech Republic 6-3, 6-2.
(AP, Reuters)
Additional reporting by
staff writer Yuriy Humber.
TITLE: Mourinho Says Chelsea Best Team In England
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WEST BROMWICH, England - Jose Mourinho hailed his Chelsea team the best in the country on Saturday as the Blues romped to a 4-1 win over managerless West Bromwich Albion to draw level on points with Arsenal at the top of the English Premier League.
"By the statistics of the Premiership, Champions League and the [League] Cup, we are the team with more points," Mourinho said. "Today I can say that in my opinion that difference is a bit bigger because we have 12 wins in 15 matches."
Arsenal has won 10.
With Frank Lampard having a standout game and playing a part in three of the goals, the Blues woke from a first half slumber at the Hawthorns to go ahead just before the interval and then cut through the Baggies' defense with ease after the break.
"I think they were the better team in the first half, they were much more committed and they were winning every ball," Mourinho said. "Usually you would go in at half-time losing, or 0-0, but we had luck on our side when we scored in the last minute.
"The second half was a completely different story, we played very well in attack and we scored three good goals. I'm really happy with the second half which was absolutely fantastic, but tomorrow we will speak about the first half because that was not good for Chelsea."
William Gallas volleyed Chelsea ahead in first half injury time before Eidur Gudjohnsen added a second six minutes into the second half.
Although Hungarian midfielder Zoltan Gera replied for the Baggies, Damien Duff and Lampard added two more goals and the Blues drew level with defending champion and longtime leader Arsenal, which tied 2-2 with Southampton.
At Highbury, the Gunners didn't play with their usual attacking flair - a hangover from losing their first league match in 17 months last Sunday.
Thierry Henry missed a first half penalty but scored in the 67th minute. Rory Delap leveled in the 80th minute and put Saints ahead five minutes later. Robin van Persie saved a point for Arsenal in the 90th minute.
"When you play 49 games unbeaten and you lose a game, it is a mental shock and it takes some time to digest that," Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger said.
"We did not find our fluency. I would say that had we lost today it would have put us in a confidence crisis."
The team that ended Arsenal's streak, Manchester United, couldn't maintain that form. It lost 2-0 at Portsmouth to a David Unsworth penalty and a Aiyegbeni Yakubu strike.
"We have to reflect on our own missed chances, because you can't afford to do that," Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson said. "It's a kick in the teeth after last Sunday's performance."
Portsmouth also won the last time the two met at Fratton Park in April.
TITLE: Washington Redskins' Loss Could be John Kerry's Gain
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Senator John Kerry has declared victory in the U.S. presidential election, staking his claim on a historical quirk linking past White House races and the Washington Redskins football team.
The National Football League's Redskins lost 28-14 to the Green Bay Packers at home on Sunday and, if tradition holds, this means President George W. Bush is bound to lose the White House.
The legend surrounding the Redskins' last home game before Election Day is simplicity itself: If they win, the White House incumbent will remain president. If they lose, the incumbent loses.
Going into the 2004 vote, the Redskins' electoral barometer has held true for 17 straight elections - a record that professional pollsters can only dream of.
"I couldn't be more thrilled with the Packers win today," Kerry said in a statement titled "Packers Win - Kerry's In!" released soon after the final whistle blew at Fedex Field outside Washington.
"This streak started with Herbert Hoover, and will continue this week when George Bush, the only president since Hoover to lose jobs, loses his," Kerry said. "When the Redskins get beat before the election, the incumbent loses. The Packers have done their part, this Tuesday, we'll do ours."
Back on the field, Clinton Portis celebrated the apparent winning touchdown with a leap into the end zone, capping a 43-yard reception that gave the Redskins a one-point lead with 2 minutes 35 second to play.
But receiver James Thrash was whistled for illegal motion, a call Thrash didn't understand and one that Washington coach Joe Gibbs called "an absolute mystery."
The Packers had a different feeling: sheer relief.
Al Harris intercepted a pass on the next play, and the Packers drove for an insurance touchdown to cap a 28-14 victory Sunday that pulled Green Bay (4-4) back to .500 after a 1-4 start.
Brett Favre had an erratic game, playing with a sprained hand, a banged thumb and the distraction of his wife undergoing breast cancer treatment.
He completed 20 of 33 passes for 289 yards and a touchdown and three interceptions.
But the play everyone will remember is the negated touchdown.
"I was exhausted," Washington tackle Chris Samuels said. "I was chasing Clinton all over the field after we scored the touchdown trying to hug him. I was like, 'Slow down, man. I'm trying to celebrate with you.' Then, I turned around and saw the officials calling us back. It's just disappointing. It's tough."
The other perspective?
"I won't even lie to you - my heart sank when I saw him run into the end zone," said Green Bay's Bhawoh Jue, who made his first start since 2001 in place of injured safety Darren Sharper. "I have full confidence in my offense, but I'm glad they didn't have to go back out."
The flag was apparently thrown because Thrash was not set for a full second after going into motion on the play. He said he didn't want to comment on the call because he "didn't know for sure" if it was the right one.
Gibbs didn't seem satisfied with the explanation the officials gave him.
"They said it was James Thrash," said Gibbs, whose team dropped to 2-5. "I know it wasn't James. He's super-smart and doesn't make mistakes like that... It's an absolute mystery to me."
Favre was brilliant early and awful late. The Packers scored on their first three possessions to take a 17-0 lead, but two interceptions by Shawn Springs set up Washington's two touchdowns, and Fred Smoot's interception set up the penalty-negated touchdown pass to Portis.
Favre grimaced at times as he grabbed the throwing hand he sprained in last week's victory over Dallas, and he banged his thumb somehow in the third quarter, but he downplayed the injuries.
"I'm pleased with the win, but I can't be satisfied with the way I played," said Favre, who extended his streak to 33 games with at least one touchdown pass in his 199th consecutive regular-season game. "It would be nice to sit here and blame it on something else, but I'm not going to do that..."
Back in presidential politics, fans of divination are still mulling the possible electoral impact of the historic World Series win last week by the Boston Red Sox baseball team - its first world championship since 1918.
Some believe it augurs a Kerry win, given that Boston is the Massachusetts senator's home team. They also point out that the Red Sox won the World Series in two other election years - 1912 and 1916 and in each case the Democrat candidate came out on top.
(AP, AFP)