SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1450 (12), Friday, February 20, 2009
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TITLE: Police Said To Have Intimidated Opposition
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The local political opposition says the authorities are increasing the pressure on them as the March 1 municipal elections approach. City Hall refused to authorize a meeting that the Solidarity democratic movement was planning to hold on Saturday, and policemen were reported to have visited the homes of people who support oppositional candidates and asked them to retract their signatures.
Solidarity was planning to hold meetings against the deterioration of the social-economic situation both in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but while the meeting was authorized by the mayor’s office in Moscow, St. Petersburg’s City Hall said it was not possible to hold a rally at any of the six locations suggested by the organizers.
According to a press release sent out last week by Yabloko Democratic Party, some of whose members are also members of Solidarity, City Hall said there would be maintenance work on Arts Square, a “military-patriotic meeting” on the Field of Mars and a “sports event dedicated to Defenders of the Fatherland Day" on Troitskaya Ploshchad at the time of the planned opposition rally.
Three other sites subsequently suggested by the organizers — Ploshchad Lenina, Pionerskaya Ploshchad and Ploshchad Sakharova — were also rejected by City Hall on Wednesday.
“They’re afraid of everything,” said Olga Kurnosova, the local leader of Garry Kasparov’s United Civil Front (OGF) and a member of Solidarity’s Federal Political Council.
Solidarity is considering holding an unauthorized “art event” on Arts Square instead, Kurnosova said by phone on Thursday.
On Tuesday, Kurnosova won a case against the Chyornaya Rechka municipal district’s election commission, which had refused to register her as a candidate, claiming that the signatures she had collected had been fabricated. On Tuesday the judge ruled that the commission should register her as a candidate, but after a protest from the prosecutor’s office, the case will be heard at the city court next week.
However, three OGF activists who also initially failed to be registered as candidates won their cases in court this week, she said.
Olga Tsepilova, the deputy head of the Green Russia faction in Yabloko, made a complaint to the prosecutor’s office about policemen allegedly visiting and intimidating those who had signed documents supporting the candidates of ecological and preservationist groups in the Yuntolovo municipal district within the Primorsky district in the northeast of St. Petersburg.
“During the past two days there has been a massive police check,” Tsepilova said by phone on Thursday.
“It turns out that two days ago, the chairwoman of the Yuntolovo election commission wrote a complaint to Police Precinct 53 that all of our signatures were false. It’s amazing — two weeks after the checking of signatures was completed,” she said.
According to Tsepilova, the policemen visited people who had given their signatures at home, often late in the evening. According to her, it is a direct violation of the law.
“They took people’s signatures, asked them if they had signed their names themselves, showed them the collected signatures, and told them that they supported unworthy people who were trying to break into power, while they should support totally different people and retract their signatures, or say that the signatures were not theirs,” she said.
“There are people who are ready to confirm this, although most were simply intimidated. There were calls from people who said they had not thought that giving their signature would have such consequences.
The police visits lasted until late evening on Wednesday, she said.
“One person called us at 11.30 p.m. saying he had just been visited by the police,” she said. “At 11.30 p.m. you are visited by two policemen, who sternly ask you if you took part in such an activity… Many got scared and told us, ‘We’ll never sign anything again for the rest of our lives.’”
A police spokesman declined to comment when called on Thursday evening, but said he would have information on Friday.
TITLE: ‘Not Guilty’ Verdict in Politkovskaya Trial
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — A jury on Thursday acquitted three men charged in the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a relentless critic of the country’s ruling elite whose 2006 slaying rekindled fears about the safety of journalists working in the country.
The 12-member jury found Chechen brothers Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov, as well as former Moscow police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, not guilty of involvement in the murder of Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in her central Moscow apartment building in October 2006.
The verdict marks the end of the often chaotic three-month trial, in which neither the gunman nor the person or persons who ordered Politkovskaya to be killed were charged.
Prosecutors said they would appeal the ruling.
Khadzhikurbanov was accused of organizing the crime, while Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov were charged as accomplices. A third Makhmudov brother, Rustam, is suspected of actually pulling the trigger in the murder but has not been apprehended. An international warrant has been issued for his arrest.
Prosecutors told the court in closed hearings this week that Politkovskaya’s murder was to be organized by the Makhmudov brothers’ uncle, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, who had previously been a witness in the trial, according to the defendants’ lawyers.
Gaitukayev is serving a 12-year prison sentence for the attempted murder of a Ukrainian businessman, and prosecutors told the court that he passed the task of killing Politkovskaya on to Khadzhikurbanov because he could not carry it out himself while in jail, the lawyers said.
The ultimate figure behind the murder, however, remains unclear. Prosecutors said Gaitukayev was acting at the behest of someone else in organizing Politkovskaya’s killing but provided no names, according to the lawyers.
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika suggested in August 2007 that the person who masterminded the Novaya Gazeta reporter’s murder was hiding abroad and that the crime was an attempt to discredit the Kremlin.
In a newspaper interview last April, Dmitry Dovgy, a former senior Investigative Committee official currently under investigation for purported corruption, accused self-exiled businessman Boris Berezovsky of ordering Politkovskaya’s assassination.
Khadzhikurbanov testified in court earlier this month that investigators had offered him a reduced prison sentence if he would implicate Berezovsky in the crime, according to the defendant’s lawyer.
Thursday’s acquittal highlights the difficulties prosecutors have shown in persuading jurors in high-profile criminal trials.
In May 2006, a jury acquitted two Chechen men, Kazbek Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev, of the 2004 murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow. Prosecutors said the initial trial had been flawed and appealed for a retrial. But the retrial process was suspended in March 2007 after Dukuzov disappeared.
In June, the Moscow Regional Court cleared retired Colonel Vladimir Kvachkov and two former soldiers of organizing the 2005 attack on Anatoly Chubais, the widely reviled architect of the country’s 1990s privatization program. In August, the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal and sent the case back to the court.
Many defense lawyers say Russian prosecutors consistently produce shoddily crafted cases against suspects, thus leading to jury acquittals. According to 2007 data from the Supreme Court, 0.7 percent of those tried by judges were acquitted, while the acquittal rate in jury trials was 17.2 percent.
Over the course of the investigation and trial, Politkosvkaya’s family and colleagues had consistently questioned the soundness of the case prosecutors built against Khadzhikurbanov and the Makhmudov brothers.
TITLE: U.S. Defense Secretary Sees Better Relations With Russia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KRAKOW, Poland — Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he sees a chance for better relations with Russia with a new president in the White House, but warned that Moscow is trying to “have it both ways” by offering help in Afghanistan and undermining U.S. efforts there at the same time.
Gates met his Polish counterpart, Defense Minister Bogdan Klich, on Thursday. Poland is one site for a planned U.S. missile shield system that Russia has aggressively protested, but the United States hopes it might work out new assurances to Russia that the system is aimed at Iran and not at Moscow.
Rhetoric on the missile system grew heated last year, and was compounded by U.S. outrage over Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer. Both the U.S. and Russia have made overtures to ease the tension since President Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“I am hopeful that with a new start that maybe there are some opportunities with the Russians that we can pursue,” Gates said.
Making his first overseas trip as an Obama employee, the holdover defense chief said Wednesday that the change in administration offers fresh traction for his argument that NATO allies must shoulder more of the load in Afghanistan.
The stalemated Afghan war is the dominant theme as Gates meets with fellow NATO defense ministers in Poland, where he will ask sometimes reluctant European governments to send additional troops to Afghanistan, at least for short stints ahead of national elections this summer.
On Tuesday, Obama pledged 17,000 new U.S. forces for Afghanistan over the coming months to address what he called a deteriorating situation.
“It is a new administration and the administration is prepared, as the president’s decision made clear yesterday, ... to make additional commitments to Afghanistan,” Gates told reporters traveling with him. “But there clearly will be expectations that the allies must do more as well.”
Klich and Gates signed an agreement Thursday formalizing cooperation between U.S. and Polish special forces in Afghanistan, where Poland has about 1,600 troops.
The era of good feeling that Obama carries globally could also smooth the way to a better partnership with Russia on Afghanistan and other issues, Gates suggested, although he said Russian behavior is still troubling.
“I think that the Russians are trying to have it both ways with respect to Afghanistan in terms of Manas,” Gates said, referring to a strategic U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic (see story, Page 3).
Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted Thursday to close the base that resupplies military operations in Afghanistan. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev unexpectedly called this month for the closure of the Manas base, a transit point for 15,000 troops and 500 tons of cargo each month to and from Afghanistan. Russia is widely assumed to be behind the decision, although Moscow denies it.
“On one hand you’re making positive noises about working with us in Afghanistan and on the other hand you’re working against us in terms of that airfield which is clearly important to us,” Gates said.
Although Obama replaced a president widely disliked in Europe, Gates suggested that the new president wouldn’t make a serious run at an issue that vexed George W. Bush: How to get NATO to commit larger numbers of combat forces and send them where they are most needed in Afghanistan.
Gates has largely given up hope that NATO countries, many with strong anti-war constituencies at home, will ever be willing to greatly expand the current NATO force in Afghanistan.
“I think the likelihood of getting the allies to commit significant numbers of additional troops is not very great,” he said.
Gates is focusing instead on asking NATO allies for emergency help this spring and summer to counter militants and improve security for the election. After that, Gates said, NATO allies can expand nonmilitary participation for the long term. As examples, he suggested more police training and work to improve the Afghan government and fight drugs.
“I hope that it may be easier for our allies to do that than significant troop increases,” Gates said.
TITLE: Russia Accused of Sinking Ship
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BEIJING — China called on Russia on Thursday to explain how a Chinese cargo ship sank in Russian waters after reports it was fired on by the Russian military.
Seven Chinese sailors were missing after the “New Star” sank on Saturday in stormy seas off Vladivostok and after a Russian warship shot at least 500 rounds into it, the official China Daily newspaper said, quoting a Chinese-language paper which in turned quoted a Russian newspaper.
The “New Star” was held at the Russian port of Nakhodka earlier this month, suspected of involvement in smuggling, before it left without permission last week, the China Daily said.
“China has already made representations to the Russian side,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference.
“We hope they continue with the search and rescue operations for the missing sailors and clarify the reason (for the incident) as soon as possible.”
China says three Chinese crew members were rescued and seven were missing.
In video footage of the incident broadcast on Russian television, the rattle of gunfire could be heard, with authorities there claiming the ship was given adequate warning.
“The ‘New Star’ captain was called by radio, border guard boats sent light signals, a special flag demanding to stop was raised and a warning shot was fired,” a prosecutor in Nakhodka, Alexander Selentsov, told Russia’s Interfax news agency.
TITLE: AvtoVAZ Announce Plans for Budget Car
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — AvtoVAZ is developing a new budget car to appeal to buyers of its boxy 30-year-old Zhiguli series, the carmaker said Wednesday.
Details about the new economy car are few, but it is expected to be based on AvtoVAZ’s Lada Kalina and priced at about 180,000 rubles ($4,950), making it the least-expensive new car available on the Russian market if the Zhiguli series is phased out.
The Kalina, a B-segment low-cost car launched in 2005, currently sells at a base price of 250,000 rubles, so slashing the price to 180,000 rubles will require AvtoVAZ to strip it of options like power windows, interior materials, soundproofing and power steering, said Dmitry Agafonov, an automobile researcher with Autostat, which tracks the car industry.
The new car’s closest competitor would be the Daewoo Matiz, which is priced at 204,000 rubles, so demand is likely to be high if AvtoVAZ delivers on price.
“It will be as basic as the classic models but developed 30 years later,” Agafonov said by telephone from Tolyatti, where AvtoVAZ has its headquarters.
A switch from the Zhiguli to Kalina series would provide an indication of AvtoVAZ’s long-term strategy to secure market share at a time when the Zhiguli series is falling behind rising standards for fuel and safety.
The Zhiguli family of cars is based on Italy’s Fiat 124, which was named Car of the Year in 1967. Its two most popular models — the Lada 2105, dubbed “Pyatyorka,” and the Lada 2107, or “Semyorka” — have been rolling off AvtoVAZ’s assembly line since 1980 and 1982, respectively.
The two models remain the best-selling cars for both AvtoVAZ and Russia, with combined sales passing 185,000 units last year, according to company figures. Sales far exceeded the best-selling foreign model last year — Ford Focus, which sold 93,000 cars — but fell slightly short of the 188,000 units sold in 2007.
Car owners ridicule the outdated, boxy look and lack of safety of the Zhiguli series. The Lada 2107 infamously received zero points in a EuroNCAP frontal crash test. But its sticker price of less than 166,000 rubles leaves all competition behind.
An AvtoVAZ official denied Wednesday that the carmaker planned to phase out the Zhiguli series in the near future, but new legislation is threatening to push the models out of the market.
“The ‘Pyatyorka’ and ‘Semyorka’ will no longer meet qualifications for safety and exhaust, so the time will come soon to replace them, and the choice is limited,” Agafonov said.
The choice of Kalina makes sense because it is AvtoVAZ’s newest model, he said.
Older Russian models are notorious for their polluting engines, and another popular cheap car, the Oka, ceased production last year because it was impossible to upgrade it to meet new Euro-3 requirements. Zhiguli models were able to modernize, but the changes drove up their price by about 2 percent in January 2008. AvtoVAZ has raised car prices three more times since then.
AvtoVAZ chief Boris Alyoshin and other Russian car executives lobbied the government last year to push back the Euro-3 standards or make Russian companies exempt from them, but the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has turned down the requests.
The government has set January 2010 as the date when Euro-4 standards go into effect.
The Kalina currently can be equipped with a Euro-4 engine.
AvtoVAZ has previously floated the idea of a new inexpensive “people’s car,” and Alyoshin said last year that the car should cost about 180,000 rubles.
TITLE: Georgian Pop Swipes At Putin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TBILISI — Still smarting from war with Russia six months ago, Georgians have picked a song for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow that takes a swipe at Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The disco song “We Don’t Wanna Put In” by Stefane & 3G was chosen late on Wednesday by a jury and public vote on Georgian television, and has already caused a stir on the Internet.
It promises to receive a cool reception in Moscow on May 12-16. The band has not hidden the fact the song alludes to Putin, the ex-Russian president who evokes strong feelings in Georgia.
“Since we (Georgia) decided to take part, we need to send a message to Europe and first of all to Moscow,” song producer Kakha Tsiskaridze told Reuters on Thursday.
“The song is called “Put In” and its text carries a double meaning,” he said. “I think everyone will understand what we want to say. It’s important for us to say what Georgia wants to say as a country.”
But Georgia’s public broadcaster denied the song contained a political message. The contest rules prohibit lyrics, speeches, or gestures “of a political or similar nature.”
“This song is not about politics, it has nothing to do with politics and politicians,” said Natia Uznadze, international projects producer at First Channel. “If you look at the text of the song there’s nothing wrong with it,” Uznadze told Reuters.
TITLE: Medvedev Opens LNG Plant on Sakhalin
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: PRIGORODNOYE, Sakhalin Island — Russia’s first plant to supply natural gas by tanker opened Wednesday on Sakhalin Island, marking the country’s foray into a new market both by product and location.
Gazprom, which relies for most of its revenues on European Union sales, is gaining access to the lucrative Asian Pacific market through its control of the multibillion-dollar Sakhalin-2 joint venture that includes the plant.
President Dmitry Medvedev and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso looked on as chief executives of the venture’s members Gazprom, Royal Dutch Shell, Mitsui and Mitsubishi pressed a symbolic brick-sized button to launch the plant on a makeshift stage inside one of its facilities.
“All this, beyond any doubt, strengthens our position, the position of Russia, as the biggest player on the energy market,” Medvedev said at the ceremony. “I will not conceal it: We are very much delighted about that.”
The plant will add 5 percent to the global supply of liquefied natural gas, or gas cooled off to become liquid, when it ramps up to its full annual capacity of 9.6 million tons next year. The Grand Aniva tanker, with white semi-spherical tops of reservoirs rising from its deck, is waiting to set sail from this port in March with the first shipment of gas.
Sakhalin Energy Investment Co., the operator of the Sakhalin-2 project, will sell 65 percent of the gas to Japan, the fuel’s biggest market. North America will take 20 percent of the supply, with South Korea consuming the rest.
Produced off of Sakhalin and piped to the plant, the gas will eventually account for 8 percent of Japan’s consumption. “Having such an energy source was our dream for many years,” Aso said, speaking after Medvedev. “Russia is becoming a constructive partner in this region. Japan welcomes Russia in this capacity.”
Aso said cooperation with Russia would help resolve a dispute over the four Russian-controlled Kuril Islands that are claimed by Japan.
Britain’s Prince Andrew, flanked by Dutch Economics Minister Maria van der Hoeven, praised Russia as a reliable business partner.
“We would like to be able to continue to invest in Russia for the long-term, as we see ... Russia as a good partner to work with,” Prince Andrew said. “Also, we see Russia as a secure supplier of energy.”
He spoke a month after Russia and Ukraine ended a bitter gas dispute that disrupted supplies to Europe for weeks, leaving many people shivering in the cold and industries at a standstill.
Gazprom took control over Sakhalin-2 from Shell in 2007 after sustained pressure from the federal government over alleged environment violations.
Senior executives from Mitsui and Mitsubishi were appreciative of Gazprom’s clout Wednesday. “Thanks to their strong support, and also sometimes support to convince the local government and central government of Russia to clear various permissions, this project started [progressing] very smoothly,” Mitsui chief Shoei Utsuda said at a news conference. “I understand the Gazprom role for this project is huge.”
Mitsubishi chief Yorihiko Kojima said Gazprom’s participation made the government more supportive. “Maybe it’s another reason why we can celebrate the inauguration ceremony today,” he said.
TITLE: Kyrgyzstan to Close Air Base
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Kyrgyzstan’s parliament voted Thursday to close a key U.S. air base in the country — a move that could hamper President Barack Obama’s efforts to increase the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Deputies voted 78-1 for the government-backed bill to cancel the lease agreement on the Manas air base, a transit point for 15,000 troops and 500 tons of cargo each month to and from Afghanistan. Two deputies abstained.
If President Kurmanbek Bakiyev signs the bill and Kyrgyz authorities issue an eviction notice, the United States will have 180 days to vacate the base.
“The decision to shut the American base reflects the will of the Kyrgyz people,” said Nurbyubyu Kerimova, a deputy with the pro-government party that overwhelmingly dominates parliament in the former Soviet bloc nation.
Bakiyev unexpectedly called this month for the closure of Manas, complaining that the United States was not paying enough rent for the base.
His announcement of the base closure was made in Moscow, shortly after Russia offered his impoverished country $2.15 billion in aid and loans. Analysts say the closure and the aid appeared to be linked, although officials deny any connection.
However, Communist deputy Ishak Masaliyev said the decision on Manas could help improve ties between Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
“We in Kyrgyzstan do not need anybody else’s base. We have always advocated a union with Russia,” Masaliyev said.
Russia established an air base in Kyrgyzstan in 2003, after the U.S. base opened in late 2001.
Widespread public discontent in Kyrgyzstan over the U.S. military presence has been sharpened in recent years by a number of high-profile incidents surrounding the base.
In late 2006, a U.S. serviceman fatally shot truck driver Alexander Ivanov during a routine security check. U.S. officials said Ivanov threatened the serviceman with a knife.
“So far, no American soldier has appeared in court,” Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev told deputies Thursday.
On a recent visit to Kyrgyzstan, U.S. Gen. David Petraeus said an investigation into the killing had been reopened.
Sarbayev also complained that the United States has failed to adequately compensate Kyrgyzstan for $650,000 worth of damage caused to a civilian Tu-154 plane when it collided with a U.S. KC-135 tanker aircraft.
Manas base spokesman Maj. Damien Pickart rejected the suggestion and said the U.S. had conducted repair work on the Tu-154, which also doubled as the president’s private jet. The KC-135 was so severely damaged it could no longer be used, he said.
The only opposition to the bill came from the Social Democrat party, which argued the shuttering of Manas could undermine national security.
“The threat from the various extremist and terrorist organizations that seek to impose religious fanaticism in the region has not yet been removed,” said Social Democrat leader Bakyt Beshimov.
“Guided solely by Kyrgyzstan’s national interests, we believe the decision to withdraw the U.S. air base is premature,” he said.
Also Thursday, a delegation of U.S. military transportation officials arrived in another former Soviet state in the region, Tajikistan, which shares an 810-mile (1,300-kilometer) border with Afghanistan.
The officials will study Tajikistan’s transportation infrastructure and evaluate the potential for shipping nonmilitary cargo through the country to Afghanistan, the Tajik Foreign Ministry said.
TITLE: Kiev Says Envoy May Be Expelled
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Famed for his slips of the tongue and pithy witticisms, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine, has been threatened with expulsion after giving a newspaper interview peppered with derogatory remarks about the country’s leaders.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko “fight like dogs and bad-mouth each other,” Chernomyrdin said in an interview published last week in Komsomolskaya Pravda. “It’s not possible to negotiate with these Ukrainian leaders. If other people come along, we’ll see,” Chernomyrdin said.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in Kiev summoned Chernomyrdin on Tuesday and publicly reprimanded the ambassador for the interview.
Chernomyrdin committed a “gross breach of the norms of diplomatic ethics,” and his behavior was “incompatible with the status of the head of a diplomatic mission,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vladimir Ogryzko said in a statement.
Chernomyrdin was warned that his actions could prompt Ukraine to declare him persona non grata and expel him, the statement said.
“How would you react as a citizen of Ukraine if you read a statement in Komsomolskaya Pravda that our leadership hasn’t got any brains? As a citizen, this outraged me,” Ogryzko told reporters Wednesday, Interfax reported.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry called Ukraine’s threats to expel Chernomyrdin an “unfriendly step.”
Chernomyrdin, 70, served as prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and was appointed ambassador to Ukraine in 2001. Numerous web sites are devoted to his sayings. His most-quoted remark was in 1993 on the subject of monetary reforms: “We wanted the best, but it turned out like it always does.”
A Russian Foreign Ministry source said the interview was just Chernomyrdin being himself. “We know the picturesque nature of his language,” the source told Interfax.
TITLE: Baltics in Decline Following End of Boom
AUTHOR: By Gary Peach
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: REZEKNE, Latvia — For decades, the Rebir factory was the pride of the industrial town of Rezekne in eastern Latvia, with demand for its power drills and chain saws surviving the collapse of communism as it won over capitalist customers.
But the factory’s owners closed up shop late last year, victims of high labor costs during the country’s now-collapsed boom. Some 1,000 people in the town of 36,000 lost their jobs, sending local unemployment to nearly 15 percent, and with the recession deepening, hopes for new work are fading.
“The worst is yet to come,” said Diana Zirnina, a city administration official. “We can feel that people are angry.”
Rezekne’s boom-to-bust woes are mirrored across Latvia and its Baltic Sea neighbors Estonia and Lithuania.
Not long ago, the three countries were nicknamed “the Baltic Tigers” for their rapid growth and business-friendly policies and held up as models for other countries that regained control of their destinies after the Soviet collapse.
Now their economies are contracting sharply, pounded by the global financial crisis just as they were struggling to deal with a decline that set in after their economies overheated because of loose credit and government spending.
The frustration and anxiety amid the drab Soviet housing blocks of Rezekne, about 45 kilometers from the border with Russia, are palpable.
“It’s upsetting. Latvia’s lost so much,” said Andris Laglers, a driver who joined the ranks of the unemployed in October. “Somehow we have to survive this winter.”
Of the three countries, Latvia is the worst off, suffering the sharpest recession in the 27-member European Union. The center-right government of Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis was forced in December to borrow 7.5 billion euros ($9.5 billion) from the International Monetary Fund and Scandinavian countries — a huge sum for a 21 billion euro economy.
Statistics last week showed that output shrank by 10.5 percent year on year in the fourth quarter — meeting one yardstick for a depression, as opposed to a mere recession.
The reversal of fortune has stunned Latvians, who after joining the EU in 2004 quickly became accustomed to the good life. From 2000 to 2007, gross domestic product per capita increased more than 90 percent to 6,500 lats ($11,600).
The government in Riga is cutting back sharply, reducing pay for many civil servants by 30 percent and postponing projects such as a new national library. Every day, hundreds of jobs are lost in this country of 2.3 million, and by some forecasts unemployment, now at 8.3 percent, could reach 15 percent.
During the boom, banks lent eagerly and Latvians borrowed profligately, so that over four years beginning in 2004 the loan-to-GDP ratio soared from 40 percent to 88 percent. Real estate prices climbed so far that many Latvians, afraid they would miss out, rushed to the banks for home mortgage loans to buy houses and apartments, further inflating a property bubble. In 2006, growth reached a white-hot 12.2 percent.
Latvians are already looking back on those days ruefully as “the fat years.”
Economists gave abundant warnings that such fairy-tale growth was fraught with the risk of an equally precipitous fall. But government leaders pushed ahead so that Latvia would catch up to Western European living standards as quickly as possible.
Outside Rezekne, the dour expression of Pyotr Karatseyev reflects the general mood. Petting one of his 70 milk cows, Karatseyev said he was afraid that Latvia’s milk industry might soon cease to exist if the government doesn’t subsidize the wholesale purchase price, which is currently 0.15 lat (26 cents) per liter.
“There’s no choice. If this situation continues, we’ll have to slaughter the cattle and sell it for meat,” the farmer said.
In the rural district surrounding Rezekne, the job situation is the worst. Unemployment in the heavily agricultural area, which has a population of 40,000, reached 20 percent on Feb. 9, according to the local employment bureau, the highest in Latvia. As farmers struggle with low food and milk prices, more jobs could evaporate.
Estonia is suffering the same boom-and-bust cycle. On Friday, its statistics agency announced that fourth quarter GDP had fallen 9.4 percent year on year. The Baltic’s wealthiest economy in terms of GDP per capita now has Europe’s second-worst economy.
Lithuania’s economy is also headed for a contraction, though nearly all analysts agree that it won’t be as dramatic.
Anders Aslund, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said there might be a silver lining in the Baltic gloom.
“It’s better to fall fast than to fall slowly for a long time. The sooner you hit the bottom, the sooner you can start recovering,” he said.
Such scholarly insight is unlikely to placate people in Rezekne. The chairman of the city’s council, Juris Vjakse, said Rezekne was pinning its hopes on EU funds to weather the economic crisis. This year alone, he said, the city hopes to receive 5 million lats ($8.9 million) in EU money, which is nearly one-fourth the city’s total budget.
People in Rezekne have been toughened by earlier woes, including a 1999 downturn, for instance, when unemployment was 27 percent. The only difference is that this time they are part of the European community. “People here are used to working a bit more, suffering a bit more, and enjoying life a bit more,” Vjakse said, smiling. “So we are very sure that we’ll survive this crisis.”
TITLE: Human Rights Court Takes On Yukos Case
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The European Court of Human Rights has accepted a $34 billion lawsuit by former Yukos management against the government, apparently the largest claim ever made in the court.
The claim is worth the tax collected from Yukos, the claimants’ spokeswoman Claire Davidson said in e-mailed comments Wednesday.
The former managers say the charges against Yukos, once the country’s biggest oil firm, were fabricated so the government could snap up the firm.
The Strasbourg-based court threw out some of the government’s key arguments against the litigation, including that Yukos no longer existed and the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case.
The court ruled that although Yukos had ceased to exist legally in 2007, the case had a lasting moral dimension. “All the more so if the issues raised by the case transcend the person and the interests of the applicant,” the court said in its decision to hear the case.
The decision was made in late January but only published on the court’s web site this week.
The court also dismissed the government’s argument that the claimants had failed to exhaust their appeals in Russian courts, siding with Yukos managers who said it would be hopeless to appeal in Russia.
“The domestic courts consistently rejected the company’s attempts to contest the actions of the bailiffs, so the attempts would have been futile,” the court said.
Human rights activists critical of the state’s onslaught against Yukos praised the court’s decision. “We welcome this decision and hope that the government will live up to its obligations under the European Human Rights Convention,” said Tatyana Lokshina of the Moscow bureau of Human Rights Watch.
Former Yukos chief financial officer Bruce Misamore said the decision was good news for the company’s stakeholders. “This is an important step toward the vindication of the company’s belief in the rule of law — something it never secured in Russia,” he said in an emailed statement.
It was unclear Wednesday when the court would actually make a ruling in the case. Davidson said the claimants had been asked to submit further information by April and noted that the case has been given priority.
Yukos managers filed the charges in 2004, when Yukos was targeted in a tax case that ultimately left the company bankrupt and several top managers in jail. Former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sentenced in 2004 to eight years in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion, and the lion’s share of Yukos assets went to state oil company Rosneft in a series of auctions.
Meanwhile, a senior federal prison official suggested that a second trial against Khodorkovsky could take place without the defendant actually being present.
“Our pretrial detention facility can do a video conference with any Moscow court. This can be done if such a decision is made,” said Yunus Amayev, the head of the prison service’s branch in the Irkutsk district where Khodorkovsky is jailed, Interfax reported.
Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yury Shmidt said a court hearing without the defendant’s presence would not be legal.
“I first thought this was a joke, but then these are the words of a senior prison service official,” Shmidt said by telephone from St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Beeline Hikes Tariffs Despite Fall in Cell Phone Use
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Despite one of Russia’s three major mobile network operators, Beeline, announcing a significant raise of its tariffs Wednesday, the amount paid by Russian mobile telephone subscribers for cell connection recently decreased.
Beeline, the brand name owned by VimpelCom, said it would raise tariffs in some of the country’s regions, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, by 25-100 percent, Kommersant daily reported.
Some experts say the move is aimed at testing the reaction of the two other biggest players on the market — Megafon and MTS. As a result, the tariffs for mobile connections may increase throughout the country.
However, others see Beeline’s decision as a gesture of despair and a risky step, especially since the company has significant debts.
Beeline said it would change the parameters for a number of its tariff options. From Feb. 27 the cost of the first minute of its ‘Oblast’ tariff option for the Moscow region will increase from two to four rubles.
Subscribers of the ‘Monstr Obshcheniya’ option will pay 3.25 rubles (nine U.S. cents) for the first minute instead of 2.25 rubles (six cents), while the first four minutes of the ‘Prostye Veshchi’ option will cost 7.01 rubles instead of the previous 5.16 rubles.
All the top three network operators recently raised prices for international roaming.
Megafon raised prices by an average of 25 percent. Beeline also increased its international tariffs by the same amount, meaning a minute of talk time in Europe now costs 69 rubles instead of 57, and a minute of talk time in Asia costs 99 rubles instead of 79 rubles.
MTS decreased its prices for network connections in countries popular among Russian tourists such as Greece, Finland and Egypt by 60 percent, but increased prices for business destinations by 25 percent. Beeline also introduced differentiated tariffs.
Meanwhile, in the fourth quarter of 2008, the growth in demand for network connection in Moscow slowed down, Megafon’s Moscow branch said. About 14 percent of Muscovites cut down their expenses on mobile connections in December. In January this year, 16 percent of Russia’s residents said they had cut down on their expenses on cell phones, including 13 percent in Moscow.
Beeline said its tariff hike was not connected to the financial crisis and devaluation.
“The optimization of prices on the mobile network market is a regular business process. We introduce new tariffs, and old tariffs get updated,” said Yekaterina Osadchaya, a spokeswoman for Beeline.
MTS and Megafon said they were not planning to raise tariffs.
“In a crisis situation, an operator tries to keep the loyalty of its clients, therefore we don’t want to raise prices,” said Sergei Soldatenkov, general director of Megafon, Polit.Ru reported.
Experts say the raise of tariffs was expected.
“25 percent is exactly the minimum that will allow operators to compensate for the effect of the devaluation,” said Yevgeny Golosnoi, an analyst at Troika Dialog. Golosnoi said that in future the other “big three” operators will also raise their tariffs. Currently they are not under the same pressure as Beeline to do so since they have a lower debt burden — VimpelCom has $7.3 billion of debt, MTS has less than $3.2 billion; and Megafon has about one billion dollars), Polit.ru reported.
However, Vladislav Kochetkov, an analyst at Finam company, said he believed that MTS and Megafon would keep their tariffs at current levels in the near future, Strana.Ru reported. Kochetkov said MTS and Megafon could also increase their advertisement campaigns to attract new clients, including former Beeline subscribers who would be dissatisfied with the tariff increases.
“The company’s decision to raise tariffs looks like a sign of desperation and seems to be a rather risky step in the current situation,” Kochetkov said.
Marianna Yankova, a spokeswoman for Beeline’s St. Petersburg office, told The St. Petersburg Times last week that the crisis “could increase competition between the network operators in Russia”
“We can quite expect both cases of dumping and some price increases in certain directions,” Yankova said.
Yulia Nemekova, a spokeswoman for the northwestern branch of MTS, said the company also recently registered a decrease in mobile network connection levels.
“We think the explanation could be both a seasonal factor and the overall decrease in business activity and consumption in the country,” Nemekova said.
Nemekova said competition on the city’s mobile network market has been tougher than in many of the country’s other regions because there are five operators working in St. Petersburg.
“Therefore operators traditionally compete not in prices but in the number of services offered for the same money, in the quality of the connection and service of subscribers.
Nemekova said the general volume of mobile network services in Russia could decrease by 10.5 percent in 2009 compared to 2008. The average income from one subscriber per month will decrease from $12 in 2008 to $10 in 2009.
“The decrease will be caused both by the lower ruble rate compared to the dollar, and a drop in subscriber consumption,” Nemekova said.
TITLE: Printing Cash May Knock 18% Off Ruble
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Russia’s plan to increase the money supply to cover this year’s budget deficit may lead to an 18 percent devaluation in the ruble versus the dollar, Alfa Bank said.
Russia’s central bank plans to print 3.2 trillion rubles ($89 billion) to cover the budget deficit, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev.
“This ruble inflow will increase the monetary mass, allowing for additional ruble depreciation by at least eight rubles to the dollar,” Alfa analyst Natalya Orlova wrote in a note Thursday.
The currency slid to its lowest position against the dollar in 11 years on Wednesday, hitting 36.56 per dollar and edging close to the 41 level against a dollar/euro basket, which the Central Bank has vowed to defend with its foreign currency reserves.
Rating agencies are closely watching the size of Russia’s reserves, still the world’s third-largest at $383.5 billion, which lost over a third of their value because of the Central Bank’s policy of gradual depreciation of the ruble.
The government keeps $222 billion of rainy day savings in foreign-currency accounts in the Central Bank and will need about $90 billion to cover the budget deficit. Many analysts say this will deplete the reserves even further.
“This suggestion is methodologically wrong,” the Central Bank’s First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said in an interview cleared for publication on Wednesday.
“Roughly speaking, our reserves will be $100 billion more in 2009 than some analysts had thought. And surely they can be used for purposes corresponding to the international definition of reserves,” Ulyukayev said.
The government is currently working on a budget deficit assumption of 8 percent of GDP for this year, which Ulyukayev said would equal around 3.2 trillion rubles from the $137.3 billion Reserve Fund, part of the rainy day savings.
“At today’s exchange rate, that is around $90 billion, they must be sold by the government to us ... and we will [print] 3.2 trillion rubles, which will be used to fulfill budget obligations,” Ulyukayev said.
He added that the same process would apply if the government decided to use some of its $84.5 billion National Wealth Fund, also kept at the Central Bank, to issue subordinated loans to the country’s struggling commercial banks.
Ulyukayev said the move would not be inflationary, as it will be compensated by a reduction in the liquidity offered to commercial banks. The Central Bank is for now sticking by its inflation forecast of 13 percent this year.
(Reuters, Bloomberg)
TITLE: Ilim Denies It Will Lay Off 5,000 Staff in Russia
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ilim Group, St. Petersburg’s biggest pulp and paper corporation, has denied it plans to make large-scale redundancies after it was reported the company planned to lay off 5,000 of its employees as a result of the economic crisis.
Yelena Kononova, a spokeswoman for Ilim, said the crisis had seriously affected the company, which is indeed planning to dismiss some staff, but mainly at its enterprises in southern Siberia. The company’s administration hopes to minimize the number of people laid off, Ekho Peterburga radio station reported.
Kononova said that only the company’s central office is located in St. Petersburg, where several dozen people may be laid off.
Earlier, Russian media reported that Ilim had postponed the realization of its two billion dollar investment program and planned to lay off 5,000 employees, Fontanka.ru reported.
Paul Herbert, general director of Ilim Group said the company had decided to temporarily put the expensive projects on hold, business daily Delovoi Peterburg reported this week.
“Officially we’ve postponed the projects for a year, but in reality we’ll see how the situation goes. In our field the crisis has mainly affected large export-oriented companies,” Herbert said, DP reported.
Herbert said that demand for cellulose and paper products and packaging had decreased by 15-20 percent. This is “lower than the bottom,” he said.
As a result, the company decided to downsize its production plans and optimize costs, including by making 5,000 of the company’s staff redundant. Of Ilim’s 28,000 employees, the company plans to lay off a further 2,800 people. Another 2,000 staff at eight service enterprises that Ilim plans to sell will also lose their jobs. Experts say such measures will help Ilim to economize up to 6-7 percent of it expenses.
Ilim also plans to sell its secondary assets, such as repair and service shops, which should help to save about 10 percent of expenses.
Currently 50 percent of Ilim Group belongs to the International Paper corporation, which runs the company’s operative administration, according to Delovoi Peterburg.
Ilim Group is very dependent on its American owners, said Denis Sokolov, head of LPK Confederation. The owners are primarily interested in the company’s U.S. operations, Sokolov said, Fontanka reported.
President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that the government would support the creation of pulp and paper mills close to the country’s borders to export more value-added products, Bloomberg reported.
“The task of setting up new pulp mills remains a pressing issue for our country,” Medvedev said during a government meeting in the Siberian city of Chita.
TITLE: Right to Produce Georgian Borjomi Water to Go on Sale
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia said Tuesday that it would sell the rights to produce its distinctive Borjomi mineral water, drunk around Russian dinner tables for decades until Moscow banned it in 2006.
The slightly salty mineral water is not to everyone’s taste, but it had been a Russian cultural institution since the country was ruled by the tsars.
Many people swear by it as a hangover cure, and doctors even prescribe it to patients, believing that it has medicinal properties.
Moscow cited health risks when imposing the import ban, but Georgia said it was a move to punish its pro-Western government.
Deputy Economic Development Minister Levan Pateishvili said the conditions for the auction, to be held on March 20, would be published Wednesday.
“A 25-year license for Borjomi will be sold to the bidder offering the highest price and best conditions,” Pateishvili said. The minimum bid price will be $8 million.
The current license held by Georgian Glass & Mineral Water expires on March 19, the deadline for new bids.
Before the ban, Russians bought 75 million liters per year.
GG&MW says it restored Borjomi’s export potential within two years, finding new export markets elsewhere. But exports have again fallen 30 percent to 40 percent since October 2008 with the onset of the global financial crisis.
TITLE: The Orange Emperor Has No Clothes
AUTHOR: By Fyodor Lukyanov
TEXT: Despite living separately for the last 17 years, Russia and Ukraine are still inextricably intertwined. Events in one country inevitably have an impact on the other. In fact, two of Vladimir Putin’s greatest foreign policy failures were linked to Ukraine. The first was in 2004, when then-President Putin personally meddled with Ukraine’s presidential election process and his preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, lost under shameful circumstances. The second flop occurred early last month when Prime Minister Putin temporarily halted gas supplies to Europe in the heat of the gas war with Ukraine, a move that will have negative long-term consequences for Russian-European political and economic relations.
At the same time, Moscow’s defeat does not signify a victory for Kiev. As President Viktor Yushchenko’s term in office approaches its end, Ukraine is poised on the brink of a severe economic and political crisis that will most likely be worse than Russia’s.
Ukraine’s deep recession stems as much from the global crisis as from the state’s inept management of the economy. What’s more, Kiev’s leadership is constantly mired in political struggles that go deeper than the most visible battle between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The main political factions have lost credibility with voters and lost respect from the international community. Moreover, the rule of law and independence of the court system have been severely eroded under Yushchenko’s presidency.
In addition, few of the foreign policy goals set by champions of the Orange Revolution have been achieved. The hope of joining NATO has amounted to nothing, and the prospects for integration with Europe have all but disappeared. To make matters worse, Russian-Ukrainian relations have never been as bad as they have been during the past four years.
What are the reasons for these dismal results? Is it because the country’s political elite are too inexperienced or inept? Paradoxically, the roots of today’s problems can be traced to the 2004 Orange Revolution itself. The initial euphoria over the “democratic revolution” drew attention away from the election violations surrounding Yushchenko’s victory. After the first vote, which was held in November 2004, the Central Election Commission declared Yanukovych the winner. Then thousands of Yushchenko supporters protested in the streets, alleging that the vote was rigged. In response, the Ukrainian Supreme Court annulled the results and ordered a repeat of the second election, which was held a month later. Logically speaking, if the first election results were annulled, there should have been a completely new election open to all candidates; under these conditions, perhaps there would be have been people running in the race. Instead, there was simply a rerun of the old election between Yushchenko and Yanukovych, which Yushchenko won. This is a vivid example of Ukrainian legal nihilism, and to this day Yushchenko is fond of manipulating the Constitution and court system to strengthen his own political position.
In addition, outside forces played an important role in shaping Ukraine’s internal political process. It is true that Russia intervened by supporting Yanukovych, but the West’s intervention was more powerful, including the support of nongovernmental organizations within Ukraine and developing a global PR campaign in support of Yushchenko.
After Yushchenko became president, the Orange coalition declared their new strategy of aligning with the West. This strong, pro-Western orientation, unprecedented in Ukrainian politics, complicated its relations with Moscow.
With practically no chance of joining the European Union, Ukraine has been left without a well-defined goal. It is now difficult to take seriously the popular slogan of Ukraine’s “European integration.”
One of Yushchenko’s most important political goals was gaining Ukraine’s membership in NATO, and this immediately became a source of heated contention with Russia. Moreover, Yushchenko tried to play the Ukrainian nationalism card, but this was clearly a flawed approach in a country with so many different ethnicities and cultures.
According to a recent Public Opinion Foundation-Ukraine Internet rating, if the presidential election were held today, only 1.9 percent of the poll participants would vote for Yushchenko. In any event, the 2009 presidential election campaign promises to be heated, and this could ultimately complicate relations with the country’s neighbors, particularly Russia. The recent gas war with Russia has shown that the Ukrainian president is willing to take risks and that he can skillfully provoke Moscow to make the Kremlin look bad. The biggest risk would be for Yushchenko to provoke Moscow on the issue of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, but this could lead to a conflict much more serious than the gas war.
Considering Ukraine’s important geopolitical position, events in the country have direct repercussions for Russia and Europe. Kiev’s politicians, however, do not fully appreciate this fact as they are more caught up in internal battles and the struggle for their own political survival. This shortsightedness will not change until a new, more pragmatic generation of politicians come to power.
For their part, Ukraine’s neighbors have yet to figure out how best to deal with Kiev. Moreover, they continue to believe in myths: Europeans like to believe the fairy tale that Ukraine is building a European democracy, and Russians like the myth that Ukraine — or at the very least its Russian-dominated eastern half — will one day return to the Russian empire.
Fyodor Lukyanov is editor of Russia in Global Affairs.
TITLE: The Danger of Downloading
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: The wisdom of our State Duma deputies is a well-known attribute — second only to their selfish patriotism. Apparently, it was their sense of national pride that moved them to pass in two readings amendments to the Civil Code regarding copyright violations. International trade organizations and a host of Western companies concerned about Russians’ widespread abuse of copyright laws had been pushing the Kremlin and the Duma for years to strengthen its legislation.
According to the legislative bill, any unlawful or unsanctioned copying of text, music or pictures from the Internet is subject to criminal prosecution of up to six years in prison.
In reality, though, it is almost impossible for the average computer user to not violate some copyright law every time they use the Internet. For example, if you accidentally right click your mouse on some useless picture while browsing the web, you are a criminal. And this is the weakness of the new legislative bill — virtually every Internet surfer is guilty a priori. If the proposed amendments become law, the state will have the luxury of jailing any citizen it wants at any moment, and they would have every legal justification for doing so.
In addition to surfers, Internet providers would also be liable. Since they are obligated to spy on the Internet activities of their customers day and night, if even a single user posts pirated material on the network the provider could have problems with the law. The only safe path for the provider to take is to be as vigilant as possible, informing the authorities on even the slightest possible copyright violation. This could mean that thousands of web sites and blogs would be wiped out.
But please don’t think that Duma deputies are inhumane. They have included two mitigating circumstances in the bill that could help Internet users evade a prison sentence. First, you can claim that the alleged copyright violation was caused by “necessary” circumstances. The only problem is that “necessary” is not clearly defined. Imagine court proceedings in which the accused testifies, “My grandmother was suffering from depression and wanted to take her own life. After I downloaded and played her favorite music for her, she decided to live a little longer.” The jury members break into tears and find the defendant innocent.
Second, a person can evade prosecution if he can prove that he is a comedian. The bill allows for free use of other people’s intellectual property if it is being used as a parody. Now that’s funny, isn’t it?
And for all of the people who rely on the Internet for automatic translations from English to Russian, the legislation has tried to create a loophole for your free use of these programs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules.
It appears that WTO membership is a key motivation behind this legislation. For the sake of this prize, lawmakers are willing to sacrifice anything, from citizens’ rights to common sense.
At the same time, there could be an added bonus for our security siloviki. They also see plenty of opportunities to increase their surveillance of Russians’ Internet activities under the pretext of complying with this new copyright law, of course. As everyone knows, Russia is a free, democratic country, and therefore nobody is thrown in prison because of his political views. But I have a sneaking suspicion that only the Kremlin’s political foes will be the ones who are caught violating this law.
The only hurdle left for this bill to become law is for it to pass the third reading in the Duma. Usually, the third reading is only for eliminating typos. In this case, you could say the entire legislation is one enormous typographical error.
Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.
TITLE: History on skin
AUTHOR: By Roland Elliott Brown
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: There is a cliche — one too readily employed with regard to contemporary Western culture — to the effect that such and such an artist has “pushed boundaries” or has “broken taboos.” Most people, if they are honest with themselves, would admit that aesthetic boundaries are exceedingly porous in liberal democracies, where bold statements are more likely to bring accolades than rebukes.
Consider, by way of contrast, the fate of a Russian convict described in Edward Kuznetsov’s 1973 “Prison Diaries,” upon whose forehead prison surgeons operated three times to remove a political tattoo:
“The first time they cut out a strip of skin with a tattoo that said ‘Khrushchev’s Slave.’ The skin was then roughly stitched up. After he was released, he tattooed ‘Slave of the USSR’ on his forehead. Again, he was forcibly operated on to remove it. [The] third time, he covered his whole forehead with ‘Slave of the CPSU’ [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. This tattoo was cut out and now, after three operations, the skin is so tightly stretched across his forehead that he can no longer close his eyes.”
Russian criminal tattoos have, in some small but significant way, begun to infiltrate and influence the Western creative class’ ideas of Russia at its most outre. In recent years, they have been depicted in David Cronenberg’s film “Eastern Promises” and in Martin Amis’ novel of the Great Terror, “House of Meetings.”
That anyone outside Russia should know anything about the phenomenon is due in no small part to the efforts of Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, the founders of the London-based publishing and design company, FUEL, which has recently released the third volume of its popular “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.”
In a recent email exchange from London, Murray described how his and Sorrel’s desire to bring the dark and splenetic, anti-authoritarian aesthetic of the Soviet underworld to English-speaking audiences took shape.
“We made a trip to Moscow in February 1992, when we were studying at the Royal College of Art,” said Murray. “We were producing our FUEL magazine from the college at the time, and it was our intention to produce and print an issue from Moscow,” he said.
“Each issue was themed around four letter words, and USSR seemed an interesting play on this — particularly at a time when Yeltsin had just declared, ‘Everything, everywhere, is for sale,’” he added.
Murray and Sorrel had an acquaintance working for a Russian publisher who showed them drawings by Danzig Baldayev, a guard at St. Petersburg’s Kresty Prison who was also a talented amateur anthropologist and folklorist. Baldayev had made detailed copies of the tattoos of hundreds of prisoners he had encountered.
The tattoos Baldayev depicted were a language in themselves, comprised of a rich array of symbols and illustrations that denoted a prisoner’s crimes and political allegiances, as well as his or her rank in the prison hierarchy. Prisoners typically applied them to each other — not always with consent — using inks improvised from soot, sugar, ashes and urine.
The tradition derives from the practice of tsarist prison authorities, who branded the faces of hard labor convicts, identifying them as criminals for life.
The motifs of 20th-century tattoos were typically anti-Soviet enough to warm the heart of any cold warrior, but many of them also expressed such relish of murder and theft, and such bloodthirsty ethnic chauvinism, that the viewer is compelled to acknowledge that not only innocents and unfortunates ended up in Soviet prisons.
A typical anti-communist tattoo in the most recent volume of the series depicts Lenin as a horned, hairy demon — the manner in which Russian convicts typically depicted “Jews” — being crucified and roasted over a burning copy of Marx’s “Capital” by two angels. The text below reads, “God’s trial for the leader of the world’s proletariat.”
“We had never seen anything quite like them,” Murray says. “The fact that the same hand had made all these drawings made the subject something that could be grasped, measured and catalogued. They were very interesting as objects in themselves, made with an ink pen on thick art paper with Baldayev’s ‘official’ stamp and initials in each corner.”
In addition to Baldayev’s drawings, Murray and Sorrel were shown black-and-white photographs of the tattoos taken by Sergei Vasilyev, which, Murray says, became an important accompaniment to Baldayev’s illustrations because they confirmed their authenticity.
When Murray and Sorrel expressed interest in turning the drawings and photos into a book, Baldayev and Vasilyev wanted to produce a coffee table book. However, the designers had a more ambitious aesthetic approach in mind.
“Our intention was that the books should feel like they existed already, so when you came across them in a bookshop they almost felt second-hand, [like] an old ethnographic exploration from the 1950s. The drawings span 1940 to 1990, so we wanted to convey an element of age in the design,” said Murray.
“We wanted people to be able to pick them up without being frightened off by the covers, so we chose pastel colors, which also felt quite Russian to us. The books appear quite beautiful as objects, which is a deliberate contrast to the often shocking and dark content,” he added.
In addition to being attractive art objects, the books exhibit a scholarly quality. While Baldayev was unable to pursue the education he desired because his father had been declared an “enemy of the people,” he was nevertheless a formidable autodidact and pursued his subject with scholarly rigour.
Although Baldayev died shortly after the publication of the first “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia,” Murray and Sorrel have aimed to preserve the serious tone of his work by inviting various experts to contribute to the books.
Anne Applebaum, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for her book, “Gulag: A History,” contributed an introduction to the second volume in the series, while Alexander Sidorov, a historian of Russian criminal life, wrote an essay and an exhaustive set of explanatory notes for the third. The books have proved a great success both in the British design community — they won a Design and Art Direction Award in 2005 — and among an ever-growing cult audience. The first two volumes, now out of print, are collector’s items that sell for up to $400 each online.
Murray and Sorrel continue to develop books on other aspects of Russian visual culture.
“As Russia [particularly Moscow] has changed over the last 15 years, it has interested us that elements of that society we glimpsed when we first visited in 1992 have started to disappear. As the general Russian culture becomes more ‘Westernized,’ more transient social traditions fall by the wayside. We aim to document them,” Murray said.
FUEL has recently published “Home-Made” by Vladimir Archipov, which documents tools and other items made by ordinary Russians because of the lack of consumer goods in the Soviet Union, and “Notes From Russia” by Alexei Plutser-Sarno, which is a portrait of the Russian street told through public notices.
All of FUEL’s Russia books address the layers of individuality and transgression that manifested themselves visually, by admirable or dubious means, throughout the Soviet era. Much of what they have documented shows up the frivolity of off-the-shelf modes of expression cultivated in the West during the same period.
“I often remark on how tattoos today are merely based on style, as worn by footballers and pop stars,” says Murray. “We believe that the interest in the Russian criminal tattoos is because they actually have meaning.”
TITLE: Chernov’s choice
TEXT: Alt-rock band Tequilajazzz will perform at the underground rock club Zoccolo on Saturday. “It’s our traditional concert at Zoccolo — lest we should lose our roots, we play there twice in summer and twice in winter, but this year we have only managed to perform once,” Tequilajazzz frontman Yevgeny Fyodorov said by phone on Thursday.
“Zoccolo is a direct successor of [the now-defunct] Moloko club, which was always dear to us as a successor to [the city’s pioneering underground rock club] TaMtAm. So we moved our winter and summer concerts to Zoccolo.”
Tequilajazzz, whose last studio work was a CD single called “Berlin” in 2007, has recorded its new album and is about to add some finishing touches to it with producer/recording engineer Andrei Alyakrinsky.
Last month, Fyodorov took part in a festival titled Barents Spektakel/Barents Days 2009 in the Norwegian border town of Kirkenes. Named “Borders — Control or Rock ‘n’ Roll?” the performance aimed to “manifest cultural politics across and without borders,” stating: “Rock ‘n’ roll is a mix of popular musical genres; Rock ‘n’ roll is a melting pot of different music traditions; Rock ‘n’ roll (read: arts and culture) is a folk alternative to border control!”
Fyodorov played and sang alongside Sami singer Inga Juuso, Finnish accordion player Kimmo Pohjonen and a group of Norwegian figure-skaters. The outdoor performance took place on Kirkenes’ main square, surrounded by artificial border control towers.
“It was prepared improvisation,” Fyodorov said.
“I prepared all the music in advance, sort of sketches, and then we worked with a computer, using every technology — starting from an accordion and traditional Sami singing and finishing with computer stuff. It was a unique, one-off thing, it’s not likely to be continued, though we plan to bring Kimmo Pohjonen to St. Petersburg and organize an ordinary club concert for him, rather than a festival performance at SKIF.”
Late last month, Fyodorov also joined the Greenpeace campaign against waste-burning plants in Russia. A photo of him holding a poster calling for the closure of waste-burning plants can be seen on Greenpeace’s web site.
After the concert at Zoccolo, Tequilajazzz will leave for the Uzbek capital Tashkent to perform at a silent film festival. The band will perform a live soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film “Strike” (“Stachka”).
This week’s international visitor is The Real McKenzies, a Vancouver, Canada-based band that blends punk rock and Celtic folk music. The band, whose sound has been described as the Sex Pistols meet Scottish folk legend Robbie Burns, will perform at Bubble Bar on Friday.
Local favorites performing this week include urban folk band La Minor (Achtung Baby, Friday), Rubl, Leningrad frontman Sergei Shnurov’s new band (A2, Friday) and indie pop/disco band Pep-See (Orlandina, Monday.)
— By Sergey Chernov
TITLE: Petersburg Prophet
AUTHOR: By Katya Galitzine
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: How often does a translation sing with the original voice of the author? Almost never. Consequently, great poetry and artistic prose writing remain fully appreciated only by those who understand the author’s native tongue. Andrei Bely’s great Russian novel “Petersburg” was translated into English three times in the 20th century. Each time, something was lacking, and the translation failed to capture the magic of Bely’s literary voice. This month sees the publication of a new and definitive version by former Manchester University Professor John Elsworth.
Despite being set in 1905 after Russia’s defeat in the war with Japan war, the book — first published in 1913, in Russia — is timeless. The architecture, monuments and weather of St. Petersburg have not changed (although Bely, himself from Moscow, describes routes within the novel that are physically impossible.
“There is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist.” His St. Petersburg is vivid but imaginary. Those who have lived in St. Petersburg have experienced the minutiae described — the weight of the doors, the darkness of entrances to buildings, the flying dust particles in shafts of sunlight — but Bely devotes whole paragraphs to descriptions of such elements of the city that most take for granted. As Elsworth himself has said, only an outsider to the city could have written this book. There is also a giddiness and emotional hysteria displayed by the characters that people visiting St. Petersburg often fall prey to.
Andrei Bely — the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev — rewrote the novel in 1922. This later, shorter version was printed in Berlin and was heavily edited and altered by Bely himself. The book remained undiscovered by English readers until 1959, when a translation by John Kournos came out. By then, Vladimir Nabokov had already praised the book as one of the most important novels of the 20th century, along with James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and the first volume of Proust’s ‘fairytale’ “In Search of Lost Time.”
Due to the stilted Kournos translation in existence, this acclaim baffled many. Academics over the years have argued and discussed whether Bely’s first or second version of “Petersburg” is the true masterpiece. The second translation, done in 1978 by two Slavonic professors from Columbia University, Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, was also of Bely’s 1922 version and was until now the version most regard as the best, but it is heavy with footnotes and contains a long introduction begging the reader to forgive their inability to exactly transliterate many of the linguistic mechanisms.
John Elsworth, the new Bely prophet, chooses to merely write an afterword in his new translation, and has achieved the impossible — working with the original, more complex 1913 version, with no loss in style or repetition. He has managed to recreate the mesmerizing rhythm that sets a frenzied pace, echoing the turmoil of the tormented son, Nikolai, and balancing this perfectly with the measured symmetry of the language used in chapters focusing on Nikolai’s aging father, Senator Apollon Apollonovich.
In London last week, the streets still puddled with black “Russian” snow, a small group of selected guests attended the launch at Daunt books of this latest edition of “Petersburg,” published (appropriately) by the Pushkin Press. Elsworth, the U.K.’s leading specialist on Bely’s work, spoke about the writer and his art.
Elsworth has already translated “The Silver Dove” — intended by Bely to be the first volume of a trilogy; a rural tale to “Petersburg’s” urban story.
The web site of the professor clearly states that he “no longer accepts research students for supervision.” After listening to him for 20 minutes, it seemed that all of the audience wanted to be his students; he makes it very clear he is now retired. And thank goodness he is, or he would not have had the time to recreate this literary gem with his exciting translation.
The forerunner to “Ulysses,” and although almost 100 years old, it is like a new voice has been discovered. At last, a translation exists that will enable “Petersburg” to join the ranks of great Russian novels for the English-speaking reader.
“Petersburg” by Andrei Bely (translated by John Elsworth) is published by Pushkin Press.
TITLE: French flair
AUTHOR: By Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Located in the Courtyard by Marriott Vasilievsky Hotel on the northern bank of Vasilievsky Island, newcomer Pierrot hasn’t quite worn in its squeaky new interior since its opening in November, but it more than makes up for its sterile atmosphere with a menu of exquisite dishes that should stand the test of time.
Upon arrival at Pierrot at around 9 p.m. on a weekday evening, the gigantic, high-ceilinged dining room appeared deserted. It took some minutes to spot and flag down the lone waitress, which proved to be a constant problem throughout dinner. The other parties were almost invisible, thanks to the vast expanse of tables and the strategic placement of walls and booths.
The atmosphere would be ideal for businessmen seeking a place to wheel and deal over a power lunch: The diverse layout minimizes background noise while providing many spacious but private corners. The restaurant also offers 2-course and 3-course business lunch options for 300 and 400 rubles ($8 and $11), respectively. The deal runs weekdays from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., at which time the restaurant’s view onto the Malaya Neva and Petrovsky stadium can be fully appreciated.
Although the restaurant should be a hot ticket for businessmen, it’s not the place for a hot date. A romantic evening at Pierrot would shrivel and die under the surgical glare of the restaurant’s odd mix of Bauhaus and colonial light fixtures, then fade away amid the pale greens, beiges and light oranges of its dentist-office decor.
Although Pierrot is part of a chain found in Marriott hotels throughout the world, the restaurant serves its own distinct “Eastern French” cuisine. The “Salad ‘Landaise’” (350 rubles, $10) lived up to this moniker with its mix of fresh vegetables, duck confit and “Foie Gras croutons” lightly drizzled in a delectable olive oil. The drier consistency of the duck blended perfectly with the juicy cherry tomatoes, while the lettuce and still-crunchy asparagus played an excellent foil to the melt-in-your-mouth softness of the Foie Gras, which was sprinkled with fresh black pepper and served on slices of toasted baguette.
The Herring Forschmak (200 rubles, $5.50), on the other hand, was a tale of wasted potential. Despite a noble attempt to liven up the traditional dish, the oily potato slices proved too similar in texture to the fish, and the combination of pickled herring and herring pate overwhelmed the fragile flavors contributed by slivers of onion and pickled apple.
But any doubts about the level of culinary skill practiced at Pierrot disappeared with the arrival of the entrees: Marinated lamb shashlik with ratatouille and spicy lamb glace (650 rubles, $18), followed by grilled salmon with sweet spinach and lemon butter (500 rubles, $14). Although the portions weren’t huge, the food was filling and was supplemented by a complimentary basket of moist yet crisp white and wheat bread.
The tender salmon meat in itself was nearly tasteless, but the delicate sauces — a creamy cheese glaze and a sweet vinaigrette with berry overtones — accentuated its subtle flavor to great effect. The spinach bed beneath helped in this regard, occasionally disgorging raisins to spark off the sweetness of the sauces. It seemed a shame to squeeze lemon juice over such a delicate balancing act, but once tried, we discovered that the lemon’s tartness added yet another delectable orbit to the solar system of flavors.
The lamb shashlik was more forceful in terms of flavor. The grilled meat was substantial but not too rubbery, while the vegetables in the ratatouille were cooked to a slightly chewy perfection. The sweet tang of the glace went well with both the savory meat and zesty ratatouille.
The Sansonnet white wine and Les Olivieres red recommended by the waitress and priced at 150 rubles ($4) a glass, were just the thing to wash down the salmon and lamb, respectively. We passed on a short but comprehensive dessert menu with prices ranging from 200 to 250 rubles ($5.50 to $7).
My Russian guest summed up our dinner with a fashion analogy: “You know, this restaurant is like that famous little black dress by Coco Channel; there is everything that is needed, but nothing extra. Only style, elegance and taste.”
TITLE: N. Korea Says Troops Are Ready
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea stepped up its war rhetoric Thursday, saying its troops are “fully ready for an all-out confrontation” with South Korea ahead of a visit to Seoul by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
North Korea’s military accused South Korea’s conservative President Lee Myung-bak of using “nonexistent nuclear and missile threats” from the North as a pretext for an invasion, amid reports North Korea is preparing to test-fire a long-range missile.
The strident statement came as Clinton was to arrive Thursday in Seoul for talks expected to focus on North Korea. Tensions between the two Koreas have risen to the highest level in a decade since the pro-American Lee took office a year ago with a harder line toward the North than his liberal predecessors.
Analysts say North Korea has been using threats against thae South — as well as missile test preparations — to draw the attention of President Barack Obama’s administration amid a deadlock in nuclear negotiations. North Korea said Monday it “has no need to draw anyone’s attention.”
Thursday’s statement, carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, called Lee’s administration a “group of traitors” and warned it “should never forget that the (North) Korean People’s Army is fully ready for an all-out confrontation.”
KCNA also claimed Thursday that the U.S. and South Korea were preparing for an attack by planning joint military exercises, and warned they would pay “a high price” for their moves.
The U.S. and South Korea insist such joint exercises are purely defensive.
North Korea has reportedly moved a Taepodong-2 missile — believed capable of reaching Alaska — to a launch site on its northeast coast.
Seoul Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan warned that a launch would “inevitably” invite sanctions because it would violate a 2006 U.N. Security Council resolution banning North Korea from pursuing missile or nuclear programs.
Clinton also warned Tuesday that a missile launch “would be very unhelpful in moving our relationship forward.”
North Korea said earlier this week that it has the right to “space development” — a term it used in 1998 when it conducted a ballistic missile test but claimed it put a satellite into orbit. It carried out its first nuclear test blast in 2006, and says it has atomic bombs.
Since taking office last year, Lee has stopped unconditional South Korean aid to the North until it abides by a pledge to dismantle its nuclear program. He also has questioned whether the South should observe a 2007 accord involving massive economic aid for the North that his liberal predecessor signed at a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
North Korea has accused Lee of wreaking their relations, and declared that a 1992 nonaggression pact and all other peace agreements with the South are now void.
On Thursday, the 17th anniversary of the start of the nonaggression pact, South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles relations with North Korea, urged the North to stop escalating tensions and agree to a dialogue.
TITLE: Zenit Starts Season With Victory at Home
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: PARIS — Competition-rusty champions Zenit St. Petersburg braved minus 10 degrees temperatures to beat VfB Stuttgart, St. Etienne relived the glory days and AC Milan and Aston Villa drew as 2009 UEFA Cup action kicked off on Wednesday.
Petersburg, fixtureless since December 10, showed no little match fitness in beating their German opponents 2-1 at home in this last 32 match.
Szabolcs Huszti scored for St. Petersburg after just two minutes and Anatoliy Tymoshchuk, who moves to Bayern Munich next season, hit the winner at the end of the first half, sandwiching Mario Gomez’s 15th minute equalizer.
Filippo Inzaghi’s record-equalling 66th goal in Europe, joining Real Madrid’s Raul, looked set to earn AC Milan victory at Werder Bremen, where they drew 0-0 in 1989 in the European Cup semi-final.
But Diego’s powerful shot past Brazilian keeper Dida near the end meant it ended 1-1.
Many of the 36,000-strong crowd had come to see AC Milan’s David Beckham, on loan from LA Galaxy, but the former England captain spent the majority of the game on the bench, coming on right at the end for twice former FIFA World Player of the Year Ronaldinho.
Aston Villa will be hoping it is less cold in Moscow than it was in St. Petersburg on Wednesday for the return leg against CSKA Moscow following their 1-1 draw at Villa Park. Martin O’Neill’s men welcomed back England midfielder Gareth Barry, suspended for last weekend’s FA Cup defeat to Everton.
On this showing however, the Premier League club have some way to go before they are ready to cut it with the best in Europe which would help in keeping the likes of Barry at the club.
Norwegian striker John Carew, whose second half goal for Villa cancelled out Brazilian Vagner Love’s 14th minute opener, told Channel Five television: “European games are very difficult, and we were against a great team, so we can’t be disappointed.
“It was a good game in the end but the away game will be more difficult, and cold, so we will have to prepare well and believe we can do it.”
Paris Saint Germain and St. Etienne flew the flag impressively for France. St. Etienne ended Olympiakos’s 100 percent record in 16 matches in all competitions this season in claiming a 3-1 victory at Piraeus, reminiscent of their impressive glory days of reaching the 1976 European Cup final.
PSG youngster Guillaume Hoarau scored twice in their 2-0 home victory against VfL Wolfsburg, no doubt earning presidential approval as head of state Nicolas Sarkozy looked on at the Parc des Princes - and then paid them a visit in the dressing room.
And 2004 champions Valencia drew 1-1 at 10-man Dynamo Kiev, David Silva scoring in the eighth minute before a Raul Albiol second half own goal for Kiev off Florin Cernat’s freekick.
TITLE: World Cup Stadium In Jeopardy
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: JOHANNESBURG — Around 400 builders at one of the 2010 South Africa World Cup stadiums have been dismissed for going on strike in a move that could put at risk its July completion deadline, their union and employers said.
“About 400 of the construction workers at Mbombela stadium, most of them members of the National Union of Mine Workers (NUM), who have been on illegal strike were sacked on Tuesday,” George Ledwaba, the union’s local spokesman told AFP.
“If this strike, which began on February 6, goes on for another week, it will affect the scheduled completion date of the stadium,” he said.
“Our target completion time is July … we will probably have to extend this deadline as a result of the strike,” said the stadium’s construction manager, Neil Fourie.
He said that the workers downed tools over wages and bonuses.
Ledwaba condemned the strike by his union members which he said was “illegal” and “irresponsible.”
TITLE: Clinton Tries to Boost U.S. Image Abroad
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JAKARTA — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Indonesia on Thursday that Washington would not neglect Southeast Asia and addressed anger in the predominantly Muslim country over U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Clinton also discussed economic cooperation and efforts to reach a new global agreement on climate change with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono during her 24-hour sidetrip to Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, before heading for South Korea for meetings on the North’s military threat.
After meeting Yudhoyono, Clinton said the United States had neglected Southeast Asia and that her decision to visit Indonesia on her first trip abroad in her new job aimed to redress that.
“We don’t want to be absent,” she told local journalists.
“We want to be present.”
Some Southeast Asian nations felt Washington had not paid the region enough attention under President George W. Bush, allowing China to fill the vacuum.
Clinton was given a welcome more typical of a head of state. Yudhoyono, who is seeking re-election in July, greeted her outside his office in the white colonial-style presidential palace in Jakarta before the two went in for talks.
“The president underlined that a global consensus (on climate change) cannot be achieved without U.S. leadership,” presidential spokesman Dino Patti Djalal told a news conference afterwards.
Earlier, Clinton made small talk on a popular music TV show and toured U.S.-funded aid projects as she tried to improve America’s image in Indonesia, a country where many of the Bush administration’s policies, including the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, were deeply unpopular.
Appearing on “Dahsyat” (“Awesome”), a local youth music show, Clinton got a cheer when she said the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were among her favorite musicians, but she politely declined an offer to sing herself.
She also fielded questions about the anger of Indonesians at U.S. policy in the Middle East, saying Obama had decided to push hard for Israeli-Palestinian peace despite the challenges of ending the six-decade conflict.
“We are going to work very hard to try to resolve what has been such a painful, difficult conflict for so many years ... so that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace.”
Clinton confirmed that she would attend a conference on rebuilding Gaza in Cairo on March 2.
Clinton, like Bush administration officials in the past, held up Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, as proof that modernity and Islam can co-exist as she visited the country where Obama spent four years as a boy.
She lavished praise on Indonesia for its transformation from an autocracy under former President Suharto — who was forced to resign in 1998 — to a vibrant democracy.
Her talks also covered the financial crisis, and Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda said on Wednesday that Jakarta had discussed the possibility of U.S. assistance in the form of a currency swap agreement and possible contingency funding.
Indonesia is already seeking to extend a $6 billion currency swap arrangement with Japan and has similar deals, each worth $3 billion, with China and South Korea.
Clinton is due to arrive in Seoul later on Thursday.
North Korea has repeatedly threatened in recent weeks to reduce the South to ashes and on Thursday said it was ready for war.
Pyongyang is thought to be readying its longest-range missile for launch in what analysts say is a bid to grab the new U.S. administration’s attention and pressure Seoul to ease up on its hard line. Clinton has said such a launch would not help relations.
After South Korea, Clinton will go to China, the last stop on an Asian tour that also included Japan. The trip is her first outside the United States since taking office.
TITLE: France Devises Plan to Placate Rioters On Guadeloupe After Activist Killed
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: PARIS — Rioters fired at police and stormed a city hall in a third night of violence on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, officials said Thursday, as France proposed a plan to boost poor islanders’ income in a bid to cool tensions.
Weeks of strikes by workers demanding higher salaries and lower prices degenerated into clashes this week. A union activist was killed Tuesday, apparently by rioters, raising the pressure on the central government in Paris.
Police helicopters were sent Thursday to dislodge youth who had forced their way into the city hall of the town of Sainte-Rose overnight, said Guadeloupe sub-prefect Stephane Grauvogel. Getting police there by road was too challenging because of barricades that protesters have been erecting during weeks of strikes, Grauvogel said by telephone.
Rioters shot at gendarmes in the tourist resort town of Gosier, and at least five stores or restaurants were set ablaze in a few towns overnight, Grauvogel said.
Some 33 people were detained overnight, he said.
Protesters are demanding a 200 euro ($252) hike in the minimum wage to cope with the high cost of living on Guadeloupe, which depends on expensive imports for many food staples. Low-paid workers currently make roughly 900 euros ($1,130) a month. Strikes have also spread to nearby Martinique.
While the government has offered numerous concessions to the protesters, it has so far balked at the demand for a pay hike, fearing it would be forced to offer the same deal across France.
Youths have been blocking roads, torching businesses and looting shops this week as the largely peaceful demonstrations spiral out of control.
Thousands of tourists looking for fun in the sun have canceled vacations to Guadeloupe and Martinique. The protests and strikes have hurt scores of businesses, including restaurants, hotels and car rental agencies during the islands’ peak winter tourist season.
While unrest continued in Guadeloupe, government officials met overnight in Paris to find solutions. Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced a plan on RTL radio Thursday morning that includes extra government benefits that would total nearly $250 (200 euros) extra a month for low-income workers.
“Mediators have come up with a proposal which I am going to assess and which will be submitted to employers and the unions,” Fillon told French radio RTL. “This allows us to get very close to the quantified financial goals of the workers.”
Fillon said he would submit the plan to employers and labor unions Thursday.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy was due to host a meeting of elected officials from France’s overseas departments and territories on Thursday “to respond to the anxiety, the worry, and a certain form of despair of our compatriots overseas,” Sarkozy said during a TV appearance.
(AP, Reuters)
TITLE: Bibi Tipped to Become Next Israeli PM in New Coalition
PUBLISHER: Agence France Presse
TEXT: JERUSALEM — Hawkish Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday gained pole position to become Israel’s next prime minister as ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman backed his bid to form a government.
The support from Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party means Netanyahu, a former premier popularly known as Bibi, can count on the support of 65 of the 120 members of parliament, army radio said.
“We have two proposals. The first: we recommend Bibi Netanyahu, but (second) only as part of a wider government,” Lieberman told President Shimon Peres who was meeting with parliamentary factions before deciding who will be tasked with forming a governing coalition.
“We are not talking of a government with a restricted majority. To govern the country, we need a government with the three largest parties, Likud, Kadima and Yisrael Beitenu,” said Lieberman, a Soviet immigrant whose party displaced Labour as the third largest parliamentary faction in last week’s elections.
“Those that want to join (the coalition) can do so later,” Lieberman added.
Peres held talks with Likud and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s governing Kadima party on Wednesday and was holding talks with the other 10 factions on Thursday.
“Netanyahu will be prime minister, but it will be a Bibi-Livni government,” said Lieberman.
“Bibi must get used to the idea it will be a broad government,” he told Peres.
Kadima had suggested a power-sharing deal with Netanyahu similar to the one Israel had in 1984 after another close ballot, when the two top parties each held the post of prime minister for two years.
But Lieberman said that “Livni must give up the idea of a rotation as such a solution would cause instability.”
Netanyahu has also rejected the rotating premiership option and made it clear he favours a broad coalition including Kadima, rather than an alliance with parties to the right of his own.
Kadima won 28 seats in the February 10 election, just one more than Likud, but has far fewer potential coalition allies than its right-wing rival.
Both Kadima and Likud have been courting other factions in a bid to obtain the majority support needed to form a government coalition.
Right-wing parties made dramatic gains overall in the election, which was held in the wake of Israel’s deadly 22-day offensive on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and was dominated by security concerns.
Under Israeli law, the task of forming a government does not automatically go to the party that garnered the most votes but to the one most likely to be able to form a majority coalition.
Peres was to announce his decision on Sunday or Monday, his spokeswoman Ayelet Frish said.