SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1498 (60), Friday, August 7, 2009
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TITLE: Georgia, Russia Step Back From The Brink
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia — Despite rising tensions and slashing rhetoric as the first anniversary of the Russian war approaches, top officials in Tbilisi and Moscow downplay the likelihood of renewed fighting — but for deeply different reasons.
The deputy chief of Russia’s general staff says Georgia is too weak after the war that devastated its military and caused an estimated $1 billion damage to the struggling country.
Georgia’s national security adviser, however, says the danger of new fighting appears low because of “preventive diplomacy” and because Russia knows a new war would undermine its influence among neighbors and rapprochement with the West.
In the two weeks ahead of the Friday anniversary of the start of the war, Georgia and Russia have accused each other of preparing for new hostilities by allegedly launching small attacks in and around South Ossetia, the separatist region that was the war’s flashpoint.
The August 2008 conflict erupted after escalating exchanges of fire between Georgia and Moscow-backed South Ossetian forces. The region, recognized by Russia as independent after the war, is now home to thousands of Russian troops and cut off by roadblocks from the rest of Georgia.
Each reported attack was followed by ominous or aggrieved words from both sides, culminating in Russia’s Defense Ministry saying it reserved the right to use all available means against Georgian aggression.
However, Colonel General Anatoly Nogovitsyn of the Russian general staff gave a milder — if no less contemptuous — assessment on Wednesday, saying “We don’t see a capability for any kind of aggression.”
The statement was a distinct backing-off from Russia’s recent allegations that Georgia is rearming with hostile intent.
Georgia has warned repeatedly that Russia and South Ossetia’s recent claims echo the provocations and heated words that preceded last year’s war. But Georgian National Security Council chief Eka Tkeshelashvili contends that Georgia’s close contacts with the United States and the European Union are keeping the tensions from boiling over.
Georgia has “the assurance that at this time, unlike last year, preventive diplomacy will work in such a manner that we will not see deterioration of the situation,” she said. Russia understands that the political price of any action would be too high, she said.
Preventive diplomacy may have already been called into action. U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev spoke by telephone late Tuesday, according to a Kremlin statement that mentioned only fleetingly that Georgia was a topic of discussion.
Among the political costs of a new war, Tkeshelashvili said, could be the alienation of neighbors, notably oil-rich Azerbaijan, if Russia appears to be trying for tough regional dominance.
“If Georgia falls ... Azerbaijan is fully encircled and then any independent thought of Azerbaijan for its energy supplies is almost a non-existent case,” she said. “What we see now is a very good example that (the war) worked contrary to Russian aspirations. We see now that even Belarus, which was clearly under Russian influence, now is seeking alternative ways of development and being closer to Europe.”
Belarus deeply angered Moscow by failing to recognize South Ossetia and another separate province, Abkhazia, as independent.
But if the war tarnished Russia’s image, it also raised deep concerns in the West about Georgia’s reliability as it seeks membership in NATO and the EU. Georgia’s intense artillery barrage of the South Ossetian capital in the opening hours of the war unsettled allies with suspicions that President Mikhail Saakashvili is impetuous and willing to spill blood to defend national pride.
Georgia is taking steps to counter that perception as the anniversary looms. On Thursday, the government is to issue an extensive report detailing its contention it had to launch an artillery barrage on Tskhinvali, the provincial capital, because Russian troops had moved into South Ossetia hours earlier and because of attacks on Georgians by South Ossetian forces.
“The Georgian government concluded that it had been left with no choice but to order military action to counter what was rapidly becoming an invasion with aims that went far beyond a dispute over two Georgian territories,” says a report summary obtained by The Associated Press.
The report says some 150 Russian military vehicles entered a tunnel that connects South Ossetia and Russia some 20 hours before the Georgian barrage began. It also rejects Russia’s contention that Georgia was planning genocide against Ossetians.
Some observers suggest that Western countries’ doubts about Georgia after the war reflect their own embarrassment at being unable to put pressure on Russia.
“It’s not easy to say ‘We just did almost nothing ... we were weak in front of Russia’,” said Thornike Gordadze, a Caucasus researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul. “It’s kind of proportional, Georgia’s bad image, a Western attempt to save their own image.”
TITLE: Putin's Popularity Not Oil Dependent
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin has been accused of undemocratic behavior, of staging unfair elections and of holding on to power like a dictator. But he can point to a strong basis for his legitimacy: He is unbeatably popular among his electorate.
In fact, since Putin’s unexpected rise from little-known bureaucrat to prime minister in August 1999 and president a few months later, his popularity has rarely been rivaled by any other politician in the country. Only his protege and chosen presidential successor, Dmitry Medvedev, has come close to his sky-high figures.
Surveys from the Levada Center, an independent polling agency, show that Putin’s approval ratings shot from zero to more than 70 percent in 1999 and have never dropped below 40 percent for any prolonged period since then. Recent polls provide ample evidence that Putin’s popularity has not suffered from the economic downturn that has hit the country hard since last fall. In fact, the figures may serve as a crushing defeat to predictions that the crisis could bring down or weaken his reign.
Western media have been awash with reports since the crisis began that Putin had just been riding high on the country’s oil-driven economic boom and that now the time had come for the people to renege their informal contract with him — that the government could freely stifle democracy as long as the people could enjoy new cars, well-stocked supermarkets and cheap vacations in Egypt.
But despite the fact that millions of people have lost their jobs and the incomes of those still working have been significantly reduced through pay cuts and the ruble’s devaluation, approval of Putin, who as prime minister has taken the role of personally overseeing the economy, stood firm at 78 percent in July.
The idea of Putin as an oil-fueled leader contains a lot of wishful thinking, analysts said.
“It is true that the country’s economic well-being depends a lot on the oil price. But it is not always true that Putin’s popularity depends on the economy alone,” said Denis Volkov, a researcher with the Levada Center.
A St. Petersburg Times comparison of approval ratings during Putin’s career and oil prices reveals that they do not always correlate.
Oil shot up during 1999, the year that Putin was appointed prime minister and moved into the Kremlin when President Boris Yeltsin resigned during his New Year’s address on Dec. 31.
But the second half of 1999 also saw the start of the second Chechen war, which coincided with the armed incursion of Chechen fighters into neighboring Dagestan in August and a series of deadly bombings in apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in September.
“Putin introduced himself as a strong and uncompromising leader,” Volkov said.
Yet his approval ratings suffered a significant drop in August 2000, when the Kursk nuclear submarine sank and he initially refused to cut a vacation short. The oil price slumped only at the end of that year.
Another boost in popularity, unrelated to economic data, happened in October 2002, when special forces gassed Chechen terrorists who had taken hundreds of people hostage in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater. The nation quite clearly rallied behind its leader in the time of crisis, despite the fact that more than 120 hostages died.
Putin suffered a backlash, however, after the Beslan hostage crisis in September 2004, when a botched rescue operation in the North Ossetian town left more than 330 dead, many of them women and children. Putin’s approval ratings dropped to 66 percent that month, according to Levada data.
The price of oil, meanwhile, began its march upward two years earlier, in 2002.
A correlation between Putin’s popularity and the oil boom only took a firm hold between mid-2005 and July 2008, when oil peaked at a historic $147 a barrel.
“Certainly the economic boom had a consolidating effect on Putin’s ratings,” Volkov said.
Still, Putin’s popularity skyrocketed to 88 percent in September 2008, when oil had fallen to below $100 and stock markets were collapsing. At the time, the country was dizzy in its success in the short war with Georgia, whose first anniversary on Aug. 8 strangely coincides almost exactly with the 10th anniversary of Putin’s first appointment as prime minister, on Aug. 9 1999.
Putin’s ratings have not dropped below 76 percent in the past year, despite the country’s worst economic downturn in more than a decade.
For Russians, politics traditionally takes precedence over the economy, said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences. “The political factor is far more important — and Putin is not just perceived as the one who is in power but as the one who controls the siloviki,” she said, referring to the powerful clan of military and security service officials in the government.
Russians also harbor a lasting desire for strongman leadership as opposed to multipolar democracy, said Yekaterina Yegorova, head of the political consulting firm Nikkolo M and a veteran insider of the country’s political scene. “The notion that you take to the streets when you can no longer afford to buy meat does not correspond to the Russian psychology,” she said.
Yegorova argued that a much broader “unspoken contract” exists between a majority of the population and the leadership. “They want a type of father figure — a strong leader who takes responsibility and who makes important decisions for their lives — and in exchange they accept living according to certain rules,” she said.
She also acknowledged that policies to divide the opposition and the cunning use of state-run media did a lot to prop up the current leadership, but she noted that under the Russian constitutional system any incumbent leader would be privileged. “The president will always stand at the center of attention,” she said.
But Yevgeny Gontmakher, the director of the center for social studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Economics, warned that Putin’s popularity today was of a different kind than a couple of years ago.
In the past, people had rated Putin for his achievements, but now they rate him highly because they expect him to solve the crisis, he argued.
“People are waiting for a miracle — this is sort of an advance payment,” Gontmakher told The St. Petersburg Times.
The problem is, he argued, that Putin was pretending to solve every problem himself instead of letting market institutions work.
Gontmakher referred to recent examples of Putin’s style of making personal appearances to solve workers’ or consumers’ problems.
In June, he traveled to the town of Pikalyovo and ordered tycoon Oleg Deripaska to pay wages and restart production at a plant there. In July, he made a surprise visit to a Moscow supermarket and berated managers for their pork prices.
“But Putin obviously cannot solve everything himself,” Gontmakher said. That makes the situation all the more risky for him now, as Putin’s popularity ratings would crumble quickly if it becomes clear that he’s not living up to expectations.
“Let’s see were we stand in the fall or by the end of the year,” he said.
TITLE: Human Trafficking Put in the Spotlight by Local Project
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two years ago, several young girls who had been trafficked from St. Petersburg were found in Antwerp, Belgium, where they had been forced to work as prostitutes. The case is far from exceptional — the girls represent just a tiny fraction of the 35,000 to 57,750 women taken out of the Russian Federation every year for the purpose of human trafficking, according to estimates by a recent UN report on the transport of women and children from Russia with the goal of sexual exploitation.
This year, the issue of human trafficking in and around St. Petersburg became the focus of a new project entitled: “Information campaign on the prevention of human trafficking in the Russian Federation with special focus on the region of St. Petersburg,” funded by the Government of Belgium and implemented by the Moscow bureau of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the St. Petersburg Red Cross.
“The girls who were found were just the tip of the iceberg,” said Marie-Johane Roccas, Consul General of the Kingdom of Belgium in St. Petersburg, explaining why the Belgian government had chosen to fund this project in particular.
A total of 270,000 euros has been allocated by the Belgian government for the year-long duration of the project. The funds were allocated to the IOM, which is based in Moscow, but works with the Red Cross in St. Petersburg.
The project, which was officially launched Apr. 9 and is due to run through Oct. 31, aims to enhance preventive counter-trafficking efforts in Russia by increasing awareness of the risks of human trafficking among at-risk groups and the general public.
“The first task is to establish an information and consultation center and free hotline,” Natalya Zaibert, the project’s coordinator at the Red Cross in St. Petersburg, told The St. Petersburg Times. “People can come and get consultations on migration and labor legislation, and of course victims of human trafficking can apply to the center.”
“Belgium has for many years funded these kinds of projects around the world — not only in Europe, but in Russia, the Caucasus, South America and other places,” said Roccas. “Each time the projects are different. Here we’re funding the information center, so people can call the free phone number for information about how not to get trapped in these kinds of problems.”
RECRUITMENT FROM AFAR
Russia is a source, transit and destination country for victims of human trafficking, which contrary to popular belief, is far from limited to sexual exploitation, and can take the form of forced labor, child labor, domestic slavery, begging, forced military work and organ trafficking.
The most vulnerable people are those from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, according to a report entitled “Human Trafficking in the Russian Federation” conducted by E. V. Tiurukanova and the Institute for Urban Economics. For all these nations, Russia is one of the main destination countries for human trafficking for the purpose of labor and sexual exploitation.
Others, including people with severe physical injuries, are brought to Russia and forced to work as beggars in the metro or on the streets and roads to earn money for those who control them. According to the same report, “disabled young men are usually dressed in camouflage uniforms, suggesting they are Afghan or Chechen war veterans, and put to work as beggars. Disabled people are ‘recruited’ throughout the CIS, but often come from former ‘hot’ spots such as Transdniestria.”
According to the 2009 U.S. state report on trafficking in persons, “Men and women are trafficked within Russia and from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Moldova to Russia for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor, including work in the construction industry. Moscow and St. Petersburg have been destinations for children trafficked within Russia and from Ukraine and Moldova for purposes of sexual exploitation and forced begging. Men from Western Europe and the United States travel to Western Russia, specifically St. Petersburg, for the purpose of child sex tourism.”
SLAVE LABOR
Despite the high profile coverage given to cases of forced prostitution and sex tourism, Zaibert said that the most common form of trafficking in the St. Petersburg region right now is forced labor.
Although many migrant workers arrive willingly, the term “trafficking in persons” legally includes using fraud and deception to harbor or receive people, as well as exploitation. Many CIS citizens are lured to Russia with promises of incomes incomparably higher than in their home countries, only to find themselves exploited upon arrival by unscrupulous employers.
“Mostly we deal with forced labor and migration and labor legislation, because many migrant workers have come here and they don’t know how to stay legal,” Zaibert said. “And if they end up illegal, they can get into all these other problems.”
Tatyana Lineva, president of the Russian Red Cross in St. Petersburg, agreed.
“In Russia, the most important issue in human trafficking is the forced labor of so-called “gastarbeitery” — migrant workers,” she said. “It’s everywhere you look. If I go to any building that’s being constructed, I’ll find slaves there who are already being exploited.
“Everywhere where dachas are being built, there are migrant workers who live in terrible conditions. There really is an element of slavery in it. But this is where the psychology of society lags behind — people don’t understand yet that this is not right. But the government now understands that this is a problem, and they are supporting us in this project.”
The problem of forced labor is by no means limited to St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. The International Labor Organization reports that labor trafficking is the most predominant form of trafficking in Russia as a whole, and estimates that there are up to one million illegal immigrants in Russia who are victims of forced labor.
The new information center in St. Petersburg is one of just two such centers in Russia, along with another in Moscow. Since the local center opened on May 29, it has already received about 250 phone calls. Zaibert said that about 60 percent of the calls came from Russians, while the other 40 came from foreigners — mainly from CIS countries such as Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Moldova and Tajikistan, as well as some calls from Tunisians and Nigerians.
“We have had a few cases of human trafficking, where people are ready to provide all the information — who their employers were, where everything was done — and when we have these cases we contact the IOM, and together with them we write letters to law enforcement bodies, the Interior Ministry and different state bodies,” said Zaibert.
The second part of the project is an advertizing campaign to raise awareness both of the issue of trafficking and the new center. Advertisements are currently running in the city’s metro, on billboards in the streets and on commercial buses, while a recorded ad is also being played on Retro FM.
Zaibert said that City Hall has also provided social advertizing space in the metro free of charge.
The final and arguably most innovative part of the project is training for diplomats on dealing with and preventing trafficking.
“We are running training sessions with the IOM to explain the problem, say what we are doing, and show identification techniques, so at least when they are issuing visas they can look at these indicators,” said Zaibert. Diplomats will also be given advice on how to deal with victims of trafficking who come to them for help, but prevention is the main aim.
AN UPHILL STRUGGLE
Lineva, who is president of the government’s human rights commission as well as president of the Russian Red Cross in St. Petersburg, said that combating human trafficking and human rights violations is fraught with difficulties in Russia.
“I’m grateful to the Belgian government, which has really highlighted this problem for the first time,” she said. “We used to close our eyes to it and pretend it didn’t exist. If for the Belgian government, two or three cases are a disaster, there could be 100 in Russia and it would be nothing.”
Lineva said that legislation was not adequate in Russia. “It doesn’t protect people in different situations, including trafficking — it’s as if it doesn’t exist.”
In 2004, Russia ratified the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, known as the Palermo Convention, and its corresponding protocols: Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, and Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. In December 2003, it also amended the criminal code to include articles forbidding trafficking in human beings and the use of slave labor, but according to Zaibert, only 30 or 40 cases have been prosecuted under this article.
“Either the courts are not used to it, or they simply don’t know how to apply these articles,” she said. “Sometimes they reclassify these crimes into other ones, such as prostitution.”
A QUESTION OF ATTITUDE
Lineva said that attitudes in Russia need to change, but this can be a difficult process.
“Our human rights institutions are still very young,” she said. “When we began to tackle the issue of domestic violence, people thought it was an internal family problem, that it was not important. Now we are fighting trafficking.”
Lack of information is also an obstacle in the battle against trafficking, especially in cases involving children.
“With forced laborers, for example, at least they know each other,” said Lineva. “But with children, it’s difficult to evaluate the situation, to get information. The Red Cross has places where we feed street children. They are cut off from society, from their family, and we only know about cases of child trafficking from other children, if for example they tell us, ‘Some man came, he took Petya away, we can’t find him now.’ We can tell the police that a boy has disappeared, but that’s about it.
“Child trafficking is still in the shadows, we are still learning about it ourselves,” she said.
The center also gets calls from women who have moved abroad only to find themselves victims of domestic slavery.
“We have had calls from Russian women who have got married to men from Algeria and Tunisia and become domestic slaves,” said Lineva. “They have run away and need help to get divorced, or help getting custody of their children.”
FACING FACTS
Both the representatives of the Red Cross and Roccas said they had run into problems trying to raise awareness of the problem of human trafficking and getting people to talk about it.
One of the advertisements for the hotline shows the popular Russian singer Valeriya, who has frequently spoken in public about her own experience of domestic violence with her former husband and manager, and is now an IOM goodwill ambassador for the Russian Federation. The singer’s latest song, “Back to Love” is accompanied by a video depicting young girls being kept prisoner that aims to raise awareness of the issue of human trafficking. When it was released in May, the video was banned by several TV channels for being too “violent.”
“The video was fantastic, very moving, and television refused to broadcast it,” said Roccas, who financed a project against domestic violence during her time as the Belgian ambassador in Croatia. “They said it was too shocking, which is incredible. It’s the truth, but they didn’t want to show it.”
Nor do things get any easier when it comes to funding for projects. In many European countries, including Belgium, businesses that support charitable and social projects get tax breaks for doing so. But under Russian law the situation is very different. There are currently no financial incentives for businesses to develop their corporate social responsibility. The Red Cross is campaigning for the introduction of tax breaks for companies that lend their support to social projects.
Nor can businesses count on getting good publicity for their support, according to Lineva, since the media is unwilling to cover such programs at the risk of being accused of hidden advertizing.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
To combat the biggest local trafficking problem — forced labor — Lineva says that new laws and legislation are needed.
“There should be a center of temporary shelter for them, where social workers and police ought to work with them individually to either help them return home or give them the right to work — I’ve been saying this for 17 years,” she said. “We don’t have anything here in the region. People are simply put in detention centers.”
Lineva is quite clear on what needs to be done, on both a local and federal level.
“First, information centers should be set up in all the regions of Russia,” she said. “The more widespread and detailed the information about this issue is, the better the chances are of improving the situation. This model [of the information centers] is unique, and not even very expensive.
“Secondly, the legislation should be strengthened. There should be a law — at present, we only have a draft law against human trafficking.
“Thirdly, the mass media should cover incidents, so people know that such things exist.”
Roccas agreed. “In the past, many people were trafficked, especially from Africa, to our country to work in the construction industry,” she said. “People’s consciences were awakened by [Belgian filmmakers] the Dardenne brothers, who made a film about this problem. Before that, people didn’t want to see or didn’t realize there was a problem.
“The work of radio, TV and the press is crucial to raising awareness of the problem,” she said. “So you have prevention through work with the press, you have a reaction from the police, and punishment from judges. It’s a triangle, not only a legal system, but prevention too.”
Roccas expressed concern over what would happen at the end of Belgium’s year-long sponsorship of the program. “Governments should take responsibility; maybe another country will support the project,” she said. “We can do it for one year, but can’t continue it every year. What’s going to happen when the current support comes to an end?”
The St. Petersburg Information and Consultation Center on the Prevention of Human Trafficking is located at 19D Goncharnaya Ulitsa and is open 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. Monday to Friday. The helpline is free within Russia. +7 800 333 00 16. www.no2slavery.ru.
TITLE: Imprisoned Antifascist's Appeal Rejected by Court
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg City Court’s judicial division for criminal cases ruled to uphold the conviction of Alexei Bychin on Tuesday, in an appeal hearing that only lasted ten minutes, according to the imprisoned antifascist’s lawyer. “They didn’t listen to any of our arguments,” lawyer Olga Tseitlina said by phone after the hearing.
She said they would perhaps appeal to the Supreme Court, the highest legal body in Russia.
Bychin was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security penal colony by a local court on May 8 for stabbing two men in the city center last year, while he insisted that he acted in self-defense as they attacked him. One of the men, who had allegedly been marching down Nevsky Prospekt shouting “Sieg Heil” and making Nazi salutes, turned out to be an OMON special-task police trainee.
The defense had asked for the conviction to be changed from “conscious bodily injury, dangerous to a person’s life” (Article 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) to “excess of self-defense” (Article 114).
The latter is punishable by “restraint of liberty” for a term of up to two years or one year in custody, which means that if the conviction had been altered, Bychin, who was arrested on July 16, 2008, could have been released immediately, as he has already spent more than 12 months in prison. At the time of his arrest Bychin was 22.
One of the defense’s arguments was that an expert analysis showed that Bychin had a cut on his arm from a broken bottle that one of the plaintiffs — the alleged attackers — had been holding, according to Tseitlina. “After they pushed Bychin against the wall, one of them hit him on the head with a broken bottle and Bychin covered his head with his arms, hence the scar,” she said. “It was disregarded by the court as irrelevant.”
The defense also presented a witness who said he saw Bychin being assaulted by two men, but the appeal court dismissed his testimony, because he saw the fight from a distance and could not clearly see the faces of the people involved. “It could have been another fight, one of the judges said,” Tseitlina said.
A testimony that the alleged attackers made Nazi salutes and shouted German Nazi slogans was also ignored by the court, according to Tseitlina. She said that she did not expect anything from the appeal court and had warned her defendant of her expectations. Bychin’s supporters claim the whole trial is biased and aimed at giving the harshest sentence to the activist.
Over the past three years, numerous incidents of the police arresting and beating antifascists and anarchists during rallies have been reported.
Bychin carried a knife for self-defense, as many antifascists have done since 20-year-old anti-fascist punk musician Timur Kacharava was stabbed to death by a dozen Nazi skinheads in the city center on Nov. 13, 2005. His fellow activist Maxim Zgibai, who sustained multiple knife wounds and severe brain damage, survived the attack.
Since Bychin’s arrest last year, anti-Nazi activists have held protests in several Russian cities. Activists claim that the police are saturated with nationalist ideas, with a number of policemen being former Nazi skinheads or sympathetic to them.
In the latest event in support of Bychin on Monday, a group of anarchists and antifascists displayed a banner saying “Freedom for Bychin” and a human-sized doll representing a Russian policeman hanged by a rope around his neck on the embankment of the Griboyedova Canal in the city center. “In this figurative way, the anarchists showed what kind of police reform they want,” the activists said on Indymedia.org, a web site on which anarchists, left-wing activists and antifascists exchange information.
TITLE: Lawyers Slam Flaws in New Case
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The retrial of four men charged with involvement in the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya began on Wednesday morning only to be quickly adjourned so that lawyers could file a flurry of complaints to prosecutors.
The hearing lasted about two hours at the Moscow District Military Court before being adjourned until Friday. Reporters were allowed into the courtroom, although guards didn’t allow several journalists inside, saying the room was full.
In February, a jury unanimously acquitted Chechen brothers Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov and former Moscow police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov of involvement in the murder of Politkovskaya in the entrance to her apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006.
A fourth man, former Federal Security Service officer Pavel Ryaguzov, was acquitted in a case tried simultaneously.
The Supreme Court overturned the court’s decision in June and ordered a retrial after complaints from prosecutors that the judge committed numerous violations.
The murder of Politkovskaya, who was harshly critical of Kremlin policies in Chechnya, focused attention on the country’s human rights record and forced then-President Vladimir Putin — on whose birthday she died — to answer awkward questions from Western reporters and politicians.
Investigators have failed to identify the people who ordered and financed the killing. A third Makhmudov brother, Rustam, is being sought by police on suspicion of carrying out the murder, but he was not a defendant in the first trial.
The initial proceedings were criticized as a sham by Politkovskaya’s relatives, who nonetheless praised the jury’s decision.
On Wednesday, Anna Stavitskaya, a lawyer for Politkovskaya’s family, called for the charges to be changed or for Rustam Makhmudov’s case to be incorporated into the case being heard.
In court, a representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office supported the request to combine the cases, raising the prospect that the case retrial could be delayed while prosecutors rework their case. A defense lawyer said he also supported the request.
“The crime still hasn’t been solved. The investigation didn’t come to any final conclusions as it should have done, and that is what provoked all the requests that were made today,” Karina Moskalenko, another lawyer for Politkovskaya’s family, said after the hearing.
“Our aim is to end the impunity, to have an investigation carried out and the crime solved,” Moskalenko said, standing beside Politkovskaya’s son and daughter, Ilya and Vera.
During the hearing, Stavitskaya also criticized the investigation, saying a man captured on security cameras at the scene could have been a decoy and that the investigators did not adequately investigate the possible involvement of the Makhmudovs’ uncle, Lom Ali Gaitukayev, and a man and woman seen following Politkovskaya, Interfax reported.
Khadzhikurbanov, the former police officer, requested that the case be sent back to prosecutors and combined with another, in which he is charged with extorting a large sum of money from a key witness in the Politkovskaya trial, Interfax reported.
Three of the defendants are free on the condition that they do not leave Moscow, but Khadzhikurbanov was taken back into custody because of the new charges in April.
After the hearing, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov came out with their lawyers, Murad Musayev and Saidakhmed Arsamerzayev.
The brothers, dressed casually in short-sleeved shirts and jeans, exchanged remarks in Chechen. Dzhabrail Makhmudov told reporters, “I’m not at all worried.”
“Everything is as expected,” Musayev said outside the courtroom.
Wearing a gray pinstripe suit and blue crocodile-skin shoes, Musayev exuded confidence. “If the court is objective, our clients will be acquitted,” he said. He questioned the prosecutors’ motives in agreeing to send the case back for further investigation, however.
“The victim’s representatives want the case to be really investigated, but for the prosecutors it’s just a possibility to save face, so as to avoid a second acquittal,” Musayev said.
TITLE: Clothing Retailers Closing Shop
AUTHOR: By Holger Elfes
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: DUSSELDORF, Germany — A third of Russia’s 42,000 clothing retailers will close by the end of this year after the economic crisis hurt local spending, according to the head of the European Fashion and Textile Export Council.
The likely retail failures and order cutbacks in Russia mean that companies in fashion-exporting nations such as Germany will deliver less apparel for the winter season, said Reinhard Doepfer, who leads the Brussels- and Stuttgart-based industry group. He said the council surveyed German clothing makers and found that an average of 35 percent of their deliveries to Russia would be unsold this summer.
“Many important German fashion suppliers have deleted between 20 percent and 30 percent of Russia’s fashion retailers from their customer records, because they don’t meet the basic conditions of doing business anymore,” Doepfer said in an interview at last week’s CPD fashion fair in Dusseldorf.
German clothing companies ranging from luxury brand Hugo Boss to menswear maker Ahlers targeted Russia for growth as the nation’s burgeoning economy outpaced that of Germany earlier this decade. Boss, known for its men’s suits, reported a wider loss last week, citing a 35 percent plunge in revenue from Eastern Europe, excluding the effect of foreign-exchange moves. Russia is the label’s largest market in the region.
Germany is Europe’s second-largest fashion-exporting nation, trailing only Italy. Germany’s first-quarter fashion sales to Russia declined 6 percent to 162 million euros ($231 million), Doepfer said.
The decline will accelerate during the year, as autumn-winter orders have fallen about 30 percent, he added.
Some analysts said Doepfer’s estimate was too pessimistic, though they acknowledged the weak local demand.
“About 10 percent to 20 percent of retailers may go bankrupt this year, but not a third,” said Anna Lebsak-Kleimans, president of Fashion Consulting Group. Some of the halted German shipments will be replaced by cheaper imports from China and Turkey, she said.
“Retail chains may be reducing the number of outlets, but they are not shutting down completely,” she said.
Russia’s gross domestic product shrank 9.8 percent in the first quarter, the worst contraction in 15 years. The average monthly wage dropped 5.2 percent in June.
Germany exported clothes worth 750 million euros last year to Russia, 6 percent more then in the previous year, according to Doepfer. Italy exported apparel to Russia worth 1.25 billion euros and will also post a decline, he said.
TITLE: New Raid on Moscow Market Worries Vendors
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Police have reported that they have interrupted a major smuggling operation at the Sevastopol market in southern Moscow, raising concerns among foreign merchants that many legitimate import businesses would be caught up in a crackdown on counterfeiting.
Traders have been locked out of the market since police raided it Friday and confiscated $29 million in goods, which they said were either fake or dangerous. The investigation comes just over a month after the vast Cherkizovsky Market was shuttered amid similar claims, leaving thousands without work and billions of dollars of goods impounded.
The closure of Cherkizovsky has also dented relations between Russia and China. Beijing sent a high-level delegation to Moscow last month to negotiate on behalf of its citizens but failed to win any major concessions.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement Monday that its economic security department “closed a major channel for smuggling consumer goods produced in China” at the Sevastopol market.
The traders there come primarily from Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, said Madzhumder Mukhammad Amin, president of the Migrants of the Russian Federation association.
“People are worried. Their business is there, and their goods are there,” Amin said. The hotel complex includes storerooms, he said.
“It wasn’t like Cherkizovsky. Everything was official, there were contracts,” he said.
The market is based in a hotel complex near the Sevastopolskaya metro station.
The hotel rooms were converted into stalls selling clothes, jewelry and knickknacks at knockdown prices. Customers pay an entrance fee and then climb narrow stairs between floors or use crowded lifts.
Police arrested apparently counterfeit goods worth at least 900 million rubles ($29 million), the statement said, adding that the merchandise came from India, Afghanistan, China and Turkey.
“A significant part of the clothes, accessories and perfume of famous brands had signs of counterfeit production,” the statement said.
A “large quantity” of children’s toys smelt strongly of phenol, it said. Tests found that the toys broke health and safety standards.
Investigators also found “counterfeited documents” in delivery trucks showing that the goods went through customs in the northwestern and central regions.
The statement comes after the Investigative Committee announced on Thursday that an organized criminal group, which included customs officials, was charged with smuggling goods headed for the Sevastopol market.
Those charged include the head of the Serpukhovskaya branch of the customs office in Podolsk and an inspector there. Investigators also charged the general director of Rostek-Serpukhov, which runs a customs warehouse in the Moscow region, and employees from customs broker Krug, the statement said.
TITLE: Oleg Tinkoff Seeking Buyer for Restaurants
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Tinkoff owner Oleg Tinkov announced Monday that he wanted to sell his share in the restaurant business and invited buyers to file their offers by e-mail.
“My restaurant business is 11 years old now. I’m bored with it,” the 41-year-old restaurateur said via his Twitter account. “I want to sell my share — [which equals] approximately 70 percent, including the brand name.”
Tinkov asked interested parties to send offers to his LiveJournal account.
The Tinkoff chain consists of nine restaurants located in 10 cities throughout the country.
Neither Tinkov nor the company’s press office responded to requests for comment.
It is not known how much Tinkov’s stake is worth. In 2008, the businessman sold a 25 percent share in the business to a Danish company for $10 million.
Tinkov has shown a knack for starting, building and selling brands within the space of a few years.
After starting a retail firm in 1993 and selling it four years later, he launched a frozen foods company that was sold to billionaire Roman Abramovich for $21 million in 2001.
The businessman then set his sights on the food and beverage industries, opening his first Tinkoff restaurant in 2001, along with a beer label that he sold to Sun InBev for $201 million in 2005.
Restaurants have suffered in the wake of the recession, as consumers cut nonessential expenditures.
“If the owner decided to sell his share at a time like this, he probably wants to avoid additional financial losses,” said Yekaterina Losshakova, an analyst with Financial Bridge. A buyer would likely be a cash-rich foreign company rather than a Russian one, she said.
TITLE: Pikalyovo Supplier Facing Fine Over Data
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service may fine fertilizer producer FosAgro up to 500,000 rubles ($16,000) for not submitting information on its production costs, the service said Tuesday.
If FosAgro does not submit the information by Aug. 31, a deal brokered in Pikalyovo in June by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin might fall apart.
BaselCement, a consumer of FosAgro’s nepheline, closed in January, forcing two other factories in its Pikalyovo complex to suspend operations.
Factory workers protested the suspensions, prompting Putin to pay a visit to the factory on June 4. Putin rebuked the plant’s owners, including billionaire Oleg Deripaska, and ordered Murmansk-based FosAgro and BaselCement, along with two other Pikalyovo factories, to sign new contracts.
The deal was good for three months, during which time FosAgro agreed to supply nepheline concentrate for 750 rubles per ton, which the fertilizer producer said was lower than its production costs. The anti-monopoly service was charged with finding a sustainable price for the plants’ products.
While the service has received some documents from FosAgro, the company “never provided production costs for apatite concentrate, from which nepheline is produced,” said Denis Davydov, deputy head of the service’s industry control department. “We asked twice.”
Without the data, the service cannot calculate a fair price for nepheline concentrate and other products made at the Pikalyovo complex, Davydov said.
A FosAgro representative, who declined to be identified in line with company policy, said Thursday that the firm had submitted all necessary information. “We have submitted all the information in full and at the right time, and we will submit all the requested information to the service again tomorrow.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Lower Oil Duty
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The Economic Development Ministry has sent a proposal to the government to lower export duties on light oil products from 2012 in order to encourage companies to produce higher-value fuels, the ministry said Wednesday.
Under the proposal, light and heavy oil products would have the same rate of export duty, equal to 0.55 times the export duty on crude oil, the ministry said.
Evraz Loan
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Sberbank said it agreed to lend 8.8 billion rubles ($283 million) to three of Evraz Group’s metals units, the lender said Wednesday.
Sberbank will lend the money to Evraz’s Nizhny Tagil and West Siberian steel plants and its Kachkanarsky iron-ore mining unit under a government plan to support “priority” industries in Russia, without detailing how much each would receive, the lender said.
Rostelecom Unites
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Rostelecom may combine with the seven regional units of parent company Svyazinvest, Vedomosti said Wednesday, citing unidentified bankers.
Shares of the units will be converted into shares of Rostelecom under proposals drawn up by advisers on Svyazinvest’s reorganization, including Morgan Stanley, Renaissance Capital, VTB Capital and McKinsey, the newspaper said.
Comstar Stake
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Mobile TeleSystems will buy a controlling stake in Comstar United TeleSystems for $1.27 billion from parent company Sistema, the companies said Wednesday.
Mobile TeleSystems will pay $5.98 per Global Depositary Receipt for a 50.91 percent stake in Comstar after the plan was approved by its board and that of Sistema.
GM Royalties?
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Germany wants General Motors to forego royalties from Opel and set aside the payments as collateral in the event of a default on government-backed loans, Deputy Economy Minister Jochen Homann said Wednesday.
Homann, who leads Germany’s side in talks on Opel’s disposal, met in Berlin on Tuesday with John Smith, GM’s chief negotiator, and executives from Magna and RHJ International. GM and Magna, selected by Germany as the preferred bidder, could overcome remaining obstacles “within 48 hours,” Homann said Wednesday.
For the Record
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service on Wednesday dropped an investigation into Raiffeisenbank and 18 insurance companies after they fixed violations in their car loans businesses, Prime-Tass reported.
(SPT)
* LUKoil set the coupon for its coming issue of three-year notes at 13.35 percent, the company said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.
(Bloomberg)
*?Moscow sold 3.5 billion rubles ($112 million) of bonds due 2016 priced to yield 14.11 percent, the city’s debt committee said in a statement Wednesday.
(Bloomberg)
*?Inflation in the year to Aug. 3 reached 8.1 percent, the Federal Statistics Service said in a statement on its web site Wednesday.
(Bloomberg)
TITLE: Obama’s Confusing Nuclear Policy
TEXT: The Cold War ended nearly 20 years ago. Isn’t it time we abandoned policies specifically designed to deal with it? Arms control talks are a case in point. Why should U.S. officials act as if only a Cold War-style treaty can save the United States and Russia from a destabilizing nuclear arms race?
Despite President Barack Obama’s strange, pre-Moscow summit remark last month in a New York Times interview that the United States and Russia are continuing to “grow” their nuclear stockpiles, both countries have, in fact, reduced their stockpiles drastically since the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Those reductions resulted from unilateral decisions, not from arms control bargaining.
Thus, on Nov. 13, 2001, then-President George W. Bush announced that the United States would unilaterally reduce its “operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next decade.” This was far less than the 6,000 limit allowed under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Then-President Vladimir Putin promptly said in December 2001 that Russia would similarly reduce its nuclear forces.
Benefiting from the happy reality that the Cold War was over, each country felt free to cut its arsenal, whether or not the other committed itself to do so. The 2002 Moscow Treaty, which simply made legally binding the reduction pledges each president had already announced, was negotiated as a friendly gesture to Russia. U.S. officials did not see it as a strategic necessity, but Putin wanted formal acknowledgment that Moscow retained nuclear arms parity with Washington.
Now, with START set to expire in December, it is Obama who’s intent on signing a new treaty. He says U.S.-Russian arms reductions will help stem nuclear proliferation.
Obama here is mixing up pretext and policy. When criticized for pursuing nuclear weapons, proliferators like North Korea and Iran make diplomatic talking points out of the size of the great powers’ arsenals. They try to shift the focus away from themselves by complaining that the Americans and Russians aren’t working hard enough to reach disarmament goals envisioned in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But depriving proliferators of such talking points won’t affect their incentives to acquire nuclear weapons — or the world’s incentives to counter the dangers that the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs pose to international peace.
Nor would cutting the U.S. and Russian arsenals by a few hundred weapons do anything significant to achieve Obama’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The roadblock is the fact of U.S. dependence on nuclear deterrence. So long as the security of the United States and of our allies and friends requires such dependence, a non-nuclear world will remain out of reach. Inventing a way to dispense with nuclear deterrence will require a political or technological breakthrough of major magnitude. Retaining our dependence on nuclear weapons even at somewhat lower levels is an admission by the Obama administration that the proposed reductions don’t actually bring us closer to a non-nuclear world.
With Obama openly eager for a START follow-up treaty, Russian leaders have chosen to play coy and become demanding. So what might the United States have to pay for it? The price is likely to be high, as suggested by the “Joint Understanding” the U.S. and Russian presidents announced last month during the summit in Moscow.
Point 5 of the document specifies that the new treaty is to contain “a provision on the interrelationship of strategic offensive and strategic defensive arms.” Russia will use this language — something Bush administration officials repeatedly rejected — to try to derail U.S. plans for a Europe-based missile system designed to counter Iranian missile threats. If Russia succeeds here, the new treaty would increase the value to Iran of acquiring nuclear weapons. By making it easier for a nuclear-armed Iran to threaten all of Europe and eventually the United States, the new treaty would promote rather than discourage nuclear proliferation.
Similarly, according to Point 6, the new treaty is to contain a provision on how non-nuclear, long-range strike weapons may affect strategic stability. Russia wants this to impede U.S. development of such weapons, probably by requiring that they be counted as if they had nuclear warheads. Hence, the new treaty could shut down one of the more promising avenues for reducing U.S. dependence on nuclear arms for strategic strike.
All in all, the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policies appear confused and self-defeating. Obama seems willing to pay for arms reductions that Russian officials have made clear will occur soon, because of aging or the planned modernization of systems, with or without a new treaty. Moreover, the Obama administration is opposing modernization measures designed to protect against the risk that the aging of U.S. weapons will compromise their safety or reliability.
There is an important connection between proliferation risks and modernization. But the Obama administration seems to have it backward. If Washington fails to ensure the continuing safety and reliability of its arsenal, it could cause the collapse of the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and others might decide that their security requires them to acquire their own nuclear arsenals, rather than rely indefinitely on the United States. The world could reach a tipping point, with cascading nuclear proliferation, as the bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission warned in its May 2009 report.
The Obama administration’s nuclear weapons policies — including its treaty talks with Russia — affect the way the United States’ friends and potential adversaries view the integrity of the U.S. deterrent. The wrong policies can endanger the United States directly. They can also cause other states to lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella and to seek security in national nuclear capabilities.
If that happens, the dangers of a nuclear war somewhere in the world would go up substantially. It would not be the first time a U.S. government helped bring about the opposite of its intended result, but it might be one of the costliest mistakes ever.
Douglas J. Feith, a former undersecretary of defense for policy from 2001-05, is the author of “War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism.” Abram N. Shulsky is a former Defense Department official who dealt with arms control issues. This comment appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
TITLE: Putin’s Afghan War
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Events in South Ossetia are unfolding according to last year’s scenario. No sooner had U.S. Vice President Joe Biden announced that the United States would not provide arms to Georgia than South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity accused the United States of complicity in genocide against the Ossetian people and announced that Tskhinvali had come under fire from the Georgian village of Nikozi. Considering the fact that South Ossetian forces had already wiped Nikozi off the map, his statement sounded a bit strange.
The next day, a Georgian citizen died after stepping on a mine on the Georgian side of the border with the Akhalgorsk district. (Remember that before the Russia-Georgia war last August, the Akhalgorsk region belonged to Georgia, and after the war both Georgians and Ossetians began leaving the area.) President Kokoity announced that Georgia had intentionally blown up its own citizen as part of its policy of preventing Akhalgorsk refugees from returning home.
As part of the ongoing peace talks, Kokoity demanded that Georgia return the Trusovsky Gorge on the grounds that “many of our people” are there. Using that logic, Russia could demand the return of countless regions — including parts of the United States and Australia — since “many Russians were born there.”
This is all exactly like the Gleivits radio station incident, when in 1939 Germans dressed as Polish soldiers attacked their own radio station and then announced that the Poles were responsible.
Russia has fallen hostage to Kokoity’s whims. Under his rule, South Ossetia is rapidly becoming a ghost town. The republic’s nominal population of 70,000 is really only 15,000 today, according to the South Ossetian opposition. Kokoity plans to implement all of his peacekeeping plans with the help of the Russian military. And even if the Kremlin supports Kokoity, it is by no means proof that he has the situation under control at home. When Prime Minister Vladimir Putin demanded an account of what happened to the funds the Kremlin sent to South Ossetia to rebuild the republic, he could not give a coherent answer.
The problem is that it would be impossible to repeat last year’s scenario now. Last year, nobody in the world paid any attention to the fact that before the war had started, South Ossetian forces began shelling Georgian territory while declaring their readiness to launch a “counterstrike” against Georgian cities. Today, it is highly unlikely that Russia and South Ossetia will be able to convince the world that Georgians blew up a fellow citizen who was trying to return to the “prospering” region of Akhalgorsk, and all at the same time as that cursed West is rejecting Kokoity’s peaceful request that Georgia return the Trusovsky Gorge.
What’s more, if there will, in fact, be Round 2 of the Russia-Georgia war, nobody will believe that Kokoity started the conflict. Everyone will conclude that it was Putin’s decision.
Against the backdrop of an economic crisis, a gas war with Ukraine and a milk war with Belarus, a new war with Georgia would mean the same thing for Putin’s regime that the war in Afghanistan meant for the Soviet Union — the beginning of the end.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: Opening minds
AUTHOR: Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The prize for each winning picture at this year’s Open Cinema short-film festival succinctly captures the power the filmmaker wields through his art. A rugged metal-and-glass hourglass with a tap in the center to control the flow of sand, each trophy enables its holder to play with time.
“You can speed up or slow down time, or you can stop time and simply be a genius,” explained festival organizer Lyudmila Lipeyko, who founded the festival five years ago.
The current festival, which opens Friday at Dom Kino and concludes Aug. 15 with a program of the winning films on the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress, includes four categories of independent short films: Live action, documentary, animation, and experimental/video art. The competitive part of the festival will select the best film in each of these four genres from 77 entries made in 23 different countries — including Russia — over the past two years, whereas the non-competitive part will feature a panorama of the winners of other international film festivals and a retrospective of the works of Russian animator Ivan Maximov.
“Short films don’t make it to viewers; at best they’re shown at a festival,” Lipeyko said. “Our main goal is to show viewers what the directors of short films do.”
This year’s event is dedicated to the internationally renowned Soviet director Sergei Paradzhanov, who would have turned 85 this year (Paradzhanov died in 1990). The art and life of this Armenian cinematic pioneer will play a large role in the festival program: Friday’s opening features the first-ever screening in Russia of the director’s cut of Paradzhanov’s “The Color of Pomegranates,” and on Thursday a traveling exhibition of rare photographs from the Paradzhanov museum in Yerevan, Armenia, opened in the Engineer’s House of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Lipeyko said the decision to commemorate Paradzhanov with this year’s festival was only fitting, considering the jubilee year of his 85th birthday and his status as an icon of independent film.
“Paradzhanov was a master of ‘avtorskaya’ (independent) cinema,” she said.
The focus of the festival from its inception has been to bring independent cinema to St. Petersburg, she added, which lacks a movie theater dedicated to independent film.
Paradzhanov was also chosen for his treatment of the struggle between life and death, a subject that figures prominently in contemporary independent cinema, Lipeyko said. The specter of crisis — both the global financial crisis and a deeper spiritual crisis that she sees as its progenitor — makes directors “think about death,” she said. This year’s festival has adopted death, symbolized by a sheathed dagger in Paradzhanov’s work, as its main theme, while also embracing life, symbolized by the fruit of the pomegranate, in its choice of pomegranate red as the color of the festival.
The festival itself had a brush with extinction this year due to a complete lack of corporate sponsorship. Although there wasn’t any financial support, submissions had already begun to pile up (over 600 submissions were received in total), and organizers decided to continue the event with the aid of private donors, many of them musicians, artists and filmmakers.
“Creative people understand that you can’t stop the festival even if there isn’t money, you have to do it,” Lipeyko said.
Open Cinema also received support from the Peter and Paul Fortress, which stepped in to co-organize the festival and gave permission for the event to be held free of charge on its beach, where the festival has been held every year. This year, the final two days of Open Cinema will take place on the beach with a program featuring musical performances, interactive “object art-from-trash” made by the local group of artists “Generator Nastroyeniya,” and showings of films from the competitive and non-competitive parts of the festival.
“Open Cinema is open in all senses: Open film and an open-air festival,” Lipeyko said.
“[The Peter and Paul Fortress] is the most beautiful place in the city and the openness of the cinema is visible there in that beauty,” she added.
The 5th Open Cinema International Festival of Short Film and Animation begins Friday at 7 p.m. in Dom Kino with a Paradzhanov-themed music video by the group Juno Reactor and a showing of “The Color of Pomegranate.” Tickets for the screenings range from 120 rubles to 400 rubles. For more information and a festival schedule, visit www.artbereg.org
TITLE: Word’s Worth
TEXT: By Michele A. Berdy
Ñîïåðåæèâàíèå: empathy
Ìû ñàìè ñîçäàåì ñâîè ïðîáëåìû (We create our own problems). Ain’t that the truth. Americans produced the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis and “Police Academy 1-49,” and then they wonder why half the world thinks they’re idiots. Russians keep repeating ìû äðóãèå, ó íàñ ñâîé îñîáûé ïóòü (we’re different; we have a special path), and they are then offended when foreigners say, “Gee, Russians are different.”
But sometimes, armed with a bit of rusty Russian and a desire to define exactly how and why Russians are different, foreigners come up with totally incorrect and truly offensive theories. Take, for example, an opinion piece that came out in a U.S. newspaper not long ago. The commentator wrote, “Empathy — the centerpiece of Obama’s philosophy — does not have an exact Russian counterpart. … [It is not a concept] that can be elegantly rendered into Russian.”
Get the hook! Not only can it be rendered elegantly, conversationally and every which way, it is one of the key values of Russian culture.
First, we need to dig a bit into etymology. “Empathy” is not an old word in English. It was coined in 1903 from the ancient Greek (en — “in” and pathos — “feeling”) to translate the German term Einfuhlung. Russians came up with a calque of Einfuhlung without borrowing from the Greek. Their word is â÷óâñòâîâàíèå: â (into, in, within) + ÷óâñòâî (feeling) + (â)àíèå (noun suffix). The term was used in German as a theory of esthetic appreciation, but can also be used in Russian to describe interpersonal relations: entering into another person’s state of mind, emotion or experience.
In Russian, there is also ýìïàòèÿ (empathy), which seems like quite an elegant word to me.
Besides ýìïàòèÿ and â÷óâñòâîâàíèå, there is another Russian word that means nearly the same thing: ñîïåðåæèâàíèå. This comes from ñîïåðåæèâàòü? (literally, “to live through something with someone” — to enter into someone’s experience and share it.)
There are other Russian words beginning with the prefix ñî- (with) that express similar notions. Ñî÷óâñòâèå (literally, co-feeling) means sympathy — sharing someone’s feelings. Ñîñòðàäàíèå (literally, co-suffering), means compassion — sharing someone’s suffering. Ñîáîëåçíîâàíèå (literally, co-pain) means condolence, commiseration — sharing someone’s pain and sorrow.
In conversational Russian, you can express this with: ïîñòàâèòü ñåáÿ íà ìåñòî êîãî-ëèáî and âñòàòü íà ìåñòî êîãî-ëèáî (to put oneself in someone else’s place). This is a good phrase to know when a spouse or co-worker is ignoring your needs. Âñòàíü íà ìîå ìåñòî (Put yourself in my place).
All of this just goes to show: A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
TITLE: Here come the brides
AUTHOR: By Ksenia Galouchko
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: In pre-Revolutionary Russia, weddings were considered the high point of one’s life. Peasants and aristocrats alike divided their lives into two parts — before and after the wedding — and village celebrations would often stagger on for a whole year after the wedding itself.
Communism tried to rid Russians of the “bourgeois” mentality and reduce marriage to the official act of stamping one’s passport at ZAGS — the abbreviation for a registry office — but failed miserably and the svadba, or wedding, remains a treasured occasion.
Exhibits from St. Petersburg comprise the majority of an exhibition running in Moscow, “Topography of Happiness: Russian Wedding from the 19th to the 21st Century.” The exhibition uses 21 walk-through rooms to tell the story of Russian wedding culture. The exhibit includes an array of wedding-related items, dresses and accessories, video recordings, photos, paintings from Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery and even fortunetelling tools that visitors can test on themselves
Each room of the show — “Happiness by Lottery,” “Wedding Feast,” “Fortunetelling of the Maidens,” “Dowry Chest,” “Wedding Blessed by God,” “Wedding Blessed by People: ZAGS” and “Photo Memories” — reflects a different aspect of the Russian wedding.
“Although the majority of show items come from the St. Petersburg Wedding Museum, the Russian Ethnographic Museum and St. Petersburg’s Historical Museum, many of the wedding dresses were donated by families especially for the exhibit. Because of these gifts, we are happy to say that our show is not an ordinary display of historical items but carries elements of personal wedding memories,” said curator Olga Sosnina.
Several months before the opening, organizers announced a countrywide wedding photo contest. The selected photos of newlywed Russian couples, posing in front of their city’s most famous sites, adorn a map of Russia creating a “topography of happiness.”
The exhibit has a contemporary design by Konstantin Larin that combines classic display techniques with video installations and interactive games. One of the rooms shows an animated video of a grotesque bride riding an automobile on a human-size screen covered with a bridal veil. Another room offers a contemporary version of bridal fortunetelling: Televisions on the walls play wedding excerpts from different Russian films, but if you spin a wheel in the room fortune will choose one of them and you will see, organizers say, your own wedding fate.
“At Russian weddings, guests are never just spectators, they always participate in various games and rituals. We wanted our exhibit to reflect that interactive side of the wedding,” said Sosnina.
A highlight of the show is the collection of bridal dresses, each with its own story. A simple wedding dress from 1941 stands out with its black flower pattern. The black was a sign of mourning for war victims, said Olga Morozova, who added that the bride had to wait for 10 years after her engagement, before her fiance returned from the war, in order to get married. The wedding eventually took place in 1951.
“One of the most expensive and exquisite dresses in my collection belonged to a Russian immigrant in France,” said Morozova. “Having left Russia during the Revolution, she had always wanted to return but never could. After her death, her relatives sent me the wedding dress, which she had bequeathed to my museum.”
The exhibit is not limited to the joyful side of marriage, and visitors can look at two rare decrees from the Orthodox Church’s Synod, from 1908 and 1914, ruling on the right to divorce in cases of adultery.
The exhibit “Topography of Happiness: Russian Wedding from the 19th to the 21st Century” runs through Oct. 18 at the Khlebny Dom, Tsaritsyno Park Complex in Moscow. 1 Dolskaya Ulitsa. Metro Tsaritsyno, Orekhovo. Tel 495 321 0743.
TITLE: Russian soul
AUTHOR: By Tobin Auber
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Not every change brought about by the financial crisis has been for the worse. It seems only yesterday that we first dined out at this address in its former guise, the excellent Ruan Thai restaurant. Even more recently we were here again, albeit in different rooms, for the opening of a far less successful Chinese which was run by the same restaurant group, Triton. And now we’re back — the crisis has put the Chinese out of its misery, with Ruan Thai moving in to replace it with no detriment to its superb standards, making way for the equally accomplished Russkaya Charka, or Russian Cup.
This culinary game of musical chairs is further complicated by the fact that Russkaya Charka is in fact a spin-off of Chestnaya Charka — Honest Cup — which is to be found just to the north of the city at the Garden City Mall in Olgino. Both restaurants are run by head chef Yevgeny Skobelev, who has won numerous awards over the years and has something of a reputation for being fanatical about Russian cuisine.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that there is now another option when looking for some genuinely good Russian food in the city. The restaurant bills itself as a traktir — ye olde speake for an inn or tavern — serving honest and hearty fare, and it does a very good job of fitting that bill.
The interior is mercifully free of the cloying folksy kitsch decor usually found at such eateries — perhaps another incidental benefit of the crisis — but the menu features all the usual suspects, from shchi cabbage soup and borshch to pelmeny dumplings, accompanied by home made kvas, the traditional Russian tipple made from fermented rye bread. The prices are reasonable, with main courses running from 240 rubles ($7.70) to 670 rubles ($21.50) — there's nothing here that will break the bank.
We started with buckwheat pancakes with smoked salmon (180 rubles, $5.80) and a duck salad (230 rubles, $7.40). The duck was finely cut and excellently cured, perhaps not visually appetizing but proving surprisingly tasty. The buckwheat pancakes, however, were a revelation, the only regret being that the plate wasn't piled high with the things — instead, the dish featured just three of them, though they complimented the fairly average fish wonderfully.
The intriguing "pork cutlet with ruddy crust filled with mushrooms and onions" (480 rubles, $15.50) was off, so the helpful waitress advised that we try the Russian "Skoblyanka with potatoes and chaterelles" (310 rubles, $10 — such a relief when they recommend one of the cheapest dishes on the menu). It comprised a frying pan of very tender chicken and rather salty mushrooms in a rich Smetana sauce. The salt level proved too much for my dining partner, though I gave it the thumbs up.
We also took the worryingly unspecific "pelmeny with different kinds of meat," at 240 rubles ($7.70). The secret with perfect pelmeny is that the wrapping of unleavened dough should be just thick enough to hold its meaty filling. That means that it has to be so thin that you can actually see the darkness of the meat through the white casing. Russkaya Charka managed the trick with generously sized dumplings that were light and packed with taste — something that you don't often say about this dish. So good were they, in fact, that a dish with the unappetizing title of "pelmeni with chicken fillet and giblets, enriched with mushrooms, served in bouillon with sour cream and green" may have to be investigated on a second visit.
TITLE: In the spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: This month’s Tatler magazine picked Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of the Uzbek president, as its cover girl. She’s a glamorous woman with long blonde hair and an eye for a nice piece of Christian Dior. And the sickeningly reverent article is headlined “Queen of Asia.”
Karimova is the eldest daughter of Islam Karimov, who has headed Uzbekistan since 1991 and is accused on a regular basis of holding unfair elections and human rights abuses, such as the torture of political opponents — not that you’ll read about this in Tatler.
Of course, Karimova can’t help what Daddy does, but she chose to work for his regime, as permanent representative of Uzbekistan to the United Nations Office at Geneva. There is also speculation that she may succeed him.
She has been reported to have powerful business interests, including in the gold mining sector. Last year, she won a bitter custody battle with her ex-husband, a U.S. citizen. Her children, aged 11 and 16, are at school in Geneva. She tells Tatler that she’s happy living with them and is unlikely to remarry.
She quite often appears in Russian glossy magazines. Hello! and Harpers Bazaar printed fawning interviews with her last year. Photographs on her web site show her hanging out at charity events with stars such as Sharon Stone and Elton John, not to mention former U.S. President Bill Clinton and President Dmitry Medvedev.
The Tatler article is about her charity work, of course. She chairs a foundation that supports arts and youth projects. But you have got to question the taste of her posing next to some of the grateful recipients in crimson lipstick and designer threads.
Quite literally groveling at her feet, the Tatler photographs are all taken from below. They also show Karimova in Tashkent surrounded by much smaller people — be they young boys in folk costumes, opera divas or dancing girls. She’s clearly tall, but she is also apparently the only woman in Uzbekistan allowed to wear Christian Louboutin heels. She stares straight ahead, taking no notice of the people around her.
In all the photographs, Karimova poses in her jewelry line, Guli, which she designed for Chopard, sparking protests from human rights activists. Karimova says profits from sales of the jewelry — enormous gold rings studded with stones — go to charity.
The interview takes a softly-softly approach but drops in information about Karimova’s high-maintenance life style. At Fashion Week in Paris, “she talks to the couturiers as a long-term client,” it says. “She doesn’t need to go to fittings because they know her to the nearest centimeter.”
Karimova talks about how she picks out clothes from collections: first suits — “I don’t like suits, but I have to” — then cocktail dresses. She reveals that she sometimes — gasp — wears clothes from previous years’ collections and that she likes to mix classic Dior with “crazy” John Galliano. She also drives a Lexus, is accompanied by “well-schooled guards” and will only eat blueberries and soy milk for breakfast, the article says.
Sadly, the article doesn’t go into Karimova’s pop career under the stage name Googoosha — apparently she’s big in the “stans,” well Uzbekistan, and sang “Besame Mucho” with Julio Iglesias.
The reporter traveled to Tashkent for an arts festival organized by Karimov and writes that when Karimova leaves at the end of a concert, “the whole audience runs up to her to have a closer look.”
Once Karimova decided to have an impromptu dance with the hoi polloi at the end of a concert, he reveals, gushing about how she could have been crushed to death.
“A party has to end on a high note,” Karimova says. And what could be higher than a personal encounter with the queen herself, she coyly suggests. “What would they have thought if I came from Tashkent looking so beautiful, gave out prizes and grants and then just went away!”
TITLE: Obama Inspires Long-Shot Bid in Depths of Russia
AUTHOR: By Karina Ioffee
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SREDNYAYA AKHTUBA, Volgograd Region — An African-born farmer is making an improbable run for office, inspired by U.S. President Barack Obama and undaunted by racial attitudes that have changed little in decades.
Joaquim Crima, a 37-year-old native of Guinea Bissau who settled in southern Russia after earning a degree at a local university, is promising to battle corruption and bring development to his district on the Volga River.
But the idea of a black man running for office is so unusual that Crima is being called “the Russian Obama,” an image he has embraced.
“I like Obama as a person and as a politician because he proved to the world what everyone thought was impossible. I think I can learn some things from him,” Crima said, sitting on his shady verandah in this town of 11,000, where he lives with his wife Anait, their 10-year-old son and an extended clan of ethnic Armenian relatives.
In truth, Crima’s quest to become head of the Srednyaya Akhtuba district is highly unlikely, not least because he lacks the political capital and connections to make it happen. And racism and racial stereotypes are still deeply ingrained.
“They are often taunted on the metro and in the market,” said Lydia Troncale of the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy, a nonprofit organization that works with African immigrants.
Crima gets along well with his fellow townspeople, but to play it safe he is accompanied almost everywhere by his muscular brother-in-law.
Crima, who came to Russia in 1989 and holds a degree from Volgograd State Pedagogical University, believes that he has what it takes to fix the problems in his district, where some residents still lack potable water and use outhouses. Unpaved streets, where goats graze, turn to mud after a rain.
About 55,000 people live in the district’s 18 villages and towns.
“The current district head has been in power for 10 years, but he hasn’t done anything for people here,” Crima said. “There are young families that need housing, who need opportunities. This town and Russia are ready for a change.”
Crima wanted to come to the Soviet Union because it supported his West African homeland when it gained independence in 1974. He describes Russia as a “great power” and admires Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. He married a local woman, learned to speak fluent Russian and earned his citizenship.
He farms 20 hectares of land, growing watermelons, which he and his wife sell along the town’s main road. He employs about 20 people.
But for many of Crima’s neighbors, that’s not enough.
“He hasn’t lived all of our issues, and he didn’t grow up around us; he’s not a kolkhoznik [collective farmer],” produce vendor Vladimir Kachenko said. “If I need help building a house, he can’t help me get the required permits because he hasn’t gone through it himself.”
Still, many in town admire Crima’s audacity. When he walks down the street in a crisp white shirt and tie, residents shake his hand and congratulate him on his decision to run.
“I haven’t heard his platform, but he’s a nice person,” said Denis Duma, 27. “I would change my party affiliation for him.”
Privately, however, some laugh at what they see as Crima’s naivety. A department store saleswoman who refused to give her name said she would not vote for him because she doesn’t want to “live in Africa.” Another said she would not vote for a black person.
But such sentiments remain common in Russia, and Crima himself put up billboards that read, “I will toil like a Negro.”
The signs were up for only a couple of days before being replaced by ads for the main pro-Kremlin party’s candidate, Yury Khrustov, a former teacher.
Crima is a member of United Russia but is running in the Oct. 11 election as an independent.
His candidacy is part of a standard tactic in Russia used to draw the protest vote and allow people to vent frustration while posing no threat to the government’s favored candidate, said Anna Stepnova, editor of Delovoye Povolzhye, a newspaper in Volgograd.
Crima’s campaign manager, Vladimir Kritsky, acknowledged that a victory for his client was close to impossible but said the Kremlin had promised Crima a seat on the district council in 2011.
“He will be able to do a lot of good for the region,” said Kritsky, 33, a former special operations commander. “He’s a very smart guy, he speaks five languages … this is an experiment that the Kremlin will be interested in supporting.”
There is deep dissatisfaction with the current head of the Srednyaya Akhtuba district, who locals say sold a lot of land to out-of-towners while purchasing a large villa and a plane for himself. The incumbent is not running for re-election.
Despite that, many in Srednyaya Akhtuba see no point in voting in elections they say are predetermined.
“I’ve lost hope in our system and our people,” said Taisya Kirilova, 64. “He can want to change things, but alone, he can’t accomplish anything.”
Crima shrugs off voters’ cynicism.
“If local residents want a change, they need to vote for it,” Crima said. “Plus, I like surprising people.”
TITLE: Ahmadinejad Sworn In For Second Term
AUTHOR: By Nasser Karimi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in to a second presidential term Wednesday with a call for the divided nation to “join hands,” but it was greeted by protests in the streets and snubs inside Iran’s parliament.
The oath-taking ceremony capped a cycle of outrage over claims of massive fraud in the June 12 elections and moved Iran into a new phase: A weakened leadership facing a wider opposition that includes powerful clerics and internal splits among conservatives.
The political fissures raise serious questions about Iran’s ability to make policy decisions on looming issues such as offers for talks with Washington and efforts to mend ties with European trade partners.
“We have now a crisis of authority, where the president and the supreme leader are not able to make big decisions including about the nuclear program and engagement with the U.S.,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
President Barack Obama has given Iran until next month to show willingness to open dialogue after a nearly 30-year diplomatic standoff.
Iran’s leaders must first try to tone down the worst domestic upheaval since the 1979 Islamic Revolution — which has been fanned by a mass trial that includes prominent reformist political figures.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Washington still favors direct contact with Iran, but she also lauded those challenging the leadership in Tehran.
“Our policy remains the same and we take the reality that the person who was inaugurated today will be considered the president,” Clinton told reporters in Nairobi, Kenya. “But we appreciate and we admire the continuing resistance and ongoing efforts by the reformers to make the changes that the Iranian people deserve.”
In his inaugural address — in tones somewhat quieter than his often-bombastic style — Ahmadinejad called for the nation to put aside its differences and “join hands.”
But on the streets outside the dark green marble parliament chamber, riot police used batons and pepper spray against hundreds of protesters chanting “Death to the Dictator,” witnesses said.
Some of the protesters wore black T-shirts in a sign of mourning and others wore green — the color of the opposition movement. A middle-aged woman carried a banner warning Iran’s leaders to listen to the people’s demands or face the same fate as Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was toppled in the Islamic Revolution.
Nearly every night, opposition supporters reprise one of the main tactics of the anti-shah movement, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is Great,” from rooftops.
Inside parliament, the dissent came in the form of boycotts. Key opposition leaders, moderate lawmakers, two former presidents and all three of Ahmadinejad’s election challengers stayed away from the swearing-in ceremony.
Among the no-shows: former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami and two of the reformist-backed candidates, the top challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi. Another powerful snub came from the third candidate, conservative Mohsen Rezaei — a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard who had attended a pre-inauguration ceremony for Ahmadinejad on Monday.
His decision to stay away from the main event could reflect growing cracks among conservatives, which could sharply complicate Ahmadinejad’s bid to regain political legitimacy.
Rezaei has increasingly criticized the leadership for their crackdowns, including calling for high-level probes into abuses after the son of his top aide died in detention. State media reported Tuesday that charges could be filed against police, judges and others for alleged abuses, but it remains unclear whether authorities will follow through.
Images on state television showed many empty seats during the swearing-in ceremony, and an opposition lawmakers’ Web site said 57 of its 70 lawmakers were not there. Many of the 13 who did attend walked out in protest when Ahmadinejad began to speak, it said. Parliament speaker Ali Larijani maintained 273 of the 290 Iranian lawmakers were present.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad demanded that Iran be on an equal footing with other world powers and denounced foreign interference. Iran has accused the U.S. and the West of backing street protests.
“We must play a key role in the management of the world,” Ahmadinejad said. “We will not remain silent. We will not tolerate disrespect, interference and insults.”
He added that he would “spare no effort to safeguard the frontiers of Iran” — an apparent reference to Israel and U.S. troops along its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Iran’s detention last week of three Americans who strayed across the border while hiking in northern Iraq has added a new point of friction in relations with Washington.
Ahmadinejad noted that some Western countries — including the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Italy — did not congratulate him on his election win.
“They do not respect the rights of other nations, yet they recognize themselves as the yardstick for democracy,” he said, without naming specific countries.
TITLE: American Reporters Released In N. Korea
AUTHOR: By Robert Jablon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BURBANK, California — After months of being left to live alone in fear and hunger, wondering if they might ever be allowed to return to their families, two American journalists held captive in Korea learned in just a heartbeat that they would be going home.
The moment, said Laura Ling, came when she and fellow reporter Euna Lee were summoned to a meeting with their captors and suddenly saw the familiar figure of former President Bill Clinton.
“We knew instantly in our hearts that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end, and now we stand here, home and free,” Ling said during an emotional airport reunion with her family and that of Lee’s.
Both reporters sobbed and embraced their husbands and Lee’s 4-year-old daughter, Hana, as they were reunited with them Wednesday in a hangar at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank following a 9 1/2-hour flight from Japan. It was their last stop following their release Tuesday from North Korea.
While questions swirled about the delicate negotiating dance that led to their freedom, Ling, her voice sometimes shaking with sobs, only talked about the pair’s gratitude to all those who worked for their release.
“We could feel your love all the way in North Korea,” she said. “It is what kept us going in the darkest of hours, and it is what sustained our faith that we would come home.”
Neither woman offered details of their treatment in North Korea, which has a reputation for a brutal government and has struggled through famine. Ling’s sister later told reporters her sister was “a little bit weak” and it would take some time for her to be able to speak about her captivity.
“She’s really, really anxious to have fresh fruit and fresh food. ... There were rocks in her rice,” Lisa Ling said outside her sister’s home in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. “Obviously, it’s a country that has a lot of economic problems.”
She said Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, rarely saw each other during their 4 1/2 months of captivity.
“They actually were kept apart most of the time. ... On the day of their trial, they hugged each other and that was it,” she said.
Lee and Ling, reporters for former Vice President Al Gore’s San Francisco-based Current TV, were working on a story about the trafficking of women when they were arrested in March. They were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor after being convicted of illegally entering North Korea.
Both were pardoned following talks between Clinton and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Lisa Ling said her family had only four telephone conversations with her sister during her captivity. During one, she said her sister asked that they write to Lee “and tell her that I’m thinking about her, and I love her.”
She said her sister and Lee were held in a guest house, having been spared the labor camp because of concerns about their health. Lee lost 15 pounds during her detention. Laura Ling, who suffers from an ulcer, was seen by a doctor, her sister said.
Both arrived at the airport with Clinton aboard a Boeing jet owned by Steve Bing, a multimillion-dollar film producer, friend of Clinton’s and contributor to Democratic causes.
TITLE: Bomb Hits Wedding Party in Afghanistan
AUTHOR: By Noor Khan and Amir Shah
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A roadside bomb hit a wedding party on its way to a ceremony in southern Afghanistan, killing 21 people including women and children, Afghan officials said Thursday.
A local police chief said that a Western airstrike hours later killed five farmers loading cucumbers into a taxi in a neighboring province. A U.S. spokeswoman said the men were militants placing weapons into a van.
Violence and deaths are climbing sharply as Western forces push into Taliban territory ahead of Aug. 20 presidential elections, but rising civilian casualties are seen as deeply damaging to the international effort to defeat the insurgents.
The U.S. and its allies say protecting Afghans is now the highest priority, and the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan imposed rules last month restricting airstrikes. The Taliban released a code of conduct pledging to limit attacks on civilians and curb suicide bombings.
The large group of men, women and children heading to the wedding were riding a tractor in the Garmser district of Helmand province Wednesday morning when they were hit by a roadside bomb, provincial police chief Assadullah Sherzad said.
The Afghan Interior Ministry said 21 people were killed and five others were wounded.
Some 4,000 Marines moved into the Garmser area last month to secure roads and population centers ahead of the presidential vote. The insurgents have pledged to disrupt the election and dramatically increased their use of roadside bombs against foreign and Afghan forces across southern Afghanistan, the traditional territory of the largely ethnic Pashtun Taliban.
A U.S. Apache helicopter opened fire Wednesday night in neighboring Kandahar province when it spotted men it believed to be loading weapons into a van, said Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, a U.S. spokeswoman.
District police chief Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi said the five were farmers trying to move cucumbers from the rural Zhari district to the city of Kandahar around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday.
It is common for farmers to work at night in southern Afghanistan’s blazing summer temperatures. Insurgents also plant bombs and move weapons in darkness, although U.S. aircraft can monitor them using night-vision equipment.
“We watched the guys loading small arms into a van for an hour before firing on it, Sidenstricker said. “Our information is that they were loading munitions, not cucumbers,” she said.
The UN says civilian deaths soared by 24 percent during the first half of 2009 compared with the same period last year and blamed most of the casualties on Taliban attacks launched with little regard for civilian lives.
The toll among Western and Afghan forces is also rising sharply: Afghan officials said a roadside bomb killed five police officers and wounded three police in Helmand province Thursday.
The Western toll for August rose to 11 as the U.S. military reported that one of its service members had been killed by a roadside bomb in western Afghanistan on Wednesday. NATO said the death came after its troops battled insurgents spotted placing roadside bombs, but then were hit by a roadside bomb themselves.
July was the bloodiest month for the U.S. and NATO in the nearly eight-year war. At least 42 U.S service members and 31 from other international military forces were killed, according to military reports.
TITLE: U.S. Senate Set To Confirm 1st Hispanic Judge
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON — Sonia Sotomayor is poised to make history as the Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice despite staunch opposition from Republicans who call her ill-suited for the bench, a pending victory for Democrats who believe her confirmation will pay off politically.
The Senate prepared to vote Thursday to confirm President Barack Obama’s high court nominee, a 55-year-old appeals court judge of Puerto Rican descent who was raised in a New York City housing project, educated in the Ivy League and served 17 years on the federal bench.
Sotomayor picked up more GOP support Wednesday even as nearly three-quarters of the Senate’s 40 Republicans said they would vote “no” and contended she would bring liberal bias and personal sympathies to her decisions. With all Democrats expected to back her, she has more than enough votes to be confirmed, barring a surprise turn of events, in one of the Senate’s last actions before it breaks for the summer.