SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1500 (62), Friday, August 14, 2009
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TITLE: Satellites Search For Missing Vessel
AUTHOR: By Anastasia Ustinova
PUBLISHER: Bloomberg
TEXT: Russia is using “all means of detection,” including satellites and naval vessels, to find a Maltese-flagged freighter that disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean after being attacked in Swedish waters.
The Russian coast guard ship Ladny is leading the search effort, which also involves navy ships located in the Atlantic, the Defense Ministry said on its web site Thursday. The missing ship, the Arctic Sea, has a crew of 15 Russian sailors.
The Arctic Sea was attacked in Swedish territorial waters on July 24. The crew was tied up and assaulted while masked pirates searched the cargo vessel. It was boarded between the Swedish islands of Oeland and Gotland in the Baltic Sea by the group who identified themselves as police officers, Swedish police said on July 31.
The freighter, operated by Helsinki-based Oy Solchart Management AB, was scheduled to deliver a cargo of timber to Bejaia, Algeria on Aug. 4, the Sovfracht maritime news service reported last week.
President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday ordered Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov to take “all necessary steps” to find the ship and, if necessary, to free its crew, according to the Kremlin web site.
The Arctic Sea may have been hijacked by pirates off the Swedish coast, RIA Novosti reported, citing Viktor Matveyev, Solchart’s managing director.
Matveyev said “in this situation anything’s possible,” even a hijacking off Sweden, the state-run Russian news service reported. Matveyev said “it’s still hard to believe that this could happen in Swedish territorial waters,” RIA reported.
Solchart has lost contact with the ship and has no information about its whereabouts, RIA said.
“If the reports are true, then this certainly qualifies as piracy in the legal sense,” Hans Tino Hansen, founder of Risk Intelligence, a Danish marine security consultancy, said by telephone. “But it wouldn’t qualify as piracy in the popular sense. There’s no link between this event and what you see in Somalia, Nigeria or Southeast Asia.”
The Malta Maritime Authority’s security committee, which has been meeting on a daily basis since the first report of the Arctic Sea’s disappearance, has “no communication” with the ship.
“It would appear that the ship has not approached the Straits of Gibraltar, which indicates that the ship headed out into the Atlantic Ocean,” the authority said in an e-mailed statement Thursday.
Sovfracht editor Mikhail Voitenko said on Russian state television Thursday that he had received a report that a 98-meter unnamed boat had arrived Wednesday at the Spanish port of San Sebastian. The Arctic Sea is also 98 meters in length, he said.
A Spanish navy official in San Sebastian said he had no information on a possible sighting of the Arctic Sea, declining to be identified in line with navy policy. A sailing club in the city also had no information.
An official at San Sebastian port said he had no information on the Arctic Sea. A 95-meter ship called the Finita R. arrived yesterday from the Port of Marin bound for Casablanca, the official said by telephone, declining to be identified in line with port policy.
TITLE: Activists Found Murdered in Car Trunk
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Two activists from a Chechnya-based children’s charity were found shot dead in the trunk of their car early Tuesday, a day after a human rights group reported that they were kidnapped from their office in Grozny.
The killings, which come less than a month after the murder of prominent Chechen human rights campaigner Natalya Estemirova shocked the world, raise new questions about the republic’s ability to protect activists and rights workers.
Zarema Sadulayeva, head of a nongovernmental organization called Save the Generation, and her husband, Alik Dzhabrailov, were abducted from their office at about 2 p.m. Monday by unidentified gunmen dressed in camouflage, the Investigative Committee said in a statement. Dzhabrailov also worked for the group.
Their bodies were found riddled with bullets at 4 a.m. in the trunk of their car in the nearby village of Chernorechye.
“A group of men dressed like officers from the security forces entered the office and took Sadulayeva and Dzhabrailov into a jeep. It all looked very ordinary. The men even left a phone number to call in case of emergency, but it didn’t work later,” Alexander Cherkasov, from human rights group Memorial, told The St. Petersburg Times. “They even returned to the office a while later to take the couple’s cell phones and car.”
Chechen police initially refused to take any action when Memorial reported the abduction, saying the couple got into the car of their own will, Cherkasov said. Interfax quoted a law enforcement source Monday evening as saying police were “disinclined to believe that a kidnapping had occurred.”
The car was found in a crowded area about 15 to 20 minutes’ drive from the office, Cherkasov said.
The killing spurred a wave of indignation from human rights groups and statements from Russian and Chechen officials condemning the crime and promising to find the killers.
“This slaying has once again proved the government’s inability to guarantee the safety of its citizens,” the Moscow Helsinki Group, a rights organization, said in a statement.
President Dmitry Medvedev released a statement ordering the Prosecutor General’s Office, Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service to find the killers.
A criminal case has been opened, and a group of federal investigators has flown to Grozny to help with the case, the Investigative Committee said. Alexander Bastrykin, the committee’s head, was in the North Caucasus on a working trip and was briefed on the initial results of the investigation, his web site said.
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika has taken the investigation under his personal control, his office said Tuesday.
“I’m shocked. It’s a cynical, inhuman and demonstrative murder,” Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said in a statement.
“I consider it a challenge to society, intended to intimidate the whole nation and every individual in Chechnya.”
He said the killings of human rights activists proved that rebels were adopting a new tactic to discredit regional leaders. Kadyrov said he considered it a “matter of honor” for him that perpetrators be found and punished, and he earlier said he would personally oversee the Estemirova investigation.
Estemirova, who worked for Memorial and had been extremely critical of Kadyrov, was snatched off a Grozny street by unidentified men and found dead hours later in neighboring Ingushetia on July 15. Memorial later suspended operations at its Grozny office over safety concerns.
Human rights groups including Memorial have blamed Kadyrov for the killing, a charge he denies.
Kadyrov, in turn, has not been shy about criticizing rights groups for what he calls unfair attacks on him. Over the weekend, he told a radio station that Estemirova did not have “honor, dignity or a conscience.”
Reporters Without Borders called on the international community Tuesday to support civil society in the Caucasus and blasted Kadyrov’s remarks about Estemirova, calling them “utterly intolerable and constitut[ing] an indirect threat to all human rights activists.”
Save the Generation opened in 2001 to help young people and their families traumatized by violence in Chechnya. From 2004 until 2008, the group worked with the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Thanks to the charity’s efforts, more than 100 children underwent successful operations, were able to get free prosthetic devices and received access to social benefits, UNICEF said Tuesday.
“I have no idea who needed to kill them,” Memorial’s Cherkasov said. “Estemirova’s death was politically related. But it’s unclear who would kill members of a humanitarian organization.”
“I’m inclined to think that it was an act of intimidation against all independent organizations sponsored from abroad, not just human rights groups,” Yekaterina Sokiryanskaya, who works in Memorial’s office in Ingushetia, told The St. Petersburg Times.
“It wasn’t an opposition organization, but it wasn’t controlled by the government either. It was independent,” she said.
Kadyrov told reporters that the couple’s murder could have been linked to rebels, as Dzhabrailov had served four years in prison for fighting with rebels and was recently paroled.
“It could be a blood feud-related murder,” Kadyrov said.
But there was no reason to kill Sadulayeva, he said.
The killings do not look like a feud murder, however, which under local tradition would not involve women, Sokiryanskaya said.
They married several months ago, soon after Dzhabrailov’s release, she said.
The killings were not the first for Save the Generation.
In April 2005, Murad Muradov, then the group’s head, was detained by security forces in Grozny. His body was returned to his relatives with numerous injuries in February 2006, and prosecutors said at the time that there were no allegations against him, Sokiryanskaya said.
The Kremlin announced an end to counterterrorism operations in Chechnya earlier this year, but violence has continued to rattle the republic and has increased in neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan.
TITLE: Building An $8 Billion Olympic Road With No Direction
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: CHERESHNYA, Krasnodar Region — Ashot Galstyan moved his family from Krasnodar three years ago to the tiny village of Chereshnya, about 200 kilometers away, in the hopes of raising his children in a more peaceful environment.
The following year, however, Sochi was selected to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, and Galstyan found himself right in the middle of the single-most complicated and expensive part of the construction.
Chereshnya and other villages along the Mzymta River are something of a backwater of Sochi, where farmers tend cattle and grow fruit. The only tourists are rare backpackers bound for the Sochi National Park. But the government’s plan to build a new road, expected to connect Sochi’s airport in the Adler district with the Olympic mountain venues at Krasnaya Polyana, has changed all that. At 260 billion rubles ($8 billion), the 50-kilometer auto and rail link is by far the most expensive item in the Olympic construction plan, or more than half of the state’s roughly $13 billion budget, according to the Transportation Ministry’s most recent figures. At that price, the project would cost 5.2 billion rubles, or $160 million, per kilometer.
The road will roughly follow the Mzymta, passing through mountains, gorges and forests. Construction includes a combined 27 kilometers of tunnels for both the road and the rail routes, as well as 28 bridges. Access roads and bridges have been constructed in the past year, and digging began on the first set of tunnels in May. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, tasked with overseeing the Olympic preparations, was invited to a special ceremony to celebrate the start of work, along with Krasnodar Governor Alexander Tkachyov and Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin.
But for all the fanfare and magnitude of “the most important Olympic project,” as Kozak dubbed it, no official route for the road has even been determined. Environmentalists say the lack of planning is taking an unnecessarily high toll on the pristine region and that rare trees are being cut down — even as the builders don’t know whether the areas will ultimately be used.
Residents in the small settlements running along the border zone with Abkhazia say the construction is damaging their property or threatening to evict them from it altogether. Galstyan, whose house sits on the Mzymta, says the river is receding because of gravel extraction upstream and has become filthy with waste from construction and workers.
The wall in his basement is beginning to collapse because of heavy trucks passing by. “This is an insane project,” he said. “I still don’t know whether my house will be demolished.”
And he’s not alone.
Representatives of Russian Railways, which is leading the project, and construction company Most, the main contractor, told The St. Petersburg Times that there was no finalized plan for the road, despite the fact that two tunnels are already being dug.
Moscow-based Most is a frequent contractor for government projects and is behind the development of the 35 billion ruble bridge from Vladivostok to Russky Island, which will host an APEC summit in 2012. According to its web site, Most was founded in the early 1990s by a group of people working on the Baikal-Amur Highway, one of the biggest Soviet infrastructure projects.
“If the Romans built their Colosseum by the rules, they still wouldn’t be finished,” a representative of Most said on condition of anonymity, citing company policy. “Time is important, and we don’t have a year to lose.”
The road must be completed by the end of 2013.
“To this day, you can’t put a finger on the map and say, ‘The road will pass through here, here and here,’” said a representative from state-controlled Russian Railways who also requested anonymity because of company policy. He said final documentation would be ready by the end of 2009 and referred most other questions to Kozak’s office.
“Russian Railways simply executes the government’s orders,” he said.
Kozak’s spokesman Ilya Dzhus said the current work was “preparatory” and that the law regarding Olympic construction allows for preliminary work before planning is completed.
The International Olympic Committee requires that all venues have at least two access routes as a security precaution. The new road will run roughly parallel to an existing road but on the opposite side of the river. The government says the railroad — which isn’t required by the IOC — is needed to make Sochi’s mountains available to the masses as a year-round resort.
Earlier this month, Russian Railways invited scientists and environmentalists to Sochi to hear a presentation on the project, which left some concerned that the road would not only damage the mountain’s ecosystem — it might end up being technically impossible to complete.
“The tunnels are being dug at random in an area with many hidden shafts and drainage systems,” said Sergei Volkov, a geologist who is a consultant on construction of the ski resorts in Krasnaya Polyana. “The company plans to make technical decisions about constructing through these formations once they hit them,” said Volkov, who attended the presentation and is an expert on local topography.
“Before construction can start, geological research should be done for at least a year, but it looks like they did it in two months,” he said.
“It’s a reckless gamble,” said Igor Chestin, Russia director of environmental group WWF, who was also at the presentation. “Just wait for construction to hit the first large sinkhole, and they’ll say they need another 500 billion rubles,” he said.
“We’ll direct our arguments to the prime minister through Dmitry Kozak,” Chestin said, adding that he thought only Vladimir Putin could make a change of plans.
Kozak is on vacation, and it’s not clear whether he plans to discuss the project with Putin any time soon, said Dzhus, his spokesman. So far, the plans remain unchanged, he said.
Aside from concerns that the hit-or-miss digging could significantly run up costs, environmentalists say the work is tearing through one of Europe’s last large stretches of pristine forest.
Taimuraz Bolloyev, president of Olimpstroi, said last month that “green standards” would be used in the construction of Olympic sites, while his deputy Stanislav Ananyev said the road’s route would circumvent endangered trees, according to an Olimpstroi news release. It was not clear what the green standards are and who is developing them.
Bolloyev, who was appointed to the post in June, is the corporation’s third chief since 2007. His predecessor, Viktor Kolodyazhny, quit as Sochi mayor in April 2008 to replace Semyon Vainshtok, the former head of Transneft. Both were dismissed amid complaints of mismanagement and cost overruns.
On a recent visit to the construction site in Sochi National Park, workers were clear-cutting a path and using car tires to burn the freshly cut wood, sending billowing black smoke up from the muddy ground. Last month, about four hectares of the Caucasian wingnut, a tree listed in Russia’s Red Book of endangered species, was removed nearby.
The next stretch of road runs through a box tree grove, a slowing-growing shrub that is also endangered.
“Such projects need to be officially assessed for environmental impact, which hasn’t been done, and logging endangered species is a criminal offense,” said Andrei Rudomakha, coordinator of Environmental Watch of the North Caucasus. The group stumbled upon the logging of endangered trees last month, he said.
TITLE: Ingush Minister Shot Dead in Office in Capital
AUTHOR: By Alexandra Odynova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ingushetia’s construction minister was shot dead by two masked gunmen who burst into his office in the republic’s capital on Wednesday morning in a brazen attack, investigators said.
The unidentified gunmen entered the office of Construction Minister Ruslan Amerkhanov at about 10:30 a.m. and fired four shots at him at close range, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The attackers also fired at the minister’s assistant and nephew, Magomed Amerkhanov, 25, slightly wounding him, the statement said. The assistant was briefly hospitalized.
The gunmen fled in a VAZ-2114 car with North Ossetian license plates, investigators said.
“A group of skilled experts flew to Ingushetia from the office of the Moscow Investigative Committee to assist in the investigation,” the Investigative Committee statement said.
The Ingush capital, Magas, is located four kilometers from the region’s main city of Nazran, where Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was badly injured in a car bombing in June.
The slain construction minister was a “very close and trusted official” of Yevkurov, said Kaloi Akhilgov, a spokesman for the Ingush president, who is recovering in a Moscow region rehabilitation center.
TITLE: Putin Promises to Give More Aid to Abkhazia
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised military protection and additional financial aid to the separatist leadership of Abkhazia on Wednesday during a one-day visit to the breakaway republic that infuriated Tbilisi.
Putin is the highest-ranking Russian official to visit Abkhazia since the Black Sea region broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s. His trip came on the anniversary of the end of the five-day Russia-Georgia war last year that resulted in Moscow’s decision to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, another breakaway Georgian region.
“Russia provides and will provide systemic economic, political and, if needed, military support” to Abkhazia, Putin told reporters Wednesday at a news conference with Abkhaz leader Sergei Bagapsh in the Abkhaz capital, Sukhumi.
Putin promised that his government would spend nearly $350 million to assist in the social and economic development of Abkhazia in 2010 and 2011.
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who accompanied Putin to Sukhumi, said Russia would increase the number of troops deployed in the region from the current 1,700 to over 3,600 by the end of the year.
Georgian officials reacted to Putin’s visit with a fury similar to when President Dmitry Medvedev visited South Ossetia last month.
“He has illegally crossed the Georgian border, and this is by all means a criminal act,” Giorgy Kandelaki, the deputy head of the Georgian parliament’s International Affairs Committee, told The St. Petersburg Times.
After its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent, Moscow has signed numerous military and economic agreements with their leaders. The only other country that has recognized the two maverick regions is Nicaragua.
“To tell you the truth, Abkhazia doesn’t need any recognition other than by Russia,” Putin said Wednesday.
He added that Moscow had not expected any other country to follow its lead and recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
In an interview with Abkhaz media published on the government’s web site Wednesday, Putin said “15 to 16 billion rubles” (almost $500 million) would be spent on boosting Abkhazia’s border defenses and military bases on its territory.
In a treaty signed with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in March, Moscow acquired the right to protect both regions’ borders with Georgia.
The Defense Ministry has said it will open a base in Gudauta, in western Abkhazia, by late 2010.
Putin suggested in the interview that the Abkhaz people should be able to move freely across the border to Georgia, saying that Russia was not creating fortresses.
“This won’t be a Maginot Line,” Putin said, referring to the fortification system built by France along its border with Germany after World War I. “It is the creation of a modern border so that [the Abkhaz people] can move freely both to Georgia and to Russia.”
Few Abkhaz have traveled to Georgia since the republic severed all ties with Tbilisi after a vicious war in 1993, when almost the entire ethnic Georgian population of 250,000 fled from the region.
Tensions have been rising over the past weeks along the de facto borders between the regions and Georgia proper, raising concerns that another conflict could be sparked easily.
In the interview, Putin accused Tbilisi of continued brinkmanship. “With today’s Georgian leadership, you cannot rule anything out,” he said when asked if there would be a repeat of last year’s war.
Bagapsh said Wednesday that Abkhazia was a firm ally of Russia in the Caucasus, and Putin promised not to interfere in Abkhazia’s domestic politics. Most Abkhaz residents carry Russian passports.
TITLE: Medvedev Speaks Out on Ukraine
AUTHOR: By Nikolaus von Twickel
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev lashed out at Ukraine’s pro-Western leader Viktor Yushchenko on Tuesday, indicating that the Kremlin is counting on a change of leadership when Russia’s most important neighbor state votes in a presidential election.
Analysts said Medvedev was effectively telling Ukrainians to vote Yushchenko out of office in the election scheduled for January.
In an open letter to Yushchenko, Medvedev said he would postpone sending a new ambassador to Kiev and accused the Ukrainian president of putting gas supplies to Europe at risk by souring ties with Moscow.
Medvedev suggested that only a new president could restore friendly relations between the two countries.
“I am sure that our relations will return to a strategic partnership in the foreseeable future. I hope that a new Ukrainian leadership will be ready for this,” he said in a video address published on his blog on Tuesday.
Medvedev announced that Russia’s new ambassador to Ukraine, Mikhail Zurabov, would only be dispatched after relations improved.
“In the present situation, I decided not to send our ambassador to Ukraine. He will start his job later,” he said.
The appointment of Zurabov, a former health and social development minister, has been beset with difficulties. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry only formally endorsed him last week, almost two months after Moscow’s previous envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, retired.
But national media reported at the same time that Yushchenko would probably not immediately hand credentials to Zurabov and that the Kremlin was considering withholding the ambassador until the presidential vote.
Sergei Markov, a State Duma deputy for United Russia, said the impasse surrounding Zurabov was one of the reasons for Medvedev’s anger.
“He is reacting to the unprecedented delay of a formal agreement to the ambassador. … It seems the only reason for this is that Mr. Zurabov will represent the Russian Federation,” Markov told The St. Petersburg Times.
Speaking on a balcony at his Sochi residence in front of the Black Sea, a casually dressed Medvedev outlined what he called “Kiev’s openly anti-Russian positions.”
As examples, he named “the obstruction” of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, a “campaign” to roll back public use of the Russian language and Ukrainian attempts to “distort” Soviet history. Medvedev also accused Ukraine of supplying weapons that Georgia used in last year’s five-day war over South Ossetia. “It was with Ukrainian weapons that civilians and Russian peacekeepers were killed,” he said.
Moscow’s lease of a base for the Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol has been a thorn in relations with Kiev since Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Both sides have also clashed over Ukrainian attempts to describe the deadly Holodomor famine of the 1930s as a genocide ordered by Josef Stalin.
But the biggest sparring point has been Yushchenko’s ambition to bring Ukraine into NATO, a policy that is unpopular with many Ukrainians.
TITLE: Frustrated Russian Throws Cup at 'Mona Lisa'
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: PARIS — A Russian woman frustrated at failing to obtain French nationality hurled a ceramic cup at the “Mona Lisa” but did not damage Leonardo da Vinci’s famed portrait, a spokesman for the Louvre Museum said Tuesday, Reuters reported.
The attack happened on Aug. 2, and the unidentified assailant was immediately arrested.
“The woman threw an empty cup at the ‘Mona Lisa,’ but there was no damage, as the cup smashed when it hit the screen protecting the painting,” said Louvre spokesman David Madec.
“She was visibly upset,” he added, saying she had subsequently undergone psychiatric testing.
The “Mona Lisa,” which is protected by a bulletproof screen, is one of the most prized works in the Louvre and was seen by some 8.5 million visitors last year.
The woman had hidden the ceramic cup in a bag and later told police that she had been upset because she had not been granted French nationality. She has since been released but faces legal action from the Louvre.
Other museums in France have also had problems.
In 2007, a man broke into the Musee D’Orsay in Paris then punched and damaged a painting by the French impressionist Claude Monet.
In 2008, a Cambodian woman was made to do community service after kissing a painting by American artist Cy Twombly at a gallery in southern France, leaving lipstick on the canvas.
TITLE: Building at Ust Luga Port Hit by Conflict
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Tyomkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Construction of the $800-million container terminal at Ust Luga port has been halted due to differences among the shareholders of the National Container Company (NKK).
NKK announced last week that construction of the Ust Luga Container Terminal (ULKT) was being stopped as a result of Fesco Group’s refusal to participate in its financing and construction.
NKK, which is owned equally by Fesco Group and British oil trader First Quantum, owns 80 percent of ULKT. The remaining 20 percent belongs to the German container operator Eurogate. The partners had planned to launch a terminal at Ust Luga in 2019 with a capacity of three million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) per year, at a cost of $800 million.
NKK had planned to launch the first stage of ULKT at the end of this year, but the launch has now been postponed indefinitely, said Yegor Govorukhin, the company’s vice president. He said that $160 million had already been invested into the construction of the terminal, and that equipment arrived at the terminal last week.
Stanislav Vardanyan, director of the Fesco Group’s share capital department, said that Fesco thought that launching ULKT at the end of the year would be premature. He said that the company’s position was not the result of their own financing problems, but of a fall in demand on the container transport market. “There is not enough cargo to make ULKT work profitably,” he said.
First Quantum and Eurogate believe that the terminal will be a success, and that it has clients with potential who are ready to discuss the transfer of cargo flows to Ust Luga from NKK’s First Container Terminal in the St. Petersburg Port, according to a source close to First Quantum. The partners provided equal financing for the project from borrowed funds, he said.
The marine container shipping market in Russia fell by about 30 percent during the last six months compared to the same period in 2008, said Alexei Bezborodov, general director of InfraNews research agency. He said that the capacity of ULKT would only be required in three to four years’ time at the earliest.
A universal cargo loading complex is already in operation at Ust Luga port, along with a coal terminal and railroad-steam complex. The company Rosneftebunker, which is controlled by Gunvor, plans to open an oil-loading terminal at the end of this year, and Sibur has started planning a 3.9 billion-ruble gas terminal, according to a company representative.
Obyedinyonnaya Metallurgicheskaya Kompaniya (OMK) is working on a project for a two-million-ton universal terminal, the construction of which was agreed with the port’s management company, Kompaniya Ust Luga, last year.
United Company RusAl, which signed a contract at the same time to build a $300 million terminal for shipping aluminum oxide and aluminum with an eight-million ton capacity has not changed its mind about the plans, but is not actively working on the project, said a representative of the company. RusAl expects the market to rebound, he said.
TITLE: Bad Loans Sell for 1/2 2008 Price
AUTHOR: By Yelena Khutornykh
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Large banks are beginning their traditional summer debt sales, but they are finding that collection agencies are only offering to pay about half of what they did last year.
Home Credit and Finance Bank announced a tender for the sale of its 2 billion ruble ($62 million) portfolio of loans that are overdue by more than a year, and GE Money Bank is selling its one-billion-ruble portfolio. The winners will be chosen before the end of August, sources in collection agencies said.
“We are selling individuals’ debt that is overdue by more than 360 days for a total of 1.7 billion rubles in consumer credit, both credit cards and loans,” said a representative of Home Credit. GE Money spokespeople declined to comment.
Individual loans that are overdue at least a year are priced at about 3 percent to 5 percent of the total value of the portfolio, said Yelena Dokuchayeva, chief executive of Sequoia Credit Consolidation.
“Preliminarily, we would pay 3 to 5 percent of the portfolio price for such loans,” said a representative of another collection agency familiar with the terms of the tender, adding that “there are enough people who are willing to buy at these terms.”
Home Credit is counting on getting an above-market price because it has been selling debt for some time and cooperates with a large number of collection companies, the representative said.
Home Credit was the first bank in Russia to sell large portfolios to collection agencies. In 2006, it sold 2.7 billion rubles worth, 1.6 billion rubles in 2007 and 2.7 billion rubles last year. Collection agencies appraised the value of the portfolio last year at 10 percent.
“Last year was overly optimistic in appraisals of loan portfolios,” Dokuchayeva said. In the summer, a similarly sized portfolio was sold for 10 percent of the value of the overdue loans, but by fall, after the crisis had begun, the same assets were worth no more than 5 percent, she said.
The reason is the unpredictable behavior of debtors and the market. No one knows whether there will be a second wave of the crisis and how it would affect debtors’ ability to pay.
Collection agencies have had to raise more expensive debt financing — loans have gotten more expensive, Dokuchayeva said. And the cost of doing business has nearly doubled. Sequoia’s June survey said it took three to four months for the loans to be paid off in 2008, but this year it has taken six to seven months.
“We used to give borrowers six months to pay off their debts, now we are giving a year,” said Alexander Fyodorov, chairman of Center USB.
Debt collectors started giving discounts to debtors for quickly paying off their loans. For example, if the debtor is required to pay off the loan within three months, the company might write off all the fees, penalties and interest, leaving only the principal. This only applies to the portfolios purchased from banks, Fyodorov said.
TITLE: New Airline to Offer $8 Flights to 4 Russian Cities
AUTHOR: By Maria Antonova
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: New low-cost airline Avianova will begin flying out of Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport to four Russian cities on Aug. 27, with one-way tickets starting at 250 rubles ($7.70), Avianova director Vladimir Gorbunov said Wednesday.
The airline’s fleet of two Airbus A320 jets will initially fly from Moscow to Sochi, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don and Samara, while Naberezhniye Chelny and Astrakhan will be added within a month, Gorbunov said at a news conference.
“We hope to get two more planes in time for the winter schedule,” said Gorbunov, who was previously an executive at Airbus’ Russia and CIS branch.
Avianova has the first two planes on a five-year lease from the International Lease Finance Corp. They are both 12 years old and were previously operated by US Airways.
Avianova is controlled by Alfa Group and Indigo Partners, a U.S. investment firm, through Russian company Luch. Alfa Group is the ultimate majority shareholder through its investment subsidiary A1, said Andrew Pyne, the founder and former chief executive of Viva Macau, a low-cost carrier in Asia-Pacific, who was introduced at the news conference as a representative of both Alfa Group and Indigo.
He declined to give investment figures, details on the size of the stakes or identify the board directors.
Media reports have suggested that Pyne will run the airline but could not be appointed to the top post because of federal rules limiting foreigners in the domestic airline industry.
A startup like Avianova would need an investment of at least $15 million, but that would cover the “bare minimum,” said Dmitry Baranov, a senior analyst at Finam Investment.
Avianova’s main competition will come from the only other low-cost domestic carrier, Sky Express, and media reports have suggested that Avianova has based its business strategy on its rival’s. Pyne denied that, telling The St. Petersburg Times, “Our business plan is independently constructed and not based on anyone else’s.”
Avianova’s flight schedule is tight, and it might face problems with only two planes, said Sky Express director Marina Bukalova.
“It’s a very risky schedule, even before two more cities are added,” she told The St. Petersburg Times.
Typical service time between landing and takeoff is 40 minutes at Vnukovo, while it can take an hour at regional airports, she said.
Avianova’s web site shows, for example, that the airline has scheduled a 25-minute stop at Vnukovo for a plane arriving from Samara and leaving for Rostov on Sept. 13, while the other plane is in Krasnodar at the same time.
Tickets to the first four destinations became available for purchase online Tuesday night. The base price of 250 rubles is available for about 45 seats out of 180, and the fare increases to 5,000 rubles at the date of departure, said airline sales director Zhanna Shalimova.
The base price does not include airport and booking fees, so the 250-ruble fare will actually cost 623 rubles.
TITLE: Brewers Criticize Government Plans For Steep Hike in Taxation on Beer
AUTHOR: By Alex Anishyuk
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A government initiative to triple the excise tax on beer would be disastrous for the brewing industry, resulting in job losses and crippling smaller producers, members of the Beer Producers Union said at a news conference Tuesday.
“The plan being considered by the government will cause production to drop by 40 to 50 percent, and thousands of people will lose their jobs,” said Daniil Briman, vice president of Baltika, the country’s largest brewer. “I don’t think anyone in the government seriously considered the social consequences of this initiative.”
The government proposed filling holes in its 2010 budget, which is now forecast to run a 9.3 percent deficit, with 96 billion rubles ($3 billion) of additional revenues from increased excise taxes, including 63.8 billion rubles from excise duties on beer.
The Finance Ministry plans to increase the tax by 200 percent, from 3.3 rubles per liter to 9 rubles per liter, although it has not said when the new tax would take effect. A draft of the budget was approved last month.
The industry currently employs about 50,000 people, and more than 500,000 work in adjoining sectors, according to data provided by the union.
Union officials did not say how many jobs would be lost as a result of the tax. A news release provided by the union said every job in the beer industry created 10 to 12 in adjoining industries.
The proposed beer tax fits in well with a Kremlin-backed campaign to curb drinking, an initiative that is supported by 65 percent of the population, according to state pollster VTsIOM.
But brewers claim that more expensive beer will undermine the campaign, as customers turn to vodka.
Beer sales fell 7.5 percent this year, while vodka sales shot up by 21 percent, the union said in its news release. A half-liter bottle of vodka can be acquired for as little as 50 rubles ($1.50) in Moscow, while a bottle of beer costs about 30 rubles, the union said.
“This campaign looks like a populist witch hunt that will force people to drink cheaper spirits, mostly of illegal origin,” Briman said.
The State Statistics Service estimates that close to 40 percent of hard liquor sold in the country is counterfeit.
“The government must have chosen the easiest way possible,” Briman said. “If they fought counterfeit alcohol production more efficiently, they could boost beer sales and the tax contribution from the sector.”
While an increase in the excise tax will be difficult for big producers like Baltika, it would be catastrophic for the industry’s smaller players.
“The tax currently accounts for 12 percent of the cost of a bottle, which is quite a lot for us to compete with,” said Valery Agafanov, the chairman of Lysovsky, a brewery in the Nizhny Novgorod region. “If the tax rate is increased, it will make 26 percent of the price and ruin our business.”
TITLE: Cash for Clunkers Deal Comes to Russia
AUTHOR: By Alexei Nepomnyashchy
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW — Car owners will soon be able to trade in their clunkers for a 50,000 ruble ($1,500) voucher redeemable for a domestic automobile, a program the state hopes will help fuel demand for cheaper models like the Lada.
A preliminary proposal regarding the program was brought before a working group formed on the orders of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a representative of the Industry and Trade Ministry told Vedomosti, without saying when a final version of the initiative would be available.
“We think the program will go into effect Jan. 1, 2010,” said Alexei Rakhmanov, the ministry’s automotive industry director.
The program aims to reduce the number of environmentally unfriendly and potentially unsafe cars on the country’s roads. Nearly 15 million cars — almost half of the total number of automobiles in the country — are aged 10 years or more, according to Avtostat.
Another no-less important goal is stimulating the sale of new domestic cars and foreign brands that are assembled in the country.
A test-run of the program will go into effect in the Moscow region, as well as in the St. Petersburg, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Ulyanovsk regions and possibly in the country’s Far East, Rakhmanov said.
Any car 10 years or older and weighing not more than 3.5 tons can be traded in, as long as it has been registered to its present owner for more than a year.
“The car has to be running, it should be registered with the traffic police and it should have all of the necessary documents,” Rakhmonov said.
The owner will receive a voucher for 50,000 rubles, which can only be used toward the purchase of a domestic car. There will be no restrictions on the price of the automobile being purchased, Rakhmonov said.
Cars will be traded at certain dealerships and at specialized companies.
The program will be overseen by the Industry and Trade Ministry, as well as the traffic police.
“The traffic police will find out who the car is registered with and make sure it’s not stolen. And the ministry will make sure that nobody trades in a nonexistent car or trades in the same car twice,” Rakhmonov said.
The program is still being fine-tuned, and a final version will be announced at a later date, he said, adding that the state plans to sell up to 200,000 new cars next year as a result of the program.
The initiative is expected to cost 10 billion rubles ($307 million). The Industry and Trade Ministry filed a request for the money with the Finance Ministry but has not yet received an answer.
The Finance Ministry refused requests for comment.
Automakers think that the program will do little to stimulate demand because it focuses on the wrong segment of society.
“According to our calculations, there won’t be much demand from owners of 10-year-old cars — they are not wealthy enough,” said a representative of a major domestic auto manufacturer. “They should lower the maximum age of the cars to seven years.”
TITLE: In Brief
TEXT: Iceland Loan Discussed
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Iceland rejected a 4 billion euro ($5.7 billion) loan from Russia in October and decided to turn to the International Monetary Fund instead, Russia’s ambassador to the island Victor I. Tatarintsev said.
“I think that if your government would have approved to take our loan, the situation in Iceland would have been quite another one,” Tatarintsev said in a video interview with Netvarpid.is, posted on the news portal’s web site. Taking the loan would have meant “no big crisis” for Iceland, he added.
Prokhorov to Pay Up
MOSCOW (SPT) — The Moscow Arbitration Court on Tuesday ordered Mikhail Prokhorov to pay $31 million to ex-partner and fellow billionaire Vladimir Potanin for a private house located near the Prospekt Mira metro, Kommersant reported.
Potanin’s InterRos Estate sold the 5,000-square-meter townhouse to Prokhorov’s Kraus-M in March 2008, but Prokhorov’s company canceled the deal in December, the newspaper said.
Ukraine Debt to Grow?
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Ukraine’s debt will increase to 18.9 percent of gross domestic product by the end of this year, compared with 13.7 percent last year, as the government needs to borrow more because of the global financial crisis, the country’s Finance Ministry said Wednesday in a statement on its web site.
Ukraine’s debt totaled $28.9 billion as of July, including $20.5 billion of foreign debt and $8.2 billion domestic debt, the ministry said.
TITLE: No Second Ruble Devaluation
AUTHOR: By Vladislav Inozemtsev
TEXT: It has become fashionable lately to discuss the impending “second wave” of the financial crisis and the next round of sharp ruble devaluations. Paradoxically, the more evidence we see that the world is gradually emerging from the crisis — there is a good chance the United States and leading European countries will show positive growth in the third quarter — the gloomier Russia’s financial analysts become.
There is a good reason for this. Despite a 70 percent growth on the Russian stock markets and a 10 percent strengthening of the ruble against the basket of currencies since late January, there has been no substantial change to the fundamentals in the country’s economy. In the second quarter, manufacturing continued its decline and real incomes fell. (Although the official level of unemployment appeared to stop growing, this was due more to creative reporting of employment figures than to any real decrease in unemployment.)
Despite these negative fundamentals, the ruble looks rather strong now, and any speculation about a new devaluation is somewhat premature. Before examining those arguments, it is important to look at the devaluation that occurred last winter and determine if it was primarily a positive or negative event.
The ruble nosedived from 23.1 rubles per dollar to 36 rubles per dollar — the largest drop of the last five years — before eventually stabilizing at 33 rubles per dollar. Thus, the ruble devaluation totaled 31 percent between October and February, but only 26 percent overall between October and today.
Is that a lot or a little? Considering that the dollar made significant gains against leading currencies between late 2008 and early 2009, gaining 21.7 percent against the euro and 32.8 percent against the British pound, the ruble’s correction does not look so unexpected, nor does its rallying this spring and summer.
At the same time as the ruble bottomed out, the national currencies of all other developing countries except China’s also fell. Between November and February, the Indian rupee dropped 15.8 percent, the Polish zloty decreased by 23.6 percent and the Brazilian real fell by 24.7 percent. This indicates that the ruble’s drop was in line with the performance of currencies in similar countries.
What’s more, the gradual weakening of the ruble enabled banks to generate significant income from currency speculation and gave Russians a chance to switch their holdings from rubles to dollars. The almost $200 billion in reserve funds that the state spent to conduct its “managed devaluation” contributed to the overall economy and supported the financial system during the first phase of the crisis. Although I sharply criticized the authorities’ actions last winter, in hindsight I must admit that their policies produced favorable results.
If the authorities were to repeat the same level of devaluation that was carried out in 2008 and 2009, they would not be able to accomplish one of the most important goals of weakening the ruble — to stimulate the economy by giving a boost to domestic manufacturers. Any significant growth from import substitution is possible only if the exchange rate were to fall to 50 to 55 rubles per dollar — and even this may be a stretch, considering the dire straits that Russia’s manufacturing sector is in now.
It is important to note that even while the ruble fell, the price of imported goods rose proportionately less than did the price of domestic goods, dampening the benefit for the country’s producers. This is in sharp contrast to the ruble devaluation after the 1998 default, which led to a prolonged period of growth starting in 1999.
Since further devaluation would have a negative impact on the economy, the authorities will try to prevent the ruble from dropping significantly. The cost of summer 2010 futures for the Russian ruble currently stands at 34.4 rubles to 34.5 rubles per dollar, indicating expectations of only a very moderate devaluation.
It is clear that the worst of the crisis is behind us, although its underlying causes still remain. At the same time, it is also clear that the U.S. Federal Reserve and the central banks of other leading economies will not make significant changes to their monetary policies in the near future. The prices for Russia’s leading exports are also unlikely to suffer a major decline. I am fairly certain that the prices of gas, oil and metals will remain at current levels through mid-2010, although some volatility in those markets will remain. Thus, it is unlikely that the Central Bank will make any drastic decisions that would affect the currency markets.
There are, however, two factors that could alter my forecast: a second-wave crisis in the banking system or a drop in oil prices to below $40 per barrel. But the pressure against the dollar brought by the Finance Ministry, which has sold and will continue to sell a substantial amount of hard currency from the reserve fund to cover current budget deficits, will help keep the dollar low.
In the end, I do not anticipate a major drop in the ruble in the next six to 12 months. The ruble might even gain strength if the dollar slumps on the world currency market and if the euro returns to its former record highs as the world’s leading economies emerge from the recession. By year-end, I see a ratio of $1.50 to $1.56 per euro and 32 rubles to 32.5 rubles per dollar.
For now, there is no reason to believe the doomsayers who are predicting another sharp ruble devaluation.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, the director of the Centre for Post-Industrial Research, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Svobodnaya Mysl magazine.
TITLE: Firing at Cyxymu With a Cannon
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Some actions invariably lead to the opposite result of the one intended. Pro-Kremlin PR agents recently waged a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against users of the Cyxymu blog, which promotes a pro-Georgian point of view on the Russia-Georgia war. In the process, the agents caused three major web sites to crash — Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal.
While no more than a few hundred people had heard of the blogger before this incident, now he or she is known by millions, and those millions will spread Cyxymu’s views of the war far and wide.
In any case, whatever Cyxymu might write about the war in Georgia, it is the opinion of a single individual. But the crash of three major Internet-based social networks is an event discussed around the world.
And the tone of that discussion is not very favorable toward Russia. This situation is the exact opposite of China’s Internet policy. Beijing restricts Internet access for its own citizens. By contrast, Moscow wants to manipulate the global Internet and is even prepared to bring down major web sites used by millions of people with one goal in mind — to eliminate a single, unwanted blogger. If this isn’t shooting pigeons with a cannon, I don’t know what is.
This, however, is not the first Internet war with Georgia. Another blog, Voice of the Soul, appeared on the Internet shortly before the war. It was supposedly authored by an Ossetian who had come to the region to defend Tskhinvali. His entries prior to Aug. 8 are particularly interesting.
On Aug. 7, 2008, at 12:38 a.m. — that is, nearly a full day before Georgia attacked Tskhinvali — Voice of the Soul logged the following entry, “Open warfare has already begun.” Six hours later, at 6:53 a.m., he again writes: “The war has started! They are firing machine guns in the city! … It seems that no peaceful dialogue of any kind has panned out!”
The web site Osradio.ru contains similar content. Here are a few posts from that blog dated Aug. 7, 2008: “Ossetians! Let’s turn the city of Gory into the biggest morgue in Europe!” “The Georgian fascists should experience their own Stalingrad, and Tbilisi should become like Berlin was in 1945.” “We haven’t bombed ‘peaceful Tbilisi’ yet. But soon we will.” “We should destroy Georgia with one salvo, and then the whole region would be peaceful.” “The 58th is already in the city!” “We should remove the enclaves at any price. There might not be another chance.”
Reading these entries, one would logically conclude that the war began on Aug. 7 and that the main aggressor, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, struck the sleeping residents of Tskhinvali on Aug. 8.
It would be difficult for any rational individual who had read the Osradio.ru or the Voice of the Soul blogs to believe that Georgia had started the war. It is difficult to believe that the people who were willing to bring down three major Internet social networks in order to silence a single, undesirable blogger really want to report the truth to the world.
The main point in this story is that those who authored Voice of the Soul or caused Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal to crash were not trying to serve the Kremlin’s long-term interests. They were operating as PR mercenaries, earning some dough while ostensibly battling the Georgian threat. And they couldn’t care less what harm their actions have caused to Russia’s image.
Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.
TITLE: From the steppe
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Contemplative nomads, serene Mongolian beauties and never-ending Eastern Siberian steppe take center stage at a new exhibition that opens at the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace on Thursday.
Titled “A Steppe Story,” the exhibition, which has already traveled to New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Moscow, showcases more than 50 paintings by the internationally renowned Buryat artist Zorikto Dorzhiev.
“The artist belongs to the ancient Buryat nation, yet he has rejected the straightforward, no-nonsense approach and the traditional perception of the Great Steppe,” said Alexander Borovsky, head of the Latest Trends Department of the State Russian Museum. “Zorikto seeks a more global and universal approach to his subject. The artist tends to generalize the image of the Steppe, while nomads in his paintings embody and impersonate the qualities of the Buryat people.”
Born in 1976 in Ulan-Ude — the capital of Russia’s Buryat Republic, which borders Mongolia — into a family of artist parents, Rimma and Balzhinim Dorzhiev, Dorzhiev studied painting in Ulan-Ude and later in Krasnoyarsk. Inspired by national painting traditions and Buryat folklore, Dorzhiev has distanced himself from the ethnographic approach. While one of his signature qualities is rich ornamentation of clothing, his paintings remain remarkably metaphoric, with a tangible philosophical bent. Dorzhiev respects tradition, yet rather than documenting the steppe, he incorporates images of it into his own magical world inspired by it.
The artist’s valuable insight into the lifestyles of the Mongolian people led Dorzhiev to become one of the principal artists responsible for the sets and designs of Sergei Bodrov’s film “Mongol,” the internationally shown and critically acclaimed movie that was nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign film and won the National Board of Review’s Award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2008.
Dorzhiev’s work has been displayed at a number of exhibitions on an international scale, including a personal exhibition in Brussel’s Conrad Gallery and Strasbourg’s Club des Arts of the Council of Europe, both in 2007, New York’s Art Expo in 2006 and 2007 and Taiwan’s Art Taipei in 2006. His paintings can be found in private collections in Russia, the U.S., Germany and Australia.
“Dorzhiev’s dominant subject is Mongolian individuals, who live in one of the most difficult environments on earth,” said Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and president of the U.S.-based Tibet House. “They conquered the greatest land empire in recorded history, [they were] ruthless with the violent but benevolent to the cooperative. They then gradually became devoted to the Buddha teaching that changed them, making the people open, peaceful and vulnerable.”
As Borovsky points out, Dorzhiev’s aim is not the detailed and meticulous reconstruction of the nomad world. Rather, his art reflects his perceptions of this world and his meditations upon it.
“Dorzhiev brings his emotional and personal life experience into his paintings, skillfully blending them with tradition,” Borovsky said. “What is most important for the artist is that the paintings should truly convey a particular emotional state, be it a spontaneous, uncontainable outburst, a purely physical tension, an intellectual confrontation, a state of self-absorption or meditation.”
As the artist himself put it in a recent interview, a nomad for him personally is a meditator. “For me, a nomad is not a tourist looking for some sort of adrenaline rush or traveling around in search for a better life,” Dorzhiev said. “He is sooner an artist, a poet, a philosopher. Nomads are usually loners. Meditation comes more natural to people when they are on their own.”
Dorzhiev compares his art with a whisper and avoids using bright colors. “I do not want my paintings to yell or shout a message; they have to have a very quiet voice — to be heard and understood better,” he said.
The artist frequently hides the faces of his enigmatic nomad characters from viewers. When asked whether this is a deliberate artistic policy, Dorzhiev answered affirmatively, adding that in some cases the characters “shy away” or “seek privacy.”
“Sometimes I myself wonder why they won’t show their faces,” he said. “But in cases like that there is nothing I can do about it. Everything has to be natural, and I cannot force anyone to show their face.”
For Thurman, looking at Dorzhiev’s paintings is a joy. The scholar compares the artist’s work with doorways into an artistic world “that makes our ordinary world seem more vivid.”
“All his works are pervaded by his kindly but relentless sense of humor, [which is] actually a form of compassion, sensitivity to the lives and suffering of others; he seeks to find the unexpected, the amusing side of the tragic,” said Thurman. “He translates to us his Mongolians, mysterious and primal, the essence of earthiness combined with divine enormity that is as vast as the sky. He has an incredible eye and hand, seeing the human comedy with unflinching compassion, and depicting the Mona Lisa’s Mongolian incarnation with extraordinary realism, power and beauty.”
The artist compares searching for ideas for his paintings with catching radio waves. “Ideas and images fly around like radio waves, and you need to sort of tune yourself in to catch them,” Dorzhiev said. “Just stick your antennae out! Everyone has their own wave, but it is not easy to catch it. Some people get the wrong one and then wonder what is wrong with their lives... Others, by contrast, have such sensitive antennae that they even know where the radio station is.”
“A Steppe Story” runs through the end of September at the Marble Palace, Millionaya Ulitsa 5/1, tel: 312 9196. M: Nevsky Prospekt. Closed Tuesday. Tickets cost 150 rubles. Links: www.rusmuseum.ru, www.khankhalaev.com, www.tibethouse.org
TITLE: Word’s Worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Ìðàêîáåñèå: obscurantism, anti-Enlightenment, die-hard conservatism, reactionary politics.
Knowledge of Russian word formation is a great tool for making sense of unfamiliar words — except when it doesn’t work. A prime example of formation analysis failure is the word ìðàêîáåñèå. Ìðàê — darkness, cheerlessness, something nightmarish or shadowy. Áåñ — a demon or devil, or perhaps a derivative of áåñèòüñÿ (to go mad). The word sounds vividly evocative, but of what? Devilish darkness? Shadowy madness? Insane darkness? Huh?
Foreigners aren’t the only ones who have been puzzled by this word. According to linguist Viktor Vinogradov, ìðàêîáåñèå appeared in the early 19th century as a translation of the French phrase la manie des tenebres, an image of maniacal reveling in darkness. Ìðàêîáåñèå became one of the buzzwords of the liberal Russian intelligentsia, used to mean a political and social philosophy opposed to progress and science — a bacchanalia of scientific and philosophical darkness that opposed the principles of the Enlightenment. The noun derived from it, ìðàêîáåñ, is a person who is reactionary, dogmatic, hostile to science and freethinking.
Ìðàêîáåñèå is usually rendered as obscurantism, which isn’t always a satisfying translation. First, obscurantism has two meanings: opposition to the spread of knowledge (which fits) and an art or literary style characterized by vagueness (which doesn’t). Second, obscurantism isn’t a word we bandy around much. In contrast, ìðàêîáåñèå can be found fairly frequently in Russian newspapers, as well as in speech — particularly in rants.
This is not to say obscurantism can never be used to translate ìðàêîáåñèå. One of the greatest ranters in Russian history was literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Just about every Russian knows his “Letter to Nikolai Gogol,” in which he castigated the writer after he published a work praising the monarchy and Russian Orthodox Church. Belinsky famously addressed him as “ïðîïîâåäíèê êíóòà, àïîñòîë íåâåæåñòâà” (advocate of the whip, apostle of ignorance). He continued to rail at him, using two synonyms, one Russian word and one foreign loan word — a rhetorical flourish still practiced today. He called Gogol “ïîáîðíèê îáñêóðàíòèçìà è ìðàêîáåñèÿ.” Considering the year the letter was written (1847) and the style, you might translate just one of the synonyms and render the phrase: “standard-bearer of obscurantism.”
Translation is trickier with modern texts. In many cases, I’d go for a descriptive translation:  ñàìûõ âûñøèõ ýøåëîíàõ âëàñòè íà÷èíàþò îùóùàòü ðîñò ìðàêîáåñèÿ â ñòðàíå (At the highest levels of government, they’re starting to feel the growing ultra-conservative mood in the country).
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
TITLE: Animal magic
AUTHOR: By Shura Collinson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An exhibition running at the Loft Project Etazhi arts center this weekend differs from the average installation in two ways. Firstly, visitors can take the exhibits home — absolutely free of charge. Secondly, the exhibits are alive.
The project, titled “Khochu Domoi!” (“I want to go home!”), is a joint initiative between Etazhi and the Rzhevka animal shelter in St. Petersburg, and aims to find loving homes for cats and dogs from the shelter.
It is the second time this year that the project has been held — the first event took place on Jan. 18. On that occasion, 30 cats and 30 dogs were brought to Etazhi in the hope of finding owners for them. Of the cats, 25 were taken home, while nine puppies and an adult dog left with new owners.
“Back in January, the number of animals housed in one single day was the same as the shelter usually manages to house in six months,” said Maria Goncharova, press secretary for Loft Project Etazhi. “This time around, we are hoping to find good homes for even more animals — there will be 70 cats and 30 dogs at this weekend’s event.”
There are only a handful of shelters in St. Petersburg to cope with the city’s huge number of stray animals. “Rzhevka gets between 10 and 30 phone calls a day from people wanting to get rid of their animals for various reasons,” said Viktoria Kuzminskaya, head of the Rzhevka charity foundation. “In the meantime, we are lucky if we can find homes for even one or two animals per week.”
Kuzminskaya said it was impossible to say how many homeless animals there are on the streets of St. Petersburg, but that it is a huge volume.
Some of the creatures on display and potential new members of the family for visitors include Pallet, a black tomcat, who is described as a “young and graceful mini-panther who is very curious,” and Konan, a black and white tomcat, who is “extremely proud and dignified, but gratefully accepts human affection.”
Sister, a three-year old tabby cat described as “a natural leader” was rescued from another local “shelter” where animals were poisoned and their corpses burned once the people responsible for running the shelter considered the animals were no longer capable of earning them any money.
There have been many reports in local media during the last few years about so-called shelters that charge a nominal fee of about 500 rubles ($15) for taking in animals, only to then neglect or even kill the animals.
Equally unscrupulous are the korobochniki — people who sit in public places with boxes of small puppies or kittens asking for money, supposedly for food for the animals. The money is invariably not spent on the animals, and more often than not, the animals are abandoned or slaughtered as they get older.
The canine specimens up for grabs at the weekend include Tessi and Baron. Tessi was handed over to Rzhevka after she failed to grow into the breed stated on her pedigree certificate and brought out an allergy in her owner. According to the organizers of this weekend’s event, at first Tessi pined for her former owners, but is now playful and alert to the arrival of strangers — though not at all aggressive.
One-year-old Baron’s owner exchanged him for two tins of stewed meat. He is described as a little shy but very curious, and as having an “angelic character” — he rarely barks and is well behaved.
People who cannot home a pet for any reason can still support the event by bringing food, toys, bedding and medicine for the shelter’s inhabitants, or by donating money to the Rzhevka shelter.
Take home your own furry friend on Friday and Saturday from the Katushki gallery on the first floor of Loft Project Etazhi from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. Ligovsky Prospekt 74, tel: 458 5005. M: Ligovsky Prospekt. www.loftprojectetagi.ru
TITLE: Take me to the river
AUTHOR: By Alec Luhn
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: When we arrived at Na Rechke, the new Ginza Project restaurant on Krestovsky Island, for a late Friday evening meal, chaos reigned supreme. A pack of kids raced circles around the elegant dining area as shouted toasts rang out from a rowdy party in the back. Meanwhile a jazz quartet in front of the Mongolian barbecue provided a soundtrack to all these antics with a quickstepping version of “Caravan.”
The staff seemed in no less a state of confusion, we observed as we waited for several awkward minutes. When the harried hostess finally approached us she was caught unawares, having obviously not made provisions for the table I had reserved, even though we had spoken three times on the phone. After several more minutes, during which the band finished up its set and began packing up, a pair of waiters set up a small table for us in the middle of the restaurant’s gorgeous, well-designed pavilion.
Throughout the night, this lackluster service kept us feeling like hangers-on at a corporate party, never sure if we had been forgotten completely or if our waiter would soon emerge from the bedlam around us. Once taken into account with the only average Russian-Asian cuisine, the only reasons to visit Na Rechke become the quiet riverfront location referenced in its name and its lively atmosphere.
Indeed, the atmosphere of the enormous dining pavilion is superb, with the layers upon layers of windblown white linens slung from the windows and columns giving the distinct sensation of floating down the Nile on a pharaoh’s pleasure barge. This is not the grandiose Nile, however, but rather the tiny River Krestovka, hidden between the peaceful eastern end of Krestovsky Island and the equally peaceful Park of Tikhiy Otdykh on Kamenny Island. Those with enough foresight to book a table well in advance can enjoy their meal amidst the splendor of the lush greenery crowding both sides of the river in front of Na Rechke’s windows.
After another seemingly interminable wait, we received one copy of the Russian-language menu. Although limited to a single large page displayed on a cardboard plaque, the menu does manage to include a surprisingly diverse ensemble, including grilled shashlyk dishes, meats by the weight on the Mongolian barbecue and an extensive sushi section.
At around 200 to 300 rubles ($6 to $10) for a plate of six, the sushi rolls were likely the best deal on the menu. We ordered two sets of rolls, a one-piece spicy shrimp sushi, 100 grams of chicken on the Mongolian barbecue, beef stroganoff and strawberry cheesecake, with glasses of Chilean Chardonnay and Merlot and a pot of Jasmine tea (each 220 rubles, $7) to wash it down.
In yet another quirky service incident, the tea arrived several minutes before anything else, though it had seemed logical that it would come with the cheesecake at the end. The first food to arrive was the barbecue chicken (100 rubles, $3), alternately too stringy and fatty, and capturing only the slightest hint of the unmistakable Mongolian barbecue taste.
Next up, the sushi rolls marked a solid if not stunning effort from the kitchen. The eel rolls (210 rubles, $7) were simple but satisfying, with the outer layer of sesame seeds providing much-needed zest to the non-distinctive eel meat. The California rolls with salmon (380 rubles, $12) also turned out to be extremely filling, although both the red caviar layer and the salmon were lacking in pungency, almost allowing the cream cheese and avocado to hijack the rolls’ flavor.
In keeping with the general theme, the beef stroganoff (420 rubles, $13) was also middling to average, its creamy, bland sauce accentuated only by a sprinkling of dill. The presentation — meat and sauce floating in the center of a ring of mashed potatoes — was excellent, but the accompanying potatoes also failed to alleviate the absence of particular zest, texture or contrast.
By far the most stimulating dish was the strawberry cheesecake (270 rubles, $9), the light and airy texture and bright-red color of its filling not resembling cheesecake in the least, but nonetheless holding both a distinctive cheesecake flavor and a mouth-watering strawberry taste, set off by two fresh strawberries.
TITLE: In the Spotlight
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: On Sunday, Channel One launched its own version of the British comedy show “The Kumars at 42.” The original show has jokes about an Indian family, while the Russian version chose Armenians as its local amusing ethnic group. And the Armenians aren’t very happy.
The concept of the British show is that a would-be television star can’t get a job, so he decides to film his own chat show at home. Real famous people step through his front door and are accosted by his embarrassing relatives, who are actors performing scripted and improvised jokes.
The show on Channel One is called “Rubik Almighty.” The ad for the show explains that Rubik is a wealthy Armenian who likes to “buy and sell everything” and has decided to pay for his own show on Channel One.
Amazingly, television critic Irina Petrovskaya told Ekho Moskvy that she initially thought that this was for real.
Rubik lives in a huge, tastelessly decorated house with his blonde Russian girlfriend, his middle-aged sister, his sex-mad grandfather and his geeky teenage nephew Gamlet, or Hamlet, a popular boy’s name in Armenia.
The Union of Armenians in Russia on Wednesday published a letter of protest to the director of Channel One, calling the Armenian family “caricatured.”
“The show was announced as a comedy, but what we saw provoked not laughter but a natural storm of indignation among Armenian youth in Russia,” the letter said.
Armenians are traditionally viewed as the funniest people in the Soviet bloc, along with Jewish people. While the idea that an Indian chat show host can’t get his own show in Britain has a satirical edge, it’s hard to argue that there’s any discrimination against Armenians on Russian television — as long as they’re being funny.
Garik Martirosyan appears on current-affairs comedy show “ProjectorParisHilton;” Mikhail Galustyan is the co-star of the sketch show “Nasha Russia;” Tigran Keosayan hosts a late-night discussion show; Yevgeny Petrosyan is the long-running star of “Crooked Mirror,” an old-fashioned variety show; and the “Comedy Club” stand-up show is owned by Armenians.
The star of “Rubik Almighty,” Ruben Dzhaginyan, is well-known in Armenia as a former member of its KVN student comedy team and the head of a big ad agency.
The pilot show was flashy but not very funny. The guests were Dmitry Dibrov, a Channel One host whose grin occasionally slipped off his frozen face, and Anna Semenovich, a figure skater turned pop singer. She looked frightened as the jokes focused on her ample bosom.
The best jokes were about Dibrov’s frequent trips to the registry office —?he recently married two girls, aged 23 and 19 — and a question to vocally challenged sexpot Semenovich: “Is it true that the only way to get into show business is via ice skates?”
Part of the problem is that Russian television doesn’t really have the celebrity chat show format that “The Kumars at 42” was parodying. Reactions to the show were baffled. “What on earth was it?” wrote Chocolita on LiveJournal.
Armenians complained that the show was offensive to their nation.
“I consider ‘Rubik Almighty’ a personal insult,” wrote Slishkomtiho, an Armenian blogger. “Either take [Dzhaginyan] off the air or force him to speak without an accent,” Juber wrote on the Channel One forum.
Rubik spoke with an exaggerated accent, which was presumably fake. All the Armenian stars on television speak Russian without any accent.
What’s more, Rubik is a collection of all the stereotypes about Armenians: He flashes the cash, likes blondes, keeps things in the family, never stops doing business and is irritatingly successful.
Although if I could pick my national stereotypes, I wouldn’t mind those ones.
TITLE: ‘Military Man’ Vladimir Putin Exceeds Expectations
AUTHOR: By Anna Malpas
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW — Ten years ago, on Aug. 9, 1999, President Boris Yeltsin told a weary and bewildered country that he was sacking his government again but that his new, 46-year-old nominee for prime minister would be “very useful to the country.”
A former KGB officer who had gone on to work for St. Petersburg Governor Anatoly Sobchak and most recently to head the Federal Security Service, Vladimir Putin was then little known to the public.
The announcement might have been brushed off as the latest in a string of erratic decisions had Yeltsin left it at that. But he went on to say that this was the man he wanted elected next year as Russia’s second president.
Putin said he hadn’t been planning a run for the Kremlin but that now he “undoubtedly” would. “We are military men, and we will implement the decision that has been made,” he said.
He was the last in a line of four prime ministers nominated by Yeltsin in 17 months, with predecessors Sergei Kiriyenko, Yevgeny Primakov and Sergei Stepashin appointed and replaced in swift succession.
At the time, many were skeptical that Putin — unpolished and unknown — would be any different.
“Back then, everyone was amazed by Yeltsin’s choice,” said Yury Korgunyuk, a political analyst for the Indem think tank. “People interpreted it as the death throes of the Yeltsin regime.”
“This is an agony, a total insanity,” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said in a radio interview at the time. “Who will take a prime minister seriously if they change them like gloves?’’
It was an open question whether the State Duma would even confirm Putin. The year before, it had refused Yeltsin’s request to re-elect Viktor Chernomyrdin to the post.
On Aug. 6, then-Moscow Times editor Matt Bivens wrote in an editorial that Putin was “someone the Duma will never confirm as prime minister.”
Ten days later, however, the deputies approved Putin by the narrowest of margins — just six votes more than the 50 percent plus one he needed for confirmation. Of the 404 deputies present, 232 voted for Putin, while 84 voted against him and 88 abstained.
Putin was an unknown quantity, said Sergei Mitrokhin, then a State Duma deputy for Yabloko, now a deputy for the party in the Moscow City Duma.
“He didn’t have a clear public face as a politician, which in itself was a worrying sign,” said Mitrokhin, who voted against his confirmation. “The question ‘Who is Mr. Putin?’ for us was a sign of danger.”
The question was posed at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2000 and became a running theme of early coverage of Putin.
Putin’s KGB background also put Yabloko members on their guard. “We had a wary attitude toward him. He came from the security forces, from the special services,” Mitrokhin said. “Putin was linked to the threat against democracy in Russia.”
Alexander Lebedev, also an alumnus of the security services, said he first met Putin around 1998. By then, Lebedev was already the influential head of the National Reserve Bank. “I think Putin was always quite a big personality and intelligent,” Lebedev said.
“I think he has changed,” he said. “He used to be more accessible. He would have an entourage of five or seven people, whereas now he has a thousand people surrounding him and you can’t approach him. It was more interesting working with him [then].”
Lebedev said he thought Putin later surrounded himself with the wrong people because of “poor recruitment.”
“He is an outstanding person, but it seems that he has surrounded himself with little-qualified officials,” Lebedev said, calling them “friends and classmates.”
Putin’s early entourage included people who were “brilliant,” Lebedev said, giving the example of Alexander Voloshin, his first chief of staff.
Voloshin resigned from the post in 2003 after Putin cracked down on Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was replaced by Dmitry Medvedev.
Many say Putin’s biggest obstacle was not convincing voters of his competence but shaking his image as a cold and gray personality.
“He made a very pallid impression when he first spoke in the Duma,” said Boris Nemtsov, then one of the leaders of the Right Cause bloc of “young reformers.”
“He wasn’t charismatic, he was weak,” Nemtsov said. “He behaved shyly and indecisively.”
At the time, Nemtsov told Ekho Moskvy radio that choosing Putin as prime minister was “madness” on Yeltsin’s part.
Putin’s personal style changed in later years, Nemtsov said. “He became more charismatic, uninhibited and aggressive — that aggressiveness that many people like.”
“He made a rather pathetic impression,” said Nikolai Petrov, of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “He wasn’t at all known in political circles. He looked like a minor official from St. Petersburg.”
Putin “gave the impression of a person not used to public appearances, who wasn’t very experienced and sure of his abilities,” Petrov added, describing his manners as “provincial.”
He was outshone by the previous prime minister, Sergei Stepashin, who had served as justice and interior minister, Indem’s Korgunyuk said. “Next to Putin, Stepashin looked like a political heavyweight.”
“Naturally, he worked on his skills and did it very quickly,” his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, who was working at the Foreign Ministry in 1999 and did not know Putin at the time, told The St. Times.
“It was a completely different situation,” Peskov said, referring to Putin’s first few months on the national stage. “The country had practically no knowledge or mechanisms to beat that crisis. It was much more complex to work on crisis management.”
Asked whether he thought Putin would succeed back then, Peskov said: “I’ve never thought about it.”
Putin worked on his communication skills after he first became prime minister, Peskov said. “Of course, he wasn’t such a public person before. He became a public figure and needed new skills to talk to people and to the media.”
In his first Duma appearance, Putin came across as out-of-touch, said Communist Deputy Viktor Ilyukhin.
Putin didn’t “know the life of the country well,” Ilyukhin said. “It was fine when he was reading from a speech, but you can’t read off the answers to questions from a piece of paper. I felt uncomfortable for him because he sometimes gave answers that were way off the mark.”
But Putin improved here, too, Ilyukhin acknowledged. “He came to grips with what is going on.”
As one of Sobchak’s deputies in St. Petersburg, Putin was gruff with reporters, Brian Whitmore wrote in The St. Petersburg Times in August 1999.
“When Sobchak didn’t want to deal with the media, he sent the dour Putin — who would scowl, tell us nothing and frighten the more timid among us away.”
In a bid to come across as more communicative, in 2001 Putin began taking part in televised phone-in sessions where he spent hours answering vetted questions from the public.
Style-wise, Putin then was a far cry from now.
While Putin now poses in figure-hugging leisure wear and sports expensive Patek Philippe watches, his style was very different, Petrov said. “He had absolutely no gloss, he didn’t look like a president or a powerful premier. He looked like a gray apparatchik in an ill-fitting suit.”
In a much-circulated photograph taken with Sobchak, Putin is shown coordinating a bottle-green double-breasted jacket and red trousers.
Putin managed an incredibly swift image change, Petrov said. “In two or three months, he was already a different person.”
The transformation can be attributed, in part, to efforts by Putin’s team to soften his image.
“If there was a tennis match, he would be phoned up and asked to come and be photographed with the champion,” Petrov said. Putin also wooed the intelligentsia by going to concerts and once asked Georgian singer Nani Bregvadze for a personal performance after he was late for her concert.
In March 2000, Putin revealed selected details of his personal life in a book called “In the First Person,” which was based on interviews with him and included photographs from his family archive.
Petrov and Korgunyuk stressed the importance of Boris Berezovsky, a key Kremlin power broker and the main shareholder of national television channel ORT, later renamed Channel One. Its nightly news broadcast is the country’s most watched.
“Both [Boris] Berezovsky and the Kremlin were actively promoting Putin,” Petrov said.
“Berezovsky tried very hard,” Korgunyuk said. “He also thought that Putin was a nondescript bureaucrat who could be easily manipulated.”
The self-exiled businessman said he didn’t want to talk about his memories of Putin anymore. “To be honest, I don’t want to comment,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “I’ve already said everything I think about Putin.”
Putin’s precipitous rise in popularity came when the bombings of apartment blocks in September 1999 switched the public’s mind to security issues, his forte.
After Putin sent troops into Chechnya in October of that year, “he started traveling everywhere and met with the troops. They showed him on ORT,” Korgunyuk said.
The situation changed so much that Putin’s strongman image became appealing, Korgunyuk said. “He was young, active, fit and decisive.”
Berezovsky “helped a lot” with Putin’s image, but he “fit the bill in some ways,” he added.
Putin “became appropriate,” Petrov agreed. “He was confident. He wasn’t afraid to take responsibility on himself. He didn’t hide behind anyone’s back, which was very different from what people were used to under Yeltsin’s regime.”
TITLE: Karzai Offers Government Jobs to Rivals
AUTHOR: By Rahim Faiez
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL — Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday he will win next week’s presidential election and will offer government positions to his top two challengers.
Karzai’s announcement seemed designed to offer a pre-election deal to his main rivals and offset any postelection tension at a time when large parts of Afghanistan are embroiled in an insurgency.
Afghans vote next Thursday for president, their second-ever direct presidential election. More than 100,000 international troops and 175,000 Afghan forces are deployed to provide security.
Karzai is the leading candidate in a crowded field of three dozen contenders hoping to win a five-year term. He is trailed by his former foreign and finance ministers, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani.
Karzai said that if he wins, “I will invite Dr. Abdullah, I will invite Ashraf Ghani, give them food and tea and give them jobs, as I did last time.”
A spokesman for Abdullah’s campaign said the people, not Karzai, will decide who wins and forms the government.
“Let’s wait for next week’s polling day and see the election results,” spokesman Sayyid Agha Hussain Fazel Sancharaki said.
Ghani’s campaign team said it rejects any pre-election deal with Karzai.
A week before the vote, there are fears that election tensions could boil over into street violence if presidential losers allege fraud. Opposition candidates have been accusing Karzai and his team of using state resources to ensure re-election.
While Karzai is leading in the polls, the latest public opinion surveys show him at under 50 percent support. If no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote on Aug. 20, the top two finishers will have a run-off. That could open the possibility of a coalition uniting around a single candidate to try to defeat Karzai.
Most of the country’s most violent regions — in the south and the east — are where the country’s ethnic Pashtuns live. Karzai, himself a Pashtun, could see his returns lowered if insurgent violence keeps Afghans there from voting.
The Taliban has threatened to disrupt the vote and warned people to stay away from polling centers on election day.
Afghan journalists in central Ghazni province received a letter from the Taliban on Thursday in which the militants threatened shopkeepers to keep their businesses closed for three days before the vote. The letter also asked students not to go to school and warned people not to get anywhere close to polling centers.
The president said the people should come out and vote despite the Taliban threats.
“Even if there are a hundred explosions, we will go out and cast our votes,” Karzai said Thursday.
Karzai spoke at a gathering of female supporters on the capital’s outskirts. Some of the teachers present said their school principal asked them to attend.
Shekeba Ahmadi, a teacher from Kabul, thought she was going to a seminar. Wahida, another teacher who gave only one name, said their principal had ordered them to come. None would identify their schools for fear of retribution.
TITLE: Pakistan Pounds
Taliban Bases
AUTHOR: By Hussain Afzal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARACHINAR, Pakistan — Helicopter gunships pummeled a key Taliban commander’s bases in Pakistan’s northwest, killing at least 12 insurgents Thursday as government forces ratcheted up pressure on the militants following their top leader’s reported death, officials said.
Military helicopters destroyed several bases and hide-outs Thursday morning near the Kurram and Aurakzai tribal regions run by militant commander Hakimullah Mehsud, three intelligence officials said.
Hakimullah Mehsud is a clansman and potential successor to Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who was reported killed in a CIA missile strike on Aug. 5.
The attacks were on bases in tribal areas near the Afghan border, about 100 kilometers north of the Mehsud clan’s main base in south Waziristan.
The intelligence officials said troops saw the bodies from the air but did not retrieve them.
Several militants were also wounded, and the casualties could rise because some people were believed to be still buried under the rubble of their hide-outs, said the officials, who sought anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Pakistan’s military redoubled its fight against the Pakistani Taliban — a loose federation of Islamist groups with various tribal and regional factions — in April after militants broke a peace deal and took over a district about 100 kilometers from the capital, Islamabad.
While mostly based in the federally administered tribal areas in the northwest, the militants had in recent years spread eastward into the one-time tourist haven of Swat Valley, executing police and burning down girls’ schools in attempts to force the population to adhere to their hard-line interpretation of Islam.
The military took back control of Swat after a two-month assault, and now government forces have increasingly targeted the Taliban strongholds in the tribal belt.
The militants are also believed to give shelter to al-Qaida leaders and help plan attacks on U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan in the same region.
For years, Pakistan tolerated its homegrown militancy, but increased attacks inside Pakistan — reportedly masterminded by Baitullah Mehsud at the urging of his al-Qaida allies — forced the government to launch large-scale strikes against them.
Militant attacks have killed at least 2,686 Pakistani people since 2008, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told the country’s National Assembly on Thursday.
Malik said there have been 1,367 militant attacks since the beginning of last year, the majority of them in North West Frontier Province — where Swat lies — and in the tribal areas next to Afghanistan.
TITLE: French Pool Bars Woman for 'Burquini' Suit
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PARIS — A Muslim woman garbed in a head-to-toe swimsuit — dubbed a “burquini” — may have opened a new chapter in France’s tussle between religious practices and its stern secular code.
Officials insisted Wednesday they banned the woman’s use of the Islam-friendly suit at a local pool because of France’s pool hygiene standards — not out of hostility to overtly Muslim garb.
Under the policy, swimmers are not allowed in pools with baggy clothing, including surfer-style shorts. Only figure-hugging suits are permitted.
Nonetheless the woman, a 35-year-old convert to Islam identified only as Carole, complained of religious discrimination after trying to go swimming in a “burquini,” a full-body swimsuit, in the town of Emerainville, southeast of Paris.
She was quoted as telling the daily Le Parisien newspaper that she had bought the burquini after deciding “it would allow me the pleasure of bathing without showing too much of myself, as Islam recommends.”
“For me this is nothing but segregation,” she said.
The issue of religious attire is a hot topic in France, where head-to-toe burqas or other full-body coverings worn by some Muslim fundamentalists are in official disfavor.
France is home to western Europe’s largest Muslim population, estimated at 5 million, and Islam is the nation’s second religion after Roman Catholicism.
A 2004 law banning the wearing of Muslim head scarves at public schools sparked fierce debate. That legislation also banned Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in public classrooms.
French lawmakers recently revived the issue of Muslim dress with a proposal that the burqa and other voluminous Muslim attire be banned.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative, backs the move, saying such garb makes women prisoners.
The “burquini” covers the arms to the wrists and the legs to the ankle and has a hood to cover neck and hair.
An official in charge of swimming pools for the Emerainville region, Daniel Guillaume, said the refusal to allow the local woman to swim in her “burquini” had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with public health standards.
“These clothes are used in public, so they can contain molecules, viruses, et cetera, which will go in the water and could be transmitted to other bathers,” Guillaume said in a telephone interview.
“We reminded this woman that one should not bathe all dressed, just as we would tell someone who is a nudist not to bathe all naked,” he said.
Guillaume said France’s public health standards require all pool-goers to don swimsuits for women and tight, swimming briefs for men — and caps to cover their hair. Bathers also must shower before entering the water.
Guillaume said Carole had tried to file a complaint at a local police station, but her request was turned down as groundless.
Carole told the daily Le Parisien she would protest with the help of anti-discrimination groups.
Emerainville Mayor Alan Kelyor said he could not understand why the woman would want to swim in head-to-toe clothes.
“We are going back in civilization,” he said by telephone. Women have fought for decades for equal rights with men, he said. “Now we are putting them back in burqas and veils.”
The suits have a clear market.
Women “jump on the occasion so they can swim with their families. Otherwise, they end up staying on the beach and watching,” said Leila Mouhoubia, who runs an online site from France that specializes in the sale of Islamic swimsuits. Sales, she said, are strong.
“I think it’s forbidden (in France) because it presents an image of the Muslim woman (and) they have prejudices against Muslims,” she said by telephone. “They want women to be undressed.”
Mouloud Aounit, head of the anti-racism group known as MRAP, said the decision to ban Carole from the pool appeared fair, since pool authorities were observing regulations. But Aounit lamented that the incident was likely to fuel religious tensions.
“The rules must be the same for everybody, regardless of the color of their skin or their religion,” Aounit said. “The concern I have is that this case will again lead to stigmatization of the Muslim population in France.”
TITLE: Economy In Euro Zone Shrinks By Just 0.1 Percent In Second Quarter
AUTHOR: By Pan Pylas
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON — The recession in the 16 countries that use the euro eased substantially between April and June after unexpected growth in Germany and France, the euro zone’s two largest economies, official figures showed Thursday.
The European Union’s statistics office Eurostat revealed that the gross domestic product for the euro zone fell by only 0.1 percent in the second quarter from the previous three month period.
Though that was the fifth straight quarterly decline, the drop was much less than expected.
The news that Germany and France grew by 0.3 percent in the second quarter prompted many economists to revise their forecasts and some even predicted that the recession in the euro zone may have ended.
The second-quarter fall represents a marked improvement on the record 2.5 percent contraction recorded in the first quarter and may stoke market hopes that the euro zone could actually start recovering in the second half of the year if global demand picks up, as most economists now predict.