SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #713 (80), Tuesday, October 16, 2001
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Miller: Gazprom Will Sell Off NTV
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Six months to the day after Gazprom-appointed management staged a hostile takeover of NTV television, the national network stood once again at a crossroads Sunday.
Gazprom head Alexei Miller announced Friday that the state-controlled gas giant would sell its media assets, including NTV, either separately or as a holding. Miller, speaking after a Gaz prom board meeting, said details of the sale would be decided in January, following a three-month valuation of the assets.
Also Friday, Alfred Kokh - the man appointed to head Gazprom-Media in its drive to wrangle control of NTV and its sister companies away from Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST - said he was quitting because he had been sidelined by Gazprom in making decisions about NTV. Later in the day, under apparent pressure from the government, Kokh said he was holding consultations and might yet change his mind. His spokesperson said late Sunday night that Kokh had not yet decided what to do.
The decision to sell off Gazprom-Media's assets once again puts up in the air the future of troubled NTV, as well as NTV Plus, TNT television and the Ekho Moskvy radio station. Cash-strapped and nearly bankrupted in the takeover, the media outlets have obtained no funding from Gazprom, which has dragged its feet over its strategy for the companies, or Media-MOST, which remains a minority shareholder.
Miller promised Friday that Gaz prom will finance the outlets for the time being. But the question for at least some of the companies is whether they will survive until they are sold to a new owner.
Another important question that cast the international spotlight on NTV six months ago, however, appears to have been answered, at least for now. Contrary to widespread concern that NTV would turn into a Kremlin mouthpiece, the channel has managed to retain an independent voice, media analysts said.
"I don't think that they have turned into an instrument of the state," said Manana Aslamazyan, director of Internews Russia, a nonprofit organization that trains television reporters. "Criticism toward the authorities has been toned down and the new staff makes some professional mistakes, but they are trying to work as they worked before. All NTV traditions remain alive."
KOKH VS. MILLER
Kokh's decision to throw in the towel came after he was not invited to a Gaz prom board meeting called by Miller.
"I have been pushed out [from the decision-making process] in the most banal way, with the help of primitive office intrigues," an irritated Kokh said Friday on NTV. "I can stand face-to-face confrontation. I cannot stay when somebody pushes me out, smiling and nodding, ousting me from the decision making, turning me into, say, a puppet."
The head of Gazprom's information- policy department, Alexander Dybal, tried but could not reach Kokh by telephone on Thursday and therefore faxed him an agenda for the NTV meeting, Kom mersant reported Saturday. However, the agenda said nothing about the sale of media assets, according to Gaz prom documents published by the newspaper.
Kokh on Friday called a news conference, postponed it for two hours and then cancelled it altogether. Gazprom-Media spokesperson Aelita Yefimova said Kokh could not hold the news conference because he had been summoned by the presidential administration, Interfax reported.
A government source confirmed that Kokh had been called in an attempt to convince him to stay. His presence guaranteed "an open and clear scenario" for NTV's future, the source said.
Kokh has repeatedly said that shares in NTV must be sold so that no party would have a controlling share. But both he and NTV's general director, U.S.-born investment banker Boris Jordan, maintained that this should only be done after the channel is restructured. Otherwise, NTV would be sold at a price far below Gazprom's investment.
Until last week, speculation in media circles had it that a part of NTV would be bought by a consortium of investors led by Jordan, another stake would go to a big Kremlin-connected Russian business and a minor stake would be kept by Gazprom. Those named as being among the potential buyers included Mezhprombank, which seized control of the small Moskovia television channel several months ago, and Alfa Group, whose Alfa Bank loaned NTV $15 million to keep afloat.
NTV's First Deputy Director Vladimir Kulistikov said in an interview Thursday that a decision on future owners would be reached by Dec. 15. He refused to disclose the potential buyers.
"The composition of participants [in the negotiations] is constantly changing," Kulistikov said. "But it will be people with real business interests. ... The new shareholders will emphasize NTV's independence from the state and state structures."
At the Gazprom meeting, Dybal was appointed to carry out an evaluation of the media companies. Also, Kokh and Dybal were given a month to "present proposals on financing the subsidiary media companies in the transitional period," Kommersant said.
The newspaper also said that Miller intends to replace Kokh with Dybal, the former commercial director of St. Petersburg's Baltika radio station. President Vladimir Putin has given Miller carte blanche in dealing with the media assets, Kommersant said.
Earlier Friday, Miller visited NTV to confirm that Gazprom would sell off controlling stakes in its media assets.
"Gazprom will not control media assets, and we will [gradually] free ourselves from these media assets," Miller said on NTV. "Maybe in some cases Gaz prom will completely get rid of its assets, if the decision is made to sell the assets separately. But an option of selling the media holding as a whole is also possible."
How such a sale would be carried out is of utmost importance because although NTV could become profitable as a separate company, other Media-MOST companies such as satellite television station NTV Plus needs continued funding and is unlikely to generate a profit in the near future.
NTV management was quick to applaud the sale plan.
"We have been asking Gazprom to decide on the future of our channel and put it up for sale for more than a year," Jordan said in a statement broadcast by NTV. "Gazprom is a gas company for which NTV is not a core asset. We do not want to remain a noncore company. We need core shareholders."
In a sign that he may want to play a role in the deal, Jordan added, "It is very important for us that the company's employees be present in this consortium as shareholders taking part in managing the company."
A STRUGGLING STATION
One of the main difficulties behind the future sale is the dire financial straits that NTV found itself in already a year ago and that were aggravated when the channel was taken over April 14.
"When we came to NTV the question was simple: Will the company remain alive economically?" NTV's Ku lis tikov said.
"Our assets were stripped, our top-rate journalists who, to a large extent, defined the face of NTV left and the producers of NTV television series went to another channel," he said, referring to the mass exodus of NTV employees to TV6.
"We were left with huge debts. We received a de facto bankrupt company, which could be bankrupted by any creditor."
Scraping together funds to cover the day-to-day costs of transmission were more pressing than NTV's massive debts to Media-MOST and Gazprom of $40 million each.
"We had to solve, at a battlefield pace, two problems simultaneously: to fill the airtime with at least something and not fall down to second tier, where we would have competed against Daryal TV and M-1," Kulistikov said.
Although the channel has not fallen to such levels, the decline has been nonetheless drastic.
NTV's average share of viewers aged 18 and older in Moscow has dropped from 23.24 percent in September 2000 to 15.16 percent last month, according to Gallup-Media. Its market share in Moscow has even been passed by TV6, whose share among the same audience grew from 9.54 percent in September 2000 to 15.29 percent in September 2001.
Nationwide, the difference is smaller but the trend is the same. NTV's share in the same age group fell from 18.69 percent in September last year to 13.41 percent last month. The same sample of TV6 viewers increased from 6.37 percent to 9.5 percent.
Kulistikov said devoted viewers of NTV in 1999 - the channel's peak year - are now divided among state-owned RTR television, TV6 and NTV.
RTR's coverage has markedly improved over the past year, while TV6 has not only hired former NTV star reporters but also started broadcasting top shows like the crime drama "Menty," which formerly was shown on NTV.
At the same time, NTV's new team has been unable to reap the full benefits of rising advertising prices, Kulistikov said, because the former management sold most of this year's advertising time before it left.
Last month, the new management took control of NTV's media sale arm, Smart-Media, and plans to introduce a new policy of higher-priced, smaller-volume advertising.
Kulistikov said that the $15-million loan from Alfa Bank has allowed NTV to make do on a shoestring budget and that the channel hopes to be at least earning as much as it is spending by the end of the year.
Taking into account the channel's long-term loans, it will still lose millions of dollars this year.
TWIN CHANNELS
When the fall television season began in September, competition on the television market surged to new heights. The split in the old NTV team led NTV and TV6 to produce similar programs. For example, "Glas Naroda" - once NTV's trademark current-affairs talk show - is now produced in a slightly revamped version on TV6 with the same anchor, Svetlana Sorokina. On NTV, the former chief of Radio Liberty's Moscow bureau, Savik Shuster, anchors on Fridays "Svoboda Slova," which is largely based on the same format of putting together prominent newsmakers and an audience to discuss topical political issues.
With many of its reporters defecting to TV6, NTV had to hire or promote a large group of young reporters to the news department. Former news anchor Tatyana Mitkova was appointed head of the department. Mitkova began anchoring the news again in September, although she had earlier promised to stay off-screen as a coach and editor.
While Yevgeny Kiselyov anchors his "Itogi" on TV6 - where he is also general director - NTV's Leonid Parfyonov is experimenting with a new type of weekly analytical program, "Namedni," a mix of political and nonpolitical news.
Kulistikov said the show, whose ratings remain low, is part of NTV's quest for a younger audience that "demands new forms of information spectacle, forms brought to life by the era of computers and music videos."
"Parfyonov is like Gertrude Stein," Kulistikov said. "Maybe he will become Hemingway, and maybe Hemingway will come after him."
EDITORIAL FREEDOM
Six months ago, the main concern swirling around NTV's takeover was that NTV would lose its editorial independence if it was taken over by Gazprom.
Media watchers said that has not happened. If NTV's coverage of Chechnya is to be considered an indicator of whether the channel is censored, NTV is doing a relatively good job, they said.
On Oct. 6, NTV aired a documentary film by correspondent Ruslan Gusarov titled "A Hero of Caucasian Nationality," detailing the grueling experiences of a Chechen civilian in both Chechnya wars. Gusarov is on the shortlist for winner of Tefi's television- reporter-of-the-year-award.
NTV has also kept track of freedom-of-the-media issues. For example, it broke a story about the takeover of a small television station in Lipetsk this summer.
"I am ready to swear on the Bible that there has been no pressure on the company or desire to shape its coverage from serious people in the Kremlin," Kulistikov said.
What has changed, however, is a switch from being in open opposition to Putin and his government to that of a more neutral observer.
"We said from the very beginning that we will be doing serious journalism but will not be involved in politics on the part of any group fighting for power," Kulistikov said.
Contacted by The St. Petersburg Times, several former NTV reporters at TV6 refused to comment about their opinions concerning NTV's editorial independence.
Alexei Simonov, president of the Glasnost Defense Foundation and one of the leading critics of the NTV takeover last spring, said he has also noticed that NTV has adopted a more neutral stance.
"I do not have a feeling that they have become a Kremlin mouthpiece, but I have a feeling that they have cooled down the pathos of principled opposition to the authorities," Simonov said. "The general information market has lost. The information field has narrowed."
OVER AT MEDIA-MOST
Media-MOST shrugged off Kokh's resignation Friday. Media-MOST spokes person Dmitry Ostalsky said that the fight between Kokh and Miller is an internal scuffle among Gazprom officials over who would get a better piece of property.
Ostalsky said he was more concerned with the fate of 22 other smaller companies formerly controlled by Gu sin sky, saying they are facing collapse if they are not funded and restructured.
"Gazprom-Media has still not officially taken ownership [of the 22 firms]," Ostalsky said. "Unfortunately, time is playing against them."
Although Media-MOST remains a minority shareholder, he said, it will not pick up the bills. "As shareholders, we are interested in preserving these companies. But since the companies were violently taken over from us, we are not going to invest in them and prepare them for the sale."
Ostalsky would not specify the current whereabouts of Gusinsky and his deputy Igor Malashenko.
"They are doing business in the U.S.A., Israel: in other words, outside our motherland," he said.
He said they are developing broadcasts for Russians living abroad.
Staff Writer Oksana Yablokova contributed to this report.
TITLE: Making a Living by Finding Liars
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - It's no secret that the country's high-tech military plants have been forced to churn out pots and pans to make ends meet. But the connection between military and civilian technologies works both ways, and once-classified devices have found their way into the commercial sector.
One example is the ultimate spy-story phenomenon of the 20th century: the lie detector.
Although the use of lie detectors, or polygraphs, is mostly confined to law enforcement agencies, starting at about $100 a pop, ordinary people with doubts about anyone from potential employees to antsy spouses can also take advantage of the device.
Civilian demand and a decade of drastic underfunding from the state have lured many experts from the KGB, now the Federal Security Service, or FSB, out of their top-secret offices. Among them is Vladimir Korovin, a 49-year-old human-resources officer at a large production firm in Moscow, who spends his days truth-or-daring job applicants, as well as private clients.
Korovin left the FSB in 1995 to join the tax authorities, where he screened staff and would-be employees, weeding out those linked to the criminal world or other potential risk groups, like gamblers or drug addicts.
Three years later, Korovin was invited to join the infamous security service of Vladimir Gusinsky's MOST Group, where he got the chance to apply his expertise on a vast scale.
"We had some 10 to 15 people going through our office every day. Altogether, I probably screened about 3,500 people," Korovin said in a recent interview. As many as 25 percent of applicants proved to be hiding important information, he said, from lying about their education and the reasons for leaving previous jobs, to secretly working for competitors or having a criminal record.
Korovin first saw a lie detector in 1979. He was fresh out of medical college when the KGB recruited him for what it called "research and medicine-related work." In fact, his job focused on studying bodily reactions to emotions, particularly those related to lying, and the role of polygraphs in this process.
"Back then, it was a top-secret topic," Korovin says. "Official science denied the whole concept, but the KGB was interested in it because lie detectors were used by our opponents and could potentially help in counterintelligence."
The polygraph, developed in 1904 and adopted by U.S. police 20 years later, registers changes in heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure and skin reactions.
The idea of finding the truth by observing physical reactions is hardly new.
In ancient Rome, body signals were used to test for chastity. While one person measured a woman's pulse, another called out the names of different men. A sudden jump in the woman's heart rate at the sound of a particular name served as indication of a love affair.
Today, jealousy is still a driving force behind lie-detector tests, according to Igor Razygrayev, a hypnosis specialist from the Association of Healing and Creative Hypnosis, who offers clients polygraph tests for around $300.
Despite the high cost, a number of people have sought Razygrayev's help to solve problems at home.
"[Requests] are often related to jealousy or theft by family members," he said. "People turn to us to prove to their spouses that they're faithful or to find out who took the money from the hiding place under the mattress."
Experts warn against trying to trick the polygraph. Though studies on ways to cheat the machine are largely classified, Korovin and Razygrayev insist it is nearly impossible to deceive a detector.
Both men said emotional responses recorded by the polygraph can be unrelated to lying - a person could just be extremely nervous or, at the other extreme, a completely calm pathological liar - but with careful preparation, the results can provide vital signs that a person is withholding information.
The main preparation involves assessing the subject's emotional state. Also, questions are discussed in detail to avoid ambiguity and generalizations.
The use of lie detectors is only partially regulated in Russia. Law enforcement agencies have their own internal rules about them, and although information obtained using a lie detector is not admissible in court, it is used in police investigations. In the private sector, there are no regulations. But screening is less common there than in the public sector, Korovin said.
"I suppose there's the problem of introducing [lie detectors]," he said. "Imagine a company's been around for five years. Bosses find it impossible suddenly to present staff with the idea of screening everyone with a lie detector."
But the polygraph does have some less intrusive applications.
Korovin, for instance, has helped a number of businesses combat internal problems, such as theft.
"A couple of years ago, we ran a series of screenings among staff at a large supermarket chain. And soon enough the number of missing items dropped to almost zero," Korovin said.
"When people know there could be a test, they think twice before taking something," he added.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Election Voided
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Sunday's vote for the State Duma mandate from the 209th district has been declared invalid due to low voter turnout, Interfax reported Monday.
Only 22.5 percent of eligible voters participated in the poll, short of the 25 percent required to validate the election, City Election Commission Chairperson Alexander Garusov told the news agency.
Yury Savelev, dean of the Baltic State Technical University, received 46 percent of votes cast, with Natalia Petukhova of the Small-Business Development movement receiving 25 percent, Garusov reported. The joint candidate from Unity and the Union of Right Forces, Yury Solonin, came in third with 22 percent of votes cast, according to Interfax.
The seat was vacated when Sergei Stephashin was appointed to head the State Duma's Audit Chamber in April 2000. An election for the seat in the fall of 2000 was also nullified because of low voter turnout.
Bomb Scare at Pulkovo
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A flight from Pulkovo International Airport to Hamburg, Germany, was delayed on Sunday evening after an anonymous telephone threat, Interfax reported.
The flight, which was scheduled to depart at 6 p.m., was delayed after an anonymous call was received by police claiming that a bomb had been placed on the plane.
The plane was evacuated and searched, Interfax reported, but nothing was found.
Oblast Church Robbed
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The St. Vladimir Cathedral in the Leningrad Oblast town of Ust-Izhora was robbed and 16 icons were stolen, Interfax reported Saturday.
Other church regalia was also stolen in the robbery, which police said happened late last week. Three unknown men knocked the 74-year-old church guard unconscious, took the keys from him and used them to enter the church, police said.
The thieves took 16 19th- and 20th-century icons. A criminal investigation has been opened, Interfax reported.
Sailors Help School
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Northern Fleet of the Russian Navy has sent an aid package to the north Caucasian republic of Dagestan, Interfax reported Friday.
The assistance is intended for the middle school of the Dagestani village of Khryug, where Mamed Gadzhiev, a civilian engineer who died when the Kursk nuclear submarine sank on Aug. 12, 2000, studied.
The package included a film projector, films, cameras, audio cassettes and 2,834 books, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Ukraine Concedes Role in Plane Crash
AUTHOR: By Marina Sysoeva
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV - Russian investigators said over the weekend that the Sibir airliner that crashed into the Black Sea was hit by a missile, and Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk conceded that Ukrainian defense forces were involved in the disaster.
"We don't know the causes of this tragedy today, but we know that we are related to it," Kuzmuk said Saturday after unexpectedly joining his deputy and chief of air defenses at a news conference.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuch ma said Sunday that a missile fired during Ukrainian military exercises was the most probable cause of the crash.
The remarks were the nearest admission of Ukrainian responsibility since the Tu-154 jet went down Oct. 4 near the resort city of Sochi. All 78 people, most of them recent Russian immigrants to Israel, were killed.
"I arrived here for only one reason: I bring my apologies to victims' relatives and loved ones. I bring my apologies to Ukraine's president, the government, parliament and the Ukrainian people," Kuzmuk said.
Kuchma reiterated that he will accept any expert conclusion, regardless of its content.
"The most probable cause of the recent crash of a Russian Tu-154 airliner was that it was hit by a missile launched during Ukrainian air-defense exercises in the Crimea," Kuchma said Sunday during a visit to the town of Kalush in the western region, according Interfax.
In a statement Saturday, Kuchma said, "We tried to be as transparent as possible from the very beginning and have taken all steps to ensure an efficient probe and present information in full," Kuchma said, adding that a new state commission had already started its work to review Ukrainian air defenses and prevent similar accidents in the future.
General Volodymyr Tkachov, the air-defense chief, said it was possible the airliner was unintentionally shot down by a missile fired by Ukrainian forces during military exercises, but stopped short of confirming outright that a Ukrainian missile was to blame.
"On the basis of the preliminary conclusions of the experts, the cause of the air crash could have been the unintended destruction of the plane by a missile during exercises," he said.
Hours after the crash, U.S. officials said that the tragedy had been caused by an S-200 missile fired by Ukraine during military exercises on the Black Sea Crimean Peninsula.
Vladimir Rushailo, the chief of the Russian commission investigating the crash, said Saturday in Sochi that the aircraft had been hit by an antiaircraft missile.
Pressure has been mounting on Ukraine's leadership to take responsibility for the crash.
Tkachov said Ukrainian officials had never rejected the missile version, but were convinced that their missile was not at fault because of parameters tracked during its descent.
"The investigation of the missile version is ongoing," he said.
Tkachov did say that a large amount of evidence pointed to the fact that it could have been a missile, and that he regretted he "could not have prevented this tragedy."
Russian investigators had initially focused on the possibility of a terror attack, but later signaled that they were considering the Ukrainian missile theory ever more likely, especially after discovering metal balls similar to shrapnel contained in the missile's warhead in victims' bodies and in the body of the plane.
Tkachov said he was prepared to accept all the investigators' conclusions "and take responsibility both morally and legally."
TITLE: Press Freedom Is Scarce in Uzbekistan
AUTHOR: By Burt Herman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TERMEZ, Uzbekistan - As police meticulously noted every detail about a group of journalists stopped at a checkpoint near Khanabad air base, an Uzbek bureaucrat boasted, "We have enough computers and computer operators to register all of you."
Confronted with possibly the most international attention it has received since its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan is showing its growing pains in dealing with the small army of foreign journalists who have arrived here to cover its role in helping U.S. retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Many journalists have been detained, either briefly or for hours. Requests to visit military sites or border posts take days for an answer, and then are invariably denied.
President Islam Karimov asserts in his book "Uzbekistan on the Threshold of the 21st Century" that the press is vital to fostering political and social stability and that measures should be taken "to guarantee social and legal protection of the journalists' activity." That book was written in 1997.
Three years later, after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe declined to send observers to the 2000 presidential elections because there were clear abuses of power, Karimov appears to have backtracked.
Opposition voices are regularly silenced in the country, and free flow of information restricted. Mikhail Ardzinov, head of the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan, said his Tashkent apartment is bugged and he has been subjected to regular harassment by authorities.
There's also little awareness about the ease of global communications. One reporter using the Internet on a laptop computer at the only hotel in the border town of Termez was confronted by a cleaning lady who insisted "you can't send information about here to the outside world."
During one dinner with journalists, a local press official in Termez, who also identifies himself as a journalist, suspiciously asked a foreign reporter, "Why do you always write everything down?"
TITLE: Kursk Being Prepared To Enter Dry Dock
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Divers on Sunday began attaching a second pontoon to the barge holding the wreckage of the submarine Kursk in preparation for raising the vessel into a dry dock at a ship-repair plant in northern Russia.
The first of two pontoons needed to hoist the barge and submarine to the dry dock was successfully attached on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported.
A team of British deep-sea divers on Sunday descended to the submarine, which was clamped beneath the Giant-4 barge that towed the Kursk to the northern port of Roslyakovo last week, to check that the first pontoon was securely attached to the barge, the Interfax news agency said.
The docking had been set for Saturday, but Russian Navy officials said last week the operation was put off until later this week at the request of Dutch engineers who wanted to make more checks to ensure that the bulky combination of barge, submarine and pontoons smoothly enters the dock.
More than a year after the Kursk sank and its 118-man crew was killed, the wrecked submarine was raised last week from the Barents Sea floor by the Dutch-Mammoet-Smit International consortium.
Secured to the barge that lifted it on 26 steel cables, the Kursk arrived in the waters of the port of Roslyakovo, near Murmansk, last Wednesday.
Officials have said the vessel's two 190-megawatt nuclear reactors were safely shut down when the disaster occurred in August 2000. But the risk of a potential radiation leak in the fishing grounds of the Barents Sea was a key reason cited by the Russian government for the precarious lifting operation.
The 18,000-ton Kursk is one of the world's largest submarines, making the docking operation a difficult undertaking since any sharp move could destabilize its reactors or its 22 supersonic Granit cruise missiles.
During the docking operation, the pontoons must be firmly locked to the barge, then filled with water and afterward drained to create enough force to raise the barge and the submarine by about eight meters.
After the Kursk is raised from the water, officials will remove the remains of the crew.
TITLE: Conflict in Abkhazia Escalates
AUTHOR: By Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia - About 100 guerrillas believed to be ethnic Georgians and Chechens have broken through Abkhaz lines in the Kodor Gorge and were headed north, Abkhaz officials said.
The guerrillas had been trapped Friday by military forces of the breakaway region in Kodor Gorge, near Abkhaz-controlled territory in northwest Georgia, according to the Abkhaz Defense Ministry press service.
"Abkhaz armed forces are chasing the terrorists, who are moving northward," the press service told Interfax.
Abkhaz forces clashed with the guerrillas earlier Saturday, and two Abkhaz people and several guerrillas were killed, according to Astamur Tania, an aide to self-proclaimed Abkhaz President Vladislav Ardzinba. The military press service said it believed the guerrillas were moving northward toward Russia or eastward to Georgia.
Tensions have mounted sharply in recent days around the mountainous region, raising threat of renewed war between Georgian troops and Abkhaz separatists, who are believed to have Russian support.
On Saturday night, Abkhaz officials said their forces clashed with a unit of Georgian interior troops in the Kodor Gorge. "There are undeniable facts," proving that the force was indeed Georgian, said Roin Agrba, a presidential spokesperson.
In Tbilisi, Defense Ministry spokes personNino Sturua denied the claim, terming it "absolute nonsense" and adding that only ministry troops were present in the Georgian-controlled part of the gorge.
The spiraling violence threatened to damage Russian-Georgian relations, and to scuttle UN-led efforts at reaching a political solution to the Abkhazia conflict. In Moscow, the Foreign Ministry on Friday issued a statement saying Russia was "seriously concerned" about the situation in Abkhazia. The ministry accused Georgia of creating tension by allowing Chechen rebels to cross Georgian territory to Abkhazia.
The statement followed the Georgian parliament's 163-1 vote Thursday to demand withdrawal of Russia's peacekeeping mission from Abkhazia, saying it had failed to fulfill its mandate.
President Vladimir Putin said he was ready to withdraw the peacekeepers if Georgia wanted them out.
"We consider the difficult situation in relations between Abkhazia and Georgia to be Georgia's internal problem. Russia is not going to meddle in solving conflicts on the territory of third countries," he told reporters.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Bush Backs Expansion
BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush is more strongly committed than ever to the eastward enlargement of NATO in view of the Sept. 11 attacks, a senior NATO official said.
He was reporting on talks that NATO Secretary General George Robertson had in Washington on Wednesday with Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and leading senators.
"Enlargement came up and the administration said 'make no mistake, we are all supportive. We haven't changed our mind.'... More than ever this enlargement makes sense because it enhances our common security," the official told reporters Friday.
It was the clearest indication so far that the new spirit of cooperation between Russia and the West in the fight against terrorism would not prompt Bush to defer or scale down the next wave of NATO expansion, due to be launched next year.
The official said Robertson and Bush did not discuss which specific east European countries should be invited to join when the 19-country alliance holds its next summit in Prague in November 2002.
But Bush had said his June speech in Warsaw, which envisaged a NATO from the Baltic to the Black Sea, remained valid.
Kazakh Anthrax
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American inspectors found anthrax spores inside piping at a Soviet-era biological-weapons facility in Kazakhstan during a routine inspection last week, a U.S. official said.
But the Kazakh Embassy in Washington issued a statement strongly emphasizing that the discovery was entirely unrelated to anthrax scares in the United States, and linked to efforts to dismantle what was the world's biggest anthrax-production site in Soviet times.
"It was a routine inspection under the joint threat reduction program. None of them contracted the disease. They are taking their medicine," said the U.S. official, who asked not to be identified, referring to the inspectors.
A handful of cases of anthrax, apparently spread deliberately, have been established in several U.S. states in the last week, raising concerns of possible use of biological weapons as the United States pursues its war on terrorism. U.S. officials believe their top suspect in the attacks, Osama bin Laden, has been seeking biological and chemical weapons for his fight against America.
In Kazakhstan, the United States has helped fund a threat-reduction program in the town of Stepnogorsk, and at a bioweapons station on Vozroshdeniye Island in the Aral Sea where the Soviet Union reportedly experimented with anthrax.
Experts fear that some of the anthrax made in former Soviet facilities may have found its way to criminals or extremist groups.
Embassy Shut Down
MOSCOW (SPT) - The U.S. Embassy in Moscow, citing security concerns, has suspended visa-processing and many other public services for an indefinite period of time.
"All embassies worldwide are on highest alert," an embassy spokesperson said Friday. "As a precautionary measure, we are suspending our public operations until further notice."
A spokesperson at the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg said Monday that this decision affects only the Moscow embassy and all consulates are working normally.
An embassy official in Moscow said Sunday that the suspended services include the processing of all visa applications, both immigrant and nonimmigrant, except for cases involving adoptions by U.S. nationals. Other services for American citizens would be available on a limited basis, the official said. These include help with emergencies such as medical problems, run-ins with law enforcement officials or lost passports. However, less pressing services, such as notarization of documents, will not be available.
The official said he did not know how long the suspension of services would last. But unnamed Russian Foreign Ministry sources were quoted by Interfax on Saturday as saying they had been assured by U.S. diplomats that the "measures would be of a short-term nature, and the issue of visas to Russian nationals would resume in the near future, possibly as early as next week."
Putin Looks Abroad
MOSCOW (AP) - Moscow has done too little over the past decade to help Russians living abroad, President Vladimir Pu tin said Thursday, and he pledged to work diligently to defend their rights and cultural heritage.
In an address to the Congress of Compatriots in Moscow, Putin acknowledged that Russia has done "intolerably little to help fellow countrymen" - an apparent reference to millions of ethnic Russians who found themselves in other former Soviet republics with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Businesses and culture should not face discrimination because they are Russian," Putin said. "Our countrymen abroad must have equal rights with the citizens of the countries in which they live."
Putin proposed the creation of an agency to deal with ethnic Russians living in other countries and asked the Russian business community to help build ties with those abroad.
"Nothing must prevent us from feeling that we are a unified people," Putin said.
The government plans to allocate 105 million rubles next year to help Russians abroad, particularly those living in the 14 other former Soviet states.
The two-day congress - held in an elegant 18th-century hall in central Moscow - brings together 600 representatives of Russian-speaking communities in 43 countries, estimated at 25 million people.
Borders Strengthened
KIEV (AP) - Ukraine strengthened its eastern borders with Russia to stop illegal migrants, expecting a migration flow from Afg ha ni stan following U.S. strikes on that country, officials said.
Foreign Minister Anatoly Zlen ko said Ukraine was concerned that terrorists and illegal migrants from Asia could penetrate Ukraine.
"All of us should understand that the declared war against terrorism touches Ukraine as well," Zlenko said in parliament earlier this week, according to the Foreign Ministry.
"It concerns our national interests, whose essential part is securing peace and prosperity for our nationals," Zlenko said.
TITLE: IMF, Russia in Mutual Admiration Society
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - It certainly hasn't been a model marriage. And their 10th anniversary isn't until next year. But Russia and the International Monetary Fund are already exchanging gifts.
The tokens of esteem? From Russia came a promise of early loan repayments, while the IMF reciprocated with praise and renewed vows of commitment.
IMF managing director Horst Koehler said Friday that the Russian government deserved praise for its economic reforms and welcomed President Vla dimir Putin's announcement the day before that Russia would pay back this year more than $1 billion that isn't due until 2003.
"This early repayment demonstrates that Russia is and will be a good borrower," Koehler told reporters at the end of a three-day visit, his first to Mos cow since replacing Michel Camdessus earlier this year.
"It will pay back as Russia gets access to the world capital markets and will increase the attractiveness of foreign direct investments in Russia," Koehler said.
On Thursday, Putin said Russia would begin paying off this year $2.7 billion of the $4.8 billion it is due to pay the IMF in 2003.
The Kremlin can certainly afford it: The Central Bank now has more than $38 billion in reserves, thanks mainly to high oil prices, which have helped that figure grow at a rate of about $1 billion a month over the last year.
Repaying the IMF early will help ease Russia's debt burden in 2003 when payments to foreign creditors are expected to peak at some $18 billion to $19 billion. Such a move may also help restore foreign creditors' trust, which vanished in the debt default and ruble devaluation of 1998.
Some analysts argue, however, that although this is a step in right direction, it will not be enough to restore Russia's badly damaged image in the eyes of investors who lost fortunes in 1998 financial crises.
Roland Nash, chief economist with Renaissance Capital, said Russia still has a long way to go before it repairs damage to its image caused by the events of 1998.
"This step alone won't change market perception," said Nash. "But this was a good decision, where the 'oil price prize' should be spent."
According to the IMF, the recent decline in oil prices is not yet threatening Russia's macroeconomic situation. The economy is in good shape and foreign debt can be fully serviced without the help of the fund or the Paris Club of creditor nations.
But in the medium term, in view of the uncertainties on oil markets, the fund plans to work out various scenarios for Russia when the regular mission arrives in November, said Koehler.
"In the case of a dramatic decline in oil prices, Russia may need the IMF's help again, and the fund stands ready to provide such help," Koehler said, adding that he hopes the "worst case scenario won't happen."
In the short term, the IMF is quite relaxed about Russia and for the first time in many years sees no immediate concerns to address.
"The current macroeconomic situation seems to be unusually favorable for Russia, which was true for the last six months or even one year already," said one Western economist who works with the IMF.
The economist, who asked that his name be withheld, said inflation is no longer the IMF's major concern, a sharp real appreciation of the ruble is, which could arise if oil prices remain high next year.
Nash agreed that appreciation of the ruble remains a danger, "but hopefully there will be enough structural reforms to prevent this from happening," he said.
Koehler said Russia still had much work to do, stressing the urgent need for an action plan for the banking sector and the need to strengthen the Central Bank's transparency and accountability. "What we see now in Russia is confirmation that reforms pay back," he said.
"This should only encourage Russian society to more reforms, as even more has to be done in the future."
As of Aug. 31, Russia was the IMF's second-largest borrower with $10.5 billion outstanding. Turkey tops the list with $12 billion owed.
TITLE: World Bank Loans Hit Snag Over Consultancy
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A Russian consultant to World Bank programs in Russia rakes in $1,700 a month. A Western consultant earns about $6,000.
The government has a big problem with the amount of those salaries for technical assistance - such a big problem that it may freeze all World Bank programs, which make technical assistance a mandatory component of its loans.
At risk are six approved programs worth about $400 million, including $85 million for heating and $50 million for education reform, as well as other programs in the pipeline.
"I think this is a purely terminology issue because historically the word 'consultant' has provoked an allergic reaction in Russia," said Andrei Bugrov, the government's World Bank director for Russia.
"In English and Russian, the word combination 'technical assistance' has the same sound but different meanings," he said.
President Vladimir Putin called the World Bank loans into question this spring when he signed a document on the country's borrowing policy for 2002. The document calls for the government to cut or scrap its policy of borrowing from international lenders that "proved to be inefficient." The paper also states that so-called tied credits and those with a consulting-service component should be refused.
The government may have to address another matter as well. Few projects can go forward these days without technical assistance. Also, the government inevitably has to turn to the West for advice and expertise in implementing structural reforms.
"It would be hard for me to find arguments to explain to the World Bank board of directors why we can't go forward with some projects that were already approved 18 months ago," Bugrov said.
Of the seven projects approved by the bank's board in the financial year ending in June 2001, only one has actually been signed and is being implemented - a $60-million urban-transport project in Moscow. Others, including the education and heating programs as well as an $80-million northern restructuring project to resettle people in the north, are on hold, mainly because of the paperwork that has to be done before Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov can sign off on them has never been completed. Additionally, a $300-million loan to fight AIDS and tuberculosis that was to be presented to the World Bank board for its approval this summer never so the light of day because the Russian government failed to say whether the loan was needed.
The Federal Center for Project Finance, the government arm that implements World Bank projects, said the government is caught between a rock and a hard place.
"We can't say that Russia will refuse technical assistance because this would mean the end of cooperation with the World Bank," said Alexander Shamrin, director of the center. "What the government has to do now is not cut all the programs but to use foreign borrowings, including consulting, to maximum effect."
That means the government should only take a loan if it can be effectively used. However, there is no generally accepted method to measure the effectiveness of consulting services.
"After a consulting contract is over, it [the project] should be implemented," Shamrin said. "Here, political will is needed. Otherwise, it is just a waste of money."
Implementation has long been a weak point for Russia, and the government has often pointed the finger of blame at foreign consultants and the creditors themselves.
Just Friday, the State Audit Chamber issued a report on how World Bank money had been spent. The findings showed that there are currently 20 groups with 455 employees - all Russian - charged with implementing World Bank projects. Those groups, called project-implementation units, rang up administrative expenses of $65.4 million in the past five years, 63 percent of which went for salaries. That comes to about $20,200 per person a year. The national average salary is about $700 a year.
Over the same period, an additional 102 foreign and 5,970 Russian experts were hired to help implement projects. Their expenses totaled $319 million, the audit chamber said. Each Russian expert earned about $2,800 over the five years, while each foreign consultant took home on average $343,000.
On average, technical assistance, including administrative expenses, account for 10 to 12 percent of World Bank programs. But the figure, depending on the project, can vary to account for 5 to 100 percent of a loan.
Shamrin said 19 percent of World Bank investment loans approved by Russia so far have gone for consulting services.
For the fiscal year ending June 30, the amount of signed commercial contracts for World Bank loans in Russia reached $140 million.
"The number of Russian companies participating in World Bank projects is constantly increasing, and this is a very good tendency," Shamrin said, referring to the fact that foreigners tend to be much more expensive.
With such enormous amounts of money involved in each project, there has always been room for misuse. And the country has seen its fair share of allegations about misspent funds.
But the World Bank said that in most cases the funds went toward their intended use.
"You can't avoid stealing at all, but my opinion is that these are very qualified people and they should be paid enough to have no motivation for taking bribes," Bugrov said.
Some government officials privately agreed that perhaps Putin was going overboard in calling for all loans with technical-service elements to be rejected. But no one wants to oppose the president publicly.
World Bank officials said they wrote a letter to the government last month asking for an update on the status of its projects. In reply, Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko was to meet with the World Bank's Russia director Julian Schweitzer to discuss the matter Tuesday. Khristenko is responsible for government contacts with international lenders.
Shamrin of the federal project finance center said he hopes that matter with be sorted out and that allowances will be made for technical assistance.
"To refuse technical assistance is like refusing to look at a map after getting lost in the forest," he said.
TITLE: Telecoms Plan Draws Ministerial Red Flag
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - More than a year after telecommunications industry consolidation began, the Antimonopoly Ministry has finally voiced a complaint about the government-driven program, claiming the process is not transparent.
Antimonopoly Minister Ilya Yu zha nov said that state telecoms holding Svyaz invest and the Communications Ministry were conducting closed procedures and not providing the ministry with enough documentation to judge fairly the progress of restructuring.
"We would like a clearer expression of the government's political will," Vedomosti reported him as saying Friday.
Yuzhanov said the plan - which involves merging more than 70 Svyaz invest-controlled operators across the country to create seven super-regional companies - should have federal government approval, as it "affects the interests of the population and practically every branch of the economy."
"It must be a government decision, it must be publicly discussed," he said. Yuzhanov did not, however, threaten to block or slow down the process, which his ministry has the legal right to do since each merger must receive the ministry's stamp of approval.
The closest thing to a nod from federal powers was a section outlining Svyazinvest reform that was included in the Communications Ministry's 10-year plan to develop the telecommunications industry, which was approved by the government last December.
Details of the restructuring have been jostled around and discussed in regional and federal government bodies - the State Duma and the cabinet. Furthermore, a deputy antimonopoly minister is on the Svyazinvest board.
Both Svyazinvest and the Communications Ministry expressed surprise at Yu zhanov's remarks, saying the Antimonopoly Ministry has been kept abreast of events for more than a year. They questioned why Yuzhanov was demanding government approval this late in the game as several mergers are nearing completion.
"It's rather strange because up until now the Antimonopoly Ministry, through its representatives, has directly participated ... and knew about all the happenings" related to reform, said Communications Ministry spokesperson Sergei Grigorenko.
It was not clear exactly what objections, legal or otherwise, the Antimonopoly Ministry would have against consolidation, and officials were unavailable for comment.
"I think there are a lot of reasons to support it, but I don't see reasons to be against it," said Vla dimir Ta tar chuk, vice president of corporate finance at Alfa Bank, which advises on two of the super-regional mergers.
So far, telecoms consolidation has run along relatively smoothly, subject mostly to spatters of complaints from regional administrations, which will lose some control over their local telephone operators, or from minority shareholders of companies to be merged.
Analysts and investors almost uniformly say that consolidating the fractured sector is a step in the right direction to attracting more investment and improving poor services. Some 6 million people are still waiting for telephone connections to their homes.
Such support has helped Svyazinvest and the financial consultants overseeing the mergers to push ahead fairly quickly, with consolidation set to finish in 2003 or even next year.
Alfa Bank said it would be sending all documents to the Antimonopoly Ministry this week for approval of the merger of seven companies in the Far East, the district furthest along in consolidation. Tatarchuk said that up until now he had not expected any resistance from the ministry. "I think the ministry will support reorganization - I hope."
TITLE: Nobel Winner Points To Russia's Catch-22
TEXT: AMONG the three American professors who won this year's Nobel Prize in economics is Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University. Russia-watchers will remember Stiglitz's controversial three-year stint as chief economist of the World Bank, a period that saw rolling financial disasters domino their way from Thailand to Indonesia to Russia.
Stiglitz had much that was unkind to say about the way the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury made that bad situation far worse and about the Washington-approved Russian economic-reform plans of the 1990s.
The other two Nobel Prize winners - George Aker lof of the Uni versity of California at Berkeley and A. Michael Spence of Stanford University - made careers, like Stiglitz, in exploring the ways in which access to good information is crucial to a healthy market economy (and intelligent economic policymaking). Stiglitz hammered away at this idea in discussions of both the IMF and of Russia.
In essence, he argued that the more democratic practices were at both the fund and in Russia, the better the results for both the world and Russian economies.
Stiglitz looked askance at the secretive, hurried privatizations of the mid-1990s and Washington's embrace of the rigged oil-company auctions of the era.
"Consider the incentives facing the so-called oligarchs in Russia." he wrote. "They might well have reasoned: Democratic elections will eventually conclude that their wealth was ill-begotten, and there will thus be attempts to recapture it. They might have been induced to pursue a twofold strategy: on the one hand, to use their financial power to gain sufficient political influence to reduce the likelihood of such an event; but, assuming that that strategy is inherently risky, to use the other hand to take at least a significant part of their wealth out of the country... ."
This, sums up Russia's catch-22: Democracy, it seems, ought to be at least an eventual goal in and of itself. And while free markets and private property generally favor democracy, the New Russia is dominated by a corporate elite whose bickering members collectively have every rational reason to fear true democracy. They have bought up the media precisely because the media, by asking questions about their corrupt pasts, might threaten their futures.
The ruling elites may talk of expanding democracy and adopting "a level business playing field" and "the rule of law." But any one of those things would put at risk what they control. So at best, democracy has to be "managed" to prevent such outcomes or postpone them as long as possible.
Russia now looks incredibly stable and the long-suffering 60 million Russians in poverty are as docile as ever.
But a system dominated by a tiny corrupt elite is inherently unstable and opposed to a flourishing middle class, which is crucial to many kinds of business activity but is also, unfortunately, likely to bring about democracy.
This is the situation in which some hope President Vladimir Putin will be an autocratic liberal, while others fear he will be a liberal autocrat. The point is that even the economy needs him to be a true democrat. Otherwise, he is simply the head of a secretive corporation called Russia that forever fears its own people.
Not even oil at $60 a barrel can solve that problem.
Matt Bivens, former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com].
TITLE: It's Bad To Pry, But Often Good To Ask
TEXT: THE world around us is full of interesting people and we should always consider ourselves lucky to live at the right place and time for meeting them. A person sitting across from us on the subway is quite likely to have lived a life containing more twists than in the plot of a novel sold at the next station.
In business you meet many extremely interesting people every day and, regardless of whether a person is your colleague, a customer, or even your boss, you will enrich your knowledge about this world and win their friendship if you just take time to listen to their personal stories. You will also find that these same people become more inclined to work for you, buy your product or service, raise your salary and just plain like you.
Unfortunately, it is too often the case that the talkative ones have little to share and the silent ones much to tell. How do we get the quiet people to open up?
There is no objective during discussions that can bring higher returns.
Some Western managers feel restricted in this matter by a code of business ethics limiting inquiries about the family, age, health and personal life of co-workers or clients.
This is an attitude that a lot of companies in Russia would do well to adopt. There are effective ways to get the questions right. For example, a question like, "Whose opinions matter to you when you make important life decisions?" is an acceptable alternative to, "Who do you live with?" a phrase you still, unfortunately, hear a lot here during job interviews.
The phrase "Equal Opportunity Employer" on recruitment ads is meant to be taken seriously. Managers, however, do have a lot more freedom to ask personal questions after hiring.
Upon hiring, and roughly twice a year after this, it's good practice for managers to hold informal talks - sometimes called "development discussions" - with each of their employees.
To make this more effective by developing the necessary rapport, it is best for these talks to seem spontaneous and take place out of the office. A long drive, an airport lounge or a train trip all provide good environments in which to get quiet employees to open up. It takes a while to move smoothly conversation from daily routine to a more personal level, so there should be enough time planned, at least an hour, to allow a person really to talk. Personal questions are perfectly fine and often very welcome in such surroundings.
These meetings can help provide the information managers need to plan human-resources decisions. They also reveal a lot of interesting stories.
Peter Ponomarev is the manager of the Northwest Region office of the RHR Northwest Region International Ecopsy human-resources company.
TITLE: New Law Set To Regulate the Regulators
AUTHOR: By James Hitch and Sergey Nosov
TEXT: ON Aug. 8, 2001, President Vladimir Putin signed the federal law "On the Protection of the Rights of Legal Entities and Individual Entrepreneurs During the Performance of State Regulation (Supervision)." The law came into force on Aug. 11 and is a major step in the regulation of the procedural aspects of the conduct of state regulatory agencies.
It provides legal entities and entrepreneurs, defined as the "subject of state regulation," with a complex of guarantees protecting their rights against abuses by state regulatory authorities.
Although the law expressly excludes several kinds of state regulation from the scope of its coverage (such as currency, budget, license, banking, customs, and other controls that are regulated by federal entities), it is applicable to all other kinds of state controls, including fire safety, ecological, sanitary, labor safety and other regulatory activities.
Under the new law, each state regulatory authority may conduct only one action vis-a-vis a particular subject of state regulation within a two-year period. Any extraordinary regulatory investigations may be conducted only if, during the performance of a scheduled regulatory action, a breach of regulations has been discovered, or if the authority has obtained substantial information about violations that might cause harm to the health and lives of people, the environment, or to the property of individuals or legal entities. The maximum length of each such regulatory action is one month.
The law also establishes safeguards against improper financial interests on the part of state regulatory bodies. They may not require subjects of state regulation to pay fees for the reimbursement of expenses incurred by a regulatory body during an investigation in which a breach of regulations was discovered. State regulatory authorities are also not entitled to receive any interest on any fees obtained from a subject of state regulation.
If a subject of state regulation, disagrees with a decision made by a state regulatory authority, it may appeal the decision either to a higher level of the regulatory body or to the relevant court.
Further, subjects of state regulation are entitled to compensation for any damages suffered, as well as for any expenses incurred, as a result of improper actions by state regulatory authorities.
James Hitch is managing partner and Sergey Nosov an associate at the St. Petersburg office of Baker & McKenzie law firm.
TITLE: Aksonyenko Strikes Again With Sakhalin Bridge
TEXT: THE government has given the nod to a plan to construct a bridge linking the mainland with the Far Eastern island of Sakhalin. The plan was developed by the Railways Ministry, headed by Nikolai Aksyonenko. The 10-kilometer bridge and 570-kilometer railway link will take about eight years to build at a cost of $4.5 billion, and the whole thing should break even by 2030.
Aksyonenko is asking that his ministry's 25-billion-ruble ($848 million) debt to the budget be restructured in order to implement this huge project. In post-Soviet Russia, it seems, we're just as keen on building as they were in ancient Egypt.
Renovation of the Kremlin cost the treasury $2 billion, which was paid to Mabetex and the Mercata trading company. The Swiss prosecutor's office says that a considerable portion of these funds ended up in the private accounts of Pavel Borodin and other members of the Kremlin Family.
Now the indefatigable Borodin is pushing a project to build a parliamentary center in St. Petersburg (with a price tag of a mere $2 billion), and his successor as Kremlin bursar, Vla di mir Ko zhin, has plans to erect a giant hotel-and-auction complex on Red Square.
Unlike Boro din, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzh kov gain ed acclaim for three building projects undertaken in parallel: the Christ the Savior Cathedral, the Manezh shopping center and the Moscow Ring Road, or MKAD. It is said that during the building of the Manezh, one of the contractors coined a wise phrase about how "the amount of money you can bury underground simply defies calculation."
To much fanfare, former Tyumen Region Governor Leonid Roketsky opened the long-awaited motorway that was to traverse the entire region. There are pictures of the speechmaking, but just as it was in the beginning, there is no road. Amen.
The bridge to Sakhalin is not the first Railways Ministry project of this kind. It was preceded by the VSM affair, which was to have seen construction of a high-speed rail link between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The government guaranteed VSM's obligations to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The only trace of the building project of the century is a trench dug alongside Moscow Station in St. Petersburg.
In a country where doctors and teachers are paid kopeks, we sure do love to build. After all, kickbacks from construction projects vary from 30 percent to 70 percent, depending on the region. The lower-key the project, the more liberally funds can be spread around. And in this country, you cannot get much more remote than Sakhalin.
Thus, it's not surprising that support for such an important project as the bridge to Sakhalin has been provided by a broad spectrum of government officials, from the omniscient Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov to the liberal German Gref.
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.
TITLE: WTO Mulling New Venue for Qatar Meeting
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SINGAPORE - The World Trade Organization may move a November meeting out of the Persian Gulf country of Qatar because of security worries following the U.S. strikes on Afghanistan, trade envoys said Monday.
"I have been impressed by the security efforts the Qataris have taken," U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick said. But "there are issues in the region that are beyond anybody's control, and those are some of the issues that they and others will have to weigh as we decide what exactly to do."
The WTO meeting is scheduled for Nov. 9 to 13 in the Qatari capital of Doha. Zoellick, who is visiting Ma laysia, and trade representatives who met over the weekend in Singapore said they are weighing whether to move the site.
Demonstrations have broken out in several Arab countries since American forces began air strikes on Oct. 7 to punish Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia for harboring Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Reaction to the air strikes has been muted in Qatar, and the country has stopped issuing visas to visitors until Nov. 15 to help keep out troublemakers. But the trade organization is wary of even the possibility of unrest following riots at a 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle and several international summits since.
"It's no secret that Doha is located in the vicinity of what is today considered a war zone," said Pascal Lamy, commissioner for trade for the European Commission.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Siemens Cuts
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - Siemens AG said Monday it would cut 7,000 more jobs by October 2002 from its fixed-line and mobile-telecommunications divisions, and close, sell or transfer half of the fixed-line division's 20 production facilities.
Siemens said it would cut 5,000 jobs from its Information and Communications Networks fixed-line group, and 2,000 more jobs from its mobile group. About 3,000 of the cuts are being made in Germany.
The fixed-line division's three German plants in Berlin, Greifswald and Bruchsal will remain open, as will one in China. But 10 plants worldwide will have their production transferred to other Siemens operations, and will be sold or closed. The company declined to specify which plants would be affected.
The fixed-line division has already been hit with 5,500 cuts this year, part of more than 10,000 across the entire company. The combined 17,000 cuts represent 3.7 percent of Siemens' overall work force.
Bethlehem Files
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bethlehem Steel Corp., the No. 3 U.S. steel producer, on Monday filed for court protection from its creditors amid one of the worst markets for steel producers in years.
The company, which is based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, listed $4.2 billion of assets and $4.5 billion of debt in its Chapter 11 filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York.
The steel industry has been suffering for three years from sluggish demand in the down economy, depressed prices and a glut of supply. Domestic producers have blamed foreign companies with dumping steel on the U.S. market, forcing prices down.
Most recently, demand has been hurt by a sharp cutback in auto production, one of the two largest buyers of steel.
Swiss Draw Line
GENEVA (Reuters) - Switzerland on Monday vowed its bank-secrecy laws were not negotiable, potentially ruining the European Unions's efforts to stop tax cheats from parking assets abroad.
In an ongoing fight against tax evasion in the EU, the European Commission is expected to get the go-ahead from EU finance ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday to negotiate a system of swapping information on cross-border savings with non-EU countries.
It needs Switzerland, home to a third of the world's estimated $27 trillion in offshore wealth, to sign up to the plan because EU members Austria and Luxembourg refuse to back it unless other countries, including Switzerland, do so too.
OPEC Meeting
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will meet Saudi Arabia's King Fahd in Riyadh on Saturday to discuss strategies to boost slumping oil prices, diplomats said on Monday.
The leader of Venezuela, OPEC's only non-Muslim member, has agreed to make a four-hour stopover in OPEC power Saudi Arabia as part of his three-week international tour aimed at stemming a drastic 25-percent drop in oil prices since September's U.S. attacks.
"Prices are the problem. His campaign is in defense of prices in OPEC's $22-to-$28 band," said a diplomat in the region. "Chavez is proposing discipline and possibly a meeting to analyze the circumstances but not necessarily an immediate cut."
TITLE: Russia Less Susceptible to World Economy's Ills
TEXT: As major global economies struggle to ward off recession following the terrorist attacks against, and continued retaliatory strikes by, the United States, Russia is shaping up to show the world that it will not only emerge unscathed but perhaps come out on top. Staff writer Valeria Korchagina reports.
As global stock markets were reeling, airlines were laying off tens of thousands of employees and consumers were staying away from stores in droves, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov made a prediction that no other leader in a leading industrial country would dare utter.
He upgraded Russia's economic forecast. Kasyanov said Sept. 20 that the economy would grow this year by 5.5 percent, a figure slightly higher than previous government forecasts.
President Vladimir Putin backed up that optimism last week later at a conference in Dresden aimed at winning over German investors.
"We know there is currently a big decline in the world economy. We hope it won't lead to serious consequences, but Russia's economy is still growing," Putin said without a trace of pride in his voice.
The mood in Moscow is drastically different from elsewhere. In Asia, Europe and in North America, stock brokers have long written off year-end bonuses, and investors are hoping that once the seesawing markets stabilize there will be enough money left for retirement. Economists have been hastily revising their colorful graphs to account for depressed economic expectations.
But those same market watchers say Kasyanov and Putin could well be right. Russia, thanks to its insulation from other global economies, has a good chance of outperforming not only other emerging markets this year, but also showing healthier growth than economic heavyweights such as the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan.
However, economists say the key to this growth could well hang on two factors: global oil prices and Russian diplomacy.
And even if oil prices hit bottom, diplomacy could pull Russia through. Russia, which has been largely supportive of the United States' call to fight terrorism, could purvey this into a deal with the West in which its war helps bring about a restructuring or write-off of its staggering foreign debt, accelerated entry into the World Trade Organization or even, perhaps, membership in NATO.
A PATTERN OF GROWTH
The optimistic economic expectations voiced by the government recently are hardly surprising. Russia's economy has been showing improved year-on-year growth every year since the devastating 1998 financial crisis. Last year, gross-domestic-product growth topped a stunning 8 percent, the highest growth ever in post-Soviet history.
The 5.5-percent GDP growth estimate for this year is 1.5 percent above initial forecasts made in January. Furthermore, Russia is expecting to see 4- percent growth in 2002.
Putin and his economic-minded government have been working around the clock to keep that locomotive of growth roaring at full steam. The Kremlin pushed legislation through the State Duma last year that simplified a mind-boggling web of often-contradictory tax legislation that was stifling investment. He also slashed personal income tax to a flat rate of 13 percent, the lowest in Europe.
The government this year has continued to keep up a frantic pace of reform aimed at improving the investment climate, submitting and steering through the Duma crucial land, labor and judicial reform legislation, and the cabinet has recently turned its attention to reforming the banking sector.
At the same time, the Central Bank has maintained a tight monetary policy that has kept the ruble stable.
THE PETRO-DOLLAR ECONOMY
The attacks only managed to shoot a first shockwave through Russia when global oil prices plummeted 13 percent within the week. Some, but not all of the losses have been clawed back, but OPEC announced last week that it was considering a cut in output in order to prop world prices.
Kasyanov dourly noted that Russia saw the value of its Urals blend drop in one month by almost $10 a barrel. The government estimates that the federal budget loses $1 billion for every $1 drop in the price of oil.
As such, there was little the country could do but sit up and take notice.
Kasyanov and the Duma have good reason to be worried. Russia's economic growth is linked almost entirely to oil prices. The country has enjoyed a sweeping ride over past two years because of high oil prices. They have enabled the government not only to meet foreign-debt obligations, but also provide extra funding for activities such as the war in Chechnya and building up Central Bank reserves.
A WORST-CASE SCENARIO
If worse came to worst, oil prices could fall to unexpected and prolonged lows as the world economy sinks into a deep recession. Russia would be unlikely to have enough revenues to meet its debt obligations - $19 billion in 2003 - and would find it difficult if not impossible to borrow more in order to keep up payments.
To ease its Soviet-era debt repayments, the government last month announced its intention to issue $2 billion worth of Eurobonds next year. Even if the float goes ahead as planned, with volatility in oil prices and uncertainty over how long and deep a global recession might be, there is a risk that Russia won't be able to find enough buyers for the debt.
The government will most likely refrain from issuing Eurobonds if the price of oil falls below $16 a barrel, said Troika Dialog equity strategist James Fenkner. Although Russia is currently in good shape politically and economically, there is still strong residual doubt over the country's credibility rooted in the 1998 crisis.
"The problem is that the investors have so much doubt following the August 1998 crisis that it is impossible to see major investors coming back to Russia yet in any meaningful way," Fenkner said. "Russia is better than other countries, but it's still not so attractive. The risk factor is still quite high."
Even if oil prices collapse, Russia should be able to get by in the short term, said Keith Rowden, senior energy partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers Russia.
"The government is building credibility in the world markets by publicly focusing on debt repayment and maintaining a surplus in the federal budget despite the significant temptation to spend money on needed domestic issues, such as salaries for government workers and infrastructure costs," Rowden said.
Russia's dependence on oil could prove to be a blessing of sorts in disguise.
When the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries hastily met late in September to discuss falling oil prices, nonmember Russia found itself with an invitation to join.
Russia is not thought to have any interest in teaming up with the cartel, but the invitation from Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi in itself is a sign that Moscow is being considered a force - albeit small - to be reckoned with on the world oil stage, analysts said.
Russia produces about 6.5 million barrels per day (bpd), and exports, nearly 3 million bpd, an amount equal to about 12 percent of all OPEC's daily output on the market.
OTHER ECONOMIC MOVERS
A saying has it that war is the grease that gets an economy going. Despite the rations and blackouts, the United States certainly saw its economy come out of the doldrums of the Great Depression during World War II as factories worked overtime pumping out weapons, planes and other military hardware.
With the conflict in Central Asia, Russia has the potential to see a rebirth of sorts in the defense industry. While a Russia that wants the West to see it as an ally would not be able to sell arms to Middle East countries like Iran and Iraq, there could be a clamoring for additional defense goods from former Soviet republics in the region such as Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Furthermore, longtime customer India, which is seeing rival Pakistan getting Western concessions for its assistance in the strikes in Afghanistan, may decide it wants to bolster its forces. Even before tensions rose following the attacks in the United States, arms sales - like Russia's economy - were expected to grow rapidly this year. The government says Russia will sell up to $4 billion in arms in 2001, the highest figure since 1991.
Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who oversees the defense sector, said earlier this year that the country will be selling $6 billion worth of arms annually in the near future.
Theoretically, an increase in arms sales could be tied to a need for an increase in metals production and, perhaps, an increase in jobs.
While the entire scenario is purely hypothetical, the fact remains that a boost in one Russian industry could bode well for the economy as a whole.
One other factor that could tip the balance for the economy is gas. Revenues from the export of natural gas account for a fourth of the country's GDP. However, with the price of gas stable and its shipment from Russia practically bypassing the central Asia region (except for imports from Turkmenistan), gas is not seen by analysts as a wild card at this point.
CUTTING A DEAL
What could turn out to be the wild card in the stack is how Russia deals diplomatically with the West in the war on terrorism.
After initially saying little about Russia's stance, Putin has largely been supportive of the U.S. actions since the Sept. 11 attacks.
In return, Russia almost immediately began to bear the fruits of this. The United States and western Europe toned down their criticism of Moscow for its ongoing campaign in Chechnya. U.S. President George W. Bush said he believed there were rebels in Chechnya funded by international terrorist groups, echoing statements made by Moscow for years.
After Pakistan offered its support to the U.S. campaign, international lenders quickly agreed to drop sanctions and rescheduled hundreds of millions of dollars in maturing debt.
At the start of the year, the government tried to convince its creditors in the Paris Club to roll over or revamp 2001 payments, claiming the country lacked the money to make good on its obligations.
When the club balked, the government was forced to rewrite the federal budget to take the debt into account. Since then, the government has repeatedly dropped hints about getting some debt relief while faithfully paying off its dues.
Russia also has its eye on one other goal, winning entry into the WTO. Putin has named WTO entry as a top priority and has ordered bundles of legislation passed that would make Russia's laws conform with that of WTO member states. Seven years of negotiations with those member states appeared to have made little progress.
However, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick met with Russian officials at the begining of the month in Moscow and emerged saying Russia could be in the final stage for WTO ascension by early 2002.
Previously, WTO members had said Russia had little chance of joining before 2003 or 2004.
TITLE: Six Principles for Fighting Against Terrorism
TEXT: Editor,
In the aftermath of the tragic events of Sept. 11 and the military strikes against Afghanistan, the danger looms of an endless cycle of violence and retribution. Experience shows that an effective campaign to address the situation should be guided by six main principles.
1. Bringing the perpetrators to justice based on lawful procedure and respect for the rights and safety of innocent civilians. A long history of attempts to combat terrorism shows that a military quid pro quo for terrorism usually fails, causes immense human suffering, and has unpredictable consequences, or "blowback." The most prudent course is to apprehend suspects legally without responding with inappropriate force that kills innocent civilians and provokes new threats. Military force should only be used to advance the rule of law within an international legal framework.
2. Unequivocal condemnation of all acts of terrorism. Unless there is condemnation of all acts, methods and practices of terrorism, the so-called coalition against terrorism will be an opportunistic, tactical one rather than a long-term, broadly supported, strategic one. A viable coalition will distinguish between terrorism and legitimate acts of resistance. The tragic irony is that terrorists such as Osama bin Laden were hailed as freedom fighters in the 1980s by many governments that labeled Nelson Mandela a terrorist.
3. Avoiding the strategic escalation of conflict and a new Cold War. An open-ended war on an ill-defined enemy risks the destabilization of many regions, including those of central, south and southwest Asia. Beyond a limited war in Afghanistan is the possibility of conflict in central Asia, a geostrategic location at the intersection of Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. Many states want access to central Asia's vast reserves of oil and natural gas.
The climate for rapprochement between the two most powerful nuclear states of Russia and the United States is currently favorable. Whether it remains so will depend on how far the West is prepared to push this regional realignment and struggle for power and resources.
4. Refocusing government resources on prevention and solving social, economic and environmental problems. A 2001 United Nations report on terrorism is adamant as to the responsibility of all states to act upon the underlying causes of terrorism: "Were all states to do this in an unbiased way, the incidence of terrorist acts would dramatically decline." Poverty, famine, mass movements of refugees and brutal and corrupt regimes fuel frustration and desperation. While no root cause justifies terrorism, to ignore causal factors is to increase the risk of future terrorist acts. Resources reallocated from the Pentagon to fund projects in health, education, economic development and violence prevention could help rebuild many local communities worldwide and start a process of establishing a new international security system.
5. Vigilance against racial vilification, the violation of civil liberties and the use of apocalyptic language. There are many legitimate security measures such as improved protection of ports and airports and coordination of emergency services. In a climate of fear, we run a heightened risk of not only the curtailment of civil liberties and human rights, but also of generalized racism and religious intolerance. Loose talk of a war to "rid the world of evil" lends dangerous credence to those terrorists who believe the world is caught in an eschatological confrontation between good and evil.
6. A comprehensive strategy under the auspices of the United Nations and linked to nongovernmental organizations. To formulate a multi-issue strategy that goes beyond the current focus of governments on symptoms and single issues such as terrorism and drug trafficking, there must be a high-level conference under the auspices of the UN.
Finally, for an effective campaign against terrorism to proceed, a reformed UN needs new models for non-governmental and civic involvement in domains of global governance historically dominated by states.
Nicholas Abbey
Melbourne, Australia
Beware of Pakistan
Editor,
Osama bin Laden planned the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, killing more than 6,000 innocent people, according to the evidence presented by the United States. The Taliban government has sheltered bin Laden. Pakistan is responsible for the creation, growth and nurturing of the Taliban government. After a military coup, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf refused to continue the operation to nab bin Laden in 1999, despite substantial efforts by the Clinton administration to revive it. With a friend like Pakistan, the United States does not need an enemy.
Mohammad Hasham Saad, the top Northern Alliance official in Tashkent, said on Oct. 1: "Pakistan is still supplying the Taliban with fuel and ammunition. More than 100 trucks carrying fuel and equipment crossed the Pakistan border to the Taliban side just last week." Survival for Musharraf means appearing to go along with U.S. goals while making sure they do not actually get carried out.
Washington knows full well that Pakistan actively supports Jaish-i-Muhammed, Lashkar-i-Taiba and other guerrilla organizations that spread terror in Kashmir and India. Members of these groups freely tell Western journalists that they have trained in camps in Afghanistan run by Pakistani intelligence services and then were deployed to Kashmir. These terrorists are creatures of Musharraf and the Taliban and soul mates of bin Laden.
Terrorist activities perpetrated in India and those in New York and Washington all come from the same swamp. By the United States' own accounts, Pakistani intelligence agencies have fostered terrorism.
Some countries sign up primarily to stall and limit U.S. action, not to facilitate it. There's the rub of the coalition President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have assembled in all necessary haste. They have recruited a coalition to fight terrorism and regimes that practice or tolerate terrorism as a matter of state policy. The inclusion of such states at the center of the coalition undermines the sweeping and noble war aims enunciated by Bush, who has promised not to divide terrorists into bad and good camps. American policy will drift into incoherence if it continues to cooperate seriously with regimes that are broken beyond repair. It is a delusional quick fix to think that United States can reform the Musharraf regime or elements in the Taliban regime into responsible partners for the fight against terrorism.
There has yet to be a serious tangible act by Pakistan to break its alliance with terror and earn the kind of trust that the United States has ostensibly extended. With us or against us, the American president warned the world two weeks ago. Others will believe these words only if the United States shows it applies them to all terrorists, not just those who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Suresh Sheth
Irvine, California
Thanks for the Eye
In response to "Global Eye," a column by Chris Floyd, on Oct. 9.
Editor,
Wow. What an excellent op-ed piece. My compliments to Chris Floyd for doing his research and coming up with an accurate statement of the way things are.
Being a left-leaning Democrat here in the United States, I was angry and upset from the moment George W. Bush was "appointed" in a perversion of justice to the highest office in the land. What's made me even angrier is how the American corporate-owned media has basically given Bush and his administration a free pass, excluding them from direct criticism, which has only been reinforced by the events of Sept. 11.
I am thankful I have foreign media to consult for the bigger picture and get information that I just don't see reported in our right-wing media.
Travis Calef
Minneapolis, Minnesota
It Was My Idea!
In response to "Web Site Helps Businesses Invest in Society," Oct. 9.
Editor,
An interesting story about a good idea. It's the same idea I had five years ago, actually. It was pitched to President Bill Clinton when he appointed me to his re-election steering committee in 1996. The results so far are a major USAID initiative in Tomsk, which I asked Clinton for in 1999 after extensive research regarding where to do it first.
The project is called People-Centered Economic Development. Anyone from anywhere in the world with access to the Web can find information on the PCED Web site to get funding for just about any business or economic-development project, as long as they're in a developing or reforming country to which funds have been committed. Russia and the former Soviet Union are currently the paper beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars of such funding.
I very much admire Oleg Tretyakov's initiative and hope you may be able to put us in touch. I also invite you to take a look at www.p-ced.com, where you'll find his idea on a large, and hopefully comprehensive, scale.
Terry Hallman
People-Centered Economic
Development, Portland, Oregon
Keep Up the Up-Keep
In response to "How To Build Mass Transit on the Cheap," a column by Vladimir Kovalyev, Sept. 25.
Editor,
In response to Kovalyev's ridicule of the grand schemes proposed to solve the city's traffic problems, I would say that he misses the mark by not exposing the root of the problem.
Eight years has separated my two tours of duty in St. Petersburg. In 1993, I first began to master the Russian transportation system, learning the art of the Mt. Elbrus-like descent on the escalators into the metro and the difference between talonchik and zheton. While the magnitnokarty are evidence of progress, the fact remains that, like many things in Russia, the omnipresent zeal for building is not matched with the same fervor to develop and sustain.
Transportation in its current state is only a reflection of the buildings, piping, sidewalks and services of the city as a whole. Herculean labor and savvy engineering are obviously evident in the building of the metro, but the dilapidated trains and outdated rail system are testimony to the inattention to upkeep and a failure to apply innovations.
When I was here previously , there was much discussion about building a ring road around the city. When I arrived at Pulkovo, I traveled along the same crowded, worn roadways through the center to my immediate destination on the Petrograd Side. Likewise, the same palaces in the city center seem to have the same scaffolding that they did eight years ago.
While the lack of funding is a convenient excuse, I venture that the true issues at hand are more political than financial. New solutions, dogmatic ideas and grand schemes are more palatable to a disenfranchised electorate, whereas reconstruction projects barely register on the back pages of local newspapers.
Certainly the sidewalks along Nevsky Prospect will be attractive, but were they really necessary? With the limited accountability of so many local leaders, it is no surprise that the Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya tunnel still remains closed.
J. B. Tulgan
St. Petersburg
Whitewash Job?
In response to a letter by Norma Brown published on Oct. 9.
Editor,
Norma Brown has tried to whitewash all the offenses and crimes committed by the United States all over the world. No sensible person would support the terrorist act in the United States, but as an Indian - I have had a close connection with Russia for more than 20 years - I have to say that we have been suffering due to selfish and at times criminal policies of the United States on the Indian subcontinent.
We will never forget the role of the United States during the India-Pakistan war in 1971. As a result of direct American military and financial support to Pakistan, Pakistani soldiers butchered tens of thousands innocent Bengalis. We in India have noted that the United States is always ready to support and help the worst kind of criminals as long as they serve American interests.
However, sometimes this situation can get out of control. Osama bin Laden is, after all, a U.S. creation. Just think about the feelings of relatives whose loved ones were killed by terrorists with American arms.
Gautam Sarkar
Faridabad, India
Editor,
The United States did become prosperous and powerful by the armed subjugation (and genocide) of the native American nations and the wholesale expropriation of their wealth, Norma Brown's contention to the contrary notwithstanding.
Nina Bartholomew
Davis, California
Kursk's Return
In response to "Silent Locals Wait as Kursk Comes Home," Oct. 12.
Editor,
I was glad to see that the Russians have managed to raise their sunken nuclear submarine Kursk from the ocean floor. Your photograph of the graves being prepared for the doomed sailors was excellent.
At the time of the sinking, many high officials in Russian politics, as well as many reporters, suggested that the Kursk may have been done in by Western sabotage rather than a freak explosion on board. In a similar manner, President Vladimir Putin was quick to blame terrorism rather than incompetence for the downing of the Russian flight from Israel to Novosibirsk over the Black Sea (by Ukrainian missiles made in Russia).
Now that the Kursk has been raised, it will surely be known with certainty what was the cause of the sinking. I hope Russian media will press the government to make full disclosure, and when the West is vindicated I hope the media will demand that suitable apologies be extended by all concerned. The sort of Soviet-era paranoia and anti-Americanism that prompted contrary outbursts does Russian interests no good at all.
Claude Dunes
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Pointless Death
In response to "Crash Debris Searched for Clues," Oct. 9.
Editor,
It seems there is no reason to stop crying. We in America shed tears not only for our own, but for the families affected by the lost Kursk, the Novosibirsk-bound passenger plane, the seemingly endless, pointless deaths in the world.
Our hearts and prayers are with you as your families claim the remains of lost loved ones.
Sandy Lipson
Grand Junction, Colorado
Something Wrong
In response to "Official: Fast Train To Helsinki in 2002," Oct. 9.
Editor,
I recently visited friends in Russia, but the hassle and time involved in getting a visa probably will make less patient people give up and go to Prague. The high-speed train sounds like a wonderful idea, but there is a flaw: seven hours by train, but seven weeks and a lot of bureaucracy for a visa. What is wrong with this picture?
Jim Dickson
Vancouver, Canada
TITLE: Can Russia Hope for Partnership With U.S.?
AUTHOR: By Peter Rutland
TEXT: RUSSIANS were horrified by the events of Sept. 11, a reaction that was reflected in President Vladimir Putin's initial emotional response on the day of the attack: "Americans, we are with you."
As a people all too familiar with the trauma of foreign invasion, Russians immediately grasped the symbolic and substantive impact of the attack on "unbombed America." The United States had sat safely behind its ocean defenses for two centuries and had not seen foreign military action on its homeland since 1812. That sense of invulnerability was rudely punctured on Sept. 11.
Putin's unprecedented cooperation in U.S. efforts to crack down on international terrorism may well be predicated on the assumption that the United States is fundamentally weakened by the events of Sept. 11, and thus willing to forge a new partnership with Russia on equal terms. Many Russians now see the ruins of the World Trade Center as symbolizing the ruins of the United States' self-image as the world's sole superpower. This is an erroneous assumption, and could mean that Moscow is headed for profound disillusionment in the not-too-distant future.
Putin's initiatives drew criticism, some of it public, from conservatives in the Russian military establishment. In particular, his willingness to accept a U.S. military presence in central Asia was a startling turnaround from Russian policies of the previous decade (if not previous century), which had been devoted to keeping foreign powers out of the region. Putin's actions were greeted with enthusiasm among liberals and centrists in the foreign-policy elite, who see Sept. 11 as an opening to put Russia's relations with the West back on a sound footing, a second chance to seize the missed opportunities of the period from 1988 to 1992.
The Russian establishment - both liberals and conservatives - still resents the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev's willingness to dismantle the Soviet empire was not rewarded by the United States. Russia was denied debt relief and was shut out from a leading role in international security institutions, a rejection symbolized by the enlargement of NATO. Hence, the 1990s were what former Security Council secretary Andrei Kokoshin has called a "wasted decade" in U.S.-Russian relations, which reached their nadir with the bombing of Belgrade in 1999.
These views were expressed in a conference on relations between Russia and the West that took place in Moscow last weekend, sponsored by the Ebert Foundation and the German Marshall Center, and which was addressed by State Duma Deputy Speaker Vladimir Lukin and Duma Defense Committee chairperson Alexei Arbatov. The Russian participants in the conference concurred in the belief that Sept. 11 was a turning point in world history, one that will oblige the United States to abandon its unilateralist ways. Alexander Konovalov of the Institute for Strategic Analysis argued that the terrorists' ability to turn civilian airliners into weapons of mass destruction showed the United States the futility of spending $300 billion a year on conventional and nuclear weapons, and the irrelevance of the petty maneuverings that have characterized U.S.-Russian relations over the past decade.
Having accepted Sept. 11 as a watershed, there is discussion in Moscow about the concessions that Russia can expect from the United States as the price for the new partnership. The shopping list includes: an end to criticism of the war in Chechnya; cancellation of Soviet-era debts; abandonment of national missile defense; an end to NATO expansion; lifting sanctions on Iraq; U.S. help in the event of future terrorist attacks on Russia; and more. (Fortunately, last weekend the Russian soccer team qualified for the World Cup finals, or one suspects that also may have been on the list.)
If Russia really believes that the September bombings will lead the United States to abandon unilateralism, it is headed for a rude awakening. The attack has served to steel U.S. resolve, unifying the country behind the president and legitimizing whatever action is deemed necessary to punish the terrorists. Previously, U.S. military action overseas was based on ambiguous and contested norms of humanitarian intervention. Now, it is rooted in the more substantial grounds of self-defense and revenge. Domestic political constraints were always the main factor limiting U.S. foreign policy unilateralism, and they have now been eased. Rather than signaling the end of a Cold War mentality of confrontation, the September attacks are likely to forge a new posture of suspicion toward the outside world. One indicator of this is the fact that the U.S. defense budget is to be boosted by $60 billion per year. Many Americans believe that the reason the United States was targeted on Sept. 11 is precisely because it is the world's sole superpower, a position it is not yet ready to yield.
Russian optimism also rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of the anti-terrorist coalition. The United States has put together a temporary tactical alliance in order to facilitate military strikes against Afghanistan. Its life-span is likely to be measured in weeks rather than years. Concessions made in the creation of this alliance are granted only in order to pursue the task at hand. And some of the concessions made to other participants (such as Pakistan) work directly against Russian interests.
Searching for historical analogies provides a useful perspective on the present situation. The past century has included a number of events after which people felt that the world would never be the same again. The initial reaction in the United States was to talk about Sept. 11 as a second Pearl Harbor. Some see an affinity with the Chernobyl accident in 1986, an event that indelibly shifted the public's sense of security, in that case in the context of nuclear power. Others draw still more disturbing parallels with terrorist actions of the past that triggered major international upheavals, such as the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, or the burning of the Reichstag in 1934.
Perhaps a more relevant historical analogy is the anti-Hitler coalition of 1941 to 1945. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin went into the alliance with their eyes wide open. They had no illusions that they had common goals for the post-war order, but they needed each others' help to defeat Hitler. They constantly bickered over the terms of the relationship, and the alliance broke up very quickly after the defeat of the Axis powers.
With only one month elapsed since the September bombings, it is simply too soon to say whether it will really represent a watershed in international relations, or merely the brutal illumination of the existing structure of international power.
Peter Rutland is a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Time Passes, and, Unfortunately, People Forget
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: MAYBE it is just the result of the end-of-summer mood. Maybe our leaders have finally gotten tired of pouring dirt over one another. Whatever the reason, I've definitely noticed that over the last few weeks there has been almost no outward tension between Governor Vladimir Yakovlev and Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov.
Now, it has been pretty clear to observers ever since Cherkesov was appointed in May 2000 that these two political giants were at war and even that the antipathy is personal as well as professional. That it is why the recent weeks of calm, in which these two boxers seem to have laid their gloves aside, struck me as so strange.
So I was a bit relieved this month to pick up a copy of Novaya Gazeta and see that they were once again up to their old tricks. The paper had a huge article headlined, "I Know Who Ordered Mikhail Manevich's Assassination," which quotes the police interrogation report of former State Duma Deputy Vyacheslav Shevchenko that presumably took place in February 1999.
"Little by little, I came to the conclusion that it was Governor Vladimir Anatolievich Yakovlev or his deputy Vladimir Vasilievich Yatsuba, who had ordered the Manevich assassination," Shevchenko testified, according to the paper.
There was nothing new about this conclusion. People in local political circles have been saying for a long time that those who brought Yakovlev to power were not pleased with Manevich's activity, especially concerning the privatization of the city's sea port, and wanted to get rid of him. But they were never able to come up with any proof.
Shevchenko's words, of course, are just more speculation of this sort. But the publication of his interrogation raised two questions. First, had investigators looked into this version of events and, second, who gave the interrogation materials to Novaya Gazeta?
When I started asking local law enforcement agencies who might have released the documents, they all began heaping blame on one another. Representatives at the Federal Security Service, or FSB, said it was the Prosecutor General's Office. Ivan Sydoruk, the St. Petersburg prosecutor general, was not at all happy when he heard this opinion.
"They are not right," he told me over the phone. "It should be the FSB who has to examine the article and give all the answers, because the FSB is responsible for the investigation. If there was a leak, it was from there. It is a violation of the Criminal Code when secrets of investigations are made public."
But the FSB continues to deny its involvement.
At the same time, neither the FSB nor the prosecutor's office wants to discuss the contents of Schevchenko's statement.
When I called Yakovlev's spokesperson, Alexander Afanasiev, with my questions, he started roaring with laughter.
"Finally, here it is!" he shouted as soon as I mentioned the article. "I've been waiting for days for somebody to call and ask about it, and here you are!"
"I think that you'll be the first and the last to ask about this. Everyone has long understood that these accusations are nothing but rubbish," he said.
He may well be right that no one else will ask. I've noticed that no one talks anymore about Yakovlev's links to Alexander Korzhakov, former head of President Boris Yeltsin's security apparatus. Nobody remembers Anatoly Ponidelko, the former St. Petersburg chief of police who said a few years back that City Hall is swarming with people from the Tambov criminal group. Nobody talks aobut how Cherkesov treated local dissidents when he worked for the Leningrad KGB.
Time passes and people get new priorities. And unfortunately this makes them forget things that seemed so important just a few years ago.
TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
TEXT: "Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground."
- George W. Bush, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001.
"These events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidel."
- Osama bin Laden, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001.
They say that great minds think alike - and not-so-great ones do, too, apparently. Thus here we are: Two spoiled rich boys made by their fathers' money and connections have now divided the world up between them, and are basically proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them.
Ah yes, welcome to the 21st century!
The Mirror Crack'd
"Tweedleedum and Tweedledee/They're throwing knives into the tree/Living in the Land of Nod/Trusting their fate to the hands of God." - Bob Dylan, from "Love and Theft," released Sept. 11.
Both Bush and bin Laden spent sybarite youths, indulging idly and amply in the pleasures of the flesh - on someone else's dime - before embracing a fundamentalist religious faith that provides divine sanction for a narrow set of self-selected cultural norms while consigning all unbelievers to eternal damnation. Bush, for example, is on record as saying that all Jews are going to hell; a belief no doubt shared by his semblable, bin Laden. True, Bush later weasel-worded the issue, but his literalist faith, which he publicly affirms at every possible opportunity, is crystal-clear on this point.
Now both of these zealous believers have shimmied up the greasy pole of power - without the nuisance of actually being elected by popular vote - from whence they can rain death on their enemies, secure in the knowledge that they are fulfilling the will of God.
Or rather, the will of an Iron Age deity cobbled together out of the noblest aspirations, deepest fears and foulest hatreds of myriad different tribes; a will derived from ancient grab bags of diverse texts and fragments - accretions of mangled history, confused traditions, inspired poetry, mystical ecstasy, mass murder, chaos and longing.
Their own limited understanding of these makeshift compendiums is the ultimate authority by which the two unchosen ones send out people to kill and die.
Plainly, this is madness. But this is the world we all must live in now. "There is no neutral ground." If we oppose or question the policies of the U.S. government, then we are supporting terrorism and "must pay the price." If we oppose the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent people by stateless renegades, then we are "infidels," marked for death.
That "choice" is the limit of our freedom in this glorious new age: trapped between two Tweedles.
Dark Valley
But if we must choose, then of course we will go with Bush. After all, of the two, he is the greatest hypocrite, and therefore there's a little more room for maneuver under his dread edict. For he doesn't really mean it when he says he will attack and punish all those who "harbor and succor terrorism." He's certainly not going to bomb, say, Saudi Arabia, which has bankrolled the deadly Hamas terrorist network for years, and spent billions during the 1980s on Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a nuclear bomb - an attempt at terror on a global scale, which the U.S. knew about and tacitly approved as part of its years-long succor of the bloodthirsty autocrat.
And certainly, Bush is not going to bomb the U.S. government, which has provided major succor to state and private terrorism over the years, in Indonesia, Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, the Congo (remember George Senior's good buddy, Mobutu?), Angola, Chile, Lebanon, Cambodia (remember U.S. support for the genocidal Pol Pot when he was fighting the Vietnamese infidels?), El Salvador, Colombia, and that first bold step toward empire, the Philippines, where more than 200,000 natives died as U.S. forces set out to, in President McKinley's words, "Christianize" the country. The Filipinos were already Catholics, but McKinley obviously shared Bush's self-selected fundamentalist Protestant cultural norms.
And Bush is surely not going to send cruise missiles into the George Bush Center for Intelligence, headquarters of the CIA, which trained, harbored, and succored the living daylights out of the same rabid Islamic extremists who've lately been practicing the agency's "covert ops" techniques to such deadly effect in New York and Washington. Nor will he direct the forces of "Operation Enduring Freedom" to overthrow the enduring despotisms of his good friends and allies in Saudi Arabia (whose draconian brand of Islam was the Taliban's model) or Pakistan (the military dictatorship that succored the Taliban and now harbors terrorists rampaging in Kashmir) or the Afghan Northern Alliance (that collection of warlords whose depredations, which include tying miscreants to two separate tanks and tearing them in half, are scarcely less heinous than those of the Taliban).
No, George is true-blue for God, but he also has a soft spot for Mammon; and an even softer spot for Dick Cheney, who spent much of the last decade scheming with his fellow oil barons to get a pipeline from the virgin fields of the Caspian Sea - where $4 trillion in profits are waiting for them - through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Cheney's business interests in oil and arms, temporarily divested while he helps direct American policy in energy and defense, rival those of the Bushes and bin Ladens. Or as the Chicago Tribune noted last year, "War is big business, and Dick Cheney is right in the middle of it."
And now we're all "right in the middle of it." But the all-too-human greed of Pious George and Deadeye Dick will no doubt trump the apocalyptic implications of Bush's political theology - a welcome hypocrisy in the face of bin Laden's homicidal sincerity. The hypocrites will triumph, as they usually do, thank God, and their depredations will be lighter, more bearable (unless you happen to live in Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Congo, etc.). But the price will be high: a "free world" less free, less tolerant, more brutalized; a world passed into the shadows.
TITLE: Naipaul Turns Back on Origins
AUTHOR: By Angela Potter
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHAGUANAS, Trinidad - The faded house where Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul was born is one of the few remnants of a humble upbringing some say the author would rather forget.
In accepting the prize Thursday, the 69-year-old novelist said it was "a tribute both to India, my ancestors' land, and to other countries in the subcontinent." Trinidad and Tobago was absent from his accolades.
"The whole Caribbean is disappointed. The man has not at all recognized the land of his birth," said Wesley Furlonge, who lives next door to Nai paul's birthplace, a clumsy structure of four levels that stands out from others on a boisterous street lined with Hindu prayer flags.
Like James Joyce, Ireland's famous exile, Naipaul has had an uneasy relationship with his homeland, once writing to his family from Oxford, "I shall die if I had to spend the rest of my life in Trinidad."
He didn't.
For the first six years of his life, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, known as V.S. or Vidia to his family, lived with his grandmother and seven siblings in the house, guarded by stone sculptures of lions, about 15 kilometers south of Trinidad's capital, Port-of-Spain.
The secluded life of the asthmatic and introverted young Naipaul began in the dwelling now known as the "Lion House."
"One was not supposed to like or dislike anything at the Lion House," Ka mla Naipaul Te wari, Naipaul's 71-year-old sister, said in an interview Thursday. "One lived with one's grandmother. One lived a very secluded and highly protected life, protected by the family, by grandmother."
"We went to school, came back home. We weren't allowed to mingle at all with anybody," she said from her home in Chaguanas. "We had no friends. In those days children were to be seen but not heard."
Tewari said her brother has never denied his roots but believes he had to leave to survive.
"To succeed as a writer, he had to go away," she said. "He worked very hard to get a scholarship. My parents didn't have that kind of money at all, at all, at all. He wanted a scholarship more than anything."
But his absence remains a sore point for Trinidadians who feel abandoned by the literary giant.
"In several ways he has been a person trying to escape his past," said Kris Rampersad, an editor at The Sunday Guardian where Naipaul's father, Seepersad Naipaul, worked as a journalist. "That past is from a small island with limited opportunities. The irony is that, over and over again, his works return to the small island."
While the 215-year-old Swedish Academy singled out the masterpiece "The Enigma of Arrival," his earlier and perhaps best-known works were based in Trinidad. "Enigma" describes his life in Britain.
Naipaul's first novel, "The Mystic Masseur," explored Trinidad in the 1950s as it struggled with identity, class and race under a colonial British regime.
Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean country almost evenly divided between blacks descended from African slaves and East Indians descended from indentured laborers, today confronts many of the same issues.
Naipaul, often described as moody, haughty and irascible, has acknowledged that Trinidad provided fodder for his writing, but has not explained why he didn't acknowledge Trinidad in his acceptance speech.
"Although I come from the Carib bean, Trinidad, I'm of Indian origin, and the Indian experience has always been interesting to me and necessary for me to explore and to come to terms with," he said in an earlier interview.
Even after Naipaul moved to Port-of-Spain to live with his parents, when he was 6, he remained a recluse.
"He was very much into his books," said Frank Abdulah, 73, who remembers Naipaul at the Queen's Royal College. "My memory of him was of someone who came to school and left."
His studious nature garnered Naipaul a scholarship at Oxford University, where he graduated in 1953. Since that time, he has lived in England, which honored him with a knighthood in 1990.
The house where Naipaul lived in Port-of-Spain inspired "A House for Mr. Biswas," one of his most personal books, based on the life of his father, who had a nervous breakdown.
Of her brother, Tewari said: "He's a very complex man. ... He can spend a long time being introspective. He can also be very talkative. He's a man of many moods - many, many moods and they could change from minute to minute."
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Power of Information
STOCKHOLM (AP) - Three Americans won the Nobel prize for economics on Wednesday for developing ways to measure the power of information in a wide range of deals and investments, from used-car sales to the recent boom and bust of high-tech stocks.
The award extends U.S. dominance of the prestigious Nobel awards, with eight Americans winning prizes so far this year, one more than in 2000.
George A. Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley, A. Michael Spence of Stanford University and Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University will share the economics prize, which is worth $943,000 this year.
Their theory on "asymmetric information" was lauded for giving experts an important tool for gauging how players with differing amounts of information influence financial markets and everyday transactions.
Though developed nearly three decades ago, the contributions continue to have a wide-ranging impact and "form the core of modern information economics," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
The researchers, for example, gave economists a way to measure the risks faced by a lender who lacked information about a borrower's creditworthiness.
Their research also explored how people with inside knowledge of a technology company's financial prospects gain an edge over other investors, while people who don't fully understand a company's finances may invest unwisely.
The theory helps economists explain why the recent bubble in high-technology stocks burst.
"The big question in economics is when do markets work and when do markets fail. These three economists have moved that analysis into a new realm," said Gregory Mankiw, who is an economics professor at Harvard University.
Drugs Made Cheap
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The Nobel prize in chemistry went on Wednesday to three researchers, two American and one Japanese, for work that helped turn sophisticated life-saving drugs into affordable treatments for millions.
William Know les and Barry Sharpless shared the $1 million annual award with Ryoji Noyori of Japan's Nagoya University for key research that has been used to create numerous products, including antibiotics and anti-inflammatory and heart drugs, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation.
"New drugs are the most important application but we may also mention the production of flavoring and sweetening agents and insecticides," the Academy said in a statement.
The contributions of the three, working separately, were crucial in speeding up chemical reactions to provide the large quantities of very pure molecules needed for the mass production of drugs, thus making these medicines accessible to a mass market.
"Even though you might have found a compound that is active against some illness, maybe you wouldn't be able to make it because it would be too expensive," Per Ahlberg, an organic chemistry professor at Sweden's Gothen burg University and a member of the Nobel Committee, told a news conference.
"The market wouldn't be able to take it."
New State of Matter
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle said he was stunned to win the Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists on Tuesday, saying their creation of a new state of matter was a great moment for atomic physics.
"We know each other very well," Ketterle said of his co-winners, Americans Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman. "We have been racing and hunting for this new matter."
"You never expect it," Ketterle said of the prize. "You do some exciting work, but you never really expect it."
Ketterle is a German citizen who came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990 as a postdoctoral fellow. The physics professor won the prestigious $1-million prize with Cornell and Wieman for creating a form of matter that is extremely pure and coherent, in the same way that lasers are a pure kind of light.
Cornell, 39, is from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, while Wieman, 50, is from the University of Colorado.
Since their 1995 discovery of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), more than 2,000 scientific research papers by other physicists have appeared. The speed with which the three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize reflected the "breadth of this discovery," Ketterle said.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences usually bestows its prizes years and even decades after an important discovery.
TITLE: Danes Bid City a Fond Farewell
AUTHOR: By Terry Battles
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: What is immediately striking when meeting Danish Consul General George Rasmussen is the warm welcome he and his wife, Lone, extend to all visitors to what has been their home during his posting to the city, the Danish Consulate on Kammeny Island.
Rasmussen and his wife are very much a team, with Lone getting very involved in the job. Both hail from Aarhus, the second-largest city in Denmark, and they have been happily married for 34 years. They have always worked closely during Rasmussen's various postings abroad, assignments that have taken him to Japan, Belgium and the United States. "It's not my job, it's our job," stresses George Rasmussen.
The striking art-nouveau house, originally the Swiss Vollenwader family dacha, dates from 19030-4 and was taken over by the consulate in 1993. Atypically, the consulate is also home for the Rasmussens, who live downstairs from the consulate offices on the ground floor. With more than 1,000 guests a year passing through its halls, the building is the hub of Danish activity in the city.
The Ramussens arrived in St. Petersburg four years ago, "hit the ground running and haven't stopped since." The couple revels in the extremes of Russia's weather: all year round each day begins with an hour-long walk together. In fact, Lone loves the changing seasons in Russia so much that she removed all the curtains from the windows to allow in as much light as possible and to see the spectacular views of the surrounding landscape. Rasmussen also likes kayaking along St. Petersburg's canals and rivers.
It hasn't all been plain sailing for Rasmussen however. The consul general admits that during his posting in St. Petersburg he has witnessed some problems: the Kosovo crises and the economic crash of August 1998. Despite differences of opinion over issues such as the war in Chechnya, Rasmussen feels the relationship between Russia and Denmark has grown stronger over his four-year term.
Rasmussen highlights the importance of Russia's second capital. "It's important that we assist and cooperate with the city and the federal authorities in developing this region economically," he said. "If you look at the vicinity, you have Finland, Sweden and Denmark and we have a mutual sea, the Baltic Sea, which draws us very close."
Although returning to Denmark for a posting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rasmussen will continue to deal with Russian matters and carry on fostering the relationship between St. Petersburg and Denmark. He will co-chair a national committee with former Foreign Minister Uffe Elleman Jensen that is developing an elaborate cultural and commercial program on Russia.
However, as he said to Governor Vla di mir Yakovlev during a farewell reception, "We will absolutely be coming back to the city privately". He says they have abused every concert hall, building and museum in the city, they have visited them so often. Much of their last few days in the city was spent revisiting their favorite ballets and musical performances at the Mariinsky and Philharmonic.
While most of those who pay a state visit to Russia go to Moscow, everybody also wants to see St. Petersburg, according to Rasmussen. "I can echo our colleague, the former U.S. Consul General Paul Smith who said that St. Petersburg is turning into the Russian Camp David," said Rasmussen.
An important part of that job has been to encourage the strengthening of the bilateral relationship between Denmark and Russia in the economic, cultural and political spheres. In fact, it was his role as a member of a bilateral economic commission that led to his posting as consul general in St. Petersburg.
There are currently 20 Danish companies operating in the Northwest Region, within the fields of environment, machine production, food processing and brewing.
Several other Danish companies are seriously considering investing in the region. According to Rasmussen, Maersk Sealand, the largest container-shipping company in the world has established a working group with the city to find out "not when, but where and how soon they can invest in their own port facility."
As dean of the consular corps, Rasmussen has been at the forefront of setting up a committee working with the city to deal with the issue of police behavior toward foreign citizens and visitors. He stresses that they want to work with the city not just resolving individual cases but looking at the roots of why such harassment is happening.
He points out that all diplomats are looking ahead to 2003. "We all want investors to come but if they're to come, over and above a good investment climate these citizens need to be sure they can walk the streets without being bothered." The consular corps will be working with the city and police in resolving the issue.
Danish companies have also been involved in environmental projects both in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. Per Aarsleff has helped with the reconstruction of the water system. There are roughly 25,000 kilometers of damaged water pipes in the city, and instead of digging up these pipes, Per Aarsleff installed a "pantyhose" that expands and creates a new inner shell, guaranteed to last over one hundred years. Khrushchyovka buildings from the 1960s have benefited from another Danish project with the city.
Danish companies have also been involved in modernizing the ventilation and heating system of the Hermitage, along with agricultural projects and maintaining the nuclear-waste facility outside the city. Neverthless, they keep these projects low-key. "We don't feel that we always need to hoist the Danish flag. It's the results that count," Rasmussen said.
The Rasmussens were deeply moved when they took part in the wreath-laying ceremonies on Victory Day. Rasmussen points out the uniqueness of the city and how no one in the city was untouched by the siege. "When you sit in the Philharmonic and listen to Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, having lived here, you sense every note of the 900 days."
TITLE: Pushkin's Predecessor Suffers Unjust Neglect
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While many Russian writers have succeeded in having statues erected in their honor all over the country, and having streets or even towns named after them, the 18th-century poet Gavrila Derzhavin has only managed to get a dingy alleyway to bear his name.
Although a late-19th-century-era plaque on the nearby house at 118 Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki dutifully records "Here lived Gavrila Romanovich Derzhavin," and a bust of the poet stands in the courtyard, the street was only unofficially known as Derzhavinsky Pereulok until recently, when the name was entered into the city records in 1979. Nevertheless, the city authorities have yet to put up a sign, and the name "Derzhavinsky Pereulok" is only painted on a couple of walls.
This seems unfair for a poet who did much to establish the foundations for modern Russian literature. Derzhavin was a prolific writer who worked in many genres, but his main achievement today is generally regarded as his lyric poetry, thought to be some of the finest written in the Russian language before Alexander Pushkin.
There has been at least one attempt to redress the balance, but it has yet to see fruition. In March 1998, the Pushkin Museum announced plans to open a Derzhavin museum in the house on the Fontanka, but after the economic crisis in August of the same year, these plans were put on hold indefinitely.
Derzhavin occupies a particular place in the history of Russian literature as a transitional figure who broke with the prevailing ideas of "high" and "low" style set down by the scientist and writer Mikhail Lo mo nosov, thus paving the way for Pushkin.
Derzhavin also believed that poetry must have a public function in state affairs. He was for a time a favorite of Catherine II, whom he praised as an enlightened ruler while satirizing her courtiers in several poems. Derzhavin himself said he would "speak the truth to the tsars with a smile."
Derzhavin served with distinction as a soldier and intelligence officer, later becoming Minister of Justice under Alexander I before devoting himself entirely to literary pursuits. Derzhavin dabbled in genres besides poetry, including musicals, tragedies and even children's plays.
Listening to Pushkin speak at his graduation from the lyceum at Tsarskoye Selo, Derzhavin is said to have wept for joy and said "Here is the one who will take my place!"
TITLE: Bush Rejects Talks With Taliban
AUTHOR: By Kathy Gannon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL, Afghanistan - Pounding target after target, U.S. bombs rocked Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad on Monday after President George W. Bush rebuffed a top Taliban leader's offer to negotiate terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden's surrender.
In Pakistan, Muslim militants pledged a nationwide strike to protest their government's support for the U.S.-led air campaign in Afghanistan.
Secretary of State Colin Powell headed to the region to try to keep calm between Pakistan, a key ally in the campaign, and neighboring India - heading off any surge in tensions that might complicate the U.S. military mission.
Daylight raids opened with jets streaking across the dawn sky over Kabul, striking in the area of the airport and a military base. Three more bombs pounded targets northwest of the capital in a second attack hours later.
In Afghanistan's east, a lone jet appeared out of the deep-blue morning sky over Jalalabad, bombing at the western outskirts as shoppers went about their errands at an open market in the city center. Taliban soldiers patrolled with rocket launchers and assault rifles.
Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network is believed to run training camps in the mountains to the west of the city. It was not clear if they were the targets.
"The Taliban just laugh at these bombs," said Mufti Yousuf, a Taliban envoy accompanying international journalists to Jalalabad. "It is nothing. It makes no difference."
Each raid drew antiaircraft fire from Taliban forces. There was no immediate word of casualties in the two cities. Taliban Information Ministry officials in Kabul claimed 12 people died in a separate strike Monday in Badgus province in western Afghanistan. The claim could not be independently verified.
The Pentagon said the U.S. Air Force was trying to gather more intelligence to check out a Taliban claim that another attack, on Thursday, killed about 200 civilians in the village of Jalalabad near Karam.
The Taliban escorted The Associated Press and journalists with several other international media organizations to Karam and Jalalabad over the weekend, for a first look inside Afghanistan since the U.S.-led strikes started.
Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Haji Abdul Kabir offered Sunday to surrender bin Laden for trial in an unspecified third country if Washington stopped the bombing and provided the Taliban with evidence of the Saudi dissident's guilt. Bush said no.
"We know he's guilty. Turn him over," the president said in Washington.
Bush rejected a similar offer aired by a lower-ranking Taliban official before he began the military strikes, now in its ninth day.
Aboard the USS Enterprise, the launching pad for raids on Afg ha ni stan, U.S. officers on Sunday described the latest attacks as "cleanup" missions to hit targets pilots had missed in earlier raids.
On Sunday, U.S. jets destroyed Kabul's Chinese-built international tele phone exchange, severing one of the last means of communication with the outside world. Residents also said the capital's historic Mogul-style Balahisar Fort, built in the medieval era and reconstructed in the early 20th century, was flattened. The report could not be confirmed because security kept outsiders from the area.
TITLE: Pakistanis Protest State Support of Air Strikes
AUTHOR: By Munir Ahmad
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Merchants by the thousands kept shops shuttered across Pakistan on Monday after Muslim leaders called for a national strike against government support of U.S.-led military strikes on Afghanistan.
It was not immediately clear how many businesses supported the strike and how many closed because of intimidation by members of militant Islamic parties that have threatened and sometimes attacked noncompliant merchants during recent demonstrations.
Nearly every store was reported closed in the Taliban-friendly border city of Quetta, and the entire business district was shuttered in the southern town of Jacobabad, site of large anti-American demonstrations Sunday near Shahbaz Air Base, which U.S. personnel are using.
However, in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, many businesses were reported open. Authorities said one demonstrator was wounded during scattered clashes between protesters and authorities. Some stores also were shuttered in Lahore, a major eastern city where one police officer was injured Monday by stones.
Outraged by President General Pervez Musharraf's support of the American-led coalition against terrorism, militant Islamic political parties have been protesting since Oct. 7 when U.S. and British planes began attacking Afghanistan.
Some demonstrations have turned violent, notably in the cities of Quetta and Karachi, though only several thousand of Pakistan's 145 million people have been involved. Militant leaders say Musharraf has betrayed the country and have called for his ouster.
The strike Monday also was aimed at protesting a scheduled visit later in the day by Secretary of State Colin Powell, according to Maulana Samiul Haq, head of the Afghan Defense Council, a pro-Taliban coalition of 35 Islamic Groups.
"We have asked our followers to exact pressure on the Pakistani government to force Musharraf to send American troops back to their country," said Haq, released Monday from a government-ordered house arrest designed to stop him from leading more demonstrations.
About 500 people who had been detained in Jacobabad during the weekend were released Monday morning, Police Chief Akhtar Shah said.
Still, many demonstrators remained in and around the sealed-off city, and the situation was reported tense.
Services were set for Monday in Jacobabad for Mukhtar Khosio, a demonstrator killed during Sunday's protests. His father, Maulana Shabir Khosio, who hours earlier had called for holy war, urged protesters to "remain cool and calm" and not to damage public property.
In Peshawar, many shops and businesses opened on schedule. But groups of demonstrators from religious schools took up position in front of open businesses to enforce the strike, shouting and shaking fists until owners closed.
Special police anti-terrorism units took up position at key intersections in armored personnel carriers. Near a central mosque, a couple hundred people gathered and waved flags from different Pakistani religious political parties as a speaker whipped up passions.
"We will make Afghanistan a graveyard for Americans and their allies," he said, his voice hoarse with emotion. "If America wants us to surrender Osama, they should surrender President Bush. He is responsible for killing innocent people."
TITLE: Israel Pulls Out of Hebron Neighborhoods
AUTHOR: By Nasser Shiyoukhi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HEBRON, West Bank - In a bid to breathe life into a truce negotiated at the urging of the United States, Israeli troops withdrew from two Palestinian neighborhoods in the volatile West Bank city of Hebron early on Monday.
Israeli troops, backed by tanks, seized the hilltop neighborhood on Oct. 5, after Palestinian gunmen repeatedly fired from there at Jewish settler enclaves in the center of Hebron.
Protesting the pullback, the ultranationalist National Union party, a patron of the settlement movement, announced Monday it would leave Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government.
The party has six seats in the 120-member parliament, not enough to rob Sharon's broad-based coalition of its Parliamentary majority. However, the hardline Sharon might now become more dependent on the moderate labor party to stay in power.
In Hebron, Jewish settlers entered the Abu Sneine and Harat el-Sheikh neighborhoods to try to prevent the army pullback. Twenty-three settlers were detained by Israeli police, some on suspicion of assaulting soldiers, said police spokesperson Rafi Yaffe.
By daylight, Palestinian security forces entered the two neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, patrolling in jeeps and taking over positions from which gunmen had fired at the settler compounds in the past, witnesses said.
The Hebron withdrawal laid bare growing tensions between Israeli Defense Minister Binyanim Ben-Eliezer and the armed forces chief of staff, Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz.
Mofaz was severely reprimanded by Ben-Eliezer after the chief of staff said in a statement he was opposed to steps that might endanger Israeli civilians and soldiers, such as the withdrawal from the two Hebron neighborhoods.
Ben-Eliezer is a leading member of Labor and advocates a quick resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians. Mofaz has generally adopted a harder line in the conflict with the Palestinians.
The Hebron pullback was the result of truce talks held on Sunday. Israel also agreed to ease its stifling travel restrictions in the West Bank - in effect for over a year - by removing barriers nears the towns of Ramallah and Jericho.
The blockade had paralyzed daily life in the Palestinian areas.
The United States has been urging both sides to show restraint as the Americans attempt to build support in Arab and Muslim countries for their anti-terror campaign. But the truce has been sorely tested on both sides since it was agreed on Sept. 26.
Ahmed Marshoud, 32, a member of the militant Hamas Islamic group, was killed Monday when a car blew up as he was walking past, in the West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian police said.
The Israeli Army refused to say whether Israel was responsible for the explosion or to comment on the incident.
On Sunday, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian accused of orchestrating a suicide bombing that killed 22 people in June.
Palestinians called the death of Abed-Rahman Hamad, a regional leader of Hamas, a grave violation of the cease-fire.
Sharon, citing Israel's right to defend itself against attacks like the Tel Aviv disco bombing for which he held Hamad responsible, said in a speech on Sunday the shooting "was not the first nor the last."
Hamad, 35, knew the Israelis were after him and rarely strayed far from his home, except to visit a nearby mosque for prayers, acquaintances said.
He attended pre-dawn prayers Sunday and was atop his flat-top roof when he was hit by fire from Israeli troops about 300 meters away, according to acquaintances.
The shooting marked a return to Israel's policy of targeted killings. Over the past year, Israel has carried out dozens of such attacks against Palestinian militants suspected of violence against Israelis. Sunday's shooting was the first since the cease-fire was declared.
Several thousand Palestinians attended Hamad's funeral on Sunday. Gunmen fired into the air and mourners carried leaflets reading, "Revenge, revenge," and "No to the cease-fire."
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has demanded that Hamas and other militant groups observe the truce, but they have refused to endorse it.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Failing Grade
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Argentine voters rebuked President Fernando De la Rua for his handling of the country's economic crisis, propelling opposition Peronists to gains in congressional midterm elections.
Sunday's outcome further weakened the embattled president, already under fire for failing to steer South America's second-largest economy out of a recession.
At the ballot box, voters poured out their distaste for politicians in general by casting an exceedingly high number of blank or nullified ballots, one of the few ways to register discontent in a country where voting is compulsory
De la Rua said late Sunday he had heard the message of the people. But he signaled he would not backtrack on a string of austerity measures meant to curb a lengthy recession and avoid default on a $132-billion public debt.
Anti-U.S. Protests
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Riot police used tear gas, warning shots and water cannons to disperse anti-U.S. Muslim protesters outside Parliament on Monday.
Witnesses said officers hit some demonstrators with batons after ordering about 300 members of the Islamic Defenders Front to end a rally outside the legislature. Some protesters threw rocks in retaliation.
Privately owned Metro TV reported that police beat one of its camera operators. Witnesses said officers also punched a news photographer and smashed vehicles belonging to demonstrators.
The protest was the latest in a series of almost daily demonstrations against the U.S.-led air strikes against Afghanistan.
Koizumi Visits S. Korea
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Japan's prime minister bowed before a Korean independence memorial Monday and expressed remorse for Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule during a short visit that was met by small but boisterous protests.
Junichiro Koizumi's trip was hastily arranged to repair relations that deteriorated this year after Tokyo adopted school textbooks that critics say gloss over Japan's wartime atrocities.
Koizumi further antagonized South Koreans by visiting a Tokyo war shrine, considered by many Koreans to be a symbol of Japan's militaristic past.
"I can't find words to express my anguish-laden mind," Koizumi said after touring Sodaemun, a colonial-era Japanese prison where South Korean independence fighters were jailed. "I looked around with a feeling of heartfelt apology and repentance about the many pains South Koreans suffered due to Japanese colonial rule."
Lord Hailsham Dies
LONDON (AP) - Lord Hailsham, who served in the governments of six Conservative prime ministers in an illustrious political career, has died at age 94, his family said Sunday.
Hailsham died at his London home on Friday after a long illness, said his son Douglas Hogg, a member of Parliament.
One of the last survivors of Winston Churchill's wartime government, Hailsham finished as lord chancellor, chief of the judiciary, for Prime Ministers Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher.
"He combined a brilliant intellect and acute political instinct with a profound patriotism and commitment to his country," Prime Minister Tony Blair said.
TITLE: Afghan Cricketers Play in Pakistan While Bombs Fall at Home
AUTHOR: By Rizwan Ali
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Dressed in traditional white trousers and white shirts, Afghanistan's cricket team tried to leave war behind Monday in its opening match in this northern border city.
Afghan captain Allahdad Noori said he was not sure his team would be allowed to participate in the tournament because of U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan.
"We thank God that we are playing," said.
"We have no business with politics," he added. "Sports should never be mixed with politics."
The Afghan players are facing the city team of Nowshera in Pakistan's domestic Quaid-i-Azam Trophy Grade-II competition.
Shamal Khan, the Afghan team manger, acknowledged his country's hardships from war the last 20 years.
"This doesn't mean we should stop doing other things," he said.
Afghanistan's Taliban rulers have banned most forms of light entertainment, including television and music. Many sports also have been discouraged because they are said to distract the young from prayer.
But not cricket, which is relatively new in Afghanistan. Many Afghans were introduced to cricket while living in refugee camps in Pakistan.
Millions of Afghans emigrated to Pakistan during their country's war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Many returned home after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, but more than 2 million Afghans still live in refugee camps and major Pakistani cities.
The Taliban rulers, who follow a harsh version of Islam, usually bar athletes from wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts. But they have allowed its cricketers to wear Western clothes during matches.
Pakistani sports have been disrupted by the bombings. New Zealand and Sri Lankan cricket teams canceled tours to the country. Pakistan also postponed this month's seven-nation South Asian Games.
Afghanistan is banned from the Olympics. It was admitted to the International Cricket Council as an associate member in June.
The Afghan national team last visited Pakistan in May and lost all four matches against club teams.
Noori said he is worried about his family in Kabul.
"My brother told me that rockets flew over Kabul and it's like daylight in the darkness," he said. "But I don't see any danger in playing in Pakistan. ... I don't know why the New Zealand team canceled its trip here."