SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #715 (82), Tuesday, October 23, 2001
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Kremlin To Stage NGO Congress
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With preparations well underway for a Nov. 21-22 Kremlin-backed congress of nongovernmental organizations, local NGOs - like many of their counterparts throughout Russia - are sharply divided on the question of whether or not to participate.
According to congress organizers, the purpose of the $1.5-million Civic Forum is to help establish a dialogue between the state and the fledgling NGO sector. About 4,000 NGOs from around the country have been invited.
At a Moscow news conference earlier this month, congress organizers stated that the Kremlin needs "advice and support from society for the upcoming, difficult structural reforms."
"We need a functioning society, not a society of passive channel surfers who don't believe that anything depends on them," said the head of the organizing committee, Kremlin-connected political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky.
The idea of holding such a congress has fractured the NGO community, although intense negotiations with organizers have persuaded some of the country's most established and respected human-rights groups, including Memorial, the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Glasnost Defense Foundation, to participate in organizing the forum. All these organizations have been sharply critical of the Russian government in the past.
At least 90 of St. Petersburg's several thousand NGOs have received invitations to the forum, which has provoked controversy.
"We are not going there," said Anna Sharogradskaya, head of the Press Development Institute's Northwest Region office. "The press is the watchdog of democracy. It should cover the authorities objectively, but there is no way for it to unite with the government."
Yelena Vilenskaya, head of the local chapter of the Soldiers' Mothers organization, which monitors human-rights violations in the armed forces, said that her organization "flatly refuses to participate in this dubious event."
"Being a human-rights organization, we must be separate from the state," she said.
On the other hand, Vladimir Shnittke, co-chairperson of the St. Petersburg chapter of Memorial, said that the forum would be an opportunity for NGOs to offer their positions on many issues.
"The major task of the forum is not to unite the government and NGOS, but to define ways for NGOs to communicate with state structures on a daily basis," Shnittke said.
He added that his organization had recently had encouraging examples of problem solving with federal government officials such as they had never seen before. In April, they were able to meet with Deputy Prime Minister Va len tina Matviyenko in order to discuss a provision of the Tax Code that requires individuals to pay a 36-percent tax on help they receive from NGOs.
According to Shnittke, Matviyenko was sympathetic and ordered a review of the matter.
"The hardest part," Shnittke said, "was getting the meeting with Mat vi yenko. We had to send hundreds of letters to her office, most of which she probably never saw."
Shnittke said at the forum they would also discuss the problems of refugees and their status, military reform and wider public access to information that the government presently delivers in small doses through its press services.
Boris Pustyntsev, head of the local human-rights NGO Citizens' Watch, said that although he is skeptical about the forum idea, he plans to go and see what it's all about.
"The basic argument of the forum supporters is society should have dialogue with power. But we do have such a dialogue! With particular administrations of different levels to solve concrete questions," Pustyntsev said.
Staff writer Ana Uzelac also contributed to this report from Moscow.
TITLE: School Trains Tomorrow's Leaders
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Slim, dark-haired, 12-year-old Yegor Putra knows that someday he might just become president of the Russian Federation.
"There are three things I'd like to change in the country," Yegor said. "First, I would combat crime, which is overloading the country. Second, I would introduce some censorship to reduce the violent foreign movies on Russian screens. And finally, I'd change our education system and open up more schools like ours."
Together with 17 other boys and one girl, Yegor attends the Gorchakov Lyceum in Pavlovsk, an experimental private school dedicated to educating the country's future leaders.
"The lyceum's overall task is to prepare its graduates with the education, deportment and sense of responsibility that a society demands of its high-ranking leaders, including its president," said Sergei Gutzeit, a St. Petersburg businessperson who founded the school two years ago.
Gutzeit's idea was to recreate precisely the legendary lyceum of Tsars koye Selo, whose graduates, including poet Alexander Pushkin, made such an enormous impact on the country's history.
That original lyceum was the brainchild of prominent reformist politician Mikhail Speransky and was opened on Oct. 19, 1811. Speransky's goal was to educate a generation of "new people" who would be able to implement the profound social and political reforms that he felt Russia needed.
Two hundred years later, a new-generation student, 12-year-old Dmitry Nikodyuk, says he wants "to become a man who will produce a positive influence on Russia."
"We teach them not just to know things, but to understand them, to feel and to think," said history teacher Boris Ne upokoyev. "If we talk about Na poleon, for instance, we ask [students] to try on his shoes and suggest how they would act in his situation."
Like the original lyceum, the Gorchakov Lyceum - named after the diplomat Alexander Gorchakov - is a boarding school. Students spend three days at home every three weeks, plus winter vacation and a one-month holiday in the summer.
Otherwise, they follow a strictly regimented program, six days a week. They wake up at 7 a.m., have morning exercises outside, followed by breakfast. Then comes a full day of classes, symposia, physical education, dancing, music and library study.
"We don't have much free time, but that's good," said 12-year-old Vadim Me shcheryakov. "Instead, we have more time to learn something valuable."
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the school, though, is that it is free. Its students, all of whom come from the Leningrad Oblast, are selected from educated, but poor families. In general, the school is for boys only, although the daughter of one teacher currently studies there as an exception.
"We have six boys who are the sons of teachers, librarians, actors and artists. These are people who are in the most vulnerable financial position, despite their education," said Yelena Kalakova, the school's headmaster.
In addition to the formal academic program, the school also tries to teach students independence, responsibility and how to handle money. Students are given weekly stipends of 50 to 100 rubles.
"They should learn how to earn money, how to distribute it correctly or to save it for some purpose," Kalakova said, adding that some of the students send their "salary" home to support their families.
The school is financed by Gutzeit and by the Gorchakov Lyceum Guar dian Club, which boasts such members as President Vladimir Putin, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov and Pulkovo Airlines General Director Boris Demchenko.
"To my mind, education is the most profitable investment for our country, and our club is open to any who want to make such an investment," Gutzeit said.
Because the school has very limited space and teachers, it enrolls a new class only once every four years. It is currently located in the reconstructed dacha of 19th-century St. Petersburg architect Alexander Bryullov. Gutzeit is currently renovating other nearby historic buildings for the use of the school.
Privately, Gutzeit confessed that he thinks the chances of one of his students becoming the president of Russia are low.
"However, even if they just become good people, willing to help others, our aim will have been achieved," he said.
TITLE: Kremlin Intensifies Anthrax Precautions
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Worry over anthrax-infected letters like those discovered in the United States has prompted the Kremlin to step up scrutiny of its mail, Telecommunications Minister Leonid Reiman said.
Reiman said letters received from abroad are coming under careful scrutiny, with checks taking place at the international post office, the Moscow office and the final destination.
"Luckily, we have not had incidents similar to the ones that have happened in the United States," Reiman was quoted as saying by Interfax late last week. "But we are doing everything to control the problem."
The Kremlin receives thousands of pieces of correspondence a day, Interfax reported, with up to 5,000 addressed to the office of President Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, a Siberian man has been arrested for sending a letter filled with harmless white powder to Putin, NTV television reported Saturday.
NTV did not say when the man was arrested. But it showed letters intercepted by postal workers addressed to Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyu ganov, LDPR head Vladimir Zhirinovsky and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Another intended recipient was the head of the Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, whose men rounded up the suspect in Novosibirsk.
"The next evening we found a man whose involvement was confirmed, a 33-year-old resident of the Lenin district," Konstantin Kolbysov, deputy FSB head in the Novosibirsk Region, told NTV. "This is not linked to terrorism. This is the result of a misunderstanding of events reported in the United States."
The addresses, all apparently written by the same person, were completed with the words "terror center," with the sender listed as "Taliban Community, Afghanistan."
So far there has been no evidence that the anthrax outbreak in the United States is associated with a weapons program or foreign terrorists.
The Health Ministry vigorously denied any link between the U.S. anthrax outbreak and Russia. "It is practically impossible to take such preparations from [a pharmaceutical] enterprise because all such cultures are under tight control," Yury Fyodorov, head of the ministry's emergency department, was quoted as saying by Interfax.
************************
A Russian immigrant was arrested in Tennessee after threatening to blow up a Southwest Airlines jet at the Nashville airport.
Georgy Bekov, 53, was infuriated when he was told that his luggage had not yet arrived from Chicago and would probably be checked for the third time on arrival. He told airline officials that he would blow up the plane if his baggage was checked again.
The FBI did not find any explosives.
- AP, Reuters
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: A Tank for Moscow
PSKOV, Northwest Russia (SPT) - A World War II-era Soviet tank was recently recovered from a swamp in the Pskov Region will be installed as an exhibit at the World War II memorial at Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow, Interfax reported Friday.
The T-34 tank, which was recovered last week by a volunteer search team, was engaged in military activity in December 1942 when it apparently fell through the ice and sank, according to members of the search team.
No bodies were recovered from the tank, which is the third that the group has found in the region since 1997, Interfax reported.
According to the recovery team, the tank is in such good condition that it could travel to Moscow under its own power with just minor repairs, Interfax reported.
Typhoon Returns
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Typhoon special-forces unit returned to St. Petersburg on Friday after completing a three-month tour in Chechnya, Interfax reported on Friday.
The unit suffered two soldiers wounded during this tour, its 10th in the region since fighting began there in the fall of 1999, according to Interfax. Both wounded soldiers are currently being treated in a St. Petersburg hospital.
While in Chechnya, the 60-man Typhoon unit was responsible for guarding the Chechen Government House in Grozny, Interfax reported.
Since the war began, the unit has had four members killed in Chechnya. Three of its members have been awarded the Hero of Russia medal, two of them posthumously, Interfax reported.
Nuclear Power Plant
ARKHANGELSK (SPT) - The Arkhangelsk Region government has decided to resume construction of a local nuclear-power station, Interfax reported on Monday.
The planned facility was designed 10 years ago, but construction was never begun, partly because of pressure from environmentalists, according to Interfax.
Arkhangelsk Governor Anatoly Yefremov said that the energy situation in the region is "extremely critical." He noted that the existing power plant was rapidly aging and that the cost of fuel to the region had increased by about 15 percent annually in recent years, Interfax reported.
He added, however, that a final decision would be made only after a careful environmental-impact study. He said that the next step would be the signing of a joint memorandum of intent with the Nuclear Power Ministry, which should happen next month, according to Interfax.
Icon Discovered
PSKOV, Northwest Russia (SPT) -Archeologists have discovered a rare 15th-century icon during a dig in Pskov, Interfax reported Monday.
According to the city administration, the icon was recovered from the Okolny dig in the historical center of Pskov. It depicts saints Nicholas, Boris and Gleb. Its value and authorship have not yet been determined and the icon has been handed over to restorers, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Prosecutor Charges Aksyonenko
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva and Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Prosecutor General's Office said Monday that it has charged Railways Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko with abuse of office that resulted in the loss of 70 million rubles ($2.3 million) in government funds.
The prosecutor's office also said it was looking into the nonpayment of $370 million in taxes by the Railways Ministry in 2000 and whether ministry money went to build homes for individuals with no connection to the ministry.
Prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the Railways Ministry on Oct. 9 and by Monday had called in for questioning a number of people, including six ministry deputies, the office said in a statement.
Aksyonenko was called to the Prosecutor General's Office on Friday evening, where he was charged with illegally authorizing the expenditure of $2.3 million, the prosecutor's office said.
Prosecutors said that Aksyonenko had refused to sign documents accompanying the charges, including one asking him not to leave town.
Aksyonenko on Monday denied the charges and said he has not tendered his resignation. "The railroad industry is one of the most noticeably and most effectively functioning systems. That's why all of these actions are being taken to discredit and destroy it," Aksyonenko was quoted by Prime-Tass as saying.
He said he has a document with the charges, but he called the paper nonbinding because it was unsigned. He also denied that six of his deputies have been questioned.
Only two deputies were called to the Prosecutor General's Office, "one of them on matters not related to this subject," Aksyonenko said.
At a hastily called news conference on Saturday, Aksyonenko accused prosecutors of playing political games and promised to take the issue to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. "The executive branch should not remain silent about the current events," he said.
But Dmitry Kozak, deputy head of the presidential administration, said Monday that Aksyonenko was "absolutely wrong" in suggesting that the Kremlin should get involved.
"The minister believes that the decision of the independent body [the prosecutor's office], according to Russian law, may be changed by the influence of the executive body," Kozak said. "If Aksyonenko does not agree with the decision, he can appeal it in accordance with the law."
The Vedomosti newspaper, citing a State Audit Chamber official, reported Monday that more than $2 million in state money went to buy apartments for ministry employees. An apartment for Ak syo nenko's deputy Alexander Kasya nov cost the state $886,700, it said.
Other media reports suggested there was a connection between the charges and Oleg Deripaska, the aluminum magnate who heads Siberian Aluminum.
Deripaska has loudly protested Ak syonenko's rail tariff policy and his plans for restructuring the ministry. A Siberian Aluminum spokesperson called the reports "false and unsubstantiated."
Aksyonenko is one of the last powerful insiders from former President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle to retain a post in the government. He has held high-level position in the Railways Ministry since 1994 and was at one time rumored to be a candidate for prime minister.
Some political analysts said Aksyonenko's head was on the chopping block. "Most likely he will lose his ministry chair," said Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of the Politika think tank.
"The charges by the prosecutor general against one of the most powerful ministries is an unequivocal message to Aksyonenko that it's time to leave," Ni k o nov said.
The government in recent months has also set its sights on reforming the country's railroads, which are plagued by financial woes similar to those of other state-run industries - decrepit equipment, a bloated staff and a burdensome social infrastructure left over from Soviet times.
The Railways Ministry estimates the railroads are a 300-billion-ruble-a-year ($10 billion) operation. They carry 80 percent of all the country's cargo - both domestic and international - and account for 90 percent of turnover on the domestic freight market. The ministry controls a sprawling 159,000 kilometers of track - almost enough to circle the Earth's equator four times - consisting of 17 railroad branches in 85 of Russia's 89 regions. The ministry employs 1.4 million people.
Aksyonenko has taken steps to reform the sector, announcing plans to lay off hundreds of thousands of workers and hike ticket and freight prices.
Aksyonenko on Saturday accused unnamed persons from the private sector of trying to sabotage rail reform by provoking the investigation, Interfax said.
Meanwhile, Prosecutor General Vla dimir Ustinov said Monday there was no connection between the Aksyonenko investigation and an announcement Friday that a warrant had been issued for Boris Berezovsky. "I cannot understand why some media are linking these events," Ustinov said.
However, the Aksyonenko investigation may be related to his close ties to Berezovsky and Yeltsin's inner circle, analysts said. Aksyonenko, a government insider since the mid-1990s, hit the spotlight in 1999 when he was not only appointed railways minister but also first deputy prime minister. The appointment was linked in the press to Berezovsky, at the time the Kremlin's gray cardinal. There was also speculation that Aksyonenko would be made prime minister.
"I have no doubt that all of this is related," said Yevgeny Volk, the head of the Heritage Foundation. "Aksyonenko and Berezovsky have always acted in tandem. So behind the move against Aksyonenko could be Putin's growing annoyance with Berezovsky."
The news of an arrest warrant being issued for Berezovsky broke Friday despite the fact that an initial decision to arrest him was made a month ago, said his lawyer, Semyon Ariya. It was not immediately clear whether prosecutors had asked Interpol to assist in the arrest.
Berezovsky, who has already spent more than a year in self-exile abroad, was charged with misappropriating funds and assisting in embezzlement "by appointing his acquaintances to work in the company," Ariya was quoted by Interfax as saying.
The company in question is Aeroflot, which Berezovsky was widely believed to control throughout much of the 1990s. Prosecutors said last year they had established that about $900 million in Aeroflot funds went through two Swiss-based companies, Andava and Forus, both reportedly co-founded by Berezovsky to service the airline's hard-currency proceeds. Berezovsky denies any wrongdoing.
Volk said that while the charges against Aksyonenko and Berezovsky appeared to be a sign that Putin was distancing himself from Yeltsin's "family," any battle to remove Aksyonenko could be tough for Putin.
TITLE: Orthodox Pray for Dead 40 Days After Sept. 11
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Russian Orthodox Church offered prayers this weekend for the victims of the terrorist attacks in the United States, following Orthodox tradition of commemorating the dead on the 40th day.
With the musty smell of incense hanging heavily in the air, believers lit candles Saturday for those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks and Metropolitan Sergy, chancellor of the Russian Orthodox Church, recited a prayer at the towering Christ the Savior Cathedral titled "For All Those in the American Land Killed Unexpectedly and Senselessly."
A similar service was held Sunday at St. Catherine's Church on Bolshaya Ordynka, the representative body of the Orthodox Church in America, where services are held partly in English.
All Orthodox churches in the United States also held memorial services over the weekend.
The Orthodox Church believes that on the 40th day after death, the soul of the dead finally leaves Earth and ascends to heaven or descends to hell, hence is the need for special prayers on this day.
Destroyed in the New York attacks was the small St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at the foot of the World Trade Center, one of the first Greek churches in New York built in part with donations from Tsar Nicholas II.
Metropolitan Sergy in his sermon Saturday conveyed the condolences of Patriarch Alexy II to the relatives of the victims and said he was performing the service on behalf of the patriarch, who was in Moscow. Some 30 Russians are believed to be among the victims.
"Our prayer today was for all those who died," Sergy said. "I think that, in part, due to our prayer their deaths will not be in vain but they will help the multiplication of good and the retreat of evil."
The clergy and choir sang in Church Slavonic verses of the Panikhida, the Orthodox requiem service. "With the saints rest thy servants, o Christ our God, where there is neither pain, nor grief, nor sigh, but life everlasting," they sang. About 200 believers, many of them women wearing black shawls over their heads as required in church, attended the memorial service, which took place shortly after the regular Saturday-morning worship service.
The Sept. 11 attacks led to an outpouring of sympathy in Russia, and Orthodox memorial services were held for the victims within days of the catastrophes. That was a contrast to the widely held anti-Western sentiments in the Russian Orthodox Church that were only enhanced during the U.S.-led bombing of Yugoslavia in March and April 1999. Many priests and laymen protested the U.S. strikes at the time.
TITLE: Bill Toughens Rules on Russian Citizenship
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma has given preliminary approval to a new presidential bill on citizenship that critics say will cause problems for migrants and former Soviet citizens who hope to obtain Russian passports.
The bill, passed in a first reading last Thursday by a vote of 273-117, increases the period of time a foreigner must live in Russia before being able to apply for citizenship from three years to five.
It also stipulates that Russian nationals who receive citizenship from another country are allowed to retain their Russian citizenship.
However, foreigners who want to become Russian citizens must officially renounce any other citizenship, except for those people who were born on Russian territory or had Soviet citizenship.
Exceptions to the five-year rule can be made for several categories of people: those who had Soviet citizenship previously; those who have been married to a Russian citizen for at least three years; those who have a child - biological or adopted - who is a Russian citizen; those who are granted political asylum or refugee status; or those who have performed "great achievements" or have professional skills that Russia needs.
But the bill does not specify what kind of exceptions can be made and how short the minimum residency period can be.
The bill also abolishes the more or less automatic procedure of "recognizing" Russian citizenship that is used by many people from the former Soviet republics.
According to Lev Levinson, an aide to State Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalyov, existing legislation says that any citizen of the former Soviet Union who lived on Russian territory in 1992 has the right to receive Russian citizenship automatically.
Under the new bill, Levinson said, these applicants would have to undergo the full procedure for receiving citizenship.
However, the draft law does allow those who were born on Russian territory or were Soviet citizens to apply for citizenship regardless of how long they have lived in Russia.
Presenting the bill to the Duma on Thursday, presidential representative Alexander Kotenkov said it was likely that harsher measures were in fact needed since "many among those who apply for Russian citizenship are on international wanted lists," Interfax reported.
But Levinson argued that people with criminal ties would always find the money and connections to circumvent the bans.
"What we get is anti-migration legislation, and I don't think that's good for Russia at the moment," Levinson said.
Levinson said the bill conformed to European standards, but added that it was "out of touch with the Russian social situation," a reference to demographic problems that the country faces, such as a rapidly dwindling population, as well as the uncertain situation in which many former Soviet citizens find themselves.
He said critics of the bill would fight for a transition period before the new law comes into effect.
The bill also stipulates that Russian nationals with dual or multiple citizenship would be regarded by the government as Russian subjects.
TITLE: Putin: We Will Help Opposition
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DUSHANBE, Tajikistan - President Vladimir Putin promised Monday to continue political and military support for the opposition Northern Alliance and said the Taliban should be excluded from Afghanistan's future government.
"We confirmed the intention of the Russian Federation to continue support to the Islamic State of Afghanistan in the military-technical sphere... and spoke of concrete plans to give humanitarian aid to the Afghan people," Putin said, using the name of the opposition Afghan government of ousted President Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Putin spoke at the end of a previously unannounced pre-dawn meeting with his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rakhmonov and Rabbani, whose government was driven out of Kabul by the Taliban in 1996. Putin's participation highlighted the central role Russia wants to play in determining the makeup of a post-Taliban government.
Meeting separately with Rabbani before the three-sided session, Putin said Russia recognized his government as legitimate and supported it.
"The internationally recognized government long has been fighting to free its people. Our position [of supporting it] long has been defined," Putin said, according to the Russian ITAR-Tass news agency.
Putin also met separately with Rakhmonov for about two hours at Rakhmonov's guesthouse compound in Dushanbe. Rakhmonov told reporters the summit was arranged by Putin.
The three leaders issued a joint statement promising to intensify their efforts aimed at stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan and the region as a whole, and providing humanitarian aid to displaced people.
"We hope that in this just fight, with our friends who support us, we will vanquish terrorism," Rabbani said in comments translated into Russian.
Putin made a pre-dawn stopover in Tajikistan as he was returning to Moscow from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum's summit in Shanghai, China. He was accompanied by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.
Before Putin arrived in this central Asian country, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and the head of Moscow's Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, met here with Rakhmonov and top defense and security officials.
Moscow has backed Rabbani's government as well as the Northern Alliance, the military wing of the opposition to the fundamentalist Taliban militia that controls most of the country. Tajikistan is close to the alliance, which has a strong ethnic Tajik component.
Ivanov said countries that actively support the Northern Alliance, such as Russia, Iran and Tajikistan, needed to share their views so as to enhance their cooperation in the fight against terrorism.
Iran and Russia oppose letting so-called Taliban "moderates" into a broad-based coalition being considered to rule Afghanistan if the Taliban regime collapses under U.S.-led attacks.
"We consider the position of the Islamic state of Afghanistan that excludes the Taliban movement from a future Afghan government to be well-founded," Putin said.
Tajikistan, which shares a volatile 1200-kilometer border with Afghanistan, has attracted attention both as a possible launch pad for military attacks and the most convenient place to marshal humanitarian efforts. About 25,000 Russian troops are stationed in the former Soviet republic to help guard the border.
Rakhmonov on Monday hailed the effort to help Afghan refugees, saying that up to 10 airplanes a day and a number of trains were bringing humanitarian supplies to his country for distribution.
TITLE: Bush, Putin Make Progress During Talks
AUTHOR: By George Gedda
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SHANGHAI, China - Brought closer together in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin "made some progress" Sunday toward a new strategic framework that would include limited missile defenses.
Putin repeated Russia's well-known opposition to Bush's plans to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile pact.
But, he said, "We should think about the future; we should look into the future, and we should react adequately to possible threats in the future."
Putin and Bush met after the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders.
At a joint news conference, Bush repeated his description of the ABM Treaty as "outmoded and outdated."
"The events of Sept. 11 make it clearer than ever that a Cold War ABM Treaty that prevents us from defending our people is outdated and, I believe, dangerous," Bush said.
Regarding missile policy, Putin said, "We are prepared to discuss that with our American partners." He said there was much work to do on missile policy before their meetings next month in Washington and at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Bush said, "We will continue working with each other and see if we can't find common ground on the ABM Treaty."
U.S. officials had said ahead of the presidents' meeting that the U.S. goal was to lay a foundation for significant advances in their meetings next month in the United States.
The Bush administration hopes that an offer it made earlier of deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal will make Russia amenable to modifications in the ABM Treaty that would allow missile tests not permitted under the accord.
The Bush administration says a missile defense is needed to protect the United States against adversary countries - Iran, Iraq and North Korea - that it says are developing long-range missile capabilities.
At the news conference, both Bush and Putin said they made progress during their talks.
Putin cited specifically their effort to reduce strategic offensive weapons as well as ABM-related issues. "I believe we do have understanding that we can reach agreement," Putin said.
Bush saw progress in what he hopes will be "a new relationship with Russia based on cooperation and mutual interests instead of confrontation and mutual vulnerability. We must truly and finally move beyond the Cold War."
The new U.S.-Russia relationship became evident on Sept. 11 in dramatic fashion. "Vladimir Putin was the first person to call," Bush said, and the new friendship was clear from his decision to stop planned Russian military exercises.
"In the old days, had an American president put their troops on alert, Russia would have responded," Bush said. "And then America would have upped the ante, and then Russia would have upped the ante. We would have had two issues on our hands: one, a terrorist attack on America, plus a military standoff.
"Instead, his first reaction was to stand down, so as not to create any confusion, any doubt, so that the United States could stay focused on the terrorist attack," Bush said.
Putin said he and Bush made progress on the issue of nuclear arms and defenses in their closed-door meeting. "At least we do have an understanding that we can reach some agreement taking into account the national interests" of the two countries, Putin said. He said Russia looked forward to full-fledged negotiations on nuclear stockpiles and missile defense.
Bush did not give Putin a timetable for when the United States would pull out of the ABM Treaty, said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, though one official said Bush made clear it would have to take place sometime soon.
Some administration officials said Sunday that Bush is prepared to give notice in January; others said Bush has not settled on a time.
Bush also did not give Putin any numbers on nuclear-stockpile reductions, Rice said. A review of possible reductions is still under way, she said.
At the two-day APEC summit, Bush also won a limited condemnation of terrorism from the 19 Pacific Rim leaders.
The leaders condemned the terrorist attacks as "murderous deeds" and demanded international cooperation in fighting terrorism. At the urging of two predominantly Muslim members, Indonesia and Malaysia, they did not endorse the ongoing U.S. military campaign.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: ISS Blast-Off
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - Two Russian cosmonauts, a French astronaut and her teddy-bear mascot blasted off Sunday for the International Space Station to replace its escape ship and conduct other experiments.
A spokesperson for mission control near Moscow said the crew lifted off at 1 p.m. Moscow time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Crew captain Viktor Afanasiev, who has already logged three space missions, was joined by rookie flight engineer Konstantin Kozeyev and French crew member Claudie Haignere, who once visited the Mir space station.
Haignere, a flight engineer, made it plain Saturday that she intended to put a personal stamp on the eight-day mission. Among other things, that meant taking along her teddy bear.
This crew's main duty will be to replace the station's escape ship. This mission will be the third manned trip from Baikonur to the $95-billion station, being built jointly by the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan.
Manned flights are made every six months to take up new supplies and replace the Soyuz spacecraft docked at the ISS for emergency departure.
Afanasiev said the crew had many other tasks to perform, including a study of the human cardiovascular system in conditions of weightlessness.
Judicial-Reform Plan
MOSCOW (SPT) - The government is to review a judicial reform project for 2002-06 in two weeks, Finance Minister Alexei Kud rin said last week, Interfax reported.
The plan for the project, initiated by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, allocates more than 44 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) for the project through 2006.
Kudrin said the project includes plans to hold trials of dangerous criminals in pretrial detention centers using video linkups with courts, starting from 2002.
The project includes building new courthouses, reconstructing old ones and providing courts with computers and Internet access. Kudrin said only 20 percent of district courts are computer-equipped.
Kudrin also said judicial-system wages will rise by 60 percent starting Jan. 1, 2002, but social discounts for housing maintenance and food will be canceled. If the canceled discounts are taken into consideration, the actual pay raise will be about 40 percent to 46 percent, he said.
Defense Minister Knew
KIEV (AP) - Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk publicly admitted for the first time that he never doubted that a Ukrainian missile was responsible for downing a Sibir passenger jet.
Despite the admission, President Leonid Kuchma may only dismiss Kuzmuk if a government commission finds the minister responsible, a presidential spokesperson said.
"For me, from the very beginning there were no other versions and there could not be," Kuzmuk said Friday in remarks that were shown on NTV television.
He said that it was time to find out why the missile that brought down the Tu-154 earlier this month had gone astray.
"There is another matter: What caused this; what fatal coincidence of circumstances? And all officials are working on this now," Kuzmuk said.
He made his remarks during telephone conversations with citizens who called a special hot line to talk with the defense minister.
The Tu-154 airliner, en route from Israel to Novosibirsk, went down Oct. 4 in the Black Sea after an explosion. All 78 people on board were killed.
Kvashnin, Afghans Talk
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (AP) - General Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the armed forces' General Staff, held closed-door talks with Mohammed Fahim, military chief of the Afg han commanders in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.
The military-political situation in Afghanistan, humanitarian-aid deliveries to Tajikistan's southern neighbor and regional security were among the issues discussed, said Mohajeddin Mehdi, an official at the Afghan Embassy.
Kvashnin also consulted with Russian military commanders in Tajikistan, where Russian border guards defend the former Soviet republic's frontier with Afghanistan.
Shoot To Kill
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway Georgian republic of Abkhazia have been told to shoot to kill anyone suspicious, the commander of a 2,000-strong Russian peacekeeping force said.
Major General Nikolai Sidorychev told TV6 on Friday that unidentified fighters had been seen conducting reconnaissance operations in the Kodor Gorge.
"The Chechens are bandits whom the Abkhaz side is fighting. So if they appear, they will be destroyed," Sidorychev said.
Russia says the guerrilla groups fighting against Abkhaz forces are largely rebels from its own separatist region of Chechnya, operating with tacit backing from Tbilisi.
According to TV6, this is the first time Russian peacekeepers - part of a contingent containing servicemen from a number of countries from the Commonwealth of Independent States - have been told to shoot to kill.
Previously soldiers were ordered to shoot only in retaliation.
Georgia's parliament voted recently to demand the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers, a decision supported by Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. President Vladimir Putin has said Russia is ready to comply with the demand.
Gorbachev the Pacifist
MOSCOW (AP) - Ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, in an article published Saturday, said that the current international coalition against terror must turn into a coalition for a new and fair world order.
"If the fight against terrorism is reduced to force actions, the world will eventually lose," Gorbachev wrote in Rossiiskaya Gazeta.
"If it becomes part of joint efforts to build a just world order, everybody shall win, including those who today are not supporting the U.S. actions and the coalition."
He urged politicians to remember the notions of solidarity and said the Third World countries must be helped to overcome poverty and backwardness. The United Nations Security Council, he added, should assume the initiative in developing corresponding programs.
Nuclear and chemical disarmament and control over the remaining stockpiles must become a top priority, he said.
TITLE: Interros Selling Banking Giant
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Interros group has announced that it is going to sell an 80-percent stake in St. Petersburg's BaltUNEXIM bank to a number of companies affiliated with the president of the bank, Yury Rydnik.
According to a press release issued by the bank, the purpose of the sale is to broaden the bank's circle of strategic investors, increase its capital and to strengthen its position as one of the leading banks in the Northwest region.
Konstantin Sidorov, the press secretary of BaltUNEXIM bank, refused to comment about concrete terms of the deal, saying that "the specifics have yet to be worked out."
"First these shares will be sold to a number of relatively unknown firms," Si dorov said last Monday. "But this will only be an intermediate phase, designed to remove the bank from Interros' influence."
"The next step will involve looking for new investors by offering the shares to the bank's business partners and clients in the region."
The bank has also said that in the next year it is planning an additional share emission to raise its charter capital to 1 billion rubles (about $33.9 million) and attract new shareholders. On Oct. 1, the bank's charter capital was 633 million rubles (about $21.5 million), while its assets totaled 4 billion rubles (about 135.6 million).
According to Valentin Shapka, a spokesperson at Interros, the plan to sell the shares was initiated by Rydnik.
"The plan presented by Rydnik was rational and promising," Shapka said. "Interros is selling BaltUNEXIM bank, because it has decided to develop Rosbank and its regional banking chain. BaltUNEXIM bank is not so important as other interests in Interros' strategy so it decided to sell it."
According to Ivan Oskolkov, banking and equities analyst at Energokapital, BaltUNEXIM Bank is one of the city's largest banks, and its sale is the event of the year in St. Petersburg banking society.
But he said that it is difficult to put an exact price on the 80-percent stake in the bank.
"Standard economic rules for determining value don't help in providing an exact answer in this case," he said. "Logically, you would just quote 80 percent of the bank's capital, which works out to about $16 million. But the real price is most likely higher, probably tens of millions of dollars."
Part of Oskolkov's rationale for the assertion of the bank's real value lies in its 2000 annual financial report.
"During the 1998 economic crisis banks failed because of loan defaults, or the negative effects of significant investments in instruments like State Short-term Bonds [GKOs]," he said. "BaltUNEXIM bank wasn't seriously hit by any of these problems so, at least visibly, the bank is in good condition."
Oskolkov is quick, however, to add a note of caution.
"All the same, no one knows the exact reasons why Interros is selling the bank," he said. "This case is not only about business, but also about local politics, and the nature of this will only really become clear after the official announcement of the terms."
According to Vladimir Potanin, the head of Interros, who held a press conference in St. Petersburg on Friday, the company is simply looking to reorganize its banking holdings.
"We will have to decide whether it makes sense to have two banks within the Interros group here, as well as having other subsidiary banks in other regions," Potanin said. "It's entirely possible that all of the shares in Interros' subsidiary banks will be sold except those in Rosbank."
"Due to the specifics of BaltUNEXIM bank's organization and the development plans of the other shareholders, shifting it over to become a part of Rosbank was impossible," he added. "The sale of BaltUNEXIM was a step in consolidating the group's assets."
Along with the sale of its interest in BaltUNEXIM bank, Interros is also selling its stakes in the industrial sector, including 30 percent of the shares in the Leningrad Optical-Mechanics Factory (LOMO), one of the Russia's largest producers of optical equipment and machinery. Interros announced this sale last week, although the purchasers of the stake were not disclosed.
BaltUNEXIM bank was set up in December 1994 by Interros subsidiary UNEXIM bank. Other shareholders in the bank include the Leningrad Oblast Property Fund, LOMO, steelmaker Le nin gradsky Metallichesky Zavod (LMZ), electric-motor manufacturer Electrosila, city-owned water utility Vodo kanal and the Oktyabrskaya railroad.
The bank has also had significant financial dealings with Smolny and rumors are swirling listing the city administration as the most likely purchasers of at least part of the 80-percent stake.
The city recently announced its intention to operate its own bank, and BaltUNEXIM bank appears to be one of the candidates.
The bank's management has already once, in 1998, invited the city to join its list of shareholders.
"Given the bank's structure, resources, activities and the abilities of its personnel, it would be a good fit as the official bank of the city," Interros' Shapka said. "However, I really don't know anything of the chance that the bank will end up in that position."
Sidorov goes even further, saying that all the talk of the possibility of a city purchase of BaltUNEXIM bank is nothing more than rumor.
"I'm tired of trying to convince everyone that it's far too early to talk about this," he said. "When the city is ready to talk about this, then we'll talk. But right now it's a mistake to try to tie the sale of the stake and the city's interest in operating a bank together."
The city showed it was serious in its interest in banking when it introduced a draft law that would allow it to own financial institutions to the Legislative Assembly at the beginning of October. According to the draft, organizations funded by the city budget would be invited to keep their accounts in the bank, in which the city administration will own at least 51 percent of the shares.
According to Igor Matveyev, a Legislative Assembly deputy who worked on the writing of the draft law, the impetus behind the rumors surrounding BaltUNEXIM bank and the city bank is simple.
"The rumors have arisen because it makes the most sense for the city to opt for an already-existing bank," he said. "Otherwise the bank would have to get a general license, which is a difficult process. It also takes a few years for a bank to develop a positive reputation."
Beside BaltUNEXIM bank, Promstroibank (PSB), Petrovsky Bank, Bank St. Petersburg and the Northwest Region offices of Sberbank all handle a significant amount of business for the city, Matveyev said.
"The fact that the spokespeople of the other banks are remaining silent, while the press service of BaltUNEXIM isn't ruling out the possibility, is the reason for the rumors," he said.
According to Matveyev, before the 1998 economic crisis, the city had maintained its accounts in commercial banks. But the failure of such institutions as Astrabank and Inkombank and the accompanying loss of city funds led to the decision to transfer the city budget's accounts to the northwestern office of Russia's Central Bank.
There are still, however, a number of city-owned but independent companies like Vodokanal; Goravtotrans, which operates the city's buses; and the Fuel and Heat Supply Complex (TEK), which might be interested in keeping funds in a city-run institution.
"These companies, which have revenues of 3 billion to 4 billion rubles ($100 million to $130 million) per year, could essentially receive credits for development through better conditions than they would get at other commercial banks," Matveyev said. "Most of all, the bank would be a commercial instrument that would earn money for the city budget."
But Matveyev also says that it's too soon to talk about which option the city is favoring.
"The law hasn't even had a first reading yet so it's not even clear the city can have its own bank," he said. "BaltUNEXIM is just one of the four possible candidates already doing business with the city."
TITLE: Putin Returns Upbeat Over Economy's State
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A jet-lagged President Vla dimir Putin returned from China via Tajikistan on Monday and showered praise on his government for what he called "better than expected" economic results this year. He then issued a warning to prepare to weather the coming global economic storm.
"The treasury has started functioning," news agencies quoted Putin as telling cabinet members in the Kremlin. "Non-interest spending has been kept under control. The exchange rate has been kept under control and inflation has been lowered over the previous few months," he said just hours after returning from the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Shanghai by way of Dushanbe, where he held a midnight meeting with his Tajik counterpart and the internationally recognized president of Afghanistan.
The economy has outperformed most estimates this year, including the government's, and is now expected to grow between 5.5 percent and 5.8 percent, down a third from last year's record 8- percent growth. But a recession in the United States and political uncertainty sparked by America's new war on terrorism has stoked fears that the global economy may get a lot worse before it gets better.
Putin warned the cabinet that if preparatory measures are not taken, the accomplishments of the last two years could be jeopardized. "We must draw the attention of State Duma deputies to this, especially to take these trends into account in making plans for 2002," he said.
The price of oil remains the major concern for the economy, which continues to be largely a petroleum-based product - last year's record growth was due mainly to unusually high crude prices. But global demand has slowed and prices have slumped, prompting the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to solicit nonmembers to agree to production cuts to buoy prices.
In an unscheduled visit, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has become something of a roving ambassador for OPEC, met with Putin for 90 minutes later Monday apparently to lobby for a cut in production.
Russia, the world's top non-OPEC producer, has boosted production 7.5 percent this year and is expected to produce a total of 350 million metric tons for all of 2001.
Energy Minister Igor Yusufov said after the meeting that Russia had no intention of cutting production now, but kept the possibility open that it may decide to do so after next month's OPEC meeting. "We have to keep a fair oil price. For the moment, we're working to maintain the price range, and there is no question of reducing production," he said.
However, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that Chavez had not asked Russia to reduce its output but had only outlined the steps OPEC was considering to maintain oil-price stability in the interests of both consumers and producers.
But whatever the Venezuelan president wanted, he apparently got it. A satisfied Chavez said that Putin "guaranteed Russian cooperation" and that he is leaving Russia "very happy."
Analysts polled Monday all agreed that a healthy relationship with OPEC is integral to the success of the economy, but there was no consensus on whether Russia should agree to cut production.
"It is not in Russia's short-term interests to cut oil production now, while the debt problem in 2003-04 is not yet solved," said Renaissance Capital's Vlad Metnev. "Of course, it would be a big political achievement, but this does not correspond to Russia's national interests at the moment," he added.
Oleg Vyugin, chief economist at Troika Dialog, said it didn't make sense for OPEC, which accounts for 40 percent of the world oil market, to ask a country that produces one-tenth of that amount to cut production. "This is not a question that should be decided on a bilateral basis, because all producers should be taken into account," Vyugin said. "In this case, Russia's decision won't have any impact, while at the same time the losses to Russian oil companies and the budget will be substantial."
But other analysts argued that a refusal to cut output could come back to haunt Russia in the future.
"Russia is taking a very short-sighted view by refusing to cut oil production," said Eric Kraus, chief strategist at NIKoil. "Russia is functioning as a free-rider on the back of OPEC, and as OPEC endures the pain of cutting oil production, Russia is taking advantage to increase its market share," he said.
"It appears that this is Putin's way of seducing the West, to show the United States that Russia will act in the economic interests of the West at the expense of other oil producers," Kraus said. "This is a very dangerous game."
Dangerous game or not, since the State Duma has already passed the second reading of the 2002 budget, there isn't much the government can do to prepare for worsening economic conditions. According to different estimates, it may have $3 billion to $5 billion in extra revenues for next year's contingency reserve, but only if the price of Urals crude falls below $17 per barrel.
In the meantime, oil prices have stabilized in the last few days at around $21 per barrel for Brent crude, the global benchmark, with Urals hovering around $19.
The stock market applauded Monday as surging oil shares lifted the RTS index by 3 percent to close at 196.89.
TITLE: KUGI, Sberbank Cut Deal on Arena
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The City Property Committee (KUGI) has reached agreement with the northwestern office of state savings bank Sberbank to repay in kind its $20 million that was used to finance construction of a new arena for the 2000 World Ice Hockey Championship.
According to the agreement, which came into effect on Monday, the company that operates the arena, Sports Palace, will hand over the responsibility for its debt to KUGI in exchange for 20-percent ownership in the arena property, while Sberbank will not be called on by KUGI to pay rent for the 260 offices it has in St. Petersburg.
The agreement solving the two-year standoff over the debt was signed Sept. 26 by KUGI Chairperson Valery Na za rov, Leonid Shats, first deputy chairperson of the northwestern office of Sberbank and Sergei Izotov, general director of Sports Palace.
The 14,000-seat arena, called the Ice Palace, is located near the Prospect Bolshevikov metro station in the city's southeast and was built at a cost of about $65 million.
Sports Palace, which was set up in 1998 by the city government to oversee the construction, took loans for the project from the federal Finance Ministry and four local banks: Northwest Sberbank, BaltUNEXIM bank, Menatep-St. Petersburg and Baltiisky Bank.
The company then missed the first three deadlines that had been set for repayments of the loans. The first, for $9 million to Baltiisky Bank, passed in January 2000; the second for $2.5 million to Menatep-St. Petersburg was missed in February 2000; and the third, for $7.9 million to BaltUNEXIM bank, went unpaid at the end of April 2000.
Since then, Sports Palace has repaid all debts to Menatep St. Petersburg and Baltiisky Banks, according to the press secretaries at the banks. While Konstantin Sidorov, press secretary of BaltUNEXIM bank, says that he has no information about whether or not Sport Palace repaid its loan, he says the bank has no claims against the company.
Sports Palace still owes 405 million rubles (about $15 million at the time of the loan at the beginning of 2000) to the federal budget. The present agreement says nothing about the federal budget but, according to Prosvirina, when the mortgage at Sberbank is canceled the federal Property Ministry will also grab a 20-percent share of the arena property.
According to the deal, Sports Palace will continue to operate the arena and pay the federal Property Ministry $400,000 per year to do so. Payments will also be made to KUGI, although Prosvirina says the amount is undecided.
The idea of repaying the federal loan by turning over part of the property was first floated at the beginning of this summer, but the ownership of the Ice Palace property could not legally change hands due to the mortgage held by Sberbank.
In July, KUGI filed a suit against the Registration Chamber of St. Petersburg, saying that the arena shouldn't be classified as a completed project, meaning that it would not be subject to the mortgage obligations to Sberbank.
"The purpose of the suit was to lift the mortgage from the arena and hand over part of the property to the federal Property Ministry, as requested," Alexey Chichkanov, deputy chairperson of KUGI said Thursday. "But now we hope that a court decision won't be necessary since we've worked the situation out ourselves."
TITLE: Lower Oil Prices Are Russia's Friends
AUTHOR: By Rudiger Ahrend
TEXT: THE world's biggest problem at the moment is terrorism, and Russia's is falling oil prices. At least this is the impression one gets from reading the Russian and international press. Russian media and politicians continue to fret about the impact of a global slowdown on oil prices. Worse, even financial markets have started to worry and the RTS has recently been falling in parallel with the oil price, mainly amid worries about Russia's ability to meet future debt repayments.
This does not reflect much consideration of the longer term. While high world energy prices such as were experienced in 2000 may be good for Russian oil majors and natural-gas monopoly Gazprom, in the longer term they are clearly bad for the rest of Russia.
The explanation is simple. At prices around $26 for a barrel of Urals blend, Russia ran a current-account surplus of around $46 billion (roughly 18 percent of GDP) in 2000. Such an imbalance is huge by any standards and either induces a rapidly appreciating real exchange rate or forces the Central Bank to print money on a large scale to buy up the incoming dollars. The former is poison for Russia's recovering industry and the latter leads to sizeable inflation. Choosing between these two evils, the Central Bank has so far rightly chosen a small dose of the former, and a good dose of the latter. It will, however, not be able to maintain this course indefinitely without creating a major inflation problem. Hence, lower oil prices would be a great boon for the Russian economy.
Nevertheless, people worry about three negative effects of a sharp drop in oil prices. First, and most importantly, they fear Russia's current-account balance could turn negative, possibly leading to a repeat of the August 1998 financial crash. However, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this concern is not seriously founded. In 2000, Russia's yearly current-account surplus was running at roughly $46 billion. In 2001, given that imports are rising rapidly and assuming oil prices on a par with 2000, the surplus would probably be down at around $40 billion. If you subtract an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion of capital flight and $7 billion to $10 billion in debt-principal repayments, you are left with a surplus of around $20 billion.
A $1 drop in oil prices diminishes yearly export revenues by an estimated $1.5 billion to $2 billion. This means that oil prices could almost halve and the current-account surplus would still be sufficiently large for Russian citizens to send huge amounts of capital abroad and for the Russian government to service and pay back all of its maturing debts in the coming years.
Even if oil prices were to fall to historic lows and stay there for a prolonged period - something that is unlikely to happen - a moderate depreciation of the ruble should be enough to keep the current account sufficiently in surplus.
The second concern, that lower oil prices will have a negative impact on economic growth, is equally unfounded. The share of the Russian oil- and-gas industry in GDP is not very large in real terms. Moreover, a rapidly appreciating exchange rate or fast-increasing inflation would have a negative impact on the whole economy. A full-scale macroeconomic model of the Russian economy, developed for the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, confirms that decreases in oil prices have no negative impact on real GDP growth.
Third is the concern that with lower oil prices the Russian government will be unable to collect enough revenue to meet its budget obligations, and in particular to pay back its debt. Here, at least, there is a grain of truth. Falling oil prices decrease government revenues from oil and gas exports, by an estimated one fourth of a percentage point of GDP per dollar. However, as long as a fall in oil prices is not extreme, the negative impact on government revenues should not be too large and the necessary adjustment should be easy to make. If there were a sharp drop in oil prices, the adjustment could be painful, but - provided the political will was there - would be economically feasible.
President Vladimir Putin and his entourage fully understand the crucial need for economic stability in Russia. Furthermore, they comprehend the foolishness of undermining this hard-earned stability by overspending for populist purposes, with the attendant risk of then having to default on debt repayment. Importantly, the Putin administration has sufficient control over the State Duma to marshal the necessary political support for making downward adjustment to budget spending, should it become necessary.
Finally, if things got really nasty, though there is no real reason that they should, the Paris Club, and especially Germany, would probably not deny Russia a helping hand and reschedule bilateral debt, something they rightly refused the Russian government in a period of affluence.
In view of all this, owners of traded Russian government debt should sleep soundly. And so should everybody else. Lower oil prices - as long as they do not fall to extreme lows - are nothing to worry about. That is, unless you own an oil company, of course.
Rudiger Ahrend (RAhrend@noos.fr) is a senior economic expert for the Economic Development and Trade Ministry under the TACIS program. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. It expresses his personal opinion, and not that of the European Commission.
TITLE: Profit-Tax Changes Just Around Corner
TEXT: RUSSIA'S new Profit Tax Chapter comes into effect on Jan. 1, and I thought it would make sense to discuss some of the changes the new provisions will have on the taxation of foreign legal entities.
Foreign legal entities are taxed on the profits they generate from engaging in activities through a permanent establishment or on the income from Russian sources. One of the goals of the drafters of the new chapter was to clarify the rules governing those activities that give rise to the creation of a permanent establishment, and to ensure that these conform with international tax practice as recommended by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Borrowing directly from the OECD model double-tax treaty, a permanent establishment is now defined as "any independent branch or any other place of activity of a foreign organization through which it regularly carries out its business activity on the territory of the Russian Federation." Like the OECD model, the new chapter even provides a list of those activities that will not give rise to the creation of a permanent establishment.
Although many of the concepts have been used under the current law, the new chapter formally states that activities of a preparatory and auxiliary nature do not create a permanent establishment. Nor will the import or export of goods under foreign-trade contracts, and, in an improvement from current practice, the new chapter no longer requires that title to goods need to be transferred outside the territory of the Russian Federation.
Going beyond the OECD model, the new chapter specifically states that the provision of staff to Russian companies does not lead to the creation of a permanent establishment, provided, of course, that the personnel act on behalf of the Russian entity only. Many expatriates doing business in Russia should be relieved, as the treatment of these agreements has often been ambiguous in the past.
Much has been made of the fact that the new law provides for a lower domestic tax rate of up to 24 percent (down from the current rate of up to 35 percent), but it should also be pointed out that the withholding tax rates in numerous instances have been increased. Interest paid to a foreign lender, for example, will now be subject to a higher withholding tax rate of 20 percent (except for State and municipal borrowing where the current 15 percent rate will be maintained).
Other significant withholding tax rates next year include:
. A 10-percent withholding on the gross payments made to a foreign lesser (versus the current rate of 20 percent applied to the profit element in the lease);
. Royalties paid abroad will continue to be subject to 20-percent withholding while dividends also will maintain their 15 percent rate;
. Income from the sale of real estate or shares of a Russian entity in which more than 50 percent of the assets of that entity are real estate will be subject to 24-percent withholding on net gain (provided that the taxpayer can provide documentary evidence of the purchase price). In the event that such evidence is not available, a 20-percent withholding will be applied to the gross proceeds.
Currently, a form provided by the tax authorities is used to seek lower withholding-tax rates, requiring not only confirmation of residence by foreign tax authorities, but affirmation by the Russian tax authorities as well. Although the new Chapter provides that only confirmation of permanent residence by the foreign tax authorities will be required in the future, there is no guidance as to the precise form such confirmation should take.
Russia's new Profit Tax Chapter is a clear improvement, but requires clarifications on a number of important issues. Foreign legal entities should review cross-border transactions and international structuring prior to the new year.
Tom Stansmore is head of the St. Petersburg branch of Deloitte & Touche CIS.
TITLE: Kazakhstan Field's Riches Come With a Price
TEXT: The Tengiz field in Kazakhstan is considered one of the greatest petrochemical finds ever. But it is also one of the most challenging. As Christopher Pala reports, there's a lot more to extracting oil there than boring a hole in the ground - like dealing with 200-meter towers of fire and millions of tons of eye-burning sulfur.
TENGIZ, Kazakhstan - Viewed from an approaching helicopter, the enormous slabs of canary-yellow sulfur reflect the desert sun like flattened gold bars, dwarfing the shiny processing plants of the world's sixth-largest oil field set on the parched shores of the Caspian Sea.
There are 4.5 million tons of sulfur at Tengiz spread out on football-field-sized cakes that are 7.5 meters thick. And every day another 4,500 tons of liquid sulfur comes up with the oil and is sprayed with agricultural watering equipment out onto the yellow slabs, solidifying rapidly into a luminous, porous material that gives off hardly any odor at all. It has accumulated here in such huge quantities because of the simple fact that the cost of getting it to market is more than what people will pay for it: Sulfur is a commodity, used as fertilizer and in the chemical industry, that today is in abundant supply.
The giant slabs represent a testimony to the impressive amounts of oil that Tengiz has already produced, but they are also a huge challenge staring the Chevron executives who operate the Tengiz field in the face: How can one find a way to dispose of so much sulfur?
The oil field's other eye-catching features are the five flaring towers that, day in and day out, send plumes of smoky orange flames into the air. With all gas pipelines leading to Russia - a country awash in gas - building the facilities to break it down and sell to Russia is not an effort that makes any economical sense.
"It is impossible to find any serious excuse for flaring," wrote Kazakh oil expert Sagat Tugelbayev in a local oil journal recently, "because it is a waste of one of the most valuable raw material required for industrial and domestic needs."
Tugelbayev's statement is representative of the widely held view among the 15 million residents of this former Soviet central Asian republic, a country the size of Western Europe. As a result, the government of President Nursultan Nazarbayev has been saying publicly for years that Tengiz's gas must be utilized, not flared.
MAN WITH THE PLANS
Tom Winterton, the lanky, amiable director of Tengizchevroil, or TCO, the company operating the field, says that he believes that he has solutions to both vexing problems.
He is building a $40-million plant that, starting in 18 months, will begin turning the huge yellow slabs into coated pellets, eliminating the sulfur dust that irritates the eyes of people living downwind from Tengiz. The market for pellets, though weak, is stronger than the market for crushed sulfur, he says, but he admits the price will still need to rise in order to overtake the cost of transporting the pellets by rail and ship.
"We plan to sell to the Mediterranean markets, but we don't expect it to generate a tremendous amount of profit," he added with a measure of understatement. "We'll have to see what the market allows us to do."
And if the market hasn't risen by the time the plant starts producing pellets?
The suggestion causes Winterton's eyes to narrow and he evades the question. In a series of recent interviews, it has become clear that for him, the task of disposing of the unsightly but harmless slabs of sulfur he inherited when he took the job last year is an irritating distraction to what an oil executive should be concentrating on: pumping oil.
If disposing of the sulfur will ultimately depend on the pricing situation on the world's sulfur market, dealing with the gas will depend on something over which Winterton can exert greater influence: technology.
A CHALLENGING FIELD
Tengiz, which was discovered in 1979, is an unusually challenging oil field. Not only is it huge, but the oil comes out of the wells scalding hot and at a very high pressure - one of the highest in the world. It is the deepest high-pressure well in the world, and its oil contains a large proportion of gas, which is unfortunately very rich in the compound hydrogen sulfide, or H2S. The sulfide not only yields considerable amounts of sulfur, but is extremely poisonous.
In June 1985, a Tengiz well suffered a blowout - an explosion in which one man was killed - that turned out to be the longest-burning in the century-old history of the Russian-Soviet oil industry. It took Moscow six months even to report the existence of the blowout, even though a 200-meter-high column of fire was visible from 140 kilometers.
Because of the poisonous nature of the hydrogen sulfide, Soviet fire fighters could not simply extinguish the fire with an explosion: "The gas would kill every living thing within hundreds of kilometers," Izvestia newspaper reported at the time. The well burned for more than a year and was eventually capped.
High-pressure oil and gas wells rich in H2S are still a problem, even with the latest Western technology. In a remote part of Alberta, it recently took a Canadian company a month to snuff out a gas well spewing H2S. There were no injuries.
But technical challenges don't frighten Winterton. While routine flaring has been cut by 70 percent and will end almost entirely at the end of this year, when the gas is processed and shipped to Europe via rail cars, the real challenge is going to be reinjecting gas from - and back into - the wells TCO plans to start drilling in 2005.
DOUBLING UP
Winterton's eyes light up when he talks about the field's phase-2 project, which will cost $2 billion taken from oil-sales revenue and will nearly double production to 56,850 tons (415,000 barrels) per day by 2005. With $2 billion already spent, Tengiz already represents the biggest foreign investment in the former Soviet Union.
Reinjecting gas increases the pressure in the well and allows more of the oil to be recovered. "Selling oil is more profitable than selling gas," Winterton said.
The early estimates of recoverable oil in the field range from 6 billion to 9 billion barrels out of an estimated total of 25 billion barrels. A new appraisal is under way and should be finished next year. It will again be modified in 2005, when the injection trials begin, he said.
There's only one hitch: The technology for reinjecting sour gas under such high pressure does not yet exist. "It'll be a new stretch of the tech," Winterton said, grinning at his turn of phrase. Of course, reinjecting most of the gas and H2S will also cut down the production of sulfur.
A SEA FAR FROM THE SEA
Overcoming the unusual challenges posed by geography and geology at Tengiz has been a mainstay of TCO's activity. Chevron owns half of TCO and effectively operates it, while ExxonMobil Corp. has 25 percent, national Kazakh oil company Kazakhoil has 20 percent and Russia's LUKarco 5 percent.
When TCO was formed and took over the field in 1993, there were 90 wells, of which only 15 were working. Total production was, at 25,000 barrels per day (bpd), a 10th of today's production. All of it was exported by pipeline to Samara in southern Russia.
Tengiz may mean sea in Kazakh, but for Chevron the Caspian Sea is tragically flawed because it is closed.
While Chevron executives negotiated with Russia to run a pipeline around the top of the Caspian Sea and across the North Caucasus to the Black Sea, a distance of 1,510 kilometers, they pondered what to do with Tengiz's steadily expanding production, which soon exceeded the capacity of the Samara pipeline used in Soviet days.
"Someone suggested trains," recalled plant superintendent Keith Coleman during a reporter's recent visit to the field. "At first, everyone thought it was a crazy idea; it had never been done on such a scale anywhere. But in the end it worked for us."
So to export two-thirds of its production, TCO leased 7,000 oil cars and 3,000 liquefied-natural-gas cars, sending out a half-dozen trains a day toward four Russian ports on the Black Sea. It remains the world's largest rail-based oil-transport system.
Eventually, Russia gave its agreement, and construction began on the $2.6-billion Caspian Pipeline Consortium pipeline, which runs from Tengiz to a spot 15 kilometers east of Novorossiisk on the Black Sea.
Last spring, after obtaining permission from five regional governments, CPC started moving the oil westward. There were difficulties and delays, notably when the oil had to cross the Russian border. A ceremony was set for Aug. 6, with presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan in attendance. It was designed to coincide with the loading of the first tanker with Tengiz crude, but when that event seemed unlikely to take place on time and minor disputes between the 11 owners of CPC failed to be resolved in time, the ceremony was postponed.
'PAT ON THE BACK'
Still, when full tankers regularly pull away from their loading buoy 4 kilometers offshore, Chevron's gambit will have paid off. While extracting a barrel of Tengiz oil costs about $3, the cost of transporting it to the Black Sea will drop from $6 to $3 when it switches from trains to the CPC.
"Chevron deserves a pat on the back for bringing the project where it is today," said Robert Ebel, director of energy and national-security studies at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington. "When they went in, there was clearly a lot of risk involved: political, technical and mostly how they were going to get that pipeline built."
"But their real success will come only when they reach peak production," he said.
"Tengiz is still in its infancy," Winterton said. "We believe that 700,000 bpd at the end of this decade is not unrealistic."
TITLE: WTO To Go Ahead With Qatar Meeting
AUTHOR: By Jaber Al-Harmi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DOHA, Qatar - A key meeting of trade ministers will go ahead in the Gulf state of Qatar next month despite security fears following the Sept. 11 terror attacks and U.S.-led strikes in Afghanistan, the World Trade Organization said Monday.
The Nov. 9 to Nov. 13 gathering is supposed to be the launch pad for a new round of global-trade-liberalization talks. The start of talks has been on hold since the last WTO ministerial meeting collapsed in Seattle in 1999.
"It's true that there is doubt and uncertainty worldwide, but our plans are to push ahead to hold the meeting in Doha," WTO Director General Mike Moore told reporters at the Qatari capital.
A WTO spokesperson in Geneva said the session, which is supposed to gather trade ministers from most of the WTO's member countries, will be held in Doha "unless something seismic or catastrophic happens."
Moore said it was possible that representation at the meeting may be reduced. But, he said, "participation must be at the highest level because it will help make the meeting a success."
He said he could not confirm beyond doubt that the Qatar meeting will be held as scheduled, but said if it wasn't held there he would "come back to Doha even if I'm alone." Moore met Qatari Foreign Minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al Thani in Doha.
The WTO meeting, which has been in preparation since the beginning of the year, had been in doubt in recent weeks because of fears about security following the terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan.
Leading WTO players have been expressing concern about security in Qatar. Several Arab countries have been hit by demonstrations since Ame rican forces began air strikes on Oct. 7.
The reaction to the air strikes has been muted in Qatar, and the country has stopped issuing visas to visitors until Nov. 15 in order to help keep out troublemakers.
But this did not allay security jitters about the meeting. Asked about the upcoming WTO meeting last week, European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said it was "no secret" that Qatar is "in the vicinity of the war zone."
TITLE: Swissair Gets $200M Reprieve
AUTHOR: By Onna Coray
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERN, Switzerland - Local and regional governments pitched in more than $200 million Monday in a final drive to salvage the nation's flag-carrying airline, an icon of Swiss pride.
The federal government is coordinating a fund-raising effort that seeks to raise as much as $2.5 billion from state and industry funds to overhaul ailing flag carrier Swissair.
The company, which collapsed earlier this month, blames the air-travel chaos caused by the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States as representing the final straw after months of massive losses.
Swiss President Moritz Leuenberger, who is also transport minister in Switzerland's seven-member coalition cabinet, said last week that the national government was ready to provide financial help as long as the business community does the same.
The governments of Zurich and Basel, which host airports that benefit from international flights, said Monday they would contribute. The cooperative Raiffeisen banks said they would chip in $16 million.
Swissair filed for protection from creditors earlier this month as a result of massive losses due to a disastrous expansion program and the repercussions of the terrorist attacks.
It was forced to ground its entire fleet for two days as it had no cash to pay necessary fuel and landing bills. This compelled the government to provide $280 million to keep it in the air until next Sunday when its profitable regional subsidiary, Crossair, takes over.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Wall of Steel
WASHINGTON (AP) - A U.S. trade panel is about to decide whether the beleaguered American steel industry has been seriously harmed by foreign imports, a first step toward imposing tariffs.
Representatives of foreign steel companies say they expect that the U.S. International Trade Commission, meeting Monday, will find that the American industry has been hurt. If that happens, the six-member panel will hold hearings about possible remedies and then submit recommendations to the Bush administration by Dec. 19.
The commission, an independent government agency, began the investigation in June at the request of President George W. Bush, who has courted the steel industry since taking office.
Wings on Sale
SYDNEY, Australia (Reuters) - European aircraft manufacturer Airbus said on Monday it would offer Qantas Airways Ltd. healthy discounts to fend off overtures from rival Boeing Co. for its $740-million-plane order.
Airbus Chief Commercial Officer John Leahy, in Sydney to convince Qan tas of the virtues of the A320 aircraft series over Boeing's 737-800s, said local media speculation the manufacturer would offer the airline discounts of up to 45 percent were "ridiculous."
"It is a buyer's market after the events of September 11, obviously you can get better buys, terms and conditions than you could six months ago," Leahy told reporters in Sydney.
"You can't just say 45 percent off. You don't have markets like that for aeroplanes," he said, noting the $52-million-to-$55-million catalogue price on the A320.
Back to Japan
TOKYO (Reuters) - General Motors Corp. on Monday brought a 60- year hiatus to an end with the launch a GM-brand car built in Japan - a key stepping stone in its goal to becoming a major player in the Asia-Pacific region.
The Chevrolet Cruze, a compact hatchback, is the first car to have been jointly developed with partner Suzuki Motor Corp. "The Cruze is symbolic of the way of our alliance has leveraged the partners' different knowledge and strengths," GM Chairperson Jack Smith told a gathering of journalists in Tokyo, noting it was developed in only five months rather than years.
U.S. automakers pulled out of Japan as the likelihood of hostilities increased prior to World War II.
Motorola Cash Grab
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Motorola Inc., the world's No. 2 mobile-telephone maker, said Monday it plans to raise as much as $1.4 billion from two securities offerings, and use the proceeds to cut short-term debt and for general corporate purposes.
The company said it began a public offering of $875-million equity security units, a convertible security consisting of senior notes and purchase contracts to buy Motorola shares. It said it may sell another $125 million of equity units if there is enough demand.
Motorola also said it plans to sell privately $400 million of 10-year senior unsecured notes.
The company, whose debt was downgraded last week, is this year cutting 26 percent of its employees amid a global slump in demand for telecommunications equipment and expects to post its first full-year operating loss in at least 45 years.
TITLE: Readers Wonder About the Real Costs of War
TEXT: Editor,
As I sit and watch the U.S. response to the inhumane acts of terrorism carried out on Sept. 11, I find myself haunted by the sentiments spoken by Henry Kissinger more than two decades ago. Astute readers will recall that Kissinger wore two hats during his service in the Nixon administration, as a secretary of state as well as national security adviser.
Speaking of the United States' failure to win the war against the North Vietnamese in southeast Asia conclusively, despite a clear U.S. advantage in terms of arms and munitions, Kissinger told his fellow citizens how to prevent such a failure of resolve from ever repeating itself again. We must be willing, he intoned, to apply a necessary force of such horrific and unrestrained magnitude that even our enemy will be unable to believe that we could resort to such horror. Only then will they be ready to capitulate to our demands.
Ever the cynic, I have thought much about those sentiments ever since. I have often wondered if those same words could not also have been spoken in political, as well as military, terms, since, as the astute military philosopher Carl Von Cla us witz once observed, politics is merely an extension of war by other means.
What haunts me now is the specter that perhaps the terrorists themselves have learned that piece of advice for themselves and are willing to exact a high price from the civilized countries of the world as the cost of keeping free from their political extortion. They remind me of the schoolyard bullies who reign on the school grounds through sheer intimidation. No one wants to confront them for their terror, and so a sickening, anesthetizing defeatism settles in until one eventually becomes devoid of any spirit or hope.
I pray that the civilized world's retaliatory measures in this particular instance - while applying whatever force might be necessary to effect an appropriate response to the terrorism carried out at the World Trade Center - does not transmogrify in Afghanistan into a spectacle of unrestrained horror itself.
Scott Nixon
Rogers, Arkansas
Editor,
We are now bombing homes of the Taliban people - that means women and children. Where is our honor now? Where is the high road that we pretend to take?
I am a military software engineer and have designed lethal weapons for more than 20 years. I am appalled at the hubris and foolishness shown by the hawks who rule us, including President George W. Bush himself. If our dead planet is visited after it cools down, the beings may be surprised to discover that the most advanced "civilization" in history was no more civilized than the earliest savages. We choose backward, damaged countries and talk of sending food, when we send death. Our people, grown dumb and lazy from poor education and material wealth, have lost the analytical skills to know when they're being led like lemmings over the cliff.
Depleted-uranium-tipped missiles are only the opening wedge in the radiation deaths we are playing with. Our country's "leaders" have lost their judgment, but have a huge supply of hypocricy and lies to fuel their political ambitions.
Is no one speaking out against this bombing madness, or are you just not printing it?
Alice Copeland-Brown
Canton, Massachusetts
New Directions
In response to "Can Russia Hope for Partnership With U.S.?" a comment by Peter Rutland, Oct. 16.
Editor,
Rutland's academic caution limits his good points. There is a turning in the world's direction! Governments that want to protect their citizens must work together to end terrorism everywhere. This need is a first priority or no government or people can long endure. The unity of countries in this goal ensures victory in defeating all existing terrorist organizations and establishing civil resistance to the birth of terror groups in the future. In time the method of terror itself should die as an option. This is a good direction the world is turning.
Governments that can agree on the importance of protecting their own citizens can then also place wars of agression on history's scrap heap. This is a good direction the world is turning. The Russian and American people have so much in common that our governments together must encourage and support the individual's rights to personal freedoms and economic opportunity. Many in both countries share common ancestors.
Presidents Vladimir Putin and George Bush have begun the process of moving our countries together as friends toward meeting the 21st-century challenges to our peoples. We will not worry about who is a superpower. The only thing that will matter is are we both enjoying progress as people and as countries? This attitude will be followed by other civilized countries. This is a very good direction the world is turning.
Both peoples, American and Russian, must learn to ignore out-of-date reactionaries and trust our common desire for good.
David Wyatt
Watertown, Tennessee
A New World Order
In response to "Russia and NATO: Achieving the Impossible," a comment by Ira Strauss, Oct. 5.
Editor,
Strauss' article on Russia's entry into NATO misses some obvious opportunities. The two biggest issues are an appropriate exit of the United States from the alliance and, subsequent to that, achieving tactical and strategic parity of the remaining European countries in the nuclear sphere.
In the first instance, historically, Europe has not been America's primary interest. For 150 years, America's first interest has been mainly on the American continents. Only with the advent of the Cold War was this view reoriented toward a Euro-Slavic mindset. Given a considered opportunity, the United States would move back to that historical viewpoint. Much has been ignored among the countries in the Organization of American States that needs to be addressed and resolved.
In the second instance, for the United States appropriately to exit the NATO alliance (or go to observer status), the EU states and former CIS states must reach a tactical nuclear parity. The extent that the EU states are capable and willing to shoulder the NATO alliance alone has become quite clear over the last dozen years. Hence the opportunity is ripe for a U.S. exit.
What would be a lynchpin in making this happen? Elimination of the 1972 ABM Treaty and further cooperation against international terrorism. Both objectives provide sufficient opportunity for cures. The United States, regardless of the effectiveness of the idea, is determned to develop a missle-defense system. That the ABM Treaty is viewed as an obstacle is the bargainiing chip for Russia's entry into NATO as a full partner. In a NATO-allied Russia, where trade partnerships with EU states will be critical, the presence of a defense shield will be considered but a minor irritant. Further cooperation against terrorism will afford both countries continued interest in cooperative relations over the long term.
Strauss is correct in his assessment of the appropriate voting rights accorded Russia as a full member of NATO.
John McGinnis
Dallas, Texas
Pakistan Responds
In response to a letter to the editor by Suresh Seth, Oct. 16.
Editor,
Mr. Seth's letter questioned Pakistan's support for the U.S. fight against terrorism and tried to disseminate Indian propaganda regarding the 50-year-old Kashmir dispute. It is well known that Kashmir is an outstanding issue in the United Nations. Various UN resolutions upholding the right of Kashmiris to determine their own future have not been implemented. Pakistan, being a party to the dispute, has the right and obligation to extend political and moral support to the Kashmiri struggle for independence. Reprehensibly, Seth has equated the confrontation in Kashmir with terrorism. This cannot be justified because the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination has been recognized by UN resolutions.
The myth of the training of Kashmiris by Pakistan in Afghanistan is nothing more than propaganda to undermine and defame the indigenous freedom struggle of the Kashmiris. According to international human-rights organizations, more than 70,000 Kashmiris have died because of terrorism unleashed by the state in an attempt to deny their legitimate demands.
Allegations stemming from Northern Alliance sources that Pakistan created the Taliban and is still providing military supplies and/or fuel to the Taliban are baseless. As Pakistan is fully complying with UN resolution 1333 and has allowed UN observers to monitor the sanctions, there is no such possibility of this happening.
The allegation that Pakistan is not sincere in its support to America is untrue. Pakistan is itself a victim of terrorism and condemns it in all its forms and manifestations. Therefore, it is logical that Pakistan is extending its unstinting support to the United States and the international community in the fight against international terrorism. It should be noted that as a signatory to UN resolutions against terrorism, the government of Pakistan has ignored economic, social and political risks and gone out of its way to support the international coalition against terrorism. Moreover, Pakistan on numerous occasions has cooperated in this field in the past, also with the United States.
No country in the world has suffered more than Pakistan because of the continuing crisis in Afghanistan. More than 2 million registered Afghan refugees are still on Pakistani soil, while more keep pouring in every day. The price paid by our economy and society has been very heavy. Pakistan, therefore, has a genuine stake in the return of peace and stability in Afghanistan.
The question whether Pakistan is a friend or a foe of the United States cannot be answered through the prism of the Indian position on the Kashmir dispute. No one should be allowed to settle scores at the cost of innocent lives in the bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
G. Bajwa
Embassy of Pakistan, Moscow
What Tripe!
In response to "Bin Laden? You Better Be Sure," a column by Boris Kagarlitsky, Sept. 21.
Editor,
I find it hard to believe that you published "Bin Laden? You Better Be Sure by Boris Kagarlitsky." I've read and respected your Internet edition for several years. Kagarlitsky's logic and opinions are so obviously flawed that I find it hard to believe that a respectable newspaper would publish his tripe. This is especially true at a time when Russia and the United States are forging a closer relationship, and Russia's president is working closely with ours to help solve the horrendous problem that the world has with mega-terrorists.
Peter McDonald
San Francisco, California
Back to Our Roots
In response to "The Hermitage Is Planning To Take Over the World," Oct. 12.
Editor,
My grandmother's family was of the Romanov family from the Ural Mountains of Russia where they owned diamond mines. My father was in the diamond and jewelry business in the United States. I am honored to tell my friends and civic organizations in Pensacola, Florida, about my family's Russian heritage and pray that I may do just a little to bring our great countries together.
And I am proud to play a part in the development of deep respect by my city for Russia and the Russian people today.
It was a pleasure to read about the expansion of the Hermitage and its Friends of the Hermitage associations. I am deeply involved with the Pensacola Museum of Art and am currently the chairperson for its School Trunk Project and public relations. The school trunk program develops mobile trunks filled with art information that school teachers take to their classrooms. A trunk is developed for various countries. This year I am funding a Russian school trunk in honor of my grandmother, who came to the United States in the late 1800s.
Many of our local school teachers have started asking: "When will the Russian trunk be ready? We want to take it to our classrooms for the school children to see." I hope that my grandmother is looking down from heaven and smiling.
Minette Cline Streeter
Pensacola, Florida
More on Language
In response to "Russian Spoken?," a letter to the editor by Mark Teeter, Oct. 9.
Editor,
My compliments to Mr. Teeter as he makes two excellent points, the first directly and by intention, but the second apparently by accident. Clearly, he misses the point entirely while demonstrating it to near perfection!
There can be no dispute of the potential benefits of opening oneself to "a rich new world of language, commerce and cultural experience" while visiting Russia. Without question, a most extraordinary opportunity exists for any visitor to this beautiful and intriguing country!
But these experiences are not limited to just those who have the time, money or disposition to learn the language - they are enhanced by it - but not limited to it. Unfortunately, Mr. Teeter completely fails to comprehend the issue at hand.
Further, he expresses a hostile and contentious attitude - "stop fighting and join us" - to non-native speakers in general, thus demonstrating by example the need for visitors to find the businesses that offer a "you're welcome here" atmosphere.
According to the City Hall Tourism Committee, St. Petersburg will have 3 million foreign visitors in 2001 alone. Perhaps Mr. Teeter would prefer that number be reduced to only those visitors who have achieved some arbitrary level of Russian-language skill?!
Tourism is an important part of the local, regional and national economy. Tourism - which is made up primarily of English-speaking persons (either as their native or second language) - brings to St. Petersburg a wealth of benefits universally proclaimed and clearly promulgated by nearly all of the country's leaders and businesspeople. Mr. Teeter's suggestion insinuates that unless these 3 million visitors possess a working knowledge and functional ability to speak Russian, they are simply not welcome or at least, should expect to be greeted with apathy and disregard. Fortunately, there are people and businesses here that do not feel this way.
Simply put, The St. Petersburg Times is an English-language paper, serving primarily the English-speaking community. And as such, should not only offer, but is essentially obliged to provide useful and timely information that will assist these people to function within the communit, during a stay of any duration. In addition, the businesses that advertise here have the right to anticipate - and even to expect - support from these readers. Last, the paper survives on the revenues generated from advertising. Therefore, the mutual reliance and the mutual benefits achieved are obvious and irrefutable.
To indicate "English Spoken Here" in advertisements, reviews and articles is a simple, common-sense step that brings together the needs and buying power of the majority of readers with the businesses interested in and willing to offer products and services to them in an accessible and realistic manner. Nuff said.
Steve Hoss
St. Petersburg
TITLE: Russia Is Still a Long Way From Civil Society
AUTHOR: By Boris Pustyntsev
TEXT: FIFTEEN years separate us from the time when any voluntary association of citizens was the object of the most intense scrutiny on the part of the state. It went without saying that the state ensured that the interests of all population groups were observed. Any attempt to question this was equivalent to calumny against the Soviet Union and could result in criminal prosecution.
This situation underwent radical change in the second half of the 1980s when the Soviet authorities, for a number of reasons, were forced to end the Soviet Union's complete isolation from the outside world. Even the regime's controlled liberalization brought a wave of civic activity that the authorities had not bargained for.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a sharp decline in outdoor, "on-the-street" civic activity. However, this has been attended by the low-profile but steady growth in active nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Russia's post-Soviet regime did not seek to impede NGO development. In fact, it did not pay much attention to the NGO sector, which was not such a bad thing, especially after the adoption of a pretty liberal law on public associations.
Although it has often not been easy to attract the attention of the relevant government agency to specific problems, we have managed to maintain our independence and to establish working relations with state officials in most government agencies. We tried to explain to them that their professional interests coincided with those of civic organizations and that we could work together to resolve common problems.
The authorities have, from time to time, attempted to set up their own tame Government- Organized Non-Governmental Organizations, or GONGOs, although this has not presented a serious threat to NGO-sector development. Actions orchestrated against civil society have never been of a systemic nature. The most dangerous year was probably 1998, when with the support of the Moscow City Hall legal department a number of regional elites attempted to launch an attack on citizens' constitutional rights. This was most clearly manifested in refusals to register or re-register a number of NGOs. This primarily affected human-rights and ecological organizations, i.e. the most ardent critics of the federal and regional authorities.
Civic associations have, over the years, suffered a number of problems in the area of tax legislation, when the status of NGOs has been mixed up with that of commercial organizations - sometimes seemingly intentionally. However, this problem can be resolved with time.
The main danger currently facing civil society is different. It is the instinct of the new administration - possibly influenced by an influx of former KGB officers to positions in many state institutions - to control everything that moves. Furthermore, the drive to strengthen the state's vertical chain of command is being followed by a drive to increase control over society. Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, said in June at a meeting between the president and NGO representatives, "We need to think about the greatness of society, not only about the greatness of the state."
This, I believe, gives a pretty clear insight into why the Kremlin is supporting a congress of Russian NGOs next month. However, it is not so clear what the NGOs themselves stand to gain from participation in the civic forum.
The main argument of the forum's supporters is that society should engage in a dialogue with the authorities. However, NGOs - as it is - do this on a daily basis and not at some abstract level, but with specific government bodies and lawmakers (at all levels) for the purpose of resolving specific problems. The key issue is whether the state is genuinely willing to cooperate with civic society and not just at the level of public declarations.
Today, the authorities are far from homogeneous, and in almost all state institutions there are officials who are perfectly willing to cooperate with NGOs. Conscientious bureaucrats understand that NGOs can make a major contribution toward resolving issues of statewide importance, such as the status and accommodation of refugees; homeless children and other juvenile problems; the reform of the education system; military and police reform; and judicial reform. They understand that we are not only mobilizing civil support but are also attracting considerable nonbudgetary funds (mainly from foreign charities and funds) to tackle these problems.
There is one area, however, where cooperation does not exist and is not likely to for the foreseeable future: access to many sorts of "open" information that directly affects the vital interests of society.
The cause for pessimism on this front is the current administration's support for the doctrines on "information security" and "a single informational space," which run against the grain of an open society. These doctrines create a kind of Great Wall of China that serves to ensure total nontransparency of state actions. Without functioning public oversight of the authorities' actions, there cannot be a fully fledged civil society. And here, the civic forum is unlikely to help us. It is, of course, essential to work with the authorities on this issue, but it is a task that will take years, if not decades.
My human-rights colleagues assure me that the initiators of the civic forum have accepted "our rules of the game." For a fair game to be played, however, it is important that both sides have a shared understanding of the rules. Here it seems that very different meanings have been attached to one and the same terms by state and NGO representatives.
At one of the round tables conducted by the indefatigable Sergei Markov, the following phrase was uttered, "Civil society in Russia differs from the Western model and this is entirely natural in the transition period." It is indeed natural, but probably not for the reason that Markov had in mind. It is due to the civic immaturity of the state, which does not feel obliged to explain its actions in clear terms to the public, i.e. to taxpayers on whose money it exists.
The real fear is that the state will seek to implement the dream of a "civil society" that does not permit itself to criticize the government. Talk of the need to write a special plan for the development of civil society is extremely worrying. No doubt the result would be that plan targets for production of GONGOs would be doggedly overfulfilled.
It is probably worth being present at the civic forum, if only to see whether the authorities, which have spent so much money and enjoy majority support (ensured by Kremlin control of two-thirds of the forum's federal organizing committee) will reject - as has been promised - the idea of packing various structures with loyalists. In any case, it will certainly not be a dull event.
Boris Pustyntsev is chairperson of the local human- rights organization Citizens' Watch. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Local Don Quixote Keeps Up the Fight
TEXT: I'VE noticed that people who are waiting to get new apartments from the city usually start going mad after about the second or third year of futile attempts. Their efforts, which initially were focused on finding a suitable place to live, gradually change into a desperate quest to find any place to live. Unfortunately, this is just the way the system works in a city where many thousands of residents still live in communal apartments and the budget is being pulled in a thousand different, but all urgent, directions.
I got a call from one such person last week. This man's father had signed "a gentleman's agreement" with a foreign consulate six years ago, under which the man gave the consulate two rooms of his three-room, city-owned apartment. In exchange, the consulate agreed to give him some money and to buy him two one-room apartments elsewhere in the city. Apparently, the consulate's ultimate plan was to get the use of the entire apartment, which is located near the consulate itself, and to turn it into a residence for the consul general.
Six years later, the dispute continues. The father's case has been taken up by the son, who insists that the consulate has not lived up to its obligations. Naturally, he wanted The St. Petersburg Times to write an article that would shame or embarrass the consulate.
So, I dutifully called the city administration, where I learned that the authorities were perfectly familiar with this man's case. In fact, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also knows the facts by heart and has been involved for more than a year. The Russian government even sent an official note of protest to the consulate not so long ago.
Karolis Kulkinas, the City Hall External Affairs Committee member overseeing this case on behalf of the city, told me that the consulate had offered this man about five different places to move during the six years of the dispute and had even delivered the keys of two one-room apartments. But the man's wife didn't like any of the options she was shown and was holding out for something better.
The man who called me thinks the incident may just be the beginning of a major international scandal, one that could soon have us forgetting all about what's going on in Afghanistan now.
"The consulate has violated the rights of people who live here, and if things keep going this way, there's going to be another Serbia here soon!" the man told me over the phone. I should point out that we are not talking about the U.S. Consulate here, but the representation of one of Europe's smaller monarchies, a country that would have a hard time seriously threatening even its neighbors, to say nothing of Serbia or Russia.
Anyway, the man tried to convince me that a well-timed article in The St. Petersburg Times might help avoid a Balkan-style international crisis, but I wasn't convinced.
You see, the whole conflict is pretty silly and both sides are in the wrong. The man's father had no right to transfer, even on a "gentlemanly" basis, his city-owned apartment to the consulate. And, of course, the consulate had no right to make such an agreement with him either.
But perhaps more importantly, the authorities convinced me that the system is working in this case - slowly, perhaps, but working. The consul general has written to his foreign ministry asking for funds to purchase the apartment outright from the city. If the man who lives there waits a couple more months, it is likely the situation will be resolved. If not, he always has the option of going to court, if he is so sure that his family is not in the wrong. In either case, his six-year war with this European kingdom could come to an end soon, if that is really what this man wants.
But I think that what he really wants is to continue the war, to keep on harassing as many officials and media outlets in St. Petersburg and abroad as possible. From talking to him, I am convinced that he won't be happy until the queen of this country herself comes to St. Petersburg to hand him the key to his new castle.
TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
TEXT: Idiot Wind
Anthrax is riding the autumn winds in America. Where does it come from?
Some say from Osama bin Laden's terrorists - although for people who can murder 7,000 victims in a matter of minutes, this piecemeal parceling out of spores seems a bit on the retail side. Then again, why expect consistency from such disordered minds? Others say it's homegrown cranks - some of those right-wing "Heartland" militants who dabble in toxins and have been celebrating Sept. 11 as a blow against the cities they hate most, or the "Army of God" anti-abortion terrorists who have used similar postal tactics to spread the Lord's word in the form of deadly chemicals.
But savvy White House hardliners increasingly point the finger at Saddam Hussein. "There's no question that the leader of Iraq is an evil man," one hardliner said last week. "After all, he gassed his own people. We know he's been developing weapons of mass destruction."
Thus U.S. President George W. Bush fires his first shot across Baghdad's bow, warming up the homefolks for the big grudge match ahead - "Gulf War II: The Empire Strikes Back." Of course, there is no denying the accuracy of Bush's declaration - but even here, right-wing white man speak with forked tongue.
For it's certainly true that the Iraqi despot gassed his own people. And it's equally true that for 20 years he's been developing weapons of mass destruction. But what Bush's statement deftly elides is the fact that Hussein's development and use of these weapons was enthusiastically abetted and countenanced by a previous occupant of the Oval Office named - George Bush.
For years, Pa Bush and the affable corporate pitchman Ronald Reagan shoveled money, weapons and "dual-use" technology at Hussein - ignoring direct warnings from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and others that the dictator was using this technology to develop ballistic-missile capabilities and augment his arsenal of unconventional weapons. Some of the versatile materials sent to Iraq with the O.K. of the Reagan and Bush administrations included the chemical agents for botulism, tetanus, West Nile Fever and - surprise, surprise! - anthrax.
The atrocity that Bush Junior mentioned last week occurred in March 1988, when Hussein murdered an estimated 4,000 Iraqi Kurds with poison gas. This was carried out with helicopters purchased from the United States - another example of "dual-use technology" in action. The next year, with Pa firmly in the Oval cockpit, the CIA informed the White House that Iraq was greatly accelerating its secret nuclear program and had become the world's leading producer of chemical weapons.
So what did Pa do? Why, he signed a National Security Directive ordering even closer ties to the poisoner. He also overrode his own cabinet to force through $1 billion in agricultural credits to Hussein, a godsend for the cash-strapped tyrant, after international banks had stopped giving him loans. Once again, Bush was shown evidence that the aid was being diverted to military uses, but Pa had faith in his old ally. There was too much oil and backdoor money binding the two leaders together: an alliance sealed with the blood of Hussein's many victims. No need to worry.
By the summer of 1990, Hussein was clearly gunning for Kuwait and openly threatening to "burn half of Israel" with his biochemical weapons. But Pa was indulgent with his frisky protégé. In the two weeks before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush approved the sale of an additional $4.8 million in "dual-use" technology to factories identified by the CIA as linchpins of Hussein's illicit nuclear and biochemical programs. The day before Saddam sent his tanks across the border, Pa obligingly sold him more than $600 million worth of advanced communication technology.
Then came the war - and the messy divorce of the Bush-Hussein union.
Nowadays, apologists for Bush's prolonged appeasement of the bloodthirsty megalomaniac like to say that he was simply practicing realpolitik: supporting Hussein in order to thwart Iran, who was America's designated "Great Satan" at the time. Hussein, say the apologists, was a bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism; by wooing him, Bush could prevent Islamic extremists from becoming powerful enough to attack the United States.
That certainly was an effective strategy, wasn't it?
Now another George Bush has launched another war against former allies in the volatile region, with the same kind of secret deals and wink-wink mollycoddling of despotisms and kleptocracies from central Asia to the Persian Gulf. Is he, like his father before him, also sending dangerous chemicals and missile components to budding maniacs he finds useful? What form will the inevitable blowback take next time? How many more rough beasts are even now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind - along with all those anthrax spores.
Negative Capability
In recent weeks, many readers have taken this column to task for its relentless "negativity," for "tearing down our leaders" without offering any "positive" alternatives. "What would you do?" is the steady refrain.
We apologize for any offense in this regard. We've always believed that our readers are intelligent enough to perceive the moral assumptions underlying the column without being hit over the head with them. But perhaps in these murky times, one must be clearer about such things. So, just this once, we will indulge the scolders with a brief personal reply.
In Jerusalem, in the generation before Jesus of Nazareth, the greatest teacher of the age was Rabbi Hillel, of blessed memory. One day, a mocker came to him and sneered, "If you can teach me the whole of the Law while standing on one leg, then I will follow your Way." Rabbi Hillel answered and said: "Do not do to others what you don't want them to do to you. That is the whole of the Law. The rest is commentary. Go, and study."
In Russia, 2,000 years later, a man named Solzhenitsyn wrote these lines: "The wolfhound is right; the cannibal is wrong."
That just about covers it. Peace and mercy be with you.
TITLE: Germany Sends Problem Children to Siberia
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KEIZESS, Omsk Region - For Christian, a 12-year-old boy from Germany's Ruhr River valley whose childhood was destroyed by his sexually abusive father and brothers, peace and safety must have seemed a distant dream.
After years spent in juvenile facilities and reform schools, Christian finally has a chance to realize that dream. But it proved more distant than even he could have imagined.
Christian now lives in Keizess, a village about 300 kilometers north of Omsk in Western Siberia, and more than 4,000 kilometers from home. He was sent there under a rehabilitation program funded by the German government.
Digging in a potato field and drawing on a cigarette, Christian offered a smoke to his friend Kolya, and cursed like a sailor in newly acquired Russian.
Then he threw down his pitchfork. "To hell with it," he said in German, and marched off. A short ways off Christian drew a large knife from under the thick clothing shielding him from the mid-September chill - a portent of the coming Siberian winter, when the mercury will plunge to minus 40 degrees Celsius - and began peeling a cucumber.
Despite his bold swagger and coarse speech, Christian has formed good relationships with the Russian and German people around him and is a rather helpful boy. He has been in Keizess since last winter. In that time he has bonded with Andreas, the German social worker whose job it is to supervise Christian 24 hours a day.
Asked what his life was like in Germany, Christian said: "It was crap. I was in trouble for stealing bicycles, cars and other things." He hasn't stolen anything in Russia, because, he said, he fears the locals will beat him up if he does.
Frank Kroner, who has been bringing troubled German children to villages like Keizess in the Omsk region since 1997, said that Christian was one of five children and that he was regularly raped by his father and brothers.
Christian was living in a juvenile home when he told someone that he had sexually abused a girl there and revealed that he himself had been abused. He has worked as a prostitute for pocket money, Kroner said, adding that the 12-year-old has also been pumped full of drugs in a child psychiatric unit.
"The Youth Office didn't know what to do with him after they failed to place him in 52 different juvenile homes," Kroner said. "I assume the homes were afraid that he would interfere with the other children. Christian was placed in the Siberian program because the lack of open homosexuality and male prostitution in the villages seemed to offer a safe haven for the troubled boy.
Christian is a rather slow child. He has spent little time in school and has got little out of it. At some stage he will need psychotherapy, Kroner said.
Kroner describes the children under his supervision as "voluntary prisoners."
"We don't accept anyone who doesn't volunteer. The young people want to make this work and we accept them only when they agree. They can also say at any time that they want to go home," he said.
As part of the Siberian program, the children learn to care for animals such as cats, dogs, horses and cows - an impossibility in reform schools in Germany.
The children come from throughout Germany, but the Siberian course is not suitable for everyone: Those with alcohol problems - which loom large in Sedelnikovo - are not accepted. Thieves, who could end up in a Russian prison, can come but must pledge to control their behavior.
"These are children who have had traumatic experiences that they respond to in socially unacceptable ways. Above all, these are children that run away from every conflict and therefore are not amenable to learning how to behave better," Kroner said.
"We show them the high-security juvenile detention centers that some Russian children are held in, and [the German children] say it's too miserable to contemplate," Kroner said.
The children that come to Siberia have already been through a series of other juvenile institutions, including high-security detention centers. Most have faced prison time. They often share a sad history of sexual abuse, suicide attempts and crime.
The philosophy underlying the scheme is that the children learn to survive the hardships of life in Siberia with the constant guidance of a trained social worker, their supervisor and guardian for the duration of their stay, which can last up to one year.
The isolation of Keizess, Sedelnikovo and the other villages in the program, combined with the children's initial inability to communicate in Russian, makes it nearly impossible for them to run away, as so many did in Germany.
The importance of this dual isolation was underscored recently. Natasha, 15, an ethnic German, grew up in Russia and emigrated to Germany with her parents. When she ran into trouble, the German authorities sent her to Sedelnikovo. But her native fluency in Russian meant that she faced few of the restraints faced by other children in the program, and quickly got up to her old tricks. She has since been relocated to Norway.
When the children's Siberian sojourn is over, their social workers accompany them back to Germany and try to build on the relationship. "When you have lived through the Siberian winter together you develop a really strong bond," Kroner said.
But it is not only the natural surroundings that make Siberia - a vast land used by the tsars and communists alike as a dumping ground for criminals and political prisoners - a good place for dealing with troubled kids. "People treat everyone that comes as welcome," Kroner said. "It doesn't matter where you come from and what you have done there. What counts for Siberians is what you do here."
"We can't find these conditions anywhere else in the world - or at least within the sphere of European culture," he said.
Pavel Sergiyenko, 49, is a program coordinator in Keizess. He said that initially the villagers were surprised that the German children were coming to their villages from so far away. "But when we realized that they were trying to help the children we approved. Of course, they don't always succeed, but in 90 percent of cases they do," he said.
"As for the kids, I'm still amazed that they go around in T-shirts and tennis shoes when it's minus 40 [degrees Celsius] out, and say, 'Allo Batka. Kak dela? [Hey, Pops. How's it going?]'"
"It's good that the Germans have such a project, that they have money for it. If our children go off the rails here, we have no resources to help them.
"We don't understand German and [at first] the kids don't understand Russian, but all the same we can communicate quite well with gestures and other means," said Sergiyenko's wife, Galina.
A woman gathering mushrooms in the forest didn't want to talk about the program, repeating only, "Go away. Auf Wiedersehen."
Other villagers said they knew the German children were in the villages, but had no contact with them. Some locals had seen photographs of local children or acquaintances who had gone to Germany on one of the exchange programs run in connection with the youth program.
"My relationship with the local people here is good. I am not afraid of them," said Mark, one of the children in the program.
Mark, 13, has a criminal record longer than his arm: 180 offenses that the German police know of. He used to steal as many as 10 mobile telephones a day and still leaves his personal possessions wherever they fall - a habit acquired over many years of stealing whatever he needed.
"I don't steal here because the people don't have anything. I work, even though no one makes me. There is no temptation," Mark said. "I have heard that the police beat up people who steal," he added.
Mark said his life in Siberia is better than the life he was leading before. "I was stealing cars. I had all these charges against me. I was hardly ever in school. I didn't think about where my life was going, but now it's normal," he said.
"At first I didn't want to come here. I was shown a film about the program and I realized that people here had nothing. But I had no choice. I didn't want to go to prison," Mark said.
Mark is small for his age, probably because his mother was hooked on heroin when she was pregnant with him. His father is also a drug addict and has spent most of his life in jail. "He was very self-sufficient. The parents were never in a position to take care of him so he had to do a lot for himself," Kroner said. "There's a photograph of Mark at age 3 sitting in a house on a pile of trash playing with syringes," he added. "He doesn't like having to follow rules because he's never had any. The social contacts between normal people are quite different to those between junkies."
"Even though he was rarely in school, what he learned he learned very well," said Kroner, adding that some form of education is probably the next step for Mark, who will remain in Russia until he is ready to enroll for the new school year in Germany next September.
But despite his progress, on the day he was interviewed for this story Mark was acting up. Outside the house in Keizess that he was sharing with his supervisor, Silvio Karger, 27, Mark was throwing potatoes over the neighbor's fence at the neighbor's dog. Karger reprimanded Mark, who responded by sulking.
The supervisor and his charge had been together less than a month and a power struggle was still going on between them. But Kroner felt sure that Karger would win in the end.
Karger, a powerfully built man, says that his fate could have been the similar to that of Mark and Christian, whom he was taking care of while their usual supervisor was taking a short break. Although not always in harmony, the three have already formed a kind of family.
"My parents died when I was young and I was brought up by my grandparents," Karger said. "Then my grandparents died when I was 16 and I was left completely on my own," he added. "I was lucky in comparison to these kids. I got a job and an education. I know what it is to have to come off the street. After my grandparents died, the relatives sold their house and I lived on the street for a couple of weeks, but I still kept going to work. A colleague let me come and stay with him."
Karger brings his training as a therapist for physically and mentally disabled children to this demanding job, along with experience as a soldier and a handy man. He has big plans for doing up a house in Sedelnikovo.
"I had been looking for some kind of work overseas," he said, "but I had not really been thinking of Siberia. I actually have found it fine, but still, nothing is easy here."
Karger bemoaned problems with the power supply, the village running out of bread, and the apparent lack of respect for privacy. People are always turning up in his kitchen uninvited, asking him to join them for a drink. If he had the chance he would like to help some of the locals deal with their alcoholism, he said.
Kroner, head of the nonprofit organization Pfad ins Leben, or Path Into Life, stumbled across Sedelnikovo (population 6,500) in 1995 when he and a group of other social workers came with a group of German scouts to the Omsk Region. Kroner, who grew up in East Germany, already knew Russian and had worked here.
Kroner himself brought the first German child to Sedelnikovo in 1997. There has been a continuous presence of children in the program in the area around Sedelnikovo and in the village of Ust-Ishim ever since, even after personality clashes led Kroner to split with his original partners in mid-1999. He has since brought six children to Siberia, two of whom have completed the Siberian segment of the program, but are still with their supervisors.
Based near the central German city of Kassel, the program employs several locals in the Omsk Region. It has the support of the Russian Education Ministry, the Omsk State Pedagogical University, the Sedelnikovo district administration, and the German Consulate in Novosibirsk.
Representatives of the Altotting Youth Office in Bavaria, which placed a child in the program, visited last month.
"The main difference between Pfad ins Leben and other projects is that it doesn't deal only with means of learning through experience, but that for a strictly limited time young people are actually placed in a community while they are closely supervised. They learn to take care of themselves," spokesman Karl Zielinski said in an e-mail interview.
The Pfad ins Leben program does not come cheap. Each child placed there costs $47,800 per year. Almost half goes to pay the child's supervisor.
The funding is provided under a provision of German law on assistance to children and youths that mandates payment for intensive assistance for children in certain cases. Various programs compete for this state funding.
A spokesperson for the German Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth Ministry said keeping a child in a German juvenile home costs up to 250 marks a day.
At 20, Benjamin, from rural Bavaria, is the oldest boy in the program. He and his new supervisor, Norfried Richter, 37, have decided to keep a horse in the yard of their house in the village of Yevlantevka, which will give them a means of transport when the roads freeze this winter.
"I have experimented with drugs. At first it was just curiosity, but then I became addicted," Benjamin said. "I lost my job as a laborer in a brewery and had problems with my family. I began to have trouble with the law after a couple of convictions and then qualified for clinical treatment. It was a bit pointless, because I got back into drugs after I left the treatment. After that, I was given the choice of going to prison or going to Siberia."
Benjamin chose Siberia.
"Here, no one talks about drugs and there are no drugs," Kroner said.
TITLE: School Encourages Learning for Roma
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Mafia-types, thieves, beggars, fortune-tellers - these are a few of the stereotypes that Roma tend to inspire today in Russia. It is precisely this kind of thinking that Margarita Marshinnikova, head of school No. 462 on the outskirts of the suburban city of Pushkin, is fighting against.
"I have been working at the school for 18 years now, and nothing has ever been stolen. There has never been any incident involving Roma children," she said. "Every child here has a right to education and is treated in the same way."
Marshinnikova says most schools in St. Petersburg, even those in proximity to large Roma settlements, do not encourage Roma to attend their establishments. School No. 462 is situated in an area that is home to large settlements of ethnic minorities, among them Roma.
When Marshinnikova started working at the school, Roma generally did not have access to education.
"Most teachers refused to teach Roma children. They said it was a waste of time. The parents used to come to the school and ask why their children were not allowed to study with the others. It was a form of humiliation," Marshinnikova said.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, illiteracy has become an increasingly common reality, especially for many ethnic minorities. Illiteracy then becomes a factor in the cycle of poverty and exclusion for still larger numbers of Roma. Being illiterate means being unable to obtain official documents such as registration or marriage and birth certificates. In that way, many Roma find themselves trapped in a vicious circle that often leads to conflicts with Russian authorities, deprives them of state benefits and casts them deeper into poverty.
Today in Russia, the majority of Roma live under the poverty line, and their birth rate is dropping. By encouraging Roma to attend school, Marshinnikova aims to facilitate their integration into Russian society and put an end to the climate of discrimination. To bring the children back to school, Marshinnikova got involved personally.
"I went to visit every Roma family and convinced the parents to send their children to school. I also wanted to see how they lived," Marshinnikova said.
She also organized a series of artistic activities linked to Roma culture to attract the children to school. Today, with the help of the human-rights group Memorial, the school offers in-depth classes in Roma language, history, music, culture and dance. "The program was created this year to extend the children's knowledge about who they are and where they come from," Mar shin nikova said.
Today, most Roma in Pushkin are able to finish school and some have started showing a growing interest in higher education. "The previous generation of Roma were not all that concerned about education. Now they are much more ambitious for their children," the school director said.
In the 1950s, the Soviet regime put an end to the Roma's nomadic traditions. Although these forced settlements had their drawbacks, it enabled Roma to a certain extent to receive an education and join in the life of the region in which they settled. At the same time, initiatives were taken to preserve Roma artistic traditions and language.
Today, Roma are caught between two worlds: their own culture, which is dying out in many regions, and a society that is, to a large extent, indifferent to their fate.
"Before, the older generation of Roma were still in touch with their culture, and passed on their knowledge to the children. Now, most parents know their language and traditions only partially," Marshinnikova said.
By teaching Roma children about their origins, Marshinnikova aims not only to encourage them to attend school but also to help them gain more confidence and a sense of cultural identity. The new classes in Roma culture, history, language, music and dance take place several times a week and have proven a success. The children attend them with visible pleasure and seem proud of the attention paid to them.
Svetlana Mikhailova, a soloist from the Roma music group Cabriolet, teaches Roma music and dance at the school and is very satisfied with the way the program is evolving.
"The children choose to come to the classes themselves. I don't even have to gather them, they are always here on time, waiting. And they are very gifted, I think we will achieve great results," she said.
The results already speak for themselves: Roma children attend school and they have started giving recitals in St. Petersburg. Some parents have even decided to visit the optional Roma-language classes. In general, the school has managed to create a climate of peace in an area where tension can easily arise among the many different ethnic groups.
In the front hall, where large letters on the wall spell out the word "peace," the atmosphere is indeed surprisingly friendly and informal. "The school has a high proportion of Azerbaijanis, Tatars, Georgians, Roma, but the children all get along very well. Whatever may happen outside, discrimination is not an issue within the school," Marshinnikova said.
TITLE: Plaques Galore for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One figure from Russian history who needs no introduction, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is without a doubt the most commemorated person in St. Petersburg. Ten years after the collapse of the system he helped create, plaques recording the places he visited can still be found all over the city.
Lenin himself is on record for being against a cult created in his name, but his wishes were ignored by the state. After his death in 1924, his body was promptly embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, making it clear to everyone that Lenin worship was here to stay.
Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1925, and an enormous statue of the man was built near the Finland Station - the first of thousands of statues that soon began appearing all over the Soviet Union.
While Stalin also enjoyed similar glorification in his lifetime, it was not to outlive him by very long. In the 1960s, the numerous statues of him began to disappear, and the streets, metro stations and factories named after him were renamed. Curiously, he was also embalmed after his death and placed next to Lenin in the mausoleum, only to be removed 10 years later.
Thankfully, not all of the projects designed to glorify Lenin were carried out, such as the plan to replace the angel at the top of the Alexander Column on Palace Square with a huge sculpture of Lenin's head or the plan for the enormous Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, on the spot previously occupied by the Church of Christ the Savior, which was to feature the world's tallest statue, a 100-meter-high version of Lenin.
Nevertheless, St. Petersburg boasts a stunning 120 plaques tracing Lenin's movements. While some of the plaques and monuments are indeed of historical importance, such as the train at the Finland Station on which Lenin travelled back into the country immediately before the October Revolution, or the apartments where he lived, others are more obscure. The one pictured above is on the wall of the building at 20 Furshtatskaya Ulitsa, and reads, "Here, in the apartment of D.V. Stasov in 1917, Lenin visited more than once."
Generally, the city has decided to keep the numerous reminders of Lenin, rather than tear them all down. Fortunately, the two major Lenin statues in the city are in fairly unpromising surroundings anyway, by the Finland Station and by the Moskovskaya metro station.
As for the plaques, many of them now seem more humorous than anything else. Other pearls include, "In the former Chancellory for Justices of the Peace, Lenin held free legal consultations from 1893 to 1895," on Grazhdanskaya Ulitsa, or, "In this house, in November 1905, Lenin lived and worked illegally for two weeks," on 10th Sovetskaya Ulitsa.
TITLE: CIA Given Authority To Destroy Bin Laden
AUTHOR: By Pauline Jelinek
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - As the U.S. military pursues its mission to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, the CIA has been given new powers and money to wage its own war against America's most wanted terrorist suspect.
Starting the third week of air strikes in Afghanistan, U.S. fighter and ground-attack jets set out Monday from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, centerpiece of one of four navy battle groups in the Arabian Sea off Pakistan.
Warplanes on Sunday bombed Taliban positions near a front line north of the Afghan capital, Kabul, marking what could be the start of a more forceful campaign to help rebel forces fighting the regime that harbors bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon released the names of two members of the army's elite Ranger regiment killed over the weekend as part of the first publicly acknowledged covert mission in the anti-terrorism effort.
Asked Sunday whether U.S. forces would kill bin Laden on sight, General Richard B. Myers, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it depends on what happens when he's found.
"If it's a defensive situation, then bullets will fly, but if we can capture somebody, then we'll do that," he said on ABC's "This Week."
Asked the same question, Secretary of State Colin Powell told CNN's "Late Edition, "Our mission is to bring him to justice or bring justice to him."
President George W. Bush signed an order last month directing the CIA to destroy bin Laden and his communications, security apparatus and infrastructure in retaliation for the Sept. 11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, a senior administration official said Sunday.
Bush also added more than $1 billion to the spy agency's war on terrorism, most of it for the new covert action.
The CIA has been in southern Afghanistan, trying to win over ethnic Pashtun leaders not solidly behind the Taliban, officials have said.
It also has operated an unmanned Predator spy vehicle outfitted with missiles, defense officials indicated last week. It is the first time the United States has used the armed, remote-controlled drone in a military campaign, they said.
Besides the air strikes north of Kabul, Afghan officials reported air attacks Sunday around the western city of Herat, Kandahar in the south and the frontline positions near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
Officials of the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban had been asking the United States to bomb the front line north of Kabul so that they could move on the capital, but until now bombing of frontline positions has mostly been around Mazar-e-Sharif.
Powell said the United States was "very interested" in seeing rebel forces take Mazar-e-Sharif, but was still "continuing discussion" about whether a rebel march into Kabul would be "the best thing." The United States and Britain have been reluctant to help the alliance seize Kabul until a broad-based government is formed to replace the Taliban.
Bombing over Afghanistan began Oct. 7, and officials on Saturday released details of daring overnight assaults made by special-forces troops starting the previous night to gain intelligence against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
In lightning strikes, some 100 airborne Rangers and other special forces hit a Taliban-controlled airfield and a residence of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar near Kandahar. Documents and other items taken during the assaults were being analyzed for intelligence value, defense officials said.
Officials said Sunday that hostile fire had been ruled out but they were still investigating the helicopter crash in Pakistan that killed the Rangers. They identified the Rangers as Specialist Jonn J. Edmunds, 20 of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Private First Class Kristofor T. Stonesifer, 28, of Missoula, Montana They served with the 75th Ranger Regiment, based at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Officials would not disclose the role of the Black Hawk copter, although some believed it was preparing to swoop across the border into Afghanistan in case any Rangers had to be rescued.
TITLE: Pakistanis Speak Out Against U.S. Attacks
AUTHOR: By Mort Rosenblum
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: QUETTA, Pakistan - From their front-row seats at the world's strange new war, some Pakistanis fear the United States may be headed into a clash of cultures it cannot win, with fallout no one can predict.
There is Syed Zaheer Ali, for instance, a dapper man of moderate politics who runs the Quetta Chamber of Commerce. He studied in New York and made American friends before coming home to Baluchistan, the province on Afghanistan's southern border.
"If this ends up as a world war, Americans will see things they cannot imagine," he said. "Vietnam will seem like a picnic in comparison. A lot of humanity will be at stake."
Across Pakistan, a thumping majority condemns the Sept. 11 attacks. Many speak with touching warmth of the grief over the more than 5,000 killed or missing from terrorism on American soil.
But even tolerant Muslims with liberal political views say the repeated pounding of a prostrate Afghanistan may strengthen its Taliban rulers, while eroding sympathy for the United States.
Washington has worked hard to get across the message that its war is against terrorists, not against Muslims. But many Pakistanis say the inevitable toll of innocents could become part of an easily exploited image of a Christian superpower raining more misery on a desperately poor Muslim backwater.
President Pervez Musharraf backs the United States, outraged by the attacks and also eager for better relations at a time when hard-pressed Pakistan can use a wealthy friend.
For diplomats and analysts, the crucial question is whether he can keep Pakistanis behind him as events unfold.
Abdul Basit, a Yale-educated Lahore lawyer who colleagues say has refused offers to be attorney general, believes Musharraf has made a fatal mistake.
Islamic extremism may have limited legislative clout, he said, but its undercurrents are strong and growing fast.
"Every Pakistani is extremely susceptible to the rhetoric," Basit said. Stroking his own clean-shaven cheeks, he added, "You may find a very well-dressed man, but he might have a beard inside."
Then there is Pakistan's nuclear capability.
"In a Talibanization of Pakistan, I see nuclear weapons being brandished in support of fanatics," Basit concluded. "If all this gets into irresponsible hands, it's a horrible thought."
Associated Press interviews suggest air attacks have hardened attitudes against America.
"Bombing is not good," said Sayeed Ahmed, 19, a science student in the megalopolis of Karachi. "If you want to eliminate terrorists, you kill them, not women and children."
Tariq Anwar, a 42-year-old exporter from Peshawar who stopped to watch the waves at Karachi's beach, made a similar point. Most Pakistanis, he added, simply see American bombs killing Muslims.
"This could very soon turn into something much bigger, spreading elsewhere in the world," he said.
In Quetta, the leather-trimmed lawyers' lounge at the High Court hums with conversation, and agreement is widespread: The terrorist attacks were contemptible, but Americans must retaliate within international law.
"On the one hand you lament the loss of innocent lives and on the other you are doing the same thing," said Raja Afsar, former Baluchistan advocate general.
Just outside of town, four young women who run a UN development project each eagerly volunteered that she would pick Osama bin Laden over George W. Bush as a hero under any circumstance. And all four said they were prepared to go to Afghanistan to help the war effort.
"What America is doing is totally wrong," said Ayesha Shah, 22. Her 28-year-old friend, Amna Khan, 28, chimed in: "Who is America to change governments? What about its terror in Vietnam and Iraq?"
TITLE: Worldwide Anthrax Panic Worsens
AUTHOR: By Hans Greimel
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO - Fear of suspicious powder sent fire fighters racing to two embassies in Malaysia, halted mail service in Finland and evacuated a high school and government building in Japan on Monday.
Global jitters worsened after tests discovered traces of anthrax in white powder leaking from a letter at a Bahamas post office, and doctors diagnosed a new case of the deadly disease in the United States.
The Bahamas incident was the third case of parcel-packed anthrax outside the United States, after cases last week in Kenya and Argentina.
Of the hundreds of suspicious packets surfacing worldwide, most have so far been ruled false alarms. But authorities have little choice but to check each scare.
"Our country absolutely can't take this threat too lightly," Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian said Monday, deciding to step up emergency drills and stockpile vaccines. "We must be prepared for every possible threat."
Concerns were much the same elsewhere.
In Finland and Denmark, the countries' main mail-sorting centers closed when white powder was found leaking from letters. The Copenhagen shutdown delayed delivery of 75,000 letters, while the Finnish workers were rushed to disinfecting showers.
Neighboring Sweden has pulled 142 suspicious items from the mail - with the 57 packets so far tested all proving false alarms.
Trying to blunt the rash of fake anthrax threats, British officials said they will try to increase the penalties for hoaxes. Anti-terrorist legislation to be introduced in Parliament next month will include a provision that boosts time behind bars for such pranks to seven years, from six months.
In the United States, a Washington postal worker has fallen "gravely ill" from inhalation anthrax, a rare and lethal form of the disease, and five others are sick with suspicious symptoms.
The diagnosed man, who was not identified, is the third person in the United States to come down with the most serious form of the disease, where anthrax spores enter the respiratory system and lodge deep in the lungs.
Six others, including two postal workers in New Jersey, have been infected with a highly treatable form that is contracted through the skin.
TITLE: U.K. Foreign Minister: Terrorism Will Spread
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - Terrorism will spread unless it is stopped, Britain's foreign minister said Monday, invoking the Cold War-era "domino theory" to justify the U.S.-led coalition's strategy of retaliation.
"In the '50s and '60s and '70s there was a great debate amongst diplomats and policy people about the so-called 'domino theory' - whether, if we did not stop communism in Vietnam and places like that, it would spread like a virus across the world. That debate can go on amongst the historians," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a news conference.
"But one thing I know for certain is that the domino theory applies with a vengeance so far as international terrorism is concerned, and unless we stop it now, it certainly will spread."
Despite reports that Britain has committed special-forces troops to ground action in Afghanistan, Straw said he would not speculate about future ground action.
"Of course there are circumstances where obviously the air action has to be supplemented by ground forces."
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said Monday that using British ground troops is an option being explored.
"I'm not going to put a time scale on that. We always have troops ready to go at very short notice," he said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview.
But an outspoken critic of the government's support for the U.S.-led coalition attacks in Afghanistan challenged Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday to allow a vote on the war in the House of Commons.
"My view on this is that we should have free and open debate, and what on Earth is the government so afraid of?" said Paul Marsden.
Marsden was one of six members of the governing Labor Party who signed a motion last week criticizing Blair's unstinting support for the U.S. policy.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Helicopter Crash
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taliban said Monday they had found the wreckage of a crashed helicopter in southern Helmand province, as well as indications two other helicopters had come in to try to remove it.
"Yesterday, a crashed helicopter was found in the Registan area of Helmand province on the border with [Pakistan's] Baluchistan," Education Minister Mullah Amir Khan Muttaqi said.
"It is most probably an American one. Two more helicopters had come to take away the crashed one, but due to firing they could not land and escaped," he said. "We don't know more details and how many people were on board or about their fate now."
Around the nearby southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban had found tires and small pieces of a helicopter hit in a U.S. ground raid Friday night, he said.
The claims could not be independently verified, and contradicted U.S. accounts of the raid.
Berlin Elections
BERLIN (AP) - Chancellor Gerhard Schröder on Monday left open his party's choice of a coalition partner to run the German capital but hinted that the former East German communists, who oppose his pro-U.S. policy on Afg hanistan, wouldn't be favored.
Berlin city elections Sunday confirmed Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit for a five-year term as the city's first openly gay mayor, but they also handed the party led by Schröder a headache.
While the Social Democrats fell short of a majority at 29.7 percent of the vote, the ex-communist Party of Democratic Socialism finished a strong third and staked its claim to share power in Berlin for the first time since German reunification in 1990.
Schröder said Monday that Wowereit has a free hand to negotiate a "stable" coalition for Berlin, but he alluded to polls showing strong unease among the Social Democrat rank and file about an alliance with the reformed communists.
Airport Attack Kills 4
SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Indian security forces killed four Muslim separatist guerrillas when they tried to storm a key military airfield in revolt-racked Jammu and Kashmir state Monday, a defense spokesperson said.
A civilian was killed and a paramilitary trooper was wounded in the gunbattle that erupted at the outer gates of Quil airport, in the Avantipur area of southern Kashmir.
"Alert forces engaged terrorists for 40 minutes near the outer gate of the airport and finally shot them dead," the spokesperson said.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. More than a dozen guerrilla groups have been fighting Indian rule in Kashmir since late 1989.
The airport, used by the army, air force and paramilitary forces, is about 30 kilometers from Srinagar, the summer capital of the state.
U.S. Engineer on Trial
BEIJING (Reuters) - China tried American engineer Fong Fuming on Monday on charges of obtaining secret state documents and bribery, only hours after President George W. Bush had left after attending an Asia-Pacific summit in Shanghai.
But there was no verdict in the trial which the court declared concluded after a session lasting seven hours, despite an announcement there would be a further hearing to consider new evidence, a U.S. embassy spokesperson said.
Fong's was one of a number of cases raised when the U.S. human-rights dialogue with China, suspended after American warplanes bombed Beijing's embassy in Belgrade in 1999, resumed in Washington earlier this month, an embassy spokesperson said.
China had said that Fong, president of a Hong Kong power company, "obtained by illegal means 43 copies of secret- and confidential-level state documents through an engineer of the State Power Corp. between 1995 and 1996, and gave bribes of 245,000 yuan."
Back in Service
LONDON (Reuters) - A Concorde took off from London to New York Monday for the first time since one of the supersonic planes crashed in Paris last year, killing 113 people and grounding the entire Concorde fleet.
The jet, embarking on the first transatlantic test flight since safety modifications were made to the fleet, left London's Heathrow airport 40 minutes later than scheduled due to fog and congestion, a British Airways (BA) spokes person said.
BA said the flight would be used to assess the operation of the aircraft, the third BA Concorde to be upgraded. Two earlier modified aircraft have flown halfway across the Atlantic as part of ongoing tests.
Investigators said the July accident occurred when one of the aircraft's tires exploded after running over a strip of metal on the runway. Chunks of rubber pierced the underwing fuel tanks, sparking the fireball.
Soccer Fans Riot
TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) - Hundreds of Iranian youths clashed with police and volunteer basij militia in the early hours of Monday after the national Iranian soccer team lost a key World Cup qualifying match in Bahrain, witnesses said.
They said many of the youths gathered in two squares in southwest Tehran, smashing windows of state banks and government buildings, after the soccer team lost 3-1 to Bahrain in a match that ended late on Sunday.
A group of about 50 basij militia men, wielding large sticks, later moved along the main street between the two squares sending the last protesters running up nearby alleys, while street cleaners were sweeping up debris.
Youths had also gathered in a street in north Tehran, where there were some small clashes between police and the soccer fans.
Witnesses said fans were angered because of rumors that the national team might have been under pressure to throw the game to prevent a repeat of the euphoric clashes that occurred 10 days ago when Iran beat Iraq and the Iranian team looked set to secure automatic qualification for the finals.
Palestine Bans PFLP
JERUSALEM (AP) - The Palestinian leadership has outlawed the group that claimed responsibility for the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister, after Israeli troops tightened their grip on six West Bank towns.
At its weekly meeting Sunday in Gaza, the Palestinian National Security Council singled out the armed wing of a radical PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The PFLP said its men killed Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi last Wednesday, revenge for Israel's killing of the PFLP leader Mustafa Zibri in an Aug. 27 missile attack. Israel said it targeted Zibri because he had organized car bombings carried out by the group.
TITLE: Rams Find Right 'Canidate' To Replace Faulk
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey - Trung Canidate scored twice and accounted for 232 yards Sunday, helping the St. Louis Rams remain the NFL's only unbeaten team with a 34-14 victory over the New York Jets.
St. Louis is only the second NFL team to start three-straight seasons with six victories. The 1929-31 Green Bay Packers had the only other such streak.
Canidate replaced Marshall Faulk, last season's Most Valuable Player, who bruised his right knee a week ago and was inactive for Sunday's game after saying during the week he might be able to play against the Jets (3-3).
The Rams and Canidate did just fine without him. Canidate rushed for 195 yards on 23 carries and added three receptions for 37 yards.
Canidate broke a 7-7 tie with the second of St. Louis' three touchdowns in the second quarter, and he will never have an easier score in his career.
With the Rams on their own 44, wide receiver Az-Zahir Hakim took a handoff and was about to be tackled after a 12-yard gain when he pitched to Canidate near the sideline.
Canidate was in the clear for the final 44 yards and just trotted the last 10. He was going backward as he crossed the goal line, and because of the lateral, he wasn't even officially credited with a rushing attempt on the play.
Cleveland 24, Baltimore 14. Tim Couch threw two quick touchdown passes in the third quarter as Cleveland beat Baltimore for the first time since returning to the league.
Cleveland's defense forced three turnovers, had seven sacks and dominated the Super Bowl champion Ravens (3-3), who are a shell of the team whose defense dominated the NFL last season.
The Browns (4-2) were 0-4 and outscored 116-26 since '99 against the Ravens and owner Art Modell, who broke Cleveland's collective heart when he moved his franchise to Baltimore following the 1995 season.
Couch was 11-of-18 for 149 yards and rookie James Jackson rushed for 77 yards and one TD for the Browns, whose biggest win in three years will be followed by an off week.
Baltimore's Matt Stover set an NFL record by making a field goal for the 32nd-straight game but that was the lone bright spot for the Ravens, whose defense has given up 55 points the past two weeks after allowing 165 all last season.
Chicago 24, Cincinnati 0. Anthony Thomas ran for a team rookie-record 188 yards and a touchdown as Chicago won its fourth-straight game.
The Bears (4-1) are on their longest winning streak since 1995, the last time they made the playoffs. They're off to their best start since 1991, when they finished 11-5.
Thomas, a second-round draft pick who had not run for more than 58 yards in a game, darted through big holes on his 22 carries and wound up with the eighth-best rushing game in Bears history.
The crowd of 63,408 left early as the Bengals (3-3) were shut out at home for the first time in three years.
The Bears dominated every aspect and could have scored even more points. They missed a field goal, had another wiped out by a penalty and fumbled at the Bengals' 2-yard line, leaving them ahead only 10-0 at the half.
Chicago's defense, the NFL's stingiest, also was at the top of its game. Bengals running back Corey Dillon got only 30 yards on 16 carries.
Pittsburgh 17, Tampa Bay 10. Jerome Bettis threw a 32-yard touchdown pass on a halfback option and ran for 143 yards and a TD as Pittsburgh dominated Tampa Bay for its fourth win in a row.
The Steelers' top-ranked defense sacked Brad Johnson 10 times and intercepted one of his passes in the end zone.
The Bucs (2-3) scored on Johnson's 5-yard pass to Frank Murphy with 28 seconds remaining, then appeared to recover an onside kick at their 43 to give themselves another chance to come back.
The officials ruled that Tampa Bay's Brian Kelly leaped into the air and came down with the ball before it squirted loose when he landed on the ground.
The ruling was reversed after it was reviewed on instant replay and the Steelers (4-1) ran out the clock to stay atop the AFC Central standings with their best start since 1996.
New England 38, Indianapolis 17. David Patten became the first NFL player in exactly 22 years to run, catch and pass for touchdowns in the same game, to lead New England.
Patten caught four passes for 117 yards and two touchdowns, scored on a 29-yard run, and completed a pass to Troy Brown for a 60-yard TD.
Walter Payton was the last player with such a trifecta, doing it against Minnesota on Oct. 21, 1979.
Tom Brady, filling in for Drew Bledsoe again, was 16-for-20 for 202 yards and three touchdowns, with no interceptions.
Entering the game, Patten had touched the ball 19 times this season and hadn't scored once. The first time the wide receiver touched the ball Sunday, on an end-around on the Patriots' first play on offense, Patten ran 29 yards untouched into the end zone.
The Patriots (3-3) easily defeated the Colts - widely considered a potential Super Bowl team - for the second time in four weeks. New England beat Indianapolis 44-13 on Sept. 30.
The Colts (2-3) lost their third-consecutive game and their second straight at home for the first time since November 1998.
Washington 17, Carolina 14. Brett Conway kicked a 23-yard field goal 1:52 into overtime to give coach Marty Schottenheimer his first victory with Washington.
The Redskins (1-5) twice believed they had won the game before they really did. Conway thought his 32-yard field goal with 36 seconds left in regulation was good - it was ruled wide right - and rookie Rod Gardner had a touchdown catch in overtime overturned when it was ruled that he was down by contact at the Panthers' 5-yard line. Conway kicked the game-winner on the next play.
With Washington trailing 14-0, LaVar Arrington's 67-yard interception return with 10:10 to play got the Redskins going, and Gardner caught an 85-yard touchdown pass on Washington's next offensive play to tie the score with 7:25 left. Suddenly, in a three-minute span, the Redskins had more points than they had scored in any game all season.
The Panthers (1-5) have lost five straight and were beaten on the last play of the game for the second consecutive week. It probably won't get any easier.
Running back Tshimanga Biakabutuka broke his foot in the fourth quarter after rushing for 121 yards and a touchdown. He is to have surgery Monday and most likely is out for the season.
Tony Banks completed 17 of 30 passes for 346 yards with one touchdown and one interception. Gardner had six catches for 208 yards, and Stephen Davis ran for 99 yards on 26 attempts.
Tennessee 27, Detroit 24. Joe Nedney kicked four field goals, including from 46 yards with five seconds left, for Tennessee.
Titans quarterback Steve McNair's 22-yard run set up the game-winning kick after Detroit (0-5) tied the game 24-all with 1:18 left. Tennessee has won two straight after starting the season 0-3.
Detroit, meanwhile, is off to its worst start since 1989, and a loss to Cincinnati at home next week would drop the Lions to 0-6 for the first time since 1955.
On the fourth play of the game, Lions defensive end Tracy Scroggins and Titans tackle Brad Hopkins were ejected for fighting. Midway through the second quarter, Detroit defensive tackle Luther Elliss was ejected for pushing an official.
TITLE: Davenport Downs Dokic To Win Swisscom Event
AUTHOR: By Erica Bulman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ZURICH, Switzerland - Lindsay Davenport defeated Jelena Dokic 6-3, 6-1 Sunday to win the Swisscom Challenge for her sixth title of the season.
The third-seeded Davenport has beaten Dokic all four times they have played. Dokic, seeded fourth, had not dropped a set until the final.
"This is the best I can do without winning a Grand Slam," said Davenport, who reached the final with a win over the WTA's new No. 1 player, Jennifer Capriati.
Davenport also won titles in Zurich in 1997 and 1998. Her record at the Zurich tournament to 15-1, with her only loss in last year's final to Martina Hingis.
Davenport took control by winning eight-straight games, going from 3-3 in the first set to 5-0 in the second.
Dokic committed four double-faults in the first game of the match and saved two break points in the third game. Davenport finally broke for 3-2 on the Yugoslav's error, but Dokic tied it 3-3 on her seventh break point.
Davenport then ran off the last three games of the set, wrapping it up with a forehand crosscourt winner. She rode her strong serve and more Dokic errors to a 5-0 lead in the second set, the final point of the run coming on a crosscourt winner. She served out the match at love.
"In the beginning, I thought she played very well and I was just fighting to stay in there," Davenport said. "Every game was going to deuce many times. It was very evenly contested. But definitely in the second set she made a lot more errors. Her game got progressively worse as the match went on."
Davenport already has qualified for the WTA Tour's year-end championship in Munich, Germany, from Oct. 30 to Nov. 4.
Dokic made the top 10 with her Kremlin Cup title in Moscow two weeks ago, moving up to ninth in the rankings.
"On this surface it's really hard to beat her," Dokic said. "In the second set I just made too many unforced errors and you can't do that with Lindsay. I was trying to go for it a bit too much and that's where you make mistakes.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Sampras Pulls Out
STUTTGART, Germany (Reuters) - Pete Sampras' season has come to an abrupt end after he pulled out of next week's Swiss Indoors tournament.
An ATP spokesperson said Sunday that the former world No. 1 had informed the organizers of the event in Basle that he would not take the wild card they had offered him.
After a shock defeat in straight sets to qualifier Max Mirnyi at the Stuttgart Masters Series tournament Friday, Sampras had said that if he did not go to Basle he would fly home to the United States and would not return for the Paris Open the following week.
Miami Signs Strickland
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (Reuters) - Pat Riley and the Miami Heat are apparently going against their offseason youth movement.
According the Sun-Sentinel, the Heat have agreed to terms with troubled 35-year-old point guard Rod Strickland.
With a reputation as a selfish player, Strickland has in the past skipped practices and team meetings while alienating his teammates and coaches during stops in New York, San Antonio, Portland and Washington.
Last season, he was suspended for a game by Wizards coach Leonard Hamilton, who then helped arrange a $2.5-million contract buyout so that Strickland could be released in late February.
While not on the court, Strickland was once suspended for fighting with former Washington teammate Tracy Murray in 1997 and has been arrested for DUI three times.
Strickland led the NBA in assists in 1998 and finished second in 1999. He enters the upcoming campaign ranked third in assists among active players.
TITLE: Diamondbacks Heading to World Series
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATLANTA - For Randy Johnson and all the other Arizona old-timers, the long journey ended Sunday night.
And now, another one begins.
The Diamondbacks reached the World Series faster than any expansion team ever, doing it in only their fourth year of existence when Johnson pitched them past the Atlanta Braves 3-2 in Game 5 of the NL championship series.
A new franchise, yet one loaded with veterans who had never gone this far before.
"I'm so thrilled for all the guys in this room," said NLCS MVP Craig Counsell, the only player on the roster with a championship ring. "So many guys in there have played 10, 12 years, accomplished so much in their career, and not had a chance to do this."
Johnson will be joined by 10 other thirtysomethings - Mark Grace, Luis Gonzalez and Jay Bell among them - making their first Series appearance.
"I realize how special it is. There's no guarantee you'll ever get to the World Series," Johnson said. "There's only two or three people on our team who have ever been there. I think we want to enjoy the moment, and then realize we have more work to do."
Now, the 38-year-old ace with three Cy Young awards gets to step onto baseball's biggest stage.
Game 1 is Saturday night at Bank One Ballpark, against either the New York Yankees or Seattle Mariners. And Arizona has ominous news for anyone visiting the desert - be it Schilling or Johnson, both aces will be fully rested for the opener.
"I think they've got a great chance," Atlanta manager Bobby Cox said. "They've clearly got the most outstanding back-to-back starters you could ever want."
Johnson, who had lost a record seven-straight postseason decisions coming into the series, erased all doubt about his ability to win when it counted. Sweating and grimacing, he earned his second victory in six days, having won 2-0 in Game 1.
The Big Unit made his 118th and final pitch his best, striking out Brian Jordan with the bases loaded to preserve a one-run lead in the seventh inning. Fellow ace Curt Schilling applauded from the dugout, and patted Johnson when he reached the top step.
Erubiel Durazo, pinch hitting for the injured Grace, hit a tiebreaking, two-run homer in the fifth off Tom Glavine. Danny Bautista, starting on a hunch by manager Bob Brenly, had an RBI single.
Byung-Hyun Kim relieved Johnson and pitched two hitless innings for his second save, making Brenly the first manager to lead a team to the World Series in his first year since Kansas City's Jim Frey in 1980.
Counsell, who helped the Florida Marlins beat Cleveland in Game 7 in 1997, hit .381 and scored five runs in five games.
A startlingly small crowd of 35,652, about 15,000 short of a sellout, saw the Diamondbacks win their third in a row at Atlanta. It was no surprise - this year, the Braves became the only team in baseball history to reach the postseason with a losing record at home.
Once again, Atlanta hurt itself with a misplay. Second baseman Marcus Giles botched Counsell's leadoff grounder in the fifth for an error and with two outs, Durazo homered. Durazo batted after Grace left with a tight right hamstring.
The Diamondbacks scored nine unearned runs in the five games against Atlanta. They have not yet given up an unearned run in this series.
Johnson, coming off the three-hit shutout in Game 1, had no trouble until Julio Franco hit a solo homer in the fourth that made it 1-all.
Johnson faced his toughest test in the seventh when a two-out walk to Giles set up Franco's RBI single. Chipper Jones then worked a tense, eight-pitch walk to bring up Jordan with the bases loaded.
Pitching on fumes, Johnson got Jordan to swing over a slider to end the inning.
New York Yankees 3, Seattle 1. No one could scold Alfonso Soriano for admiring this shot.
Soriano, a rookie on a team of veterans, moved the New York Yankees one win from their fourth-straight trip to the World Series. His two-run homer off Kazuhiro Sasaki in the ninth inning Sunday night ended a wild and gritty game, giving New York a 3-1 victory over Seattle and a 3-1 lead in the AL championship series.
"I think we're just blessed," said Bernie Williams, who tied it with an eighth-inning homer. "It has taken a lot of work. It has a lot to do with the attitude of this club."
Seattle's Bret Boone broke up a scoreless game with an eighth-inning homer off Ramiro Mendoza, moving the Mariners within six outs of fulfilling the promise of manager Lou Piniella, who pledged his team would stretch the series to six games and force New York to return to Safeco Field.
But Williams answered right back with a drive in the bottom half off Arthur Rhodes, who gave up David Justice's go-ahead, seventh-inning homer in the Game 6 clincher last year.
Soriano, the rookie second baseman whose strong spring training caused the Yankees to find a spot for him in their lineup, won it with his homer off Sasaki, last year's AL Rookie of the Year.
"We just jumped off the bench," Tino Martinez said. "We knew it was gone when he hit it."
In Game 1, Soriano was criticized by the Yankees for failing to run out a ball he thought was a home run and then getting only to first base when it clanked off Safeco's left-field wall. And in Game 3, he was slow to cover second base, contributing to the Mariners' win.
Scott Brosius, whose two-run double propelled the Yankees to their Game 2 win, reached on an infield single with one out against Sasaki, who allowed just six homers all season.
Soriano took a ball, then sent an opposite-field drive to right-center. Mike Cameron went back and jumped, but the ball was helped by a stiff wind and landed about 3 meters past him.
"They used the elements very well today," Cameron said. "For a minute, I thought I had a play on it, but it didn't seem like it wanted to be played."
Roger Clemens and Paul Abbott reunited in a rematch of last year's fourth game. Clemens allowed one hit, just like he did last year, but Abbott pitched hitless ball.
Because of their wildness, both were pulled after the fifth inning. Abbott walked eight, one short of the ALCS record.
It then came down to a battle of the bullpens, and the Yankees prevailed. As usual.
Andy Pettitte will try to close it out Monday night against Aaron Sele in a rematch of Game 1 starters. The three-time defending World Series champions are trying to become the first team to win four-straight pennants since they did it from 1960-64.
TITLE: Ivanisevic Continues To Win in Petersburg
AUTHOR: By John Varoli
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Fifth-seeded Goran Ivanisevic pounded his way past unseeded Chilean Nicholas Massu to advance into the second round of the St. Petersburg Open on Monday evening at the Sport and Concert Complex. The 1.93-meter-tall Croatian Ivanisevic needed only 55 minutes to win 6-2, 6-3 over the Chilean who struggled to return Ivanisevic's legendary serve.
Though he reached the Wimbeldon finals in 1998 and has been named service-ace champion five times, which has earned him the title of "King of Aces," Ivanisevic struggled on the court in 2000, finishing the year ranked 96th in the ATP, the governing body of the men's professional tennis circuit.
He has recovered this year, however, most notably with a victory at Wimbledon, tennis' most glorious tournament.
It was this form that he showed during his first-round match, attended by a crowd of about 500 who gave the Croatian a rousing round of applause when he walked onto the court.
Ivanisevic got off to a slow start, splitting the first two games with Massu, but then went on to break the Chilean in the fourth game, following that with two service aces in the fifth game to go up 4-1. Ivanisevic never lost the momentum and continued to roll over Massu in the second set, appropriately finishing him off with an ace.
In other first-round matches on Monday, sixth-seeded Frenchman, Fabrice Santoro, easily defeated the unseeded 20-year-old, St. Petersburg resident, Mikhail Elgin, 6-4, 6-3, in little over an hour, while unseeded Czech, Daniel Vacek, struggled to take out unseeded Belgian, Olivier Rochus, in two sets.
After Vacek easily won the first set 6-3, both players played a bitter duel in the second set, with the 1.90-meter-tall Vacek finally coming out on top in a tiebreaker, 7-6.
Unseeded Bulgarian, Vladimir Voltch kov, upsetted eighth-seeded French man, Nicolas Escude in a tense two-set match. After Voltchkov, ranked 53rd in the world, easily won the first set 6-2, Escude, put up a tougher fight in the second, but the Bulgarian hung on to emerge victorious in a tiebreaker, 7-6.
The St. Petersburg Open offers cash prizes of $800,000, an almost three-fold increase since the first tournament in 1995, and games will be played every day and evening all week long, with the finals on Sunday. The tournament is sponsored by BaltUNEXIM bank, one of the city's largest banks, and the Conti Group, headed by jailed businessperson Mikhail Mirilashvili, and famous for its Astoria and Olympia casinos, as well as others.
Despite the meager cash prizes, the open has attracted several top-ranked players and crowd favorites, such as Russians Yevgeny Kafelnikov and Marat Safin, as well as Spaniard Juan Ferrero.
Most important for the city's reputation, however, is the open's inclusion in the ATP's list of tournaments. Each year, the ATP conducts 68 tournaments in 31 countries on six continents, and the St. Petersburg Open is the last stop before the Tennis Masters Cup in Sydney, Australia.
Though the open began in 1995, it's not the first tennis tournament in St. Petersburg, which is also known as the motherland of Russian tennis. According to a book by Boris Fomenko, "The History of Tennis in Russia," the first Russian tennis championship was played on Krestovsky Island in 1907, and was called the Open Cup of St. Petersburg.