SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #748 (14), Tuesday, February 26, 2002
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TITLE: Olympics Trigger Cold War Rhetoric
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia plunged the Olympic movement into its worst crisis since the Cold War over the weekend, with rhetoric spewing forth from every corner of society damning the perceived bias against Russian athletes at the Salt Lake City games.
Using epithets such as evil, lawlessness and robbery, a bitter country vented its anger at officials of the 19th Winter Olympics, which President Vladimir Putin characterized as "a flop" and the Orthodox Church called unfair.
Protests were held outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow over the weekend, and jokes have already appeared on popular Internet sites like Anekdot.ru.
Already seething over the International Olympic Committee's decision in the first week of the games to award - after an intense populist media campaign across North America - a second gold medal in pairs figure skating to a Canadian duo that was beaten by Anton Sikharulidze and Yelena Berezhnaya, the storm broke for real when Russia's women's cross-country team was forced to withdraw from the 4 x 5K relay race Thursday. Just 15 minutes before start time, officials banned nine-time medalist Larisa Lazutina and another team member for having too much hemoglobin in their blood, leaving the heavily favored team no time to find replacements. Lazutina was also subsequently stripped of her individual 30K classical gold medal, and her teammate Olga Danilova was `disqualified from the race, in which she had finished eighth.
Prompted by that move and a number of other controversial decisions, the State Duma passed a resolution Friday unanimously accusing the IOC of bias and urging a boycott of Sunday night's closing ceremony.
"Send the president's plane to pick up our Olympic team and fly them home,'' Liberal Democrat Alexei Mitrofanov told lawmakers.
"Our team is absolutely clean. It is simply lawlessness," a visibly furious Russian Olympic chief Leonid Tyagachyov told Russian television after the cross-country team was disqualified. "If this chaos continues, then we will have to look at the question of alternative games."
Russian officials then prompted the worst Olympic crisis since the boycotts of the 1980s by threatening, in an impromptu press conference, not only to walk out of this year's games, but also the summer games in Athens in 2004 unless measures were taken within 24 hours.
Tyagachyov called the awarding of an extra gold medal to the Canadian pair Jamie Sale and David Pelletier "practically unprecedented." He said: "We went along with the decision and tried to look at it objectively.... But we have only so much patience."
Russian officials also protested the judging of the women's freestyle skiing competition, in which Olga Koroleva finished fourth despite leading after the first of two rounds. Some Russian newspapers also criticized the awarding of the ice-dancing gold to a French couple over the Russian pair of Ilya Averbukh and Irina Lobacheva.
Tyagachyov said an unfair number of Russian athletes were singled out for drug tests, including cross-country skier Pavel Rostovtsev, who, according to Russian television, had three rather than the usual two blood samples taken only minutes before the start of a race.
And the men's hockey team, officials said, was unfairly penalized in its 1-0 quarterfinal win against the Czech Republic, as well as in its 3-2 semifinal loss to the United States on Friday.
Russian coach Vyacheslav Fetisov accused the referee of favoring the U.S. team and denying Russia an equalizer in the third period.
"[Canadian National Hockey League referee Bill McCreary] just killed us," Fetisov said. "[The referees] live here, they work here, they get paid by the NHL, therefore it's only natural that in crucial situations they will not make any calls against the U.S. or Canada," he said. "It was designed to be a U.S.-Canada final, and now they have it."
Only a few hours after the news conference threatening the boycott, figure-skating star Irina Slutskaya was upset by 16-year-old American newcomer Sarah Hughes, giving Russia another reason to complain. After favorite Michelle Kwan stumbled, Slutskaya looked certain for gold, but Hughes outscored a nervous Slutskaya, who looked incredulous at her low marks.
"Those bastards. Idiots," said Slutskaya just after seeing the marks the judges gave her. "Are they blind?" she said, Gazeta.ru reported.
Russia protested the decision, saying Slutskaya should be awarded a gold as in the pairs, but the protest was rejected.
"North American athletes receive a clear advantage," Putin told reporters, directing the charge at new IOC President Jacques Rogge.
Rogge responded to Russia's complaints with a letter to Putin, but compounded the problem by addressing the letter to A. Putin rather than V. Putin, drawing even more fire.
"Before addressing a head of state, it wouldn't hurt to learn that he is not Antoine, nor Andre, but Vladimir," said Putin spokesperson Sergei Yastrzhembsky, who was among dozens of notable figures to condemn the games on Russian television stations, which spent hours discussing the perceived injustices.
"It's a continuation of the Cold War," said film director Nikita Mikhalkov.
Even major corporations jumped into the fray.
Russian Aluminum, one of the sponsors of the Olympic team, issued a press release Friday saying that the "organizers of the Olympics have declared war on our athletes." The metals giant said that it would hire "top lawyers" to protect Russian athletes from the "machinations" that have stripped them of victory.
In North America, Russia's complaints were mainly seen as sour grapes and a return to Cold War antics. Other countries, especially those that also had grievances - such as South Korea, whose skater Kim Dong-sung had been disqualified in favor of American Apolo Anton Ohno - were more sympathetic.
Many non-Russian observers were critical of the IOC's decision to award a second gold in pairs figure skating, and there was some sympathy for the cross-country team.
But in the end, cooler heads in the Russian delegation prevailed.
"We will stay at the games," Gennady Shvets, a spokesperson for the Russian team, said late Friday, describing the threat to withdraw as "emotional."
"Everybody understood we had to stay."
Putin praised Russian athletes on Sunday for remaining despite "complicated conditions" in Salt Lake City.
In a message released by the Kremlin, Putin made no direct reference to complaints by Russian officials that their athletes had been victims of biased judging. But he said athletes had proved that "hard work and endurance" were required qualities.
"I know that in the difficult conditions of these games, those qualities took on a special meaning," the message said.
"And I thank all those who did not give way to emotions in a difficult atmosphere at these games. The decision taken by our team to cover the extremely difficult Olympic distance to its conclusion was a wise one."
TITLE: VOX POPULI
TEXT: Now that the scandal-plagued Salt Lake City Olympics have ended, Staff Writer Irina Titova hit the streets of St. Petersburg to ask locals what they thought about the games and whether or not they were fair to the Russian team.
Irina Pavlova, 41, biologist:
It's hard to judge. Maybe our athletes really were to blame for something, or maybe the judges were somewhat biased.
As for the situation with [cross-country skier] Larisa Lazutina's high hemoglobin content before the relay race, I'd say it's a complicated case. Having some relation to medicine, I know that hemoglobin is difficult to control. It depends on many factors. Besides, her hemoglobin level wasn't that high.
Mikhail Trener, 18, German student studying in St. Petersburg:
I haven't seen much of the Olympics. But I think it wasn't fair at least in the case when the French ice dancers beat the Russian Ilya Averbukh and Irina Lobachyova. The Russians skated much more beautifully."
Oleg Surikov, 64, teacher of Physics:
It was a bad Olympics and not fair. To my mind, the Russian team shouldn't have shown up at the closing ceremony. I wouldn't have.
The judging was unfair, especially in regards to figure skating. For instance, I don't agree with Irina Slutskaya's second place.
I agree with the opinion that this Olympics was one of the most scandalous in the history of the Olympic movement. There hasn't been so much unfairness before.
I think that such a massive attack on our athletes has to do with politics and particularly with certain changes in the international political situation. It is clear that the United States sees itself as the ruler of the world, and of course, sports victories are viewed as indicators of global leadership. It's like that for any country. However, it should be done honestly.
Alexander Popov, 32, unemployed:
The attitude toward the Russian athletes was obviously biased. It's a fact that taking doping tests from our skiers immediately before the event was not correct.
I'm also dissatisfied with our government's reaction to those facts. They should have announced some vote of no confidence or something like that. They were too passive about the developments.
Meanwhile, the bias against our athletes indicates a prejudice against our country. We witnessed distrust of Russia, plus an attempt to devalue the capabilities of our country, to put them on a par with those of developing countries.
Viktor Shakhmaliyev, 20, photographer:
There were several situations at the Olympics when our athletes were not objectively evaluated. For instance, freestyle skier Olga Korolyova obviously deserved at least third or even second place, while she ended up in fourth.
It seems that the United States has been trying to provoke us to some reaction for a long time. Just remember the Moscow Olympics in 1980 when American athletes didn't participate. Or while interfering in Yugoslavia, the United States kept telling us what we should do about Chechnya.
There is one more strange fact. The American team has never won this many medals before. They usually come in fifth or sixth place [in the overall medals ranking], and now, suddenly, they took the second in Salt Lake City.
It just shows that it was provocative behavior toward all other countries.
- Photos by Sergey Grachev
TITLE: Orthodox Church on Its Way to Antarctica
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Loggers in the Altai region of southern Siberia began a project of truly global scale this month: They are cutting cedar logs to be used next year to build the first Orthodox church on the world's highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent - Antarctica.
The future St. Nicholas church, its builders say, would not only offer pastoral care to a handful of Russian researchers on the Bellinshausen base on King George Island but would also stand as a memorial to the 47 Russians buried on the continent over decades of exploration. Moreover, the 12-meter-tall structure - conceived as a mix of ancient Russian wooden architecture and modern construction technologies - would welcome tourists visiting this relatively mild area of Antarctica.
Some 180 years after Fabian Gottlieb von Bellinshausen led the first Russian naval expedition to the Antarctic area, and 45 years after the Soviet Union established its first station on the continent, the Russian government faced a dilemma last September: It either had to abandon the continent entirely or increase funding for new expeditions and the four stations remaining after two were closed in the 1990s.
Since a complete evacuation would cost about $120 million, officials said, the cabinet preferred to allocate $10 million in the 2002 budget to Antarctica - half to repair a research ship and half to invest in the stations.
To raise Russia's profile in Antarctica, State Duma Deputy Speaker Artur Chilingarov - himself a former polar researcher - undertook an expedition last month to plant the Russian flag on the South Pole. The venture, however, ended in embarrassment when, despite a congratulatory telephone call from President Vladimir Putin, Chilingarov's plane got stuck on the South Pole and his group had to be evacuated by a U.S. aircraft.
Just 10 days later, another Russian expedition journeyed to Antarctica, this time to bless the site of the planned church and erect a wooden cross. The group included the continent's would-be first Orthodox priest, Hegumen Georgy Ilyin; two of the small church's patrons, businesspeople Pyotr Zadirov and Alexander Kravtsov; and its architect, Pyotr Anisiforov.
"A great deed has been done," Zadirov said in an interview last week at his modest Moscow office decorated with Orthodox icons. "In my view, the entire continent was blessed. We put soil from Jerusalem and poured water from the Jordan River in the foundation of the cross."
For Zadirov, a soft-spoken man whose first profession was testing parachute systems - "a profession that strengthens one's faith," he says - the history of the Antarctic church dates back to the early 1980s. At the time, Soviet polar researchers called on him to drop food and fuel on ice floes in the Arctic Ocean when researchers at drifting stations were cut off from vital supplies. In 1989, Chilingarov, who headed the Arctic and Antarctic Institute, convinced Zadirov to create a specialized air company for emergency polar deliveries. Since then, Zadirov's Antex-Polus has grown into a holding company that operates several aircraft and has branched out into fields as diverse as kerosene trading and real estate.
Zadirov was approached with the idea of sponsoring an Antarctic church by Valery Lukin, head of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, after Lukin learned that Zadirov had spent three years building a church in his native village in the southern Urals to replace one destroyed in 1928.
Lukin said no budget money would be used to construct the church.
"We are not pursuing any political goals there, only ideological ones," Lukin said in a telephone interview. "The Orthodox Church will be present in Antarctica... and we will have the opportunity to fully, religiously commemorate our people who died there."
With Patriarch Alexy II's blessing, Zadirov set up a special foundation in July 2000 and was joined by another businessperson, Kravtsov, to share the project costs.
"I simply decided that not everybody should be building luxury homes - someone should build something else," Zadirov said, explaining his motivation for sponsoring the church. "When during every liturgy, the prayer is said 'for the founders, benefactors and beautifiers of this holy church,' it is of great importance to you."
"When one researcher's wife was killed in an accident in St. Petersburg, or another man's wife abandoned him - what could they do? Only go get a liter of vodka and drink," Zadirov said. "Now we are at least offering an alternative - go drink vodka or go weep at the church. The Communists did not offer us such an alternative."
While Soviet bases made do with "red corners" for party meetings, other nations built chapels at their Antarctic stations, with the Chapel of the Snows at the U.S. McMurdo Station believed to be the world's southernmost building constructed for religious purposes.
During last month's visit, the Russian Orthodox delegation visited a Chilean chapel made of trailers topped with a makeshift cross. "That's not what the Russian heart yearns for," said architect Anisiforov.
When five sketches were presented to the patriarch last year, he signed off on the design submitted by Anisiforov, who was also the architect of the Urals church funded by Zadirov. Anisiforov said his design for the polar church combines two types of traditional Russian wooden architecture: fortresses and churches.
"It is, so to speak, a lighthouse and an outpost of Russia that must simultaneously comply with all the requirements of Orthodox canons for church buildings ... and withstand Antarctica's harsh climate," he said in a telephone interview from Barnaul. "This is a very complicated task."
The church was placed on a hill above Bellinshausen on King George Island - which is off the tip of Graham Land and the closest island to Cape Horn (about 1,000 kilometers away) - because the area has a relatively mild climate and is most frequently visited by tourists. The hope is that tourists' purchases of candles and small donations will help maintain the church at a place where only 10 Russians stay through the Arctic winter and 15 more join them during the summer. Lukin said a total of 90 scientists populate the four Russian stations permanently and up to 80 more join during annual summer expeditions in December.
From last month's trip, Anisiforov brought samples of the soil that are now undergoing tests to determine the right structural design for the church to stand on Antarctica's mix of stone and ice. Siberian cedar and larch were picked as the most durable material: They can stand for hundreds of years in Antarctica's bacteria-free environment, where metal rusts easily due to the high alkaline levels and concrete is soon eroded by wind. But to withstand the terrible gusts reaching 50 meters per second, the log structure has to be braced by internal steel cables akin to those in the Ostankino television tower in Moscow. Special rust-resistant screws are to be used to keep the roofing shingles in place.
Zadirov said that $10,000 out of the planned $60,000 construction budget has already been spent on the lumber, which has to be cut in the wintertime. From March to June next year, the church is to be built in the Altai region. After the wood yields during the Siberian summertime, the church will be disassembled in November and shipped in containers, first by railroad from Barnaul to St. Petersburg, and then, in December, by ship to Antarctica. If all goes as planned, by March next year, the small St. Nicholas church will stand on the hill above Bellinshausen.
TITLE: Ironic Article Lands Journalist in Court
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Chelyabinsk law student has taken a German journalist to court after he quoted a song written by the student in an article examining President Vladimir Putin's cult of personality.
Mikhail Anishchenko has charged that Klaus-Helge Donath, of the Berlin-based newspaper Die Tageszeitung, defamed him in an ironic article titled "Kim Il Putin Lets Himself Be Celebrated," which was printed in May last year.
The lawsuit, in which Anishchenko is seeking 300,000 rubles ($9,700), will be heard Tuesday in Moscow's Gagarin district court.
The article quotes Anishchenko's song as saying: "Tell me, Russia, answer the question; why do you believe the president and feel no tears when you look at him and your soul is in sympathy with him."
A suit filed Nov. 1, 2001, a copy of which has been obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, charges that Donath was implying that Putin had paid Anishchenko to write the ode.
Anishchenko draws this conclusion from Donath's text that reads: "The president enjoys limitless power and can rush to the aid of each patriot," followed by a new paragraph beginning: "One of [the patriots] could be the Chelyabinsk student Mikhail Anishchenko."
Anishchenko's suit says the suggestion that he did not write the ode out of patriotic feeling does damage to his reputation both as a writer and lawyer.
Donath said Friday in a telephone interview that he did not say that Putin had paid Anishchenko, although a Russian translation of the article published on Internet sites, with which neither he nor Die Tageszeitung have had any relationship, allowed that interpretation.
"But I don't think the author of the ode, Mr. Anishchenko, is as interested in a possible translation error as much as the chance to attack a foreign correspondent," Donath said.
Anishchenko initially brought his case before the Gagarin court in October, only to have it thrown out. Then Anishchenko produced a second, more detailed claim, the first hearing of which was held in December, in which he accused Donath of spreading untruths and argued that his accreditation should be removed and the Tageszeitung office in Moscow be shut down as well.
Donath said the German Embassy has been kept informed about the case and is following developments as are other foreign correspondents.
"I am not on my own here; many journalists are interested that the same thing doesn't happen to them," he said.
Donath said that one of his lawyers had quit his defense team after the state-owned Rossiiskaya Gazeta published an article on the dispute suggesting that there was a link between Anishchenko and the Kremlin.
"She withdrew from the case, and after that I myself took it more seriously," he said.
Genri Reznik, perhaps the country's best known lawyer, is now leading Donath's defense team.
Reznik declined to reveal his defense strategy before Tuesday's hearing.
"What I can say is that it is a totally illegal lawsuit and that we will reject all the claims made," he said.
Yana Sklyarova, an expert with the Media Law and Policy Institute, said in a telephone interview that Anishchenko is not likely to win his case.
It would be hard to prove that Donath was not merely expressing his opinion, she said.
TITLE: Sobchak Honored With Scholarships
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin signed an order Saturday establishing 10 individual scholarships in honor of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Interfax reported.
Citing Sobchak's "considerable contribution to the establishment of the Russian state and the development of legal scholarship," Putin ordered the creation of 10 scholarships valued at 700 rubles per month for students of the law departments of state universities. The scholarships, which will be awarded on a competitive basis, will begin with the 2002-2003 academic year.
Sobchak was the first mayor of St. Petersburg from 1991 to 1996. He died of a heart attack in Kaliningrad on Feb. 19, 2000. Putin served in several senior positions in the Sobchak administration.
Last week, City Hall announced that the city would erect a monument to Sobchak in the near future and would name a city street in his honor. The city will also name the Baltic Lawyers' College after Sobchak and place a memorial marker at 31 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki, where Sobchak lived during the last years of his life.
Vice Governor Yury Antonov told St. Petersburg television that the orders for these honors had already been signed, although it has not yet been determined where the monument will be placed.
"The memory of the first elected mayor of the city and of one of the sources of the democratic transformation of Russia must be commemorated," said City Hall spokesperson Alexander Afanasiev on Friday, according to Interfax.
"The figure of Anatoly Sobchak has entered into our city's history," Afanasiev said.
At the Nikolskoye Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, relatives and colleagues of Sobchak gathered on Feb. 19 to mark the anniversary of the former mayor's death. Wreaths from Putin and Federation Council Chairperson Sergei Mironov were placed on the grave.
TITLE: Fatherland Day Not A Holiday For Everyone
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As most career officers celebrated Defender of the Fatherland Day, Major General Aslanbek Aslakhanov had a quiet day at home in central Moscow.
He is proud of his career in the Interior Ministry, but he is also a Chechen. And for Aslakhanov, who represents Chechnya in the State Duma, Feb. 23 is not a date to celebrate. That was the day in 1944 that the entire Chechen people were deported from their homeland on Stalin's orders.
"I always congratulate my colleagues. It is my country, I never separated Chechnya from the Soviet Union, nor from Russia," Aslakhanov, 59, said Sunday. "And what some political scoundrels are doing in Chechnya cannot be projected to all of the Russian people.
"But Feb. 23 ... is the day of our tragedy."
Accused of collaborating with the Nazis, some 500,000 Chechens and Ingush, who shared a Soviet republic, were rounded up and sent on cattle trains to Central Asia and Siberia. About 100,000 died during the first two years from sickness and hunger.
"Everybody knows that and nobody congratulates me on Feb. 23," Aslakhanov said.
Aslakhanov was just about to turn 2 when officers broke into his family's house in Noviye Atagi. He and his siblings were sent with his grandparents to, of all places, the Stalinskoye village in the Stalinsky district of the Soviet republic of Kirgizia, now Kyrgyzstan.
His parents were not home. His father was in the Soviet Army and had been wounded while fighting against the Germans, and his mother had left the day before to visit him in the hospital. They would join their children only three years later.
Despite the hardships, Aslakhanov has happy memories of his childhood in Stalinskoye. He is still grateful to their Russian neighbors - wealthy peasants who were exiled during the collectivization of the 1930s - who helped the Chechen family survive.
"Back then I learned about Easter," he said. "Our neighbors used to paint eggs. A whole crowd of us kids would walk around the village and, in exchange for announcing that 'Christ has risen,' we would be allowed to gorge ourselves on eggs and kulich [Easter cake]." The family remained in Stalinskoye until 1957, when they were allowed to return home.
Some time in the 1980s, when Aslakhanov was already a high-ranking Interior Ministry official, he was assigned to organize a meeting of police officials from the Central Asian republics. The choice of a location was left up to him, and of course he picked the Kyrgyz capital because it meant he could visit his old village, by that time renamed Belovodskoye.
"Oh, it was great. They remembered us. Eventually the whole street came, and we stayed up all night. Oh, all the things we did," he laughed. One of his old neighbors said he had some samogon, but he was worried about the local police since it was during Mikhail Gorbachev's anti-drinking campaign. "There won't be any problems this time," Aslakhanov said he told him, and the fun continued.
Aslakhanov's path to law enforcement began in the late 1960s when he joined the Dynamo sports club, the official sports division of the Interior Ministry, to compete in sambo. In 1971, he became a policeman fighting economic crime, and by the end of the 1980s he was promoted to general - the first Chechen, he says, to reach the high ranks of the police.
He prides himself on being part of some of the most famous corruption investigations of the 1980s, which busted officials in the Uzbek and Kazakh republics, among others.
Aslakhanov's last promotion, to major general, arrived in 1991, when he was a member of the Congress of People's Deputies. By rights, the promotion should have come years before, but when he asked top officials about the delay, he said he was told: "Aslanbek, but you are a Chechen."
In some ways, though, it was easier to be a Chechen then. "In the Soviet Union there were hardships. Chechnya had the highest unemployment rate, and there were still restrictions for some posts and professions," Aslakhanov said.
"But at least we could move around the country freely. Nobody planted bullets or drugs in our pockets." The courts also were less likely to discriminate against a Chechen, he said.
"It is not only that it is hard to be a Chechen officer, it is just hard to be a Chechen in the Russian Federation. Extremely hard - we are outcasts," Aslakhanov said.
Even his young children, who live a supposedly privileged life in the capital, are learning what it means to be a Chechen. Damir, his 4-year-old son, recently came home crying from kindergarten. "Dad, they said I have a Chechen mug. Do I really have a mug?" Aslakhanov recalled the little boy asking. His 13-year-old daughter studies at home because she could no longer take the remarks about her nationality, he said.
Despite his high position, Aslakhanov said he also still faces discrimination. He said he remains the only officer of his rank in Russia who has not been awarded a gun, a symbol of the state's respect for people of his profession.
At a ceremony in the Duma on Feb. 18 to mark Defender of the Fatherland Day, Aslakhanov said he was the only person who was not given "even a postcard." He said the problems facing Chechens - from the widespread racism to the murder and persecution of civilians by federal troops deployed in the republic - can only be solved by the country's top leadership.
Aslakhanov said he has discussed the situation in Chechnya with President Vladimir Putin, but the president does not agree that the servicemen are out of control.
Aslakhanov said he wants to believe that Putin does not know what is going on in Chechnya. "Because if he does know then he is a maniac, not a human being, who hates these people and ordered their extermination. ... I really want to believe the first option that he really does not know."
TITLE: U.S. Company Makes Offer for NTV
AUTHOR: By Gregory Feifer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A U.S. television production company previously associated with exiled media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky announced last week that it has offered to buy Gazprom's controlling stake in NTV and the rest of what was once Gusinsky's media empire.
Massachusetts-based Global American Television President Edward Wierzbowski said on Thursday that the company had made an offer acting together with an investor, whom he refused to name. The move stumped media observers, but there was speculation it may represent a bid by Gusinsky to reclaim Media-MOST, taken over by shareholder Gazprom, a state-controlled firm, in a bitter legal fight last year.
Wierzbowski, speaking by telephone, declined to state the amount of his company's offer for Gazprom's share, pointing to the fact that the gas giant has repeatedly put off a long-promised valuation by Dresdner Bank's investment vehicle, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
Gazprom pledged in October to announce by mid-January the valuation of its media assets and structure of the sale but has since postponed the deadline twice. The foot-dragging has prompted accusations that the sale will not be open and transparent.
Gazprom media arm Gazprom-Media seized its controlling stake - 50 percent plus one share - in debt-ridden Media-MOST last April. U.S. investment fund Capital Research Management holds a 4.5 percent stake in NTV television. The rest of Media-MOST belongs to Gusinsky-affiliated firms.
Media-MOST's value has been fiercely debated. Gusinsky claimed last year that it was worth $400 million or more, while Gazprom-Media put its value at half that.
Wierzbowski said Global American Television offered to buy 25 percent of NTV from Gazprom in November, and followed up with a bid for 25 percent of Media-MOST's TNT network in December. The offers expired Feb. 15, after which the U.S. company made its bid for Media-MOST.
Gazprom-Media general director Boris Jordan and board chairman Alexander Dybal were appointed in October to oversee Gazprom's announced plan to sell off the assets seized from Media-MOST.
Jordan - an American banker who helped lead the takeover at NTV, where Gazprom installed him as director - was also to direct the transfer of Gusinsky-controlled Media-MOST shares to Gazprom-Media. Gusinsky said last spring that he would sell off his remaining stakes in Media-MOST, but he has stayed mum on the subject ever since.
Press Minister Mikhail Lesin earlier this month accused Jordan, however, of buying Gusinsky's remaining 30 percent stake in NTV for himself. Jordan and Gusinsky have denied any such agreement. Observers said Lesin made his announcement to try to undermine an insider deal.
Media-MOST spokesperson Dmitry Ostalsky said Thursday that he had not heard of Global American's offer. "I've nothing to comment," he said. "It's between Global American Television and Gazprom."
Gazprom Head of Corporate Finance Alexander Semenyako also refused on Thursday to comment on the announcement.
Global American is not new to Russia. The company produced a landmark television program in 1982 - in what was then the Soviet Union - featuring satellite links between a U.S. studio and a Soviet one hosted, respectively, by talk show impresario Phil Donahue and his Soviet counterpart Vladimir Pozner.
The U.S. company also placed the first paid advertisement on Soviet television for Pepsi, Sony and Visa, it said in a press statement. Since then, Global American has, among other activities, sold U.S. programming to Russian television stations and produced documentary programs broadcast in Russia.
Media analysts were puzzled by Global American's announcement. Oleg Panfilov, of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, and Anna Kachkayeva, a media analyst with Radio Liberty and an assistant professor at Moscow State University, said they had no knowledge of it and were hard-pressed to speculate.
Kachkayeva said Global American could be acting on behalf of U.S. financier and philanthropist George Soros. Panfilov said cooperation with Jordan was a possibility.
But Pozner, who is now president of the Russian Television Academy and anchor of ORT's "Vremena" program, said that Jordan's involvement was unlikely. "I'd be surprised if that's the case," he said.
Gusinsky was a more likely candidate, Pozner added, saying Wierzbowski has long been a friend of several top Media-MOST insiders, including Pavel Korchagin, a longtime deputy of former NTV director Yevgeny Kiselyov.
Wierzbowski's company has also sold programming to NTV, as well as to other Russian channels.
Korchagin was general director of TNT and last year became executive director of TV6, where Kiselyov and a core team of NTV journalists found refuge after the channel's takeover by Gazprom.
TITLE: Report Asks Kremlin For Forestry Money
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As the old saying goes, money may not grow on trees, but the forestry and paper industry could generate as much as $100 billion per year for the Russian economy if the government steps in with major support, according to a report presented to the government on Friday by the Union of Forestry Industrialists and Exporters.
Russia is home to 23 percent of the world's forests, yet the country accounts for only 2.3 percent of the world's timber and paper products. The country produced about $7.5 billion worth of timber and related products in 2001, with exports earning $4.3 billion, the union reported at a national conference held in Sykhtyvkar, a city located in the Komi Republic.
Industry, Science and Technology Minister Ilya Klebanov told participants at the conference that the country's resources were "not being used effectively." He promised that the government would, at a session planned for the end of March, review what steps should be taken in order to help the industry grow by 300 percent by the year 2010.
The union renewed its calls for the government to resurrect the forestry ministry to take over management of both forests and the industry itself, which are currently overseen by the Natural Resources Ministry and the Industry, Science and Technology Ministry, respectively.
Not all foresters present were in favor. Zakhar Smushkin - head of the country's largest pulp-and carton-holding, St. Petersburg-based Ilim Pulp - proposed the creation of a government corporation that would contribute forest lots, infrastructure, tax credits and loan guarantees to attract investors and set up companies in return for blocking stakes that could later be privatized. Other proposals involve the development of legislation that would allow the industry to use its main asset - the forests - as collateral to secure loans.
Vneshekonombank head Andrei Kostin, who also attended the conference, said that loggers and producers should not hold their breath waiting for an infusion of government money.
He said, however, that Vneshekonombank would help organize equipment-leasing programs to allow producers to modernize heavily depreciated facilities.
"If the forestry industry misses this opportunity, it will be a big mistake," Klebanov said.
The industry has become a target for investors in recent times, Which has already lead to clashes between and raised fears among existing players. The board of the Sykhtyvkar Forestry Plant sent President Vladimir Putin a letter protesting a review of the circumstances of its privatization as another attempt to redivide ownership within the industry. Ilim Pulp has already gone head to head in Irkutsk with aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska's SibAl industrial holding, and the two may also be heading for conflict in Arkhangelsk.
Both Ilim Pulp and SibAl are eyeing the Arkhangelsk pulp-and-paper plant, a top-five cellulose producer. Sibal approached the Titan group, which manages the plant, but Titan had sold its controlling stake to foreign investors last year, business daily Vedomosti reported.
SibAl, which owns the Krasnoyarsk pulp-and-paper plant, "has many plans in the sector and would be interested in buying into Arkhangelsk pulp and paper if offered," said SibAl spokesperson Alexei Drobashchenko. Ilim Pulp recently restarted negotiations with Titan after putting them on hold when troubles erupted last December at its 86-percent owned Bratskcomplexholding forestry plant, said Ilim Pulp spokesperson Svyatoslav Bychkov.
In December 2001, a super-minority shareholder in the Bratsk plant filed suit several days after purchasing the shares to overturn an earlier board decision and reinstate former General Director Georgy Trifonov. After Trifonov was reinstated, he annulled a long-term debt repayment schedule with Irkutsenergo, partially owned by Deripaska through metals giant Russian Aluminum. The energy company demanded immediate repayment of the 753-million-ruble ($25-million) debt and instituted bankruptcy proceedings. SibAl's interest in the plant was to ensure repayment of the energy debt and the return of its production assets from the balance sheet of the Bratsk plant's wholly owned subsidiary, Cellulose Carton Plant, Drobashchenko said.
In February, Ilim Pulp bought out SibAl's share in the neighboring Ust-Ilimsk forestry plant for about $200 million, a significant part of which was advanced by oil major Yukos. The payment also gave Ilim Pulp control of the Bratsk plant from Sibal-affiliated managers and an exclusive right to the Irkutsk region, one of the country's richest logging areas, said a source close to the deal.
With the acquisition of Ust-Ilimsk, Ilim Pulp has boosted its share of the Russian pulp market above 70 percent and plans to raise its revenues from about $700 million in 2001 to $900 million in 2002 and $1.22 billion by 2004, Moshiashvili said.
Ilim Pulp has begun the process of consolidating into a single share its holdings, which include the Bratsk plant, the St. Petersburg carton plant, the Kotlas pulp and packaging-materials plant and 42 logging enterprises in Irkutsk and Arkhangelsk, assisted by the Yukos-owned Trust and Investment Bank. The holding is planning an initial public offering in 2004, said Moshiashvili, who worked at Yukos before moving to Ilim Pulp in 2000.
TITLE: New Airport Body Yet To Get Off Ground
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A government plan to bring Moscow airports' state-owned infrastructure under the control of a yet-to-be-created federal agency, the Airports Administration, ground to a halt last week after civil-aviation authorities called off interviews to choose the agency's chief.
Airports earn up to $300 million a year from using state property, which is half of their yearly revenues, according to the Russian Airport Association. That property includes runways, taxiways, aircraft parking stands and ramp lights.
Civil-aviation authorities were to have interviewed six candidates competing for the post of general director of the planned agency on Friday, the Airport Association said, but they called off the interviews earlier last week without explanation.
The Property Ministry put forward the project last year to accumulate money that airports earn by charging airlines a unified tariff to use state property, after which the agency would redistribute the money to airports for upkeep and development.
Government officials said at the time they did not believe airport management was maintaining the infrastructure correctly and said the agency could ensure the money is spent properly by taking back control of the cash flows from the state property.
The new system, set to begin in March, was to include four Moscow airports - Sheremetevo, Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Bykovo - and then be extended nationwide if successful.
The heads of Sheremetevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo airports protested the move last year in a letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, saying that the formation of the administration ran counter to the interests of airports, airlines and passengers and could endanger safety.
The airport chiefs said it would no longer be clear who takes responsibility for the property if control is given to the agency because, technically, the infrastructure would still be handled by the airports, though they would no longer control cash flows.
Sheremetevo earned some 1.5 billion rubles ($48.6 million) last year from these duties, airport officials said earlier this year. Some 80 percent of net profits went toward maintenance and repairs, Sheremetevo said.
Nevertheless, the government pressed ahead, calling a tender for the administration's top post. Six candidates applied: former Kazan Airport General Director Salikh Sultanbikov, former State Duma Deputy Vladislav Kochan, Central Airport Terminal Director Vladimir Smigalovsky, former Transaero and Vnukovo executive Andrei Konstantinov, Domodedovo Airport Administration General Director Leonid Sergeyev and Abakan Airport General Director Valery Gordeyev.
Viktor Gorbachyov, president of the Airport Association, said the interviews were called off because of protests from Moscow region officials who want the agency to be registered in the region in order to reap the tax revenues. The ministry had intended to register the agency in Moscow city.
"We are waiting now for a resolution of the dispute between the Property Ministry and the regional administration," Gorbachyov said. "A new tender will be called in March or April."
Kochan, the Duma deputy, said the lack of a charter and office space for the new agency were given as reasons for the delay.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Aeroflot Hires Volvo
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) - The Aero Engine unit of Swedish truck maker Volvo said Monday it had won a deal from Aeroflot to provide the company with engines used in the airline's DC 10-40 aircraft.
Volvo Aero said in a statement the order was initially worth $60 million and that it was the largest overhaul contract signed by the unit since 1998.
"There is also potential for a total order value of $120 million if Aeroflot decides to add more DC 10-40's to its fleet," the company said.
Domestic Carlsberg
Moscow (SPT) - Carlsberg Breweries AS is choosing a brewery from the Baltika Beverages Holding stable to produce its well-known Carlsberg label in Russia, company spokesperson Margrethe Skov said Monday from Copenhagen.
Ownership of BBH, which owns a number of breweries in Russia and the Baltics, including local market-leader Baltika, is evenly split by Carlsberg and British giant Scottish & Newcastle.
Earlier this month, S&N acquired Finnish brewer Hartwall - along with its half of the BBH joint venture - in a deal worth 2 billion euros ($1.74 billion).
"Like Hartwall, S&N believes it is advantageous for BBH to sell Carlsberg [in Russia]," Carlsberg Breweries CEO Nils Smedegaard Andersen told Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, Reuters reported.
S&N's entry in BBH has weighed on Carlsberg's shares because, among other reasons, of doubt about whether BBH would promote Carlsberg or S&N's leading brand, Kronenbourg.
Yavlinsky Warning
MOSCOW (SPT) - Yabloko party leader and economist Grigory Yavlinsky told Ekho Moskvy radio that inflation might soar to more than 40 percent this year.
He also told the station Sunday that the 2003 debt problem has not been removed, but is manageable. State finances are in good condition and tax proceeds to the budget have shown marked improvement, he said.
Some 90 percent of costs are covered by regular tax receipts, Yavlinsky said, which has not happened since 1990. Improved tax collection should allow the government to create a reserve fund, he said. If the oil price does not fall below $16 to $17 per barrel, then Russia will be able to cope with its domestic and foreign debts, he added.
Yavlinsky expressed concern, however, that GDP growth would not exceed 3 percent this year, and he warned against Russia orienting itself too much by international oil prices.
Furthermore, he criticized the government's policy of supporting a devalued ruble.
Energy-Sector Reform
MOSCOW (SPT) - The government commission on reforming the power industry has approved the main parameters of the sector's 85 billion ruble ($2.8 billion) investment program for 2002, RosBusinessConsulting reported Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko as saying Friday.
The federal budget will provide 2.6 billion rubles ($84 million), while raising energy tariffs will add another 40 billion rubles ($1.3 billion), said Khristenko, who heads the commission.
He said that investment totaling 8 billion to 9 billion rubles for some projects would be spelled out later.
TITLE: Selling the Land of the World's Biggest Country
TEXT: The new Land Code is just a small part of an unprecedented series of reforms being undertaken to eventually introduce a Western-style land market in Russia. The issues range from valuating land parcels for tax purposes to protecting the quality of farm soil. But first the government has to decide the ownership of some 90 percent of the country's land - and solve an intergovernmental feud for control of the entire reform effort. Yevgenia Borisova reports on the questions that remain to be worked out.
The government has its hands full. It is trying to create a land market in a country that has never truly had one. It is also trying to estimate the value of every plot of land in a country that spans 11 time zones. And to complicate matters, the ownership of 1.56 billion hectares, an area roughly 63 times the size of Great Britain, is unclear. Considering that it took the government two years just to figure out how many banks it owns stakes in, creating a true free market for land could take a generation or more - but its pressing forward aggressively.
From the government's perspective, the whole point of land reform is to stimulate the economy, generate revenue and improve the standard of living for the population. But to buy and sell land - and tax it - the government first needs to decide who owns it.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they declared that all land should belong to the people. In the Yeltsin era title to the country's land was changed from the Bolshevik "all peoples' ownership" to "property of the state." But in order to proceed with privatization and create a large class of private landowners, the government needs to decide which of the 1.56 billion hectares are federal and which are sub-federal.
Tax and property officials in various administrations are hoping that the new law, "On the Division of Lands into Federal, Regional and Municipal," which took effect Jan. 17, will put an end to the chaos. According to the law, a "specially authorized federal body dealing with property in accordance with other bodies of executive power ... will prepare lists of land parcels owned by the Russian Federation, regions and municipalities."
To the surprise of some, however, this powerful body apparently will not be Roszemkadastr - the federal land service currently compiling the first national land cadastre (a public survey of the value, extent and ownership of land as a basis for taxation) - but the Property Ministry. According to ministry spokesperson Anna Martynova, the Property Ministry now has the authority to determine the ownership of all disputed land.
The ministry said that the federal government will retain 69 percent, or 1.1858 billion hectares, 90 percent of which is "forests, water reservoirs and reserves" that cannot be bought or sold. Few expect a turf war to erupt over controlling forests or rivers, but bureaucrats at all levels are already maneuvering to influence who will get the proceeds from leasing or selling the rest. The battle is expected to be most intense in Moscow, where the federal government has thousands of properties and institutions and annual revenues from land leases and taxes is more than $100 million.
According to the 2002 federal budget, municipalities are entitled to 50 percent of all revenues from land taxes and lease payments, while regions are entitled to 35 percent and the federal government 15 percent. But the budget doesn't specify whether this means all land owned by local administrations, or simply all land within their boundaries.
'Printing Money'
One of the problems complicating the process is the lack of a single authority to deal with land. Experts say too many government agencies are finding land a very lucrative target for applying their expertise - and justifying their existence. In addition to the infighting among various bodies in thousands of local and regional administrations, at the federal level, the Tax Ministry, Justice Ministry, Property Ministry, State Construction Committee, Roszemkadastr and other bodies are all trying to influence the process to their own advantage.
The biggest loser so far seems to be Roszemkadastr, which was created in 1991 as a single federal land authority. But its influence and budget have slowly been reduced over the past decade. What was once a policy-making ministry with thousands of employees is now just another cash-strapped, understaffed and overburdened agency.
The Justice Ministry has already usurped a lucrative function of Roszemkadastr - registering land deals. Since 1998 the ministry has established 1,700 offices and hired 18,000 employees throughout the country to register such transactions, according to Deputy Justice Minister Alexander Karlin.
Karlin said that the ministry has approved more than 5 million land transactions for an average fee of 5,000 rubles. That equates to more than $800 million, and Karlin said "not even 1 percent" of the demand for registration has been met.
"The Justice Ministry has essentially been given a license to print money," said Frederik Zetterquist, area manager of Swedesurvey, the Swedish National Land Survey's overseas agency that has been helping Russian authorities conduct a pilot land-cadastre project since 1995. "Roszemkadastr lost a major source of income at the expense of the Justice Ministry," he said.
So far has Roszemkadastr's star fallen that in many regions its land inspectors, who earn just 1,500 rubles a month, are responsible for up to 200,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of Slovenia.
Feoktista Rogozhina, head of the Kletsky district land committee in the Volgograd region, said that her budget had been reduced to the point that she cannot afford stationary, let alone basic office repairs. Even the name of the body is ridiculous, she said. "In the past Roszemkadastr was a department of the Land Committee.... It is now called Roszemkadastr for some reason. It's like renaming the Agriculture Ministry the Vegetable Ministry and pretending vegetables are the only thing in agriculture to worry about."
Too Many Cooks
Zetterquist was critical of the government's decision to divide Roszemkadastr's functions among different agencies and ministries, a decentralization process that is just the opposite of what Sweden is doing.
"In Sweden, we are integrating information because everybody knows it is advantageous for society. But it is not the case here," he said.
Indeed, Russia is apparently unique in this regard, said Olga Nesterova, head of the department in charge of land valuation at Roszemkadastr. She said her service conducted a survey among the 29 member countries of the United Nations working group on land surveying and land-resource management and found that half have a special land service that controls all issues related to land management.
"The other half said that the responsibilities are shared with either financial authorities, tax authorities or local administrations," she said. "None said they share functions with property bodies - which are normally created for a transition period only."
While the Justice Ministry now registers land deals, the powerful Property Ministry has been put in charge of land distribution on all levels. It has also been tasked with preparing a new state register where land and buildings, as well as any improvements made to them, will be listed as a single piece of real estate - a land and real-estate cadastre. The State Construction Committee, or Gosstroi, however, also wants to participate in preparing the cadastre.
According to the deputy head of Roszemkadastr, Viktor Kislov, his organization has had a long history of conflict with Gosstroi, which is fighting to retain its network of real estate inventory bureaus, or BTIs, where all buildings and apartments are registered.
Linklaters' Kuzin said, "Look, we have a register for deals in the Justice Ministry, a register for real estate with BTI, a land cadastre, and now you talk about a land and real estate cadastre. I have even heard about a special register for state property. This is nonsense. How will all these registers relate to each other? How many resources will be lost? It will definitely not benefit the development of business in Russia."
"It's always better if you can have one body dealing with the land," Zetterquist said. "It will be more effective, more efficient to have information gathered by one body. Now they have to exchange information between these organizations. This is something extra you have to do and this is a disadvantage, of course. Say Gosstroi is afraid to spread their information because they think it is valuable for them ..."
Despite losing a major source of revenue and much of its authority, Roszemkadastr is still in operation. In fact it is moving forward with an ambitious six-year, 33-billion-ruble ($900 million) federal program to create a computerized database of all plots of land and buildings and structures that exist on them.
"In the next six years, we will put everything that exists in Russia into one register," Kislov said.
This project has caused some concern in the Property Ministry, which is anxious to control the key elements of land reform. A statement from the ministry said that the fact that too many government agencies are working with land is a "real problem." It also said that one of the aims of the government's policy on using real estate effectively is to "exclude different agencies from the functions of managing land and passing it on to only one [body]."
The ministry did not elaborate but, presumably, it was referring to itself. The ministry may believe that now is an opportune time to step in and take control, since Roszemkadastr has nearly finished its most vital task - putting a cadastre value on all rural and urban land that can be used to calculate taxes.
Valuing the Land
Roszemkadastr has nearly completed its cadastre for agricultural land and expects to finish its registry of urban land by the end of the year. This process, however, will not determine the market price for every plot of land. "Cadastre valuation" is simply a euphemism for the "mass valuation of land."
None of Russia's regions have prepared a Western-style land register that would list all, or even most, of the land plots that are owned or managed by individuals or corporations, said Roszemkadastr's Nesterova. "For taxation reasons, there is no difference if agriculture land within an area occupied by a former collective farm is of different quality, as long as we have an average cadastre value of land for the whole parcel [from which taxes are paid]," she said.
Like most other issues related to land reform in Russia, however, the way it is being done has caused considerable controversy.
The biggest problem with the method used to assess agricultural land is that it relies on soil-quality data compiled between 1969 and 1989. Soil quality, according to experts, comprises about 80 percent of the cadastre value of land.
Quality characteristics include thickness and richness of soil, inclusion of sands, clay or stones, humidity and erosion. Other qualities such as location are also considered. The assessment is lower if a parcel is located on a slope, in a ravine, or far from transportation infrastructure. The assessment also includes economic indices such as costs of production in the area.
However, according to many agriculture experts, in many cases the quality of the land has changed dramatically since the data was compiled. In addition to erosion and depletion of nutrients, some 80 billion tons of waste - 1 billion tons of it toxic or radioactive - has been spread on agricultural lands throughout the country, according to Deputy Natural Resources Minister Ivan Glumov.
One expert who is working on the rural land cadastre provided, on condition of anonymity, one example of how flawed the valuation process is. Speaking of a region where land was assessed at about 5,000 rubles ($160) per hectare, the expert said, "We conducted our research within the limits of collective farms that no longer exist. We didn't take any samples of the earth: We based everything on data that has been added to our files since 1972."
The source said this method skewed the results and valued land in remote areas accessible only by plane and in good weather at about 9,000 rubles ($290) - more than four times the cadastre value of some areas close to the regional capital that have been well taken care of despite having inferior soil quality.
"How could we offer these assessments to our governor for his approval?" the expert said. "We went to Moscow and convinced those who deal with our sector to consider improvements made to the land, such as fertilization and irrigation. The problem is that our instructions say that only natural productivity must be considered. I think people who prepared such instructions have a very vague idea of what land is about. So now, we corrected the assessment and the cost of land near [the city ] is about 9,000 rubles, while land in remote districts has been lowered."
Cadastre values of farmland in different regions are listed in the "National Report on Land" issued by Roszemkadastr in December.
Regional values vary from 400 rubles ($13) per hectare in the oil-soaked autonomous district of Khanty-Mansiisk to 43,600 rubles ($1,400) in Krasnodar territory. In the Moscow and Leningrad regions, that average value is 33,030 rubles ($1,070), and 23,000 rubles ($745) respectively. There are no values for Chechnya, Chukotka or Taimyr.
Complicating the task, Nesterova said, is the absence of clear borders for parcels of land.
Urban Jungle
The valuation of urban land is much more complicated, and the difficulty is compounded by the sheer size of the country and a lack of both time and qualified personnel, Nesterova said.
"In developed countries, where a system of valuation has existed for centuries, each plot of land is assessed separately. But in [Russia], where such a system is only now being created, the assessment is based on so-called mass valuation technology, she said. "But it is a step forward anyway."
To value urban land, Roszemkadastr has divided municipal areas into so-called cadastre blocks, plots in each of which have 14 different categories of value, depending on how the land is used or intended to be used. Cafes and restaurants are in one category, and industrial enterprises are in another, for example. Each town or city is supposed to prepare 14 "patchwork quilts" that can metaphorically overlay a map of a cadastre block to determine the cadastre value of each square meter in a given area.
These "quilts" will also be used to determine how much land tax is owed. For example, to calculate the tax owed by a gas station, tax officials need only check the quilt that includes gas stations and multiply the cadastre value for that particular area by the number of square meters and then by the tax rate set by local administrations, which can vary by particular area or particular user. The draft of the second part of the Tax Code, expected to be passed by summer, stipulates that such rates must be between 0.1 percent and 2 percent of the cadastre land value.
Oleg Skufinsky, head of Roszemkadastr's department of technology for cadastre land valuation, said dozens of different criteria that affect land value were studied from transactions, interviews with land valuers and real estate dealers, newspapers, magazines and professional publications.
For properties near the Kremlin, cadastre values could be as high as 31,351 rubles ($10,150) per square meter, while industrial and communications enterprises could be valued as low as 3,776 rubles ($122) per square meter.
"But a cadastre value is not a market price," Skufinsky said. "The closer we will come to a developed market for land, the more transactions we will have and the closer the cadastre land values will resemble market prices."
This method is only "a simulation of the land market" because "a real market cannot exist in a country where a few regions freely sell land, while in at least 14 regions no single transaction of land has ever happened," Skufinsky said.
As the market develops, cadastre values will move "closer and closer to market prices," he said.
Skufinsky sees cadastre valuation as more than just a step forward. He believes it will also improve land management. "There are other ways to use the cadastre land values than just for taxation. It could easily be used to evaluate the best use of land in a particular area," he said.
Padding the Budget
The cadastre valuation of the whole country is expected to be completed by the end of the year and put into use for taxation and leasing purposes in 2003. But so far, only Yaroslavl has officially approved its land register and submitted it to Roszemkadastr.
Urban land valuation is also finished in Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tver and Kostroma - areas that do not rely on federal funding and that paid for the assessments themselves.
Proper taxation of the land under commercial enterprises is the most important part of the system because up to 85 percent of all land taxes paid to the federal budget is supplied by cities and about 80 percent of land tax within urban areas is collected from industrial enterprises, Nesterova said.
Nesterova said that, while it is difficult to forecast how much the new system will boost tax revenues throughout the country, it has been remarkably successful in Yaroslavl. "Believe it or not, in the first nine months of last year, tax collection from land in Yaroslavl doubled. It is phenomenal, because effectively nothing has happened except that the valuation of land, which did not affect the level of tax, was simply created and published," she said.
Nesterova believes it is a purely psychological effect. She said that after taxpayers saw that valuation of land had been done, they understood that they had to pay.
"The region's land committee even agreed with the local union of entrepreneurs on higher rates and now expects a boost of at least 40 percent in land tax revenues this year," Nesterova said.
TITLE: Code Could Have Done Enron Some Good
AUTHOR: By Matthew Murray and Anna Ossipova
TEXT: Due to growing cross-border investment, events in one market often highlight the significance of initiatives in another. The collapse of Enron Corp., the seventh largest corporation in the United States, is just one such event, as it accentuates the importance of a recent initiative in Russia. On Feb. 4, as more details surfaced about corporate governance failures at Enron, the chairperson of the Federal Securities Commission, Igor Kostikov, unveiled the Russian "Corporate Governance Code" at the World Economic Forum.
The code's primary aim is to increase investment in public companies by helping them adopt "best practices" in the field of corporate governance. Though the code's provisions are voluntary, the markets should reward companies that utilize the code to move beyond compliance with the law to create business norms that engender trust in corporate behavior and enhance shareholder value.
Though there is concern that, as a nonbinding instrument, the code may not induce widespread change in Russian corporate conduct, ultimately, increased capital flow is the most effective incentive for good governance. For evidence that markets punish companies that fail to regulate themselves, take the case of Gazprom, whose share value is perennially discounted by investors due to persistent asset-stripping and other abuse of shareholders.
Moreover, the Enron case demonstrates that, in more regulated systems such as the United States, the market evaluates a company's corporate governance performance more efficiently than regulatory bodies. After learning in October 2001 that the company failed to account for and properly disclose profits and losses, Enron's stock nose-dived. Market capitalization decreased from over $80 billion to a couple of hundred million within a matter of weeks, forcing Enron to declare the largest bankruptcy in history. Now, top managers are under civil, criminal and congressional investigations for allegedly defrauding shareholders by creating a complex web of outside partnerships to move corporate debt off the balance sheet, reporting false profits and otherwise enriching themselves through self-dealing and insider trading.
U.S. officials are also examining why Enron's board of directors failed in its corporate-governance role - both to protect shareholder rights and to hold management accountable. Management disclosed to the board plans to move company debts off the balance sheet into outside partnerships owned and run by Enron managers. Although such transactions posed classic conflicts of interest, the board approved them. Indeed, Enron's board took the extraordinary step of waiving certain provisions of the company's code of ethics in order to permit Enron's chief financial officer to be the general partner of certain of the outside partnerships.
These events are particularly significant since many Enron board practices were contrary to recommendations for governing company decision-making in the Russian code. For example, certain Enron directors who sat on the audit committee and were expected to act independently were affiliated with charities sponsored by Enron. One had a consulting arrangement with the company.
The Russian code advises against such practices, as they tend to encourage boards to unduly accommodate top management to the detriment of shareholders and trust in the corporation as a whole. But even the best of governance provisions will not overcome a corporate culture that rejects the values underlying transparent conduct.
Ironically, Enron's code of ethics helped the board detect violations of conflict of interest rules. According to the code of ethics, which we found being auctioned on eBay, no officer or employee should "make an investment or perform services for his or her own related interest in any enterprise under any circumstances where, by reason of the nature of the business conducted by such enterprise, there is, or could be, a disparity or conflict of interest between the officer or employee and the company."
Due to board passivity and management aggressiveness, however, Enron did not follow this prescription to prevent interested-party transactions. By suspending the code of ethics, both Enron's board and management sent the message that rules could be shelved when inconvenient.
The Russian code can lead companies to increased investment, capital flows and access to markets - domestically and internationally. Adopting the code, however, will not instantly transform a company into a profitable paragon of corporate virtue, particularly if the company has a vested interest in short-term growth strategies. Enron's bankruptcy demonstrates that a company's directors and officers must create a culture of compliance by setting transparent standards of external reporting and applying them to a range of internal business procedures, practices and decisions that, together, will determine a company's level of performance and shareholder value. Effective implementation of best practices is an ongoing process that will require top managers accustomed to absolute control and secrecy to share information and decision-making not only with a board of directors, but also with their own middle management.
For Russian managers seeking evolutionary and sustained growth, the code is a vital communications tool that can enable them to apply transparent standards of external financial reporting to internal auditing and accounting. If implemented consistently, the code can help them to detect and prevent potentially costly violations of law and ethics, thereby reducing investor risk and increasing shareholder value.
Matthew Murray is chairperson and Anna Ossipova is director of the St. Petersburg-based Center for Business Ethics and Corporate Governance. They contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: It's Different When We Are Hiding The Profits
TEXT: BUSINESS Week magazine recently labeled Gazprom "Russia's Enron" based on the fact that Gazprom's auditors, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, signed off on some truly unbelievable deals in its audits.
The assertion that Gazprom is Russia's Enron testifies to a basic misunderstanding of how the economy works in this country.
A Russian manager doesn't inflate the profits of his company in the hopes of boosting the value of his stock options. He or she suppresses the company's profits. Enron executives concealed millions of dollars in losses in its subsidiaries; Gazprom executives poured millions of dollars in assets into its subsidiaries.
And then there's Severstal. Eighty-six percent of the company's stock belongs to General Director Alexei Mordashov. Severstal recently reported amazing profits in order to boost its share price before the stock was floated on Western markets - a strategy suggested by the company's wise Western advisers. The presence of Western shareholders was supposed to serve as added security in case of a takeover bid by the Urals Mining and Metals Company. And the money received from stock sales was to finance the purchase of shares in Magnitogorsk, which had also been targeted by the Urals Mining and Metals Company.
The result? Mordashov paid a whopping tax bill, and Severstal's huge profits were perceived by the market as a sign that Mordashov was in for some serious problems.
Enron was the product of a long evolution in corporate bookkeeping. Then again, that evolution was moving in the direction of practices mastered in the 1970s by the directors of Soviet state cotton farms, who achieved fictional harvests and real awards with the help of extremely creative accounting.
Gazprom is, above all, a primitive and ignorant organism. A friend of mine once sold a small factory to Gazprom. In negotiations with a high-ranking Gazprom executive, my friend laid out two options for working the deal. Both were entirely legal, but one would cost Gazprom one-third as much in taxes. The Gazprom exec asked for clarification. My friend obliged. Then the exec, unable to understand the basic tax calculations involved, asked my friend to draw the plan on paper. My friend did so, using euphemisms such as "Object A" and "Object B" rather than real names. The Gazprom exec studied the scheme, mulled it over, then scribbled an order in the right-hand corner and sent it off with his secretary.
When the deal was concluded, my friend was given a copy of the paper. The executive's command read: "Coordinate the tax-evasion scheme with the accounting department."
Russian managers do not inflate the performance indicators of their companies in order to pass the stock off on an unwitting public. They steal from their companies behind the public's back, and the state's. So the problems of America's bubble really have nothing to do with Russia's leaky sieve.
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.
TITLE: Paradigm Shift at Bottom of Lay's Fall From Top of Heap
AUTHOR: By Steven Berglas
TEXT: Why did Kenneth Lay do it?
Pundits from every corner of academe are weighing in on this question. But the countless analysts who claim that the former Enron Corp. chairperson lied out of greed are wrong.
After 25 years of studying and counseling self-destructive executives whose behavior was at least as abnormal as Lay's, I can guarantee that what drove him was far more complex.
Consider what is arguably Lay's greatest offense: In late October 2001, despite receiving several warnings about Enron's accounting practices, Lay promised that Enron would again be wildly profitable. Many Enron insiders who had heard the same warnings found Lay's statements and inaction bizarre.
Yet one of the best-kept secrets of executive psychology is that, once you achieve success, you become a prisoner to the business model that brought you acclaim.
Before its collapse, Enron was the Microsoft of energy, primarily because of Lay's brilliance. He took a garden-variety company - a union of two pipeline companies - and propelled it to Fortune 100 status. Rather than merely delivering gas to customers, Lay exploited the recent deregulation of pipelines, realigning Enron so that it could trade, at a huge profit, the product that others had to drill wells to extract.
The success of this paradigm shift set the stage for Lay's undoing. Rather than sticking to gas, Enron branched into trading whatever seemed tradable - water, coal, fiber-optic capacity and so on.
Inevitably, Lay stretched this model too far. Rather than remaining true to the swashbuckling soul that enabled him to seize an opportunity, he grew hyperconservative and became blindly adherent to the business model responsible for his success.
This argument is neither an apology for Lay nor an effort to exonerate him. I do, however, urge caution before judging his motives. Contrary to Freud, smoking a cigar is typically far more complex than merely seeking a good smoke.
Steven Berglas is a freelance business writer. He contributed this piece to the Washington Post.
TITLE: Enron Requests Insurance Payment From U.S. Agency
AUTHOR: By Pete Yost
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Enron Corp. has asked a U.S. federal agency to pay a huge insurance claim on an idled power plant in India, a project financed in part by an outstanding government-backed loan.
The relationship between Enron and the little-known Overseas Private Investment Corp. demonstrates the company's two-prong government-relations strategy. In the U.S., the energy giant has sought to free power companies from regulation. But internationally, Enron has embraced government help in the form of loans and insurance protection.
OPIC is still owed $453 million in payments for Enron-related projects. Another U.S. agency, the Export-Import Bank, is due $512 million. The two agencies made $1.2 billion in loans on Enron-related projects overseas.
"They're definitely among our top 10 borrowers," OPIC spokesperson Larry Spinelli said.
Although Enron has filed for bankruptcy protection, four of its projects financed by OPIC are making payments on time. Enron and two other U.S. corporations are trying to get OPIC to pay off a $200-million insurance policy on a fifth project, the financially troubled Indian power plant.
OPIC provided $160 million to Enron and two other corporations to help build the $2.9-billion plant in Dabhol, India, which isn't producing any power because prospective customers don't want it.
In December, the same month it filed for bankruptcy, Enron and the other two companies filed a claim on their "political risk insurance" policy asking OPIC to pay $200 million.
The companies say the Indian government has broken promises to stand behind the project, in effect denying the U.S. corporations their asset, and requiring OPIC to pay the insurance policy.
The claims process will take months to resolve. Ex-Im Bank says it is still owed $203 million on the India project, but that it can call on guarantees from five Indian financial institutions for repayment if necessary.
The four Enron-related power plants that are operating now are in the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela and Gua te mala. The payback comes from revenue from power sales. Ex-Im Bank's Enron-related projects are in Colombia and at the same plants that OPIC is helping in Turkey and Venezuela.
Enron's bankruptcy stopped two OPIC applications in their tracks: two of power projects in Brazil that would have got $390 million in OPIC loans. Those applications have been abandoned.
OPIC "gave hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and other support to Enron-related projects during the Clinton administration," said U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee.
"These projects obviously were a tremendous benefit to Enron's operation. The disclosure of this information sheds light on the government's actions in support of Enron over the years," Grassley added.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Still Too Soon
LONDON (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund will not start negotiations on new loans for Argentina before the country presents plans which will allow the bankrupt country to implement a sustainable economic policy, IMF Deputy Managing Director Anne Krue ger said on Monday.
Speaking on the sidelines of a conference on the euro, Krueger said it was not in Argentina's interest to get new funding at present.
"The fiscal arrangements have to get back to a more sustainable situation," Krueger said
She added further that Argentina also needed to sort out issues related to exchange rate conversions, bankruptcy laws and the bank sector as well as a programme relating to debt management after the largest bankruptcy in history.
"There is no point in lending more money at this stage," she said.
Big Withdrawal
SHANGHAI, China (Reuters) - Minsheng Bank, China's sole private bank, said on Monday a former bank teller has allegedly defrauded it of 108 million yuan ($13.05 million) in what police called one of Shanghai's biggest financial scams.
A Shanghai bank teller at Minsheng, widely regarded as the best-managed of China's three listed banks, allegedly forged the seal of a Shanghai printing company to obtain loans from the bank from 1997 to 2001, bank officials said.
The fraud was unearthed last year and bank officials were now working to retrieve the funds.
A Minsheng spokesperson said the 108-million-yuan loss figure was not a final one and the Beijing-based bank hoped a police investigation would help it retrieve some money.
Another senior official said Minsheng was uncertain of the exact scale of the teller's activities, but estimated they could have involved up to 354 million yuan in fraudulent loans.
Debt Precedent
LONDON (Reuters) - International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director Anne Krueger said on Monday that the lack of a formal warning to Germany on its adherence to the budget deficit rules of the European Stability Pact could set a precedent.
"It's a question of precedent setting," she said at a conference in the euro in London.
The 1997 Pact lays out the ground rules for EU public finances and was adopted at the insistence of Germany as a safeguard for monetary union.
Finance ministers of the 12-country euro zone agreed earlier in the month not to rap Germany and Portugal for rising deficits - which under the pact must be no more than three percent of Gross Domestic Product - after the two agreed to pledge their deficits below the 3-percent level.
The ministers abandoned proposals from the European Commission to issue a formal "early warning" to Germany and Portugal over their budget deficits.
TITLE: Passions Run High As Olympics Close
TEXT: Editor,
I attended the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and saw first hand some of the issues raised by the Russian Olympic Committee.
I congratulate [Alexei] Yagudin and [Yevgeny] Plushchenko on their splendid performances in the men's figure-skating competition. They are very deserving of the medals they received and are to be commended.
I watched with great anticipation the ice-dancing original program, and without a doubt the Russian pair - who ultimately took silver - should have been placed first. The French pair was also talented, but in my opinion the Russian pair was superior. I did not have an opportunity to watch the free dance, and therefore cannot render my opinion.
Now on to the bigger problems. The Russian pairs figure-skating team did not deserve the gold medal. I have seen them skate before, and had they skated up to their potential on that particular day, they would have won the gold medal. But they did not. They lacked luster, their timing was off, their jumps were not perfect. The Canadians were, in my eyes, the winners.
In the women's program, Irina Slutskaya had a mediocre performance. I have seen her skate before, and she is amazing, but she was not amazing for the long program. It was almost as if she were taking for granted that she would be the winner. Sarah Hughes was not only flawless, but technically and artistically superior to Slutskaya.
Whether it is a U.S. team, Russian team, French team or otherwise, I like to see the best win.
I remember watching the Protopopovs, who are legendary, as is Oksana Baul and Viktor Petrenko. All were deserving of their medals. I wept when Baul beat Nancy Kerrigan for the gold, but she won outright. She was the best on that day.
I think the performance should be looked at and not the nationality of the skaters.
Rose Mary Rogers
Miami, Florida
From an Expert
Editor,
I think that the International Skating Union was very premature in awarding any medal to the Canadians, let alone a second gold.
As a former member of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, I have never seen a gesture similar to this. This is unprecedented, especially since the actual investigation hadn't taken place when they decided to award this medal.
According to the latest press statements, the French judge denied ever collaborating with anyone or being pressured into changing her vote. She stated that she voted for the Russian pair as they were, in her opinion, the best. So that must stand. If changes are needed in judging this must take place in future Olympics. You may not award a second medal.
As for the so-called face-saving measure, this was to protect the Olympic committee and International Skating Union, not the Russian Olympic committee. After all, since when has the Russian committee ever backed down from an investigation or any controversy?
It appears this is a Canadian Olympics and that crying can get you anything. Shame on Canada, its skating and Olympic committees and the International Olympic Committee for bowing to public pressure and not investigating this issue first.
Michael Smith
Long Beach, California
Less Politics
Editor,
The media, politicians and officials are all missing the point of the ideals and spirit of friendly athletic competition. It is time to depoliticize the Olympics. Let's do away with the flags, anthems, country medal counts and team officials.
For all events that are decided by subjective judging rather than objective measure, let's improve the method of judging to eliminate the potential for bias.
Let's increase the number of judges and diversify the regions from which they come. Let's then have random selection of a moderate number of the judges' scores and average them. That way no one will have any idea whose scores were included in the final tally. And, with a larger number of judges, the possibility of fixing or bias will be reduced, especially if no one knows which judges' scores will even be included in the final count.
Let's ban for life anyone involved in doping, be it the athlete, the coach or the doctors. Let's publicly shame anyone who attempts to cheat. Let's test all participants, before the competition and after.
Dan Gabig
Polson, Montana
Putin Backtracks?
Editor,
Not long ago I was impressed by President Vladimir Putin's forthright declaration that Russia's population is dying off at an alarming rate. Putin's new policy emphasis on promoting sports seemed extremely wise.
How surprising, then, to see Putin and his government lambasting the world for a massive anti-Russian conspiracy to deprive Russia of medals at the Olympics, in tried-and-true neo-Soviet fashion, rather than looking inward for the cause. No one who listened to the president's earlier warnings should have been surprised by Russia's poor Olympic results, and yet Putin himself was shocked and eager to find a scapegoat.
Even if there were a conspiracy, one might hope Russians would think to ask why the whole world would want to gang up on them, rather than simply threaten to run away from the game.
George Dupree
Chicago, Illinois
Outraged and Sorry
Editor,
I wish to express my outrage and contempt for the International Olympic Committee as well as the U.S. news media for their treatment of Russian athletes. I love my country, but I am truly ashamed of the U.S. media for their prejudicial and distorted reporting practices. Half-truths, omissions and overt bias punctuated the entire event, and it became apparent that the United States and its Olympic cronies used every conceivable means to subvert the legitimate efforts of the Russians. Like everything else here, it seems the last vestige of true competition has finally succumbed to the influence of the almighty dollar.
Ronald Holmes
Lanett, Alabama
Editor,
First let me say that I am a very patriotic American. It is this patriotism that moves me to write this apology for the horrid treatment of the Russian men's hockey team during and after their loss to the U.S. team.
We were supposed to be a host country, not the home country. The chanting of "U.S.A., U.S.A." during the match embarrassed me. The waving of our flag over the heads of the Russian players as they exited brought me to anger. I've always been puzzled as to why we are viewed as arrogant. I see why now.
I wish Russians could understand that the media and those who could afford tickets to watch the Olympics are not a true representation of this country. You should understand that our media are located in a few major cities on the east and west coasts of this vast country and seldom, if ever, reflects the attitudes of the majority of Americans between the coasts. Those who were privileged to attend this hockey match do not represent the average American, and they showed this by their arrogance.
We are not an arrogant people, although you would not know it by our media and the mob mentality shown by some during and after the hockey match.
So please accept this apology for the conduct of the minority of Americans. We who are in the majority are ashamed of it.
Jack Paladin
Whitefish, Montana
Editor,
No doubt you will have many letters concerning the Winter Olympics and the lack of fair play by U.S. officials and corporate interests. Please add mine to the pile in support of [Yelena] Berezhnaya and [Anton] Sikharulidze for winning the gold in figure-skating pairs. The IOC capitulated to the childish complaints of the Canadians and Americans. Likewise, I support [Irina] Slutskaya in the women's singles. She outperformed the other competitors in the short program by a lot. The hockey refereeing disgrace in a game Russia would have won, if not for the efforts of U.S. officials, proved once and for all that North Americans will drag their win-at-all-costs philosophy out of the political and corporate arenas and tarnish the Olympics without regret. And I will not go into the farce in the Nordic events.
As far as I'm concerned, Berezhnaya, Sikharulidze and Slutskaya are to be congratulated on their gold-medal performances. North Americans may whine, but dignity, integrity and fair play are still Olympic ideals cherished on the remainder of the planet.
Carl Wayne Ferry
Round Lake Beach, Illinois
Nation of Whiners?
Editor,
It seems that Russia's new favorite pastime is whining. Russians act as if there is a grand conspiracy against their country. Hello? The Cold War is over. We are not in a pact with Canada to make you look bad. In fact, Russia is doing a grand job of that all by itself. Sarah Hughes won the gold. Irina Slutskaya won the silver. It was not even as close as the judges' scores suggest. Sarah Hughes skated the performance of a lifetime. Russians should be embarrassed for their skating federation's attempt at tainting such a beautiful performance.
Linda Stewart
Metairie, Louisiana
Editor,
I think Russia's Olympic protests reveal more about Russia than they do about the Olympics. Persecution? "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" said Hamlet of his mother, who truly had something to hide.
Is it possible that cheating and corruption have become so endemic to Russian society - one thinks of Gogol's "Dead Souls" - that the Russian people are practicing the self-justification of the guilty? Isn't it ironic that Russia's fury over these Olympics happens as the first honest International Olympic Committee president in years takes office? The IOC wants and needs to clean up the Olympics.
Russia is not being persecuted, it is just more resistant to the new rules than many other nations. Russia should join the new Olympic movement.
Over the past century, Russia's own literary giants have painted a striking portrait of a country wrestling with corruption. Now it's time for Russian leaders and citizens to do the difficult job of maturing as a nation and to outgrow the persecution complex that has developed after so many generations of being disenfranchised.
Russia has been a great nation; it should be one again.
The innovations it has made to hockey, for example, are the greatest the sport has ever seen. It deserves credit for revolutionizing the game. I wish Russia could do this as much as I once wished Canadian hockey players could stop being brutes. If you've noticed, since Wayne Gretzky came along, we've learned to play (and sometimes win) as skilled sportsmen. When we lose, we look within and try to improve.
That's all we ask of Russia today.
Kevin Teichroeb
Vancouver, Canada
Editor,
I am saddened by Russia's behavior during the Winter Games and its negative reaction to any decision perceived to be against Russian athletes. The incident with the Canadians was unfortunate. With hope, this will lead to judging reform in the near future before figure skating is tarnished further.
Watching Sarah Hughes skate last night was spectacular, and she clearly won. Irina Slutskaya made mistakes pure and simple, and while she's a great skater, her program last night lacked the grace and artistry of Hughes'. To claim a bias because you don't like the decision is ridiculous, petty and immature.
At these games all athletes must take drug tests. Certain athletes have failed these tests, including Russian athletes, and this has not been disputed. To claim a bias against Russian athletes because of mandatory drug testing is factious and facile.
The simple fact is that Russia itself has become somewhat insignificant on the world stage, having had setbacks and blows like the tragic loss of the Kursk. The economic climate in Russia has also played a role.
This is now reflected in the public mood, where any perceived slight is taken as a slap in the face.
When life lets you down, blaming others may seem to be a panacea, but false pride will be Russia's downfall. Russia, along with South Korea, is rapidly becoming the laughingstock of the games. Russia should stop behaving so immaturely, for the sake of the games, for the message it sends to all, and most importantly, for its own sake.
I, like many people in the United States, believe the judging to be fair and impartial, and if it results in our athletes doing well, that may simply be because we have some darned good athletes, and perhaps Russia doesn't have as many as it did since it does not have the resources to devote to sports that it once did.
Bill Wildprett
Gig Harbor, Washington
Editor,
Enough is enough. I know there are legitimate complaints concerning cross-country skiing and some other events, but now every single event in which a Russian does not win the gold is automatically assumed to be the result of a conspiracy. Last night's women's figure-skating final is a perfect example. Any person watching the free skate knows that Sarah Hughes gave the performance of a lifetime, and that everyone else was, by comparison, decidedly underwhelming. She performed two triple-triples for the first time in the history of women's competition. Starting in fourth place, she skated with the ease and brilliance that one often sees from someone who doesn't feel they have anything to lose. In contrast, [Irina] Slutskaya, [Michelle] Kwan, and [Sasha] Cohen skated with greater pressure on them, and it showed. None of them skated their best on the night it counted most. That's the nature of the Olympics.
Stephen Mattox
Brighton, Massachusetts
Comeuppance?
Editor,
The Koreans and the Russians are both making fools of themselves. If you want to talk about cheating Olympic referees, all you need to look at are the two biggest rip-offs in the history of the games. The first was in 1972 when Soviet officials gave the Soviet basketball team three chances to sink the winning shot, and the second was at the 1988 games in Seoul when Korean boxing judges stole the gold medal from U.S. middleweight Roy Jones and awarded a beat-up Korean fighter the medal. Afterward, Roy Jones was given the award as the best boxer in the tournament. What goes around comes around.
Mark Dresslar
Dallas, Texas
TITLE: How Did Afghanistan Get Into This Mess?
AUTHOR: By Steve Coll
TEXT: TO a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign-intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions.
When spies help construct a civil war, one seed they sow is confusion. Afghans today have little basis to trust their own recent history; too much remains hidden. The country has become a cauldron of interlocking conspiracies, both real and imagined, a maze of fractured mirrors designed by warmakers who embraced deception as a winning weapon. Afghanistan's successful reconstruction as even a semi-normal country, then, must eventually include some reclamation by Afghans of the truth about their recent past.
The KGB was present at the creation of this clandestine architecture. But there has been too little evidence to allow even an intelligent guess about how the Soviet secret services operated as the Afghan war developed after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Now a section of the shroud has been lifted. In a 178-page paper released this month, former Soviet archivist Vasily Mitrokhin extensively quotes KGB cables and files to describe violent guerrilla deception campaigns, assassinations, sabotage and bribery carried out by the KGB in Afghanistan between 1978 and 1983. In the context of current events, Mitrokhin's disclosures read like a catalogue of the Afghan war's original covert sins. Among other things, they forecast and explain many of the sins that followed.
Mitrokhin, now living in Britain under an assumed identity, is still working at one of the most impressive acts of heroism ever performed by a librarian. From 1956 until his retirement in 1984, he toiled in the archives of the KGB's foreign department. Pricked by conscience, he later said, he secretly smuggled out handwritten notes he had created and saved, describing roughly 300,000 documents. He defected to Great Britain in 1992 and seven years later co-wrote a meticulous book with Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, which covered the part of Mitrokhin's chronicle involving Western Europe and the United States. He originally drafted his newly released paper on the KGB in Afghanistan in 1987, working in secret in an isolated country dacha. The record Mitrokhin presents of Bolshevik follies and outrages in central Asia surely would have been lost had he not risked his life to take home his notes of KGB files day after day, often hiding them in his shoes.
The Soviet military's occupation of Afghanistan occurred in plain view. Unseen were large-scale, adjunct operations mounted by the Soviet secret services. They worked, Mitrokhin writes, out of a large Kabul-based KGB "residency" and through numerous ad-hoc training, sabotage and small-unit paramilitary missions, some organized directly from Moscow.
Most strikingly, according to Mitrokhin's paper, the KGB ran scores of secret "false flag" military operations inside Afghanistan during the 1980s. In these, Soviet-trained Afghan guerrilla units posed as CIA-supported, anti-Soviet mujaheddin rebels to create confusion and flush out genuine rebels for counterattacking. The KGB attached "particular importance" to this program, Mitrokhin writes: As of January 1983, there were 86 armed, KGB-trained "false bands," as they were called, operating throughout Afghanistan. They "provoked clashes between different [genuine rebel] groups and when necessary pretended to abandon their armed opposition," falsely surrendering to the Kabul government. In a relatively small country riven by ethnic and tribal suspicions, a successful program of this kind could have created widespread confusion.
Because Mitrokhin's retirement deprived him of access to files about later stages of the Soviet occupation (Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989), his information on this deception program is incomplete. It is difficult, for example, to know how rigorous KGB supervision of these false rebel groups was, or how effective the groups were among fellow Afghans. It would be absurd to attribute factionalism among the U.S.-backed mujaheddin rebels primarily to KGB provocation, as such discord had many other deeply rooted causes.
Yet the program Mitrokhin describes had an impressive scale, and his disclosures cast the standard history of chronic mujaheddin infighting during the 1980s in a new light. An unknown, perhaps significant, number of the clashes among mujaheddin groups during the 1980s - which set the stage for the catastrophic civil war in the 1990s - apparently were carried out deliberately by paid KGB agents.
The 8th Department of the KGB foreign division's "Directorate S" ran the sharp edge of Soviet covert programs in Afghanistan. The unit, Mitrokhin writes, "engaged in what is known in the criminal jargon as wet jobs, i.e., murder, sabotage, arson, explosions, poisoning, mechanical breakdowns and terrorism." In 1982, the 8th Department set up a training camp in Afghanistan run by a veteran KGB officer named Kikot, who had been transferred from Havana. The center trained Afghan agents to run sabotage and other operations in the refugee camps that were then filling with Afghan civilians - as well as anti-Soviet rebel fighters - in Pakistan and Iran.
From the Soviet embassy in Kabul, the KGB spent enormous sums to rapidly build up indigenous Afghan communist intelligence services. The main Afghan security service, known as KHAD, became feared and hated for its use of torture and assassination. With KGB funding and training, Afghan staff at KHAD soared from 700 in 1980 to more than 16,000 in 1982.
Because the Soviets knew that Pakistan's intelligence services, backed by the CIA, were training and arming anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas, the KGB sought to infiltrate and disrupt this activity with secret cross-border operations, some violent. They also sought to destabilize Pakistan. Mitrokhin documents - with names and dates - what had been long suspected: The KHAD supplied arms to Pakistani dissidents in Baluchistan and Sind who opposed their own government in Islamabad. The KGB and KHAD also linked up with Murtaza Bhutto, the brother of later Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The KGB and KHAD worked directly with Murtaza Bhutto, a leftist terrorist, to organize and supervise the hijacking of a Pakistani civilian airliner in 1981, according to Mitrokhin. Citing KGB cables, he describes a scene in which Najibullah, then the head of KHAD and later Afghanistan's Moscow-backed president, met mid-hijacking with Bhutto at Kabul's airport while disguised as an aircraft-maintenance man.
By the early 1980s, KHAD claimed to its KGB sponsors that it had placed more than 200 Afghan agents and trainees inside Pakistan, and more than 110 inside Iran. According to Mitrokhin's account, some operated at least occasionally inside the headquarters of the seven major anti-Soviet mujaheddin parties. They ran operations meant to sow dissent among the Afghan leaders.
Mujaheddin leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in particular, was so prone to attack his fellow rebels that some American intelligence analysts in Washington wondered at the time if he might be on the Soviet payroll. Mitrokhin's files make clear that he was not. Hekmatyar's considerable flaws as an American proxy seem to have been entirely his own.
The clandestine structure of the Cold War-era Afghan war anticipated the character of the fractured, deception-laden civil war that raged there during the 1990s. After Moscow and Washington withdrew, regional intelligence agencies - in most cases trained, inspired and funded by the CIA or the KGB during the 1980s - intervened directly. They often used the same covert methods pioneered by their mentor agencies. Pakistan's still-obscured role in aiding the rise of the Taliban between 1994 and 1996, and Uzbekistan's clandestine support for ethnic Uzbek warlords reigning in Mazar-e-Sharif are two examples among many. In addition, after his expulsion from Sudan in 1996, Osama bin Laden introduced his stateless terrorist network to Afghanistan - a secret brotherhood that operated as a conspiracy within the Taliban's Pakistani-supported conspiracy.
A consequence of this history for Afghans is evident in today's headlines. When political violence occurs, it is very difficult for anyone to express confidence about its origins. A government minister was killed Feb. 14 by a cold, hungry, angry mob at the Kabul airport. The country's interim government, eschewing the obvious, made arrests and announced that the minister had been assassinated in a covert plot, perhaps with international dimensions. Now it has backed away from that assertion. Which is true? Sadly, either seems plausible.
Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, served as the newspaper's South Asia bureau chief from 1989 to 1992, based in New Delhi. He contributed this comment to The Washington Post.
TITLE: The Gold Medal for Whining Goes to ...
TEXT: POPULAR culture is always sensitive to what is going on in the world, and Russian popular culture is no exception. This is why the various controversies at the Winter Olympics have been so quickly turned into literally thousands of new jokes already.
To be honest, I can't remember ever hearing a joke about Canadians before the last couple of weeks. I don't think Canada ever made much of an impression on the Russian narod before.
"The Canadian figure skaters got gold medals, but there was a misprint. Instead of 'Olympic Winners,' their medals read 'Olympic Whiners,'" goes one of the first ones to hit the streets.
"The Olympic Committee has decided to award two sets of gold medals for every event. One will be given to the winners and the other to the Canadians," runs another.
Of course, there are hundreds of others that all boil down to the same point: Canadians are whiners.
But if you look carefully at what is going on, Russians certainly shouldn't be so quick to point fingers. I was talking about the crisis with a Russian friend who is by no means a sports fan.
"[The West] doesn't give a damn about Russia," he said. "Russia doesn't mean anything to them."
A lot of people have been even less generous, saying that the West has always had a latent dislike for Russian and that the recent Olympic scandals are just additional proof of this attitude.
We have heard this type of reasoning from the highest levels of society. Viktor Mamatov, head of the Russian Olympic delegation, said that the decision to disqualify the Russian cross-country skiing relay team was "a political provocation." He added that "they are trying to knock down the Russian team at any price because our team is a favorite to win."
Mamatov was vague about who "they" are, but Alexei Mitrofanov, a Duma deputy from Vladimir Zhirinovsky's faction, was pretty clear.
"The Americans decide who should get a gold medal and try to rule the world," he said.
That's it. A return to the Cold War. It is still very fashionable and easy for politicians to repeat the old lines of those times, since there are still many people in Russia whose mindsets respond to the old Soviet-American opposition.
Politicians can use this to color almost any issue. For example, recently the Catholic Church decided to open four dioceses in Russia. At that time, Alexander Dugin, a member of Duma speaker Gennady Seleznyov's staff, said that he "thinks" the decision was made under pressure from the United States.
Why does he think this? Because he thinks it is that same as "NATO expansion."
So I wonder who is really the gold-medal winner for whining? Is it the Canadians, whose arguments were always based solely on issues directly related to the competition? Or is it the Russians, who are eager to find an American-sponsored, anti-Russian conspiracy behind every turn of events?
If Russian politicians really want to change something, they might do best to start with their own mindsets.
TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
TEXT: Hey, did you catch that great article in the Financial Times this week? A sharp, independent analysis of the growing crisis with Iraq, a nuanced piece that took full account of European worries over U.S. President George W. Bush's aggressive approach, but showed clearly that there is no credible alternative to some sort of military action to achieve lasting security in the region.
Or how about the article in the Boston Globe, which drew on insightful pieces from Agence France-Presse and Reuters to clear up the media myths about alleged "blunders" in the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan? All those quotes from neutral observers - including respected Arab voices usually hostile to the United States - showed the falsity of the claims that "thousands of innocent civilians" have been killed by American bombs.
Didn't see any stories like that? Well, you soon will, when the Pentagon's new global propaganda team, the "Office of Strategic Influence," launches its full-scale "information warfare" against America's allies - and the American people.
Pentagon officials said this week that the new office will be planting news items - including false ones - in the foreign press "to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries," the New York Times reports. This new Bush team of professional liars will handle everything from straightforward press briefings to "psychological operations" - "from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white," as one official said.
The Bush Liars will plant stories produced by supposedly independent figures, who can then push the Bush line, using the Pentagon's carefully filtered facts - or outright lies, if that will better serve the purpose. The Liars will also create false-front organizations to send emails and press releases to reporters. Naturally, these deep-cover deceptions will inevitably find their way back into the American press, allowing Bush to begrime his own country with mendacious filth.
Of course, there are people - even in the Pentagon - who joined the military in order to serve their country, not act as mercenaries for unelected elitist cliques. They complain that the covert work of the Bush Liars will destroy the remaining credibility of the U.S. armed forces.
But credibility means naught to the Liar-in-Chief, who's dissembled about everything from his criminal record to his military service to his roll in the hay with Kenny Boy Lay. So when the plan was criticized late this week, he dispatched War Lord Donald Rumsfeld to deny that the Pentagon itself would be using "lies" - although they might indulge in a bit of "tactical deception" now and then. However, he carefully omitted any mention of using outside sources to plant false stories - which is of course the heart of the plan.
Looks like the black ops have already begun!
Over a Barrel
Now let's get this straight. In America, the feds can seize the records of your private book purchases - if they're investigating a possible terrorist threat. They can haul you in for remarks you made at your local gym - if they're investigating a possible terrorist threat. They can listen in on your private conversations with your lawyer, they can enter and search your home without telling you, they can hold you indefinitely without a charge - if they're investigating a possible terrorist threat.
But what they cannot do, under any circumstances, is look at the records of your latest gun purchase - even if they're investigating a possible terrorist threat.
Yes, that's life in the topsy-turvy moral universe of John Ashcroft, the Bible-beating attorney general who is leading the domestic side of Bush's war against the American people. Obviously, most of these evildoers - who committed the ultimate sin of failing to elect the divinely chosen Dear Leader back in 2000 - deserve no more rights than those untermenschen languishing in the lager on Guantanamo Bay. But there is one class of Americans whose civil rights are sacrosanct in Bush's United (or else) States: trigger-ticklers.
Ashcroft underscored the special status of gun owners last week, while announcing new measures to "accelerate background checks on gun-buyers." A laudable notion, although its main practical effect will not be catching terrorists but simply allowing gun merchants to move weapons faster than ever, eliminating the lag time that occasionally forces itchy fingers to wait a whole day or two before they can squeeze off a round into the old ball-and-chain or that crabby supervisor at work.
That's because Ashcroft also decreed that these background checks can never, ever be used in any investigation of suspected terrorists. "For us to contravene that would be inappropriate," he announced solemnly.
How do gun owners - like Osama bin Laden, whose agents purchased many of their weapons at fine emporiums across America - rate such constitutional protection, when everyone else is up for G-man grabs? Well, for starters, everyone else didn't hand John Ashcroft more than $370,000 in cold cash for his failed Senatorial campaign, as the National Rifle Association did. That's chicken feed in comparison to the millions the NRA put at Bush's disposal, of course - but not a bad pile of scratch for all that.
Ashcroft was so publicly compromised by the mere $50,000 he got from the robber barons at Enron that he recused himself from the Bush regime's "investigation" of its chief patron. But no such scruples trouble him when it comes to guns - which, as we all know, the Lord Himself has placed in the hands of godly white men so that they might chastise the heathen, protect the womenfolk and - thank you, Jesus! - rake in the loot.
So all you terrorists out there: America is wide open - come on in and grab those heaters! No waiting required! And be sure to tell 'em ole John sent you. You might get a $370,000 discount!
TITLE: Trial of Journalist Murder Suspects Opens
AUTHOR: By Amir Zia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KARACHI, Pakistan - Three Islamic militants believed to have participated in the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl appeared in court Monday, and were ordered jailed for two more weeks while prosecutors develop their case.
The accused had been expected to face murder and kidnapping charges. But in a closed-door hearing, the judge delayed the charges to give police more time to interrogate the suspects and recover Pearl's body, said Raja Quereshi, the chief prosecutor. He said police also wanted more time to find the weapons used to kill Pearl.
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the alleged mastermind behind Pearl's abduction and murder, and two of his alleged accomplices arrived at a courthouse in the southern port city of Karachi in two armored personnel carriers that were part of an eight-vehicle convoy.
Each suspect wore a hood made made of white cloth, their faces completely covered.
During the proceedings at a special anti-terrorism court, all three defendants complained that police had forced them to sign blank pieces of paper as part of coerced confessions, said defense attorney Khawaja Naveed. He said the judge, Shabir Ahmed, ordered police to refrain from such action.
In a court appearance on Feb. 14, Saeed confessed to Pearl's kidnapping. Court officials later said that would not be enough to convict him because he was not under oath at the time.
On Monday, Naveed quoted Saeed as saying: "I don't want to make any confession."
Quereshi, the prosecutor, said that none of the suspects complained of any ill treatment by police. The prosecution, he said, informed the judge that authorities are looking for several suspects still at large. Quereshi identified them as Amjad Faruqi, Asim, Hashim Qadeer, Imtiaz Siddiqi, Ahmed Bhai and one unidentified suspect who police believe photographed Pearl.
In their hunt for the remaining suspects, police believe they may have found a link to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network, citing the involvement of three Arabs who were allegedly seen accompanying a key suspect.
Those appearing in court Monday are Saeed and two men accused of sending e-mails announcing Pearl's Jan. 23 kidnapping. U.S. and Pakistani authorities on Friday revealed the contents of a grisly videotape showing Pearl's dead body, which has not been found.
The accused had already surrendered or been arrested by the time the videotape became public. The tape does not indicate when or where the slaying took place.
A third accused e-mailer, 21-year-old Fahad Naseem, was not in court on Monday.
In a closed door deposition last week, Naseem admitted sending e-mails announcing Pearl's kidnapping on orders of Saeed. Police had already found the e-mails on Naseem's laptop computer.
"My line of defense will be that he's a man who became part of this without realizing its gravity," said Naveed, who is representing the three accused e-mailers.
Naseem sent the e-mails - one of which included a photograph of the 38-year-old journalist with a gun to his head - without knowing their contents, Naveed claimed. Naveed said he has not been allowed to see Naseem or his other two clients since they were taken into custody two weeks ago.
Kidnapping and murder are capital offenses in Pakistan.
"I will plead with the court not to treat him too harshly," Naveed said of Naseem.
He said the two co-defendants - Sheikh Mohammed Adeel, a constable with the police department's special branch, and Naseem's cousin, Salman Saqib - have not confessed to any crime and will not do so.
Mohammed Aslam, Adeel's brother, insisted Monday that Adeel was innocent but confirmed that his brother has been involved in Islamic "holy war" activities for years. As early as December, he said Adeel spent time in Afghani stan to support that country's now ousted Taliban regime.
Saeed, the suspected mastermind, was taken into custody Feb. 5. He told interrogators that his group wanted to teach the United States a lesson and that Pearl's murder was just a first step, intelligence officials said.
Newsweek magazine reported Sunday that Saeed has been indicted in the United States, raising the possibility that he could eventually be extradited. The United States and Pakistan do not have an extradition treaty.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said bringing Saeed and others to the United States to stand trial is a possibility. "The United States government may very well want to try to extradite the people involved if possible for the killing of an American, which would seem to me as a non-lawyer to be a reasonable thing," Rumsfeld said.
Authorities offered little information Sunday about the identity of the three Arab suspects or what role they may have played. But their alleged involvement - combined with investigators' revelation that Saeed said he met personally with bin Laden in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States - suggested an al-Qaida link.
Police believe a dozen or more people were involved in Pearl's abduction and murder, and that most of them have spent time in Afghanistan as supporters of the Taliban.
Before his abduction, Pearl had been investigating alleged links between Pakistani militants and Richard Reid, who was arrested in December for allegedly trying to ignite explosives in his sneakers during a Paris-Miami flight.
With Saeed in jail, the prime target of a massive police dragnet is Amjad Faruqi, who is believed to have carried out the kidnapping. A senior police investigator said one detainee said he met Faruqi several times, and each time Faruqi was accompanied by three Arabs.
TITLE: Israel Stands Down on Arafat Restrictions
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: JERUSALEM - The Israeli government decided on Sunday to keep Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, restricted to the West Bank city of Ramallah, while loosening the military cordon at his compound. The government said that if Arafat wanted to leave Ramallah, he would have to get permission from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
There had been expectations that Israel would lift the restrictions on Arafat altogether, after the Palestinian Authority detained four of the five Palestinians accused by Israel of assassinating a cabinet minister, Rehavam Zeevi, in October. Their arrest is one of the major conditions laid down by Israel for Arafat's release.
But hard-line members of the cabinet opposed any concession beyond allowing Arafat to move more freely around Ramallah, and moving back the tanks that have been parked near the entrance to his compound for two months. In fact, Arafat has gone outside the compound, to pray at a mosque, and to visit wounded Palestinians at a hospital.
There was no immediate reaction to Israel's action on Sunday from Arafat, but his lieutenants responded angrily and quickly. The Palestinians canceled security talks with the Israelis that had been scheduled for Sunday evening and that had raised hopes for new efforts to quell the current violence.
"The decision doesn't mean anything except the continuation of aggression against our people and will not lead to anything except more violence and tension," declared Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a top aide to Arafat, after a meeting of the Palestinian leadership.
A statement issued after the meeting called the "continued siege" of Arafat a "severe violation" of agreements between the Palestinians and the Israelis and a "threat to the security and stability of the whole region."
However limited the Israeli action, the debate on loosening Arafat's bonds reflected a growing sense in at least part of the Israeli government that the siege was leading nowhere.
Arafat's lieutenants, and the Palestinian population, rallied around him after Israel imposed the humiliating siege in December, and the violence raged on. While the U.S. administration has supported Israel's actions against Arafat, European governments have become critical.
In an incident Sunday evening, Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near Ramallah accidentally fired on an armored car carrying Ahmed Qurei, a senior Palestinian negotiator.
Qurei had given notice that he would be driving to Ramallah, but the Israelis said the car had approached rapidly and they had not recognized it. Palestinians said that eight bullets struck the car but that Qurei had not been injured. Peres telephoned him to apologize.
In another incident, a pregnant Palestinian woman was shot at an Israeli roadblock near the West Bank city of Nablus. Witnesses said her husband had been taking her to a hospital to give birth.
They were allowed to pass one Israeli roadblock, but then a soldier who was not aware they had been cleared opened fire. The woman survived and gave birth to a girl, whom she decided to name Hiba, Arabic for offering.
Palestinian gunmen killed two Israelis in a shooting on a West Bank road near Bethlehem on Monday, Israeli security sources said. The incident seemed to be part of an accelerating campaign by Palestinian militants to focus their attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The security sources said the gunmen opened fire on an Israeli civilian convoy traveling between the Jewish settlements of Nokdim and Tekoa near Palestinian-ruled Bethlehem, killing two Israelis and wounding two others.
(NYT, Reuters)
TITLE: Haj Gives Islam Chance To Examine Itself
AUTHOR: By Hamza Hendawi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MECCA, Saudi Arabia - In some ways, this year's haj was like any other: Muslims from around the world came to Mecca to perform ancient rites, marvel at the many faces of Islam and reaffirm their faith. But, coming after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the pilgrimage also provided an opportunity for Muslims to respond to critics and answer questions about Islam's commitment to democracy and its stance on terrorism.
Saudi-born Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network of Islamic militants are the chief suspects in the attacks. "How could terrorism fit in a faith that calls for the respect of agreements, the honoring of pacts?" Sheik Abdul-Aziz bin Al al-Sheik, Saudi Arabia's top Muslim cleric, said in a sermon during the haj. "How can terrorism fit in a religion that gives peace precedence over war?"
The pilgrimage - required of able-bodied Muslims at least once in a lifetime if they can afford it - began in Mecca on Wednesday with a traditional prayers for Islam's triumph and the destruction of its enemies. The haj has its origins in pre-Islamic days, when Arabs gathered in Mecca to worship idols, trade and reconcile tribal differences. In those days, the gatherings attracted poets who competed with work that survives today as some of the best Arabic verse.
This year, pilgrims and their political and religious leaders also seemed to reach for eloquence - and a mix of defensiveness and defiance amid questions about Islam and their suspicions that it is under attack after Sept. 11.
"If there's a force to defend Islam, count me in as a volunteer," said Anwar Sadat Mohammed Rabia, a 44-year-old Egyptian who works on a poultry farm in Medina, Saudi Arabia. "We came here this year to show the entire world that we, as Muslims, are united no matter what the enemies of Islam say," he said.
In his sermon, al-Sheik warned against blaming "our enemies," saying it would be "neither wise nor prudent." But he asked, "Why do our enemies envy us? Do they have a grudge against us because our religion is the conclusive faith and the most perfect?"
Saudi monarch King Fahd joined the debate on the teachings of Islam in an address marking the haj, which ended Sunday after bringing more than 2 million people to his kingdom. "The Muslim in this universe has a positive role to play and endeavors to fulfill it. The objective of this role is to work for the good of mankind and protect the means of life and achieve stability," King Fahd said.
Saudi Arabia's place in the debate is central. Because it is home to Islam's holiest shrines, in Mecca and Medina, it sees itself as the chief protector of the faith. The country's role in promoting the militant version of Islam it has adopted since its creation early in the 20th century became a focus of international attention when it emerged that 15 of 19 suspected hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks were Saudi citizens. Saudi officials say the Saudi government and society cannot be blamed for the actions of "deviants."
The haj, the world's largest religious annual gathering, has attracted at least 2 million pilgrims annually in recent years. Of an estimated 2 million this year, more than 1.3 million came from abroad.
After gathering in Mecca, pilgrims moved south toward Mount Arafat, where the Prophet Muhammad delivered his last sermon, for more prayers and meditation in a ritual interpreted as a foretaste of Judgment Day.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Mauritius in Turmoil
PORT LOUIS, Mauritius (Reuters) - Mauritius gained its fourth head of state in two weeks on Monday when deputies elected a replacement for a president who resigned over an anti-terrorism bill he said gave too much power to police. The National Assembly elected Karl Offmann to the largely ceremonial post in a five-minute session boycotted by 12 members of the 70-seat house arguing that security laws adopted after the Sept. 11 U.S. attacks are repressive.
Offmann, a former labor minister, is due to step down next year, when Jugnauth takes over as president under a power-sharing arrangement agreed within his coalition government.
President Cassam Uteem resigned on Feb. 15 after parliament passed the anti-terrorism bill, but rejected 10 amendments he had submitted. A vice president who stepped in as acting president resigned after just four days, saying he also had strong reservations about the content of the bill. Under the constitution, Chief Justice Ariranga Pillay then took over as acting president before Monday's elections were held to fill the post.
UN Urges Angola Peace
JOHANNESBURG (WP) - The United States and other countries Sunday urged both sides in Angola's 27-year civil war to treat the death of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi as a major opportunity for peace and to resume talks toward a lasting settlement.
The United States joined UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, neighboring South Africa and Portugal, Angola's former colonial ruler, in urging the factions to settle the war, in which UNITA claimed to champion the interests of rural black Angolans against a government dominated by people of mixed race.
The war began in 1975, when Portugal granted the country independence. Cold War divisions stoked the fighting, with Cuba and the Soviet Union backing the Marxist ruling party, and the U.S. helping Savimbi's rebel militia. After the Cold War, the fighting became a battle for Angola's vast mineral wealth. Fueling the conflict was intense personal enmity between the charismatic but ruthless Savimbi, and the somber dos Santos, who said repeatedly that he would not reopen talks while Savimbi was UNITA's leader.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Skiers Disqualified
SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Two cross-country skiers were sensationally stripped of their Winter Olym pics gold medals on Sunday after three athletes tested positive for a new blood-boosting drug. Russian Larisa Lazutina lost the gold medal she had won only hours earlier in the women's 30K classical race and Spain's Johann Muehlegg had the 50K classical gold medal he won on Saturday taken away.
Both athletes and Russian Olga Da ni lova, another world-class cross-country skier, tested positive for the blood-boosting drug darbepoetin, International Olympic Committee director general Francois Carrard told a news conference.
Lazutina's disqualification handed the gold medal in the women's 30K to Italy's Gabriella Paruzzi. Paruzzi won her surprise gold medal for Italy in the women's cross-country after finishing a massive 1:48 behind Lazutina.
Ironically, Russia gained a cross-country gold medal because of Muehlegg's disqualification. Muehlegg keeps the two gold medals he won earlier in the games, but the 50K classical went to original runner-up Mikhail Ivanov.
Scientists estimate that darbepoetin, relatively new to the market, is 10 times more powerful than EPO (erythropoietin) which also stimulates the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.
Croat Blitzes Downhill
SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Janica Kostelic reasserted the classical values of the Winter Games with a record medal haul for a women's Al pine skier at the Salt Lake City Olympics.
Mastering precipitous slopes that often resembled ice rinks more than pistes, the 20-year-old Croatian showed no aftereffects from a series of knee operations to claim three gold medals and one silver. Only Toni Sailer and Jean-Claude Killy, operating in more abbreviated program, have previously won three golds at the same games.
Kostelic opened her campaign with a gold in the combined, followed by the slalom and giant slalom titles and silver in the super-G. She sailed close to the margins, but with such fine technical expertise that her skis barely seemed to touch the snow.
Stephan Eberharter started with a bronze in the men's downhill on the perilous Grizzly piste. He went one better with silver in the super-G, losing to the seasoned Norwegian Kjetil Andre Aamodt by a tenth of a second after the team of Austrian coaches failed to advise him adequately on the final stages of the race. Finally Eberharter stood on top of the podium, leaving Snowbasin for Deer Valley and securing victory in the giant slalom.
Canada Loses Curling
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Ca na da's curlers came into the Olympics with a bunch of world championships, agents, nutritionists, fitness trainers and sports psychologists. They left with just a silver and bronze medal, as the golds went unexpectedly to Norway's men and four Scottish women representing Britain.
Canada's women had won the world title six times over the past 10 years and 12 times in all. Its curlers are celebrities. To prepare for the Olympics, Canadian skip Kelley Law left no stone unturned. A nutritionist was hired to plan all meals at the competition. The team had personal trainers and a clinical psychologist was brought along for major events.
Despite all the preparation, Canada lost in the semifinals to Britain, a team made up of four women from Scotland, the birthplace of curling. And winning the bronze wasn't enough to soothe the pain for the Canadians. "It would be nice if it was a different color," said Law. "But it's not."
In the men's final, Canada lost to Norway in the final end. On the last throw of the tournament, skip Kevin Martin's stone barely missed scoring by about an inch.
Teen Skating Sensation
SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Sixteen-year-old Sarah Hughes vaulted over early leaders Michelle Kwan and Irina Slutskaya to take the Olympic women's figure-skating gold in a stunning upset on Thursday. The American teen skated first of the top contenders and, as it turned out, skated best.
Russia's Slutskaya grabbed the silver while Kwan, the 1998 Olympic silver medallist and favorite heading into the free state program, took the bronze. Both had flawed performances.
Hughes, the 2001 world bronze medallist, skated the performance of her young life, knocking off seven triple jumps, four of them rarely seen combinations.
"Tonight was probably my greatest skate ever," said Hughes, who entered the free program fourth. "Going into it, I didn't really think I had a chance for a medal, let alone a gold because I know the competition is really difficult here."
The crowd was on its feet 10 seconds before the end of her four-minute routine to Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe," and flowers rained down on the ice as Hughes took her final bows.
TITLE: Leverkusen Takes Over First Place
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BERLIN - Bayer Leverkusen crushed title rival Borussia Dortmund 4-0 on Sunday to regain the top spot in the German Bundesliga.
Bayer, seeking the first league title in its history, is now one point ahead of second-placed Dortmund, whose 12-match unbeaten run came to an end.
With just five points separating the top five teams with just 10 matches to go, the Bundesliga title race is once again heading for a thrilling finish.
"It was a great win," said Leverkusen coach Klaus Toppmoeller of the surprisingly lopsided victory. "We deserved to win by four goals," said Toppmoeller. "It's going to be a close race up to the finish."
Dortmund had an early goal disallowed before German international Michael Ballack fired the home side ahead after 32 minutes in front of a sell-out crowd of 22,500.
Leverkusen, which has now netted 57 goals in 24 league matches, besieged the Dortmund defence, and Ulf Kirsten twice came close to scoring late in the first half.
Carsten Ramelow, Oliver Neuville and Dimitar Berbatow added goals in the second half to seal a comprehensive victory.
The visitors were forced to play most of the second half with 10 players after striker Jan Koller was sent-off in the 53rd minute.
England. Brad Friedel made a point-blank save in the closing minutes to preserve Blackburn's 2-1 win over Tottenham in the League Cup final Sunday.
The League Cup is the first English trophy to be contested this season and Blackburn secured a place in next season's UEFA Cup competition with its win.
Friedel had a standout game for Rovers. He made three tough saves against Les Ferdinand, two in the first half and a late stop on a header to seal the win.
"He is a top man," Blackburn manager Graeme Souness said of Friedel. "I have said before there is nobody in the Premier League I would swap him for."
Andy Cole, who joined Blackburn on Dec. 29 from Manchester United, scored the winning goal in the 68th minute after a defensive error by Tottenham's Ledley King.
Matt Jansen also scored for Blackburn and Christian Ziege scored Tottenham's only goal.
In the Premiership, Newcastle Unit ed climbed to second place in the English on Sunday after a hard-fought 1-0 victory at its north-east rival Sunderland.
Greek defender Nikos Dabizas, who had hit the crossbar minutes earlier, headed Newcastle's winner in the 64th minute.
Newcastle was the better team on the day and fully deserved their win, though it also needed a handful of fine saves from their Irish goalkeeper Shay Given.
Meanwhile, Leeds lost more ground on the leaders as it was held to a goalless draw by Charlton.
Strikers Robbie Fowler and Mark Viduka fired blanks against the Londoners, leaving manager David O'Leary to rue the missed opportunities.
"We had enough chances to win the game, and we missed good chances today," he said.
"Robbie knows himself, he's disappointed that he hasn't scored a few goals today, because there were good chances and he's a quality player. He's human."
Italy. Inter Milan took its turn in first place in Serie A after a 3-2 win against Udinese on Sunday, while Juventus was grateful for a point from an exciting 2-2 Turin derby draw with Torino thanks to an 89th minute equalizer from substitute Enzo Maresca.
Inter and second-place Roma, which beat Perugia 1-0 on Saturday, both have 49 points with third-place Juventus a point behind. None of the top three teams are truly shining at the moment, but all are doing enough to stay in a battle that looks set to go to the wire.
Christian Vieri set Inter on its way with a 28th-minute volley and a second-half goal from Nicola Ventola doubled the advantage for Hector Cuper's side.
Roberto Muzzi got one back for Udinese in the 75th minute, but Inter's Portuguese winger Sergio Conceicao restored the two-goal advantage with a stunning strike before Giampiero Pinzi gave Inter a late scare with a fine shot a minute from time.
Just as in their first meeting of the season, which ended 3-3, Torino showed no fear in confronting its more illustrious neighbor Juventus.
But whereas in October Torino came back from three goals down for a draw, this time it will be disappointed to have only taken a point from another pulsating encounter.
Juve took the lead in the 10th minute with the prolific David Treze guet heading home a fine left-wing cross from Holland international Edgar Davids.
But Marco Ferrante put Toro on level terms in the 65th minute with an angled drive from the right.
Ten minutes from the end, French midfielder Benoit Cauet looked to have given Torino a famous win with his first-ever goal for the club, slotting home a low Cristiano Lucarelli cross at the back post.
But Juve poured on the pressure, with Ciro Ferrara hitting the crossbar and then, with just a minute of normal time remaining, Maresca rose superbly on the edge of the area to head home a Lilian Thuram cross.
(Reuters, AP)
(For other results, see Scorecard)