SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #798 (63), Tuesday, August 27, 2002
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TITLE: Georgia Acts on Russia 'Rebels' Claim
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia - Georgian troops patrolled a lawless region where Russia says Chechen rebels are based but came up empty-handed, while President Eduard Shevardnadze announced plans to visit the Pankisi Gorge and said that, before launching the sweep, his government warned militants they should leave.
"We had just one proposal for them: Leave the Pankisi Gorge as soon as possible, because we don't want bloodshed there," Shevardnadze said at a briefing. Later, his office said he would visit the region Tuesday to meet with residents and the Interior Ministry troops sent in Sunday to search for militants.
Georgian officials have not said how many Interior Ministry troops were sent into the Pankisi Gorge. But NTV showed footage of a convoy of tanks, armored personnel carriers and trucks filled with troops heading into the gorge, and said there were about 200 vehicles.
In a parallel operation, 1,500 army troops - under the command of officers who have had U.S. anti-terrorism training - began exercises in the Akhmet district near the southern edge of the gorge.
There were no reports of clashes in Pankisi on Monday as troops set up checkpoints in the gorge, some 40 kilometers from Tbilisi, as the crow flies.
"If some of them have left the gorge and headed elsewhere, I wouldn't be looking for their address," Shevardnadze said of the militants. "They themselves know where to go. Of course, it would be difficult for them to cross into Russia. Maybe they have other addresses. We haven't discussed it with them."
Last week, Georgia's Rustavi-2 television reported that a Chechen warlord and up to 500 fighters abandoned a camp north of Tbilisi and headed north, toward the border with Chechnya.
Washington has said that some of the fighters in the gorge could be linked to al-Qaida and sent U.S. military instructors to Georgia to train troops for anti-terror operations.
Lasha Natsvlishvili, the deputy minister of state security, promised there would be no zachistki, or sweeps, to round up criminals. This was a clear comparison to Chechnya, where troops have been accused of systemic abuses, from looting to torture and murder, in sweeping villages for suspected rebels.
"Identifying and detaining criminals will be done according to existing intelligence information," Natsvlishvili was quoted as saying.
At any moment, the 1,500 Georgian army troops deployed in the military exercises, dubbed Kakheti-2002, may join the police operation in the gorge if needed, Georgian Defense Minister David Tevzadze said Sunday. Tevzadze earlier told Interfax that soldiers would not enter villages in the gorge.
The exercises, scheduled to last three weeks, are intended to test cooperation between the Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and border guards in securing border areas, Tevzadze said.
The Pankisi Gorge has long been a source of tension in Georgia's relations with Russia. Moscow has accused Tbilisi of harboring Chechen rebels on its territory and demanded that it permit Russian troops to flush them out. Georgia has said its own troops would do the job.
Russian officials urged Tbilisi to detain the militants and hand them over to Moscow, or, as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov proposed Monday, kill them and produce their bodies for identification. They strongly warned Georgia against simply pushing rebels back into Chechnya.
"We don't want bands of killers and terrorists to bring death to our territory," Ivanov said, according to ITAR-Tass.
Shevardnadze scoffed at Moscow's complaints, saying it was the Russian military that pushed the rebels into Georgia when it launched its second invasion in Chechnya in the fall of 1999. He accused Russia of trying to derail the anti-terror operation in Pankisi by launching an air raid on the area on Friday that killed at least one civilian and wounded five others. Russian military officials have denied the accusations.
Ivanov asserted Monday that Georgia might have carried out the strikes and was blaming Russia for them to prevent possible retaliation by militants.
"Because they do not want to fight with terrorists and rebels, who can at any moment turn their weapons towards Tbilisi, they conveniently say each time that someone is bombing them," he said.
But the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which maintains patrols on the border, said its staff saw the planes.
Washington also came down on Georgia's side, with U.S. President George W. Bush's spokesperson issuing a strongly worded statement all but accusing Russia of lying.
"The United States strongly supports Georgia's independence and territorial integrity, and has welcomed similar statements by the Russian Federation," White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer said Saturday. "Yesterday's attacks and their denial by the Russian government, however, belie such Russian assurances."
Ivanov refused to comment on a White House statement Saturday voicing strong concern about the bombing.
Since the Soviet collapse, Shevardnadze's pro-Western course has vexed Moscow, which would like to keep the strategically placed Caucasus country in its sway.
Russia, which has a pipeline for Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan, pushed for a bigger pipeline to follow the same path to its Black Sea port of Novorossiisk. However, it lost the bid as the United States strongly backed another route via Georgia and Turkey.
Shevardnadze said that the alleged Russian air raids were also aimed at disrupting big international projects involving Georgia.
Georgian lawmakers held an emergency session on Monday to consider responses to the bombing. Some legislators proposed breaking diplomatic ties with Russia and quitting the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Russian-dominated alliance of ex-Soviet republics.
Shevardnadze said he opposed such action, saying that Georgia and Russia must work together to normalize relations.
(AP, SPT, Reuters)
TITLE: Shipping Away a Generation of Intellectuals
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - On a quiet August day 80 years ago, Nikolai Berdyayev, perhaps Russia's best known philosopher, left his dacha in Barvikha where he had enjoyed his first comfortable summer since the Revolution five years earlier.
He was answering a summons from the GPU in Moscow, as the Bolshevik secret police had just been renamed. Berdyayev thought he was being called in to talk about a planned trip to Czechoslovakia, which had become possible with the new liberties of Lenin's new economic policy, or NEP.
Instead, together with dozens of other prominent philosophers, economists, sociologists, scientists, journalists and other intellectuals, Berdyayev was arrested on Aug. 16, 1922, charged with "anti-Soviet activity" and expelled from Russia.
He left Petrograd on Sept. 28 aboard the Oberburgermeister Hacken - one of two German ships that became known as a "philosophers' ship" - a real and metaphorical boat that carried away the nation's intellectual elite and, with it, the very notion of free intellectual pursuit.
After the turmoil of the Revolution, life for Berdyayev had seemed to be settling down. He had been appointed a professor at Moscow University and, for the first time, he had managed to get a dacha for the summer.
"When I was told that I was being expelled, I was crestfallen," Berdyayev wrote in "Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography," first published in 1949, a year after he died in Clamart, France. "I did not want to emigrate and I rejected emigre circles with which I did not want to blend. But at the same time, I had a feeling that I would get to a freer world and be able to breath a freer air."
The paradox of the expulsions is that what was a tragedy for these people, and for philosophy in Russia, in the end saved them from almost certain death in the purges of the 1930s.
One possible explanation for the Bolsheviks' unusual humanism was their desire to win diplomatic recognition from the Western powers. "Perhaps, the Bolsheviks were trying to show that their regime was not a barbaric despoty," wrote one of passengers, philosopher Nicholas O. Lossky, in his memoirs.
In the runup to the anniversary, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, declassified the files of two lesser known passengers of the philosopers' ship - the People's Socialist Party leader Alexei Peshekhonov, who served briefly as the Provisional Government's food-supplies minister in 1917, and journalist Viktor Iretsky - Izvestia reported Aug. 16.
Deputy FSB head Vladimir Shults stopped just short of saying that those expelled should have thanked the Soviet leaders.
"Today, we say this action was undoubtedly inhumane and violated human and civil rights," Izvestia quoted Shults as saying. "But, keeping in mind what followed, the 1922 mass deportation of intellectuals appears to have become a blessing for many of those expelled, even taking into account that their lives in emigration were not easy. Thanks to the action of Bolshevik leaders, outstanding academics remained alive and made a substantial contribution to the development of the world's science, technology and art."
Such a concept does not sit well with historians and descendants of the exiles.
"Please tell the FSB that they are deeply mistaken," Lossky's grandson said by telephone from a suburb of Paris.
"I am grateful that they were deported and not shot - otherwise I would not have come into this world," said Nicholas V. Lossky, a professor emeritus at the University of Paris who continues to teach at St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute there. But he said neither his grandfather nor Berdyayev nor Sergei Bulgakov, another of the deportees and one of the founders of the Paris theological institute, ever saw the expulsions as a blessing.
"They did not plan to leave Russia," he said. "Not because they were of Soviet convictions, but because they considered it their duty to share the destiny of their people."
A connection with Russia was important for the philosophers, most of whom had moved from Marxism to Christianity and who, despite many differences among themselves, were attempting to formulate a distinctly Russian metaphysics rooted in the country's history and culture.
All those arrested in August faced the same charge: "Since the October coup [name] not only failed to reconcile with the power of workers and peasants that exists in Russia, but did not stop his anti-Soviet activities for one moment."
None of those expelled were active in political opposition. With several exceptions, all wanted to be loyal citizens of the new Russia. Yet they continued to profess their ideals, which were different from those of communism.
"I recognize the Soviet power, but do not consider it ideal in terms of approaching the goal of the power of the people," Peshekhonov wrote in his protocol of interrogation.
Berdyayev said he advocated "a Christian society, based on Christian freedom, Christian brotherhood and Christian equality, which cannot be carried out by any party, i.e. I equally disagree with bourgeois society and communism." Excerpts from his GPU file are used extensively in Alexander Vadimov's biography of Berdyayev.
The expulsions were ordered when intellectual activity began to bloom with the NEP. It was also a period when the Communists began to enforce ideological uniformity and suppress any sign of a civil society. The year before, Lenin had disbanded the Committee for Help to the Hungry, or Pomgol, which included both government and public figures such as writer Maxim Gorky and theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Most members of the committee were imprisoned or exiled.
The year 1922 also saw a bloody campaign to confiscate church valuables. "The more representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reactionary clergy we manage to shoot in this case, the better," Lenin wrote in a now-famous note. "It is now that we should teach the public such a lesson that it doesn't dare to think of any resistance for several decades." It didn't.
On May 19, 1922, Lenin wrote a letter to GPU head Felix Dzerzhinsky ordering him to track down non-Communist intellectuals. "To collect data systematically on the political background, work and literary activity of professors and writers," he wrote. "To assign all this to a diligent, educated and careful man at the GPU."
On June 8, the Politburo appointed two commisions: one to compile lists of professors, the other of students. On Aug. 16 and 17, most arrests were carried out in Moscow, Petrograd, Kiev and other major cities.
However, when the government applied to the German Embassy for a collective visa, Germany balked. "Chancellor Wirt replied that Germany was not Siberia and one should not send Russian citizens into exile there," Lossky wrote in his memoirs. "But if Russian scientists and writers apply themselves for a visa, Gemany will gladly offer them hospitality."
Some of the intellectuals were then released, and delegates were elected to take care of the visa process, book the cabins on the ship and negotiate with the authorities about how many books and manuscripts they would be allowed to take with them. Lossky was one of the delegates.
The Politburo's lists have not been published, and the FSB refused to say when other files would be declassified, Izvestia reported. Memoirs differ on how many people were deported.
Modern-day philosopher Sergei Khoruzhy, who wrote a book on Russian philosophy, concluded that at least 77 intellectuals, accompanied by their famillies, were expelled. Of them, 23 were economists, agronomists and cooperative movement leaders; 13 were philosophers, sociologists and legal scholars; 13 were scientists and technical experts; 11 were journalists and writers; six were historians; six were religious activists; and five were doctors.
The Oberburgermeister Hacken left on Sept. 28. The second ship, the Preussen, on Nov. 16. Later that month, the deportees opened the Russian Academy of Philosophy and Religion in Berlin and in February 1923 the Russian Science Institute. But few won recognition outside Russian emigre groups.
One exception was Pitirim Sorokin, who founded the sociology department at Harvard University in 1930. Others also taught in Western universities.
"With the expulsions, philosophy in Russia ended," Khoruzhy wrote in "After the Break. The Paths of Russian Philosophy." "What has since been called by that name in our country was in reality just a service of the totalitarian machine."
The expulsions were also a milestone on Russia's way to totalitarianism, because politically loyal but intellectually free people who consituted the basis of what came to be known as civil society were no longer to be tolerated.
TITLE: Copter Death Toll Reaches 117
AUTHOR: By Sergei Venyavsky
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia - A soldier injured when a military transport helicopter crashed in Chechnya last week died in the hospital, authorities said Monday, raising the death toll to 117 as officials denied reports that investigators had determined the craft was shot down by a rebels.
A private, Roman Stepanov, died in a military hospital in Rostov-na-Donu over the weekend, Interfax quoted the head of the group charged with taking care of the victims as saying.
Major General Alexander Serov, a deputy commander of federal forces in the region, confirmed the death toll had risen to 117.
The Mi-26 helicopter went down on Aug. 19 in a minefield outside Khankala, the main military headquarters in Chechnya. The dead, who were passengers on the flight from a military base in Mozdok, in the nearby North Ossetia region, including contract soldiers, conscripts, an army nurse and her child. Some of the injured remain in critical condition.
Citing unnamed sources in the commission investigating the crash, Interfax and Itar-Tass reported Monday that the commission concluded a portable anti-aircraft missile was used to down the huge helicopter.
However, the head of the commission and a top prosecutor both later said the cause had not yet been determined for certain.
"All allegations to the effect that the cause of the air crash is known and that it was a missile strike are premature," Interfax quoted Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky as saying. Fridinsky had confirmed last week that part of an anti-aircraft missile system had been found close to the crash site.
Commission head Nikolai Kormiltsev, who is the chief of Russia's ground forces, said investigators were still examining the helicopter's engine and considering two possibilities - that it burst into flames because of a technical problem or was hit by a missile. He said the commission's conclusions would be announced in the coming days, Itar-Tass reported.
Kormiltsev said the helicopter, which was designed to carry some 80 combat-equipped soldiers or up to 20 tons of cargo, was not overloaded.
Fridinsky denied reports that troops have detained a Chechen militant suspected of involvement in downing of the aircraft, saying no arrests have been made.
The crash came amid an upsurge of rebel attacks. At least four service personnel have been killed and 11 wounded in three days of clashes near Bamut in western Chechnya, according to an official in Chechnya's Moscow-backed regional administration.
TITLE: Investigators Report on Russian Pilot
AUTHOR: By David Rising
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - The pilot of a Russian passenger jet that collided in mid-air with a DHL freight plane responded immediately to orders from a Swiss air-traffic controller to descend, despite conflicting warnings from his onboard computer, German investigators said Monday.
Germany's air-accident investigation agency had previously said the pilot of the Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 only responded to a second order to descend from Swiss air-traffic control.
The information led to speculation the Russian pilot was unsure whether to obey the air-traffic controller, or his Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System, or TCAS, which told him to climb.
Western experts have said pilots are always taught TCAS orders take precedence, but Russian aviation officials have insisted their pilots are told to obey air-traffic control orders in case of conflict.
The DHL International Boeing 757-200 pilot followed his TCAS command to descend, but did not alert ground control that he was bringing the plane down until 13 seconds before impact, the report confirmed.
The two planes collided over a strip of southern Germany controlled by Swiss towers on July 1, killing 71 people.
It had been unclear from the flight-data recorder exactly when the Russian plane began its descent into the DHL jet's path, but more detailed information was uncovered in examination of the Tu-154's TCAS computer, said Frank Goeldner, a spokesperson for the German agency, which is in charge of the investigation.
The report said both aircraft were equipped with the same TCAS systems, and neither malfunctioned. It noted that "both operators had provided training programs for TCAS and the crews had completed the corresponding training."
Goeldner said investigators are still looking into who the Russian crew was trained to obey. Accident investigations usually take about a year to complete, Goeldner said.
The crash killed 69 people on the Russian plane, including 45 pupils heading for a Spanish beach vacation, and the two DHL pilots.
Investigators have so far focused on the role of Zurich controllers, who had command of the planes even though they were in German airspace. A lone controller was on duty while a colleague took a break, a collision-warning system was down for maintenance and the phones were being repaired.
Swiss prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation to see whether charges of negligent homicide are warranted. That investigation will not proceed until German authorities have finished their report, Swiss air-traffic control spokesperson Patrick Herr said. The air-traffic controller who was on duty was suspended shortly after the crash.
TITLE: Putin Pledges Support to Embattled Navy
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIVOSTOK, Far East - President Vladimir Putin on Monday visited a Pacific Fleet destroyer and said that the Kremlin is working to improve conditions in the country's troubled navy.
Like other branches of the military, the navy has been plagued by financial problems and low morale since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hundreds of ships have been idled, others are in poor repair and exercises and other operations have been limited.
Putin said the navy had been given particularly short shrift in recent years.
"The navy is in a difficult position," he said in Vladivostok, where the Pacific Fleet is based. "The share of the navy in overall spending assigned to the armed forces has been too small" and the government "forgot about laying down new ships."
"We have worked out a new program of rearming the navy, an absolutely feasible one," Putin said. "As a result of implementing it we will not only preserve the navy but raise it to a qualitatively new level allowing it to carry out the tasks facing it."
During his visit to the anti-submarine ship Marshal Shaposhnikov, Putin reassured the crew that their work is critical to the country.
"The Pacific Fleet was, is and will remain a guarantor of Russia's interests not only in the Far East but also in all parts of the Pacific," he said.
Aboard the ship, Putin met with Pacific Fleet Commander Rear Admiral Viktor Fyodorov and the commander of the Pacific district of the Federal Border Service, Colonel General Pavel Tarasenko.
He asked about the conditions for protecting the Russian border and interaction between the border service and fleet. Illegal immigration is a high concern in the Far East, which has a long border with China and a short common frontier with North Korea.
He also commented on the Kremlin's efforts to introduce a professional army, and cautioned that the transition would take time. Not only do salaries have to be raised, he said, but apartments must be built to accommodate the service personnel.
Putin is in the middle of a six-day trip that is his first visit to Vladivostok, the country's principal Pacific Coast city, since becoming president 2 1/2 years ago.
Earlier in the visit, he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in talks that Putin said focused on improving economic relations with that country and he met with regional officials to discuss economic recovery in the Far East.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Forest Fires and Fumes
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) More than 300 hectares of forest area and peat bog are currently on fire around St. Petersburg, Interfax reported on August 26.
As a result, many neighborhoods in St. Petersburg, including the center of the city, were covered in smoke on Monday.
There are 40 areas where the fire is concentrated, in the Tosno, Vyborg and Gatchina regions of the Leningrad Oblast. The largest fire enveloped 72 hectares in the vicinity of Semrino village in the Gatchina region.
By Monday evening, the fire centers had become localized and over 150 firefighters and 70 fire engines were working to put them out.
Spokespersons for the emergency services said that rainy weather would be needed in order to extinguish the fires and remove the smoke in the city. The St. Petersburg Meteorological Center, however, has forecasted no rain in the immediate future, Interfax reported.
Construction Accident
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) seven-year old child died and three people were injured as a result of a construction crane falling on Kolomyazhsky Prospect in St. Petersburg on August 26.
A three-year-old child, and two women of 25 and 36 years of age, were also hospitalized as a result, the St. Petersburg Emergency Situations Ministry press service reported.
The cause of the accident is currently being investigated.
TITLE: Vodka-Fueled Row Ends in Bomb Threat
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A bomb threat at Kristall's headquarters in eastern Moscow on Friday temporarily ended a standoff between two rivals who both claim to be in charge of the country's largest vodka distillery.
An anonymous caller phoned in the threat about an hour after former Kristall director Alexander Romanov entered the grounds of the tsarist-era factory with several court marshals and a court order saying he is the rightful head of the company.
It was the second time Romanov attempted to take control of the factory from current general director Alexander Timofeyev since a local court ruled on Aug. 16 that Romanov is legally in charge.
"Romanov had all the necessary documents," said Kristall spokesperson Olga Frolova. "Contrary to expectations, he entered without the use of force."
Romanov submitted to the Butyrsky inter-municipal court the results of an alleged vote Aug. 12 by Kristall's board electing him general director. Four days later, the court ruled in favor of Romanov and ordered Kristall's bank accounts frozen until he assumed control of the company.
However, Timofeyev and Kristall board chairperson Yakov Mastinsky have contested the ruling with the Prosecutor General's Office. Both men claim that the board vote was illegal, and Mastinsky says his signature on the document was forged.
Timofeyev and Romanov were discussing the issue when the bomb threat forced them to evacuate the main building at the century-old compound.
Police cars and ambulances quickly arrived and sniffer dogs were sent in.
Romanov and Timofeyev then joined the crowd of police officers, security staff and reporters outside the factory's red brick walls. But no bomb was found and Romanov, a one-time vice president in charge of government relations at state-controlled oil major Rosneft, left.
But about 2 1/2 hours later, he returned - this time with a heavily armed private security force that operates out of the Interior Ministry.
He was accompanied by Leonid Karpukhin, the deputy head of the Moscow branch of the police guard service, or vnevedomstvennaya okhrana, the largest force within the Interior Ministry. The officers are rent-a-cops, earning their salaries from private clients, not the state.
Karpukhin produced a contract that his guard service signed with Romanov and said that his officers would be replacing Timofeyev's security staff, according to Frolova. She added that the contract was stamped with a Kristall seal that went missing when Romanov was general director two years ago.
Frolova said that Romanov and his guards negotiated through the gate of the complex with Timofeyev's lawyers until about 9:30 p.m., when they left after reporters and television crews arrived.
Kristall, a byword for quality vodkas throughout Russia, is on track to post revenues of some $250 million this year. The recent events at the company have been linked to a change in management at state vodka holding Rosspirtprom, which controls the government's 5- percent stake in the distillery.
Last month, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov replaced former Rosspirtprom chief Sergei Zivenko with Pyotr Myasoyedov, a former major-general in the St. Petersburg Tax Police.
TITLE: Moscow Car Show Ignored by Foreigners
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The country's biggest auto event became less of a global spectacle than a festival of all things Russian last week, as international carmakers shied away from the seventh annual Moscow International Motor Show.
Although this year's show has drawn a record number of participants, with 750 companies represented from around the world, most foreign automakers said that they would wait until next year to show off their wares. In doing so, members of the European Business Club's automotive manufacturing committee have effectively boycotted the event.
"We're trying to work with the organizers [ASM-Holding and International Trade and Exhibitions] to have the Moscow motor show coincide with all the other motor show structures of the world," said Heidi McCormack, general director of GM-CIS, a member of the EBC's auto committee. "The major shows exhibit every two years."
Cost was also a factor in the EBC's decision to stay away, with foreign companies charged more to exhibit than their Russian colleagues.
"There has been a somewhat large disparity. We're trying to equalize the price of all exhibits," McCormack said.
Domestic producers were quick to take advantage of the foreign absences and draw attention to themselves.
"I think this is an exposition of national achievements because foreign carmakers are not represented," said Yury Stepanov, vice president of Russia's largest automaker, AvtoVAZ.
AvtoVAZ showed off for the first time a line of automobiles it hopes will one day replace the Ladas seen so often on Russian roads - the Calina.
Designed to be an attractive, affordable automobile, the Calina will need $500 million in investment to make it onto the assembly line.
At the same time, the auto giant plans to start producing its so-called modernized classic, the VAZ-2151, which is essentially the same Lada as on the streets today but with a new, more stylish wrapper.
No. 2 carmaker GAZ had less to offer the consumer market at the exhibition, reflecting the falling sales of its legendary Volga sedan. But one of its new developments, the Tigr - Russia's answer to the American Humvee - drew substantial crowds.
"The show is already at a European level," said Marco Berti, a representative of exclusive Italian carmaker De Tomaso, as he walked through the exhibition complex on Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya. De Tomaso has a joint venture with UAZ to produce an SUV in Italy, but Berti said his company had not had enough time to set up its own stand at the show this week.
TITLE: U.S. Claims Row Over Chicken is Resolved
AUTHOR: By Martin Crutsinger
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - U.S. President George W. Bush's administration announced Friday that it had resolved a trade dispute that had for months seriously disrupted exports of U.S. chicken products to Russia, the biggest foreign market for U.S. poultry farmers.
The dispute was resolved when negotiators for both countries reached agreement on a new veterinary certificate that addressed health concerns raised by the Russian government.
The agreement was announced jointly by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who had all actively participated in the negotiations. The dispute had disrupted sales of U.S. chicken products in Russia since March, adversely affecting farmers in 38 states.
"This agreement comes at a critical time for the U.S. poultry industry and will allow trade flows to resume with much greater certainty," Veneman said.
Agriculture Undersecretary J.B. Penn said Friday in a telephone interview that the last issue negotiated was a "long-running misunderstanding" between Moscow and Washington over avian influenza.
"American chicken companies will move immediately to implement the agreement and rebuild the trade, which has been subject to cutoffs and regulatory uncertainty for the past six months," said George Watts, president of the National Chicken Council.
The council said that last year Russia imported 1.07 million tons of U.S. chicken parts, worth $630 million, and 30,780 tons of turkey, worth $26.5 million. Exports to Russia represented 8 percent of all the chicken produced in the United States and 2 percent of all the turkey.
Russia on March 1 imposed a ban on further chicken shipments from the United States because of health issues. It ended the embargo April 15 but imposed other restrictions involving import permits that had severely limited U.S. sales in the country. Through the first six months of this year, Russian imports of U.S. chicken products were down by 29 percent compared to the same period a year ago.
The agreement on the chicken dispute was announced a day after the Bush administration announced a large expansion in the amount of foreign steel it will exempt from protective tariffs Bush had imposed in March to protect the U.S. steel industry. Russia, along with other countries, had strongly objected to those tariffs. Under the new exemptions, 25 percent of the original 13.1 million tons of foreign steel originally covered will now be exempt from the tariffs, which ranged up to 30 percent.
Russia is involved in talks with the United States and other countries on its application to become a member of the World Trade Organization, a process that administration officials said could be jeopardized unless the chicken dispute is resolved satisfactorily.
Evans said that the agreement to resume chicken exports "moves the United States and Russia one step closer toward realizing our common goals of greater economic partnership and expanded trade between our two countries."
TITLE: Western Bank Consortium Grants Uralsib Loan of $33M
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A consortium of Western banks on Friday granted Bashkortostan-based Uralsib a one-year, $33-million loan - the largest unsecured, syndicated credit to a domestic bank since the 1998 crisis.
Interest on the loan is 3.5 percent above the London interbank offered rate, or LIBOR.
"Loans have been given on a very selective basis [since the crisis] to assure that funds are used in an appropriate way," said Martin Czhurda, head of the global financial institutions department at Austria's Raiffeisen Zentralbank, which led the consortium. "We want to be sure that we don't repeat the mistakes of 1998," he added.
The loan was co-syndicated by Dresdner Bank, Commerzbank, American Express Bank, Banque Bruxelles Lambert, ING Group, Bank Gesellschaft Berlin, London-based Moscow Narodny Bank, Adria Bank, DZ Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China.
Only a few Russian banks have managed to attract money from abroad since August 1998, when the banking sector defaulted on billions of dollars in loans.
Standard Bank of London syndicated a $20-million loan for No. 4 bank Alfa Bank last year. The one-year loan, provided by several European banks, had a rate of LIBOR plus 3.75 percent. Also last year, MDM-Bank received a six-month, $10-million loan at LIBOR plus 4.125 percent syndicated by Raiffeisenbank Austria. And earlier this year, Nomos-Bank received a $17-million loan syndicated by Standard Bank.
"This is good news for Uralsib, and it reflects the fact that it has chosen the right strategy for its development," said Natalya Orlova, an economist with Alfa Bank.
Uralsib is the No. 8 domestic bank.
TITLE: New Entries Make Top Ten of Con-Artist Crime
AUTHOR: By David Ho
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Scams involving unscrupulous stockbrokers and financial analysts with conflicting interests are for the first time among the top 10 investment frauds listed by U.S. state securities regulators.
Fraudulent oil and gas investments and schemes involving charitable gift annuities also joined the annual list, the North American Securities Administrators Association said Monday. The group, known as NASAA, represents securities regulators in the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Canada and Mexico.
"Record-low interest rates and a bear market on Wall Street have created a bull market in fraud on Main Street," said Joseph Borg, NASAA president and director of the Alabama Securities Commission. He said con artists take advantage of nervous investors, pitching scams as safe alternatives with high returns - an impossible combination.
The regulators ranked the frauds and risky investments they are fighting by how often they occur and their impact.
The top-ranked scam for 2002 involved unlicensed individuals, such as independent insurance agents, selling securities. Borg said most agents are honest, but too many are lured by high commissions into selling high-risk or fraudulent investments.
The regulators ranked deceptive stockbrokers at No. 2, saying "the declining stock market has caused some brokers to cut corners or resort to outright fraud."
Last year, North Dakota's securities commissioner yanked the licenses of two brokers, saying that they squandered millions by making speculative investments without their clients' permission. The brokers were affiliated with H.D. Vest Investment Services Inc., an Irving, Texas, firm that in December settled with regulators and agreed to repay customers more than $3.2 million.
Analyst-research conflicts came in third on the regulators' list. State investigators are probing whether some analysts issued glowing research reports and made buy recommendations to win investment-banking business, NASAA said.
The other seven top investment frauds, in order, are:
. Promissory notes, which typically involve loans to companies made by investors in exchange for a fixed amount of periodic income. Legitimate corporate promissory notes are not usually sold to the public and some schemes are fraudulent.
. Prime-bank schemes that promise investors risk-free, triple-digit returns on debt notes that are said to be guaranteed by the world's biggest banks.
. Viatical settlements, which, when done legally, involve buying into the insurance policies of the terminally ill, who get a portion of the money to help with medical bills. The investor is supposed to get paid when the person dies, but, in some fraudulent cases, the policyholders aren't really dying or don't even exist.
. Affinity-fraud investing schemes that target religious, ethnic and professional groups and are performed by members of the groups who use their common backgrounds to gain trust.
. Charitable-gift annuities, in which a donor gives cash or stock to a charity in return for lifetime fixed payments based on age - the older the donor, the larger the payment. Regulators said investors should be cautious of little-known organizations offering such investments.
. Oil and gas schemes, including investments in fraudulent operations or wells that don't produce.
. Leasing scams involving telephones, automated teller machines and Internet kiosks.
TITLE: Workers at Bankrupt Polish Shipyard Stage Sit-In Protest
AUTHOR: By Beata Pasek
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW, Poland - Employees of the bankrupt Szczecin shipyard staged a sit-in protest Monday, demanding that their jobs be retained by the government-run company that has been formed to continue production.
Thousands of protesters gathered below a banner reading "Strike" that they had tacked to the entrance of the shipyard, demanding that all 5,500 of the original employees be given work in the new company, Stocznia Szczecinska Nowa SA, and that they receive pay outstanding since April.
"Nobody cares about us," said Roman Pniewski, spokesperson for the protesters in the Baltic city of Szczecin. "We must take a decisive action. It's a struggle for existence."
Since taking over from the bankrupt shipyard in late July, the new company said that it would employ up to 5,500 workers, and has so far signed contracts with 750, none of whom are participating in the protests.
Nowa is still negotiating terms to take over contracts from the private company that declared bankruptcy last month.
Andrzej Stachura, president of Nowa, which is owned by a government agency, said in a letter to workers that he began talks with a Norwegian client on Monday about a contract for several ships and that the yard has already signed a contract with a Vietnamese customer.
He also said that the yard has asked for government guarantees for building another five ships. The government has already extended credit guarantees for continuing work on seven vessels.
The shipyard, once the jewel of post-communist restructuring, overextended itself before bad economic times hit and filed for bankruptcy.
Since then, workers have marched regularly through the streets of Szczecin or held meetings in the shipyard demanding that the government help them get their jobs back.
The shipyard halted work in April after it could no longer pay suppliers, then filed for bankruptcy after creditor banks refused to forgive the bulk of its debt. The failure of negotiations with creditors caused the government, which held a 10-percent stake in the company, to drop its plan to take over the shipyard.
Experts estimate that if the yard is not rescued, it could affect 55,000 workers nationwide in related industries.
TITLE: Cutting Through the Red Tape
AUTHOR: By Maxim Kalinin and Igor Gorchakov
TEXT: The process of state registration of legal entities in Russia underwent a major overhaul with the introduction of a new law which came into force on July 1, though questions concerning the registration of those with foreign participation were only really cleared up on July 25, when amendments, with the relevant provisions, were made to the aw "On Foreign Investments in the Russian Federation."
Prior to this latest round of changes, the basic framework for registration of legal entities with foreign participation had been provided by existing legislation.
In practice, however, the nuts and bolts of registration varied significantly from region to region within Russia, whenever the procedure wasn't carried out by the State Registration Chamber in Moscow. The absence of uniformity with regard to state registration bodies, document requirements, registration periods and the grounds for refusal of registration lead to unequal investment conditions for foreign investors.
The good news is that from July 25, a level playing field has been in force with all legal entities with foreign participation, with the exception of lending entities, being registered according to the procedure established in the registration law.
The law introduces unified rules of state registration that are applicable when a legal entity is founded, reorganized or liquidated, or when its founding documents are amended. It's also worth noting that, by simplifying the registration process for newly-founded legal entities and by increasing the liability of the registration bodies, lawmakers have made an attempt to cut through the bundles of red tape previously encountered in the registration process.
The registration law requires registration bodies to complete registration within five working days of the moment the required documents are submitted and empowers them to refuse registration only on the basis of two formal grounds - failure to submit the required documents or submission of the documents to the wrong state body.
Moreover, the law makes the registration body's officials liable for any violations of the rules and procedures for the state registration of any legal entity applying in the proper manner. According to the Code of Administrative Offences, if the registration body is responsible for a delay in registration, it must compensate the applicant for the resulting damages.
The law provides a straightforward procedure for registration which is identical for legal entities with foreign participation and legal entities that are entirely owned by Russians.
A person authorized to register a legal entity submits all the necessary documents for registration at the executive body where the legal entity plans to be located. Registration is currently carried out by the Tax Ministry and its territorial offices, which is to say the district tax inspectorates.
This is the case for those applying in St. Petersburg, although the registration of public bodies in the city is carried out by a department of the Tax Ministry.
The list of documents required under the law is exhaustive and the registration bodies are even prohibited from requesting any additional documents.
A standard application form was approved by a government resolution on June 19. Applicants must pay a registration fee of 2,000 rubles ($65).
Having received all the necessary documents, the registering body is given a total of five working days to enter a record of registration in the State Register of Legal Entities and to issue a certificate of registration to the legal entity making the application.
The main purpose of this reform was to simplify and to unify the registration process and to remove the existing bureaucratic obstacles.
On paper, the new rule book has a lot going for it. In reality, and in practice, the establishment of a harmonious system for state registration of legal entities may yet be some way off.
Maxim Kalinin is a partner and Igor Gorchakov is an associate at Baker & McKenzie St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Corruption Casualties in The Battle for Ilim Pulp
TEXT: AT long last someone in this country has been uncovered trying to bribe a high-ranking bureaucrat. The person in question is Zakhar Smushkin, owner of pulp and paper conglomerate Ilim Pulp.
The incorruptible official's name is Igor Kostikov, head of the Federal Securities Commission.
In a nutshell, Smushkin's Ilim Pulp has been waging a war to the death with Oleg Deripaska's Base Element since last winter.
A series of minor skirmishes and major battles has already been fought, the most recent of which being a titanic struggle for control of Kotlass Paper and Pulp Plant in the Arkhangelsk region.
Kotlass is part of the Ilim Pulp group, and the shareholder register until recently was held by PTsRK (the St. Petersburg Central Registration Company), controlled by Smushkin's erstwhile partner, St. Petersburg banker Vladimir Kogan.
In 1998, Kogan's Promstroibank owned 38 percent of Ilim Pulp. Smushkin says he bought out the banker's stake with his full consent and at the price he asked. Smushkin's foes say Kogan was squeezed out of the business on the cheap.
Then, one fine day, Smushkin discovered that, in the no-holds-barred hunt for forestry assets initiated by Deripaska and Co., Kogan was playing on Deripaska's side. To discover that your registrar is on the enemy's side is tantamount to learning on the eve of an enemy invasion that your frontier fortresses are controlled by turncoats. Smushkin sought to replace the commanders posthaste, but was too late.
Unbeknown to Ilim Pulp, two lawsuits brought in Kemerovo courts by two minority shareholders resulted in the seizure and sale of a 36-percent stake and then a 25-percent stake in Kotlass.
In principle, PTsRK was not obliged to carry out the dubious order to confiscate the shares, but, as mentioned above, the registrar was not batting for Smushkin's team.
The shares were confiscated without informing Ilim Pulp and sold at auction (also unbeknownst to Ilim Pulp) to companies acting in the interests of Deripaska and Kogan.
The buyers claim that their actions are in keeping with that of a bona fide purchaser. However, in this country, the concept of bona fide purchaser differs little from that of a stolen-goods fence.
The registrar's actions did not in the least perplex Kostikov. He did, however, proceed to strip the Energoregistrator company - to which Smushkin had transferred the shareholder register - of its license.
After this, Kostikov declared at a press conference that Ilim Pulp had tried to bribe the FSC.
In this forestry war there are no innocent and guilty parties. To censure Deripaska is the same as saying that Alexander the Great should not have invaded Persia.
War has a logic of its own: It doesn't matter who has right on his side, but who prevails.
The problem is that, in this war, state officials are being used as ammunition. And while Deripaska evokes certain associations with Alexander the Great of a more favorable nature, Kostikov resembles a talking catapult.
Kostikov is, of course, a well-known pauper. Having become FSC head, he not only sold his controlling stake in the St. Petersburg firm AVK to some completely unknown off-shore companies for peanuts but, even after the sale, he continued to be very well disposed toward it.
For example, word has it that the best way of registering a share issue is to hire AVK as your consultant.
Furthermore, Ilim Pulp suspects that the St. Petersburg firm Fourth Dimension, which, on behalf of the northwestern division of the State Property Fund, organized the auction to sell 61 percent of the shares in the Kotlass plant, also has a fairly close and intimate relationship with the renowned pauper Kostikov.
In other words, Kostikov's complaint that his FSC was the victim of a bribery attempt is akin to the owner of a strip club saying some of his girls have been approached with indecent proposals.
And the federal official would do well to bear in mind that the respect the aggressive young oligarch Deripaska has earned does not extend to the expendable materials used by him.
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.
TITLE: Russian Creativity in Talking the Talk to Make the Money
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: VOZDUSHKA: money not made through production, but through trading or other means, "money made out of air," "money made out of nothing."
ONE of the delights of the early post-Soviet period was the magical way some people made billions overnight. They didn't seem to do anything. They didn't have any factories, or own an import-export firm, and there was no such thing as a stock market. Somehow, however, the very day after the Soviet Union fell, numerous banks opened with initial capital of millions of dollars.
Beats me how these banks managed to manufacture the money and capital they required, but I was never convinced that prosto skinuli semeynye sberezheniya (they all just chipped in their family savings). But maybe I have the wrong kind of "family."
In any case, Russians quickly came up with a term for this kind of money: vozdushka - which I translate as "money made out of air," "money made out of nothing." Or maybe, "magic money."
Someone who makes money this way is a vozdushnik, a "wheeler-dealer," or "tradester" - someone whose money is not made through production or by getting their fingers dirty.
Another lovely way of making millions in those years was the investitsionnaya piramida, a pyramid-investment scheme. In American English this is also called a Ponzi scheme, after the man who bilked his fellow compatriots out of millions in the 1920s, before laws were passed in an attempt to prevent this form of fraud.
People who invested in these get-rich-quick schemes were first called vkladchiki (investors), and then very quickly obmanutye vkladchiki (cheated investors) or, perhaps more harshly, lokhi (suckers). Unfortunately, the expression, "If it seems too good to be true - it probably is" got here late.
Of course, you can also make money by taking on extra work Rabotat po sovmestitelstvu means "to take on a second job," and podrabatyvat also always has the connotation of "to earn extra money." Voobshche ya inzhener v NII, no ya rabotayu konsultantom po sovmestitelstvu (I have a regular job as an engineer in a research institute, but I moonlight as a consultant).
Dengi nuzhny? Beri khalturu - khoroshii perevodchik vsegda mozhet podrabatyvat (You need money? Moonlight! A good translator can always earn some extra money).
You can also make money the old-fashioned way: by working really hard. On tak pashet! On ochen trudolyubivy (He really puts his nose to the grindstone. He's a very hard worker). Ya gnula spinu nad rukopisyu vse bykhodnye, i nakonets-to zakonchila otchyot. (I broke my back over the manuscript every weekend, and I finally finished the report).
However, Russians and Americans have different styles of working. Americans tend to plug along, doing a modicum of work every day. Their Russian colleagues, meanwhile, tend to sail along for a bit, taking things easy and letting the work pile up and then push hard to clear the decks, kak Stakhanovtsy - like workers in the Stakhanov movement of the 1930s, which was named after a miner in the Donetsk coalfields who achieved high rates of production. As the saying goes, rabota ne volk, i v les ne ubezhit ("work isn't a wolf, and won't run off into the forest") which is to say that the work will always be there, however late you leave it.
This difference in approach makes for a host of intercultural misunderstandings, with the Russians driven mad by American zanudstvo (pedantry, tediousness) and Americans terrified that the work won't get done.
The only problem with Russian work binges is that the quality of work can suffer, which is why Russians check to see when a car or television was built and try not to purchase anything assembled during the last days of a month or quarter.
On the bright side, the tendency to put things off until the last minute applies equally to spending money; the best time to hit up a ministry for extra funds can be the last quarter, when they suddenly realize they haven't spent their quota.
Ya poidu vybivat dengi iz MinPechati - oni dolzhni raspredelit vse fondy do kontsa goda (I'm going to the Press Ministry to wheedle some finances out of them. They have to allocate all their funds by the end of the year).
Which just goes to show, v Rossii net khuda bez dobra (In Russia, every cloud has a silver lining).
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
TITLE: This Time, Chechnya Is Not a War for Words
AUTHOR: By Oleg Panfilov
TEXT: ON Aug. 16, Russian soldiers detained camera crews from ORT television and TV Center working in Chechnya and confiscated their cameras, microphones, personal belongings and press passes. Alexei Borzenko, a correspondent for TV Center, told the Interfax news agency that the soldiers were from the military commandant's office.
The incident occurred when the journalists arrived in the settlement of Shalazhi, where Chechen fighters had skirmished with federal soldiers the night before. On Aug. 16, the army began a "special operation" in the settlement, and accused the journalists of traveling to Shalazhi "on their own initiative and without military escort."
This incident highlights two troubling aspects of the peculiar relationship between journalists and the military, which, since August 1999, has flouted the Constitution and its laws regulating the press.
The first is that journalists cannot and will not do anything to defend themselves. After the Aug. 16 incident, the journalists involved appealed, not to the Prosecutor General's Office, but to Akhmad Kadyrov, head of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration, who has no direct jurisdiction over the military or the press.
The second is that the army was conducting a "special operation" and didn't want journalists to witness its methods, or the results. The military usually describes its operations in Chechnya as counter-terrorist, thereby taking cover behind a law "on the war on terrorism" signed by then-President Boris Yeltsin on July 25, 1998.
In September 1999, Yeltsin issued a secret decree launching counter-terrorist operations in Chechnya. Journalists working in the breakaway republic immediately ran into trouble. The government's official line holds that the restrictions on press freedom in Chechnya are necessary because of the threat of kidnapping, injury and death. But it seems to me that the cause lies elsewhere: The first Chechen war, which lasted nearly two years, was won not by the Chechen resistance, but by journalists.
It was reporters who showed the world the horrors of that war - the carpet bombing, murder of civilians, filtration camps and maimed children. Yeltsin was forced to accept a peace agreement because television coverage of the war was beamed into millions of homes around the world, including the homes of world leaders capable of exerting influence on Russia.
By 1999, Russia's top brass were preparing for a new war, which they would call a "counter-terrorism operation," in line with the new law on the war on terrorism signed by Yeltsin. This law allowed the generals to shield their activities from prying eyes and ears.
Anyone who takes the time to study the 1998 law, however, will discover that the military began to violate it as soon as operations got underway on Oct. 1, 1999.
Chapter 1, Article 3 of the law defines the zones in which counter-terrorist operations can be carried out. These zones include "individual sectors, districts and bodies of water, vehicles, buildings, structures, installations, premises and any grounds or bodies of water belonging to them." Nowhere does the law state that an entire region of the Russian Federation, covering 17,000 square kilometers, could be classified as a zone of operations.
Casuistry is the Russian bureaucrat's stock in trade. Since the law mentions zones suitable for counter-terrorist operations, government functionaries feel free to interpret this provision as they see fit. Such a functionary could decide that a whole republic, such as Chechnya, falls under the law. There's a risk that the generals will some day extend the Chechen zone to cover the entire North Caucasus region.
Another article in the law states that the press corps working in an anti-terrorism zone shall be regulated by the commanding officer in charge of operations. But who really commands the journalists? Sergei Yastrzhembsky, the Kremlin's chief spokesperson on Chechnya, who currently has no legal authority to do so. Quite the opposite. Under the law on the press, the accrediting agency is called upon to assist journalists, not to restrict their movement and hinder their work.
Freedom of speech in Russia was a catchphrase among Western journalists and politicians during the Yeltsin years and a key indicator used in assessing the new Russian democracy. Yeltsin certainly had plenty of cause to lash out at the Russian press, which at times openly discussed his affair with the bottle. But he never did, for he remembered that he had come to power thanks in no small part to favorable press coverage.
President Vladimir Putin has an entirely different relationship with the press - he fears and loathes it. That is, he would like the press to be obedient, patriotic and serve the interests of the state, though he seems to forget that it's too late to send journalists back into the dark age of censorship. He has managed to make some "progress" in this direction, however. The tests he has already "passed" include the old team of journalists at NTV television, the Kursk tragedy, TV6, Ekho Moskvy radio, Novaya Gazeta newspaper, etc. This list could be extended, but just how far depends on Russian journalists themselves.
Chechnya has become the abyss into which Russian journalists fall one after the other. The tone of reports from Chechnya on the two state-owned networks has changed drastically when compared with the first war. NTV sways between the truth and the Kremlin line. Ekho Moskvy adds a dash of objective reporting to its usual fare of government propaganda. Newspapers exert no influence on the public any longer, and owners of major publications whose circulation exceeds 1 million copies know very well the dangers of irritating the Kremlin.
The result is that a new Russian censorship and propaganda have arisen in Chechnya and in all that concerns Chechnya. Propaganda limits what the public knows about the progress of the war. Censorship ensures that the generals decide what information gets into print. God forbid that a journalist accuse Yastrzhembsky or Press Minister Mikhail Lesin of violating their rights. They are likely to lose their accreditation. Foreign journalists can face visa difficulties. And if a journalist works for an influential newspaper, their editors could find themselves in hot water.
The law provides a mechanism for exerting pressure on the government when a journalist's rights are violated. It's Article 144 of the Criminal Code, which includes penalties for hindering journalists in their work. The correspondents of ORT and TV Center could have filed a complaint with the prosecutor's office requesting a criminal investigation. They chose to follow Soviet tradition - asking their superiors to get involved. No one really wants to implement the laws - not the government, not the journalists.
This state of affairs is called manageable democracy, or, more to the point, manageable freedom of speech. I get the impression that many of our government officials have either never read the Constitution or wilfully forgotten about its existence. Article 29 of the Constitution - which provides for freedom of the press and forbids censorship, among other things - is not something about which the generals and the Kremlin bureaucrats want to think. Laws in Russia are not meant to be implemented. They're just meant to lie there and look pretty.
Oleg Panfilov, director of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Confession of a Religious Television Viewer
TEXT: "IT is in the lap of the gods." I am not a religious person, but watching television of late has disposed me toward fatalism and mysticism.
My contacts with the world of television are twofold.
First, I watch the news and, like everyone else, am shaken by the spectacle of technological disasters and cataclysms raining down on the world, from falling airplanes and train crashes to floods and hurricanes. Neither technology nor nature discriminates between rich and poor, developed and undeveloped, democratic and undemocratic societies.
Second, for several weeks running I have been attending sessions of the expert club of the country's main television company, ORT. The club gathers together serious political scientists, sociologists and editors of all political hues.
ORT deputy general director Marat Gelman wants ORT to have a good grasp of what is going on both in the country and in the world in the run-up to elections. The conclusions of these discussions, according to Gelman, are disseminated to those responsible for making news and current-affairs programs, and on the basis of this, in time, new current-affairs programs are to be developed (this last bit gladdens me as a potential participant, but as a viewer is cause for considerable concern).
In the most recent discussion of foreign-policy issues, the majority of experts concurred that, within the country, Putin has almost unlimited freedom of maneuver in setting the country's foreign-policy course.
If we believe that everything in 2003 and 2004 will be just as it is this year, we would be better off speaking about potential threats.
For example, I am haunted by a nightmare of the dollar collapsing. Just like millions of Russian citizens and voters, I keep my savings primarily in dollars. Whatever threatens its stability - be it Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush, Enron or Worldcom - concerns me a great deal more than all the waffle about Russia's place in the world, relations with former compatriots and Kaliningrad taken together. To be quite honest, it is the only issue that really concerns me in the outside world.
I don't want to start everything from scratch again for a third time (after January 1992 and August 1998). My overriding foreign-policy interest can be formulated as follows: What is good for the dollar is good for Russia. I want my president to give top priority to defending this interest, and I won't vote for him unless he does.
Whether he is up to the job, I do not know.
And this is where my new-found interest in religion comes in. When I hear my fellow experts discussing how the United States is the only super-power in the world, with a huge reserve of stability, and when I see on the news that, against all odds, two airplanes have crashed into one another, or that yet another prosperous European city has been evacuated as a result of unexpected floods - I offer up one and the same prayer to the heavens above: "God preserve the United States! And may ORT assist in the task!"
Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda)
TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: The Secret Sharers
This article is the second of two parts. The first part appeared in last Tuesday's The St. Petersburg Times.
Washington, 1975. It was a long hot summer of discontent in the White House. Gerald Ford - who had taken over as president, unelected, after the resignation of Richard Nixon - was raging. Every day seemed to bring fresh horrors from the Congressional committees investigating the United States' intelligence agencies. Assassination plots, terrorist acts, coups, secret armies, subversion of allied governments, Mafia connections, torture, press manipulation, domestic surveillance - the revelations were endless, a bottomless pit of corruption and criminality being dredged up by the House and Senate panels.
Where was their sense of duty, the code of omerta that had for so long protected those who toil in the shadows, who do the dirty work to keep the United States fat and safe and happy? What right did these mere senators and representatives have to tell the people - the big, dumb, dazed mobocracy out there - the truth about what their leaders were doing in their name? They were like children, they could never understand the higher wisdom that guided the elite. Oh, it was a far cry from the old days, back on the Warren Commission, when a good soldier like Gerald Ford knew just what to do: You accepted whatever the agencies told you, and you steered investigations away from anything that might break the code and pierce the shadows.
So Ford seethed. What the hell is wrong over at the Central Intelligence Agency, he complained to his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld. Why couldn't Bill Colby, the director, keep a lid on things? Colby had even come clean about Operation Phoenix, for goodness' sake: More than 20,000 Vietnamese murdered in the CIA-run program - did Joe Lunchbucket really need to know about that?
What next? Are they going to find out about Reinhard Gehlen, too: the Nazi spy who joined the CIA and recruited thousands of Hitler's best and brightest - including Klaus Barbie and a cadre of SS veterans - to work for the Agency? Sure, it would look bad, but come on: Gehlen was championed by Allen Dulles himself - the founding father of the CIA, the hotshot lawyer who kept Prescott Bush's name out of the papers when Pres was caught trading with the Nazis in 1942. Dulles and those Yale boys knew what was best - but try explaining that to some poor schmuck whose father got killed at Normandy or Auschwitz or some other godforsaken hole, eh?
As it happened, the "Gehlen Organization" stayed secret for another 26 years. But, in July 1975, Ford had still more worries. A top White House aide, Dick Cheney, sent a memo to Rumsfeld warning him about an upcoming lawsuit. The family of Army scientist Frank Olson had found out - through the Congressional investigations - that he had been secretly drugged by the CIA not long before he apparently committed suicide in 1953 by jumping through a hotel window. Now they were suing the government for damages.
The lawsuit could be bad business, Cheney told Rumsfeld. "It might be necessary to disclose highly classified national-security information" during the trial. That would include the truth about Olson: that he was actually a high-level CIA employee working on biochemical weapons; that he had discovered his colleagues were experimenting with mind-control drugs and torture techniques on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians, "sometimes to the point of termination;" that the CIA had built this program on research by Nazi scientists in the death camps; that Olson wanted to quit the agency but was, instead, drugged with LSD, whisked away to New York and there fell from the window in the presence of his CIA handler.
The family's lawsuit might even reveal the existence of special "CIA Assassination Manuals," like the one issued in 1953, which stated: "The most efficient accident, in simple assassinations, is a fall of 75 feet [22.9 meters] or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. [In some cases], it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him."
Such revelations had to be avoided at all costs. Rumsfeld and Cheney urged Ford to make a settlement before the trial started. To avoid the courts entirely, they would arrange a private bill in Congress to give the family some cash. The deal would be sweetened by private audiences with both Ford and Colby, apologizing for the CIA's past "mistakes," and promising "full disclosure" of all the facts, so the family could at last find peace.
As noted here last week, it was all lies. Ford and Colby revealed almost nothing - beyond the bare fact, already unearthed by Congress, that Olson had been drugged by the CIA before his death. It took Olson's son Eric another 27 years to piece together as much of the truth as we are ever likely to know.
But Ford, Rumsfeld and Cheney had kept the faith - they had honored omerta. Colby was not so lucky. For his sins - his "weakness" in allowing a few spears of sunlight into the shadows - he was summarily dismissed a few months later. He was replaced by a man who also lived by the code, who would keep the precious agency - and all its Gehlens, its torturers, its dopers, its shooters - safe from the mobocracy, the ignorant rabble with their pathetic fairytale notions about democracy, justice, law and honor. He would guard the shadow world so well that, one day, the headquarters of the CIA would proudly bear his name:
George Herbert Walker Bush.
For annotational references, please see the "Opinion" section at www.sptimesrussia.com.
TITLE: Mbeki Opens UN Development Summit
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The United Nations development and environmental summit opened Monday with a call for coordinated international action to fight poverty and protect the global environment.
"The peoples of the world expect that this world summit will live up to its promise of being a fitting culmination to a decade of hope," South African President Thabo Mbeki told delegates at the opening session of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
The problems being discussed at the summit are many and huge: Oil and gas are being consumed faster than ever; Emissions of pollutants and global-warming gases are at an all-time high; Forests are shrinking; Market fish are being pulled from the sea faster than they can repopulate; And 11,000 species, including one in four mammals, are threatened with extinction.
Although U.S. President George W. Bush is a very notable no-show, more than 100 presidents and prime ministers and even a sprinkling of kings will join a cast of thousands at the summit.
The last time the world's leaders gathered like this was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. At that meeting, trumpeted boldly around the globe as the Earth Summit, delegates signed pledges to slow, if not stop, the degradation of the planet.
They didn't. Most indicators show its health getting worse. So leaders have been arriving here a bit warily, but also determined to show tangible progress.
"By and large, the picture is bleak," Nitin Desai, the summit's secretary general, said in an interview. "So the main point of this summit is action, not on all fronts, but in critical areas where we need a quantum change."
This time, summit leaders will push a strategy that they hope will lead to quicker action. Instead of waiting for all countries to sign a treaty before setting to work, UN officials are nudging clusters of governments, businesses and citizens groups to forge partnerships to get moving on a specific problem or in one region - and hoping the momentum builds.
Many of these partnerships, it is anticipated, will focus on helping the nearly 3 billion people who live in poverty gain access to clean water, proper sanitation and energy - much of it from alternative sources, such as solar and wind, or from alternative fuels, derived from sugar cane or corn.
The 10-day summit, billed as the largest in UN history, hopes to halve the more than 1 billion people without access to clean water and the more than 2 billion without proper sanitation. It aims to develop specific plans for expanding the poor's access to electricity and health care, to reverse the degradation of agricultural land and to protect the global environment.
The idea is simple: Help Third World countries develop in such a way that they can leapfrog over past mistakes in the United States and elsewhere that resulted in polluting the air, the water and the land in the name of convenience and economic progress.
Other partnerships are expected to tackle pollution in the developed world that is contributing to global warming and posing threats to the environment, to endangered species and to human health. Such global-issue networks may focus on everything, from halting overfishing to reducing reliance on fossil fuels to phasing out carcinogenic chemicals.
"We are trying to change the way people act," Desai said Sunday, briefing an auditorium packed with journalists from around the world.
He and other leaders acknowledged that that won't be easy. But they said that the 104 heads of state and other national leaders have committed to the summit, creating a "critical mass" of world leadership to get things done.
But some activists fear the world's wealthiest countries could sabotage any meaningful attempt to build on agreements adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.
"It's important for us that the vision that was captured at Rio is not eroded," said Goh Chien Yen, an official with the Third World Network.
(AP, WP)
TITLE: Bush May Not Need the Nod
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CRAWFORD, Texas - White House lawyers have told U.S. President George W. Bush that he would not need congressional approval to attack Saddam Hussein's Iraq, although advisers say political considerations could prompt the president to seek a nod from lawmakers anyway.
Two senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said White House counsel Al Gonzales advised Bush earlier this month that the Constitution gives the president authority to wage war without explicit authority from Congress.
"Any decision the president may make on a hypothetical congressional vote will be guided by more than one factor," said White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer, who declined to confirm that Bush had received an opinion from Gonzales on the matter.
"The president will consider a variety of legal, policy and historical issues if a vote were to become a relevant matter. He intends to consult with Congress because Congress has an important role to play."
Despite the go-ahead from his legal advisers, administration officials said the president has not ruled out seeking lawmakers' approval if he decides to attack Iraq. The officials noted that Bush's father was told in advance of the 1991 war that he did not need congressional authority to act, but nonetheless sought Congress' blessing for his action.
One of the officials said Gonzales also concluded the current president has authority to act against Saddam under the congressional resolution that authorized his father's actions in the 1991 Gulf War. Saddam has not complied with the terms that ended that war, the official said.
Furthermore, the official said Bush was told he also could act against Iraq on the strength of the Sept. 14 congressional resolution approving military action against terrorism.
TITLE: A's Recover To Down Detroit
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - The Oakland Athletics rallied late and extended the majors' longest winning streak this season to 12 games, defeating the Detroit Tigers 10-7 on Sunday.
"We knew we'd get our shots," said Greg Myers, whose pinch-hit homer started Oakland's five-run comeback in the eighth. "We didn't give up."
The AL West leaders had only trailed for a half-inning during their previous 11 wins. Even after Randall Simon's grand slam and RBI single gave the Tigers a 7-2 lead in the fourth, Detroit knew its day wasn't done at Comerica Park.
"Oakland is a great team. It's not like you're going to beat them easy," Simon said. "They don't give up. They kept at it. They're flying."
The Athletics still trailed 7-3 in the eighth, before they picked on a trio of Tigers relievers. Myers led off with a home run and Eric Chavez and pinch-hitter John Mabry had two-run doubles as the A's took an 8-7 lead.
Jermaine Dye added a two-run homer in the top of the ninth, then Billy Koch escaped a bases-loaded, one-out jam in the bottom half to end it.
"This was one of our better wins of the year, definitely," manager Art Howe said.
The Athletics' winning streak is their longest since they set an Oakland record with a 14-game string in 1988.
Arizona 7, Chicago Cubs 0. Randy Johnson (19-4) struck out 16 for his third shutout of the season as the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the Chicago Cubs on Sunday.
The Big Unit is scheduled to go for his 20th win against San Francisco on Friday, the strike deadline set by players.
"I'm very optimistic. The glass is half-full," Johnson said.
If Sunday turns out to be his final outing of the season, he finished with a flourish.
Johnson scattered six hits and walked two to improve to 11-0 in 12 starts against the Cubs, who were missing Sammy Sosa because of a sore neck.
The left-hander's win total is second in the majors to teammate Curt Schilling's 21.
"Velocity alone, this was by far his best game of the season," Arizona manager Bob Brenly said. "We had him at 102 miles per hour [163 kilometers per hour] on the strikeout pitch to end the seventh. He hit 100 two other times, 99 two times and 98 seven times."
Johnson (19-4) reached double-digit strikeouts for the sixth start in a row, 14th time this season and 185th in his career, second only to Nolan Ryan's 213.
In other games, it was: Anaheim 8, Boston 3; Seattle 12, Cleveland 4; Texas 6, New York Yankees 2; Kansas City 4, Minnesota 2; Toronto 5, Baltimore 2; Chicago White Sox 8, Tampa Bay 3; Philadelphia 5, St. Louis 3; Houston 1, Cincinnati 0; Los Angeles 7, Atlanta 5; San Francisco 8, Montreal 4; New York Mets 7, Colorado 4; Pittsburgh 3, Milwaukee 2; Florida 7, San Diego 6.