SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #833 (1), Friday, January 10, 2003
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TITLE: Region Suffers Winter Blues
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: At 10 p.m. on Dec. 31, when Yulia Kash and her husband, Sergei, had just started boiling potatoes and frying chicken for New Year's dinner in their apartment in St. Petersburg's Kalininsky District, the electricity went off.
With the electricity went their electric stove, telephone, telephone, tape recorder and, for some reason, their cold water. The darkened windows in neighboring apartment buildings signaled that the family was not alone in facing a "romantic" New Year's celebration.
"Thank God that one of my students gave me a candle as a gift the day before, and that I had already boiled the beetroot," said Kash, a 28-year-old French teacher. "We managed to make a beetroot salad with garlic and mayonnaise."
"Pickles and champagne also helped," she added.
Kash and her husband were not the only ones to celebrate the arrival of the New Year in almost complete darkness; thousands of other residents of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, hit by temperatures down to minus 35 degrees Celsius, did likewise.
An unusually long and deep cold snap that enveloped much of Russia over the last three weeks has created a number of emergencies in the Northwest Region, as temperatures dipped as low as -39 C.
As of Thursday, at least 166 buildings in the Leningrad Oblast were still without heat.
The below-freezing temperatures on the streets generated their own crisis, with Interfax reporting that two St. Petersburg residents had died from hypothermia. While it could not confirm the deaths, the city administration's Health Committee said at least 341 people had been treated for frostbite and hypothermia in St. Petersburg between Dec. 31 and Jan. 7.
According to the committee, about 220 of those treated were drunk. But Vladimir Kotsur, chief doctor of the St. Petersburg Scientific Research Institute for Ambulance Services, said 95 percent of the cases involved drunk people.
"There is no problem with frosts hurting people, but there is a problem with the stupid drunken mentality," Kotsur said. "Sober people are rarely seriously injured by the frost, unless they are injured, because they can control the situation."
"Every year, we are faced with situations in which we have to amputate people's extremities after they have suffered from hypothermia brought on while out drunk in very cold weather," he added. "They are left as invalids who receive a state pension. In my opinion, people who suffer hypothermia while they are completely drunk outside should pay for their hospitalization from their own pockets. Only then are they likely to stop behaving that way."
While large numbers suffered outside, for many, being indoors was not much better. Particularly badly hit was Tikhvin, in the Leningrad Oblast, where 62 buildings lost all heating last Friday. By Thursday, emergency repair workers had restored heat in at least 15 buildings. The remaining 47, housing some 13,000 people, including 4,500 children, still had no central heating as of Thursday.
Residents of another 62 buildings in the villages of Sverdlov and Krasnaya Zvezda, near Vsevolozhsk, also in the Leningrad Oblast, lost their heating on New Year's Eve. Twenty six of the buildings were still without heat on Thursday.
According to the press service of the Northwest Region branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry, most of the shutdowns were the result of electricity failures brought on by the cold.
Valentin Shumovsky, the head of the press service at local power utility Lenenergo, said many electrical problems arose because the system cannot handle all the electric heaters switched on when the temperature dips.
"The problem is that the electricity systems in most Russian buildings were built to certain specifications that limit the consumption of electricity by any one apartment," Shumovsky said. "Many apartments are wired to receive no more than 5 kilowatts, while one modern electric radiator alone can exceed that."
He added that, when the levels are exceeded, transformers in the buildings switch off automatically, to prevent wires overheating and causing fires.
"In this situation, people who switch on several electric radiators at once in their apartments should be aware that, in the end, they might cause problems for the whole apartment building," Shumovsky said.
He also said that the city's electric and heating networks are simply not equipped to deal with temperatures below -25 C and that, at a city-administration meeting on Wednesday, the discussion centered around a program for reconstructing the networks.
One of the hardest hit areas in the Northeast Region was Karelia, which saw temperatures drop as low as -45 C and the heating fail in 265 buildings, home to 5,300 people. Sixteen schools, four kindergartens, four hospitals, and one orphanage were left in the cold, Interfax reported.
Karelia President Sergei Katanandov, in a conversation with President Vladimir Putin broadcast on Channel One, said some outages were the result of carelessness on the part of utility workers. He said that a heating breakdown in the town of Muyezerskoye was in part caused by holiday celebrations. The electricity was accidentally switched off at 11:55 p.m. on Dec. 31, as outside temperatures dropped to -45 C. As a result, water froze in the town's pipes, which subsequently burst.
"Clearly, people were celebrating," Katanandov told Putin. "They relaxed a bit, and let this happen."
The cold snap left a number of public institutions scrambling to get by and avoid further disasters. Halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, in the Novgorod region town of Valdai, 24 apartment blocks and a hospital were without heat after pipes burst, leaving more than 3,000 people in the cold. Novgorod's Emergency Situations Department was unable to turn the heating back on by the end of Wednesday, as it previously promised, media reported. Television showed newborn children surrounded by hot water bottles in the local hospital.
Employees at the St. Petersburg Botanical Gardens resorted to lighting fires to warm up the fragile plants in the gardens' greenhouses. Utilities workers were able to restore power at the gardens on Monday, after it had been out for just over a day, Interfax reported.
On Thursday, Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov approved the allocation of 2 million rubles ($62,500) for emergency repairs in Tikhvin, and 2,000 rubles ($62) in compensation to each family that suffered from central-heating-system failures in the Leningrad Oblast. The State Construction Committee has allocated another 3 million rubles ($94,000) for work in Tikhvin.
Thursday brought relatively warm weather in St. Petersburg, with temperatures rising to -3 C, but forecasters do not expect it to last. According to the city's Meteorological Center, temperatures are set to drop as low as -18C Friday and continue falling Saturday - to as low as -28 C. Temperatures in the north of the Leningrad Oblast are expected to fall to as low as -37 C on the same day.
While experts at the center said that temperatures this low are not rare for the region - 1987, 1978 and 1942 brought much lower readings - the length of the current cold spell is unusual. Not since the winter of 1940 to 1941, when the deep cold brought misery, as well as food - across frozen Lake Ladoga - to Leningrad, then suffering under a Nazi-German blockade, has the city endured such a prolonged and severe cold period.
The meteorologists said that the cold spell is being caused by fronts of warm air that usually come in from over the Atlantic Ocean swinging south of the Northwest Region this year, leaving cold air from the Arctic unchallenged.
The center says that the next cold spell will begin to relax on Wednesday, with temperatures climbing to between -8 C and -10 C and likely remaining in that range for the rest of the month.
Staff Writer Andrei Zolotov Jr. contributed to this report.
TITLE: Business as Usual for City Duma
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Wednesday saw of the first meeting of the new Legislative Assembly that was elected on Dec. 8, and despite - or perhaps because of - some new faces in the assembly, it seems that everything old is new again.
The session, which was attended by only 37 of the 50 deputies, was further marred by a malfunction in chamber's the electronic voting system, forcing the deputies to vote by hand and causing some moments of confusion.
But the breakdown in the voting system wasn't the only unusual happening on the first day, as among the seven factions in the assembly was one under the name of the Communist Party of Russia and the People's Patriotic Party. The Communist faction is the first to be registered in the assembly since it was first elected in its present form in 1994.
"This means that the left end of the spectrum among the city electorate is now represented in the Legislative Assembly on a more-or-less significant level," said Vladimir Yeryomenko, a legislator from the five-member faction in a telephone interview on Thursday.
"This is natural, and not a sensation at all," he added. "From 12 to 14 percent of the population agree with our position or are close to it - roughly the same number as support Yabloko. It was not right that they were not represented before."
Vadim Tyulpanov, head of the pro-Kremlin Unity faction, said that he also sees nothing to worry about in the appearance of the faction.
"The deputies here represent the city as it is," Tyulpanov said. "This is the city of old democratic traditions. It's not Magadan, where they have 29 lawmakers of a total of 30 belonging to Unity. We can't have an assembly like that."
One of the first chief tasks for the newly formed faction will be participating in the process of selecting a speaker for the assembly, which could engender a sense of deja vu. The process threatens to be fractious and could drag on for months - even years, as it did in the last Legislative Assembly, elected in 1999.
Sergei Tarasov, the speaker in the last Legislative Assembly was elected to the position in June 2000, after a 2 1/2 year-long struggle between pro and anti-governor factions in the chamber. Early rumors are that the Kremlin may be interested in dumping Tarasov, using the resources of the Unity faction and its allies.
"The trading process to work this out in the parliament could take a long time," said Boris Vishnevsky, a Yabloko member. Vishnevsky is not a member of the assembly.
"We have two sides here: One in favor of a third term for [Governor Vladimir Yakovlev] and one in favor of saving the City Charter," Vishnevsky added. "So it could take anywhere from one month to 1 1/2 years to find a solution. We could even stretch the process to four years, but this would be the limit."
According to Vishnevsky, the battle will be between pro-governor factions, who will support Sergei Tarasov for the position, and factions supporting Tyulpanov, the Unity Party faction leader.
Tyulpanov is said to be opposed to plans by supporters of the governor to amend the City Charter to allow him to run for a third term. The charter presently limits governors to two terms, with a two-thirds majority - 34 votes - required to change the provision.
Alexander Afanasyev, the governor's spokesperson, says that Tyulpanov acts in the interest of his allies in the so-called St. Petersburg team in Moscow. But he said that President Vladimir Putin shouldn't be counted as part of the team.
"Putin is the only real St. Petersburger in Moscow, because he is not ashamed of his [native] city," Afanasyev said in a telephone interview Thursday. "It is people like are [United Energy Systems head Anatoly] Chubais, [head of the State Audit Chamber Sergei] Stepashin and [Federation Council speaker Sergei] Mironov who are playing this game. When they sleep, they dream of taking a swipe at Yakovlev."
On Thursday, Tyulpanov accused Sergei Tarasov of mismanagement in relation to the voting-system debacle.
"I don't know what the cause was - intentional sabotage or just a case of technical failures - but the one thing is clear: We have to elect a speaker who can clean up the mess in the assembly. We have people who don't want to work ... who try to prevent [lawmakers] from electing a speaker, who paralyze the work of the legislative [branch] of power in St. Petersburg, turning it into a circus," Tyulpanov said in a statement released by his press service.
"This is, at least, the fault of the Legislative Assembly's [administrative] staff, which was appointed by and worked under [Tarasov]," he said.
But Tyulpanov drew his own share of criticism on Thursday.
"There were two candidates, Tarasov and Tyulpanov, and I prefer Tarasov," said Yeryomenko of the Communist and Patriots faction.
"It is, of course, linked to the question of the third term," he said. "Tarasov ... isn't going to let himself become the center of intrigues or let us find ourselves in the role of hostages."
TITLE: Court Puts Budanov In Clear Over Death
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A regional military court has ruled that Colonel Yury Budanov, the highest ranking Russian officer to be charged with abuses against civilians in Chechnya, cannot be held accountable for the murder of an 18-year-old Chechen woman because he was temporarily insane at the time of the killing.
In compliance with a request by defense lawyers, the court ordered that Budanov undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment. It was not clear whether the Dec. 31 ruling set a time period for his institutionalization.
The case has been perceived as a barometer of Moscow's willingness to crack down on military abuses against civilians in Chechnya, which international aid organizations and rights groups have documented as commonplace. Human Rights Watch condemned the acquittal, saying it "shows Russia's resolve to shield its military from accountability for atrocities" in Chechnya.
Lawyers for the family of Heda Kungayeva - whom Budanov, by his own admission, strangled in March 2000 after abducting her from her family home - said Wednesday that they would call for a retrial with a new judge, Interfax said.
"The decision handed down by Judge Viktor Kostin ... is not adequate in light of the crime," lawyer Abdulla Khamzayev was quoted as saying.
Khamzayev said the Supreme Court's military collegium would have a month to examine the request and Budanov would have to remain behind bars throughout that time.
TVS television reported that the complaint was submitted Wednesday.
Prosecutors had asked the court in Rostov-na-Donu to give Budanov - who testified that he had believed Kungayeva to be a rebel sniper - a 12-year prison sentence and to strip him of his military rank and honors.
The psychiatric evaluation cited by the court in its decision was the last of four and the second one conducted by Moscow's Serbsky Center for Forensic Psychiatry. The first two evaluations had declared Budanov sane.
Human-rights activists and Kungayev family lawyers have argued that the experts at the Serbsky Center - once a mainstay of the Soviet government's unwritten punitive psychiatry policy - were under political pressure to declare Budanov temporarily insane. Kostin denied the accusation as groundless.
Several experts said the temporary insanity ruling also does more harm than good for the military. "If a man can command a regiment in such a condition, that's a scandal for the entire Russian army," Vyacheslav Nikonov, president of the Politika think tank, told Interfax.
TITLE: Japanese PM Arrives To Push Cooperation
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW/TOKYO - Japan and Russia will try to push aside their niggling dispute over the ownership of four barren islands this week, focusing instead on the more pressing issues of a troublesome North Korea and stronger economic ties.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi arrived in Russia Thursday for a four-day trip, the first state visit by a Japanese leader since 1998, including talks with President Vladimir Putin on Friday and a visit to the far eastern city of Khabarovsk.
"Japan must cooperate closely with Russia and China, which both have diplomatic relations with North Korea," Koizumi said earlier this week, citing the need for a coordinated response to concerns over North Korea's nuclear weapons development.
"I think Russia holds strong influence over North Korea, and I also think Russia has a perspective on North Korea that Japan does not have," he said.
While both sides remain stubborn over the islands seized by the Soviet Union in the waning days of the Second World War, which has prevented them signing a formal peace treaty, the relationship is showing new signs of maturity, analysts say.
"Things are different now," said diplomatic commentator Tetsuya Ozeki. "The peace treaty is important, but there are bigger issues to deal with, such as terrorism and North Korea.
"Japan said in the past that a close relationship would be difficult if the islands weren't returned, which was extremely unrealistic," he added. "Now, both sides are taking steps that are quieter but more productive."
Among them will be the signing by Koizumi and Putin of a declaration that lays out a framework for broad cooperation on a range of issues from diplomacy to economics.
But the most urgent issue will be communist North Korea, whose renewed nuclear ambitions are threatening to destabilize the entire East Asian region.
Both countries have a major interest in seeing the problem resolved, with Russia one of the few countries that maintains close ties with both North and South Korea.
"Putin and Kim Jong-il have a fairly positive relationship, and both Japan and Russia want to come up with some kind of proposal to help the situation," said Shigeki Hakamada, a professor of Russian studies at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University.
While any decision between the two may not have a direct impact on the North Korean issue, any new cooperation could be another step toward better bilateral ties.
"This will be used by Japan and Russia as a lever to move things forward between them," said commentator Fumio Nishimura.
There have been repeated rumors - denied by the Japanese government - that Koizumi's visit to Khabarovsk could include a meeting with North Korean officials.
Koizumi could boost his fading domestic popularity by making progress on the issue of Japanese abducted by North Korea 25 years ago. Five abductees are now back in Japan, but talks with Pyongyang on establishing diplomatic ties are stalled over Tokyo's demand that the families of the five be brought to Japan.
While the joint declaration is likely to include a vow by both sides to continue efforts toward a peace treaty, analysts said the real meat is in promises of economic cooperation.
"This is very much to the benefit of both nations," Ozeki said. "Russia has vast natural resources, but they are meaningless without a customer. Japan, of course, needs them."
Japan is already in talks with Russia on the joint construction of an oil pipeline in eastern Siberia. Other attractions include a huge Russian market and an economy that grew a healthy 4.2 percent in the first 11 months of 2002.
Japanese firms have often been reluctant to invest heavily in Russia, citing a shaky legal system and heavy taxes, but this climate is slowly starting to improve, said Tetsuya Umetsu at the Japan External Trade Organization.
"As a number of the problems are taken care of and the business environment slowly improves, more and more Japanese firms are looking to the Russian market," he said.
Even as the bilateral relationship improves, analysts say a peace treaty remains distant, citing Putin's reluctance to cede even an inch of Russian soil and Japan's refusal to give in, both sides hemmed in by the demands of nationalists at home.
Koizumi has repeatedly said that the four islands off the north of Japan - known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the Southern Kuriles - are Japanese, and that Russia must acknowledge this.
Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov as saying that, before Koizumi's visit, Moscow received "signals from Tokyo that Japan would not want to wrap itself up in the territorial problem."
Given the islands' limited strategic and economic value, the only real benefit to Japan would be a huge boost in the popularity of the prime minister who gains their return.
"It may appear this time that Japan is moderating its stance on the islands, but nothing has changed," Hakamada said.
"If the island issue is raised now, there's very little chance of any progress," he added. "And, if Japan makes too much fuss over it, it will appear weak. That's all."
(Reuters/AP)
TITLE: OSCE Set To Close Chechnya Operations
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is closing its mission in Chechnya after some of the OSCE's 55 participating states refused to endorse a limitation of the mission's mandate as insisted upon by the Russian government.
"The Russian Federation wants the OSCE mission in Chechnya to concentrate on humanitarian assistance and to stay away from politics," an OSCE official said Wednesday on condition of anonymity. "This is not acceptable for some participating countries."
The OSCE mission began closing on Jan. 1 and should be completely out of Chechnya by March 21, the official said. The OSCE has a six-person office in Znamenskoye.
As a further sign of Russia's displeasure at outside interference in Chechnya, three Germans, including a former labor minister, who had planned to visit Chechnya to look into the human-rights situation there, were turned back when they arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported.
The original OSCE mandate, which was set down in April 1995 and expired on Dec. 31, 2002, stipulated that the mission would, along with humanitarian activities, "pursue dialog and negotiations, as appropriate, through participation in round tables, with a view to establishing a cease-fire and eliminating sources of tension."
The OSCE played a significant role in the negotiations that ended the war of 1994 to 1996, and in the elections that followed. But now, with President Vladimir Putin refusing to negotiate with the rebels, Russian officials say that the OSCE's mandate is obsolete.
"That mandate was accepted in 1995 in an absolutely different situation," Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Chizhov said in an interview posted Sunday on the ministry's Web site. "Now, the situation in the Chechen republic has changed radically."
Chizhov's office referred calls for comment on the OSCE's departure to the Foreign Ministry's press office, which said Chizhov's statements on the Web site represented the ministry's position.
The OSCE official at its Vienna headquarters said a new mission could be sent to Chechnya if member countries can reach a concensus on a new mandate.
Boris Makarenko, an analyst with the Center of Political Technologies, said the issue, however, is not the OSCE.
"This is not a conflict between the Russian government and the OSCE, which is a rather weak and uninfluential organization," he said. "This is a conflict between the Russian government and such European values as human rights."
The referendum and elections are part of an effort to consolidate Moscow's grip on the republic. The proposed constitution would be subordinate to federal law, and would ignore the separatists' independence claims.
Jorma Inki, the former head of the OSCE mission in Chechnya, said the referendum plans were premature.
"Such a referendum is needed, for it is necessary to legitimize local authorities, but it is too early to hold it in the current circumstances," Inki was quoted by Interfax as saying Sunday. "The presence of 80,000 servicemen from the Russian armed forces and Interior Ministry, the large number of displaced people inside Chechnya and outside its borders, and the basically unstable situation that persists - all this does not make suitable circumstances for a real referendum."
TITLE: Service Cites Russia's 'Rebirth'
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The head of Russia's church praised what he called the country's "spiritual rebirth," as Orthodox believers braved frigid temperatures to attend Christmas services Tuesday.
Thousands turned out to join Patriarch Alexy II for services at Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral. The nighttime service, which began on Christmas Eve, was broadcast live on the two state-controlled national channels. Alexy also led vespers at the cathedral Tuesday evening.
Bells rang from thousands of churches as clocks struck midnight Monday.
In a televised address on Tuesday, Alexy praised the increasingly prominent role that religion has played in Russia since the 1991 Soviet collapse.
"The spiritual rebirth that is taking place in our fatherland bears clear witness to the return of the people to true spiritual Orthodox values," he said.
Alexy also urged people to unite in the face of terrorism. Russia saw several deadly attacks on civilians by Chechen rebels last year.
"The past year brought mankind and our fatherland new sorrows and new ordeals. After the terrorist acts carried out in the Russian Federation and in other countries, the world is under the threat of a new, unprecedented evil," Alexy said. He also lamented the continuing violence in the Middle East.
For the patriarch, who has been recovering after being hospitalized for hypertension in October, the holiday marked a return to the public eye.
President Vladimir Putin, on a ski vacation in the Ural Mountains, attended Christmas Eve services at church in the village of Agapovka in the Chelyabinsk region, some 1,400 kilometers east of Moscow. State television showed him lighting candles inside the light blue church topped by golden onion domes.
In addition to the religious component, Christmas in Russia has strong folk traditions. TVS television showed residents of southern villages going door-to-door in costume in a Russian Christmas tradition similar to trick-or-treating. Teenage girls held fortunetelling sessions by candle light and looked for clues about their future husbands.
TITLE: Grozny Death Toll Reaches 72
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Chechen Prime Minister Mikhail Babich announced Sunday that the death toll from the Dec. 28 suicide car-bomb attack at the headquarters of the Kremlin-backed Chechen administration was 72, Itar-Tass reported. Previous reports had placed the toll at up to 83. Some 120 people were wounded.
The blasts dealt a severe blow to President Vladimir Putin's efforts to convince Russians and the world that life in Chechnya is returning to normal after more than three years of war.
Officials said three suicide bombers used military uniforms, IDs, and license plates to drive their trucks through security checkpoints in Grozny. They burst through the building gates and set off the explosions, blowing away doors, windows, and the interior walls and leaving the building a concrete shell.
The head of the Moscow-backed Chechen administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, has offices in the building but was in Moscow at the time of the blast. Many of the wounded were flown to Moscow and other cities to help ease the burden on the overwhelmed hospital in Grozny.
Officials said international terrorists were behind the attack. A counterterrorism official, Colonel Ilya Shabalkin, said Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev and an Arab militant, Abu al-Walid, ordered the Grozny bombing, Itar-Tass reported. Shabalkin also implicated Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov in the bombing. A spokesperson for Maskhadov denied the rebel leader played any role in the attack.
Babich said charges would be brought against three members of a riot-police force that had been guarding the compound. Dozens have been detained in sweeps of Grozny for militants suspected of being involved in the bombing. At least four police officers were killed and eight wounded during a search Saturday.
TITLE: Top General Accuses U.S. of Missile Threat
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - U.S. plans to deploy defenses against ballistic missiles pose a potential threat to Russia, a top Russian general said in an interview published Thursday.
"I absolutely disagree with the claim that the [U.S.] missile defense is not a threat to Russia," Colonel General Yury Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff, told the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets.
The statement from Baluyevsky, a top arms-control negotiator, reflected the Russian military's uneasiness about the U.S. missile-defense plans that contrasted with calmer statements from the Kremlin. Moscow has tempered its criticism of Washington's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to deploy a national missile-defense shield. President Vladimir Putin has said that the U.S. move was a "mistake" but not a threat to Russia.
The U.S. has said that the prospective missile-defense system would be aimed against potential threats from countries such as Iraq or North Korea, and would be unable to fend off a massive nuclear strike Russia is capable of launching.
"A missile defense is intended to engage any missiles or warheads that would fly toward a target or the country it protects," Baluyevsky said. "Therefore, it's illogical to say that a missile defense isn't a threat to one country or another."
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Zakayev on Bail
LONDON (AP) - A British judge on Thursday ordered that Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev, who is accused by Russia of crimes including mass murder, remain on bail while the British government considers whether extradition proceedings should continue.
At Moscow's request, police arrested Zakayev, an aide to Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, at London's Heathrow Airport on Dec. 5. He was freed the next day after posting Pound50,000 ($78,500) bail.
On Thursday, Judge Timothy Workman ruled that Zakayev could remain at liberty, and during a brief administrative hearing at Bow Street Magistrates Court in central London, adjourned the case until Jan. 31.
"The court has received a request from the Home Office for further time," Workman said, adding that he could not proceed with the extradition hearing without the authority of Home Secretary David Blunkett.
Video at Theater Trial
MOSCOW (AP) - A lawyer representing victims and relatives seeking compensation in connection with last year's hostage-taking raid on the Moscow theater said Thursday that he intends to show video footage taken by the gunmen during the court hearings.
Lawyer Igor Trunov said one of hostages provided the footage but would not say how that person obtained it. He said the hearings may be closed to journalists because of the footage. Trunov said he filed four more suits from former hostages and relatives of victims Thursday. A total of 49 people are seeking a total of $48 million in compensation from the Moscow city government, he said.
NATO Slammed
MOSCOW (AP) - In a sign of tension in its otherwise warm relations with the West, Russia has accused unidentified NATO countries of dragging their feet on the ratification of an arms-control agreement that limits weapons levels in Europe.
"Some of our NATO partners are continuing to put up various pretexts in a bid to prevent the start of the ratification process" of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement released late Wednesday.
Yakovenko did not name the countries Russia believes are hindering the ratification, but made a thinly veiled reference to the United States. "There is a feeling that some don't feel happy about the modified treaty as well as other binding disarmament agreements relating to anti-missile defense, the nonproliferation of biological weapons and the demilitarization of space," Yakovenko said.
Solzhenitsyn in Clinic
MOSCOW (SPT) - Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn remained in a Moscow hospital with high blood pressure on Thursday, although his condition has improved since he was hospitalized in late December.
"We have no news except for good news. He is feeling better," an official at Solzhenitsyn's Russian Public Foundation said by telephone Wednesday.
It was unclear when Solzhenitsyn would be released from the Central Clinical Hospital. The 84-year-old writer was hospitalized with high blood pressure in the last week of December, the official said. Solzhenitsyn is also suffering a stiffness in his left leg, Interfax reported. The official would not confirm the report.
TITLE: Hammer and Sickle To Fly High No More
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Eleven years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle continues to fly high over Russia - but not for long.
Aeroflot, the former Soviet Union's monopoly carrier, says that it will drop its Soviet-era logo as part of a new campaign to radically modernize its corporate image.
"We were surprised to find out that as many Russian customers as foreign customers have negative associations with the symbol," said Yevgeny Bachurin, Aeroflot's commercial director.
Long infamous for its drab style and mediocre service, the airline has hired Britain-based consulting firm Identica Ltd. to rework everything about the carrier's image, including its attitude and its style, especially the uniforms.
Though the rebranding strategy won't be unveiled until March, Aeroflot has revealed that a revamped color scheme will include orange tones and navy blues, because their former colors, drab blue and white, are considered too cold.
Navy blue represents the traditional color of aviation and the oranges are meant to evoke sunrise and sunset as well as shades of khokhloma, a type of Russian national folk art, the airline said.
Aeroflot hopes a more modern style will bolster its business. Once the world's largest airline, Aeroflot's passenger rates have been falling while its revenues are rising.
It expects to have carried 5.5 million passengers by the end of this year, down from last year's total of 5.7 million, but it expects to more than triple its net profit to $75 million, a figure Bachurin said could be much higher if "tens of millions of dollars" in revenues weren't lost due to the weakness of the brand.
"Passengers are losing trust in our brand," he said.
"We started by taking a look at the visual aspects of our brand ~ how it's presented, how it looks, how our planes look ~ and we came to the conclusion that there is no conformity in how our company is presented, no binding idea, and this causes the brand to fall apart in the eyes of our passengers," Bachurin said.
Though most of the restyling will be aesthetic, the company also has plans to make changes to its service, Bachurin said. For example, the airline intends to make its in-flight food service resemble restaurant service, where passengers are offered a menu and can eat any time they choose. A flight demonstrating the new service will leave Moscow for New York on Dec. 25.
Aeroflot began its bid to cater to Western travelers three years ago, phasing out smoking on flights incrementally, banning smoking on flights less than two hours in duration in 1999. The smoking ban on flights bound for the United States took effect on March 30.
Last year, Aeroflot instructed its flight attendants to smile more with passengers, even launching a campaign to explain its previous lack of friendliness: "We don't smile because we are serious about making you happy." Now, not only will new recruits be selected for their foreign language ability and statuesque builds, but also for being "more caring and more polite."
The airline released a lengthy motto Wednesday expressing their updated philosophy: "Russian hospitality provided by sincere, spirited people with elements of the best traditions and modern way of life."
Unmodern aspects of Aeroflot's exterior will be touched up or changed. Brown shapeless trays are to be replaced with brighter models, food containers are also to become more shapely, morphing from rectangles to sleek ovals.
Aeroflot will institute a unified color scheme for the seating in all its planes. Though the airline has concentrated its efforts on attracting the top-dollar international business traveler market, Bachurin assured journalists Aeroflot would devote equal attention to improving domestic flights ~ where the quality of planes and service is notoriously low.
More sophistication will mean 5 percent to 10 percent higher ticket prices, Bakunin admitted, saying business- and first-class travelers will see the greatest increases. He noted that company surveys had shown 80 percent of respondents were willing to pay more.
Identica 's Tim Barson called Aeroflot's uniforms reminiscent of military garb and outdated. Aeroflot has solicited uniform proposals from the country's leading fashion designers, including Tatyana Parfenova, Nina & Donis, and the Ekspotorg design collective, whose competition entries can be found on the company's web site (www.aeroflot.ru). The winning design will be chosen by a jury of fashion professors and editors and launched Feb. 9, to coincide with Aeroflot's 80th anniversary celebrations.
Although Aeroflot's new image will be the result of taking a more Western approach to doing business, Barson emphasized that part of the strength of the brand remains the fact that it is Russian.
"Being Russian must be part of the brand," he said.
TITLE: MegaFon Stakeholder Sells Assets
AUTHOR: By Larisa Naumenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - St. Petersburg-based telecoms holding Telecominvest - which owns a 29.81-percent stake in No. 3 cellular operator MegaFon - announced earlier this week that it has sold off a chunk of its non-core assets.
"We have gotten rid of non-core assets in accordance with the group's development strategy adopted by our shareholders, and we will be concentrating our resources on developing the most promising and attractive projects," Telecominvest General Director Mikhail Gorokhov said in a statement.
"Telecominvest is 'cleaning' its portfolio to concentrate on its main asset, Megafon," said Alexei Yakovitsky, an analyst at United Financial Group.
Telecominvest sold its 100-percent stake in data-transfer operator Neva Lain to transit-traffic operator Mezhregionalny Tranzitny Telekom and a 100-percent stake in Balttelekom, which is handling the delayed construction of a fiber-optic line between St. Petersburg and Estonia, to Alsean-N.
Telecominvest also sold the Presskom publishing house, which puts out the St. Petersburg telephone directory Ves Peterburg, to Infospace, and a 25-percent stake in Delta Telecom, to the offshore company Telco Overseas Ltd.
Telecominvest declined to give the prices of the stakes.
TITLE: Russian Savings Reduced by Dollar Decline
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The dollar, the currency of choice for Russian savers, hit a fresh three-year low against the euro on Thursday, as the Central Bank had to spend about $50 million to keep the ruble from strengthening against the struggling greenback.
Doubts about the strength of America's economic recovery and a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq pushed the dollar down to $1.0537 per euro in European trading, its weakest level since November 1999, when it stood at $1.0545.
When the common currency's notes and bills were launched on Jan. 1, 2002, a euro could be had for just $0.89 cents. Since then, however, the greenback has taken a steady beating, losing 18 percent of its value against its European rival over the course of the year and 10 percent against a trade-weighted basket of major world currencies, making it the worst performing currency in the world.
According to a study published Thursday by consulting group Unicon/MS, the euro had a real rate of return in ruble terms last year of more than 15 percent, while the dollar actually had a negative rate of return.
Due to the heavy dollarization of the Russian economy - the greenback is the Central Bank's favorite reserve currency and more dollars are in circulation here than in any other country save America - and interventions by the Central Bank, the dollar is up 5.7 percent against the ruble since the beginning of last year. The official ruble/dollar rate was set at 31.88 on Thursday, compared with 30.137 on Jan. 1, 2002.
Currency dealers estimated that the Central Bank spent $40 million to $50 million to keep the ruble from further appreciating against the dollar.
"The Central Bank wants to prevent an excessive appreciation of the ruble, whose strength is often blamed for eroding the competitiveness of local producers," Reuters quoted one trader as saying.
The government expects an average rate of 33 rubles to the dollar this year.
Against the euro, however, the ruble has faired far worse, losing 25.9 percent of its value against the common currency since Jan. 1, 2002. The official ruble/euro rate is currently 33.54, while a year ago it stood at 26.62.
This trend has accelerated since Dec. 7, when the euro became stronger than the dollar versus the ruble for the second time. Since then, the euro has gained some 6 percent against the Russian currency.
In 2002, the real-ruble yield, adjusted for last year's inflation rate of 15 percent, was 8.6 percent for cash euros and 14.6 percent for euros deposited in one-year savings accounts, according to Unicon/MS.
In the same period, the real-ruble yield of one-year deposits in the national currency was just 1.8 percent, with dollar savings faring even worse. The real-ruble yield of savings in cash dollars was minus 8.4 percent, while one-year dollar deposits yielded between minus 1.6 percent to minus 4.4 percent, Unicon/MS said.
Despite the euro's strong performance, economists say that the vast majority of Russians held onto their dollars last year because their favorite currency still had many advantages over its rival.
"I think that the majority of Russians' savings is still kept in dollars, and only the most sophisticated people, mostly in Moscow, have decided to diversify their savings," said Mikhail Matovnikov, head of Interfax Rating Agency's banking division.
Bankers say that Russian accounting standards make it virtually impossible to estimate what percentage of household deposits are in euros and what percentage is held in dollars.
"According to Central Bank requirements, we only provide numbers for ruble-denominated deposits and dollar-denominated deposits, which also include the ones made in European currencies," said a spokesperson for Alfa Bank, the country's largest private bank.
Nevertheless, both Matrosova and Matovnikov said that they expect a further shift toward the euro in 2003, but said that it was unlikely that the currency would repeat last year's performance.
TITLE: Foreign Insulation Gets a Warm Welcome
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Unfortunately for just about everyone who lives in a building older than a decade, which is nearly everyone, Soviet architects were never into insulation.
The reason? Bountiful and cheap gas and electricity, which made insulation a costly, and therefore unwanted, expense. But that is changing: Although domestic energy prices are still way below the world norm, they are rising more than 10 percent a year and will continue to do so for years to come.
While consumers may not like it, insulation companies do, and they are determined to convince others that not only is their product needed, but also that it pays for itself in the long term.
"You could say that older Russian buildings are not insulated at all," said Oleg Yermakov, general director of the Russian branch of Finland's Paroc, a company that specializes in rock wool, a fibrous insulation material made from stone.
"Even modern buildings have shortcomings in terms of insulation," Yermakov said.
To understand the scale of the problem, the world's largest rock-wool producer, Denmark's Rockwool Group, spent two months interviewing dozens of architects and designers and discovered that the only buildings that even come close to meeting modern standards are those that were built between 1925 and 1945 and have more than six stories - thanks to their thick walls.
"Most people in Moscow and in the rest of Russia and the CIS live in panel houses," said Oleg Volkov, marketing manager at Rockwool Russia, which operates an upgraded former Soviet rock-wool factory in the Moscow region town of Zhelyoznodorozhny.
Despite new energy-saving building standards, not all new buildings meet international standards, and those that do make up only a small part of all residences, Volkov said. "People cut corners to save money."
Rockwool estimates that 34 percent of Russia's thermal-energy production is used to heat houses, compared to just 20 percent to 22 percent in Europe, which has improved heat retention by some 3 1/2 times since the world oil crises of the 1970s.
The company found that as much as 800 kilowatt-hours per square meter per year are expended to heat multistory apartment blocks - roughly 10 times what is spent in developed countries.
By comparison, the United States uses just 55 kwh per square meter per year. In Norway, Sweden and Finland, where, as in Russia, the thermometer drops below minus 35 degrees Celsius in winter, less than 80 kwh are expended per square meter per year.
"Installing effective insulation in buildings that leak heat would result in warmer houses, a cleaner environment and pay for itself in a couple of years," Volkov said. "Cost savings should be up to 30 percent."
"If it is a private house, fitting insulation could pay for itself in one or two years," he said. "If we are talking about big buildings then it could be two or three years."
Revamping a 60-flat Khrushchev-era apartment block would cost between $1,000 and $2,000 per apartment, he said, adding that, in some regions, especially the Far North, waste is greater and the savings, therefore, could be greater.
In the Khrushchev era, when the government launched a program to provide everyone with their own homes, apartments were built with thin walls to trim expenses.
The type of apartment blocks built after that continued to have this flaw, Volkov said.
To demonstrate the advantages of insulation, Rockwool refitted a Khrushchev-era apartment block on St. Petersburg's Torzhovskaya Ulitsa in 2000. The building's facades were made more energy efficient, stairways, windows and doors were rebuilt and replaced, and the sewage system was upgraded. The project almost doubled the heat retention of the building, and residents were able to stay inside during the reconstruction.
A similar project is taking place on Moscow's Lipetskaya Ulitsa, and another is planned in the Marino district.
Vladimir Batsarin, chief engineer of French-based Saint-Gobain Isover, another large player on the Russian market, said that one of the ways of using energy more efficiently has been to build mansard roofs on top of Khrushchev-era buildings. This was done in the Moscow region town of Lytkarino, and resulted in heat savings of up to 9 percent.
Paroc's Yermakov said that Russia's insulation market has grown about 25 percent per year since the financial collapse of 1998.
The boom has attracted international attention.
Volkov said that many small Russian companies produce insulation products, but Rockwool's leading competitor is Madrid-based Uralita, which has a factory near Nizhny Novgorod and is building one near Moscow.
TITLE: Reserve Fund for Debt Hits $8Billion
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - High world crude prices and the successful sell-off of state stakes in LUKoil and Slavneft in 2002 have left the government with nearly $8 billion of extra cash it can use to pay this year's record debt bill and cushion against external shocks.
Finance Ministry spokesperson Yury Zubarev said Wednesday that the government had surpassed its goal of setting aside 197 billion rubles ($6.2 billion) in the financial reserve fund, which was created within the 2002 budget to ensure this year's $17.1-billion external-debt obligations are met.
"This amount meets the budget target of 197.4 billion rubles, and does not include revenues from privatization," Zubarev was quoted by Interfax as saying.
The government sold its 5.9-percent stake in top oil producer LUKoil in August for $775 million and received $1.86 billion for its 75-percent stake in Slavneft last month, allowing the government to forgo a planned $1 billion eurobond.
According to most estimates, the fund, once the money from the Slavneft sale is received next month, will hold 250 billion rubles, leaving the government with $1.5 billion it did not plan on having.
Some analysts think that the windfall should be used to buy back some of the state's debt but, with parliamentary elections later this year many worry that the money will be misappropriated or channeled into the budget to cover growing expenses.
"The higher-than-expected reserve figure will allow for a more flexible budget policy in 2003," said Alexander Kudrin, a fixed income analyst with Troika Dialog.
Kudrin said that the surplus will likely be used as insurance against a drop in oil prices between now and April. If prices remain stable, however, the government will likely start buying back debt in the second quarter, he said.
Russia managed to lower its sovereign debt in 2002 to 40 percent of its gross domestic product from 49 percent in 2001, while total debt payments dropped to 2.3 percent of GDP from 2.6 percent, according to government figures.
Russia's debt bill this year balloons to $17.3 billion - $10.8 billion of which is principal - from $14 billion in 2002.
The 2003 debt hump was originally $19 billion, but the government last year managed to buy back some $1.7 billion, suggesting that it may continue the practice this year, although some economists say that this is not necessary.
"It is more important for the government to avoid new borrowings in 2003," said Yevsei Gurvich of the Economic Expert Group.
The 2003 budget allows the government to issue eurobonds worth up to $1.25 billion.
"Also, if oil prices stay above $21.5 a barrel, which is the budget average, it would be wise for the government to leave most of the reserve fund untouched," Gurvich said.
TITLE: BP To Get Rid of Its LUKoil Stake
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - BP next month will call a $420-million bond that is convertible into LUKoil shares in what the oil giant hopes is its exit from an inherited investment in Russia's top crude producer, the company said Wednesday.
The British company is offering to redeem the bonds at par ($1,000) starting Feb. 10, to be completed the next day. Until then, bondholders may convert each bond into 20 LUKoil American Depositary Receipts, which were trading down slightly at about $59.30 in London on Wednesday afternoon.
BP expects bondholders to opt for the conversion.
"LUKoil was something we inherited," a BP official said by telephone from London. "The aim is that we'd actually have money to do what we wanted to do with, to get involved in projects where we could have a direct impact. It doesn't mean that we're saying we've got no interest in Russia."
If all the bonds are converted, BP will be relieved of the remaining 8.4 million LUKoil ADRs it acquired when it bought ARCO in 2000. The BP official said that the company sold 5.9 million shares when the bond was placed in February 2001.
LUKoil's local shares shed more than 5 percent Wednesday to close at $14.77 on the Russian Trading System.
Analysts said, however, that at least three fourths of bondholders appeared to have planned for the eventual call and have hedged positions, so the jitters should disappear soon.
"The net supply [on the market] will be a lot smaller than 8.4 million," said Kaha Kiknavelidze of Troika Dialog. "Technically, it's negative, but it has no fundamental impact. Any further decrease in price could be a buying opportunity."
"If anything, this is good. Everyone knew that BP is not a strategic partner of LUKoil," said Christopher Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank.
TITLE: Venezuelan Currency, Economy Face Crisis
AUTHOR: By James Anderson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARACAS, Venezuela - Bank employees were stopped for two days on Thursday, adding weight to a strike against President Hugo Chavez that has dried up income in the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.
Jose Torres, president of the Fetrabanca workers unions, urged workers to provide only minimal services such as processing payments for medical emergencies Thursday and Friday. Automatic-teller machines were to shut down.
Private banks, which Chavez has threatened to nationalize, have opened just three hours a day since Dec. 9. In Caracas, thousands of people line up each morning outside banks splattered with graffiti reading "I want my money!" and "Banker thieves!"
The announcement of the two-day strike pushed Venezuela's bolivar currency to a record low against the dollar on Wednesday.
Demand for dollars soared on speculation that Chavez's government, facing a fiscal crisis because of dwindling oil and tax revenues, would devalue the bolivar to balance its budget. Nervous depositors wanted dollars before the banks closed, not knowing what the bolivar would be worth when banks reopen next week.
The bank strike underscored the intransigence of both sides, despite international pleas for them to help the Organization of American States negotiate a solution to the standoff.
The bolivar plunged by as much as 13 percent before its official close at 1,510 bolivars per dollar, down 6 percent, said the Central Bank, which uses an average of all the day's trading prices. Previously the lowest close was 1,492 per dollar on Sept. 15.
On Wednesday, the government tried to raise money by offering 40.5 billion bolivars in government bonds, worth $29 million at that point. There were no takers.
Strike leaders are calling for a Feb. 2 nonbinding referendum on Chavez's rule and want him to schedule elections in 30 days if he loses the referendum.
Chavez insists that the constitution only requires him to respect a possible recall referendum next August, the midpoint of his six-year term.
Before Wednesday, the bolivar's value had fallen by more than 45 percent since Chavez abandoned exchange controls last year to curb capital flight. Venezuela spent $6 billion in 2001 to support the bolivar.
The strike briefly sent international oil prices above $30. The state oil company is seen as gradually picking up activity but is still operating well below normal. Crude output is estimated at around 400,000 barrels per day, compared to the pre-strike level of 3 million barrels per day. Exports, normally 2.5 million barrels a day, are at 500,000 barrels per day.
Chavez has managed to stabilize domestic gasoline supplies somewhat through imports. Caracas streets were jammed with traffic Thursday, and many businesses were open. However, international franchises, large malls and many factories were closed, emptying industrial parks.
Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez has vowed to crush the strike by decentralizing the oil monopoly, where 30,000 workers are on strike.
Chavez's government will cut jobs at the Caracas headquarters of the company, a hotbed of dissent where 7,000 are employed, Ramirez said. The government is systematically firing strikers throughout the giant corporation.
TITLE: Talks Held To Avert Mass Strikes in German Pay Dispute
AUTHOR: By Sven Kaestner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: POTSDAM, Germany - A final push to solve a bitter dispute over German public employees' pay resumed Thursday under the threat from union leaders of their first all-out strike since 1992.
Negotiators from unions and from federal, state and municipal governments worked deep into the night but did not break the stalemate. They took an early-morning break, then went back to talking.
Interior Minister Otto Schily said as he arrived Thursday that he was "cautiously optimistic we will achieve a result today."
The giant ver.di service workers' union said Wednesday that its members could take a strike vote if the talks fail, and that nearly 3 million public workers from nurses to tax collectors could begin walkouts in less than two weeks.
"We stand on the brink of the biggest strike in the history of the federal republic," ver.di head Frank Bsirske said before talks opened Wednesday evening.
Unions want a raise of at least 3 percent, pointing to similar awards won by industrial workers last year. But employers insist that the lame German economy means that they cannot afford a big pay increase without laying off staff.
Schily on Wednesday warned unions that the employers' existing offer, which he said was worth 2.8 percent, would be taken off the table in case of a strike.
Germany hasn't seen a full-scale strike by public employees since an 11-day stoppage in 1992 left garbage piled in the streets. The threat of a repeat loomed Monday when employers rejected a proposal by mediators called in last month to break the deadlock.
The mediators had recommended an 18-month deal that would see a pay award of 2.4 percent from this month, with another 0.6 percent increase from Jan. 1 next year. Union negotiators accepted the plan, but employers said that it was too costly.
TITLE: What Is To Be Done To Control North Korea?
AUTHOR: By Michael Kelly
TEXT: ON North Korea, the conventional wisdom in Washington, which happens to be the same as the conventional wisdom in Pyongyang, goes roughly like this: U.S. President George W. Bush triggered the crisis by excessive hardening-of-line and axis-of-evil-calling; Bush is compounding his hard-lining error by irresponsibly refusing to negotiate with Pyongyang; and, paradoxically, Bush is guilty of foreign-policy incoherence, or worse, in adopting a harder line toward Saddam Hussein than toward Kim Jong Il.
Conventional wisdom tends by its nature to get things wrong, but seldom this dangerously wrong. This is wrong to the point of divorce from reality. The reality, in brief, is as follows (in large part taken from reports by the Congressional Research Service, the Federation of American Scientists and the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control):
North Korea has been working on developing nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapons-delivery systems for at least three decades. Since the 1970s, North Korea has agreed to inspection regimes, treaties and other agreements intended to curb its bomb-building, and has violated all of these agreements. North Korea has used episodic violation as a tool of foreign policy, periodically forcing confrontation to produce fresh agreements and fresh outpourings of money and other aid from its neighbors, the United Nations and the United States.
In the latest of such successful blackmailings, North Korea won an agreement with the United States - the Agreed Framework of Oct. 21, 1994, negotiated, after Jimmy Carter's intercession, with the administration of then President Bill Clinton.
This agreement was never more than a kicking of the can. Indeed, it was so by its very own definition.
South Korea agreed to construct for North Korea two light-water (non-plutonium-producing) reactors at a cost of $4.5 billion, and the United States promised annual gifts of half a million tons of heavy fuel oil until the reactors were built. In exchange, North Korea agreed only to "freeze" - emphatically not to abandon - its bomb program.
Specifically, North Korea promised to halt the construction of two major nuclear reactors at its Yongbyon facility, capable of annually producing enough weapons-usable plutonium to make 30 bombs; to shut down its plutonium-reprocessing center, also at Yongbyon; and not to refuel an already constructed plutonium-producing reactor. But the agreement delayed for five years any inspection regime serious enough to ensure verification.
Moreover, the framework made no provision for dealing with the gains North Korea had already made in its decades-long nuclear program. With an estimated 3,000 scientists working at Yongbyon alone, this program had, by 1994, already produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to make anywhere from two to six small atomic bombs, according to the intelligence estimates of several countries, including the United States, South Korea, Japan, Germany and Russia.
A 1990 KGB report to the Soviet Central Committee asserted, based on "available data," that North Korea had "completed" its "first nuclear device," and in 1994, before the agreement, the director of the CIA said that the agency believed North Korea had already produced one or two bombs.
Current U.S. intelligence assessments are that North Korea has probably produced at least one nuclear weapon.
The United States government had so little faith in the 1994 agreement that it did not define it as a formal treaty - it did not wish to be legally bound by an agreement it had so little reason to think would be kept. And the agreement was not kept - the can was merely kicked, and not very far.
In October 2002, after years of mounting evidence of North Korean violations, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly confronted North Korea with evidence that it was conducting a clandestine bomb-building program based on a process of enriching uranium.
North Korea had begun this program only a few months after the signing of the 1994 Agreed Framework - and, note, seven years before George Bush called anybody evil, in that storied January 2002 State of the Union address. North Korea first denied the truth, then admitted it - and then unilaterally "nullified" the 1994 deal.
We were bound to arrive at this point, no matter which president ended up holding the can kicked in 1994. North Korea never had any intention of living up to the agreement, and it never did. Eventually, it was going to get caught, and it did.
Bush has reacted as probably any responsible president would. He has refused to back down. Well, what else?
Would it be better that he "renegotiate" - that he give North Korea another seven years of bomb-building time?
He has promised not to wage war against North Korea, not to treat this particular evildoer as he is threatening to treat another. Well, what else again?
There is, in the end, one stark difference here. We are trying hard to stop Iraq's madman from acquiring the bomb. North Korea already has one.
Michael Kelly is a columnist for The Washington Post, where this column first appeared. By Nicholas D. Kristof
WHILE in North Korea years ago, I barged into as many private homes as possible, and every single one had The Speaker.
The Speaker is like a radio, but permanently on and without a choice of stations. It's the electronic umbilical cord from the Great Leader, waking citizens up each morning and putting them to bed each evening with a mix of heroic songs, denunciations of "the American war-maniacs" and tributes to Kim Jong Il, "the greatest of great men produced by heaven."
(Oops. Now North Koreans are going to wake up to hear The Speaker declare that even the imperialist reactionary New York Times has hailed the Great Leader as "the greatest of great men".)
The Speaker is a reminder that North Korea is like no other country in the world today. It was eerie to interview groups of North Koreans and then hear them praise Kim Jong Il in unison, like synchronized robots, a feat of hagiography unmatched except in Washington when White House aides give interviews.
It's also a reason that the United States' North Korea policy seems bound to fail. Since October, the White House has tried to use economic pressure to squeeze the Great Leader to give up his uranium program. Economic pressure? In a country so regimented and totalitarian that its leaders yawned through a famine that killed 2 million people in the 1990s?
As one of the few Americans who have traveled around both North Korea and Iraq, I believe the problem is far deeper than just a muddle of our priorities. The White House's champing at the bit to invade Iraq alarms me, but I have to admit that so far the champing has had an excellent effect: It has put backbone into the United Nations, returned inspectors to Iraq and made containment of Iraq a more viable option.
On the other hand, the White House North Korea policy is baffling and is aggravating the crisis. My guess is that President George W. Bush is deferring North Korea until Iraq is out of the way, and he's hoping that Chinese pressure will bring North Korea around. It won't. China won't squeeze North Korea because it doesn't want a collapsed neighbor and millions more refugees. Moreover, China's influence on North Korea has always been wildly exaggerated. North Koreans speak openly of their contempt for Chinese officials, and Chinese and North Korean border guards have on occasion even fired at each other. I realized the strains a decade ago when one North Korean introduced me to another by saying "The Chinese government hates Mr. Kristof" - and they both beamed and pumped my hand warmly.
Unless the administration switches gears, here's what may happen: North Korea will reprocess spent fuel at its Yongbyon reactor, giving it enough plutonium for five to eight nuclear warheads by May 1. The North will also resume construction of a much bigger reactor at Taechon, accelerate its enriched-uranium program, possibly drop out of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and test a Taepodong 2 missile that, in three stages, could reach New York (although it might be so inaccurate that it would miss and wipe out Newark).
In five years, North Korea could have 100 nuclear weapons and be churning out more like a fast-food chef. With nothing else to keep its economy going, North Korea will peddle them to the highest bidder ("One free Taepodong 2 missile with every three warheads you buy!")
This scenario is so horrendous that, by late spring, the Pentagon will be preparing options for a military strike on Yongbyon, even though Bush has sensibly resisted that approach, because the result could be another Korean War. And this is, as Secretary of State Colin Powell calls it, "not a crisis"?
The only way out that I can see is to negotiate with North Korea, despite the administration's legitimate concerns about rewarding bad behavior. We could save face by getting President Vladimir Putin to sponsor an international conference on North Korea, and then working out a deal in which the Great Leader verifiably gives up his nuclear and long-range missile programs, while the West offers normalization, trade, Asian Development Bank loans and pledges of nonaggression.
This would be a deeply unsatisfying solution, but it is less unsatisfying than the options we're now speeding toward: a nuclear factory peddling bombs on the North Korean Ebay, or Korean War II.
Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times, where this comment first appeared.
TITLE: Desertions Prove the NCOs Should be Pros
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: LAST week there was another case of mass desertions by Russian conscript soldiers - this time from a unit of the Federal Railroad Troops near St. Petersburg. Similar to a recent mass desertion from a unit near Moscow, the soldiers took a train to the city and went directly to the St. Petersburg office of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee to complain of abuse by their commanding officers.
The mass desertion got lots of publicity on national television channels. A representative of the railroad troops - once part of the Defense Ministry before becoming an independent armed force in the 1990s - claimed the soldiers were "hooligans" who had attempted to consume alcoholic beverages in the barracks to celebrate the New Year and, after being disciplined by officers, deserted to escape punishment.
Abuse of conscripts has long been a feature of Russian military service. In most cases, newly enlisted conscripts are hazed by their longer-serving comrades - so-called grandfathers - who have served at least 1 1/2 years of the two-year term. This abuse often leads to desertions, shooting incidents and widespread suicides by conscripts who are physically and sometimes sexually assaulted, according to evidence gathered by the Soldiers' Mothers Committees and other human-rights groups.
But the recent mass desertions from units near Moscow and St. Petersburg seem to be special cases. Many of the deserters were in fact grandfathers - conscripts with only a few months left to serve who, according to military tradition, enjoy unofficial privileges in barracks. Apparently, it was the grandfathers themselves who organized the mass desertions, a sign that the hazing system is beginning to break up.
Unlike in the West, Russian military units do not have professional noncommissioned officers. After World War II, the number of experienced corporals and sergeants tumbled. By the 1960s, they had virtually disappeared. The few who remained - the praporshchiki - mostly occupied administrative and logistics positions. Units were run by young conscripts who became NCOs after just five months of sergeant school. These half-baked sergeants in most cases were not ready to be true leaders of detachments. Nor were they experienced enough to keep discipline and order in conscript units. Today, unit commanders concern themselves with battle strategy and, not wanting to be bothered with supervising troops' daily life and discipline, delegate to grandfathers the dirty work of keeping order among their peers in the barracks, while they, the professional officers, return home to their families at night.
From the 1960s, grandfathers began to take on the roles of the nonexistent professional NCOs - safeguarding discipline, order and unit traditions. Commanding officers tended to turn a blind eye to the grandfathers' methods of disciplining younger soldiers - as long as there was some sort of order in the barracks. As the conscript saying goes: The first year, the grandfathers beat you; the second year, you, in turn, beat up the newly enlisted.
Hazing has allowed the preservation of a semblance of military order, but only while allowing terrible abuse and sadistic outrages. Since the late 1980s, the press has exposed military hazing. Soldiers' Mothers Committees were formed to help stop the abuse. Defense Ministry chiefs publicly acknowledged the problem, promising to eradicate it.
Of course, hazing has not disappeared. Instead, it has worsened in many cases. The Defense Ministry steadfastly refuses to consider plans to create a professional NCO corps, but as long as there are no professional NCOs, grandfathers will remain indispensable as an organizing force in the barracks, and officers will continue to permit hazing. But now, with grandfathers' desertions, it seems this seemingly stable, inhumane system is beginning to fall apart from the inside. Discipline, morale and professionalism of Russian officers are at an all-time low. Career officers work second jobs to feed families and neglect their service duties. They steal and sell military hardware. They extort bribes from soldiers and their parents in exchange for favors, while the grandfathers hold things together in the units.
The Russian officer corps is losing respect and authority from among the rank and file. The grandfathers are organizing mass protests in the form of desertions to defend their rights and privileges. If officers are often drunk on the job - why can't soldiers be?
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst and St. Petersburg Times columnist.
TITLE: ring cycle comes full circle
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Prominent Moscow director Vladimir Mirzoyev is known for his daring, original and, some say, unceremonious approach to classic plays, such as Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," Gogol's "Revizor" ("The Government Inspector"), and Edmund Rostan's "Cyrano de Bergerac." When Mirzoyev's plans to turn his hand to opera in St. Petersburg were unveiled, therefore, the city's artistic circles went into paroxysms of hysteria, and dire warnings abounded of impending disaster.
However, the director's treatment of Wagner's "Siegfried" and "Goetterdaemmerung" - the final two parts of the composer's massive cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen" - that premiered at the Mariinsky Theater on Dec. 25 and Dec. 30, respectively, displayed much tact and delicacy. Mirzoyev was not at all intimidated by the power of the composer's talent; rather, it seems that he has quickly learned the key rule of operatic directing - to follow the music without trying to destroy the composer's logic.
Mirzoyev's conception of Siegfried is of a fearless Tarzan, with all of the jungle hero's associated naivete and brutality. The whole story is told through Siegfried's eyes, and in the light of his perceptions. Thus, to show Siegfried's lack of feer, Mirzoyev portrays the giant Fafner as a harmless grumbler, and no more dreadful than a hedgehog; in line with this, costume designer Tatyana Noginova wraps the giant in a brownish cloth, reminiscent of a walnut.
Stage designer Georgy Tsypin's minimalistic, highly compelling sets involve placing enormous, transparent plastic figures on the stage; the megalithic figures create a pre-historic environment for the whole story. The evolution of Siegfried's character is reflected by the way that the figures change through the scenes. In Act I of "Siegfried," their heads are merely shapeless stones; after Siegfried defeats Fafner in Act II, one of the giants is fallen; during Act III, when Siegfried falls in love with Brunnhilde, the giants are kneeling. Red lights sparkling in the figures' heads and chests - where their hearts would be - illustrate that Siegfried is becoming a thinking, sensitive hero. For "Goetterdaemmerung" Leonid Zakhozhayev's light-hearted and somewhat carefree Siegfried of the first opera gives way to Viktor Lutsyuk's humane, mature hero. In Act III of the second opera, the giants emerge with prehistoric lizards' heads, enhancing the power of the finale.
The giants, highly successful on their own, are at odds with the richly detailed costumes, which are perhaps a little overdone. For instance, in Act III of "Siegfried," Brunnhilde (Milana Butayeva) wears so much whimsical decorative clothing that it is hard to discern her gender. Some costumes had Mexican themes, while others seemed more appropriate to a staging of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" than Wagner's ring.
Musically and vocally, the productions left little to be desired, although the lack of Wagnerian voices was obvious. The powerful, heavy, yet flexible, bass Edem Umerov was magnificent as Alberich, but Vladimir Felenchak, although dramatically profound as Mime, lacked strength and power. The excellent artistic skills that allow Felenchak to portray grotesque characters could not compensate for his lack of Wagnerian timbre. On the other hand, Larisa Gogolevskaya, whose tormented Senta in the theater's production of Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" earned her much critical acclaim, was a stunning Brunnhilde, both vocally and dramatically in "Goetterdaemmerung." The love scenes in both operas were perhaps the most traditional and static; at times, the characters didn't even look at each other, concentrating, instead, on singing.
In both "Siegfried" and "Goetterdaemmerung," Mirzoyev's philosophy, matched by the compelling set design, seems to have struck a chord in the company. As is almost always the case with the Mariinsky's Wagner productions, the rapport between the orchestra, the cast and the conductor was impeccable.
Mariinsky Artistic Director Valery Gergiev's dream and most ambitious project has finally been fulfilled. The Ring will be shown in full during this year's Stars of the White Nights Festival. However, seeing all four parts back to back may prove a rather unusual experience. In most Western companies, one director usually stages the whole tetralogy. At the Mariinsky, on the other hand, "Das Rheingold" was staged by Johannes Schaaf, "Die Walkuere" by Gottfried Pilz, and the final two operas by Mirzoyev.
Having a different director for each part would be eclectic, but would, at least, have its own logic. "Siegfried" and "Goetterdaemmerung" are done in similar styles and present a holistic experience, very different from the other two parts. The result may be that the cycle appears fragmented - only time will tell.
TITLE: cynic: going back to the underground
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Cynic, St. Petersburg's favorite underground hangout, reopened in its new location this week after a six-month hiatus with a huge party and a concert by local acts Sveta Kolibaba and Selyodka.
Evicted from the decrepit premises near Moskovsky Station that the club had occupied since opening on Feb. 23, 2001, the new Cynic makes an immediate impression as being more spacious - and substantially cleaner.
"The old building was to be pulled down, that's why the toilet never worked, and everything was just dying and perishing," owner Vladimir Postnichenko says of the old, dirt-covered place, which habitually reeked of grenki (garlic-soaked toasted bread), Cynic's cheapest and most popular offering. "Here, everything has been done conscientiously, and we'll clean the place regularly, because Cynic's atmosphere is defined by free relaxation, not dirty floors and cigarette butts all around."
Located in the basement of a 19th-century building at 4 Pereulok Antonenko, just off St. Isaac's Square, Cynic now includes three rooms - a bar, library and a VIP room - with a fourth still to open.
The library of several hundred titles from Postnichenko's own collection is also a reading hall from which books can be borrowed - if guaranteed by handing over a passport. There are also plans to open a kiosk selling contemporary literature.
A members-only VIP room may seem a foreign idea for such a democratic place as Cynic but, according to Postnichenko, the idea comes from the "secret" back room for friends at the old place. "The other reason is that there are too many people in the main room, and it's too noisy," he says. "Here, you can discuss things in the same atmosphere, only quieter."
The VIP room is equipped with its own bar, selling more expensive beers - such as Stella Artois and Warsteiner - as well as cigars.
Despite not being a music club, the old Cynic hosted semi-spontaneous live gigs using an overworked old Soviet PA system. Now, however, the sound quality is substantially better.
"Every concert was a strain," says Postnichenko, who played drums with art-rock band NOM. "It was difficult to provide anything, so I was happy to have bands like Tres Muchachos, which plays unplugged, or Selyodka, which doesn't give a damn about anything and can use an ashtray for a hi-hat."
"Now, we can provide all the equipment; we have good amps, a good sound system, and a good console," he says. "Also, the quality system means you can talk, even when it's loud."
Postnichenko plans to use the building's courtyard in summer - as Cynic is surrounded exclusively by office buildings, it will be possible to arrange open-air concerts when the weather gets warmer. He also says he will resume the tradition of Cynic rock festivals, such as Sound of the City, at Varshavsky Station in September 2001.
The bar's staff, says Postnichenko, moved most of the old club's furniture to the new place - including the bar, which had to be sawn into five pieces - to provide continuity between the two locations.
Like the old Cynic, the new place was not the work of one single designer, instead taking ideas from various friends and visitors. The club's trademark dog logo was conceived by Moscow designer Dmitry Gomzyakov.
"I define the concept, and all sorts of people help me," says Postnichenko. "It's not that I think the new place's image is finished - I believe that you should have a definite skeleton and, in this atmosphere, meat will grow on it."
Postnichenko says that Cynic aims to bring together people from different artistic spheres.
"It's important for me to gather creative people here, as it often leads to interesting collaborations," he says. "For instance, filmmaker Max Pezhemsky saw Chirvontsy performing here and then wanted them for a film project. That means something works. That's what a club stands for."
According to Postnichenko, the reasons why the old Cynic was shut down are still unclear.
"What do they have there now? Nothing," he says. "There are more questions than answers. Who'll let them pull the building down with the city's 300th anniversary approaching? So there is an empty place, and there'll be nothing there in the near future."
Postnichenko hopes the new Cynic will be around for a long time.
"I like places in Paris that exist for 20 or 30 years, such as New Moon and New Morning. When [NOM] played there in the early 1990s, it was nice to find out that the young Talking Heads played there in the late 1970s," he says. "So I'd like Cynic's punters to be coming here in five years, and not jumping from place to place according to somebody's whim."
Cynic, 4 Per. Antonenko. Tel.:. 312-9526, 312-8779 (working soon). M: Sadovaya/Sennaya Ploshchad. Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. Friday, Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 a.m. No cover charge. www.cynic.spb.ru
TITLE: gergiev's grammies?
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Valery Gergiev, artistic and general director of the Mariinsky Theater, figures in three of the nominations for Grammy Awards that were announced Tuesday.
He conducts Sofia Gubaidulina's "Johannes-Passion," which was one of five nominees for Choral Performance and for Classical Contemporary Composition. It is performed by Genady Bezzubenkov, bass; Natalia Korneva, soprano; Viktor Lutsiuk, tenor; Fedor Mozhaev, baritone; Chamber Chorus of St. Petersburg and Chorus of the Mariinsky Theater; and Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater.
With violist Yury Bashmet, Gergiev was nominated for Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with Orchestra) for Gia Kancheli's "Styx" and Gubaidulina's "Viola Concerto."
The 45th annual Grammy Awards, the music industry's top prizes, are to be presented in 104 categories on Feb. 23 in New York.
TITLE: what's journalism got to do with it?
AUTHOR: by Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg fans of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini have been suffering from culinary depression since the closure last year of the director's namesake restaurant. That deficit, however, has been partially mediated by the opening of Paparazzi, a cafe just off St. Isaac's Square.
One of the more obscure corners of Fellini's cultural legacy, the word paparazzo - and the plural form, paparazzi - derives from a character of the same name in the director's most popular film, "La dolce vita." According to the invaluable Web site www.dictionary.com, a paparazzo is "A freelance photographer who doggedly pursues celebrities to take candid pictures for sale to magazines and newspapers."
Paparazzi, on the other hand, is a curiously themed little cafe featuring decent, cheap food and swift, sober service, but that, unfortunately, suffers as a result of a fairly unconvincing effort at interior design. The cafe's two rooms are plastered on all sides with an eclectic series of life-size photos of various personalities - ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger posing in a tiny T-shirt against a backdrop of snowy mountains to Whoopi Goldberg taking a milk bath. We chose to spend our meal in the company of a somewhat austere-looking Winston Churchill.
During a lunch visit this week, we found the paparazzi theme repeated on every page of the eatery's menu, which seemed to be decorated with an odd collage of photographs of Russian leaders past and present - we recognized Putin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Stalin - until, somewhat puzzlingly, we came across a shot of a woman looking suspiciously like Marilyn Monroe.
Getting down to the serious business of food, Paparazzi's menu offers a wide selection of salads and cold starters, all modestly priced, rarely exceeding 100 rubles ($3.15). It also has a selection of similarly priced soups and omelettes.
After much hesitation, my dining companion opted for the healthy-sounding Vitamin C salad, a mix of lettuce, walnuts and pieces of orange and apple in a light olive-oil dressing (90 rubles, $2.85). The salad was fresh and the different ingredients blended well together, offering a considerably tastier alternative to vitamin pills. I was less fortunate with my Pikantny salad (75 rubles, $2.35), which featured chunks of potato, fried pork, pickled cucumber and grated boiled egg, all unhappily drowned in mayonnaise. The freshly squeezed orange juice (75 rubles, $2.35), however, made for a refreshing change.
The main-course menu is fairly extensive, and boasts a whole page of fish dishes - from 85 to 260 rubles ($2.65 to $8.15; the latter for a salmon steak) - for those abstaining from other meats.
My dining companion opted for a pork schnitzel (105 rubles, $3.30) with French fries (a modest 25 rubles, $0.80). The schnitzel was deemed tasty, as well as the fries, which seemed to be homemade and were not too greasy.
Deciding to follow up on the menu's journlism theme, I ordered a "Journalistic Investigation" (180 rubles, $5.65), which turned out to be a chicken fillet stuffed with bacon, mushrooms, cheese, and vegetables, and a portion of fries. The dish was decent enough, with the exeption of the walnut-and-red-pepper sauce, which was sickly and, most likely, came straight out of a can. After getting rid of seas of pink sauce, I discovered that my dining companion's plate had also been generously splattered with the stuff.
Until then, Paparazzi's link to investigative journlism had been completely lost on me. However, the "investigation" piqued my curiosity, and I began to wonder what dishes such as "Photo Session for Two" and "Special Correspondent" could possibly involve. By then, however, I realized that journalistc investigations of another kind were calling me back to the newsroom, and left Paparazzi reasonably fed and satisfied.
Paparazzi, 8 Pochtamtskaya Ul. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Menu in Russian only. No credit cards. Meal for two, with no alcohol: 670 rubles ($21.05).
TITLE: a cellist who came into the cold
TEXT: A few hours after landing in St. Petersburg, Truls Mørk was already feeling the cold.
"Well, in Oslo, where I live, it's about - 9 [degrees Celsius]," he smiled. "Which seems warm by comparison."
One of today's most feted cellists, Mørk was in St. Petersburg to play Dvorak's Cello Concerto at the Shostakovich Philharmonic on Saturday as part of the Arts Square Festival.
Mørk shot to prominence when he won the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982. Mørk's success took even him by surprise - he had not even packed a pair of dress shoes for the competition, as he hadn't even expected to reach the final, and had to borrow some from a fellow competitor. While in the Soviet Union, Mørk said, "everything was impossible, unless you had one of those official persons [with you]."
The following year, Mørk won the Cassado Cello Competition in Florence and, in 1986, the Naumberg Competition in New York. Since 1989, he has played with nearly all the major orchestras in Europe and the United States, and has made several acclaimed CDs, including a Grammy-winning recording of Britten's Cello Suites this year, and a disc of Shostakovich's two Cello Concerti, which was also nominated for a Grammy, with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mariss Jansons.
As well as working with orchestras, Mørk is a renowned chamber musician, regularly playing with luminaries such as Martha Argerich, Yefim Bronfman and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. He is also the founder and artistic director of the Stavanger International Chamber Music Festival in Norway.
After rehearsing with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Academic Symphony Orchestra, half of whom were wearing coats and gloves on the stage - "at least I can move around a bit, but they have nothing to do; they just have to sit there," Mørk sympathized - Mørk spoke with Staff Writer Peter Morley.
q:Whose idea was it for you to play the Dvorak? It seems a bit of an odd choice for St. Petersburg, especially as your recording of the Shostakovich concerti was nominated for a Grammy.
a:I was asked to play it. Musicians don't really get to say, "I want to play this piece or that piece." But I play the Dvorak quite a lot. I think it's a good piece.
q:It seems somehow to meander, almost as though the composer didn't really know what he wanted to do.
a:Yes, there is that criticism, especially in the last movement. But I like the variety of the piece. It's a challenge to bring it all together.
q:Do you feel any special affinity for Russia, especially since winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow?
a:Definitely. I've read a lot of literature, and I always loved Russian cellists. There are so many great Russian cellists - Rostropovich, obviously, but others, like Natalya Shakovskaya.
I like the Russian school [of cello playing], because they get so much out of the instrument. They dig into the string more, and I like the way they use vibrato.
q:You said in an interview about three years ago that you wouldn't perform Bach's Cello Suites because "I don't have any particular conception of them ... I will have to work on them for quite some time before I feel that I am ready." You've since started playing them; what's changed? Do you feel ready now?
a:No, but I had to do it. My colleagues all play them, and I felt it was time. You know, it's different for cellists than for pianists. We have a much smaller repertoire. Pianists can play all this fantastic music for their whole career, but we don't have that much.
q:What is it that makes Bach so special? We talked to Evgeny Kissin, who also said he wants to play Bach.
a:The problem with Bach is that there are so many choices to make. You know, when I get up in the morning, I sometimes have a problem deciding what to put on my toast. With Bach, there's so much to decide - the phrasing, where to have bit of rubato, the harmonies, everything. I get frustrated when just one little thing goes wrong, and it disturbs what I think of the piece as a whole.
q:Do you think that Norwegians, and Scandinavians in general, take a particular pride in music by their country's composers, as opposed to, say, Germany, which has a much larger musical cannon?
a:I don't play so much Norwegian music. We are a small country, about 4 million people, and there's not that much good music to play.
Grieg wrote in a letter that I saw that he was in Amsterdam and people came up to him on the street asking for his autograph. He found it horrible. Grieg actually didn't write that much music - one symphony, two string quartets, one cello sonata, three violin sonatas, plus, of course, solo piano music and songs. But it was obviously very important, if you think of how famous he became.
There was also Johan Svendsen, but he started to drink, and didn't write anything after he was 35. He was talented. Did you know that his wife burned his Third Symphony? Everyone knew that he was unfaithful, so she took the symphony and burned it. So we only have two symphonies by Svendson.
Then there are some talented young composers today, but they are all influenced by other schools, like [French composer Pierre] Boulez.
q:Do you think there's a risk of losing national characteristics in music, in today's "shrinking world," with borders breaking down?
a:Yes. I think it's dangerous that contemporary music is decided by boards and committees. They are quite rich, and politically powerful, so it becomes political. You have these composers giving money to other composers, and it is all about money and politics.
If you compare Europe and America in terms of output, no one in Europe is ambitious. Writing big stuff is Romantic and, therefore, pathetic, so it's not very "nice" to write like that. But I think that some composers are starting to break away from this.
q:What music do you listen to for pleasure?
a:I can't listen for pleasure. I always have to listen to the music. I relax in other ways. I have a boat. It's something totally different. It brings me out of only thinking about music.
q:Is it a big price to pay, not being able to listen to music casually?
a:I love listening to music; I just listen to it actively. In the beginning, I got more impressions of music from records, because we lived in northern Norway, and there were hardly any concerts. Even today, I get much more pleasure from listening to a recording than from going to a concert. I realize that the live thing is fantastic - it's the excitement of the moment - but I get really disturbed by visual things, and the audience.
q:Do you ever have a real break?
a:This summer, I had four weeks of free holidays. It was difficult to start again afterwards, because the shock of being on stage was tough. You get too relaxed, and forget about the cruel reality.
q:Do you have any big plans for the festival in Stavanger?
a:It is as big as it can be for the place. We do 20 concerts, spread over eight or nine days, and we have string quartets, a chamber orchestras, and 20 or 30 individual soloists. For this type of festival, and for the audience we have, it's what we can do.
q:Why did you start it?
a:At that time, there was no other festival like it in Norway, and then, suddenly, at the same time, more or less, a lot of festivals started. We have many chamber-music festivals, which is great, because they all have their own audiences. It seems to be more and more that regular chamber-music concerts don't get big audiences, but festivals do. So, if you put on the same music and call it a festival, then a lot of people are attracted to it.
q:Does it help having a big name behind it?
a:I think it's more important to have great artists. This year, Martha Argerich played seven concerts. We have a festival composer, who is there for the whole week, and we play his works. The first year, we had Lutoslawski, which was incredible. [In 1993], we had Isang Yun, a Korean composer. He's very special, because he was in prison and tortured. He writes really special music - contemporary but also very Korean-sounding in some way. I'm trying now to get [Sofya] Gubaidullina.
q:Are you planning on coming back to St. Petersburg?
a:The problem here is that the organization doesn't pay anything. You hardly cover the expenses when you come here, so it's something you do now and then. It's great to come here, because you know that the musicians here have terrible living circumstances. It's nice to come here, but it's not something that you can do all the time.
TITLE: so, just what is a contralto?
TEXT: Ewa Podles claims to be the only true contralto in the world. Yet the Polish singer - whose unique, almost masculine voice, with its tremendous chest notes, encompasses a range of almost three octaves - is often called anything else. For example, some of the advertisements for the recent Arts Square Festival, at which she sang in the role of Orfeo in a concert performance of Christoph Gluck's opera "Orfeo ed Eurydice" on Jan. 6 in the Shostakovich Philharmonic, listed her as a mezzo-soprano.
Podles, who was born in Warsaw, started her career singing roles such as Rosina, in Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," and Angelina, in the same composer's "La Cenerentola," before eventually moving on to works by composers as diverse as Verdi, Berlioz, Prokofiev, Handel and Gluck. She has performed extensively on the international circuit, singing at New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Berlin Staatsoper, the Budapest Opera, Venice's Teatro La Fenice, Paris' Theatre Chatelet and Madrid's Teatro Real.
Podles recently spoke with Staff Writer Galina Stolyarova.
q:Has your voice changed over time?
a:I was born with this voice, although it has darkened and become more dramatic since the birth of my daughter. My voice is, perhaps, in my genes - my mother, who is now 85, was also a singer, and also a true contralto. Her voice was so low that radio audiences sometimes became confused. Once, when my mother was recording for the radio, people called the studio saying that there had been some mistake, and that the singer was a man, not a woman. My mother's name is Juliana, so some of the listeners suggested it was Julian, instead.
q:Did you encounter any difficulties when studying at the Warsaw Conservatory because of your rare voice?
a:My teachers were very cautious, because they didn't quite know my vocal limits, which was, naturally, confusing. My teachers didn't waste time arguing if I was a mezzo, an alto or a coloratura [a high soprano]. They were very delicate and patient, suggesting that I should be given some time, until it became clear what voice I have.
q:Sometimes you are referred to as a mezzo-soprano, rather than a contralto. Why is that?
a:It's just because people who call me a mezzo don't know what they are talking about. Of course, I protest but, unfortunately, there is little I can do about it. There were almost no true contraltos in the 20th century, and neither theaters nor audiences are used to [the voice]. They don't know that a true contralto embraces more than three octaves, from soprano [notes] to alto [notes], while possessing the [virtuoso high] coloratura abilities.
It used to be that, when I sang coloratura during an audition, I was told, "You are fantastic, but we need a mezzo." They didn't seem to understand that, as a true contralto, I am versatile enough to do Bizet's "Carmen" or Verdi. At another audition, I would sing mezzo repertoire, and managers would tell me they were looking for a coloratura. It is, indeed, sad that people who make important decisions don't quite understand what kind of voice I have.
Quite often, altos are called contraltos, which is very embarrassing. An alto is deep and dark, but not as rich and flexible. Altos also lack high notes. An alto can sing Schubert and Schumann, but never Rossini. As a contralto, I can do Rossini, Verdi, Prokofiev and even Wagner.
q:What was the most previous professional advice your mother gave you?
a:She always told me to be careful with my repertoire. "Don't be tempted by everything that is offered to you," she used to say. For example, at the start of my career, I was invited to sing one of the most dramatic [mezzo] roles, Azucena in [Verdi's] "Il Trovatore." This is a role for a mature singer but, without my mother, I would have agreed and destroyed my voice completely. When singers are young, they are eager to work, and have a very vague idea of their limitations.
I also always remembered what happened to my older sister. She had the most beautiful, dark alto, and studied at the [Warsaw] Conservatory. When she practised, people stopped what they were doing and were rooted to the ground, listening to her. But her teacher forced her to become a mezzo, suggesting that she sing higher repertoire. She wouldn't listen to my mother, who warned her that [mezzo] roles were too high, and she destroyed her vocal chords. I am 10 years younger than my sister, and I always had that bitter lesson in front of me.
q:How do you decide whether or not to take on a new role?
a:I have to know the opera and the libretto in detail. If necessary, I translate the libretto myself. I don't think that's excessive, because I need to know not only every single note of the score, but also every single word of the story. I must be fully aware of the kind of role and the drama, the story behind it. I would rather lose a contract than accept something about which I only have a vague idea.
Some of my colleagues accept anything, thinking that they can learn fast, and adapt to the character in the process of learning the role but, very often, it doesn't work. I am quite different but, maybe, it explains why I have been on the stage for 30 years now.
q:If you weren't a singer, what would you like to have been?
a:You may be surprised to hear it but, perhaps, I would like to have been a veterinarian, or to do something connected with animals. My husband [pianist Jerzy Marchwinski] and I have a big garden - we have birds in the house, plus three dogs, a pig and a rabbit.
TITLE: unravelling a writing mystery
AUTHOR: by Richard Bernstein
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: Anyone who has read the stories of Bruno Schulz, the collection called "The Street of Crocodiles," or "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass," will know this writer as one of the strangest literary figures of the century. The stories are weirdly beautiful, evocations of a world where, as Jerzy Ficowski puts it in this biography of Schulz, a "general fluctuation of the laws of nature" operates, where time itself loses its inevitability and even death can be undone. When Schulz was gunned down by the Gestapo in 1942 in Drohobycz, the Polish town (now part of Ukraine) where he spent his entire life, literature lost a voice as unusual in its way as Kafka's.
For that alone, "Regions of the Great Heresy" by Ficowski, the Polish poet, translator and essayist who has studied Schulz for half a century, has been eagerly anticipated. Ficowski knows pretty much everything that it is possible to know about Schulz's life, and he provides exhaustive analyses of Schulz's writings, as well as of his paintings and drawings, which are equal to the writing in their disturbing erotic strangeness. Ficowski believes that the life explains the work and vice versa. He examines the elements of Schulz's world - his childhood years in a gloomy, financially afflicted family, the dread wasting disease of his beloved father, the overprotection of his mother, the presence of a sadistic maid - and draws connections between them and both Schulz's stories and drawings.
It is a valuable endeavor and both an informative and intelligent one, even if there is an old-fashioned formality to Ficowski's writing - or perhaps it is in the translation from the Polish by Theodosia Robertson - that has the effect at times of keeping his subject at something of a remove. He shows Schulz as frail, shy and brilliant, a Drohobycz schoolteacher all his life, finding a kind of ambiguous consolation in his fictional fantasies.
Schulz's dying father, a bookkeeper who ran a dry-goods shop, was, in Ficowski's view, at the center of his later mythology, the father who, in the story "Treatise on Tailors' Dummies," declares: "There is no dead matter. Lifelessness is only a facade concealing forms of life unknown to us." The "Treatise" serves the purpose of giving eternal life to Schulz's dead father, but also of elucidating an alternative reality worthy of one of the elaborations of Jorge Luis Borges. In the story Schulz has the father speaking of the Demiurge, the subordinate supernatural being who gave birth to the world, and of his desire to rebel against his creation, to perform a second Genesis that would "stand in open opposition to the present era." Or as Dr. Gotard, a figure from "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass," puts it, "Here we reactivate time past, with all its possibilities, therefore also including the possibility of recovery."
Strangely, Ficowski gives only glancing attention to the very aspect of Schulz's life that might seem most related to his alienated position as an artist: his being a Jew in Poland in the first half of the 20th century. And yet Schulz's unease with the surrounding world, with "the present era," and his savage or comical thrusts at the complacency and self-satisfaction involved in its conventions, seem very Jewish, similar to the way that Kafka's sensibility seems related to the alienation felt by a Jewish boy growing up within the German community of Prague. Moreover, Ficowski's own themes lend themselves to the interpretation that he declines to make explicit.
For example, he calls Schulz a heresiarch (another word that Schulz applies to his father in "Treatise on Tailors' Dummies"), an inhabitant of the territory that gave Ficowski his title, the region of the great heresy. Indeed, Ficowski at one point avers that Schulz's "entire life was overshadowed by his intuition of imminent danger," but he makes no connection between that sense of looming catastrophe and Schulz's membership in an often persecuted minority.
Ficowski, a Polish poet and a non-Jew, no doubt has his reasons for not exploring this possibility. He discovered Schulz just after World War II, and has devoted much of his life ever since then to studying him and promoting his literary and artistic reputation. His biography of Schulz is, in this sense, not only a prolonged labor of love but also a model of a kind of penetrating adoration. One fascinating chapter tells how a series of postscripts in letters Schulz wrote to a friend passed from hand to hand until they turned into his first published collection. When a nervous Schulz went to Warsaw and shyly turned his manuscript over to the Polish writer Zofia Natkowska for her assessment, she declared it "the most sensational discovery in our literature."
Ficowski's account of Schulz's murder by the Gestapo adds to other accounts and makes for necessarily horrible reading. After the Nazi occupation of Drohobycz in 1941, Schulz was protected by the Gestapo commandant of the region, a vicious murderer named Felix Landau, who fancied himself a patron of the arts. But Landau, who used to shoot Jews from the window of his home, killed a Jewish dentist being protected by a Gestapo rival named Gunther and, in retaliation, Gunther - exploiting a Gestapo action against the Jews of Drohobycz - tracked Schulz down on the street, put a revolver to his head and pulled the trigger twice. Schulz was 50.
Fragments of some of the paintings that Schulz was forced to do under the Nazis were rediscovered many years later and, with the consent of some local authorities, were cut out of the walls on which they were painted and taken to the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. Ficowski regards this as the theft of a treasured part of Polish heritage, and his anger is understandable. Yet he also criticizes the director of Yad Vashem, Iris Rosenberg, because she "justified Schulz's belonging to the Jewish nation by recalling that he had been killed in the ghetto by a Gestapo officer - thus the shot of a mass murderer determined the victim's identity." Given that Schulz was unarguably killed because he was a Jew, this argument is strange. Clearly Ficowski believes that Schulz belonged to the Polish nation, and he is certainly correct. Yet his effort to claim Schulz for Poland, and Poland alone, may explain his curious reluctance to name Schulz as a part of the Jewish heritage as well.
"Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait." By Jerzy Ficowski. Norton. 255 pages. $25.95.
TITLE: filming history, and making it
AUTHOR: by Alina Tugend
PUBLISHER: special to the los angeles times
TEXT: NEW YORK - It was the middle of a Russian winter, and cinematographer Tilman Buttner had just a narrow window of daylight to do something no one has ever done before - shoot a feature-length film in one continuous take.
The film was "Russian Ark," a dreamy tableau of Russian history from Peter the Great to the present, filmed entirely in 33 rooms of the State Hermitage Museum, with 2,000 actors and extras who had never rehearsed all together. It was, to say the least, a staggering undertaking.
"Russian Ark" is the creation of Alexander Sokurov, a Russian who has directed numerous documentaries and feature films ("Taurus," "Moloch" and "Mother and Son"). Although the film was screened at several international film festivals abroad last year, it will first be seen in St. Petersburg only in May, with a special screening at the Hermitage during the 300th-anniversary celebrations.
Sokurov has said he did not wish to direct a film with no edits simply as a cinematographic stunt, but to do a film shot "as [if] it were in a single breath ... I wanted to try and fit myself into the very flowing of time, without remaking it according to my wishes."
It was Buttner, 38, a German, originally from the former East Berlin and an acknowledged expert in the use of the Steadicam - a camera-stabilization device that combines the steadiness of a dolly with the freedom of movement of a hand-held camera - who was chosen to make Sokurov's wish come true.
Buttner, who operated the Steadicam on the movie "Run Lola Run," says he was excited from the moment Sokurov approached him.
"It was great someone had the idea and had the courage to try it," Buttner said during a recent visit to New York. "At first it was supposed to be a documentary and, as it developed, it got bigger and bigger."
Past filmmakers have dreamed of shooting one long unedited movie; Hitchcock attempted it in "Rope" but was constrained by the technology of the time. But technical advances in video - some made especially for "Russian Ark" - allowed it to happen. It was shot on compact, high-definition cameras, which produce images commensurate with the shutter speed used on motion-picture film, with the image eventually transferred to a 35-millimeter negative. A complex portable rig was designed to move the camera on a Steadicam to cover 1,300 meters of the museum.
The high-definition camera made it possible to shoot in one take, but the maximum time that they could record with it was 46 minutes - and Buttner needed almost twice that. A German company developed a prototype portable hard-disk recording system that could record up to 100 minutes. (The completed film runs 87 minutes.) The catch was that, because of technical limitations, the filmmakers could not back up and record over any mistakes. Those restrictions, combined with the limited availability of the Hermitage (two days) and the famously short Russian winter days, made the shoot the equivalent of a high-wire act without a net.
"Films are usually shot in 30 to 40 days," Buttner noted. "They're like a pyramid with a large foundation - a lot can go wrong, but they can fix it. This was the opposite. It was like the top of a pyramid stuck in the ground. It was stuck well in, but if anything had happened, it would have fallen."
The film takes the point of view of a contemporary filmmaker - whose murmuring voice is Sokurov's, but who is never seen on camera - and a jaded 19th century French diplomat (Sergei Dreiden) as they invisibly meander, alternately bewildered, frightened and amused, through the Hermitage. The film begins in the 1700s and time-travels back and forth through Russia's past and present, with a grand-finale extravaganza of the last Great Royal Ball of 1913, shortly before the Bolshevik revolution, complete with hundreds of beautifully costumed dancers and a full orchestra.
Shooting of "Russian Ark" was set for a few days before Christmas 2001, with only about four hours of light available during the wintry Russian days.
"The Hermitage was closed for two days, one for preparation and one for shooting," said Buttner, as he animatedly told the story of those tense few days. "For 48 hours, nobody slept."
Forty electricians moved into the Hermitage on Dec. 22 to set up lighting for the film. "We started on Dec. 23," Buttner said. "We were supposed to start at 12, but pushed it to 1 because of problems with the camera and lighting."
Now, they had three hours.
The unwieldy army of people responsible for making cinematic history fell into place. The slender Buttner, strapped into his 34 kilograms of camera equipment, was tied as if by an umbilical cord to an assistant carrying 22 kilograms of apparatus that recorded the images to a hard disk.
Seven other people surrounded him - two camera assistants, two electricians, Sokurov, an actor in white gloves whom Sokurov would send in and out of scenes as he felt necessary, and the translator, as Sokurov speaks only Russian and Buttner speaks only German.
Communication flew back and forth on walkie-talkies as Buttner moved from room to room. "It was a kind of paramilitary operation," Buttner said.
Fifteen minutes into the first take, Buttner saw himself reflected in a window and stopped. A few minutes into the second take, an actor made a mistake. During the third take, in the second room of the Hermitage, a light broke, and the room was too dark to shoot in.
"We all thought the third take would be the one that would go all the way through," Buttner said. Because of the rapidly fading light and the limitations of the recording equipment, "The gas tank was now on reserve. This was definitely the last take."
The fourth take began.
"I was not nervous. I like these moments of tension," Buttner said. "I knew if I was nervous, it would have ruined it. I was certain we would do it. Everything was concentrated on this one point in time."
This time it went all the way through. At the end of the film, Buttner had four minutes of video left over. The producers and actors were elated, embracing and kissing each other and Buttner.
Buttner was totally exhausted, and in physical pain; he thought holding the Steadicam for so long had given him a hernia. In fact, he had just pulled a groin muscle. Nor was he satisfied with the final shot. "I'm a perfectionist, and I saw a lot of flaws," he said. "So did Sokurov. We would have liked to do it again."
But, he said, when he was on the plane, flying home from Russia to Berlin for Christmas, it hit him that he had accomplished an extraordinary feat.
Buttner still sees all the mistakes when he watches the film, but now "I'm proud of it, yes, I'm proud of the organization from my side."
TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: by Michele A. Berdy
TEXT: Fartsovshchik: black-marketeer (Soviet period).
As another anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union passed at the end of December, I was overcome by a fit of nostalgia for all the words, expressions and cliches of the Soviet period that disappeared along with the hammer and sickle. Do young Western students of Russia know what a fartsovshchik is? Tolkach? Can they make any sense out of the phrase: my otovarili nashi sertifikaty v Beryozke? Can they understand what a planovo-ubytochny zavod is? Or kolbasnye poyezda?
Before the days of chelnoki (shuttle traders: people who go abroad to buy cheap goods, which they sell on the street or at markets), good Soviet folk could thank fartsovshchiki (black-marketeers) for their Western jeans and T-shirts. These guys would buy clothes off tourists or foreign students and resell them at a higher price. They were something like proto-capitalists, and, in the land of razvity sotsializm (advanced socialism) what they were doing was spekulyatsiya (profiteering) and against the law. They were also called spekulyanty (profiteers).
Spekulyanty had blat (contacts, connections), with, say, a printing press and could get rare books (like the poetry of Akhmatova or Mandelshtam), which they sold for astronomical prices. Their business was based on a simple principle: "buy low, sell high." And it could put them in the camps for several years.
The other source of good things was the Beryozka, foreign-currency stores, mainly for tourists, that sold every sort of defitsitny tovar (deficit good) for dollars, francs and marks. Since possessing foreign currency was against the law, Soviet citizens who worked abroad came home with sertifikaty (vouchers), which they could use in the Beryozki. If you lived in the provinces where, in the last decades of Soviet power, coffee, sugar, tea, meat, cheese, butter and just about anything else remotely edible were sold po kartochkam (by ration cards), and often weren't available at all. Your only option was to go to Moscow to buy your monthly supply of food - whence kolbasnye poyezda (trains full of people hauling home kilo upon kilo of foodstuffs).
Official Soviet economic terminology was a world unto itself. Planovo-ubytochny zavod was my all-time favorite: a planned loss-making factory - that is, a factory that was never intended to get out of the red. Tolkachi, another concept unique to the Soviet era, were "fixers:" factory or ministry employees, who traveled around the country, cutting deals to make sure that the 14,000 widgets produced by Factory A and scheduled po planu (by the plan) to be sent to Factory B for the manufacture of thingamabobs were actually made and shipped on time. Vypolnim i perevypolnim plan! (Let's fulfill the plan quotas and produce even more!) might have been the slogan of the factory but, in real life, plans went unfulfilled for lack of component parts.
Voplotim resheniya sezda v zhizn! (Let's bring to life the decisions of the congress!); Borba za mir vo vsem mire! (The movement for peace all over the world!). It's hard now to remember the Moscow of those years, with 3-meter high exhortations to unite, join, fight, and be victorious screaming at passers-by from buildings and banners. For a long time a two-story banner reading Vperyod k kommunismu! (Onward to communism!) was strategically placed on the Ring Road, until someone realized that we weren't heading to communism, but going around in circles. One dark night, by order of the Party, it was quietly dismantled.
Maybe that was the beginning of the end.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.
TITLE: Blix Says No Smoking Gun Found in Iraq
AUTHOR: By Edith Lederer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS - UN weapons inspectors have not found any "smoking guns" in Iraq during their search for weapons of mass destruction, the chief inspector said Thursday.
Hans Blix spoke to reporters at the United Nations before he and his counterpart Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, went in to brief the Security Council on their assessments of Iraq's 12,000-page weapons declaration.
"We have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever wider sweeps, and we haven't found any smoking guns," Blix said before the Security Council meeting, in which he and ElBaradei were likely to provide an update on the inspection process.
Asked whether inspectors were getting significant intelligence from the United States, Blix said: "Well, we are getting intelligence from several sources, and I will not go into the operative part of that, but it's clear that this will be helpful in the future to us."
"We have gone to, I think, about 125 sites already, and some of them were not visited before, and there will be more. And, as more intelligence comes in, there will be more sites visited. I'm confident that we will get more intelligence."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told The Washington Post on Thursday that, in the past few days, the United States has begun giving inspectors "significant intelligence" that has enabled them to become "more aggressive and to be more comprehensive in the work they're doing."
But Washington is holding back some information to see if inspectors "are able to handle it and exploit it ... It is not a matter of opening up every door we have," Powell said.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said that his government wants the council to adopt a resolution that requests all countries to provide information on Iraq's "prohibited programs" and recommend sites to be visited and Iraqis to be interviewed.
The United States has promised to share information with inspectors, as long as U.S. intelligence sources aren't compromised. "We have and will continue to provide information to the inspectors," a U.S. official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Blix has said that his inspectors need intelligence from other states because Iraq's weapons declaration leaves so many unanswered questions that it's impossible to verify its claim of having no weapons of mass destruction.
On Thursday, Blix reiterated that Iraq's weapons declaration was incomplete.
"We think that the declaration failed to answer a great many questions."
ElBaradei said Monday that, after two months of inspections, it was still too early to determine whether Saddam Hussein's regime was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
"We are not certain of Iraq's [nuclear] capability," he said.
Blix has called on Iraq to answer outstanding questions in the declaration on Iraq's chemical, biological and missile programs, which is required under Resolution 1441, adopted Nov. 8.
"Iraq may have more to say. I hope so," Blix said.
A senior Iraqi official denied on Thursday that the arms declaration was incomplete, as inspectors have repeatedly said.
"People who claim there were gaps, I could tell you right away they have not read it," Amir al-Saadi, Hussein's science adviser, said.
The purpose of Thursday's Security Council meeting was to give council members an assessment of Iraq's arms declaration and update them about "our increasing capability in country, including the use of helicopters, the opening of a temporary regional monitoring center in Mosul and other steps to make us more effective," Blix's spokesperson, Ewen Buchanan, said.
Blix is to give the council a formal report on the inspections on Jan. 27.
After his last briefing to the council on Dec. 19, Blix urged the United States and Britain to hand over any evidence they have about Iraq's secret weapons programs so UN inspectors can check it.
Britain opened a channel weeks ago to provide the inspectors with information and "they are getting all that we can usefully give," a British official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Blix said that the United States and Britain have given briefings to inspectors on what they think the Iraqis have, but what inspectors really want to know is where weapons-related material is stored.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Thursday that weapons inspectors must be given the time and space to do their job, and that Jan. 27 was not a deadline for conflict.
TITLE: India Tests Missile With Nuclear Capability
AUTHOR: By Laurinda Keys
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI, India - India test-launched a short-range ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons Thursday, but said that it was unrelated to recent posturing by Pakistani and Indian military officials.
The Agni I missile was fired from the Chandipur-on-Sea testing range on the coast of eastern Orissa state, said Defense Ministry spokesperson P. K. Bandyopadhyay.
The Agni I has a range of 600 to 800 kilometers. The test took place about 1,200 kilometers southeast of New Delhi.
India said that the launch was a routine test. But it came as the Indian and Pakistani governments have been trading ominous boasts about their capability of nuclear retaliation if either takes aggressive military action.
The Agni test is "part of India's continued policy of imposing its hegemony in the region, but we are hardly impressed with what they have done," Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said in Islamabad.
In London, Britain's Foreign Office criticized the Indian missile test, saying that it "sends the wrong signals within the region and beyond."
"We believe that restraint in developing possible nuclear-weapon-delivery systems is in the long-term interest of India and the region," a Foreign Office spokesperson said.
On Wednesday, Pakistan's nuclear-research facility approved deployment of a new medium-range ballistic missile, the Ghauri, capable of carrying a nuclear payload. President General Pervez Musharraf attended the ceremony at the Kahuta Research Laboratory outside Islamabad.
India and Pakistan - at odds since they gained independence from Britain in 1947 - came to the brink of a fourth war last year after New Delhi accused Islamabad's spy agency and Pakistan-based Islamic rebel groups of attacking the Indian Parliament in December 2001. Pakistan denied the accusations.
Diplomatic pressure from the United States and others reduced tensions somewhat. Both sides were persuaded to pull back hundreds of thousands of soldiers from their border in October.
Journalists at the Chandipur site said that the test was witnessed by Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, who on Tuesday made a chilling prediction of how a nuclear war would turn out.
"There will be no Pakistan left when we have responded," he told a business gathering in southern India. He reiterated India's policy of not striking first with nuclear weapons.
Fernandes was reacting to Musharraf, who on Dec. 29 told a group of air force veterans that he had personally warned India during last year's hostilities to "not expect a conventional war from Pakistan."
His spokesperson quickly denied that the president was referring to nuclear weapons, and Musharraf said later that he meant only that some 150,000 retired Pakistani military personnel living in Kashmir would have risen up against any Indian aggression.
U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill said last year that there was a "small" chance of nuclear war between India and Pakistan at the height of tensions, when about 1 million troops were deployed on their border.
TITLE: Families Claim Bodies in Turkish Crash
AUTHOR: By Selcan Hacaoglu
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - Families claimed the bodies of some of the 75 people killed when a Turkish Airlines jetliner crashed short of a fog-covered runway in southeastern Turkey, and the prime minister ruled out sabotage on Thursday.
Five survivors aboard the flight from Istanbul were hospitalized after the plane came down Wednesday at the airport in Diyarbakir. Four Britons were killed in the crash, the British Embassy said. A U.S. citizen was aboard the flight, U.S. officials said, but it was unclear whether the American was among the survivors.
Prime Minister Abdullah Gul dismissed the possibility of a terror attack and said that the weather was likely to blame. Fog had been a problem in the area in recent days and forced the cancellation of flights to the southeastern cities of Gaziantep and Sanliurfa from Istanbul Thursday.
"It's clear that it was an accident. The pilot couldn't reach the runway because of fog," Gul said after meeting with the families of the victims in Diyarbakir. "It's a miracle five people came out alive. The plane was torn apart."
Two Turkish warplanes also collided in heavy fog in nearby Malatya province on Thursday, the military said. The pilots and navigators of the two F-4 jets were seen parachuting to the ground, but none of the four aviators survived.
One of the survivors from the Turkish airliner, Aliye Il, a 48-year-old homemaker, said that she was flying to Diyarbakir for the funeral of an aunt.
"A strong explosion rocked the plane and everyone and everything turned into balls of fire," she said. Il struggled to unbuckle her seat belt.
"I was screaming, 'I can't unbuckle it, I can't unbuckle it,' but nobody could hear me," she said.
Il managed to unfasten her belt, falling out of the plane into a large pile of dry, cut grass.
"I think it was a miracle," she said, speaking from her hospital bed where she is recovering from a broken shoulder. Her hair and her eyebrows were burned.
Turkish newspapers reported that Diyarbakir airport lacked an instrument landing system to help pilots land in bad weather. Newspapers said that Turkey's military, which owns the airport, opposed the system for unspecified security reasons.
"There shouldn't be flights to airports with no ILS system," said Faik Akin, chief public relations officer of Turkish Airlines.
Investigators have recovered both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullatif Sener said.
"Measures will be taken so that an event like this won't happen again," Prime Minister Gul said.
TITLE: Jordan Remains Perfect Against Chicago
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Michael Jordan was weary from a stomach bug, so Christian Laettner and Larry Hughes finished off the Chicago Bulls.
Laettner had season-highs of 18 points and 11 rebounds, including eight points in the fourth quarter, and Hughes had 22 points as the Washington Wizards beat the Bulls 101-98 Wednesday night. Jordan, playing with a mild virus that caused him to leave the morning shootaround early, had 14 points, 10 rebounds and seven assists in 33 minutes, but most of the points came at the start of the third quarter when the Wizards turned an 11-point halftime deficit into an 11-point lead.
Jordan was 0-for-3 in the final quarter, even as the Bulls cut their deficit to one point four times.
"When you're feeling bad, you just try to figure out what can you get by with," Jordan said. "In the first half, I didn't really have the energy to try to ignite anything. And I got into foul trouble early, so that kind of makes you tentative.
The Wizards have won five straight and are above.500 for the first time since Nov. 17. Jordan is now 4-0 when playing against his former team; he was injured when the Wizards had their only loss to the Bulls last season.
The Wizards also survived a bad night from Jerry Stackhouse, who missed 12 of 14 shots and scored 10 points. Laettner and Hughes made up the difference.
"All my teammates and coaches are always barking at me to shoot the ball more, so I tell them I will when I feel like I'm open," said Laettner, who was 7-for-9. "In the fourth quarter, people are going to collapse on Stackhouse or Jordan even more, and if I step away and shoot my 18-foot jumper, I'm wide open. There was no reason for me not to shoot tonight. I was feeling good out there."
Donyell Marshall had 24 points and nine rebounds for the Bulls, who had their two-game winning streak snapped and lost their 15th straight on the road. Jamal Crawford and Eddy Curry had 15 points apiece.
The self-proclaimed culprit for the Bulls was Jalen Rose, who was 4-for-17 with 10 points and scored just one point in the second half.
"My team played the way they're capable of playing," Rose said. "Unfortunately, I didn't step up and play the way I am capable of playing. This is the first time this season where I had that opportunity in the fourth quarter, and the shots didn't go in for me."
The Bulls kept rallying in the fourth quarter, but they never took the lead. Laettner's jump shot put the Wizards up 95-92 with 1:27. Crawford's driving layup made it 95-94, but Hughes' running one-hander on the baseline got the lead to three with 18 seconds left.
Rose made one of two free throws with 16 seconds to go, creating the opening the Wizards needed. Stackhouse then made two free throws with 15 seconds left to make the lead four points, enough to seal the victory.
Dallas 117, Atlanta 99. In Atlanta, Nick Van Exel hit a 3-pointer with 0:01.1 left in the third, part of a 20-4 run as the Mavericks beat Atlanta on Wednesday night, improving the NBA's best record to 29-5.
Van Exel and Dirk Nowitzki combined for 18 points during the spurt to help Dallas win its fourth in a row and seventh in eight games. Nowitzki finished with 30 points and 14 rebounds, and Van Exel added 14 points.
The Mavericks opened a 15-point lead after one quarter, but Atlanta tied it at 58 at the break.
"We didn't want to give them a chance to get back in the game," Van Exel said. "We had a pretty good rhythm, but we let them back in the game."
Jason Terry scored 20 of his 27 in the first half for the Hawks, who got poor performances from Glenn Robinson and Shareef Abdur-Rahim to lose their sixth straight. They are 1-6 since coach Terry Stotts replaced Lon Kruger and 2-12 since evening their record at 10-10 on Dec. 7.
"They are the best team in the league for a reason," Stotts said. "We defended them well in spots. But a team with that many offensive weapons is difficult to sustain."
The Mavericks led by seven late in the third quarter before the game-changing run. Raef LaFrentz started it with a layup before Nowitzki and Van Exel took over and scored the next 18 points.
"That took away all of our momentum," Stotts said.
With time winding down in the third, Van Exel hit a 3-pointer from well behind the line to stretch the lead to 12, and then he and Nowitzki quickly scored eight in the final quarter to give the Mavericks a 20-point lead.
Stotts was screaming for Terry to foul Van Exel before the long 3-pointer, but before he could, Van Exel pulled up and shot it. Dallas cruised from there.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Troubled Senators To File for Bankruptcy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OTTAWA - The Ottawa Senators, unable to pay their players last week, may end up filing for bankruptcy.
TSN in Canada reported Tuesday that an official announcement could come this week. The Ottawa Sun reported the Senators would file for protection from their creditors in Canada and the United States and receive a short-term cash infusion from the NHL.
After the Senators failed to pay players on Jan. 1, team owner Rod Bryden met with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman to come up with a plan to help the financially struggling team that has the most points in the league. Bettman said he hoped financing could be arranged and finalized this week.
Bankruptcy protection allows a company to continue operating and prevent creditors from going after the team's assets. It also gives a business time to deal with creditors and come up with a long-term business plan, and could lead to a sale of the Senators and the Corel Centre where the team plays its home games.
The Senators' debt is around $160 million to creditors, with its main creditors the NHL, owed about $14.3 million. Total debt, including the arena, is in excess of $350 million.
A complex $234-million financing deal that would have seen investors pump $42 million in cash into the franchise failed on New Year's Eve after at least one major creditor rejected the plan.
Court-ordered protection does not allow a company to abandon union contracts, such as the Senators have with the NHL Players' Association.
The Companies Creditors' Arrangement Act in Canada - similar to Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States - gives a company protection from its creditors, usually for an initial 30-day period that can be extended by a judge if progress is being made toward restructuring.
Under bankruptcy protection, though, outside interests can put in offers on all or part of a troubled company and a judge can rule if a sale is in the company's and creditors' best interests.
On the ice, meanwhile, Markus Naslund scored his NHL-leading 29th and 30th goals on the power play before missing part of the third period with an ailing back as the Vancouver Canucks beat Ottawa 6-4 on Wednesday night. Naslund missed five minutes of the final period so he could go into the locker room for treatment.
"My back cramped up and I just couldn't breath for a little bit," Naslund said. "I'll be OK. It might be a minor tear in the muscle, I don't know."
Naslund, who came into the game with a one-goal advantage over Ottawa's Marian Hossa, tied it at 1 with 5:11 left in the first. He outskated three Senators and beat Patrick Lalime with a perfect wrist shot into the far corner.
"It was nice to take it coast to coast, it doesn't happen that often anymore."
Neither do 60 goals in a season, the pace Naslund hit when he added his 30th on a long shot through traffic with 5:38 left in the second, giving him 16 points - nine goals and seven assists - in an eight-game point streak.
Marek Malik, Trevor Linden and Jarkko Ruutu also scored and Dan Cloutier stopped 23 shots for the Canucks, who have won three straight and five of six. The win secured the Western Conference All-Star coaching spot for Marc Crawford.
Ottawa coach Jacques Martin will lead the East All-Stars.
Mike Fischer returned after missing two games with a bruised right knee, and scored twice for Ottawa. Martin Havlat and Steve Martins also scored as the Senators lost in regulation for just the fourth time in 29 games.
It was the first time in 25 games the Senators gave up more than three goals, the longest streak since the 1955 Montreal Canadiens held the opposition to three or fewer for 25 straight games.
It was also the first time in four games since the Senators missed payroll last week that they failed to earn at least a point. After learning Tuesday that the team is reportedly close to filing for bankruptcy protection, Ottawa could have used a break, but they didn't get one from the officials.
The Senators were called for 14 penalties, 10 more than Vancouver.
"It's too bad because they're an exciting team, we're an exciting team and it could have been a great game," Ottawa captain Daniel Alfredsson said. "I think both teams were really excited about this game and I think the fans were and they missed out on what could have been a real good game."
Ottawa jumped out to three one-goal leads, but the Canucks, aided by 10 power plays in the opening 40 minutes answered each time. Vancouver finished 2-for-14 with the man advantage. The Senators were 1-for-4.
"It's uncharacteristic for them to take that many penalties," said former Senators player Sami Salo, who had three assists. It was his first game against Ottawa since being traded just before the season started.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Last-Minute Farce Sparks Ref Changes
AUTHOR: By Dave Goldberg
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - The NFL implemented several officiating changes Wednesday, including the positioning of officials on field-goal attempts to avoid future foul-ups like the one at the end of the Giants-49ers playoff game Sunday.
Under the new policy, initiated by commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the seven field officials will be realigned so they can better see what happens in the event of a fake field goal or a botched attempt, like the one at the end of last Sunday's game, won by San Francisco 39-38. The new policy will begin with this weekend's four playoff games.
In addition, the new policy calls for the field officials to confer on controversial game-deciding calls at the end of games instead of just the referee and the other officials who made the call.
However, the officials involved in Sunday's botched call are unlikely to be disciplined beyond bad grades that will keep them from working the Super Bowl this season, according to a source within the league who requested anonymity.
In the Giants-49ers game, a bad snap on a potential game-winning 41-yard field goal by New York on the game's final play was fumbled and then picked up by holder Matt Allen. He tried a desperation pass on which there was clearly interference against Rich Seubert, a guard wearing No. 69 who had lined up as an eligible receiver.
As teams are required, the Giants had told the officials before the game that Seubert would be eligible on field-goal attempts and extra points.
The league announced Monday that officials correctly threw a flag for an ineligible receiver downfield against Tam Hopkins, a New York offensive lineman who ran beyond the line of scrimmage. But the league also said a flag should have been thrown against San Francisco's Chike Okeafor for pass interference against Seubert, who came close to catching the ball that Allen heaved downfield.
The offsetting penalties would have allowed the Giants to try the kick again.
As for discipline, Tagliabue said: "As I have learned from successful coaches like John Madden and Bill Parcells, we do not make overall personnel decisions until the season is completed, not during the season."
NFL rules actually have provisions for replaying parts of games or - as in this case - one play. However that has never been done and the league said in this case that it is obviously impractical.
In reality, there are mistakes by officials every week - coaches routinely ask the officiating department to review calls that they think were improperly handled. The NFL then responds to the coaches, often telling them they were correct and occasionally the controversies become public when teams announce that they have been wronged.
But rarely has the league volunteered that officials made a mistake, something it did this week because of the magnitude of the game and the national exposure it got.
Officials are graded on their performances in every game - obviously receiving lower grades if they make mistakes.
Those rated at the top at each position are given playoff assignments. And those that finish No. 1 are assigned to the Super Bowl. If they are consistently rated low, they are fired.
However, there are exceptions. For example, Scott Green, the back judge involved in the call in the Giants'-49ers game, did last year's Super Bowl and was rated No. 1 at his position this year. However, he would not have been eligible for the title game in any case because league policy prohibits an official from working it two years in succession.
But league officials noted that, since the officials in the Giants-49ers game had been rated high enough to get playoff assignments, it was unlikely there would be discipline beyond low grades for the game. They also said those downgraded for mistakes in Sunday's game will likely start over with clean slates next year - as does every official.