SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #838 (6), Tuesday, January 28, 2003
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TITLE: Kremlin Sets Its Sights on St. Isaac's Square
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Isaac's Square is facing a massive upheaval, following a decree signed last month by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov to give four buildings on the square to the Presidential Administration.
According to the decree, which Kasyanov signed Dec. 17, organizations based in the buildings will have to relocate "in order to effectively accommodate federal administrative offices in St. Petersburg and provide effective state control over the use of unique historical monuments in St. Petersburg."
The list of organizations affected includes the Russian Horticulture Institute, the State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg Project Institute No. 1, and The St. Petersburg Times. No date has yet been set for the relocations.
Although the organizations affected have yet to find new homes, in the decree, Kasyanov instructed the federal Construction Committee and the St. Petersburg City Administration to start looking for suitable locations, or to put forward plans for new buildings.
Presidential Administration Press Secretary Viktor Khrekov said no concrete plans for using the buildings on St. Isaac's Square have yet been developed.
"All we have is Kasyanov's decree, suggesting that the buildings be used more effectively," Khrekov said Monday. "Now, we are only making tentative plans, which may change, and which we can't yet announce."
"When a decision is made, the Presidential Administration will announce a tender for the renovation, as was done with the Konstantinovsky Palace," he said, referring to the former imperial palace in the St. Petersburg suburb of Strelna that is currently being turned into a presidential residence.
Khrekov denied allegations in the media that St. Isaac's Square will become a "federal recreational zone" or, alternatively, that the buildings will eventually house the Culture Ministry and some other ministries, should they relocate to St. Petersburg. He also refused to elaborate on options for new uses for the buildings, or to say when the current owners may have to move out.
Horticulture Institute Director Viktor Dragavtsev said he first heard of the plans from an article in Kommersant daily last week.
"My initial reaction was frustration and rage, frankly," he said in an interview Friday. "Naturally, none of us would have dreamed of this happening."
Dragavtsev subsequently obtained a copy of the decree from the Science Ministry, and told Russian Agricultural Academy President Gennady Romanenko of the plans.
Romanenko has since sent Kasyanov a letter in which he wrote that "the decision is illigitimate, was made without consulting the academy, and must be reversed. ... The decision would destroy a venerable Russian scientific institution."
The institute's collection was founded in 1922 by plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov and is now, according to Dragavtsev, valued by international experts at $8 trillion. The collection boasts an impressive 330,000 items, the oldest of which dates back to 1894. Dragavtsev also said that 25 percent of the plants in the collection are now extinct in the wild.
Dragavtsev and a group of the institute's leading scientists have written a letter similar to Romanenko's to President Vladimir Putin, asking him to scrap the planned relocation, which, Dragavtsev said, would destroy the institute's collection.
"Our storage facilities have been built over the last 10 years with the help of $5.5 million from the United States, Germany, Japan and Canada," he said.
After visiting St. Petersburg in 1993, then U.S. Vice President Al Gore arranged for disused refrigerators from U.S. military bases to be given to the Horticultural Institute. The institute has already received refrigerators from U.S. bases in the United Kingdom and Italy.
Moving the collection now is impossible, Dragavtsev maintained.
"We'd have to take the plants out of their containers, where they're stored at minus 10 degrees Celsius, put them into a temporary, portable storage at the same temperature, and transport them in refrigerator cars to the new storage facilities," he said, adding that, in the process, over half the seeds would lose their ability to germinate. Institute scientists said that even the most careful relocation would lead to tremendous losses.
"It would be a very costly process, especially given that we have at least five samples of all 330,000 plants," Dragavtsev said. "Building a new DNA bank for the institute's collection would cost at least $30 million."
He added that the institute would also have to move its vast laboratories and analytical resources.
The institute's extensive herbarium contains 300,000 items, and enjoys protected status from UNESCO, which considers it the largest in the world. Some of the plants were collected personally by Vavilov, the institute's founder.
"Last year, when I wanted to relocate the herbarium to our facilities in Pushkin, UNESCO wouldn't let me, because too many plants would simply fall apart during the move," Dragavtsev said, adding that the institute's staff try to touch items in the herbarium as rarely as possible.
Olga Taratynova, the deputy head of the city's Committee for the Preservation and Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, said the buildings in question deserve better treatment than their current owners have afforded them.
"In my 22 years on the committee, I have only seen cosmetic repairs [to the buildings]," she said in a telephone interview Monday. "[The organizations] couldn't even afford any renovation to the facades, never mind more serious repairs."
At the same time, Taratynova was cautious about the uses to which the buildings may be put, saying that her office has yet to be officially informed of the relocation plans.
"They are beautiful buildings and, ideally, it would be nice to see them as public places, open to everyone, rather than just to a limited group of people," she said.
"What worries me most is the damage the new owners may cause," Taratynova said. "That will depend heavily on the new owners, and what they want to do with the buildings. For example, using any of the buildings as a hotel would necessitate severe interior alterations."
Kasyanov's decree has outraged many who work in the buildings.
"Just think of the [Horticultural Institute's] history: We didn't lose a single plant during World War II; fourteen people died at their desks, but we didn't lose a single seed," said a clerk at the institute, who gave his name only as Andrei. "Now, we're being kicked out. It's a slap in the face for all these people."
Local officials have also expressed concern over the situation.
"It's sad and alarming to see that Russian authorities are assuming the right to decide issues that are above their moral competence," said local lawmaker Alexander Shchelkanov, who was head of the City Administration from 1990 to 1991.
Dragavtsev, meanwhile, has yet to inform his foreign colleagues or UNESCO about Kasyanov's decree.
"I know it would make them furious, and maybe even provoke an international scandal," he said. "I will only turn to them for help if we exhaust all our options here."
Nevertheless, he remains optimistic about the future of the institute's precious collection.
"I don't think the authorities want to compromise themselves and appear short-sighted to their foreign counterparts," Dragavtsev said. "I hope they'll reconsider."
TITLE: Russia: Inspections Ought To Continue
AUTHOR: By Jim Heintz
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A top Russian diplomat said on Monday that the reports presented to the United Nations on two months of weapons inspections in Iraq suggest that conditions are favorable for continuing the inspections.
The assessment by Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov reflected Russia's stance that the Iraq crisis can be resolved without the use of force. It contrasted sharply with the position of the United States, whose UN ambassador John Negroponte said the reports contained nothing indicating Iraq would disarm voluntarily.
"All the conditions are present for continuing the inspections ... The inspections take place with adequate cooperation from the Iraqi side, which guarantees timely access of the inspectors to all sites," Fedotov was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax.
Earlier Monday, before the reports by UN inspections chief Hans Blix and his nuclear-inspection counterpart Mohamed ElBaradei, President Vladimir Putin emphasized the need to continue weapons inspections in Iraq, in a telephone conversation with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Kremlin said.
Putin told Blair, a key U.S. ally on the Iraq issue, that weapons inspections should continue in accordance with UN Security Council decisions, the Kremlin press service said.
"It was noted that, as with settlement of other international problems, it is necessary to use as much as possible the resource of coordinated political-diplomatic efforts to eliminate the concerns of the international community," the press service said in a statement.
Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said the inspections were proceeding in a satisfactory manner, and that the UN experts "have not encountered any serious problems in their work."
In an interview with the pan-Arab news station Al-Jazeera, a transcript of which was posted on the ministry's Web site Monday, Ivanov said Russia believed the inspectors should continue their work. "Only the inspectors can give a professional answer" to the question of whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, Ivanov said.
The United States says Iraq is not cooperating with the inspectors and that time is running out for Baghdad. Washington has signaled that it believes it does not need international approval to launch a war against Iraq should Baghdad fail to prove that it has complied with UN resolutions requiring it to disarm.
Ivanov said there was "practically no chance" the Security Council would approve the use of force.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement Monday that there was no need for additional decisions in order to prolong the work of the inspectors.
TITLE: Putin Arrives In Kiev for CIS Summit
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KIEV, Ukraine - Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in the Ukrainian capital on Monday for bilateral talks and a summit of leaders of ex-Soviet republics.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who has faced angry opposition at home and has been shunned in the West after the U.S. administration last fall accused him of sanctioning the sale of military radars to Iraq, has increasingly turned to Russia for political support of late.
During a visit to Russia last month, Kuchma told Putin that Russia was his nation's "most important strategic partner."
Putin attended a ceremony kicking off a year-long festival of Russian culture in Ukraine - an event intended to strengthen ties between the two ex-Soviet republics - and said "I am sure it will strengthen our old and strong friendship that will continue for centuries."
About 100 Ukrainian nationalist demonstrators gathered outside the theater where the ceremony was held, holding placards denouncing Kuchma and "creeping Moscow imperialism"
Putin and Kuchma are set to hold bilateral talks Tuesday in the run-up to Wednesday's summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose alliance of 12 ex-Soviet republics. However, four CIS countries won't be represented by their presidents. Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov said the summit conflicted with a planned trip to Spain and the presidents of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan declined to attend, without stating reasons.
Putin is also set to meet on Tuesday with several other CIS leaders, including Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, who this month angrily criticized Moscow for opening a railway link with Georgia's rebel province of Abkhazia without consulting the Georgian government. Shevardnadze refused to support the presence of Russian peacekeepers in the region, who are deployed in Abkhazia under CIS auspices, but stopped short of calling for their withdrawal.
TITLE: EBRD Loan To Help Imrove Tanker Safety
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or EBRD, has granted a $5.4-million loan to the St. Petersburg Sea Port Authority to complete a modern navigation system to make the Gulf of Finland safer for the growing amount of shipping traffic in the region - particularly traffic carrying oil.
The five-year loan is guaranteed by the federal government and will be spent on constructing steel radar towers and communications equipment, to be installed on the islands of Gogland, Sommers and Seskar, which are all located in the gulf.
"This will allow us to monitor ships in the area up to the [Finnish-Russian] border, and we plan to integrate our system with those operating in Estonia, Finland and Sweden, so that we will be able to monitor the entire area," said Andrei Markelov, the St. Petersburg Sea Port Authority spokesperson, in a telephone interview on Monday.
When completed, the $9.3-million system will be able to monitor ships on their way to and from St. Petersburg's port and other ports in the gulf, including the new Baltic oil terminal at Primorsk, about 110 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg.
Markelov said the St. Petersburg Sea Port became the leading harbor for cargo handling in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland last year, with the amount of cargo handled jumping by 4.3 million tons in 2002, an increase of over 10 percent on the year before. A total of 11,234 vessels delivered and shipped away a total of 41.3 million tons.
The port is forecasting an almost 50-percent increase in turnover by 2010, with a figure of 60 million tons being projected for that year.
But Markelov said that, once built, the system will provide more than navigational information for shipping.
"This system is necessary, but not just for ships. From what I understand, the towers will also provide other services linked to transmissions," Markelov said. "This is a federal program so, because there is not enough money to go around, the border-guard service is also interested in using it."
But EBRD representatives say that the system will mainly be used to reduce the risk of tanker accidents.
Local environmental-emergency services are called on to deal with an average of seven pollution incidents - including oil leaks - per month in the Neva River delta, according to the ABNews agency. In 2001, 41.8 tons of oil were cleaned up from the waters in the area.
The most serious accident in the area happened in October 2001, when a tanker on its way to Kronshtadt from Yaroslavl hit a rock, spilling 300 tons of oil into the Neva and the Gulf. The tanker was carrying 2,700 tons of oil.
"This project marks the EBRD's first involvement in the Russian port sector," said Riccardo Puliti, the director of the EBRD's Transport Team, in a statement released by the bank Thursday. "It will bring international safety standards to the Russian sector of the Baltic Sea and is a major plus for the environment, as well as demonstrating the benefits of regional cooperation."
The EBRD says that the Gulf of Finland is an extremely difficult area for navigation because of its numerous islands, patches of shallow water and frequently bad weather conditions, such as fog or ice. The recent development of oil-export ports like the one at Primorsk prompted the signing in 2001 of an agreement between Estonia, Finland and Russia to built a sophisticated joint communication system that would be able to track and identify ships and tankers all the way though the Gulf and the Baltic Sea.
"The danger is usually of ships running aground, but I don't remember any such cases recently," said Markelov. "The last case I remember happened in 1983."
The announcement of the loan comes on the heels of a major tanker disaster off the shores of Spain in November, when the Bahamas-flagged tanker Prestige, carrying 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, broke up and sank in a storm. About a quarter of the total cargo has already leaked into the sea, damaging more that 280 kilometers of coastline.
The Spanish government has estimated the economic damage at $42 million in the fishing area alone, which generates about $330 million annually.
TITLE: Communists Air Differences in Public
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Communists and their allies risked doing something this month that they have been loath to do in the past: They aired their dirty laundry.
Moreover, they've blamed the Kremlin for sullying it, with the most outspoken of them accusing the presidential administration of planting subversives in their ranks and funding the "moles" through loyal businesspeople.
Star politicians and separate factions have co-existed in the so-called left-wing opposition. But, with parliamentary elections 10 months away and pro-Communist groups set to win some 20 percent of the popular vote, fanning the flames of internal dissent has become a political imperative for the "nationalist patriots'" main rivals - most prominently, the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.
"The party of power is troubled by the Communists' growing influence and wants to promote the idea of a schism, to strike a blow to the Communists and neutralize them," political analyst Sergei Markov of Moscow's Institute of Political Studies said Monday.
In the latest conflict, the brunt of the Communists' wrath has fallen on the State Duma's lowest-profile deputy speaker - Gennady Semigin, a former businessperson who now heads the executive committee of the Popular Patriotic Union of Russia, or NPSR. The umbrella group unites some 15 left-wing political movements, with the Communists as its backbone. In the Duma, Semigin formally represents the Agrarian faction.
The first shock waves rippled through pro-Communist circles early this month, when the editors of two major left-wing opposition newspapers published a joint article called "Operation: Mole," accusing Semigin of helping Kremlin officials organize a fifth column in the NPSR.
"The [presidential] administration is planting its covert representatives among the patriots, advancing them to top posts in the movement," says the Jan. 6 article by Alexander Prokhanov and Valentin Chikin, editors of Zavtra and Sovietskaya Rossia, respectively.
"The main goal of the conspiracy is to explode the patriots, to push out the most tested and tried leaders, who have been the least compromising in dealing with the authorities, and to replace them with loyal, easy-to-control people."
A Semigin spokesperson called the accusations "absolute nonsense," adding that his boss's efforts have been aimed at strengthening the "nationalist patriotic forces" and securing their victory in December's elections.
Influential Communist leaders have taken up positions on opposite sides of the fence. Party chief Gennady Zyuganov endorsed the scandalous article by Prokhanov and Chikin, and the party's leadership issued a resolution admonishing Semigin's committee for overstepping its bounds and abetting the Kremlin's attempts to sow discord.
However, Sergei Glazyev, the energetic young economist widely seen as the top candidate to replace Zyuganov at the party's helm, defended Semigin. In a comment piece published last week in Pravda, Glazyev calls the allegations leveled at Semigin "calumny" and likens "Operation: Mole" to the Stalin-era smear campaigns used as a pretext for the bloody purges of the 1930s.
"Intentionally or not, the article's authors are speaking out against the unification of all patriotic forces into a single, powerful fist. If this continues, our left-wing movement will face, if not a schism, at least a drastic narrowing of its possibilities," Glazyev wrote.
One of the central issues in the conflict has been funding - which was Semigin's main responsibility when he entered the left-wing coalition in the late 1990s.
Although the Communist bloc lost a great deal of its lobbying power last year after pro-Kremlin lawmakers forced it to abandon most of its Duma committee chairpersonships, it remains a formidable force.
"This party's appeal as an investment is going to grow," said Andrei Ryabov of the Moscow Carnegie Center. He said that, despite President Vladimir Putin's high ratings, voters have a growing number of gripes with the current political elite.
"Even mainstream political groups like United Russia will be forced to distance themselves, at least virtually, from the establishment and to attract disgruntled protest voters. There are too many of them to ignore," Ryabov said.
Various press reports of "political investments" in the Communists have abounded over the past month.
A Russian-language Web site controlled by veteran spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky said earlier this month that No. 2 oil company Yukos has agreed to provide the Communists with $70 million over the next five years. Several newspapers picked up the report, but Yukos said it was false "from beginning to end."
In "Operation: Mole," Prokhanov and Chikin wrote that the Kremlin's plot included an unnamed "metallurgical oligarch, possibly from the aluminum sector," who will fund the pro-Communist bloc in order to factionalize it and maintain leverage over its moderate members.
Yury Korgunyuk of the INDEM think tank said the Communist Party has long received financial support from various business interests, but now some of them want to have greater influence on the party - and this is what Zyuganov is trying to stave off.
Indeed, earlier this month, Zyuganov told Sovietskaya Rossia: "We support a union with patriotically inclined entrepreneurs, but we are against them becoming our bosses."
Analysts agreed that Semigin would likely be squeezed out of the pro-Communist leadership, but that this did not spell an end to the party.
Instead, Carnegie's Ryabov said, the public scrap highlights a major argument within the left-wing opposition: how far to go in working with the Kremlin - to build bridges or to burn them?
Zyuganov and his supporters have repeatedly, at least in public, emphasized that they will not cooperate with the current "anti-popular" regime, recently calling on the Duma to vote no-confidence in the government for failing to deal with this winter's heating crisis. Other top officials within the party, such as Duma Deputy Valentin Kuptsov, have been more willing to look for compromises.
"Nonetheless, a schism is highly unlikely," Markov said. "People and groups might splinter off, but the party won't fall to pieces."
Such precedents already exist. Last year, the Communists ousted several prominent members, including Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov, for refusing to abdicate their Duma posts in protest over the loss of the bloc's committee chairpersonships.
Since then, Seleznyov has formed his own party, Rebirth of Russia, believed to have the Kremlin's support as a political decoy to lure away Communist votes.
"The Communists will survive plenty more rifts like these," Korgunyuk said. "They've got nothing to worry about."
TITLE: Vyborg Aims To Get Finns Coming Back
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Prompted at least partially by a boycott by Finnish tourist agencies and a visit to the town by the Finnish Consul General from St. Petersburg, authorities in the Russian town of Vyborg, 20 kilometers from the Finnish border, say they are taking measures to protect tourists.
Since early January, over 20 Finnish travel agencies have been boycotting bus tours to the town, as a result of rampant robberies of tourists that the companies say the town administration is doing little to combat.
"Our proposal is to set up four or five fenced and guarded bus stops in the town for Finnish tourists, and to increase the number of police officers on duty and the number of police posts around the town, starting Feb. 15," said Vyacheslav Beck, the deputy head of the Vyborg District Administration.
Feb. 15 is the date the agencies have chosen to end the boycott.
Beck's proposal was the same that was offered to Kauko Jamsen, Finland's Consul General in St. Petersburg, who discussed the problem with the town's administration in Vyborg on Monday.
Juha Virpanen, a Finnish consul in St. Petersburg, said Monday that the consulate "was following the problem very closely."
"The situation in Vyborg is getting more and more dangerous for tourists," Virpanen said on Monday. "It seems like it's organized somehow, so we hope that the town's authorities will be able to find effective solutions to the problem."
The Finnish travel agencies said that they decided to cancel their trips to Vyborg when a group of young thieves, which had been picking the pockets of Finnish tourists on the streets of Vyborg over the last year, turned to more aggressive methods in December, using gas sprays during robberies and breaking into luggage compartments on the buses.
"There was nothing else we could do when one to three tourists out of every busload of some 40 people were getting robbed and sprayed with gas," said Julia Kaisanlahti, a representative of Turku-based Turun Neva Tours. Turun Neva Tours had been running bus trips to Vyborg once a week before the boycott.
"It was impossible to watch youngsters who were openly getting on the buses and stealing people's belongings inside or from the luggage storage," said Kaisanlahti, who has had two mobile phones stolen while working as a tour guide in Vyborg. "In fact, it wasn't only our idea to stop tours. We also had to stop them because we couldn't attract enough tourists for the trips. People are scared to go to Vyborg."
While an increased police presence will help the situation, Kaisanlahti said that she thought the most effective way to solve the problem would be for local authorities to find "the political will to arrest the gang."
Beck said that the Vyborg administration also was also interested in restoring the flow of Finnish tourists, since tourism from across the nearby border accounts for 20 percent of the local budget. He added that the local administration also plans to distribute fliers carrying essential police telephone numbers to Finnish tourists at the border, and that Consul General Yamsen had expressed satisfaction with the results of Monday's meeting. Jamsen himself could not be reached for a comment, while Virpanen said that he was not yet familiar with the specifics of the meeting.
According to Beck, most Finnish tourists visiting Vyborg come to the town to buy Russian goods or gas, which are much cheaper than in Finland.
Valery Serdyukov, the governor of Leningrad Oblast, in which Vyborg is located, met with regional police and Federal Security Service (FSB) representatives over the weekend to discuss the problem. Serdyukov stressed the importance of working out an effective solution, but also noted that many of the Finnish guests who were robbed had been intoxicated and often provoked the incidents with their own behavior, the Leningrad Oblast press service said in a statement.
Turun Neva Tours' Kaisanlahti said that, while some Finnish tourists previously abused alcohol on the tours, it was not the case so much recently.
"Anyway," she added. "This wasn't the reason they were robbed."
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Taimyr Poll Held
MOSCOW (SPT) - Norilsk mayor and one-time Norilsk Nickel official Oleg Budargin has been elected the new governor of the resource-rich Taimyr Autonomous District, Interfax reported Monday.
After a preliminary vote count, Budargin took 69 percent of the vote, local election official Yekaterina Guzhavina was quoted as saying. The second place candidate, Gennady Subbotkin, a city councillor from Taimyr's capital, Dudinka, won only 7 percent.
Budargin is the former personnel chief of the Norilsk Mining Co., a subsidiary of the area's largest company, Norilsk Nickel. The metals giant is based in the city of Norilsk, which is administratively part of the neighboring Krasnoyarsk region, but pays huge royalties to the sparsely populated Taimyr district for use of its territory.
Krasnoyarsk Verdict
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Krasnoyarsk regional court ruled Monday to disband the local elections commission, saying it committed grave procedural violations when it declared the results of September's gubernatorial poll invalid, Interfax reported.
The high-profile elections caused a stir last fall when Alexander Khloponin, a former metals executive and governor of the neighboring Taimyr region, won more votes than his main opponent, regional parliament speaker Alexander Uss, but the regional elections commission annulled the vote, forcing President Vladimir Putin to step in and appoint Khloponin governor pending a legal resolution.
The lawsuit against the commission was filed by the Central Elections Commission in December.
RIA Exec Named
MOSCOW (SPT) - A public-relations executive who once worked for Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST holding was appointed the new head of the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency on Friday.
Svetlana Mironyuk, 34, who was first vice president of Sergei Zverev's CROS PR firm for the last three years, replaces Alexei Zhidakov. Zhidakov will become Press Minister Mikhail Lesin's adviser, according to sources at the Press Ministry.
RIA Novosti is part of the VGTRK holding of state-owned television and radio companies. VGTRK head Oleg Dobrodeyev and Lesin thanked Zhidakov on Friday for his service to RIA.
From 1992 to 2000, Mironyuk worked at Gusinsky's Most Group and then Media-MOST as deputy head of the public relations department.
Afghan Heroin Seized
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan (Reuters) - Russian border guards seized 113 kilograms of heroin on the Tajik-Afghan border on Monday and said an anticipated flood of drugs from Afghanistan was becoming a reality.
A spokesperson for the guards, responsible for patrolling 1,300 kilometers of the 1,400 kilometer-long border, said they opened fire on a group of smugglers, who escaped back to Afghanistan in a rubber boat across the Pyandzh river.
No one was injured, but the smugglers left behind four sacks of heroin.
Over the weekend, a further 16 kilograms of heroin and 200 kilograms of raw opium, from which heroin is derived, were seized on the frontier, taking total drug seizures in Tajikistan this year to 450 kilograms, of which over half was heroin.
TITLE: 'Walruses' Find Their Winter Chill Out
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While Sergei Ivanov's colleagues at St. Petersburg's metro system hurry to grab a bite on their lunch breaks, he races off for a quick, refreshing dip near the Peter and Paul Fortress in the frozen Neva River.
"I feel extreme excitement and physical euphoria when getting out of that cold water," said Ivanov, a 43-year-old engineer, pulling on his clothes over skin reddened by the sub-zero water on Friday. The air temperature was minus 2 degrees Celsius.
Ivanov is one of at least 100 St. Petersburg ice swimmers - or morzhi ("walruses") - who regularly make their way to the 12-square-meter pool formed by cutting through the 30-centimeter-thick ice on the Neva.
Nina Lyubitskaya, at 66 years old still energetic and vibrant, with sparkling eyes, is another of the site's afficionados. After undressing and stepping into the pool, she swam gracefully back and forth across the opening, smiling all the while.
"It was a passionate desire to live that made me take this up," Lyubitskaya said after her swim. "You don't need to have a strong will for that."
But her husband, Alexei Kirillov, also 66, undressing for his swim on the snowy edge of the opening, wasn't quite as certain.
"I have to force myself every time to get into that water," Kirillov confessed. "It was only because of pressure from my wife that I tried it for the first time."
"I had to obey. She is the head of the family, and she knows what's best," he said with a grin.
The morzhi tradition finds its specific origins in the teaching of a 20th-century Russian folk healer, Porfiry Ivanov. While taking a quick dip in cold water after some time in the banya or sauna is a long-standing tradition, Ivanov, who would walk barefoot wearing only light undergarments year round, stressed the ice-water swims as a way to improve health through a union with nature.
Ivanov died at the age of 87, in 1985, having survived torture while a prisoner of the Germans during WWII, the appalling conditions of a Soviet psychiatric hospital, and general Soviet restrictions on the activities of folk healers. But his ideas gained and maintained currency, and thousands of Russians follow his teachings today.
The morzhi say that swimming in the icy water charges them with energy, and helps prevent colds, flu and nervous breakdowns, among other illnesses.
"I began ice bathing when I felt that I had no energy to work," said Irina Krasnogorova, 60, who still works as an engineer. "I was already feeling tired when I was still on my way to the office."
According to Krasnogorova, who also comes to the pool on her lunch break, along with a colleague, Leonid Kirichenko, she feels she still has lots of energy in the evening after work.
"And I'm always in good mood," she added.
Kirichenko, 68, who has been ice swimming for forty years, says that he began because he was experiencing severe back pains.
"My friends told me that I could either suffer with those pains all my life, or get rid of them with the help of ice swimming," Kirichenko said. "The pain went away when I started ice bathing, and it hasn't returned."
For one of the morzhi, Yelena Yekimova, even an ice-swimming induced injury hasn't diminished her passion for the practice. Yekimova, 51, has been involved in ice swimming for 15 years and credits the practice with helping her cure her bronchitis. She slipped once, however, on the snow beside the pool, and ended up with a broken leg.
"While I was in the ambulance, which came and picked me up right from the ice, my biggest concern was that the trauma would prevent me from swimming for a while," Yekimova said.
While Yekimova's leg has healed, some of the morzhi have found themselves in even more hazardous situations. Yekimova said that one of the elderly regulars at the spot had a penchant for shocking tourists visiting the fortress. Once, in early spring, the man jumped onto an ice floe that had been drifting by on the river. Not having noticed the strong current, he quickly found himself sitting naked on the block of ice in the middle of the Neva, waving his arms frantically and callling for help.
He managed to grap hold of the pilings at one of the bridges and, only then, was rescued, Yekimova said.
Kirichenko, for his part, said that he had once found himself struggling for half an hour to climb back to the river bank from the opening cut in the ice.
"It was February, and I came to swim alone. The slope down to the pool was icy, so I just slid down to the water. But, when I tried to get back, I realized that it was impossible to climb back up the slope. I ended up with broken nails and a frozen body trying to get back up that 2 meters," Kirichenko said.
The ice swimmers say that, far from freezing, they feel warm when they get out of the water, after which they experience a feeling of "lightness" in their bodies.
Research by the Crimea Medical University backs their claims, reporting that the temperature of the human body jumps for about two minutes after bathing in water that cold, causing what it calls a "warm stress" to the system. The warm stress helps to kill off bacteria, open and cleanse pores and speed up the circulation of blood to the body's organs.
At the same time, doctors warn people with heart problems that the activity can be dangerous, and the morzhi themselves advise newcomers to the practice to acclimatize themselves gradually in cold water in the fall or spring, and to do it every day.
The ice swimmers say that most of their acquaintances react positively to their passtime, although some raise concerns that the activity could cause kidney problems or other ailments. Yekimova says that such concerns have prevented her from telling her mother about the activity.
The Peter and Paul Fortress' walruses are not organized as a club, each coming to swim when it is convenient for them. They do, however, meet at the spot every year on Dec. 31 to celebrate New Year's.
"This year, it was a particularly cold New Year's party, with the temperature outside at -30 degrees," said Yekimova. "But we had hot wine, vodka and pies to cheer us up."
TITLE: Thousands Dodging Military Service
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Thousands of conscription-age men are exploiting a legal loophole that allows them to get out of mandatory military service by signing up for two-year stints as firefighters and police officers - jobs that let them spend nights at home, the Defense Ministry said Monday.
And a growing number of young men are ignoring call-up notices from military recruiters to ride tanks and sail submarines thousands of kilometers away from home, opting instead to volunteer for service at the Interior, Emergency Situations and Justice ministries, according to a batch of statistics released by the Defense Ministry.
The number has swelled from 1,051 in 1999 and 2,834 in 2000 to 7,234 in 2001, Interfax reported.
This is forcing the military to call up less capable recruits, a Defense Ministry official said in an interview.
"It is limiting our choice," said the official, who asked not to be named.
The Defense Ministry has become so concerned with the situation that Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov has written a letter to President Vladimir Putin, according to Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
The presidential press service said Monday that it did not have any information about Ivanov's letter.
The Emergency Situations Ministry declined to comment, while calls to Interior Ministry's press service went unanswered.
One Moscow police official confirmed, however, that conscription-age young men in the capital sometimes choose the police over the armed forces.
"If the Defense Ministry doesn't like it, it should feel free to contest it in court," the official said.
The police force will continue to welcome such volunteers, he said.
The police, which is part of the Interior Ministry, and the Justice and Emergency Situations ministries all have annual quotas that are filled by recruitment-age young men.
The Moscow police reportedly lack 10,000 men.
The Defense Ministry said Monday that it was illegal for young men to volunteer elsewhere, pointing out that this contradicts the law on military service, which states the armed forces get first pick from the pool of conscripts.
The loophole comes in laws on firefighting and the police, which allow conscripts to serve as firefighters and police officers and, thus, legally avoid military service.
Alexander Pikayev of the Moscow Carnegie Center said it was no wonder that the loophole was being exploited to avoid serving.
"Young men are attracted by the opportunity to avoid the very bad conditions of serving in units where hazing is commonplace," he said.
With thousands of young men dodging the draft altogether every year, the loss of conscripts to other ministries is only one more headache for the Defense Ministry.
The ministry said that 21,000 men defied their call-up notices last fall alone, although it still managed to meet its quota of more than 100,000 conscripts.
However, the need to fill the ranks often has left recruiters with no choice but to pick less-than-ideal candidates - men in ill health, psychological problems, drug addicts and even convicted criminals.
TITLE: Putin Praises Legal Reforms
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Friday praised the country's judicial reform, saying it had resulted in a 20 percent decrease in the number of people in detention and a threefold increase in the number of not-guilty verdicts.
"Although the Criminal Procedural Code came into force only six months ago, its mechanisms are already working," Putin was quoted by Interfax as saying. "Far fewer people have been put in detention."
The new code promised the introduction of jury trials across Russia by Jan. 1 of this year, though the parliament subsequently agreed to delay the deadline for up to four years. It also removed some powers from prosecutors, including the authority to authorize arrests, and strengthened the independence of judges, who are now the only officials authorized to sanction searches, wire taps and the detention of suspects for more than 48 hours.
Critics of the system allege that judges rarely exercise independence and can easily be controlled by powerful officials and other influential people in their communities.
TITLE: Russian Pitch at Davos is Governed by Iraq Threat
AUTHOR: By Lynn Berry
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: DAVOS, Switzerland - A year ago, the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world's business and political elite, had moved to New York to show solidarity with the United States after the attacks of Sept. 11. This year, with the WEF back in Davos and the world a different place, the United States has been the target of attacks.
No matter what the planned agendas, in so many of the sessions and debates, the discussion has turned to Iraq. The overwhelming majority of people here, including many Americans, are worried, not only about what many fear will be a unilateral U.S. decision to go to war against Iraq but more broadly about whether the sole remaining superpower can, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell put it in his address Sunday, "be trusted to use its power wisely and fairly."
Powell, of course, said it could, although many remain unconvinced.
Powell was preceded at Davos by less likely defenders of America, such as Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat who opposes the U.S. administration of George W. Bush's policy on Iraq, and even Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky.
Although Russia has stood with the Europeans on demanding a decision from the UN Security Council before sending in troops, Russians have been quiet here on the U.S. buildup toward war. Economic issues and Russia's own disputes with Europe, have been higher on the agenda. Russia could even benefit, some say, from Washington's split with Paris and Berlin.
"If before it had been worth $100 for Russia's friendship, now it is worth $200," Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, said Sunday.
Browder said that one of his purposes in coming to Davos each year is to gauge big international investors' interest in Russia, and what he's hearing this year is that they are feeling more comfortable about investing in Russian oil companies because of what they see as strong geopolitical support for Russia to expand exports and become a more viable alternative to the Persian Gulf.
While downplaying the discord with Europe, Powell reached out to Russia and China. He said that both were playing an important role in resolving the problems of Iraq and North Korea, and asked the audience to imagine how different the international situation would be if U.S. relations with Russia and China were still marked by intense rivalry.
And then he told Russia what it wanted to hear: "We fully support Russia's efforts to become fully integrated in the world economic community," he said.
Much of the criticism of the United States has been over the way it has pursued the campaign against terrorism, its perceived willingness to compromise democracy and curtail civil liberties at home and forgive human rights violations by allied countries. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft defended U.S. policies, saying, "The fight for security is not a sacrifice of freedom." But he made clear that security comes first.
Senator Biden, who arrived in Davos on Friday afternoon, the second day of America-bashing, livened up a session on U.S. foreign policy with a colorful description of the United States' place in the world as "every country's problem and every country's solution." He closed by telling his international audience that "you know in your heads that we're not as bad as you say we are, and we're not as bad as some of your own countries."
Perhaps glad for the dose of humor, many members of the audience applauded, including Mikhail Margelov, the head of the Federation Council's foreign affairs committee, who was seated in the front row.
At a session the next day titled "U.S.A. Omnipotence," the moderator, Le Monde editor Jean-Marie Colombani, sent some participants and even some of the panelists scrambling for headphones by introducing the topic in French.
Yavlinsky, one of the panelists reaching for headphones, defended the United States, saying its "greatness" comes not just from its military power but from the difficulties it has overcome, such as slavery, segregation and poverty.
Yet even though the United States is the world's supreme power, it is not capable of fighting terrorists alone, he said. By way of analogy, Yavlinsky said that the United States is prepared to hunt big game, but its real problem is not elephants but poisonous mosquitoes.
"We see a task - to help the United States to be a factor for stability," he said.
At a dinner session Saturday night, Russia's relations with the European Union were on the agenda. Instead of geopolitics and security, the issues were trade barriers, WTO membership and European Union visas, and the problems seemed more divisive.
Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said that little or nothing has been accomplished in WTO talks and called on Europe to put forward a clear timetable for opening its markets.
Yavlinsky repeated President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov's recent calls for visa-free travel to Europe.
Finnish President Tarja Halonen told the Russians that the EU supports WTO membership "on the condition that you fulfill the demands" and urged Russian entrepreneurs to have "more modern" business agreements.
As for visas, she said, "We hope you don't freeze cooperation before then, because it will be a long time."
Troika Dialog president Ruben Vardanian said that the real test of Europe's acceptance of integration will come as Russian companies take over European companies. "This is a big question," Vardanian said. "This needs to be discussed. Are we really ready for cooperation?"
TITLE: Zurabov Tipped To Save Russian Aviation Sector
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Alexander Zurabov wants to make one thing clear: He is not joining the government.
He may have just been named Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's first (and only) aviation adviser, but the man widely credited with turning around the fortunes of Russia's flagship airline says that he has no interest in politics.
After three years as Aeroflot's chief financial officer, Zurabov had let it be known that he was thinking about leaving the aviation industry. Then, he got a call from Kasyanov asking him to help save it.
"In my current position, I did everything I could have done ... but, when this offer came, I decided to give it another try," Zurabov said in an interview Saturday.
And, now that he has accepted, that's exactly what he intends to do.
Zurabov said that, if the government is going to reverse a decade of decline in an industry that was once the world's largest, aircraft manufacturers and airlines must find common ground, because one cannot survive without the other.
"The airline business cannot do without a dialog with the aircraft industry. But it's been hard ... Our positions are so far from each other that nobody wins. We have joined hands, and together we are heading toward an abyss," he said. "I hope to contribute to this dialog so that it becomes more constructive."
Industry insiders say that the 46-year-old former banker has earned a reputation as one of the most capable and professional executives in the industry and is well suited for the job.
A Western-style manager who, like his brother, State Pension Fund chief Mikhail, knows his math only too well, Zurabov spearheaded a strategic-development plan that overhauled nearly every facet of the carrier's operations, from streamlining the route network and optimizing its fleet usage to improving its corporate image by teaching flight crews to smile.
"Zurabov is an important choice. What he's done with Aeroflot demonstrates that the problem is not a lack of money, but how it is used," said one senior industry official.
"With his vast experience in dealing with serious financial flows, he can teach this industry, now dominated by technically minded people, a thing or two."
"The government has been paying more attention to the industry, but for it to have a balanced approach it needs professional advice, which Zurabov can give," said Alexander Rubtsov, head of Ilyushin Finance Co., one of a handful of leasing companies created to help airlines purchase domestic aircraft.
The numbers tell the story of Zurabov's success. Since joining Aeroflot in 1999, the company's stock has risen 465 percent, compared with a market average of 332 percent, and the company now has a market capitalization of $378 million, said United Financial Group analyst Yelena Sakhnova.
The year Zurabov joined Aeroflot, the airline posted a $60-million loss, but has been in a steep climb ever since. It posted its first-ever profit, $8.6 million, in 2000, followed by a net of $20 million in 2001 and an estimated $80 million last year. This year it expects to break the $100 million mark.
Even without the $200 million Aeroflot gets every year from inheriting its Soviet predecessor's monopoly on the fees that foreign airlines must pay to overfly Russian airspace, the company will be in the black by 2005, Zurabov said.
Dropping unprofitable routes and adding flights to popular destinations alone has made a $200-million difference to the company's bottom line since 1999, he said.
Zurabov was also behind the company's controversial decision to replace the 27 foreign jets in its 100-plus fleet of aircraft with new Airbuses and Boeings, which should cut costs by more than $90 million a year from 2005. When the state-controlled airline's board of directors, chaired by Transportation Minster Sergei Frank and dominated by government officials, approved the deal last month, domestic aircraft companies were outraged - another example, they said, of the state turning its back on the industry.
Zurabov said that this issue - protecting domestic aircraft producers without crippling the airlines - is particularly pressing and sensitive for an industry that employs nearly 2 million people.
With unlimited political and financial support, the Soviet aircraft industry once accounted for 26 percent of the world's commercial fleet, churning out more than 150 civilian airplanes and 300 helicopters every year. Likewise, former monopoly carrier Aeroflot was by far the largest airline in the world, hauling more than 100 million passengers per year.
But most of the 200-odd carriers that inherited Soviet-era Aeroflot's fleet are facing a crisis, as their planes near the end of their lifespan without an affordable way to replace them quickly.
Aircraft producers like Ilyushin and Tupolev are still suffering from post-Soviet shock, when state orders dried up and no private customers emerged to replace them. Skilled workers have left, assembly lines have worn out, debts have accumulated, and the few passenger jets that have been produced in the past decade are prototypes not yet ready for mass production.
In an effort to salvage what's left of the industry, the government has imposed prohibitive tariffs on foreign craft. But, with no real domestic alternative to Boeing and Airbus, airlines say that they will go out of business if the tariffs aren't removed.
The government has tried to address the problem, drawing up plans to develop the industry, but these efforts have been hasty and unrealistic, experts say.
The course that the government will now take will be, in part, based on Zurabov's advice.
One of the first things he plans to do is urge Kasyanov to repeal the projectionist tariffs on foreign craft. "I think that one thing [Kasyanov can do] is temporarily allow the import of certain types of craft for three to five years," he said. "I am prepared to put forward this question regularly and openly [and form a common position] with everyone involved."
The airlines need this window of opportunity to expand capacity to handle growing traffic, he said. This would give domestic manufacturers a chance to concentrate on creating products that are in high demand, such as a new regional passenger jet and cargo version of the Il-96, he added.
TITLE: Cabinet To Form $42-Bln Firm
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The cabinet on Thursday agreed in principle to a list of $42-billion worth of assets that will make up the charter capital of corporate newcomer Russian Railways Co., the linchpin in the government's ambitious overhaul of the country's sprawling railroad system.
"[Railways reform] is going according to plan," Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told his ministers.
Railways Minister Gennady Fadeyev said that ministers will take the next two weeks to study and tweak a 51-page inventory of the companies that will form the massive backbone of the new monopoly.
The list of properties that Russian Railways will inherit from the Railways Ministry includes all 17 regional-railways branches, the factories that supply and repair their infrastructure and several scientific-research institutes.
The list also includes scores of assets not normally associated with the railroad industry, such as food retailers, sports facilities and health organizations.
"The land under all of these objects, including the rails and stations, will be owned by the federal government," Fadeyev was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Fadeyev said that the charter capital of the joint-stock company Russian Railways will be fully formed by May 18, when two new laws on railway transport and the rail-transport charter come into force.
Fadeyev said that most of the legislative base needed to reform the industry has been created, except for the law on managing railway property. The law, which lays down the rules for privatizing the sector, will lead to the establishment of the 100-percent state-owned Russian Railways.
"[It will be passed] not later than Feb. 15," Fadeyev said.
A conciliatory commission in the Federation Council is currently making minor changes to the sector-privatization law after rejecting it last month, although it approved the transport and charter bills, as well as amendments to the law on natural monopolies. The latter was signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this month.
The overhaul of the Railways Ministry has progressed more quickly and more smoothly than fellow natural monopolies Gazprom and Unified Energy Systems.
"The first phase involves setting up the legislative base for the reform," Interfax quoted Kasyanov as saying. "[This includes the] separation of noncore assets and the creation of a competitive rail-transport sector, in which some progress has already been achieved."
The second stage, which will take two to three years, calls for Russian Railways to be divided into several financially independent subsidiaries, which will then be privatized.
TITLE: Choice of Pension Agent Judged Damaging
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government's decision last week to appoint Vneshekonombank as the state's Pension Fund manager raises doubts about the government's commitment to competition in the troubled banking industry, and could prove damaging to the development of the sector as a whole, analysts said Friday.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov late Wednesday signed a decree making Vneshekonombank, or VEB, the sole government agent for investing Pension Fund money in Russian stocks and bonds under a new system that will put to work billions of dollars' worth of previously dormant funds.
"This looks like another move in the Russian elite's game of 'Who controls the nation's cash flows?'" said Richard Hainsworth, who tracks banks for Renaissance Capital and heads the rating agency RusRating. "This puts substantial financial power into the hands of VEB managers."
The move came just five months after the government said that it would transfer all of VEB's commercial operations to Vneshtorgbank, or VTB, ahead of the bank's partial privatization.
"I was surprised to see VEB entitled to a de facto commercial task only several months after the government had said that it was making plans to transfer all of its commercial operations to Vneshtorgbank," said Mikhail Matovnikov, head of banking at the Interfax Rating Agency.
"I see no logic here," he added.
Under the new pension system, funds will be invested through appointed fund managers. One of the fund managers will be state-owned, while at least another three will be private. This will give every Russian a choice as to how their retirement money will be invested.
However, analysts say that VEB will get the lion's share of the business, because the average Russian does not yet know enough about investing or the new system to make that choice.
"During the initial years of pension reform, the public is unlikely to play an active role in choosing its form of money management and, as a result, 90 percent of contributors will probably offer their money to VEB," Alfa Bank said Friday.
VEB, which does not have a commercial banking license and mainly acts as the government's debt agent, agreed in September to transfer $340 million to $350 million in commercial assets to Vneshtorgbank. Despite not having a license, VEB has amassed commercial assets of about $800 million. Total assets stood at $3.84 billion as of March.
"VEB does not exercise commercial activity and has the status of government agent, so managing pension funds will be just another task from the government," a VEB spokesperson said Friday.
"Pension money will be accumulated in separate accounts and will be exempt from risks connected with VEB's banking operations," she said. "Also, it will be strictly regulated."
TITLE: Home-Grown Packaging Beating Opposition
AUTHOR: By Andrei Musatov And Maxim Trapeznikov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: In the last year, over ten new packaging-materials facilities have appeared in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, with total investment amounting to about $150 million.
For the most part, this impressive expansion is the result of flourishing local manufacturing and foodstuff enterprises and, say market analysts, the sector is set to continue growing, thanks to the squeezing out of foreign competition.
DRIVING FORCES
One of the most ambitious of the new projects is being implemented by Rostar, which plans to invest $50 million in the construction of a factory producing aluminum cans in Vsevolozhsk, 20 kilometers northeast of St. Petersburg, The factory is due to open in the summer of this year, and Rostar has located it close to the Baltika brewery, which has an estimated demand of 800 million to 1 billion cans per year.
The Veda holding, in Kingisepp in the Leningrad Oblast, opened a $50-million factory producing glass bottles and jars in 2002. Veda plans to use the factory's output for its own bottling operations. The company currently ranking third in vodka production in Russia, according to the State Statistics Committee.
In 2002, Polygrafoformlenie, which specializes in packaging for foodstuffs, began work on a factory for the production of flexible-packaging materials at a cost of $15 million.
Mir Upakovki ("World of Packaging") invested another $8 million in producing plastic containers for cosmetics and foodstuffs, while Tuboplast-Otradnoe spent $2 million on producing tubes for cosmetics. Unipak-Rus, distributor of a range of European plastic sheeting packaging, has invested $5 million in producing packets for use in chips, nuts and ice-cream packaging.
Representatives of companies investing in the sector say that they are aiming at market niches that, for the time being, are dominated by foreign producers that have more advanced technologies and higher cost packaging.
Russian producers believe their advantages will be closer links with local customers and lower prices.
Kirill Derevitsky, commercial director at Unipak-Rus, said that 90 percent of metallic sheeting used in packets in Russia is imported.
"We're hoping to win through affordable prices, effective delivery strategies and the quality of foreign materials," he said. "The market for packaging is showing a good rate of growth."
Dina Vishnya, communications director at Darya, a major local foodstuffs producer, said that her company is opting for Russian packaging. Its pelmeni, for example, are being marketed in Russian-produced packets.
"Russian packets are 10 to 15 percent cheaper, the Russian suppliers can deliver in shorter time frames, and it's easier to work out logistics with them," Vishnya said.
As yet, not all forms of packaging are produced in Russia, but manufacturers are convinced that this will change - just five years ago, they say, there were almost no players on the Russian packaging market.
Vladimir Burenkov, head of Eagle Venture Partners (EVP), a company managing 97 million euros of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development funding in Russia, said that the growth in the market is being supported by the appearance of major international corporations on the local scene.
Foremost among these new entries are those working in confectioneries, beer and non-alcoholic drinks, all of which require relatively high-quality packaging.
"Foodstuffs manufacturers have created a demand which has given an impulse toward developing packaging enterprises," Vishnya said.
"Seven years ago, in the frozen-foodstuffs market, packaged goods only accounted for 10 percent of the market, and having proper packaging was a competitive advantage in itself," she said. "Now, it's exactly the other way round."
MAJOR SAVINGS
"Producing flexible packaging within the country cuts the cost price of the finished product by about 10 percent by saving on customs duties," Burenkov said, adding that, for glass bottles, the saving amounts to 40 percent to 50 percent.
"At the beginning of the 1990s, the production of flexible packaging in Russia didn't exist at all, so, for the first few years, the yearly rate of growth in Russia came to over 20 percent," Burenkov said.
Now, according to Burenkov, the rate of growth has contracted somewhat, though it still amounts to over 10 percent per year.
IRG maintains that Russian manufacturers now account for 96 percent of cardboard boxes used for transportation.
Foreign companies, however, continue to dominate in supplying boxes for sweets and confectioneries and other packaging materials that use chrome, with 60 percent of such packaging being imported.
Foreign companies are now entering the lucrative and fast-developing cardboard-boxing market. Austrian company Mayr Melnhof has plans to build a factory in the Leningrad Oblast at an estimated cost of $20 million.
In fall 2002, Finnish company Stora Enso announced its intention to invest around $60 million in production at the Balabanovkaya Cardboard Factory and around $40 million in the creation of a new factory in the Nizhegorodskaya Oblast.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Russian packagers believe that they have already reached the point where they can begin to compete with foreign firms on equal, or even advantageous, terms.
Viktor Volkov, development director at Plastic, which specializes in polymer packaging, said that simply replicating Western technologies would be enough, given time, to force imported products out of the market.
Nikita Kalashnikov, general director of Food Plastic Group, distributor for a number of foreign packaging firms, said that local manufacturers will take the niches currently occupied by imported products within three years.
"At the moment, there are customs duties and all the difficulties involved in that. Those difficulties are encouraging the creation of manufacturing within Russia," said Kalashnikov. "In addition, delays caused by transportation are providing another incentive."
Interactive Research Group maintains that Russian producers are capable of capturing 85 percent to 90 percent of the market for consumer packaging. According to IRG, that market was worth around $3.5 to $4 billion in 2002.
The volume of imported packaging materials amounted to $800 to $900 million in 2002, though it was almost entirely absent in sectors such as cardboard, the main forms of polymer packet sheeting and aluminum and tin packaging.
The proportion of imports is higher in sectors such as high-quality cardboard and flexible packaging with printing and labeling but, with investment continuing, it seems that home-grown packaging won't take long in catching up.
Another cause of optimism in this industry, however, is that the taste for packaging also looks set to grow. The average city inhabitant in Russia gets through about $60 to $70 of packaging per year.
In comparison, in Japan and the U.S., which are currently the leaders in packaging consumption, the average person gets through $300 to $450 of packaging per year.
TITLE: Davos Host To Summit For Anxious Telecoms
AUTHOR: By Paul Geitner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DAVOS, Switzerland - Not so long ago, they were among the brightest stars at the elite Alpine gathering of global movers and shakers in the business world. This year, the telecommunications-companies chieftains still standing can't even fill a room.
"We're in a survivor mentality now," David Dorman, chairperson and CEO of AT&T Co., told a less-than-packed session Monday at the World Economic Forum on the outlook for his beleaguered industry.
Former giants like WorldCom have filed for bankruptcy. Once-celebrated titans and forum regulars, like WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers, Deutsche Telekom's Ron Summer and France Telecom's Michel Bon, are out of jobs and out of sight.
Members of the telecom panel were suffering from more than Monday-morning blues: cut-throat competition for fewer and fewer new customers, enormous debts run up in the process of buying up licenses for next-generation services, but little cash to invest in upgrading networks and equipment are just two of the ailments currently afflicting the industry.
"I had a bad dream that, one day, I woke up and was chairperson of AT&T," Dorman joked.
The gloom is certainly not confined to the telecoms sector, however, as other execs roaming the halls will confess.
In telecoms, though, it was not that long ago that companies thought nothing of spending billions of dollars on licenses for next-generation mobile services.
Now, new investment is shrinking as many telecoms struggle to stay afloat.
German equipment maker Siemens saw a 20-percent reduction of investment in networks last year and the company is expecting another 20-percent drop this year, said board member Volker Jung.
Pondering ways to raise cash, panelists discussed new business models, charging commissions from content providers, and the quest for a lucrative new "killer application."
The last was SMS (short message service), quick text messages that can be written and sent on wireless phones. They generate enormous profits for European phone companies, but are only now starting to catch on in the United States.
Japanese mobile-phone giant NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service, which allows users to send e-mails and download pictures, could be another success outside Japan as well, but networks have to be upgraded to create the necessary conditions for mobile-data transfer to be a hit.
"I think speed could be another kind of killer app," said Edward Tian, chief executive of China Netcom Corp., who suggested a new business model based on the airline industry, where those who pay more get a better class of service.
John Riordan, CEO, chairperson and president of United Pan-European Communications NV in the Netherlands, told the panel that he was successfully charging customers for extra bandwidth.
"When I became chairman, I banned 'free' as a word," he said. "If you build it, they will come. If you give customers the choice, they will pay."
TITLE: Investing in Electricity Isn't a Leap in the Dark
AUTHOR: By David Herne
TEXT: BARON Nathan Rothschild, one of the best investors in history, said that the right time to invest is when blood is running in the streets. His point was that periods of turmoil, when investors are panicked and everyone assumes that only catastrophe awaits, offer the best opportunities. Russia is not undergoing a bloody revolution but, figuratively speaking, there is blood in the streets of the electricity sector. Share prices are less than 10 percent of similar companies in other countries. Influential investment banks forecast that most assets will be lost to shareholders over the course of restructuring. The market believes that any assets not lost will never be profitable, due to inefficient regulation. This looks like an excellent time to invest.
Today, all may look dark in the electricity sector, but not much really needs to happen for investment interest in the sector to pick up. In my role as minority-shareholder representative on the board of directors of Unified Energy Systems, I spend a lot of time talking to portfolio investors who are minority shareholders of the company. These shareholders care about a small number of criteria:
. a clear, consistent plan for reform
. clear ownership rights, maintained over the course of restructuring
. a market which allows efficient, well managed businesses to be profitable
. sufficient liquidity of company shares
These criteria are all achievable. A clear, consistent plan for reform will emerge shortly after the State Duma passes the new laws on electricity-sector reform.
Ownership rights have so far been respected, albeit with occasional threats, and ownership will remain respected, so long as we remain vigilant. My key focus on the board is to remain vigilant.
The reform laws should allow efficient businesses to be profitable.
Sufficient liquidity of shares is one of my goals on the board, and I have proposed ADR facilities for all spun-off companies as well as company mergers to improve liquidity. At the end of the reform, most if not all of UES spin-offs will be large enough to be liquid.
One key concern of investors is that electricity-sector reforms in Russia will not be carried through at all. This risk is minimized by the fact that, over the long run, prices will always be higher under a cost-plus system, such as the one Russia uses today, than under competition. The government is smart enough to realize that the only real way to reduce electricity tariffs is competition.
The other concern I often hear is that of the "Chubais Risk." Some analysts and investors believe that UES CEO Anatoly Chubais is necessary for reform and worry about his removal. Others believe that effective and fair reform cannot be carried out while he heads UES, and worry that he will not be removed. Both beliefs are mistaken. Personalizing reform as a debate over Chubais is an easy way out for people who don't really understand the reform. It is easy to say "Chubais is evil, so all the measures he proposes are evil" or "Chubais is good, so all the measures he proposes are good."
Despite my strong opposition to many of his initiatives, I would not say that I am anti-Chubais. I want reforms to happen, shareholders to retain ownership over assets and the market to function efficiently. I support any proposals that promote those goals.
I share with the market all of the information I receive on the board of UES; in fact, by the time the board receives any information, it has been seen by hundreds of people.
However, I do know one important thing that the market either doesn't know or doesn't believe: It is not all agreed beforehand. Market analysts seem to think that key decision makers sit around behind closed doors, smoke cigars and divide up Russia's electricity sector. Well, I'm sure that people sit around behind closed doors and talk about all sorts of things, but I know that a number of key decision makers in the Russian government are honestly trying to think through the issues and make the best decision for the country.
In 1999, after a series of corporate-governance abuses, oil major Yukos cost only $0.18 per share but nobody wanted to buy. Yukos management claimed that it was reformed and presented evidence of good intentions, but investors said, "We're too smart to be tricked this time." Today, those same investors are happy to buy shares in Yukos at $9.00 per share.
Similarly, the market does not believe the positive steps taken toward electricity-sector reform. One potential investor said to me, "Well, yes, the initial steps are good, but that is just to lure you in. I'm too smart to be tricked."
I don't think that electricity-company prices will rise 50 times, but UES is clearly worth 5 to 10 times its current share price.
Electricity-sector reform is a tricky process and it is only smart to learn from the mistakes made in other countries. It makes sense to bring international expertise to Russian companies and, thus, improve the professionalism of the sector, as well as make profitable investments.
In summary, although prospects for Russia's electricity sector today look dim when you read about them in the press or in market analysis, prospects look brighter when you examine key requirements for investment and the oft-cited risks. Cynicism and the market perception of blood running in the streets of the electricity sector scare investors from a good investment opportunity.
David Herne is a member of the board of directors of UES and managing director of Halcyon Advisers. This comment first appeared in Vedomosti.
TITLE: Davos Values New Russian 'Maturity'
AUTHOR: By Alan Cowell
TEXT: DAVOS, Switzerland - The Russians are coming, but quietly. And that is just how some of them seem to want it to be.
A decade ago, before the financial crisis of 1998 ended the stampede of Western investors looking for a slice of post-Soviet riches, Russian executives attending the annual World Economic Forum in this Alpine resort carved out quite a reputation. They were flashy high rollers and hard partiers, whose tentacles spread to the heights of political and economic power.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the 39-year-old chief executive of Yukos, Russia's second-biggest oil producer, said that, a decade ago, Davos' night spots were "all something new" for Russians.
"These days, Moscow is one of the liveliest cities in Europe, and we are all 10 years older now," said Khodorkovsky, who is possibly Russia's richest person. "So, anybody who wants to go out and party and have a good time can do so in Moscow. And they come here for other reasons."
Those reasons, mainly, are to talk and schmooze and convince the world that, after defaulting on its debt in 1998 and bamboozling Western investors, Russia now has a youthful economic elite that has changed.
But the gates are not wide open to this by-invitation event. In 1996, the number of Russian participants here reached a high of 76. After the crash of 1998, it fell to just half that. Since then, it has been climbing back and reached 52 this year - dwarfed by an overwhelming American and Western European presence among the 2,000-plus participants.
"If we opened the door, we would have about 100 Russian business participants," Klaus Schwab, the forum's founder, said in an interview. "But we are very restrictive, and we try to invite only those who have a good record in terms of corporate governance and so on."
Indeed, the Russian participants - both from politics and business - were met this year with a broadside from Amnesty International. "There are human rights issues that business can't ignore - arbitrary detention, appalling prison conditions, unlawful killings, disappearances, gross violations in Chechnya and pervasive corruption everywhere," said Irene Khan, Amnesty's leader.
"We are not asking companies to divest from Russia, or disinvest, but to influence human rights through their own policies and practices," she said.
Naturally, the barons of Russian capitalism are not enthusiastic about such reminders of a not-too-distant past when so-called oligarchs used political influence to wrest control of vast slabs of Russia's previously state-owned assets. Khodorkovsky, for instance, was reported to have won control of the multibillion-dollar company Yukos for a relatively modest $159-million loan to the state. In 1999, he succeeded in muscling Kenneth Dart, an American billionaire, out of big stakes in Yukos subsidiaries, by shifting assets to offshore subsidiaries.
In several conversations, Russian executives bridled at any hint that the history of the post-Soviet 1990s has somehow set them apart from the mainstream of global business. Indeed, they argued, recent developments in the United States have given them ammunition for a counterattack. With the accounting scandals at Enron and elsewhere, supposed paragons of American corporate virtue have fallen from the moral high ground.
"There is less suspicion than there used to be," Alexander Lebedev, a banker, said of the attitude toward Russian business. "It turned out that some Western countries were no better."
And these days, said Ruben Varanian, a prominent financier, Russians in business "want to be respectable."
That does not mean that they do not party anymore. On Saturday, Khodorkovsky had a party for fellow industrialists at one of Davos' upscale hotels.
A formal $70-per-head dinner to discuss Europe's ties with Russia was oversubscribed, in what the Russians saw as a sign of growing interest.
Moreover, Russian business seems more assertive, in part because it has a story to tell of economic reform, partly repaid debt and growth far outpacing that of other European countries or the United States. Big companies are looking beyond Russian borders to expand.
Furthermore, having made millions, some executives have concluded that the best way to hang on to their wealth is to draw up rules of good behavior.
Still, worries remain. "Has Russia dealt with corruption?" Khodorkovsky asked. "No it hasn't. Is it a problem? Yes, it's a problem. But can it be said that Russia is the most corrupt country in the world? Not at all. There are many countries in Europe that are a lot more corrupt than Russia."
Alan Cowell is a journalist for The New York Times.
TITLE: Boris Jordan Takes a Dose of Own Mass-Media Medicine
TEXT: BORIS Jordan did not carry the mantle that he snatched from Vladimir Gusinsky for very long. He was purged from Gazprom-Media after President Vladimir Putin uttered the phrase - following the Dubrovka hostage siege - about a certain national television channel making money "on the blood of its fellow citizens."
In response, Jordan launched a PR campaign to let everyone know just what a good manager he was It is true that, last year, NTV, for the first time, turned a profit - to the tune of $14 million - although this was after the advertising market grew by 40 percent, and Gazprom unexpectedly spent $64 million on advertising.
It turns out that Gazprom is the second biggest spender on advertising in Russia, and yet it doesn't even figure in the top 12 Russian advertisers as measured by airtime, etc. It is strange that the gas monopoly feels the need for such an expensive campaign - maybe it is experiencing problems selling its gas in central Russia. It is pretty obvious that the advertisements are a form of subsidy for NTV. Hence the surprise at the promises of Alexander Dybal, his replacement, to conduct an audit of NTV.
Jordan's firing is proof that television is the one branch of the economy that the president intends to control personally. In all other spheres, the president won't get personally involved. Oligarchs can scrap for control of enterprises, buy judges, shuffle ministers, etc. But, if a national television channel has the temerity to lip-read one of Putin's conversations in the Kremlin, that's lese-majeste - an offense against the dignity of the tsar himself.
Television is capable of a lot. If there is a more-or-less favorable economic situation in the country, television can ensure high ratings for the president.
The problem, of course, is in the word "favorable." What if world oil prices collapse? What if we are hit by another freezing cold spell, exacerbated by the degradation of municipal services? What if there is a succession of major terrorist attacks?
Economists have something called the Laffer curve that shows that, if you raise tax rates, at a certain point the total amount of taxes collected starts to fall, as high taxes encourage evasion. The Laffer curve can also be applied to television. If you increase the dosage of lies, at a certain point people's trust in what they are watching starts to drop off. Television is a make-up artist, not a surgeon. It can hide wrinkles, but can't cure a severe case of obesity.
Jordan was running one of the freest Russian channels not because he was a great fan of freedom of speech, but because he is a entrepreneur and understands that only independent television can be commercially profitable.
It is hard to feel sorry for Jordan that Gusinsky's mantle has been taken away from him. The real tragedy is that the mantle will almost certainly now fall into much more dubious hands.
Yulia Latynina is author and host of "Yest Mneniye" ("Some Believe") on TVS.
TITLE: Russia's Gamble on Last-Minute Diplomacy
AUTHOR: By Alexander Shumilin
TEXT: STORM clouds have been gathering over Baghdad. Even before UN weapons inspectors discovered 12 warheads designed to carry chemical weapons that were not included in Iraq's declaration to the UN Security Council, Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix had assessed the situation as tense and unpredictable.
What if, as Washington would have us believe, fresh discoveries are about to be made by weapons inspectors? In fact, even without them, as U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow recently stated, the United States will present inspectors and the international community with irrefutable evidence of Baghdad's mendacity. If that happens, then it is quite possible that UN Security Council permanent members will approve a second UN resolution sanctioning the use of military force against Iraq. And how would Moscow vote if it comes to that?
Russia is in a tricky situation. As on the eve of the first Gulf War, when Yevgeny Primakov visited Baghdad immediately before the U.S.-led invasion, Moscow is currently looking at possibilities for last-minute mediation - first and foremost in order to safeguard its economic interests in the region.
The week before last, a delegation including Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Saltanov and top managers from LUKoil and Zarubezhneft descended on Baghdad. After that, Iraq awarded several new contracts to Russian oil companies, and it seems that the LUKoil contract to develop the West Qurna field may have now been restored. In addition, a State Duma delegation is to visit Baghdad on Feb. 3.
Blix's report to the UN Security Council, delivered on Monday, will likely be crucial to Iraq's fate. It is perfectly possible that, following the report, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush will commence military operations in the first half of February. And superficially, at least, it will not be a unilateral act by the United States, as countries such as Britain, Australia, Canada and the Czech Republic have declared their willingness to participate in operations.
The United States has three other possible options - to postpone war until autumn 2003, to organize a "palace coup" against Saddam Hussein with the help of U.S. special forces or to force the Iraqi leader into exile - but these are considered less likely. However, the Bush administration has yet to make its final decision. In the meantime, it is maintaining pressure on members of the UN Security Council, threatening to circumvent the UN if approval is not forthcoming. The view in the U.S. administration is that such an uncompromising approach resulted in unanimous support for UN Security Council Resolution 1441.
In spite of the uncompromising public rhetoric used by members of the U.S. administration vis-a-vis Hussein, at a more informal level, there have been a number of indications that the administration still hopes for a "bloodless" solution. Recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld openly approved of Hussein going into exile outside Iraq - moreover, apparently with guarantees of immunity from subsequent prosecution, although such guarantees have not been forthcoming from Bush himself.
It is still too early to talk of military action as the only remaining option. According to press reports, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been looking into the possibility of persuading Hussein to go into exile (the countries most frequently mentioned in this regard are Egypt, Syria, Libya and even Russia) or of a palace coup by members of his inner circle. With this in mind, Saudi Arabia is said to be preparing an appeal to Security Council members to adopt a UN resolution on exonerating all Iraqi officials, with the exception of a dozen of Hussein's closest circle. Although, the meeting in Istanbul of the foreign ministers of Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria did not produce much - not even an appeal to Hussein to voluntarily go into exile.
Currently, the Bush administration is only really ruling out the option of postponing decisive action (Blix and Mohamed El Baradei have talked of the need to extend the inspection mission for at least another 10 months).
U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a recent op-ed in The New York Times, underlined that time is running out for Iraq. The latest date for launching an invasion of Iraq is February or March, in order to complete the operation before the heat sets in in late April. Failure by the Bush adminstration to act within this time frame would be extremely damaging to the White House, discrediting its whole strategy vis-a-vis war on international terror. In addition, failure to overthrow Hussein would be portrayed by Iraqi propaganda as the Iraqi leader's personal victory, and would make him a figurehead for radicals in the Middle East, as well as a magnet for extremist forces.
Another factor pushing Bush to commence military operations in February or March is the falling support in the United States for war on Iraq. In the last half year, support has dropped by a third and, now, is not significantly higher than opposition (53 percent to 37 percent). Furthermore, Bush's rating fell below the 60 percent level for the first time in mid-January. The White House believes that decisive action on Iraq will be able to halt or reverse this trend.
Washington's increasingly blatant wager on the use of force has provoked a mixed reaction from its allies. Western European leaders find themselves in a tricky situation: on the one hand, they cannot ignore growing domestic opposition to war; but on the other hand, they are worried about loss of geopolitical influence in general, and in particular in a "post-Saddam" Iraq.
At the beginning of January, a paradoxical situation arose: While the U.S. dependable ally British Prime Minister Tony Blair was trying - under pressure from his own party - to soften his line on Iraq, suggesting extending the inspection mission for another six months, French President Jacques Chirac was underlining his preparedness to send a number of battleships to the Persian Gulf, including the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. There were two main reasons for doing this this: to avoid breaking North Atlantic solidarity and to avert the possibility of an Anglo-Saxon coalition dominating the Middle East.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder also stated his intention to put Germany's military capacity at the disposal of the United States. It was only toward mid-January that Chirac and Schroeder changed their positions, stating that they would not approve a new UN resolution sanctioning war on Iraq. Their joint statement was interpreted in Washington as a direct challenge to the United States' position - Rumsfeld even talked about the crisis in relations between the United States and the "Old Europe."
Moscow's position has been more consistent: After a series of statements criticizing Baghdad's treatment of LUKoil, the Foreign Ministry has largely limited itself to formal statements about Russia's striving for a peaceful resolution to the conflict - although it has expressed solidarity with the Franco-German position, it has made it clear that it will not veto a UN Security Council resolution. The delegation that went to Baghdad to discuss various economic issues reiterated Moscow's unswerving commitment to commercial projects in Iraq. Indeed, Russia's economic interests in the region are expanding. For example, Stroitransgaz recently became one of the first Russian companies to be allowed to participate in commercial tenders in Saudi Arabia; the major Blue Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Turkey is to be officially launched in the next few weeks.
Russia is absolutely right to emphasize the full range of its political and economic interests in the region. These can only be realized if there is stability in the Middle East. Hence its attempts at last-minute diplomacy. It remains to be seen what effect they will have.
Alexander Shumilin is director of the Center for Analysis of Conflicts in the Middle East, at the Russian Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the Web site Mideast.ru. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Better Well-Fed Then Red for Communists
TEXT: THE Communist Party's brand name is one of the most valuable assets on the Russian political market. Just about anything or anyone can be concealed in the folds of the Communist Party's banner, from the State Duma Perk Lovers Society to the Tsarist Fan Club.
Come what may, for the next decade or two, people in this country will vote for the party recognized as the official successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and it doesn't matter whether the party's policies are in keeping with the name or not. In fact, the more you can get away with, the more valuable the KPRF brand is. People may not be willing to vote for the same policy packaged under another name.
For the past decade, Gennady Zyuganov and his team have done a good job of pretending to be in opposition. All the while, radical communist groups that enjoyed considerable popularity in the early 1990s were squeezed out and the development of a "new left" movement was successfully blocked.
However, times have changed. President Vladimir Putin has a penchant for straightforward administrative methods and the KPRF doesn't fit very easily into the new scheme of things. So, now, the Kremlin has had a bright idea: If, in 1993, Zyuganov's team was able to privatize the KPRF brand, why not re-privatize the party - but, this time, give it to another group?
In fact, the idea of privatizing the KPRF belongs to Boris Berezovsky. Not only did he publicly discuss his plans on the pages of Nezavisimaya Gazeta and in an interview with Zavtra editor Alexander Prokhanov, he is also known to have met with Zyuganov's chief financier, Viktor Vidmanov, who rushed to London to hammer out the details of a deal with the exiled magnate. However, then other oligarchs got wise to the value of the "red brand" and a pool of oligarchs, organized by the Kremlin administration and close to the "Family" of former President Boris Yeltsin put together a consortium to privatize the KPRF.
However, bearing in mind that political parties are not bought and sold at open auction, a complicated scheme had to be worked out, the lynchpin in which was supposed to be Deputy Duma Speaker Gennady Semigin from the KPRF - who is close to the party's chief apparatchik Valentin Kuptsov. Semigin is a low-profile figure, but a key player in behind-the-scenes intrigue. This "patriotic" businessperson provides the funds to support approximately 500 KPRF and National Patriotic Union functionaries at the national and regional levels.
Until recently, people didn't take much interest in where Semigin's money came from. His position in the party was unassailable until Zyuganov and his coterie uncovered the plot to re-privatize the party and unseat Zyuganov as leader.
Earlier this month, Zyuganov's allies brought the struggle out into the open, revealing details of the behind-the-scenes goings-on. Prokhanov and Sovetskaya Rossiya editor Valentin Chikin published a joint article entitled "Operation Mole" in both their newspapers, exposing Semigin's plans to privatize the party. The article was also placed prominently on the KPRF's official Web site and, a few days later, Zyuganov personally endorsed the article.
With breath-taking naivete, Prokhanov and Chikin openly debate whether the money that was accepted as a bribe indirectly from the Kremlin was used effectively or not. At the same time, the authors of the article defend with conviction their right to maintain friendly relations with Berezovsky.
In earlier times, articles exposing "internal enemies" and "traitors" were only published once a conflict was over and the "guilty parties" were already on their way to the Lubyanka (or, at least, had been stripped of their posts).
In this case, the matter is yet to be resolved. And it seems unlikely that the different groups within the KPRF will be capable of organizing a civilized discussion on the topic of which oligarchs the party should be taking money from.
Clearly, Zyuganov's political survival is at stake - hence the lightning strike delivered against Semigin. However, even if victory is secured and Zyuganov manages to preserve his position as party leader, the damage will nonetheless be considerable.
Whoever wins in the current battle, the re-privatization of the party is merely a matter of time. However, the eventual victors may well discover that while they have been fighting for control of the brand, its value has plummeted and it's no longer worth what was paid for it.
Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.
TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: Street Legal
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the United States last weekend to protest the Bush regime's planned invasion of Iraq. It was an impressive outpouring of public will, cutting across a broad swathe of the social spectrum. For example, in Bush's own capital city, Washington, an anti-war crowd of some 200,000 was packed with religious leaders, nurses, store clerks, military veterans, housewives, hard-hats and office workers - a host of deep-dyed "Heartland" types.
Just days earlier, the city council of Chicago, the country's third-largest city - a tough, no-nonsense, big-business town - voted 46 to 1 for a declaration opposing the regime's "preemptive" aggression. (You might have missed that story, of course; it wasn't deemed worthy of mention in those organs of record, The New York Times and The Washington Post.)
This was all rousing stuff: mainstream America stirring at last from its long slumber to confront the preening usurper in the White House. Unfortunately, these protests - and 100 more like them - won't make a dime's worth of difference to the Regime's calculations for war on Iraq.
That decision was made long ago: before the Sept. 11 attacks, before the November 2000 election - even before the 1992 election, which saw the temporary removal of the Bush oligarchy from public power. During the waning days of that failed administration, plans were drawn up - by Dick Cheney among others - to ensure long-term American economic and military dominance over the world. The plan was refined over the next few years by the Project for a New American Century, a thinktank whose members included Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and several current regime officials. PNAC called for the conquest of Iraq, the planting of military bases throughout Central Asia, and the establishment of a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Why then didn't Bush the Elder simply capture Baghdad when he had the chance, during the first Gulf War? In this case, we can probably take the old deceiver at his word: "The coalition would have fallen apart." More to the point, the Saudis and Japanese would not have bankrolled further combat. People tend to forget that the United States was an economic basket case under the first Bush regime; even the police action to chase Saddam out of Kuwait and restore the undemocratic rule of George I's royal business partners would have been too costly without the foreign bailout. The Soviet Union - still in existence at that time, and still regarded as a superpower - would also have balked.
But what a difference a decade makes. Years of prosperity filled American coffers to overflowing. The Soviet Union disappeared, leaving behind a weak and acquiescent Russia, eager to scoop a few crumbs from the new master's table. Central Asia was now wide open for the plucking, ruled by the kind of thuggish crime lords Washington has always preferred to deal with. All that was missing was what one of the PNAC planners called a "Pearl Harbor-type event" to galvanize public support for unlimited military action.
Global Eye does not hold with the theory that the regime planned the Sept. 11 attacks. Nor is there yet a preponderance of public evidence to indicate that it specifically allowed them to happen - although its criminal negligence before the attack, and its strangely lethargic response during it, does call its competence and morality into severe question. But it wouldn't have required a nefarious conspiracy - or a crystal ball - to see that a big blowback from the renegade CIA army of Islamic extremists was going to hit home sooner or later. You just had to be ready to exploit it.
And if there's one thing the Bush boys know, it's how to make hay when the sun shines - or, in this case, when the smoke rises over the burning corpses of dead Americans. With a shell-shocked public still reeling from the blow, the regime seized on the catastrophe to put its long-held plans into action. At home, it established a virtual dictatorship of the executive branch of power, running roughshod over liberties - and acquiring unprecedented power to curb dissent, should it ever prove truly meddlesome. Meanwhile, cronies and contributors - including "family firms" like Cheney's Halliburton and Papa Bush's Carlyle Group - reaped billions in tax cuts and increased military spending.
The PNAC plan was then enshrined as official policy in Bush's "National Security Strategy," which commits the United States to military "pre-emption" around the world to promote what Bush calls "the single sustainable model of national existence" - i.e., the regime's own peculiar brand of corporacracy. Or, as the suddenly popular president himself put it just days after the Sept. 11 attacks: "Through my tears I see opportunity."
So here we are. The newly installed regime in Afghanistan is now signing fat deals for foreign consortiums to build pipelines across its territory. U.S. military bases - built on open-ended contracts by Halliburton - are going up all over Central Asia. Some 200,000 troops are massing on the Iraqi border.
Months ago, the regime's war planners said quite openly that they wouldn't be ready to attack until the "mid-February time frame." And that's why the war has not yet come. It has nothing to with the time-killing farce of UN "debates" and pre-doomed inspections, or with the moral force of mainstream protests on America's streets. When the logistics are ready, the assault will begin.
It's very simple; brutally simple. This war - and the attendant skewing of national priorities toward a militarized corporate state - is the reason the regime came into existence. This is their cherished dream. No one will stop it now.
For annotational references, see the "Opinion" section at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Going Under the Ice On Top of the World
AUTHOR: By Christopher Pala
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: CHUPA, Far North - While the rest of the world is just discovering that diving under ice-covered lakes can be fun, a bright young Russian marine biologist is already leading teams to the White Sea, the North Pole and Antarctica.
Ice diving is dangerous, expensive, complicated, unprofitable and uncomfortable, and even less popular than cave diving. So why is he devoting his life to pioneering it?
Because he loves what can be found only under ice: the clear water and the fantastic, infinitely varied shapes of the ice itself; the violent mating of the giant snow crabs, the delicate combfish that float by; and, in lakes, teasing crawfish and catching sleepy fish by hand.
The contours of the jumbled ice not 6 meters from a cliff along the White Sea were curiously hard to see underwater. The light the ice emitted ranged from white to green. Where the light penetrated fully, shining down between bocks broken up by the tides, tiny bubbles caught in the ice shone like miniature light bulbs.
I was lost in contemplation when I heard a scraping sound behind me. It was Misha Safonov, who would call himself the King of Ice-Diving if he weren't so modest, and he was up to one of his favorite pranks.
Displaying his mastery of the dry suit, he had turned upside down, given himself positive buoyancy and was now walking toward me on the flat ice that stretched into the distance on the other side of the dive hole.
Then, he stopped and, ever the pedagogue, pointed to his feet, where the air from his tanks had gathered in huge, quivering lumps that glistened like mercury.
He kicked them away with his fins and they broke into myriad bubbles, scuttling under the surface in a desperate search for an escape that would only come in summer.
We were at a spot that marine biologists from Moscow State University had nicknamed the bio-filter, from the large number of mussels carpeting the bottom.
The scientists had been touring the area in 1937 prior to setting up a bio-station, or field lab, 6 kilometers away.
The station where we were staying was made up of two dozen wooden buildings nestled among the pine and birch on a slope that ended with a pier. A few boats were caught in the ice or pulled up on shore.
In summer the place was bustling with students, but now, in March, it was pretty much deserted, except for us.
In addition to Safonov, the vice president of the Moscow State University Diving Club, our group included two club staffers; a professional underwater camera operator, his girlfriend/assistant, and five Russians who were paying $100 per day for a week's ice-diving.
We had left Moscow on the train to Murmansk and, after 26 hours, gotten off in the middle of the night at a tiny station on the White Sea called Chupa, where the train stopped for one minute and we were the only ones to get off.
Two cars had driven us along an awful stretch of the Murmansk-St. Petersburg road for an hour. We had piled into sleds pulled by two clunky Russian snowmobiles and, as dawn broke, traveled for another two hours along the snow-covered shore over frozen marshes and copses.
When we arrived, a pleasant surprise awaited us. Instead of the usual smelly outhouse at the bottom of the garden that is the norm in rural Russia, Safonov had had his staff place a little wooden cabin with a chemical toilet and a gas stove a few steps from the front door.
After a few hours' rest, we piled back into the sleds and drove off to the first dive site.
With Safonov riding behind us on skis, pulled by a rope, we roared across a bay to our first dive site, called The Rock. Located in a bay near an island, it was set above a huge boulder that rose to within 8 meters of the surface, and dropped steeply to 20 meters.
Though nothing marked the spot, Safonov, who had been diving around here since adolescence in summer and since 1998 in winter, knew exactly where it was.
Manual drills and saws came out and we started cutting out blocks of ice to make a pair of holes more than a meter across.
Meanwhile, the two snowmobiles left and returned with another innovation: two crude wooden houses built on runners. One had benches and a table and served as a mess hall, the other as a changing room for the divers. Both were well-heated with gas stoves.
Once the blocks of ice had been pulled out like plugs, it remained to use shovels to take out the lumps of ice that robbed the surface of its transparency. In the end, when only tiny bits remained, we poured boiling water from the expedition tea kettle over the surface to melt them.
Throughout the day, the divers explored the rock in pairs. Each was tied to a diver on the surface by a 45-meter rope held in the hand, and the tender gave tugs at regular intervals. From a distance, the tenders looked like fishermen holding lines.
It was possible to follow the path of the divers from the noise the bubbles made against the ice.
After his first dive under sea ice, I asked Alexei Yegorov, a PR representative for a multinational, whether he had liked it.
"It's wonderful," he said. "The water is so much clearer than in summer, I could see 40, 50 meters instead of 10 in summer, so the light is very different.
"But the most surprising thing is that there is so much life below and everything seems dead above," he said, waving to the expanse of whiteness around us.
As the light fell, the diving continued. Leaning over the side of the hole with a mask on, I watched Safonov and a partner shining his powerful flashlight on red sea anemones as he crept on the top of the rock just below us.
The water was so clear he seemed to be 30 meters below and not 75 meters.
We also shone a light on a combfish, visible only in winter, and saw how bright-red elements pulsated through its transparent, oval body as it slowly glided across the ice hole.
The next day we went to the so-called Bio-Filter dive site, which is located just below a cliff and was chosen because the tides break up the ice there. As we sawed our way through three holes, a white-tailed eagle wheeled overhead.
The divers spent the day exploring the jumble of ice at the foot of the cliff. "It looks like the cast of the Snow Queen, only all broken down," said Safonov, referring to the Andersen tale.
Once, Vadim, the camera operator, came up with a frozen regulator (he and everyone else had two) that we thawed with the indispensable kettle.
For the rest of the week, we alternated between the two spots. Sometimes it snowed, sometimes there was brilliant sunshine. Our warm clothing made us physically insensitive to the changes, though divers walking around with snow on their suits made for an amusing sight. The temperature ranged from well below freezing to well above.
I spent the last night alone in a fisherman's log cabin built under the trees on a head of land near the Bio-Filter site. The ceiling was low and a wood stove kept me warm. There was a full moon in a clear sky and I spent an hour outside sitting on an ice ridge, savoring the silent beauty that is the white White Sea.
TITLE: Falling for the World Hidden Under the White Sea
AUTHOR: By Christopher Pala
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - I met Mikhail Safonov at the North Pole in 1999.
The previous year, a professional rescuer, Andrei Rozhkov, approached him about organizing the first spring dive at the pole. Rozhkov, a veteran parachutist and diver, died of a heart attack during the dive - the first man to dive at the pole became the first man to die doing it.
Safonov returned a year later with six Russians and three Westerners. I witnessed that dive, which went smoothly, and Safonov and I became friends.
On the train ride back from a week's dive this year, this time on the White Sea, I asked Safonov, who is 31, how a childhood in Moscow led him to diving and, particularly, to ice diving.
"By the time I was seven, I knew I wanted to be a marine biologist," he said. " I started diving at 18 but, in Soviet times, there was no recreational diving. Invertebrate-marine-biology students were required to take a professional diving course, and that's what I did. Naturally, that included diving under ice in lakes and rivers."
"Then, in 1990, when I was working on my Ph.D. and supporting my wife and two kids on an teaching assistant's salary, Vladimir Orlov [another marine biologist] and I decided to start a diving club at the university. We thought we could keep the club small, concentrate on instruction, make $500 a month and continue to teach and work as scientists."
"We soon found out that to survive, we had to grow," he said. "So we bought a small research ship, the Kartesh - it's 30 meters long, with room for 18 guests - and started doing summer diving safaris in the White and Barents seas. I was curious to see what things looked like under the ice, so in 1998 we came to dive at the bio-station with four clients. I was really surprised to discover to what extent underwater life goes on in winter. We saw things that we had never seen in summer, such as the mating of the giant snow crabs. When I saw it for the first time, I thought they would fight, and the bigger crab would eat the smaller one. They would jump at each other with tremendous violence and stay locked in a tight embrace for 10 or 15 minutes. We were mesmerized and watched them the whole time. It turned out that the bigger one was a female and a small one was a male."
Safonov took a sip of tea as the train rumbled through the night and continued.
"We've been doing the White Sea in winter ever since," he said. "The water is very clear, there's a rich marine life and it's reasonably accessible. I've dived around St. Petersburg, but the water is murky and there's very little life, though plenty of shipwrecks."
"It's dangerous. The sea water under the ice is at minus 1.8 degrees Celsius and the condensation in your regulator can freeze at any time, so you need two regulators. But a dry suit is much more cumbersome than a wetsuit, and your hands are numb with cold, so finding the other regulator fast is something you need to train for. And you can't always surface right away, sometimes you are 40 meters from the ice hole. Last year we had a client drown just below the hole, 4 meters deep. We never understood why."
"If there were more frozen lakes in Europe and a frozen sea, more people would do it, but there is a very limited supply of places. The White Sea is still a terra incognita for Europeans," he said "Now that Russia is an open country and it's possible to dive with Russians at the North Pole and the White Sea, the number of ice divers should increase."
TITLE: Israel Toughens Stance Ahead of Election
AUTHOR: By Mark Lavie
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERUSALEM - Israel locked down the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Sunday ahead of its national election, after a large-scale military incursion into Gaza and warnings that Palestinians may try to disrupt the voting with violence.
About 26,500 police and soldiers were deploying to guard against Palestinian attacks during the voting, scheduled for Tuesday, police spokesperson Gil Kleiman said. There were general warnings of attacks by Palestinians over the next 48 hours, but no more than usual, he said.
However, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the cabinet on Sunday that Israel is in the midst of an "assault of terror," both in terms of the scope of warnings and attempts to carry out attacks.
Wrapping up his campaign in Haifa, the home of his main opponent, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would try to set up a broad-based government after the election.
On Sunday afternoon, Israel imposed a blanket closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, barring all Palestinians from entering Israel and confining most to their communities. Israel has enforced stringent travel bans on Palestinians since the outbreak of fighting, but Sunday's restrictions, to be in effect until Wednesday, impeded movement even further.
The military said the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the West Bank and the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt would remain open.
Palestinians drew a connection between the Israeli election and a large-scale Israeli incursion into Gaza City early Sunday in which 12 Palestinian gunmen were killed and 67 wounded. Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said it was part of Sharon's re-election campaign.
The Gaza City raid began shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday, and ended Sunday morning. After Israeli troops withdrew, about 30,000 Palestinians joined the funeral procession for the 12 gunmen killed in the fighting - the highest death toll in Gaza in five months. Those killed included members of the security forces and various Palestinian militias.
It was the deepest Israeli penetration into the Palestinian city of 300,000 in more than two years of fighting. The raid came in response to the firing of crude, short-range Qassam rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot in the southern Negev Desert, near Gaza, on Friday.
"The Israelis will pay a heavy price for every drop of blood shed last night," Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas, told the crowd at the funeral. "Our battle will continue until we uproot this Zionist occupation from our holy land, no matter what the sacrifice."
The Israeli military said its forces "raided dozens of buildings used as weapon-producing workshops," destroying equipment. Also, soldiers blew up two houses belonging to militants. However, five more Qassam rockets were fired at Israel Sunday, causing no damage or injuries.
Also in Gaza, a 50-year-old Palestinian man was killed outside his home in the border town of Rafah by an Israeli tank shell, Palestinian security officials said. The Israeli military said soldiers opened fire on suspicious figures moving in a forbidden area near the Gaza-Egypt border.
In Cairo, where the Egyptian government has been trying to forge an agreement among Palestinian factions for an end to attacks against Israeli civilians, the Arab League issued a statement condemning the Israeli incursion and warning that failure of the international community to stop such actions "would increase the feelings of Arab anger and frustration."
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement deploring the "ominous" escalating violence, criticizing Israeli operations "that place Palestinian civilians in harm's way" and Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
Ahead of the electopm, a poll published Sunday indicated that Sharon's Likud Party remains comfortably ahead, winning 30 seats in the 120-member parliament, compared to 19 for the opposition Labor party. The Geocartographia survey among 1,007 voters also said the centrist Shinui party would win 13 seats. It quoted an error margin of 3.1 percentage points.
TITLE: Ivory Coast Rocked by Rioting on Peace Plan
AUTHOR: By Austin Merrill
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo prepared Monday to address his splintered country on a French-brokered peace plan, the day after violent opposition to the plan from Gbagbo's own supporters shook the country's key city.
A pro-government youth group that has played a lead role in weeks of at-times violent demonstrations in Abidjan said it would rally Monday in front of the U.S. Embassy, urging Washington to come out against the peace plan.
Angry at France over the French-mediated peace deal, pro-government protesters in Abidjan have pinned their hopes in part on the United States opposing the deal.
The U.S. State Department already has welcomed the plan, however, and urged all sides to stick to it.
On Sunday, government supporters went on a rampage through the city of 3 million, laying siege to France's embassy and army base and looting French-affiliated businesses and agencies.
French forces in the former French colony responded with tear gas, stun grenades and water cannon.
Protesters blamed France for a peace deal closed Friday in Paris that they said gave too much to rebels behind Ivory Coast's 4-month-old civil war.
From Paris, Gbagbo urged calm. The violence led Gbagbo to cut short his trip to Paris and return late Sunday to Abidjan.
Hundreds broke military curfew for a second night to line the route of the presidential motorcade and welcome him.
Witnesses at the airport awaiting the president's arrival reported hearing shots and smelling tear gas around midnight from the direction of the main French army base, where some protesters reportedly lingered. There was no immediate word from French military officials.
Gbagbo worked into early Monday morning with advisers on an address to be delivered to the country Monday evening, aides said.
Gbagbo has argued to his fervent supporters that compromise was unavoidable to achieve peace, acknowledging Sunday, "I did not win this war."
Despite Sunday's mob attacks, Gbagbo spokesman Toussaint Alain insisted "the Ivorian people are not against France." Instead, they are "in support of ... the legitimacy of President Gbagbo."
Abidjan's people awoke to a tense but calm city. Merchants and others sought to clean up scattered damage from protests that saw ralliers set fires and ransack some businesses.
A key part of the accord calls for a power-sharing deal between rebels, government and the political opposition until 2005 elections.
The accord is meant to end the worst-ever uprising in Ivory Coast, the world's largest cocoa producer. Conflict erupted Sept. 19 with a failed coup attempt against Gbagbo.
The rebels - who accuse the president's southern-based government of fanning ethnic tensions - quickly seized the northern half of the country and, since November, have taken parts of the west.
TITLE: Serbia's Former Top Two Back in Court in the Netherlands
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: THE HAGUE - Former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic on Monday pleaded not guilty to crimes against humanity during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo as he made his first court appearance since surrendering to the tribunal in The Hague.
The former ally of ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic denied four counts of crimes against humanity including murder, deportation and persecutions, and one charge of war crimes at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
Milutinovic, whose five-year term as president of Serbia ended late last month, flew to The Hague a week ago. He was indicted in 1999 along with Milosevic and three other former senior officials for atrocities against Albanians in Kosovo, the southern province of Serbia now under United Nations rule.
The white-haired Milutinovic, dressed in a dark suit, striped shirt and blue tie, looked pale but poised as he sat in a dock usually occupied by Milosevic, who has been on trial in The Hague since last February.
Prosecutors allege Milutinovic, 60, had at least formal control over Serb forces who killed hundreds of ethnic Albanians and expelled hundreds of thousands from their homes.
Milutinovic participated in "a deliberate and widespread or systematic campaign of terror and violence directed at Kosovo Albanian civilians living in Kosovo in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia", according to the charge sheet against him.
But Milutinovic has argued that as president of Serbia - the dominant of the remaining two republics of Yugoslavia - he had little real power.
Named along with Milutinovic on the original Kosovo indictment were former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, ex-army chief Dragoljub Ojdanic and former Serb Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic.
Sainovic and Ojdanic surrendered to The Hague last spring and pleaded not guilty. But Stojiljkovic shot himself and died in Belgrade last April just hours after parliament passed a law to send him and other war crimes suspects to the UN tribunal.
Prosecutors say around 800,000 Kosovo Albanian civilians were deported, and accuse Serb forces of a string of massacres.
Also Monday, Milosevic returned to court after a two-week recovery from the flu to face testimony from a former Croatian defense minister.
Milosevic's poor health has lead to nearly two months of postponements since his war crimes trial began at the UN Yugoslav tribunal last February.
Milosevic, 61, suffers from high blood pressure and his doctors say he is at serious risk of a heart attack due to the strain of his trial, where he is defending himself against 66 counts of war crimes allegedly committed during the Balkans upheavals in the 1990s.
Monday's witness, Petar Kriste, served as Croatia's first minister of defense for several months in 1990 and then became the minister of trade at the start of the war of 1991 to 1995.
He testified Monday that the Croat government had hoped to avoid conflict with the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army at the start of fighting, but Milosevic and other Serb nationalists were determined to "push the borders of Serbia further to the West so that all the Serbs would be living in a single state."
He said the Yugoslav army's shelling of the historic coastal city of Dubrovnik in October 1991 was part of this plan.
Milosevic has argued in the past that the Yugoslav army shelled Dubrovnik in self-defense after coming under attack.
TITLE: Korean Envoys Meet To Discuss Weapons
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - A South Korean presidential envoy met with a key aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on Monday as the communist country criticized the UN nuclear agency, saying it was in no position to address the impasse over weapons development.
Lim Dong-won, a national security adviser to President Kim Dae-jung and a former unification minister, flew to the North's capital, Pyongyang, earlier Monday. He was accompanied by an envoy of President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, who takes office on Feb. 25.
In North Korea, Lim spoke first with Kim Yong Sun, who is known as a close confidant of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Despite the talks, North Korea on Monday issued an angry tirade through its state-run KCNA news agency against the UN International Atomic Energy Agency. It called agency head Mohamed ElBaradei a "poor servant and mouthpiece" of the United States.
The IAEA indefinitely postponed a meeting of its 35-country board of directors to discuss whether to refer the Korean nuclear crisis to the Security Council after South Korea said the meeting could upset its efforts at dialogue with North Korea.
Washington is pushing for the matter to go to the Security Council, which could further pressure the North with international sanctions. The North has said that it would consider sanctions a declaration of war.
Officials in Seoul did not provide details on the delegation's activities, including whether Lim met alone with the confidant of the North Korean leader.
Lim said he was not carrying any specific "solution" to the dispute. He said the North's nuclear issue would take "a considerably long time" to be resolved.
"My mission is to convey President Kim's strong will to resolve the dispute peacefully and carry back a North Korean response," he said before he left. "If possible, I will try to find a solution."
Also on Monday, an American pilot whose U-2 spy plane crashed in South Korea on the weekend, injuring four Korean people on the ground, apologized for the accident.
"I am deeply sorry for injuries, damage, or suffering caused by this accident for anyone on the ground," said the pilot, who was not identified in the statement. The crash happened on Sunday.
The pilot ejected safely from the plane before it crashed and was treated for minor injuries. He said in the statement that he did everything he could to keep the plane from hitting a densely populated area. U.S. military officials said the pilot belonged to the 5th reconnaissance squadron at Osan Air Base, southeast of Seoul.
The plane crashed about 50 kilometers south of Seoul. The U.S. Air Force said an investigation was underway to find out the cause of the accident.
TITLE: Bucs Down Raiders for First Superbowl
AUTHOR: By Barry Wilner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN DIEGO - They were the laughingstock of the NFL, maybe of all pro sports.
They had garish orange uniforms with a winking pirate on the helmet. Losing 10 games came automatically. Wasting high draft picks was also a given.
Those Tampa Bay Buccaneers were buried Sunday with a flourish. Led by a fearsome defense, a suddenly dynamic offense and a coach who brought the final fiery touch, the Bucs routed the Oakland Raiders 48-21 in the Super Bowl.
Laughingstock? Try champions.
"For all this franchise has been through, nothing could be sweeter," veteran safety John Lynch said. "Super Bowl champs. Wow!"
Indeed. As in five interceptions of league MVP Rich Gannon, three of them returned for touchdowns - two by nickel back Dwight Smith, a Super Bowl record, and one by NFL defensive player of the year Derrick Brooks.
The other two pickoffs went to Super Bowl MVP Dexter Jackson.
As in holding the game's No. 1 offense to 62 yards and three first downs in the first half, which ended 20-3.
As in staging consecutive touchdown drives of 77 and 89 yards, both concluding with passes to Keenan McCardell, a 5-yard score and an 8-yarder.
Whatever the Bucs tried seemed to work. It was as if coach Jon Gruden, acquired from the Raiders last February for four high draft picks and $8 million, had drawn up the game plan for both teams.
In a way, he had.
"Jon Gruden was Gannon," said Bucs defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin, whose unit also had five sacks and yielded all of 19 yards rushing. "Nobody can be like Gannon like Gruden can. He taught Gannon. He was in Gannon's head."
But Gruden played down that apparent advantage.
"That was all overrated," he said. "I stayed away from the defense. That's a credit to our players. We've got a great defensive club."
So great that All-Pro tackle Warren Sapp was willing to proclaim it the best ever.
Before he attempted to light a massive victory cigar, Sapp compared the unit that allowed only 196 points this season - and just two touchdowns in the playoffs that were not tainted by special-teams gaffes - to the legendary defenses.
"We had to have that championship before we could say anything," Sapp said. "Now you can put us in the same sentence as the Ravens and the Steel Curtain."
"But I don't think any of them faced the kind of offense like we did. None of them went into the Super Bowl and played the No. 1 offense. And we put a stranglehold on them."
Almost from the very start.
Brad Johnson was hit as he threw on Tampa Bay's third play from scrimmage. The ball fluttered short of a wide-open McCardell to cornerback Charles Woodson.
Just like that, the vaunted Oakland attack was at the Bucs 36. But Tampa Bay held the Raiders to Sebastian Janikowski's 40-yard field goal.
The next 34 points belonged to the Bucs.
Martin Gramatica tied it with a 31-yarder, and Jackson got his first interception near the end of the opening quarter. That led to Gramatica's 43-yarder.
While Jackson's second interception on the next series did not lead to points, the defense had fully asserted itself.
"Give them a lot of credit," Gannon said. "They performed exceptionally well on defense and we couldn't do what we wanted to do. The turnovers obviously killed us. ... It was a nightmarish performance."
It was the kind of performance people expected from the old Bucs, the ones who lost their first 26 games (0-14 in their debut season of 1976) and, in one 14-year stretch, had 13 seasons with at least 10 losses, including 12 in a row. On Sunday, it was the Raiders who were inept on both sides.
The worst came after Tampa Bay took a 13-3 lead on Mike Alstott's 2-yard run that Karl Williams set up with a 25-yard punt return. Looking to get back into it, the Raiders wound up punting, and the Bucs went on a 77-yard drive to McCardell's first touchdown catch.
After an Oakland three-and-out to start the second half, Tampa Bay covered 89 yards in 14 plays and nearly eight minutes, with McCardell scoring from the eight.
Two plays after that, Smith cut in front of Jerry Rice and stole a poor pass from Gannon, sprinting 44 yards to make it 34-3.
"This is the thing I've been doing for 17 years of my life," said Smith, one of the least-heralded Bucs defenders. "Play football and make plays was what I was known to do."
Better known for doing it are Sapp, Brooks, Lynch, Simeon Rice (two sacks and relentless pressure), Ronde Barber and Brian Kelly. But Smith and Jackson got many of the accolades this night.
"When I first came to the team I knew they had some great players like the Sapps, the Lynches and the Brookses," Jackson said. "These guys came from nothing and came together as a championship caliber team."
That they came together on offense, as well, made this rout even more impressive.
Many expected the Bucs to outdo the Raiders defensively. But to also have the game's most dynamic offense before 67,603 fans - none of them wearing that awful orange - might have been too much to ask.
"It's so awesome after what this franchise has been through," Lynch said. "You got to go prove it, but we knew that we had it, and that's what Jon did so well - make us believe it."
"One of his first words was that we are going to win a world championship. We never wavered from that fact. It's unreal."
TITLE: Sister Act Ends With Another Serena Win
AUTHOR: By Phil Brown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia - Serena Williams has said all along that she's the perfectionist in the family. Now, she has a perfect set of trophies from the last four major tennis tournaments.
Williams completed her "Serena Slam" by defeating older sister Venus at the Australian Open, 7-6 (7-4), 3-6, 6-4 Saturday. Serena has beaten Venus in the final of the last four majors.
The match was filled with mistakes, and Serena committed 54 errors, compared with 51 for Venus. Serena slammed down her racket after a few of the more serious miscues, and she berated a line judge even after winning a key point.
"I think she just about had me," Serena said of her sister. "I just wanted to win so bad."
Serena missed last year's Australian Open with an injury, ruining her shot at becoming the first player since Steffi Graf in 1988 to win a true Grand Slam - all four majors in the same calendar year.
But, after winning last year's French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles, and now the Australian, Serena joins an elite group of players who have held all four major titles at once; the others are Maureen Connolly, Margaret Court, Martina Navratilova and Graf. Connolly and Court also won all four in the same year.
"I just can't believe I can now be compared to these women," Serena said. "They're such greats, and I don't know if I'll accomplish everything they have."
"But to even be in the category of winning four in a row is, for me, really amazing, it's something I've always dreamed of and wanted to do."
Errors cost Serena two service games in the first set. After she netted a forehand with Venus out of position, leaving herself at 4-5, she tossed her racket.
But Venus couldn't serve out the set, losing serve for the second time as well. Later, she held for 6-all, helped by a forehand that sent Serena stumbling.
The second set was the first Venus had won from Serena in five matches since she beat Serena in the U.S. Open final in September 2001.
The two traded early breaks in the final set, and Serena had five break points to go ahead 5-3. She violently hurled down her racket after finally netting a forehand to give Venus game point.
"That's fine," Venus said. "She's questioning calls and yells and slams the racket. I'm more or less the one that's kind of silent."
In the last game, however, Venus went out with four straight errors, ending with a forehand hit long.
On Sunday, Andre Agassi needed only 76 minutes to beat Germany's Rainer Schuettler 6-2, 6-2, 6-1.
The 26-year-old Schuettler, seeded 31st and playing in his first Grand Slam quarterfinal, was outmatched from the start.
Agassi won the first eight points before hitting a backhand long, prompting Schuettler to raise in arms in mock triumph. Schuettler held service four times the entire match.
"Over the past two weeks, I've been hitting the ball better than I ever have. I feel stronger and better. It's a great feeling to work hard and have it pay off," Agassi said.
Schuettler said he's never faced a better player.
"It's as if he puts you on a carousel and you just can't get off," he said. From the first point on, I was under pressure. It's a bit disappointing to play a final and lose easy like that."
Agassi, the oldest man to win a Grand Slam singles title since Ken Rosewall won the Australian in 1972 at age 37, makes some concessions to age.
While he is ready to work hard for major tournaments, he is not interested in "grinding through a lot of different circumstances and difficulties" to pursue the No. 1 ranking again, he said.
"No. 1 will be a result of a lot of things going right, and it's a long year," said Agassi, who is ranked second in the world behind 21-year-old Lleyton Hewitt.
Besides, Agassi said, "the year is a complete success for me now. I'm over the moon with it."
Receiving his trophy, he told the center court audience, "There's not a single day that's guaranteed or promised to us, and certainly days like this are very rare."
Agassi said he now regrets not playing more often in the Australian Open, where he has won four titles - 1995, 2000, 2001 and 2003 - in seven outings.
Agassi's eight Grand Slam titles tie him for sixth-most with Rosewall, Jimmy Connors, Ivan Lendl and Fred Perry. Agassi also is the fourth man to win at least four Australian titles. Roy Emerson had six, and Rosewall and Jack Crawford won four each.
By losing only five games, Agassi matched the most lopsided victory ever in an Australian Open final - John Hawkes' 6-1, 6-3, 6-1 defeat of Jim Willard in 1926. Overall, it was the most lopsided Grand Slam men's final since John McEnroe lost just four games to Connors at Wimbledon in 1984.
At age 46, Martina Navratilova served out the match, teaming with India's Leander Paes to beat Todd Woodbridge and Eleni Daniilidou 6-4, 7-5 Sunday for the Australian Open mixed doubles championship.
It was her first mixed title in the Australian, and completed an impressive cycle - at least one title each in singles, doubles and mixed doubles at all four major tournaments.
"This goes beyond any wildest dream," said Navratilova, who was playing in her first Grand Slam final in almost eight years.
It was her 57th title at a Grand Slam tournament, and eighth in mixed doubles. She also has won 18 singles and 31 doubles, but still trails Australian Margaret Court, who has 62 titles, including 24 singles.
At age 46 years, 3 months, she was a month older than the previous oldest winner at a Grand Slam event, Australian Norman Brookes in the 1924 Australian men's doubles.
TITLE: Returning Carter Inspires Raptors To Win Over Kings
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TORONTO - Vince Carter showed that his right knee feels fine, and the good news didn't come a minute too soon for the Toronto Raptors.
Playing in his first game since Dec. 8, Carter scored 22 points as Toronto defeated the Sacramento Kings 101-907 Sunday to snap a five-game losing streak.
Carter, who missed 23 games because of a strained knee, scored Toronto's last six points on his 26th birthday.
"It was a very nice birthday present," Carter said. "It wasn't just a present for the team, it was a present for the fans. It was an opportunity to show that we can play with one of the best teams in the league, and show that when we get the majority of our guys back, we're a pretty good team ourselves."
After a two-handed dunk in the second quarter, Carter bent down to dust off his right knee.
"I was dusting the old stuff off and letting you know that my knee's OK," Carter said. "Actually, it was to let the doctors know, so that they could breathe easy."
Not everyone cheered Carter's return.
"I don't really care about Vince. We lost today. Who cares?" said the Kings' Chris Webber, who had a triple-double with 24 points, 19 rebounds and 10 assists. "There's a lot of good players in the NBA. All I'm concerned about is the Kings."
Carter looked tentative in the opening minutes but scored 15 points in the second half. He finished 8-of-16 from the field in 23 minutes.
"He had just had a great all-around game," Toronto's Jerome Williams said. "I'm just glad he was able to come in and not re-injure himself."
Carter was voted to start the All-Star game by the fans, despite playing in only 10 games before Sunday. Before getting hurt in practice on Dec. 10 - two days after scoring 25 points in a loss to Portland - Carter missed 10 other games with an injured left knee.
"We've been missing Vince for so long," Toronto's Alvin Williams said. "He really did a great job coming in."
Carter's fadeaway jumper gave the Raptors a 97-91 lead with 1:36 left, and his two free throws made it 99-94 with 17.7 seconds remaining.
Sacramento's Jim Jackson followed with a 3-pointer, but Carter made two free throws with 0:07.9 left to give Toronto a four-point lead.
Carter's 3-pointer, fadeaway jumper and short jumper gave Toronto a nine-point lead early in the third quarter. The Kings followed with a 12-4 run, including 10 straight points from Bibby.
Vlade Divac's jumper cut the lead to one, but Toronto began the fourth quarter with a 15-4 run, including Carter's 3-pointer with 6:58 left.
After Carter made his fadeaway jumper with 1:36 left, Webber made one of two free throws. Webber then missed two free throws with 56 seconds left, but Bibby made two with 18.2 seconds left to cut Toronto's lead to three.
Carter then made his two free throws before Jackson's 3-pointer. After Carter made two more to give Toronto a four-point lead, Webber missed a 3-pointer with 3 seconds left.
"We knew Carter coming back would bring them energy," Stojakovic said."The other guys looked confident because of him."
New York 106, Phoenix 98. Kurt Thomas scored 28 points, grabbed a season-high 17 rebounds and glared at the referees only once Sunday as the Knicks opened a big lead and then held off the Phoenix Suns.
Players who continually glare and complain never seem to get the benefit of the doubt in the NBA - a lesson that Thomas has stubbornly refused to learn.
Sunday's game was different, however, with Thomas's only glare at an official coming when Dick Bavetta called a foul on Latrell Sprewell late in the first quarter - after Thomas had already collected 14 points and six rebounds.
Sprewell also scored 28 points and Allan Houston added 16 for the Knicks, who benefited from one of the worst games of the season by Suns rookie Amare Stoudemire.
The 20-year-old phenom had just three points and six rebounds and missed three of four free throws.
Stephon Marbury had 31 points and nine assists and Shawn Marion scored 24 for the Suns, who cut a 22-point deficit to five in the late going but couldn't get any closer.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Capitals Making Numbers Count on Power Plays
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The Washington Capitals' power play has some sting these days.
Sergei Gonchar had a goal and three assists and the Capitals produced five power-play goals in a 7-2 victory over the New York Rangers in a penalty-filled game Sunday.
Robert Lang scored twice and Jaromir Jagr had a goal and two assists for Washington.
"We had the power plays, we won the game," Jagr said.
Calle Johansson, Kip Miller and Peter Bondra also scored for the Capitals, who are 2-0-2 in their last four games.
Washington has recorded two or more power-play goals in five of its last nine games. The Capitals have 19 power-play goals in 16 games.
Only a month ago, Washington was not delivering on its power play. On Sunday, the Capitals entered the game with the 13th-best power play in the NHL, and the fifth most dangerous at home.
"The key is that we stuck together," Gonchar said. "In the beginning of the game, we got a five-minute penalty [called against Washington] and we killed it. That was huge - the game started and we were down for five minutes."
Referees Mike Hasenfratz and Brad Watson called 155 minutes in penalties, 89 against the Rangers. There were three fighting majors assessed and several other melees that resulted in seven misconduct penalties and two game misconducts, both handed to New York. Rangers defenseman Boris Mironov was ejected in the opening minute.
Jamie Lundmark scored twice for the Rangers, who have lost two straight.
"We need to maintain a little more poise at times and come up with focus," Rangers coach Bryan Trottier said. "We paid the price tonight."
The Rangers wasted a five-minute power play awarded them 0:51 into the game, and never seemed to recover.
"That changed the whole complexion of the game to a certain extent," Washington coach Bruce Cassidy said. "If they get one or two goals, now you're behind the 8-ball."
New York then let Washington take a 1-0 lead on a power-play goal by Lang, who tipped Gonchar's center-point slap shot at 9:32.
Johansson swept a backhander past a screened Mike Dunham from the right circle at 12:23, making it 2-0.
New York's Matthew Barnaby was penalized for tripping 18 seconds into the second period, and the Capitals needed only 32 seconds of the power play to go up 3-0 when Miller scored from the right side.
Dan Blackburn replaced Dunham at 3:12 of the second and Lundmark got the Rangers' first goal on a shot from the left point.
Presented two 5-on-3 power plays early in the third period, Washington converted on both, with Gonchar scoring 3:50 into the period and Jagr scoring 1:15 later for a 5-1 lead.
Montreal 4, Chicago 3. Jan Bulis scored midway through the third period to lead Montreal to a 4-3 win over the Chicago Blackhawks on Sunday.
Chicago rookie Tyler Arnason made it 3-3 early in the third period. Bulis restored the Canadiens' lead with 11 minutes left when he took a pass from Doug Gilmour and fired the puck over Jocelyn Thibault.
Montreal held a 31-19 advantage in shots, including a 12-5 margin in the second while scoring three straight goals. It was just the 10th time through 51 games the Canadiens have outshot opponents.
"We played 60 minutes for the first time - we outshot the other team and that's what we've got to do in our next games," Bulis said.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Lemiex Doubtful
PITTSBURGH (AP) - Mario Lemieux might miss the NHL All-Star game because of a groin injury.
Lemieux, who has missed eight of the Pittsburgh Penguins' last nine games, does not plan on playing in Tuesday night's road game against the New York Islanders. He is expected to decide Wednesday if he will try to play Thursday night in Washington.
"If I don't play [this week], it would be tough to play in the All-Star game," Lemieux said.
The All-Star game is Sunday in suburban Miami.
Lemieux, the NHL's leading scorer, has played only a few shifts since sustaining a groin injury Jan. 7 against the Islanders. He hasn't skated since spending a few minutes on the ice in practice Monday.
"It's taken a lot longer than I thought," Lemieux said. "It's frustrating. Every day you get up and it's still there."
Gazza in China
BEIJING (Reuters) - Former England midfielder Paul Gascoigne joined the last-place team in China's second division from the dirt-poor western province of Gansu, saying on Monday the chance to become a player-coach was too good to pass up.
Gascoigne, with his trademark humour, suggested a diet of Chinese delicacies would help him adapt to life with B-league Gansu Tianma in Lanzhou, a largely Muslim industrial city on the fringes of the desert northwest known for spicy noodles.
"I've tried everything. I've tried duck's head, I've tried chicken's head, chicken's feet, bats and everything," he said. "And hopefully if I keep that up I'll be flying."
The ex-England midfielder, 35, who arrived in China earlier this month hoping to revive his career, said he passed up an offer to stay with first division side Liaoning Bodao, which expressed concerns about his fitness, to coach as well.
"I've been missing football and it's a big opportunity for me," he told reporters after signing a contract with Gansu Tianma on Sunday.
Gansu Tianma ended the 2002 season in last place in the B-league, with a record of four wins, seven draws and 11 defeats.
Kirkland Out
LIVERPOOL, England (Reuters) - Liverpool goalkeeper Chris Kirkland was ruled out for the rest of the season on Monday due to a torn knee ligament.
The 21-year-old, tipped as a future England international, was injured in Liverpool's FA Cup fourth round tie at Crystal Palace on Sunday when he collided with the first division side's striker Dele Adebola.
"Chris Kirkland has been ruled out for the rest of the season after sustaining a tear to the posterior cruciate ligament in his right knee," Liverpool said on their official Web site on Monday.
Dodgy Dealings
HOUSTON (AP) - The Houston Astros traded outfielder Daryle Ward to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Saturday, clearing room for Craig Biggio to move from second base to center field.
Ward, who failed to live up to his power-hitting potential, was traded for minor league pitcher Ruddy Lugo.
Ward, 27, hit.276 last season for the Astros, with just 12 home runs and 72 RBIs. He also had limited fielding range, but the Dodgers praised his versatility.
Biggio is changing positions to make way for free agent second baseman Jeff Kent, who signed an $18.2 million, two-year contract with Houston last month after turning down a three-year deal from the San Francisco Giants.