SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #942 (10), Tuesday, February 10, 2004
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TITLE: Tbilisi Had Blast 'Warning'
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A man showed up at the Russian Embassy in Tbilisi a day before the Moscow metro blast and warned that Chechen rebels planned to carry out a "huge" terrorist attack in the capital on Friday, Georgia's state security minister said Monday.
The revelation came as investigators said Friday's explosion bore the trademarks of a train suicide bombing in Stavropol last year and Moscow observed a day of mourning.
The blast in the metro tunnel near the Avtozavodskaya station killed at least 39 people. President Vladimir Putin has blamed Chechen rebels.
Georgian Security Minister Valery Khaburdzania said the man was recruited by authorities in the breakaway region of Abkhazia who knew of the bombing in advance and plotted to place the blame for the attack on Georgia, Interfax reported.
He said the man, Nazir Aidabolov, a Russian citizen from the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, was told to go to the Pankisi Gorge and collect the names of several Chechens there that he could later give to Federal Security Service officials at the Russian Embassy. Georgia's Pankisi Gorge has long been a hideout for Chechen rebels.
This would have created "the impression that the terrorist acts had been planned specifically in the Pankisi Gorge," Khaburdzania told reporters in Tbilisi, Interfax reported.
He said Aidabolov went to the embassy and warned an FSB officer there that Chechens were planning a major attack for Friday.
Abkhaz officials denied Khaburdzania's allegations Monday.
Aidabolov also warned the FSB officer that a second attack would be carried out at an outdoor market in the southern Stavropol region two or three days later, Khaburdzania said.
Stavropol authorities ordered all regional markets closed for three days after the Moscow bombing for sanitary inspections, local media reported.
The FSB has detained Aidabolov for questioning, Ekho Moskvy radio reported.
FSB officials could not be reached for comment late Monday.
But earlier in the day, the FSB, which is in charge of the metro bombing investigation, reiterated that Friday's blast was most likely the work of a suicide bomber.
"This terrorist act is identical to the one committed last year in Yessentuki," FSB deputy director Vyacheslav Ushakov told a gathering of State Duma deputies in the Moscow region.
In December, a suicide bomber blew up a train near the Stavropol region town, killing 46 people.
Ushakov did not elaborate on the similarities.
But sources close to the investigation said Monday that the explosive device used Friday had been packed with metal nuts and bolts - shrapnel meant to increase the force of the blast and used by Chechen suicide bombers in a series of attacks last year, Interfax reported.
The investigation is being headed by Alexander Zhdankov, the FSB's pointman for combating terrorism and a former commander of the federal forces in Chechnya. Local media said his involvement might help investigators trace possible links between the explosion and Chechen rebels.
As one of his first acts, Zhdankov ordered FSB departments in the North Caucasus region to search for possible accomplices in the Moscow bombing and focus on the families that lost relatives in the ongoing war with federal troops, Kommersant reported Monday.
FSB sources said the blast might have been ordered by Arab warlord Abu Walid, who is thought to be responsible for distributing foreign financial aid among Chechen rebels, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported.
While the main theory being investigated is that a suicide bomber detonated the explosives, the FSB is also looking into the possibility that a time bomb might have been left on the train and exploded when a passenger picked it up, Kommersant said. Investigators earlier established that the device detonated about 50 centimeters above the floor. A third theory is that the blast might have been accidental.
Although the official death toll has been placed at 39, reports from a morgue official familiar with the situation and in the local media put the number at between 50 to 120 people.
Gazeta reported Monday that City Hall has a list of the actual number of people killed that is much higher than the official one, but the FSB has barred it from releasing the information.
The FSB denied this. "We are ignoring this report. The main thing now is to conduct the investigation," an FSB spokesman said by telephone.
The Moscow prosecutor's office issued a vague statement saying that 39 is not the final figure but it was unlikely to change.
Prosecutors said 34 bodies had been identified as of Monday - 18 men and 16 women. They said the dead included two Armenians and one Moldovan. The youngest was a teenager who was to turn 18 this month and the oldest was a man of 57.
Pavel Ivanov of the Russian Forensic Medicine Center said the exact death toll could be established in four weeks, after experts study all the body fragments, RIA Novosti reported.
The type of metro car that exploded can carry up to 200 passengers, Moscow metro spokeswoman Yelena Krylova said.
Russian newspapers gave heartbreaking accounts of how relatives identified the dead. Natalya Kiselyova, 35, died as she was headed for work at the Central Elections Commission, her parents told Izvestia. Kiselyova was among the election officials who oversaw the legality of last year's Chechen referendum.
Ushakov on Monday called for new laws giving more power to the FSB to prevent terrorism, saying that among other things the FSB needs to be able to arrest suspects without a court warrant, Interfax reported.
Amid the accusations that rebels are behind Friday's bombing, Chechens complained of a growing animosity Monday. Rudnik Dudayev, head of the Chechen Security Council said authorities have received hundreds of calls from Chechen students in other regions complaining of "cynical treatment" and "reproaches" by teachers, Interfax reported.
Chechnya President Akhmad Kadyrov condemned what he called "the instigation of ethnic enmity."
Nationalities Minister Vladimir Zorin echoed his comments, saying, "International terrorism is no doubt Enemy No. 1 today, but it is no less dangerous to instigate anti-Caucasus and xenophobic sentiments in a great multinational country like Russia."
As of Monday, 102 people remained hospitalized, Interfax reported. The first two victims were buried that day.
TITLE: Ostriches Find Favor In Oblast
AUTHOR: By Simone Kozuharov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Never leave your ostriches alone. Never try to get too friendly with them either. And most importantly, never assume that farm work is not important for city folk because even Bill Gates would trade in his computer for some bread if he didn't have any.
"Without farmers no city residents would be able to live, not even Bill Gates himself," says Vladimir Alksnis.
After six years of raising the enormous birds on a farm located 100 kilometers north of St. Petersburg, Alksnis is more or less the Obi-Wan Kanobi of ostriches.
"They can't get used to human beings," Alksnis said Friday. "The ostrich is not man's best friend."
Nevertheless Alksnis' farm has become something of a petting zoo for schoolchildren from St. Petersburg, the occassional foreigner and others who might be wondering what on earth ostriches, as well as emus, are doing in northern Russia.
People usually react to the birds - living far from their natural habitat in balmy Australia and Africa - with "big eyes," Alksnis said.
Alksnis keeps his two ostriches and 18 emus in special enclosures in several barns. They have a heater, but it is rather small. Still, the birds seem to cope in the snowy conditions.
"All ostriches live on the latitude of the southern tropic," Alksnis said. "But they also survive in Russia."
The birds do best in a warm, dry climate, said a spokesman from the Kolmarden zoo and safari park in Sweden, but it is possible to keep them in colder temperatures. They can withstand cold-weather temperatures down to about minus 8 degrees Celsius, he said.
Last winter, temperatures in the St. Petersburg region dipped into the negative double digits, but all the leggy birds survived, he added.
"The density of the population of ostriches in this space [their stalls] is such that they are able to warm it with their own breath."
African ostriches, the largest of the two species of flightless bird kept on the farm, can grow to a height of 3 meters and weigh about 225 kilograms. Ostriches also have the nastiest demeanor, Alksnis said.
"The African ostriches, they know their own strength ... they know how to use it," Alksnis said. "The smaller birds, they understand that they are a little bit weaker and therefore they don't become aggressive."
Australian emus weigh in at about 60 kilograms and are about 2 meters tall, Alksnis said.
Alksnis runs the farm with the help of his wife, their grown children and a small staff. During the high season, which begins in the early part of the year, the Alksnises welcome five to six buses of people a day.
Schoolchildren come daily for excursions, which include a lecture, lunch, games and time to gawk and laugh at the daft birds' antics. The ostriches seem to enjoy the attention, pecking at the lecture hall's window that backs up to one of the stalls as some of the children sketch the ostriches' little heads and giant eyes. As Alksnis lectures the children, the ostriches run wildly back and forth past the window.
"It's a great farm, I like it a lot," said Pavel Sherkhbo, 14. "It's a cool farm with these ostriches. I've never seen one before in my life."
Even the teachers seemed to be enjoying themselves.
"We often go on excursions and this time we decided to go on an unusual excursion to an ostrich farm because [the students] are studying different continents in geography class and this is an exotic animal that is not really raised in the Leningrad region," a teacher said.
Two years ago, Alksnis was sure he had the northern-most ostriches on Earth, but now he can't say for certain. There are some in Sweden, but their location is slightly to the south. There is also another ostrich farm run by monks located in the same region, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Friday. At least one more may also exist in the region.
A U.S. organization that helps ostrich enthusiasts get started helped Alksnis and even sent an ostrich farmer from California to give advice.
"She has a farm located several kilometers away from her house and she leaves them alone when she goes home," Alksnis said. "And I said, 'How come? Someone can steal them.'"
By Russian standards, ostriches have proven to be a fairly lucrative business for Alksnis. Excursions costs 35 rubles ($1.10) for schoolchildren and 50 rubles for adults. During high season, the farm hosts about 3,000 people a month.
It costs about 20 to 25 rubles a day per bird to feed them, Alksnis said.
TITLE: 'House of Dead' Comes to Life in Prison
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Pale, shaven-headed teenage boys are shuffling in circles, hunched up, their hands bent behind their back, their faces cheerless.
"Listen guys, come on, you really make it look as if you are having stomach cramps," says the man standing in front of them.
"Think about your emotional burden and the fierce cold wind you are walking against - and make us feel it."
The man is director Yevgeny Zimin and the boys are prisoners of juvenile penal colony in Kolpino, 30 kilometers south of St. Petersburg. They are rehearsing a theatrical performance loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "The House Of The Dead," which premieres at the colony on March 7.
They will perform it in front of the public at the Dostoyevsky Memorial Museum on March 15.
Of the 20 or so actors, aged 14 to 19, most serve their terms for theft, robbery and racketeering. There are also several murderers and a rapist. None of them have ever read Dostoyevsky, and none feel they have missed anything.
"Few of them ever get to read a book at all," said Svetlana Demicheva, the colony's deputy director on educational issues. "We even have some boys who are completely illiterate, who can't even write. Dostoyevsky is like higher mathematics for them."
In the production, the boys perform scenes from prisoners' life. Dostoyevsky's novel is based on his prison experience - the writer spent four years in the camps. It has been adapted for the show, with many scenes of violence and drinking omitted so that the inmates will not react rashly.
"Strong scenes of hostility and physical abuse have been deliberately left out to minimize the chance of disorder," said Vera Biron, director of St. Petersburg's Dostoyevsky Memorial Museum, and the initiator of the project. The text of "The House of the Dead" has also been mixed with Dostoyevsky's story "A Boy at Christ's Christmas Party."
The idea for the project came to Biron when a visitor to the museum suggested that they design a memorial cell as part of the apartment museum. "Naturally, a cell wouldn't work in a museum like ours, but soon after I started thinking about the imprisonment theme, and the idea emerged, " she said.
Written in the form if memoirs of fictional murderer Alexander Goryanchikov, the novel shows the tragic transformation of the main character from a human being to a zombie-like creature. Biron said the material is bound to touch the young prisoners.
"Naturally, the story will not be the same as it was written by Dostoyevsky," Zimin said. "In many senses, the boys will be playing themselves."
The inmates will perform alongside two professional actors Sergei Byzgu and Valery Kuhareshin who are reading author's text.
The actors admit finding it hard to treat the inmates as real stage partners. Kukhareshin smiles as he is watching the inmates rehearse.
"When they huddled together, I suddenly saw that they look so childish, and they have small pink ears like kids," Kuhareshin said. "I am aware of who they are and why they are in jail, but for me they are still children."
Demicheva said the boys have a friendly and warm relations with the actors.
"They don't have much trust for people in uniforms, whether we are kind to them or not," she said.
"But the actors do help the boys to start communicating in a much better, more honest way."
The prisoners joined the rehearsals for various reasons.
"I have never been keen on reading," said 16-year-old Ivan Krylov, who was sentenced to 3 1/2 years for theft. The last two books he remembers reading were detective novels "A Thief Called Moscow" and "The Cell."
"On the outside I was too busy to read, here I am too exhausted," he said. "When I get to the cell in the evening, reading is the last thing on my mind."
He signed for the show "just to spice my life up a bit," he said.
A day at the prison colony starts at 6.30 a.m. and involves a shift at a workshop in the morning and school lessons in the afternoon.
The workshop doesn't get many orders so the colony authorities have to take on almost anything they are offered.
Several years ago the young inmates were making coffins, now they make children's toys.
Lights out is at 10 p.m.
Dmitry Gordin, 19, was sentenced to 8 years for murder. He joined the project because he was moved by Dostoyevsky's writing.
"It might seem that a more cheerful plot would have been more appropriate but that is not true," he said. "It is quite the opposite: it is easier for us to play the drama because it is so much closer to our life that anything jolly. A funny plot, or even anything normal would be very hard to perform."
Director Zimin said he doesn't have any artistic goals in the project. The most important thing for him is to help the inmates-turned-actors to wake up emotionally.
"I just want for them to forget about hierarchy, to stop showing muscles and playing games," Zimin said. "If they start seeing each other as human beings, then our project will succeed."
Kolpino colony's Demicheva said changes are already visible among the performers.
"As someone who observes them every day, I can tell many of them have changed," she said. "During rehearsals they joke and laugh, and there is no sign of aggression. The boys are warming up and become more open."
TITLE: Three Yushenkov Slaying Suspects Plead Guilty
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Three of the six suspects on trial in the high-profile murder of Liberal Russia co-leader and Deputy Sergey Yushenkov acknowledged in a Moscow court on Monday that they had participated in the killing, Interfax reported.
Alexander Vinnik, assistant to Mikhail Kodanyov, head of a rival wing in Liberal Russia, told the Moscow City Court that Kodanyov had given him $50,000 to organize the murder.
He said he then contacted Igor Kiselyov and gave him $20,000 to buy a gun and other items needed to carry out the killing.
Kiselyov then purchased a gas pistol that was re-fitted to fire bullets and recruited three assistants, Alexander Kulachinsky, Anton Drozd and Vladislav Palkov, according to prosecutors. The four devised a plan and put it into motion on April 17 when they drove to Yushenkov's apartment building on Ulitsa Svobody. It was Kulachinsky who fired the shot that killed the deputy, prosecutors say.
Kiselyov and Kulachinsky partially admitted their guilt in court Monday, Interfax reported. It was not immediately clear what they had said.
Kodanyov, Drozd and Palkov maintained their innocence Monday.
Yusehnkov, 52, was a vocal critic of Liberal Russia co-founder Boris Berezovsky and he co-headed a wing of Liberal Russia that in late 2002 kicked out a rival wing loyal to Berezovsky.
Yushenkov was killed just hours after announcing that his wing would take part in the December State Duma elections.
Berezovsky, who has been given refugee status in Britain, then appointed Kodanyov as his representative in Russia and chairman of his wing of the party.
Kodanyov and Vinnik were arrested in June, while the four other suspects were detained later that year.
Investigators said in July that Vinnik had confessed to having helped organize the killing on orders from Kodanyov.
Vinnik's lawyer suggested at the time that prosecutors had drugged his client to get the confession.
Prosecutors say the murder was carried out in an attempt to take control of Liberal Russia's finances.
The trial is by jury, as requested by Kodanyov, who faces life in prison if convicted on charges of masterminding the murder.
It was unclear how long the trial would last.
TITLE: Rybkin Disappearance Baffles
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The mystery shrouding the disappearance of presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin deepened Monday, amid conflicting reports of his whereabouts and the abrupt opening and closing of a murder investigation.
Local media reported Monday afternoon that police had located Rybkin, a former State Duma speaker who has been bitingly critical of President Vladimir Putin. The reports did not specify his location.
But police spokesman Alexei Vakhromeyev said Rybkin reportedly surfaced on his own and police were in the process of verifying that information. "For now, we haven't found him," he said by telephone.
Rybkin's campaign manager, Ksenia Ponamaryova, who with Rybkin's wife signed a missing persons report Sunday night, said Monday that they have had no contact with him since he disappeared Thursday evening.
His wife, Albina Rybkina, said both of his cars are in his garage and she feared he might have been kidnapped.
At the request of Rybkin's relatives, the Presnenskaya district prosecutor's office opened a criminal inquiry into Rybkin's disappearance on suspicion of premeditated murder at 11 a.m. Monday.
The Moscow city prosecutor's office learned of this and canceled the inquiry at noon, spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said.
"It was judged as immature," she said.
She said the city prosecutors were, however, continuing to investigate Rybkin's disappearance and would decide within 10 days whether the facts warranted a criminal case.
Gennady Gudkov, a member of the State Duma security committee, said Monday afternoon that security service officials had told him that Rybkin might have been located at a sanitorium in Odintsovo, just west of Moscow.
Calls to the sanitorium indicated that Rybkin had never been there. The presidential administration, which owns the sanitorium, also denied Rybkin had ever been there.
Gudkov later retracted his statement, saying that his sources might have been joking.
The search for Rybkin comes as a Moscow court is trying six suspects in last year's murder of his former colleague in the Liberal Russia party, Deputy Sergei Yushenkov. A third colleague from Liberal Russia, Vladimir Golovlyov, was also gunned down in murky circumstances, in August 2002.
Liberal Russia is backed by businessman Boris Berezovsky, and he and Rybkin are closely associated.
Fueling confusion about Rybkin's disappearance, Berezovsky said in a telephone interview Sunday night that he was "pretty certain" that Rybkin was safe and would reappear Monday.
Ponamaryova said she remained skeptical about that prediction. "There is information that Boris Abramovich [Berezovsky] interprets in a certain way. I have the same information, but my interpretation is different," she said.
Rybkina said in an interview published in Berezovsky-owned newspaper Kommersant on Monday that she thought her husband's disappearance was intended to remove him as a challenger to President Vladimir Putin in the March 14 election.
Central Elections Commission chief Alexander Veshnyakov said Rybkin's registration, granted Friday, remains in place.
Until Friday, some had doubted that the commission would approve the 2 million signatures submitted by Rybkin to register his candidacy.
In a separate development, Viktor Fedoruk, 49, the head of one of Rybkin's signature-drive teams, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of falsifying signatures, and a Moscow court has ruled that he should remain in custody.
Late last month, state television cast doubt on the validity of Rybkin's signatures, suggesting in news reports that students had been hired to falsify them.
Rybkin fired back that the lists of signatures shown on television were not his but Putin's, bearing the president's date of birth at the top. He argued this in a letter sent to Veshnyakov and media outlets on Thursday, the day he disappeared.
As a candidate, Rybkin was allotted free airtime to participate in televised debates by the Central Elections Commission on Monday. Deciding how to handle it, though, is complicated, because only in the two "exceptional cases" of illness or official obligations can a candidate send a representative to appear in his stead, Veshnyakov said.
Ponamaryova said Rybkin would "most likely" forgo the debate slots, since no one is prepared to stand in for him.
TITLE: Varsity Marks 280 Years
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The famed St. Petersburg State University, one of the top educational institutions in the country, marked its 280th birthday on Sunday.
The main celebration took place in the Mariinsky Theater, with many officials in attendance.
President Vladimir Putin graduated from the university's law department. His wife Lyudmila Putina read out his address to his alma mater.
"St. Petersburg University always taught students to think freely, stand up for one's position, and take brave decisions," Putin wrote.
Peter the Great signed a decree on the foundation of the Russian Academy of Science and St. Petersburg University on Feb. 8 1724. It was the first university in Russia.
Since that time the university's graduates have included famous names such as natural scientist Mikhail Lomonosov; Dmitry Mendeleyev, who founded the periodic table of elements, physiologist Ivan Pavlov, writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky and poets Alexander Blok and Joseph Brodsky.
The university trained seven Nobel Prize winners.
Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), leader of the Bolshevik revolution, graduated from the university as a lawyer.
Today the university has 19 faculties with more than 17,000 students. Among them there are 2,500 foreign students from 91 countries.
TITLE: Security Raised After Blast
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: St. Petersburg police strengthened security measures in the local metro, and in airports, railway stations and other public areas after the explosion in the Moscow metro on Friday.
"All of St. Petersburg's metro stations now have a bigger police presence and are also supplied with police sniffer dogs," said Elmar Shakhirzayev, deputy head of St. Petersburg police press-service.
Shakhirzayev said local police are performing more thorough checks of luggage in airports and at railway stations.
He asked St. Petersburg residents to be more attentive to abandoned boxes, bags and other suspicious objects.
He urged them to tell the police about unattended items and not to touch such objects.
"We also apologize in advance to city residents and guests for possible inconveniences they may come across due to extra police activities, such as more frequent document checks and others," Shakhirzayev said.
"We have to do this to prevent similar tragedies in our city," he said.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko expressed her sympathy to the victims of the Moscow blast.
"We all are shocked by that horrible terrorist act," Matviyenko said, Interfax reported.
"I want to express my sympathy to all Muscovites and to the families of the victims," she said.
Matviyenko confirmed that she gave special orders to boost security measures to St. Petersburg police.
"I can't speak of all the details of those measures but all possible measures on ensuring the city's residents' security will be strengthened," she said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Police Detain Offical
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - An anti-corruption unit of the police on Friday detained the deputy head of municipal district No. 63 Sergei Kupchenko for taking a bribe, Interfax reported.
"The detained official had in his possession 150,000 rubles," the report said. "This was the sum that between September 2003 and January 2004 he extorted from the managers of the company Katarsis so that they would get approval for plans to reconstuct their factory in the Petrograd district," the report added.
Citizens' Role Seen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - City authorities are calling for citizens to play a role in improving the city's dilapidated communal housing service sector, Interfax reported Friday.
"Until we reach the point where every apartment has its owner, no one will be able to effectively manage the sector," Governor Valentina Matviyenko was quoted as saying at a meeting of homeowners and housing cooperatives.
She also floated the idea of creating public committees of homeowners to tackle problems including poor infrastructure, accidents, and energy waste.
Smolny, Deputies Meet
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governor Valentina Matviyenko on Friday called for meetings between City Hall and St. Petersburg deputies in the State Duma to be held at least once a month, Interfax reported.
The head of the governor's administration Viktor Lobko said that City Hall and the deputies had much to discuss, including the ring road, housing services, the protective dam, and metro construction.
Lobko said a co-ordinator for the meetings will be named on Wednesday.
Gorbachev Grammy
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich became laureates of the 46th annual American Grammy Awards on Sunday.
Gorbachev received the award for taking part in recording the soundtrack for Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. Former American president Bill Clinton and Italian actress Sophia Loren also feature in the narration for children.
Rostropovich got a Grammy for conducting the recording of the London Symphony Orchestra playing concertos by Britten and Walton which earned soloist Maxim Vengerov an award of his own.
Kaliningrad Transit
ST.PETERSBURG (SPT) - More than 350,000 Russian citizens took trips to Kaliningrad Oblast through Lithuania under the new rules of transit, Interfax said Monday.
"Lithuania considers that the problem is mainly solved, and the new rules worked well," said Yustas Paletskis, deputy minister of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry.
He said almost all Russian citizens who had applied for a free and simplified transit railway documents received them.
However, he said that about 140 Russian citizens had to leave their trains at the border. Paletskis said that every state has lists of undesirable people, who had committed various crimes on its territories and therefore are forbidden to enter those counties.
"Lithuania also has such a list, but it's not very big," he said.
Survivor Lives a Week
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - A 24-year-old woman was found alive in the rubble of an apartment building Monday, a week after the structure collapsed, a rescue official said. At least 83 people died in the tragedy.
Relief workers found Yasemin Yaprakci somewhere close to the entrance of the building, where rescue officials estimate more than a dozen bodies, killed as they tried to escape, were buried.
Teams also pulled a 16-year-old boy from the debris on Sunday, a teenager who survived almost six days under the rubble shrouded in pulverized concrete that kept him warm. He slept often, which slowed his metabolism.
UN Pleads for Aid
BEIJING (Reuters) - Out of grain to feed 6.4 million undernourished North Koreans, the U.N. food agency on Monday warned of potentially appalling suffering and appealed to foreign donors for help.
The U.N. World Food Program would feed fewer than 100,000 of 6.5 million needy dependants in the sheltered communist state until shipments from the United States, Russia and others began to arrive at the end of March.
In 2003, breaks in the pipeline forced the WFP to stop feeding as many as half of its dependants who constitute more than a quarter of the North's 23 million people.
$3.2m Heathrow Heist
LONDON (Reuters) - Robbers handcuffed 15 workers at a cargo shed on the grounds of London's Heathrow Airport and stole some $3.2 million in British pound notes, police said Saturday.
The Friday night raid, which netted 1.75 million British pounds, is the latest in a string of heists at the airport in recent years.
Police said they arrested five men in or near the capital Saturday in connection with the robbery.
Israel: Convert Muslims
JERUSALEM (AP) - A hawkish Israeli Cabinet minister has asked Christian missionaries to try to convert Islamic militants, an aide to the minister confirmed Sunday.
Tourism Minister Benny Elon made the suggestion during a meeting last Wednesday with visiting Christian leaders from Europe, said the spokesman, Sagiv Rotenberg.
Elon told the Christians that Israel would not accept any missionary attempts to convert Jews, but suggested that they try Muslim militants in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
"Go to mosques and bring the light to the Muslims. Remind all the Muslim killers that thou shall not kill. Make them good Christians and good people," Elon was quoted as saying in the Yediot Ahronot daily.
Britain is Anti-Blair
LONDON (AP) - Just over half of Britons think Prime Minister Tony Blair should resign and 54 percent believe he lied to the nation about the threat from Iraq, a new poll showed Saturday.
Fifty-one percent of those questioned by polling firm NOP for the anti-war Independent newspaper said they agreed that "it is now time for Tony Blair to resign." Thirty-five percent disagreed.
A second poll also showed that many voters were tiring of the controversy over the Iraq war and want Blair's government to focus on domestic issues instead.
According to the survey, 72 percent of respondents believed Parliament had spent too long discussing the issues, while 54 percent said ministers should concentrate on Britain's struggling National Health Service. Mordashov Steel Stake
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Severstal board chairman Alexei Mordashov holds an 82.75 percent stake in the metal maker, RosBusinessConsulting reported Friday, without identifying from whom it obtained the information.
Dmitry Druzhinin, an investor relations manager at Severstal, refused to comment on the report.
The Cherepovets-based company makes about one-fifth of the country's steel.
MegaFon Doubles Sales
MOSCOW (Reuters) - No. 3 cellphone operator MegaFon's preliminary results show revenue more than doubled to $820 million in 2003, and its chief executive said in an interview on Friday he expected $1.3 billion in 2004.
Sergei Soldatenkov also said the Alfa Group consortium's surprise attempt to purchase a stake in TeliaSonera-backed MegaFon was "not helping," but not hindering the company from sticking to its business plan for this year. Alfa owns a stake in MegaFon rival Vimpelcom.
Preliminary earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization rose to about $380 million, with a margin of 46 percent, from $143.8 million in 2002 and a 36 percent margin.
MegaFon's 2004 plans, he said, include $650 million in capex to develop its pan-Russian network, of which $250 million would be out of cash flow. In addition, it is considering a eurobond.
RZD to Issue Bonds
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Russian Railways Co., or RZD, is planning to raise up to 10 billion rubles ($351 million) in domestic bonds and is considering a eurobond issue next year to fund its ambitious investment program.
The company, which controls the world's largest railway system after the United States, said in a statement the ruble bond placement was likely in August-September of 2004 as part of the firm's borrowing program of over 20 billion rubles for this year.
It did not say when it may issue the eurobond. Newspapers reported last month the firm was considering borrowing up to $500 million via bonds. Investment to Rise?
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The St. Petersburg administration predicts that foreign investment in the city economy will rise to $1.1 billion by 2008 as compared to $750 million in 2003, Interfax reported Monday.
Vladimir Blank, chairman of the city's committee on economic development, industrial policy and trade aired the figures at a meeting of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly's budget and finance committee on Monday.
Blank added that the administration is developing a series of measures to boost the investment climate in the city.
Blank's committee also predicts that by 2008 gross regional product will amount to 875 billion rubles, or about 190,000 rubles per capita.
Oblast Climate Stable
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Leningrad Oblast legislative assembly speaker Kirill Polyakov said Monday that the investment climate in the Oblast will not worsen in the near future, Interfax reported.
The statement was made to allay fears over amendments to the new property tax law adopted by the Oblast legislature in November 2003.
The amendments provide tax exemptions for public organizations, agricultural enterprises, housing associations, dacha and garage cooperatives, garden plot associations, investors and traders.
"If the federal budget allows us to provide tax cuts, then we will look at which benefits can be provided for those who invest in the Oblast economy," Polyakov said.
Baltic Customs
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Ivan Krasulenko was named acting chief of Baltic Customs, Interfax reported Monday.
Yury Rybkin, who had been chief of Baltic Customs since January 2003, was tapped to head Privolzhsky Customs.
Czech Cooperation
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Czech Republic plans active participation in the Eighth St. Petersburg International Economic Forum held by the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly in June, Interfax reported Friday.
A Czech delegation led by Consul General Antonin Murgash visited the Tavrichesky Palace, the venue for the Forum, and also the Mikhailovsky Manege, where a special Czech exhibit will run concurrently.
City Privatization
ST. PETERSBURG - The St. Petersburg administration has prepared a draft decree on city state property privatization and the transformation of 165 state-owned enterprises into open joint-stock companies wholly owned by the city, Bloomberg reported.
The state-owned enterprises will go public in 2004. By April 2004 city authorities will submit to the state property committee estimates of the value of net assets of state-owned enterprises and statements on their operations as of Jan. 1, 2004. Within a month auditors will check and conduct an inventory of state-owned enterprises.
TITLE: Fiery Explosion in Metro Kills at Least 39
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor, Carl Schreck and Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When a powerful explosion ripped through a metro train at rush hour Friday morning, Dmitry Kuznetsov was riding in the packed third car, standing face-to-face with his best friend Sergei Shvelkov and chatting.
The two teenagers, both first-year students at the Moscow State Service Academy, were heading to class and had two more stops to go to change lines when the blast stopped the train between the Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stations.
"There was this big bang, the lights went off, I fell down and felt this terrible pain on my face," Kuznetsov, 17, said, sitting just outside his hospital room, with his entire head burned and covered with bandages.
Kuznetsov and Shvelkov were taken to Hospital No. 36 in eastern Moscow along with 21 other injured passengers from metro train No. 171. About 120 more were taken to other city hospitals.
In all, more than 700 people who were on the train made their way out of the tunnel, Itar-Tass reported, citing metro staff. Most walked out, with many describing a gruesome journey along a smoky underground track, having to step over arms and legs of people blown apart by the blast. Whole bodies were also hurled out of the train.
Kuznetsov said he reached for his friend, and holding on to each other, they got out of the dark car through the window and walked 2 kilometers through the tunnel to the Paveletskaya station.
"Though there was no fire, the air was unbearable, impossible to breathe," he said. "I had to put a sweater over my face."
On the way, they helped a woman who had been thrown by the shock wave of the explosion and was jammed between the second and third cars. "Apparently her foot had been broken, so she was screaming while we freed her," Kuznetsov said.
Because the automatic doors would not open, passengers were saying the windows needed to be broken, he said. They then realized that all the windows were shattered.
The explosion in the second car crushed adjacent cars and sent a shock wave along the tunnel that smashed windows and sent debris flying. Many passengers who appeared otherwise not to have been badly hurt had bloodied faces, pocked by shards of flying glass. Passengers also suffered from smoke and rapid changes in air pressure inside the tunnel after the explosion.
Vladimir Gorelov, the train conductor, told reporters that he opened the doors only after he confirmed that high-voltage lines in the tunnels had been switched off.
"We spent a long time trying to pry open the doors," one woman with a blood-smeared face said on NTV television. "Then at last the men managed to open them and we all set off on foot."
Many noted passengers' general composure.
Ilya Blokhin, 31, a doctor who was in the next-to-last car - several cars away from the blast - said when the doors opened, people walked calmly toward the Avtozavodskaya station, 300 meters away. "There was no panic, no stampede. People behaved very calmly. Men were helping women and children," he said.
Kuznetsov said there also was no panic among the passengers who headed the other direction. They passed by the destroyed second car in which the blast occurred and walked for about an hour in the tunnel to the Paveletskaya station, where a doctor and rescue workers helped them onto the platform.
There were, however, reports of panic. Rescue workers said one woman was thrown through the train car window by the force of the blast and then ran, in shock, all the way to the Paveletskaya station.
Lyubov Gureyeva, a clerk in the representative office of the Oryol region in Moscow, was riding in the second car.
"I heard a terrible explosion, and the next moment a piece of burning plastic fell on my head," said Gureyeva, 52. All of her hair was singed and her face heavily bruised and burned.
Gureyeva said she fainted shortly after the blast. When she regained consciousness, the scene around her was horrifying.
"Twisted metal, blood everywhere around, body parts. I broke down into hysteria," she said, her hands shaking.
Some fellow passengers helped her out the carriage.
"While we walked for about 45 minutes, some stumbled," Gureyeva said. "I saw two elderly woman who had fainted, unable to breath the burnt air.
"The carriage was packed. Most of the people in the car were so young, like my children," she said. Seconds later she burst into tears when her two sons came into her hospital room.
Some who survived the blast in the second car had to make the 2-kilometer journey through the tunnel without their shoes that had stuck to the floor of the car where the explosion occurred.
While the grisly scene left surviving passengers stunned, commuters waiting for trains at the two stations expressed similar bewilderment.
Alexei Maximov, an 18-year-old student, said he was on the platform at Avtozavodskaya when he heard the blast.
"My first thought was to run outside to the fresh air, but from the shock I could hardly move," he said.
The platform quickly turned into a first-aid center. Television showed teams carrying stretchers into the tunnel and paramedics helping patients up the escalators.
Firefighters, wearing oxygen tanks, trudged in and out of the Avtozavodskaya metro entrance. Outside, dozens of ambulances lined up to take people to hospitals.
At 11:35 a.m., an Emergency Situations Ministry helicopter landed in the middle of a World War II memorial square adjacent to the station.
Channel One reported on the evening news that it had been sent to whisk away the wounded, but the helicopter was not outfitted for medical evacuations. By that time, three hours after the blast, the wounded had long since been taken to hospitals.
Having nonetheless attracted a great deal of attention, the two pilots climbed back into the helicopter and flew off 30 minutes later.
Tatyana Lenyova, whose window looks out on the entrance to the Avtozavodskaya station, said she could see from her fourth-floor window "a sea of people" being treated for minor wounds on the sidewalk.
The scenes were similar outside the Paveletskaya metro station, with ambulances clogging the Garden Ring and adjacent Novokuznetskaya Ulitsa.
With police blocking off the area around the Paveletsky Station, pedestrians were walking en masse along tram lines. Women with megaphones updated them on transportation schedules.
At the hospitals, dozens of teary-eyed relatives were arriving to find their loved ones burned, bandaged and in shock.
At Hospital No. 36, college student Shvelkov, who suffered heavy burns to his lungs and was still in a state of shock. He could not recall what he had gone through in the morning.
His friend Kuznetsov did. "I still cannot believe I was some 7 meters from the blast, from death," he said.
TITLE: Putin Says Chechen Rebels to Blame
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin, in accusing Chechen rebels of staging the metro bombing, defiantly reiterated Friday that he will never negotiate with "terrorists."
"Russia doesn't conduct negotiations with terrorists - it destroys them," Putin said.
He suggested that Friday's attack would be followed by new calls for talks with rebels.
"This would not be the first time that we have encountered a synchronization of crimes in Russia with calls from abroad for talks with terrorists," Putin said.
Nobody had claimed responsibility for the attack as of Sunday, and Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov has denied any involvement.
But this did not stop Putin from pointing the finger at Maskhadov.
"We know for certain that Maskhadov and his bandits are linked to this terrorism," Putin said.
Mosocw has routinely blamed Maskhadov, who is seen as a moderate among the rebels, and radical Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev for past attacks. Basayev has sometimes later claimed responsibility, while Maskhadov has repeatedly denied any involvement and issued new calls for negotiations.
The Kremlin's steadfast refusal to negotiate is based on a shrewd calculation that any attempt to start talks would be perceived by a group of more radical rebels as a sign of weakness and pave the way for attacks aimed at forcing Moscow to withdraw troops from Chechnya, analysts said.
While Maskhadov has pushed for negotiations in the past, the problem is he has no control over radical warlords in Chechnya who rely on funding from abroad, including from international terrorist networks, said Arthur Martirosyan, program manager with the Conflict Management Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Basayev, for one, has formed an entire unit of suicide bombers and may use them to blackmail Moscow if talks with more moderate separatists began, said Martirosyan, who helped mediate talks between Russian authorities and Chechen separatists in the 1990s.
"If they feel that such attacks work, it would lead to a very dangerous situation in which they would force Russian leadership into concessions by threatening to carry out more attacks," he said.
In addition, talks are not feasible at this point because Chechnya's pro-Moscow president, Akhmad Kadyrov, would see them as giving Maskhadov a cloak of legitimacy on the Chechen political scene and try to derail them, analysts said.
It may make sense, however, to start talks with moderate rebels if the goal is to drive a wedge between them and the more radical fighters, said Alexander Pikayev, deputy head of the Moscow-based Committee of Scientists for Global Security.
In any case, if the Kremlin is going to continue to refuse to negotiate, it must make a better effort to hunt down rebel leaders and dismantle their groups, Pikayev said. It was "outrageous" that troops and security services have been unable to do this in four years of fighting in the relatively small republic, he added.
If the rebels are not uprooted, they will continue to pose a threat and may one day be able to carry out an attack of catastrophic proportions, Martirosyan said.
TITLE: Nationalists Appeal for Crackdown on Ethnic Minorities
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Shocked reaction to Friday's metro bombing is strengthening voices calling for a crackdown on ethnic minorities in the capital and a toughening of state power as the influence of nationalist and hawkish forces rises.
In one of the strongest reactions to the blast, Dmitry Rogozin, co-leader of the populist-nationalist Rodina bloc, called for the declaration of a state of emergency and laid the blame for the attack squarely at the feet of "ethnic crime."
"It is clear that this terrorist act was an attempt to undermine the power of the state in the country," Rogozin said Friday, Interfax reported. "This was committed on the eve of the presidential elections and the reaction to it should be the harshest.
"The enemy is here, within," he said. "This is ethnic crime, which is supporting terrorists arriving in Moscow, which owns property in Moscow and is imposing its will on the authorities. These ethnic criminals are behaving insolently and should get the harshest response."
Moscow has been the target of a string of violent terrorist attacks ever since a series of apartment bombings in the capital in 1999 triggered the second war in Chechnya. Chechen terrorists have been seen to be behind most of the attacks. There is a large Chechen diaspora in Moscow.
Rogozin's Rodina bloc surged into the State Duma with a surprisingly strong showing in this December's parliamentary elections on a nationalist and anti-big business ticket. The campaign tapped into a rich vein of ethnic resentment as well as an ideological vacuum left by the collapse of communism and the failure of liberal market reforms to boost living standards for the majority.
The bloc joined Vladimir Zhirinovsky's nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, which also boosted its standing in the Duma, to give nationalist forces nearly 20 percent of all seats. The rise in influence of nationalist factions comes as forces from the security services grow in power under former KGB official President Vladimir Putin.
On Friday, Zhirinovsky, too, called for all immigrants from the Caucasus regions to be deported from the capital.
Analysts said the growing voice of nationalist forces in the country's political life could embolden leaders to take tougher action.
"The situation in the country and the results of the Duma elections could give [Moscow Mayor Yury] Luzhkov and other leaders carte blanche to introduce tougher measures in pushing out migrants and in increasing police powers," said Yevgeny Volk, political analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, the former interior minister, also called for greater police powers.
Analysts said it was unlikely Rogozin's call for a state of emergency would find any greater resonance, but they said moves to beef up security could strengthen the hand of those calling for tougher authoritarian measures.
"Terrorism is becoming an element of everyday life in Russia," said Lilia Shevtsova, political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "This can be used to strengthen totalitarian tendencies. This is much more of a threat."
She said the Kremlin would seek to keep the lid on nationalists like Rogozin because growing nationalist sentiment could ultimately provide an even bigger threat to Putin's power base.
"Nationalism is still not a dominant part of the Russian mentality," she said. "It is possible to stop nationalism in its tracks as a dominant ideology as long as the Kremlin does not force it to the top."
TITLE: Khakamada Leads a Lonely Liberal Campaign
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Irina Khakamada is running for president but her campaign headquarters are not bustling. Phones aren't ringing off the hook and no one is barking instructions. This is no Clinton-style war room, yet this lone warrior still looks battle weary.
She says she harbors no illusions of unseating President Vladimir Putin, but that's not the point. "We're fighting so that people raise their voices," she says, not fighting to win. "That costs less."
But it's not clear just who is raising their voices in support. Speculation that she is a mercenary front for the Kremlin or oligarch interests has made it difficult for her to forge alliances with her deeply divided fellow liberal politicians.
When her party, the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, failed to win seats in the State Duma on Dec. 7, and she herself lost an individual race, Khakamada blamed a failure to take firm policy stands in opposition to the Kremlin - a mistake she seems determined not to repeat as she gears up for the March 14 vote, five weeks away.
Khakamada, 48, is a steely, seasoned politician who takes Putin to task for clamping down on press freedom and turning a blind eye to corrupt judges.
"Internally, people can't formulate it, but they feel it, that there's a return of the Soviet regime," she says. "It may be in a new form, new names for it. We used to have the Politburo, now it's the presidential administration. There used to be the Supreme Soviet, now it's the State Duma."
In evident criticism of the state's case against oil company Yukos, she accuses top figures in the Kremlin and security services of neglecting national security while meddling in the economy.
"They say they are fighting a war on terror," she says, but instead they are fighting "for a redistribution of property in their own interests." In late January, she made the same argument to world leaders and businessmen gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Khakamada likes to describe herself as a bottle opener whose mission it is to release Russia's pent-up spirit, repressed inside by the cork of Putin's authoritarian regime.
A Political Past
Her SPS colleagues are said to refer to her as Lady Samurai, and she comes by the nickname honestly. Her father, Mutsuo, was a Japanese Communist who emigrated to the Soviet Union and met her mother, a teacher, in Khabarovsk, though Irina was born in Moscow.
She has a degree in economics from Moscow State University, having defended a thesis on the French economy in 1984; her business cards identify her as Dr. Irina M. Khakamada.
She taught economics during the perestroika years and in 1989, when restrictions on private business began to loosen, she started a cooperative that traded in computers.
For future oligarchs, cooperatives were forerunners to the firms that they used to get their foot in the door early and parlayed into fortunes.
But instead of going that route, she entered politics. Khakamada founded the Economic Freedom Party with her business partner, the mathemetician-turned-democrat Konstantin Borovoi, in 1990. She was elected to Russia's first State Duma in 1993 from a northwest Moscow district and re-elected in 1995, this time from a different district, in the southeast.
She is also said to have considered a run for the presidency in 1996, when President Boris Yeltsin's chances for re-election looked feeble.
She left the Duma in 1997, having been appointed by Yeltsin, whom she had ultimately endorsed, as chairman of the State Committee for Small Business Support and Development.
In the 1999 elections, her party, the new Union of Right Forces, won party-list seats in the third Duma, while her personal popularity won her a seat from St. Petersburg. This past December, fate was reversed.
In VTsIOM's annual December poll of women of the year, Khakamada was outstripped by St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, getting only 11 percent compared to Matviyenko's 21 percent, though Khakamada has won the title twice before.
Her web site biography indicates she likes literature, aerobics and classical music, but she keeps her private life very much under wraps. She mentions her 25-year-old son, Daniil, from her first marriage, and 6-year-old daughter, Masha, only to say she's a mother of two who has managed to raise a family while making a career in a man's world.
Rhetorical Attack
Khakamada dropped an attention-grabbing bombshell on Jan. 14, with an open letter accusing Putin of building "a society based on lies," in particular by hiding the truth about what happened during the Dubrovka hostage crisis.
SPS and Yabloko leaders, still undecided on whether distance or proximity to the Kremlin would better serve the goal of reinvigorating the country's democratic movement, were caught off guard, much as they had been by her late December decision to throw her hat into the race. Her co-party leader Boris Nemtsov is said to have learned of her candidacy on the Internet.
Divided views on whether to endorse her, and her sharp line, only deepened a rift among liberal leaders, who were already split on whether to boycott the vote or encourage members to vote "against all."
Khakamada reportedly confided to friends that the letter's particularly biting language was meant to dispel the widespread belief that she had entered the race at the behest of the Kremlin, which needed her presence in the race to lend a veneer of democracy.
In choosing Dubrovka and the 1999 apartment bombings as her weapon, though, she sparked a different set of rumors: that her bid was being bankrolled by stigmatized oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who has relentlessly attacked Putin along the same lines.
She categorically denies any relationship with Berezovsky, who, as she points out, is underwriting his own presidential hopeful, former Duma Speaker Ivan Rybkin, who went even further in criticizing the president in an open letter of his own, published in Kommersant on Monday. He accused Putin of leading a return to Stalinesque state-sponsored terror.
"Berezovsky doesn't interest me," she said, disgusted with a question that has been asked infinite times. "I say what I think and what interests me."
Underwriters
Campaigns, nonetheless, are expensive undertakings.
With the exception of Berezovsky, and Leonid Nevzlin, a top Yukos shareholder and billionaire who announced his intention to support Khakamada's campaign, the country's most deep-pocketed figures have been eager to show loyalty to the Kremlin, and have opted to keep their heads down.
No sooner had Nevzlin, who lives in Israel, announced his support, than Russian officials issued an international warrant for his arrest. No money has been given, she angrily insists.
This week she declared a war chest of 1,673,000 rubles ($58,700) to the Central Elections Commission. What candidates publicly declare is widely assumed to be only a fraction of total spending, which is estimated in the millions of dollars.
One million rubles, she has said, came from her husband Vladimir Sirotinsky - her fourth - who is vice president of the Institute for the Development of Entrepreneurship and keeps a low profile.
"If you look at my campaign fund accounts, you'll see money from a few private individuals and my husband," she said.
She said television reports of Yukos funding are the Kremlin's black-PR attempt to discredit her in the eyes of voters and the latest proof that "all nationwide channels are controlled by the state."
In May 2001, in the wake of the takeover of NTV by state-controlled Gazprom, she was less concerned about press freedom, emphasizing that the West should focus its attention on supporting Russia's economic reforms.
"What, she just woke up one day in opposition to Putin?" said Lilia Shevtsova, an expert on the Russian presidency, saying Khakamada came to this new position out of political convenience more than conviction.
Khakamada responded to critics like Shevtsova, who chide her for running with an abundance of emotion and an absence of any concrete agenda, by posting on her web site, www.hakamada.ru, a blizzard of essays that lay out her stance on 27 issues from accession to the World Trade Organization (a priority) to teachers' salaries (new legislation is needed).
Ballot Hurdles
Khakamada, as an independent, had to submit 2 million signatures backing her bid. She collected 4 million, she said, though only 2.5 million - the most trustworthy - were submitted.
That way, even if 20 percent had been rejected by the Central Elections Commission, her registration could still be approved. It did approve the signatures on Sunday.
Khakamada said he had expected the commission to decide in her favor "as long as there is no political pressure."
And her hopes for March 14, if she gets placed on the ballot? "I don't want to give any numbers," Khakamada said flatly.
Igor Klyamkin, the head of the Liberal Mission Foundation, was more willing to hazard a forecast. "There's no way she could get more than 3 or 5 percent of the vote," he said. Other analysts say 1 to 2 percent is more realistic.
Slim Support
Support from the liberal elite is at best lukewarm.
Khakamada failed to get her party's endorsement at the SPS congress Jan. 24-25, a stinging defeat, though she won't admit it.
Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the liberal wing resents Khakamada for taking matters into her own hands while they remain "disarrayed, disenchanted, disillusioned and disconcerted."
Khakamada freely admits that her candidacy has done nothing to unite the democratic elite, but that doesn't bother her.
"My goal in this election campaign is not a dialog with politicians but a dialog with the people," she said from her office, which is located inside SPS party headquarters at Ploshchad Ilycha - "at least for now," her press secretary Konstantin Lazarev said.
Khakamada resigned as a party leader after the December defeat, though the congress named her to the 25-member political council.
Her detractors are many and her supporters are few, but she's tough enough to handle it, Lipman said. "Putin is unique as a politician who can't stand criticism. She's seasoned, she's used to it."
Liberals To Lead
Speculations vary as to what Khakamada will do after the March elections.
"I think she will start her own party, they all will," said former SPS deputy Konstantin Remchukov. "The real process of unification will begin only in 2006" ahead of the next Duma elections in 2007."
She claims that it is irrelevant to her whether she leads a future democratic movement, as long as there is one.
The triumph of nationalistic parties in the Duma elections has led some to doubt whether there is a liberal electorate out there to lead, but Khakamada says she's an optimist.
"The roots of liberalism exist, " she said. "I want Russia to be developed as a European democratic country ... and if we do more than just talk, that can come about."
In Russia, liberal ideas "have always smelled like some kind of romanticism," Khakamada said philosophically, and liberalism has trouble competing against the energy of nationalistic-socialistic slogans.
"When you say that each person must take some responsibility," she said, "people hear: 'I must work.'" Meanwhile "authoritarianism promises them, 'We'll do everything for you and everything will be great.'"
Iron Lady?
Khakamada takes evident pride in being self-made. "I made my life from nothing," she said, drawing a contrast with Putin, who rose "through the government vertical."
She also seems eager to follow in significantly sized footsteps.
A signed portrait of Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister known as "the Iron Lady," sits on her windowsill. On her desk, next to a pack of slim Vogue cigarettes and a basket of trail mix, stands a gold-plated statuette of Catherine the Great.
TITLE: Budget Jeep Aimed at Cowboys
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Tough guys living on a shoestring no longer have to dream of owning a boxy, black Mercedes G-Class jeep.
Thanks to three brothers from Karachayevo-Cherkessia, there will soon be the Cowboy, a poor man's version of the muscular jeep.
The first cars are expected to roll off the assembly line in Cherkessk in a matter of months.
"I own a G-Class myself, and I've always liked it," said Hadzhi-Murat Derev, the youngest of three brothers who founded the Cowboy's maker, Derways.
"We told the designers we wanted it to look something like that."
Not surprisingly, the Cowboy resembles a black box on wheels, like its Mercedes inspiration.
But the Cowboy's body is made of plastic and is considerably smaller. At $10,000, it is also significantly cheaper than the G-Class, which on average costs more than $100,000.
The car was designed to appeal to sportsmen, hunters and fishermen living on the rugged terrain of southern Russia, Derev, Derway vice president, said by telephone from Cherkessk.
"I can feel the market well," he said. "I saw there was no Russian SUV with a diesel engine, and that's what is needed."
The factory will operate at a capacity of 5,000 cars per year when it goes online in two or three months, Derev said.
So far it has produced 15 prototypes, most of which have been handed out as gifts to heads of neighboring regions where the car will initially be sold.
The name Derways is taken from the first three letters of the bothers' last name Derev. The company is Russia's first family-owned carmaker.
Although the oldest of the three brothers, Stanislav, came up with the idea to produce a car six years ago, the two younger brothers, Vyacheslav and Hadzhi-Murat, hired a team to begin designing the car only in August.
"I don't know haw we managed to do this so quickly," Derev said, "Its been a busy past few months."
The Derev brothers subcontracted automobile designers from Russia's motor capital Tolyatti, home of the 750,000-per-year auto giant AvtoVAZ, to design the vehicle.
They used funds from their other family businesses, which includes a distillery, a sewing factory and a livestock farm, as well as a $10 million bank loan, to finance the project.
What they came up with is not the world's highest performing all-road vehicle; equipped with a 98 horse power diesel engine, the Cowboy has a top speed of 150 kilometers per hour.
Its creators hope its looks will move sales.
"It looks nice, like the G-Class," Derev said.
If Derways doesn't run into trouble with Mercedes for plagiarizing its 4x4's exterior design, the car may prove to be a success. Judging by the number of G-Class jeeps and Hummers plying Moscow streets, boxy SUVs appear to have a serious following.
DaimlerChrysler could not be reached for comment. It sells close to 200 new G-Class vehicles annually, and many more are imported second hand.
Moscow automotive analysts polled on Friday could not offer any insights into the nascent company's prospects, saying they had not even heard of it yet.
Derways isn't the first carmaker in Russia to design a new sports utility vehicle to replace the ubiquitous Niva and UAZ jeeps, which have been bumping along Russia's roads since Soviet times.
Last year the country's largest automaker AvtoVAZ teamed up with General Motors to produce 35,000 Chevrolet-Nivas annually, at a cost of a $10,000 per vehicle.
GM launched assembly of the $86,000 Hummer H2 at a plant in Kaliningrad last year, its third venture in Russia after the Chevy-Niva and the failed Chevy Blazer assembly project in Yelabuga, Tatarstan.
Despite its plastic body, Derev says the Cowboy will win over consumers' hearts with its durability in off-road conditions, especially in comparison to the Chevy-Niva.
"It's hard to make a judgment about the car because it's new and hasn't been tested by consumers and experts yet," said GM-AvtoVAZ spokesman Dmitry Popov.
"But I'm sure it will quickly fill it's own niche in the market. And we are of course regarding it as competition."
TITLE: Summer Suicide Bombers Were Society Outcasts
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Two of three young women sent to Moscow to be suicide bombers last summer by Chechnya-based Islamic fundamentalists had been ostracized by their families, one of them said in an interview, published in Isvestia newspaper last week.
Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, a 23-year-old widow from Ingushetia, was arrested after failing to detonate a bomb in downtown Moscow last July. She told the paper she had joined a Wahhabist rebel group after stealing $800 worth of jewelry from the family of her late husband.
Muzhakhoyeva said she took the jewelry in an effort to take her daughter away from her in-laws, who had given the child to her childless brother-in-law after her husband had died.
"[I became] the shame of the family," Muzhakhoyeva said in the interview from the top-security Lefortovo prison, where she is being held awaiting trial on terror charges.
Describing how she came to join a band of Chechnya-based wahhabist rebels, Muzhakhoyeva said she decided to become a shakhid, or martyr, to repay her in-laws, as they would receive compensation of $1,000 from the rebels if she carried out a suicide bombing.
Muzhakhoyeva is charged with attempting to detonate a homemade bomb at 1, Tverskaya Ulitsa on July 9, 2003. The bomb went off hours later, killing a bomb disposal expert who tried to defuse it.
Muzhakhoyeva said she lost her nerve one month before the botched attack, and was trying to draw attention to herself on the busy street so that she would be arrested.
"I realized I would never be able to blow myself up," she said, Izvestia reported.
In the days leading up to the bombing attempt, two male minders from the rebel group stayed with Muzhakhoyeva in a house in the Moscow region village of Tolstopaltsevo - along with two other young women preparing to carry out suicide bomb attacks.
Zalikhan Elikhadzhiyeva, 19, and Zinaida Aliyeva, 26, blew themselves up on July 5, killing 14 bystanders at a Tushino Field rock concert.
Muzhakhoyeva said Elikhadzhiyeva's family had disowned her after she ran away with her stepbrother and Chechen rebel Magomed Elikhadzhiyev. It was he who later convinced Elikhadzhiyeva to become a suicide bomber, Muzhakhoyeva said.
According to the Izvestia interview, of the three young women, only Zinaida Aliyeva fitted the classic "black widow" profile, a term often used to describe a close female relative of a Chechen rebel who seeks to avenge his killing by Russian troops.
Experts say both Muzhakhoyeva and Elikhadzhiyeva had violated one or more of the informal, but strictly observed social or religious laws that still govern poverty-stricken rural communities in the North Caucasus.
Outcasts from these tight-knit communities become easy prey for wahhabist rebels.
"The traditions are structured in such a way that women can more easily become outcasts," said Artur Martirosyan, a Caucasus expert and program manager at the Conflict Management Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Martirosyan noted the similarities between Elikhadzhiyeva's case and that of Palestinian suicide bomber Reem Al-Reyashi. Al-Reyashi had allegedly been caught cheating on her husband and was forced to carry out the bombing as punishment, according to reports in the Israeli media.
Aleksei Malashenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center and Oleg Nechiporenko of the National Anti-Crime and Anti-Terrorism Fund think tank agreed that social marginalization had emerged as a factor, along with ideology and revenge, motivating women from the North Caucasus to become terrorists.
"Those who are marginalized by society and its traditions are [easy prey] for catchers of souls," Malashenko said.
TITLE: Calculating KamAZ Man Arrives in Dakar First
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Before truck driver Vladimir Chagin gets into his 10-ton KamAZ, he never forgets to go to the toilet.
That's because, for the last 13 years, Chagin has been in sub-Saharan Africa every January racing in the grueling Paris-Dakar rally. He has won in the last two years
"Water is a serious theme" whenever you are in a race that hurtles you at speeds of up to 170 kilometers per hour in the desert heat, Chagin said.
Every day for 18 days, Chagin, along with a navigator and mechanic, are strapped into the KamAZ truck - like spacemen in a rocket - and shook continuously by a vehicle that was not built for comfort on Russian roads - let alone Mauritanian tracks. Racing against teams such as Mitsubishi, Daf and Ford, KamAZ cannot lose a moment of time.
"Every time you stop to go to the toilet you use up to three to four minutes. You don't drink more than a glass in the morning and squeeze out as much as you can," Chagin said in a recent interview. "This way you are in action for 12 hours and don't stop for a second."
And that means not even for a drink, despite the 40-degree Celsius heat and the lack of air conditioning. (Air conditioning would reduce some of the strength of the KamAZ's 700 horsepower engine).
"You don't pay attention," Chagin said of the discomfort of thirst. "It's a passion, a battle. If you were in an ordinary car, you'd sweat a little and it would be uncomfortable. Here you are dusty and sweaty, and you don't even think about it. You forget about all ordinary things."
Begun in 1979, the Paris-Dakar rally is one of the most extreme and dangerous races in the world. In this year's rally, cars, motorbikes and trucks set off on New Year's Day to cover 11,000 kilometers in just over two weeks, through France and Spain and the African countries of Morocco, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Senegal.
Famously, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's son, Mark, had to be rescued in the first Paris-Dakar rally. A number of drivers have died in crashes nearly every year of the competition, and two stages were canceled this year after French secret services warned of possible attacks by terrorists.
Chagin first took part in the race in 1990, when the KamAZ team made its debut, as a mechanic. His truck, and the two other trucks on the team, never finished the course. It was only three years later, in 1993, that KamAZ managed to finish the course, and in 1995 that Chagin first took part as a driver.
Since then, he and his crew have won four times, and the KamAZ team has dominated the trucks section. This year, it took first and second place, and a back-up truck came in fourth.
"We don't travel in a Mitsubishi or a Daf. I'm Russian and in a Russian car. That's most important," Chagin said.
The KamAZ team did not escape without injuries, though, after teams such as Daf pushed it hard. Chagin still has back pain, while Sergei Girya, the navigator of the KamAZ that placed second, is in the hospital suffering an injured kidney with complications.
"[This year] we went past the limits of human endurance," said Semyon Yakob, the general manager of the team. "We could have gone faster - the drivers were ready to step on the gas - but it would have been impossible to sit in the cabin. We would have ended up in the hospital."
Or as Chagin reflected ruefully: "It's much easier if something breaks in the vehicle. If your spine is tearing up, what can you do?"
Girya's condition was not improved by the team doctor's refusal to give him injections to relieve pain during the race, saying the truck was too dirty. Pills were hard to swallow as the truck bumped up and down at high speeds.
The KamAZ team, however, knew the risks it was taking, Yakob said.
"They understand that it can bring temporarily injury, but they know they need to win and need to keep up the tempo," he said.
Chagin is one of the best-traveled truck drivers, but he doesn't see much. "If it is a beautiful place, then it catches the eye. Mostly it is just the horizon."
And the food is bad as well - not the African but the French food that race organizers serve up every day, he said. "It's horrible French food. Sometimes you just want some pelmeni."
TITLE: Chemical Arms Facilities Due
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - All of Russia's facilities for disposing of the world's biggest chemical weapons stockpile should be ready for operation by the end of 2006, officials said Wednesday.
Viktor Kholtsov, general director of the Russian Agency on Ammunition, told Interfax two large-scale plants in the provinces of Udmurtia and Kurgan are planned to be built in 2005. The first such facility, in the Saratov region, started its work in 2002.
The Saratov and Udmurtia plants are intended to carry out a two-stage disposal of lewisite, while the Kurgan facility will do away with sarin, soman and VX, agency spokesman Dmitry Timashkov said.
Three smaller plants are to be erected in Kirov, Bryansk and Penza in 2006, Kholtsov said, according to Interfax. The plants will dispose of the same chemicals, making them non-military reagents, Timashkov said.
TITLE: Putin? No, It's Galkin, Master of the Mimics
AUTHOR: By Carl Schreck
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Close your eyes and you hear Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zhirinovsky bantering back and forth. Zhirinovsky is angry, as usual, and Putin occasionally interjects some German gibberish that he picked up during his days as a KGB spook in East Germany.
But when you open your eyes, neither the president nor the flamboyant leader of the Liberal Democratic Party is anywhere in sight. Instead you see a wiry, boyish-looking 27-year-old contorting his face and vocal chords.
His name is Maxim Galkin. He has used his knack for aping politicians and celebrities to become the country's most sought-after impersonator and a leading entertainer in his own right.
Galkin said he discovered his unique impersonating abilities when he was 12.
"I started with Gorbachev and then moved on to Yeltsin and Zhirinovsky," Galkin said, munching on a bowl of mixed berries during a recent interview in a cafe at the World Class fitness club. "Back then, whenever we had guests, everyone demanded that I do impersonations."
Galkin's publicist requested that no photographer be present during the interview, apparently hesitant about letting unflattering pictures of her client appear in the press. And indeed, the petite Galkin looked a little beat, with dark circles under his eyes and unkempt hair.
He chided the bartender for forgetting the honey for his tea, a prerequisite for battling colds.
"I've worked so much lately that I'm simply tired," Galkin said. "I'm just taking it easy right now, not working."
Judging by the New Year's festivities on television, it's not difficult to believe that Galkin is exhausted. He was everywhere.
His Channel One concert "Neposlyedny Geroi," a mish-mash of impersonations - including Zhirinovsky, Putin, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and Boris Yeltsin - skits and musical numbers, was the most-watched New Year's Eve program in Moscow, according to a Gallup poll.
The concert's ratings narrowly edged out a Channel One New Year's Eve special in which Galkin performed alongside pop diva Alla Pugachyova and other stars. On Jan. 1, Channel One aired the musical "Za Dvumya Zaitsami," in which he starred with Pugachyova and Ukrainian drag queen Verka Serdyuchka.
Galkin has joined the sometimes bizarre fantasy world of Russian pop stars, lounge singers and variety acts known as estrada, thanks to his friendship and collaboration with Pugachyova, so it's no coincidence that wherever he goes, she is not far behind.
Pugachyova became Galkin's ticket into estrada when she invited him to record the catchy duet "Bud ili ne Bud" in the fall of 2001, only a few months after meeting him at a concert in which they both performed. The song quickly became a pop hit, and the pair has been practically inseparable ever since.
It seems Pugachyova is seen in public more often with Galkin than with her pop star husband, Fillip Kirkorov. Galkin has even perfected his impersonation of her, leading to at least one memorable prank.
"[Pop-opera singer Nikolai] Baskov and I were over at Alla Borisovna's one time while Kirkorov was on tour in Mongolia," Galkin said. "I called him and talked to him for a while in his wife's voice, and he believed it was Alla Borisovna. He never knew until I told him sometime later."
Galkin pointed out that his fame did not come overnight. He began giving performances while he was a linguistics student at Russian State Humanities University, and with his star rising, he finally began performing on television in 1998, the year he graduated.
In the spring of 2001, he landed the job as the host of the Russian version of the game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," a role he said he enjoyed greatly and that cemented his star status.
"I was flying to New York, and there were some Americans on the plane, and one of them recognized me," he said. "He started to tell all of his friends that I was the Russian [version of American host] Regis Philbin."
Galkin's fame has crossed the Atlantic, and he has given performances in front of emigre audiences in Atlantic City, San Francisco and Los Angeles. He said he preferred the West Coast cities - Los Angeles because of its great boutiques.
Despite his success in game shows and pop songs, impersonations are Galkin's bread and butter.
He adopts a drunken swagger for Yeltsin and turns to his five years of German classes at the university to mimic Putin's fluent German. He has performed in front of Putin and said he has seen the president chuckling at the impersonation.
Though political parodies anchor his act, Galkin said he is not a politics buff.
"I don't follow politics closely," said Galkin, who noted that he voted "against all" in December's State Duma elections and for Yury Luzhkov in the Moscow mayoral poll. "I don't like them that much. But to do [political humor], you have to follow it a little."
Galkin declined a request to do his Putin act during the interview.
"That's normal with comedians," he said. "It's the principle of conserving your energy. I know comedians who never go out of character. It's very hard to be around people like that."
TITLE: Danish Reporter Denied Russian Visa
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A veteran Danish reporter who wrote articles critical of the war in Chechnya and human rights violations has been denied a Russian visa.
Danish Prime Minister Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen last week criticized the decision as worrisome, while media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said it was tantamount to censorship.
Vibeke Sperling, a senior reporter for the respected Politiken daily newspaper, applied for a single-entry visa to attend an EU conference in St. Petersburg last fall. At the same time, she applied to the Foreign Ministry for accreditation to work as a reporter in Russia.
Sperling had recently returned to Politiken from a year-long sabbatical teaching media courses at the University of Oslo. The newspaper had assigned her to work full-time in Moscow and cover December's State Duma elections and the presidential poll in March.
But when Sperling went to the Russian Embassy in Copenhagen to pick up the visa on Oct. 5, she was told that the applications for a visa and accreditation had been turned down. An embassy official indicated that something was wrong with her reporting but did not elaborate, Sperling said Tuesday.
"I have been traveling as a journalist for 30 years and was threatened with being kicked out twice back in the Soviet Union, but that never happened, even though I sometimes had to wait for a long time to get the visa," Sperling, 59, said by telephone from Copenhagen.
She suggested that her critical coverage of the two Chechen conflicts might have upset Russian authorities. "It cannot be anything but speculation, but when they do not come out with an explanation we cannot see nothing but politics behind the move," she said.
Politiken editor in chief Toeger Seidenfaden informed the Danish Foreign Minister Per Stog of the denial and was told that the "relevant authorities would look into the case," Sperling said.
Danish Ambassador to Russia Lars Vissing appealed to the Russian Foreign Ministry and was told he would have to wait two months for a reply, Sperling said. In January, the Foreign Ministry upheld the denial and said the decision had been personally ordered by Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, she said. The Foreign Ministry had no comment.
A Danish Embassy official confirmed last week that the ambassador had received a written refusal from the Foreign Ministry last month.
Critics of the Kremlin have long accused President Vladimir Putin of clamping down on independent-minded news organizations.
Several foreigners with nongovernmental organizations also have been denied visas in the past two years. They include Czech journalist Petra Prochazkova, who set up two orphanages in Grozny and Briton Chris Hunter, who organized schooling and psychological counseling for Chechen refugee children.
Politiken itself has previously had trouble getting reporters into Russia. Poul Funder Larsen, a former Moscow Times reporter, was initially denied a visa and accreditation when Politiken assigned him to Moscow in 2002, Sperling said. He later got the visa and worked without the accreditation, she said.
In Copenhagen, the Danish prime minister said last week at a news conference that a reporter's right to travel and write critical reports about any government is a key part of democracy.
Reporters Without Borders urged Moscow to reconsider Sperling's case. "Barring a foreign journalist from working as a correspondent is tantamount to censorship," it said in a statement last week.
Sperling said her case may be part of a Kremlin attempt to curb criticism and send a warning to other foreign journalists. She said the Kremlin under Putin appears to have become more sensitive to criticism than it was in Soviet times.
Sperling first worked in Moscow from 1981 to 1982 with the small Danish newspaper Information. She returned in 1993 as a radio journalist for the Danish Broadcasting Corp. She came back to report for Politiken in 2001.
She said she traveled to Chechnya frequently during the first 1994-96 war and only visited the region once during the second military campaign - with a Kremlin-organized tour for foreign journalists in 2002.
Reporters Without Borders, while expressing fears that Sperling was being punished for her reports about Chechnya, said she might be the victim of diplomatic tensions between Denmark and Russia that sprang up after Copenhagen refused to extradite Chechen rebel envoy Ahmed Zakayev in 2002.
But Sperling doubts the Zakayev affair has anything to do with her difficulties. "I was not working as a journalist at that period of time," she said.
TITLE: City Seeks Software Action
AUTHOR: By Vanessa Bittner
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Why go to Calcutta when you can get all your software outsourcing requirements filled in St. Petersburg, the cultural capital of Russia?
The question, put at the Technology Leadership Forum held in St. Petersburg on Wednesday by Andrei Narvsky, co-chair of the American Chamber of Commerce Information Technology Committee, revealed the competitive nature of the outsourcing market.
Russia is second to India as a supplier of offshore software programs. In 2001 it was third in terms of quality of software outsourcing, according to a study cited by Valentin Makarov, president of the Fort Ross Consortium.
In 2003, Russia exported software products worth $475 million, and this figure is growing, Makarov said.
The forum, held by software outsourcer DataArt and the CIO Collective, a U.S. group with 75 members, gathered St. Petersburg programmers and representatives of high technology firms.
The chief hurdle to making Russia the world software outsourcing leader is lack of government support. But, with lobbying, the situation is changing, Makarov of Fort Ross said.
St. Petersburg offers more than scenery to potential outsourcing clients.
Among the advantages for chief information officers of engaging the services of St. Petersburg firms Narvsky, of eVelopers, listed historical and cultural ties with Europe and the United States, and its educated workforce.
As Narvsky pointed out, about 1,500 engineers in software development graduate from St. Petersburg universities every year. The city's universities produce an additional 12,000 IT-related specialists per year.
Teams of programmers from St. Petersburg's universities consistently either top the the annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest or place among medalists.
As a result of these factors, between 30 percent and 35 percent of all income from offshore programmers in Russia is generated by St. Petersburg companies, according to data from Outsourcing-Russia.com.
TITLE: Soviet Symbol Under Fire
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Going, going ... gone?
With the unseemly Intourist already gone and the imposing Moskva going, Mayor Yury Luzkhov is now looking to score an unprecedented hotel-bashing hat trick by bringing down the Rossiya, the biggest eyesore of them all.
The sprawling, 3,000-room complex next to Red Square, which has been Europe's largest hotel since it was built in 1967, is simply too big and ugly to leave standing, Luzhkov told guests at a function at the Russian Consulate in New York last week, news agencies reported Monday.
In its place, he said, would be, among other things, a massive parking garage.
The Rossiya, Luzkhov said, is "alien" to downtown and an "unmanageable" enterprise.
"City Hall is now discussing the question of dismantling the Rossiya Hotel after the Moskva," news agencies quoted the mayor as saying.
City Hall officials declined to comment on Luzhkov's latest grand project Monday, saying that only his spokesman, Sergei Tsoi, was authorized to do so.
Tsoi could not be reached for comment, but he was quoted by Vedomosti as saying that although official documents for the project had yet to be drawn up, "Yury Mikhailovich never speaks off the top of his head."
Tsoi also said the real estate belonging to the Rossiya is being used "inefficiently" and that a large parking garage would help solve the city's traffic problems.
Few argued with Luzkhov when he first floated the idea to raze the Intourist, which finally came down last year. But when he unveiled an estimated $400 million plan to bring down the massive Moskva, located directly across from the State Duma, and replace it with an exact replica, the Culture Ministry cried foul, albeit to no avail.
Alexander Rybatkevich, who heads the Culture Ministry's department for the protection of monuments, said that unlike the Moskva, the Rossiya is not considered historically significant, meaning that the ministry would have no objection legally to its destruction.
Rybatkevich added, however, that the ministry will be keeping an eye on what the mayor plans to build on the site: "Since it is part of the protected zone around the Kremlin, they can't go building huge skyscrapers there. When it gets to that stage we'll look at it. At the moment this is all just talk about plans."
Luzkhov's announcement has already stirred up interest in the project. Open Investments, a real estate fund set up by billionaire Vladimir Potanin's giant Interros holding, has already expressed an interest in the project, according to news agency RBC.
The news came as a shock to the Rossiya's employees.
"This news struck the hearts of myself and the other employees," Vedomosti quoted one top official at the hotel as saying. "After all, no one was bothered to find new jobs for the employees of the Intourist and the Moskva."
TITLE: Ministries Agree On $3.5Bln Oil Tax Hike
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Ministries of Finance and Economic Development and Trade have agreed on proposals to increase the tax burden on the oil sector by roughly $3.5 billion a year, Kommersant reported Friday.
The newspaper cited sources in both ministries as saying a compromise was reached that the tax burden should be increased by raising export duties and the mineral extraction tax. Analysts said changes would bite heavily into corporate profits.
"If approved, the tax increase would be significant, tugging down oil company valuations by more than 30 percent," said Troika Dialog.
The two ministries have yet to reach agreement with the Energy Ministry, which has proposed a much sharper taxation increase of around $6 billion, ahead of a government meeting later this month to discuss ideas for new taxes.
The move by the ministries follows a December statement by President Vladimir Putin, who threw his support behind an idea to raise oil taxes to help generate balanced economic growth but said any hike would not bring in more than an extra $3 billion.
The government is currently collecting tax change proposals from different ministries to put into one document, which should be approved by parliament this year and become effective in 2005.
Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said last week that he was against a dramatic tax hike on the oil sector, which is estimated to pay around $30 billion a year to state coffers.
The world's second largest oil exporter has been boosting output over the last five years and plans to raise it by a further 6 percent to 8 percent this year to 10 million barrels per day.
Kommersant said higher export duties would help raise around $2 billion in extra revenues, while changes in the mineral extraction tax would bring in another $1 billion to $1.6 billion.
It also said a potential differentiation of royalty tax was still undecided and this could raise an additional $1 billion for the budget.
The base rate for the mineral extraction tax will be increased to 451.4 rubles per metric ton under one scenario, or to 560.6 rubles under another scenario compared with the current rate of 347 rubles.
Export duties will be raised when prices for Russia's main crude oil export blend Urals stay above $20 per barrel.
(Reuters, SPT)
TITLE: Lebedev Denied Release
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Moscow City Court on Monday turned down a petition to release key Yukos shareholder Platon Lebedev, ordering him to remain in custody pending trial.
The court upheld the decision of the Basmanny district court in Moscow, which ruled in December that Lebedev be held until March 30, rejecting his lawyers' appeal.
Before his arrest, Lebedev was chairman of Group Menatep, a holding company with a large stake in Yukos, Russia's largest oil company by market value.
Lebedev's lawyers asked the Moscow City Court on Monday to release him because of poor health, but prosecutors said his condition allowed him to stay behind bars and cited concerns that he could influence the investigation if released, the Interfax and Itar-Tass news agencies reported.
Lebedev has remained in jail since his arrest on July 2 on fraud charges, which marked the start of an official probe widely seen as a Kremlin-orchestrated effort to curb influence of Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky, who resigned as Yukos chief shortly after his Oct. 25 arrest on fraud and tax evasion charges, remains in custody.
TITLE: Tank Drivers Get New Jobs
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KUBINKA, Moscow Region- Alexander Nachyovkin doesn't exactly turn swords into plowshares, but he has managed to give this drab garrison town hope for a future in the civilian economy.
Squeezed between a tank museum and a military research institute, Nachyovkin's new bicycle factory stands out in its shiny blue aluminum siding.
The factory, which opened in late January, is the brainchild of Nachyovkin, a gregarious reserve colonel with entrepreneurial ambitions.
"I decided to climb out of a tank and get on a bicycle," he said.
A one-hour drive west of Moscow, Kubinka is home to 60,000 people, most of whom have ties to the town's two divisions, two brigades and special forces regiment.
Nachyovkin claims that Velomotors is the only Russian bicycle manufacturer still designing new bikes.
One day Nachyovkin said he plans to take out his fledgling Russian competitors and capture the European market.
Currently Velomotors orders all its parts from China. But in a few years the factory will start producing its own parts to take advantage of low domestic metals prices, Nachyovkin said.
Velomotors already produces three bikes per minute, he said, and with additional technology plans to boost that number to 1.5 million cycles per year.
In its heyday, the Soviet bike industry produced around 5 million cycles annually, said Andrei Myatiyev, a private Moscow bicycle collector.
Today the country's four largest bicycle factories produce 450,000 bicycles per year, Nachyovkin said, while another 750,000 are imported from Belarus. The rest of the market is filled mostly by imports from China.
"Chinese companies have already started making copies of our bikes and illegally using our 'Stels' brand," Nachyovkin said. "But we will still sell our bikes cheaper and with higher quality."
Competitors are skeptical.
"With the quality of the bikes they produce, they're not going to be successful in Europe this century," said a representative of a large Russian bicycle retailer that custom makes the "Atom" and "Merida" brand mountain bikes.
The representative, who asked to remain anonymous, said Velomotors would essentially flood the market to get rid of the competition. Furthermore, he complained, Nachyovkin was exploiting the popularity of the domestic bike movement without helping promote it.
"Take any young guy, and he'll know more about good quality bikes than these people," he said. "These people are military."
Exactly that affiliation is a matter of pride for Nachyovkin.
"I served in the tank regiment here, and most of the company's managers are friends of mine from army days," he said.
His colleagues tell similar stories of how they quit making and servicing 50-ton killing machines in favor of designing and assembling 15-kilogram tyke-toys.
Velomotors' prices range from 750 rubles ($26) for its cheapest children's model, to 6,640 rubles ($233) for its most sophisticated aluminum-frame mountain bike.
TITLE: Report: Vimpelcom May Face Tax Probe
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Already locked in a legal battle over its license to operate in the lucrative Moscow market, national No. 2 cellular operator Vimpelcom is now being investigated for possible tax evasion, according to media reports.
Citing an unnamed Communications Ministry official, Vedomosti reported Friday that the Interior Ministry's economic crimes department is probing alleged illegal tax-minimization schemes used by the company and that the Communications Ministry is actively cooperating.
Of particular concern is Vimpelcom's routing of long-distance calls through operators other than long-distance monopolist Rostelecom, which the source said allows the company to artificially deflate its traffic figures and avoid value-added and other taxes.
The legal attack on the company, which operates under the Bee Line brand and boasts 11 million subscribers nationwide, began last year when it sued a private customer over an unpaid $800 bill. The customer counter-sued, alleging that Vimpelcom was not authorized to make him pay because it didn't have a license to operate - a claim based on the fact that although Vimpelcom operates and signs agreements with subscribers in Moscow, it is KB Impuls, a fully owned subsidiary, that actually holds the GSM license and owns the network.
Vimpelcom won the case, but state telecoms regulator Gossvyaznadzor, which operates under the aegis of the Communications Ministry, ordered Vimpelcom to clean up its contract arrangements in the capital. And last week Moscow prosecutors, at the request of a little-known company called Mobilny i Sovremenny, announced they opened an criminal investigation into Vimpelcom for operating without a license.
Vimpelcom quickly appealed against the decision to launch the criminal probe, and a preliminary hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
"Unfortunately, [the] unwarranted decision by the prosecutor's office is the latest example of an escalation of an attack on the company," Vimpelcom said Friday.
Prosecutors were not available for comment.
Analysts have linked Vimpelcom's legal troubles to the purchase of a 25 percent stake in rival operator MegaFon by major Vimpelcom shareholder Alfa Group - a deal that is also being disputed in court. MegaFon's major shareholders, including Telekominvest, have made it clear that they are not interesting in having Alfa as a partner.
Market watchers say the situation is getting more serious for Vimpelcom. "When one court case happens, people forget about it. But when it's one thing after another, the negative information accumulates in consumers' heads, and it's bound to affect sales," said Alexander Shatikov of AC&M Consulting.
TITLE: Property Tax Law New For Taxpayers, Officials
AUTHOR: By Artem Vasyutin and Andrew Zhigulev
TEXT: Not much time has elapsed since Chapter 30 of the Tax Code "On property tax on organizations" was introduced on Jan. 1, 2004. But thanks to considerable changes in the object of taxation, the tax base and concessions, many taxpayers will need more time to become accustomed to the new law.
The law is not only new for taxpayers but for the tax authorities too. And as usual, we should expect documents expressing the official opinions of the Tax Ministry since the date for publishing methodological recommendations was announced as sometime in March - just before the deadline for the first quarter's tax return).
The object of taxation for property tax should be clear, i.e. movable and immovable property classified as fixed assets according to Russian accounting legislation (RAS). But the tax authorities may have difficulty resigning themselves to the absence of construction in progress, intangibles, inventory and prepaid expenses from this list. Previously these items were subject to the tax.
It seems the only chance for tax authorities to influence the new tax calculation is to consider accounting and the application of RAS.
As a preliminary sign that this will become the target of their attention, a statement was issued with regard to taxation of buildings and other immovable property. The general practice under RAS is to transfer construction in progress into the fixed assets account when all formal conditions have been met, i.e. state registration and commissioning - and the property is actually being used. And, indeed, the accounting instructions of the Finance Ministry provide options for the treatment of non-registered immovable property. It can either be recognized as a fixed asset when the commissioning act is signed and the property is actually in use, or kept on the construction-in-progress account until state registration is completed.
However, even though they refer to the same Finance Ministry instructions, the tax officials have stated that - irrespective of the choices under RAS - they believe that construction in progress becomes an immovable fixed asset and is therefore subject to the tax as soon as it is in use. This may precede the date of state registration by many months.
This raises further questions as to how the authorities will continue to view the filed accounting policy of a company, particularly since this policy should be a valid document for the tax authorities when calculating taxes.
When published we may find that the methodological recommendations of the tax authorities will contain many more surprises.
Artem Vasyutin is a senior tax consultant and Andrew Zhigulev is a tax consultant with Deloitte St. Petersburg.
TITLE: Consul Follows in Peter's Footsteps
AUTHOR: By Christopher Condlin
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Henri Everaars, consul general of the Netherlands, knew about St. Petersburg from an early age. After all, everyone in Everaars's hometown of Zaandam knows the story of the confident, eager-eyed Russian youth Peter Mikhailov who came to the town in 1697 to learn the art of shipbuilding. The boy was Tsar Peter the Great, and the visit was the beginning of a relationship between two cities and two countries that has endured more than 300 years.
Everaars, like Peter tall and imposing, is an important figure in the modern relationship between Russia and the Netherlands. In his fifth year as consul general, he is one of the most well-entrenched and well-known diplomats in the city. With a strong background in economics, he is the face of Dutch business in the Northwest Region.
Everaars came to St. Petersburg in the wake of the financial crisis when investor interest in Russia had hit an all-time low. His tenure here, however, witnessed one of its greatest periods of growth.
Everaars is not bashful about his role in restoring investor confidence. "It took some years," he says, "but we did it, and I'm very happy that I contributed to that, and I was, from my point of view, instrumental in bringing back confidence with the Dutch trader, with the Dutch investor, and with the Dutch people who really like to do business with this country."
President Putin, says Everaars, also deserves much of the credit for the economic growth. "A much better economic system came in place the moment President Putin took office, and also when he introduced the system of the seven representatives of the various regions. It was seen in the beginning by the governors as a kind of threat, but now they are realizing that it brings a lot of stability. There is much more economic coordination now between the various areas of the regions."
In the Northwest Region, no one has profited from this stability and coordination as much as the Dutch who, in 2003, were the region's biggest trading partner. The region imported from the Netherlands $180 million in food products, flowers, auto parts and machinery for the oil sector. The Northwest Region exported to Holland $1.3 billion in oil, gas, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, and timber.
The Netherlands is also the second biggest trader in St. Petersburg. Dutch trade accounts for 25 percent of the city's total volume, second only to the United States with 27 percent.
"Dutch interest in doing business in Russia is growing day by day," says Everaars, pointing to the Feb. 2 announcement that the Dutch-owned Heineken brewery is investing 6.3 million euros in a new line of "Okhota" beer in 1.5-liter bottles. "Beer in plastic bottles is one of the fastest growing markets in the Russian Federation, and by doing this Heineken will basically double the production of these kinds of bottles."
In another sign that trade relations between the Netherlands and Russia are getting stronger, the Rotterdam port opened an office in St. Petersburg on Jan. 1. "Why?" Everaars asks rhetorically, "Well, because the relationship between the two cities has never been better, and the expectation is that traffic between Rotterdam and St. Petersburg will increase."
The consulate's role in all of this, explains Everaars, "is to facilitate as much as possible every contact between Dutch interests and Russian ones. We are mainly an advisor, mainly a match-maker, and we also help the Dutch traders maintain contact with the administration of the city."
One of the Russian companies that helps the consulate with its match-making is the St. Petersburg Foundation for SME Development. Maxim Balanev, the Foundation's representative working with the consulate, has high praise for Everaars and his team. "I know Mr. Everaars only from the best sides. He is a good consul, and also a really good manager. His team is one of the most professional in the city."
"I really admire the Dutch people," continues Balanev, "they are a fast thinking and a fast working people. They are really, really efficient, and the same can be said for the consular staff."
The consulate's efficiency served it well in September when it organized the eighth annual "Window on the Netherlands" festival, a celebration of Dutch culture. In a year during which scores of countries organized events and brought presents to St. Petersburg, the Dutch contribution stood out.
"It was fantastic," beams Everaars, "We had an enormous program with about 60 cultural events - concerts, exhibitions, seminars. We had trade missions, we had maritime missions; we organized environmental conferences, health conferences, and on top of that we gave a beautiful present: we restored the tsar's bastion in the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was handed over officially by the Prince of Orange."
Thomas Noll, who runs the Corinthia Nevskij Palace Hotel, attributes Everaars's dedication to his love for Russia and Russian culture. "I think what's special about him," says Noll, "is that he loves this country, he loves the people, and that's why he does whatever he can to help them. He has made it his life to be consul 24 hours a day and he represents his country in the best way. At the same time, I think he is also a good ambassador for Russia wherever he goes, not just in the Netherlands. And I think he probably sees his term here not just as a period of thee or four years, I think he sees his future here."
Asked whether he is here for good, Everaars chuckles. "Well that is always the diplomat's life: you never know. But it is my personal wish that I would like to stay here." Behind him, occupying a prominent position on his desk, is a model of the boat - the Shtandart - on which Peter the Great arrived in Zaandam 307 years ago. It suggests that Everaars, like the Netherlands' partnership with Russia, is not likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
TITLE: Railway Reform May Not Reach Destination
AUTHOR: By Russell Pittman
TEXT: Russia's railways are in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Two years ago, the system was entirely a creature of the Railways Ministry, a "Country within a country," and the enterprise was completely owned, operated, and regulated by the government. Unfortunately, as in so many countries around the world, the funds available to the railway from its own earnings and from the government were insufficient to keep the railroad in good operating condition and, post-1998, to expand and modernize to meet the needs of a growing economy. This challenge is clearly becoming more and more serious.
In response to the increasing need for major investments - and to pressures from economic reformers in the Anti-Monopoly Ministry, or MAP, and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry - the system has begun a complete makeover:
. The operating railway enterprise is now the Russian Railways Co., or RZD, a company separate from the Railways Ministry that has in fact already gone to the capital markets in search of investment funds (and recently landed a $250 million credit line with Vneshtorgbank).
. The new tariff regime is designed to provide at least some encouragement to private firms both to purchase and organize rolling stock and to operate independent trains on the RZD infrastructure. The result has been a huge increase in private rolling stock investment and a small number of independent train operators - just three at this point, but with more applicants waiting in the wings.
. While the Railways Ministry continues to be involved in strategic planning for the system, MAP will now regulate the terms of access to the infrastructure for independent train operators, and some combination of MAP and the Federal Energy Commission, or FEC, will oversee the tariffs charged to shippers.
So far, so good. But this is only the first stage in a planned three-stage reform process, and much of the difficult work lies ahead. Three areas in particular must be addressed very soon if progress is to continue.
Cross-subsidies: Passenger fares, both long-distance and suburban, remain far below costs. This is the case throughout the world, but most countries have by now made the important change from supporting passenger operations through cross-subsidies from freight operations to supporting them directly from government budgets. The rest of the world has seen particular success with policies that require regions and localities that ask for subsidies for their citizens to come up with some of the money themselves. And with RZD likely to face increasing competition from motor carriers and independent train operators, the freight profits that have supported passenger operations will no longer be able to do so.
Effective regulation (and deregulation): The new tariff regime, Pricelist No. 10-01, is exceedingly complicated, with commodity tariffs differentiated very specifically by commodity and by distance. The access prices to be charged to the independent train operators are differentiated in exactly the same complicated way. Together these constitute an intimidating set of tariffs and railway infrastructure charges that run a real risk of deterring shippers and would-be operators from making full use of the system. It seems questionable whether either MAP or the FEC has, or will have, the resources necessary to prevent RZD from discriminating against the new, independent train operators which would like to compete with RZD trains - or that, even if these regulators can do the job, the Russian court system is up to the task of enforcing their orders against the railway giant.
At the same time, if RZD itself cannot vary its commodity tariffs in response to competition from motor carriers - as train companies in the United States and EU are free to do - it may find itself unable to hold onto the highest margin traffic. Equally important, RZD is not allowed to sign the kind of closely tailored service and quantity contracts that formed the basis of the success of North American railroad deregulation. The most urgent reform in the near term may be the freeing of tariffs in markets where competition emerges.
Further restructuring: The primary reason for the urgency behind calls for the reforms to continue is that the current situation, with railway reforms more or less at the completion of stage one, is probably not stable over the long term (nor was it designed to be). It is possible that opening up the RZD tracks to entry by independent train operators will be successful in creating a workably competitive railway sector, but in other countries that have tried this reform model the result has been much the same as in Russia so far: small-scale entry but no real competition to the vertically integrated incumbent. It is possible that complete separation of RZD into a track-operating company and a train-operating company - one possible outcome of the three-stage reform process - will yield a more competitive outcome, but in other countries that have tried this reform the result has too often been losses in performance and reliability. And an infrastructure operator unable to generate the needed investment funds.
This is likely the reason that the long-term reform plan also introduces the possibility of a very different reform model, at least in European Russia: the break-up of RZD not vertically but horizontally, into vertically integrated train companies that compete with each other to carry freight over parallel lines and to and from common points of service.
In the worldwide experience with railway reform to date, this has arguably been the most successful reform model in a number of dimensions: i) it allows most railway companies to maintain complete vertical integration and so to enjoy the economies that come from the same company controlling both the trains and the tracks; ii) it allows the integrated companies sufficient pricing freedom that they are able to earn profits, attract investments and make the capital expenditures necessary for a healthy railway sector; and iii) perhaps most importantly, it largely substitutes competition for regulation, with tariffs constrained not by regulators or anti-monopoly authorities in the capital, but by the threat of the loss of traffic to competing railroads.
Note that two common objections to this reform model in the railways sector do not hold up under scrutiny. Some have argued that creating competing vertically integrated railway companies would require fragmenting the ownership of the Russian rail infrastructure among private companies, and that this is contrary to Russian law. However, in countries such as Brazil and Mexico this reform model has been implemented in the form of 30-year or 50-year concessions to private companies, with infrastructure ownership remaining firmly in the hands of the state. Some have likewise argued that separating the unitary Russian railway system into competing vertically integrated railway companies would weaken Russia's national defense, harming the country's ability to move soldiers and materiel in military emergencies. But throughout the world, wherever operational control of the railways has passed into the hands of private companies, the government retains absolute priority rights in case of emergency - and Russia would be no different in this regard.
If the reform momentum is to be continued, and in directions that focus more broadly on the needs of the entire Russian economy, there will have to be increased energy and expertise and resources from elsewhere: from MAP, the Economic Development and Trade, Transport and Railways ministries, and the FEC, or perhaps from a new railway regulatory agency. Otherwise the reforms will stall at somewhere near their current level: a good intermediate point, to be sure, but not the final destination.
Russell Pittman, an economist for the U.S. Department of Justice and a visiting professor at the New Economic School, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. The views expressed are his own.
TITLE: Tender Questions Arise with Abramovich, Sheremetyevo
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: Who said the Yukos affair was a threat to the private sector? Two weeks ago we saw solid proof to the contrary: A private company won the right to operate state-owned Sheremetyevo Airport.
The tender was won by a subsidiary of Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group.
Speculation that Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov intended to hand the airport over to Alfa, moreover without any tender, had been circulating for ages. Word was that Kasyanov and Alfa had reached an agreement back when they were negotiating the TNK-BP merger.
But we're not primitive country bumpkins who just hand over state property without a tender. A tender was held and Alfa won. What a coincidence.
In the past, two types of tender were conducted in Russia.
In the first, money was paid for property; the winner might offer less than the loser, but he still had to pay. And who wants to pay? In the second type, property was sold for a promise to invest. And you can promise as much as you like, but as the Yukos case shows, at some point you might be called to account.
In this context, the Sheremetyevo tender was unique: no money, no promises. Just a score. Some bureaucrats simply sat down and judged the merits of each bidder according to four criteria. And lo and behold, Alfa Group received the highest marks.
Keep in mind that the tender was not for ownership of the airport, but for the right to operate it for the next three years. That is to say, the bidders were potential thieves, not potential owners. What Russian businessman is going to sink his own hard-earned money into someone else's property? That's about as likely as someone hacking into your bank account and making a deposit.
In this sense it didn't matter who won the tender: Alfa, National Reserve Bank or Mezhprombank. It was a hackers' tender, but there could only be one winner.
So why not sell Sheremetyevo, you may ask? In general terms, the Sheremetyevo tender is a sign that in the new Russia it doesn't pay to buy companies. More specifically, there are things that cannot be owned - like the traffic in contraband.
Sheremetyevo is much more than airline passengers. It is freight, terminals and customs. Experts have estimated the value of under-the-counter customs payments at $20 billion annually.
As I said, speculation about the handover of Sheremetyevo to Alfa Group was in the air a year ago, but the deal fell through. Why? Very simple. Sheremetyevo is Aeroflot's hub, and at the time Roman Abramovich owned 26 percent of the airline. Abramovich had enough clout to stop the deal.
But then Abramovich sold his shares to the National Reserve Bank, and a few months later Alfa took control of Sheremetyevo.
Does this remind you of anything? How about the Yukos affair?
Abramovich sold his shares in Sibneft to Yukos, a company whose relationship with the government was rapidly deteriorating. In the short term Abramovich cashed in, and in the long term he was presented with the opportunity to take control of Yukos after the government had done the dirty work.
Abramovich sold his shares in Aeroflot, depriving the airline of his clout and connections. Now Sheremetyevo will likely rescind the discount rates it currently extends to Aeroflot for use of the airport. If that happens, denying the airline the income it now receives from foreign airlines for the right to fly over Russian airspace would be enough to push it over the brink into bankruptcy.
People who buy companies from Abramovich discover that his political connections weren't part of the deal. Soon the value of the companies plummets, making them easy pickings.
Yulia Latynina is a columnist for Novaya Gazeta.
TITLE: Bomb, Vimpelcom Shock
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Two major events that influenced the market last week were the explosion on the Moscow subway, killing 39 people and injuring more than 100, and the growing conflict between the Prosecutor's Office and Vimpelcom. Both of them dragged the market slightly down on Friday. The U.S. dollar rate against the ruble has also fallen, but did not waver noticeably from last month's trend.
On Thursday the Finance Ministry said the budget surplus in January was 5.3 percent of GDP or 55.5 billion rubles ($2 billion). Budget revenues over January amounted to 217.8 billion rubles ($7.6 billion), while expenses reached 162.4 billion rubles ($5.7 billion). Sovereign debt servicing (interest expenses) came up to 11.1 billion rubles ($390 million). Aton experts consider this to be positive news showing balanced budget execution despite several taxes being either raised or lowered.
Furthermore, January's high oil prices mean part of the surplus should be credited to the Stabilization Fund.
The United Financial Group also noticed that the budget surplus exceeded the figure of 34.59 billion rubles, or 4.0 percent of GDP, recorded in January 2003. "The government finances have benefited from the favorable export market, the higher than expected economic growth and the stronger ruble. Moreover, collected taxes exceeded the government's target by 9.3 percent, although there were some problems with collecting the Unified Social Tax (UST)," a UFG report said.
Analysts also maintain that "this adds further optimism to Russia's positive medium-term outlook. It is good news for the Russian debt market in particular and should support debt market gains going forward."
In the gas and oil sector, the Finance Ministry and Economic Development Ministry have agreed on a proposal to increase taxation of the oil industry, Troika Dialog reported Friday. The proposal, which will be reviewed at a cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, implies a significantly more aggressive approach than was proposed by Economic Development Minister German Gref at the American Chamber of Commerce conference last week.
"The new proposal is for an increase in crude oil export duties of $2 billion and in production taxes of $1.081.6 billion at current oil prices. Moreover, it implies a shift from the current statutory three-grade scale for levying export duties to a four-grade scale, i.e. increasing the marginal export duty from 35 percent to 50 percent for an oil price of $20.825 per barrel and from 40 percent to 70 percent if oil goes higher. The production tax proposal is for an increase by around 30 percent, with a rise in the coefficient from 347 rubles to 450 rubles. If approved, the tax increase would be significant, tugging down oil company valuations by more than 30 percent," Troika Dialog said in a report.
On the equity front, Thursday's equity trading was buffeted by events, as local market volume remained heavy ($437 million). According to UFG, the market welcomed the Shakhnovsky trial verdict, with Yukos rising 1 percent. But this was later overshadowed by the competing state-business conflict story of Vimpelcom (-1 percent), whose official tormentors took up a fresh line of attack on international traffic routing.
This news was accompanied by unsubstantiated rumours of a wider attack on Alfa Group. Apart from these stories, there was plenty of weakness among leading stocks, notably UES
(-4.2 percent), LUKoil (-2,2 percent), Surgutneftegaz (-1.9 percent) and Rostelecom (- 2.2 percent). The only important shares to join Yukos in positive territory were Mosenergo (+2.6 percent), Severstal (+2.8 percent) and Sberbank (+0.7 percent).
The Russian market closed down 1.6 percent on Friday, despite closing at its high for the day. The metro bomb in Moscow unsettled the market early on while the continuing attacks on Vimpelcom added to concerns. Volumes were low at $625 million overall. The oil sector generally outperformed with oil prices still around $29 per barrel and even the cellular companies bounced back later in the day, UFG said in a report. "Monday's OPEC meeting, Sibneft's potential results release as well as those of UES will be events that the market will watch this week," analysts said.
TITLE: Nationalism Threatens New Democracies
AUTHOR: By Andrew Kuchins
TEXT: Politics and international relations are hardly exact sciences. But the notion that democracies do not go to war with each other is one of the most widely accepted and empirically verified "laws" that exists in the field of political science. Scholars refer in shorthand to this argument as the "democratic peace," and it is part of a wider set of liberal theories of international relations. One variation suggests that greater economic interdependence between states promotes more peaceful relations. Another corollary posits that the more deeply engaged states are with multilateral international organizations, the less likely they are to go to war. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman promoted what he called the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" that argues that no two countries that have McDonald's restaurants have ever gone to war. As an avid golfer, my personal favorite liberal peace theory indicates that countries with more than one golf course per one million in population have never gone to war against each other. With McDonald's springing up all the time, Russia is in good shape on the "Golden Arches Theory," but with only one full golf course and a population of 145 million, there may be cause for concern.
The track records of peace theories that correlate rising income, trade levels and multilateral institutional engagement, however, are not nearly as strong as the idea of the democratic peace. So powerful is this idea that it was a major pillar of the Clinton administration's foreign policy to promote democracy abroad. While this rationale was always very skeptically received in Russia, a major conceptual driving force behind the Clinton administration's decision to expand NATO to the east was that it would help promote the enlargement of a democratic Europe which would be more stable and peaceful. Similarly, post-Cold War U.S. policy toward Russia also rests partially on the view that a democratic Russia is very unlikely to present security threats to its neighbors, Europe, and the United States, while a totalitarian Soviet Union was a grave security challenge to the democratic West for more than 40 years. The current Bush administration efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East rests on the assumption that states in the region will conduct more peaceful foreign policies if they are democracies rather than dictatorships.
But while history does support the view that mature, stable democracies are highly unlikely to go to war with each other, the picture looks very different for countries trying to make the transition from authoritarian dictatorship to democracy. Important research conducted in the 1990s by American scholars Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield concluded that not only are democratizing countries more likely to go to war than democratic states, but they are also less peaceful than stable authoritarian regimes. Further, they found that states making the huge leap from total autocracy to very broad-based mass democracy are twice as likely to fight wars than those that remain authoritarian. Their study also showed that moving backwards in the democratization process, as opposed to no regime change, similarly increases the probability of war.
The explanation for this dangerous phenomenon is that increased political participation virtually always is accompanied by the rise of nationalism. The French Revolution marked the first dramatic modern case, but the rise of a belligerent Germany and Japan in the first half of the 20th century also follows this pattern. In their important 1995 Foreign Affairs article, Mansfield and Snyder concluded about this dangerous pattern that, "As in so many previous cases, nationalism proved to be a way for militarist elite groups to appear populist in a democratizing society while obstructing the advance to full democracy." We have unfortunately witnessed this kind of dynamic all too often since the end of the Cold War, but perhaps nowhere as tragic for Europe as the former Yugoslavia.
The irony, however, is that democratization does not increase the chances for war because that is what the people desire, but these states are war-prone due to the perverse political incentives for elites to unleash nationalist sentiments to mobilize political support. And in many democratizing countries - again, Serbia is a powerful example - state-controlled media are enlisted to inflame the voters.
Our explanation, however, is incomplete without remembering that democratizing countries typically suffer from poorly developed political institutions and weak political parties. Opening the political process allows more and diverse interests to have a voice, but the lack of strong institutions and parties makes it harder to mitigate and reconcile fundamental differences. Political coalitions emerge, but they are unstable and often resort to nationalist appeals to hold constituents together. Not surprisingly, military and related security interest groups will seek to strengthen their domestic political strength in a weak institutional environment, and the residual appeal of nationalism can often result in the emergence of more belligerent coalitions that increase the likelihood of war. Once the genie of nationalism is let out of the bottle in weakly institutionalized democracies, it is unpredictable and difficult to control.
International policymakers face a real conundrum, in that the efforts to promote regime change in authoritarian states out of the belief that a more democratic world will be a more peaceful world may actually result in increasing short-term dangers. This is the crux of the challenge that the United States and the international community faces in transforming Saddam Hussein's totalitarian Iraq into a stable and peaceful democracy. Maybe we will find ourselves more satisfied and the region more peaceful with a transition in Iraq from a hard to a soft authoritarianism, rather than a weakly institutionalized and unstable democracy.
The volatile mix of nationalism in weakly institutionalized democracies is also a major reason why the United States and many European governments remain concerned about Russia's ongoing transition. Political parties, despite the powerful performance of United Russia, remain poorly consolidated, and key democratic institutions such as the parliament and an independent judiciary are weak. Nationalist appeals found greater resonance than ever in the December parliamentary elections. Political stability increasingly rests on the ability of one man to manage a very broad and diverse coalition. That is why my policy advice for Russians is to build more golf courses fast!
Andrew Kuchins is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. This comment first appeared
in Vedomosti.
TITLE: Clear Goals a Boon, But Are They Realistic?
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: The committee on economic development, industrial policy and trade has recently drafted what is, in essence, Governor Valentina Matviyenko's program for her first term. She will publicly discuss the document, called "The Program for Social and Economic Development of St. Petersburg to 2008," on Feb. 17.
The program's creators were given two major tasks. The first was identified during Matviyenko's election campaign as the goal of making St. Petersburg a European city with a European standard of living. She seems intent on achieving this. The second task was identified by President Vladimir Putin: to double gross domestic profit by 2010.
With these tasks in mind, the economics committee developed a concept for the program, the essence of which can be summed up as follows. The St. Petersburg government brings the city's residents a European standard of living by 2008. The authorities will achieve this goal on their own, through reforming the public sector. The developing economy will take care of exceeding the minimum standard, and the economy will in turn by stimulated by the administration.
The second system of goals is a set of concrete economic indicators that correspond to doubling the gross regional product of St. Petersburg. This includes, for example, that per capita income must grow 2.5 times and reach $430 per month.
It is easy to understand the program's authors. Who knows what will happen in four years, but business taught the members of her team to strive toward clear, measurable results.
From this perspective it is understandable that numbers were chosen as goals. The average Petersburger will undoubtedly be satisfied if a European standard of living is established here. That means minimal norms of these standards must be formulated and someone must be responsible for achieving them. Another group of voters, businessmen, are geared toward the success of their business. This means the administration must ensure growth of concrete economic indicators.
And that is good. Considering the low abilities of the authorities, this program is probably the best we could expect from City Hall. But even doing this will be difficult. In addition to institutional hurdles, the liberal faction of Matviyenko's team will need to overcome the lack of understanding and even resistance of the conservatives.
Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. This comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.
TITLE: Responding in Kind
AUTHOR: By Matt Bivens
TEXT: "Moscow does not negotiate with terrorists - it destroys them." - President Vladimir Putin responding to Friday's terror attack.
About this time last year, a group of fifteen armed and masked men - from their accents, Russian soldiers - arrived at the home of a Chechen family and seized two brothers, Kharon and Aslanbek.
At a detention center in Grozny, Aslanbek was interrogated and beaten. His nose was broken with a heavy metal flashlight; his back and face beaten with rifle butts.
The next day he was loaded into a car - with the corpse of his brother, Kharon - and driven to an abandoned chemical plant. His tormentors tied him and his dead brother to timed explosives, shot him in the head and left. However, the head wound had been a near-miss - merely superficial. Aslanbek worked free of his bonds and brought his brother's body home.
That case, as recounted by New York-based Human Rights Watch, is just one of many atrocities by Russian forces documented last year.
For last February, the Russian human rights group Memorial documented 41 "disappearances" - cases in which people were taken into custody and never heard from again. All told, Memorial documented 269 disappearances in 2003, of which several dozen have turned up as corpses.
Put aside guerrillas being gunned down in fire fights, or women and children caught in the regrettable crossfire; put aside those who stepped on mines, or succumbed to war-zone diseases; put aside kidnappings or arrests where the victims were ransomed, or freed, or at least formally accounted for. Consider only the "disappearances" - people last seen alive being led away by men with guns, and never heard from again - and these alone have been averaging about 22 victims every month.
And that's a conservative undercount. Memorial is only able to document a fraction of atrocities in Chechnya - a patch of mud and mountains in the Caucasus still too dangerous for a UN mission. Memorial guesses that for every documented atrocity, two or three go unrecorded. That works out to an average of 66 to 88 "disappearances" each month. (That jibes with figures from the Kremlin-approved Chechen administration, which last August was already reporting 400 "disappearances," plus dozens of mass graves containing the remains of about 3,000 civilians.)
So on top of the landmines and diseases and such, there are 22 or 44 or 66 or maybe 88 "disappearances" every month, for more than a year now, with no end in sight. For tragedy and death, that's in the ballpark of one Moscow metro bombing every month.
But the metro bombing was carried out, presumably, by a group of criminals - people we really have no control over. It was immediately and loudly denounced by the entire world. Even the London representative of Chechen president-in-exile Aslan Maskhadov condemned it. The Kremlin declared a national day of mourning, and accepted condolences from governments on every continent.
The Chechen disappearances, by contrast, were ultimately carried out not by unaccountable criminals, but by a democratically-elected government - Vladimir Putin's. They occurred with little comment or complaint, even as they were exhaustively documented in reports to the United Nations and other bodies. And no doubt this all fed the determination of crazed extremists, who upon seeing the callous murder of their own by outsiders, said things like, "We don't negotiate with Russians - we destroy them."
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, covered the first war in Chechnya for the Los Angeles Times.
TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Team Spirit
The confession by the Bush Administration's chief arms investigator that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war has sent a thunderbolt of puzzlement through the pundits and politicians of the Anglo-American elite. "How could the intelligence reports have been so wrong?" they cry, wringing their hands in consternation. "Independent" commissions filled with Establishment worthies are now in the offing, as the architects of the war - and their media sycophants - pledge to resolve this disturbing mystery.
But of course there is no "mystery." Anyone with a passing acquaintance of recent history knows exactly how, and why, the intelligence data concerning Iraq's non-existent WMD came to be used as a justification for military aggression. Indeed, this history is so open, so transparent and so widely available - in news reports, unclassified government documents, think-tank publications, etc. - that a cynic might suspect that these government-appointed "investigations" are actually designed to obscure the already evident truth.
It began in 1976, when CIA Director George Bush established a new intelligence analysis unit called "Team B." Championed by top White House officials Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush unit was packed with hardcore ideologues - including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle - bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of the Soviet Union were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Soviet aggression and the Kremlin's ever-increasing political and economic might, as American Prospect (among many others) reports.
At every turn, the B-Teamers cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for massive increases in military spending. During the Reagan-Bush years, the B-Teamers and their acolytes spread throughout the corridors of power, where they launched covert operations and proxy wars around the world, always citing "credible evidence" of "imminent threats" - such as Ronald Reagan's famous warning that tiny Nicaragua, then besieged by a U.S.-backed terrorist army, could invade the sacred American heartland of Texas "in a matter of hours."
As it turned out, even the "softest" CIA assessments vastly underestimated the weakness and instability of the Soviet regime. Team B's wildly inflated perversions of reality were exposed as perhaps the most incompetent, ignorant - and costly - intelligence failures in American history. For in addition to the lives and money wasted fighting phantom threats "to America's very survival," the now thoroughly B-Teamed CIA armed and funded a horde of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, schooling them in "asymmetric warfare" and terrorist operations. No doubt the B-Teamer's ideologically blinded "intelligence" told them that the Western-hating jihadists would never turn this training against their American paymasters.
The end of the Soviet Union found Team B still entrenched in the White House. In 1992, Bush, now president, directed Cheney, now Pentagon chief, and his deputy, Wolfowitz, to draw up a plan for America's strategic future. Despite the collapse of the Communist enemy, the plan called for - what else? - massive increases in military spending and a more aggressive, unilateral "pre-emptive" posture against perceived threats to American interests, with "vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf Oil" listed as the first priority, the NY Times reports. The objective, openly stated, was American dominance over global economic and political development in all spheres.
The Cheney-Wolfowitz plan was then refined by the B-Teamers during the Clinton interregnum. One of their groups, Project for the New American Century, whose members included Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, published a manifesto in September 2000 that incorporated the 1992 plan and openly called for the expansion of American military presence all over the planet, and into outer space as well - "full spectrum dominance" for "U.S. warfighters" and "economic interests." It specifically insisted on the establishment of U.S military power in Iraq, a strategic need that "transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." But PNAC warned, openly, plainly, that this "revolutionary transformation" of American society would probably not take place - unless the American people were "catalyzed" by a "new Pearl Harbor."
When George W. Bush took office, he restored Team B to glory and enshrined PNAC's plan as the official national security strategy of the United States, adding a new imperative to establish "the single sustainable model of national success" - Bush-Enron crony capitalism - in every land. After the "new Pearl Harbor" of September 11, Rumsfeld created a new "Team B" at the Pentagon: the Office of Special Plans, packed with hard-line ideologues bent on "proving" a predetermined conclusion: that regular CIA assessments of Iraq were "too soft," ignoring the "imminent threat" of Saddam's aggression and his vast arsenal of WMD, The New Yorker reports.
At every turn, the OSP cooked and distorted intelligence data to fit their agenda. Scare stories were regularly leaked to credulous journalists to whip up public fear; legislators were plied with "top-secret" briefings to win Congressional support for the invasion. Rumor, hearsay, and forgeries were "stovepiped" directly to the White House, bypassing professional analysts. Anything that contradicted the Bush Regime's ideological delusions was ruthlessly pruned away. Anything that flattered their desire for war - no matter how specious, how false - was eagerly embraced.
So there's no mystery in the current situation. It's how "Team Bush" has always operated. They pervert intelligence to suit their needs - and their greeds. When they're proved wrong - at a horrendous cost in blood and money - they never admit it, never apologize. They simply break out the whitewash, blame someone else - usually the very intelligence services they've suborned - and lumber on in their brutal quest for dominance: ignorant, incompetent and untouchable to the end.
For annotational references, see the Opinion section at www.sptimes.com
TITLE: Britain's Prince Charles In Iran
AUTHOR: By Ali Akbar Dareini
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TEHRAN, Iran - Britain's Prince Charles headed Monday to the earthquake-flattened city of Bam after meeting with President Mohammed Khatami on the first visit to Iran in 33 years by a member of the British royal family.
After a handshake at the Red Palace in central Tehran, Prince Charles inquired about Khatami's recent back pain, which had confined him to his home for several days.
"It's due to old age," the 61-year-old president said with a smile, standing straight and with no visible signs of pain.
His smile, however, appeared forced and his face was not as fresh as journalists usually see him. Khatami has been under tremendous pressure about Feb. 20 legislative elections that he says will be unfair because more than 2,000 pro-reform candidates have been banned from running by a hard-line council.
There was no immediate comment from Khatami's office about his hour-long private discussions with Prince Charles.
The prince arrived in Tehran late Sunday after dropping in on British troops in a high-security visit to the southern Iraqi city of Basra. There, dressed in desert camouflage and boots, he sipped tea with soldiers and praised them for their role in securing southern Iraq.
After the meeting with Khatami, the prince left for Bam, where more than 41,000 people died in a December earthquake that destroyed the ancient southeastern city.
Charles' visit ostensibly was planned so he could see quake aid work in Bam. However, the visit prompted speculation of political motives, perhaps to further improve relations strained after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The British Embassy asserted the prince's trip had no political implications.
"The prince is a patron of the British Red Cross and is visiting Iran in that role. It's an official but completely a nonpolitical visit," said Andrew Dunn, First Secretary at the British Embassy in Tehran.
On Friday, Charles made an appeal in London for funds to aid quake survivors.
Dunn said Charles and Young will assess how the British Red Cross can help the survivors and try to resume agricultural life in the area.
The last time a British royal family member visited Iran was in 1971, when Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and Princess Anne attended grand celebrations marking 2,500 years of monarchy in Iran.
Now, three decades later, Charles is visiting a completely different Iran, ruled by hard-line clerics who routinely have denounced British support of the former shah.
People on the streets of Tehran were surprised by Charles' visit.
"I won't believe a British royal figure is in Iran unless I see it by my own eyes," said Hadi Taqipour, a store clerk.
TITLE: Bostonians Protest Ruling on Gay Marriage
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BOSTON, Massachusetts - Boisterous opponents of same-sex marriage sang, cheered and chanted Sunday at a rally to build support for a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
The demonstration on the Boston Common, a short distance from the Massachusetts Statehouse, broke out into chants of "Let the people vote!" while demonstrators held aloft banners with phrases such as "Marriage, ancient, sacred," and "Repent or perish." Police estimated the crowd at 2,000 people.
Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston said the rally was not about "hatemongering," as some critics have charged.
"We are here because we are concerned about marriage and about family," he told the cheering crowd. "Good strong marriage and family are good for our country, for society."
Massachusetts' highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court, ruled 4-3 in November that same-sex couples had a right under the state constitution to the benefits of marriage. This past week it ruled by the same margin that only marriage - not civil union - would satisfy its initial decision.
The court gave the Legislature a mid-May deadline to comply with its ruling. Legislators, meanwhile, are meeting Wednesday for a constitutional convention to consider an amendment banning gay marriage, but 2006 is the soonest voters could approve such an amendment.
Demonstrator Ed Zicko, 69, acknowledged that gay marriage could become the law before residents in the state have a chance to vote on it.
"We'll just have to wait for that time to vote, unless they find some way to delay it, which I hope they can," Zicko said. He said he came to the rally because marriage is a tradition going back thousands of years and "I think people should have the opportunity to vote on it."
During the rally, several hundred supporters of gay marriage demonstrated loudly at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul across the street.
A poll released Sunday by Merrimack College's Center for Public Opinion Research suggested that support for gay marriage may be slipping, and support for legalizing civil unions growing.
Of 501 adults interviewed by phone in late January and early February, 33 percent said the state should recognize gay marriages, compared to 37 percent in November. In the latest poll, 43 percent said the state should recognize civil unions, compared to 38 percent in November. The margin of error was 4.5 percentage points.
TITLE: Bush Defends Iraq War in TV Interview
AUTHOR: By Deb Riechmann
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - President Bush denied he marched America into war under false pretenses and said the U.S.-led invasion was necessary because Saddam Hussein could have developed a nuclear weapon.
"I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best," the president said. Bush suggested Saddam may have destroyed or spirited out of the country the banned weapons the Bush administration cited as a main rationale for the war.
"I expected to find the weapons," Bush said in an Oval Office interview broadcast Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"Sitting behind this desk, making a very difficult decision of war and peace, I based my decision on the best intelligence possible," the president said. The interview was taped Saturday.
Bush also was asked about the fugitive Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks whom the president had pledged to get "dead or alive."
He chuckled when told that a Republican lawmaker had predicted Osama would be captured before the presidential election. "I appreciate his optimism," Bush said. "I have no idea whether we will capture or bring him to justice.... I know we are on the hunt."
The interview, his first on a Sunday talk show since taking office, came as the president's approval rating has dipped to 47 percent, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll taken in early February; that compares with 56 percent just a month ago.
The appearance followed weeks of criticism from Democrats over the failure so far to find Iraq's cache of weapons.
"They could have been destroyed during the war," Bush said, speculating about reasons the reports might have been wrong. "Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we'll find out."
The president said he retained confidence in CIA Director George Tenet. Bush shook his head from side to side when asked if Tenet's job was in jeopardy. "No, not at all, not at all," Bush said.
Bush pledged to cooperate with a commission he set up last week to examine prewar intelligence lapses and defended its March 2005 reporting date, which is four months after the White House election.
"There is going to be ample time for the American people to assess... whether or not I made the right decision in removing Saddam Hussein from power," Bush said.
Democrats in Congress and on the campaign trail said Sunday they wanted to see the findings before the election, if possible.
"What we've got here is a president who simply doesn't want to be held accountable," presidential hopeful Wesley Clark told CNN's "Late Edition."
Bush did not directly respond to election-year allegations that his administration exaggerated intelligence, but made clear that the United States considered the Iraqi president a dictator who brutalized and killed his own people.
"I strongly believe that inaction in Iraq would have emboldened Saddam Hussein," Bush said. "He could have developed a nuclear weapon over time - I'm not saying immediately, but over time.... We would have been in a position of blackmail. In other words, you can't rely upon a madman."
Also on the foreign policy front, Bush said "diplomacy is just beginning" with North Korea. The United States and its allies are seeking to persuade the communist nation to abandon its nuclear weapons programs. "We are making good progress," Bush said.
On domestic issues, Bush said his tax cuts were responsible for an economic rebound.
He dismissed news reports that there is no evidence he reported for National Guard duty in Alabama during the summer and fall of 1972, during the Vietnam War. "There may be no evidence but I did report; otherwise, I wouldn't have been honorably discharged."
Bush expressed indifference about polls that showed him trailing the Democratic front-runner, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. "I'm not going to lose," Bush said. "I don't plan on losing."
TITLE: Belarus Beats Russia to Play Quarterfinals
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINSK, Belarus - Vladimir Voltchkov overcame an ankle injury to beat Russia's Mikhail Yuzhny in the decisive singles match Sunday, giving Belarus a spot in the Davis Cup quarterfinals.
Belarus won both singles Sunday after entering the final day of the World Group series down 2-1.
Playing with a bandage on his strained right ankle, Voltchkov won 7-5, 6-2, 6-4 for a 3-2 victory. Earlier, Max Mirnyi downed rookie Igor Andreev 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 to make it 2-2.
Belarus will play Argentina in the quarterfinals in April. Russia will go to the World Group playoffs in September.
Marat Safin and Youzhny had defeated Mirnyi and Alexander Shvec in doubles Saturday to give Russia a 2-1 lead.
Voltchkov quit with an ankle strain in the fourth set of the opening singles against Andreev on Friday. He was not expected to play Sunday.
Safin, the Australian Open runner-up, was originally set to play reverse singles, but Russian captain Shamil Tarpishchev decided to rest him.
In Adelaide, defending champion and host Australia was knocked out of the Davis Cup on Sunday - a big fall for a country that won the title just more than two months ago.
Jonas Bjorkman and Thomas Enqvist won singles matches, giving Sweden a 4-1 victory in the first round.
Sweden advanced to the quarterfinals against the United States, which downed Austria 5-0 in Uncasville, Connecticut, on Sunday and will be a host in the next round. Australia will compete in a playoff to stay in the World Group.
Spain, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland also advanced to April's quarterfinals. Argentina made the quarters on Saturday and completed a 5-0 sweep the next day.
Spain hosts the Netherlands in the quarters while France visits Switzerland and Belarus hosts Argentina.
Bjorkman topped Wimbledon runner-up Mark Philippoussis 7-5, 6-2, 6-2, and Enqvist beat Wayne Arthurs 7-6 (8), 3-6, 6-4.
"We had all the good bounces on our side, all the luck," Sweden captain Mats Wilander said.
Philippoussis, the star of the Davis Cup final last year, lost both his singles matches.
"It's three days I want to put behind me. One day you're the hero, the next day everyone jumps on you," Philippoussis said. "That's how it is here unfortunately. It's a tough time now."
Australia is the seventh defending champion to be eliminated in the first round since the World Group format was introduced in 1972.
In Brno, Czech Republic, Spain, last year's runner-up, got a deciding win against the Czechs from Rafael Nadal to win 3-2. Nadal, at 17 the youngest man to play for Spain in the Davis Cup, topped Radek Stepanek 7-6 (2), 7-6 (4), 6-3.
Feliciano Lopez started the comeback for Spain by beating Tomas Berdych 6-4, 6-7 (2), 6-3, 6-4. Spain was without injured stars Juan Carlos Ferrero and Carlos Moya.
In Maastricht, Netherlands, Martin Verkerk and Sjeng Schalken both won to lead the Dutch over Canada 4-1. Verkerk beat Frank Dancevic 6-7 (5) 6-2, 7-5, 6-3 and Schalken defeated Simon Larose 6-2, 7-5.
In Metz, France, the hosts advanced 4-1 after downing Croatia in both singles Sunday. Arnaud Clement first beat Ivan Ljubicic 6-2, 3-6, 7-6 (3), 6-4. Nicolas Escude then topped Ivo Karlovic 7-6 (5), 6-2.
In Agadir, Morocco, Argentina completed a 5-0 sweep of Morocco. Guillermo Coria defeated Mehdi Tahiri 6-2, 7-6 (4), and Agustin Calleri topped Mounir El Aarej 6-7 (1), 6-3, 6-1.
Morocco was without its top two players - Younes El Aynaoui and Hicham Arazi - who are both injured.
In Bucharest, top-ranked Roger Federer overpowered Romania's Andrei Pavel 6-3, 6-2, 7-5 Sunday to give Switzerland a first-round victory in the Davis Cup.
Switzerland will host France in April in the quarterfinals for the second straight year. Last year, the Swiss won in Toulouse.
In the final singles, Romania's Victor Hanescu beat Swiss reserve Stanislas Wawrinka 6-3, 7-6 (3) to make the final score 3-2.
On opening day Friday, Federer, the Wimbledon and Australian Open champion, downed Hanescu. Pavel beat Michel Kratochvil in the other singles.
In Saturday's doubles, Federer and Yves Allegro won a five-setter over Pavel and Gabriel Trifu.
TITLE: Champion Lewis Says Goodbye
AUTHOR: By Tim Dahlberg
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: The heavyweight champion of the world retired, and the world responded with a big yawn.
Don't blame boxing, a sport that has enough problems as it is.
Blame Lennox Lewis, who wanted fans to embrace him but never gave them a chance.
At a London hotel on Friday, Lewis bid the sport goodbye, turning down a lucrative rematch with Vitaly Klitschko to become the first heavyweight champion in nearly a half-century to retire for good while still holding the title.
He brought along a pair of Violets - one his fiance, the other his mother - and spoke like a man relieved to be finally unburdened by the price of fame.
"I just wanted to keep my life private as much as I possibly could," Lewis said.
In 14 years in the ring, through three heavyweight championship reigns, he largely succeeded. By doing so, though, Lewis paid a price that could wear on him as the years go by and his accomplishments are finally tallied.
Lewis had the size and talent to go down as one of the greatest ever, but when the history books are written he'll likely be remembered more for being the first British heavyweight champion in more than a century than anything else.
He was often overly cautious in the ring, never more evident than when Oliver McCall began crying in front of him in the ring and Lewis, suspecting a trick, didn't go after him. He was also knocked out twice by single punches to the head by McCall and Hasim Rahman.
Even his two biggest wins were somewhat suspect, with Mike Tyson a shell of his former self and Evander Holyfield past his prime.
But it's what Lewis did - or failed to do - outside the ring that will always tarnish his reign.
Heavyweight champions are supposed to be larger than life, and at 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds, Lewis was larger than most. But he never seemed to embrace the sport that made him rich, or the fans who wanted to cheer him on.
Lewis rarely ventured out between fights and when he was seen in public he was usually hidden behind dark shades, underneath dreadlocks and a cap. To many, he was perceived as aloof, even arrogant.
Lewis was largely unloved, to the point that he was booed loudly when he won his last fight against Klitschko.
"Unfortunately for Lennox, he was shy and didn't enjoy the press attention so he was an easy target," HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg said. "A lot of people took that British accent [sic] and quiet confidence and mistakenly portrayed it as arrogance."
Part of that could be chalked up to typical British reserve, even though Lewis spent much of his life growing up in Canada. But Lewis made only the bare minimum effort to promote his fights, and it wasn't just overseas. When he defended his title against Francois Botha at the London Arena in 2000, promoters literally gave tickets away.
Even while trying to decide whether to fight again, Lewis did boxing no favors. For months, he left Klitschko, the rest of the heavyweight division, and HBO in limbo while he pondered his future.
"He held up the division from making major matches," said Chris Byrd, who holds the IBF version of the title.
On the phone Friday from London, Lewis said he didn't know until two weeks earlier what he was going to do. In a moment of retrospection he never showed while fighting, he also acknowledged that he had trouble being the kind of heavyweight champion people expected.
"Some people love the spotlight and thrive for it," he said. "I can't say I'm one of those people who thrive on it."
Lewis also had a role model of sorts when he turned pro after winning the 1988 Olympic gold. At the time, Tyson was wrecking cars, hitting wives and wreaking havoc on the heavyweight division.
Lewis knew he didn't want to be like Mike.
"I chose my life to definitely not be like Mike Tyson," he said. "I wanted to do it in a more positive way in the sense I wanted to be honorable, respectable, role model-like and go about my job in a professional matter."
The trouble is, boxing likes its heavyweight champions to be a bit bad, and Lewis never fit in. He doted on his mother, played chess, kept out of nightclubs and out of trouble.
When Tyson bit him during a melee at the press conference in New York to promote their 2002 fight, Lewis chose to analyze the moment in a proper British way.
"When he attacked me, I was mortified in a sense. I thought, 'Why is he biting me? Is there something mentally wrong with him?'" Lewis said. "I thought about it a minute and then decided if I was going to pay him back I was going to do it in the ring."
Lewis would go on to stop Tyson in the eighth round in Memphis, Tennessee, in what turned out to be the defining moment of his career. Though Tyson was no match by that time, Lewis finally had his biggest win.
"There was more fire under me for that fight," he said.
You can only wonder what might have been had that fire always been there. Lewis might have fought Tyson earlier, met Riddick Bowe in his prime, and secured his place in boxing history.
He didn't, and left boxing the worse for it.
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Mike Tyson may be getting ready to get back in the ring for the first time in more than a year.
The manager Tyson fired just a few months ago says he is exploring a possible fight for May or June for the former heavyweight champion, who is mired in debt and in bankruptcy proceedings.
Shelly Finkel said he and Tyson have reunited and that Tyson wants to fight again. Tyson hasn't fought since last February, when he stopped Clifford Etienne in 49 seconds.
Showtime network executive Jay Larkin said he is in talks with Finkel for a Tyson fight on June 5. Tyson has fought mainly on Showtime in recent years.
The June 5 date is the same one Oscar De La Hoya said he will fight on in his next bout. De La Hoya fights on HBO.
Finkel said the 37-year-old Tyson has been working out with a bodyguard, but does not have a trainer yet.
(AP)
TITLE: Western Conference Defeat In All-Star Hockey Skirmish
AUTHOR: By Alan Robinson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ST. PAUL, Minnesota - They call Minnesota the State of Hockey and, fittingly, the NHL's All-Star game there reflected the state of its hockey, too. The trend to defense has spread even to the sport's showcase game.
In a relatively low-scoring game befitting what is jokingly called hockey's dead-puck era, 43-year-old Mark Messier turned back the clock and Joe Sakic scored three goals, but the goalies dominated in the Eastern Conference's 6-4 victory Sunday over the Western Conference.
"The goaltending was unbelievable and we got a game out of it because of the goaltending," Messier said after four of the six goalies allowed only a single goal apiece. "Otherwise I think it would have been up in the double digits for both sides."
Messier, who was winning Stanley Cups before some current All-Stars were born, had a goal and an assist and Daniel Alfredsson had two goals and an assist for the East to overcome All-Star MVP Sakic's hat trick.
If it was his last All-Star game - and, perhaps, the NHL's last for a while as it prepares for what could be months of divisive labor talks - at least Messier left behind a lasting memory with his sixth multiple-point game in 15 All-Star appearances.
"There's no question he deserved to be here," Rangers teammate Jaromir Jagr said of Messier, whose selection was questioned for being more sentimental than reflective of his current skills.
Despite the big games by players (Messier and Sakic) with a combined 39 seasons of NHL experience, it was only the second All-Star game with fewer than 10 goals in the last 19 seasons. Nine goals were scored in 1996.
Only two goals were scored in the first period against goalies Martin Brodeur of the East and Marty Turco and in the third against the East's Roberto Luongo and the West's Dwayne Roloson as all four made a series of exceptional saves.
"I thought it was high tempo, it was quick out there, but the goaltending was great," the West's Jarome Iginla said. "It could have been a really high-scoring game if they weren't so good."
Not likely. Though the final score would be a shootout by today's standards in a sport where scoring had dropped by 2 1/2 goals per game in the last 15 years to an average of five per game, it was far below that of the 16-goal average of the last 14 All-Star games.
Only three years ago, North America beat the World All-Stars by the football like-score of 14-12 in Denver, a game derided by hockey purists as being more like a home run derby than a real game.
On Saturday, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said the league's general manager and a league-wide committee will look at ways to pump up the offense and improve the game.
"I think we can make a lot of changes, but we're never going to have the scoring we once did and today is proof of it," Messier said. "I think a 6-4 All-Star game with that many chances, you can take out every red line and blue line in the game and you're never going to have the goal scoring that we had in the 80s."
This game actually had some contact and some checking, a rarity in a mostly hitting-free game in which the last thing any player wants to do is get hurt.
After the East's Jeremy Roenick delivered a hard check on the West's Keith Tkachuk during the first period, Tkachuk responded by slamming Roenick into the boards, drawing one of the few big ovations from the sellout crowd.
"Guys love it when [Roenick] is out there doing that," Sakic said. "He does a super job promoting the game. I thought he was great."
Messier set up the game's first goal, Adrian Aucoin's shot that eluded Turco's glove with about 5 1/2 minutes gone as the goalie swiped at it along the right side of the net. Messier set an All-Star game record with his 14th assist, one more than Ray Bourque had in 19 games.
Messier, who was already a Stanley Cup winner with Edmonton when 19-year-old Columbus All-Star Rick Nash was born, later tied it at 3 with the first of three consecutive East goals in the final 6:12 of the second period against Nashville's Thomas Vokoun. Vokoun let in four of the 12 shots he faced in his All-Star debut.
"Both [Jagr] and Robert [Lang] all game long were trying to set me up and score a goal, and I was the lucky receiver," Messier said.
Messier's goal, his sixth in an All-Star game and his first since 1998, gave him 20 career points - breaking a tie with Gordie Howe for third place in All-Star history.
The pro-West crowd gave Messier a standing ovation before the game and then loudly cheered his goal. The East won for the fifth time in the last six All-Star games played with an East vs. West format.
Gary Roberts, who retired for the 1996-97 season because of a neck injury but came back a season later, put the East ahead 4-3 by slamming Alfredsson's long rebound past Vokoun less than a minute after Messier's goal.
Alfredsson, the Ottawa star who played most of the game on a line with rival Mats Sundin of Toronto, made it 5-3 late in the second by swiping in a Sundin rebound that lay in the crease between Vokoun's pads.
The only goal against Brodeur - arguably, the NHL's MVP to date - was by Sakic, who tied it at 1 with the first of his consecutive goals for the West. Sakic's three goals equaled his total in his first eight All-Star games.
Sakic was the 14th player in All-Star history to score three or more goals; five share the record with four goals, including 2003 MVP Dany Heatley of the East in a 6-5 overtime loss to the West. Sakic became the second straight MVP to play for the losing team.
TITLE: Joubert Beats Plushenko to Win Men's Title
AUTHOR: By Andrea Dudikova
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BUDAPEST, Hungary - Brian Joubert joined Olympic champion Alexei Yagudin as the only men to beat Yevgeny Plushenko at the European Figure Skating Championships when he won the men's title Thursday. It was no coincidence.
Joubert admitted after becoming the first Frenchman in 40 years to capture the title that he'd received coaching from Yagudin, an archrival of Plushenko's until he finished competitive skating last year because of hip problems.
"Alexei helped me before the French championship," Joubert said. "Now we keep contact by Internet and he gives advice.
"He gives me tips on jumps and mental preparation. He will be in Dortmund," Germany for the world championships next month.
Yagudin or Plushenko had swept every European and world title since 1998.
Plushenko won the Europeans in 2000, 2001 and 2003, while Yagudin won in 1998, 1999, and 2002 when Plushenko did not compete.
Joubert, the reigning two-time French champion, became the first French winner of the European title since Alain Calmat won successive championships from 1962 to 1964. "Too bad the Olympic Games don't take place in Hungary," Joubert said. "I have three goals: I want to be a European champion - I did it. I also want to be world and Olympic champion." Joubert, who won bronze and silver medals the previous two years, completed two quads and six triples in his program to "The Matrix" soundtrack. He scored from 5.7 to 5.9 for technical merit, and 5.5 to 5.8 for presentation. "It wasn't perfect but very good," Joubert said.
Plushenko had a rough night. Although he started brilliantly with a quad-triple-double, he made three major mistakes. He sprawled on a first attempt at a triple axel, and popped the second one to only a single. He missed his first two tries but came back later in the program to improvise a triple axel-triple toe loop-double loop and also fell attempting a triple flip. "I don't know what happened, maybe it was psychological," Plushenko said.
"I still look forward to going to the world championships. I will skate better. ... I am already a three-time European and two-time world champion," Plushenko added. "Life doesn't stop."
On Friday, Russia's Elena Sokolova will kick off the women's short program in search of her first European title following a silver medal last year. Her chances are high of winning as five-time European champion Irina Slutskaya of Russia has not competed this season due to health problems. During practice, Sokolova cleanly managed triple-triple jumping combinations.
Russia also has another chance for a title in ice dance. Ice dancers Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostomarov were a step away from their first European title following an original dance program filled with hypnotic movements Thursday.
The energetic couple performed to the slow-moving tune "Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers and Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" with marks between 5.5 and 5.9.
Their step sequence to the repetitive "I know, I know ... ," lyrics was riveting as they moved slowly down the middle of the rink with most of their moves on one foot.
"We had a perfect dance, we expect to show our best tomorrow," Navka said. The ice dance competition ends with the free program Friday.