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Christus Rex Information ServiceGROZNY, Russia (Apr 2, 1996 08:09 a.m. EST) - Russian forces said on Tuesday they were sticking to President Boris Yeltsin's plan to end their offensive in Chechnya but that troop withdrawal could not start for several weeks.
Meanwhile refugees were reported to be fleeing two villages in southeast Chechnya after an alleged attack on them by Russian "Grad" multiple-launch rockets and fighting persisted in three villages to the southwest of the North Caucasus region.
Yeltsin, running for a second term in a June 16 election, ordered a halt on Sunday to almost 16 months of "military operations" and said a stage-by-stage withdrawal of federal forces from stable regions of Chechnya was beginning.
But on Monday a spokesman for rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev dismissed the plan as a pre-election stunt and the head of Russian land forces in Chechnya told Itar-Tass news agency that troops could not be withdrawn yet.
"The withdrawal of military units from remote regions of Chechnya to its administrative border and beyond is scheduled to start no earlier than the end of April," it said, citing the commander, Vladimir Semyonov.
About 80 percent of the forces would eventually be withdrawn but some Interior and Defence Ministry troops would remain behind in Grozny, he said.
Interfax news agency quoted federal forces in Chechnya as saying there had been no active military operations in the region overnight but that rebels had attacked their checkpoints in Grozny eight times.
It later said that Russian troops had killed three dozen rebels who had tried to recapture the village of Orekhovo in southwest Chechnya in a dawn raid.
The deputy commander of forces in Chechnya Major General Stanislav Kondratyev said there had been no losses on his side.
"Federal forces will continue special operations to stave off territorial sorties by the armed (rebel) groups in line with the president's order," Interfax said, quoting Kondratyev.
He said such operations were going on in the Nozhai-Yurt region in the southeast, but did not explain what they involved.
Tass quoted the regional administrator in nearby Shali as saying refugees were flooding down from the mountains after their villages were attacked by Grad rockets on Monday night.
The head of the North Caucasus military district Colonel General Anatoly Kvashnin dismissed criticism by some politicians and media that Moscow was merely giving the rebels time to regroup. "An end to militarised operations does not mean a complete end to all military activities," he said.
Dudayev aide Movladi Udugov said that real peace could not come to Chechnya until all the troops had been withdrawn.
"All the political steps taken by the Russian side can be no more than pre-election action with the aim of raising Yeltsin's authority and making him Russian president for a second term," he told Ekho Moskvy radio.
Udugov said Dudayev had, as yet, no answer to Yeltsin's offer of indirect talks but rejected the offer of mediation by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
"They can't even leave Grozny without permission from the Russian checkpoints," he said.
Those doing the fighting on the ground, on both sides, rate the chances of Dudayev and Yeltsin making peace as very slim, since they hold incompatible views on Chechnya's status, which Moscow will not allow out of the Russian Federation.
Dudayev's fighters say they will not surrender until they have driven from their Caucasus homeland a force they see as a foreign invader.
GROZNY, Chechnya (CNN) -- A Chechen rebel held captive by Russian troops as a prisoner of war was released Saturday after his sister negotiated an extraordinary POW swap.
The woman paid Chechen rebels 15 million rubles ($3,000) for two Russian POWs. She then turned her newly acquired POWs over to Russian federal forces in exchange for her wounded brother.
As Russian special forces looked on, the brother was carried to his sister on a stretcher from the military base where he was being held.
A crowd gathered to watch the emotional reunion, then helped the sister carry her brother to a hospital for treatment.
Several Chechen women begged Russian troops to make sure the Russian prisoners that were swapped for the brother would be sent back to their parents.
"We hope this is the last shot, not the opening of a new round of fighting," Lake told a U.S.-Russian trade group.
Lake also said the United States supports Yeltsin's efforts to end the fighting and his program to reform the Russian economy. Stopping just short of an open endorsement of the Russian president in June elections, Lake said: "We make no secret of the fact we support reforms and reformers."
Russian Ambassador Yuli M. Voronstov, speaking after Lake, predicted Yeltsin would be re-elected, even though he is trailing Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the polls.
As for Chechnya, the ambassador said "the war is over," but it is up to rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev to make peace. "It takes two to tangle; it takes two to make peace," Voronstov said.
The Interfax news agency in Moscow reported today that Chechen rebels attacked a column of Russian troops near the guerrilla stronghold of Vedeno, killing 28 Russian servicemen and wounding 75 on Sunday.
Russian military officials said they halted combat operations in Chechnya today as ordered by Yeltsin.
Lake also said of previous efforts to quell the Chechen separatists, "We oppose the means the Russians have been using" but support the country's boundaries. He said they should not be changed by force.
Criticizing the rebels, he said, "We oppose terrorism in all its forms," but he also said Moscow's "widespread and indiscriminate use of force has spilled far too much innocent blood and eroded support for Russia."
President Clinton is due to meet with Yeltsin in Moscow in three weeks.
Lake said, "We always expected Russia's journey to freedom to be uneven." But he said the administration would maintain a steady supportive stance "staying engaged with Russia" in what is "a new age of possibility but also of peril."
He also reaffirmed U.S. opposition to the Communist-dominated parliament's vote last month to bring back the old Soviet Union.
"Let me emphasize," Lake said, "we support the millions of former Soviet citizens in all those nations who broke the chain of tyranny in 1991. They have chosen freedom and their will must be respected. President Yeltsin believes that too, and so do the vast majority of Russians."
PRESIDENT Yeltsin's peace plan for Chechnya is a sickly child, conceived in the cynical atmosphere of the Russian presidential election campaign and surrounded by enemies waiting to stifle it.
Mr Yeltsin, however, still deserves praise for taking a step that he has not dared to make during the past 15 months of war: recognising that peace can come only through negotiations with the separatist leader, Gen Dzhokhar Dudayev.
This is as dramatic in Russian terms as for an Israeli leader to negotiate with Yasser Arafat or for a British prime minister to accept the role of Sinn Fein in an Ulster settlement.
Behind-the-scenes battles have long been waged in the Kremlin, but the hawks in the so-called "war party" have always scotched any move towards negotiations. In this they have been helped by the inflexibility of Gen Dudayev, who insists on full independence.
Underlining the sensitivity of this issue, the key phrase on the need for talks with Gen Dudayev was written into Mr Yeltsin's statement at the last moment before the broadcast was recorded. Only in a later interview did Mr Yeltsin explain his reasoning: that Gen Dudayev - long derided as a bandit and leader of world terrorism - was a figure of authority for many Chechens.
Those in favour of a Chechnya settlement welcomed the U-turn. One of the proposed mediators, the President of the autonomous Russian republic of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiyev, said yesterday that Mr Yeltsin had "overcome the influence of the power bodies" - a euphemism for the heads of the army, police, internal security forces and the presidential guard.
Mr Yeltsin said he had gone against his advisers: "In my team they didn't think it should be said."
But if Mr Yeltsin is so weak that he can only slip in his call for peace talks by sleight of hand, there does not seem much hope of successful negotiations.
"If these talks are not properly engaged in two to three days, then there is no chance of them coming off at all," said Andrei Piontkowsky, director of the Moscow Strategic Studies Centre. "The fighting will resume."
The impressive list of those who do not want a settlement includes Nikolai Yegorov, Mr Yeltsin's chief of staff, who was a prime mover in starting the disastrous attempt to bring Chechnya to heel by force.
The military has given at best a lukewarm response. The commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, Lt-Gen Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, ordered his men to cease fire yesterday but said "special operations" to disarm the rebels would continue.
Retired Gen Lev Rokhlin, the chairman of the defence committee of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, said: "Dudayev has forced us to bow our heads."
Gen Rokhlin - a Chechnya veteran who led the assault on Gen Dudayev's presidential palace last year - said he feared that a ceasefire would mean Russian soldiers would be left freezing in their trenches, living off thin cabbage soup. Meanwhile, the rebels would have recouped their forces in warm houses and prepared for the next round of battle.
Little compliance can be expected from the Kremlin-installed Chechen government. The pro-Moscow President, Doku Zavgayev, who is well connected in the Kremlin, has no interest in fresh elections or seeing the rebel leader accepted as the real president of his people.
There is little sign that the rebels themselves are ready for talks. The Russian military said 28 soldiers were killed and 69 injured in an ambush near the southern village of Vedeno on Sunday. After a month-long Russian offensive which has left a series of burnt-out Chechen villages, the rebels and much of the population are in a fiercely anti-Russian mood.
Gen Dudayev himself, a diminutive former bomber commander in the Soviet air force, often seems to be losing his grip on reality as he contemplates the ruins of his homeland from a mountain fastness out of reach of Russian guns. Talking to journalists he descends into an ill-tempered rant.
But there are also serious problems in Moscow. Any peace process would depend on an amnesty for Gen Dudayev, which would have to be granted by the Communist-dominated parliament. But the Communists relish seeing Mr Yeltsin squirm on the Chechen hook and do not want to help him to escape.
There was no appetite in the Duma yesterday to give Gen Dudayev amnesty, and Russian politicians lined up to declare the peace plan too late to solve the crisis and too clearly linked to Mr Yeltsin's campaign for the June elections
Last September, Lt. Col. Victor W. Weedn of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and his American and Russian colleagues said they were sure "beyond any reasonable doubt" the remains found in the Ural Mountain city of Yekaterinburg were those of the Russian imperial family.
Formally presenting those findings in a paper in Tuesday's issue of the journal Nature Genetics, Weedn and his colleagues say that after further DNA studies they are 99.99999999 percent certain the remains are Czar Nicholas'.
The location of the remains of the Russian royal family had been a mystery for decades. The entire Romanov family was believed to have been shot in July 1918, shortly after Bolsheviks seized power, and their bodies beaten and dumped in sulfuric acid. The Romanovs had ruled for nearly three centuries.
The remains found in Yekaterinburg have been identified by investigators as those of the czar, his wife, Czarina Alexandra, three of their five children and four servants -- leaving unsolved the mystery of whether daughter Anastasia and son Alexei might have been spared death or buried elsewhere.
Building on earlier British studies, Weedn's team bolstered the case for the identification of Nicholas II's remains by taking a DNA sample in July 1994 from the corpse of his brother, Grand Duke Georgij, who died of tuberculosis in 1899.
Like Nicholas', Georgij's bones showed an unusual condition called heteroplasmy at the same genetic location. Combining that finding with others -- including a genetic match between the czar's wife and her great-nephew, Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, who donated hair and blood to researchers -- produced odds of 130 million to 1 that the remains are those of Czar Nicholas and the Romanovs.
"People operate with complete certainty on much less than that," said Thomas J. Parsons, a colleague of Weedn's. Nevertheless, plans to give the Romanovs' remains a proper Orthodox burial have been held up for months in Russia amid lingering doubts from some people about their authenticity.
HAVANA, Cuba (Apr 2, 1996 0:39 p.m. EST) -- Warning of what it described as a campaign by the United States to "deceive, confuse and dismantle" the Cuban revolution, the Cuban Communist Party has called for strengthening ideological and economic orthodoxy and threatened "severe punishment" for those who failed to comply.
The party's Central Committee endorsed a harder political line against what were said to be Washington-supported "Trojan horses" and "fifth columnists" in its midst at a meeting last weekend. Reports of the rare full session, which was held behind closed doors, only began to emerge last week.
Party leaders also sharply criticized features of the limited opening of the economy in the last three years that has rescued the Cuban economy from the brink of collapse, demanding increased self-reliance and discipline instead.
The actions come at a moment when relations between Cuba and the United States are unusually tense, the result of the episode on Feb. 24 in which the Cuban air force shot down two light planes belonging to a Miami-based Cuban exile group.
In retaliation, President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act, which intensifies and extends the longstanding U.S. economic embargo against Cuba.
Ordinary Cubans, dissidents and foreign diplomats have expressed concern at the tone of the documents emerging from the party meeting, saying they augur a period of increased repression and retrenchment.
"This is a sea change in terms of moving to a much more rigid ideological position and a much more absolute control by the party of everything," said one diplomat here.
In a report to the party conference published last week in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, Defense Minister Raul Castro, the country's second-most-powerful figure, argued that Cuba must at all costs avoid reforms of the type that "undermined the Soviet Union and other socialist countries."
Self-employed workers and intellectuals here are being used by Cuba's enemies, he complained, to weaken the authority of the party and the state and must be brought back into line.
President Fidel Castro led the closed two-day party plenum, the first since 1992. The full text of his remarks has not yet been made public, but Granma reported that he had told the 212 members of the Central Committee that the meeting marked "the start of an intense ideological battle" requiring the mobilization not only of party members, "but of the people as a whole."
The effort is necessary because the country is experiencing "particularly difficult and dangerous moments," Castro, who is also the head of the Communist Party, was reported to have warned. "Revolutionary ideology has never been more necessary than today."
Ricardo Alarcon, the speaker of Cuba's Parliament, said in an interview that the Central Committee session was to be followed by "thousands of meetings throughout the country to discuss this report" in workplaces and schools.
The Helms-Burton Act will be a main focus of discussion, he said, and he predicted that the strengthening of the United States sanctions against Cuba would be especially useful in motivating young people, whose ideological commitment to the Cuban revolution has flagged considerably in recent years.
"We are profiting from Helms," Alarcon said gleefully. "He has served us on a silver plate something that is crucial from an ideological point of view.
"Of course, we are going to play that card to death."
Other Cuban officials said the call for ideological orthodoxy reflected a "renewed confidence" resulting from a successful sugar harvest and predictions that the Cuban economy would grow by 5 percent this year after contracting by one-third since 1989.
But Vladimiro Roca, a leader of the coalition of dissident and human rights groups called the Concilio Cubano, contended that the tough line showed a "fear and panic among the leadership of losing power."
The Communist Party views the emergence of a vigorous sector of self-employed workers as a threat to its absolute control over the populace, Roca maintained. The emerging private sector is less dependent on the state and underlines the inefficiencies of a centralized economy, he said, and so "the government feels it has to brake this."
In Raul Castro's speech, which was splashed over five pages of Granma on Wednesday and emphasized in television and radio reports, the defense minister expressed apprehension that the growing number of self-employed workers "stimulates old and new forms of criminality" like profiteering and corruption. The phenomenon also is "creating the basis for organized groupings, associations and actions free of the state" that could "constitute a test tube for the subversive efforts of the enemy," he said.
The solution to that problem, said Carlos Lage, Cuba's chief economic planner, in another lengthy speech to the conference, is increased supervision of the embryonic private sector. "We must guarantee the control and combat the illicit enrichment" of self-employed workers, he said.
Lage also appeared to play down the importance of attracting foreign involvement in the Cuban economy, arguing that the main source of growth in the future must come from within, using Cuba's own untapped resources.
Foreign investment "is necessary, is important," he said.
"We have to promote it," he said, "but it is not the essential factor in our economy."
Officials at government ministries dealing with economic affairs said Lage's remarks did not signal a change in economic strategy and that reforms would continue, and perhaps even accelerate. But others who work in sectors dealing with foreigners expressed doubt about his emphasis on self-reliance and fortifying state control.
"This is a bad sign," said a young Cuban employed by a private company that deals with foreign trade. "We have to have more foreign investment in order to grow, because we do not have enough capital ourselves."
Lage also said that despite the recovery of the Cuban economy, ordinary Cubans should expect to continue to live with the austerity that has been the main feature of life here since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989.
"This is not the moment for wage increases, no matter how justified they may be," he said.
In his speech, Raul Castro warned of deviations within the Communist Party itself, singling out for condemnation a respected research institute called the Center for Studies of America. "Various comrades were falling into the spider's web spun by Cuba experts abroad, in reality servants of the United States and its policy of fomenting a fifth column," he admonished.
The center is a semi-academic institution that focuses on political and economic developments in the Western Hemisphere, the United States included. But economists and political scientists at the institute have also argued and written in favor of more rapid and profound economic reforms within Cuba and for dialogue with Washington.
Cuban intellectuals and foreign diplomats here said that a purge of the institute had begun as a result of Castro's accusation and that it was likely to spread to other party research centers he has criticized.
The director of the institute has been replaced by the head of the Communist Party's polling operations, and other specialists have also been removed from their posts, they said.
Raul Castro called for a similar campaign in the government news media, because "we lowered our guard" and "have ceased being vigilant in the observe of our own rules." He said some publications used "a language supposedly revolutionary that seems intended to serve as a smokescreen for their true intentions," which he described as "a diversionary role."
Alarcon defended the dismissals at the institute, saying, "The party has a right to say we don't like this and we are going to make some changes."
Since the institute had been "created by the Central Committee to be a kind of advisory group," he added, it was perfectly proper to tell academic experts whose views are considered wrong that "you are invited to do something else.">
The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi combines the international expertise of the Bank of Tokyo, which specializes in foreign exchange transactions, with the massive domestic presence of Mitsubishi Bank.
Tasuku Takagaki, president of the new bank, told reporters the merger came in response to an overseas trend toward huge banking powers.
"Changes are occurring worldwide, with banks such as Chemical Banking Corp. and Chase Manhattan Corp. of the United States merging," Takagaki said. "We have to do our best to respond to these changes."
Takagagi was formerly president of the Bank of Tokyo. Tsuneo Wakai, the former head of Mitsubishi Bank, has become chairman of the new bank.
Industry analysts are upbeat about prospects for the new bank, which is the world's biggest in terms of assets, holding more than $720 billion. The new Chase bank will have about $300 billion in assets.
"I think the merger comes from a position of strength for both banks," said banking analyst Betsy Daniels of Morgan Stanley. "It forces other Japanese banks to consider their competitive positions and what their strengths and weaknesses are."
Both banks are among the most profitable in Japan, and both were relatively unscathed by the bad-loan debacle still weighing heavily on many Japanese banks.
Of the top 21 Japanese banks, Tokyo and Mitsubishi are expected to be among only four that will report profits for the fiscal year that ended Sunday. The others will go into the red to write off loans that went sour following the easy credit and rampant land and stock speculation in the late 1980s.
Analysts say Mitsubishi was more conservative than other banks in its lending during that period, while the Bank of Tokyo concentrated more on international dealings.
The newly created bank has 21,000 employees, 366 domestic branches and 83 overseas outlets.
By The Associated Press
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