-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Wednesday, December 30, 1998 Hazed and Hating It: Russian Draftees Flee Army ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Daniel Williams Washington Post Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ST. PETERSBURG - Volodya, with a boyish fuzz on his lean young man's cheeks, detailed his ordeal in slang he picked up during a short, brutal stay in the Russian Army. ''Grandfathers'' - that is, senior soldiers in his unit - had ''hung'' him with an arbitrary debt. When he didn't pay, the grandfathers taught him to ''fly'' - meaning they kneed him with such force that he was lifted off the barracks floor. Fearing he would end up in a ''zinc box,'' Volodya deserted, fled to St. Petersburg and hid in the anonymous high-rise neighborhoods of the city's periphery. Zinc box is what soldiers call the metal coffins used for military dead. Volodya has joined the legion of deserters and draft dodgers on the run from the army, a once-proud institution that has become a chamber of horrors spread across 11 time zones. Unrestrained hazing and material deprivation await youths who answer their country's call to serve. Killings, suicides and depraved forms of abuse are the backdrop of a soldier's life. The beatings aggravate already inhumane conditions brought on by Russia's seven-year economic tailspin and deep cuts in military spending. Barracks are often unheated, and soldiers go without pay for months. Units trained for tank warfare sometimes pick potatoes to make money. Corrupt generals use their troops as free labor to build country homes or to maintain their properties. During the autumn draft season in St. Petersburg and the rest of Russia, tales told by young men like Volodya were making it difficult to fill quotas. Recruiters complained that health certificates were forged, illness being one way to avoid the draft. After exemptions are handed out for schooling and other reasons, the leftovers are often ill-suited for army service, they say. Draftees say recruiters will illicitly exempt them for a $2,000 bribe. Doctors on the take will provide fake diagnoses for about the same price. Russia's 1.2-million-member army is fed with 150,000 new draftees every six months. No one seems to have exact figures for the number of draft evaders, although only about half the conscripts actually end up in the service, said Alexander Uzhanov, a Defense Ministry spokesman. About 15 percent do not bother to respond to draft notices and an additional 20 percent try to get out on health grounds. Mr. Uzhanov could not account for the rest. Commanders complain that drug addicts, alcoholics and criminals are being admitted to the army in large numbers. The Defense Ministry says 42,000 deserters are on the lam at any time. Defense officials are defensive or dismissive about complaints that the service is brutal. But hardly a month goes by without some scandal involving soldiers reaching the public eye. Last month on a base near Volgograd, two captured soldiers who had been absent without leave were punished with confinement in a pit on a firing range. Overnight, the hole collapsed, burying them alive. One of the soldiers died before they were discovered; the other survived. In September, a sailor on duty aboard a nuclear submarine shot and killed eight of his comrades, then shot himself. Officers said he was ''mentally unfit''; friends said he had been hazed. During the draft call last spring, Russian television broadcast a videotape that has left an indelible image on the national consciousness. In a sadistic hazing ritual, burly older men marched down a row of junior soldiers and kneed each one in the chest. In response to orders to stop such assaults, commanders at a base in the northern Caucasus require soldiers to strip for inspection every week. That way, the officers can check for bruises hidden by clothing - and the recruits' fearful silence. ''I volunteered,'' said Volodya of his five-month career in a unit of the railroad troops, which provide security along Russia's vast locomotive network. ''The grandfathers wanted money. They didn't care how I got it - stealing, begging. When I didn't pay, they hit me in the chest. Kicked me around the room. The officers in charge, they looked the other way.'' Volodya's eyes shifted nervously to one side. The sound of shuffling footsteps behind him on the ice-glazed sidewalk made him fidget. He lives a life of suspicion and hides at a friend's house. On occasion, he borrows a neighbor's baby and takes it for a stroll just to get outside. ''It's camouflage,'' he said sheepishly. ''Police don't stop you if you're tending a child.'' He was visiting the offices of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee, a St. Petersburg organization with roots in protests against the war in Chechnya. Earlier, mothers of soldiers missing in Chechnya came to the committee for help in reclaiming their sons, dead or alive. Now, mothers and sons come to learn ways to avoid the draft. The Mothers hold Saturday seminars on draft evasion. Ella Poliakova, the co-chairman, opened a recent lecture with a brief eulogy for Private Sergei Floch, a slender 18-year-old who, according to his officers, hanged himself with his leather belt in a bathroom at his barracks. Mrs. Poliakova investigated and found the explanation wanting. Private Floch had written plaintive letters to his parents that told of beatings and abuse. ''Don't let my brother join the army,'' he implored. Mrs. Poliakova and an assistant inspected the zinc box that held Private Floch when his body was returned to St. Petersburg and found that Private Floch was not dressed in his own uniform. He bore slashes on his neck and scratches on his hands. At the base, Mrs. Poliakova said, soldiers told her that a barracks bully had been arrested and spirited off to an unknown location the day Private Floch's body was found. An initial death certificate included descriptions of blows to the head and internal injuries. Then another certificate was issued saying his death was caused by hanging. ''You see,'' Mrs. Poliakova told the audience matter-of-factly, ''if it is a suicide, the army does not have to pay for the burial. So it is always a suicide.'' According to Defense Ministry statistics, 481 soldiers took their own lives last year. Mrs. Poliakova tacked Private Floch's picture above a makeshift altar beneath a picture of Mary and Jesus. She handed out draft evasion handbooks to her audience. The mothers and sons first hesitated, then gingerly opened the books when Mrs. Poliakova pointed out the ailments that, if certified by a doctor, can earn an exemption. ''People don't know the law, or if they know it, they don't believe in it,'' said Mrs. Poliakova. ''Here, we are trying to make every family a defender of human rights.'' ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Paris, Wednesday, December 30, 1998 Deployment Of Missiles Is Scrapped By Cyprus Island Greeks Defuse Tension With Turkey Over Russian S-300s ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PARIS - Cyprus canceled the deployment of advanced Russian surface-to-air missiles on Tuesday and instead agreed to store them in Greece, extinguishing a flash point for potential Turkish attacks on the island and easing Greek-Turkish tensions both in the Aegean and within NATO. President Glavkos Klerides of Cyprus said, ''I reached the decision not to install the missiles on Cyprus, and I agreed to negotiate with the Russian government on the possibility of installing them on Crete,'' a Greek island from which the missiles would not be able to reach Turkish airspace. Western governments had been hoping that the Greek Cypriots would accept this plan as a way of ending the confrontation over the S-300 missile system. In recent weeks, the United States pressed a diplomatic campaign promising new momentum to settle the Cyprus question if the Greek Cypriots did not take delivery of the $500 million weapons package. For nearly a year, officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have warned that Turkey would probably carry out its threat to launch a devastating air assault against Cypriot military installations as well as the launching sites if the Greek Cypriots deployed the weapons, widening their military edge over the Turkish Cypriots in the northern part of the divided island. The U.S. State Department quickly commended Mr. Klerides for reducing tensions on Cyprus and said that his decision would give ''important new impetus'' to U.S.-backed moves by the United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan, to reinvigorate the drive for a final settlement on the island. The idea of sending the batteries to Crete had emerged as the most palatable option for Cyprus, according to officials in NATO countries, who said that they thought Turkey could be persuaded to accept this outcome despite earlier statements warning of Turkish ''concern'' if the missiles were deployed on Crete. Several of the officials interpreted the Greek Cypriot announcement to mean that the missiles were to be stored on Crete without being activated until Turkey was reassured about their presence. Russia seemed unlikely to object to the announcement. Moscow had stressed that the sale was a purely commercial venture. It was unclear whether Moscow had received full payment for the armaments from Cyprus or whether part of the tab might be picked up by Greece or other NATO countries, such as the United States or Germany, now that the weapons seem destined for Greece and might therefore count in the NATO inventory. Turkey was not alone in objecting to the Greek Cypriots' order for the S-300 missiles, an advanced system which carries the NATO code name ''Grumble'' and whose radar system is so sophisticated that it would require the presence of Russian military personnel to operate on Cyprus. The system would have been able to track the movement of NATO aircraft as far away as the Balkans. NATO governments had therefore urged Greece to help find a face-saving way to avoid bringing the weapons to Cyprus. The decision was largely in the hands of Mr. Klerides, who met Tuesday in Athens with Prime Minister Costas Simitis of Greece and returned to Cyprus to rally support among political parties for the Crete solution. In ordering the missiles in 1997 as a gesture affirming their right to self-determination, the Greek Cypriots' real motives, diplomats said, probably had more to do with hopes of forcing European governments to step up efforts to settle the Cyprus problem, which has festered since 1974, when a Greek Cypriot coup triggered a Turkish invasion that led to the partition of the island. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. 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