Around the World

Cohen faces Vietnam veteran challenges

HANOI - A U.S. defense secretary flew into Vietnam yesterday for the first time since 1971 in hopes of building relations with the armed forces that once humbled the world's most powerful military.

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the war's end, Defense Secretary William Cohen was received by Vietnamese Minister of Defense Gen. Pham Van Tra. Cohen expressed his hope for development of military ties that would mark a final stage of normalization.

Side by side in front of a graceful French colonial government guesthouse, Cohen and Tra stood at attention as a Vietnamese army band played a spirited "Star Spangled Banner." The single-starred red banner of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam fluttered lazily overhead as the defense chiefs followed a goosestepping officer on a red carpet around the courtyard in a review of Vietnamese army and navy units.

Although Cohen insisted he was not going to dwell on a past that has "scarred both our countries," powerful symbols of the war were at hand.

The three-day visit comes just as the Vietnamese are beginning a seven-week official celebration of their country's victory in the war.

Though a 90-minute meeting at the guest house was cordial, officials said progress on a joint agenda was modest, and that the meeting also showed the

wariness of the Vietnamese leadership _ especially the military.

``There is a sensitivity, and somewhat of a suspicion as to American motives for returning here,'' U.S. Ambassador Pete Peterson, a former prisoner of war in

Hanoi, told reporters earlier in the day.

The talks between the defense chiefs took place after three years of effort by Cohen, who began pushing for a meeting as soon as he entered office in early

1997. Two previous dates were canceled, though there have been contacts between other U.S. and Vietnamese officials.

Leaders of the Vietnamese Communist regime are wary that stronger ties with other nations and the global economy could destabilize the country and could

loosen their grip on power. In addition, they are highly sensitive that any hint of U.S.-Vietnamese military alliance might arouse Chinese fears of encirclement.

To try to dispel that kind of anxiety, Cohen said without mentioning China by name that the relationship should remain fully in the open.

Officials said there is no talk of the United States helping the Vietnamese with new weapons. Peterson predicted, however, that U.S. warships might pay their

first post-war port call to Vietnam within as little as a year.

The last U.S. defense secretary to visit the country was Melvin Laird, in the Nixon administration, who visited South Vietnam in 1971. No defense secretary is

known to have ever before visited Hanoi or the north, officials said.

Peterson said Cohen's meetings were heavy in symbolism `

Russia: Chechen warlord captured

URUS-MARTAN, Russia - Russia said yesterday it had finally captured senior Chechen warlord Salman Raduyev, an elusive fighter who once raided Russia and seized hundreds of hostages and claims to have set bombs at Russian rail stations.

Raduyev - who masks his war-scarred face with dark glasses and a thick beard - was the first high-level rebel leader seized by Russia in the six-month-old Chechen war.

The Russians say they are questioning him at a Moscow prison.

"This is one of the most odious bandit leaders," Acting Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting of top ministers, using the standard Russian epithet for the rebels. "Now he's in prison, and that's where he belongs."

News of the arrest is likely boost to Russia's claims that the rebels in Chechnya are being forced into irreversible defeat.

But as a battle in the southern Chechnya town of Komsomolskoye entered its second week yesterday, rebels were using measures as daring and desperate as Raduyev's to defend a stronghold ravaged by artillery and air assaults.

Raduyev was apprehended by Russian troops on Sunday in Chechnya and brought to the Russian capital, Putin said. He was charged yesterday with terrorism, which carries a possible sentence of 50 years, the Interfax news agency reported.

The rebel warlord, in his early 30s, became one of Chechnya's most notorious figures in January 1996, during the previous Chechen war, when he led a raid on the Russian town of Kizlyar, taking hundreds of hostages.

He negotiated safe passage back to Chechnya, taking some of the hostages with him, but Russian forces stopped the group at a border village, setting off clashes that killed dozens of people.

He also has claimed credit for two fatal railway station blasts in Russia in 1997 and for an assassination attempt on Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in 1998.

Raduyev, whose beard and glasses cover scars from a Russian attack, has been one of the more recognizable faces of Chechnya's guerrillas. He also is a distant relative of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the leader of Chechnya's secession drive, who died in a Russian rocket attack in 1996.

In the town of Komsomolskoye, at the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, rebel snipers hid in deep pits dug under houses during Russian artillery and air barrages, then emerged to fire at Russian troops.

The tactic has stymied Russian forces in more than a week of fighting to take the village, which rebels seized March 5, embarrassing commanders who claimed to have rebels blocked in the mountains.

The suffering of Chechnya's civilians in the war has brought widespread criticism from the West and the pressure increased yesterday from a delegation from the Council of Europe, the continent's principal human-rights body.