Around the World

Russia signs contract to retrieve sailors

MOSCOW - Russia signed a high-risk, high-profile contract yesterday with Halliburton Co., the Dallas-based energy services giant formerly headed by GOP vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney, to retrieve the bodies of sailors who died aboard the Kursk nuclear submarine when it sank under mysterious circumstances Aug. 12.

The agreement, which calls for Halliburton's Norwegian affiliate to send a diving platform, diving bell and deep sea divers to the accident site off the northern Russian port of Severomorsk this fall, improbably links two of the summer's biggest news stories: the U.S. presidential election and the futile effort to rescue the submarine's 118 man crew.

In Russia, the U.S. connection to Halliburton was given far less notice than the question of whether the salvage operation is possible or even necessary.

Russian navy officials have said that most crew members were probably killed instantly and that many of their bodies are likely to have been burned or destroyed. Moreover, even many of the crew's family members have asked the government to leave the bodies buried at sea, according to naval tradition, and use the money to assist survivors.

"Let the submarine be their temporary tomb, as a time-honored sailors' custom has it, until everything is ready to raise the whole ship together with the crew," 78 relatives of the dead sailors said last week in a joint letter to President Vladimir V. Putin.

The government has been resolute about retrieving the bodies, perhaps because Putin personally made the promise as part of his damage-control efforts. The president was criticized at home and abroad for remaining on vacation during the bungled rescue operation in the Barents Sea.

Retired Rear Adm. Nikolai Mormul, who in 1972 helped raise a sunken sub, said the operation is likely to bring up no more than pieces of a few bodies.

"The problem is that his aides, navy commanders and government experts are simply afraid to tell (Putin) that he must take his word back," Mormul said. "If they still go ahead with this operation, they will risk human lives, wasting a lot of money in the process. And in the end, no one will be happy or grateful for this stupid labor of Sisyphus."

Halliburton's Norwegian spokesman, Birger Haraldseid, said the contract is for a two-stage operation: surveying the submarine's wreckage using divers and remote-controlled cameras, and then retrieving the bodies. The surveying work would be done exclusively by Halliburton's Norwegian and British divers and could provide new clues about the cause of the disaster.

During the retrieval, two Russian divers would work with a Halliburton diver, who would support them from a diving bell. Holes are to be drilled at various points along the hull, and one Russian diver would enter while the other would support him from outside the opening. Russians have been adamant that for security reasons, only Russian divers would be permitted inside the damaged vessel.

Milosevic battles political opponents

BUDVA, Yugoslavia - As the opposition tightened the screws with strikes and roadblocks, President Slobodan Milosevic fought back yesterday in a rare address to the nation in which he attacked his opponents as puppets of the West who would lead Serbs to extermination.

In a speech on state run television, the defiant leader said his main rival, Vojislav Kostunica, who, like Milosevic, has won popularity by attacking the West, isn't the opposition's "real boss."

Milosevic claimed that the shots are really being called by Kostunica's much less popular campaign manager, Zoran Djindjic, whom he branded "a collaborator of the military alliance that waged war against our country."

Kostunica and his backers say they won an outright victory over Milosevic in elections Sept. 24, but the Federal Electoral Commission says no candidate won a majority and it scheduled a second round of voting for Sunday.

Kostunica says the ballot count was faked to deny him victory, and he refuses to take part in the runoff.

"I don't like to use the word revolution, but what is happening now is a revolution-a peaceful, nonviolent, wise, civilized, quiet and smart democratic revolution," Kostunica told a news conference in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the dominant of the federation's two republics. "People are ready to start building a new country."

More than a year after the end of the NATO air war against Yugoslavia, the bombing and the subsequent loss of Kosovo to U.N. control are wounds that Milosevic continues to exploit.

Like Milosevic, Kostunica is highly critical of NATO and the U.N. administration in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia. He has blamed Milosevic for leading Yugoslavia into disastrous wars.

But Milosevic has shifted the blame before, and in Monday's speech he tried to exploit fears among Serbs that other ethnic groups such as Muslim Slavs in the Sandzak region and ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina region would be the next to break away from Yugoslavia.

He also accused the West of funding and orchestrating yesterday's mass protest, which shut down mines, schools and shops, and stopped traffic on roads across Serbia. The opposition lifted the main roadblocks after only a few hours.