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From INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu Tue Sep 30 23:10:03 1997 Message-Id: <9709302124.AA14693@smarty.ece.jhu.edu> Errors-To: INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu Sender: INFO-RUSS-request@smarty.ece.jhu.edu From: info-russ@smarty.ece.jhu.edu To: info-russ@smarty.ece.jhu.edu Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 17:05:10 +0100 Subject: INFO-RUSS: Reuters: Threat to West Priority: normal

--------------------------------------------------------------------- This is INFO-RUSS broadcast (1200+ subscribers). Home page, information, and archives: http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/inforuss.html To post, or to subscribe/unsubscribe, mail to info-russ@smarty.ece.jhu.edu INFO-RUSS assumes no responsibility for the information/views of its users. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Reuters New Media] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Monday September 29 9:06 PM EDT Russia Crime Crisis is Threat to West - Report By Jim Wolf WASHINGTON (Reuter) - Russia is an increasingly unreliable partner on international issues because of the power of corrupt officials, crooked businessmen and organized crime, a U.S. public policy research group said Monday. A panel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said criminalization of its economy would make normal state-to-state relations with Russia impossible if left unchecked. Some 200 Russian organized crime groups operated worldwide after thrusting their "tentacles throughout Russia's economy" and gaining the ability to manipulate its banking system and financial markets, the CSIS panel said in a report. It said the erosion of legitimate government authority in Russia endangered international efforts in peacekeeping, nuclear non-proliferation and economic restructuring. "The most important, and perhaps the most significant and troubling finding of the task force, is that, at the level of state-to-state interaction, it will become impossible for the United States and other states to have traditional satisfactory dealings with an emergent Russian criminal-syndicalist state," the CSIS panel report said. It defined such a state as one shot through with bureaucratic corruption, full-time "professional criminals" and businessmen for whom existing Russian law was simply an obstacle to be overcome. "In many respects such a criminal-syndicalist state already exists in Russia today," said the CSIS panel, citing government, business and academic leaders. It said corruption that pervades "every level of Russia's bureaucracy" was the major hurdle to thwarting organized crime there. William Webster, who headed both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s, was chairman of the steering committee under which the CSIS report on Russian organized crime was prepared. In a preface to the report, Webster and Arnaud de Borchgrave, the CSIS Global Organized Crime project director, said roughly two-thirds of Russia's economy was already "under the sway" of crime syndicates involved in protection rackets. "The majority of private enterprises and commercial banks are compelled, by force if necessary, to pay protection in the amount of 10 percent to 30 percent of their profits" to organized crime groups, it said. The CSIS panel urged President Clinton to describe Russian organized crime publicly as a threat to U.S. national security, notably because of the danger of losing control of its nuclear arsenal. It said the United States should prod partners in the Group of Seven rich industrial nations to discuss an investment treaty to deny export credits to Western firms doing business with organized-crime controlled firms in Russia. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------