#7 - RW 264
gazeta.ru
July 11, 2003
Defence minister wants no communism
By Maria Tsvetkova

The Russian government has endorsed a 4-year plan designed to turn the country's impoverished, cumbersome army into a modern volunteer force. If the reform is successful, by 2008 the term of army service for conscripts will be reduced from 2 years to 1. At the same time, the government has cut the financing for the transfer to a professional army from 138 billion to 79 billion.

The document endorsed at the government session on Thursday is entitled the Federal Target-oriented Programme of Transition to a Contract-based Army. Its general provision became known in spring when two plans of army reform were submitted to the cabinet.

The first one was prepared by the Defence Ministry, which suggested that the transition to the contract-based army should be gradual, while the means earmarked for the army reform should be spent on improving conditions for privates and NCOs.

An alternative plan prepared by the Union of Rightist Forces and Yegor Gaidar's Institute of Economy in Transition proved far more radical and less costly. The rightists suggested that the transition to the contract-based army should be completed by 2007 and the funds allocated for the reform be used for paying wages to contract servicemen.

In May the government approved a draft, based mostly on the plan proposed by the military, though some of the provisions contained in the SPS plan were incorporated in the document. Though Sergei Ivanov refused to turn the Russian armed forces into a fully professional force in the foreseeable future, it was agreed that by the end of 2007 half of all military units will be manned by contract soldiers, and as of 2008 the term of service for conscripts will be reduced from 2 years to 12 months.

The Defence Minister pledged on Thursday that from 2005 conscripts will stop being sent to hot spots, such as Chechnya and Russia's southern borders, where only contract servicemen will serve. The rightists claimed that the Defence Ministry's plan is doomed to failure, since, even if the cabinet approves it, it will not allocate the amounts of money for its implementation that the military have demanded. The military agency said it needed 138 billion roubles for the programme. Boris Nemtsov was convinced they were unlikely to receive more than 50 billion.

On Thursday it transpired that the government had cut the financing of the 4-year programme from 138 billion roubles to 79.1 billion roubles. At the same time the defence minister noted that some of the money has been redistributed to other programmes, for instance, national defence and activities to protect law and order.

Furthermore, Ivanov explained, some forces have been taken out of the programme altogether. ''The special construction troops and the troops of the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information [FAPSI, abolished in March 2003, with its functions now being shared between the Federal Security Service and the Ministry of Defence] have been completely taken out of the programme and these are the units which in most cases do not take an active part in combat operations or never take part in them,'' Sergei Ivanov said. Thus, even though the financing has been cut the chief of the military agency is convinced that the allocated amount is enough for transferring combat units on to the contract basis.

The SPS leader Boris Nemtsov attended the government session on Thursday, but this time he refrained from holding his usual briefing at the House of Government. Instead, his party's activists held a picket not far from the government building, protesting against the disruption of army reforms.

According to Sergei Ivanov, by 2008 half of the Russian armed forces will be manned by professionals. However, contract soldiers will not replace all conscripts in the foreseeable future. Both kinds of servicemen will man the armed forces for a long time, the minister said. The minister believes that sometime in the future the conscripts will be replaced by professional servicemen, ''but it will not be anytime soon,'' he said. ''Naming the deadline would be silly, like going back to the 1960s when the deadline for the advent of communism was announced,'' Ivanov said.

Contract servicemen filling the positions of privates and noncommissioned officers will account for 49 per cent of the Russian armed forces' manpower at the end of 2007, he said. At the moment, this percentage is 22, with the number of contract soldiers totaling 130,000. By the end of 2007, 147,000 more privates and NCOs will be contract servicemen, Ivanov claimed.

The cabinet's programme is largely open to the public. There are only two secret provisions in it that cover the deployment areas and exact number of units commanded by the Defence Ministry while the rest will be freely accessible, Ivanov said.

There is no alternative to the cabinet-proposed technique of setting up a contract-based army, believes the minister. Trying to make this transition in two years would not be realistic and would be reminiscent of the reforms attempted in the early 1990s, the results of which are still painfully felt, he said.

Under current legislation, every Russian male between 18 and 27 years is obliged to serve two years in the armed forces, notorious for their brutal treatment of conscripts. Many young servicemen with only minimal training are sent to war-ravaged Chechnya or to police Russia's borders.

The ill-treatment of conscripts and the state of the army -- plagued by desertions and reports of widespread bribery --are key issues for Russian voters, due to go to the polls twice in the next year for presidential and parliamentary elections.

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