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The Globe and Mail (Canada)
November 5, 2002
Civil servants' poor pay weakens Russian security
By MARK MACKINNON
MOSCOW -- Last month's deadly hostage-taking in Moscow shocked many with its audacity, but questions about how 50 Chechen militants managed to get into a guarded theatre just four kilometres from the Kremlin are invariably answered with a shrug.
Everyone here knows how easily the poorly paid security services can be bought off.
The root problem is the poor salaries paid to the Russian public service: A starting salary for a policeman is 4,000 rubles (about $200) a month, and military pay can be even worse, making graft a fact of life.
"We all have to do it, to make a little extra for our families," one police captain said yesterday. "If you were paid what I am, you'd do the same thing."
Often, it's simply a shakedown involving a demand for documents or identifications, followed by a small bribe. But Kremlin spokesman Sergei Yastrzhembsky acknowledged yesterday that another form of corruption, the long-standing practice of soldiers selling their weapons for cash, helped the Chechen hostage-takers.
Stories of destitute conscripts selling their weapons to the very separatist rebels they are supposed to be fighting date back to the first Chechen war, which lasted from 1994 to 1996.
The corruption is so blatant that the Chechens likely planned their operation knowing they could count on soldiers and police to give them an opening to take the theatre, independent defence analyst Pavel Felengauer wrote in a recent newspaper column.
But the irony of the graft is that it forced the Chechen warlord who has claimed the theatre hostage-taking to modify a previous plan to take hostages in Moscow.
Seven years ago, Shamil Basayev planned an operation in which his band of militants would bribe their way through Russian checkpoints all the way to the capital and take hostages en masse.
"But the damned [road police] were so greedy! We just ran out of money," Mr. Basayev recounted later. Due to budget constraints, a hospital in the southern Russian city of Budyennovsk was chosen as the new target.
That operation also ended badly: 120 people died when Russian troops stormed the hospital.
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