November 11, 2008	Tuesday	Ziqa'ad 12, 1429

VLADIVOSTOK (Russia): As a child, Anton Perigin dreamed of a life on the high seas. Now 18 and watching his Pacific port hometown reel from another maritime tragedy, he says he no longer wants any part of the navy.

“This is so sad. And it happens all the time,” said Perigin as he and a classmate stood before a monument, freshly adorned with red carnations, reading the names of sailors killed in 1905 as they developed Russia’s first submarine.

“You have to wonder why we continue to try to build our own ships. We would be better off buying them from abroad, just like we do with cars,” he said, adding that instead of joining the navy he would continue his studies.

The cynicism expressed by Perigin despite his youth, following the accident Saturday aboard a new nuclear submarine that left 20 dead and 21 others injured, could be heard in conversations throughout this naval town.

A day of mourning has been declared for Tuesday in Vladivostok, the home port of Russia’s Pacific Fleet and the launch pad of the Kremlin’s ambitions to project its resurgent power farther and wider throughout in the Asia-Pacific basin.

But the official commemoration of those who died in the accident, most of them civilian specialists taking the vessel through pre-commissioning sea trials, will not assuage the deep disillusionment felt by local residents.

“It is always the same story,” said Yury Voronin, a salesman for used cars imported from Japan just across the water, for which there is a thriving market based in Vladivostok, the capital city of the Russian Far East.

“They mock us! The army constantly brags about its weapons but in the end we just count the dead and we never find out what really happened,” he said.

“They say there was no radioactive leak. But how can we believe them? After the tragedy of the Kursk, we can’t trust these guys at all.”

He was referring to the widely-criticised handling by the administration of then president Vladimir Putin of the disaster in 2000 in the Barents Sea in which 118 Russian sailors died of suffocation aboard the submarine Kursk.

However, despite the pervasive gloom, not everyone in this city, which is also a major industrial port, was convinced that the latest nuclear submarine accident was a fair pretext for generalised antipathy toward the armed forces.

“Yes, there will always be a danger,” said a young non-commissioned Russian naval officer who spoke to AFP on condition that he not be identified by name.

“And of course we need to develop better technologies. But when I board a ship, I don’t ask myself ‘what’s going to go wrong this time?’ I think of the sea,” said the serviceman, decked out in his navy coat.

Comments posted by local residents on an Internet blog in the closed military port of Bolshoi Kamen, site of a secret submarine shipyard from where the stricken vessel, named the Nerpa, sailed and where it returned on Sunday, were not so sanguine.

“It’s the usual Russian screw-up that is to blame” for the accident, which occurred when toxic fire-extinguishing gas was accidentally released into the vessel, wrote one commenter who identified himself as Roman75.—AFP