03 June 2004 03:55
Gadhafi and Abashidze Clearing the Board
No world champion, next to no corporate sponsorship and no end to scandals involving shady financing and
international political pariahs.
This is the troubled world of chess under Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the mercurial president of Kalmykia and head of the
World Chess Federation, better known by its French acronym, FIDE.
Instead of mainstream corporate sponsors, Ilyumzhinov has courted a pantheon of dubious chess patrons, including
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, deposed Adzharian leader Aslan Abashidze and
controversial businessman Grigory Luchansky.
The latest scandal to hit the chess world under Ilyumzhinov comes in connection with his enlistment of Gadhafi to
host the FIDE men's world championship in Tripoli from June 18 to July 13.
Gadhafi's son Mohammed, who heads the country's Olympic Committee, said that Israeli players would not be
welcome. "We did not and will not invite the Zionist enemy to this championship," he was quoted by The
Associated Press as saying May 6. "We know the Zionists will seize such occasions to enter Arab society ... but we
will not give up our principles, even if that leads to canceling holding the tournament in Libya."
A FIDE spokeswoman in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia, said the organization could not confirm Mohammed
Gadhafi's statement, but that the Libyan authorities had promised to provide visas on arrival in Tripoli to all of
the tournament's eligible participants.
FIDE had planned to hold a parallel tournament in Malta for players who might have Libyan visa problems or who feared
for their safety, but the idea was later scrapped. Two Israeli players and one reserve qualified for the championship,
but decided not to participate.
The Libya scandal came shortly after Ilyumzhinov's peculiar decision to stage the women's world
championship in Georgia's Adzharia region blew up in his face.
Fears for players' safety mounted as the political standoff in the region between Abashidze and Georgian
President Mikheil Saakashvili grew increasingly turbulent. Shortly before Abashidze fled to Moscow on May 6, Ilyumzhinov
was forced to move the tournament to Elista, where it got under way May 22.
For Abashidze agreeing to switch the championship to Elista, which Ilyumzhinov called Abashidze's "present
to chess," the FIDE web site announced that he had been awarded the ceremonial title of "Holder of the Order
of Grand Commander of the Legion of Grandmasters," an organization previously unheard of in the chess world.
It was not the first time that Ilyumzhinov has transferred a world chess championship to Elista after initially
securing a controversial host.
In 1996, he arranged to have the Anatoly Karpov-Gata Kamsky championship match held in Baghdad under the patronage of
Saddam Hussein. That venue fell through when the U.S. government refused to grant Kamsky, a Russian-born immigrant,
permission to travel to Iraq.
In an odd side note, the winner of this year's women's tournament, which runs through next Tuesday, will be
presented with a golden, diamond-studded crown named after Abashidze. The crown was donated by the event's sponsor,
the Center of Investment Projects and Programs, which is headed by controversial Latvian-born businessman Luchansky.
Luchansky, a friend of Abashidze, has been accused of money laundering through his Austrian company, Nordex, and its
Swiss subsidiary, Kontitrade.
U.S. authorities have reportedly barred Luchansky from entering the United States because of alleged links to
organized crime and suspicions that he was involved in the sale of nuclear arms parts in the Middle East in 1994.
Chess players and experts say that the questionable company Ilyumzhinov keeps has scared off numerous potential
corporate sponsors.
"Saddam, Abashidze, Gadhafi, Luchansky -- you've got to wonder where these guys meet each other," said
Mig Greengard, a popular Internet chess journalist. "Are they all hanging out at some club? They terrify
sponsors."
"Frankly, I don't believe this is the kind of sponsorship we should be attracting," Russian
grandmaster Pyotr Shvidler said at a news conference in Moscow on May 20, commenting on the $1.5 million Gadhafi has put
up for the men's tournament.
FIDE, however, has openly embraced Abashidze, Luchansky and Gadhafi as patrons.
"Of course we would like to have Microsoft as a sponsor," Georgian grandmaster and FIDE vice president
Zurab Azmaiparashvili said by telephone from Elista.
"And we should be working in the direction of corporate sponsorship. But right now Luchansky and Abashidze want
to support us. Abashidze is a friend of chess who has been organizing tournaments every year since 1999. Thank God we
have friends like this."
In an interview posted on the FIDE web site, Ilyumzhinov defended FIDE's decision to work with Gadhafi in light
of his recent rehabilitation in the international community after abandoning his country's nuclear weapons program.
The Libyan leader was welcomed at the European Commission in Brussels in April, his first trip to Europe in 15
years.
But it is not just Ilyumzhinov's shady friends frightening off sponsors, French grandmaster Joel Lautier
said.
"Ilyumzhinov himself has had a very troubled history, to put it mildly," Lautier said by telephone from
Paris. "Many Western sponsors do not want to have anything to do with him."
That troubled history includes allegations of misuse of public money and authoritarian tendencies that have been
leveled against Ilyumzhinov since he was elected president of Kalmykia in 1993.
Ilyumzhinov, 42, has poured tens of millions of dollars into chess since becoming FIDE president in 1995. He says the
money has been his own, but his critics have accused him of dipping into the tiny republic's coffers to fund his
chess obsession, including the construction of his chess fantasy land, Chess City, a slick complex in Elista built to
host the 1998 Chess Olympics.
One of Ilyumzhinov's loudest critics was investigative journalist Larisa Yudina, editor of Kalmykia's main
opposition newspaper, Sovietskaya Kalmykia, who was killed while looking into various allegations of official
corruption, including the murky financing of Chess City.
Yudina's body was found June 8, 1998, in a pond near her home in Elista with multiple stab wounds and a
fractured skull.
The man convicted of organizing her murder was a former aide to Ilyumzhinov who shortly before had been released
early from prison, where he was serving time on a manslaughter charge.
Ilyumzhinov and his administration denied any involvement in Yudina's killing.
Political scandals and accusations of corruption aside, the lack of corporate interest in sponsoring chess may be due
in part to the nature of the game itself.
After all, when you get down to it, watching two men hunched over a board for four hours is not exactly eye candy for
the casual spectator.
Lautier, president of the Association of Chess Professionals, an organization formed last year to support
professional chess players, agreed that chess had a long way to go to attract spectators and sponsors.
"There is not a broad chess culture in the West, where most of the sponsor money lies," Lautier said.
"It does take time and effort [to popularize chess], but once people are there, I've found they remain very
interested."
Lautier nonetheless placed much of the blame on FIDE's shoulders, saying that chess in schools and on the
Internet was experiencing a boom.
"It's a pity FIDE has not been able to capitalize on this huge potential," he said. "We're
being run by amateurs."
But despite criticism of mismanagement under Ilyumzhinov, one of the chess world's most glaring problems is one
that the FIDE president inherited: the lack of a universally recognized world champion.
Gone are the days when world champions like Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov or Garry Kasparov were household names.
When Kasparov broke away from FIDE in 1993 to form the now-defunct Professional Chess Association, the world's
most famous chess player took with him the title of world champion.
Kasparov subsequently staged and won a series of world championship matches, while FIDE, not recognizing
Kasparov's claim to the title, held its own championships.
The ensuing situation left chess with competing claimants for the title: Kasparov and whoever happened to win the
FIDE world championship tournament.
Igor Utkin / Itar-TassKirsan Ilyumzhinov opening FIDE's world championship in Moscow in November 2001.In 2000,
Kasparov lost a championship match he arranged with fellow Russian grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, while Ukrainian
grandmaster Ruslan Ponamariov won the most recent FIDE world championship, held in Moscow from November 2001 to January
2002.
The FIDE world championship was scheduled to clash with another match between Kasparov and Kramnik, a $500,000
exhibition match sponsored by Yukos and AvtoVAZ, and also being played in Moscow.
In May 2002, the two warring factions agreed on a reunification plan, the so-called Prague Agreement, which both
sides believe to be crucial to attracting sponsors and recapturing the type of worldwide interest seen during the 1972
Fischer-Boris Spassky match or the epic Karpov-Kasparov battles in the 1980s.
Grandmasters backed the reunification plan, hoping it could bring the game's finances back from the
doldrums.
"We need some kind of unification plan, and frankly any kind of plan is better than none," said Shvidler,
the Russian grandmaster.
Kramnik is already on his way toward fulfilling his end of the bargain, having organized a challengers'
tournament in Germany last year. The winner of that event, Hungarian grandmaster Peter Leko, will face off in September
against Kramnik in a $750,000 match sponsored by Swiss tobacco company Dannemann.
According to the Prague Agreement, the winner of the Kramnik-Leko match should play the winner of a match between
Ponomariov, the reigning FIDE champion, and Kasparov, currently No. 1 in the world rankings.
FIDE has been less successful in sticking to its side of the deal.
The Kasparov-Ponamariov match was set to take place last fall in Yalta, with President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian
President Leonid Kuchma making the symbolic first moves.
But the match fell through over a dispute between FIDE and Ponomariov. Kasparov is now set to face the next FIDE
champion, the winner of the Tripoli tournament, for the right to play the winner of Kramnik vs. Leko for the
long-awaited unified world title. This leaves out Ponomariov, who is refusing to play in Libya.
After the Yalta debacle, Lautier said he is less than confident that Ilyumzhinov and FIDE can put the title match
together.
"They had full support from Kuchma and Putin, and they failed even in that," Lautier said.
But Ilyumzhinov has brushed aside Lautier's doubts, and claims that FIDE already has serious offers from Dubai
and Cairo to host the reunification match with a $1 million prize fund.
Staff Writer Tim Wall contributed to this report.
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[The Moscow Times] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
