A Step At A Time

Show your support for democracy in Ukraine on Wednesday, December 1 at 16:00
Tallinn, Town Hall Square (Raekoja plats).


EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT
2004 2009
Session document
[30.11.2004] B[6- /2004]

DRAFT JOINT MOTION FOR A RESOLUTION
to wind up the debate on statements by the Council and Commission
pursuant to Rule 103(2) of the Rules of Procedure

by Jacek SARYUSZ-WOLSKI, Charles TANNOCK, Jerzy BUZEK, Tunne-Väldo KELAM and Edward McMillan-Scott on behalf of the EPP-ED

- PSE,
- ALDE,
- VERTS,
- UEN,
- GUE/NGL

on Ukraine
RE\000000EN.doc PE 000.000v00
EN EN
B[6- /2004]

European Parliament resolution on Ukraine


The European Parliament,

– having regard to its previous resolutions on Ukraine

- having regard, in particular, to its resolution on Ukraine adopted on 28 October 2004,

- having regard to the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) between the European Union and Ukraine , which entered into force on 1 March 1998,

- having regard to European Council Common Strategy 1999/877/CFSP on Ukraine, adopted by the European Council in Helsinki on 11 December 1999,

- having regard to the Final Statement and Recommendations of the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee of 16-17 February 2004,

- having regard to the Communication from the Commission of 11 May 2004 on the European Neighbourhood Policy - COM(2004) 373 final,

- having regard to the Joint Statement of the Ukraine-European Union Summit of 8 July 2004 in The Hague,

- having regard to the statements and the preliminary findings and conclusions of the international election observer mission in Ukraine on both rounds of the Presidential election,

- having regard to the declaration by the Dutch Presidency on the second round of the Presidential election in Ukraine,

- having regard to the address by the High Representative of the European Union Javier Solana before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament on Ukraine,

- having regard to the announcement on the final results of the
Presidential election in Ukraine by the Central Electoral Committee,

- having regard to the procedure before the Supreme Court of Ukraine on the validity of the second round of the Presidential elections,

- having regard to the resolution adopted by the Ukraine Parliament in its special Session of 27 November 2004 on the second round of the Presidential elections and the following political crisis,

– having regard to Rule 103(2) of its Rules of Procedure,



A. whereas the European Neighbourhood policy recognises Ukraine's European aspirations and the importance of Ukraine as a country with deep historical, cultural and economic links to the Member States of the EU, and whereas a genuine and balanced partnership can only be developed on the basis of shared common values with regard, in particular, to democracy, the rule of law and respect for human and civil rights, (PSE)

B. whereas the Ukrainian society proved its political maturity and adherence to common European values; (EPP)

C. whereas the conditions under which the Presidential elections in Ukraine were taking place were considered beforehand as a serious test for the state of democracy in Ukraine and for the authorities' adherence to these shared common values, (PSE)

D. whereas international observers have concluded that the second round of the presidential elections in Ukraine was marked by a multitude of serious irregularities and has fallen far short of international standards for democratic elections, (PSE)

E. whereas serious allegations have been made that massive fraud has taken place in the counting of the votes in favour of the incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich and many indicators point to a confirmation of these allegations, (PSE)

F. whereas the Central Electoral Committee has refused to take up these allegations of fraud and has declared Mr. Yanukovich as the winner of these elections, (PSE)

G. whereas the Ukrainian Supreme Court suspended the publication of the decision taken by the Central Electoral Committee and at this moment is investigating the validity of the Presidential elections, (UEN/PSE)

H. whereas the Parliament of Ukraine, many representatives of governments and international organisations - including the EU Presidency and the government of the United States - and many leading national and international politicians, have asked for annulling the result of the second round of the elections and for a new round of voting to take place on actual notice, (PSE)

I. whereas the Russian Federation and in particular its President have made great efforts to influence the result of the Presidential elections in Ukraine and to secure the victory of one candidate, Mr.Yanukovitch, (PSE)

J. whereas hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have gone to the streets for more than a week in a massive protest against the manipulation of the elections, (PSE)

K. whereas the situation concerning these elections has led to a serious political crisis in Ukraine and even to threats to break up the unity of the country, (PSE)

L. whereas the European Union and its Member States have acted promptly by sending mediators which prevented the crisis from deepening by bringing the two candidates to the table to negotiate and defuse tensions, (PSE/VERTS)

M. whereas announcements were made on 29 November by President Leonid Kuchma that he would support a new election; (EPP)

1. Expresses its solidarity with the Ukrainian people, whose right to freely elect its president has to be recognized and implemented and not to be repressed; (EPP/ALDE)

2. Strongly rejects the conditions under which the second round of the Presidential elections in Ukraine have taken place, both as regards the final stage of the pre-electoral campaign as well as the irregularities and the apparent fraud during the counting of the votes, (PSE)

3. Rejects the decision by the Central Electoral Committee under the chairmanship of Serhiy Kivalov to declare Mr. Yanukovich as the winner of the Presidential lections without having thoroughly and fully considered the validity of the elections and the electoral process and therefore with apparent disregard to the wish of the people of Ukraine, (PSE)

4. Calls on the Ukrainian authorities to annul the second round of the Presidential elections and re-organise this second round before the end of this year with the participation of international observers, whilst guaranteeing an open and transparent electoral process according to international democratic standards both during the pre-electoral campaign as well as during the actual voting and counting of the votes and thoroughly improving the conditions of the election campaign,
(PSE/EPP)

5. Gives its full support to the efforts of EU High Representative, the Lithuanian and Polish Presidents as well as the speaker of the Russian State Duma to come to a peaceful and political solution to the crisis in Ukraine and calls to all those concerned in the Ukraine to co-operate in finding such a political solution,
(PSE)

6. Calls, in this respect, on the Council and the Commission to make clear to the Ukrainian government that in no way the use of violence against the peaceful and democratic protestscould be tolerated and that if such is the case the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement will immediately be suspended and sanctions applied; VERTS)

7. Calls on all protestors to allow for a normal functioning of the Ukraine State organs and to refrain from barricading the main buildings of these organs of the state,(PSE)

8. Juge inacceptable toutes menaces séparatistes et de partition de l'Ukraine, et exprime son attachement ? l'intégrité territoriale de l'Ukraine (GUE/NGL)

9. Rejects allegations, especially by the Russian President, that the European Union and the international community by expressing its support for the Ukrainian people's right to exercise their democratic rights would encourage violence; underlining at the same time that Russia carries a great responsibility for the situation in Ukraine; (EPP/UEN)

10. Believes that relations with Ukraine depend on a democratic resolution and pledges itscontinuing support, assistance and duty to the Ukrainian people's establishment of a free and open democratic system, their creation of a prosperous market economy and their country's assumption of its rightful place in the Euro-Atlantic community of democratic nations; (ALDE)

11. Calls upon the Commission, the Council and the Members States in case of a satisfactory outcome of the present situation to speed up the ratification of the Action Plan for Ukraine, to engage in the rapid implementation of this plan and to include new measures aiming at strengthening the role of civil society.

12. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Parliament and the Government of Ukraine, the Parliamentary Assemblies of NATO and OSCE, the Council of Europe, as well as the government and Parliament of the Russian Federation.
(PSE/ALDE/VERTS)

With regard to the "East-West split" scenario which is being so energetically played by the Kremlin, it now seems that Germany is getting in on the act, with Alexander Rahr rallying to the cause:

2004-11-30 17:49
UKRAINE'S SPLIT TO DRIVE IN RUSSIA-WEST WEDGE, WARNS GERMAN EXPERT

MOSCOW, November 30 (RIA Novosti) - In its raging political crisis, Ukraine may split into East and West, warns Alexander Rahr, director of Russian and CIS programmes at Germany's Foreign Political Council. He analyses the option in a contribution to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, influential Moscow-based daily.

The dire prospect threatens to drive in a wedge between Russia and the West. East Ukraine may repeat the patterns of Transdniestria, unrecognised republic in Moldova, or else develop quasi-statehood on a par with Abkhazia, Georgia's self-proclaimed republic. Such countries are a kind of black holes-they are established economic entities, even though the world has not recognised them. If Ukraine receives such a black hole in its east, the new state will largely depend on Russia. West Ukraine will lose economic support of the country's industrial part, the impending split to rob it of money and resources that have always flooded in from east. If that becomes true, West Ukraine, doomed to weakness, will have to sponge on the European Union and the USA.


If you read Russian, you can catch up on Rahr's article here.

Marius has drawn my attention to an excerpt from an article in yesterday's Le Monde:

ANALYSE
L'avenir de la Russie se joue aussi à Kiev
LE MONDE | 29.11.04 | 15h01

The future of Russia is also played in Kiev

[passage omitted]

Since 1990-1991, the collapse of communism, and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire has been in retreat. In the west, the old people's democracies have completed their emancipation while adhering to the EU and NATO, just as the Baltic republics, which had been integrated into the tsarist empire for centuries. have done. Apart from Belarus and the Kaliningrad enclave, Ukraine remains the only vestige of this "étranger proche" [near abroad] to which the Kremlin asserts to have particular rights.

Whereas Russia itself is threatened in its territorial integrity by the Chechen secession, the leaders of Moscow know that a supervision of Ukraine represents the last chances for the Russian empire to survive.
[passage omitted]

RIAN again, this time with a story that begins:

004-11-30 09:53
TIGIPKO TO RUN FOR UKRAINIAN PRESIDENCY?

KIEV, November 30. (RIA Novosti) - Sergei Tigipko, ex-chief of Viktor Yanukovich's campaign team and leader of the Labor Ukraine party does not rule out that in case of repeat elections he may run for presidency, he said on Monday in an interview with Novosti Ukraine.

He may run "if the parliament votes [for repeat election] and the party [Labor Ukraine] makes a corresponding decision," he said.

When asked about the outlook for overcoming the political crisis in the country, he replied, "We simply must overcome the divide in the society."

"We must look for a compromise and take into account mutual interests," he believes. At the same time, "first of all, it is necessary to diminish tension in the society."

Tigipko believes that the divide in the Ukrainian society into pro-Russian and pro-Western parts is a temporary phenomenon caused by "use of election technologies."

(via Marius)

Once again we have a British columnist/campaigner who has made it his task to defend the dictators. Putin, John Laughland tells us, "has been the very opposite of a dictator or an imperialist. He has preferred instead to adopt an attitude of appeasement in the face of relentless US expansionism. During Putin’s presidency, Russia has been geopolitically weakened far beyond even the catastrophes inflicted under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and yet the so-called tyrant in the Kremlin has done absolutely nothing to stop it." Milosevic, he tells us, is a scapegoat in a "show trial" organized by the West. Most recently, as David Aaronovitch has shown,Laughland has been trying to discredit the Ukrainian opposition and its leadership, and lavishing praise on Yanukovych.

Laughland and the type of views he presents are not really a new phenomenon in Britain and in Europe. During the 1930s, when there reigned a confusion of political and social values not dissimilar to the one that exists now, the Laughlands could be found all over the British press - especially the Beaverbrook press. In many ways, the rise of Hitler was made possible because of such confusion - a loss of moral and intellectual focus, which enables the crossing from one political extreme to another, where fascists become communists, and "libertarians" are allied to the most intolerant and anti-liberal ideologies. After the collapse of Soviet Communism, a return to this mish-mash of extremisms was always on the cards, and it has begun to assert itself in many quarters, including, it seems, areas of the British political establishment.

In the 1930s, liberal democracy became deeply unfashionable - the vogue was for "commitment", whether of left or of right, and the ideals of moderation and tolerance , were exchanged for those of "creative destruction". The push towards illiberal, totalitarian modes of thinking and acting exists also now, in our modern society - human kind cannot stand very much reality, and the urge to escape into the pseudo-certainties of anti-democracy, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, anti-"bourgeois"-ism, is as strong as it was back then. The tactic of the political and moral smear becomes all-important in the media, as the distortions of thinking that characterized the ideologists of Nazism and Stalinism still prevail - though now harnessed to a new and possibly even more destructive form and force of nihilism.

Update: RIAN haven't been slow to seize on the "Laughland controversy": here they go with an old-fashioned propaganda piece in time-honoured Soviet style, by one of their in-house commentators:

Western Europe seems to have accepted the American theory that the presidential election in Ukraine was rigged. Washington and Old European capitals, in particular Berlin, demand a repetition of the second round of the election.

But respected European organizations disagree. The British Helsinki Human Rights Group, whose observers sat in election districts in Ukraine, is convinced that the election was honest.

Does anyone in Europe know about the Group's opinion? No. The Ukrainian news circulated in Europe is screened to favor opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko and all other views are discarded as spam..

It's a rather tedious read, but you can catch the whole of it here. (via Marius)

A remarkable essay in New Times by Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov argues that the Russian secret services will not be able to defeat terrorism. Interestingkly, he bases this assertion on the notion that terrorism - particularly the kind of terrorism that is practised by the Chechen resistance - is based on concepts that are in some important ways foreign to the Russian mindset:

Why is it that the question of Islamic terrorism is now posed so acutely? There is a current view that terrorism does not need popular support, that individuals or small groups can go about their horrible business without any approval of the masses. There seems to be no contradiction in this as logic goes. But we see how jubilant crowds welcome any effective terrorist act. What is the reason?

I believe a very important circumstance is involved in this. For historic or other reasons (on which experts should ponder) terrorism, to my mind, receives the biggest popular support wherever there is the notion of collective guilt, and where this notion becomes one of the fundamental principles. What is the blood feud all about? It is based on the notion of collective guilt. It is a primitive notion, characteristic of undeveloped legal systems. Nevertheless, it is a deeply-rooted notion. If I killed your relative, I must realize that you will be killing my relatives with the belief that you are avenging on the guilty because we are of the same clan. Terrorism is based on the same notion. Russian soldiers behave atrociously in Chechnya, so we will avenge ourselves on Russian citizens – such is Chechens’ logic. So a terrorist act is regarded as something natural there. It cannot cause the horror and repulsion it causes among the people of European Christian civilization who view the collective responsibility only in a moral and historic sense. This is a very important factor that must be taken into account.

There are subtle and paradoxical manifestations of this. The trouble in Russia is that we have no notion of, or don’t want to realize what the national guilt is, the moral guilt rather than the juridical, requiring sanctions. Germans have this notion but we don’t. Even raising the matter prompts indignation. What can we be guilty of? We are victims! Whereas in the Caucasus the sense of collective guilt is deeply rooted in the conscience, the collective guilt in the true sense of the notion, in the biblical sense, if you wish – seven generations should pay for the guilt, should be exterminated.

Indeed, Islam is a biblical religion. Christianity, however, has long since veered from these biblical considerations into deep aspects of morality, and got firmly planted there, it seems, not on the basis of the profound knowledge of the Bible. What can be done about that.

Kovalyov looks to the West. The West. he believes, must substitute its offers of help to Russia in defeating terrorism with an honest and open appraisal of what the conflict in Chechnya is actually about:

Is there room in these generalized reflections for a specific peace plan for Chechnya? I think the core of such a plan is the internationalization of the conflict on which the West should insist firmly, by demands, rather than persuasion. The West should take a stand of having the right to uphold its view of the conflict rather than stating the readiness to help.

I believe such an approach must become normal for the contemporary community. All the members of the community must have their own stand on such conflicts, and must have the right and opportunity to take part in their solution. For instance, Ilias Akhmadov (who was foreign minister in Aslan Maskhadov’s government – Ed.) have proposed any form of a mandated territory. This proposal is, certainly, far more realistic than, say, the plan to dispatch United Nations forces to Chechnya. They can only be sent there by the Security Council in which Russia wields a veto. Even before Akhmadov’s plan emerged, the Russian national committee for ending the war and establishing peace in the Chechen Republic had pronounced its own, quite specific, plan but that aspect was expressed there in a more generalized way. The need for mediation and monitoring by other countries and the need to internationalize the conflict was stressed there.

It is apparent that Akhmadov’s plan, too, is presently unfeasible because the international community treats any statement of the Russian authorities, and we have heard what President Putin said after the Beslan events as the final say.

This is understandable because all the countries, members of the international community, have their own guilts, too. In this situation, not a single state is ready to come up and declare “Yes, we are imperfect, but we don’t want to live in such a world any longer. We must live in a rule-of-law world.” Sooner or later this will happen as there is no other way out. But politicians presently are unprepared for this, so it is for society to demand such a stand from politicians. All other pragmatic steps are possible, but if we don’t strive for radical change of the situation we will find ourselves in a quagmire. This is clearly shown by history.

Baroness Thatcher has made a personal statement on the Ukraine election crisis, warning that a new "Iron Curtain" may be about to fall over Ukraine. According to the BBC

She issued a statement after Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the UK could not accept the country's presidential elections were either free or fair.

Again at EDM, Vladimir Socor writes:

Reacting to the Kremlin's premature move to proclaim Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych as winner, the government daily Moldova Suverana editorialized, "If they ultimately 'appoint' Yanukovych as president, Moldova will find itself in difficulty, as Yanukovych is an ally of Putin and of [Trans-Dniester leader Igor] Smirnov against Moldova and against the West" (Basapress, November 24). Moreover, the Communist government, the right-of-center opposition, and civil-society are all apprehensively expecting Kremlin-connected political operatives to turn their attention to Moldova's electoral campaign, once they complete the mission in Ukraine.

"After Ukraine We Shall Tackle Moldova," ("O Moldovoi My Zaymyomsya Posle Ukrainy"), according to Russian political planners, cited under that headline by the pro-Moscow, pro-Tiraspol newspaper Kommersant Plyus in Chisinau. Accompanying the front-page story is a photograph of Chisinau mayor Serafim Urecheanu shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting last summer (Kommersant Plyus, November 19). This newspaper propagandizes simultaneously for Smirnov and for Urecheanu, leader of the five-party Bloc Moldova Democrata (BMD), the three "centrist" components of which count on Moscow's support for their electoral campaign.

Urecheanu has met with senior Kremlin officials several times in recent months. However, he has tried to keep most of those Moscow visits secret and acknowledged some of them only after the information leaked out. He denied having met with Putin and is now keeping silent on what looks like a calculated disclosure that he did. Capitalizing on President Vladimir Voronin's open break with Russia, BMD's centrist leaders hope to replace Voronin as Russia's partners in Moldova.

Russia's newly appointed ambassador to Moldova, Nikolai Ryabov, signaled during his inaugural press conference on November 24 that Moscow is considering getting involved in Moldova's electoral campaign. While disclaiming any intention by Russian official authorities to do so in Moldova or "in any country," Ryabov stated, "Russian political technologists [operatives] might offer consultations to certain political parties in Moldova. How to present themselves and for whom to perform this service is their business. We are free men in a free country," Ryabov claimed (Infotag, November 24).

As former chairman of Russia's Central Electoral Commission, Ryabov is an experienced election-manager. This background almost certainly contributed to the Kremlin's decision to appoint him ambassador to Moldova, as the country now embarks on a parliamentary and presidential election campaign. A team of Moscow "political technologists" -- some of them with long-standing ties to Tiraspol -- recently worked for approximately six weeks in Chisinau, advising BMD's three "centrist" factions on electoral strategy and tactics. The bloc's two right-of-center factions objected to the Russian consultants' involvement and helped blow the cover on their mission, which BMD's centrist troika was trying to keep secret. Financed by Russia's Presidential Administration, the team recommended creating an alliance of BMD centrists with hard-line Russian/"Russian-speaking" groups that are expected to defect from the Communist Party as a result of Voronin's break with Russia (see EDM, November 10).

In a November 23 news conference, a November 24 clarification statement, and a November 28 rally in downtown Chisinau, BMD leaders equivocated on the situation in Ukraine. Urecheanu declared that the official election returns represented the voters' choice, and that BMD would seek good relations with Ukrainian presidential contender. He argued that Moldovan-Ukrainian relations "mainly depend on Chisinau's leadership showing goodwill" -- thus placing the onus squarely on Moldova, as Urecheanu also does when criticizing official Chisinau for the impasse in Trans-Dniester. BMD's clarification statement the next day added an expression of "regret over widespread fraud" and "concern over developments in Ukraine," without taking a stand. Speakers at BMD's street rally differed among themselves, with some expressing sympathy for Viktor Yushchenko, some criticizing his tactics, and most speakers asserting that Urecheanu could solve problems through negotiations with Russia, Ukraine, and Trans-Dniester (Flux, Basapress, November 24; Basapress, Moldpress, November 28).

Christian-Democratic People's Party leader Iurie Rosca made public a "Dear Viktor" letter to Yushchenko, announcing that Moldova's CDPP stands "shoulder-to-shoulder with the Our Ukraine bloc," and recognizing Yushchenko as the "real winner of the election" and "legitimate president of Ukraine" (Flux, November 24).

In EDM Taras Kuzio argues that the only conclusion that can possibly be drawn from the continuing standoff in Ukraine is that the government side never intended to hold free and fair elections in the first place:

Plans for organized mass election fraud have been confirmed on tapes made by the Security Service (SBU) in Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's campaign headquarters and subsequently leaked to challenger Viktor Yushchenko. (The Russian-language tapes can be heard at maidan.uar.net/audio and pravda.com.ua has published three excerpts.) Just as President Leonid Kuchma was implicated in Kuchmagate, now a "Yanukovychgate" is taking shape.

While round one witnessed moderate "massaging" of the vote, in round two the authorities deployed extensive and blatant fraud. The political crisis following round two has paralyzed the authorities, which grossly under-estimated the domestic and international reaction and vastly over-estimated their own strength. Yanukovych has admitted, "If I am to be really honest, I never expected such statements [from the West]" (Ukrayinska pravda, November 25). Institutions of state power (local councils, educational institutions, television, the Interior Ministry, the military, and SBU) have increasingly recognized Yushchenko as Ukraine's next elected president while refusing to recognize Yanukovych's alleged "victory."

The authorities's paralysis pushed them into pressuring the Central Election Commission (CEC), which itself was involved in election fraud, to declare on November 24 that Yanukovych had won. Their plans to rush through Yanukovych's inauguration two days later and publish the official election results in parliament's Holos Ukrainy and the Cabinet of Ministers' Uriadovyi Kurier was thwarted by both Yushchenko's "orange revolution" on the streets of Kyiv and by the Supreme Court ruling that no official announcement could be made until it had investigated the numerous charges of fraud.

This left the Yanukovych camp in further paralysis and panic. One day after the CEC announced the official results, the situation in Kyiv and Ukraine began to "tip" in Yushchenko's favor. While Leonid Kuchma is still president technically, real power is increasingly moving into Yushchenko's hands.

In August 1991 leading Ukrainian officials, including then-parliamentary speaker Leonid Kravchuk, waited until the anti-Gorbachev putsch in Moscow failed before jumping ship. The same delay was happening in the "orange revolution," as many individuals and state institutions waited until Thursday or Friday (November 25-26) before defecting to Yushchenko. Interior Ministry cadets and officers openly sided with Yushchenko, while the SBU and former Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk issued statements condemning election fraud (see Marchuk on 5tv.com.ua/video). The Ministry of Defense's orchestra even serenaded the sea of orange-clad protestors.

Yanukovych's gut instincts were always to resort to force or provoke conflicts with Yushchenko's orange crowd by transporting his own supporters to Kyiv. They began to arrive on November 24-25 and never totaled more than 15,000-20,000 (compared to Yushchenko's estimated 200,000-one million). Yanukovych's supporters tended to be coal miners or other workers from his home base of Donetsk, who were given $100 for expenses, free alcohol, and transportation (The Times, November 27).

Dispatching Yanukovych supporters to Kyiv grossly backfired. Instead of clashing with Yushchenko's supporters, some of them defected to Yushchenko's side after political discussions and being given warm clothing, food, and shelter. Other Yanukovych supporters were simply awed by the size of Yushchenko's support, as local Donetsk television stations had misled them about the scale of the protests. At the November 26 round-table negotiations brokered by Poland and the EU, Yanukovych announced that he would send home his supporters. Yushchenko wryly pleaded for him to continue sending them, as many had defected to his ranks.

The governmental paralysis deepened during Saturday's parliamentary hearings, when the pro-presidential camp split. The stormy session voted by an unusually high constitutional majority of 307 votes (out of 450) for a resolution that did not recognize the second-round vote. The resolution was supported by key opposition groups: the dissident Center faction (which had supported Yushchenko in round two), speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn's Agrarians, and the People's Democratic-Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs [NDP-PPPU) (PPPU head Anatoliy Kinakh also backed Yushchenko in round two), and unaffiliated deputies.

Opposition to the resolution came from Yanukovych's Regions of Ukraine, Labor Ukraine (led by Serhiy Tyhipko, who formally headed the Yanukovych campaign), and the Social Democratic United Party. Even within these three factions, 19 out of 131 deputies backed the resolution.

The 48-hour ultimatum issued by Yushchenko at the November 26 roundtable meeting, followed one day later by the parliamentary resolution, were too much for Yanukovych. Feeling betrayed by Kuchma and other Kyiv allies, and unable for an entire week to enter his own government building due to a blockade by the orange crowds, forced Yanukovych to abandon Kyiv and retreat to Donetsk.

Seven days after the runoff, an extraordinary session of the National Security and Defense Council (NRBO) convened without the Prime Minister. The NRBO criticized Yushchenko's supporters for barricading state and government buildings in Kyiv. Meanwhile, Yanukovych and his eastern Ukrainian allies were criticized for separatist and autonomist agitation. Kuchma even praised parliament's resolution as "correct," which Yanukovych interpreted as further evidence of betrayal (Ukrayinska pravda, November 28). Even before round two Yanukovych had threatened Kuchma that he would become his "personal enemy" if he approved changes to the law on presidential elections adopted by parliament on November 18 that aimed to remove potential channels for election abuse.

Yanukovych ignored the NRBO session, instead preferring an "All-Ukrainian Congress of Deputies" held in Severodonetsk, Donetsk oblast. Besides local council deputies from Russophone regions of eastern and southern Ukraine, the congress invited Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov to speak, in what can only be understood as gross interference in Ukraine's internal affairs. The congress was broadcast using Russian television transmitters.

The congress heard calls for a "federal southeastern republic based in Kharkiv" (Ukrayinska pravda, November 28). Yanukovych threatened to call for a referendum on this issue if Yushchenko becomes president. The 1994 elections in Donetsk included a referendum on a similar question and, like then, any such referendum today would have no legal force. Not surprisingly, as Yushchenko pointed out, the officials organizing these separatist steps are the same individuals who were most involved in election fraud.

Yanukovych's retreat to Donetsk also reflects his skepticism about the Supreme Court ruling scheduled for today (November 29). The Supreme Court is likely either to annul the results in the regions with rampant fraud (i.e. Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv) and then hold fresh elections, or to call for a repeat of round two on December 12 or 19, a step preferred by Yushchenko. In either case, Yanukovych is likely to lose to Yushchenko by a substantial margin, as he has been discredited by the charges of election fraud.

Yanukovych is in a dilemma of his own choosing. Claims that he did not know of plans to falsify the elections on his behalf are not believable. The majority of Ukrainians, who have watched unbiased television coverage since November 25, (see related article in this issue of EDM), now believe Yushchenko's charge that round two was plagued by election fraud.

Kuchma is squeezed between the "Orange Revolution" and Yanukovych's wrath at being betrayed. By permitting Viktor Medvedchuk, head of the presidential administration, to undertake the dirtiest and most divisive elections in Ukraine's history, Kuchma is now facing both a popular revolution and autonomist-separatist sentiment as he leaves office.

From Moscow comes news of a new campaign.

from the PORA website
(my tr.)

29.11.2004 14:11:33

The organizations RED PORA! – Orange Moscow! – Russian PORA!
demand the immediate institution of impeachment proceedings against V. Putin on the charge of drawing Russia into a dangerous foreign policy adventure, leading to a sharp deterioration of relations with Ukraine and a possible military conflict.

The real face of Putin is Yanukovych. Putin is Yanukovych.

Putin has soiled peaceable Russia’s international reputation in Chechnya, and is now drawing our motherland into the dirty conflict it has provoked in Ukraine.
Putin has had no qualms about forming an alliance with the criminal Akhmetov-Yanukovich grouping which has looted Ukraine’s national budget.

We, citizens of Russia, appeal to decent Russian legal experts, politicians, lawyers, deputies, judges, businessmen, entrepreneurs, bankers, journalists, publishers, photographers, film and television cameramen, writers,
to all decent people in Russia:

WE MUST STOP PUTIN
LET’S GET RID OF THIS MONSTER
PUTIN OUT
IMPEACH PRESIDENT PUTIN

We declare juridical, informational, aesthetic and moral war on this disgrace to Russia
BOYCOTT PUTIN

Let each of us in their own place decide what they can do and how.
It may be:
legal action, humorous posters, songs, photographs, collages, aphorisms, slogans,
anything you like, but
WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK of Russian law.

We CAN bring about a change of regime in Russia and we shall do it
by legal means.
We are beginning the campaign: “PUTIN IS YANUKOVYCH”,
aimed at Putin's impeachment and his being held to account for harmful activity against the state.

Actions will be staged in Moscow and in other cities of the world.

Get out of the Kremlin, Putin!

We appeal to all public and private organizations, human rights groups, centres of learning, publishing houses, film studios, journals, newspapers, to all who are now ashamed and afraid for the future of our beloved Russia!

WE ARE MANY TOGETHER WE SHALL GO SINGING TO VICTORY

Red Pora!
Action Co-ordination

Update: Red Pora!'s email address is REDPORA@gmail.com

Maidan reports that Serhiy Tihipko has resigned as head of Yanukovych's headquarters. He is now, of course also ex-chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine.

Alexander Litvinenko, writing from London:

Our common enemy is Cheka

Today the Ukrainian people have risen against enslavement and dictatorship. The intellectuals, workers, students, housewives and servicemen have gone out and crowded in the streets and squares of the cities of Ukraine to voice a protest against the arbitrariness of the authorities. The chekists and criminal elements, having seized power in Ukraine , are threatening with cleaving the country into “east” and “west” and with the possibility of unleashing the civil war.

Of course, there is a severe political opposition in Ukraine , but it is not fraught with splitting the country into “east” and “west”. That is an opposition of the honest and free people not wishing to return to the yoke of slavery against the chekists and criminals always uniting in extremal situations to defend their corporative interests. The chekists and the criminals siding with them are the main enemies of the Ukrainian people and not the natives of the western or eastern parts of the country.

The chekists and criminals are not strong enough to fight openly against the thousands of citizens of their country, who, in a burst of despair have come out to stand up for freedom and to save their children. That's why they, as usual, first will try to cleave the country in two huge camps, and then stir up one mass of people against the other. And if they manage to act according to this bloody scenario, they will exterminate the active part of the population on the both sides.

Therefore, I declare that our common enemy is the cheka – i.e. those who in the offices of the so-called body of state security are spinning their bloody web of plots and intrigues setting on the civil population to fight; those who, using the secret agents in different strata of society, are sowing discord and hostility among their fellow countrymen; those who, covering themselves with the slogans about security and national interests, actually are defending their own “feeding-racks”, their accounts in the banks of foreign countries, the chance given to them to rob people with impunity.

No wonder that Russian chekist Putin, so violently supporting his Ukrainian colleagues – criminals Yanukovich and Kuchma, has sent to Kiev the chekist landing party, able to organize coup d'etat. But comrade chekists do not understand one thing – it is not 1991, when the initiative was in power of the Centre, and the KGB could somehow take control over the democratic processes that later made it possible for the chekists to save themselves and their agents.

All that is happening today comes from the regions, and that is another situation and quite another apportion of forces. And control over the processes taking place in society is not sufficient for the chekists to win a victory over the people who stand up for freedom. They have to take up arms and openly fight against the people. They can no more achieve anything, sitting in the cosy offices.

So far, the chekists can hide behind the skinhead criminals, whom they are driving in special busses from place to place all over Ukraine , but very soon, the skinheads will run to their places. And then, comrade chekists, the moment of truth will come to you, and you will not be able to escape from the people's anger, as it happened in 1991, when you managed “to write off” your sins attributing them to the marasmic Central Committee of the KPSU. Only Chechens, Georgians and Ukrainians have stood up against you so far; the Byelorussians, Ingush, Balkarians, Russian and thousand representatives of the enslaved and humiliated peoples are waiting for their turn. Then, you will have to fight with them personally, as no criminals will help you.

Indeed, one cannot say you are in luck's way, comrade chekists! Today the Ukrainians are defending not only their freedom, but also that of all freedom-loving peoples, because we have one common enemy – the cheka!

Alexander Litvinenko, London, for Chechenpress

27.11.04

(Via Chechnya-SL)

Listening to the discussion* of the Ukraine election crisis on BBC World Service's Talking Point (you can watch it and hear it with RealVideo here) this morning, I was struck by one thing that clearly emerged from the points that were being made on both sides of the Ukrainian political divide: whatever else may be needed to resolve the crisis, the one step that can't be dispensed with is a re-run of the second round of the elections. From Katharyna Wolczuk's comments it was possible to glean a truth that in some of the analysis I've seen appears to have been more or less ignored so far: that the Kuchma government, while agreeing to hold the presidential elections in the first place, decided to use and manipulate them in order to deliberately precipitate a crisis of the kind that has developed - one in which fears of a new Cold War can be exploited in order to undermine the Yushchenko opposition. It was this agenda that lay behind the gross and blatant manner in which the election fraud was carried out - the purpose was to make it so open and obvious that it could not possibly be ignored, and would lead to large-scale protests of the kind we have seen in Western Ukraine. The idea was to split the country, to aggravate political divisions that in some ways were not yet clearly defined, to arouse democratic political opinion in the West, and in short to create all the conditions where the accusation of "political interference by the West" could be levelled both at Yushchenko and at the West itself.

This technique is not a very sophisticated one, yet it can be quite effective. Its origins and ancestry are in Moscow - and in recent times it has been used even more crudely, with disastrous consequences in terms of human suffering and loss of life, by Russia in Chechnya. The Kuchma/Yanukovych/Putin axis is well aware that force alone will not lead to the results it desires, and so old KGB informational tactics, some of which date from the Stalin era, were brought out of the cupboard and put to service. What's mildly reassuring about this, at least to a Western observer, is that it highlights even more graphically the true nature of the Yanukovych campaign, and also of its Moscow patrons and supporters. An example: what has happened in the election, and in the last week, will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Yanukovych to go on presenting himself as an ally of the West in the War on Terror - for his government has been seen to be practising a blatant form of political terror: one based on fraud, intimidation and the threat of state repression. This man is no friend of the West, and no friend of democracy: at least that message has come through loud and clear. And the re-run of the second round - this time with proper and extensive international supervision - is needed not only to establish the will of the Ukrainian people, but also in order to provide a start in repairing the split in the nation that was maliciously and intentionally created by the government.
______________________________________________
*There's also a page about the programme, with listeners' viewpoints, here

A report in today's London Sunday Times says that

Russia ‘will back force’ by Ukraine president

Russia has offered to back the Ukrainian government if it uses force to crush pro-democracy demonstrators who have taken control of the capital and other cities, it was claimed last night, write Askold Krushelnycky and Mark Franchetti.

A senior figure in the Ukrainian presidential administration who declined to be identified said that Boris Gryzlov, President Vladimir Putin’s personal envoy to Ukraine, had promised “diplomatic cover” against any international backlash prompted by such a move.

The source emphasised, however, that the pledge had been given at the beginning of escalating protests prompted by last Sunday’s elections that handed the presidency to Viktor Yanukovych, the prime minister.

The rest of the article is here.

From Victor Katolyk:

Tymoshenko is speaking in front of the people in the Independence Square. Here is just a few things she said:
1) The authorities are planning to sweep away the demonstrators this night;
2) She announced an ultimatum to Kuchma, where the opposition leaders give Kuchma 24 hours to meet their requirements;
3) The authorities excercise enormous pressure on the Supreme Court judges, inluding threats of bodily harm etc.

Posted by: Victor Katolyk | November 28, 2004 02:24 PM

korrespondent.net
The Eastern congress decided to hold a referendum about the autonomy 12 December.

Posted by: Victor Katolyk | November 28, 2004 02:51 PM

Update:

28-11-2004 23:01 Maidan-INFORM

Yulia Tymoshenko Announced a Rally in Front of Supreme Court

http://maidan.org.ua/static/enews/1101675708.html

At this moment Julia Tymoshenko (Yushchenko’s ‚right hand’) is talking to hundreds thousands of people at Maidan. She has announced, a rally in front of Supreme Court is starting at 11 o’clock tomorrow. This is going to be a peaceful rally directed at protection of Judges from Kuchma’s pressure. She further informed people about Kuchma’s and Yanukovich’s plan to scatter protesters in Kyiv tonight. She called upon all Yushchenko’s supporters to gather at president’s administration. Julia also said that today or tomorrow Yanukovich was going to seize president’s office and this should not happen. That’s why no Kuchmist should be allowed into the president’s administration and ministers’ office.

http://maidan.org.ua/static/enews/1101675708.html

Vitaliy Dovhych, writing in Maidan:

Tonight Russian TV channel TVC, obedient to Moscow Mayor Luzhkov, cited Western treacheries as reason for Ukrainian political crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people that spend their days on Maidan, Kyiv’s main Independence Square, people that come here for hours in a row, that walk in Khreshchatyk in unbelievable jams, - that, by the appraisal of the program “Post scriptum”, is a “well-organized crowd”. Anything but a people conscious of its own self-respect.

Moreover, TVC is giving voice to the crisis deepening scenario desirable for Russian authorities – scenario that implies interference in Ukrainian internal affairs: “We shouldn’t shy away from it – even at the cost of our friendship with EU and USA, even at the cost of Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.

And where is Russia’s intelligentsia? What is its civic stand? Where are the demands that media provide well-balanced information?

So far we only hear from some lone voices of Moscow’s, St. Petersburg’s and Sochi’s intellectual elite.

Read the rest.

Statement in Support of Ukraine's Democratic Forces

November 24, 2004

On behalf of the tens of thousands of members of the Lithuanian-American Community, Inc., we express our solidarity with the people of Ukraine, particularly the democratic forces of Ukraine which today are standing firm against a corrupt, arbitrary and lawless regime and defend their electoral process and the future of their children.

We call upon our own government to support the democratic forces in Ukraine and to not recognize the Ukrainian Central Election Commission's decision to certify Viktor Yanukovych the winner of the Ukrainian presidential election. This election has been judged by independent international observers as flawed by wide-scale and visible fraud.

This is no longer an internal matter of Ukraine and Ukrainians. The United States and other Western democracies must act on their convictions in defense of the democratic process.

We, Lithuanian-Americans, know something about the issue of not recognizing an illegal regime. The United States did not recognize the illegal occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union for over fifty years and never recognized the Soviet government's claim to speak for the people of Lithuania. Therefore, we call upon the United States to not recognize the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych.

The United States and other Western democracies must also insist on the removal of foreign troops or foreign armed units from the territory of Ukraine. There are widespread reports that Russian interior ministry troops and even Russian spetznatz troops have entered the territory of Ukraine. Since the parliament of Ukraine has not voted to support any such request, this is a violation of both international law and the Constitution of Ukraine.

People of Ukraine, do not lose faith in your ability to govern yourselves. We call on all people of conscience in the government of Ukraine to support the candidate of the majority, Viktor Yushchenko. We call on the regime of President Kuchma and presidential candidate Yanukovych to refrain from the use of police or miltary force against your fellow Ukrainians.

We urge our members throughout the United States to call on the Congress of the United States and the President of the United States to support the democratic forces of Ukraine.


http://www.lithuanian-american.org

From Victor Katolyk:

Verkhovna Rada:
* recognized the second round of elections as invalid,
* expressed distrust to the Election Comission

However, Verkhovna Rada didn't adopt the ruling to re-run the elections.

The Russian leader has got away with meddling in Georgia and Moldova and he serves as sponsor to the tyrannical regime in Belarus. Ukraine was always next in Mr Putin's efforts to tame Russia's near-abroad.

The west's complicity, or at the very least acquiescence, has been justified as part of the bigger (let's not dignify it by calling it grand) bargain. Washington is anxious for Russian co-operation in Iraq. Europe has sought its aid in persuading Iran to scale back its nuclear ambitions. And, of course, the oil companies want access to Russia's vast reserves. Somewhere along the way the strategic ambition to support and entrench Russian democracy has been discarded. Maybe events in Ukraine will change things. I hope so. But I am not optimistic.

Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times. You can read the whole article here.

My translation of an article from newsru.com:

Brzezinski: The West Needs to Cool Its Relations with the Kremlin

time of publication: 26 November 2004, 13:51
last update: 26 November 2004, 13:51

The political crisis surrounding the outcome of the presidential elections in Ukraine has caused a deep split between Russia and the West. In spite of the open criticism from the EU, Russian president Vladimir Putin continues to support Viktor Yanukovych. On Friday the German newspaper Handelsblatt published an interview on this theme with President Jimmy Carter’s former adviser on national security, the prominent Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In his opinion, what is at stake is democracy and a country’s independence. However, in a broad sense, Russia’s future also depends on this: if democracy is buried in Ukraine, because the West merely watches the events, Russia will become more authoritarian and more imperialistic. Russia, which dominates both in Ukraine and in Belorussia, does not fit into the democratic world. Brzezinski explains how the EU and the US can have an influence on the development of events.

“Firstly, it’s essential to establish that the elections in Ukraine were not conducted in accorance with the law. Secondly, we must support the promotion of the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko by political means. Thirdly, work must proceed on the preparation of new elections. In addition, the EU and NATO must display a greater degree of interest in relation to the membership of Ukraine in those organizations. The West must send an unambiguous signal: if the outgoing Ukrainian President Kuchma wants to crush democracy, then that will have consequences – not only for relations with Ukraine, but also with Russia. To the extent that the Kremlin has contributed to the manipulation of the Ukrainian elections.”

The well-known Sovietologist described what in his view should be the consequences of what is happening in Ukraine. Brzezinski considers that the new Ukrainian leadership must be outlawed, and its property and holdings abroad be sequestrated. With regard to Russia, a cooling of relations must be planned. The West must return to the question of Russia’s membership of the G8.

Brzezinski went on to characterize the government of Vladimir Putin:

“It bears a definite resemblance to the Italian Fascism of Mussolini in the 1930s: an authoritarian state, nationalist rhetoric, historical myths about a great past; also, private enterprise in Russia is under state control.”

The Sovietologist commented on the relationship between US President George W. Bush and his Russian counterpart. Bush constantly extols his friendship with Putin.

“I have nothing against good relations between heads of state. But the advantages that stem from personal relations should not become the cause of delusions. It’s bad if someone portrays an authoritarian regime as democratic.”

(via Marius)

The article by Taras Kuzio part-quoted and linked to below appeared in the Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor on November 24.

The entire international community has condemned the second round of the Ukrainian presidential election, held on November 21. The only exception has been the CIS Election Observers Mission, a body established in Russia in 2003 that brings together most CIS member states. CIS Executive Secretary Vladimir Rushailo, head of the election mission to Ukraine, noted that the second round was an improvement on the first, a view that contradicted Western governments and international organizations (Interfax, November 21). CIS observers reported that the elections were "legitimate and of a nature that reflected democratic standards" (Ukrayinska pravda, November 22). In contrast, the Civic Voters Committee in Ukraine, which deployed 10,000 observers, and the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, which deployed 1,100 observers, both condemned round two as not being "free and fair."

The CIS Election Observation Mission never attempted to be impartial. They supported Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and condemned his opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, in their printed materials. One letter sent by a CIS observer to Ukrainian voters warned that a Yushchenko victory "would lead to Ukrainian politics being dictated by American activists" (Ukrayinska pravda, October 28).

Read the rest here.

Here's more on that Cold War-style conspiracy theory from Sergei Markov:

Russian Political Scientist Blames Polish Conspiracy for Ukraine Election Crisis

Created: 25.11.2004 17:30 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:30 MSK

MosNews

Renowned Russian political scientist Sergei Markov told reporters in Moscow on Thursday that the ongoing political crisis in Ukraine was in fact a Polish conspiracy with the aim of imposing Polish patronage over Ukraine and thus raising Polish influence within the European Union.

“Yushchenko’s electoral campaign has been developed within the Polish diaspora abroad and its ideological basis was prepared by former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and his two sons,” the Newsru.com web-site quoted Markov as saying.

Markov said that another ethnic Pole, Andrian Karatnitsky, the head of the U.S. foundation Freedom House, had hired Serbian spin doctors and brought them to Ukraine ahead of the presidential elections. (Another Russian political scientist, Gleb Pavlovsky, said in a Wednesday evening news broadcast on Russia’s RTR television channel that Yushchenko’s campaign had been prepared by the same specialists who prepared similar campaigns in Serbia and Georgia).

“The arrival of Lech Walesa and Aleksander Kwasniewski as intermediaries in the Ukraine negotiations would become a part of the Tbilisi-Belgrade scenario, as the objective of these intermediaries is not peace, but a passing of power to Yushchenko,” Markov said.

Read the rest of the article here

Kommersant, Nov.26 2004

Very Expensive to Buy Votes

//The Price of the Question//

Andrey Kozyrev, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

Russia has unambiguously endorsed one candidate in the Ukrainian presidential elections and even congratulated him on his victory before the Ukrainian Central Elections Commission announced the outcome of the voting. And that while all major European countries refused to recognize the election as legitimate. That will cost Russia dearly, and the cost will be paid both in foreign policy and in domestic affairs.

The Ukrainians will settle their election sooner or later. Their movement away from the post-Soviet oligarchic structure toward the competing Western model is already irreversible. It is only a matter of time. It was faster when Yushchenko was prime minister, and it will probably be faster yet if he becomes president. If anyone else becomes president, the course of events will remain the same, just maybe going more slowly and with more detours. Equally assuredly, any president of Ukraine is going to maintain good relations with Russia (especially economic relations) at the same time it moves closer to the West. There are no other alternatives for Ukraine.

(via Marius)

DONETSK REGION TO SECEDE FROM UKRAINE?

KIEV, November 26 (RIA Novosti) - The Donetsk Region, East Ukraine's best-developed industrial area, is in for a status referendum.

If a coup d'etat awaits Ukraine, the coal-rich province's authorities will call its entire population to independently determine its fate, the Donetsk Regional Council says in a resolution it passed at an emergency session today.

Victor Yanukovich, Ukrainian Premier, won last Sunday's presidential runoff in close competition, the Central Election Commission announced, Wednesday. The supporters of Victor Yuschenko, opposition leader and his rival, adamantly opposed the election returns they consider forged, and appealed against it to the Supreme Court. The issue will come under consideration Monday next, November 29.

The regional resolution qualifies opposition moves as "unconstitutional and putting Ukraine to the brink of civil war", Council PR said to Novosti-Ukraina news agency.

Yanukovich swept the runoff in the Donetsk Region with 96.2 per cent votes, a token 2.3 per cent for Yuschenko, reports the Central Election Commission.

(via Marius)

from Moscow News:

Ukraine’s Yanukovich Warns Against Opposition “Coup” Just Before Meeting with Mediators

Created: 26.11.2004 19:08 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 19:22 MSK, 1 hour 7 minutes ago

MosNews

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich urged supporters on Friday to help him avert an “unconstitutional coup”, hours before a scheduled meeting with his rival, opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, together with European mediators to sort out the crisis over disputed presidential polls both candidates claim they won.

“Dear friends, together we must do everything so that an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine does not happen,” Yanukovich told thousands of his own supporters brought to Kiev by train from the Donbass coalfield in his power base —- the Russian- speaking east of the country, Reuters reported.

from Moscow News

Russia Accuses Europe of Dragging Ukraine Westward

Created: 26.11.2004 15:20 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 15:20 MSK, 5 hours 2 minutes ago

MosNews

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday accused some Western nations of trying to drag the Ukraine westwards, taking advantage of the massive support for pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who, according to official results, lost the presidential elections to pro-Kremlin Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.

“Some capitals have not recognized the election and put forward the theory that Ukraine should be with the West,” Reuters quoted Lavrov as saying.

“In some European capitals there are some forces that are attempting to draw some new border lines across Europe.”

Western countries have cited fraud and some have refused to recognize the results as legal, straining relations with Russia which fears losing influence in Ukraine. Moscow traditionally regards Ukraine as being within its sphere of influence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has officially congratulated Yanukovich on victory and has warned foreign powers against statements that could incite chaos in the former Soviet state. Putin said on Thursday a solution to the crisis should be found through the courts and not through street protests. Ukraine’s supreme court has declared it will investigate accusations of electoral fraud.

Earlier Putin warned the West not to meddle in Ukraine’s affairs by supporting the opposition.

http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/swiat/1,45627,2412231.html

Gazeta Wyborcza

Viktor Yushchenko was created by the Poles!

BW 25-11-2004, last update 25-11-2004 16:03

Zbigniew Brzezinski, his sons and Poland's government created the candidate of the Ukrainian opposition and have promoted Yushchenko in order to prevent the deeper integration of the European Union!

Thus asserts Sergei Markov, the well known political expert and director of the Institute of Politcal Studies in Moscow.

At a press conference in Russia’s capital city, Markov argued that Brzezinski, together with his sons - Mark and Ian - wanted Yushchenko to win, because this would increase Poland’s significance in the EU. And this - thinks Markov - suits Washington, because a strong Poland won't allow greater integration of the EU, which is under the patronage of France and Germany.

Markov describes this Polish conspiracy thus: Mark Brzezinski is an aide of the Democrats and his brother advises the Republicans. Their co-conspirator is Adrian Karatnycky - "a person with Polish ancestry", one of the leaders of Freedom House - the organization which supports democracy in the world.

According to Markov, the visit of Lech Walesa and the planned visit of [Polish president] Aleksander Kwasniewski are not coincidental - The Polish socio-technologists are planning in Kiev the repeat of coupe d'etats from Georgia and Serbia - asserts the Russian expert.

- Of course, the whole plan has to be secret, because the Ukrainians know that the Poles don't like them and treat them as something inferior [to them], so they can't know that actually Poland is behind the candidature of Yushchenko.

But what does Zbigniew Brzezinski want to achieve himself? - That's simple - answers Markov. - The Polish diaspora in the US hates George Bush, and it wants, by supporting Yushchenko, to make the president of the US quarrel with the president of Russia.
----------------------------------------------------------------------


http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/swiat/1,34174,2411922.html

Tough talk of Walesa with Yanukovich

Marcin Bosacki, Kiev, PAP 25-11-2004, last update 25-11-2004 21:13

Chances for talks between the authorities and opposition in Kiev are slim. Premier Yanukovich, who was declared as the winner of Sunday's elections in Ukraine talked very tough with the Polish mediator Lech Walesa. - Today I'm still ready for talks, but tomorrow I might be not - he told Walesa.

Lech Walesa came out from one hour talk with Yanukovich visibly upset. He said that Yunukovich declares his intention for talks with the opposition's leader Victor Yushchenko, but not about the results of the election. That means de facto, that he wants that Yushchenko would recognized him as a president. Of course, the opposition won't agree to any talks on these kind of conditions.

Lech Walesa, after the meeting with Yanukovich, was saying that he feared provocations on the streets of Kiev, and the next 24-48 hrs will decide about development of the situation there. Although Walesa's collocutors were assuring him, that are ready for talks and are excluding the use of force, the president thinks that there's a serious possibility of provocations and if you have a provocation
then force must be used.

He repeated these words later at a rally of thousands of Yushchenko's supportes, on which he showed up for the second time, after the meeting with Yanukovich.

People from Walesa's entourage add that Yanukovich told the ex-president that he might not talk tomorrow, because he will bring to the streets of Kiev thousands of his supporters from the Eastern Ukraine. And this will radically change the arrangement of forces.

It's not known if these threats are real.

It looks as though, in this tough attitude, Yanukovich is being supported by Moscow. During Walesa's meeting, to the government building, where the talks were going on, came the Russian ambassador - Victor Chernomyrdin, and ambassadors of Kazakhstan and Armenia. These two ambassadors were carrying big bouquets of flowers, it could be
assumed, to congratulate Yanukovich of his victory.


(translations by Marius, my minor edits)

Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, writing in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 26 November 2004:

East-West conflict

The return of the past can neither be overlooked nor denied. Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulates Viktor Yanukovych, the protégé of the Ukrainian oligarchs who would so like to crawl under the Russian blanket, on his election victory. The West, aroused by the pictures of civil protest in Kiev and a dramatic confrontation, said the vote was rigged. U.S. President George W. Bush's special delegate even speaks of a defrauding government. Washington's other comments on developments in Ukraine show all too clearly that the U.S. government favors the opposition candidate Yushchenko. The political and geopolitical lines of conflict reach far into the East and the West. At least it has now become clear that the future development of this massive, internally torn-up country, has a wider European significance. Without exaggerating, one may conclude that the fate of Ukraine could decide the future of the post-Soviet area in general. Russia clearly wants to play fate. Rather than merely make Ukraine a part of its own sphere of influence, it would like to reintegrate the country. Russia's behavior in this matter also impacts its relationship to the West - which today includes countries that still feel the effects of subjugation to Moscow. There are two reasons why many Europeans have been surprised by this new East-West conflict. For one, they have neglected eastern Europe, with Ukraine as a country of key geopolitical importance. And they have been deafened by their own, repeated talk about a strategic partnership with Russia. In the end, the Europeans - including German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder - apparently believed that Putin was a model democrat whom they should stop criticizing so harshly. No doubtful word about the open process of de- democratization in Russia, no complaints about Chechnya, no queries on Russia's interference in Ukraine.
Perhaps Schröder, Chirac, Berlusconi & Co. are now learning a lesson about the ”true Putin.” It is high time that Putin was told clearly how Europe defines democracy and that old striving for power and influence will not gain access to this Europe. The demand in Kiev's direction must be: Repeat the election under strict supervision.

With Solana, Kwasniewski, Kubis and others visiting Kyiv today for mediation efforts, one might be forgiven for thinking that the decision-making in the present crisis is being taken out of the hands of the opposing forces in Ukraine into the realm of international diplomacy. This is probably an illusion. While the envoys may talk to the parties concerned, there has to be something for them to talk about - some measure of give and take. If Lech Walesa's experience during his hour-long talk with Yanukovych yesterday is anything to go by, there's not much of that on the government side. According to Walesa, Yanukovych was singularly unforthcoming and unwilling to compromise - by all accounts, Walesa emerged from the meeting quite upset.

The responsibility for the taking of decisions - and, indeed, for the entire future course of Ukraine's development - rests with Ukrainians themselves. That is what the present crisis illustrates above all else, and while international helpers and observers can watch and suggest, in the end the resolution of the crisis lies in the hands of the Ukrainian people. That is, of course, unless Russia intervenes with force - in which case the whole of Europe will be thrown into a political crisis, and a new Cold War will begin. If there is anything the envoys can do in the present situation, it's to help to avoid that scenario.

Announcement from the Council of European Union website:

Javier SOLANA,
EU High Representative for the CFSP,
to visit Ukraine
26 November 2004

Javier SOLANA, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, will travel to Kiev on Friday 26 November 2004. He will have meetings with President Kuchma as well as Prime Minister Yanukovich and opposition leader Yushchenko to try to assist in the identification of a way out of the current crisis following the second round of presidential elections.
°
° °
Meeting on 22 November, EU Foreign Ministers discussed the situation in Ukraine after the run-off of the presidential election. The Presidency noted after this discussion that the European Union had followed the second round of elections with great concern; that the EU had on several occasions urged the Ukrainian authorities to observe democratic principles so that the second round of elections could be free and fair; that the second round of elections had clearly fallen short of international standards and that in view of the irregularities detailed in the OSCE/ ODIHR report the EU seriously questioned whether the official results would fully reflected the will of the Ukrainian electorate. Since then, the EU has continued to follow the electoral process in Ukraine closely.
________

from PORA

25.11.2004 12:23:16

sign the letter of freedom and solidarity

To all the CITIZENS of the FREE WORLD

Now, while you are reading this letter, 48 millions of people that live in one of the largest European countries, have a unique chance to make their choice and change ruling corrupted regime.
This autumn 2004 is the moment of truth for Ukrainian nation

We know that choice of Ukrainian people is clear.
They are tired of years of corrupted regime and distrusted government. They are exhausted by permanent lie and lawlessness. They want prosperity and stability for their children. They want to live in a democratic country. They value freedom of expression and freedom of press They want to join European community. They want their choice to be heard and respected.

But we also know that this choice could be falsified, as it happened during parliamentary elections in 2002, during the elections in Mukacheve and in tens of small towns all over Ukraine. We recognize that people’s choice could be disgraced and replaced by the will of a small oligarchic group. And again millions of Ukrainians will be deceived

We started this letter of freedom and solidarity to protect free and fair results of elections.
If you believe in freedom, if you care about future of Ukraine, sign this letter to prevent falsifications and to protect thousands of young Ukrainians, who created a national network of volunteers and started PORA (TIME) civic movement, aimed at ensuring and protecting fair and democratic elections of the President of Ukraine.
We need your help
because regime will be afraid to break the rules in front of
because only UNITED we can win


There is no alternative to public action:
1. Check our website www.pora.org.ua/en
2. Sign our letter of freedom and solidarity
3. Make a difference: join PORA Campaign and contribute to campaign
4. Forward this letter to your friends
There might not be other chance

It is TIME to act, TIME to struggle, TIME to win
The letter was signed by: (show all).
If you want to sign this letter please send your name, organization you represent and your email to info@pora.org.ua

The BBC reports that Ukraine's Supreme Court has frozen the election result. This is good news as far as it goes, I guess.

Timothy Garton-Ash, in the Guardian, with an excellent article on Freedom's Front Line:

Actually, it's in places like Kiev, rather than in Brussels, that you see what a great story Europe has to tell, if only we knew how to tell it. It's the story of a rolling enlargement of freedom, from a position 60 years ago when there was just a handful of perilously free countries in Europe, and virtually the whole continent was at war, to a position today where there are only two or three seriously unfree countries in Europe, and almost the whole continent is at peace. Today, the front line of that forward march is in Ukraine.

Orwell writes somewhere that "from inside, everything looks worse". Whatever its faults seen from inside, and they are many, seen from outside the European Union is a great magnet and promoter of freedom. Most of our neighbours want to join it in order to become more free (as well as richer), and so as to secure the freedoms many of them have fought for in velvet revolutions.

In the longer term, to say, as I believe we should, that a democratic Ukraine has its proper place in the EU, is the best support we could give Ukrainian democrats. Immediately, though, we need the hardest, sharpest warning that Europe, the US and any other democracy that has influence in Kiev or Moscow can deliver. A group of students in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv send us this appeal via the BBC website: "We just hope Yanukovich decides not to turn the guns on us ... Don't let them kill our will."

There are clearly some strong divisions of opinion in the views of German political figures on the current crisis in Ukraine, as the following reports show.

Merkel warnt vor Bindung an Rußland
Schröder: Putins Kurs nötig / Tagung der Trilateralen Kommission
K.F. BERLIN, 24. Oktober. Die CDU-Vorsitzende Angela Merkel hat vor einer zu engen Verbindung Deutschlands mit Rußland gewarnt und damit indirekt ...

Germany's Merkel Warns Against Ties With Russia, Schroeder Backs Putin's Course
Frankfurt/Main Frankfurter Allgemeine in German 25 Oct 04 p 5

[Report by "K.F.": Merkel Warns Against Ties With Russia; Schroeder --
Putin's Course Necessary / Meeting of Trilateral Commission"]

Berlin, 24 October -- CDU [Christian Democratic Union] Chairwoman Angela Merkel has warned against too close ties between Germany and Russia, thus indirectly criticizing the policy of the Federal Government. Equidistance to Russia, or even closer ties would be dangerous, she said. Ms Merkel stressed her firm opposition to a policy of equidistance toward the United States and Russia, complaining, "The level of dependence on Russian natural gas is exceeding acceptable levels." She called on Germany to resume its former mediating role in Europe, as well as between the European states and America. In the Iraq conflict, the Federal Government has given up this balancing role of mediator, she complained.
[passage omitted]

With regard to the assessment of the development in Russia, the chancellor's view clearly differed from that of the opposition leader, when he expressed his understanding and support for the centralization policy of [Russian] President Putin. His [Putin's] goal is the "reconstruction of statehood" in Russia, he said. "The state should once again fulfill its protective function, so that it is no longer necessary to pay mafia-like elements for protection," he stated. Stressing the will of Germany and the European Union to enter into a strategic partnership with Russia, without which it would be impossible to achieve sustainable peace and prosperity in Europe, Schroeder demanded: "We should understand this process." The line that Putin has adopted in Russia is necessary, he said.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Nov 24 2004 6:43PM
Putin, Schroeder want legal solution to Ukraine crisis

MOSCOW. Nov 24 (Interfax) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and his German counterpart Gerhard Schroeder had a phone conversation on Wednesday, in which they said a legal solution is needed for the crisis in Ukraine, the Russian presidential press service reported.

"It was mentioned that the post-election situation should be resolved on the basis of the election legislation currently effective in Ukraine. As to political problems, they can be resolved within the framework of the corresponding political contacts and consultations," the press service reported.

(via Marius)

As the Ukraine election crisis enters another day, some items from here and there:

* The Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reports that Lech Walesa has flown to Kyiv for a meeting with Yushchenko, and probably also for one with Kuchma and Yanukovych:

Lech Walesa flies to Kiev
ms, mab 25-11-2004, last update 24-11-2004 18:25

Nobel prize-winner Lech Walesa flies today to Kyiv for one day with a mission. He will meet with the opposition leader Victor Yushchenko, and probably also with his rival Victor Yanukovich and president Leonid Kuchma.

The legendary leader of Solidarity was invited to Ukraine, just after the elections, by Victor Yushchenko. Walesa had been hesitating for a long time, he was still saying yesterday "that although he is with the Ukrainian people in spirit, he won't go there now". Today he had a planned trip to Portugal.

But at noon, Jaroslaw Walesa, who acts as an assistant of his father informed us - We are flying to Kyiv. Our plan: We're neutral and we talk with both sides.

The former president flies at dawn on the airplane provided by the present president. Probably he will be accompanied by other Polish politicians, among them another legend of Solidarity, Zbigniew Bujak [former "S" leader from the Warsaw region M.L.]

* The Moscow News has the following report:

Former Czech Leader Havel Urges Ukrainians to Keep Up Protests
Created: 24.11.2004 13:16 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 13:16 MSK,

Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel, urged Ukrainians to keep up their protests against the presidential election results.

The leader of the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia was quoted by Reuters as saying that "all respected domestic and international organizations agree that your demands are justified. Therefore I wish you strength, endurance, courage and fortunate decisions."

Long years or decades of the Ukrainians' future are at stake, Havel said during a trip to Taiwan.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian presidential opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko proclaimed himself president even though preliminary results provided by the Central Election Commission said he lost. Late in the evening, Yushchenko and his supporters surrounded the president's office. The candidate's aides said the current president,
Leonid Kuchma, agreed to hold negotiations.

* The current issue of Nature magazine contains an article about a British toxicologist's claim that Yushchenko's acne points to dioxin poisoning:

John Henry, a clinical toxicologist at St Mary's Hospital, London, and a consultant for Britain's National Poisons Information Service, points out that current photos of Yushchenko's face show a dramatic transformation compared with a few months ago.

He says that Yushchenko's disfiguring acne is almost certainly 'chloracne', a characteristic symptom of dioxin poisoning.

(via Marius)

MAK reports from Tallinn that "Russian airplanes continue to violate Estonian airspace. Today a TU-154 heading in the direction of Kaliningrad penetrated Estonian territory twice."

Yulya Tymoshenko's speech, as she talks on the Maidan, relayed by this blog:

Tomorrow we will go to the supreme court though we know that the court is not fair. we will try to convince them to be just. But we also know that trying to work legally with people don't recognize the law is truely impossible.

we must start first battles. we will battle to the end

last night when we passed the barriers into the Presidential Administration and we saw what is happening there. We got infornmation from the officers there. there are not only Ukrainians. there are soldiers of another country dressed in Ukrainian uniforms. But the foreign soldiers will shoot if there are more than 50 people coming in. The Ukrainians said they will not shot.

But last night we knew if we brought the people in there, we knew what will happen.

We must now plan concretely. we will block roads, railroads, airports and will not let them destroy or country


We do not want to lose a single Ukrainian life.

Also, Yushchenko calls for a general strike.

From the most recent entries on the PORA civic campaign website:

24.11.2004 19:27:17

Weapons for Yanukovych supporters discovered
According to our activists, road inspectors have detained a truck carrying weapons. According to the information received, these weapons were intended for supporters of Victor Yanukovych in Kyiv.

24.11.2004 19:18:41

A prayer for the inhabitants of the tent camp

At this very moment a rally continues at Independence Square with the participation of Victor Yushenko. At present there are no specific appeals from the stage. But the people said they are ready to stay in the Square for many days.

Before Yushenko’s speech, preachers came to PORA camp and prayed for the activists.

24.11.2004 17:33:19

Youngsters wearing blue colors support Yushchenko!

Tents of Yanukovych "supporters" have been installed in the territory between Dinamo Stadium and Mariinskyi Palace.

Near the tents, young people stand with blue-and-white ribbons proclaiming “For Yanukovych!” Military men can be seen there giving orders to the youngsters. Many of the young people admitted in private talks that they were forced to come to Kyiv and that in fact they support Yushchenko.

24.11.2004 17:17:25

Reports of incoming aircraft from Donetsk and Russia
We have received an eyewitness report from Zhulyany airport that 30 aircraft are incoming from Donetsk, and a further 20 from Russia itself. Our observer reports that the aircraft from Russia are carrying men in military uniform. We await confirmation of these details.

24.11.2004 15:52:33

ATTENTION!

We have just received information from the sources close to Security Service of Ukraine that in two hours (on November 24th at 16:00) Victor Yanukovych will be announced a President and Russian special troops that are already in Kyiv will start force actions against the people in the center of Kyiv.

BE CAREFUL!

24.11.2004 13:30:14

We have just received information that almost all the higher institutions in Kyiv are on strike About two hours ago they formed columns and marched to Independence Square to support those at the meeting. At the present time these students should have arrived at the central square of the capital.

The results of the Ukraine election have been announced by the Central Election Commission.

This doesn't augur well for the future.

It appears that the authorities in Moscow are beginning to get worried about what they may have started in Ukraine. RIA Novosti has put out the following report:

2004-11-24 13:29
DID RUSSIA BACK THE WRONG UKRAINIAN CANDIDATE?

MOSCOW, Nov 24 (RIA Novosti) - Leonid Kuchma will meet with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg soon. The Russian president's press secretary, Alexei Gromov, has confirmed this news.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta recalls that Mr. Putin was the first foreign leader to congratulate the current Ukrainian prime minister, the authorities' presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, on his victory in the elections before the official results were declared.

Meanwhile, an opposition rally of 200,000 people in central Kiev has proclaimed its leader, Viktor Yushchenko, the president, and the parliamentary opposition has attempted to swear him in.

Stanislav Belkovsky, a Russian political scientist and head of the National Strategy Institute, believes that Mr. Putin's experts were mistaken in assessing the situation in Ukraine in the run-up to the vote. "We should have never have backed Mr. Yanukovich. There were five or six politicians in Ukraine who could have defeated Mr. Yushchenko. Now we are witnessing a revolutionary situation."

The political expert explained that the only possible compromise in this crisis could be to recognize Mr. Yushchenko as the winner of the elections, to appoint Socialist Party leader [Oleksandr] Moroz prime minister, and to form a coalition government to incorporate, in particular, the Communists and Mr. Yanukovich's supporters.

Some Ukrainian experts believe that Russia is currently finishing a game imposed on it by Kremlin political expert, Gleb Pavlovsky. "However, every step President Putin is making in this game is complicating Ukrainian-Russian relations for years to come," said a parliamentarian of the Ukrainian Rada.

(Via Marius)

The wait is now for the announcement of the official election results by the CEC, and it looks as though the expected talks between Kuchma and the opposition will not take place. From the BBC:

Deputy head of Mr Yushchenko's headquarters Taras Stetskiv said the opposition wants Mr Kuchma to declare the elections as falsified and name Mr Yushchenko as president.

If the authorities fail to respond to these demands, the opposition "will paralyse the country", he said.

"There will be no trains or cars moving, and there will be a general strike," he added.

Meanwhile, it's reported that journalists and newsreaders have walked out in protest at censorship:

The IFJ said four newsreaders on Channel 1+1 had refused to read the news after complaining of "crude" censorship, forcing the station to drop certain news bulletins altogether.

Three newspapers had their distribution blocked in the days leading up to the election, while a fourth had 500 copies seized from sellers in northern Ukraine.

"The situation is very tense and we have extremely worrying reports about attempts to distort the news and control the media," said the IFJ general secretary, Aidan White.

"Many broadcast journalists are risking everything by refusing to bow to pressure and censorship".

As the wait for the opening of talks between the president and the opposition continues, and the protests go on, it's perhaps as well to consider that Ukraine's struggle has always been a twofold one: while the first stage of the struggle, independence, has been won, the second stage, which will decide what kind of a country Ukraine is to become, is still being fought.

Earlier this year the Canadian academic and political commentator Taras Kuzio pointed out that

Those who refuse to criticize President Kuchma should bear in mind his presiding over a Ukraine that is going to commemorate the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty and Ukrainian Communist Volodymyr Shcherbytsky's 85th anniversary, while continuing to refuse to honor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as genuine veterans and freedom fighters.

And Kuzio asked:

Does the Ukrainian diaspora wish to support this kind of Ukraine which is being subjected to what Ukrainian scholars are increasingly describing as the country's "Little Russianization?"

Not only the Ukrainian diaspora, but the Western world as a whole needs to ask this question, for in the answer to it may lie the future of entire areas of modern democratic practice. The fate of Europe, in particular, is acutely bound up in it.

What we see in Ukraine today is a continuation and development of the processes that took place in Eastern Europe and parts of the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1980s.

Roman Szporluk, Professor of History at Harvard University, says that

The Ukrainian crisis today brings to mind events in Poland in late 1988 and in 1989. Under the pressure of the popular democratic movement Solidarity the Communist rulers of Poland agreed to negotiate with leaders of the democratic forces and undertook to conduct an honest parliamentary election. In order to ensure that the election would be truly free, the Communists allowed the democrats access to the mass media, including TV. In the election the democrats won a convincing victory and the Communist establishment accepted the nation's verdict. In August 1989, Poland had a government headed by one of the opposition leaders. There was no violence, no arrests, no revenge.

Professor Szporluk also points to some other 20th century historical precedents:

In a situation like this, a law-abiding citizen has to ask whether he or she is obliged to obey an authority that is engaged in breaking the fundamental laws of the state. Thousands of people are now demonstrating in the capital of Kiev and in other cities and towns of Ukraine in order to defend their democratic rights and the state constitution. Especially impressive is the participation of the younger generation, including university students, which is understandable because they are the people who were young children in 1991 when democracy seemed to have been coming to Ukraine. They feel that their struggle for fair elections is legitimate even if it appears to be in opposition to the established authorities.

A historian knows that there are certain turning points in history when resistance to the ruling powers is justified and indeed is a moral duty of the citizen. Nobody questions the decision of Charles de Gaulle to defy the French parliament and the head of the French state, Marshal Petain, when they established a collaborationist regime in France in 1940. Looking back at Hitler's rise to power, many people now understand that he should have been resisted as early as 1933, even though his appointment as chancellor of the German state was consistent with legal formalities. These examples are not to suggest that President Kuchma or Viktor Yanukovich are comparable to Petain or Hitler. But they do provide historical support, just as in a different way does the case of Poland in 1989, to those who believe in the supremacy of a law that respects the fundamental human rights of the individual and the sovereignty of the nation. The decision is now in the hands of President Kuchma. It is not too late for him to uphold the integrity of the law.
(JRL #8468)

Paul Goble, on how attitudes towards Islam are seen to be deepening the split between Russia and Europe:

Tartu, November 23, 2004 – Differences in the way Russians and Europeans now think about Islam, about the Muslims living within their borders and beyond, and about the possibility of including an Islamic component in their respective identities, are exacerbating the split between Russia and Europe, according to a leading Russian specialist on Islam.

Aleksandr Ignatenko, who does research at Moscow State University and serves on the Presidential Council for Cooperation with Religious Groups, made this comment during a recent discussion at the Liberal Mission Foundation in Moscow. His comments and those of his fellow participants have been posted online at
http://www.liberl.ru/sitan.asp?Num=505 .

That session, organized by the Liberal Mission Foundation’s Igor Klyamkin was called to discuss the new Russian translation of a study exploring how peoples in general and Russians and Europeans in particular use images of „the other,” of outside groups, to define themselves and to promote the integration of their communities.

Entitled in Russian „Ispol’zovanie ‚Drugogo’” („The Use of the ‚Other’”), the book was written by Iver B. Neumann, a former Norwegian diplomat and social scientist who now works at the Oslo Institute for International Affairs.

In this study as in its English-language predecessor, „Russia and the Idea of Europe” (London, 1996), Neuman argues that Europeans over the last several centuries have tended to view Russia in one of two ways, both of which have flatter Europe at Russia’s expense.

On the one hand, he writes, Europeans have conceptualized Russia as „the barbarian at the gates,” as a threat to European civilization. On the other, Europeans have seen the state centered on Moscow as „the eternal apprentice,” as a country that wants to become European but constantly falls short.

Not surprisingly, such ideas provoked a lively and wide-ranging debate at this Moscow seesion whose participants included Klyamkin, Central European University Professor Aleksei Miller, Levada Center pollster Boris Dubin, Effective Politics Foundation expert Oleg Vitte, Moscow State University Africanist Vil’ Gel’bras, Social Accord Project expert Denis Dragunskiy, and Strategic Reserach Center director Andrei Piontkovskiy.

But perhaps the most intriguing comments were made by Ignatenko who addressed the very different ways Europeans and Russians currently view Islam and how that is dividing the two even more than they were in the past.

„European identity at present,” Ignatenko said, „is formed to a remarkable degree if not entirely in opposition to Islam as ‚the other.’” Hepointed out that in the recent discussion of whether to include any reference to Christianity in the European Constitution, Europeans were „prepared” to drop any reference to the faith that has defined them for centuries in order to avoid having to include any reference to „certain Islamic roots” of Europe.

And he said that this desire to keep Islam at bay even at the cost of denying Europe’s own religious past was even more clearly displayed by France’s decision to prohibit the wearing of all religious symbols in schools and other public places in order to prevent Muslims from wearing the hijab.

„In this way, the French said that they were prepared to pursue a far-reaching secularization in order that France not have anything Islamic as part of its public identity,” Ignatenko said.

The situation with regard to Russia, he continued, is very different. „At present, ever more Islamic aspects are being included in the image of Russia in the West.” The existence of indigenous Muslim populations in Russia itself – in Europe, Muslims are almost all immigrants -- and Moscow’s efforts to present itself as a Muslim country within the Organization of the Islamic Conference – something no European country has sought to do -- each have played a role, he said.

But the most important reasons for European attention to this Islamic aspect of Russia, Ignatenko continued, have to do with three ideological formulations that are now on offer in Russia itself and that have attracted much attention in the West.

The first of these is Eurasianism, the notion that Russia is „an Orthodox-Islamic state (country, civilization) and in this way is set apart both from the West and the East,” having taken „all the best from the one and the other.”

The second is EuroIslam, an idea advanced by Rafael Khakimov, the director of the Institute of History in Kazan and an advisor to Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiev. Khakimov’s call for a modernized, Europeanized Islam has attracted much interest, but it has also led many Europeans to conclude that Russia really is Islamic in important ways.

Reporting that he had been present when Khakimov discussed his ideas, Ignatenko observed „with what hope, the Westerners began to listen to him and how great was their disappointment. Because the conception of EuroIslam did not offer anything except that Tartarstan could and would like to move in the direction of Europe but without the rest of Russia, in which there is not ‚EuroIslam’ but eastern Orthodoxy.”

The third ideological formulation involves the idea of „so-called ‚Russian Islam.’” Its proponents advance the following proposition: „At one time in the histori past, Russians made a mistake when they adopted Orthodoxy and not let us say Islam, and on this basis, they decayed” as a people falling away from God and taking to drink.

Consequently, advocates of Russian Islam say that „if now [Russians] want to reestablish a certain historical justice and accept Islam, then this will save Russia – Russians will stop drinking and the demographic situation (under conditions of polygamy) will resolve itself.”

All these developments and ideas only add to Russia’s image in Europe as a very different and unwelcome „other,” Ignatenko concluded. And that in turn seems certain to deepen the existing divide between a Russia that has not yet made a final decision as to whether it is part of Europe and a Europe that appears to have concluded that it has yet another reason for believing that Russia is not a European country.

Via MAK

Peter Lavelle has an analysis of Ukraine's Poisoned Election:

MOSCOW, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- With almost all the votes counted, Prime Minster Viktor Yanukovych appears to have "won" Ukraine's runoff presidential election held on Sunday.

Given he is the establishment's candidate, his final victory is all but ensured. For the most part this election is over. However, in a different sense, Ukraine's presidential campaign may be far from concluded. Who will rule Ukraine could still be determined in the streets.

With one policeman reported killed, thousands of election violations claimed, journalists kidnapped, and busloads of "professional voters" being transported by buses from one polling to another, Ukraine's Central Election Commission (CEC) has counted more than 90 percent of ballots cast in yesterday's runoff presidential. Viktor Yanukovych has claimed victory with 49.3 percent of the votes to opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko's 46.9 percent. Yushchenko and his supporters claim the election has been stolen and are taking to the streets of Kyiv to protest the CEC's official results.

Yanukovych, outgoing President Leonid Kuchma's handpicked successor, and Yushchenko, a former central bank head and former prime minister, could not be more different. The former represents powerful business clans in the country's east as well as closer economic integration with Russia. A shameless populist with a criminal record, Yanukovych pitched for support from Ukraine's very large Russian minority by running on a platform to elevate Russian as the country second official language and a call for dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship. In a campaign with no shortage of outside influence and money, Yanukovych also counts among his close political friends Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Yushchenko, claiming to have been poisoned before the first round of the presidential election last month, is portrayed as a "Western alternative." He supports closer economic cooperation with the European Union and is open to discussion concerning Ukraine's possible NATO membership. Yushchenko is also the anti-corruption candidate with a will to take on Ukraine's largely oligarch-controlled economy.

However, as most media have implied during this campaign, Yushchenko is not the "anti-Russia" candidate. During his premiership, Ukraine-Russia economic relations flourished. He has a record of constructive engagement with all Ukraine's neighbors. More than anything else, Yushchenko's campaign has been about putting an end to a decade of state-inspired corruption. This desire for change is what ensures the campaign is far from over.

Read the rest.

Correspondent Veronica Khokhlova, reporting from Kyiv, is giving an hour-by-hour account of the election protests, at Neeka's Backlog. From one of the latest entries:

Tuesday, November 23, 2004
The rally at Maidan Nezalezhnosti was amazing - I've never seen so many people there, and I doubt anyone has. I'm also amazed and proud of how peaceful everyone was - peaceful and happy, yet very determined. There are over a hundred tents now near Maidan - and I really hope they're not gonna freeze this night. Tomorrow, there's gonna be a parliamentary session and everyone's waiting for it. Less than half an hor ago, at around 2 am, there was some commotion over there, mostly honking (I could hear from the balcony, since I live nearby), and now every once in a while I hear shouting, Yushchenko! Yushchenko! - but I can't make myself go outside again. There were rumors that the police are preparing to attack the tents around 3 am - but if that happened, the sound would be very different. The honking is normal - they do honk in solidarity as they turn from Khreshchatyk up Bohdana Khmelnytskogo St., passing the makeshift blockpost.

At some point, I walked up from Maidan to the Kuchma Administration building tonight. It's located within a five-minute walk from Maidan, and yet, it feels like a different world there. Quiet - as if the neighborhood is soundproof. You wouldn't guess anything's going on at Maidan if you're based there, not even when something of this scale is taking place - a few hundred thousand people rallying, in addition to a concert...

So I decided to take a picture of the administration building - it's fenced off (always, not just now), and there was some guy standing next to the entrance, and when I pointed the camera toward him, he ordered - yes, ordered - me not to photograph there. I got a blurry picture, regardless - but that's not the point. The point is, who the fuck is he to tell me, in Russian, what to do. I'm wearing some orange, of course, so tbere was some logic to his behavior, considering who he's with, but still...

Very close to the administration, there were two buses with commando-looking men in them, all dressed the same, in dark-blue jackets, brand new, with neat black collars made of artificial black fur, and in black military boots. They looked quite menacing, even though they didn't say a word to me, as I passed by, on my own and wearing orange. Those guys definitely represented some kind of special forces, but they didn't carry any distinguishing marks on their clothes, nor did they have any weapons visible. They just looked weirdly out of place so close to where hundreds of thousands peaceful people were demanding a fair election and listening to cool music. They weren't some thugs brought here to riot, they were probably there to guard Kuchma from the crowd, in case something went wrong - but the look of them was still disconcerting. And that guy's obnoxious order not to take pictures just reinforced this feeling.

Protests are continuing in Ukraine. And Russia has "accepted" the result of the election, which - predictably enough - it sees as a victory for Yanukovych.

Filming yesterday at Elstree with Vox Simba for the East Enders Christmas Special. Seen close to, Steven Keogh's set designs are extraordinarily lifelike, so that you really do have the sense of being in a part of east or south-east London - a slightly dreamlike telescoping of Bow, Bromley, Deptford, Lewisham and somewhere else, not defined. This year V.S., billed as a gospel choir, sang with Laurie Brett, and also took part in the carol singing on Albert Square. It was a long day, but an enjoyable one.

The result of the Ukraine presidential election seems to be as expected.

Harry'a Place has a feature on a pro-Saddam website run by something calling itself the National-European Communitarian Party. Interestingly, the site has a link to another organization called , rather weirdly, the "Congress of International Eurasian Movement", part of whose manifesto says:

In Western Europe, all governments, all politicians are submitted to Washington.

The time is far away when the great General De Gaulle lived. France has joined NATO.

Only Russia, even though it has been divided since 1991, even though it has weakened, still has the demographic, geographic and human resources to give Europe an alternative to the « New World Order ». For Russia, just as before when it was called the Soviet Union, is the last free and independent country in Europe.

We believe in the Russian mission in Europe in the twenty-first century.

But, even though we stand on your side for logical reasons, which are these of all European patriots, we are also Eurasists for ideological reasons. Because the Russian mission in Europe is not only political ; it is social, as Nicholas Berdiaev stated : « The mission of the Russian people is to carry out social justice within the human society, not only in Russia, but throughout the world », he wrote.

But men do not live out of ideas, they also need a dream. And the heart has to answer the brain. We are also Eurasists because we share your dream, always revisited since the fall of Constantinople, the second Rome. Yes, your dream is also our dream.

For the Europe we fight for, the great and free Europe, from Vladivostok to Reykjavik, will indeed be the fourth Rome !

Facing new-Carthage like America, the European Empire can only be a new Rome.

With Moscow as a capital. Why not !

Why not? Well, one can think of more than a few reasons.

Leon Keylin at GAF has drawn my attention to an interesting article (pdf format) by Sol Encel, Professor Emeritus at the Social Policy Research Centre of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, about Stalin's pogrom against the Jews - in particular, the history of the JAC, the so -called Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which was set up on Stalin's orders in 1942 to mobilize international Jewish support for the Soviet war effort, and subsequently "liquidated", also on his orders:

The JAC comprised 25 leading writers, artists, doctors, scientists and government officials. It was headed by the most famous Jewish actor in the USSR, Solomon Mikhoels, who was also a professor of drama and director of the State Jewish Theatre in Moscow. (His director’s chair is preserved in the foyer of the theatre). Mikhoels was at once a Soviet patriot and a loyal Jew. His family name was Vovsi. Born in Latvia in 1890, he received a traditional Jewish education. His father-in-law was the editor of a Hebrew newspaper. After school, he studied law and practised for a few years, but abandoned the law for the theatre in 1919, when he joined a Yiddish theatre group and moved to Moscow. The theatre group became the State Jewish Theatre. For a time, the theatrical troupe was joined by the painter Marc Chagall, who had returned to Russia after the 1917 revolution , and designed many sets for the theatre, as well as painting portraits of Mikhoels and his fellow actors. Mikhoels’ talents were widely recognised. He received a state award in 1926, and in March 1935 he was given the title of People’s Artist of the Russian Federation, after he had given a widely acclaimed performance as King Lear. In 1946, he received the Stalin Prize. Mikhoels’ successes were partly due to the policy of the Bolshevik regime in encouraging Yiddish culture (although Yiddish newspapers were closed down in the 1920s). This included support for Yiddish writers, a number of whom had left Russia after the revolution and were enticed back by the regime. Several of them, including the poet Peretz Markish and the novelist David Bergelson, became prominent in the JAC. Mikhoels was instrumental in persuading Bergelson to return.

-------

The suggestion for an anti-fascist committee had also been made by two refugees from Poland, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, who were leading figures in the socialist Bund and had been members of the Polish parliament. The proposal was recommended to Stalin, who was sympathetic until he recognised the names of Erlich and Alter as former Mensheviks. They were arrested and interrogated. Erlich was shot, and Alter died some months later in a prison camp. (Recent information from the archives corrects the previously accepted version that both were executed at the same time). The JAC was finally established in June 1942, with the objectives of publicising Jewish contributions to the Soviet war effort, developing a ‘strong anti-fascist camapign’ among Jews in the Allied countries, and raising funds to assist the Soviet government. The JAC also supported Jewish cultural activities and published a weekly Yiddish newspaper, Eynikayt (Unity), the first time this had been permitted since the 1920s. The high point of the JAC’s activities came in 1943, when Mikhoels and the writer Itzik Feffer spent seven months overseas, mainly in the USA, to campaign for support for the Soviet war effort, including demands for the opening of a European second front. The climax of the tour was a mass rally at the Polo Grounds in New York City, attended by more than 50,000 people. The gathering was addressed by Albert Einstein, the Yiddish writer Sholem Asch, and the mayor of New York, Fiorello la Guardia (himself part-Jewish). Mikhoels and Feffer then visited a number of other centres, and finally spent some weeks in Britain. Mikhoels privately expressed his unease about Feffer, whom he suspected (correctly, as it turned out) of being an agent of the Soviet secret police, then known as the NKVD. Nevertheless, Mikhoels and Feffer returned in triumph to the Soviet Union, and the JAC continued to grow in importance. At its peak, the committee had a staff of more than 50 people, and occupied two floors of a large office building in the centre of Moscow. It received letters from Jews all over the USSR, as though it were a national representative body. But its very success led to its undoing. Stalin and his circle were pathologically suspicious of any manifestations of nationalism. A year after the war ended, responsibility for the JAC was transferred from the Information Bureau to the Foreign Relations Department of the Communist Party’s central committee, and Mikhail Suslov was given the task of supervising the Committee’s activities. Suslov was a loyal Stalinist hack who acted as chief guardian of the ‘party line’ for many years. In November 1946, he made a secret report to the Politburo of the Communist Party. He acknowledged that the JAC had made a positive contribution during the war, but its work had now taken on an increasingly nationalistic and Zionist character, and was strengthening reactionary Jewish circles abroad. He cited numerous extracts from Eynikayt which were said to indicate the determination of the JAC to campaign for ‘the reactionary idea of a single Jewish nation’. Many years later, in his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev recalled Lozovsky’s activities during the war, and his great success in publicising Nazi atrocities. ‘The Sovinformbureau and its Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were considered indispensable to the interests of our State, our policies, and our Communist Party’. But, he added, ‘after the war, it all counted for nothing’. Suslov’s recommendation was that the JAC should be ‘liquidated’, but Stalin was not ready to act. Events in the Middle East suggested that the Soviet regime could extend its influence, and this was not the time to alienate international Jewish opinion. At the end of 1947, he took the opportunistic step of supporting the United Nations resolution for the partition of Palestine. Mikhoels, in the meantime, was a marked man. He never concealed his support for a Jewish homeland. In 1944, he told the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, who was visiting Moscow, that when his plane for America flew over Palestine he ‘kissed the air’. He denounced the official conspiracy of silence over the massacre at Babi Yar. One of his last public acts was a performance of a play by Mendele Mocher Sforim in December 1947, where one character asks, ‘Where is the road to Eretz Israel?’. Mikhoels, speaking with his own voice, responded that ‘Comrade Gromyko gave us the answer to this question from a rostrum at the United Nations’. Mikhoels’ daughter recollected that the audience erupted with an ovation that lasted ten minutes. A week after this incident, Mikhoels was sent by the Party secretariat to review the performance of a new play in Minsk. He was run down in the street in a faked car accident. The assassin was rewarded, secretly, with the Order of Lenin.

While much of the material in Encel's article will already be familiar to those who have studied the Stalin era, new information about this particularly brutal and murky aspect of those years is constantly coming to light. Accounts of Mikhoels's death vary: while Encel talks of "a faked car accident", Robert Conquest, in his book "Reflections on a Ravaged Century" (1999) writes that Mikhoels "was clubbed to death at Belorussia's KGB dacha on January 1948 under the supervision of Stalin's Deputy Minister of State Security, Sergei Ogoltsov (and this was at a time when the death penalty had been abolished!). His body and that of a similarly treated companion were then left on a Minsk street where, it was announced next day, they had been run over by a truck. Later the same month the police officials concerned were. without publicity, awarded medals (similar medals and orders without publication had been given to the NKVD team that murdered Trotsky in 1940)." (p. 101)

Encel describes the subsequent history of the JAC, its liquidation and the arrest, imprisonment and torture of its members, based on the trumped-up charges of "bourgeois nationalism, the creation of an anti-Soviet underground, treason, and spying for the Americans", and the development of the "doctors' plot" affair. Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of the whole matter is that the repercussions of Stalin's anti-Jewish progrom continue to be evident in today's Russia. Encel writes:

The official leaders of the Orthodox Church, restored to its traditional role in Russian society, have been relatively cautious in their attitude to Judaism and the Jews. However, sections of the church are overtly hostile to Judaism. The organ of the National Orthodox movement, ironically named Al-Quds (i.e. the Muslim name for Jerusalem), is particularly virulent in this regard. An article in Al-Quds in 1995 compared Stalin with Jesus Christ. ‘Whereas Christ was a martyr in his life, Stalin bore his crown of thorns even after his death… Today the descendants of those who crucified the Son of God many centuries ago, crucify Stalin on the cross of lies and malice’. Another school of apologists for Stalin is to be found in the movement called ‘National Bolshevism’, which is an attempt to present the achievements of the Soviet regime in nationalistic terms, and to justify the purges of the 1930s as a defence against subversion of the Russian fatherland. National Bolshevism identifies the Jews as agents of international capitalism, in an updated version of the traditional ‘international Jewish Bolshevik Masonic capitalist conspiracy’. In its updated form, it describes Zionism as a global conspiracy of the Jewish Financial elite that aims to establish Jewish world domination. Some adherents of National Bolshevism have gone so far as to assert that Stalin was murdered by the Jews involved in the ‘doctors’ plot’, alleging that the killing took place on the night of Purim, March 2nd, 1953, and that they misled the public by concealing the fact until March 6, when they announced the ‘sudden and serious illness of Comrade Stalin’. This is a perversion of the actual sequence of events, which involved a delay because the members of the Politburo were uncertain about the succession, and is in any case preposterous because the doctors were in detention. But the currency of such stories illustrates how the shadow of Stalin still hangs over Russia, and particularly over its Jewish population.

NIGHT DESCENDED ON US WITH A CHILL

by Tomas Venclova

For Marina Kedrova

Night descended on us with a chill.
The low-roofed and soot-blackened archways
Looked onto ten stations as well
As ten parks, or more, sunk in November—
That settlement, circle, or zone
Where on the blind brickhouse wanders
A moving one-hundred watt beam:
In the labyrinth, mentor and escort.

Temporarily we make our home
In the kingdom of Ariadne and Minos.
Because of the fog and the gloom
For hours not a single plane takes off.
Every day again all trains are jammed—
How much space, how much air and unhappiness.
So those prisoners who returned home
Sometimes longed for the eye of the cell-guard.

Like a debt repaid to the void
Some familiar places stood opened:
I repeated inside my head: "bus,
University, monument, island."
I said: "Tomorrow I'll go,
I'll go or at least I'll try to."
And along the hither world's brow
My soul hurried on into limbo.

Old addresses grew suddenly near.
The alphabet changed form and meaning.
Voices grew faint and dead, I could hear,
Unable to find us two in either
This house's locked-up, empty cell
Where the paintings don't recognize me,
Nor in dreams, nor in heaven, nor even
Dante's second circle of hell.

Thus time is stopped; to be exact,
One ceases existence gradually.
It's just that each year, in effect,
You hear the phone ring more remotely,
And memory, day after day,
Shifts diameter like a compass
Till the past's a straight line on the page,
First pretending to turn into distance.

What you hear and see, I can't tell,
In reality chipped from reality.
The paved banks of Acheron withheld
The unfelt swell. Each nullity
Is separate, all on its own.
And the world lives its life without us.
There exist, in the end, alone
Dead silence and the nine muses.

Where the capital slowly revolves,
And the snow's games make us weary,
Where the fog hides all objects' selves,
Thank God for the dictionary.
In the kingdom where a friend's hand
Will never hurry to help you,
The void or the supreme power
Sends the angel—rhythm and language.

I ask not one moment's respite,
Neither death, nor forgiveness for sinning
—Only leave the primordial drumming
Over stone and the ice of the night.


(translated by David McDuff with the autbor)

See also Nel Mezzo Del Cammin

My normblog profile is up at Norman Geras's blog. Thanks, Norm.

At the time of the last closure of the Kavkaz Center website - it was removed by Supo, the Finnish security police, at the request of the Russian government, and is now hosted by a Finnish businessman on a server in Sweden - there was talk of a resurgence of Finlandization. Some years ago, after the fall of Soviet Communism and the break-up of the USSR, a book on this subject was published in Finland, something that would have been impossible in earlier years. I wrote a review of the first Finnish edition of the book, which is now available in English translation, under a title slightly different from the original one (the "Estate" referred to is the "fourth estate" of the press and media, and the title ends with a question-mark). I thought my review might be of interest, so I'm reproducing it here:

The Silent Estate? [Vaikeneva valtiomahti?]
by Esko Salminen.

Kleio ja nykypäivä. Edita. Helsinki, 1996. 323 pp.


In this newly-published study, Esko Salminen gives a detailed analysis of the process of 'Finlandization' as it affected the Finnish press and other public media during the period 1968-1991. The book is remarkable in being the first full-length Finnish-language work to deal with the entire history of this delicate subject in all its ramifications, and the author is not afraid to name names and give chapter and verse where necessary. There is a fascinating photographic section, with reproductions of Finnish press reports and photo-reportage.

The term 'Finlandization' is of German origin (Finlandisierung), and was first used in 1966 by Richard Löwenthal, Professor of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin to describe a certain type of domination of a small state by a larger one. The process by which the Soviet Union pressured Finland into accepting a far-reaching control of its public and educational media monitored not directly from Moscow, but via the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki, came to stand throughout the 1970s and 80s as a warning to other Western states as to what might await them as the Soviet Union increased its power and influence over the whole of Europe in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the six parts of his volume, Esko Salminen shows how the development of Finlandization proceeded from events in Finland's immediate postwar history, such as the so-called 'Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance' (YYA-sopimus) that Finland was made to sign with the Soviet Union in 1948. He also demonstrates how the process was inextricably linked with the political careers of three Finnish presidents: Juho Paasikivi, Urho Kekkonen, and Mauno Koivisto. In addition, he gives a full and circumstantial account of the methods by which the Soviet domination of Finland's press and media was implemented, with particular emphasis on the phenomenon of 'self-censorship' (itsesensuuri), whereby strict limitations on freedom of speech and expression were imposed not from outside, but by the Finnish media themselves.

'Self-censorship', in the way that it was practised in Finland during the 1970s and 80s, has always been difficult for non-Finns to understand. Salminen demonstrates that it was essentially a two-edged weapon, which ultimately rebounded on the Soviets themselves. In the early part of his volume Salminen describes the elaborate arrangements that were made at the Soviet Embassy's press department in Tehtaankatu in order to monitor the columns and editorials of the Finnish newspapers. These arrangements were felt by the Soviet authorities to be necessary, since while it was a relatively simple matter to control and influence the news and information output of Finnish state radio and television, the heterogeneous and traditionally independent nature of the Finnish press made it much more difficult to exert pressure on it. What emerges from Salminen's long and well-documented study of Finlandization as it affected two major news topics - the exiling of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - and from his analysis of Finnish news coverage (or non-coverage) of events in the Baltic States (especially Estonia), is that for many Finnish newspaper editors and journalists, self-censorship was a strategic instrument that was used to preserve press freedom, rather than destroy it. A revealing interview with William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the London Times, one of the Western newspapers that did much to publicize to the rest of the world Finland's problems in the area of information control, shows how this was possible - and also links the specifically Finnish context to a general European one.

In the post-Cold War era it might be thought that 'Finlandization' and 'self-censorship' would become obsolete concepts. However, Salminen convincingly demonstrates that, having been aggressively active in Finnish political life as recently as 1986, they are still part of the fabric of the Finnish political system - he refers, in particular, to the question of Finland's future membership of NATO, to the silence of the Finnish press on this subject, and to Max Jakobson's lonely foray into the details of this vexed issue in 1996. Above all, Salminen stresses that now that Finland, as a member of the European Union, has provided Europe's first border with Russia, it is incumbent on both Finland and the other European member states to make sure that the 'larger entity' of the Union remains a force for democracy, human rights and freedom of expression. Where the Soviet Union failed, Europe must succeed - for the possibility of a resuscitation of the old order, and of the old rule of fear, cannot be wholly excluded.

The Volodymyr Campaign has opened its official weblog. It co-ordinates and publicises the activity of a London-based group committed to exposing the recent violations of human rights and democratic process in Ukraine, and to urging the U.S. and European governments to exert their influence and take action. It's also concerned to promote free speech and democracy throughout the former Soviet Union.

The group's factsheet for 21 November - the day of the second round of voting in the Ukraine presidential election - has been published for circulation:

What is happening in Ukraine?

Today (21 November) Ukrainians are voting for a new president. Today’s vote is a runoff, held after the first round on 31 October failed to produce a clear winner. Viktor Yanukovych, who has been endorsed by the current Ukrainian president and the Russian government, is running against Viktor Yushchenko. The campaign and the previous round of the election have been marked by serious violations of democratic principles and human rights.

Censorship. Virtually all media in Ukraine are controlled by the government, and journalists who probe too deeply into sensitive matters are attacked and even killed. Shortly before the first vote, the government tried to shut down the sole remaining independent television channel, TV5. A local court unfroze the channel’s assets after its journalists staged a week-long hunger strike.

Persecution of activists. Throughout Ukraine, people have been arrested and imprisoned purely for expressing their political views. A particular target has been the youth movement PORA (It’s Time). Amnesty International recently stated: ‘The number of such detentions that are taking place across Ukraine and the numerous violations of procedures raise concerns that these young people may have been detained for their legitimate and peaceful opposition activities.’

Electoral irregularities. International observers found that voters were bribed and threatened; that some registered voters were left off the election rolls, while others appeared more than once; and that some ballots were pre-marked for Yanukovych.

What does this mean for the rest of the world?

Democracy in the former Soviet Union is under threat. In Ukraine’s neighbour, Belarus, the prime minister has changed the constitution to allow himself to rule indefinitely. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is on the verge of abolishing regional elections, and he has made it virtually impossible for opposition parties to get into government. It is vital that Ukraine does not fall into the same trap. In a leader on 28 October, The Economist said: ‘Ukraine's [election] will help map out not only the future shape of Europe but also the relationship between the West and another, colder East … Showing that Ukraine can escape the Soviet legacy will be a powerful argument against those who believe that Russia and its neighbours are condemned to it.’

What can we in Britain do?

Other countries must insist that the Ukrainian government allow fair elections without interference and that it respect the fundamental human right to free expression. The European Union is in a unique position to help. The prospect of membership has encouraged other countries, such as Turkey and Romania, to clean up corruption and increase civil liberties. We believe Ukraine, too, should be offered this incentive. We are asking people to write to their Member of the European Parliament; we have attached a sample letter you can send.

Whether you write to your MEP or not, we urge you not to turn a blind eye to what is happening in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former USSR. We know the region does not get much coverage in the British press, and people must sometimes make a special effort to find out about it. But we must let the leaders in this region know that the world will not remain indifferent to oppression.

Who are you, anyway?

We are ordinary citizens and do not represent an organisation. We are very concerned about the events in Ukraine and feel that they have not received enough coverage in the Western media. We have taken it upon ourselves to inform people of the situation and encourage them to take action.

Do you support a particular candidate?

No. That is a choice for the Ukrainian people. We are asking only that their choice be measured fairly and respected, and that people on all sides be allowed to express their opinions freely.

Can I help you with future information campaigns?

We would be delighted to hear from you; please e-mail volodymyrcampaign@btinternet.com.

Hat tip: Laura Brown

Chechnya: 'War on terror' legends debunked A war of unintended consequences

*Has Chechnya really become a `front in the war in terror' as President Vladimir Putin repeatedly claims, or have ten years of Russian brutality and intransigence driven this tiny republic into the arms of its own radical Islamists? Leading regional expert Thomas de Waal considers an under-reported reality in an under-reported war.*

On the afternoon of 3 September, when the worst of the shooting had stopped, and the terrible aftermath of the Beslan school siege was only just beginning, I was sitting in a BBC World television studio talking live with a Russian analyst. A news flash came up on the wire agencies: the Russian security services said that among the dead hostage-takers they had found nine Arabs and one `black' (the Russian word, still used without embarrassment, is negr ). My fellow analyst and I both agreed that, if this was true, this had a significant bearing on the nature of this horrible event: it meant Beslan had been attacked by a group with a clear link to the Middle East and the wider front of `international terror'.

The next day, President Vladimir Putin delivered his address to the Russian people about Beslan. In a pained speech Putin told his nation that it was at war. He put his words in a strongly historical and international framework, appealing to nostalgia for the strong Soviet state and warning that Russia's enemies wanted to break up the country. The language was often obscure but the message was unmistakeable: the threat emanated from outside Russia's borders. `This is an attack on our country,' Putin said. The word `Chechnya' was not mentioned once.

Slowly however, a more inevitable truth began to emerge from Beslan: almost all the hostage-takers were from the North Caucasus. First,Russian officials admitted that the so-called ` negr ' was mistaken for such because his face had been coated in ash from the fire in the school. Then they started to draw back from their claims about the so-called dead Arabs. Later the notorious Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, who claimed to have planned the raid, said there were 31 hostage-takers, of whom only two had been Arabs.

The obvious truth was also, in its way, more terrible. It meant that the group of men and women who rigged up explosives in the gym of School No 1 in Beslan and then presided over up to 400 deaths, half of them children, were almost all locals, who had a common language and culture with their hostages. Despite what Putin might say, despite some links with international jihadis , this conflict remains very much Russia's home-grown problem: its horrors have been bred locally.

Read the rest here.

(via Chechnya-SL)

From today's RFE/RL Newsline:

[RUSSIA]

CONSTITUTIONAL COURT REJECTS LATIN SCRIPT FOR TATAR LANGUAGE. The Constitutional Court rejected on 16 November a suit by Tatarstan's parliament seeking to replace the use of the Cyrillic alphabet with the Latin alphabet for the Tatar language, RFE/RL's Kazan bureau reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 6 October 2004). The court ruled that only federal-level legislators have the right to decide such linguistic matters, and that by introducing its own linguistic reform without special permission from federal legislative bodies, Tatarstan risked threatening the linguistic integrity of the Russian Federation. Following the decision, Tatar President Mintimir Shaimiev said that he does not consider the question closed. "I would say that yesterday's decision by the Constitutional Court does not deprive Russian Federation subjects of the right to consider this issue -- it can be resolved through the adoption of a federal law," RIA-Novosti quoted him as saying on 17 November. Tatar parliamentary speaker Farid Mukhametshin told reporters that the republic is not planning on removing street signs in Latin script because "there is a similar situation in Moscow, where I saw several buildings and restaurants [bearing signs] with Latin script." JAC

NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN DI NOSTRA VITA

by Tomas Venclova

To the memory of Konstantin Bogatyrev


My middle years had overtaken me.
I lived, but studied only non-existence.
Death was for me one of the family,
Took nearly all the space in my apartment.
By stages I had even trained it, so
I'd ask it not to touch me, keep its distance.
I'd see each morning what for all I know
Is Eastern Europe's most exquisite city,
Where iron waits to come into its own,
In gloom the reeds, decaying softly, rustle,
With knuckleduster, locomotive, stone,
Or in, perhaps, the best of cases—petrol.
I slept and drank and ate all inside death.
I tried to give it purpose and some meaning.
Forgot it sometimes. Getting used to it
Is almost too hard for a human being.

I turned the key that barred the corridor.
My heart beat raggedly, weighed down my breast.
It's true: within the confines of this state
Death even, sometimes, was an accident.


Note: Konstantin Bogatyrev, the Russian translator of Rilke and a close friend of Tomas Venclova, was violently murdered, as far as is known, by KGB agents in Moscow in 1976 (see "Why Kostya Had to Die," Index on Censorship, vol. 6, no. 2, March-April 1977, pp. 47-51). The most exquisite city is Vilnius. The reeds, knuckleduster, locomotive, stone, petrol all refer to types of death met by Venclova's friends.


(translated by David McDuff with the author)

Following on from the earlier post about Estonia's Tatars, it's perhaps a good idea also to post a link to a site that has information about other peoples who were subjected to the domination of the Russian Empire. The site, which was founded in Tallinn in 1993, on the second anniversary of the restoration of independent statehood in Estonia, is called The Red Book Of the Peoples Of The Russian Empire. As its Introduction states:

In the cliché-ridden propaganda of the Soviet era tsarist Russia was frequently dubbed the “prison of nations”. When the Soviets came into power this “prison”, by virtue of new national policies, transformed into a family of friendly and brotherly nations in whose bosom all the national cultures flourished. To boast of the achievements under the Communist Party leadership, grandiose cultural festivals were arranged in the Soviet republics, folkloristic dance, song and instrumental groups were established and the revival of old peasant culture was encouraged. The slogan “socialist in content, nationalist in form” came to be applied to the new Soviet culture. Behind this deceptive facade of ethnographic originality, the tsarist prison of nations never ceased to exist: russification was carried out on a large scale, nationalist intellectuals were persecuted, a policy of extensive exploitation of land was pursued and nations were continuously resettled and mingled. The desired result was the birth of a new, Russian-speaking “Soviet nation”, and to lay the theoretical foundation for this a whole army of scholars was employed. The evolution of the Soviet nation was seen as the process of history within the cognizance of Marxist-Leninist principles which was as inevitable as the process of life itself.

The recent rapid collapse of the Soviet economic and political system has revealed the consequences of these brutal colonization policies: hundreds of culturally and economically crippled nations, with the smallest of them nearing the crucial point of extinction.

The site contains information about many of these nations, including Abazians (Abaza), Abkhaz, Aguls, Akhvakhs, Aleuts, Altaics, Aliutors, Andis, Archis, Asiatic Eskimos, Bagulals, Baraba Tatars, Bartangs, Bats, Bezhtas, Botlikhs, Budukhs, Central Asian Jews, Chamalals, Chukchis, Chulym Tatars, Crimean Jews, Crimean Tatars, Didos, Dolgans, Enets, Evens, Evenks, Georgian Jews, Godoberis, Hinukhs, Hunzibs, Ingrians, Ishkashmis, Itelmens, Izhorians, Kamas, Karaims, Karatas, Karelians, Kereks, Kets, Khakass. Khants, Khinalugs, Khufis, Khvarshis, Kola Lapps, Koryaks, Kryz, Kurds, Lithuanian Tatars, Livonians, Mansis, Mountain Jews, Nanais, Negidals, Nenets, Nganasans, Nivkhs, Nogays, Orochis, Oroks, Oroshoris, Peoples of the Pamirs, Roshanis, Rutuls, Selkups, Shors, Shughnis, Tabasarans, Talysh, Tats (Tatians), Tindis, Tofalars, Trukhmens (Turkhmens), Tsakhurs, Udeghes, Udis, Ulchis, Veps, Votes, Wakhs, Yaghnabis, Yazgulamis and Yukaghirs.

According to Kavkaz Center

Russia expressed on Monday their disapproval of the fact that the controversial Chechen web page Kavkazcenter.com started to use a Swedish server during the weekend. Johan Molander, who is recently appointed Swedish ambassador, was invited to the Foreign Ministry where a high official expressed the "concerns" of the Russian side because of this matter. Anyway, the discussion climate was described as friendly.

The Swedish ambassador promised to put the message forward to Stockholm, but he also pointed out that the Swedish government is prohibited by law to interfere in affairs that shall be solved by legal instances. It's a task of the legal instances to judge if the content of a web site is illegal.

- If somebody thinks that the web site has illegal content, then he has to go to the prosecutor, says Elisabeth Stam, the legation counselor at the Embassy in Moscow.

Veteran East European correspondent Askold Krushelnycky, reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine, describes how the final round of voting in this Sunday's presidential election is being rigged in favour of the pro-Russian Yanukovych:

Senior police officers say they have been ordered to help rig the result of the Ukrainian presidential election and to use violence, including bombings, to undermine the opposition.

The second, decisive, round of the presidential election is to be held next Sunday when the two candidates, the pro-Western opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, who gained the biggest share of the vote in the first round on 31 October, and the pro-Russian Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych, face each other in a run-off.

Foreign election monitors blamed the government for dirty tricks before and during the first round. The opposition expects widespread attempts to distort results of the final round.

Officers from the eastern city of Kharkiv, disgusted that their service was being used to undermine the election, wrote to the speaker of the parliament, Volodymyr Lytvyn, detailing massive election fraud by the government and warning that similar methods were going to be used next Sunday.

They agreed to speak with The Independent on condition of anonymity. The meeting happened at night in a park after they took elaborate precautions worthy of a John Le Carré novel to ensure privacy.

The five men, aged between their late twenties and early fifties, held Ministry of Internal Affairs identity cards. Some covered over their names but revealed their photos, while two showed the entire card, complete with names. Their ranks ranged between full colonel and under-colonel. When asked what the consequences would be for them if their identities were revealed, the officers made gestures showing they would be shot.

The rest of the report makes disturbing reading.

The year is 1999:

05.02

Lennart Meri, President of the Republic, today had a meeting with the Indian President Kicheril Raman Narayanan at the Rashtrabati Bhavan, the residence of the Indian President.

On the welcoming ceremony in honour of President Meri and Mrs. Helle Meri, the Guard of Honour and the Cavalry Regiment were lined up, and the national anthems of Estonia and India were played. On the festive ceremony the Presidents introduced to each other their delegations.

After the ceremony, President Meri and Mrs. Helle Meri paid a visit to the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial, where the President of the Republic of Estonia laid a wreath. Into the guestbook of the Mahatma Gandhi memorial the President wrote that he is glad that the thoughts of the Mahatma have been translated into Estonian and have, in a way, influenced Estonians as well as other nations in the whole world.

A collection of the speeches of this remarkable former Estonian President, together with the press releases from his term in office, can be found here.


Hat tip: Leopoldo

Russian Dilettante has a translation of a long essay by Russian columnist Masha Lipman about Russian perceptions of George Bush, particularly in the aftermath of his reelection, and also about the very nature of U.S. society itself:

While post-war Europe was painfully contemplating the possiblity of God after Auschwitz, the attitude to religion, and to the country itself, remained largely the same in America as in the Europe of a century earlier, before the world wars.

No doubt, the under-modernized segment of American populace did not emerge today -- it had to be taken into account at every election. But this time the American voter obviously moved rightward, towards conservatism, traditional values and religious fundamentalism. The most important reason for that were the 9/11 acts of terrorism: a sense of danger was pushing people back to their roots; fear deepened their distrust of the globalized world outside, and the sense of America’s being in the right got a boost from Americans' perceiving themselves as victims.

Anyway, George Bush, who, by the way, also counts himself among the born-again Christians, fits the likings of traditionally-minded voters as he invariably demonstrates a simple and unmuddied view of the world where Good and Evil are clearly separated, and Good undoubtedly must win. Bush, along with his voters, is sick of newfangled whims like same-sex marriages. By the way, same-sex marriages have recently been legalized in Kerry's Massachusetts, while they were outlawed in ten other states via referenda on the election day.

Bush has a steadfast sense of being right, which directly follows from his being President of the USA: would the Lord have let America become the strongest were it not the source and measure of Good! It means whatever America -- headed by Bush – does, is good and right, especially as President makes no decision without having consulted God. Bush’s religiosity is of a most simple sort: it is a faith that allows him to shift responsibility to God while keeping his calm and self-confidence despite the growing chaos in Iraq, the Americans who die there every day, the shame of Abu Ghraib and the giant budgetary deficit.

The second part of the essay is here.

Mr. Leopoldo Niilus has reminded me of an interesting letter he received ten years ago from the leader of Estonia's Tatar community. The letter, which is still on my old site at the URL http://www.halldor.demon.co.uk/tatars.htm, makes interesting reading in today's international political climate - in many ways I'm inclined to think that, where Timur Seifullen's comments about Russia are concerned, not much has really changed:

Translation from the original Estonian

SITUATION OF MINORITIES IN ESTONIA

OPEN LETTER

TIMUR SEIFULLEN

CHAIRMAN OF THE ESTONIAN ISLAMIC COMMUNITY


Tallinn, March 31, 1994

Dear Mr. Leopoldo J. Niilus,

I address this letter to you personally with the request that you inform the leadership of the Lutheran World Federation, its membership and the broader public opinion about the recent past and current reality of the Republic of Estonia, seen by me as a foreigner, that is, from a non-Estonian perspective. I am of Tartar nationality. Having been elected by my co-nationals as their community leader in 1987, I am thoroughly familiar with the recent Tartar history as well as with the problems Estonia is facing. Since September l988, when the Union of the Peoples of Estonia (Eestimaa Rahvuste Ühendus) was created, our community is one of its members. In 1993 I was elected vice chairman of that Union, and I am fully aware of both the work and aspirations as well as of the sorrows and joys of some twenty national organizations.

In March 1994, the Islamic national communities living in Estonia elected me chairman of the Islamic Community in Estonia. I have listed all the above, not with the aim of glorifying myself personally (in my activities I have missed out many things and committed mistakes and I have had to face tasks for which my strength has been insufficient), but with the purpose of giving some of the background on which this note is based.

We have, thus, the Tartars in Estonia. The history of the current Tartar community in this country begins with the years following the Great Socialist October Revolution. When the Russian Empire, under the pretext of civil war, reached with its conquering quests the Tartar Republic and again occupied it (or, in other words, instituted there the Soviet regime), massive repressions began. A quite common feature was the locking of intellectuals and religious leaders into mosques and to burn them alive. A wave of refugees became unleashed. Tartars were scattered all over the world - reaching among other places Finland and Estonia. In Estonia, Narva and Tallinn witnessed the main concentrations of these war refugees. These Tartars who had been able almost miraculously to cross Russia, were war refugees, totally deprived of any means, frequently having lost their health. Many of them - those from the rural districts and particularly the women - spoke no language beside Tartar. From among the men some people had some Russian, mostly of a very faulty kind.

In what shape was Estonia of that time? It had been a tiny a poor province of the Russian Empire. Estonia and the Estonians had cruelly suffered during World War I, reaching the very limits of hardship during the War of Liberation. In actual fact, at the time of gaining its independence, Estonia was totally ruined. But what was the attitude of the Estonians and that of the Republic of Estonia in such pitiful conditions? It took under its protection the war refugees of several nationalities (from among them the Tartars), that is, people who, in addition to everything else, also had lost their homelands.

Estonia is a Christian country. Islam here is and will remain a phenomenon that is alien or even out of place or unbecoming. In spite of this, I would want to witness here to the tolerance of the Estonians. At the request of those of Islamic faith, separate cemeteries were granted to them. Islamic cemeteries were established in the Tallinn center town cemetery, in the cemeteries of Rakvere and Narva. The constitution of the Islamic faith community was registered in 1928. The faith communities in Narva and in Tallinn either owned buildings or took them in rent. During the 1920-1940 period, the people of Islamic faith living in Estonia suffered no restrictions or hindrances. This I bear witness to based on written or oral memories of the oldest members of our community. Parallel to the improvement of the situation in Estonia, the life of the Tartars here became better as well. According to their capabilities, they found areas of work and employment. Successful merchants put the basis of a wealthier sector. Youth was oriented towards acquiring higher education and Tartars took great pride in such of their young people who went to study in the University of Tartu.

Then comes the summer of 1940 and all this takes an end. The tiny Republic of Estonia is unable to defend the Estonians or its citizens of other nationalities. Estonia is occupied by Soviet Russia - massacres and deportations begin immediately (that is, a replay of what the older Tartars already had once witnessed).

War began in Estonia in the summer of 1940 and, in actual fact, it has not yet come to an end to this very day. The Republic of Estonia was reconstituted under conditions of occupation: in it an organization, known world wide as the KGB, continues functioning; a Russian occupation army is still in place; Russia denies the legitimate border of Estonia and subjects it to a brutal pressure through scores of different means.

One frequently is confronted with the argument that Estonia was dragged into World War II. This is a wrong way to put it. A number of big countries were dragged into that war. In the case of Estonia it just rolled over it. This is how it happened:

1939: Enter Red Army bases

1940: Total occupation of the Republic of Estonia by Russia, followed by massacres and deportations to Siberia

1941: Enter German occupation forces - exit the Red Army. Follow repressions and concentration camps

1944: Exit the German occupation forces - enters the Red Army (still in place till this very day). Followed again by mass murder, deportations and all conceivable kinds of repression.

Since 1940 till the recent past, Estonia has been constantly ruled by puppet regimes; the Estonians not having had the slightest chance to run their own country. With this in mind, it is totally slanderous to accuse the Estonians for the mass murders and repressions carried out by the different occupying powers.

Here I would like to lift out the fact that the Estonian Muslim Community, dispersed in 1940, was reconstituted in the fall of 194l and their properties returned - certainly not by the Germans but by the Estonians. In 1944 the Red Army totally destroyed the city of Narva (later asking the Germans for compensation), and forbade the return of its original inhabitants to their home city. Thus the Estonians were unable to rebuild their homes in Narva. Nor could those representatives of other nationalities who survived the war return either. Then began the filling of Narva with migrants and the city became totally Russianized. Today, Narva is basically inhabited by people who only speak Russian and whose national ideal is to see Estonia as a tiny portion (province) of Russia, with all the privileges restituted to the Russians, in other words, the status of "victors" given back to them.

Returning now to 1944, we should recall the fact that in the beginning of March of that year the Red Army air force bombed Tallinn. The capital of Estonia was seriously damaged and the building that housed the Estonian Muslim Community was also destroyed. The drainage system in the vicinity of the city's central cemetery was wiped out as well and the Muslim graveyard site there became flooded and unfit for further use.

The entire war front rolled over Estonia. The endlessly long occupation by the so called Soviet power began. For some countries the war had really finished. For many others only the battles had come to an end. In Estonia, the Communists did their own thing that, spelt out, meant mass murders, deportations and repression. For some incomprehensible reason, this period in Estonia is called the Stalin time, although it is true that that particular period was extremely dangerous for all Estonians: witch hunts were carried out, repression applied under any excuse and frequently without one.

Needless to say, the Islamic faith community was again forbidden. But even so, some courageous Tartars applied for a new cemetery in lieu of the one destroyed. And, lo and behold, they did find some Estonians who, in spite of the risk for them and their families, satisfied this request without further ado. The courage of these Estonians cannot be overestimated. Rumor has it that they had to face later on lots of harassment and unpleasantness. But the outcome was a new Muslim burial site at the Tallinn Liiva cemetery. Such, then, was the attitude of the Estonians in regard to us Tartars during the time of the Republic of Estonia, World War II and the "Stalin period."

When I now return to the time of World War II, it is only to note that the Tartar community living in Estonia met with exactly the same fate than the country's population of origins, that is, the Estonians. According to age, men were drafted into the Red Army, into the "work battalions." These battalions were the Soviet equivalent of death camps. Side by side with the Estonian youth also the Estonian Tartars died there of starvation and illnesses. Both also perished senselessly in the battle of Velikye Luki and, in general, anywhere else some fools call the glorious war. Such Estonian youth that became of age during the German occupation were drafted by force unto SS front units.

Part of that Estonian youth were also the Tartars of Estonia. Death bound and separated both to them. The war divided the Estonian youth between "defenders" and "liberators," but in, actual fact, between dead and living, maimed or half-maimed. Women had it better - they only became deprived mothers, widows and orphans. All this is supported by facts: from among the young men born between 1922-1923, out of 100 only 1 or 2 survived. There are no statistics about how many among those who survived became crippled.

Estonia had nothing to win in World War II. It lost each fifth inhabitant. And how many of the Estonians who were forced to fight on the side of the loser were unable to return to their occupied homeland? Those Tartars who served in the German army may have had a clearer picture. They lost for the second time the place they came to call their homeland. They as well had to live with the fate of never being able to meet again their parents, brothers, sisters, wives and children. Add to this the worry for the fate off those related to them as these belonged to the Soviet category of deportees - proven by the events of 1940-1941 and repeated again in 1950.

Up to now I have mainly referred to the life of the Tartar community living in Estonia and their relationship with the Estonians. However, the relations between Estonians and other nationalities living in Estonia is pretty much analogous. What I have written has been retrospective. Let me say now some words about the period during which the Soviet academician (twice awarded the prize of Soviet Heroic Worker) Sakharov manufactured the hydrogen bomb for Stalin till the time the same man received the Nobel Peace Prize. It was during this time period that the Russianization of Estonia took place. During the Republic of Estonia, in 1939, 93,000 Russians (8,2% of the overall population) lived in Estonia. The census of 1987 claimed the figure of 475,000 Russians.

The Russianization mechanism of Estonia was quite simple and straightforward. Huge apartment buildings coupled to industrial complexes for the employment of outside labor were created. To top it off, a somewhat higher living standard as compared to many other regions of the Soviet Empire, was kept in Estonia. Aliens were attracted to the Baltic states by easily available lodging, decent salaries, better living standards and a host of other benefits. The occupation army officers preferred to remain in Estonia as well as they were acutely aware of the living standards in other parts of the Empire. Alongside the Slavs, also representatives of other nationalities entered Estonia but, comparatively, their numbers were noticeably different: they came in few hundreds or thousands only.

The period during which the Estonian people began the process of reconstituting their independence took the Russians by total surprise. They immediately set off counter-mechanisms. The leadership of Russian factories and enterprises began to launch campaigns in favor of strikes - a somewhat unique phenomenon; the proletariat was supposed to strike at the orders of the directors. Meetings were held to explain the following: Estonia is part of Russia, conquered with the blood of forefathers! The deportation of Estonians to Siberia had been senselessly discontinued and should be immediately retaken. The law protecting the national language was humiliating. No self-respecting Russian should be forced to learn some aboriginal language, especially as the aborigines in question were about to die out anyway. At the same time, numerous fighting groups began to be organized, threatening with immediate blood baths.

The Union of the Peoples of Estonia actively supported the Estonians' quest for independence. Many of the representatives of that Union saw analogous processes taking place in their respective historical homelands. For a series of nationalities however their homelands had remained as ethnographic names only; their compatriots deported, their territories settled with aliens (cf. Crimea and the Tartars).

This support to Estonia by the Union of the Peoples of Estonia has a deep significance. The experience of the minorities living here has shown that their wellbeing depends upon whether Estonians remain the rulers of their own land or whether it is run by occupiers. The positive attitude of the original people, the Estonians, is well known. On the other hand, misery and pain, pogroms and persecutions all unmistakably stem from the basic population of the Russian Empire.

This, indeed, is our peoples' historical memory. We are much aware and remember very well the tragic recent past of our peoples, we know the name of its originator.

Yet, at the time of the rebirth of the Republic of Estonia, a world wide anti-Estonian campaign was launched: In the wake of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic we are now faced with the danger of fascism. Estonians are fascists and dangerous - especially for Jews. Remedy: bring into Estonia the protective Russian tank columns.

The campaign about the alleged Estonian anti-semitism continues to this very day. And, since the day of the reconstitution of the independence, another peculiar phenomenon has seen the light of the day. Estonia is visited by nice individuals and delegations who, under the aegis of various foundations and organizations, come to teach paternalistically how Estonians, from government down to individual persons, would have to show total openness to Russians. At the same time, the prevailing attitude of such visitors to the minorities living in Estonia is deeply contemptuous. It is argued that the developed world no longer engages in such minority practices. Many thanks! Nor does great Russia.

According to these learned visitors it does not much matter whether the non-Estonians living and working in Estonia have even an elementary knowledge of the local language. Back home, of course, the same people could not conceive of a medical doctor or a policeman who would be unable to speak the local language. Having then wisely spent the moneys given for their missions, these elegant gentlemen and ladies take their leave and after that no one any longer knows what may go into their reports and whom these may be passed on to.

What then is left for the Estonians to do, except to sigh and to continue their work, among other things also paying close attention to the day-to-day problems of the minority populations living in Estonia and trying to find solutions to these as well. In fact, the government of the Republic of Estonia has done everything possible within its limited means to support (also financially) the communities of the minorities living in Estonia.

At the same time, old problems have taken on a new face. The earlier Russian "Black Hundreds" (note: a terrorist organization which operated during the 1905 revolutionary period) have suddenly turned into "Russian democrats" of various kinds. Again, the song is familiar: blown up lies, cries for help coupled to threats! Unfounded grievances and outright slander are current. Especially ludicrous is the claim that those people would be protecting all the interests and rights of non-Estonians against the basic aggressivity and nationalism of the basic population of the country.

True enough, outside Estonia there exist enough simple minded people who may believe such lies. Individuals and nations who have not felt in their own flesh the great Russian chauvinism may indeed be induced into confusion. On the other hand, people whose nations have died out or are about to die out, remember well that before that happened came "liberation" by Russia, followed by "brotherly protection and assistance" and, finally, the state of coma.

The whole notion of a "Russian speaking population" is insulting. I would like to call your attention to the fact that it would not be acceptable to any of the representatives of the communities of people living in Estonia to be considered as belonging to the Russian speaking population.

Let me try to illustrate this point. Estonia is also inhabited by Swedes (Estonian Swedes in the local parlance). Older people belonging to this group speak both their own Swedish dialect ("coastal Swedish"), high Swedish, Estonian and Russian. This brings them into a situation where they may be played against the basic Estonian population and counted, against their own wish and will, among the "Russian speaking" population. Consequently, the "Russian democrats" would also would be fighting against them being discriminated against in Estonia.

Let me give you some further background about the past several hundreds of years history of the Estonian Swedes. They have been located along the Estonian coasts, covering several islands as well. For that people deportations were known already from the time of Catherine II. The census of 1920 during the Republic of Estonia registered some 10,000 of such "coastal Swedes." This unique group of people lived here. Undoubtedly they had their problems and difficulties, but the fact remains that they had a number of churches and schools, cemeteries and harbors of their own. They lived according to their traditions and spoke their own language, a language by the way quite unique in the sense that it has preserved many of the characteristics of centuries' old Swedish.

Thus, then, till 1939 when the Russian military bases are installed in the Republic of Estonia, affecting the coast and islands. Part of the coastal Swedes fled to Sweden, some were forced to leave their traditional sites, others were deported to Siberia in 1940-1941. The next refugee wave came in 1943-1944.

In the wake of the German occupation and the beginning of the Soviet re-occupation we find the same familiar picture also in regard to the coastal Swedes: the savage special destruction battalions (villages burned down, people drowned in wells), followed by waves of deportations and resettlements. As the Communists also deported people according to their nationality, many of the non-Estonians, from among them the Swedes, did not dare to confess their own nationality but registered under the name of Estonians. Some further illustrations: Of the 3,000 Estonian Swedes on the island of Vormsi, only a couple of families remained, and now even these have died out. Today only some 300 people live on the island, all of them non-Swedes. The church of Vormsi, used during the Soviet period as a grain silo, has now been restored with Swedish aid.

Another illustration is given by the island of Naissaar. All its inhabitants were removed and a naval base installed. Naissaar became closed area where virtually no one could enter for decades, except military personnel. Recently, accompanied by naval personnel, I visited the island. The local church was being used up for firewood and to the same fate had been subjected the few remaining local buildings. In the cemetery one could see scores of reopened graves. Red Navy officers had sent sailors to "work" there, to look for rings, other jewelry, dental crowns, in other words, gold.

Similar stories could be repeated endlessly. But what we were talking about was the "protection" given by the Russian "democrats" to the "Russian speaking population." The problem is that these Russians have never asked anyone whether such protection was needed or required, because most answers would be negative. Understandably so, as the historical memory of many peoples' end and disappearance is preceded by the words "and then the Russian era began."

Just now the Russian church and its various branches have initiated an international slander campaign against the Republic of Estonia and its Department of Religious Affairs

Coming back again to the actual situation and what happens in Estonia from the point of view of a Muslim living there, I would repeat that Islam in this region is alien and perhaps even inappropriate. Nevertheless, the Tartars were able to register their faith community as soon as they were able to sustain it - already in 1928. This faith community has been repeatedly re-registered due to the Soviet regime's continued prohibitions.

Today it is registered again in the Republic of Estonia and as long as the Estonians remain the rulers in their own land we can rest assured that it will not again be forbidden. In the process of the registration and all the paper work related to it, we have had an immense amount of problems and questions to solve. The Department of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Estonia and chancellor Mr. Tiit Sepp not only have had a positive attitude towards our endeavors but also have actively assisted us in all kinds of ways, have shown us serious concern and spent lots of working time in our benefit. The government of the Republic of Estonia and its prime minister Mr. Mart Laar are trying to find possibilities to satisfy our request for building to house our faith activities. It is obvious that in this country it is clearly understood that if any European is entitled proudly to claim to be a Christian then also any person of Islamic faith who has settled in Estonia has the right, without being ashamed, to call himself a Muslim. I may add that our current endeavors have found support from many different Estonian government instances and political parties, from among them even those who some call "ultra-nationalist."

Finally I would like to call your attention to the fact that the Russian community, the leaders from within which claim to be "harassed" and discriminated against, possesses everything here in Estonia: Russian kindergartens; within all levels (including university) of the educational system so many Russian language departments can be found that they are not fully covered by Russian students; Russian theater; buildings for Russian communal activities; as well as their own church network. What they call "harassment" goes back to the fact that the Estonian language law did not give the Russian language the status of state language; that they were not given immediate and automatic citizenship; lack of pensions for the occupation army officers, etc. In fact, practices which cannot be found elsewhere in the world either. The pretension by Russian leaders to obtain totally inconceivable privileges for themselves here in the Republic of Estonia, occasionally aided and abetted by various western organizations and foundations, cannot be seen as a quest to integrate the Russians into the Estonian society but is tantamount to the attempt of integrating the Estonians and the other peoples living in Estonia into the Russian community.

May the Almighty protect the Estonians and their Republic.

Yours sincerely


Timur Seifullen

Chairman of the Estonian Islamic Community (Congregation)

From RFE/RL Newsline, 15 November 2004:

PUTIN, ZHIRINOVSKII NAMED RUSSIA'S LEADING DEMOCRATS. According to a new poll by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), President Vladimir Putin and Liberal Democratic Party of Russia leader Vladimir Zhirinovskii are considered the country's leading democrats by more Russians than any other public figure, "Izvestiya" reported on 13 November. The poll of 1,500 respondents in 44 regions found that Putin and Zhirinovskii were named by 11 percent of respondents, while just 5 percent named Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinskii. Twelve percent named no one. Asked to characterize Russian democrats, 32 percent of responded that they are people who stand up for democratic rights and principles, while 10 percent said they are "thieves, deceivers, bureaucrats, and idlers." Four percent agreed that democrats are "just, honorable, and responsible politicians." Although more respondents named Unified Russia as the most democratically oriented political party in Russia, 39 percent said the party's goals do not correspond to their own, up from 25 percent in September 2003. RC

Paul Goble, writing from Tartu, Estonia, on November 15, discusses an article on a Russian special forces website which presents the disturbing argument that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 might not have been such a bad thing after all:

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, an accord which opened the way to World War II in Europe and which cost the Baltic countries their independence for 50 years, should be a source of pride rather than shame for Russians, according to an Internet magazine directed at veterans of Russia’s elite special forces.

Such a view certainly does not reflect mainstream opinion in Russia today. Indeed, its author is notorious for his pro-Stalinist writings – including an effort three years ago to justify Stalin’s deportation of nationalities at the end of World War II. But the appearance of the current article in this forum does suggests that it may have some broader support within the Russian security community.

Given both the increasing role of that community within the Russian government as a whole and the likelihood that at least some in that community will extract certain lessons from this article on how they should approach some current problems, these views may affect policy outcomes even if they are unlikely to define them.

In an 8500-word article in the October issue of „Spetsnaz Rossii” - available here - Igor Pykhalov uses his title to ask rhetorically „Is It Necessary to Be Ashamed of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?” His answer is a clear and unqualified „no.”

Much of Pykhalov’s argument will be familiar to students of earlier Soviet and Russian commentaries on the pact: The Soviet government couldn’t trust the West because of its behaviour at Munich. Moscow needed to win time in order to build up its own forces. And it was already confronting a serious challenge in the east from Japan.

But in the course of his heavily-footnoted essay, Pykhalov pointedly adds three additional notes to this discourse, each of which is worth noting because of what the clues it provides about how at least some in Moscow are thinking about how to deal with Eastern Europe and the West’s relationship with that region.

First, Pykhalov suggests that German demands about the Danzig corridor were justified and that Poland should have agreed to them. Specifically he writes: „However negatively we relate to Hitler, his first two demands [that Poland transfer to German control Danzig and that Warsaw agree to the construction of extraterritorial rail and highway links between Germany proper and East Prussia] are difficult to describe as being without foundation..”

Indeed, Pykhalov says, Berlin’s demands were „extremely moderate,” and Poland should have at least been willing to talk about them. Given Moscow’s current complaints about transit arrangements across Lithuania between Russia and Kaliningrad, Pykhalov’s conclusion is especially troubling.

Second, the Western democracies encouraged both Czechoslovakia and Poland to take a harder line against Moscow than either of them could sustain unless the West supported them fully, something the Western powers proved themselves unwilling to do in a consistent fashion until after the war began.

Czechoslovakia represented a clear object lesson in this regard, Pykhalov continues. It „was the favourite child of the Entente, the only democratic country in Eastern Europe and the true and devoted ally of Paris and London.” But as Munich proved, the West was prepared to sell it out, a lesson that was not lost on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

That argument may take on contemporary relevance for some given Moscow’s current pressure on Estonia and Latvia concerning the status of ethnic Russians in those two Baltic countries and Russia’s ongoing effort to cause European countries to back away from their support of these new EU members in order to win favor with Russia.
And third, Pykhalov argues, the most important reason for viewing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in a positive light is that it effectively destroyed the Anti-Comintern Pact. As a result, Japan decided to move against the United States rather than the Soviet Union, a decision that spared the USSR a two-front war and allowed Moscow to win World War II „on the diplomatic front.”

Stalin’s willingness and ability to shift his foreign policy course dramatically and unexpectedly made that possible because his approach forced other powers to fight with one another before confronting the Soviet Union and thus it gave Moscow the „chance to enter the war later than the others and retain[ed] for itself a certain freedom of choice as to whose side it would support.”

Readers of „Spetsnaz Rossii” are likely to find this realpolitik argument especially attractive, suggesting as it does that Russia should be ready and willing to make dramatic shifts in its foreign policy line to achieve its goals. But precisely because of that possibility, Pykhalov’s argument on this point may be for almost everyone else the most disturbing of all.

(Via MAK)

Blogs can affect the news. But that's hardly news.

(via Marius)

From Leonardo da Vinci comes the proverb, full of profound wisdom, "Seek what you are capable of, and be capable of what you seek." No norm of life seems more fitting for those who are victims of the illusion that their capabilities are adequate for the achievement of a seductive goal. One must not desire more than one can achieve, but first the mainspring of the will must be strained to the utmost, so that Leonardo's dictum does not degenerate into a justification of sloth or pettiness. There will always be some who think the greater a man's ambition, the better; only thus can he improve. This opinion is valid, however, only in so far as a man is is profoundly conscientious, and as he watches every step in order to preserve the notion of a boundary between the possible and the impossible. The Biblical maxim that "no man shall add a cubit to his height" must be kept in mind. But if the individual goes through life obsessed with the idea of superiority at all costs, and with no other purpose than to dominate others simply for the pleasure of it, then his soul will always be restless and on the defensive, and fearful that his lie will be discovered.

Samuel Ramos, in Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (1933)

An excerpt from a long interview in the Polish weekly Przeglad with Poland's Deputy Foreign Minister, Adam Daniel Rotfeld, makes it clear how different are the approaches to Russia currently taken by the states of Eastern Europe from those of Western Europe. After outlining a number of ways in which Poland has drawn closer to the West in recent years, particularly since the country's accession to the EU and the progress, for example, in resolving with Germany issues related to compensation for lost Polish assets during the Second World War and the Cold War, Rotfeld turns to the subject of Poland's relations with Russia:

[Walenciak] And does such goodwill exist in Polish-Russian relations?

[Rotfeld] Here the problem is both more complex and less complex. On the one hand, there are many people in Poland who would like to constantly give Russia advice. I would be the last person to consider such an attitude rational. This does not mean that there are no grounds for astonishment or concern.

[Walenciak] What does astonish you?

[Rotfeld] When I closely listened to, and then read President Putin's speech of the 4th of September, I was surprised that he spoke about traditional threats: Russia's borders -- Putin was saying -- are not protected either to the east or to the west. He did not mention the south at all. But it is there -- and only there -- that threats for today's Russia come from. I thought that whoever wrote that speech for him should ask himself the question whether he wasn't falling into an old scheme of thought. The ruts of speeches by Brezhnev and Chernenko. Today Russia is a signatory not only of the NATO Founding Act from 1997, but also of the document about the "new quality of relations between NATO and Russia," as well as a party to the joint NATO-Russia Council. In the West, Russia has partners more numerous than it seems to have had in its entire history, not enemies... The threats are born in the south.

[Walenciak] The Caucasus, ethnic issues...

[Rotfeld] The uprising of Shamil, the imam of Dagestan and Chechnya, the leader of the mountainous peoples of the Caucasus in their war against tsarist Russia, lasted more than 60 years. After the Revolution - during WWII - Stalin worsened the situation, by deporting all of the Chechens to Central Asia and Siberia. They came back, after Stalin's death, under the rule of Nikita Khrushchev. The new Russia had chances of resolving the problem; I had the impression that president Boris Yeltsin was close to this, especially after the signing of the agreement in 1996 between General Lebed and Maskhadov. It remained in force for a very short duration. The current Russian Government does not have confidence in Maskhadov.

[Walenciak] Should we be surprised?

[Rotfeld] Let's look at internal Polish affairs. General Wojciech Jaruzelski, after all, did not have confidence in Lech Walesa, nor Walesa in Jaruzelski. But the realism of both the former and the latter meant that however they perceived each other's weaknesses and shortcomings, they also knew that they had no other partner for discussion. I have the impression that president Vladimir Putin is wrestling with this problem today. Meanwhile, in his speech, he was saying that the Russian nuclear potential was like a "bone in certain peoples' throats," and they wanted to eliminate this threat. Terrorism -- Putin was saying -- is "only an instrument to achieve this goal." Well, yet this nuclear potential is "a ball and chain" for Russia today -- it is absolutely inappropriate for the purposes. Russia cannot use it to solve the problem of Chechnya. Moreover, these weapons are becoming a huge burden, because they are getting old and have to be destroyed. But Russia does not have the money to do so. The world has allocated the astronomical sum of $20 billion to reducing these and other weapons of mass destruction in Russia. The United States is paying half of this -- $10 billion. So, saying about that someone finds distasteful, what is for Russia a problem and burden, attests to a sort of cognitive dissonance. The shock of Beslan has brought back a conviction that Russia is allegedly a besieged fortress.

[Walenciak] Maybe among a part of society, but not, it seems, among the leaders.

[Rotfeld] From president Putin's speech emerges a longing for the lost status of a superpower: our country -- the Russian president was saying, once had the "strongest system for protecting its borders"; "we live today, after the collapse of the huge power, which proved to be incapable of life under the conditions of a rapidly-changing world. But we have managed to preserve the nucleus of this giant, which was the USSR, and we named this new country the Russian Federation. We live under conditions of heightened internal conflicts and inter-ethnic clashes, which were formerly kept under control by the hard fist of the prevailing ideology. We've stopped paying attention to the problems of defense and security. We were unable to react adequately to all of the processes that are taking place in the world; we demonstrated our weakness. And the weak get beaten." These are conceptual phrasings that come from times that are thankfully behind us. Whoever wrote this speech did not perceive the essence of the problem. In today's times, it is not military potential that determines a country's strength, but rather the rule of law and economic potential. Russia has, as I have said, problems to the south. The problem is that although Russia is capable of quelling any uprising that breaks out there, it will not resolve the essence of the matter in this way. Because only a political solution can be a lasting solution. Gorbachev says this, former Prime Minister Chernomyrdin says this, Yeltsin says this. I think that president Putin also thinks in a similar way.

[Walenciak] I interpreted this speech a bit differently. It did not surprise me. I think that Putin didn't have a choice, he had to demonstrate toughness, he had to appeal to profound emotions, because this is what Russian society and his group of backers demanded from him. In such a situation, a leader has to be with society. And so, this was his speech for domestic purposes. I expect that Putin will now make several tough moves, so as to seek political solutions later, perhaps in a year.

[Rotfeld] I accept the second portion of this argumentation. Life will force Russian leaders to seek a political solution. I do not agree, on the other hand, that society expected such a reaction from him, meaning a reminder of who rules in this country. This has already been clear for five years. When president Putin came to power, he took over a Russia that was wobbly, unpredictable. He normalized the situation and the world took this with great relief. Putin gained popularity in Russia and very great recognition among Western partners. Putin had, and has, the backing of Russians.

Let's compare this with the approach taken by Anthony Brenton, Britain's new ambassador to Russia, in a much shorter interview for Kommersant Daily:

Volkhonsky: With regard to political relations, do you not think that friendship between leaders, smiles and handshakes just mask the serious, deep-seated problems?

Brenton: First of all, I should say that the relationship between our prime minister, Tony Blair, and your president, Vladimir Putin , is really excellent. They have a common view of many problems, in particular the problem of terrorism. The recent terrible events in Beslan provoked an extensive response in British society and in the government. I was in the United States on 11 September 2001 and I can see that the reaction in your society to the events in Beslan is in many ways similar to that, which occurred in America with regard to the acts of terrorism in New York and Washington. And this just emphasises the community of our aims.

Volkhonsky: Moscow is openly accusing London of dual standards, citing the fact that a number of individuals accused of aiding and abetting terrorists by the Russian government have been given asylum in Great Britain.

Brenton: I understand that you mean the case of Zakayev. Our position with regard to this is clear. This issue is governed not by parliamentary decision but by law. And the law says that if convincing proof of specific individuals' guilt is provided they will be extradited. Such proof has not been provided. But if the Russian government provides it, we will be among the first to demand that these individuals should be made to answer before the law.

Volkhonsky: During recent times, in connection with the events in Russia, the question of what is primary -- the fight against terrorism or democracy and human rights -- is being actively discussed. How do you assess this aspect of the situation in Russia?

Brenton: All countries must keep a balance between the tasks of protecting the population from terrorism and democracy and human rights. Russia must determine itself precisely where this boundary should lie. But we are taking into account President Putin 's statement made in May at the Federation Council. He said then that no one would ever force Russia to turn off the path of democracy or to renounce human freedoms and rights. And we hope the measures, which Russia is taking now, will not go against this statement.

Volkhonsky: Great Britain has a long history of its own problems with terrorists. Can your experience in Northern Ireland teach Russia anything?

Brenton: Of course, every case is different and the situation in Chechnya is not identical to the one in Northern Ireland. One of the aspects of the fight against terrorism is the strengthening of the law-enforcement bodies and we decisively took this path. But there is another aspect as well. It is that the socio-economic conditions in the problematical region need to be changed so that young people can obtain well paid jobs, which enable them to buy sports cars. Then they simply have no reason to become terrorists. After all, one of the main manifestations of democracy is a developed economy. And I am glad to see that it is this path, which the Russian president intends to take.

All one can say in response to this rather embarrassing performance is that British foreign policy with regard to Russia has always been characterized by a rather large degree of dualism. It should be remembered, for example, that throughout fifty years of the Cold War, despite numerous phases of "rapprochement" and "detente" with the Soviet Union, Britain stubbornly refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States. That said, it's a pity that the new British ambassador should be quite so effusive in his lauding of the "excellent" relationship between Blair and Putin. There is also the unfortunate recent precedent of another short interview - the one conducted by the Russian Vremya with Terry Davis, recently appointed Secretary of the Council of Europe. While there are few excuses for Davis's incautious and naive remarks, the ambassador's newness may be a factor in his apparent gullibility - or perhaps he is just repeating the line so often heard from Washington these days. Or perhaps - in a manner that's not quite unknown in Britain's participation in Europe's history during the last three-quarters of a century - he is letting Poland do the real talking.


(via Marius)

STROPHES

by Joseph Brodsky


I

Like a glass whose imprint
leaves a circular crown
on the tablecloth of the ocean
which can’t be shouted down,
the sun has gone to another
hemisphere where none
but the fish in the water
are ever left alone.


II

In the evening here it’s
warm. The silence is
completed literally, dearest,
by a parrot’s speechlessness.
Into the shrubs of celandine
the moon pours its milk:
far away, in outline,
a body’s inviolable silk.


III

Dearest, what’s the point of
arguing over the past
which, in its own turn, is over.
The needle’s forever lost
in the human haystack,
not be found there.
Feels like hitting a shadow
or – moving your queen on a square.


IV

All that we’ve got together,
what we’ve called our own,
time, regarding as extras,
like the tide on pebble and stone,
grinds down, now with nurture,
now with a chisel’s haste,
to end with a Cycladean sculpture,
with its featureless face.


V

Ah, the smaller the surface,
the more modest the hope
of faithfulness and unselfish
love for this speck or drop.
It may be that a body’s loss,
in general, from view
is the vengeance on farsightedness
the landscape thinks its due.


VI

Only space spots self-interest
in a finger pointing afar,
and light has its swiftness
in an empty atmosphere.
So eyes receive their damage,
from how far one looks.
More than they do from old age
or from reading books.


VII

The impact of darkness’s
harm is identical,
for dark’s implied flatness
borrows from the vertical.
Man is only the author
of the tightly clenched fist;
thus spoke the aviator
vanishing into the mist.


VIII

The bleaker things are, for some reason.
the simpler. No more do you
crave for an intermission
like a fiery youth.
The light on the boards, in the stage wings,
grows dim. You walk out right
into the leaves’ soft clapping,
into the U.S. night.


IX

Life’a freewheeling vendor:
occiput, penis, knee.
And geography blended
with time equals destiny.
Its power is learned of faster
if the stick drives it in.
You bow to the Fatal Sister
who simply loves to spin.


X

My forehead’s withered forget-me-
not twists my dental set.
Like our thirty-third letter
I jib all my life ahead.
You know, dear, all whom anguish
pleads for, those out of reach,
are prey of the laws of language –
periods, commas, speech.


XI

Dearest, there are no unfortunates,
no living and no dead.
All’s just a match of consonants,
on crooked legs, instead.
The swineherd exaggerated,
obviously, his role;
his pearl, however unheeded,
will outlast us all.


XII

True, the more white’s covered
with the scatter of black,
the less the species cares
for its past, for its blank
future. And that they neighbor
just increases the speed
the pen picks up on the paper,
promises little good.



XIII

You won’t receive an answer
if “Where to?” swells your voice,
since all parts of the world are
joined up in the kingdom of ice.
Language possesses a pole, named
“Noth”, where a voice won’t hoist
its flag, where the snow finds holes and
cracks in the Elzevir cast.


XIV

These lines are a doomed endeavor
to save something, to trace,
to turn around. But you never
lie in the same bed twice.
Not even if the chambermaid
forgets to change the sheets’
this isn’t Saturn, you won’t
land from its ring on your feet.


XV

From the drab carousel that
Hesiod sings and chides
you get off not where you got
on, but where night decides.
No matter how hard you’re rubbing
the dark with your pupils, the Lord’s
idea of repetition’s
confined to the jibing words.


XVI

Thus one skewers a morsel
of lamb, rakes the fire up.
I’ve done my best to immortal-
ize what I failed to keep.
You’ve done your best to pardon
all my blunderings.
In general, the satyr’s song
echoes the rustle of wings.


XVII

Dearest, we are even.
We are immunized, so to speak,
with each other, as if for
pox in a time plague.
The object of evil gossip
alone gets a forearm shot
with its consoling chance of
dwindling into a spot.


XVIII

Ah, for the bounty of sybils,
the blackmail of future years,
as for the lash of our middle
names, memory, no one cares.
To them belongs, like bundles
to storks, the sick-sweetness of lies.
But as long as forgiveness
and print endure, we’re alive.


XIX

These things will merge together
in the eyes of the crew
peering from their flying saucer
at the motley scene below.
So whatever their mission
is, I suppose it’s best
we’re apart and their vision
won’t be put to the test.


XX

Well, then, remove the Virgin
from the gold frame; put in
the family snapshot version:
a view of the earth from the moon.
A cousin never came close in
to photograph us two
together, nor did the plainclothesmen.
All had too much to do.


XXI

More out of place than a mammoth
in a symphony den
is the sight of us both smothered
in the present. Good men
of tomorrow will surely wonder
at such a diluted mix:
a dinosaur’s passions rendered
here in the Cyrillic marks.


XXII

These rambling phrases feature
an old man’s twaddle, spew.
At our age, judges issue
stiffer sentences to
criminals, and, by the same token,
to their own fragile bones and teeth.
But the free word has no one
there to get even with.


XXIII

So we switch lights off in order
to knock over a stool.
All talk about the future
is the same old man’s drool.
Better, dearest, to bring
it all to an end, with grace,
helping the darkness along
with the muscles of one’s face.


XXIV

Here our perspective ends. A pity
that it’s so. What extends
is just the winding plenty
of time, of redundant days;
gallops in blinkers of cities,
etc., to the finish in view;
piling up needless words of which
none is about you.


XXV

Down near the ocean,
a summer night. I feel
the heat like a strange hand’s motion
on my skull. Orange peel
stripped from its content withers,
grows hard. And the flies flit
like the priests of Eleusis,
performing their rites over it.


XXVI

I hear the lime tree whisper,
leaning my head on my hand.
This is worse than the whimper
and the famous bang.
This is worse than the word said
to soothe children after a fall,
because after this there follows
nothing at all.


1978


(translated by David McDuff with the author)

Kavkaz Center, which has been offline for nearly a month after it was closed down, first by Lithuania and then by Finland, in both cases after heavy pressure from Moscow, has reopened. The site is not always accessible, but seems to be "back".

Update: The new host server is in Sweden. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the Russian government to close the site down once again.

From a recent AP report:

NEW YORK -- More than 50 former Soviet dissidents who spent years in prisons and Siberian exile say Russia is in danger of slipping back into a police state under President Vladimir Putin and the former KGB colleagues he has brought to power.

Graying and aging, the former political prisoners reminisced one night this week about how they challenged the totalitarian superpower to abide by laws that on paper guaranteed free speech, a free press and fair trials.

The former dissidents include Eduard Kuznetsov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Orlov, Ludmilla Thorne, and many other well-known names from the Soviet era.

The report notes that

Bukovsky, who won his freedom in a swap for Chilean Communist Louis Corvalan on Dec. 18, 1976, recalled that Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as "a tragedy." He said Putin's colleagues also share this view.

"They do so because they used to be young officers of the KGB ... and they still have the feeling that they served the great power and now they want the great power to be back, and they think by repeating the Soviet example they once again will bring greatness to Russia," Bukovsky said.

The whole of the report can be read here.

Update 14/11/2004: The Washington Times has more on the story.

Øyvind Strømmen at Bjørn Staerk's weblog has commented on the media reports about the Kristallnacht commemoration in Oslo, Norway, last Tuesday. Some of what he writes puts the events into context and makes them more comprehensible. It's still not clear, though, why Israeli flags were banned from the demonstration. That still seems unacceptable, in spite of what Øyvind Strømmen says.

from Polish newspaper Fakt

19 Oct 2004 pages 2-3

By Magdalena Rubaj and Tomasz Pompowski:

"What Is the KGB Interested In?"

Alganov is only one of hundreds Russian agents spying in our country. Experts we have asked about what the Russian Federation Security Service [FSB], the successor of the KGB, is doing in Poland tell us that each year the situation gets worse.

"Poland is full of Russian agents," former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky tells us. Polish experts confirm his claim. "Russian business equals secret services, secret services, and secret services. They do business with our entrepreneurs," says General Gromoslaw Czempinski, former chief of the Office of State Protection [UOP].

The most recent affair with Vladimir Alganov is only the tip of the iceberg. "There are currently hundreds of Russian officers of the FSB and the former KGB operating in Poland," says an officer of the Polish services. "At least several of them might have an influence on major political and economic decisions."

"They are implementing the strategy adopted after the collapse of the Soviet Union aimed at making Poland and other countries dependent on Russian energy resources. Their activity has intensified since Putin became Russian president," says Marek Biernacki. The former Interior Minister points out to another threat: "Polish companies employ former secret service officers as experts. There are no guarantees that these experts are loyal to Poland."

Russian agents are also trying to infiltrate our secret services. "The circumstances are favorable for them. They met a lot of our people many years ago at training courses and parties," says Tadeusz Rusak, former chief of the Military Information Services [WSI]. "They might have a hand in shaping Poland's economic policy. Just look what Alganov has managed to do on his own."

"There were 12 spies at the Russian Embassy whom we managed to deport from Poland. The 'Olin' affair showed that [former] Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy did have contacts with a Russian spy, therefore the most recent reports on Russians gaining access to top state officials do not come as a surprise," says former UOP Chief Colonel Zbigniew Nowek, who is currently an expert on the Sejm commission investigating the Polish Oil Concern Orlen affair.

Energy Sector

Gas, oil, and -- most recently -- electric energy are the number one target of Russian agents. Russia is seeking to make Poland dependent on its supplies. This would enable it to blackmail any Polish government. The meeting between Vladimir Alganov and [the weathiest Polish businessman] Jan Kulczyk clearly shows this: the two men discussed not only oil, but also mysterious electricity deals. The Russians earlier did everything they could to control a fiber optic cable that was to connect Russia with the West via Poland.

WSI

Our experts say the military intelligence is infiltrated by Russian agents. How is that possible? The WSI are a relic of the Polish Peoples Republic. Oddly enough, they have resisted deep reforms since the collapse of communism. Agents trained under the previous system know their Russian colleagues very well. Many of those colleagues are high-ranking state officials.

Banking Sector

This is a strategic sector of the economy. Thousands of people were cheated by Russian businessman David Bogatin, who was associated with the Russian services, in the early 1990s. Experts claim that the Russians still have their people in major Polish banks. The fact that the banking sector was taken over by former officers of the Polish communist services after the system transformation poses an additional threat.

Politicians

Nine years ago Vladimir Alganov succeeded in winning the trust of then Prime Minister Jozef Oleksy. This shows how keen the Russian services are to establish ties with Polish politicians. Twelve Russian diplomats who were discovered to be spies were expelled from Poland in the times of the Jerzy Buzek Solidarity cabinet. A Polish diplomat who was found to have collaborated with the Russians was also denied a promotion to Brussels.

(via Marius, with thanks)

Recently I've noticed an increasing frequency of articles and commentary, both on the Web and elsewhere, that seek to explain the conflicts and tensions of the contemporary world in terms of the legacy of the past - in other words, what we see in the rise of militant Islam, for example, is a "sequel" to the Communist-inspired movements that characterized the last century. Indeed, at Belmont Club, a recent article is headed "The Communism of the 21st Century", proposing just such a thesis, and quoting Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, who makes an analogy between the disillusionment with Western democracy that affected Western liberals and intellectuals who converted to Communism and their counterparts today:

It is still very early in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other.

Wretchard notes:

Jean Paul-Sartre seized upon Dostoevsky's dictum that "if God did not exist, everything would be permitted" to justify existentialism. He forgot that Dostoevsky added that if God did not exist, we would be compelled to invent him. For if, as Sartre argued "in the present one is forsaken" why should the future when it arrives be less forlorn than today? For good or ill, man can as much live under a heaven swept of stars as endure a sky without stars to dream of. If Augustine of Hippo was right, that "our soul is restless until it rests in Thee" then when all the lights of the Tabernacle are extinguished the Kaaba will beckon in the desert.

Perhaps what such analyses leave out is the recognition that, far from being consecutive, sequential phenomena, the viruses of Nazism, Communism and Islamism are actually simultaneous threats to the peace and stability of the world. Nazism and Communism did not somehow disappear, to be replaced by a more modern variant - as anyone who reads the work of a Pacepa or a Bukovsky can perceive, the universal witches' brew of totalitarian ideology and praxis that threatens the values of the West and the Enlightenment is one that is constantly fermenting, and has been since as far back as the first three decades of the twentieth century, when Communism and and Fascism were more or less interchangeable, Benito Mussolini was an avowed admirer of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and the German Gestapo learned most of what they knew from the Russian Chekists. Similarly, later on, Yassir Arafat and the PLO were created in Moscow, while Saddam Hussein and Baathism derived in equal measure from the personality cults and state terror practised by National Socialism and Stalinism. And the force that became "Islamism" really grew not from a mosque, but from the barrel of a gun.

While it's true that Nazism, Communism and Islamism have sought and still seek to exploit what their followers perceive as a lack of moral and spiritual content in Western secular "bourgeois" democracy, the real ideological basis of their activity is a nihilistic one - centred on the conviction that human beings are essentially worthless, and that it's the task of the strong individual to rise above them and enslave them, asserting the principle of absolute power in the enforced imposition of the totalitarian state. If Dostoyevsky is to be cited in the context of the modern world's problems, it's the message of the Grand Inquisitor that needs to be borne in mind.

Taras Kuzio at EDM gives some insights into the deep contradictions in the foreign policy of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, who has the wholehearted support of Russia's President Putin. An important part of Yanukovych's political program is devoted to "improving U.S.- Ukraine relations" - with Ukrainian troops deployed in Iraq, the most recent manifestation of this was his bringing of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Ukraine. However, Kuzio notes:

despite these U.S.-oriented activities, neither President Leonid Kuchma nor his chosen successor, Yanukovych, are "pro-American." Rather, they are pursuing a contradictory "multi-vector" foreign policy that combines this "pro-American" lobbying with a deep hostility toward the United States and the West.

Former Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk has described the widespread use of anti-Americanism in the Ukrainian elections as a return to a "Cold War mentality" (bbc.co.uk/Ukrainian, November 10). Yushchenko concurs, saying, "There are ominous signs of neo-Soviet revival here" (The Guardian, October 27).

Yanukovych was represented at a November 9 National Press Club conference in Washington by Eduard Prutnyk, his adviser, and Aleksei Kiselyiov, his U.S.-based representative. When asked how they expected to improve relations with the United States while promoting Ukraine's biggest anti-American campaign since the Brezhnev era, both men blamed other candidates and disavowed any links between the campaign and Yanukovych. Stepan Havrysh, Yanukovych's representative to the Central Election Commission has made similar arguments (Wall Street Journal, October 26).

A U.S. Department of State official attending the press conference reacted with disbelief. As he pointed out, the 150 tons of anti-American posters found in Kyiv by the opposition were stored in a government-owned warehouse (see EDM, October 8). Yanukovych neither tried to block their distribution around Ukraine nor condemned their defacement of U.S. national symbols and President George W. Bush.

Such duplicity runs deep in the Yanukovych camp, as seen in four ways:

First, members of the Yanukovych government are directly involved in the anti-American campaign. Minister of Education Vasyl Kremen has revived the Brezhnev-era practice of ordering teachers to make their pupils write letters to the U.S. President complaining of "U.S. interference" (Ukrayinska pravda, October 20). These instructions build on a Soviet-style rhetoric that denounces Western criticism of rigged elections and democratic regression as "interference" in Ukraine's domestic affairs.

It seems that the Russian government has decided to openly intervene in the Ukrainian election. A RIAN report explains:

2004-11-12 14:48
PUTIN, KUCHMA AND YANUKOVICH TO DISCUSS WAYS OF MOBILIZING ELECTORAL RESOURCES

MOSCOW, Nov 12 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to the Crimea (a Ukrainian autonomy) and his meeting with Ukrainian leader Leonid Kuchma came as a surprise. Unofficial sources told Kommersant that Ukraine's Prime Minister and a presidential candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, would join them. The formal reason is the opening of a ferry route between Russia's Krasnodar territory and the Crimea.

After the results of the first round of the elections were declared, it became clear that the pro-Russian Mr. Yanukovich might lose the election. Now Moscow's priority is to mobilize the pro-Russian electorate in the second round, the newspaper reports. Gleb Pavlovsky, one of the leading ideologists of Mr. Yanukovich's election campaign, has noted, "In the first round, 4% of the vote may have been rigged in favor of Yushchenko." He referred to opinion polls conducted by the Public Opinion Fund on November 2-7 when 36% supported Mr. Yanukovich and only 33% - Mr. Yushchenko (the official results of the voting were 39.87% for Mr. Yushchenko and 39.32% for Mr. Yanukovich).

And the mobilizing doesn't stop there:

To motivate Mr. Yanukovich's electorate, Russia will advise using Russian-speaking organizations and communities of Ukraine, including moves to step up work with the Russian-speaking diaspora in Trans-Karpatia, Mr. Yushchenko's electoral stronghold. This requires, the newspaper continues, a series of measures in the days remaining before the second round, in particular, adopting laws to raise the status of the Russian language.

The get-together of Kuchma, Putin and Yanukovich is already underway, and the ferry trip has now been completed. According to RIAN the respective transport ministers "gave a green light to the first Krym-Kavkaz railway ferry."

All of which makes one wonder: are we likely to see similar tactics adopted by Russia with regard to elections in the Baltic states - especially Estonia and Latvia - before long?


(Hat tip: Marius)

I'm still using the new Firefox 1.0 as my main browser, and finding it not bad at all. The only initial glitch I noticed was the lack of a spellchecker such as IESpell. However, it's possible to download an excellent alternative in the form of Spellbound, at SourceForge.

With Western-oriented Viktor Yushchenko looking likely to prevail over his rival Viktor Yanukovych in the second round of the presidential race to be held in just over a week's time, who should be preparing to make a second visit to Ukraine during the election period but Russia's President Putin...

The Moscow Times has a commentary.

(via Marius)

Leif Knutsen has an update on the story, with commentary.

Garry Kasparov attacks Putin's appeasers:

George W. Bush appears to be sincere in trying to follow the ideals set forth by John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address: «Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." But Mr. Bush's approach has been inconsistent and regional when it must be global to be effective.

Kristallnacht was the predictable manifestation of years of a hate-mongering legislative agenda in Germany. Many European leaders turned a blind eye to Hitler's belligerence, naively hoping that he was a new Bismarck who wanted only to unite a Greater Germany. This attitude was exemplified by Neville Chamberlain's remark that he could «do business» with Hitler, a comment that became his epitaph.

In May, 1941 Franklin Roosevelt answered the appeasers' propaganda of accommodation in one of his fireside chats: «Those same words have been used before in other countries — to scare them, to divide them, to soften them up. Invariably, those same words have formed the advance guard of physical attack."

FDR recognized that what Hitler was doing was more important than what he was saying (a gap that was shrinking by the day). From World War II to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the ethnic cleansing of Slobodan Milosevic, history is full of examples of the West ignoring signs of impending explosion.

Likewise, in Russia it will not have been a sudden coup but a steady march to dictatorship. Mr. Putin has authorized an endless illegal war in Chechnya, taken over the airwaves, jailed a prominent businessman who resisted the Kremlin's intimidation, and presided over rampant electoral fraud.

And, later in the article, he warns about the future:

Some say that Mr. Putin doesn't care what the West says. This is both cynical and false. The money of Mr. Putin's elite backers is held almost exclusively outside of Russia, so he has vested interests in Russia's relations with the West on a national and personal level. That doesn't mean someone who takes such audacious measures will be swayed by newspaper editorials. Unless Mr. Putin hears strong, unequivocal words from George W. Bush and other Western leaders, he won't respond. Mr. Putin lives in a world where only the No. 1 man is relevant.

Instead, we have heard only innocuous remarks about checks and balances and weakening institutions. The man is abolishing elections! Mr. Bush should not be fooled by Mr. Putin's pre-emptive words of support. If the American president truly wants to flex his new mandate, there could be no better goal than protecting democracy in Russia.

Even if the Western democratic powers are unwilling to stand up for democracy on moral grounds, there is a clear security concern. The escalating terror attacks in Russia show that authoritarianism has not improved security inside our borders. Nor is the world safer with a Russian dictator in place.

The language used by the current Kremlin regime has not been heard in Russia since Stalin. Official talk of foreign meddlers and fifth columnists will send chills down the spine of a any student of history. If this familiar train continues to run on schedule we can expect violent repression and purges next.

The whole article can be read here.

An article from Izvestia, containing an interview with Nikolai Shepel, Russia's Deputy Prosecutor General, on what happened at Beslan. The interview is of interest, as it can be compared with Basayev's account in his Globe & Mail interview.

“SENIOR POLICE OFFICERS’ ACTIONS PLAYED INTO THE TERRORISTS’ HANDS”
Izvestia.ru

13:41 10.11.04

Who is to blame for the tragedy of Beslan? Did the bandits really hide their weapons in School No 1 beforehand? Might it have been possible to avoid the mass murder of the children? On Thursday at the State Duma all these questions will be put to the representatives of the inquiry and witnesses of the tragedy by the members of the parliamentary commission that is investigating the terrorist act. The commission has invited the Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia, Nikolai Shepel, who on the day before his meeting with the deputies shared the results of the work of the investigative-operative group with Izvestia’s special correspondent Nikolai Gritchin.

The first explosions in the Beslan school were caused by the terrorists’ drug withdrawal symptoms [“lomka”].

Izvestia: A key question: what provoked the explosions in the gym hall, which were the beginning of the tragic outcome?

Nikolai Shepel: We have long sought an answer to this question. The explosions were not provoked by anyone from outside, they apparently took place spontaneously. The results of the expert forensic analysis of the 30 corpses have suggested an answer. According to the conclusions of the experts, 27 of the bandits were using various narcotic substances. Moreover, in the bodies of 22 of them the concentration of narcotics exceeded the dose that is fatal to an ordinary person. In other words, a proportion of the terrorists were long-term drug addicts, their organisms had adapted to extremely high doses of poison. 21 terrorists were injecting heroin, one – morphine, three were smoking marijuana, two were taking tablets that contained narcotics.

Izvestia: But the bandits’ fondness for narcotics was nothing new to anyone – it was known right from the day of the assault on the school.

Shepel: The new element is something else. The experts did not find pure heroin in any of the corpses; although most of the terrorists were injecting it, it had already broken down into morphine and codeine. We can therefore conclude that at a minimum of several hours before the explosions the bandits’ supply of narcotics had run out. On 3 September the bandits were in a state of withdrawal (“lomka”). It is to this fact that we may ascribe their strange (neadekvatnyi) behaviour and heightened nervousness that day, and these were observed by many of the hostages. It is well known that during withdrawal drug addicts lose their sense of fear. Under the influence of withdrawal, there was nothing to stop a terrorist from pressing the button on the detonator. The policemen who were supposed to be guarding the school were sent off to accompany the president’s motorcade.

Izvestia: Has the inquiry found an answer to the question of who should have stopped the bandits on their way to the school?

Shepel: As you know, during the investigation criminal proceedings were instituted under paragraph 3, article 293 of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code (“Negligence in the discharge of one’s official duties involving the death of two or more persons”) with regard to the head of the Malgobek Raion office of the Ingushetian Interior Ministry's internal affairs department (ROVD) Mukhozhir Evloyev and his deputy – head of the public security police Akhmed Kotiyev, and also the head of the Pravoberezhny Raion office of the North Ossetian Interior Ministry (ROVD), Miroslav Aidarov, his deputy – head of the public security police Taimuraz Murtazov and Guram Dryaev, head of ROVD headquarters. It has been established that on the eve of September 1 these senior officers received direct orders from the republics’ MVD (Ministries of Internal Affairs) to take appropriate measures with regard to the threat of terrorist acts on the Day of Knowledge (Den’ znaniy). In actual fact, however, these orders and assignments were ignored. In addition, several actions by senior police officers played into the terrorists’ hands. For example, on 1 September, according to an estimate of their powers and resources, Kazbek Dzutsev and Alekandr Gobeyev, officials of the Pravoberezhny OGIBDD (regional traffic police), ought to have been protecting public order at School No.1. But at the last moment they were sent to the “Caucasus” Federal Highway in order to guard the passage of the North Ossetian President’s motorcade. As a result, no one prevented the boyeviks’ car from approaching the school. In the school itself there was only one policeman – a female official belonging to the Department of Minors’ Affairs, who was, moreover, unarmed.

Izvestia: Could a group of traffic police (GIBDD) have put up any resistance to the bandits?

Shepel: Of course. They have sub-machine-guns. If there had been a shoot-out near the school, the boyeviks would have been deprived of their advantage – they would not have taken the children unawares. Their line would probably have been broken.


THE TERRORISTS BROUGHT ALL THEIR WEAPONS WITH THEM

Izvestiya: Do you know the precise route by which the terrorists came to Beslan?

Shepel: We know that the band had been formed in a camp, in the wooded environs of the village of Psedakh of the Malgobek district of Ingushetia, from 26 to 31 August. On the morning of 1 September, it left the village of Inarki in a GAZ-66 truck for the administrative border of North Ossetia, a distance of approximately five kilometers. After crossing the border, the bandits had to drive on a country road to Beslan for about four more kilometers. On this route they were stopped by the district police officer of the village of Nizhniye Batako of the Pravoberezhny district - Sultan Gurazhev, who was driving his personal "Seven" [model of Lada car M.L] then. The tarped GAZ-66 appeared to him suspicious. But the well armed bandits took his service pistol from him and manhandled him into the back seat of the car, and they proceeded further in two vehicles. They did not meet any other obstacles on their way.

Izvestiya: What about the district policeman?

Shepel: When the bandits began to surround the school, Gurazhev jumped out from the vehicle, ran to the ROVD and reported the seizure.

Izvestiya: There is a persistent rumor in Beslan that the bandits had hidden their weapons in the school during repair work. There was even an eyewitness who alleged that he saw submachine guns being taken from under the floor of the school library.

Shepel': This version has been thoroughly checked. It has been established that no storing of weapons and ammunition was made there. On the terrorists' orders, the hostages did indeed take out the school's flooring, but for other purposes. In the gymnasium - to check to see if there was a basement, through which the terrorists could expect an assault. In the adjacent rooms - for use as a toilet. In the library - to form a barricade, using the room’s floorboards.

Izvestiya: The assumption that the weapons were delivered in advance is feeding another rumor - about the presence in the school of an enormous arsenal belonging to the bandits, that couldn't be delivered in one vehicle.

Shepel: In the course of the inspection of the place of the incident, the following weaponry belonging to the terrorists has been retrieved: 20 automatic submachine guns and 5 Kalashnikov machine guns, 2 hand held anti-tank rocket propelled grenade launchers, 5 handheld Shmel flame-throwers, 9 pistols and revolvers, 6 explosive devices, 25 grenades, 29 warheads for the grenade launchers, more than 2,000 cartridges, knives, and cartridge-cases. The whole of this arsenal, together with 32 fighters (boyeviks), could be completely accommodated in the GAZ-66 military truck in which they travelled.


A BANDIT PHONED SAUDI ARABIA FROM THE SCHOOL - TO SAY GOODBYE TO HIS MOTHER

Izvestiya: There is talk that there were far more than 32 terrorists in the school. Many of them might possibly have escaped.

Shepel: That is not true. There were attempts to flee. One of the terrorists tried to break out through the encirclement with a machine gun in his hands. But he was destroyed. Another, being wounded, left in a vehicle for the hospital, disguised as a hostage. But people exposed and lynched him, and he died as a result of beatings. Nurpasha Kulayev, who was has been in the hands of the investigation, also attempted to "squint" ["kosit"] under the [guise] of a hostage. But spetsnaz soldiers immediately "cleaned him up". He confirmed that the band consisted precisely of 32 people, the number of terrorists announced for them before the trip to Beslan by the leader of the band – the "Colonel” (Polkovnik). By the way, the investigation with regard to Kulayev is already being wrapped up. Soon the materials will be sent to the court.

Izvestiya: How many of the terrorists have not yet been identified?

Shepel: Twelve, including two suicide-women [smertnitsas], who stayed in the band together with their husbands. One of them was blown up by the "Colonel", to frighten the hostages and fighters, prior to the assault.

Izvestiya: There were foreign fighters in the band. From what countries were they?

Shepel: So far we have obtained information about the identities of Magomed, who was a Turk by nationality, and Farukh, an Arab by nationality. According to the CIA's data transferred to our SVR on 3 September during the battle, the latter called his mother in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from the Beslan school building, and said good-bye to her.

Izvestiya: The investigation has revealed that the terrorists had an accomplice outside the school. Who is he and what was his role there?

Shepel: This was a spotter [korrektirovshchik], who was informing the bandits about events around the school, including the deployment of military units. He is now being sought.

Nikolai GRITCHIN, Stavropol

(tr. M.L. and D.M. See also Chechnya-SL)

Evidence is emerging that more than 32 hostage-takers were involved in the Beslan school siege. Vasily K., a member of a Southern Federal District spetsnaz commando unit who participated in the storming of Beslan's School No. 1 on September 3, has told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that he personally counted 52 militants at the end of the operation – 49 dead and three captured alive. The Jamestown Foundation has a report on Vasily K.'s statement, and also on other aspects of the siege:

He claimed that among those captured were not only Nur-Pashi Kulaev, whom the authorities presented on television shortly after the raid as the single captured terrorist, but also Vladimir Khodov, a North Ossetian officially reported to have been killed in the storming, and a female suicide bomber. "I saw how they interrogated Khodov," Vasily K. said, adding that at one point Khodov "pulled out a 50-ruble note and said, ‘With this piece of paper I passed through all the checkpoints and with the help of it, I will get out of prison in two years and again kill for cash.' Throughout the whole interrogation he was insolent and self-assured. On the evening of September 4 they took him to Moscow; what's happening with him now, I don't know."

Vasily K. claimed that the authorities are hiding the fact that Khodov is alive because he was one of the hostage seizure's main organizers and is close to Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basaev. The commando also said that the raid was not, as the Prosecutor General's Office alleged, led by Ruslan Khuchbarov, known as the "Colonel," but by Magomed Evloev, an ethnic Ingush known as "Magas" who is Basaev's personal bodyguard. Khuchbarov, he said, was Evloev's right-hand man. "On the photograph of the dead Evloev is visible a braid with an Arabic character that testifies to the fact that he belongs to the clan of ‘brigade' commanders," Vasily K. told Komsomolskaya pravda.

As indirect evidence that there were more than 32 hostage-takers, Vasily K. said that 47 automatic rifles were seized in the school along with three grenade launchers and other weapons. He also claimed that some 15 terrorists arrived in Beslan four days before seizure: "Police received numerous calls about suspicious looking people, but no measures were taken." Vasily K. claimed that there were four female suicide bombers among the terrorists, three of whom managed to escape, as well as a Beslan resident, who was an ethnic Ossetian.

There are also unanswered questions about the real number of hostages, and about the identity of some of the dead terrorists:

Earlier this month, Versiya quoted an unnamed employee of a morgue in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, as saying that the morgue had issued 648 death certificates. The weekly newspaper said that people in Beslan believed the true number of deaths to be "around a thousand." According to the Prosecutor General's office, 330 people were killed, including 172 children.

Meanwhile, Vremya novostei reported on November 3 that investigators had identified among the dead Beslan terrorists the body of Bashir Pliev, a former senior officer with the Ingushetian Interior Ministry's internal affairs department, who has been on the wanted list for involvement in the June insurgent raids on law-enforcement installations in Ingushetia. According to the paper, investigators believe Pliev chauffeured Shamil Basaev and fellow Chechen rebel field commander Doku Umarov into Ingushetia for that operation.

Andrew Sullivan and Harry's Place have features about a demonstration held in Oslo on Tuesday night to commemorate Kristallnacht.

Nettavisen has a report (my tr.):

Police turned away Jews

09.11.04 21:44

Jews who wanted to take part in the marking of Kristallnacht were turned away by the Oslo Police on Tuesday evening. The police over-reacted, say politicians. See Web-TV.


Several hundred anti-racists from a dozen organizations took part in the event on Oslo's Jernbanetorget to commemorate Kristallnacht, which took place 66 years ago. A group of Norwegian Jews and friends of Israel from the Democrat Party (Demokratene) had plans to mark Kristallnacht, but the organizing committee refused to accept Jewish symbols.

Member of Parliament Jan Simonsen was one of those who was asked to leave.

"The Democrats were just out to provoke. They wanted among other things to carry the Israeli flag, even though we had made it clear that neither slogans nor flags should be part of the procession," says Trond Thorbjørnsen, director of SOS Racism.

The police were afraid of confrontations, and therefore took steps to make sure that the group did not become a part of the event, TV2 News reports.

The police justify the turning away of the group by saying that they were afraid for the Jews' safety.

"They were turned away out of consideration for their own safety," Stig Tonsjø, police director of outdoor operations, told NTB.

Thus the commemoration of acts of violence against Jews in Germany in 1936 ended without a single representative from Norway's Jews.

"I think it is utterly deplorable that the state of democracy in today's Norway is such that the police protect people who use violence," Erez Uriely told TV2 News.

"The holding of the demonstration in a way that makes the presence of Jews undesirable produces extremely unfortunate associations. I think the police over-reacted," said Lars Riise (Christian People's Party [Kr F]).

Carl I. Hagen, leader of the Progress Party (Frp) also reacted.

"This was appalling. The Jews ought to have been the guests of honour during the commemoration. This was very negative behaviour on the part of the police," Hagen told TV2 News.

"On Kristallnacht, no matter what their views on the conflict in the Middle East, people ought to be able to unite in a commemoration. That it's not possible is sad, and food for thought. There should be room for Jewish symbols in a commemoration like this on a day like this," said Odd Einar Dørum in a statement to TV2 News.

Talking of Firefox, version 1.0 seems quite stable and usable, and I'm thinking of switching to it altogether.

As will no doubt be all too obvious, I've been experimenting with a different look for the blog. Reliant as I am on the Blogger templates, I'm having some issues with the way the sidebar section in most of them deals with added links: the results look quite different in different browsers - the two I've tried so far are IE6 and Firefox. Hopefully I'll get this problem sorted out soon, but in the meantime don't be surprised if the blog undergoes some further changes in shape, colour and layout.

Update 11/11/2004

In the end I decided to go back to the Douglas Bowman Minima template, which I think is easier on the eye. Feedback received suggests that this is so!

An interesting article on the 19th century history of the Russo-Chechen War:
Antecedentes históricos del conflicto ruso-checheno.

Anastasia Bezverkha
Civic Campaign PORA
____________
NEWS RELEASE

To: Domestic & Foreign News Agencies

6 November 2004 Kyiv, Ukraine

Today, the UCCA Luhansk Oblast delegation of official international election observers appointed by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and registered by the Central Election Commission of Ukraine, filed a preliminary six-page report based on documented observations in Luhansk Oblast. The delegation of observers traveled to Luhansk Oblast to report on the adherence to international election standards in its twelve electoral territories.

In brief the report states:

The UCCA Luhansk Oblast delegation has concluded that the elections in the areas under observation were not universal, fair, secret, free or transparent.

The delegation had occasion to observe serious campaign irregularities both in the pre-election period and on election day. In the main, these irregularities can be characterized as the 'absence of a level playing field' that would help ensure fair elections. Many of these reflect preferential treatment based on an abuse of state or administrative authority. Others are a violation of Ukraine's Criminal Code. Also, in our opinion, many Precinct Election Commissions (PEC) and Territorial Election Commissions (TEC) committed violations ranging from relatively minor administrative errors to major infractions of Ukraine's Election Law.

The violations documented by the UCCA Luhansk Oblast delegation include: a) Bribery, Intimidation or Harassment of Voters and Campaign Workers; b) Voter List Violations; c) Ballot Box Violations; d) Impeding the Rights of International Observers and Media Representatives; e) Ballot and Voting Premises Violations; and f) PEC & TEC Violations (by commission members and against commission members).

Such irregularities and violations bolster the belief of Ukraine's citizens that the results of the election were pre-determined. The local electorate lacks confidence in the current system and fears repercussions if they report any threats or even minor transgressions of the Election Law.

Since there is a lack of a fair and free press in Luhansk Oblast, as in many areas of Ukraine, the UCCA Luhansk Oblast delegation recommends that both domestic and foreign news organizations initiate intensive reporting on this election in order to spread the truth and consequently discourage further election violations.

The UCCA group of officially registered election observers support Ukraine's commitment to OSCE standards for free and fair elections, that accurately reflect the will of the electorate. UCCA does not support any candidate, party or election block.

To receive a copy of the report or for further information contact:

Victoria Hubska, UCCA Kyiv Office, tel: + (380-44) 228-4580, ucca@i.kiev.ua



--
best regards,
Anastasia Bezverkha
Civic Campaign PORA

www.pora.org.ua
anastasia@pora.org.ua
+38067 446 5330

(via Chris & Laura Brown)

Marc Cooper has a link to the weblog of Slate journalist Eric Umansky, whose reporting from Cuba shows both sides of an increasingly murky political divide that - strangely, some may think - now exists there. Cooper notes that Umansky's

first post reports on the sickening charade now underway at the Gitmo base where the detainees at Camp X-Ray are being given "hearings" by U.S. military authorities. These military tribunals have all the due process you might find in a Castro-run kangaroo court. Any American who holds dear our principles of civil liberties should be outraged by the reports coming out this week from Guantanamo.

Right after that post, Eric makes available his piece from Sunday's New York Times profiling the courageous Claudia Marquez. She's a brave and tragic 27 year old Cuban independent journalist whose family has been ripped apart for Thought Crimes. Nothing like State Security arresting you and threatening your 6 year old because you have published articles criticizing overcrowded busses, cultural machismo and poor treatment of AIDS patients. All this after your husband has been tossed into the can for 18 years for similar "crimes" against the Almighty State.

Kudos to Umansky for reminding us that the word freedom requires no modifiers or qualifiers.

A report by RFE/RL Newsline's Editor-in-chief Liz Fuller (scroll down to see it) notes that

Since masterminding the hostage taking in the south Russian town of Budennovsk in the summer of 1995, radical Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev has claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist acts that have claimed hundreds of Russian lives. His ill-fated incursion into Daghestan in August 1999 in the wake of an
unsuccessful attempt to sideline Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov served as the rationale for the Russian leadership to launch its second war against Chechnya in October of that year under the pretext of combating terrorism.

Yet although he is routinely reviled by leading Russian politicians and has been designated an international terrorist by the United States, the Russian military have for five years failed to apprehend him, despite offering a reward of 300 million rubles (over $10 million) for information leading to his capture see "RFE/RL Newsline," 9 September 2004). Basaev's seeming immunity has fuelled speculation in the Russian press that he may be acting at the behest of, and/or enjoy the protection of, the Federal Security Service (FSB).

The report goes on to summarize and recapitulate many of the points raised in Basayev's recent Globe & Mail interview.

The results of Norm Geras's normblog Pundit Event are published today.

Yevgeny Kiselyov, writing in Moscow News, has some reflections on the party that was held at the U.S. embassy in Moscow on election night:

Pure Bush
05.11.2004
[passage omitted]

What was it that Russian guests of the U.S. ambassador discussed on the day of the U.S. presidential election? Did they discuss Bush or Kerry's chances? Nothing of the kind! The most actively discussed issue was the presidential election in Ukraine, the chances of Viktor Yanukovich and his rival Viktor Yushchenko and whose victory would be of the most benefit for Russia.

As usual, opinions were split. Those who had frequented Kiev lately in order to back the Kremlin's favorite Yanukovich through cutting-edge campaigning, told horror stories about what would happen if Yushchenko, God forbid, wins.

They claimed that should he win, Yushchenko - that malicious Russophobe and NATO fan - would immediately evict Russia's Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol, forcing Russia to spend $20 billion on the construction of a new naval base.

Of course, all Russians who live in Ukraine would be forced to speak Ukrainian, wear sharovary - those baggy trousers that form part of Ukrainians' national attire, and grow forelocks like Ukrainians used to do their hair in olden times. And, perhaps most horrifically, Ukraine would enter the EU and NATO immediately, leaving Russia behind.

Some tried to object shyly, appealing to reason, democratic feelings, to rationale, saying, why put all the eggs in one basket? What if Yushchenko wins? And wouldn't a Yanukovich victory bring about much more instability in western Ukraine than Yuschenko's win could entail in the east of the country? Besides, how could Ukraine possibly sever ties with Russia, considering how dependent it is on Russian gas, let alone other matters? And who said that Ukraine is about to be accepted by NATO and the EU?

But soon the discussion petered out. The choice between Yushchenko or Yanukovich is not a matter of conviction but of belief. The problem is that we revise our beliefs very easily, it occurred to me on the way back home from Spaso House. We back Bush under the banners of our union with the West, but Yanukovich under the banners of completely anti-Western ideas. Then I was reminded of a skier whose skis slide in opposite directions. That skier's not going very far.

(via Marius, with thanks)

And then the party’s over
It starts to snow, slowly and
wonderfully, the way I remember
it snowing on the white
house once. We have to give back
all that was our happiness, but not
its transformation into image. And its
transformations. Snow falls on the litter
and the streamers, snow falls on
the snow and some lights in the snow that whirl like
vertigo. Mild days, a small
stretch of water: We never really
noticed we had gone.


Tua Forsström (my tr.)

There seem to have been a larger than usual number of literary receptions and get-togethers organized by the the various Nordic embassies in London recently. First it was the launch of Neil Kent's Helsinki: A Cultural and Literary History at the Finnish embassy. Then there was a reception at the Norwegian embassy for Merete Morken Andersen and her book Oceans of Time, translated by Barbara Haveland, and Monday sees the launch at the Swedish ambassador's residence of Tom Geddes's translation of Torgny Lindgren's novel Hash. As I attend these events, which form an opportunity for renewing old acquaintances and catching up with translators' gossip, I sometimes wonder what the real reasons are for these rather rarefied cultural events being held in the workaday and mostly trade-and-commerce oriented surroundings of London's diplomatic circuit, but can only conclude that the embassies consider that it all adds to the raising of the cultural profile of their respective countries, not all of which are as well-known to educated Britons as they perhaps ought to be.

A couple of posts earlier, I quoted Albert Camus, who in his time had quite a lot to say about Algerian Islamic militancy and terrorism, particularly in his "Letter to an Algerian Militant"(1955), and the essay "Algeria 1958". In the latter essay - it was published in 1958, remember - he wrote:

The Arabs can at least claim kinship, not in a nation, but in a sort of Moslem empire, either spiritual or temporal. Spiritually that empire exists, its adhesive force and doctrine being Islam. But there also exists a Christian empire, at least as important, which there is no question of bringing back as such into temporal history. For the moment, the Arab empire does not exist except in the writings of General Nasser, and it could not come about without worldwide upheavals that would mean the Third World War in a short time. The claims for Algerian national independence must be seen in part as one of the manifestations of this new Arab imperialism in which Egypt, overestimating its strength, aims to take the lead and which, for the moment, Russia is using for its anti-Western strategy. The Russian strategy, which can be read on every map of the globe, consists in calling for the status quo in Europe (in other words, the recognition of its own colonial system) and in fomenting trouble in the Middle East and Africa to encircle Europe on the south. The happiness and freedom of the Arab populations are of little account in the whole affair. One has only to think of the slaughter of the Chechens or of the destruction of the Tartars in the Crimea or of the destruction of the Arab culture in the once Moslem provinces of Daghestan. Russia merely takes advantage of such dreams of empire to serve her own designs.

It might be a good idea to keep those words of Camus at the back of one's mind when reading Kathryn Hahr-escolano's analysis, in the latest issue of the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor, of Algerian Salafism and the threat it poses to democracy in Spain - and other parts of Europe - today:

The involvement of Moroccan Islamists in the Madrid terrorist attacks on March 11 has overshadowed the significantly larger role that Algerian Salafists — with ties to al-Qaeda — have had in recent terrorist activities in Spain. In mid-October, Spanish authorities dismantled an Algerian Salafist terrorist cell which was identified as part of al-Qaeda's European network with plans to blow up the National Court in Madrid. The role of Algerian Islamists in both the March 11 attacks and the National Court terrorist planning suggests that Spain has become a new locus of operations for North-African based al-Qaeda terrorism.

Algeria's two principal Salafist groups form part of al-Qaeda's North African network. The Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) — an organization that two years ago kidnapped European tourists in the Sahara desert — is the country's most hard-line group fighting the Algiers regime. The GSPC is on the United States' list of "terrorist groups" since 2002 because of links to al-Qaeda. As with other Muslims around the world who identify themselves as Salafists, GSPC members advocate a pure interpretation of the Qur'an and strict observance of the original texts of Islam and the traditions of the "pious ancestors".

The other militant group is the Armed Islamic Group, known by its French acronym GIA: The GSPC is an off-shoot of the GIA. Many members of the outlawed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) migrated to the GIA. Algeria's civil war unleashed a flood of fleeing Islamists who primarily traveled to France, but they also found "havens" in London, Cologne, and Spain. Although the Algerian government's counter-terrorist campaign against the GIA and the GSPC has significantly diminished the numerical strength of both groups and their operational capabilities, nonetheless the extreme jihadist orientation of the dedicated members remains intact. Moreover, the alignment of Algerian and other North African Salafist groups to al-Qaeda's European terrorist network represents a nexus of terrorist resources that will serve to strengthen al-Qaeda's reach into the continent.

-------

Given the geographical proximity and the historical relations between Spain and Algeria, it is no accident that Algerian Islamists were involved in the attacks. For a variety of historical and sociological reasons, Algerians, and Moroccans have immigrated to Spain and successfully blended in. Prior to 9/11, most Spanish officials did not view the influx of North African immigrants with major concern. Following 9/11 and particularly 3/11 — in which immigrant Moroccan Islamists orchestrated the attacks — large portions of Spanish society together with the government have become increasingly suspicious of the North African immigrants.

The concern and reaction of the Spanish authorities is certainly not disproportionate to the threat that faces their country. Salafi groups have operated in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco for many years. These groups can potentially reach out to "compatriots" in Spain and execute attacks in that country and other European states. Increasingly, Spanish authorities are going to have to deal with the triangle of terrorism: Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, which form a rear base for al-Qaeda.

Via RFE/RL

UNCERTAINTY HOVERS OVER UKRAINIAN VOTE COUNT... Central Election Commission (TsVK) head Serhiy Kivalov told journalists in Kyiv on 3 November that the 31 October presidential ballot may be declared invalid in some constituencies, ITAR-TASS reported. "About 50 election constituencies did not submit their protocols or the protocols they submitted were not properly executed. Courts are now considering violations in some of the [225] constituencies," Kivalov said. The TsVK stopped the vote count on 2 November, announcing that with 97.67 percent of the ballots counted Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych won 39.88 percent of the vote, while opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko obtained 39.22 percent. Meanwhile, Ukrainian news agencies reported on 3 November that the TsVK has decided to verify 30 percent of the polling-station protocols in 132 constituencies. Yushchenko's campaigners have charged that the verification was ordered to steal what they believe to be a win by Yushchenko. Yushchenko wrote in the "Financial Times" on 3 November that his staff will "challenge" the 31 October poll results. His staff pledged to complete a parallel vote count by 7 November. JM

...AS CHIEF ELECTION OFFICIAL SAID TO BE BLACKMAILED BY AUTHORITIES. Lawmaker Oleh Rybachuk from Yushchenko's Our Ukraine parliamentary caucus, said in Kyiv on 3 November that TsVK chef Serhiy Kivalov has not yet announced the final vote count in the presidential election because the presidential administration has threatened to instigate a criminal case against his daughter if he fails to ensure a "necessary election result" for Premier Yanukovych, the "Ukrayinska pravda" website (www2.pravda.com.ua) reported on 3 November. Rybachuk said the criminal case could be linked with the business activity of the Antarktyka fishing company, but failed to provide details. Kivalov denied that the presidential administration is putting pressure on him personally and on the commission concerning the release of final results of the voting. "[My daughter] is not involved in any business activities," Interfax quoted him as saying. JM

I honestly believe that the Holocaust was the greatest crime in history. You would have had to be there, Howard, to realize the magnitude of the despair and hopelessness that covered us all after the war. It was hard to say why anyone should wish to continue living in such a world. I felt, along with thousands of others, that suicide was the logical conclusion of truth. I believe that this universe, which is capable of killing millions with one bomb, results in a feeling that existence is anguish. I believe that it is a sickness tha only death can cure. If there is a God, why does he allow so many innocent people to writhe in anguish?

Albert Camus, talking to Howard Mumma in The Wearied Existentialist

EDM reports that

YUSHCHENKO WINS FIRST ROUND OF UKRAINE'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Challenger Viktor Yushchenko won the first round of the Ukrainian presidential elections on October 31 (Itar-Tass, November 2). According to official Central Election Commission (CEC) figures, Yushchenko won 16 oblasts and the city of Kyiv. Besides sweeping western Ukraine, Yushchenko won the whole of central Ukraine, a key region where then-incumbent Leonid Kravchuk lost to Leonid Kuchma in the 1994 presidential elections. Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych only won in nine of Ukraine's 25 oblasts and in the city of Sevastopol.

With 97.67% of the results tallied by the end of Tuesday [November 2], the CEC reported that Yanukovych was leading by 39.88% to Yushchenko's 39.22%. However, many observers find it suspicious that the CEC has taken so long to collect results from key regions that are Yushchenko strongholds -- western Ukraine, including Lviv (3.5% of the votes still not submitted), Ivano-Frankivsk (12%), Ternopil (5%), Volyn (5%), and central Ukraine, including the city of Kyiv, (8%), Khmelnytsky (6.4%), Kirovohrad, and Vynnytsia (3%). These regions would give Yushchenko an additional 250,000 votes, eclipsing Yanukovych's lead of 182,000.

EDM also notes that, because of the Socialists' disquiet about apparent falsifications and their unwillingness to back a candidate from the authorities

Yushchenko is...set to gain the Socialist vote in round two [which takes place in 3 week's time], as well as negative votes against the authorities. Yanukovych meanwhile, has exhausted his election support in round one and has nothing to draw upon in round two.

Each land is a society: a world and a vision of the world and the otherworld. Each history is a geography and each geography is a geometry of symbols. India is an inverted cone, a tree whose roots are fixed in the heavens. China is an immense disc - belly and navel of the cosmos. Mexico rises between two seas like a huge truncated pyramid: its four sides are the four points of the compass, its staircases are the climates of all the zones, and its high plateau is the house of the sun and the constellations. It is hardly necessary to remind ourselves that to the people of antiquity the world was a mountain and that, in Sumer and Egypt, as in Mesoamerica, the geometric and symbolic representation of the cosmic mountain was the pyramid. The geography of Mexico spreads out in a pyramidal form as if there existed a secret but evident relation between natural space and symbolic geometry and between the latter and what I have called our invisible history.

- Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude

George Crowder of Flinders University has an interesting review in ARPA, the Australian Review of Public Affairs, of a new book by the philosopher Richard Wolin, who has previously published three books on Martin Heidegger, one of the principal fathers of postmodernism. The new volume is entitled The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004), and discusses the intellectual phenomenon known as the Counter-Enlightenment, which arose in Germany during the nineteenth century, was based on the rejection of reason, and, in Wolin's words, became the "German Ideology". It was an ideology that was destined to have a fateful significance for the development of European thought in the twentieth century:

From Germany, the German Ideology travelled to France. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the First World War and the Great Depression, many right-wing French intellectuals of the 1930s saw in the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment an antidote to the perceived corruption and decline of capitalist liberal democracy. Indeed, the enemy was really modernity as a whole. Socialism, too, was implicated in the image of a shallow, moribund civilisation in which the rationalist, bureaucratic organisation of economic interests was treated as central. The Counter-Enlightenment celebrated a different set of values that seemed to have been lost in modern times but might yet be recovered: vitality and manliness, ritual rather than reflection, the mythic or mystical dimension of experience in contrast with the scientific, self-assertion through violent conflict, and above all the rejection of reason in favour of action and instinct. These were the themes of Nietzsche—and they became the themes of fascism. These values attracted Heidegger, appealing to his philosophical emphasis on the authenticity of ‘being’ in contrast with reason and the pursuit of truth.

Among those French intellectuals who took the same path, Wolin singles out two as especially significant. Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot sang the praises of fascism in the 1930s, retreating into ‘inner emigration’ during the War only when it became clear what fascism looked like at close quarters. Their significance, for Wolin, lies in their influence on Foucault, Derrida and their supporters. From Bataille the postmodernists take their condemnation of reason as ‘homogenising’ and suppressive of ‘difference’, without acknowledging that the difference Bataille is principally concerned to reassert includes anti-democratic authoritarianism and gratuitous (‘transgressive’) violence. From Blanchot the postmodernists inherit a suspicion of language as an insuperable barrier between thought and reality, ignoring the origins of this view as a rationalisation of Blanchot’s prudent wartime ‘silence’.

These themes—the ‘impossibility’ of language, and the homogeneity of reason and democracy—come together in the work of Derrida in particular. For Derrida, language can never generate the stable meaning presupposed by notions of objective truth, and the generality of legal rules necessarily impedes ‘justice’, which is always peculiar to concrete cases. In short, the notion of objective truth is incoherent, and the rule of law unjust. As Wolin points out, the first of these conclusions is itself incoherent, since it presupposes the objectivity it purports to deny. The second is typical of the postmodernist penchant for ludicrous overstatement and for striking radical postures that have no sane implications for political action. Justice, obviously enough, calls for both particularity and generality: attention to the particularity of cases, and general rules to prevent bias and special pleading. The silliness of Derrida’s pronouncements on the injustice of law is nicely brought out by Wolin though the story of the philosopher’s arrest in Czechoslovakia in 1981. Suddenly subject to a genuinely arbitrary decision process, Derrida found himself impelled towards the thought that humanist norms like the rule of law might have some value after all. Undaunted and with ‘great lucidity’, however, he rationalised this odd experience by positing a new philosophical category in which contradictory thoughts confront each other without ‘intersecting’: ‘the intellectual baroque’.

Where does the defining postmodernist hostility towards truth come from? Hatred of the Enlightenment and the modern world is its remote source, but one of Wolin’s most interesting and provocative ideas is that much of French postmodernism can be traced to what he calls the ‘Vichy Syndrome’ (189). For example, he attributes Blanchot’s ‘silence’ (that is, his doctrine of the impossibility of language) to a ‘subconscious will to unknowledge’ resulting from a failure or refusal to face the distressing facts of occupation and collaboration. Indeed, the Vichy Syndrome, Wolin believes, lies behind the radical and dogmatic scepticism of postmodernism as a whole. Although the Counter-Enlightenment or German Ideology was influential in France in the 1930s, it was after the War that notions of reason and truth reached their lowest ebb among French intellectuals.

UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL BALLOT PROVES INCONCLUSIVE... With 94.2 percent of the ballots counted, the Central Election Commission announced on 1 November that Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich won 40.11 percent of the vote, while his main rival Viktor Yushchenko obtained 39.16 percent of the vote in the 31 October presidential election, UNIAN reported. According to these incomplete results, Oleksandr Moroz was backed by 5.77 percent of voters, Petro Symonenko by 5.02 percent, and Natalya Vitrenko by 1.54 percent. Turnout stood at 74.38 percent. These results suggest that, as predicted by analysts and pollsters, Yanukovich and Yushchenko will fight for the Ukrainian presidency in a runoff on 21 November. AM

(via RFE/RL)

Moscow's Sakharov Museum is currently facing a trial for its exhibit criticizing the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in society. But not deterred, it is also presently hosting a new exhibit on Chechnya. Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper has a feature on the exhibit by Carolynne Wheeler, who writes:

The fighting, and the spillover attacks that have touched Beslan, Moscow and other Russian cities, have been documented visually in a new, daring exhibit by Moscow's only museum dedicated to uncovering human-rights abuses. The show is called War in Chechnya Has Brought Terrorism to Russia.

"After Beslan, on Sept. 4 when everything had reached its terrible end, it was Saturday and I couldn't stay at home. So I came here, and I was thinking what can we do?" said Sakharov Museum and Public Centre co-founder and director Yuri Samodurov.

The museum, established in 1996 to archive the works of Russian scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, is dedicated to recording human-rights abuses under past regimes and in modern Russia, from remembering lives lost in Stalin's work camps to showing banned films about the war in Chechnya. It operates out of two small buildings on the edge of the Moscow city centre, surviving on modest donations and the dedication of its staff.

Samodurov is a soft-spoken man who, with his greying fringe of hair, wire-rimmed glasses and tweed jacket, more resembles a university professor than a radical rights activist. But his role as museum curator has taken on a new dimension: He and two staff members are now being tried on charges of inciting religious hatred, for permitting an exhibit in January of 2003 entitled Caution! Religion, which questioned the role of the Russian Orthodox Church. The case, sent back to the Moscow prosecutor's office this summer for lack of evidence, has returned to court for a new trial; Samodurov is scheduled to appear again on Wednesday.

He says he fully expects pressure to shut the current exhibit down -- a reasonable expectation at a time when the editor of the newspaper Izvestia was fired for his choice of a front-page photograph depicting a woman in Beslan mourning a dead child. The same photograph was used in newspapers around the world, including The Globe and Mail. That Izvestia front page is among the newspapers on exhibit.

"We are losing political freedoms," Samodurov said. "How can we fight? We can fight with this exhibit. . . .

"Many people write about who we are fighting against," he said. "But I've never encountered this question: What are we fighting for in Chechnya? . . . The war cannot be won unless we know what we are fighting for."

The whole article is well worth reading, as is the Chechnya Brief to be found at the Andrei Sakharov Foundation's website.

On chechnya-sl, Norbert Strade has some interesting reflections on Basayev's earlier statement (17 September 2004), and on the nature of the Kavkaz Center website in general. On the 17 September statement:

With regard to the "Basayev statement" on KC, in which he takes responsibility for Beslan, things look somewhat different. I've previously said here that I'm not sure if it is authentic. I'm still not sure. It contains many inconsistencies and strange variations in the language used. Some parts of it don't sound like Basayev, others do. Additionally, it contains information which only someone who was on the spot during the assault could be in possession of. This again implies that either this info was added by someone else, or that Basayev was in cellular phone connection with the kidnappers until the end of the drama. The latter would again raise certain questions, like: "How come the Russian authorities allowed the perpetrators to keep up their cell-phone contacts with their accomplices, against all rules in such cases? How was it possible that they didn't track the receivers of these calls?", and so on. I'm not yet ready to have a 100% sure opinion about this whole text, as long as there's still new information coming in from Beslan, and while the Russian authorities and the KGB-controlled media are continuing to pour out tons of self-contradicting disinformation every day, in order to totally confuse any attempt at analyzing the material. Right now, it looks to me as if the mentioned statement is partially Basayev, partially doctored. But let's wait and see.

And on Kavkaz Center:

With regard to Kavkaz-Center, I can only repeat what I have said here any times: One has to invoke Soviet terminology to describe its role. It's playing the part of an "objective agent". I.e., whatever the motives of Udugov and his journalists, the objective role plaid by this publication is to deliver material which is warmly welcomed by the Russian propaganda and used by it in order to describe the Chechen Resistance as "Muslim terrorists". Each time some Russian atrocity exceptionally makes it to the international headlines, KC would not wait long and publish some threat against civilians, Western states or interests, anti-Semitic pamphlets, cheers to Mr. OBL, and so on. In this way it has done better work for the Russian Fascists than their own, usually clumsy propaganda. I think one should give KC the benefit of doubt and assume that they are just writing according to their convictions, but their activity has been an objective catastrophe for the Chechen cause. Even more so, because it is the only Chechen website taken seriously by Western media. On the other hand, not everything on KC is bad. In between the provocative stuff, they've always had interesting and useful analyses, and especially the best coverage of the military events, compared with other Chechen sites, including Chechenpress.

Read the whole post here.