A Step At A Time

The American Red Cross is accepting donations for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. This is probably at present the best way to help from outside the United States.

Instapundit has a growing list of other places that are taking donations.

From the most recent MSNBC/Reuters report on the upcoming meeting:

Susanna Dudiyeva, whose 12-year-old son Zaurbek was among 331 people, half of them children, killed after Chechen rebels seized their school in southern Russia, said late on Tuesday her grief gave her the right to speak frankly to Putin.

She and her Beslan Mothers’ Committee will tell him in the Kremlin on Sept. 2 -- a year and a day on from the start of the siege -- that official blundering which made the bloodshed worse is being covered up, she said.

“I will say that we think President Putin is to blame for what happened. As for what else I will say, well I am unpredictable and I can’t tell the exact words I will use but it will be serious,” she said in the group’s office, where black-clad women meet daily to discuss their plans.

via RFE/RL:

Basaev Says Beslan Raid Prompted By FSB Sting

(AFP)

The catalyst for the Beslan hostage taking on 1 September 2004 was an attempt by the Federal Security Service (FSB) to infiltrate the Chechen resistance and to provoke them to try to seize the parliament building in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, according to a 30 August statement by radical field commander Shamil Basaev that was posted on the resistance websites kavkaz-tsentr and chechenpress.org.

Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel promptly rejected Basaev's claim as the "delirium of a terrorist murderer of children," AFP reported. Shepel told Interfax on 31 August that the official investigation into the Beslan events has not revealed any evidence of FSB involvement.

Basaev claimed responsibility for planning the Beslan hostage taking shortly after it took place. In an interview made in June that was broadcast last month by the American television network ABC, Baseav argued that "the entire Russian people share the responsibility for Beslan in that their silent consent is tantamount to approval of this war." At the same time, Basaev admitted that "to be honest, I did not expect" that the Russian authorities would risk the lives of hundreds of children by storming the school building where they were being held hostage.

Basaev said he would welcome "an open international investigation" into the circumstances of the hostage taking, and that "we have a survivor of that operation who is ready to give evidence." That assertion calls into question the Russian authorities' assertion that Nurpasha Kulaev, currently on trial for his participation in the hostage taking, was the sole militant to survive the storm of the school.

In his 30 August statement, Basaev asked why he should disclaim responsibility for "a successful operation that demonstrated the true face of 'Rusism,'" a concept that he subsequently defined as "a people-hating, schizophrenic imperialistic ideology, a mutation comprised of elements of fascism, racism, chauvinism, and other 'isms.'"

Basaev then proceeded in his statement to outline the developments that culminated in the Beslan operation. He alleged that the special services in North Ossetia had infiltrated into the ranks of his men an agent, whom he identified as Vladimir Khodov. Khodov was instructed to win Basaev's confidence, which according to Basaev he succeeded in doing by participating in several bombings in Vladikavkaz. Khodov then proposed to Basaev seizing the parliament and government buildings in Vladikavkaz. But shortly afterward, he confessed to Basaev his relations with the FSB, and agreed to function as a double agent.

Basaev said preparations for the operation in Vladikavkaz got under way in the spring of 2004. That operation was scheduled for 6 September, the anniversary of the declaration in 1991 of Chechnya's independence. The plan was for the FSB to intercept and neutralize Basaev's men on the outskirts of the North Ossetian capital. To that end, a safe corridor was made available to Basaev's men, which Basaev said they took advantage of to reach Beslan without being intercepted.

August 30, 2005

Putin overture angers Beslan mothers
From Jeremy Page in Moscow


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,171-1755863,00.html


President Putin of Russia has offended many mothers of Beslan victims by inviting them to meet him in Moscow on Friday, during a vigil marking the first anniversary of the school siege.

The Beslan mothers’ committee said yesterday that it would accept because it had been asking for a meeting for more than a year to protest against the failure to punish any senior officials involved in the tragedy.

But the committee accused the Kremlin of being grossly insensitive or trying to deflect media attention from the ceremonies in Beslan on September 1 to September 3.

“To invite us on September 2 is the height of cynicism,” said Susanna Dudiyeva, the head of the mothers’ committee. “But we are putting our pain and sense of insult to one side for the sake of our cause.”

Her son Zaur, 13, was among the 331 people killed when the three-day siege of Beslan’s Middle School No 1 ended in a hail of gunfire and explosions on September 3.

She and other Beslan residents had been planning to spend Friday visiting the cemetery where the victims are buried and the remains of the school where they perished.

The mothers’ committee, which has 200 members, had asked Mr Putin and other senior government officials to stay away from the commemorations.

Many in Beslan blame negligent or incompetent government officials for allowing 32 terrorists to occupy the school and then botching the rescue operation. They are furious that the only person to be put on trial so far is Nurpashi Kulayev, the one hostage-taker captured alive.

They also accuse investigators of covering up, or failing to consider, key evidence that contradicts the official version of events.

The mothers’ committee said that it had asked for a meeting with Mr Putin at least three times but had received no response until now. Mr Putin confirmed that he was willing to meet the mothers. “I know about their request. I am ready to meet them,” he told reporters in the southern city of Sochi. The invitation was for 20 Beslan mothers to accompany President Mamsurov of North Ossetia, on a trip to Moscow. But Julietta Basiyeva, another leader of the mothers’ committee, said that only seven would join him as the majority wanted to take part in the commemorations. Mrs Dudiyeva would be in the group, but some of the others would not be from the mothers’ committee. “We want the group to reflect the views of many different victims, not just ours,” she said.

Mr Putin has kept his distance from Beslan until now in what analysts see as an attempt to prevent bad publicity denting his popularity elsewhere in Russia. His only visit to Beslan was a hurried trip to a local hospital in the early hours of September 4 last year.

Russian media reported last week that Mr Putin may be unhappy with the pace of the investigation. A federal parliamentary commission was supposed to announce its findings in time for this week’s anniversary but has postponed its report indefinitely

A three-day celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, the union led by Lech Walesa, is underway in Gdansk, Poland. The BBC alao has an interview with Mr Walesa. An excerpt:

Let me ask you about the fears of many Polish people. There were fears that you might win at the negotiating table but that would not be the end.

There were 200,000 Russian troops based permanently in Poland and a million more on our borders. And they had weapons of mass destruction as well. We knew all about that. But we were determined not to go back to work. They could kill us but they could not defeat us. They could us disperse us but they could not force us to work. So in fact the Communists did not have very effective weapons to use.

When the moment of victory came how did you feel?

When we were approaching the end of our battle I stood up and said 'You're all happy but I'm worried and frightened of what lies ahead of us'. Those who were carrying me on their shoulders then could soon be throwing stones at me.

So in a way the difficult part started after 31 August?

You've got to understand. It was clear to us that following this way would eventually lead to the collapse of Communism, the Warsaw Pact would cease to exist, but the whole pleasure of that would be at the expense of our economy, our cooperation, and our markets.

So how much was it the action of Solidarity which eventually brought down the Berlin Wall?

It did more than anything else that happened anywhere in the world. The further history moves on, the clearer it becomes how important that moment was.

The European Union couldn't have expanded, the unification of Germany would not have been possible. And other countries wouldn't have got their freedom if the Poles had not broken the Soviet bear's teeth. When other countries did their own thing, the bear could no longer bite.

The world fiddles as the North Caucasus simmers

By Fiona Hill and Sarah Mendelson
Published: August 29 2005 03:00 | Last updated: August 29 2005 03:00

This week, the one-year anniversary of the hostage siege and massacre of children and parents in the Beslan school gym is tinged with a specific sorrow; it could happen again. The political situation in Russia's North Caucasus region is dangerously unstable but few outside the region are paying attention.

Beslan was an especially depraved example of what has spread well beyond Chechnya. Acts of intra-communal violence, brutal assassinations, explosions and armed clashes are the norm in places such as Dagestan and Ingushetia. Local politics is circumscribed by corruption, incompetence and a lack of interest in the wellbeing of ordinary people. Many regional leaders are running their fiefdoms into the ground. While some in the Russian government claim that the situation has "normalised" (the Putin administration plans "parliamentary elections" in Chechnya this November), a recently leaked document from the Kremlin's own representative to the North Caucasus asserts that the situation is perilous.

Unlike other conflicts where expertise, political will and millions of dollars have been deployed to contain regional violence, this has not happened for Chechnya or the North Caucasus. The international response to date has been grossly inadequate. There are many explanations for this, including, chiefly, the Putin administration's ambivalence over international engagement on the issue. But it is also difficult to determine what will actually help. About three months ago in Berlin, we gathered representatives of key international organisations, several European governments and representatives of the younger generation of human rights activists from Russia to discuss exactly that. One answer given by many was to focus on the next generation. Young people in the North Caucasus have known nothing but war, leaving many vulnerable to extremism.

The international community must create opportunities for young people from the North Caucasus to be integrated with their peers from around Russia and other countries. Donors should support the creation of networks of young people that focus on common concerns, establish political dialogue about the future and address issues of reconciliation. Students from the North Caucasus need scholarships for study abroad, and universities and schools need assistance packages.

In addition, monitoring needs to be improved. For years, local organisations have tracked tens of thousands of detentions, killings, disappearances and incidences of torture in Chechnya. The shocking details have not moved the international community (with a few exceptions) to pay attention. As atrocities spread beyond Chechnya, local groups need help finding novel ways of conveying this information to the international community. The security implications of abuse need also to be addressed. Events in Chechnya and the North Caucasus are often depicted as peripheral to developments in Russia. In fact, human rights abuses and impunity have had profound security implications. Of grave concern are the links between the buses experienced by civilians, the lack of response from local and central authorities, and the growth in support for insurgents and terrorists among local populations. Clearly this is not a set of circumstances exclusive to this region.

International donors need to co-ordinate their activities in the North Caucasus. At the same time, donors need to get better at learning what types of humanitarian and developmental assistance are most effective in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, including from non-governmental experts. An international working group must be created on the North Caucasus. The conflict resolution community should be engaged to draw lessons from other regions. Many donors that support work in Russia have not made conflict resolution an area of funding. This should change.

The conventional wisdom that we can do nothing to tackle the problems of the North Caucasus must be challenged. On the anniversary of Beslan, and in memory of the tens of thousands of other Russian civilians and military personnel who have died or been affected by the war in Chechnya, the international community must dedicate new leadership and resources to persuade and assist Russia in addressing the crisis of the North Caucasus.

It needs to happen before another Beslan turns the region into a full-scale conflagration.

The authors are senior fellows at, respectively, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings Institution

(via chechnya-sl)

The Chechen Society Newspaper, #17, August 30, 2005

Chechnya the Draft

Until very recently there has been no precise or considered strategy in Chechnya for managing the Republic. To use an analogy, Chechnya is like a draft that the administration of the President of the Russian Federation is using for practice. Neither are the political leaders defining the course the Republic should follow themselves definite. The current leaders, President Alu Alkhanov and Ramzan Kadyrov - the Vice Prime Minister with security responsibility, are just strokes of the pen on this draft.

By Timur ALIEV

Alkhanov – Kadyrov

In the year since the death of Akhmat Kadyrov at the stadium in Grozny, the Kremlin has still not taken its final decision on whom to appoint in Chechnya and how. This is shown by the apportionment of power in the Republic, with no one leader or person striving for the leadership having been completely taken out of the fight. Apart from those who stand for the separation of Chechnya from Russia, naturally.

Meanwhile, the temporary option to manage the Republic - the fairy tale combination of Kadyrov-the-Younger-Alkhanov - is currently still in the lead.

Alkhanov is doubtless a decent man, a fact which seems to have won over the Kremlin for his candidacy. The general public can see the weakness in their President but still have some confidence in him. This support, however, has not been won over his Presidency of now almost a year, but was trust given like credit to the new leader of the Republic, which has still not completely run out.

Ramzan Kadyrov is patriotic in his own way – many of his actions bear witness to his desire to be useful to his Republic and his people. Examples include his recent decision to close all gambling arcades and the various building sites around Chechnya.

However, despite his achievements in the past year, Ramzan Kadyrov cannot compete with his father, for example, in his ability to lead external political affairs. Saying this, Kadyrov is still useful for the Kremlin as Moscow cannot see any other power in the Republic at present.

It is possible that Ramzan Kadyrov’s position will soon become a burden for the Kremlin because his resources are needed here and now, whilst punitive measures are necessary. The “Kadyrovtsy” [troops under the command of Ramzan Kadyrov] are their own kind of propaganda of the understanding that “it is better to be with us than against us”.

In any case this is not a question that can be solved in a day, especially after the Sochi meeting between Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov, which showed that the position of the latter in the Republic is as strong as ever.

The Opposition

Despite the large number of believers in the theory that Moscow decides everything and that Moscow is supporting someone particular in Chechnya, the Kremlin only decides the general line taken – the rest is decided by concrete individuals.

As a matter of fact it is in the Kremlin’s interest for new political figures to come through in the Republic, people capable of influencing the situation, as long as they fall within the current boundaries. I.e. the Kremlin needs opponents but not to the authorities in the Republic but to several figures within the authorities, namely Ramzan Kadyrov. If any new politician can prove he is indispensable, then it is possible he will be able to gain the support of the Kremlin.

However, this opposition should again not become military, and should not become a conflict, putting in doubt the current “stability” in the Republic, as the recent conflict between Ramzan Kadyrov and the former vice-Prime Minister of Chechnya, Bislan Gantamirov, showed. When the conflict escalated beyond the Cabinet boundaries through the mass media, the Kremlin was forced to intervene and “reconcile” the politicians, calling them to the Kremlin offices and ordering them to calm down.

Good vs. Evil

The only definition that exists, is in regard to the separatists. After the destruction of the separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov it became clear that no contact at all with them was expected (of any kind – no talks, nothing). The elimination of Maskhadov allowed for the strict division of Chechnya into two political camps – the pro-Moscow and the pro-Ichkeria. At one end of this conflict there is the Kremlin and the pro-Moscow leadership of Chechnya, whilst at the other there is the terrorist and leader of the radical wing of Chechen separatists, Shamil’ Basaev and his supporters. There is no longer any middle, the moderate fighters who prefer a political resolution to the conflict and whose leader was Aslan Maskhadov.

This has turned into a classical type of opposition: the “good” and the “evil”. The Kremlin is good, as it proclaims a peaceful future for Chechnya, Shamil’ Basaev is bad, calling for total Jihad. Basaev is the kind of enemy the Kremlin wants to see in the Caucasus. He takes hospitals and schools hostage, constantly threatens new acts of terrorism and calls Muslims to a global jihad. Basaev is bad. He is a classical enemy who needs to be destroyed and that will be Russian policy in the Caucasus.

Europe Against a Sovereign Chechnya

European policy on Chechnya is quite straightforward. Europe is against the violation of any human rights in Chechnya and is prepared to announce this firmly in recommendations to Russia from European institutions. However, Europe is equally firm in its objections to the acquisition of full independence for Chechnya, particularly by non-political means, being wary of creating an international precedent. In supporting Chechnya in its attempt to gain independence, the world could get other conflicts, for example in Kosovo or in the State of Punjab. Europe does not want to redefine the world’s territorial boundaries and so will not support the Chechen separatists in their military struggle with Russia.

The Economy

For the future Chechnya will remain an “additional supply of raw materials” for Russia – there are no plans to restore Chechen oil-refining plants. The process of signing the Agreement on the division of power between Moscow and Chechnya, which all regions need to sign, is also being dragged out. Official Chechnya is trying to win back its own resources within the framework of this agreement, so far unsuccessfully.

All operations concerned with oil (extraction, transport) are currently still handled by the Federal State Company “Rosneft’”. Part of the money is returned to the Republic, but only through Moscow and only in the form of grants.

This happens mainly because Moscow is worried that if Chechnya comes off the grant “hook” and gains economic independence, it could easily start wanting political independence too.

Lobbying aimed at the Kremlin by Chechnya’s neighbours in the south of Russia may also be partially to blame for this, as they do not want a strong economic neighbour either and do not want to see a redistribution of economic benefits in favour of Chechnya.

Restoration and Corruption

The restoration of the Chechen Republic is happening extremely slowly for two reasons. The first is bureaucracy and how as a result of a lack of co-ordination of instructions any important decisions to be taken are delayed. The second reason is corruption at every level of authority. Every bureaucrat in Chechnya comes to office having paid the person above him. This means that instead of working normally at his post he has to earn the money to pay off the amount he paid for it.

Any inhabitant in Chechnya wanting to find him or herself a prestigious or well-paid job finds themselves in virtually the same position. The ability to get a job by handing over a bribe also leads to a situation whereby positions managing the republic are sometimes taken by people who do not have the necessary knowledge to do the job.

The lack of permanent jobs forces many inhabitants of the Republic to work in the “grey economy” as it is called – either as a private cab driver, small trader, day work on a building site or elsewhere, or working for semi-criminal or criminal “businesses” – extracting or refining oil, transporting the oil products, or stealing non-ferrous metals.

Military action and the violation of human rights

There has been a marked decrease in the militarization of the situation in the Republic in the last two years. There are no longer any large-scale military actions being run in Chechnya. The separatists continue the partisan war – damaging military equipment and small diversions, whilst the federal forces run special operations combing the woodland and foothill tracts.

Tactics of mass mop-up operations in populated areas of Chechnya, changed several years ago to targeted operations to detain those suspected of belonging to the separatist forces, have not brought much success. At the same time it is precisely these tactics used by the federal forces that have provoked the most criticism from the public and human rights organisations, as innocent people often suffer.

The policy of “Chechenisation” whereby Chechens fight Chechens, which was conceived by Moscow, has already started to bite back. This was shown by the situation in Borozdinovskaya. Having given weapons and a carte-blanche to destroy fighters to loyal Chechens, Moscow has created a force in the Republic that it cannot control.

Military presence

The federal military [forces] are no longer a force that can completely influence the situation in the Republic. The tactic of controlling the situation through federal check-points, set up on key roads in Chechnya, has gone forever, never having justified itself. Some of the check-points have been removed, others take care of routine checks on road vehicles.

At the moment we can say that the military have “gone into the shadows” but that they are still carrying out their activities as before. Their strength does not depend on the 80,000 troop contingent which is based in the republic, but on their contacts with the Chechen security forces and politicians. Some of the military, including the former head of the General Headquarters of the Russian Armed Forces, Anatolii Kvashnin, and the current head, Yury Baluevskii, support Bislan Gantamirov. The military have known him since the beginning of the Chechen war in 1999, when Gantamirov created the Chechen police detachments, which came forward on the side of the federal troops against the fighters. He is also trusted because he does not use former fighters as his military support.

Parliament

The future Chechen parliament, the elections to which have been set for the end of November this year, will not become a political force, capable of changing the situation in Chechnya or even influencing the share of power in the Republic. This is mainly because any power the parliament could have in reforming Chechnya will depend totally on the Kremlin and as yet there are no preconditions for that.

No one trying to get into parliament is actually aiming for that anyway. Gantamirov himself wants to get back to the Republic any way he can as he has too much money invested in there. He owns a market and several buildings in the centre of Grozny and could lose them if he has no support within the republic leadership.

The future parliament will more likely become an auxiliary resource. If “Unified Russia” gains the victory then it will mean a strengthening in the position of Ruslan Yamadaev in the Republic, the former deputy of the Russian State Duma from Chechnya and his brothers. Ramzan Kadyrov is actively trying to stop this and is ready to create a new social movement and promote it to parliament.

The point of view of President Putin’s Official Representative in the South of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Kozak, could also win the day. Dmitry Kozak is not against the parliament becoming a multi-party entity as this would allow [Russia] to demonstrate the democratic nature of power in the Republic and at the same time weaken Kadyrov and Yamadaev’s position there.

The Kremlin can allow itself this as from the very start no political forces that could stand for independence will be allowed to take part in the parliamentary elections. From Kozak’s point of view any democratic and liberal forces in Chechnya who could be guaranteed a place in the parliament if they won, would stand at most for a broad mandate for Chechnya within Russia, but would not stand for full sovereignty on any terms.

Civil society

At the moment there is no stable, active civil society that could become a new force in these conditions of an extreme centralisation of power in Chechnya. The rare sparks of civil action at events like demonstrations and human rights conferences do not aim to create this civil society either, but are more like PR for several public leaders who would not be against going into politics themselves.

The situation for civil society in Chechnya is similar to that in Russia generally. So in Moscow President Putin is trying in vain to create a Public Chamber which could control the vertical of power which he has created, without destroying it completely. In Chechnya the situation is worse because the local authorities have not still fully understood the importance of civil society.

The official number of inhabitants in the Chechen Republic is one million and eighty thousand people (according to information from the Russian Census of 2002). According to unofficial figures there are around 800,000 people living in Chechnya today.

As far as the demographic situation in the Republic is concerned there is a characteristically high birth-rate. In 2004 there was a natural growth in the population of around 25 babies for every one thousand inhabitants, whilst the birth-rate was around 3.9 times higher than the death-rate.

The average wage in 2004 was 3,600 roubles. Those who worked in finance, credit and pension provision earned the highest salary – ten and a half thousand roubles. Next came: branches of the authorities – six and a half thousand roubles, material production – six thousand roubles, material-technical supply and sales – four and a half thousand roubles. The lowest wages were for agricultural workers – one and a half thousand roubles.

The number of children in the Republic aged under 16 is 416,000. The overall number of pensioners of different categories is just over 200,000. The average pension is 1,400 roubles.

The high level of unemployment can be explained mainly by the lack of industry and developed agriculture. Just over 150,000 people out of 550,000 economically active people who are fit to work have work. Out of this number just over 100,000 inhabitants of the republic have permanent work. The highest number of jobs is found in the education sector- almost 34,000, the health sector – 16,000 and agriculture – 10,000. Seven and a half thousand people work in industry, which is one thousand less that those working for the republic’s authorities - eight and a half thousand. (According to figures from the publication “Business Chechnya”).

This article is based on the author’s material for the Rosbalt information agency.

Translated by Claire C.RIMMER

"Chechen Society" newspaper, #17, 30 August 2005
http://www.chechensociety.net/

THE PRAGUE WATCHDOG WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, No. 35 (August 29, 2005)
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1) THE WEEK IN BRIEF (August 22 - 28)
August 22 - A vehicle was blown up by a mine near a hospital in Nazran, Ingushetia. One passer-by was killed.

August 23 - Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree setting the date of parliamentary elections in the Chechen Republic to October 27. He also signed a government resolution removing Batukhan Kurganov, the head of the federal state-run company in charge of reconstruction in the Chechen Republic, from his post.

August 23 - Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, successor to the slain President of independent Chechnya Aslan Maskhadov, appointed the members of his new cabinet. Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev became the First Vice-Premier.

August 23-24 - About fifteen representatives of the Beslan Mothers Committee staged a sit-in inside the building of North Ossetia's Supreme Court, where the process with the "only surviving terrorist" Nurpashi Kulayev is underway, in protest against the alleged failure of the authorities to investigate last year's Beslan tragedy properly.

August 25 - Ingushetia's Prime Minister Ibragim Malsagov was seriously wounded in a mine attack on his vehicle in Nazran. One of his bodyguards was killed.

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2) UPCOMING EVENTS

September 1-3 - Russia: The first anniversary of the school hostage tragedy that took place in the North Ossetian town of Beslan.

September 2 - Moscow (Russia): Representatives of the Beslan Mothers Committee will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

September 3 - Russia: Various events in memory of the victims of last year's Beslan school siege will take place throughout Russia. A minute of silence will be held at 13:05.

For more upcoming Chechnya-related events go to http://www.watchdog.cz/calendar.

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3) REGIONAL REPORTING

Attempt on the life of Ingushetia's prime minister (by Timur Aliyev, August 26)
As a result of the two explosions, Malsagov was injured in the leg and one of his guards was killed.
http://www.watchdog.cz/?show=000000-000004-000002-000025&lang=1

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4) HUMANITARIAN - SURVEY

Results of survey carried out by Caucasus Times in Karachay-Cherkessia (by Caucasus Times, August 26)
The results testify to, i.a., a high degree of dissatisfaction of the population concerning the republic's leadership, a pessimistic mood with regard to the republic's future and a high degree of tension in society at large.
http://www.watchdog.cz/?show=000000-000002-000001-000159&lang=1

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5) ATTACKS ON HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
Monitoring attacks on the rights defenders whose work is connected with the Chechen conflict.

Link: http://www.watchdog.cz/attacks

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6) LATEST ADDITION TO OUR LINKS LIBRARY:

Golos Chechenskoi Republiky (http://www.goloschr.net)

For more Chechnya-related links go to our Links library ( http://www.watchdog.cz/links ), which is being continuously updated.

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Prague Watchdog Weekly Newsletter is a publication of Prague Watchdog. If you wish to subscribe (unsubscribe) to it, please send us an e-mail to mail@watchdog.cz. The newsletter is usually sent out on Monday evenings.

Prague Watchdog launched its website in August 2000 and its aim is to collect and disseminate information on the ongoing conflict in Chechnya, focusing on human rights, media coverage, political situation and relief aid.

Visit us at http://www.watchdog.cz. For the Russian version, go to http://www.watchdog.cz/russian.
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At Free Thoughts, Stefania has some disturbing news about developments in the Italian blogosphere.

The Sunday Times, London:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1753404,00.html

August 28, 2005

Beslan mothers tell Putin: stay away
Mark Franchetti, Beslan


THE heartbreaking three-day vigil will begin at dawn. Thousands of wailing mourners are expected to gather this Thursday at Beslan’s bullet-ridden School Number 1 to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s worst terrorist attack.

Dressed in black, they will carry flowers and bottles of water as a symbolic way of quenching the thirst endured by their loved ones in the last hours before death.

Yet as the inhabitants of the nondescript southern Russian town come together to remember the 330 people — 171 of them children — who died after Chechen terrorists stormed the school and took more than 1,200 hostages, one man has been told to stay away: President Vladimir Putin.

The Committee of Beslan Mothers, a group of 150 women who lost children and grandchildren in the attack, has banned the Russian leader from the memorial service in protest at what they claim is a Kremlin-led cover-up of mistakes made during the siege.

The women, who have written three times to Putin pleading for a meeting but have so far received no reply, are demanding that several senior state officials be put on trial for criminal negligence.

They accuse the men — who include the local head of the FSB, the Russian security service — of failing to prevent the attack and of lying so blatantly throughout the siege that they compounded the danger faced by the hostages.

They suspect that two powerful explosions inside the school and a subsequent fire which killed many hostages could have been set off by the Russians, not the terrorists, as investigators claim.

The mothers have denounced the continuing trial of Nurpashi Kulayev, the only terrorist to have been caught alive, as a farce and are angry at what they regard as the incompetence of the rescue operation, arguing that many more people could have been saved.

“We don’t want Putin here during the memorial,” said Ala Khanayeva-Romanova, a former hostage whose daughter, Marianna, 15, died in the siege. “He and his state bureaucrats would come here only to try to rehabilitate themselves. He is not sincere and feels no grief. He should have come to save our children during the siege. It’s too late now.

“The Kulayev trial, the investigation, it’s all a smoke screen, a farce. It’s a cover-up. We are fed up with this show. We want the truth and won’t stop fighting until we know it.”

Angered by the Kremlin’s silence, Khanayeva-Romanova and dozens of other grieving mothers are planning a 1,000-mile protest march to Moscow to secure a meeting with the president. Last week they also briefly occupied the court where Kulayev is on trial.

Despite a year-long investigation, the identity of 12 of the 32 terrorists is still not known. A parliamentary inquiry set up reluctantly by Putin has repeatedly postponed the publication of its findings. In any case, most of the people of Beslan have already dismissed it in advance as a whitewash that will clear the security forces of any blame.

The women have compiled their own dossier condemning the authorities’ handling of the attack. How, they demand to know, was a large group of heavily armed terrorists able to cross from Ingushetia to North Ossetia, where Beslan lies, and reach the town without being challenged by police? Five police officers are being tried for negligence, but victims’ relatives believe they are scapegoats and want more senior figures to be investigated.

Throughout the siege, the Russian authorities lied about the number of hostages, claiming there were only 300 even after locals reported that at least 1,000 were inside. Survivors said that when the terrorists heard the official headcount on the radio they taunted their captives, saying the state had buried them alive.

Officials from the emergency headquarters set up to deal with the hostage crisis also said the terrorists had not made clear demands, but that negotiations with them were on course. Both claims were false.

Early on the second day of the siege, Ruslan Aushev, the former Ingushetian president, who was the only person allowed into the school, was given a list of demands to end the war in Chechnya signed by Shamil Basayev, Russia’s most wanted terrorist, who claimed responsibility for the attack.

The paper was kept secret, however. And although he negotiated the release of 20 toddlers and children, Aushev was later falsely accused by some officials of colluding with the Chechens.

It has also emerged that the terrorists named four high-ranking state officials with whom they wanted to hold talks, but by the third morning none of them had come to the school. Frustrated, the gunmen — who had already executed several male hostages and dumped them out of a window — stopped giving the hostages water. Held in sweltering heat, they resorted to drinking their own urine.

“On the second day, we were all very thirsty,” said Malik Kalchakeyev, 14, a former hostage who burst into tears as he gave evidence against Kulayev last week. “Women told us boys to pee into plastic bottles so the children could drink our pee. Small children, even babies drank it.”

Investigators claim the gunmen deliberately set off bombs wired around the gymnasium in which the hostages were held, or that one fell to the ground accidentally. They say the explosions, on the third day of the siege, precipitated a gun battle with security forces that caused a fire, bringing down the gym roof on hundreds of hostages.

Others died in the crossfire. Many in Beslan believe the explosions were triggered by Russian forces. Kulayev, a 25-year-old Chechen carpenter, has testified they were caused by a sniper shooting dead a terrorist standing with his foot on a detonator. The Russians, who lost 12 elite anti-terrorist officers in the battle, have rejected the accusation.

Prosecutors initially denied eyewitness claims that the soldiers used flame throwers that could have set fire to the roof. Only recently, after residents presented them with empty shells, did investigators confirm that they had been used.

They denied the flame throwers could have caused the inferno as they say they are incendiary grenade launchers which create a small ball of fire lasting only a few seconds.

The relatives are also demanding that officials in charge of the rescue operation be investigated because there were only two ageing fire engines on site when the blaze broke out.

A year after the siege, two new schools have been built and money has poured into the town from the state and abroad. Yet reminders of the tragedy are everywhere — chief among them the old school building that remains as it was on the last day of the siege.

People in tears, including many children, visit every day, roaming the bullet-riddled corridors, writing messages to the dead on the walls, leaving flowers and bottles of water. The place where the terrorists executed the men on the first day is still marked by trails of dry blood. Clumps of black hair dangle from the ceiling above the spot where a female suicide bomber blew herself up.

The psychological scars run so deep that many children are terrified at the prospect of returning to school this week.

Makharik Tskayev, 4, one of the youngest survivors, still does not know his mother and sister were killed, because his father cannot bring himself to tell him. The little boy, who was hit by shrapnel, was in a state of panic when his grandmother signed him up to the local kindergarten. He said he feared “the men in masks” would be waiting for him.

“He is a difficult child now, often throwing tantrums,” said Svetlana Tskayeva, his grandmother. “Whenever he passes a TV set showing a war film or shoot-out, he watches it mesmerised. He still asks about his sister and mother but we can’t bear to tell him they won’t be coming back and say simply that they are still in the school.”

Since the Beslan attack, the Russians have intensified their hunt for Islamic rebels. In the spring they killed Aslan Maskhadov, the former Chechen president, and several other senior rebel commanders.

Basayev remains at large, however, and only recently defended his men’s actions in Beslan in an interview in which he threatened further attacks.

The violence continues across Chechnya and in Ingushetia — whose prime minister narrowly escaped an assassination attempt last week. There have been more than 70 terrorist attacks since the beginning of the year in neighbouring Dagestan, a clear sign that the conflict is spreading.

“I used to have great respect for Putin,” said Ludmilla Jimiyev whose son, Oleg, 15, died in the siege. “Even Oleg used to look up to him because, like the president, he loved judo. I hate the terrorists for destroying my life but with his policies Putin has failed us.

“His government only worried about killing the terrorists, not saving our children. That is why he doesn’t want to meet us. Because then he would have to look into our eyes and would not know what to say.”

THE QUESTIONS

Many questions asked by victims’ relatives remain unanswered -


Why have investigators failed to establish the identity of 12 of the 32 Chechen hostage-takers?

Why did police not prevent a busload of heavily armed terrorists driving into the town?

Why did the authorities play down the number of hostages held during the siege?

Why did officials claim the terrorists had made no demands when they had, and insist negotiations had begun when they had not?

Did Russian forces trigger the final explosions by opening fire on the school?

Why were only two ageing fire engines stationed at the school?

Why have no officials been put on trial for their mishandling of the siege?

Have things gone too far already? Are we done for? Must we wait
Hearing doom's approaching footsteps regular down miles of straight;

Run the whole night through in gumboots, stumble on and gasp for breath,
Terrors drawing close and closer, winter landscape, fox's death;

Or, in friendly fireside circle, sit and listen for the crash
Meaning that the mob has realised something's up, and start to smash;

Engine-drivers with their oil-cans, factory girls in overalls
Blowing sky-high monster stores, destroying intellectuals?

Hope and fear are neck and neck: which is it near the course's end
Crashes, having lost his nerve; is overtaken on the bend?

Shut up talking, charming in the best suits to be had in town,
Lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.

Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving like a stone:
Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to leave ourselves alone.

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try;
If we don't it doesn't matter, but we'd better start to die.

W.H. Auden (April 1930)

Basaev Named To Chechen-Resistance Cabinet

26 August 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Chechen President and resistance commander Abdul-Khalim Sadullaev has appointed radical field commander Shamil Basaev as first deputy prime minister in the new Chechen government, lenta.ru and "Kommersant-Daily" reported on 26 August.

Basaev was named to that post in early 1997 by Sadullaev's predecessor,Aslan Maskhadov, but he stepped down months later because of disagreements between the two men. He was reappointed acting first deputy premier in early 1998, but resigned a second time six months later, after which he launched an unsuccessful bid to impeach Maskhadov.

In the summer of 2002, Maskhadov named Basaev to head the State Defense Committee, a post he resigned from following the hostage taking at a Moscow theater in October of that year. Basaev has claimed responsibility for that raid and for the September 2004 hostage incident at a school in Beslan that left more than 300 dead. The United States government has declared him a terrorist.

Maskhadov's killing in March 2005 has left Basaev and Doku Umarov, whom Sadullaev named deputy president, the two most experienced and senior field commanders.

Sadullaev also reappointed as minister of information Movladi Udugov,who served in that capacity under Chechen President Djokhar Dudaev. Udugov served briefly as Maskhadov's foreign minister, and then as a member of the Security Council; Maskhadov fired him from that latter post in August 1999 following Basaev's incursion into Daghestan.

Udugov left Chechnya shortly after the outbreak of the second Chechen war and in recent years has lived in Turkey, where he ran the kavkaz.center website.

Since the beginning of this month, Sadullaev has issued a series of decrees dismissing the government and envoys in exile he inherited from Maskhadov.

Writing in the New York Times, C.J. Chivers examines the situation and state of public opinion in Beslan, a year after terrorists laid siege to School No. 1. He gives attention to the officially discouraged work of the regional parliamentary investigation led by Stanislav Kesayev:

After months of denials, the prosecutor's office admitted this summer that the Russians had fired powerful shoulder-fired rockets, known as Shmels, at the school. Some families believe the rockets caused or accelerated the blaze, although this is not clear.

Whatever the rockets' actual effect, the bereaved mothers say, their presence demonstrated the government was willing to use indiscriminate force where children were present.

There is similar anger and disbelief over the use of tanks. One witness, Teimuraz Konukov, said that at about 2:30 p.m. he lay behind a tree across the street and watched a Russian tank fire its main barrel into the school's facade. Hostages remained inside at the time.

Prosecutors insist the tank did not fire until evening, after all the hostages had escaped or were dead. Konukov, whose version aligns with what was witnessed by two journalists from The New York Times, is incredulous. "I was right here," he said, pointing to the spot.

No full explanation has been given for the even more extensive tank shooting later in the day that destroyed one of the school's wings.

Nurpasha Kulayev stands in a cage in the courtroom, rarely raising his eyes. Russia claims he is the sole surviving terrorist from the siege; his trial had been expected to bring a deeper understanding of those days. Instead it has become a showcase of contempt for the government.

Families contest even the authorities' most basic claims. The prosecutors, for example, say 32 terrorists seized the school - 30 men with automatic rifles and 2 women wearing suicide bombs. Thirty-one of them died, according to this account. (They are not counted among the 331 victims.) But many survivors and participants insist they saw at least four other men who were captured and have not been seen again, and a third woman. Their faith in the official version has been further undermined because Russia has not publicly identified all the terrorists it says were killed.

The trial's conduct has also perplexed the families. The officers who arrested Kulayev have not testified, but people who knew little of him are regularly on the stand. At a recent hearing the slate of witnesses so frustrated one woman that she stood and loudly scolded the judge.

The trial is only one example of what families here regard as official incompetence and callousness.

A crime-scene video taken the morning after the battle, leaked to the Mothers Committee, shows investigators shoveling ashes among the dead. At one point two men discover a dead girl, and unceremoniously toss her blackened body into a bag.

Families say evidence was lost or mishandled, a conviction that deepened in February when residents found charred items from the school in a local dump. In the mess were human remains: tangles of hair and dried skin.

They also wonder why the school was secured for less than 36 hours after the battle - scant time for forensics work. Instead of serving as a resource for investigators, Kesayev said, the bloody ruins were converted "to a place for pilgrimages and excursions."

The prosecutors have responded by declaring his commission illegal - a declaration of no legal standing, and one that Kesayev said fits a pattern. "Every agency wants to be first in line for their medals," he said. "And last in line to take responsibility for the failures."

Beslan Demands Words, Not Silence

By Masha Gessen

At the Aug. 16 hearing in Vladikavkaz, where the lone accused hostage-taker is standing trial for last year's attack on a school in Beslan, a remarkable exchange took place. A man named Eduard Adayev testified as a witness. A well-known and, apparently, well-connected athlete in North Ossetia, he arrived at the school soon after it was seized. Then, two days later, he was one of the people saving children from the burning school. He says he saved two children before he was injured.

Adayev's description of the rescue effort was blood-chilling. But something else he described was perhaps even more important. One of the prosecutors asked Adayev what he knew about the origins of the figure 354. This was how many people Russian officials claimed were inside the school -- when in fact there were more than 1,000. Former hostages have testified that when the hostage-takers heard the figure on television, they concluded that Moscow was laying the groundwork for a planned storm of the school by lowering the estimate of potential casualties. This, say the hostages, was when their captors stopped giving them water.

Here is what Adayev said: "When we heard that figure, 354, we started asking, 'Where did that come from anyway?' ... Ordinary people thought that if there were 354, then there would be a storm, and if there were 1,500, then, naturally, nobody was going to storm the building. We thought so, too, but then we asked ... someone and then someone else, and they were all saying, 'We put a person there to make a list of people.' He was writing down the relatives of people who were in there. That's where that figure came from." Adayev added that the person making the list was a policeman and that the figure 354 held until the standoff had ended, despite the fact that Adayev and others made up a huge poster claiming there were no fewer than 900 people inside and held it up for the cameras.

I think this is probably the truth, if not necessarily the whole truth. And it is a terrific illustration of how things work in this country. The figure 354 arose accidentally. Law enforcement officials and Kremlin representatives seized on it out of a combination of laziness and expediency: No one could be bothered to get the true figure, and the low estimate was handy. The question is why initially the media continued to reproduce this number. One of the main exceptions was Izvestia, which provided outstanding coverage of the tragedy, for which the editor was promptly ousted. Because the default setting for many Russian journalists these days is to report what they are told, not what they see -- to participate unquestioningly in a conspiracy of silence.

This conspiracy is everywhere -- perhaps nowhere more evident than at the Beslan trial itself. Adayev's testimony is atypical: He is a well-respected and well-informed citizen of North Ossetia, who clearly commands the court's respect. But if you read the trial transcripts, all too often you will see remarks to other witnesses from the prosecutors and judge like: "Don't talk," "That question cannot be answered," "Now is no time for that" and other variations on "Shut up."

This is also what we are all invited to do next week, on the first anniversary of Beslan, when the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi is organizing a silent rally. "No Words" says the white-on-black poster advertising the event. It looks beautiful. But here is the thing. When it comes to the memory of Beslan, the right things to do are to listen -- or read the transcripts of the trial online -- remember and tell others. Silence, when it comes to Beslan, is not dignified. Silence is the opposite of truth.

Masha Gessen is a contributing editor at Bolshoi Gorod.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/08/25/007.html

A video download (92 MB) of Andrei Babitsky's interview with Shamil Basayev is available here.

A Caucasus Times interview with Andrei Babitsky - the Russian journalist who recently interviewed Shamil Basayev - makes interesting reading. The interview dates from 2003, yet the insights it offers are still valid, and increasing in validity with each day that passes:

Andrei Babytsky: "The long-standing war resulted in Islamic radicalism in Chechnya"

Caucasus Times: Andrei, prior to now you had been to Chechnya quite often, but this time the Chechen rebels movement became your main interest there, while the mass media is focused on elections in Chechnya?

Andrei Babytsky: Actually, very few have an idea what is brewing in the Chechen rebels underground since the resistance movement has mutated in the course of four years of the second war campaign. There have been a lot of speculations on this account, but no foreign journalist has ever been able to get to the guerillas camps in the mountains thus far. As to the Russian journalists, they are not interested in what's going on the other side, at that restricted by the Russian legislation that vetoed any contact with the Chechen mujahideens as an enemy party. The western journalists have very limited opportunity to get in contact with rebels and are at constant risk to be expelled from the country. Actually, as of now the rebels remain quite isolated that are not interested themselves in any contacts with foreigners. All this also has induced me to go to Chechnya.

CT: What is the main cause of the growing radicalism in Chechnya?

AB: The Chechen rebels movement is being radicalized and the process got into high gear. The anti-Russian movement for self-determination has mutated into a jihad. The national liberation movement turned into a religious war. This is quite natural when the movement was secluded and the rebel underground is stewing in its own juice. There is no channel for accruing fury, where no exchange of ideas or emotional contacts with the outside world. On the other hand, just think of it, in a week I had spent over there in the mountains it was raining all day long. A warrior there needs to be constantly on a move, loaded with munitions. Therefore, one must be motivated and to have an aspiration for an emotional objective to survive somehow. The more radical, plain and rewardable the doctrine is, the easier the war path becomes for the holy warrior who might get killed next morning but would gain his reward and relish in paradise gardens. Such harsh conditions originated the doctrine, which appeals to an experience of the first Islamic communities. It has not gone too far yet, but the course is clear and constant.

CT: Prior to now scores of observers have paralleled the Chechen conflict to the Palestinian long-term conflicts, since the counter-terrorism warfare has been declared round the world. Do you find any analogy between these two conflicts?

AB: I would say, there is absolutely no similarity in both examples in historical perspective. Since such radicalism and methods do not correspond to the Chechen national traditions the populace as well on plain as in the mountains would never accept these religious doctrines. And the majority of the Chechens do support the rebels not as a group of the people with definite religious beliefs but as the field police, as those who are capable to resist and fight off anyhow the bloody arbitrariness in Chechnya. The Islamic radicalism in Chechnya was ensued as a result of this long-term war. Actually, the longer the war continues the more radical the Chechen armed resistance will get. It is a little bit complicated to grasp, but there is the Palestinian conflict does not match our case.

CT: As of now almost all observers consider Kadyrov to be a winner in the upcoming presidential elections in the republic. How good are chances for Kadyrov that he will win?

AB: The Russian authorities actually have granted Kadyrov a free hand in Chechnya who managed to create an enormous, powerful administrative machine, which has been killing the people unabatedly. And now Kadyrov's forces have turned to be a more awful scourge for the populace than the federal forces. That's the way things are. So far, a man detained by the Russian troops could have chances to get away battered, crippled but alive. Not with Kadyrov's gunmen. They leave nobody alive. As a matter of fact, Kadyrov's loyalists have all resources to make the election results predictable. Therefore, I consider Kadyrov is going to get the presidential office in Chechnya.

CT: Is there any precondition giving hope for the situation in Chechnya will ever get better?

AB: I just do not know. The situation there is quite complicated. Today it is almost impossible to predict all factors, which would influence the situation in Chechnya, there are lots of them. Thus far, there are several groups in Russia, which are interested in the war to go unabated.

Islam Tekushev, Prague, Caucasus Times

Caucasus Times ® 2003. All Rights Reserved. contact us: info@caucasustimes.com

My better half died in this bed, he just slumped against that wall without saying anything. He died so suddenly that I didn’t have time to do anything. We’d been in the sauna and when we came back into the house again he complained about his chest and said he had a pain in it. I tried to get him to lie down, but he’s never listened to what I say. He just kept walking about, and he looked terrible, I noticed that, for I was keeping an eye on him. I pretended to be watching some sports show on the telly before going to bed. After a bit, my hubby came to bed too, and then he was dead. He didn’t even have to time to pray to have his sins forgiven, he went godless to his grave, even though I told the priest that he’d said sorry for his sins and had called on God. I couldn’t bring myself to ring for a taxi so late at night to take him to the church but fell asleep beside him like I usually did, and only made the call after I’d had my morning coffee. The taxi driver arrived after the school run, put hubby’s corpse on the back seat and then drove it to the church, probably straight to the morgue. I made sure it was buried quickly, and I didn’t bother with much of a funeral. Me and my hubby didn’t have much to do with other folk. We kept ourselves to ourselves and it was best that way. We didn’t run around the village and we didn’t keep the coffee-pot warm for strangers. We were able to live in peace, because it’s a long way from the village to our place and nowadays people are so lazy that they can’t manage to walk more than a metre on their own legs. It was the second half of the winter when he was buried, and I thought everything would go on like before, but right enough there was a change. I started coughing, and the cough just got worse and worse. I couldn’t sleep in any more, for as soon as I went to bed it started, really bad. I kept the radio on loud from morning to night and tried to stop coughing. Of course I knew that it’s not a good sign if you’re coughing all the time and can’t get any sleep. I started taking hubby’s pills, I don’t know what they were but at least I began to sleep again. As soon as I woke the phlegm would come up from my throat in bucketfuls, but I slept as sweet as a baby. I only got up to put more wood in the stove and make meat broth. Then it was summer, and since I didn’t need to heat the place I just lay in bed and drank sour milk and swallowed pills by the handful. Hubby had stuffed the medicine cabinet full of them, for over the years the doctor had prescribed thousands of them for him, but he never wanted to take them. Well, I took them all, and slept like a log. By the autumn I was full of phlegm up to here and the trouble was that I couldn’t manage to get to the medicine cabinet. What else could you expect, since I’d been living on nothing but pills and sour milk for months. I don’t know what I was thinking of, I suppose I just wanted to slip down into the grave and lie beside my better half. That’s probably how I saw it, and I didn’t care about anything, never did any housework or anything at all. I just lay there, listened to the radio and the TV at the same time, waiting for death and coughing blood. But then one day that damned taxi driver came to the door and knocked. I was convinced it was the angel of death who’d come to collect me, but no it damn well wasn’t, it was the taxi driver and he dragged me out into his car. He took me to the health centre and they immediately took me into the clinic and began to examine me. And of course they found a thousand and one things wrong with me. They began giving me more pills and yelled at me for not looking after myself. They even said I’d been on the point of dying. I was that weak, I was practically nothing but skin and bone. And they yelled at me for peeing in my pants and lying in my own shit for months. I mean, there was nothing I could say. I don’t even understand myself how it happened. That it all went so badly wrong. Anyway, I lay in the hospital for months and they fed me through a funny kind of tube and linked me up to all kinds of machines. I put a bit of flesh on my bones there and started to get better. I’m in really good shape now that they’ve sent me home. They send a woman from the council to clean for me and bring me food. The nurse always comes when I need her, so they’re looking after me. And now I understand why they keep an eye on poor old ladies like me. What’s behind it is that the council want my flat, but they’ll wait in vain. I’ve left everything to hubby and he’s left everything to me. When I die, hubby will inherit it all. So then they’ll just have to bury the house with us in the graveyard.

from: Rosa Liksom, Tyhjän tien paratiisit (Paradises of the Open Road, 1989)

Sheaves from Sagaland

PART II.-THE NATIVES

The Icelanders are human

`They are not so robust and hardy that nothing can hurt them; for they are human beings and experience the sensations common to mankind.'-Horrebow.

Concerning their hair

`The hair which belongs to the class Lissotriches, subdivision Euplokamo, seldom shows the darker shades of brown. The colour ranges from carroty red to turnip yellow, from barley-sugar to the blond-cendre so expensive in the civilised markets. We find all the gradations of Parisian art here natural; the corn golden, the blonde fulvide, the incandescent (carroty), the florescent or sulphurhued, the beurre frais, the fulvastre or lion's mane, and the rubide or mahogany, Raphael's favourite tint.' -Burton.

Concerning their eyes

`A very characteristic feature of the race is the eye, dure and cold as a pebble - the mesmerist would despair at the first sight.'-Ibid.

Concerning their mouths

`The oral region is often coarse and unpleasant.' -Ibid.

Concerning their temperament

`The Icelander's temperament is nervoso-lymphatic and at best nervoso-sanguineous.' -Ibid.

Concerning their appearance

`The Icelanders are of a good, honest disposition, but they are at the same time so serious and sullen that I hardly remember to have seen any of them laugh.' -Van Troll.

Concerning their character

`This poor but highly respectable people.' -McKenzie.

Letters from Iceland - W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (1937)

The Prague Watchdog has resumed publication after a break of several weeks. Two of the latest posts are about human rights initiatives in Chechnya (my tr.):

Grozny residents demand resumption of compensation payments (August 18 2005)

By Timur Aliyev

GROZNY, Chechnya - On August 18, a picket took place outside Chechnya's Government House in Grozny. About 50 people held placards demanding that the republic's leadership resume the payment of financial compensation for lost homes and personal belongings.

The placards bore the slogans: "Give us back our compensation", "Change your minds! We'll declare a hunger strike" and "Shame on Russia and Chechnya".

In connection with the picket, during the first half of the day the police closed the section of the motorway that runs past the government building.

Payments of financial compensation in Chechnya were stopped on the decision of the local authorities several months ago, as it was officially explained, "in connection with numerous instances of infringement and abuse on the part of officials".

Thursday's action on was a continuation of the picket held a week ago. Then a similar picket closed the road in front of the Rosselkhozbank building in the centre of Grozny. Last time the demonstrators dispersed after receiving promises that as soon as the money for the payments reached the republic, it would start to be paid out.

The payments of financial compensation to the citizens of the Chechen Republic for residential property and personal belongings lost in the course of military actions involve a sum of 350,000 rubles (300,000 for lost residential property and 50,000 for personal belongings). In all, 142,000 applications have been filed, and scarcely more than half of them have been paid.

--------------------------


Organization created in Chechnya for women whose relatives have disappeared without trace (August 19 2005)


By Timur Aliyev

GROZNY, Chechnya - Chechen women whose relatives have disappeared without trace have decided to create their own association. This was decided at a constituent assembly which took place in Grozny on August 18.

Approximately 60 women and about ten representatives of human rights organizations spoke about the possibilities of searching for their disappeared relatives and of punishing those responsible for their disappearance. According to them, the recently created organization will work precisely in this direction, with priority given to an investigative response to cases of fresh disappearances of Chechen residents.

The organization will include only women whose relatives have disappeared during "mop-ups" and night round-ups in Chechnya. The human rights activists who were present at the meeting are ready to help the women in the formation of the association.

"In the initial stage we will help the new organization with its registration. We also intend to actively co-operate in getting the members of this organization invited to human rights conferences in Russia and beyond its borders. We hope for a partnership with the Union of Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia. Furthermore, we have already scheduled an appointment for a meeting with Chechen President Alu Alkhanov," said Minkail Ezhiyev, one of the initiators of the assembly and cochairman of the regional branch of the Society of the Russian-Chechen Friendship.

According to the data of the "Memorial" human rights centre, in the first half of 2005 142 residents were abducted in Chechnya. Of these, 53 were freed, 5 were found murdered, 2 are under investigation, and 82 have disappeared. In the five previous years of military actions in Chechnya approximately five thousand people have disappeared without trace.

In her study of the community of world-renowned writers, composers and artists who, for a dozen intense and anxious months during 1940 and 1941, the early years of World War II, lived at No. 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn, New York City, biographer Sherill Tippins has filled in many important lacunae in our knowledge of the early career and state of mind of some of the leading figures in American and European culture and thought. February House – the book draws its title from Anais Nin’s characterization of the place, so many were the February birthdays of the house’s occupants – presents a composite portrait of intellectual and creative development as it affected young and iconic pioneers such as the poet W.H. Auden, the novelist Carson McCullers, the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears, the composer Colin McPhee, the poet, essayist and political activist Klaus Mann, the novelist Richard Wright, and the painter Salvador Dali, all of whom lived under this one roof. The tenants also included Paul and Jane Bowles, the stripper and thriller writer Gypsy Rose Lee, and the Broadway set designer Oliver Smith. George Davis, the writer and Harper’s Bazaar editor whose project and inspiration the house was, organized the practical side of things together with Auden, who ended up as the unofficial manager of the premises, collecting rent from the tenants and acting as the house policeman, imposing hours of silence and controlling the logistics of multiple occupancy with a firm and sometimes inflexible hand.

While it can’t be denied that the book is above all remarkable for its human interest – the accounts of the affair between Auden and his lover Chester Kallman, the relationship between Davis and McCullers, and the bond that united Pears and Britten in themselves constitute narratives of almost Balzacian intricacy and fascination – it also throws light on some of the burning political and social issues of the day. In particular, it shows how the threat and subsequent outbreak of war in 1939 utterly changed the lives and outlook of people for whom the interpretation of the world and the channelling of it to others was central to their preoccupations. Auden, Britten and Pears, who had left Britain in the late 1930s, came under attack in their home country for supposedly “running away”, and the methods they employed in order to cope with this accusation and prove its falsehood became the underpinning of the evolution of their creative talent, which flowered in ways that could never have been expected in the pre-war situation. Britten found his way towards Peter Grimes, Auden began to write in a new, transatlantic vein of civic populism, while the portrait of Carson McCullers that emerges from the book is a most powerful one: from obscure beginnings as a 22-year-old literary prodigy from the American South, at Middagh Street she came under Auden’s influence and developed a moral and intellectual sensibility that more resembled that of a Central European writer.

It’s perhaps in this pinpointing of the fusion of British, European and American artistic and intellectual life that took place in this strange and impermanent crucible – the house was torn down in 1945 to make room for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway – that Sherrill Tippins’ book makes its most valuable contribution. It was a fusion that depended above all on raw, creative energy, which made itself felt in every aspect of the house’s life: there seems to have been never a moment’s rest or lapse, as the “babble” of voices at the dinner table, the “cheerful and unhygienic mess”, and the obsessive sound of pianos and gamelans and the rattling of typewriters indicated. In conclusion the author writes: “Perhaps in the end what was produced is not as important as the fact that these bold young artists, believing in and committed to the importance of their work, took action to pursue the truth as best they could before the events of history conspired to redirect their efforts. In coming together, they placed their faith in a creative energy that, at the very Ieast was bound to send them off on exciting new trajectories. And it was this journey that was the point of 7 Middagh Street, more even than the results. As Colin McPhee wrote in the sad, silent days after the house at 7 Middagh was torn down, ‘My few friends admire or love me, not for what I've accomplished, but for what they think I might have done. And ultimately, a work of art that does not exist is the most beautiful of ­all - it's a rich blend of nostalgia, stoicism, and futility. Shake well, add fresh ginger, and pour through a fine sieve.’"

February House – the story of Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Gypsy Rose Lee living together under one roof in 1940s Brooklyn. Hardcover. 317 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company 2005.

- I have no sympathy for Basayev. I do not consider him to be a victim. He is more like a puppet of Russian politics. He served with the FSB in Georgia, got money from the Executive Committee in his time from Yeltsin, then from Putin, and particularly from Berezovsky. He served as the spark that enabled Putin to unleash the second Chechen war and today he is helping him in the most monstrous way to turn the face of Chechnya in the world into the face of a blood-thirsty monster.

I think that he is working for Putin (whether this is voluntary or not, I don’t know). If he isn’t working of his own volition, which is quite possible, then it shows how incompetent he is. If he is working of his own volition then this has to be the limit. The Beslan terrorist act served Putin as an excuse to silence all his critics in the democratic west as far as his policy in Chechnya is concerned. This is the best thing that he could have done for Putin through the inhuman taking of hostages. I think that if Putin has an ally, it is Basayev.

- André Glucksmann

The bombing escalated sharply with the first daytime raids on the city on 22 December [1994]. It was mid-morning when seventy-five-year-old Alexander Shevchenko ventured outside for a breath of fresh air. The Russian pensioner moved carefully over the ice on his walking stick towards a few stalls where women were selling bread and chocolate. Traffic was moving along the street, crossing the river to the main square just 100 yards away.

The apartment next to Shevchenko's had been bombed in the night. He stared in disbelief at the mound of rubble and at the broken rafters sticking skywards that were all that was left of his neighbours' building. The earsplitting blast had rocked his own building and his neighbours had urged him down to the basement. 'It was terrifying, terrifying,' he said, his whole body shaking, still in his pyjamas under his coat. `They are not people who are doing this, they are wild beasts, savage.'

As he spoke, the sound of jets sent the crowd of people running for cover, suddenly diving right overhead, the roar of the engines escalating to an urgent scream, People fled in panic, not knowing where to run, bumping into each other as they scanned the skies and looked round for friends. Two huge explosions shook the ground with a deafening bang. Then followed a moment of complete silence as debris, branches, brick dust rained down on figures crouching on the ground. The sound of falling glass tinkled to a stop. Then people were shouting. The women running the kiosks were hurriedly packing away their chocolate bars and sweet drinks with shaking hands. This was the first time planes had bombed in daylight hours, and suddenly no one felt safe. A column of black smoke rose above the trees. A truck and car on the bridge just 300 yards away were on fire, the bodies still inside. More mangled bodies lay in the street. The missiles had blown a huge crater in the black earth of the river-bank and sliced into the trees of a small park. A man's body lay where he had been walking, a red stain in the snow where his head should have been. The death toll was least six; the bridge, presumably the target, was untouched

Across the city at a crossroads in the Mikrorayon district half a dozen cars and buses were blazing after another terrifying bombing raid. People were out clearing the debris from the previous night's bombing when the jets returned. At least twenty people were killed, including American photographer Cynthia Elbaum, a young freelance. It was the first war she had covered and she had not even told her parents she was going to Chechnya. Like many of the Chechens at the bomb site, she had absolutely no warning and no chance to take cover. That day the planes ran sortie after sortie on the city centre, flattening houses and apartment buildings, rocketing major intersections and roads. The city centre now looked, felt and smelled like a battlefield. Ash from the burning fires and explosions turned the snow black, broken glass crunched underfoot and torn-down trolleybus wires trailed in the streets. Trees snapped off by the explosions left ragged, gleaming yellow stumps and the acrid smell of burning and explosives hung in the air. Incredibly, the Russian government press office denied there had been any bombing or any damage to apartment buildings. [Sergei] Kovalyov sent Yeltsin a telegram from Grozny, calling on him to stop `this crazy massacre' and pull the country `out of this vicious circle of despair and bloodstained lies'.

from: Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, 1998

Today, Russia and China started their first-ever joint military exercises.

From Caucasian Knot:
16/8/2005

Victim says gunmen 'had accomplices outside'

The case of Nurpashi Kulayev charged with involvement in the attack on the school in Beslan continued to be heard in North Ossetia's Supreme Court today.

Eduard Adayev, a district prefecture official, was interrogated as a victim. Adayev had not been in the school, but he had been near it during the onslaught. He told in detail how he rescued two girls and what was going in the school and outside it during the onslaught.

"The first two days, Lev Dzugayev (spokesman for North Ossetia's former president Alexander Dzasokhov - ed.) was constantly coming out to us, repeating one and the same, that they demanded Dzasokhov, Roshal, Aslakhanov, and Ziazikov without any other demands. The people were agitated and everyone demanded that Dzasokhov should come out to meet the people. They went to the headquarters which Dzasokhov headed, but even then he did not come out, but Mamsurov (the former speaker - ed.) did. He said they would do everything to prevent an onslaught. Then blasts thundered. In a while, I ran into the school. Children were lying all over in the hall, some burning, some still alive. They were no longer able to cry and just stared, all sooty, half-naked... I took out two girls. Then came the third blast."

To the prosecutor's question about fire on the school, Mr Adayev answered evasively: "If the terrorists had no large-calibre weapons, it turns out such were not fired at the school. If they had, then I don't know. I know as much as ordinary people." (Being an official, Eduard Adayev might be afraid to tell what he really thought. - ed.)

Inga Kharebov was taken hostage together with her son. She told the court in detail what was going on in the school: "In the school, they videotaped us. When we asked why they needed it, a gunman said, 'Maybe, they will tell the truth at least now that you are more than 350.' One woman then asked reproachfully how they could do that, seize a school. In reply, he said, 'You would be even more surprised if you knew who sold you. But you will never know that."

Inga Kharebov managed to escape during the onslaught. She met her mother in a Beslan hospital. "With my mum, we went out the hospital and got into a car. The driver was a man in a police uniform, but he had no shoulder-straps. At once, a man in black clothes, unshaven, sat down near him in front and another one looking the same way sat down near us. There were already rumours that the gunmen had escaped, so I suspected something. When I told them the address, it looked like they had not heard me and they continued to go in the opposite direction. The driver was like a robot. I gave the address louder and the man in black then turned round and said, 'I don't know where it is.' They were trying to go to the first school. My mum and I got out nearly in motion. I was not capable of thinking after the shock I had experienced in the school, but now the picture is getting clearer. I am sure they had accomplices outside and very many managed to escape."

See earlier reports:
Kulayev thought to have 'mission'
Author: Regina Revazova, CK correspondent
See also:
Information of Caucasian Knot correspondents
Hostage-taking in Beslan, North Osetia
To main page

from today's RFE/RL Newsline:

PUTIN TAKES SUPERSONIC BOMBER TO NORTHERN FLEET GAMES... President Vladimir Putin flew on 16 August in a strategic Tu-160 bomber (Blackjack) from Moscow to a military base in Olegegorsk, Murmansk Oblast, to take part in the naval exercises of the Northern Fleet,Channel One and NTV reported. During the five-hour flight it was reported that Putin briefly endured up to 2.5 times the normal force of gravity and observed the launch of a new long-range cruise missile while aboard the bomber. Before the flight, Putin, 52, was found by a doctor to be fit for such a high-speed flight and was instructed about flying by Lieutenant General Igor Khvorov, the commander of 37th Air Army that belongs to the president's strategic reserve. Upon arrival in Olegegorsk, Putin said that the new "high-precision cruise missile" hit its target, RTR reported. Putin then boarded the flagship of the Northern Fleet heavy cruiser, "Peter the Great," where he and Ivanov watched the launch of a ballistic missile from a nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea on 17 August that landed at a testing ground in Kamchatka. Putin has previously flown in a Sukhoi fighter to Chechnya and went under Arctic waters in a submarine. VY

...AFTER OPENING INTERNATIONAL AIR SHOW NEAR MOSCOW. President Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Rosaviakosmos (national space agency) head Anatolii Perminov, and other members of the Russian government were at the opening of the annual aerospace fair MAX in Zhukovskoe, near Moscow, international media reported. Some 700 companies from 40 states are displaying the latest models in civil and military aircraft. Some of the best pilots from many countries are also taking part in an air acrobatic show, including U.S. pilots who flew on two strategic B-1B Lancer bombers. Putin visited the Chinese exhibition as well as the MiG and Sukhoi aircraft company stands and was shown the prototype of Russia's new space shuttle Clipper, slated to be ready for a moon flight by 2013, Channel One reported. Putin said he supports the idea of opening a kind of free economic zone in Zhukovskoe that would contain the offices of all the biggest Russian aircraft-design and aircraft- building. VY

At perfect.co.uk, Robin Grant, who blogged the July 21 attempted terrorist attacks in London, examines the damage caused by the police error in identifying the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes as a terrorist on July 22, and insists that [Ian] Blair must go:

CCTV footage clearly shows that Senhor de Menezes was wearing a thin denim jacket so he could not be concealing a bomb and nor was he carrying any bag.

Far from running to avoid police who were tailing him, the electrician did not realise anyone was following him. He used his season ticket and did not vault the barrier. He only began to run when he saw a train pull into the station and as many commuters do he quickened his pace to catch it.

The International Herald Tribune has published a Letter from Estonia, documenting the changes that membership of the EU has wrought in that country, as well as the changes that Estonia is making to the European Union itself:

Membership in the European Union has changed Estonia, this small country of coastlines, forests, and wet plains, since it joined on May 1, 2004. Membership accelerated a transformation that began when Estonia emerged, limping and gray, from communism 14 years ago.

But Estonia has in turn changed Europe. In a way that could hardly have been foreseen last year, the entry into the EU of 10 new countries - eight, including Estonia, from behind the former Iron Curtain - triggered a tumultuous year and a crisis of confidence among the EU's old guard. The trends they imported - their rapid growth, fueled by low wages and low taxes, as well as a competitive zeal to make up for the last 50 years - threw into relief the moribund growth of older economies such as Germany and France.

The competitive threat posed by the new members alarmed Western voters, who feared for their jobs. That fear contributed to the defeat of the European constitution in France and the Netherlands. It led to the public's waning appetite for further EU enlargement - bad news for Turkey and Ukraine, even perhaps for Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, all yearning to join the EU's ranks.

Germany and France now engaged in debates about how to confront globalization and save their comfortable social models. But the view from this cool, northernmost tip of the group of new EU states suggests that the pressure for change that the new members are bringing to bear across Europe's broader political landscape is not about to abate.

In Estonia, roughly the size of the Netherlands - with less than a tenth of its population - one area where EU membership has had a big effect is politics. It has led to a political renaissance for a country that for centuries was a vassal state tossed between Scandinavian and German overlords. Most recently it smarted under the even stricter lash of Russia's Soviet empire.

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Leopoldo)

The Financial Times reports that

An internet virus targeting computers running Windows 2000 software struck companies across the US and Europe, including several top media outlets. Joe Hartmann, director of anti-virus research at Trend Micro, said the Zotob virus had hit several large news organisations including CNN, ABC News, the New York Times and the Financial Times.

The virus - known as Zotob - tries to target every computer on infected networks, causing computers to shut down and reboot repeatedly preventing a user from logging on. Security experts said the virus had overloaded networks at several large corporations as of late Tuesday.

It's probably no coincidence that the organizations hit by the worm are precisely the ones that have been most consistently informative and honest about what is taking in place in Russia - this is especially true of ABC, which recently broadcast Andrei Babitsky's interview with Chechen leader Shamil Basayev. Other, non-media, corporations and companies were also affected, but the focus of the attack seems to have been ABC.

THE PRAGUE WATCHDOG WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, No. 33 (August 16, 2005)

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1) THE WEEK IN BRIEF (August 8 - 14)

August 8 - Sergei Abramov, Premier of the Moscow-backed Chechen government, said that main streets in fifteen Chechen towns and villages would be renamed after Akhmad Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed President of the Chechen Republic assassinated in May 2004.
August 9 - Ingushetia's President Murat Zyazikov said that gambling houses should and would be closed in the republic.
August 10 - The Russian Defence Ministry announced that a total of 3,459 servicmen had been killed since the beginning of the second war in Chechnya in September 1999, and 67 of them were killed this year, but an independent monitor, the Union of Committees of Mothers of Russian Soldiers, said the count is several times lower than the real figure. The count does not include killed servicemen and members of the Russian Interior Ministry and other agencies.
August 11 - Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev, successor to the slain President of independent Chechnya and resistance leader Aslan Maskhadov, issued decrees sacking the separatist government and cancelling the posts of foreign envoys, according to reports by websites close to the resistance.
August 12 - Natasha Khumadova, sister of top Chechen guerrilla commander and Vice-President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Doku Umarov, was kidnapped from her house in Urus-Martan. Human rights defenders suspect the incident to be another case of retaliatory hostage-taking by government forces aimed at making the abductee's relative to surrender.
August 14 - Five Russian soldiers, including the commandant of the Urus-Martanovsky district, were killed in a clash with the guerrillas in the village of Roshni-Chu.
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2) UPCOMING EVENTS

August 20-23 - Chechnya: The Moscow-backed Chechen leadership will organize celebrations marking the 54th birthday of Akhmad-Khadzhi Kadyrov, the late leader of the republic, whom the Kremlin made President in October 2003 and who was assassinated in May 2004.

August 25 - Chechnya: Deadline for the closure of all gambling houses in Chechnya as set by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed Vice-Premier of the Chechen Republic.

For more upcoming Chechnya-related events go to http://www.watchdog.cz/calendar.

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3) REGIONAL REPORTING

Dear readers, we apologize for the absence of new reports in August. Things should be back at normal after summer holidays are over. PW editors.
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4) ATTACKS ON HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS
Monitoring attacks on the rights defenders whose work is connected with the Chechen conflict.

Link: http://www.watchdog.cz/attacks

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4) LATEST ADDITION TO OUR LINKS LIBRARY:

Russian-Chechen Information Agency (http://www.ria.hrnnov.ru)
A new on-line project of the Nizhny Novgorod based Society of the Russian-Chechen Friendship. In Russian.


For more Chechnya-related links go to our Links library ( http://www.watchdog.cz/links ), which is being continuously updated.

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Prague Watchdog Weekly Newsletter is a publication of Prague Watchdog. If you wish to subscribe (unsubscribe) to it, please send us an e-mail to mail@watchdog.cz. The newsletter is usually sent out on Monday evenings.

The Gaza Withdrawal and Israel's Permanent Dilemma

By George Friedman

Israel has begun its withdrawal from Gaza. As with all other territorial withdrawals by Israel, such as that from the Sinai or from Lebanon, the decision is controversial within the Jewish state. It represents the second withdrawal from land occupied in the 1967 war, and the second from land that houses significant numbers of anti-Israeli fighters. Since these fighters will not be placated by the Israeli withdrawal -- given that there is no obvious agreement of land for an enforceable peace -- the decision by the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza would appear odd.

In order to understand what is driving Israeli policy, it is necessary to consider Israeli geopolitical reality in some detail.

Israel's founders, taken together, had four motives for founding the state.

1. To protect the Jews from a hostile world by creating a Jewish homeland.
2. To create a socialist (not communist) Jewish state.
3. To resurrect the Jewish nation in order to re-assert Jewish identity in history.
4. To create a nation based on Jewish religiosity and law rather than Jewish nationality alone.

The idea of safety, socialism, identity and religiosity overlapped to some extent and were mutually exclusive in other ways. But each of these tendencies became a fault line in Israeli life. Did Israel exist simply so that Jews would be safe -- was Israel simply another nation among many? Was Israel to be a socialist nation, as the Labor Party once envisioned? Was it to be a vehicle for resurrecting Jewish identity, as the Revisionists wanted? Was it to be a land governed by the Rabbinate? It could not be all of these things. Thus, these were ultimately contradictory visions tied together by a single certainty: none of these visions were possible without a Jewish state. All arguments in Israel devolve to these principles, but all share a common reality -- the need for the physical protection of Israel.

In order for there to be a Jewish state, it must be governed by Jews. If it is also to be a democratic state, as was envisioned by all but a few of the fourth (religiosity) strand of logic, then it must be a state that is demographically Jewish.

This poses the first geopolitical dilemma for Israel: Whatever the historical, moral or religious arguments, the fact was that at the beginning of the 20th century, the land identified as the Jewish homeland -- Palestine -- was inhabited overwhelmingly by Arabs. A Jewish and democratic state could be achieved only by a demographic transformation. Either more Jews would have to come to Palestine, or Arabs would have to leave, or a combination of the two would have to occur. The Holocaust caused Jews who otherwise would have stayed in Europe to come to Palestine. The subsequent creation of the state of Israel caused Arabs to leave, and Jews living in Arab countries to come to Israel.

However, this demographic shift was incomplete, leaving Israel with two strategic problems. First, a large number of Arabs, albeit a minority, continued to live in Israel. Second, the Arab states surrounding Israel -- which perceived the state as an alien entity thrust into their midst -- viewed themselves as being in a state of war with Israel. Ultimately, Israel's problem was that dealing with the external threat inevitably compounded the internal threat.

Israel's Strategic Disadvantage
Israel was at a tremendous strategic disadvantage. First, it was vastly outnumbered in the simplest sense: There were many more Arabs who regarded themselves as being in a state of war with Israel than there were Jews in Israel. Second, Israel had extremely long borders that were difficult to protect. Third, the Israelis lacked strategic depth. If all of their neighbors -- Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon -- were joined by the forces of more distant Arab and Islamic states, Israel would find it difficult to resist. And if all of these forces attacked simultaneously in a coordinated strike, Israel would find it impossible to resist.

Even if the Arabs did not carry out a brilliant stroke, cutting Israel in half on a Jerusalem-Tel Aviv line (a distance of perhaps 20 miles), Israel would still lose an extended war with the Arabs. If the Arabs could force a war of attrition on Israel, in which they could impose an attrition rate of perhaps 1 percent per day of forces on the forward edge of the battle area, Israel would not be able to hold for more than a few months at best. In the 20th century, an attrition rate of that level, in a battle space the size of Israel, would be modest. Israel's effective forces rarely numbered more than 250,000 men -- the other 250,000 were older reserves with inferior equipment. Extended attritional warfare was not an option for Israel.

Thus, in order for Israel to survive, three conditions were necessary:

1. The Arabs must never unite into a single, effective force.
2. Israel must choose the time, place and sequence of any war.
3. Israel must never face both a war and an internal uprising of Arabs simultaneously.

Israel's strategy was to use diplomacy to prevent the three main adversaries -- Egypt, Jordan and Syria -- from simultaneously choosing to launch a war. From its founding, Israel always maintained a policy of splitting the front-line states. This was not particularly difficult, given the deep animosities among the Arabs. For example, Israel always maintained a special relationship with Jordan, which had unsatisfactory relations with its own neighbors. Early on, Israel worked to serve as the guarantor of the Jordanian regime's survival. Later, after the Camp David Accords split Egypt off from the Arab coalition, Israel had neutralized two out of three of its potential adversaries. The dynamics of Arab geopolitics and the skill of Israeli diplomacy achieved an outcome that is rarely appreciated. From its founding, Israel managed to prevent simultaneous warfare with its neighbors except at a time and place of its own choosing. It had to maintain a military force capable of taking the initiative in order to have a diplomatic strategy.

But throughout most of its history, Israel had a fundamental challenge in achieving this preeminence.

Israel's Geopolitical Problem
The state's military preeminence had to be measured against the possibility of diplomatic failure. Israel had to assume that all front-line states would become hostile to it, and that it would have to launch a preemptive strike against them all. If this were the case, Israel had this dilemma: Its national industrial base was insufficient to provide it with the technological wherewithal to maintain its military superiority. It was not simply a question of money --all the money in the world could not change the demographics -- but also that Israel lacked the manpower to produce all of the weapons it needed to have and also to field an army. Therefore, Israel could survive only if it had a patron that possessed such an industrial base. Israel had to make itself useful to another country.

Israel's first patron was the Soviet Union, through its European satellites. Its second patron was France, which saw Israel as an ally during a time when Paris was trying to hold onto its interests in an increasingly hostile Arab world. Its third patron -- but not until 1967 -- was the United States, which saw Israel as a counterweight to pro-Soviet Egypt and Syria, as well as a useful base of operations in the eastern Mediterranean.

In 1967, Israel -- fearing a coordinated strike by the Arabs and also seeking to rationalize its defensive lines and create strategic depth -- launched an air and land attack against its neighbors. Rather than risk a coordinated attack, Israel launched a sequential attack -- first against Egypt, then Jordan, then Syria.

The success of the 1967 war gave rise to Israel's current geopolitical crisis.

Following the war, Israel had to balance three interests:

1. It now occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which contained large, hostile populations of Arabs. A full, peripheral war combined with an uprising in these regions would cut Israeli lines of supply and communication and risk Israel's defeat.
2. Israel was now dependent on the United States for its industrial base. But American interests and Israeli interests were not identical. The United States had interests in the Arab world, and had no interest in Israel crushing Palestinian opposition or expelling Palestinians from Israel. Retaining the industrial base and ruthlessly dealing with the Palestinians became incompatible needs.
3. Israel had to continue manipulating the balance of power among Arab states in order to prevent a full peripheral war. That, in turn, meant that it was further constrained in dealing with the Palestinian question by force.

Israeli geopolitics created the worst condition of all: Given the second and third considerations, Israel could not crush the Palestinians; but given its need for strategic depth and coherent borders, it could not abandon the occupied territories. It therefore had to continually constrain the Palestinians without any possibility of final victory. It had to be ruthless, which would enflame the Palestinians, but it could never be ruthless enough to effectively suppress them.

The Impermanence of Diplomacy
Israel has managed to maintain the diplomatic game it began in 1948: The Arabs remain deeply split. It has managed to retain its relationship with the United States, even with the end of the Cold War. Given the decline of the conventional threat, Israel's dependency on the United States has actually dwindled. For the moment, the situation is contained.

However -- and this is the key problem for Israel -- the diplomatic solution is inherently impermanent. It requires constant manipulation, and the possibility of failure is built in. For example, an Islamist rising in Egypt could rapidly generate shifts that Israel could not contain. Moreover, political changes in the United States could end American patronage, without the certainty of another patron emerging. These things are not likely to occur, but they are not inconceivable. Given enough time, anything is possible.

Israel's advantage is diplomatic and cultural. Its ability to split the Arabs, a diplomatic force, is coupled with its technological superiority, a cultural force. But both of these can change. The Arabs might unite, and they might accelerate their technological and military sophistication. Israel's superiority can change, but its inferiority is fixed: Geography and demography put it in an unchangeably vulnerable position relative to the Arabs.

The potential threats to Israel are:

1. A united and effective anti-Israeli coalition among the Arabs.
2. The loss of its technological superiority and, therefore, the loss of military initiative.
3. The need to fight a full peripheral war while dealing with an intifada within its borders.
4. The loss of the United States as patron and the failure to find an alternative.
5. A sudden, unexpected nuclear strike on its populated heartland.

Therefore, it follows that Israel has three options.

The first is to hope for the best. This has been Israel's position since 1967. The second is to move from conventional deterrence to nuclear deterrence. Israel already possesses this capability, but the value of nuclear weapons is in their deterrent capability, not in their employment. You can't deal with an intifada or with close-in conventional war with nuclear weapons -- not given the short distances involved in Israel. The third option is to reduce the possibility of disaster as far as possible by increasing the tensions in the Arab world, reducing the incentive for cultural change among the Arabs, eliminating the threat of intifada in time of war, and reducing the probability that the United States will find it in its interests to break with Israel

Hence, the withdrawal from Gaza. As a base for terrorism, Gaza poses a security threat to Israel. But the true threat from Gaza, and even more the West Bank, lies in the fact that they create a dynamic that decreases Israel's diplomatic effectiveness, risks creating Arab unity, increases the impetus for military modernization and places stress on Israel's relationship with the United States. The terrorist threat is painful. The alternative risks long-term catastrophe.

Some of the original reasons for Israel's founding, such as the desire for a socialist state, are now irrelevant to Israeli politics. And revisionism, like socialism, is a movement of the past. Modern Israel is divided into three camps:

1. Those who believe that the survival of Israel depends on disengaging from a process that enrages without crushing the Palestinians, even if it opens the door to terrorism.
2. Those who regard the threat of terrorism as real and immediate, and regard the longer-term strategic threats as theoretical and abstract.
3. Those who have a religious commitment to holding all territories.

The second and third factions are in alliance but, at the moment, it is the first faction that appears to be the majority. It is not surprising that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is leading this faction. As a military man, Sharon has a clear understanding of Israel's vulnerabilities. It is clearly his judgment that the long-term threat to Israel comes from the collapse of its strategic position, rather than from terrorism. He has clearly decided to accept the reality of terrorist attacks, within limits, in order to pursue a broader strategic initiative.

Israel has managed to balance the occupation of a hostile population with splitting Arab nation states since 1967. Sharon's judgment is that, given the current dynamics of the Muslim world, pursuing the same strategy for another generation would be both too costly and too risky. The position of his critics is that the immediate risks of disengagement increase the immediate danger to Israel without solving the long-term problem. If Sharon is right, then there is room for maneuver. But if his critics, including Benjamin Netanyahu, are right, Israel is locked down to an insoluble problem.

That is the real debate.

Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.

Facing the 40,000-strong Russian invasion force was a makeshift army of barely 1000 Chechen fighters, according to the Chechen Chief of Staff Aslan Maskhadov. Volunteers soon flocked to increase that number several times over, but the number of trained men under arms at the beginning of the war was only in the hundreds, some 500 belonging to the National Guard led by Shamil Basayev, another 200 in the Presidential Guard, and a few more in special forces and security service units.

Maskhadov had only been Chief of Staff for a matter of months. He had resigned from the Russian arm and returned to Chechnya in 1992, when the Ingush-Ossetian conflict threatened to spill over into Chechnya. He was immediately appointed Deputy Chief of Staff of Chechnya's forces. Maskhadov, like all of his generation, was born in exile, in Kazakhstan in1951 He says his family were always fighters, his father and his uncle both fought in their time. At the age of seven he returned with his family to their home village of Zebir-Yurt in northern Chechnya. He joined the Soviet army at the age of eighteen and moved all over Russia and Eastern Europe, passing through Leningrad Academy in 1981 and then serving in Hungary for five years. His ast post was commander of a Soviet artillery division in in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 1986 to 1992. He was regarded as as one of the best artillery officers of hi s year, His men remember him as strict but fair. They noticed he improved the quality of the food, as well as the fitness of both officers and soldiers, joining them on runs and training exercises himself, unlike any other commander.

As with Dudayev, the break-up of the Soviet Union and independence demonstrations in the Baltics brought an awareness of nationalism. He was in Vilnius when civilians were killed as KGB troops stormed the television centre. `I was in Lithuania, in Vilnius during those events. I also thought at that time that the Lithuanians were allowed to do what they wanted, to live under the wing of Russia, they lived normally there. And today it is shameful for me that I had those views and I think differently.' In July 1994 as the clashes against the Chechen opposition grew more serious, Maskhadov took over as Chief of Staff of Chechen forces.

`We did not have a regular army, we did not manage to create one. All those parades, it was for show. When I came back from the Russian army, I knew that Russia was preparing to fight us, I quickly began to bring them up to strength, to prepare, but I did not succeed,' Maskhadov said later.


from: Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, 1998

The second anniversary celebrations of Independence Day in Grozny [in 1993] showed how bizarre independent Chechnya had become. In a military parade Dudayev had the empty cases of SS-20 missiles transported several times around Freedom Square, as if to demonstrate that he was armed with nuclear weapons. One of the guests for the independence celebrations was the Russian ultra-nationalist and presidential hopeful Vladimir Zhirinovsky. When Zhirinovsky sat down for dinner with Dudayev, Zviad Gamsakhurdia and the President of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, it was dubbed `the dinner of the four Presidents'. Zhirinovsky pleased his hosts by drinking a toast to Chechen independence.

* * *

Despite the gradual changes, many Moscow politicians were impatient for the Dudayev regime to fall as soon as possible ideally by the end of the year [1994]. Presidential elections were only two years away and Boris Yeltsin's popularity rating below 10 per cent. The old opposition had been replaced by a new threat - the rise of the extreme nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who had won the largest share of the vote in the Decermber 1993 parliamentary elections. Zhirinovsky's victory shifted Russian politics to the right; it put on the agenda the issue of a revivalist Russia and `defence' of ethnic Russians living outside Russia itself, and it coincided with an upsurge of racism in Moscow against `people of Caucasian nationality'. Chechens, Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were routinely harassed by the police. Some Kremlin advisers reasoned that a decisive strike against the Chechens would steal the nationalist vote from Zhirinovsky.

* * *

In November 1994 pro-Yeltsin liberals like Gaidar, Kostikov and Satarov were in disarray. They found it hard to gain access to Yeltsin and complained that Korzhakov was keeping him in an 'information blockade'. Here, in the view of many political insiders, is the key to the start of the Chechen war - not in oil or a radical change in the situation on the ground, but in a shift inthe balance of Kremlin politics combined with poor intelligence from Chechnya. The hawks would have approved of a military intervention in Chechnya as their way of remaking Yeltsin in their own image and stealing the rhetoric of the nationalist opposition. In the words of Gaidar: `I have said more than once that the "Zhirinovsky effect" played a big part because of his rhetoric, his "last march to the south", and so on. It seemed that a small victorious war would be very helpful.' A small war against the 'mafiosi' Chechens would go down well with the electorate, the argumentt went, and Yeltsin would enter the lists for the 1996 presidential elections as a tough ruler whose flirtation with liberalism was finally over.

from: Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, 1998

from RFE/RL:

More than half of Russians have xenophobic views -- that is the charge coming from Russian human rights campaigners today. In a new report, rights groups say that -- despite progress in some areas -- racism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism remain rife in Russia. But what worries watchdogs most are recent moves by nationalist-patriotic movements to form paramilitary groups.


Moscow, 15 August 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Russian human-rights advocates gathered in Moscow on today to assess the level of racism, ethnic discrimination, and anti-Semitism in the country for the first half of 2005.

The results, they told reporters, are not encouraging.

Semyon Charny is an expert at the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights and the author of the new report.

He said xenophobic feelings remain widespread in Russia. In a recent nationwide poll, Charny said over half of the respondents espoused nationalist views. "The level of xenophobia remains stable and high," he said. "Between 50 and 60 percent of the population sympathize, to various degrees, with nationalist slogans such as 'Russia for Russians'. The first people to inspire irritation are the Caucasians, Central Asians, and Chinese. Jewish people rank third or fourth."

According to the report, Chechens continue to top the list of the most-hated people in Russia. It is a hostility human rights advocates largely attribute to the war in Chechnya that has been claiming lives daily on both sides for most of the past
decade.

But there was also encouraging news. The report said the number of racially motivated murders has dwindled in the first half of this year, with 10 foreigners killed. That number was three times higher during the same period in 2004.

The number of such attacks and killings, however, still remains much higher than in European countries.

The report comes just days after two Polish diplomatic personnel and a Polish journalist were beaten up and hospitalized in Moscow, sparking a diplomatic row.

Human rights groups say some progress has also been made in recognizing racially motivated attacks and punishing assailants on charges of incitement of ethnic and religious hatred.

Russian law-enforcement agencies have long angered watchdogs by dismissing racial attacks as mere hooliganism.

In the first half of 2005, however, five people have been sentenced for inciting ethnic and religious hatred. Only one person was sentenced on the charge for the same period last year.

Despite these positive trends, rights advocates expressed strong concerns over recent moves by Russian nationalist- patriotic groups to form their own armed groups.

Alla Gerber, who heads Russia's Holocaust Foundation, said these political organizations are rapidly trading propaganda speeches for weapons. "The most deadly for me is the transition of national patriotic parties and movements from propaganda to calls for terror," she said. "This is the latest and most important development. Before, there were words, propaganda, but now there are calls for an open, organized terror."

Charny said Russia's numerous nationalist-patriotic movements are beginning to openly state their plans to form armed paramilitary groups and seize power by force. Some of these groups, Charny added, rganize forums during which they explain to their members how to get hold of weapons.

Slavyansky Soyuz (Slavic Union) is one of these groups. It is known to have called for an armed uprising and broken into the websites of Russian human-rights organizations.

Slavyansky Soyuz's own website features the group's insignia, a symbol approximating the Nazi swastika. It offers links to a prominent skinhead website. It also displays pictures of youths with their right hand raised in the air in imitation of the
Nazi salute, and a series of articles disparaging various ethnic and religious groups.

In parallel, Charny says skinhead groups are also on the rise and are now active in all Russian regions: "Concerning skinheads, their numbers are definitely growing, they are spreading to more and more cities. Now, we can say there is not a single region that does not have a band of skinheads."

According to official figures, there are 10,000 skinheads in Russia. But human rights groups and experts contend the real figure is more than five times higher. According to the report, skinheads were responsible for most of the racially motivated attacks and killings this year.

Mideast Watch: Chechnya and Russian policy
By Mark N. Katz
United Press International
Published August 15, 2005


WASHINGTON -- The Russian Foreign Ministry's virulent criticism of ABC News for broadcasting an interview with Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev indicates how important the war in Chechnya is for Moscow's foreign policy.

Even before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Moscow claimed the Chechen rebellion was part and parcel of the worldwide radical Islamic revolutionary movement. Chechen rebels, though, run the spectrum from secular nationalists who seek independence for Chechnya alone, to radical Islamists who do indeed have close ties with al-Qaida, the Taliban, and similar groups. By identifying all Chechen rebels as being closely tied to the broader Islamic revolutionary movement, Moscow has sought to minimize sympathy for the Chechen cause and criticism of Russian actions against it both in the West and in the Muslim world.


In the aftermath of 9/11 and President Vladimir Putin's firm expression of support for the Bush administration's "war on terrorism," the U.S. government has muted its criticism of Russian actions in Chechnya, and has declared various Chechen leaders and groups to be terrorists. By contrast, the French government continued to be more critical of Moscow's Chechen policies (especially the violation of human rights there) even at the height of Moscow's cooperation with Paris and Berlin in seeking to avert a U.S.-led military intervention against Iraq.

Despite the variation in how Western governments view Chechnya, there is also an important degree of uniformity among them. No Western government has been willing to give Moscow what it wants most: give approval for the Russian intervention in Chechnya. On the other hand, no Western government is doing what Moscow fears most either: provide assistance to the Chechen rebels.

The same cannot be said, in Moscow's view, about some countries in the Muslim world. Russian officials have often blamed the continuation of the Chechen rebellion on funding from Muslim countries -- especially Saudi Arabia. Prior to 9/11, these complaints fell on largely deaf ears in the West. With the uproar that developed after 9/11 over 15 of the 19 hijackers being Saudi citizens (along with bin Laden and many of his closest collaborators) and over Saudi charities providing massive funds that ended up in the hands of Islamic terrorists, there was suddenly much greater sympathy for Russian concerns on this issue, especially in Washington.

From 9/11 to the end of 2002, Putin himself seemed as if he were trying to worsen Saudi-American relations by publicly reminding President Bush that this was the country from which most of the 9/11 hijackers came from, and by accusing Riyadh of funding terrorism. But in 2003, Moscow began to woo Riyadh in pursuit of, among other goals, Saudi support for Russian membership in the Organization of the Islamic Conference. While Putin's stated justification for seeking this membership was so that Russia's 20 million Muslims could be represented in the bloc, Moscow's real aim in doing so was to mute criticism from Muslim governments over Russian policy in Chechnya.

At the September 2003 Saudi-Russian summit meeting, though, the Saudi foreign minister indicated Russia might only gain observer status in the OIC. A Russian news account of the summit meeting reported that Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah told Putin that "fulfilling Moscow's wish would be difficult because...the situation in Chechnya remains unresolved, in Riyadh's opinion."

Chechnya also appears to have an impact on Moscow's broader Middle East policy. Russian intervention in Chechnya has not become as much of a cause celebre within the Muslim world as has U.S. support for Israel or even Soviet intervention in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Moscow hopes to keep it this way by frequently expressing its sympathy and support for the Palestinian cause, even though Russia has developed close ties to Israel in recent years. The message Moscow hopes to convey to the Muslim world is that the Chechen cause is not at all the equivalent of the Palestinian cause. In order to do this, Moscow sees keeping Chechen rebels such as Basayev off the airwaves for fear that he will gain a media following like Osama bin Laden or the late Yasser Arafat.

Whatever the success or failure of Moscow's efforts to curtail sympathy and support for the Chechen cause either in the West or in the Muslim world, Moscow has clearly failed to convince the Chechen people of its benign intentions toward them. Until it does, the war will go on -- whether Basayev appears on the evening news or not.

--

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

The Soviet authorities made sure Chechen-Ingushetia remained a backwater of deep political conservatism and thinly disguised Russian chauvinism. Official policy required that the First Party Secretary, the local head of the KGB, the local police chief and all the top administrators in the oil industry should be ethnic Russians. Despite this, Leonid Brezhnev's ideologist Mikhail Suslov launched a campaign against 'anti-Russian' sentiment in the press and academia in Chechnya in the early 1980s. Suslov sponsored the ideas of the Russian historian Vitaly Vinogradov, who said thatt the Chechens and Ingush had willingly joined the Russian empire in the reign of Catherine the Great in an act of 'voluntary union'. Six Chechen historians who contested this point of view were harassed. In 1982 the republic had to go through the charade of official celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the 'voluntary union.'

The Chechens and Ingush were second-class citizens who found it extremely hard to get higher education or advance in prestigious professions. The pilot Hussein Khamidov got his flying licence only after studying in four different institutes and taking correspondence courses: `If there was the slightest flaw or the smallest obstacle they didn't let you in,' he said. `They didn't even make Chechens bus drivers, especially on important routes.'

Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Calamity in the Caucasus

The war that was unleashed was a triumph of brutality over reason. The level of destruction in Chechnya was phenomenal - proof of what heavy weapons and bombs can do to a small place if no regard is taken for civilian casualties. Russian actions on the ground, though less reported, were if anything even more terrible. All armies in all wars do terrible things and the Chechens also committed acts of savagery, as witnessed in the hostage-taking incidents in Budyonnovsk and Pervomaiskoye. But the chaotic, underfed, vicious Russian army did something quite apocalyptic in small Chechnya. It became a war against all Chechens, both those who wanted to stay in Russia and those who did not.

Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, describing the outbreak of the first Chechen War on New Year's Eve, 1994 in Chechnya - Calamity in the Caucasus, New York University Press, 1998.

Writing in Yezhednevnyi Zhurnal under the headline Putin in Space, Vladimir Nadein ruminates on the near certainty that Putin will run for a third term as president whether he "wants to" or not, and considers the "black hole" scenario that is opening up for Russia:

In all his six years in the Kremlin our President has never once taken part in an open debate with his political opponents. His rare press conferences have resembled fancy dress charades. Only abroad has anyone dared to ask Putin inconvenient questions. The President has lost his temper, threatening some of the questioners with cutting off their you know whats, and sometimes limiting himself to a laconic "it sank". Even after becoming the darling of the masses, he has not dispersed the old anxiety of the question: "Who is Mr. Putin?".

I am far from intending to stain the silvery profile of our President with my suspicions. I am willing to join those who assert that Russia knew no such educated, energetic and mobile leader in the past century. But before voting for him a third time, I should like to obtain a clear idea about who he is, our Vladimir Vladimirovich. We shall in any case find out. But it would be nice if it were before, and not after.

by

Ruslan Isayev

The hopes of the federal center to stamp its authority on Chechnya by establishing various government and other bodies to generate an administered and controlled society seem destined to fail.

The upcoming parliamentary elections in November are sure only to increase the number of obedient officials eager to carry out the non-intelligent will of the Kremlin. And the absence of a real arena in which public discussion could be developed only fuels an explosive build-up of discontent.

The repressive control functions only on first appearance. By and large, Moscow, during the long years of war, has not succeeded in creating any comprehensible concept to either placate the republic or, more importantly, to neutralize separatist yearnings.

Result of Moscow's policies – terror

The shaky yet bloated power structure built up in Chechnya is only maintained by massive support from the federal center. If this support should suddenly weaken for one reason or another, then the structures would surely collapse.

This assertion is easily proved. In the past five years of war, neither the federal forces nor the Moscow-backed Chechen ones were able to change the balance of power in the conflict despite immense forces and equipment; they only succeeded in eliminating or driving abroad practically the entire former resistance command.

The losses incurred by the federal forces have in no way decreased and, according to some information, are actually increasing. At the very least this indicates that the resistance is not short of resources, people, arms and food, despite five years of terror against the population.

At the same time, the ideas of separatism and radical Islam, which motivate the resistance, have now become far more attractive to young people who lean toward armed resistance. The price they‘ll pay for such a choice is high as the risks involved affect not only their own lives, but those of their relatives as well.

Therefore, it’s possible to objectively say that the situation in the republic in terms of Moscow’s interests has only worsened. Terrorism has finally been sanctioned as the normal method of armed struggle.

With the death of Aslan Maskhadov, whatever his true role may have been, the Chechen resistance has lost its moderate center. Ichkeria’s new president, Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, actively cooperating with warlord Shamil Basayev, apparently sees no need to preserve an image of a moderate leader.

It is also a somewhat unpleasant sign that the resistance is becoming more and more self-sufficient and isolated, casting off all connections to Europe -connections that, within certain limits, somehow managed to contain the terrorist struggle.

Parliamentary elections: another missed opportunity

As to the upcoming elections, there is no doubt whatsoever that the new Chechen parliament will not be elected but formed according to the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament.

The federal center is to once again miss an opportunity to initiate a public discussion, which could begin with selecting a representative body.

Separatism and radical Islam have caused very serious damage to Chechnya and its citizens during the past ten years. Had people been given the opportunity to discuss affairs publicly, the outcome could have been extremely favorable to the Kremlin.

The only way to avoid further surprises in the future is to bring back to the republic a spirit of public consciousness and the right to vote.

Neither Ramzan Kadyrov nor Alu Alkhanov will ever win for Russia Chechen support, despite their repeated calls for uniting with Moscow. The terror they unleashed in the republic and their arguments about the dangers awaiting Chechnya on the path to independence deprives them of any moral substance.

Hope dies last of all

But how should we proceed? Is there even the slightest hope the Kremlin will ever change from inter-Chechen conflict to inter-Chechen dialogue? Will it try, in one form or another, to allow Chechens to discuss those questions that continue to provide the basis for the ongoing armed conflict?

It’s unlikely that Vladimir Putin regards this way to be reasonable or productive. The Kremlin is apparently certain that all answers are quite clear - Dzhokhar Dudayev threw the republic into an abyss; Aslan Maskhadov handed Chechnya over to armed gangs; Shamil Basayev remains as a murderer of children, and so on.

One can assume that a majority of Chechens would agree with these assertions, but only if they were given an opportunity to think all this through from beginning to end. A “truth” that is imposed via blood, violence and kidnapping, can only be regarded as nothing but a lie.

The situation continues to deteriorate, but a point of no return doesn’t exist. Putins come and go, yet the people need to live humanely, without fear, social schizophrenia and violence.

Young Chechens are now studying in colleges and universities in Russia and Europe, and it’s in their hands that their country’s future lies. The day will come when a more sober leadership will appear in Russia and there’ll be no other way available other than to initiate a nationwide public discussion with all people involved.


Ruslan Isayev is Prague Watchdog's North Caucasus correspondent.

(via Prague Watchdog - the Russian text of the article is here)

As it happened, Auden had also been reading [Reinhold] Niebuhr's views in his book Christianity and Power Politics, which he reviewed for the Nation. He summarized Niebuhr's argument that Western democracies, having developed from the Renaissance tradition, saw human history as a realm of infinite positive potential - and ignored to their peril the truth that potential for evil exists permanently within this realm as well. The progressive democratic conviction that an individual could extricate himself from a state of sin - that is, eradicate his potential for evil through either mysticism or rational action - was false. The practice of pacifism, for example, would never achieve its goal of world peace in the face of political devastation because it was based on the idea that perfection could be achieved simply through progressive thinking. Evil, whether active or latent, would always remain, and it was blasphemous, as well as tragic, to ignore this truth when choosing one's actions.

from: Sherrill Tippins, February House,Houghton Mifflin, 2005

By Andrei Smirnov

Thursday, August 11, 2005


Escalating Tensions in the North Caucasus

Observers, security officials, and journalists across Russia are all talking about the possibility of another big war in the North Caucasus. This conflict is already known as "the third Caucasus war," as there have been already two military campaigns in Chechnya.

Last year, rebel spokesman Movladi Udugov said in an interview with the Kavkazcenter news agency that while the Russian authorities' strategy was to make Chechens fight Chechens (the so-called "Chechenization policy"), the rebels plan was to escalate the war beyond Chechnya, spread it across the North Caucasus, and gain the support of the populations of other Caucasian republics.

This year Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev, the new separatist leader after Aslan Maskhadov's death in March, has taken specific steps to trigger war across the Caucasus. Specifically, Sadulaev ordered the insurgents to establish a new front in the North Caucasus. According to his decree, the insurgents' "Caucasus Front" will consist of four republics west of Chechnya (Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Karachaevo-Cherkessia), and two provinces populated mostly by ethnic Russians: Krasnodar krai and Stavropol krai (Kavkazcenter, May 16). Three days before Sadulaev's decree, field commander Doku Umarov had announced that the separatist forces were changing their tactics and would attack outside Chechnya (see Chechnya Weekly, May 11).

Unlike previous threats from the insurgents, this time the Kremlin did not ignore the warning. Earlier in 2005, the Kremlin had more than 300,000 troops in the Caucasus, but except for 80,000-100,000 troops located in Chechnya, all of them were scattered over a large territory, including ethnic Russian-dominated regions like Rostov oblast, Krasnodar krai, and Stavropol krai. Now forces are being concentrated in the Caucasian republics in preparation to fight the insurgency. On May 13, Nikolai Rogozhkin, commander of the Russian Interior Ministry troops, announced that MVD troops would be augmented in the cities of Elista (Kalmyikia), Cherkessk (Karachaevo-Cherkessia), Nalchik (Kabardino-Balkaria), and Sochi (Interfax, May 13).

According to Nezavisimaya gazeta, Moscow is responding to the rebels' increasing activities by preparing countermeasures and militarizing the entire North Caucasus. "The scope and concept of the reorganization are at such a level that we can say that the federal forces have never before conducted preparations for combat operations on such a grand scale" (Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 13). By early 2006, brigades and battalions of MVD troops in the North Caucasus will be replaced by regiments and divisions. Instead of a battalion of 600 men, there will be a regiment of 2,000 (Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 13). In addition, two mountain brigades will be established in Dagestan and Karachaevo-Cherkessia. Officially these units are to protect Russia's southern border, but in reality they will have other tasks. The mountain brigade in Karachaevo-Cherkessia will defend the Black Sea Coast from rebel attacks and the brigade in Dagestan will defend the republic, particularly areas near the Caspian Sea, from insurgents coming from Chechnya.

At the same time, the Russian army units already stationed in Caucasian republics such as Chechnya, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Ingushetia will also be reinforced. More special-task and reconnaissance groups will be sent to the mountainous areas of Chechnya (Nezavisimaya gazeta, July 13).

This year the authorities also began to prepare the public for a major new war. Special attention is being paid to officers who serve in the Caucasus. According to kavkaz-strana.ru website, more and more people in the army are discussing the prospects of a new Caucasian war in near future (kavkaz-strana.ru, July 14).

In addition to MVD and army troops, this summer local police, supported by policemen from other regions of Russia, began non-stop search operations in almost all of the North Caucasus republics. The police were most active in Dagestan, where there was no respite from bombings and attacks by the insurgents. In Ingushetia, the police in the valley and army troops in the mountains have been continuously looking for places where militants could hide to prepare new operations. To prevent another raid like the one that happened in Ingushetia on June 21, 2004, army posts have been established on the routes connecting the valley and the mountains. Last year the rebels attacked Ingush towns by coming through such settlements as Yandiri, Ali-Urt, and Nesterovskaya. Army units have now blocked all routes near these villages (Russian-Chechen Friendship Society press releases 1355 and 348).

In Kabardino-Balkaria, special-task police units (OMON) conduct regular mopping-up operations in Elbrus district, the mountain part of the region. Recently, house-to-house searches also took place in the outskirts of Nalchik, the capital (Kavkazsky uzel, August 1).

Nevertheless, the rebels are also keen to keep their promise to stage attacks across the entire Caucasus region. Along with Dagestan, rebel attacks have intensified in Karachaevo-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria. In Karachaevo-Cherkessia, insurgents killed several officers from the police department's organized crime division, and a police patrol was attacked in the town of Karachaevsk. In Kabardino-Balkaria, attacks on patrol cars killed four policemen. On August 9, the separatist Chechenpress website published a press release from the rebel command that claims that during the night of August 7-8, Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev held a meeting with commanders from different Caucasian regions in a village in Chechnya. According to the statement, the men discussed improvements in communications, medical supplies, and coordination of actions. "Sadulaev heard the reports from the commanders about how to provide all squads with everything needed for effective military and sabotage operations" (Chechenpress, August 9).

With this announcement the rebels have again sent a clear message that they are going to launch a major attack in the North Caucasus, including, perhaps, taking control of the main towns and strategic roads. At the same time, the militants have no plans to relinquish the "Chechen front" either.

Negotiated settlements now seem impossible. Both sides of the conflict -- the Russian authorities and the rebels alike -- now rely only on sheer force to achieve their goals. The Kremlin and the separatists would rather turn the entire North Caucasus into a bloodbath rather than look for a compromise and a peaceful solution.

http://www.jamestown.org/edm

By Vladimir Socor

Thursday, August 11, 2005


On August 5 and 10, respectively, the heads of presidential think tanks in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan made statements to local media, calling for the removal of U.S. bases from Central Asia. Their statements largely reflected Moscow's public arguments to that end.

In Bishkek, Valentin Bogatyrev, director of the Strategic Studies Institute attached to Kyrgyzstan's presidency, urged that Kyrgyzstan should follow the example of Uzbekistan (which has given the United States six months to vacate the Karshi-Khanabad base) and set a deadline for removal of the U.S. air base from Manas. While "the existence of the Manas base is unjustified even now," Bogatyrev recommended that the request to close it be made in October, after the holding of parliamentary elections in Afghanistan (scheduled for September) will have shown that the situation is normalizing in that country.

In common with Moscow officials, Bogatyrev tried to turn the tables on the U.S. public presentation of the situation in Afghanistan: If the U.S. is correct in saying that the military operation there has been completed, he argued, then the Manas base is no longer necessary. Otherwise, he claimed, the United States should admit that conflict hotbeds persist in Afghanistan, in which case "the anti-terrorist operation in its existing form should be pronounced a failure," and the United States should continue its operations using airfields inside Afghanistan, "of which there are many," Bogatyrev inaccurately claimed (Interfax, Kabar, August 5).

In Almaty, Bulat Sultanov, director of the Strategic Studies Institute attached to Kazakhstan's presidency, told his news conference that U.S. bases in Central Asia "potentially threaten the security of Russia and China." Moreover, Sultanov argued, U.S. bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have circumvented the CIS Join Air Defense System, rendering parts of it meaningless. He went on, "I am categorically against the presence of military bases in Central Asia because any military base is an occupation base. … The American military bases should definitely be removed from Central Asia."

Sultanov scathingly criticized Kyrgyzstan's leaders for succumbing to U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's influence and reversing Bishkek's initial decision to set an early deadline on the Manas base. He praised Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev's "far-sightedness" in ruling out a U.S. military presence in Kazakhstan (Interfax, Khabar, August 10). This latter claim is also inaccurate, as Nazarbayev had in fact publicly and repeatedly offered after 9/11 and during 2002 to host a U.S. base in Kazakhstan. This adviser's statements seem to be doing his president a disservice even as the U.S. White House is signaling its readiness for a major improvement of relations with Kazakhstan.

In Bishkek, the outgoing U.S. Ambassador Stephen Young told an August 10 news conference that it would be premature at this time to plan or discuss transferring some operations to Manas. He noted that geographic location means that Manas cannot perform the same missions as Karshi-Khanabad, and that the United States has six months during which to address the Karshi-Khanabad issue. The remarks seem to signal a rare and overdue public recognition that Karshi-Khanabad is not expendable or interchangeable with some other base, and that Washington may seek to retrieve the basing arrangement with Uzbekistan.

Young denied Russian media reports that Washington has promised $200 million in foreign aid to Kyrgyzstan in return for prolongation of the American presence at Manas. The United States has only promised to increase foreign aid to Kyrgyzstan in 2006 to $35 million, from the previously planned $30 million. Additionally, the United States has pledged two tranches of $5 million each to support anti-terrorism, anti-narcotics, and anti-corruption programs in Kyrgyzstan.

For an interim balance sheet of expenditures since late 2001, Young reported that the United States has paid to Kyrgyzstan thus far $28 million in rent and landing and takeoff fees at Manas, $114 million for fuel supplies to American planes, and $17 million to Kyrgyz contractors for other services at Manas. These amounts do not include an estimated $4 million spent on personal purchases by the U.S. military in Kyrgyzstan and its humanitarian assistance activities there (Kabar, Interfax, August 10).

http://www.jamestown.org/edm

DETAINED JAMESTOWN ANALYST MOVED FROM AIRPORT
Igor Rotar In Uzbek Custody; May Be Deported to Kazakhstan

Contact: Christopher Swift , +1 202.483.8888

Washington, DC – The Jamestown Foundation has learned that independent journalist Igor Rotar was recently moved from Tashkent airport by Uzbek authorities.

Unnamed government sources report that Rotar was taken by car and may be deported to Kazakhstan. His current condition and whereabouts are unknown.

"Igor Rotar is a respected journalist known for balanced, unbiased reporting," said Jamestown President Glen Howard, "Spiriting him away under cover of darkness further injures Uzbekistan's image in the eyes of Western governments."

Rotar was detained by the Uzbek Immigration Service on August 11th. As a Russian citizen traveling on a Russian passport, he did not require an Uzbek entry visa.

Uzbek authorities today told the Jamestown Foundation that Rotar was detained for failing to secure accreditation as a journalist before arriving in Tashkent. Major Western news organizations privately contested that claim, noting that Uzbek authorities routinely arrange accreditation for foreign journalists upon arrival.

"Igor Rotar is not an enemy of Uzbekistan," noted Howard, "His detention only benefits backward-thinking Uzbeks eager to discredit their own country, while undermining those enlightened officials who backed the 2002 U.S.-Uzbekistan Declaration on Strategic Partnership."

Rotar is a regular contributor to Eurasia Daily Monitor, the Jamestown Foundation's flagship publication. Jamestown and other organizations continue to monitor the situation.

Founded in 1984, the Jamestown Foundation is an independent, non-partisan research institution dedicated to providing policy-makers and the public with timely analysis concerning critical political and strategic developments in China, Eurasia and the Greater Middle East.


http://www.jamestowe.org

YLE reports that divers have now recovered 13 bodies from the wreck of the Copterline helicopter that crashed Wednesday en route from Tallinn to Helsinki. The body of one of the two pilots is missing. The report adds:

Copterline, Finland's largest helicopter operator, says the reason for the crash remains unclear. The company says all its helicopters were in a well-maintained condition.

The company's CEO, Kari Ljungberg, does not believe windy weather was a factor in the crash.

Copterline says the two Finnish pilots on Wednesday's ill-fated flight were highly experienced. The company has flown on the Helsinki-Tallinn route since 2000, with some 28 flights are made daily. Copterline resumed service on Thursday, but weekend flights will be cancelled.

Estonian air traffic controllers lost contact with the craft three minutes after take-off but said it did not send out any distress signal. The craft went down in strong gusty winds. Eyewitness reports suggest that two loud bangs may have been heard before the craft crashed into the sea.

Copterline was in the headlines last year when Civil Aviation Administration Officials imposed a temporary ban on its flights over the Gulf of Finland during poor weather. At the time, officials said Copterline crew members did not have adequate training and skills to fly in poor weather. After additional training was carried out, the ban was lifted

Writing in EDM, Igor Torbakov considers what may be behind the present sharp deterioration in relations between Russia and Poland, and concludes:

For a number of Polish and Russian commentators, Warsaw's active role in the 2004 Ukrainian political upheaval that ended in what Moscow perceives as its largest strategic defeat is but an element of a broader trend. The Kremlin views last year's sweeping eastward expansion of the European Union, and especially the emergence of the "Eastern Dimension" sponsored by Poland, as a serious geopolitical threat -- particularly due to the perceived "tendency of selectively offering partnership arrangements" to the countries sandwiched between Russia and United Europe. "There exists a widespread feeling in Russia," one commentary argues, "that Poland is reluctant to accept the common rules of the game and is eager to distinguish Ukraine (and potentially Moldova and Belarus) from other eastern neighbors, which transfers the whole issue to the domain of power politics."

See also in this blog: Poland: the Chechnya of the 1860s

Jamestown Foundation political analyst Igor Rotar (left) has been arrested and detained in Uzbekistan. JF has posted the following statement:

The Jamestown Foundation deplores the arrest of journalist Igor Rotar, a regular contributor to the Eurasia Daily Monitor who has been affiliated with Jamestown since 1998.

"Igor Rotar is an independent journalist covering conflict and instability in Central Asia," said Jamestown President Glen E. Howard. "He poses no threat, and we urge the Uzbek government to release him immediately."

Rotar was detained by the Uzbek Immigration Service on Thursday, August 11th. He has reportedly been unable to communicate with anyone since his arrest.

As a Russian citizen traveling on a Russian passport, Rotar did not require a visa to enter Uzbekistan. Colleagues with Forum 18 and other organizations believe his detention fits a broader pattern of press intimidation by Uzbek officials.

Rotar's is a frequent contributor to Eurasia Daily Monitor, the Jamestown Foundation's flagship publication. "He is one of the premier experts on Islamic movements in Central Asia," said Howard.

In recent weeks Rotar's reporting in Eurasia Daily Monitor covered issues including security, terrorism and human rights in Central Asia. His last story ran on August 8th.

Founded in 1984, the Jamestown Foundation is an independent, non-partisan research institution dedicated to providing policy-makers and the public with timely analysis concerning critical political and strategic developments in China, Eurasia and the Greater Middle East.

For more information, contact: Christopher Swift , +1 202.483.8888

Pearsall has an interesting post and idea for a discussion on the mammoth topic of:

What Is The West?

In my comment I suggested that

the concepts of the West (Occident) and East (Orient)are very ancient. In the relatively modern world, the West is a German philosophical-cultural idea that really began with Goethe, and developed all the way to the writings of Oswald Spengler. During the Cold War, the West was seen as a democratic adversary of the totalitarian regimes of Russia and China. in In the 21st century, the term "West" probably signifies the bond between the United States and the developed democracies of Europe, as well as their allies in the rest of the world. In spite of recurrent attempts to revive the Spenglerian idea of a West in decline, the term "West" still has a positive resonance in many parts of the world.

But there's obviously an awful lot more to be said on the subject - and that in itself is a huge understatement...

Comments to Pearsall's blog, please.

While one is often grateful when other bloggers link to a post on one's blog, it's nice to see the name of the blog in its proper form. This doesn't always happen to me, however, as you can see here and here, where the title has morphed into something quite unintended. Now what is this - a Freudian slip, or something?

Update: Siberian Light has now updated the entry. Thanks, Andy.

Mikhail Zygar, writing in Kommersant, comments on the aftermath and general context of the recent mugging attack in Warsaw on the teenage sons of Russian diplomatic staff, and the two apparent "tit-for-tat" assaults on Polish embassy staff in Moscow - attacks that bear the hallmarks of a calculated provocation on the part of someone doubtless intent on making a further negative impact on the already badly frayed relations between Russia and Poland. Zygar notes that few people remember that some 150 years ago Poland for Russia was the same as Chechnya is now:

Uprisings flared up from time to time in the Polish Kingdom, part of the Russian Empire. The latest, in 1863, caused the indignation of the authorities and broad circles of the Russian public. It began with an act of terror: in the heat of night Poles massacred Russian men and officers sleeping in their barracks.

Many influential, including liberal, mass media demanded that a non-constitutional order be reestablished in Poland by a firm hand (the Constitution in the Polish Kingdom was repealed by Nicholas I after the uprising of 1830). The progressive-minded poet and writer, Nikolai Nekrasov, publicly read an ode to Count Muravyev the Hanger who suppressed the uprising. Only the Russian revolutionary emigrant, Alexander Herzen, who lived in London at the time, spoke with sympathy of the Polish insurgents and openly wished them victory, for which many of his fellow-countrymen denounced him.

The Polish question was a matter of principle for many people. Some persons, like the writer and journalist, Nikolai Danilevsky, maintained that independence shouldn't be granted to Poland, because in that case it would immediately become the centre of all revolutionary intrigues against Russia.

A century-and-a-half later the situation is repeated. Poland is now the main critic of Russia on the problem of Chechnya. And Moscow now regards Warsaw as the extremely dangerous source of revolutionary ideas smuggled into the CIS.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Marius

An English-language transcript of Andrei Babitsky's televised interview with Shamil Basayev can be read here.

The Estonian Foreign Ministry has now issued the following statement:

The helicopter crashed about 5 km off the coast of the island Naissaar today before 13.00. The Copterline helicopter was on its way from Tallinn to Helsinki.

The flight control station lost contact with the helicopter crew at 12.43, three minutes after the departure from Tallinn.

According to the latest info there were twelve passengers (6 Finns, 4 Estonians and 2 Americans) and two Finnish crew members on the flight. The rescuers have not yet found people or the helicopter on the surface.

The rescue operations are under way. A border guard helicopter, a border guard vessel Kati and border guard boat N-29 are working on the site. A trade vessel Baltic Teider has also come to offer its help.

For information on the passengers and crew call the info hotline 1345 (for calls from Estonia only).

Interior Ministry Communications Centre
Tel: (+372) 612 5033, (+372) 612 5032

http://www.vm.ee/eng/kat_138/5831.html


PRESS SPOKESPERSON'S OFFICE
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFARIS OF ESTONIA
(+372) 6317 654
(+372) 50 94 645
pressitalitus@mfa.ee
www.vm.ee

Walk of Faith - Condoleezza Rice

August 27, 2002

Walking in faith

Trained as a girl to be a concert pianist and a competitive ice skater, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, 47, is undergirded by her Christian beliefs. During an Aug. 4 Sunday school class at National Presbyterian Church, she explained what inspires her. Here are some excerpts:

I was a preacher's kid, so Sundays were church, no doubt about that. The church was the center of our lives. In segregated black Birmingham of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church was not just a place of worship. It was the place where families gathered; it was the social center of the community, too.

Although I never doubted the existence of God, I think like all people I've had some ups and downs in my faith. When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad. I was always in another time zone. One Sunday I was in the Lucky's Supermarket not very far from my house - I will never forget - among the spices and an African-American man walked up to me and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. And he said, "Do you play the piano by any chance?"

I said, "Yes." They said they were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American church right in the center of Palo Alto. A Baptist church. So I started playing for that church. That got me regularly back into churchgoing. I don't play gospel very well - I play Brahms - and you know how black ministers will start a song and the musicians will pick it up? I had no idea what I was doing and so I called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches.

"Mother," I said, "they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" She said, "Honey, play in C and they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, people will come back. I tell that story because I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach." I mean, in the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning.

I played for about six months for them and then I decided to go and find the Presbyterian Church again. I'm a devoted Presbyterian. I really like the governance structure of the church. I care about the Presbyterian Church. On a Sunday morning, I went to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church [in Palo Alto]. The minister that Sunday morning gave a sermon I will never quite forget. It was about the Prodigal Son from the point of view of the elder son.

It set the elder son up not as somebody who had done all the right things but as somebody who had become so self-satisfied; a parable about self-satisfaction, and content and complacency in faith [and] that people who didn't somehow expect themselves to need to be born again can be complacent. I started to think of myself as that elder son who had never doubted the existence of God but wasn't really walking in faith in an active way anymore.

I started to become more active with the church, to go to Bible study and to have a more active prayer life. It was a very important turning point in my life.

My father was an enormous influence in my spiritual life. He was a theologian, a doctor of divinity. He was someone who let you argue about things. He didn't say, "Just accept it." And when I had questions, which we all do, he encouraged that. He went to great lengths to explain about the man we've come to know as Doubting Thomas; he thought that was a little story from Christ about the fact it was OK to question. And that Christ knew that Thomas needed to feel his wounds; feel the wounds in His side and feel the wounds in His hands. That it was what Thomas needed - he needed that physical contact. And then of course Christ said when you can accept this on faith, it will be even better.

I [liked] that because my father didn't brush aside my questions about faith. He allowed me as someone who lives in my mind to also live in my faith.

In this job, when we faced a horrible crisis like September 11, you go back in your mind and think, "Is there anything I could have done? Might I have seen this coming? Was there some way?" When you go through something like that, you have to turn to faith because you can rationalize it, you can make an intellectual answer about it but you can't fully accept it until you can feel it here (taps chest). That time wasn't a failure, but it was a period of crisis when faith was really important for me.

I try always to not think I am Elijah, that I have somehow been particularly called. That's a dangerous thing. In a sense, we've all been, to whatever it is we are doing. But if you try to wear the imprimatur of God - I've seen that happen to leaders who begin too much to believe - there are a couple of very good anecdotes to that. I try to say in my prayers, "Help me to walk in Your way, not my own." To try to walk in a way that is actually trying to fulfill a plan and recognize you are a cog in a larger universe.

I think people who believe in a creator can never take themselves too seriously. I feel that faith allows me to have a kind of optimism about the future. You look around you and you see an awful lot of pain and suffering and things that are going wrong. It could be oppressive. But when I look at my own story or many others that I have seen, I think, "How could it possibly be that it has turned out this way?" Then my only answer is it's God's plan. And that makes me very optimistic that this is all working out in a proper way if we all stay close to God and pray and follow in His footsteps.

I really do believe that God will never let you fall too far. There is an old gospel hymn, "He knows how much you can bear." I really do believe that.

I greatly appreciate, and so does the president, the prayers of the American people. You feel them. You know that they are there. If you just keep doing that, it is so important to all of us.

In many ways, it's a wonderful White House to be in because there are a lot of people who are of faith, starting with the president. When you are in a community of faithful, it makes a very big difference not only in how people treat each other but in how they treat the task at hand.

Among American leadership, there are an awful lot of people who travel in faith. It's a remarkable thing and I think it probably sets us apart from most developed countries where it is not something that is appreciated quite as much in most of the world.

I've watched over the last year and a half how people want to have human dignity worldwide. You hear of Asian values or Middle Eastern values and how that means people can't really take to democracy or they'll never have democracy because they have no history of it, and so forth. We forget that when people are given a choice between freedom and tyranny, they will choose freedom. I remember all the stories before the liberation of Afghanistan that they wouldn't "get it," that they were all warlords and it would just be chaos. Then we got pictures of people dancing on the streets of Kabul just because they could listen to music or send their girls to school.


from the Washington Times 8/27/2002

YLE reports that a Copterline helicopter en route from Tallinn to Helsinki has crashed into the Gulf of Finland only a few minutes after taking off. All fourteen people aboard are believed to have been killed.

At Stratfor, Peter Zeihan has some interesting reflections on the probable future course of American foreign policy beyond the war on terrorism:

Unfinished Business in Russia

It should come as no surprise that the most dynamic part of U.S. foreign policy relates to Russia. Condoleezza Rice, appointed as Secretary of State at the beginning of the year, began her government work during the end of the Cold War, when she served as former President George H. W. Bush's Soviet expert at the National Security Council. Now that she is in the big chair at Foggy Bottom, she has surrounded herself with members of the same team from her previous stint in government service. Of particular note are former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, former U.S. ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns, and Robert Joseph, former special assistant to the president and senior director for proliferation strategy, counterproliferation and homeland defense with the National Security Council (NSC) -- a wordy way of saying that he was really important. The three now serve essentially as Rice's No. 2, 3 and 4 at State.

As we stated when Rice was appointed in January, the State Department is now "staffed by a team that helped knock the Soviet Union off its superpower perch. Russia can look forward to four years of a State Department with the resources and the will to ratchet back Moscow's influence throughout the Baltics, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia and even its western Slavic flank. The confrontation over Ukraine was just the beginning."

Personnel changes have not been limited to the top tier. Vershbow's replacement as ambassador -- William Burns -- fits the mold set by Rice and her top team. He served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow as minister-counselor for political affairs during the 1980s, a position and time that would tend to shape one's political views. He is now coming back to Moscow after several years of knocking Israeli and Palestinian heads together.

In the case of Russia, however, the transformation is much deeper than "just" a fresh ambassador, secretary of state and top management team. The rank and file of the entire Russia desk at the State Department is being overhauled. Considering that most State Department personnel swap out positions every two to three years to avoid the dangers of going native, a certain amount of turnover is expected, but the top-to-bottom housecleaning in the case of the Russia team appears to be far more thorough than any scheduled rotation.

The big shift began -- and the direction of U.S. policy was set -- at the V-E Day celebrations in Moscow in May. During that trip, the Bush team bracketed a whirlwind tour past a parade stand in Moscow between deep, long and extremely friendly visits to Latvia and Georgia. The message was clear: the United States is now more concerned with the comings, goings and concerns of Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Mikhail Saakashvili-- the Latvian and Georgian presidents -- than it is with the Russians, and this message was sent on the Russians' national day.

In the Russian mind, it is all snapping into place: color "revolutions" in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine; NATO and EU expansion right up to the Russian border; the commencement of pumping on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline; and now a thorough personnel shift in the State Department that is stocking the top ranks with people who were present at -- and played a role in -- the Soviet defeat. The Kremlin's belief is that the West, led by the United States, is committing to a full-court press into Russia's geopolitical space in an attempt to permanently remove Russia as a threat.

James Hamilton, with a hard-hitting analysis of British modes of social communication based on ideological platitudes that centre around perceptions of the West's role in Iraq and the war on terror. Money quote from the article:

This debate about the West - which is currently chewing on suicide bombers and will shortly spit them out, as it spat the Iraq War out - is also a kind of jostling for position, a way for us in the West to communicate to our friends and colleagues about the sort of people we are.

If we are at all interested in politics, the chances are that we are also interested in seeing ourselves as intelligent, nuanced, concerned, involved. Of course we are - who really, at the bottom of their hearts, wants everyone to see them as an ignorant thug? (There will be those who'll affect not to care..) And we'd like other people to see us as smart and caring too, if at all possible. But you can't just go up to someone and say "I'm nuanced, I'm intelligent": they'll immediately assume the opposite, and that's not all they'll assume. No, these things have to be got across by osmosis. How? by declaring support for sets of views which we think are adopted by people who have those desirable attributes of intelligence, nuance etc.

There's actually a number of these sets of views - pro-War, South Park Conservative, anti-Poverty, etc. - and there are points where they merge or serve the same constituency. But by far the most effective and universal set of views at the moment is the anti-Bush, anti-Capitalist, Kyoto, anti-Globalisation, anti-War one. Given the advantages adopting this set of views gives you, it is no surprise that they have taken off in quite the way they have.

Although I don't hold any of those views myself (I think I may be the only British psychotherapist who doesn't) I don't blame anyone who does. In fact, in a real way I envy them. Holding these views does so much for a person, gives them so much extra, provides so much value, that it's only sensible to take them on if you can.

There are so many advantages that I don't even know where to start. I'll attempt a list:

People assume that you're a nice person
People assume that you are intelligent
People assume that you keep yourself informed
People think that you have cleverly not been fooled by liars.
People think that you are willing to sacrifice for the benefit of others
You can do all the adopting of these views from home. No equipment or additional purchase needed
You line up with Geldof, Tutu, Mandela, Castro, Galloway, Moore, Benn - charisma is on your side, and it rubs off on you
You have a context for passion, anger, commitment - which other people accept
You are no longer to blame for global warming - you're on the side of the angels
You are no longer responsible for poverty - you're on the side of the angels
You have access to the youth-giving properties of these views
You are assumed to be tolerant, anti-racist, in favour of human rights
You are assumed to be easy-going and to have a sense of humour
You are assumed to be capable of a fulfilling sex life
You are assumed to be free of neuroses, tics, hang-ups.
You are assumed to be in the right on the issues of the day without your having to demonstrate this
You are seen as being essentially classless - neither a toff, nor a chav.
You get to feel you're in the majority and in the vanguard at the same time

I could go on, and on, and on. There's no punchline, by the way - I'm not writing satire here.. The fact of the matter is, you can get all those advantages in your life and many more, just by saying something like "He's killed thousands" when Bush appears on the television. Everything else is done for you. You don't have to march - but it's there for you if you want. You don't have to spend a lot of money - stick the Guardian or the Independent in your bag, and you're away. You don't have to change your job (if you're in the military, you actually get bonus points). You don't have to move house. In fact, you can pretty much carry on as before

Read the whole thing.

At Babalú Blog, A.M. Mora y Leon has a personal overview of the life and work of the great Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who died recently in Havana at the age of 78.

Window on Eurasia: Russia is Losing the North Caucasus, Moscow Analysts Say

Paul Goble

Tartu, August 9 – Despite Moscow’s repeated claims of progress in Chechnya, the Russian government is quickly losing control of the northern Caucasus as the other non-Russian republics there increasingly acquire the attributes of independent countries, according to a group of analysts in the Russian capital.

Moreover, Moscow’s position in that region, they say, is likely to deteriorate further in the near future because the remedies the Kremlin currently favors – greater use of military force and spending more money through existing political structures – do little to reverse that trend and may in many cases even be making the situation worse.

As a result, these analysts suggest, the situation across the northern Caucasus ever more recalls „the parade of sovereignties” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a development that contributed to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the serious weakening of the Russian Federation as well.

These analysts, who are grouped around the Institute for National Strategy, do not argue that a similar outcome is inevitable, but they do suggest that the Russian government must stop denying to itself and others how serious things are and change its policies as well.(http://www.apn.ru/?chapter_name=advert&data_id=599&do=view_single).

The INS analysts draw most of their examples from Daghestan because they argue the situation there is the most critical. But they insist that Russia’s position is declining across the region as a whole because of the coming together of a set of seven increasingly inter-related factors.

First, they note, in the years since 1991, ethnic Russians and other Russian-speaking groups have fled the region, thus eliminating one of the groups on which Moscow had traditionally relied to maintain control. Today, for example, Russians account for fewer than one of every 20 residents in Daghestan.

Second, the people in the region are increasingly relying on foreign currency rather than the Russian ruble, precisely what happened at the end of the Soviet period across the country but just the reverse of more recent and much-commented-upon trends elsewhere in the Russian Federation.

According to official statistics, Daghestan has the lowest avereage pay of any federal subject, but the population there has increased its purchases of foreign currency from 1.6 billion rubles worth in 2003 to 8.8 billion rubles’ worth in 2004. And its foreign currency deposts over the last four years have shot up 17.5 times, the INS analysts report.

Third, despite Moscow’s promises, the Russian authorities have failed to develop a sufficiently large or effective assistance program. In this year alone, they note, the central Russian government allocated twice as much money on the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the city of Kazan as it did on the reconstruction of Chechnya.

Fourth, the political institutions left over from Soviet times on which Moscow has continued to rely are increasingly corrupt and do not have much authority with the local population. Indeed, the INS analysts say,one can now speak of „the absence of the state” in many parts of the north Caucasus.

Because the central Russian government relies on these corrupt regimes, little of its assistance to the region reaches the population, something that undermines Moscow’s authority there. And because of both these factors, people in the northern Caucasus are far more willing to engage in protests than people in other parts of the Russian Federation.

Fifth, because nature abhors a vacuum, the INS analysts argue, Islam as a social and political force and not just as a set of ideas has moved to fill this gap, creating what are in effect parallel political institutions with more authority in the population and consequently more effective power.

Often, as in the case of Daghestan, these parallel structures take the form of Islamic jamaats, communal organizations whose operations have the effect of creating „a special social space where Russian social and legal norms already no longer operate.”

One measure of this is the explosive growth in the number of Islamic institutions, especially in Daghestan. There are now more than 1595 mosques in that republic alone – 59 times more than in 1983 – and some 14,000 young people are studying in the more than 400 Islamic academies now operating there.

Remarkably, the INS analysts note, both Moscow and local officials in the 1990s even helped power this growth, the first out of a belief that Islam could help overcome ethnic divisions and integrate the people of this region into the Russian Federation and the latter in the hope that it would provide them with an independent power base.

Sixth, because of the collapse of the Soviet external border, the people of this region have dramatically expanded their ties to foreign countries and especially to the Muslim Middle East. Indeed, for many people in the northern Caucasus, the Arab world is now less foreign than the rest of the Russian Federation.

Many in Europe and the United States have focused on the impact of the opening of the Russian Federation’s border with the West, but few have considered the results of the opening of the Russian Federation’s southern border, something that could prove equally fateful, the INS analysts say.

In 1998 alone, they report, 14,000 Daghestanis made the haj to Mecca. During the 1990s on average, 12,000 people travelled from there to Saudi Arabia each year. And in 1996 alone, the INS experts report, some 1230 young people from that northern Caucasus republic studied abroad, most of them in Saudi Islamic institutions.

Those ties have contributed to a change in the mental maps of the Daghestanis, these analysts say. Now, many in that republic and other parts of the northern Caucasus view the Arab world as far closer to them than Moscow, a place they see as an increasingly „foreign” destination.

And seventh, the INS analysts point out, the common information space which the Soviet system imposed on this region has collapsed, and as a result, people in the region increasingly get their news and have their opinions shaped not by Moscow outlets but rather by their own national elites or by groups beyond the borders of the Russian Federation.

Recent statements by Dmitriy Kozak, the Presidential plenopotentiary for the northern Caucasus whose report on Daghestan recently leaked to the press, and by top Putin aide Vladislav Surkov who compared the problems of this region to „a underground fire,” suggest that Moscow may be beginning to understand dangerous the situation is, the INS analysts say.

But they add that there is as yet little indication that they are prepared to change course, and as a result, the situation first in Daghestan and then elsewhere across the northern Caucasus is likely to develop in ways that may prove even more threatening to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation than the insurgents in Chechnya have been up to now.

Curious Behaviour of a Scotch Baronet

`We instantly left our guides and the horses to manage matters as they could; and rushing over slags, lava, and mud, fell upon the snow like wild beasts upon their prey. My enjoyment was excessive; and the very recollection of it is so gratifying that I must be excused for recording a circumstance of so little importance.'

-McKenzie.

Art without malice

`The clergyman had a large family and McDiarmed good-naturedly took a blooming little maiden of six or seven years a ride on his pony; while Lord Lodbrog drew a very accurate sketch of his home and church. It was really very well done and when pinned up against the wall of the sitting-room had a smart appearance.'

-Umbra.

Hear, Hear!

'Let's go home. We can't camp in this beastly place.
- What is he saying?
- I'm not going to camp here.
- You must, All Englishmen do.
- Blast all Englishmen.'

-William Morris.

Moral drawn from a Geysir

`While the jets were rushing up towards Heaven with the velocity of an arrow my mind was forcibly borne along with them to the contemplation of the Great and Omnipotent JEHOVAH in comparison with whom these and all the wonders scattered over the whole immensity of existence dwindle into absolute insignificance; whose almighty commands spake the universe into being; and at whose sovereign fiat the whole fabric might be reduced, in an instant, to its original nothing.'

- Henderson.

Rudeness shown to the same Geysir

'Darwin profanely called the Geysir an old brute.'

-Umbra.

Spread of Nazi Doctrines among the Icelandic ponies

`Famous scientists, doctors, politicians, and writers, mounted her and rode for a wonderful week's tour. Richer in experience, strengthened and refreshed by Nature, ready for a new struggle with the arch-fiend culture, they went home and gave lectures.'

-Fleuron.


W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (1937)

Here's a wonderfully informative and inspiring account of the career of one of the great string players in jazz, violinist Gayle Dixon, who together with her sister, cellist Akua Dixon, has brought the clarity and scope of classical string playing to the realm of jazz performance. In addition to her extensive work as a music educator and union organizer, Gayle was an original member and first violinist of the Uptown String Quartet and Quartette Indigo, has performed with singers such as Sarah Vaughan and Tony Bennett, and recorded with major jazz artists such as Woody Shaw, Max Roach (The Max Roach Double Quartet is pictured left), Steve Turre and James Newton. An excerpt from the essay-interview:

Dixon's music studies began at a time when enormous cultural opportunities were available to New Yorkers. For one thing, she notes, there were many community orchestras, opera companies and chamber music groups that she and her sister Akua, a cellist, could play with after school. Her professional career also began early. "In junior high school my sister and I earned money by playing in churches. We would play three or four Messiahs on the Sunday before Christmas."

After attending Performing Arts High School, she won a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Stanley Bednar for four years. She then studied violin with Raphael Bronstein and chamber music coached by Harold Berkley and his wife. She was awarded a Martha Baird Rockefeller Music Assistance Fund fellowship, and later studied violin with Sam Kissell and Burton Kaplan.

Along with her classical training, Dixon was deeply influenced by the music she grew up with: the blues, spirituals and gospel music. She also heard Latin music in her neighborhood, and has subsequently done a lot of work in that field.

Dixon's college roommate found out about the Symphony of the New World, which had been formed by a group of activist musicians in the early 1960s to give opportunities to Black musicians, and both of them played for the conductor, Benjamin Steinberg. "One of my finest musical experiences as a young musician was playing in the first chair octet of the Symphony of the New World, and in the octet for young players, which was funded by a Ford Foundation grant," Dixon recalls. "We rehearsed three or four times a week and played string quartet and octet concerts in New York City and the surrounding areas. Several people in the fellowship program went on to major orchestras."

Among the people who helped her get started were Selwart Clarke, Al Brown, Kermit Moore, Julien Barber and Sanford Allen. "Raphael Bronstein's daughter, Ariana Bronne, hired me to sub for her at the Palace Theatre, where I met Mel Rodnon. He hired me to work at the Westbury Music Fair and on Broadway while I was still in school, and is the contractor of Phantom. Red Press hired me over a period of many years."

Dixon has worked closely since the beginning of her career with her sister, cellist Akua Dixon Turre, a composer and arranger. "Akua has written many works, including a body of work for symphonic strings, compositions for string quartet, an oratorio based on the poetry of Henry Dumas, and a wonderful opera that I hope she will complete some day. Over the years I played in many ensembles she formed to play her music." Akua is married to jazz trombonist Steve Turre, a member of the Saturday Night Live band, and Gayle has also worked on many of his projects, including his CD "Fire & Ice," which featured Quartette Indigo.

She was among a group of 30 Black string players who founded The String Reunion in 1976, at violinist Noel Pointer's initiative, "to develop a repertoire of music by Black composers. We held workshops and presented concerts, classical as well as jazz, and were hired to do concerts and record dates," Dixon recalls. "Akua was the music director, and her compositions were the foundation of our repertoire.

"The most gratifying work I've done musically has been string quartets, and some of the most demanding has been as a string player in a jazz environment. The first time I played string quartet with jazz ensemble was a concert for McCoy Tyner at Town Hall about 1970. Akua put together a jazz string quartet to play at the Village Gate in 1972. I did lots of interesting projects with Jazzmobile, with the Collective Black Artists, with Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell for Strata East Records, and for The New Muse (the Community Museum of Brooklyn), where Reggie Workman was director."

She has also worked with many of the Latin greats, including Tito Puente and the great Cuban bassist, Israel "Cachao" Lopez, and has also worked and recorded with many popular charanga groups, including Lou Perez y su charanga and Tipica Novel.

Read it all.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free
is often to be lonely. He would unite
the unequal moieties fractured
by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will
the smaller possesses but can only use
for arid disputes, would give back to
the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice
if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,
even to bear our cry of 'Judas',
as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave
the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:
sad is Eros, builder of cities,
and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

from: W.H. Auden, In Memory Of Sigmund Freud (1940)

Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer about the British Left:

Auden noticed a retreat from universal principles in the 1930s - communism was fine in 'semi-barbaric' Russia but would have been a screaming outrage in a civilised country. He should have been alive today. With no socialism to provide international solidarity, good motives of tolerance and respect for other cultures have had the unintended consequence of leading a large part of post-modern liberal opinion into the position of 19th-century imperialists. It is presumptuous and oppressive to suggest that other cultures want the liberties we take for granted, their argument runs. So it may be, but believe that and the upshot is that democracy, feminism and human rights become good for whites but not for browns and brown-skinned people who contradict you are the tools of the neo-conservatives.

On the other hand when confronted with a movement of contemporary imperialism - Islamism wants an empire from the Philippines to Gibraltar - and which is tyrannical, homophobic, misogynist, racist and homicidal to boot, they feel it is valid because it is against Western culture. It expresses its feelings in a regrettably brutal manner perhaps, but that can't hide its authenticity.

The result of this inversion of principles has been that liberals can't form alliances with the victims of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or Iraq any more than the Auden generation could form alliances with the victims of Stalinism.

This isn't simply about international relations. Who is going to help the victims of religious intolerance in Britain's immigrant communities? Not the Liberal Democrats, who have never once offered support to liberals and democrats in Iraq. Nor an anti-war left which prefers to embrace a Muslim Association of Britain and Yusuf al-Qaradawi who believe that Muslims who freely decide to change their religion or renounce religion should be executed. If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to suggest the same treatment for renegade Christians all hell would break loose. But as the bigotry comes from 'the other' there is silence.

Read it all.

(via Harry's Place)

Abductions in Chechnya

http://eng.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/engnews/id/838682.html

A group of unidentified people in camouflage uniforms, armed with automatic weapons, broke into the house of Said-Selim Abdulkhanov, a local resident, in Dolinskoye, Grozny district, and brought him away on the night of 4 August, a source with Chechnya's Internal Affairs Ministry told Caucasian Knot. Abdulkhanov is a fireman with the fifth fire unit of the republican Civil Defence and Emergencies Ministry, the source added. Sultan Abubakarov, CK correspondent.

Military men detained six local residents in Serzhen-Yurt, Shali district, and brought them away without indicating the destination. There were searches carried out without search warrants, Radio Liberty says. Neither people from the prosecutor's office, nor representatives of the district administration attended the arrests.

http://eng.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/engnews/id/838683.html

The case of Nurpashi Kulayev charged with involvement in the attack on school No 1 in Beslan continued to be heard in Vladikavkaz. Three out of the 38 summoned victims came to interrogation today.

Svetlana Dzheriyev who had been taken hostage together with her daughter spoke first. Her 6-year-old Dana went to the first form on that day. To calm down her daughter, Svetlana told her the bombs hanging overhead were lumps of soap. Svetlana also confirmed the terrorists were shooting in the backs of running children.

Liudmila Reznov who spoke next also told about atrocities. She said one terrorist ran into the gymnasium after an explosion there and threw a grenade. Liudmila said while some gunmen were breaking windows in the gymnasium one of them explained, "Nord-Ost taught us that."

The evidence given by Atikat Koniyev who had been taken hostage together with her granddaughter was the most interesting. Atikat told the court about a terrorist called Ali. Other victims had previously mentioned a terrorist named so, and some think it was Ali who was the chief of the gang, not Ruslan Khuchbarov nicknamed Colonel.

Atikat described Ali as a very cynical man.

"He told us, 'These bombs are very good, I've made them myself. There are 1,200 metal items in each of them, one bomb is enough for all of you.' He also said, 'We will be killing federals as long as we have cartridges, and when we are out, we will blow you up.'"

Atikat recollects that the "school was like a tin stuffed with explosives." Ali even read out the Koran to them, according to her.

"I asked him why children, why haven't you seized the House of Government. He answered, 'We would take the House of Government, too, if they hadn't taken away Grozny.' He also said, 'I've shaven my beard to get here.'"

Several times Ali talked to someone by phone and demanded the president. Atikat was near at such moments and could even hear answers in the receiver.

"I will only talk to the president," Ali told someone and put down the receiver. His phone rang again in 15-20 minutes.

"President?"

"No, his aide," the reply was heard in the receiver and Ali interrupted the talk at once.

Once, when someone asked Ali for water, he replied:

"We have an aim - no food and water. It was an indulgence that we gave you water. We have rations, but I don't eat myself," Ali said.

Atikat said no one of those men whom they had taken out of the gymnasium had come back.

"Overall, it was clear from the very beginning that they will be killing us, it was no secret to anyone. Their demands were unrealisable, how could these troops be removed..."

"Do you think talks with the gunmen should have been held?" the victim's lawyer, Taimuraz Chejemov, asked Atikat.

"Of course, they should! Everything should have been done to save the children, talks held, and the president (Dzasokhov) as a man should have gone there."

In conclusion, Atikat Koniyev who had not even been wounded in the school confessed she felt guilty because she survived.

"I have since been unable to sleep, those children before my eyes," the victim said crying.

The next hearing was scheduled for 9 August.

I've been watching a remarkable DVD of colour documentary footage from the Second World War, called Britain At War In Colour. The most extraordinary sequences are not those of the actual fighting, but of British cities, towns and country places in wartime. One can actually gain a sense of what it felt like to live in Britain during those years: the shots of street scenes (such as I remember from my own childhood only five or six years later) and countryside fairs, with "Holiday At Home" signs, and the children, many pale and undernourished, yet cared for. The films, many recorded by amateurs, show a society deeply unsettled and anxious, plagued by food shortages and fears of bombing and invasion, yet cohering around a sense of national identity that was really nothing more nor less than a sense of being human. These sequences go a long way to counter the commonly accepted cliches about Britain - the "stiff upper lip" and so on - for one can see just from the expressions on faces in the street that there was no certainty the war would be won, and the material hardship and ever-present threat and reality of cataclysmic violence made it hard to go on.

Watching these films, which among other things show U.S. service personnel in London, and British fighter pilots being trained at airbases in the United States, I became more and more aware of the acute differences between Britain and the United States: though America made a great contribution to the defeat of Nazism, America did not suffer internally as a country in the way that Britain did. In spite of all the sacrifices made by U.S. forces during the war and after, the American people still don't really know what it means to encounter and fight evil as a nation.

The following is a very quick translation of a recently-published article by Novaya Gazeta correspondent Alexander Nekrasov about the U.K. Channel 4 documentary "The Dirty War", which was screened in July. It contains some interesting remarks about the apparent links between Russian intelligence services and Arab extremist organizations.


"THE DIRTY WAR"

British television crew meets with Chechen fighters in the very heart of Chechnya

Oh, how the word will fly to someone in the FSB and MVD! Is it a joke? A film crew from the British Channel 4 TV program “Dispatches” arrives in Grozny in May this year, with authorization from the Russian authorities, to make a film about “the restoration of normal life in the republic", but at odd moments meets up with Chechen field commanders and even films their annual assembly at which they take a decision to extend military operations to the entire territory of Russia.

As if in mockery of the Russian and Chechen security services, the documentary film "Chechnya: The Dirty War", shown recently on British television’s Channel Four, opens with the following words by the presenter: "The military conflict in Chechnya has now been dragging on for more than ten years. During this war Moscow has tried every means possible to prevent it being reported in the press. And so all contacts with members of Chechen resistance are considered illegal... "

The makers of the film "A Dirty War" lost no time in informing their viewers that they began to gather material about Chechen fighters as long as three years ago, when they established contact with field commander Gelayev and his men during a visit to Chechnya in the winter of 2003. And although in the film itself Gelayev appears only as an extra, as he leads his fighters through the mountains on a routine operation, his closest companion-in-arms, field commander Alman Bakayev, talks about the situation.

Among other things, Bakayev tells of how in late November 2003 he sent *his men” to Moscow with the task of "meeting Putin". "At the last moment he turned down the meeting,” Bakayev asserts. “The pretext was that they had to wait until the elections were over." Bakayev also said: "Because of the Chechen war they (i.e., Russia. - A.N.) lost the positions they had had in the USSR, beginning with influence in the Arab countries and ending with the countries of the former Union, including the ones in Europe. Certainly, they want to find some way out, but it’s not one that suits us."

The film crew of the program “Dispatches” visited the Middle East, where they were able to find some leaders of the Chechen fighters, who, as it was said in the film, are occupied there in collecting money. "The guerrilla war is always a deep underground,” said an unnamed leader of Chechen fighters. “This deep underground irritates the Russians more than the open war. I do not know how this war can be stopped, but I know that our purpose is to go to the end. No one in history has ever got back their territory without war. After the disintegration of the USSR, Russia was not yet a state, but were a state already then. At the time, Yeltsin said: take as much as you can. We took, and created are state more quickly than the Russians. But then they realized what had happened and thought that if Chechnya were to secede, then the entire Caucasus would follow. And if the entire Caucasus were to secede, then the whole of Russia would come crashing down."

Later in the film, Alman Bakayev was shown in Paris, where he has spent the past year through the invitation of the French government. But the most curious thing here was Bakayev’s assertion that he went to France in order, together with the French authorities, "to study the strange interrelation between the Russian special services and the Arab extremists". In France, according to Bakayev, "live very many of our people and many officials of Russian intelligence". And here he made one completely unexpected admission, after referring to the fact that some officials of the Russian special services work "at the level, let us say, of our representatives". "Bakayev told us,” said the presenter, “that the French authorities were greatly interested in the assertions of Chechens about the fact that Russian intelligence used its contacts from the times of the USSR in order to mobilize Arab extremists for its purposes". According to Bakayev, Russian special services were able to inject their agents into the radical organizations of the Arab world, which support the Chechen movement for independence. "All this is true,” said Bakayev. – “Unfortunately, it’s true."

In the film it was acknowledged that the seizure of the school in Beslan deprived the Chechen independence movement of support in the world. Immediately after the Beslan tragedy the authors of the film put questions to Aslan Maskhadov, who in response to this gave them a cassette with his answers. Maskhadov, in particular, said the following: "Without removing responsibility from those people who took children hostage at the school in Beslan, I would like to tell the truth about the main reason for what happened – it is the human-hating, barbarous policy of Russia in the Caucasus. The second reason is the continuing war in Chechnya. A war which in its cruelty has no analogs. In the last five years all Chechen children, the entire people of Chechnya have been held hostage. They are all undergoing state terrorism from the side of Russia ".

"Our film crew returned to Chechnya during May of this year,” said the presenter. “As before, Russian troops were in complete control of the situation in Chechnya. We were taken to the ceremony of the first anniversary of President Akhmat's Kadyrov’s death. This ceremony was not announced in public and was held a day early for reasons of security.”

“In the course of the ceremony the fountains were turned on. And this in a city where the majority of people do not have running water in their houses. All the filming was done under the indefatigable supervision of Russian soldiers. And this in spite of the fact that Russia insists that the Chechens are managing their own affairs and that the republic is attempting to return to a normal course of life. However, according to the latest report to the human rights organization "Human Rights Watch", in 2004 1700 disappeared in the republic without trace, and illegal killings became commonplace."

According to the makers of the film, no one from the "Pro-Moscow Chechen government" was willing to meet with them or to give them an interview. And so, the presenter quietly explained, the film crew of the program "Dispatches", itself went off in search of fighters, as it had done in the past. As a result, the meeting of British journalists with the group of field commanders took place in the mountains: they included Alman Bakayev, who, as it was explained, on this occasion was dealing with the creation of small forces capable of delivering blows against government forces and targets.

The film makers also met with Doku Umarov, vice-premier of the Chechen government in exile. The meeting took place at one of the bases of the Chechen fighters. "Never in my life have I seen the Chechen people in such humiliation and fear", Umarov said in the “Dispatches” interview.

Kusama Maskhadova – Aslan Maskhadov’s widow – also appeared in the film.

"For the Russians this was a great victory,” said the film’s presenter. “After enticing Maskhadov with promises to begin negotiations, they killed him. With his death, the last vetiges of faith among the Chechen resistance in the possibility of negotiations disappeared."

"In order to preserve Russia’s influence in Chechnya, President Putin is ready to support Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who, in the view of human rights organizations, bears responsibility for many disappearances of people and illegal killings. It even awarded Kadyrov with Russia’s highest award – the title of Hero of Russia."

But the creators of film saved up the biggest bombshell for the end. After complaining about the fact that the West no longer supports the Chechen resistance, Doku Umarov declared that from now on the war will be conducted by Chechen fighters using different methods. "We will now divide the regions of Russia between the commanders, so that this commander will deal with the western regions, this – with the Siberian regions, this – with the eastern ones. We will now set this work into implementation."

"Maskadov's death”, said the film’s presenter, “convinced the leadership of fighters of the that it would be expedient to transfer the war to Russia’s economic centres. This solution was communicated to all fighters who were located outside the territory of Chechnya."

And at the very end of the film the presenter drew this conclusion: "President Putin was able to convince the West of the fact that Chechnya is Russia’s internal problem and that the West has no right to interfere. At the same time he says that it is part of global war with terrorism. What began as a fight for the independence of a small republic may go far beyond its boundaries. This war now helps to feed the wider movement of an Islamic Jihad in the world, which threatens both the West and Russia."

Alexander Nekrasov, our own correspondent, London

04.08.2005

A Russian-language transcript of Andrei Babitsky's televised interview with Shamil Basayev is now available on the Chechenpress website. Normally an English translation is released on the site some days after the initial publication of such transcripts, so it may be necessary to wait for this.

Andrei Smirnov in EDM:

BASAEV INTERVIEW ENRAGES RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES

The interview with Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev that aired on American television on July 29 dealt a serious blow to the Kremlin. Russian authorities made desperate efforts to prevent the ABC television network from broadcasting the interview on its "Nightline" news program. The Russian Embassy in Washington sent its protest to ABC several hours before the show aired (Kommersant, July 30). When the interview was broadcast, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it would not renew ABC's accreditation in Russia for the next year (RIA-Novosti, August 2).

There are several reasons why Russian authorities are so angry at the interview with Basaev. First of all, the Chechen rebel commander called himself a "terrorist," but at the same time he explained convincingly that the Russian side was also responsible for the violence and the wave of terror in the Caucasus and Central Russia. Talking about the Beslan and Nord-Ost terrorist attacks, Basaev pointed out that most of the hostages died because of gas (in Moscow) and flame throwers and tanks (in Beslan) used by federal forces during so-called "rescue operations" rather than because of actions by his men.

To take at least part of the responsibility for the Chechen war means the Kremlin would partly open the door for negotiations with the rebels, which the Russian government is very afraid to start. Meanwhile, to have Basaev or somebody else reveal the truth about operations in which Moscow's representatives all but ignored the lives of hostages could unleash anger among Russian society and give another strong argument to the anti-Putin opposition movement. At the same time, the Russian government is unhappy with the fact that major Western media sources are queuing to interview Basaev but almost ignore President Alu Alkhanov, First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, and other pro-Russian Chechen leaders handpicked by Moscow.

However, it is not just the interview, but also the way it was produced that partly explains the Kremlin's disappointment.

Basaev was interviewed by Andrei Babitsky, a well-known Radio Liberty correspondent who had worked on the rebels' side at the start of the second Chechen campaign in mid-1999. In January 2000 federal officials detained Babitsky as he tried to leave Grozny, the Chechen capital. He spent one month in detention before he was freed.

Babitsky subsequently left Russia for Prague, where Radio Liberty has offices, but in 2003 he returned to Chechnya to visit rebel bases in the mountains. Late in June of this year he went to the Caucasus again to meet, as he said, Doku Umarov, a Chechen commander and vice-president of the separatist government. Babitsky entered Russia from Ukraine and went by car to Ingushetia, a republic adjacent to Chechnya. A rebel, whom he had met in the Ingush village of Sleptsovskaya, took him to another village, named Nesterovskaya.

Nesterovskaya lies at the intersection of two roads leading to the mountainous part of the republic. One of the roads goes to the mountain village of Arshti and then on to the Chechen settlement of Bamut. The rebel envoy accompanying Babitsky brought him to this road in Nesterovskaya and asked the reporter to go to a car waiting for him on the roadside. Babitsky said later that he was shocked when he saw Basaev himself sitting in the back seat of the car. Basaev and Babitsky reached the Chechen border and walked into the woods on the Chechen side. The journalist spent two days at a secret rebel base interviewing Basaev (Kommersant, July 30).

The details of Babitsky's journey show how weakly federal officials control the North Caucasus and revealed lies told by the generals. Just four months ago Nikolai Rogozhkin, the commander of Russia's Interior troops, had said that Basaev was lying low because was scared. "Hardly anybody has heard Basaev's voice recently," Rogozhkin added confidently (RIA-Novosti, April 15).

Nevertheless, as we know now, such statements contradict reality. Basaev can travel by car not only in Chechnya, but also in Ingushetia and probably in other North Caucasus republics as well. The Babitsky story of his meeting with Basaev in Ingushetia forced security officials to respond. The Kremlin has made the Ingush Ministry of Interior Affairs the scapegoat. They are blamed instead of the army, Russian police special units, and Federal Security Service (FSB). The Ingush police were ordered to lie to the media.

"If Basaev or his men had been in Ingushetia, they would have been immediately arrested," declared Murat Zurabov, head of the Press Service of the Ingush Interior Ministry (RIA-Novosti, August 1).

In reality, however, the Kremlin now trusts the Ingush police even less than before. Two days after the interview was televised, Ingushetia's roads were crowded with Russian troops who had set up mobile checkpoints at all main intersections. Supported by armored trucks and armored personnel carriers, masked servicemen check suspicious cars and their passengers while military aircraft patrol above Ingush towns and villagers. The larger groups of soldiers are stationed near the approaches to Sleptsovskaya and Nesterovskaya settlements, the area where Basaev met Babitsky.

The hunt for Basaev is underway, but the warlord is unlikely to appear where he knows his enemies are lying in wait. Basaev gained a small victory over Vladimir Putin by meeting Babitsky in Nesterovskaya, and there is nothing else for the Russian president to do but to blame ABC television for his public humiliation.

"In the gymnasium it had become as hot as in hell"

//Beslan hostages assert that they were fired at from
flamethrowers//

Trial of Kulayev

http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.html?DocID=598138&IssueId=23472

[passage omitted]

Zemfira Agayeva described how the fighters were rounding up people into the gymnasuim, shouting that those were not to be afraid, "that we here, so the troops from Chechnya would be withdrawn". The victim told also about the beginning of the assault:

- Practically immediately, as the first explosion was heard, from the side of courtyard some unbearable whistle was heard, and again something exploded, only it was much stronger. In a few minutes in the gymnasium became hot as in hell, I even thought that I'm on fire.

Those flamethrowers were being shot, although Shepel (Nikolai Shepel, deputy prosecutor of Russia. - L) assures that the flamethrowers couldn't cause any fire. If he were here, I would want to ask him a question.

Zemfira Agayeva described how when leaving the school she noticed "people at the front - in the bulletproof vests and with the automatic submachine guns standing quite far from the school, and the hostages were being saved by the locals, as there are now called them, the [people's] militiamen (opolchentsy), and if not them, then even more of us would perish". Victim Marina Pak tried to present a question to Zamfira Agayeva, presumably , about the use of flamethrowers; however, Judge Aguzarov interrupted her. Mrs. Pak didn't stop, after stating that, "if we've been trying Kulayev, why we listen to those, who didn't see Kulayev in the school"; however, this argument did not work. Then the judge threatened to remove the woman from the courtroom, and passions calmed down a little bit. True, not for long.

- Tell us Nurpashi, do they inject you with anything before these court sessions? - Agayeva asked the defendant .

- This question is removed, sharply interupted her Tamerlan Aguzarov. - It does not relate to the case.

- How it does not relate, the victim got sincerely astonished. - He always says one and the same - about a number of fighters and about the fact that there were no flamethrowers...

But she did not get an anwer in this question.

Aleta Gadiyeva described how on the third day "we waited, that everything will end, we wanted just simply to die, that everything would explode". When the assault began, the hostage with her two daughters crawled up to a window in order to get out into the schoolyard.

- There, under the window, a man was laying, recalled Mrs. Gadiyeva. - He saw what I wanted to do and he yelled not throw the children out in any circumstances. He said that the fighters shoot them in the back. Then we went to other side, to the cafeteria. There were already many people there. Khodov (one of the leaders of terrorists. - K) began to shout to take the children as shields and put them at the windows. We begged him to put the adults there, but he answered: "I said - the children!"

Zaur Farniyev for K., Vladikavkaz

(tr. M.L., via chechnya-sl)

Like the Censors of Old

By Masha Gessen

Back in the dark old days of the Soviet Union, foreign journalists in Moscow led pretty ridiculous lives. They lived in hotels and, later, in special closed compounds. They were required to use interpreters, drivers and office staff supplied by the Soviets -- and, generally speaking, employed by the KGB. They had to ask for permission to venture outside of Moscow.

Before 1961, all foreign journalists were required to file their reports from a particular room in the Central Telegraph building on what was then called Gorky Street. The reports were read by the censor, who sometimes held them up for days and sometimes returned them with multiple deletions -- or marked "not cleared." The censor made few decisions by himself or herself. During the Stalinist era, all questions were phoned directly in to Stalin's secretariat, which issued instructions.

Obviously, most journalists were constantly looking for ways to circumvent this system. Some slipped idiomatic expressions or literary allusions into their copy in the hopes that the censor would miss the subtleties -- and it often worked. Radio reporters filing by phone from a special booth in the Central Telegraph would try to speak fast so the censor would not notice when they diverged from the approved copy. Some journalists sent their copy through diplomatic mail so it could be published under a pseudonym.

When they got caught cheating the system, reporters would get expelled. At one point in the late 1940s, expulsions became so frequent that there was only one foreign correspondent in Moscow: the great Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times. Several others were writing for foreign media, too, but all of them were married to Soviet citizens so their presumed loyalty was to the Soviet state. Eventually, other newspapers and radio companies got new people accredited, and the pool widened.

Expulsions continued after the lifting of censorship, well into perestroika. A UPI reporter was expelled for interviewing a hospital doctor soon after the Chernobyl disaster. Briton Edward Lucas claims to have been the last reporter kicked out of the Soviet Union -- he was asked to leave the Baltics in 1991, though he later returned to Russia as an Economist correspondent.

Expulsions of journalists resumed after the second war in Chechnya began. But until recently there was always a formal reason for expelling journalists, banning them from re-entering Russia or revoking their accreditation. An exception is a bizarre incident in May when a Latvian TV crew was detained in the Pskov region and kicked out of the country with no explanation.

But the current brouhaha over ABC's airing of an interview with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev takes the practice of punishing journalists to a whole new level. After the interview aired, the Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. envoy for a dressing down, then issued a note of protest. Then the defense minister said ABC would lose all access to information about the military. Then the Foreign Ministry said that no one from ABC would have their accreditation renewed. Even in Soviet times, repressive measures were always taken against individual journalists, not against entire media companies. An interesting wrinkle in the scandal is that the interview was recorded by Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky, a Russian citizen living in Prague who can't be expelled.

So some of the most senior officials in the country, feeling helpless to do anything about Babitsky, start flailing and doing what comes naturally. They appeal to the higher-ups -- as though they thought Ted Koppel could make no editorial decision without consulting ABC executives, who, in turn, could make no move without Washington. Of course, this is not how the real world works -- but it's a valuable insight into the way the Russian ministers' lives are organized. Like the censors of old, they call all questions in to the Kremlin.

Masha Gessen is a contributing editor at Bolshoi Gorod.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/08/04/006.html

(via chechnya-sl)

From Chechnya Weekly (August 3):

http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=409&&issue_id=3424


BABITSKY FOUND HIM – WHY CAN'T THE FSB?

Gazeta.ru ran a commentary on July 29 stating that the Russian authorities and Basaev find each other useful. "On the one hand, granting air time to the gangster Basaev – and he is undoubtedly a gangster, whatever your different semantic experiences in this area might be – could not provoke applause in Russia, and it would evidently be much more preferable to see a broadcast about how the special services had finally succeeded in eliminating such a dangerous criminal," the website opined. "On the other hand, it is hard to escape the feeling that the federal authorities need Basaev for the time being as a figure on which to pin the organization of any terrorist act regardless of whether he has any relation to it or not. It should be stated that the interest is, paradoxically, mutual. Members of the security services who are not in a position to single out the organizer of a specific act of terrorism can always blame Basaev for it. And he, in turn, by admitting to it regardless of the extent to which this corresponds to the reality, increases his rating among potential clients." The Gazeta.ru commentary added that U.S. officials do not publicly protest the broadcasting of statements by Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi on Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya. "They are not talking about ‘journalists' double standards' as does the Russian Foreign Ministry," the website opined. "Journalists are not to blame for the fact that Basaev and Bin Laden are still alive."

Sergei Goncharov, head of the association of veterans of the elite Alpha commando unit, said the fact that Shamil Basaev could be found by a foreign journalist raised doubts about the Russian special services' efforts at eliminating terrorist leaders. "This question arises each time an interview with a notorious rebel appears," Goncharov told Interfax on August 1. "Ordinary people cannot understand why it is that a journalist can reach a specific bandit while the same bandit remains unattainable for the special services. This situation gives rise to undesirable speculation and puts the Russian special services in a questionable position against the backdrop of the successful fight against terrorists conducted by their British and Egyptian colleagues…Basaev's invincibility may be explained by the fact that somebody needs him alive and that for some reason Basaev is more dangerous dead than alive."

Novaya gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov was more explicit. Asked during a call-in show on Ekho Moskvy radio on July 29 how Babitsky was able to find Basaev while those in Russia responsible for tracking him down seem unable to do so, Muratov answered: "Well, I think the answer to this is simple. Basaev wanted Babitsky to find him and did not want [Federal Security Service Director Nikolai] Patrushev or anybody else to find him. But, indeed, why can't they find Shamil Basaev? This is a good question. Why are we so indignant about the interview, but not about the failure to catch him so far? Let's recall where, in general, he came from, in order to understand why this is happening now. At the start of the 1990s, when Russia wanted to win control of a section of Georgian territory called Abkhazia, a special battalion was established, Shamil Basaev's battalion, which trained on ranges belonging to the Main Directorate of Intelligence [GRU] of the Russian Defense Ministry's General Staff. He was given arms there. He was trained. His men were trained for sabotage raids. They were trained in mine warfare, sniper skills. I myself have seen a photograph taken at the Prudboy range near Volgograd, a range run by our very own Defense Ministry, which showed them training Shamil Basaev."

Noting that the GRU also trained the pro-Moscow Vostok battalion headed by Sulim Yamadaev, which is accused of numerous human rights abuses during a raid in the Chechen village of Borozdinovskaya in June, Muratov said: "We ourselves are creating monsters. The monster is, of course, a bastard, but he is our bastard, as far as this principle goes. Yes, the terrorist is a murderer, but he is now serving our interests. So, let's help him. But that doesn't work. That won't work, as the case of Basaev shows. We can see what he has perpetrated, the bloodiest terrorist act in Russia's history. Neither will it work with Kadyrov or Yamadaev – who use our weapons – with the people whom we are now festooning with medals."

Interestingly, on July 28 before the "Nightline" program with excerpts from Basaev's interview was broadcast, gazeta.ru quoted the Vasily Panchenkov, head of the press service of the Interior Ministry's Internal Troops, as saying they had located Basaev in Chechnya's Vedeno district but had not carried out an operation to capture or kill him out of fear for the safety of civilians. Panchenkov claimed that Basaev had planned several days earlier to attack Dagestan from Chechnya but had not gathered sufficient forces to carry it out.

The chairman of Chechnya's State Council, Taus Dzhabrailov, denounced Panchenkov's statement. "This is the first time I've ever heard that the [Russian military] command did not carry out a special operation in the mountains out of fear of possible victims among the civilian population," Dzhabrailov said. "To this day, operations of varying scope are carried out in any settlement even if one militant is discovered, and there are instances in which damage is done to the property and lives of citizens."

Vladimir Socor at EDM:

PUTIN'S ANTI-BALTIC MONOLOGUE REBUFFED

In an unprecedented development, a European head of state has publicly and outspokenly refuted Russian President Vladimir Putin's accusations that Estonia and Latvia oppress their Russian residents. Most European officials are aware that those accusations are unfounded, but would not contradict the Kremlin publicly.

Visiting Finland on August 2, Putin used the joint news conference with the country's President Tarja Halonen to launch a routine attack on Riga and Tallinn. Putin urged Finland -- a member of the European Union's troika this year, and scheduled to become the EU's presiding country in 2006 -- to work with Russia and within the EU in order to "resolve the problems" of Russians in Estonia and Latvia. Zeroing in on the issue of citizenship, Putin alleged that the legal category of "non-citizen" [to which many of the Soviet era-legacy residents there belong] is unique to Estonia and Latvia. Terming this situation "absolutely impermissible," Putin accused Estonia and Latvia of withholding citizenship and otherwise restricting the rights of those people "on ethnic grounds." "Ethnic discrimination is unacceptable," he warned. On this occasion again, Putin tried to portray the Baltic states as breaching European criteria for democracy and rule of law, and he asked the EU to help Russia correct this situation.

In her response, Halonen -- a Socialist who maintains traditionally good rapport with Moscow -- made three basic points. First, Estonia's and Latvia's legislation and practice "correspond with the criteria for EU membership," as well as "meeting the requirements of the Council of Europe and the OSCE," on citizenship and related issues. Moreover, "It is normal for any state to set certain requirements and conditions for granting citizenship." Second, minority-related issues "exist everywhere in the EU, and are resolved within the EU, as well as in cooperation with the UN and OSCE" -- a remark apparently intended to preclude intrusion into EU political processes by non-member Russia. Thirdly, the policies of Estonia and Latvia are "doing their best … actively encouraging the non-citizens to take up citizenship."

Halonen went on to urge Putin to encourage the signing and ratification by Russia of the border treaties with Estonia and Latvia. Indicating that this is not just a problem for the two Baltic states, but also an EU problem, she told Putin that the conclusion of the border treaties would mean "one less problem for us" (Interfax, August 2). Russia had refused to sign the treaty with Latvia in May and revoked its signature on the treaty with Estonia in June this year. Although fully satisfied with the content of both treaties, Moscow objected to legal statements attached by Estonia and Latvia reaffirming their standing as continuation states since 1918, whereas Moscow implies that the Baltic states were only created in 1991.

Putin handled defensively the issue of linguistic and political discrimination of Finno-Ugric-speaking people in Russia's Mari-El Republic (western Siberia), where the native language is closely related to Estonian and Finnish. Without addressing that issue directly, Putin paraphrased Soviet historiographical confabulations about "Slavic and Finno-Ugric tribes that did not just live there, but were building a kind of a community. Objective research shows that their coexistence was very harmonious." He spoke of a common Slavic and Finno-Ugric culture as "our culture: How can I not like it, when part of it, a significant part, is mine."

In recent months, cultural and political figures from Estonia, Finland, and Hungary have issued a series of appeals for measures to protect the identity of the Mari people from forced assimilation and to defend political representatives of that people from repression. The European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have recently adopted resolutions on this issue. Last month, that republic's authorities expelled students from Estonia's Arts Academy who were on a field trip to Mari-El. A major conference of Finno-Ugric studies is scheduled to be held there later this month.

(BNS, Interfax, Russian Television Channel One, August 2)

Update: Estland has some more on the story and related issues here.

Words Versus Body Counts

By Yulia Latynina

When the ABC program "Nightline" aired journalist Andrei Babitsky's interview with Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, it made Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov see red. The Defense Ministry has troops in Chechnya, including two military intelligence battalions: Zapad, which is under the command of Hero of Russia Said-Magomed Kakiyev, and Vostok, which is under the command of Hero of Russia Sulim Yamadayev. Yamadayev's men recently distinguished themselves in a violent raid on the peaceful civilian population in the village of Borozdinovskaya.

You would think that the defense minister would be out there pledging to nab Basayev as fast as possible so that he would stop giving interviews to journalists and start giving testimony to investigators. But no. Instead, the ministry's retribution promises to be far more terrifying. From now on, the U.S. channel's single Moscow journalist will be banned from all ministry briefings. This is it, folks. ABC will never recover from the blow.

The interview scandal has its roots in the peculiar nature of the Russian authorities. Those in power in Russia today are former KGB men. These chekists are running businesses, interfering in politics and tapping many a wire. But somehow they can't manage to keep track of Babitsky, who lives in Prague and has long been a thorn in their side.

The authorities had a chance to catch both Basayev and Doku Umarov, whom Babitsky has interviewed in the past. They had at their disposal the means to catch them if they didn't want them to talk to the press, such as the Vostok battalion or the FSB's elite Alfa unit. But just because the FSB can't seem to get the job done does not mean they should take it out on journalists.

An interview is not an act of terrorism. Terrorists do not use words to make their points; they use dead bodies. Basayev is a terrorist not because of what he says but because he kills people.

You can understand why the authorities reacted to the interview the way they did. They had to react somehow, and better to condemn its broadcasters than to discuss its content. For example, Basayev was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word "Anti-Terrorist" and said that Russian policies in Chechnya were terrorism, which makes him an anti-terrorist.

This might sound almost reasonable if it weren't for one small "but." Let's not forget that back in 1999, Chechnya was for all intents and purposes independent. Regardless of how terrible the war was before the Khasavyurt accord and no matter which side committed more atrocities, Chechnya had practically gained its freedom. There were no Russian troops, but only President Aslan Maskhadov and roadblocks manned by criminals who robbed passersby in the name of Allah.

Basayev, like many a military leader in peacetime, was threatened with political oblivion.

When did Chechnya lose its hard-won freedom? When Basayev and his men attacked Dagestan. Some believe that this invasion was orchestrated by the Kremlin: It got Vladimir Putin the presidency and returned Basayev to the limelight. I would not go so far as to suggest a conspiracy. But at the very least Basayev sacrificed his homeland's freedom to satisfy his own ambitions.

A person who orders a sniper to take out a terrorist holding a detonator is just as responsible for the ensuing explosion as the people who planted the explosives to begin with. In much the same way, Basayev, by invading Dagestan, shares the blame for the second Chechen war with the Russian authorities.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.

Tanya has posted some of the photos she took on the last night of the GSS strings course. Here's one of them (yours truly on the far right):

Daniel Pipes has an article about terrorism and television exposure, asking whether it's a good idea to let terrorists like Osama bin Laden expound their ideas on the airwaves:

The distinguished historian Conor Cruise O'Brien thinks not. When he served as the Irish minister of posts and telecommunications in 1976, he imposed a ban on interviews with Irish Republican Army terrorists and Sinn Fein members, arguing that it was necessary to prevent them from spreading their message. For the same reason, the Russian foreign ministry expressed its "strong indignation" after America's ABC television last week interviewed Chechen terrorist leader Shamil Basayev.

It's such a pity that Daniel Pipes doesn't understand that the Russian federal government is one of the foremost promoters of terrorism in the world today, and that its "war" in Chechnya is designed precisely to sabotage the very principles he aims to safeguard and protect.

George Friedman has an interesting take on Al Qaeda:


Al Qaeda as Warfighting Entity


In recent weeks, we have been trying to analyze the state of the U.S.-jihadist war, touching on subjects ranging from the decision -- announced this past week -- to begin reducing U.S. troops in Iraq to the idea that we are in the midst of a surge of jihadist attacks, intended to reshape the course of the war.

As often happens, our readers -- mostly non-subscribers, we would note -- have lambasted us. Critics of the war have accused us of pimping for the Bush administration for daring to imply that the war was anything but a total and catastrophic failure. Supporters of the war wrote to condemn us for even imagining that al Qaeda might consist of people who actually think and plan things, rather than of raving psychotics seeking slaughter because they feel like it. One e-mail said the war is the result of George W. Bush's unresolved Oedipal conflicts. Another said that we were naïve in assuming that all Muslims were not deranged killers. Discussions of the war have never been elevated, but they have now degenerated to a Warner Brother's cartoon -- with Sylvester, Tweety, Elmer and Bugs all cranked up on speed and self-righteousness.

In the midst of this cartoon-like mayhem, one group of quite serious e-mails caught our attention and seemed to require serious consideration.

Stratfor has been treating both Iraq and the global U.S.-jihadist conflict as a war, understandable by the rules of warfare. We have treated this as an asymmetric war in which two sides, using very different methods, have engaged in a global duel. If this is so, then looking to previous wars will provide us with guidance. As an example, we spoke last week of the current offensive as similar to the Battle of the Bulge and Tet -- one unsuccessful and one successful military gambit to reverse an unacceptable course of events.

A series of thoughtful e-mails arrived, arguing that in thinking in terms of conventional warfare -- and these readers regard even the unconventional warfare of Vietnam as ultimately conventional -- we are fundamentally missing the point about what is happening. The United States may be engaging in warfare, but the jihadists are not. As one writer put it, al Qaeda is engaged in a kind of theater and is indifferent to the outcome in any practical sense. Creating terror is an end in itself. Therefore, so long as it can continue to inflict terror at some level and with some randomness, it will be satisfied.

Put simply, this argument goes, al Qaeda does not think of itself as being in a war but in a permanent confrontation with Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism. This is not warfare properly understood because it is not politics properly understood. Moreover, another stream went, terrorism is not a warfighting strategy but a psychological one. Yet others argued that al Qaeda is not sufficiently coherent as an organization to be engaged in warfighting and that what the United States faces is not a military force but a social movement.

These are good, thoughtful arguments that have some merit. Ultimately, however, we think them to be in error.

Karl von Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. In order for the United States to be engaged in a war with al Qaeda, three things seem to be necessary.

1. Al Qaeda must be an entity that is capable of making and enforcing decisions. There can be no war without strategy and tactics, and no strategy and tactics without a command structure.
2. Al Qaeda must have political goals that are in some sense practical. Punishing the infidel is not a political goal: It is not intended to achieve a political outcome, nor is it intended to create or influence regimes.
3. Al Qaeda must have a warfighting strategy that it is pursuing. Its actions must fit into the paradigm of war and make sense from a military standpoint.

In our view, all three of these criteria are met. This does not mean that al Qaeda will or won't be successful; it simply means that al Qaeda's behavior can be properly understood in terms of war.

First, it is true that al Qaeda is not a nation. The history of warfare is replete with sub-national groups that have waged wars on the way to becoming nations or to taking over a state. What is interesting about al Qaeda is that it is not a sub-national grouping but a trans-national grouping. Its goals do not involve any one country, but a range of countries. What comes to mind is the First and Second Communist International, before the Bolshevik Revolution captured revolutionary communism for the Soviet state.

In the end, however, the issue is less whether there is historical precedent for al Qaeda than whether there is a decision-making structure that can guide combatants through the war. There certainly was one on Sept. 11, 2001. At this point, that structure appears to be frayed. But if it is frayed, that is not due to the nature of al Qaeda but rather to the reversals it has suffered. In addition, decision-making must be appropriate to a particular battlefield. Whereas the United States may require a highly technical command, control and communication system to manage its assets on the battlefield, al Qaeda commands sparse forces on a global basis in an intensely hostile environment.

The very process of command, control and communication represents the Achilles' heel of their system. More precisely, the enemy -- the United States -- owns the electromagnetic spectrum. Communications through that domain will lead to detection and destruction. This leaves al Qaeda's primary path of communication as the movement of humans from one point to another to deliver messages. Command and control is dramatically slowed by communications. By necessity, operational and tactical control devolve to forces in the field. The situation on the global battlefield requires that al Qaeda provide only general guidance. That does not prevent the waging of a global offensive, planned in general with sufficient time for couriers to arrive with instructions. Al Qaeda is a warfighting system -- but one that, of necessity, operates by different rules than others. Al Qaeda has a command structure and does wage war.

Al Qaeda also has political goals. Indeed, it differs from prior groups that used terror tactics by the fact that it embarked on the war with political goals. The long-term goal -- creating a caliphate encompassing all the lands it deems to be part of the dominion of Islam -- was not the immediate goal. Rather, al Qaeda's immediate goal was to increase the effective Islamist opposition to existing Muslim regimes to force at least one successful uprising. The means toward that end were two-fold: First, to demonstrate in the Muslim world the vulnerability of the United States -- the patron of many of these existing regimes -- and second, to force a response from the United States that would increase either contempt or effective hostility among Muslims. If the United States refused combat, this would be a sign that it was a paper tiger. If it surged into the Islamic world, this would prove the United States was the enemy. Either way, al Qaeda thought it would win.

This perspective differs wildly from that of terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s. Consider groups such as the Bader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Weather Underground in the United States or even Black September. The first two couldn't state a coherent political program, let alone correlate their actions with that program. Black September had a goal -- the creation of a Palestinian state -- but there was no clear connection between any of its actions and that goal. Killing Israeli athletes in Munich was theater.

Al Qaeda had a very clear goal and, from many perspectives, it was not a preposterous goal. It wanted governments like that in Egypt to fall in an Islamist uprising. It felt that the submerged sentiment in these countries favored Islamism, and that -- depending on the behavior of the United States -- risings were achievable. Al Qaeda might have been wrong, and an element of psychological warfare was present, but in the end, the attacks on Sept. 11 and afterward were carefully connected with a political goal.

If they made an error, it was only in assuming that genuine anti-Americanism and hatred of local regimes supported by the United States would translate into effective anti-Americanism that could be leveraged to al Qaeda's advantage. Public sentiment matters in democratic regimes; it doesn't matter in warfare very much. Consider: Most of Europe hated the Germans and their occupation during World War II. Anti-German feeling was overwhelming. Nevertheless, this did not translate into effective anti-German sentiment. European states were never in a position to overthrow German power. That required an external intervention. In Vietnam, on the other hand, anti-Americanism proved effective: It turned into a warfighting process.

Where al Qaeda miscalculated was in assuming that sentiment would turn into effective sentiment. Thus far, except in four Sunni provinces in Iraq, that hasn't happened. But that it didn't happen was neither pre-ordained nor obvious. Al Qaeda knew what it was doing.

Finally, al Qaeda used a reasonable method of warfighting to achieve its aims. Given its intention -- to strike the United States and other countries -- and its resources, its only option was to conduct counterpopulation operations. Allied bombing of Germany and Japan and the German bombing of London constituted counterpopulation attacks. The goal was to drive a wedge between the state and population, or cause a social breakdown, through mass bombings designed to inflict hardship and generate terror among the civilian populace.

Al Qaeda's use of terror attacks suited its strategic goals. The organization intended to destabilize the target country, forcing it into military actions that would bring the desirable result. Given al Qaeda's resources and expertise in covert operations, it had few options other than pursuing terror attacks.

At this point, al Qaeda is losing the war from the standpoint of its own strategic goals. No Muslim regime has fallen since Sept. 11, save two -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- that fell to the United States. The Iraqi resistance showed extreme promise for a very long time, given American miscalculations. Anti-Americanism had turned effective. However, the shifting calculus among the Sunni elders has threatened to undermine support for al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the Sunni nationalist insurgency -- onto which al Qaeda has clamped parasitically -- has been in danger of disruption. This, coupled with serious breaches in al Qaeda's global system, forced the group into a desperate counteroffensive.

The counteroffensive could be only loosely organized, given the difficulties in command, control and communication. Moreover, the resources available were local supporters in places such as London who lacked the key skills needed for strategic operations -- operations on the order of Sept. 11. The counteroffensive may not be over, but thus far the attacks appear to be politically ineffective. There has been no shift in the basic trends. The center of gravity of the situation now is in Iraq, among the Sunnis. As the Sunnis go, so goes the war in Iraq. As the war in Iraq goes, so goes the general war in the Muslim world. The trend favors the United States, but al Qaeda is attempting to reverse that trend.

In short, al Qaeda is very much a warfighting entity. It adheres to the general rules of warfare and therefore can be understood and, to a limited extent, predicted, on the basis of its political program and resources. The outcome of the war is still uncertain, and the level of violence is not a measure of anyone's warfighting capability unless you know their resources. In warfare, the most intense fighting frequently occurs prior to collapse. If the Sunnis in Iraq switch sides -- which is one of the things U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently visited Iraq to try to arrange -- al Qaeda's back will be against the wall. The violence will not end, but its significance will decline.

We therefore feel that we can, in fact, understand the U.S.-al Qaeda war in relatively conventional ways, so long as we adjust for the asymmetric nature of the conflict. In the end, war is simply politics by other means. The United States has its means, and so does al Qaeda. But it is still war.

RBW: We should conclude that ABC has possibly acted illegally, has certainly acted irresponsibly, and has certainly violated the public trust. We should conclude that the American government has fallen short of justice and leadership. We should conclude that Americans are uninformed, but we should not conclude that Americans are malevolent. The only way that most Americans will ever be able to find the North Caucasus on a map is if Survivor films a segment there. Most Americans will never hear of Shamil Basayev, and will never know anything about what is happening in Russia. They want America to maintain good relations with Russia, and they wish all Russians and all Chechens peace and prosperity.

Robert Bruce Ware, commenting on ABC's recent screening of Andrei Babitsky's interview with Chechen guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev.

(via chechnya-sl)

Pliable at On An Overgrown Path has an interesting post about a new study of the present world-wide development of monthly subscription charge systems that make unlimited amounts of recorded music available to an ever-increasing audience:

The main thrust of Leonhard’s paper is that consumers are now taking charge of their own entertainment, and the borders between performance and copy, and access and ownership have been crossed. He says the music business is rapidly moving towards a flat charge for access, and away from the historic, and clumsy, pay per performance model. A flat charge for access is how utility providers operate, and is where his catchy music-like-water moniker comes from. Leonhard predicts that once distribution is no longer a barrier to entry, the music market will explode. And the traditional record companies will be left for dead as new players control the flow of music-like-water.

Fanciful? Unlikely to happen in our lifetime? Harmless crystal ball gazing? I don’t think so. Music-like-water has already arrived. Just last week mobile (cell) phone operator T-Mobile announced an 18 month deal with Robbie Williams, which will make some of his songs and concert footage available exclusively over the phone network - presumably music will follow.

Read it all.

It struck me that music-oriented readers might like to follow the current discussions on the IAJEStrings list. There are presently threads on three topics: octave (or tenor) violin, amplification, and the new AB Fable CDs of historic jazz violin recordings. All the threads can be found here.

It is not himself that God creates, not himself he redeems, even when he “reveals himself” it is not himself he reveals: his revelation does not have himself as an object. He limits himself in all his limitlessness, he makes room for the creatures, and so, in love to him, he makes room for love to the creatures.

Martin Buber, The Question to the Single One