A Step At A Time

Via Civil Georgia:

Leaders of breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Sergey Bagapsh and Eduard Kokoity, participated in a roundtable discussion on “Economic Development of Southern Russia” hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi on September 29.

The list of participants, which was posted on the Russian President’s official web-site, included “Eduard Kokoity, the President of South Ossetia” and “Sergey Bagapsh, the President of Abkhazia.” These two names were listed under the section “foreign guests.”

“I would like to specially salute our foreign guests. These are: Sergey Vasilevich Bagapsh – the President of Abkhazia… Eduard Jabievich Kokoity – the President of the South Ossetian Republic,” President Putin said in his opening remarks at the conference.

In addition, the Civil Georgia report notes that in his public remarks Putin made use of terms such as "joint economic complex", that were last used during the Soviet era.

Presidents Lech Kaczynski, Valdas Adamkus and Viktor Yushchenko, who are taking part in the celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Lvov,  have issued a statement in support of the Georgian government, calling for the current crisis over Russian espionage in Georgia to be settled in accordance with international law, gazeta.ru reports.

Via gazeta.ru (my tr.):

Georgian Defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili rules out the possibility that the withdrawal of Russian military bases from Georgian territory will be halted. According to Okruashvili, nothing can stop this process, and the statement made by General Alexander Baranov does not correspond to reality... According to the bilateral agreement  between the two countries, the last trainload of Russian military equipment must leave Georgia in 2008. "I assure you that in 2008 there will be no Russian military equipment on Georgian territory,"  the minister told journalists.

Civil Georgia has a longer report here.

Via Civil Georgia:

Four Russian officers suspected of spying against Georgia were sentenced to two-month pre-trial custody by the court in Tbilisi on September 29.

In addition, the court has also sentenced three other Russian officers to custody in their absence. Konstantin Pichugin, who is wanted by Georgia for alleged spying, is among them. The Georgian side claims Pichugin in sheltering in the Russian Troops Headquarters in Tbilisi and demands his extradition. Russia has already ruled out possibility of extradition.

The court in Tbilisi has also sentenced ten Georgian citizens to custody, who are suspected of cooperating with the Russian military intelligence.

Lenta.ru has a report timed at 14:10:22 today. Excerpt:

The withdrawal of sub-units of the Group of Russian Troops in Transcaucasia (GRVZ) has been halted. This was announced by the commander-in-chief of the forces of the North Caucasian Military District (SKVO) General Alexander Baranov, the RIA news agency reports.

According to Baranov, all officers and ensigns have been moved to barracks, and combat training operations are being conducted only on the territory of military bases. "The primary task now is to ensure the men's safety and to defend the honour of Russia," the general said.

The Georgian television channel Rustavi 2 has broadcast a live  interview with Georgian Interior Minister VanoMerabishvili on the crisis currently affecting Russia-Georgia relations. An excerpt, via Civil Georgia:

Q.: According to international law, should Russia inform Georgia when it plans such large-scale military exercises near the Georgian border?

A.: First I want to say that these maneuvers are over-dramatized. I want to tell you, that because of the huge international support, including among the international organizations and western media, Georgia has never been as protected as it is now in our recent history. At the same time Russia has never been so unprotected and weak as it is now, because Russia is very confused and is undertaking inappropriate and spontaneous steps. Russia [military] maneuvers are an ordinary face-saving action. Military exercises neither in North Ossetia, nor on the Black Sea pose any threat to Georgia’s security. The only thing which might happen is to continue minor provocations in the Tskhinvali Region [South Ossetia] and Abkhazia so that to redirect attention towards these regions. So I do not see any serious threat in Russia’s actions.

Russia is very confused. As you see that Russia’s reaction is changing every day and every hour. They are so confused that they have sent to Georgia aircrafts with the capacity to transport 800 passengers to evacuate just 100 persons.

I absolutely understand the reasons behind these [actions]. This is a very unusual condition for Russia. Russia always had an advantage, because it had better access to the international media, it had levers in the UN and in other international organization, it had advantage because it could manipulate inside Georgia, in Tbilisi, Tskhinvali and Abkhazia through staging provocations, but today the entire world saw that Russia is just an ordinary helpless state and the myth about its powerful intelligence and its omnipotence has been destroyed and this myth now only belongs to history. Of course for Russians it is especially painful that this blow was made by Georgia.

I do not think that Russia will refrain from any major provocations and even if it decides to undertake a step of this kind Russia itself will be harmed. I expect certain provocations mainly in Tskhinvali and Abkhazia. Our police forces are mobilized and we will not yield to these provocations.

Q.: If the court finds them [Russian spy suspects] guilty, will the Russian officers spend their term of sentence in Georgia, or they will be extradited to Russia?

A.: This is not up to the Interior Ministry to decide.

One thing is clear: they are now in the Georgian penitentiary and I am sure that the Georgian court will rule fair judgment.

I think that those foreign agents are not as alarming for us as those citizens of Georgia, who were selling Georgia in exchange of a very low payment. I think discussion and intensive work should be started in Georgia with those people who have been working with the foreign special services for many years and there are lots of people of this kind in Georgia. These people bear lion’s share of responsibility for those defeats which Georgia has suffered in past 15 years.

Ynet News reports that

The United States and Britain have objected to Russia's draft UN Security Council statement that would rebuke Georgia's "provocative" actions and its stationing of troops in the breakaway Abkhazia province.

According to Civil Georgia,

U.S. Department of State spokesman Sean McCormack said on September 29 Washington “is in touch” with the Russian and Georgian governments over spy row between the two countries, but “this is an issue between Russia and Georgia and they will decide what steps they want to take.”

“Whatever decisions each side may take, those will be their own decisions. We would urge just to put the events of the past couple of days in the proper context,” McCormack said at a press briefing.

When asked about the U.S. position about Russia’s stance to refer the issue to the UN Security Council, the U.S. official responded: “we think it's an issue that is best and most properly resolved between two neighbors.”

Via Monsters and Critics:

Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports on the final day of talks between NATO defence chiefs in Portoroz, Slovenia, at which concern was expressed at heightened tensions between Russia and Georgia, and included a plea by NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer for an increase in defence spending on the part of NATO countries:

The 26 ministers, meeting in the Slovenian coastal resort of Portoroz, also reviewed progress in plans to modernize NATO armies and the setting up of a NATO Response Force (NRF) for quick deployment on peacekeeping and counter-terror operations worldwide.

NATO's so-called 'transformation' from an anti-Soviet Cold War military alliance into a modern fighting machine will top the agenda at a summit in Riga at the end of November.

The second day of talks in Portoroz, which included a meeting with Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov, was dominated by worsening tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi.

As NATO chief Scheffer urged both Russia and Georgia to 'moderate and de-escalate' tensions, Ivanov accused Tbilisi of seeking a military solution to end frozen conflicts in its breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Ivanov also said several new members of NATO were fuelling current tensions by supplying Soviet-bought arms to the Georgian government.

Long-standing strains in relations between Russia and Georgia have been further inflamed in recent days after Georgia brought espionage charges against four detained military officers from Russia.

'The situation has deteriorated...we see it with concern,' German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung told reporters, adding that it was important that both sides resolved their dispute in a peaceful manner.

Meanwhile, gazeta.ru reports that the Georgian embassy in Moscow has been placed under round-the-clock guard by police and OMON troops after extreme Russian nationalist demonstrators from the anti-American and anti-NATO Eurasian Youth Alliance smashed a windowpane and threw a pig's head into the building.

Russia is hoping that its statement on the Georgian conflict will be accepted by the UNSC today. But the approval is being delayed - US UN ambassador John Bolton has spoken of "difficulties" with the statement, gazeta.ru reports.

Georgia - South Caucasus Blog has a link to a useful backgrounder on the current Russia-Georgia conflict:

Conflicts in Georgia: Causes and Consequences

Reuters reports  (via Alertnet) that two of the Russian servicemen being held in Tbilisi on charges of espionage are to remain in jail for another 2 months while their cases are considered. The fate of the other two servicemen will be decided later today. Three Georgian nationals are also being held on similar charges.

Via Civil Georgia:

/ Civil Georgia, Tbilisi / 2006-09-29 18:32:37

[Georgian] Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili said on September 29 that Russian military are undertaking certain measures around the Georgian borders, as well as in the Russian military base in Akhalkalaki, as part of its intimidation efforts.

“The Russian Federation plans large-scale navy maneuvers on the Black Sea. At the same time, Russia’s 58th Army which is deployed in North Ossetia is being mobilized and there is information that [the Army] is removing in direction of Georgia. In addition, certain movements are being noticed on the Russian military base in Akhalkalaki [southern Georgia]. I can not understand why Russia needs this kind of moves,” Merabishvili said.

He also noted that this is part of threats Russia is resorting in response to arrest of its four military officers accused of spying against Georgia.

The IHT has an updated AP report here.

Writing in EDM today, Vladimir Socor looks at the contents of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's address to the UN General Assembly on September 22, considering that it finally breaks the Russia-created consensus on  the so-called "frozen conflicts",  in particular those in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Some Western nations, anxious not to antagonize Moscow, had begun to accept the Kremlin's definitions of "peacekeeping" and "mediation" in relation to these disputes. Socor gives a 10-point analysis of Saakashvili's speech, pinpointing the following areas of emphasis:

1. The conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia are “territorial conflicts,” conducted by Russia against Georgia. Saakashvili outlined the process by which “these regions are being annexed” through military force and handover of Russian citizenship to local residents, directly violating international law. This part of Saakashvili’s speech implicitly underscores the long-ignored change in the nature of these conflicts: from local ethnic conflicts (Moscow-orchestrated in the first place) into a Russian assault on Georgia.

2. All ethnic communities suffer in the secessionist enclaves: the Georgians through ethnic cleansing and denial of native-language education, the others through rule by “sponsors of organized crime, fear, and lawlessness. Such suffering must come to an end.” Implicitly but clearly, the grounds for international humanitarian intervention are shown to exist.

3. “Proxies” underscore Russia’s primary role in the conflict.  Saakashvili called attention to the heavy arming of Abkhaz and South Ossetian forces by Russia and frequently held joint exercises of secessionist and Russian forces.

4. Russia’s conduct poses a clear case of aggression: “Few examples are more blatant of a state seeking to annex the internationally recognized territory of another state.” Thus, Russia is shown to challenge the foundations of the international system as well.

5. Georgia holds the right of self-defense based on international law: Saakashvili wondered aloud “whether any members in this great hall would tolerate such intervention on their own soil.” Russia, he noted, expects the international community to accept this situation with regard to Georgia. If accepted, then “lawlessness and indifference to it [become] the new rules of the international game.” The ultimate stake transcends Georgia: “There is a vital interest to reject the unraveling of sovereign statehood.”

6. Resolution of these conflicts must be integrated with the agenda for rule of law and democracy: “The residents of our disputed territories are under a form of gangster occupation. The Rose Revolution and democracy in Georgia will remain unfinished until all citizens of Georgia have the right to participate in the life and decisions of the state.”

7. On their track record, Saakashvili noted, “The inherited peacekeeping frameworks and negotiating formats neither promote peace nor encourage any genuine negotiation.…They have served to perpetuate, rather than resolve the conflicts.” In the course of 12 years, Russia’s “peacekeepers” have failed to facilitate the return of Georgian refugees to Abkhazia. Russian peacekeeping operations have “abused and made a farce of the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and trust.”

8. Georgia calls for international action to “replace and transform the current frameworks for negotiation and peacekeeping in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.” It seeks demilitarization of both areas and the deployment of internationally mandated police units, backed by active engagement of the UN, OSCE, and the European Union. Russia’s ‘peacekeeping’ forces “themselves, by their own choice, not by ours, have in effect annulled their own mandate.” The negotiating formats must be reconfigured to focus on “direct dialogue on the ground between Georgians and Abkhaz, Georgians and South Ossetians” as well as opening the prospect of economic rehabilitation: “Why should our citizens be reduced to such miserable economic conditions?”

9. Thus, Georgia serves notice that it intends to exercise “the sovereign right to request the removal of foreign military forces. We make no secret of our intentions to fulfill this sovereign right and solemn duty.” Saakashvili was alluding to plans by the Georgian government and parliament to issue in October an evaluation of more than a decade of Russian “peacekeeping” and, based on that track record, to demand the termination of those operations.

10. The onus for a peaceful resolution rests not only on Georgia, but on the international community as well: “Let no one ever say that Georgia was not clear as to how it would protect its democracy and its State, let no one ever say that we did not seek to do so by peaceful means alone.…All nations that share these values are willing to sacrifice for them.”

Russia has now taken the matter to the UNSC, posing as the "moderate" party of reason in the affair (RFE/RL):

Russia's UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said after an emergency session of the council that he had circulated a draft statement expressing deep concern over Georgia's actions.

"We are concerned by the tendency of the Georgian authorities to fuel tensions, so we are calling on the Security Council and the international community to exert its influence on the Georgian side, so that instead of provocative actions and fueling tensions they engage in constructive dialogue," he said.

Update: As the four servicemen accused of espionage appear in a Tbilisi court, warnings have started to come from various Russian sources:

...Fyodor Lukyanov, editor in chief of the journal "Russia in Global Affairs," told RFE/RL that Russia could well resort to tougher measures should negotiations fail.

"So far [Russia's reaction] is still rather moderate. No irreversible steps have been taken. But the way things are developing is very unpleasant, and if no outside influence is exerted, for instance, on Georgia to make it reduce the tension, Russia's reaction could stop being moderate," Lukyanov said.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has called on Russian and Georgia to "de-escalate tensions" over the espionage affair. The United States and the EU have also urged calm.

In an apparent drive to assert the new, "independent" foreign policy outlined by foreign minister Lavrov on September 26, Moscow has finally decided to further exacerbate the tensions that already exist in its relations with Tbilisi and to create a mini-crisis with Georgia -  mainly, it seems, as a sop to growing nationalist feeling within the Russian Federation, and in order to divert the West's attention away from embarrassments connected with recently-disclosed facets of Russian energy policy.  Using Tbilisi's detention of four Russian military officers accused of espionage, the Russian authorities have now recalled their ambassador and are undertaking a partial evacuation of Russian service personnel in Georgia.

The Russian government is expending a great of aggressive rhetoric on this new campaign, accusing Georgia of being a "bandit state", and talking of preparations for war.

 Moscow's principal aim in these hysterical outbursts is, it seems, to embarrass the United States into taking sides in the manufactured conflict. It's also, no doubt, a routine "testing of the water", in the wake of TH Ilves's victory in the Estonian presidential election - the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now led by presidents who were either born in the United States or were educated and brought up there.  Since the Baltics are now firmly in the EU and NATO, a showdown with one or all of them would not be in Moscow's best interests any more (Moscow even uses the old insulting phrase "near abroad" less frequently now in relation them)  - so Georgia has been singled out as a "next best" option. The implications for European security are, however, just as serious.

The current standoff with Georgia shows how little, in fact, the foreign policy aims of Moscow have really changed in the 15 years since the Cold War is supposed to have ended, and how closely the sights of Russian political leaders are still trained on an eventual restoration of "old" borders. Some of this geopolitical thinking goes back a rather long way. As Paul Goble told an audience recently,

No Russian that I have ever met thinks the borders of the Russian Federation are the proper borders. A poll last spring found that 74 percent of high school graduates in the city of Moscow think the proper borders of the Russian Federation are those of the Russian Empire in 1914. Which means Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries, and part of Turkey, and there are several people in the Russian state Duma who want negotiations restarted about Alaska.

Among the transcripts of the lectures and seminars at Jamestown's recent North Caucasus Conference (see the previous post), there is the transcribed text of a remarkable keynote speech (pdf) by former US State Department and CIA analyst Paul Goble, who has spent many years studying the Soviet Union and the implications of its disintegration. In his address, Goble touches on some of the most crucial and sensitive areas of controversy and discussion that surround the events of September 11 and the resurgence of radical Islam in the modern world, tracing them to what happened in the Soviet Union during the period that followed the end of World War II until the early 1990s. In one passage of the speech, he pinpoints the signals for the future that are contained in Russia's present changing political face, and in the changing face of political Islam:

If the Russian Federation is at a turning point, and I believe that it is and I believe that the borders will change in a variety of ways, and I think they will change largely due to the actions of the Russians and Russian desires, as we’ll see. And this leads me to my one good piece of advice for today: don’t buy any maps. Buy stock in companies that print maps and you’ll make money.

But it’s equally important that Islam, too, is at a turning point. Indeed, if you understand the Muslim view of what happened in the Soviet Union in 1991, you can see a direct line from there to September 11th and you can understand why Muslims who were ethnic Muslims who didn’t know very much about their identity and what their faith was about turned to Islam in the ways that they did.

The collapse of the Muslim project after the French Revolution and the colonization of the Muslim world, which was more or less complete except for Egypt and Afghanistan by 1922, left the Muslim world with the question: if we’re right, how come we’re losing? And there were three answers. God’s time isn’t our time so we wait it out. The second answer was, we are wrong; we’ve got to be radical secularists. And the third is, back to basics: Allah, Sharia – the people who become the fundamentalists.

As long as there was a Soviet Union supporting the radical secularists, and please remember it was the Soviets who were doing that, the third category were in jail. Once the Soviet Union could not do that, those people emerged. And with the Muslim reading, or some Muslim reading anyway, of 1991 you saw a very different set of messages for people who were Muslims. These were in many ways – and this is another argument, different, but just to point it out for you – I believe that Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus will be over time the prime recruiting area for a radical fundamentalist Islam. Why? Because people there know they are Muslims, but don’t know exactly what it means and therefore they are prepared to listen to people who tell them exactly what it means.

I remember a conversation I had with Dzhokhar Dudaev, the first president of Chechen Ichkeria. And Mr. Dudaev said to me, Mr. Goble, I’m a good Muslim I pray three times a day. Well I was very polite and deferential the senior official and didn’t point out that a good Muslim prays five times a day, but he didn’t know. He had been in the Communist Party since the age of 18 and was a major general in the Soviet Air force.

Read it all.

The Jamestown Foundation

Transcript and Speaker Papers - North Caucasus Conference, September 14, 2006

The transcript and speaker papers from the September 14 North Caucasus conference at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are available below:

Transcript: Panel I

Transcript: Panel II

Transcript: Keynote Speech by Dr. Paul Goble

Transcript: Panel III

Transcript: Panel IV

---

"Military Jama'ats in the North Caucasus"
By Andrew McGregor

"Putin, Kozak and Russian Policy Toward the North Caucasus"
By John Dunlop

"The Russian Military Campaign in the North Caucasus: Is a Victory in Sight?"
By Pavel K. Baev

"Islam in the Northern Caucasus - Dagestan"
By Mikhail Roschin

"The Chechen Resistance: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow"
By Mairbek Vachagaev

"The Rise and Fall of Arab Fighters in Chechnya"
By Murad al-Shishani

"Karachaevo-Cherkessia: An Inside Look"
By Fatimat Tlisova

Again via Radio Prague:

One of the steps taken by the Czech Republic to come to terms with its communist past were so-called 'lustrace', or screening laws. They were meant to prevent former communist secret agents and other people associated with the former regime from taking government and senior civil service posts. But it appears that some former secret police, or StB, agents have managed to slip through the net. It has just emerged there are far more former agents in the police than previously believed - 800 rather than a few dozen.

Read the whole of Dita Asiedu's report here.

Via Radio Prague (Rob Cameron):

It is difficult to know for certain, but it does seem the massive security operation currently in place in Prague is the result of arrests made last week in Norway. Four people were arrested by the Norwegian police on September 19th, accused of planning attacks on the Israeli and US embassies in Oslo. The Czech newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes claimed on Tuesday that one of them - a Norwegian citizen of Pakistani origin called Arfan Qadeer Bhatti - was in contact with an Albanian man by the name of Princ Dobrosi, who ran a Europe-wide drug business from Prague in the 1990s.

That certainly doesn't sound like "the most serious threat ever faced by the Czech Republic" as the Czech authorities are claiming, and there must be more to it than that for the authorities to have reacted in this way. Whether Dobrosi was somehow involved in a plot to attack Jewish targets in Prague remains a matter of pure speculation. Neither Norwegian or Czech intelligence services will comment on the claims.

A bomb threat was telephoned to Åsvang School in the northern Norwegian city of Trondheim at 2.3o pm Wednesday, Nettavisen reports.

The school's approximately 480 pupils were evacuated and the area was cordoned off by local police.  The threat proved to be a false alarm.

Via Prague Watchdog (my tr.):

Hostage-taking still rife in Chechnya

By Umalt Chadayev

CHECHNYA - The practice of taking hostage the close relatives of members of armed guerrilla units still continues in Chechnya.

On September 22 representatives of the law-enforcement agencies abducted from a house in the 8th precinct in Grozny's Staropromyslovsky district a young man whose brother left in secret to join the guerrillas several months ago.

"About three months ago, when many of the republic’s residents, mainly young men, set off en masse to worship at the grave of the mother of Kunta-Hadji in Vedensky district (Kunta-Hadji Kishiyev, the founder of one of the Sufi movements in nineteenth century Chechnya, is one of Chechnya’s most revered ustazy, i.e., saints), three lads from our area also left there. But they didn’t return,” says 47-year-old Kheda, one of the residents of Grozny’s 8th precinct. “Then there was a rumour that they’d gone to join the guerrillas. The problems started after that.”

According to the woman, the father of one of the youths (she says that all three are aged between 18 and 19) began to receive “visits” from the members of various law-enforcement agencies. "Alkhazur Seriyev, the father of one of the boys who left, began to get regular visits from the FSB, the police, or whoever they were. They told him he had to find his son and get him back home. One of them even went so far as to call our precinct ‘a nest of Wahhabists’, though no more than a dozen families live there at present,” the woman says.

The law-enforcers simply ignored all of Alkhazur’s attempts to explain that he doesn’t know where his second son is, or how to go about looking for him. "Neither Ruslan (Alkhazur Seriyev’s son) nor the two other lads ever said that they wanted to go and join the guerrillas. Ruslan didn’t ask his father for permission, and the other two never said anything to their mothers about it (their fathers died several years ago at different times). There were no guerrillas in any of those three families, and no one can tell why they acted like this," she says.

The law-enforcers’ repeated visits to Alkhazur Seriyev always came down to one thing – he must immediately find his son and get him back home. "They told him quite openly: "We don’t intend to go chasing your son in the mountains. If we come across him, we will shoot him and kill him at once. Go and look for him yourself, any way and anywhere you want, but get him back home. Otherwise it will be the worse for you," Kheda says.

Through relatives and friends who live in the mountainous part of Southern Chechnya (where the guerrilla units are principally based), Alkhazur Seriyev attempted to make inquiries about his son. But in this he had no success.

Then the law-enforcers resorted to radical measures. At dawn on September 22, several men in camouflage uniform armed with automatic weapons broke into the Seriyevs’ house. Threatening physical violence, they forced Alkhazur Seriyev’s eldest son Ilyas to get into their vehicle and drove away with him in an unknown direction.

"We don’t understand: what does Ilyas have to do with it? His younger brother didn’t tell him about his plans, any more than he told his father. Who gave this kind of authority to the special services, the police and soldiers, to take the relatives of guerrillas hostage, or those who sympathize with them?” the woman says angrily. “After all, even during the Stalin era, in the years of the Second World War, there was the principle of ‘the son does not answer for the father’, and that went for other relatives, too. But there’s only one word for what is going on just now, and that’s terror."

Officials at the Staropromyslovsky district police station where the relatives of the abducted Ilyas Seriyev have filed a complaint say that the local police did not take part in this abduction. They have accepted a complaint from Seriyev’s father about the abduction of his son and have promised to take steps to look for him. At the present time, nothing it is known of his location and further fate.

The practice of taking hostage the relatives of members of armed guerrilla units has been adopted quite widely in Chechnya during the present military campaign on the republic’s territory. Officials of different law-enforcement bodies have at various times taken hostage the relatives of Aslan Maskhadov, President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, as well as those of field commanders Shamil Basayev and Dokka Umarov (the present leader of the Chechen resistance). The former Ichkerian defence minister Magomed Khambiyev (now a member of the Moscow-backed Chechen parliament), "voluntarily" turned himself in to the authorities in March 2004 after law-enforcers seized and abducted about 40 of his relatives and close family.

Meanwhile, the Chechen historian and political analyst Murad Nashkhoyev considers that the practice of hostage-taking has its roots in the distant past. "This vicious practice was introduced by the tsarist generals after Russia began its active advance into the depths of the Caucasus. In those days it was the children of influential families who were taken hostage – they were called amanats. The tsarist administration thought this was the best way to secure the obedience of potential enemies of the regime. So I don’t see anything new in what’s being done now,” he says.

Translated by David McDuff.

The New York Times has a report on the cancellation of a production of Mozart's Idomeneo by the Deutsche Oper Berlin:

A leading German opera house has canceled performances of a Mozart opera because of security fears stirred by a scene that depicts the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad, prompting a storm of protest here about what many see as the surrender of artistic freedom. In the scene that offended Muslims and led to security fears, a king places the severed heads of religious leaders on chairs. The Deutsche Oper Berlin said Tuesday that it had pulled “Idomeneo” from its fall schedule after the police warned of an “incalculable risk” to the performers and the audience. The company’s director, Kirsten Harms, said she regretted the decision but felt she had no choice. She said she was told in August that the police had received an anonymous threat, but she acted only after extensive deliberations. Political and cultural figures throughout Germany condemned the cancellation. Some said it recalled the decision of European newspapers not to reprint satirical cartoons about Muhammad, after their publication in Denmark generated a furor among Muslims.

It looks as though there may be some link between yesterday's terror alert in Prague (which still continues) and the Norway terror plot.

From AIA:

According to some speculations, the reported danger in Prague is connected with the developments in Norway, where three men were recently arrested on suspicion of planned terrorist attacks on the local embassies of the US and Israel. Police and special security teams are patrolling dozens of sensitive sites in Prague, including its international airport and railway stations. 

From RFE/RL Newsline, September 25:

NO 'TRIUMPHALISM' AT TRILATERAL SUMMIT... The September 23 summit of Russian President Vladimir Putin, France's Jacques Chirac, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Compiegne, near Paris, lacked the "triumphalism" of meetings of the three countries' leaders under Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, Deutsche Welle reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," September 21, 2006). As Merkel had insisted, all three leaders carefully avoided referring to their relationship on September 23 as an "axis" and stressed that their meeting was an exchange of ideas and not directed against any third party. She has long made it clear that she intends to follow the policy of her mentor, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, of working closely with the smaller European countries, as well as with France and the other larger ones, and of strengthening the trans-Atlantic partnership. Putin, Chirac, and Merkel agreed on the importance of negotiations in dealing with Iran and on the role of international peacekeepers in helping get Lebanon back on its feet. Merkel added that it is equally important to ensure Israel's right to exist. At the final press conference, the attention of French journalists in particular was, however, centered not on the summit but on an alleged intelligence leak by French intelligence to a regional newspaper on the supposed death of Osama bin Laden. The German broadcaster noted that Chirac found the report and the ensuing discussion "more than unpleasant." PM

...AS PUTIN SEEKS TO EASE FEARS... Speaking in Compiegne on September 23, President Putin sought to allay French and German fears over Russia's ambitions in the EADS aerospace company and its willingness to observe its agreements with foreign energy companies, specifically with France's Total regarding the Kharyaga oil field, Western and Russian media reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," September 15, 20, 21, and 22, 2006). He said that Russia was not displaying "aggressive" behavior regarding EADS or its corporate structure but was simply "playing on the stock market." He announced the creation of a working group to study Russia's possible role in the company, but Chirac and Merkel did not address the issue. Putin added that "rumors about taking away Total's license are greatly exaggerated." Russian commentators noted on September 25, however, that it is unclear how Putin intends to deal with EU demands that Russia ratify the Energy Charter, which Moscow signed in 1994 and which would require it to open up access to its pipelines, news.ru reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," July 17 and 18, and September 5, 2006). In Compiegne, Putin repeated earlier Russian calls for the document to be "amended." He also suggested that Europe is "afraid" of Russia because it is "big and rich." On the eve of the summit, he and Chirac announced France and Russia signed deals in the transport and aviation sectors worth $10 billion. PM

...AND OFFERS BAIT FROM SHTOKMAN. The Moscow dailies "Kommersant" and "Vremya novostei" noted on September 25 that perhaps the most important development at the September 23 Compiegne summit was Putin's offer to Chancellor Merkel of up to 45 billion cubic meters of gas from the Shtokman field over a period of 50-70 years. He asked rhetorically: "Can you imagine that volume and what it means for the economy of Europe...and Germany? It will create an absolutely stable situation in the European economy and for energy." Elsewhere, Gazprom officials declined to comment on Putin's offer, news.ru reported. Russian dailies pointed out that it has been widely assumed that most of the gas from Shtokman will be exported to North America in liquefied form and that Putin's offer is aimed at driving a wedge between the United States on the one hand and the EU, especially Germany, on the other. Russia has articulate lobbyists in Germany and offers German businesses big growth opportunities they lack at home. Putin, who is a German-speaking former KGB officer who once worked in Dresden, has used energy and other business opportunities to lock Germany into an ever closer relationship with Russia at the expense of trans-Atlantic ties, which was a long-standing Soviet policy goal. PM

FOREIGN MINISTER SEEKS TO REASSURE SHELL. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in New York on September 24 that Russia is a "long way off from backing out of agreements we have reached, no matter how difficult the conditions were when they were made," news.ru reported. He was referring to the controversy regarding Russia's recent blockage of the Sakhalin-2 gas production-sharing agreement (PSA) with Royal Dutch Shell and Japan's Mitsui and Mitsubishi (see "RFE/RL Newsline," September 19, 20, 21, and 22, 2006). Agreements with Shell, Exxon, Total, and others were concluded in the 1990s when oil prices were low and Russia sought foreign capital. Now that Russia is awash in petrodollars, the government wants to ease the foreigners out in favor of domestic, state-run firms like Gazprom and Rosneft. The excuse given by the Russian Federal Service for the Oversight of Natural Resources (Rosprirodnadzor) for blocking Sakhalin-2 is that the project has already led to damage to salmon-bearing rivers and "excessive logging" along the pipeline route. Referring to those issues, Lavrov said on September 24 that Russia's objections to the current state of Sakhalin-2 are based on environmental and not political considerations. On September 22, a U.S. State Department spokesman said that Washington is "very concerned" over Sakhalin-2 and called on Russia to "uphold [its] commitments on energy," including those it made at the July St. Petersburg summit of the Group of Eight (G8) leading industrialized countries. PM

FINANCE MINISTER SAYS RUSSIA COULD CATCH UP WITH GERMANY, U.S... Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin told Channel One television on September 24 that "we want to create a system that would be equal in strength to the economies and financial systems of the United States or Germany. I have to say that this distance can be covered in 10 years if the country conducts a very skilled financial policy." He noted that Russia has made much progress in that respect in recent years but still has some way to go to catch up with the United States or Germany. Looking at a broader index, the World Bank said in a report released on September 15 that Russia ranks 151st among 208 countries in terms of accountability, political stability, effectiveness of the government, the quality of regulatory bodies, the rule of law, and control over corruption, which places it on a level between Swaziland and Niger (see "RFE/RL Newsline," September 18, 2006). PM

A school and a shopping centre in the southern Swedish city of Växjö were evacuated on Monday after a bomb threat, Dagens Nyheter reports. The threat was phoned to SOS Alarm at 30 minutes after noon, giving 30 minutes' warning of an explosion in the shopping centre, but police are not saying exactly what the threat involved. 600-700 people were evacuated, most of them schoolchildren.

Via RFE/RL:

MOSCOW, September 25, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Around 40 left-wing Russian activists were arrested near the Kremlin today after they forced their way into the Finance Ministry to protest against government policies.


Members of the National Bolshevik Party waved red flags and shouted antigovernment slogans from the Finance Ministry windows before the police arrived.

Party spokesman Aleksandr Averin told RFE/RL's Russian Service the protest was over the Kremlin's decision this year to pay back Russia's Soviet-era foreign debt early, rather than compensate Russians who lost money due to the shock economic reforms of the early 1990s.

Averin put the number of demonstrators who entered the building at 50, and said they had "seized three floors of the building" in the 30 minutes before they were detained.

Witnesses said the protesters, some of whom had climbed onto window sills, offered no resistance to arrest.

Commenting on the Norway terror plot, Norwegian journalist Mona Levin has pointed again to the high levels of anti-Semitism in Norwegian society. She also places some of the blame on public statements like those of the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder, whose outburst in the press in August this year caused outrage in Norwegian Jewish circles:

From Nettavisen(my tr.):

Gaarder wrote... that Israel had “violated the world’s recognition”, and that they would not attain peace until they laid down their arms. Mona Levin wrote the following day that it was the ugliest thing she had read since Mein Kampf.

“But as I said on Norwegian State Radio a day after Gaarder’s first article: When you open a can of worms, the worms crawl out,” says Levin.

Levin says there has been a huge increase in anti-Semitism in recent months. She finds it very disturbing that no one is dealing with this.

“Jewish children are being persecuted at school. The Jews in Norway have been subjected to a number of attacks of late, and now these dreadful shootings at the synagogue. There has been something bewildering around this. It doesn’t seem as though the people who are usually so eager to debate social issues care very much this time,” says Levin.

Levin is angry that Norway’s Jews are held responsible for policies they don’t have anything to do with.... For all anyone knows, those Jews who are subjected to hatred may be very critical of Israel’s policies. We’re not the ones who should feel responsible,” says Levin.

She says that we need a better understanding of what is what, and who is who, in this debate. In Norway knowledge about Jews and Judaism is very slight, in spite of the fact that Jews have a 150-year-old history here. Norway needs to confront what happened during the Second World War, and realize that Norwegian history in relation to Norwegian Jews is not very pretty.”

She is also highly critical of the one-sided press coverage of the conflicts in the Middle East.

"We need a more balanced media coverage of what is happening in the Middle East. The same is true in relation to the United States. The media image of Israel and Jews in Norway has been very negative and one-sided."

Jostein Gaarder has told iOslo. no that he does not wish to comment on the matter.

See also: The 2006 Jostein Gaarder Controversy
and
Mona Levin's reply to Jostein Gaarder

From The Moscow Times:

The State Duma on Friday approved a government amnesty plan intended to persuade militants in Chechnya and surrounding regions of the North Caucasus to disarm and surrender to authorities.

Deputies quickly passed the legislation, proposed by President Vladimir Putin, in a 350-80 vote, with one abstention. The amnesty, part of an effort to end more than a decade of separatist resistance following the deaths of rebel leaders this summer, would remain in effect until Jan. 15.

The amnesty would also apply to servicemen suspected of committing crimes while serving in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.

Pavel Krashennikov, head of the Duma's Legislation Committee, denied speculation that the amnesty might apply to servicemen convicted or indicted of serious crimes, such as the murder of civilians, Interfax reported Saturday.

Mari-Ann Kelam in Tallinn, Estonia, has forwarded to me an interesting report on Toomas Hendrik Ilves's presidential victory in yesterday's Estonian election. The report is from Monsters and Critics, and I'm republishing it here, as the site seems to be very slow this evening (but see the important copyright notices at the end of the article). Mari-Ann also says that "Ilves brought out Estonian young people, let's hope this interest in politics continues for the Riigikogu (parliament elections in March 2007). Sidelight - Savisaar and Reiljan, the heads of the two parties supporting Ryytel, did not congratulate Ilves."

Tallinn - Estonian politicians voted by a hair-thin majority to elect 52-year-old former Soviet exile Toomas Hendrik Ilves president on Saturday.

Ilves, who was born in Sweden to exiles from Soviet-ruled Estonia and raised in the US, received 174 votes from an electoral college of MPs and local councillors - just one more than the number required for victory.

'It's surprising that Ilves managed to squeak through in the first round - the momentum seemed to have turned in his favour this week, but nobody was sure that we could avoid a repeat vote,' said Andres Kasekamp, professor of Baltic politics at Tartu University.

His opponent, incumbent president Arnold Ruutel, received 162 votes. The result is a major blow for the two centre-left parties which supported him, and which had been lobbying fiercely to gain control of the college.

'(Ruutel's supporters) were sounding desperate this week ... even suggesting that there could be trouble on the streets as a result of actions by Ilves' supporters,' Kasekamp said.

There is still a chance that Ruutel's camp could overturn the decision. Last week the Estonian Electoral Commission decided to reduce the number of voters in the electoral college by two after allegations of procedural irregularities - a decision Ruutel supporters challenged in the Supreme Court.

'In theory, the Supreme Court could nullify the ballot. However, it seems highly unlikely that the Electoral Commission would have acted without very strong justification,' Kasekamp said.

'Ruutel's supporters looked pretty resigned after the vote,' he added. The 174 votes which Ilves received would have been enough for first-round victory even if two extra electors had taken part.

Ilves' victory is likely to be a popular one in Estonia. He has consistently led the field in opinion polls, with his support among ethnic Estonians more than twice as high as Ruutel's.

Ilves, the current vice-president of the European Parliament's foreign affairs committee, is reckoned the country's most effective diplomat, winning a third of all votes in elections to the European Parliament despite challenges from over 100 other candidates.

His exile background is also an advantage, according to observers.

'Despite participating in Estonian politics for so long, Ilves is seen as bringing a fresh transparency and honesty to the political scene - he's free of corruption and scandals,' Kasekamp said.

'Ilves represents everything that is western and European,' agreed Vello Pettai, professor of political science at Tartu University.

The decision puts an end to a month of political intrigue. According to the Estonian constitution, the president is elected by the country's 101-member parliament.

However, if no candidate receives two-thirds of votes, the choice passes to the electoral college. Parties supporting Ruutel boycotted three parliamentary votes in late August in order to ensure that the vote would be decided in college.

The boycott was fiercely criticised in Estonia's press, where it was seen as an attempt to install a partisan president before parliamentary elections, due in March 2007.

Ilves now becomes the second-youngest head of state in the EU, after the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the Union's youngest elected president. The oldest is Giorgio Napolitano of Italy, aged 81.


© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
© Copyright 2003 - 2005 by monstersandcritics.com.
This notice cannot be removed without permission.

Carl Bildt has a post about the remarkable exhibition Erzwungene Wege. Flucht und Vertreibung in Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts ("Coerced Paths - Escape and Expulsion in Europe in the 20th Century") now on at the Kronprinzenhalle in central Berlin. As he writes, the exhibition, while controversial from many points of view, throws light on the damage that was done to Europe in the 20th century, both by itself and by outside powers.

The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat has some more:

One of the stories detailed in the exhibition is exceptional.

The fate of Finland's Karelians in the Second World War was more humane, and their escape route was no death-march. Nevertheless, more than 400,000 Karelians had to leave their homes during the war years, and in 1944 the displacement became permanent, when the territories were annexed to the Soviet Union. The tragedy directly affected more than ten per cent of the Finnish population.

"The fate of the Karelians is interesting in many respects", says Dr. Doris Müller-Toovey, who is responsible for the Karelian section in the exhibition.

"The people left of their own free will. What is also exceptional is that it all happened not once but twice."

When studying the events, which were quite new to her, Dr. Müller-Toovey was also impressed at how successful Finland was at settling the Karelian population in other parts of Finland.

The exhibition places the Karelian displacement story within a European framework in a completely new way. It is also exceptional that any interest is shown in the Karelian issue in Central Europe.

"It is not known that anything like this would have happened previously in exhibition activities", says Mervi Piipponen, cultural secretary of the Karelian Association.

From Budapest's Lajos Kossuth Square this evening, via Reuters:

Thousands of supporters of Fidesz, the main opposition party which canceled its own rally because of fears of violence, were among those gathering in the square. Party leaders reiterated earlier calls for Gyurcsany to quit.

Fidesz Deputy President Pal Schmitt, in a brief speech outside parliament, asked the crowd to wear white clothes and white armbands to show they reject violence, and about half the crowd was wearing some white clothing.

Via Axis News:

23.09.200614:37 (GMT)
The Czech government decided on heightening the level of security measures on the basis of information received from the Security Information Service (Bezpecnostni informacni sluzba – BIS), daily Mlada fronta Dnes online edition reports. BIS spokesman Jan Subert confirmed speaking to the paper that the threat was serious. He emphasized that all the BIS units are on duty according to the order of the highest security risk level, Mlada fronta Dnes says. Topolanek marked that the information was related "to increased security risks of similar character abroad."The tightened security measures over a possible risk of a terrorist attack, which the Czech government took during the night, has further escalated the already tense relations between the heads of the two strongest parties, Mirek Topolanek and Jiri Paroubek, CTK reports. Former Prime Minister Paroubek, chairman of Social Democrats, told CTK that the news of a terrorist risk threatening Prague had been circulating in certain circles for three weeks already. Topolanek said that it was he who informed Paroubek about the threat three weeks ago."Nevertheless, the information was of a usual intelligence character and only yesterday's and last night's information led security forces to ask the government to deal with it," Topolanek said. Paroubek told CTK he does not comprehend why the government did not inform about the situation at its meeting three days before already.

Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek told journalists today afternoon that there is no immediate danger, in connection with the threat of a terrorist attack in Prague, CTK writes. He said the government believe that the security measures taken and the fact that the public have been informed of the danger will eliminate the risk. According to Topolanek, security forces have assured him that the whole security operation is proceeding smoothly. Operation at C line of Prague's underground was interrupted for about an hour after an anonymous caller told police that an explosive had been planted in the underground tunnel on the Nuselsky Bridge, CTK says.

The latest issue of the pro-Falun Gong (but independent) web newspaper Epoch Times carries a report that

As of 12:01 EST, 13,801,393 people have submitted statements withdrawing from the Chinese Communist Party or its affiliated organizations (for the text in Chinese of all of the statements, please visit the Tuidang website: English | Chinese). Those who are current members of the CCP or its affiliated organizations are resigning their membership with these statements; former members sever all association with these organizations. All are renouncing the CCP completely.

The paper also publishes Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party. In outline, these cover the following topics:

Introduction

More than a decade after the fall of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European communist regimes, the international communist movement has been spurned worldwide. The demise of the Chinese Communist Party is only a matter of time.

1) On What the Communist Party Is

More than a decade after the fall of the former Soviet Union and Eastern European communist regimes, the international communist movement has been spurned worldwide. The demise of the Chinese Communist Party is only a matter of time.

2) On the Beginnings of the Chinese Communist Party

Why did the Communist Party emerge, grow and eventually seize power in contemporary China? Did the Chinese people choose the Communist Party? Or, did the Communist Party gang up and force Chinese people to accept it? The CCP has set itself above all, conquering all in its path, thereby bringing endless catastrophe to China.

3) On the Tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party

Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s violence and abuses are even more severe than those of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty. The CCP’s philosophy is one of “struggle,” and the CCP’s rule has been built upon a series of “class struggles,” “path struggles,” and “ideological struggles,” both in China and toward other nations.

4) On How the Communist Party Is an Anti-Universe Force

In the last hundred years, the sudden invasion by the communist specter has created a force against nature and humanity, causing limitless agony and tragedy. It has also pushed civilization to the brink of destruction. It has become an extremely malevolent force against the universe.

5) On the Collusion of Jiang Zemin with the CCP to Persecute Falun Gong

Why is Falun Gong, which upholds the principles of “Truthfulness, Compassion and Tolerance” and has been promulgated in over 60 countries worldwide, being persecuted only in China, not anywhere else in the world? In this persecution, what is the relationship between Jiang Zemin and the CCP?

6) On How the Chinese Communist Party Destroyed Traditional Culture

The CCP has devoted the nation’s resources to destroying China’s rich traditional culture. The CCP’s destruction of Chinese culture has been planned, well organized, and systematic, made possible by the state’s use of violence. Since its establishment, the CCP has never stopped “revolutionizing” Chinese culture in the attempt to completely destroy its spirit.

7) On the Chinese Communist Party’s History of Killing

The 55-year history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is written with blood and lies. The stories behind this bloody history are not only brutally inhumane but also rarely known. Under the rule of the CCP, 60 to 80 million innocent Chinese people have been killed, leaving their broken families behind.

8) On How the Chinese Communist Party Is an Evil Cult

The Communist Party is essentially an evil cult that harms mankind. Although the Communist Party has never called itself a religion, it matches every single trait of a religion. At the beginning of its establishment, it regarded Marxism as the absolute truth in the world. It exhorted people to engage in a life-long struggle for the goal of building a “communist heaven on earth.”

9) On the Unscrupulous Nature of the Chinese Communist Party

What is most terrifying is that the CCP is going all out to try to destroy the moral foundation of the entire nation, attempting to turn every Chinese national to various degrees into a scoundrel in order to create an environment favorable for the CCP to “advance with time.” It is especially important for us to understand clearly why the CCP acts like scoundrels and to discern its criminal nature.

It's possible to sign an international declaration denouncing the Chinese Communist Party here.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the new President of Estonia.

He took 174 of the 345 possible votes in the electoral college.

The incumbent, Moscow-leaning Arnold Rüütel, gained only 162 votes.

Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the first Estonian president not to know Russian. An Estonian-American, he will take Estonia further towards the European Union, of which the country is already a member, and also in an Atlanticist direction.

Via Axis News:

23.09.200609:35 (GMT)
The Czech government raised security in the capital city, Prague, today after information of what it said was an increased threat of a terrorist attack, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reports, referring to Reuters news agency. Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said the Czech government met during the night and adopted unspecified security measures, according to the RFE/RL.
Czech Prime Minister said in a written statement the information was received from representatives of the security services and police. He marked that the information was related "to increased security risks of similar character abroad." Topolanek reportedly said the government decided to strengthen security measures in Prague "with the aim of eliminating the existing risks," but he gave no further details.

Update:

23.09.200610:31 (GMT)
Czech police deployed armed guards in Prague's historic centre today after security services issued its most serious warning of a terrorist attack, Reuters reports from the Czech capital. The possible terrorist attack risk in Prague targets sites that are not specially guarded under normal circumstances, Police President Vladislav Husak said today at a press conference on the extraordinary security measures the government introduced in Prague during the night, news agency CTK says. He told that the police had heightened the protection of tens of buildings in Prague; neither he nor Interior Minister Ivan Langer would specify them. Langer said this is for the first time that the Czech Republic faces such a concrete risk of a terrorist attack. "The information ... was evaluated as serious, the most serious ever," Langer is quoted as saying, though refusing to elaborate. He added that no danger threatens outside the capital of Prague and that no special security measures are taken there. Langer said that the security forces are not in a situation where they would know "when, where, who, what." He stressed that “nevertheless, the message is clear: no unnecessary panic, people who take part in the security measures are professionals." Langer said measures have been taken on three levels: visible, less visible and invisible. Langer did not reply to the question whether the situation is connected with the developments in Norway where the police marred terrorist attacks this week. According to CTK, Langer said the special security measures would be in force for at least several days. The press conference participants would not say "for tactical reasons" whether potential attackers stay on Czech territory. The Prague city authority does not plan to cancel entertainment events at the weekend but it has involved also Prague policemen in security measures that are secured mainly by the national police, Rudolf Blazek deputy mayor of Prague, said Husak said it is considered to call in the military for the time being.

Update (via CTK):

Anonymous caller says bomb planted on a Prague bridge
14:36 - 23.09.2006

Prague- Operation at C line of Prague's underground has been interrupted after an anonymous caller told police at 13:30 today that an explosive had been planted in the underground tunnel on the Nuselsky Bridge, police spokeswoman Eva Miklikova told CTK.

She said road traffic along the bridge had not been interrupted.

Tightened security measures have been in force in the capital since early today over a possible terrorist risk.

A few more updates on the Oslo terror arrests, seen from a local Norwegian perspective:

* The lawyer for the 28-year-old Norwegian Pakistani says that his client did make a remark about "cutting the Israeli ambassador's throat" (this is apparently what is on the recording - not "beheading" her, as reported elsewhere) - but that it was made during a heated discussion, and was not intended to be taken seriously. (Dagbladet)

http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/09/22/477557.html

* The 29-year-old Norwegian Pakistani has been under surveillance by Norwegian and foreign police since June 23 this year. Norwegian police say that during this period the 29-year-old has sent regular text messages to and exchanged phone calls with a female reporter employed by Norwegian television station TV2's news section. They were in a close personal relationship, according to police. The recorded conversations between the two show the expression of "radical Islamist attitudes" on the part of the 29-year-old. The reporter has been suspended from her post. (Nettavisen)

http://www.nettavisen.no/innenriks/article747713.ece

* The third suspect, "of foreign origin", is a Norwegian Turk.

* Dagbladet reports the 26-year-old ethnic Norwegian as saying that the intended target of the attack was a small Bunnpris grocery store located some 400 metres from the U.S. embassy, and not the embassy itself. The aim was to rob the grocery store. The 26-year-old denies having anything to do with the shots that were fired at the synagogue.

http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/09/22/477569.html

Via Sky News:

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has died of typhoid in Pakistan, according to reports in a regional French newspaper.

The paper quoted one of the country's secret service reports, saying that Saudi Arabia is convinced that Bin Laden died a month ago.

L'Est Republicain also said a copy of the report was shown to President Jacques Chirac and the French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

"According to a usually reliable source, the Saudi services are now convinced that Osama bin Laden is dead," the document said.

Jesus and Mo are discussing the Pope's Regensburg address.

Via Ynet:

Norwegian prosecutors unveiled on Friday evidence against four men detained on suspicion of plotting to blow up the US and Israeli embassies and of participating in a shooting at the Oslo synagogue last weekend.

Prosecutor Unni Fries told a court the Norwegian secret services had bugged the car of the main suspect and recorded conversations between the men planning the attacks. "They spoke in detail about how to attack the synagogue and the US and Israeli embassies," Fries said, asking the court to detain all four suspects for four weeks without visitors or other contact with the outside world. (Reuters)

Tomorrow's presidential election, which will be held by electoral college vote, is a potentially decisive event for Estonia - one that may once and for all determine its future development, and the development of the entire Baltic region of Europe.

In EDM, Vladimir Socor looks at the background to the election, and the issues it involves. In many ways, the shadow of the Soviet past still looms - yet there is a real hope, if Toomas Hendrik Ilves is elected president tomorrow, that the shadow may finally be dispelled.

Why not choose the best candidate, Socor asks.

Estonia’s presidential election tomorrow, September 23, involves more than just a choice between Arnold Ruutel and Toomas Hendrik Ilves. In a more profound sense, this election can decide whether or not a third man, Center Party leader Edgar Savisaar, becomes Estonia’s political and business king-maker for years to come, de-liberalizing the economy in favor or privileged interest groups and building a special relationship with Russia to balance Estonia’s Euro-Atlantic orientation.

Savisaar reckons to achieve those goals by ensuring the elderly Ruutel’s reelection to another five-year term of office as well as a place for the small pro-presidential party, People’s Union, in a governing arrangement with the Center Party. In turn, Ruutel and People’s Union leader Villu Reiljan would use Ruutel’s presidential authority to “guarantee” the Center Party’s hegemony building.

The choice between Ilves, 53, and Ruutel, 78, should be an easy one to make both democratically and on merit. Ilves is the distant front-runner in Estonia’s popularity ratings as well a highly respected international personality. But, under Estonia’s electoral law, the president will be elected by an insufficiently transparent electoral college that offers scope for manipulation. In practice, the electoral college and Estonia itself faces a choice between constitutional government with Ilves and the risks of de facto rule by Savisaar under a figurehead president.

Writing in the September 20 issue of the Center Party’s weekly Kesknadal, Savisaar attacks Ilves for being an Estonian-American; claims sarcastically as well as gratuitously that “NATO would not go into a row with Russia for our sake”; cites German Minister of Foreign Affairs Karl-Walter Steinmeyer -- a close associate of the Kremlin-friendly former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder -- as urging that Russian interests be catered to (apparently, Savisaar privileges that perspective over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Atlanticism); and raises the specter of clashes between ethnic Russians and Estonians if the latter insist on removing the Red Army monument from Tallinn -- as we ll as clashes among Estonians if Ilves supporters hold a planned open-air song festival in the city (BNS, September 20).

The Center Party-People’s Union alliance stipulates that Estonia should withdraw its soldiers from coalition forces in Iraq “at the first opportunity” and that the country can only participate in international operations with United Nations’ approval. This would imply that Estonia would not be free to participate in NATO peacekeeping or common defense operations unless the UN -- that is, Russia as well -- consents. The agreement strengthens this impression by failing to mention NATO altogether.

The Center Party has actively participated in running Ruutel&rsqu o;s campaign, particularly in its “dirty trick” aspects. Kesknadal and others in that camp have publicly “investigated” the life of Ilves’ octogenarian mother for Jewish origins -- an invention that the candidate has not bothered to refute. Ruutel and his close circle have on the whole kept their distance from the negative campaigning, nor have they endorsed the strategic overtures to Russia in Savisaar’s discourse and the Savisaar-Reiljan agreement. However, the president and his advisers have clearly failed to disavow those transgressions and those overtures.

Savisaar has no consistent vision for the country’s future. He is a consummate tactical operator who follows what he perceives to be the prevailing winds. He headed the Popular Front during the heyda y of the liberation movement and served several brief stints as prime minister, internal affairs minister, and economics minister in the last 15 years. Savisaar narrowly averted an end to his political career in the late 1990s when, as internal affairs minister, he used the services of a security firm to bug political rivals. The Center Party is the country’s single largest with a nearly 30% share of the electorate in Estonia’s multi-party system. Savisaar has developed a political and organizational model that rests on fusion of the party with certain favored business circles, strict internal party discipline under Savisaar’s close oversight, predominant influence on Tallinn’s City Hall, and a lock on a substantial share of the Russian vote. The Center Party has signed a cooperation agreement with Russia’s party of power, United Russia.

Both the Center Party and People’s Union aggressively recruit members among mayors and other local officials, offering largesse from ministerial funds controlled by those parties in return for electoral support. The People’s Party constituency is predominantly rural and aging, and the party wields influence in part through Ruutel’s contacts in the milieu of agrarian and administrative officials in the countryside.

The dynamics of this campaign notwithstanding, Ruutel and Ilves can by no means be described as political adversaries, though they come from very different milieus and project contrasting personal images.

Ruutel, once a high official in Soviet Estonia’s agriculture and political nomenklatura, joined the liberation movement in the late 1980s and played a prominent role -- along with young movement leaders -- in the restoration of Estonia’s independence through parliamentary enactments. His presence in the parliament’s chair for the better part of the 1990s helped reassure sections of society, including many Russians, that Estonia’s independence and aspiration to join NATO and the European Union was good for the country and all social strata. Ruutel became president in 2001 at the age of 73 and served as a figurehead, though often with dignity. However, not speaking any foreign language other than Russian, he is at a disadvantage in representing Estonia internationally.

Ilves, born in Sweden to an Estonian post-war refugee family, grew up in the United States and is widely recognized as a scintillating orator in English. He headed the Estonian broadcasting department at Radio Free Europe, went on to serve as Estonia’s ambassador to the United States, and became the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, steering the country’s policies of accession to NATO and the European Union. Since 2004 Ilves has been the Vice-Chairman of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Commission and one of the most influential figures in Brussels debates on the EU’s neighborhood policy, energy issues, and policy toward Russia. In recent years he has led Estonia’s politicians in terms of popular rating -- a fact that casts some doubt on his detractors’ stereotyping of Ilves as “elitist.” Ilves is a highly knowledgeable spokesman not just for Estonia, but also for Central-Eastern Europe generally in both Washington and Brussels, the workings of which he knows from the inside.

Unless Ruutel’s handlers have their own reasons to think otherwise, Ruutel can now retire in dignity and with full national gratitude for his past services. At this point, Ilves personifies a successfully modernizing Estonia and the country’s obvious best choice.

As tensions in the North Caucasus continue to spread beyond the borders of Chechnya, it seems that Moscow is attempting to fan them further by pitting the law-enforcement agencies of different North Caucasus republics against one another. Prague Watchdog has a report (my tr.):

Bloody incident between Chechen and Ingushetian police assessed differently in the two republics

By Umalt Chadayev

The armed conflict between Chechen and Ingushetian police that took place near the Ingush village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya on September 13, leading to numerous casualties, may have a sequel.

Chechen OMON officers who lost seven of their comrades, including the unit’s deputy commander, as a result of a clash on the administrative border between Chechnya and Ingushetia are convinced that the killing of their colleagues was carried out deliberately. They dismiss completely all the arguments by the Chechen and Ingushetian authorities that the reason for the bloodshed was a lack of operational co-ordination on the part of the law enforcement agencies of the two republics.

"What sort of ‘lack of co-ordination’ could there have been? When they entered the republic of Ingushetia at that Ingushetian traffic police post No. 20, our colleagues went through all the necessary procedures: registration, and so on,” says Adam, one of the Chechen police officers, who lost his close friend during the skirmish on September 13. “What’s more, they were travelling in three UAZ jeeps marked with police numbers in dark blue. This was obviously an action that was planned – open murder. But on TV they’re talking about some ‘fatal error’, a ‘lack of operational co-ordination’ and ‘wilfulness’ on the part of our OMON officers on the territory of the adjacent republic."

"The lads told me what really happened. They had gone to arrest the notorious Ingush ‘car-theft authority’ Gerikhan Temurziyev, leader of an Ingush criminal gang who specializes in stealing expensive foreign-made automobiles. Temurziyev’s gang has been carrying on this ‘business’ in different regions of Russia, and has now switched to Chechnya. In addition, it seems there was information that Temurziyev is engaged in smuggling narcotics into our republic. The policemen had managed to arrest one of the members of this group and to get on the trail of its leader, who was living very quietly in the village of Yandare in Nazranovsky district," the respondent says.

"When the officers arrived at the scene of the impending operation, they notified the village administration head as well as the policeman in charge of the area, who told them the location of the house where Temurziyev lived, but refused to take part in his arrest. Temurziyev offered no resistance, and the group of law-enforcers set off back to Chechnya. On their way they were followed by an unmarked Zhiguli car. The occupants of that car probably signalled the group’s approach to the traffic police post, where an ambush was waiting," he says.

"At that post there were not only Ingush police officials, but also a large number of armed men in masks, dressed in civilian clothing. When the column was about 80 metres from the post, the barrier came down, and officials demanded that the OMON police should leave their jeeps and give up their weapons. As soon as one of them got out of his jeep in order to find out what was going on, he was shot almost at point-blank range. Then the OMON jeeps were opened fire on, and a shoot-out began which lasted for about twenty minutes,” the Chechen policeman says.

"It was a flagrant attempt to recapture the arrested man. None the less, the OMON officers were able to break out and make their way back to Chechen territory, and from there they reported the attack to their superiors. Buvadi Dakhiyev and a large group of Chechen police arrived at the scene of the incident. Dakhiyev and several OMON officers set off in the direction of the Ingush post in order to investigate the situation. The Ingushes immediately opened fire on them without any warning. Buvadi was seriously wounded and later died in hospital, while his comrades perished on the spot. In all six of our policemen were killed as a result of this incident, and five more were injured. On the Ingush side two policemen were killed, and about ten were injured. Such is the outcome of this ‘fatal accident’.”

According to Adam, on the evening of the same day, soldiers of the unit gathered at the Chechen OMON base, intending to go to the Ingush police post where the armed clash had taken place, and "sort it out". Adam says that they were only stopped by the arrival of one of the republic’s leaders, who demanded that the policemen should not take the law into their own hands, promising that the authorities of the two republics would conduct a full inquiry, and that all those guilty for what had happened would be punished.

Representatives of the Ingush law-enforcement agencies blame the Chechen OMON officers for the whole incident. The Ingush side claims that that the Chechen officers opened fire first, and that they then summoned their colleagues to help. In the Ingush opinion, the actions of the Chechen OMON officers were illegal. Things reached such a point that Isa Kostoyev, an Ingushetian senator in Russia's Federation Council, issued a call to the residents of Ingushetia to offer resistance to representatives of the law-enforcement agencies of other republics if the latter arrived "to make searches without the representatives of the law-enforcement agencies of the Ingush Republic being present."

After the incident, the Chechen Interior Ministry placed additional posts on the motor highway that leads out of the republic into Ingushetia, justifying this by the need to prevent the passage of armed men in either direction. On the Ingush side the post where the bloodshed occurred was reinforced by armoured vehicles and soldiers of the Federal forces. The situation on both sides of the administrative border remains quite tense, though no manifestations of violence or hostility towards Chechen residents in Ingushetia and vice versa have been observed.

An investigative group of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office is at present undertaking an inquiry into the circumstances of the incident.

"It’s possible that the investigation will explain all the circumstances of what took place, it’s possible that those guilty for what took place will be identified and punished, it’s even possible that someone will be put on trial. But I have a feeling that it’s going to be settled not by investigators and judges, but by custom – the old Caucasian custom of blood vengeance. In order to prevent this, both sides will have to be reconciled with each other, and elders of both republics who possess authority and respect will have to intervene. After all, the reconciliation of opposing parties is also an old and very good Caucasian tradition," says 57-year-old Grozny resident Usman Mezhidov.


Translated by David McDuff.

See also: The Widening Conflict
The Widening Conflict - II

Jamestown's Chechnya Weekly has a thorough and detailed report on the Ordzhonikidzevskaya incident here.

A couple of items from yesterday's RFE/RL Newsline (9/21/2006):

GERMAN LEADER SAYS 'NO' TO MOSCOW-BERLIN-PARIS AXIS.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has closely involved the diplomats and leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland in preparations for her planned September 23 meeting near Paris with French President Jacques Chirac and Russia's Vladimir Putin, the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" reported on September 21. She wants to make it clear to all that she is opposed to reviving the Moscow-Berlin-Paris "axis" that took shape under her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, and intends to present Baltic and Polish concerns to the Paris meeting. Latvian and Estonian diplomats have stressed to her the importance of Russia's finalizing border treaties with their countries. The daily reported that Merkel was angry that Chirac announced the summit on July 3 without consulting her, but decided to go with her own agenda rather than refuse to attend. She has long made it clear that she intends to follow the policy of her mentor, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, of working closely with the smaller European countries, as well as with France and the other larger ones, and of strengthening the trans-Atlantic partnership. The daily noted that she telephoned U.S. President George W. Bush in connection with the Paris meeting and that Bush welcomed it as an opportunity for her to present her concerns over Iran to Chirac and Putin. Schroeder, who now heads the stockholders' oversight body for the planned Russo-German North European Gas Pipeline, brought U.S.-German relations to their lowest point since World War II through his active opposition to Washington (see "RFE/RL Newsline," May 26, July 17, August 24, and End Note, "RFE/RL Newsline," March 23, 2006). PM


IS AMERICA AGAIN THE ENEMY?

The [Russian] Defense Ministry has denied recent reports in the Moscow daily "Gazeta" and on lenta.ru that it is preparing a new official doctrine in which the United States and NATO are allegedly placed on a level with terrorists as threats to Russian security, "Gazeta" reported on September 20. Ministry spokesman Colonel Vyacheslav Sedov said that "there have been media reports about that before, but now, as on previous occasions, they're still a long way from the truth." The ministry's previous comprehensive defense doctrines date from 1993 and 2000. The daily suggested nonetheless that the ministry is trying to "hide something" from the public about defense plans. Elsewhere, on September 21 news.ru and "Nezavisimaya gazeta" reported on an alleged "secret report" to the State Duma prepared by a group of experts around former point man for Germany and CPSU Secretary Valentin Falin and former top foreign intelligence official Gennady Evstafiev. The alleged study says that Washington is seeking to promote an "Orange Revolution" in Russia by subtle and indirect means. PM

With the defeat of Sweden's Social Democrat government in Sunday's election, and the return of the centre-right, Sweden's foreign policy is likely to undergo some changes, not least in the area of the Middle East. The new political alignment in Sweden has been noted with some satisfaction in Israel, where the Social Democrats' antagonistic policies towards the country, being almost exclusively pro-Arab and anti-Israel, have caused much anger and displeasure.

In the Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon notes that some officials in Jerusalem are privately delighted by the new turn of events, and hold out hopes for the future of Swedish-Israeli relations. Israel's former ambassador to Stockholm, Zvi Mazel,

said that the centerright parties, headed by 41-year-old prime minister designate Fredrik Reinfeldt, who ousted Prime Minister Goran Persson, made supportive comments about Israel while in the opposition.

"We had good relations with them in the past, and hope it will continue," Mazel said.

Mazel - who in 2004 wrecked a display at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm that glorified a suicide bomber - said that Sweden has for years been among the most critical countries in the EU towards Israel, along with Ireland and France.

He said that the new government was likely to bring Sweden's Middle East policy from the far left into the center in the EU, and that he believed the new government's public declarations about Israel and the Middle East would be far less critical.

Mazel's optimism was shared by Gunnar Hokmark, a Swedish member of the European parliament from one of the central-right Swedish parties. Hokmark, chairman of the Israel-Swedish Friendship League, said from Brussels that he thought the new government would "chart a more balanced policy," toward Israel.

According to Hokmark, the new government was likely to "be more focused on the support for democracy development in the Middle East."

Although foreign policy played almost no role in the elections, Hokmark said Reinfeld had made some comments in the campaign for the need for stable regimes in Syria and Lebanon.

One senior official in Jerusalem said that although it was hard to say whether there would be a dramatic change in Stockholm's policies, "there is definitely an opportunity now to turn a new page. The social democrats went that extra mile in their criticism of Israel," the official said. Over the last few years, he added, Sweden has distinguished itself in being more critical of Israel than about any other European country.

There have been more attacks on synagogues in Russia, this time in the city of Khabarovsk (in Russia's Far East,) and in Astrakhan (on the Volga in Southern Russia). Of the Khabarovsk attack, AP writes:

Unidentified attackers on Friday hurled stones at a synagogue in a far eastern Russian city, shattering windows but hurting no one, officials said.

The pre-dawn attack on the synagogue in Khabarovsk, a city of 580,000 on the border with China, was the latest sign of rising xenophobia and anti-Semitism in Russia.

The regional department of the Interior Ministry said the attack occurred in the pre-dawn hours Friday when the synagogue was empty. A criminal investigation was launched.

A 29-year-old Norwegian Pakistani man is among 4 suspects charged by Norwegian police with a terrorist attack on an Oslo synagogue on September 17.

Oslo, Sep 20 (Online): A 29-year-old Pakistani origin man with links to the criminal A-gang is among the four suspects arrested on Tuesday and charged with firing on Oslo’s synagogue last weekend, Aftenposten’s Norwegian reported.

The man was arrested in Germany this summer, suspected of participating in the planning of a terrorist attack on the soccer World Cup there. He was released quickly.

Last week he was arrested again, this time charged with threats against crime journalist Nina Johnsrud from the newspaper Dagsavisen.

Police suspect him of having something to do with shots having been fired against her house this summer, but he was released after 24 hours.

Update: Norway's Nettavisen has details of the suspects:

De fire siktede, en norskpakistaner (29), en norskpakistaner (28), en nordmann av utenlandsk opprinnelse (28) og en nordmann (26), blir fremstilt for varetektsfengsling fredag formiddag klokken 11.

The four accused, a Norwegian Pakistani (29), a Norwegian Pakistani (28), a Norwegian of foreign origin (28) and a Norwegian (26), will be brought before the court to be remanded in custody on Friday morning at 11 am.

The four men planned an attack on the US and Israeli embassies in Oslo.

At last, an honest, fair and balanced report on the situation in Beirut, Southern Lebanon and Northern Israel, by a Washington Post journalist, William M. Arkin, who went there and wrote about what he saw and experienced:

What struck me about the bombing, in both countries, was that you could see the destruction and completely misread what it meant. In Beirut, the destruction in reality is efficient and impressive. The destruction in Israel, on the other hand, is random and scattered. When Hezbollah rockets were fired on Israel, landing meant success.

So here is the truth: Israel did not do anything close to what it was capable of doing. Hezbollah did all it could.

Because Israel is hyper-modern and it has the technology to exact such a concentrated result, it is capable of creating visible and jarring images.

And, of course, Israel is Israel. That is why the non-aligned countries condemned "Israeli aggression in Lebanon" this weekend, befuddled about Lebanon and Hezbollah: Such an easy target.

I recognize that one can’t analyze what happened in Lebanon in the 34-day, Israel-Hezbollah war without walking into a minefield.

Also, what happened can’t be reduced to 1,000 words. There is complex history, the players are not necessarily as they represent themselves, there are intramural battles going on about military force and politics, there are secrets and there is even the difficulty of reading what one is looking at accurately.

Read the first part of the report here.

In the aftermath of Hugo Chavez's "Bush is the devil" speech at the U.N., it may be instructive to look back at an earlier era of the international body's history, when similar comedy acts were performed, not by the head of a relatively insignificant Latin American country but by the leader of approximately one half of the "bipolar world" which then existed. From the Wikipedia entry on Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev:

Khrushchev repeatedly disrupted the proceedings in the United Nations General Assembly in September-October 1960 by pounding his fists on the desk and shouting in Russian. On September 29, 1960, Khrushchev twice interrupted a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan by shouting out and pounding his desk. The unflappable Macmillan famously commented over his shoulder to Frederick Boland, the Assembly President (Ireland), that if Mr. Khrushchev wished to continue, he would like a translation.

At the United Nations two weeks later, in one of the most surreal moments in Cold War history, the premier waved his shoe and banged it on his desk, adding to the lengthening list of antics with which he had been nettling the General Assembly. During a debate over a Russian resolution decrying colonialism, he was infuriated by a statement, expressed from the rostrum by Lorenzo Sumulong. The Filipino delegate had charged the Soviets with employing a double standard, pointing to their domination of Eastern Europe as an example of the very type of colonialism their resolution criticized. Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up, brandishing it at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall. The enraged Khrushchev accused Mr. Sumulong of being "Холуй и ставленник империализма" (kholuj i stavlennik imperializma), which was translated as "a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism". The chaotic scene finally ended when General Assembly President Frederick Boland broke his gavel calling the meeting to order, but not before the image of Khrushchev as a hotheaded buffoon was indelibly etched into America’s collective memory. At another occasion, Khrushchev said in reference to capitalism, "Мы вас похороним!", translated to "We will bury you". This phrase, ambiguous both in the English language and in the Russian language, was interpreted in several ways.

But the world was a different place back then. Voices suggesting the withdrawal of the United States from the U.N. were rather few, and tended to come only from the very far reaches of extreme opinion and sentiment, such as the John Birch Society. There was a rationale for this. It was thought - and the perception was spread over a large spectrum of opinion in the West - that because of the nuclear standoff between the two Great Powers, the United States had no option but to fight its corner in an international body that was heavily biased towards the Soviet Union and its field of influence. Otherwise, it was thought, the world might just go up in flames one day, when someone "pressed the button". Nowadays, with the United States as the world's only "superpower" (the term is dated, and belongs to that earlier era), the thought of the possibility of a U.S. secession from the United Nations is no longer such a far-fetched or recondite one. Indeed, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the U.N. as it has now developed has all the vices, defects and weaknesses of its older self without the saving graces of a "world security guarantee", and continues to be dominated by the kind of states that were promoted by the former Soviet Union, from which they have inherited its anti-Western, anti-Israel, anti-democratic animus and ideology, it's now coming to the point where Western nations will have to make a decision on where their best interests lie.

Perhaps it really would make more sense for the free nations of the world to form an alternative organization. In the words of Anne Bayevsky:

We can make speeches spinning wins out of losses and claiming success for Western policies at the UN. We can announce that we are working hard for reform that lies just over the horizon. We can proclaim that yet another subject will serve as the final, real test of the UN's credibility. And Americans can claim that the attempt to thread US foreign policy through the eye of a UN needle is an end in itself.

Or we can say: No more. We gave this organization 60 years of our best efforts - Americans gave $5 billion last year alone. But our reform efforts have failed.

And in return for our willingness to look first to the UN for solutions, we emboldened Iran, its proxy Hizbullah and fellow terrorists around the world. We handed our enemies the mantle of human rights and left more Sudanese to die.

There is an antidote to the self-doubt and moral relativism planted in our midst by Turtle Bay. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist calls it a "council of democracies outside of the UN system…[that would] truly monitor, examine and expose human rights abuses around the globe." Such a gathering is an idea whose time has come: the United Democratic Nations - an international organization of democracies, by democracies and for democracies.

A world war is being waged, and the UN is not on our side. It is a tragedy in view of its beginnings and its promise, but the tragedy will be far greater if we refuse to say: Enough.

Some 40,000 people have held a rally in support of Israel in the streets and avenues surrounding the United Nations building in New York City. Via Arutz Sheva:

"People are coming from as far away as California," Conference of Presidents Chairman Malcolm Hoenlein told Arutz-7 an hour before the rally began. "The plaza is already filled with Jews, Christians, Blacks, Whites, Hispanics – an unbelievable rainbow of the American people."

See the collection of photos of the rally at Atlas Shrugs.

LGF points out that

not a single mainstream media source carried the story.

It really is time that the United Nations were moved out of New York, and out of the United States. With the Soviet-like hate-speech of Ahmadinejad, and in the light - or rather darkness - of Venezuelan thug Chavez's performance today, the venue that suggests itself is Moscow, or Caracas. This is also apparently something that Chavez himself would welcome, so why not let him have his wish. And then perhaps it's also time that some nations, including the United States, finally made up their minds about whether it's a sensible idea to go on financing, or even being part of, such an organization, which has finally hit rock bottom.

Anne Bayefsky has some excellent commentary on the whole issue here.

Despite the need for the occasional U.N.-eze translation device, what Americans get for their $5 billion a year was painfully clear. First came Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He proclaimed that the Arab-Israeli conflict was the most important conflict on earth today. Why? Because it was “emotional” for “people far removed from the battlefield.” Translation: Anti-Semites from all over the world get emotional about the existence of a Jewish state. Annan’s solution to all this feeling was for the Security Council to end the Israeli “occupation.” Until that time, it was quite understandable that “other conflicts” all over the globe won’t be resolved. Translation: Deliver up Israel on a U.N. carving board or the blood-thirsty mobs will not be satiated. While he was at it, Annan couldn’t resist a dig at the pope. He complained that the feelings of the mob were also provoked by “insensitivity towards other people’s beliefs or sacred symbols — intentional or otherwise.” What the secretary-general did not mention in his final major address before retirement, as he pontificated about the demands of our age, was the word “democracy".

Read it all.

(via lgf and Vital Perspective)

In EDM, Pavel Felgenhauer discusses the finalizing of work on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power reactor. Although the reactor will produce thousands of tons of plutonium, this will consist of an isotope mix from which it would not be easy to construct bombs. Iran has all the technology needed to enrich uranium but, as Felgenhauer points out, it doen't have enough uranium to enrich.

The arrival of the Russian nuclear fuel may drastically change the situation: By diverting a relatively small fraction of the 100 tons of the 4% enriched uranium 235 fuel, the Iranians could dramatically speed up their nuclear program and produce hundreds of kilos of arms-grade uranium (over 90% enrichment) in a year or so, using a limited amount of enrichment centrifuges. It is technically much easier to move from 4% to 90% enrichment, than from 0.7% as in natural uranium, to 4% and a nuclear weapon requires only 20 kilos of arms-grade uranium to make.

Washington has already told Russia that, while the continued slow construction of Bushehr is OK, the actual transfer of nuclear fuel without a comprehensive solution of the Iranian nuclear problem is unacceptable. Will the Russians heed this warning? While in Palestine on September 8, Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov angrily told a news conference that it is "a clear provocation" to suggest that Russia may stop constructing Bushehr and move its specialists out (RIA-Novosti, September 8, 2006).

The pro-Kremlin news site Strana.ru reported on September 11 that Russia will not only sell Iran modern anti-aircraft Tor-M1 missiles (a billion-dollar deal announced last November), but also provide more powerful, longer range S300 anti-aircraft missiles and other modern weapons "needed to defend Bushehr and other strategic targets" against possible U.S. air and missile attacks.

It is obvious that at least part of the ruling Russian elite is ready to openly side with Iran against the United States, to block the imposition of any sanctions in the United Nations while providing Tehran with modern weapons and nuclear materials. But will Russia's ultimate decision-maker, President Vladimir Putin, risk a showdown? Up to now Putin has opted to postpone a decision, which has meant Bushehr has also been postponed. But the time for pondering is rapidly running out, and Washington and Tehran are both pressing for a clear answer -- something Putin always hates to give.

Reuters correspondent Tom Armitage writes:

Neo-Nazi paramilitary groups have gained strong footholds in economically depressed parts of Germany and are gaining a voice through far-right political parties, Germany's top Jewish body said on Wednesday.

Via RFE/RL:

KEY [RUSSIAN] LEGISLATOR WARNS OF ROLE OF 'OUTSIDE FORCES' IN HUNGARIAN PROTESTS.

State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Konstantin Kosachyov told Interfax in Moscow on September 19 that the situation in Hungary is "disturbing because political disputes have once again turned into an open violent confrontation" (see "RFE/RL Newsline," September 19, 2006). He called on the government to "alleviate complaints" by the opposition, which he asked to refrain "from any use of force, including steps to seize the television headquarters and other buildings." Kosachyov argued that "it is exceedingly important" to stop unnamed "forces abroad" from taking advantage of the tensions. "All external factors, including assessments of the 1956 events, ought to be excluded from this situation," he added. Other Russian commentators have suggested that there are "two Hungaries," namely one with ties to the West, and the other, primarily in the business world and with close ties to the governing Socialists, with Russia. PM

See also: Hungary Revolt: Background

British television screens have been filled with pictures of angry Muslims, after the Home Secretary John Reid held a meeting in London's East End with Islamic scholars, at which he called on Muslim parents to look out for tell-tale signs of terrorists brainwashing their children.

The main disrupter of the meeting seems to have been an individual calling himself Abu Izzadeen - apparently a member of the banned Al-Ghurabaa organization.

A car has exploded in the centre of the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, injuring at least one person, Dagens Nyheter reports.

Roberto at Wind Rose Hotel links to an article by Peter Popham about "arguably the most extraordinary journalist Italy has ever produced."

From Strategic Forecasting, Inc. at www.stratfor.com:

Faith, Reason and Politics: Parsing the Pope's Remarks

By George Friedman


On Sept. 12, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture on "Faith, Reason and the University" at the University of Regensburg. In his discussion (full text available on the Vatican Web site) the pope appeared to be trying to define a course between dogmatic faith and cultural relativism -- making his personal contribution to the old debate about faith and reason. In the course of the lecture, he made reference to a "part of the dialogue carried on -- perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara -- by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both."

Benedict went on to say -- and it is important to read a long passage to understand his point -- that:

"In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that Sura 2,256 reads: 'There is no compulsion in religion.' According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Quran, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the 'Book' and the 'infidels,' he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: 'Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.' The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God,' he says, 'is not pleased by blood -- and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats ... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death ...'

"The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: 'For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent.'"

The reaction of the Muslim world -- outrage -- came swift and sharp over the passage citing Manuel II: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Obviously, this passage is a quote from a previous text -- but equally obviously, the pope was making a critical point that has little to do with this passage.

The essence of this passage is about forced conversion. It begins by pointing out that Mohammed spoke of faith without compulsion when he lacked political power, but that when he became strong, his perspective changed. Benedict goes on to make the argument that violent conversion -- from the standpoint of a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, and therefore shaped by the priority of reason -- is unacceptable. For someone who believes that God is absolutely transcendent and beyond reason, the argument goes, it is acceptable.

Clearly, Benedict knows that Christians also practiced forced conversion in their history. He also knows that the Aristotelian tendency is not unique to Christianity. In fact, that same tendency exists in the Muslim tradition, through thinkers such as al-Farabi or Avicenna. These stand in relation to Islam as Thomas Aquinas does to Christianity or Maimonides to Judaism. And all three religions struggle not only with the problem of God versus science, but with the more complex and interesting tripolar relationship of religion as revelation, reason and dogmatism. There is always that scriptural scholar, the philosopher troubled by faith and the local clergyman who claims to speak for God personally.

Benedict's thoughtful discussion of this problem needs to be considered. Also to be considered is why the pope chose to throw a hand grenade into a powder keg, and why he chose to do it at this moment in history. The other discussion might well be more worthy of the ages, but this question -- what did Benedict do, and why did he do it -- is of more immediate concern, for he could have no doubt what the response, in today's politically charged environment, was going to be.

A Deliberate Move

Let's begin with the obvious: Benedict's words were purposely chosen. The quotation of Manuel II was not a one-liner, accidentally blurted out. The pope was giving a prepared lecture that he may have written himself -- and if it was written for him, it was one that he carefully read. Moreover, each of the pope's public utterances are thoughtfully reviewed by his staff, and there is no question that anyone who read this speech before it was delivered would recognize the explosive nature of discussing anything about Islam in the current climate. There is not one war going on in the world today, but a series of wars, some of them placing Catholics at risk.

It is true that Benedict was making reference to an obscure text, but that makes the remark all the more striking; even the pope had to work hard to come up with this dialogue. There are many other fine examples of the problem of reason and faith that he could have drawn from that did not involve Muslims, let alone one involving such an incendiary quote. But he chose this citation and, contrary to some media reports, it was not a short passage in the speech. It was about 15 percent of the full text and was the entry point to the rest of the lecture. Thus, this was a deliberate choice, not a slip of the tongue.

As a deliberate choice, the effect of these remarks could be anticipated. Even apart from the particular phrase, the text of the speech is a criticism of the practice of conversion by violence, with a particular emphasis on Islam. Clearly, the pope intended to make the point that Islam is currently engaged in violence on behalf of religion, and that it is driven by a view of God that engenders such belief. Given Muslims' protests (including some violent reactions) over cartoons that were printed in a Danish newspaper, the pope and his advisers certainly must have been aware that the Muslim world would go ballistic over this. Benedict said what he said intentionally, and he was aware of the consequences. Subsequently, he has not apologized for what he said -- only for any offense he might have caused. He has not retracted his statement.

So, why this, and why now?

Political Readings

Consider the fact that the pope is not only a scholar but a politician -- and a good one, or he wouldn't have become the pope. He is not only a head of state, but the head of a global church with a billion members. The church is no stranger to geopolitics. Muslims claim that they brought down communism in Afghanistan. That may be true, but there certainly is something to be said also for the efforts of the Catholic Church, which helped to undermine the communism in Poland and to break the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe. Popes know how to play power politics.

Thus, there are at least two ways to view Benedict's speech politically.

One view derives from the fact that the pope is watching the U.S.-jihadist war. He can see it is going badly for the United States in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He witnessed the recent success of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas' political victory among the Palestinians. Islamists may not have the fundamental strength to threaten the West at this point, but they are certainly on a roll. Also, it should be remembered that Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, was clearly not happy about the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, but it does not follow that his successor is eager to see a U.S. defeat there.

The statement that Benedict made certainly did not hurt U.S. President George W. Bush in American politics. Bush has been trying to portray the war against Islamist militants as a clash of civilizations, one that will last for generations and will determine the future of mankind. Benedict, whether he accepts Bush's view or not, offered an intellectual foundation for Bush's position. He drew a sharp distinction between Islam and Christianity and then tied Christianity to rationality -- a move to overcome the tension between religion and science in the West. But he did not include Islam in that matrix. Given that there is a war on and that the pope recognizes Bush is on the defensive, not only in the war but also in domestic American politics, Benedict very likely weighed the impact of his words on the scale of war and U.S. politics. What he said certainly could be read as words of comfort for Bush. We cannot read Benedict's mind on this, of course, but he seemed to provide some backing for Bush's position.

It is not entirely clear that Pope Benedict intended an intellectual intervention in the war. The church obviously did not support the invasion of Iraq, having criticized it at the time. On the other hand, it would not be in the church's interests to see the United States simply routed. The Catholic Church has substantial membership throughout the region, and a wave of Islamist self-confidence could put those members and the church at risk. From the Vatican's perspective, the ideal outcome of the war would be for the United States to succeed -- or at least not fail -- but for the church to remain free to criticize Washington's policies and to serve as conciliator and peacemaker. Given the events of the past months, Benedict may have felt the need for a relatively gentle intervention -- in a way that warned the Muslim world that the church's willingness to endure vilification as a Crusader has its limits, and that he is prepared, at least rhetorically, to strike back. Again, we cannot read his mind, but neither can we believe that he was oblivious to events in the region and that, in making his remarks, he was simply engaged in an academic exercise.

This perspective would explain the timing of the pope's statement, but the general thrust of his remarks has more to do with Europe.

There is an intensifying tension in Europe over the powerful wave of Muslim immigration. Frictions are high on both sides. Europeans fear that the Muslim immigrants will overwhelm their native culture or form an unassimilated and destabilizing mass. Muslims feel unwelcome, and some extreme groups have threatened to work for the conversion of Europe. In general, the Vatican's position has ranged from quiet to calls for tolerance. As a result, the Vatican was becoming increasingly estranged from the church body -- particularly working and middle-class Catholics -- and its fears.

As has been established, the pope knew that his remarks at Regensburg would come under heavy criticism from Muslims. He also knew that this criticism would continue despite any gestures of contrition. Thus, with his remarks, he moved toward closer alignment with those who are uneasy about Europe's Muslim community -- without adopting their own, more extreme, sentiments. That move increases his political strength among these groups and could cause them to rally around the church. At the same time, the pope has not locked himself into any particular position. And he has delivered his own warning to Europe's Muslims about the limits of tolerance.

It is obvious that Benedict delivered a well-thought-out statement. It is also obvious that the Vatican had no illusions as to how the Muslim world would respond. The statement contained a verbal blast, crafted in a way that allowed Benedict to maintain plausible deniability. Indeed, the pope already has taken the exit, noting that these were not his thoughts but those of another scholar. The pope and his staff were certainly aware that this would make no difference in the grand scheme of things, save for giving Benedict the means for distancing himself from the statement when the inevitable backlash occurred. Indeed, the anger in the Muslim world remained intense, and there also have been emerging pockets of anger among Catholics over the Muslim world's reaction to the pope, considering the history of Islamic attacks against Christianity. Because he reads the newspapers -- not to mention the fact that the Vatican maintains a highly capable intelligence service of its own -- Benedict also had to have known how the war was going, and that his statement likely would aid Bush politically, at least indirectly. Finally, he would be aware of the political dynamics in Europe and that the statement would strengthen his position with the church's base there.

The question is how far Benedict is going to go with this. His predecessor took on the Soviet Union and then, after the collapse of communism, started sniping at the United States over its materialism and foreign policy. Benedict may have decided that the time has come to throw the weight of the church against radical Islamists. In fact, there is a logic here: If the Muslims reject Benedict's statement, they have to acknowledge the rationalist aspects of Islam. The burden is on the Ummah to lift the religion out of the hands of radicals and extremist scholars by demonstrating that Muslims can adhere to reason.

From an intellectual and political standpoint, therefore, Benedict's statement was an elegant move. He has strengthened his political base and perhaps legitimized a stronger response to anti-Catholic rhetoric in the Muslim world. And he has done it with superb misdirection. His options are open: He now can move away from the statement and let nature take its course, repudiate it and challenge Muslim leaders to do the same with regard to anti-Catholic statements or extend and expand the criticism of Islam that was implicit in the dialogue.

The pope has thrown a hand grenade and is now observing the response. We are assuming that he knew what he was doing; in fact, we find it impossible to imagine that he did not. He is too careful not to have known. Therefore, he must have anticipated the response and planned his partial retreat.

It will be interesting to see if he has a next move. The answer to that may be something he doesn't know himself yet.



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It looks as though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may find himself speaking largely to an audience of the converted. Via Ynet News:

Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak at the UN general assembly session on Tuesday night, but many of the heads of state and foreign ministers will be absent. At the same time, US President George W. Bush will be hosting the officials at a reception in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the Pope's lecture in Regensburg, Iran's supreme leader has been calling for attacks on the United States.

Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post:

Nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it’s time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to “hate” Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn’t the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain’s chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them — simultaneously?

Read it all.

Via RFE/RL Newsline:

PUTIN ASSURES HUNGARY OF OIL, GAS SUPPLIES...
President Vladimir Putin told Hungary's Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany in Sochi on September 18 that "Gazprom guarantees the necessary volume of supplies [of gas] to Hungarian consumers," RIA Novosti and the state-run "Rossiiskaya gazeta" reported (see "RFE/RL Newsline," March 1 and June 22, 2006). Putin spoke warmly about increasing Hungarian exports to Russia and the two countries' cooperation in the energy sector. He called for further "improvement in the structure of trade," focusing on fuel and energy. The two men also discussed high-technology projects, including nanotechnology, for which a pilot project is under way in Miskolc, Hungary. The Hungarian oil and gas company MOL signed an agreement with Gazprom in Budapest on June 21 on extending the Russian Blue Stream pipeline from Turkey to Europe. Gyurcsany and leading Gazprom officials reviewed the project, as well as the possible construction of a large Russian gas storage facility in Hungary, which Gyurcsany and Putin discussed during the Russian leader's visit to Hungary earlier in 2006. The two men met five times before that. PM

...WHILE EMBASSY SAYS BUDAPEST PROTESTS ARE NOT ANTI-RUSSIAN
The Russian Embassy in Budapest said on September 19 that the ongoing street protests against Prime Minister Gyurcsany are not anti-Russian in character even though a Russian monument at the venue of the demonstrations was slightly damaged, Interfax reported. The embassy stressed that there is no connection between the protests and the Socialist prime minister's visit to Russia. The sometimes violent demonstrations began after a tape was broadcast on September 17 in which Gyurcsany admitted to a closed meeting of Socialist legislators in May that he and his fellow politicians lied repeatedly to the voters in order to win the 2006 elections and that his party's government accomplished "nothing of which it could be proud" in the past four years, international media reported. The opposition has called for him to resign, which he refuses to do. PM

Svetlana Bakhmina, the YUKOS lawyer sentenced to six and a half years of imprisonment in a labour camp, has appealed to a Moscow court to have her sentence deferred for nine years, until her youngest child reaches the age of 14, gazeta.ru reports.

Public figures and human rights activists in Russia have condemned the sentence given to Ms. Bakhmina, saying that she does not deserve it. Ms. Bakhmina herself has denied any wrongdoing. The Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov has called it an act of repression, considering it part of a campaign by the Kremlin aimed at intimidating business employees in order to prevent them from expressing independent views on society in Russia.

See also: Svetlana Bakhmina

Stratfor's daily podcast considers the local security implications of this week's UN General Assembly meeting in New York City:

All in all, this week in New York won't be pretty. If he gets through the week with New York unscathed, Mayor Bloomberg will be a happy man, even if the costs will have driven a big hole in his budget.

It will be remembered that the "Mujahideen Shura Council" is the al-Qaeda related group that carried out the murders of the four Russian embassy workers in Iraq back in June. These bizarre murders bore a distinctly suspicious character - as Kommersant newspaper noted at the time, the Russian government did not request a UN Security Council meeting to discuss the murders while the diplomats were still alive, but waited until well after they had been killed in order to do so.

Now, according to CNN, the same "Mujahideen Shura Council" has released a statement calling for a "war" against the "worshippers of the cross" in response to the Pope's speech:

"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya," said an Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq's branch of al Qaeda, according to the Reuters news agency.

"We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen," said the statement.

The group evidently still includes Russia as part of the "West", as the reference to Chechnya makes clear. It's often remarked by political and military commentators that little is actually known about the organizational structure of al-Qaeda - where its real bases are located, where its commanders are. In this case, it would not be at all surprising to find that the trail leads back to Moscow.

Meanwhile, RFE/RL's Newsline reports that Russia's president is offering the Pope some "gentle advice":

President Putin said in Sochi on September 17 that world religious leaders should exercise "responsibility" and restraint in their public utterances, Russian news agencies reported. He added that "we understand how sensitive such matters are." His comment came amid widespread negative reactions in the Islamic world to some historic citations made by Pope Benedict XVI in a recent theological presentation in Regensburg, Germany.

Carl Bildt writes about a New Beginning for Sweden.

The FT reports that Sweden's Social Democrats are poised to lose the Swedish election.

Update: Social Democrats have lost, and Persson is resigning. This is definitely a hopeful sign for Sweden's future. The Centre-Right is going to take over.

One difficulty with interpreting the Pope's statements about his Regensburg lecture in recent days has been the fact that the Pontiff has spoken in languages other than English, including German and Italian. His statements in these tongues have then been translated into English for the world's media - not always successfully. Sometimes it's even possible to reflect that the mistranslations are deliberate.

One example has occurred today, with the Pope's use of the Italian word rammaricato, which means "saddened", or "afflicted with sadness" (the word denotes a mixture of disappointment and regret). In his sermon this morning, the Pope said:

Sono vivamente rammaricato per le reazioni suscitate da un breve passo del mio discorso all'Universita di Ratisbona, ritenuto offensivo per la sensibilita dei credenti musulmani.

Which translates as: "I am actively saddened by the reactions provoked by a brief passage in my lecture at the University of Regensburg, which has been deemed offensive by the sensibility of Moslem believers."

Many agencies, including Reuters, are translating vivamente rammaricato as "deeply sorry" - thus suggesting an apology, which is not in fact in the Pope's words.

Yesterday, Benedict's use of the German word bestürzt was causing similar problems - many agencies used the word "upset" to translate this, when it would have been better to use "shocked" or "taken aback" as the English equivalent.

Bedauern, another German verb used by the Pope, was coming across as "to be sorry", when its real meaning is actually "to regret".

And so on. The shades of meaning may seem trivial, but they do affect the way in which the recent crisis has developed in the media.

In Der Spiegel, Claus Christian Malzahn considers the threats made to Pope Benedict by Islamist groups in the context of earlier threats to public figures who have dared to criticize Islam: the satirical comedian Rudi Carrell, the writer Salman Rushdie, the feminist Ayan Hirsi Ali, the newspaper editor Flemming Rose. Malzahn comments (my tr.):

But the attacks on the Pope in Rome are particularly grotesque. The sharp criticism of Benedikt XVI's lecture in Regensburg, criticism often also combined with the threat of violence, is not only an attack on the head of the Catholic Church. The malicious twistings of his words and the absurd imputations of the resprentatives of Islam are also a frontal attack on free religious-philosophical discourse. The fact that an apparently ever-increasing number of people in the Islamic world can be tempted to follow this protest shows how influential Islamic groups have now become there. The political calculation is clear: any discussion between Christianity and Islam can only exist within the rules that have been specified by political Islamism.

Oslo police are searching for an armed, black-clad attacker who opened fire on the synagogue at Bergstien 13, St. Hanshaugen, at around 2.30 am today. The area has been cordoned off, and security at the Israeli embassy on Parkveien has also been reinforced, Aftenposten reports.

The shots were probably from an automatic weapon, and at least 11 bullets were fired. The bullet holes in the synagogue wall are clearly visible.

Reuters has some background to the incident:

Norway's Jewish community had asked its members not to speak Hebrew on the streets of Oslo after an assault on a man wearing a yarmulke in July. In August a man defecated on the steps of the Oslo synagogue and smashed two windows there.

Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser, Eldad Regev and Gilad Shalit are still in captivity - Goldwasser and Regev are held by Hizballah, and Shalit by a Palestinian group. There is no sign of their being released at any foreseeable date in the future.

In this YouTube video, Ehud Goldwasser's wife Karnit talks to Fox News's Hannity & Colmes about her husband's abduction.

A commenter on FAZ's news site puts the matter in succinct terms (my tr.):

The reactions of the Islamic world are turning against the passage quoted by the Pope to the effect that Mohammed created a religion of violence. And how does the Islamic world do this? Not by trying to disprove the quotation through argument, but by threatening violence and terror. And thereby logically confirming the the truth of the quotation.

Via Arutz Sheva:

At least five churches in the Palestinian Authority have been targeted in a series of attacks since Friday. One Islamic terrorist group threatened to blow up all the churches in Gaza.

The attacks and threats represent the response of Islamic fundamentalists in the PA to statements made last Tuesday, at Regensburg University in Germany, by the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI. By reference to a reported discussion from the 14th century between a Christian Byzantine Emperor and a Persian Islamic scholar, the pontiff implied denigration of the Islamic notion of Jihad for the sake of imposing Muslim rule.

AP reports that the Russian government has authorized the sending of an engineer battalion to Lebanon in early October. It will carry its own supplies, will restore 6 infrastructure facilities, and will stay for the maximum permitted period of 3 months.

[Senior Russian Defence Ministry official Lt. Gen. Ivan] Tsygankov said the battalion would be deployed near Saida and would restore bridges located some 30 kilometers (20 miles) southeast of Saida.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov had said earlier that Russia would send a battalion of up to 400 engineers and experts at disarming unexploded ordnance. He said it would not be involved in peacekeeping operations.

Russia accused Israel of using excessive force in its 34-day war in Lebanon, which caused widespread damage to its infrastructure and left unexploded bombs and other weaponry scattered throughout the country.

Some 3,250 United Nations peacekeepers are fanned out across the south of Lebanon, part of a force planned to reach 15,000.

Carl Bildt has a post on tomorrow's parliamentary election in Sweden, predicting the demise of the Social Democrats and a victory for the centre right's Fredrik Reinfeldt. In addition, he writes about the Senate elections in Berlin, which also take place tomorrow.

At Biased BBC, Ed Thomas looks at the BBC's editorialising of the news:

Faced with the very foolish Muslim anger over the Pope's rather erudite (and I might add, as a non-Catholic, rather excellent) speech, the BBC states baldly:

"The BBC's Arab affairs analyst, Magdi Abdelhadi, says the reason for the vehemence of Muslim reaction is simple: America's global "war on terror" is perceived by many Muslims as a modern crusade against Islam."

As the post points out, what this amounts to is a kind of game, in which special pleading on behalf of Muslims gradually becomes the "news" itself - the process can be extended almost indefinitely, until all that's left is a wholly partisan viewpoint.

Reading the text (pdf) of Pope Benedict XVI's speech at the University of Regensburg on the subject of the nature of religion and reason, it's possible to reflect that the "dialogue" and extension of the concept of reason so eloquently advocated by the Pope in his address have almost no chance of realization in the modern world as it has now developed - the barriers to such a process are simply too great. A historic confrontation between Islam and the West is clearly inevitable, and has, of course, already begun.

The BBC has presented some key excerpts from the speech. A few of them:

ON UNIVERSITY LIFE

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium.

The university [of Bonn, where the Pope taught for a period from 1959] was also very proud of its two theological faculties. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university - it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God.

That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.


ON HOLY WAR

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read... of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

In the seventh conversation...the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God," he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats."

ON RELIGION AND REASON

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?


ON THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE

The liberal theology of the 19th and 20th Centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenisation, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative.

The intention here is... of broadening our concept of reason... Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.

From Jamestown's Chechnya Weekly:

FEARS GROW OVER MISSING JOURNALIST’S FATE

The Sunday Times reported on September 10 that fears were growing over the fate of Elina Ersenoeva, a young Chechen journalist who was reportedly forced to marry Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basaev last fall and was abducted at gunpoint, apparently by pro-Moscow Chechen security forces, in Grozny in August, just weeks after Basaev’s death. The British newspaper quoted her mother, Rita Ersenoeva, as saying she was “terrified” that her daughter’s captors had already killed her. “I fear that the men who took her have done terrible things to her,” she said. “She had no choice but to marry Basaev. Now that she is gone I have lost hope. I have lost a golden child.” Rita Ersenoeva told the Sunday Times that she has received anonymous calls warning her not to make a fuss and that she fears that her daughter’s captors will come back for her two brothers, aged 15 and 22.

According to the British newspaper, Elina Ersenoeva was approached last autumn by Kheda Saidulaeva, the wife of the late separatist leader Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev, who was a distant relative of Ersenoeva. Saidulaeva told her that she had been chosen to marry a commander known as Ali-Khan Abu Yazidov and that if she refused, her brothers’ lives would be in danger. “On November 30 Elina was approached by an envoy of Abu Yazidov,” the Sunday Times reported. “The man ordered her to get into his car. He blindfolded her and drove her to a house on the outskirts of Grozny. She was led into a room where she came face to face with Basaev.” She was forced to marry the rebel warlord, whom she saw on a few other occasions for several days at a time before he was killed in July of this year. It was only after his death that she revealed to her family that she had been married to Basaev.

The FSB questioned Elina Ersenoeva two weeks after Basaev’s death, but they accepted that she had been blackmailed into the marriage and brought no charges against her. On August 17, she was abducted at gunpoint as she and her aunt, Elza Astamirova, were on their way to work in Grozny. “Eight men with machine guns shoved us in and drove us away,” Astamirova told the Sunday Times. “They put sacks over our heads to stop us seeing where they were taking us. I was screaming with fear but they were just laughing. We ended up in a small room with bare walls. Elina was next to me. They let me go and kept her.”

On the day she was abducted, Elina telephoned her mother three times to say that she would be released that evening, but she has not been heard from since. The Sunday Times quoted her mother as saying that she fears her captors may have believed rumors that Basaev left behind a stash of millions of dollars and decided to torture her into disclosing its whereabouts. “To think that Basaev would share that information with her is absurd,” her mother said. “To think she lived all those months in fear to protect her family is very distressing. I can’t bear to think what they are doing to her.”

See also in this blog: Elina Ersenoyeva
Basayev "Widow" Kidnapped

The Italian writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci has died in Florence, Italy, aged 77, Corriere della Sera reports.

As a journalist, she interviewed many prominent figures on the world political arena, including Henry Kissinger, General Giap, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan, Indira Gandhi, Alì Bhutto, Pietro Nenni, Giulio Andreotti, Giorgio Amendola, Archbishop Makarios and Alekos Panagulis. Her writings on fascism, totalitarianism and Islamism became known worldwide, and her books were translated into 30 languages.

Of her basic attitude, she said: "...I participate in what I see or feel as though it affected me personally, and I had to take a position (in fact I always take one that is based on a precise moral choice)."

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a front group for Palestinian terrorists. In the past it has posed as a "peace group", but recently began to drop this pretence when some of its principal organizers went to Lebanon to act as "human shields" for Hizballah.

 At StoptheISM.com, Lee Kaplan has documented the ISM's operations in the United States, while also showing the extent of its reach to other countries of the world. One of the London July 7 bombers was connected to the group.  

Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will arrive in New York City on Monday for a 3-day visit, during which he will seek to address the United Nations' 61st General Assembly. His current itinerary looks like this:


Wednesday, September 13
Dakar, Senegal: Meetings with local officials to talk about bi-lateral cooperation and inter-states relations.

Thursday-Saturday, September 14-16
La Havana, Cuba: Meeting of leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The NAM is comprised of 116 countries, among them Algeria, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Saudia Arabia and Venezuela. Cuba is the current chair of the organization.

Sunday, September 17
Caracas, Venezuela: Official visit and meeting with President Hugo Chavez, to talk about inter-state cooperation.

Monday, September 18
United Nations, New York: High Level meeting on the Least Developed Countries.

Tuesday, September 19
United Nations, New York: Speech at the 61st General Assembly.

(via The Israel Project)

Stratfor continues its daily podcast series, with FTTV founder and chief executive Colin Chapman introducing some of the main Stratfor analyses of the day. Although the title of the series is something of a misnomer - the podcasts don't always appear daily, and are probably intended as a "taster" for the complete Stratfor subscription service - the mp3 files are free to download and do give some pointers to Stratfor's thinking on many issues of global geopolitics. Recent items have included an assessment of the UK's Gordon Brown in terms of his foreign policy orientation (the organization doesn't predict much change in that department if Brown does take over from Blair according to plan), a look at al-Qaeda since 2001 (Osama has ended up strengthening the hand of the Shiites in Iran and the Middle East in general, which surely wasn't something he wanted to happen, and suits him just as little as it suits Washington), and a view of Tuesday's attack on the US embassy in Damascus (was it a put-up job by the Syrian authorities? Most likely).

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In EDM, military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer writes that Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov recently made a public statement which suggests that Russia has apparently abrogated a major nuclear arms control agreement with Washington by successfully test-launching two submarine-based ICBMs.

Felgenhauer says that

Ivanov’s de facto abrogation of the non-strategic arms limitation agreement comes at a time when military-to-military relations with the West are at an all time low. Last week prearranged peacekeeping and anti-terrorist military exercises that were scheduled to take place this month in Nizhny Novgorod oblast (U.S.-Russian) and Pskov oblast (NATO-Russian) were suddenly cancelled. Ivanov’s announcement of the battlefield redeployment of non-strategic nukes was hardly a simple slip of the tongue. As the incumbent regime in Russia is preparing for parliamentary elections next year and presidential ones in 2008, anti-NATO and anti-American rhetoric is being supplemented by official anti-Western military actions.

The collapse of the existing tactical nuclear limitation regime is not in Russia’s national interests, since the United States and Great Britain have the capability to deploy tens of times more naval nuclear long-range cruise missiles and other non-strategic nukes than does Russia. But it would seem that the Kremlin is still ready to risk drastically worsening relations. Increased military tension may facilitate a nationalistic anti-U.S., anti-NATO surge of public opinion in Russia that might help carry someone like Ivanov (or whomever Putin chooses) into the Kremlin as the new president.

A new opinion poll shows that Estonia's ex-foreign minister, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, is gaining ground on his rival, incumbent Arnold Rüütel, in the race for the country's presidency, AFP reported on Monday. The survey showed that 51 percent of Estonians would prefer to see Ilves as the next president, compared with only 31 percent who wanted Rüütel to win a second term. Rüütel is favoured mainly by Estonia's Russian-speaking minority, while Ilves is supported by a large section of the ethnic Estonian population.

On August 29, the Estonian parliament failed for a third time to elect a new president, and had to resign themselves to choosing their head of state in a wider electoral college vote. This will take place on September 23, when 101 members of parliament and 246 local government representatives will take part in the vote.

Today a group of 80 prominent Estonian public figures, writers and intellectuals released an open letter in support of Toomas Hendrik Ilves, appealing to the electorate to choose him as Estonia's president. The letter's principal is Mart Meri, son of Estonia's former president Lennart Meri, who passed away in March this year.

Among other things the text of the statement says: "We want the path that is chosen on this day (the day of the elections) to lead Estonia out of the isolation that threatens it and towards a wider outlook on life. Therefore we take upon ourselves the responsibility of being the agents of Toomas Hendrik llves and we guarantee that our presidential candidate will make a good head of state."

The signatories include the writers Jaan Kross, Viivi Luik and Jaan Kaplinski, the composer Arvo Pärt, the conductor Neeme Järvi, the singer Tõnis Mägi, the actors Ita Ever, Aarne Üksküla and Kaljo Kiisk, the artists Enn Põldroos and Jüri Arrak,and the scientists Erast Parmasto and Mart Saarma.

While the authors of the letter recognize Arnold Rüütel's contribution in bringing Estonia into the European Union, they accuse him of acting in the interests of only two of the country's political parties - the Centrist Party and the People's Union. In the view of the authors and signatories, Ilves will break this narrow and inward-looking focus and will be able to speak directly to the Estonian people as a whole about the sensitive issues that face the country, as well as being a worthy representative of Estonia abroad, in the manner that Lennart Meri developed during his lifetime.

(via MAK)

From Prague Watchdog (my tr.):


Guerrillas becoming more active in Ingushetia

Alikhan Batayev

INGUSHETIA – The Ingush public has been seriously alarmed by Ramzan Kadyrov’s recent meeting with Murat Zyazikov (September 6), because of the issues that were discussed at it. In addition to the "strengthening of brotherly relations between the two peoples" – the phrase officially used to describe the occasion – there was also discussion of questions connected with the increased activities of guerrillas in this republic.

A source close to the official Ingush law enforcement agencies has reported that an anti-guerrilla counteraction plan was worked out at the meeting, most of which was held in private. Chechnya, where the authorities consider that “order has been re-established”, was put forward as an example. According to the source, Kadyrov has been sent by Moscow in order to study the situation on the spot and to work on developing effective tactics for conducting the struggle against members of the Ingush armed underground.

The Ingush guerrillas are indeed today considered one of the most combat-effective elements of the so-called “Caucasian front”. Not a week goes by in the republic without armed clashes or attacks on police or Russian soldiers.

A favourite location for such guerrilla actions is believed to be the Ingush section of the Caucasus federal highway, which has a total length of more than 30 kilometres. From there the constant sound of explosions and exchanges of fire can be heard. Many military columns prefer to make detours through the villages rather than travel along the flat asphalt road. A method favoured by the Ingush guerrillas is to drive along the highway at full speed, opening fire from their cars on motor vehicles in which police or soldiers are riding, after which they make themselves scarce.

Residents of Ingushetia fear a repetition of the Chechen scenario, with the relatives of guerrillas being taken into custody by the special services. It is no secret that the use of precisely this tactic by the pro-Moscow Chechen authorities has to some extent induced many well-known guerrillas to move over to their side.


Translated by David McDuff.

In Jamestown's Terrorism Focus, Chris Heffelfinger looks at Al Qaeda's evolving strategy five years after 9/11:

Reviewing the developments of the war against al-Qaeda during the last five years, one sees their strategy being carried out in the various stages described above—inspiring Muslims around the globe, the creation of franchise organizations, frequent attacks in countries that support the United States and its allies and the gradual widening of the battlefield to the point that al-Qaeda itself becomes less and less relevant.

And indeed, looking back at the list of al Qaeda-related attacks and atrocities since 2001, in Bali, Madrid, Casablanca. London, Istanbul, and elsewhere, there is one atrocity that stands out by its incongruousness, and its pointers to that "gradual widening". As JR Nyquist noted in September 2004, in an article that still has as much relevance now as it had at the time it was written and published -

Many in the West would prefer to herald the Beslan tragedy as an opportunity for greater U.S.-Russian cooperation in combating terrorism. In reality, however, relations between Washington and Moscow are following a downward spiral. In Russia we find an emerging dictatorship that espouses a subtle anti-American propaganda. What was previously hidden has come into view: the totalitarians are still in charge. Putin’s pretext for strengthening his dictatorship is found at Beslan, in 350 body bags.

What actually happened at Beslan (where hundreds of children were slaughtered by terrorists)? We still don’t know the facts.

Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya says that the FSB poisoned her on a flight from Moscow to Rostov, effectively keeping her from reaching Beslan. She was not alone in being hindered. Journalist Andrei Babitsky was detained at Vnukovo airport on “a specious pretext.” Russian security personnel drugged Georgian journalist Nana Lezhava’s coffee, putting her out of action at a critical moment. The 55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) took note of these and other incidents in a “scathing” report on the Kremlin’s handling of the Beslan affair. According to the OSCE, the Kremlin forfeited its credibility by preventing journalists from reaching Beslan. From the outset, Russian authorities told one lie after another. As if to prevent accurate information from reaching the outside world, Russian authorities also interfered with foreign journalists, confiscating television footage.

And, after considering the consequences of the Beslan atrocity in terms of Putin's centralization of political control in the "September Revolution", Nyquist concludes, in the same piece:

Moscow’s attitude is nothing new. The most distressing fact in all of this, however, is the ultimate non-reaction of the Western elite. There is a strong tendency to self-deception in Washington, especially where Russia is concerned, and this tendency is struggling mightily against truth. And what is this truth? Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko spelled it out in his book [Blowing Up Russia] when he described Putin’s objective as “the total destruction of the foundations of a constitutional society built on the admittedly frail but, nonetheless, democratic values of a market economy” in Russia.

The failure of freedom in Russia is a major event. No other country is as dangerous as Russia. No other country has thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at America. None has missiles as advanced as Russia’s. None has a submarine fleet as large. To rate Russia as “just another country” is to negate the last 100 years of history.

I should like to end with a quote from Bill Gertz’s new book, Treachery: “The record of Russian proliferation – to Iraq and other dangerous countries – is long. Classified intelligence reports show that for more than a decade Moscow used its arms sales to rogue states as a strategic hammer against the United States.”

Now ask yourself: Why has Russia done this?

Tarkovsky's Horses is the title of a new, 80-page collection of poems by the Danish poet Pia Tafdrup. All the poems in the book are are devoted to her experience of being with her father during the final weeks and months of his life, when he suffered a breakdown of consciousness that gradually destroyed his memory, brought about changes in his behaviour and personality, and was followed by total kidney failure.

Although the poems are autobiographical, they aim beyond the purely personal towards a universal appraisal of the human condition and its constant link with pain and suffering, together with a deepening of the need to speak about this in terms that derive from an inner revelation:

With the same lofty calm
Tarkovsky's horses
in Andrei Rublyov
   radiate
in the film's last images,
my father is present,
resting in himself.
He has been wrapped
in flames,
and I have carried
his urn to the burial place.
Being is not
being
without pain.
I carry him
within me
like a new authority. 

The collection is so far only available in Danish, but translations into other languages should soon be forthcoming. The poet herself will be introducing the book and reading from it tomorrow, Wednesday, at Chester's Bogcafé, Strandgade 26, Copenhagen, at 7pm.

There won't be any further posts today, the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City. I'll resume posting tomorrow.

Some recently published books I've either translated as a whole, or have helped to translate.



Isaac Babel: Red Cavalry and Other Stories




Tua Forsström: I studied once at a wonderful faculty



Lev Tolstoy: The Cossacks and Other Stories

Listening to the last hour of George Galloway's 3-hour programme on Talksport radio, devoted to the subjects of the parliamentary report on antisemitism in Britain and the political fallout in Britain as a result of the conflict in Lebanon, I had the strange feeling that I was hearing something from the second or third decade of the twentieth century - a kind of Goebbelsian propaganda discourse that tried to insinuate its way into the listener's consciousness, doubling back on itself as it tried to appear reasonable and moral, while all the time preaching a cynical message of hatred. It may sound naive, but I didn't think I would hear such a discourse on the airwaves of this country in my lifetime.

Galloway read out the emails and text messages sent by listeners, and almost invariably added his own commentary at the end of those messages which criticized his virulently anti-Israel opinions - "fool", he would say, or "confused", or "I don't think anyone would want to share a street with you, Ian," and so on. His voice held a distinct note of dark and aggressive menace, which would then almost at once be replaced by the smooth and kindly tones in which he addressed those with whom he agreed. Some callers were genuinely puzzled by the term "Zionism" Galloway uses so often, so he promised to explain what it meant. When it came to the point, he told his audience that what it signifies is a minority belief "not shared by the vast majority of Jews", involving "all the Jews in the world getting together and leaving the countries where they were living and going to live in someone else's country without their permission". At that point there was a break in the transmission, a silence, and then Galloway's voice could be heard again continuing the "explanation". There was another silence, and then he said "there's a technical glitch, something wrong with this microphone - I could believe that they're out to get me, but I'm not that paranoid, though because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not out to get you." One can only assume that someone in the studio had signalled that what he was saying was not to be continued, and for that one was grateful. And that was the end of the "explanation" - the show moved to more discussion of the hated Blair and Brown, and their support for the "Zionists".

I'd never really taken Galloway seriously before - but listening to him at some length, I became aware that with a radio show on which he appears each week, not just for one night, but for three nights in succession (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), and for several hours at a time, he has the potential to become a real problem.

See also: Antisemitism in Britain
Harry's Place has a fuller account of the broadcast here.

IsraelNN.com:

Finnish leaders gave the final approval to send 250 soldiers to take part in the international stabilization force in southern Lebanon.

Official state sources in Finland stated the soldiers will primarily be assigned to cleaning minefields and establishing bases.

In Denmark, the leftist Information newspaper has reprinted six of the Iranian Holocaust cartoons which are currently on display in Tehran.

Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is quoted by the IRNA news agency as saying that the information alleging a possible suspension by Russia of the Bushehr reactor project if Iran Tehran expels inspectors from the UN's atomic energy watchdog is a "provocation".

As tensions in the Karelian town of Kondopoga continue to rise, RFE/RL's Victor Yasmann documents more racially charged disturbances in Russia, in which authorities demonstrated "complete ineptness":

"Vremya novostei" and "Komsomolskaya pravda" on September 5 compiled a list of such cases, all sharing traits of corruption and cover-ups by local officials that helped lead to unrest.

June 2006, Rostov Oblast: Clashes take place between local youths and members of the local Daghestani community in the 30,000-population city of Salsk. The disturbances were attributed to the "redistribution of spheres of interest." Members of the Daghestani community resorted to using weapons, and one person was killed and eight locals wounded. To quell the violence, the city government calls in a detachment of Interior Ministry riot police, the OMON. Local residents attending a city meeting demand that more be done to punish the perpetrators of the violence and call for the eviction of "every Daghestani from the krai and oblast." Arrests had been made as of September, but the situation remained tense following the beating of a local official at the hands of a young Daghestani.

June 2006, Irkutsk Oblast: In the village of Targis, local residents clash with Chinese migrant workers. Six people are injured, with police siding with local residents. Seventy-five Chinese workers are subsequently expelled.

May 2006, Chita Oblast: The village of Haragun becomes the scene of anti-Azeri riots in which one is killed, several are injured, and 16 are arrested. Unhappy about the influx of Azerbaijanis, local residents demand at a meeting that they be evicted. Afterward, homes, property, and vehicles are the target of violence and arson.

August 2005, Astrakhan Oblast: A conflict erupts in the village of Yanyki between local Kalmyks and Chechens. More than 400 people take part in the violence, in which one person is killed, several are wounded, and 14 are arrested. During an assembly attended mostly by ethnic Russians, demands are made for the expulsion of "non Slavs."

Such large-scale violence is occurring with increasing regularity. And there is reason to believe the trend will continue. The unrest in Kondopoga has already had one serious consequence. Russian nationalists throughout the country have been stirred to action, under the banner: "Down with xenocracy -- the rule of foreigners."

There are signs that military co-operation between the United States and Russia - a process that began in the 1990s, and has been hailed as one of the major gains achieved by the assumed ending of the Cold War, is now in trouble. RFE/RL reports that Russia has officially informed the U.S. that the joint military maneuvers known as Torgau, which were scheduled for late September and early October, have been indefinitely postponed, "allegedly due to unresolved legal issues regarding the presence of foreign soldiers on Russian territory." (Newsline, September 6).

Several Russian commentators have pointed out that the real reason for the postponement is political. In EJ, Alexander Goltz writes (my tr.) that

In actual fact, the Russian-American maneuvers, and even the entire existing system of military co-operation, was not all intended to prepare the armed forces of the two countries for joint operations. However strange it may seem, these maneuvers represented a certain modern form of mutual restraint. With the increased cooling in Russian-American relations, and the growth of anti-Americanism cultivated by Federal television, the Torgau maneuvers were supposed to demonstrate that even if our two countries plan to wage war, they will only do so together, and not against each other. It appears that now the Kremlin does not feel the need for this demonstration.

Publius Pundit's Robert Mayer presents an interview he conducted with Mikola Ilin, a Belarusian student who was expelled from university and forced to flee his country (he is now living in Estonia) simply for participating in opposition activities. There is also a podcast of the interview.

The full text of the British parliamentary all-party commission of inquiry's report on antisemitism in Britain is available online here.

The report finds that many British citizens who happen to be born Jewish face unacceptable harassment, intimidation and assault. It also concludes that the problem of antisemitism is growing worse.

CiF has a post by one of the authors of the report, Denis MacShane. The discussion in the comments that follow the post is evidence of the nature of the problem in contemporary Britain.

Update: Melanie Phillips comments on the report:

Any serious study of today’s antisemitism must ask— although regrettably this report fails to do so — why Israel is singled out for treatment afforded to no other country on earth; why Israel is scapegoated for the crimes of others; why Israel is dwelt upon so obsessively for seeking to defend itself, while countries which deliberately inflict terrible things upon the innocent are scarcely reported; why Israel alone is demonised and delegitimised through systematic lies and libels; why Israel alone is not allowed to defend itself while other in other countries this is taken for granted; why the legitimacy of Israel’s existence alone is called into question while that of artificially created countries like Pakistan are not; why Israel alone is blamed for a refugee problem while everywhere else in the world displaced populations are routinely ignored; why unlike any other country in history Israel alone, as the victim of genocidal warfare of which it was the victor, is expected to defer to its aggressors — which continue to wage war against it — and give them everything they are demanding.

The report does not ask this. It says instead:

We do not believe that the vast majority of discussion surrounding the Israel-Palestinian conflict is inherently antisemitic; rather we are concerned that the currently popular discursive tools need to be deployed with greater responsibility and understanding of the historical resonances that they evoke. A legitimate opinion on the political decisions of the Israeli state may be expressed in an antisemitic manner, even if its author did not intend it to be, if it uses phrases and imagery which tap into antisemitic discourse.

Well no, actually; lies and libels and falsehoods and distortions about Israel are not a ‘legitimate opinion on the political decisions of the Israeli state’. It’s not the manner of expression that is wrong but the expression itself. The imagery is not down to a fit of absent-mindedness about historic resonances. It is used because it perfectly expresses the prejudice in the minds of the writers or speakers.

The Nazis’ infamous excuse was that they were ‘only obeying orders’. Today’s antisemites, it seems, are merely ‘forgetting historical resonances’. In other words, they don’t really know what they are doing, so they can’t be guilty of prejudice. After all, if they’re the ‘anti-racist’ left or the media, they don’t fit the image.

This report has sounded a welcome alarm; but it has put only a timid toe into the sewer.

Window on Eurasia: Kondopoga - 'The Birth of a Nation' or the Beginning of the End of Russia?

Paul Goble


Vienna, September 7 - The growing flood of reactions by commentators of all stripes to the events last week in Kondopoga may say more about the present state and future prospects of the Russian Federation than do the details of the conflict itself in that Karelian city between local ethnic Russians and immigrants from the Caucasus.

Two of the most interesting commentaries on those events appeared yesterday. In an essay posted online, analyst Avraam Smulevich asks whether the willingness of the Russians to stand up as a community rather rely on the state to defend them might represent "the birth of the nation".

Smulyevich suggests that historically the Russians have "relied on the strength of the state for the defense of their interests in conflicts with other peoples" but argues that today such "a model no longer works."

And consequently, he says, Russians must either rebuild a powerful state machine or coalesce as a nation capable of defending itself.

In his commentary, Smulyevich notes that as in the past, Russians today "are incapable of acting as a single whole, including in the mobilization of financial or administrative resources 'for the common goal' and that 'national membership' of ethnic Russian bureaucrats plays a far smaller role in defining their action than their pockets."

After surveying what he describes as the long history of the inability of Russians to act as a nation - and his words recall the debate between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and émigré historian Yuri Srechinskiy in the 1970s - Smulyevich draws attention to two aspects of this issue that few have paid much attention to.

On the one hand, he notes that in post-Soviet times, as in the past, "all of the most notable anti-Caucasus demonstrations have taken place not in purely Russian regions but rather in the south of Russia or in Karelia," a republic in which more than a quarter of the indigenous population is not Russian.

And on the other, he notes that conflicts between ethnic Russians and people from the Caucasus have generally occurred in smaller cities, precisely because "the horizontal ties among the residents" of both groups are far stronger in these places than in larger cities or in rural areas.

Smulyevich's argument suggests one of the reasons why violent clashes like those in Kondopoga may not spread to Moscow and other major Russian cities, but second essay, this one by Aleksei Pantykin, says the Kondopoga events highlight the danger that "the Russian Federation may collapse in the same way the USSR did."

He bases his argument on the fact that the reaction of Russian officialdom and even many Russians resembles all too closely the disastrous misreading of the start of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, a conflict that ultimately contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.

At that time, he recalls, one Politburo member (V.I. Dolgikh) travelled to the region and bemoaned the fact that tehre was a dispute between "two Muslim peoples," a statement that not only distorted the facts - Armenia is historically Christian - but highlighted the extent to which the Soviet leadership was out of touch with reality.

Citing the observation of Ortega y Gasset that elites must restrain their peoples, Pantykin suggests that at present many elites in Russia are doing just the reverse, pushing both sides in the conflict in Kondopoga toward more and broader conflicts rather than calming the situation.

Others agree: Pavel Svyatenkov noted that Russia was rapidly becoming a place in which one section of the country might decide to fight another, a situation unthinkable elsewhere: "even in a nightmare," he said, "it is impossible to imagine Texas forces advancing on California".

And Oleg Kashin argued that Russian elites bear much of the responsibility for this deterioration, not only by failing to discuss what is going on but by offering television time to extremist Russian nationalists like Yegor Khomogorov to advance their agendas.

But however valid or invalid these generalizations may be, the Kondopoga events are already having three major consequences. First, officials in both Karelia and Moscow have rushed to blame the non-Russian immigrants for what happened rather than exploring the complex of causes behind this explosion.

Second, non-Russians in major Russian cities are rushing to say that their communities will never destabilize the situation there, however bad things may get. Indeed, the head of the Uzbek community in St. Petersburg said his people would remain calm despite recent knifings of its members.

And third, in some Russian cities, officials now feel themselves empowered to repress non-Russians and especially people from the Caucasus even more harshly. In Kaliningrad, ANN reported on Tuesday militia have been going house to house and asking: "Are there any suspicious people there? Any persons of Caucasus nationality?"

Officials there say they are doing this to enhance security in advance of what they hope will be a visit to that non-contiguous portion of the Russian Federation later this month. But few people be they Russian or non-Russian will fail to conclude that what is going on is something bigger than that.

And to the extent they are correct, one of the two more apocalyptic conclusions offered above - either a repressive Russian nationalist state or the disintegration of the Russian Federation - could prove true, despite the expectations or hopes of many in virtually all camps.

Michael Scheuer has an essay in Terrorism Focus about the Western media's misreading of al-Qaeda's latest videotape:

The primary theme of Western media analysis has been that the al-Zawahiri-Azzam tape is an effort—some term it a "PR campaign"—to soften al-Qaeda's image, to focus more on proselytizing than on violence. Another theme is a sense of relief that the journalists and media experts have not been able to find a blatant "threat" in the video, a theme that has been reinforced by an argument offered by unnamed U.S. officials who point out that Azzam al-Amriki is not a senior al-Qaeda leader and so his words are not as important as those of Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. Another theme that seems to accompany most new al-Qaeda videos has been again expressed about this one, namely, that the film is an effort by al-Qaeda leaders to keep the group "relevant." Finally, the fourth theme is a more or less "invisible theme" that entails the Western media's traditional ignoring of the fact that al-Qaeda's audience is as much Muslim as American.

Meanwhile, in WorldNetDaily Ilana Mercer has a parallel analysis of the same Western misreadings. Money quote:

Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict in the world. They were slaughtering innocent, pacifist Jews in Israel well before the Jewish state was a figment in the fertile mind of Theodor Herzl (and well before the "occupation" of 1967: in 627, Muhammad decapitated 900 Medina Jews. The women were only raped). Governments, abetted by the Fourth Estate (and a fifth column), have framed strife in Sudan, East Timor, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, the Balkans and Russia as sectarian or regional. The struggle in these spots, however, has more to do with the overriding refusal of the one faction to abide the others (unless they've been conquered or preferably killed).

(Hat tip: Leopoldo)

In EDM, Vladimir Socor outlines what he sees as seven Russian challenges to the West's energy security, commenting:

At last, Brussels and Washington are beginning to acknowledge some aspects of this manifold challenge. But they have yet to focus on the dangerous nexus now forming between disruptions by Russia or in Russia and growing dependence upon Russia.

Via Prague Watchdog (my tr.)

5 years since the proclamation of the Chechen Republic’s independence

by Umalt Chadayev

On September 6 1991 the All-National Congress of the Chechen People (OKChN) declared the national sovereignty of the Chechen republic. Today this holiday is observed in Chechnya as the Day of Civic Concord and Unity, or Republic Day.

Grozny’s municipal authorities have announced that on September 6 a number of cultural and mass events will take place, dedicated to the celebration of the Day of Civic Concord and Unity. A large public concert will be held in the centre of Grozny, with the participation of Chechen variety stars. There will also be celebratory events in the republic’s other cities and major population centres.

In the years of the governments of Dzhokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov, September 6 was always marked as the Chechen state’s Independence Day. It was a date on which military parades, rallies, and other celebratory events were held. There were also prayers and religious sacrifices.

The first large-scale celebration of Independence Day took place in 1992. It involved a military parade and special concert in one of the Chechen capital’s sports stadiums. In the following year, the Independence Day celebrations were attended by the LDPR party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky (now the vice-speaker of the Russian State Duma). At the time Mr. Zhirinovsky stated that "Now I have two good friends - Saddam Hussein and Dzhokhar Dudayev," which, however, did not prevent him later on (after the beginning of military actions in Chechnya) from completely changing his views on Dudayev and his relation to him.

The Independence Day of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was even marked in September 1995, despite the fact that a large number of Russian soldiers and officers of various law enforcement agencies were located in Grozny. On that day tens of thousands of the republic’s residents took to the streets of Grozny and marched through the centre of the Chechen capital holding Ichkerian flags, portraits of Dzhokhar Dudayev and banners, and demanding an immediate end to the war and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the republic’s territory.

September 6 was also a holiday in 1996, since only a few days earlier that year Aleksandr Lebed, and Aslan Maskhadov had signed a treaty in the Daghestan city of Khasavyurt, thus bringing an end to the "first Chechen war".

Chechen Independence Day was observed as a state holiday for the last time in September 1999, shortly before the start of the second military campaign. That day, Russian aircraft had already begun to bomb the republic’s population centres in the region of the administrative border with Dagestan, and so the mass events were cancelled.

In 2002 Chechen administrative head Akhmat-Khadzhi Kadyrov (who later became the Kremlin-backed President of Chechnya, and was assassinated in May 2004 in Grozny’s Dinamo Stadium), issued a decree renaming Independence Day Republic Day. Today this holiday is called the Day of Civic Concord and Unity.

Via Strategic Forecasting, Inc., at Stratfor


By George Friedman

U.S. President George W. Bush now has made it clear what his policy on Iraq will be for the immediate future, certainly until Election Day: He does not intend to change U.S. policy in any fundamental way. U.S. troops will continue to be deployed in Iraq, they will continue to carry out counterinsurgency operations, and they will continue to train Iraqi troops to eventually take over the operations. It is difficult to imagine that Bush believes there will be any military solution to the situation in Iraq; therefore, we must try to understand his reasoning in maintaining this position. Certainly, it is not simply a political decision. Opinion in the United States has turned against the war, and drawing down U.S. forces and abandoning combat operations would appear to be the politically expedient move. Thus, if it is not politics driving him -- and assuming that the more lurid theories on the Internet concerning Bush's motivations are as silly as they appear -- then we have to figure out what he is doing.

Let's consider the military situation first. Bush has said that there is no civil war in Iraq. This is in large measure a semantic debate. In our view, it would be inaccurate to call what is going on a "civil war" simply because that term implies a degree of coherence that simply does not exist. Calling it a free-for-all would be more accurate. It is not simply a conflict of Shi'i versus Sunni. The Sunnis and Shia are fighting each other, and all of them are fighting American forces. It is not altogether clear what the Americans are supposed to be doing.

Counterinsurgency is unlike other warfare. In other warfare, the goal is to defeat an enemy army, and civilian casualties as a result of military operations are expected and acceptable. With counterinsurgency operations in populated areas, however, the goal is to distinguish the insurgents from civilians and destroy them, with minimal civilian casualties. Counterinsurgency in populated areas is more akin to police operations than to military operations; U.S. troops are simultaneously engaging an enemy force while trying to protect the population from both that force and U.S. operations. Add to this the fact that the population is frequently friendly to the insurgents and hostile to the Americans, and the difficulty of the undertaking becomes clear.

Consider the following numbers. The New York Police Department (excluding transit and park police) counts one policeman for every 216 residents. In Iraq, there is one U.S. soldier (not counting other coalition troops) per about 185 people. Thus, numerically speaking, U.S. forces are in a mildly better position than New York City cops -- but then, except for occasional Saturday nights, New York cops are not facing anything like the U.S. military is facing in Iraq. Given that the United States is facing not one enemy but a series of enemy organizations -- many fighting each other as well as the Americans -- and that the American goal is to defeat these while defending the populace, it is obvious even from these very simplistic numbers that the U.S. force simply isn't there to impose a settlement.

Expectations and a Deal Unwound

A military solution to the U.S. dilemma has not been in the cards for several years. The purpose of military operations was to set the stage for political negotiations. But the Americans had entered Iraq with certain expectations. For one thing, they had believed they would simply be embraced by Iraq's Shiite population. They also had expected the Sunnis to submit to what appeared to be overwhelming political force. What happened was very different. First, the Shia welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein, but they hardly embraced the Americans -- they sought instead to translate the U.S. victory over Hussein into a Shiite government. Second, the Sunnis, in view of the U.S.-Shiite coalition and the dismemberment of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army, saw that they were about to be squeezed out of the political system and potentially crushed by the Shia. They saw an insurgency -- which had been planned by Hussein -- as their only hope of forcing a redefinition of Iraqi politics. The Americans realized that their expectations had not been realistic.

Thus, the Americans went through a series of political cycles. First, they sided with the Shia as they sought to find their balance militarily facing the Sunnis. When they felt they had traction against the Sunnis, following the capture of Hussein -- and fearing Shiite hegemony -- they shifted toward a position between Sunnis and Shia. As military operations were waged in the background, complex repositioning occurred on all sides, with the Americans trying to hold the swing position between Sunnis and Shia.

The process of creating a government for Iraq was encapsulated in this multi-sided maneuvering. By spring 2006, the Sunnis appeared to have committed themselves to the political process. And in June, with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the announcement that the United States would reduce its force in Iraq by two brigades, the stage seemed to be set for a political resolution that would create a Shiite-dominated coalition that included Sunnis and Kurds. It appeared to be a done deal -- and then the deal completely collapsed.

The first sign of the collapse was a sudden outbreak of fighting among Shia in the Basra region. We assumed that this was political positioning among Shiite factions as they prepared for a political settlement. Then Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), traveled to Tehran, and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army commenced an offensive. Shiite death squads struck out at Sunni populations, and Sunni insurgents struck back. From nearly having a political accommodation, the situation in Iraq fell completely apart.

The key was Iran. The Iranians had always wanted an Iraqi satellite state, as protection against another Iraq-Iran war. That was a basic national security concept for them. In order to have this, the Iranians needed an overwhelmingly Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, and to have overwhelming control of the Shia. It seemed to us that there could be a Shiite-dominated government but not an overwhelmingly Shiite government. In other words, Iraq could be neutral toward, but not a satellite of, Iran. In our view, Iraq's leading Shia -- fearing a civil war and also being wary of domination by Iran -- would accept this settlement.

We may have been correct on the sentiment of leading Shia, but we were wrong about Iran's intentions. Tehran did not see a neutral Iraq as being either in Iran's interests or necessary. Clearly, the Iranians did not trust a neutral Iraq still under American occupation to remain neutral. Second -- and this is the most important -- they saw the Americans as militarily weak and incapable of either containing a civil war in Iraq or of taking significant military action against Iran. In other words, the Iranians didn't like the deal they had been offered, they felt that they could do better, and they felt that the time had come to strike.

A Two-Pronged Offensive

When we look back through Iranian eyes, we can now see what they saw: a golden opportunity to deal the United States a blow, redefine the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf and reposition the Shia in the Muslim world. Iran had, for example, been revivifying Hezbollah in Lebanon for several months. We had seen this as a routine response to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. It is now apparent, however, that it was part of a two-pronged offensive.

First, in Iraq, the Iranians encouraged a variety of factions to both resist the newly formed government and to strike out against the Sunnis. This created an uncontainable cycle of violence that rendered the Iraqi government impotent and the Americans irrelevant. The tempo of operations was now in the hands of those Shiite groups among which the Iranians had extensive influence -- and this included some of the leading Shiite parties, such as SCIRI.

Second, in Lebanon, Iran encouraged Hezbollah to launch an offensive. There is debate over whether the Israelis or Hezbollah ignited the conflict in Lebanon. Part of this is ideological gibberish, but part of it concerns intention. It is clear that Hezbollah was fully deployed for combat. Its positions were manned in the south, and its rockets were ready. The capture of two Israeli soldiers was intended to trigger Israeli airstrikes, which were as predictable as sunrise, and Hezbollah was ready to fire on Haifa. Once Haifa was hit, Israel floundered in trying to deploy troops (the Golani and Givati brigades were in the south, near Gaza). This would not have been the case if the Israelis had planned for war with Hezbollah. Now, this discussion has nothing to do with who to blame for what. It has everything to do with the fact that Hezbollah was ready to fight, triggered the fight, and came out ahead because it wasn't defeated.

The end result is that, suddenly, the Iranians held the whip hand in Iraq, had dealt Israel a psychological blow, had repositioned themselves in the Muslim world and had generally redefined the dynamics of the region. Moreover, they had moved to the threshold of redefining the geopolitics to the Persian Gulf.

This was by far their most important achievement.

A New Look at the Region

At this point, except for the United States, Iran has by far the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf. This has nothing to do with its nuclear capability, which is still years away from realization. Its ground forces are simply more numerous and more capable than all the forces of the Arabian Peninsula combined. There is another aspect to this: The countries of the Arabian Peninsula are governed by Sunnis, but many are home to substantial Shiite populations as well. Between the Iranian military and the possibility of unrest among Shia in the region, the situation in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Peninsula is uneasy, to say the least. The rise of Hezbollah well might psychologically empower the generally quiescent Shia to become more assertive. This is one of the reasons that the Saudis were so angry at Hezbollah, and why they now are so anxious over events in Iraq.

If Iraq were to break into three regions, the southern region would be Shiite -- and the Iranians clearly believe that they could dominate southern Iraq. This not only would give them control of the Basra oil fields, but also would theoretically open the road to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. From a strictly military point of view, and not including the Shiite insurgencies at all, Iran could move far down the western littoral of the Persian Gulf if American forces were absent. Put another way, there would be a possibility that the Iranians could seize control of the bulk of the region's oil reserves. They could do the same thing if Iraq were to be united as an Iranian satellite, but that would be far more difficult to achieve and would require active U.S. cooperation in withdrawing.

We can now see why Bush cannot begin withdrawing forces. If he did that, the entire region would destabilize. The countries of the Arabian Peninsula, seeing the withdrawal, would realize that the Iranians were now the dominant power. Shia in the Gulf region might act, or they might simply wait until the Americans had withdrawn and the Iranians arrived. Israel, shaken to the core by its fight with Hezbollah, would have neither the force nor the inclination to act. Therefore, the United States has little choice, from Bush's perspective, but to remain in Iraq.

The Iranians undoubtedly anticipated this response. They have planned carefully. They are therefore shifting their rhetoric somewhat to be more accommodating. They understand that to get the United States out of Iraq -- and out of Kuwait --they will have to engage in a complex set of negotiations. They will promise anything -- but in the end, they will be the largest military force in the region, and nothing else matters. Ultimately, they are counting on the Americans to be sufficiently exhausted by their experience of Iraq to rationalize their withdrawal -- leaving, as in Vietnam, a graceful interval for what follows.

Options

Iran will do everything it can, of course, to assure that the Americans are as exhausted as possible. The Iranians have no incentive to allow the chaos to wind down, until at least a political settlement with the United States is achieved. The United States cannot permit Iranian hegemony over the Persian Gulf, nor can it sustain its forces in Iraq indefinitely under these circumstances.

The United States has four choices, apart from the status quo:

1. Reach a political accommodation that cedes the status of regional hegemon to Iran, and withdraw from Iraq.

2. Withdraw forces from Iraq and maintain a presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- something the Saudis would hate but would have little choice about -- while remembering that an American military presence is highly offensive to many Muslims and was a significant factor in the rise of al Qaeda.

3. Halt counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and redeploy its forces in the south (west of Kuwait), to block any Iranian moves in the region.

4. Assume that Iran relies solely on its psychological pre-eminence to force a regional realignment and, thus, use Sunni proxies such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in attempts to outmaneuver Tehran.

None of these are attractive choices. Each cedes much of Iraq to Shiite and Iranian power and represents some degree of a psychological defeat for the United States, or else rests on a risky assumption. While No. 3 might be the most attractive, it would leave U.S. forces in highly exposed, dangerous and difficult-to-sustain postures.

Iran has set a clever trap, and the United States has walked into it. Rather than a functioning government in Iraq, it has chaos and a triumphant Shiite community. The Americans cannot contain the chaos, and they cannot simply withdraw. Therefore, we can understand why Bush insists on holding his position indefinitely. He has been maneuvered in such a manner that he -- or a successor -- has no real alternatives.

There is one counter to this: a massive American buildup, including a major buildup of ground forces that requires a large expansion of the Army, geared for the invasion of Iran and destruction of its military force. The idea that this could readily be done through air power has evaporated, we would think, with the Israeli air force's failure in Lebanon. An invasion of Iran would be enormously expensive, take a very long time and create a problem of occupation that would dwarf the problem faced in Iraq. But it is the other option. It would stabilize the geopolitics of the Arabian Peninsula and drain American military power for a generation.

Sometimes there are no good choices. For the United States, the options are to negotiate a settlement that is acceptable to Iran and live with the consequences, raise a massive army and invade Iran, or live in the current twilight world between Iranian hegemony and war with Iran. Bush appears to be choosing an indecisive twilight. Given the options, it is understandable why.
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A report in Nezavisimaya Gazeta describes an embarrassing situation for Russia's foreign minister Sergei Lavrov as he sets off on an official visit to Israel. The visit was originally timed to coincide with the opening of a large "Russian National Exhibit" at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel-Aviv, costing in the region of $300,000. The exhibit was to have presented "science-intensive technologies in the different fields of industry, agriculture, medicine and tourism." However, at the last moment the exhibition was indefinitely delayed "for technical reasons", at the instigation of the Russian organizers.

Arutz Sheva has a different explanation, however:

Moscow said the reasons were "technical" but the Russian government has expressed its anger at Israel, which has presented evidence that Hizbullah terrorists have Russian-made weapons. Russia denies the claims.

As Vladimir Putin begins his visit to South Africa, the first by a Russian leader, some points for reflection. For one thing, Putin goes as head of a country in which racially motivated incidents are showing a marked increase. A timeline from 2004 to March 2006 shows a staggeringly long list of racial assaults committed against groups and individuals from countries in Africa and Asia, as well as against Russia's own non-white minorities.

It's no secret that many of today's leading South African politicians and political figures, including President Thabo Mbeki, received training and support in the Soviet Union as far back as the 1970s. Thus, Putin's visit further confirms the growing movement of Kremlin foreign policy towards the strategic and ideological orientations of the past.

From Prague Watchdog (my tr.):

Accident rate on Chechnya’s roads increasing

By Ruslan Isayev

GROZNY, Chechnya – There has been a sharp increase in the number of road traffic accidents in Chechnya, especially in Grozny. More than one thousand accidents have taken place in the republic since the beginning of this year, involving the deaths of 132 people, including 22 children.

The worst recent accident occurred two weeks ago on Grozny’s Zhukovsky Street, where a 3-kilometre level stretch of asphalt surfacing has recently been laid. Five people, including two children, died there in a head-on collision between two passenger cars. On the same day, three more people were killed in the republic.

In the view of traffic police officers, the sharp increase in the accident rate on Chechnya’s roads is connected primarily with the new highways that have been built as part of the restoration of Grozny, with the low level of driving skills in the majority of drivers, and with an over-saturation of automobiles in the republic.

The typical age of those guilty of gross violations of road traffic rules is between 18 and 30. It is no secret that a large number of them bought their driving certificates under the counter. While earlier these cost not much more than $100, the sum now fluctuates between 10 and 12,000 rubles ($375-450). The price of driving certificates rose sharply after Russia’s President Vladimir Putin turned his attention to the increase in injuries and the number of accidents in Russia as a whole, and demanded a stiffening of control on the issue of licences.

The large number of automobiles in Chechnya is linked to the republic’s economic development. Since the beginning of the second war, financial resources for the republic’s restoration have begun to enter the country from Russia: the money is intended for the creation of jobs, especially in the law-enforcement agencies.

High salaries and the payment of so-called "combat" money have had a major influence on the number of motor vehicles in Chechnya. Two years ago police officials were receiving up to 30-40,000 rubles per month for working during special operations. Now this sum is not much less. For example, a rank and file official of the criminal investigation department in a local police station earns a maximum of 25,000 rubles.

This is normal pay by Chechen standards, and makes it possible for an employee to save for a motor car if he wants to. It is probably no coincidence that according to observations by traffic police officials the members of the law-enforcement agencies are the principal culprits of road accidents in Chechnya.

The most pressing issue, however, is Grozny’s new roads. This year, several tens of kilometres of new highway have been constructed. Sometimes these roads are built in violation of many safety requirements. For example, the so-called "gaps" on Zhukovsky Street, where cars can turn round, do not satisfy these requirements and drivers who attempt to complete the manoeuvre usually come out into the opposite lane, creating a dangerous situation.

Taking all these factors into account, the Chechen directorate of the traffic police (GAI) has recently formed a commission in liaison with the republic's government in order to study this problem and work out a mechanism for its solution.


Translated by David McDuff.

Valentinas Mite, on the Kondopoga riots:

The riots come as ethnically motivated attacks are on the rise in Russia. Foreigners, Jews, and dark-skinned migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia have all come increasingly under attack during the past several years.

Young neo-Nazis in Kondopoga (Kontupohja), Russian Karelia, after violent racial clashes with North Caucasian migrants in the town. The director of a local paper mill is shown trying to calm the situation. (Helsingin Sanomat)

See also: Ethnic Clash in Russia

RFE/RL has a more recent report here.

Moscow demonstrators holding an unsanctioned rally in memory of the victims of the Beslan siege have been detained by police, Gazeta.ru reports, citing Interfax.

The report says that police would not allow the demonstrators on to Lubyanskaya Square to the Solovetsky Stone memorial (which commemorates the victims of Stalin's terror).

Participants in the demonstration stood for two hours near the metal barriers on the Polytechnic Museum side. On the asphalt next to the barriers they placed flowers, children's soft toys, photographs of the children killed in Beslan, and lit candles. At the very beginning of action the colleagues of law-enforcement agencies arrested 13 people, including the demonstration's organizer - executive secretary of the "For the Rights of Man" movement Lev Ponomarev. (my tr.)

From Interfax.ru

Those detained, among them young women whom police officers had raised up from the asphalt, were taken into riot police vehicles, an Interfax correspondent reported.

Police also tried to detain Yabloko deputy leader Sergei Mitrokhin and deputy of the Moscow legislature Ivan Novitsky.

Via Chechen Society Newspaper:

Social opinion in the Chechen Republic, and in Russia as a whole, is inclined negatively towards the idea of forming - in Chechnya - a 'peacekeeping Cossack division' composed of ethnic Chechens. Nevertheless, according to some facts, almost two thousand Chechens have already entered into a Cossack regiment which has been created in the Chechen Republic.

By Laila BAISULTANOVA, Timur ALIEV, Ruslan ZHADAEV

In early July, in Ingushetia, a meeting occurred between Ruslan Dunaev - Ataman (Cossack-chieftan) of the Chechen-Cossack special okrug "The All-Mighty Don Host" and Cossack Host Army General Nikolaj Kozitsin. At this meeting they discussed creating, in Chechnya, a representation of the International Union of Social Unification 'The All-Mighty Don Host' - as 'special Chechen okrug’.

According to Nikolai Kozitsin, the formation of this organization is necessary for strengthening friendship, cooperation and mutual understanding between citizens of the Chechen Republic and Cossack hosts both in Russia and abroad.

At present, this organization is not formally registered in the republic (the Ministry of Justice of the CR makes mention of the fact that there is already a Tersko-Grebenskij Cossack department and a Cossack national-cultural autonomy). However, Ruslan Dudaev maintains that registration is not necessary for the creation of a 'special Chechen okrug' because it is an international organization.

How to Become a Cossack

In Grozny, a 'Cossack regiment' composed of ethnic Chechens has existed for some time now. According to the regiment’s commanders, two thousand men have joined.

The main office of this organization - it's named the 'Headquarters of the Cossack-Chechen Society of the Chechen Republic' - is located on Gagarin Street in the center of Grozny. The 'Chechen Peacekeeping Regiment' and the 'Special Chechen Division' under the ‘All-Russian Union of Cossack Formations’ is located here. "In April, three hundred and fifty youth were accepted into the first sub-unit, one thousand were taken into the second," writes 'Ruskij Newsweek'.

It is not difficult to become a 'Cossack'. Just bring six hundred and fifty roubles as a registration fee and everything will soon be ready. Kozitsin asserts that a Cossack doesn't have to be Russian, that it to us is artificial ill-wishers present. "Russia is multi-national, but Cossacks are one of the peoples living in Russia. Thus, it's constitutional that Cossacks can serve in the military." Along these lines, he pointed out that both the Cossacks as a people exist as well as those who work as Cossacks.

Ruslan Dunaev claims that the 'Chechen Cossacks’' major problems are finding work-space and providing a patriotic upbringing for Chechen youth - so they can serve the fatherland. "I have a building company and when federal funding begins, we will take to construction. Besides that, we plan to open a sports club where our young men can train. We're going to raise champions," says Dunaev.

...a bad example – it’s attractive

Chechnya is not the first North Caucasian republic en route to its population’s 'Cossack-ization'. ‘The Union of Cossack Formations of Russia’ has already existed in the Republic of Ingushetia for several years. And upwards of five thousand people are presently involved.

In the words of Asab Barakoev - Chairman of the Council of Elders of the ‘Union of Cossack Formations of Russia’ in the Republic of Ingushetia, Cossack-ism in the Chechen Republic will “unify into one family”, the Russian and Chechen peoples.

Army Commandant of the CR, General Lieutenant Griigorij Fomenko, believes otherwise. In his opinion, the creation of a Cossack unit in the Republic is, "inexpedient and untimely because more than seventy thousand individuals from various security forces are currently located on its territory, (and are already) protecting the social order and constitutional structure of the region."

"Peacekeepers"

So why indeed is a 'Cossack Formation' being created in Chechnya? Many surmise that the plan is for 'Chechen-speaking Cossacks' to be sent to Abkhazia or South Ossetia, just in case an armed conflict were to break out in Georgia. Or in an extreme situation in Pre-Dniester koshevoi ataman, in other words, paymaster, Kitaeva "no analogies with the Abkhazian army of the early nineties - where ‘volunteer Russian Cossacks' and Shamil Basaev fought side-by-side for the independence of a rebellious republic - are perceived," quotes 'Russkij Newsweek'. "We have the aim of peacekeeping; building cities and republics as well as involving the unoccupied contingent of young people, helping them develop work skills and enter into studies," she explained to the journal's correspondent.

"‘Maybe our peacekeeping regiment will be called upon in relation to circumstances in Abkhazia,’ postulated Samart. ‘But you yourself said that you will protect the borders of the motherland,’ - I reminded the Commander. ‘Now there is an opposition in Georgia and Abkhazia. Is Abkhazia in Russia? No? Well our citizens are there. And our task is to help Russia.’ - the commanders political patience was wearing thin," - relates 'Russkij Newsweek' correspondent Lilia Mykhamed'jarova about her meeting with Kitaeva.

The Chechens have already had a similar 'peacekeeping' experience - in 1992. At that time, the as of yet unknown Shamil Basaev and Ruslan Gelaev fought on the side of the Abkhazians. The former was appointed to a post in the Ministry of Defense of Abkhazia and commandeered troops from the Confederation of Caucasian Peoples (KNK). The Chechens received nothing in return for their participation.

"Participation in the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict didn't bring any good. To speak openly, we helped some of our Caucasian brothers to kill others of our Caucasian brothers. Today I think that, in that situation, we, as well as other Caucasian peoples and Cossacks should not have gone as volunteers into Abkhazia, to create a unifying peace-making sub-unit and stop the blood-letting between Georgians and Abkhazians. That would have been a result indeed. As such, we have just divided the Caucasus with our own hands. And in case of a new conflict, if a similar wave of volunteers is sent, 'Cossacks' or anyone else, we risk only making the situation worse," - a former participant of military activities in Abkhazia, the forty year old Aslambek is convinced.

B.CH.K

Many inhabitants of Chechnya are clearly displeased with the idea of Creating ‘Chechen Cossacks’. "I can understand those young men, who today have no employment or educational options - who have no way to make a life. They are prepared to go anywhere just to occupy themselves. But I disapprove of the idea of creating some kind of 'Cossack part' in our Republic. First, we must reconstruct our own distinctive culture. For example, our customs and traditions, but not rob that of others. We are Chechens, not Cossacks," says 24 year old Ch.G.U. student Mikail.

"I have heard that even 'atamans' are turning up among us. Interesting. Why not just start immediately with 'hetmans'? It would sound even more respectable. 'Hetman of the Chechen-Cossack troops'. I propose shortening the name of the Chechen 'Cossack special okrug' to B.Ch.K. That is to say the 'All-Mighty Chechen Cossacks'. And we can call those who have joined - 'Chechenocossacks' ... or for short - 'Chekists'," joked Mikail.

What exactly will our new 'Cossack Union' be called? It is hardly likely to be named after Sheik Mansur, Bajsungur Benoevskij or Alibek-Khadzhi Aldamov. Most likely, this 'host' will be named in honor of Yermolov. What more, General Gennady Troshev, the ex-Commander of unified forces in Chechnya, today holds the post of advisor to the president on Cossack affairs.

It would also be interesting to know what color the stripes on the Chechen Cossacks' trousers will be? Will they be red and blue or green? And how will Chechenocossacks greet each other? Will they shout "Ljuba!" at gatherings like other Cossacks customarily do to convey some or another expression of comrade-ship? Or will they say, "Allah-u-Akhbar" as Muslims do? In general, there are many unanswered questions.

"One really has to hate his past, not think about the future and very strongly disrespect both his people and himself, to 'Cossack-ize'," - thinks fifty-five year old Grozny inhabitant Salmu Madaev. Even in Russia, many call Cossacks none other than Masquerade -mans. Why ape and imitate someone else when you have much of your own. Why creep into someone else's monastery, when you have your own mosque? Leave Cossack-ness to Cossacks, those who were born as Cossacks. Find something better to do. It's better to rebuild your own. The Cossacks are our neighbors, but each must inhabit his own home. And first of all, each must solve his own problems. There is no need to play 'Cossack-robbers', stretching someone else's skin onto one's self. Let each stick to his own, as it has been since time immemorial. Caesar's things to Caesar, the metal-worker’s things to the metal-worker.

From Emirs to Atamans

At the end of the so-called ‘First Chechen War’, we had in the Republic, our own particular ‘fashion’ for ‘Brigadier-Generals’ and ‘Emirs’. every self-respecting ‘man-in-arms’ called himself one or the other. Soviet military ranks, commanding posts and subdivision titles were all changed into one capricious and succinct word - ‘emir’. ‘Emir’ of the detachment, ‘Emir’ of the group, ‘Emir of the Djamaat’.

Indeed, it is well known that ‘fashion never rests’; and these days being an emir not only lacks prestige, but it is downright dangerous. Much is required in order to fancy oneself a cool Chechen Rambo and rapidly climb the ladder of service while yet avoiding tedious army humdrum. But an alternative has been found. ‘Ataman’ of the Chechen-Cossacks.

All the same, any know nothing of history or his motherland Chechen must know that there never was any ‘Cossack-ism’ among the Chechens.

In our history, there did exist the murtazeki of Imam Shamil, the ‘Sharia hundreds’; a regiment within the structure of the Caucasian native division better known as ‘Wild’; Aslambek Sheripov’s ‘Murids of the Revolution’; the Chechen-Ingush cavalier regiment and so on; but there weren’t any ‘Cossacks’. Of course in tsarist times, some Chechens served in Cossack formations, but the idea of creating a ‘Chechen-Cossack army’ didn’t enter the mind of anyone - then, before or after. It resonates as absurd or preposterous as, say, the phrase ‘Cossack Sahria hundreds’.

“In 1852, Emperor Nikolai I - at the suggestion of Minister Dolgorukov and Commander of the Left Flank of The Caucasian Line Prince Barjatinskogo - advanced a plan for ‘Cossack-izing’ the Chechens. But even the Russian officers of Chechen extraction dared not propagandize this plan. And thus it was lost in the bowels of Russia’s War Ministry,” recounts Chechen historian Murad Nashkhoev.

“Funny” Cossacks

Historians in Russia and in Chechnya, finding the many of discrepancies between the historical aspects of Cossack-ism and its contemporary realization in Chechnya, believe that - in the full sense of the word - Chechen Cossacks cannot now be considered as such., and they will have no future.

Director of the CR Republican Library Edilbek Khasmagomadov points out that in ‘Chechen Cossacks’, the very same principle that establishes the association is destroyed . “The Cossack armies had a written charter. In order to become Cossacks, it was necessary to be registered at a station. The new Cossack would receive a share of land from the land which surrounded the station. This was the principle of Cossack service - land in exchange for service,” he says.

Historian Murad Nashkhoev affirms that, “today this plan is doomed to fail as every Cossack must be Orthodox Christian.” “Moreover, our people have always known that the Russian Empire’s Cossacks were the ‘shock force’ for conquest of the entire Caucasus at the end of the XVII century. In our time, even Chechens of Russian descent expect this this affair to be a crippling failure,” he declared.

Despite the fact that on the Middle Volga and in the Urals, Bashkkiri-Muslims became Cossacks (in 1798 the Russian government issued a decree on the system of governance in cantons of riflemen, converting Bashkir and mishars in riflemen, and on the territory of Bashkiria created 11 Bashkir, 5 Mishar and 5 Orenburg Cossacks cantons), in the North Caucasus, Cossacks were always only Orthodox Christians.

In the words of author Irina Dedjukhova, among Cossacks there were Christian Jews, Armenians and Volga Germans. But it was always believed that the ‘idea of Cossack-ism’ - was united with the preservation and dissemination of the Christian Faith. One could be of any nationality, but he had to be Christian,” she says.

Concerning the “present campaign for restoration of the Don Cossacks - which brings to mind people’s folkloric collective,” as it relates to the “Chechen Cossacks,” Dedjukhova presents an analogy to the Mamluks - the personal guard of Egyptian leaders that was composed of Georgians, Cherkess and other Caucasian peoples.

Roman Toporkov - deputy of the Refts Duma - made the following remark to the press about the creation in Chechnya of a Chechen Cossacks: “So? Russian Tsars had ‘funny regiments’. Here, in this spirit have appeared …. Funny Cossacks!”

Translated by Sarah SLYE

Signs of a split in the ranks of European foreign ministers who are meeting in Lappeenranta, Finland (near the Russian border), this weekend, where relations with Russia are concerned.

Finland's leftist foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja has been arguing for "improved contact" and "better relations" between Russia and the union, and this line has generally been approved by the nations of "old" Europe, particularly France and Germany. Countries such as Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia take a different view, however. Hufvudstadsbladet reports that

In particular, there is the uncertainty surrounding energy supplies, which is seen as a problem.

"We are far too dependent on energy imports from one supplier," says Poland's foreign minister Anna Fotyga, without mentioning Russia by name.

The Poles have also been unhappy with the Russian-German decision to lay a nutral gas pipeline along the bottom of the Baltic Sea directly to the continent.

Latvia's foreign minister Artis Pabriks says for his part that his country will probably support a common EU line concerning Russia.

"But it mustn't be a blind partnership, of course."

Within the Baltic region there is also the problem that not all the border agreements with Russia have been ratified. But Tuomioja plays down the significance of this, maintaining that border co-operation functions well in practice.

-----

The international press which is watching the EU meeting in Lappeenranta has noted that Finnish-Russian relations have not always been as problem-free as now. As an example of this there is mention of the large cemetery in Lappeenranta with the graves of [Finnish] soldiers who fell in the Second World War.

(my tr.)

It is now almost 16 months since the bloody events at Andizhan on May 13 2005, which marked a turning-point in Uzbekistan's relations with the West, particularly the United States. The bloodshed also set the seal on a process of change in Central Asian politics as a whole, one that had been gathering momentum for some time and involved a regional shift of emphasis away from Western and U.S. interests to an alignment with other powers, primarily China and Russia. Not only Uzbekistan, but also Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and indeed all the countries of the region are now gravitating away from the United States and towards Moscow and Beijing.

The last few days have seen a remarkable upsurge of movement between the Central Asian states, including preparations for a regional summit to be held today in the Kazakh capital. There has also been an energy-related visit to Moscow by Kyrgyz prime minister Feliks Kulov, and the beginnings of an attempt by Uzbekistan to forge a separate understanding with the European Union. Meanwhile, China has officially opened a network of 22 new transport routes to connect the border cities of China and Kazakhstan.

An AIA study published in April this year examines Washington's defeat in the region, and sums up what it will mean in terms of the "war on terror" (AIA's translation, with my minor editing):

First, Iran, Pakistan and India intend in the near future to become full members of the Shanghai Organization of Cooperation [SCO](for the present they have only the status of observers there).

As a consequence, Afghanistan, governed by the pro-American regime of Hamid Karzai, will become enclosed by the states of the SCO. This will inevitably be reflected in the balance of forces of the Afghani leadership between a part of the Pushtu elite focused on the West, and national minorities supported by regional rivals of America and their allies (Uzbeks – Uzbekistan and Turkey; Tajiks – Tajikistan, Iran and Russia; Khazars – Iran and China).

Secondly, the final defeat of the US in the Central Asia will provide Teheran with reliable rears in the northeast, in case of an American-Iranian conflict. Yet before such a conflict has begun, it will allow the Islamic republic to make room for the forces of the diplomatic department and special services, in particular in the direction of the Southern Caucasus. To fundamentally change the situation in Kyrgyzstan in favour of the US is already almost impossible. The stakes on Bakiyev’s opponents would demand many more financial resources than were contributed to the organization of last year's revolution. Besides, the support for regime change would be interfaced to the development of the US long-term strategy regarding this republic, and calculated for the period before and after Bakiyev's overthrow.

However, even in that case the new regime would hardly turn out to be of great vitality. First, it will immediately collide with a great number of accumulated social and economic problems. Its position will also be complicated by the sharp polarization of society, in many respects aggravated as a result of the events of the last one-and-a-half years (division into political groupings, regional clans and elites, indigenous population and national minorities, etc.).

Secondly, China, Russia and Uzbekistan, possessing perceptible influence in Kyrgyzstan, will put a maximum of effort into eliminating any pro-American regime. The analysis of Washington's post-Soviet policy in Central Asia leads to the conclusion that Washington is not capable of realizing such an expensive and long-term project.

Commenting on Mihai Ion Pacepa's recent National Review article Russian Footprints, JR Nyquist observes that the wishful thinking of Western governments regarding Moscow's aims and intentions in the "post-Communist" era has its dangers:

Unfortunately, a bad situation doesn’t go away because you refuse to believe in it. Russia has been working against America in the Middle East for many decades. As KGB Gen. Yury Andropov explained to Pacepa, the Muslim world was a petri dish in which the Russians might “nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought.” You merely combine Islam with class struggle and you get the Iranian Revolution proclaiming America as the “Great Satan.” According to Pacepa, “The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.” The idea that America and Israel form a fascist/imperialist bloc is an old Soviet construct. It is straight from Stalin’s playbook. The Kremlin’s plan would work, according to Pacepa, because Islam “would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.”

Moscow’s anti-Jewish propaganda has so succeeded that a frightening percentage of Americans have fallen for it. What must be understood, first and foremost, by all those who fret over the wickedness of America and Israel, is that the very terms that have come into fashion today originated in the think tanks of the world’s most infamous criminal regime – not as an honest attempt to understand international events, but as a psychological warfare operation codenamed “Zionist Governments” (Sionistskiye Gosudarvstva). If the United States were portrayed as a “Jewish fiefdom,” the Arab world would stop thinking of the threat from Moscow. All eyes would be narrowed in the direction of Washington. According to Pacepa, the KGB ordered its sister agencies in the satellite countries to “export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world.”

The disinformation campaign against Israel and the United States has spread, like an infection, throughout the world. It is now found everywhere, not merely in the Middle East. Old Nazi lies, thought to be dead, are now presented as fresh news. Americans and Europeans no longer remember the past, and don’t realize that history is now repeating itself. Only this time the envisioned holocaust isn’t merely for the Jews, but for Americans. “We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds,” wrote Pacepa, “because we knew we could not win any military battles.” But once you have conquered billions of minds, the military battles are yours without argument.

Those who see in Russia a weak economic power have not considered the equalizing potential of clandestine networks, psychological warfare, strategically organized corruption and blackmail, and nuclear terrorism. Moscow’s combination play could prove deadly. No effective counter-strategy is likely to emerge from Washington because a regime predicated on economic optimism cannot acknowledge the truth, cannot accept the negative implications of ongoing Russian enmity. The Cold War never ended. The nuclear arms race continues – while America falls behind. The first nuclear blows are being set up, and we are led to believe that Arab terrorists will be responsible. The U.S. economy is ready to topple. All one needs is a little (or a big) push.

Read it all.

Via RFE/RL:

PRAGUE, September 2, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- The Moscow-based rights group Sova today said that at least two people have been killed in clashes between ethnic Russians and Chechens in the northern city of Kondopoga.

Sova director Aleksandr Vekhorovsky said the deaths occurred earlier in the week when a fight broke out at a Chechen restaurant in Kondopoga, located in Russia's Karelia region.

Kondopoga police have confirmed that two people were killed and several wounded in a fight on August 30.

After the incident, Vekhorovsky said anti-immigrant groups called on Russian nationalists to come to the city.

Vekhorovsky said dozens -- possibly hundreds -- of nationalists came to Kondopoga. On September 1, he says groups of them attacked the Chechen restaurant with metal bars and gasoline bombs and fought with police.

The Pravdabeslana.ru (Truth of Beslan) website has a gallery of photographs of Beslan's School No. 1. The photographs were taken in May 2006.

 

As British police continue raids in London and the suburbs - latest reports describe around 100 police surrounding and searching an Islamic school near Crowborough, East Sussex - Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police anti-terror branch, has spoken of  "thousands of suspects":

The threat from homegrown terrorism is increasing in Britain, he told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast Sept. 3, an advance transcript said.

"What we've learnt since 9/11 is that the threat is not something that's simply coming from overseas into the United Kingdom," Clarke said. "What we've learned, and what we've seen all too graphically and all too murderously, is that we have a threat which is being generated here within the United Kingdom."

RFE/RL reports that Moscow authorities have turned down a request by Russian human rights activists to hold a rally in Moscow to commemorate the second anniversary of the Beslan tragedy:

The rally was planned for September 3 on Moscow's Lubyanka Square, but rights activists said authorities told them no rallies to mark the anniversary would be authorized in Moscow.

Svetlana Gannushkina, the leader of the rights group Civic Assistance, told RFE/RL that she believes the authorities did not sanction the rally to avoid drawing the public's attention to what she describes at the official investigation's failure to reach "objective conclusions."

"The authorities are not interested in letting people speak a lot and speak loudly about Beslan now," she said.

Elsewhere in Russia commemorations have taken place, including at Beslan itself.