Shame and Pride

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via MAK)

No Apology

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

(via Marius)

Power

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

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

Contrasts

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

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

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

[Walenciak] What does astonish you?

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

[Walenciak] The Caucasus, ethnic issues...

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

[Walenciak] Should we be surprised?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


(via Marius)

Strophes

STROPHES

by Joseph Brodsky


I

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


II

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


III

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


IV

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


V

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


VI

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


VII

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


VIII

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


IX

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


X

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


XI

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


XII

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



XIII

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


XIV

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


XV

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


XVI

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


XVII

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


XVIII

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


XIX

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


XX

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


XXI

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


XXII

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


XXIII

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


XXIV

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


XXV

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


XXVI

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


1978


(translated by David McDuff with the author)

Kavkaz Center Reopens

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

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

Police State

From a recent AP report:

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

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

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

The report notes that

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

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

The whole of the report can be read here.

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

Kristallnacht - III

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

What Is The KGB Interested In?

from Polish newspaper Fakt

19 Oct 2004 pages 2-3

By Magdalena Rubaj and Tomasz Pompowski:

"What Is the KGB Interested In?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Energy Sector

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

WSI

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

Banking Sector

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

Politicians

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

(via Marius, with thanks)

The Grand Inquisitor

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

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

Wretchard notes:

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

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

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

Sovietizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobilizing

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

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

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

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

And the mobilizing doesn't stop there:

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

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

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


(Hat tip: Marius)

Firefox

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

Ukrainian Election - III

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

The Moscow Times has a commentary.

(via Marius)

Kristallnacht - II

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

Appeasement

Garry Kasparov attacks Putin's appeasers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole article can be read here.

Trouble at the Top

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

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

13:41 10.11.04

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


THE TERRORISTS BROUGHT ALL THEIR WEAPONS WITH THEM

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

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

Izvestiya: What about the district policeman?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nikolai GRITCHIN, Stavropol

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

Through the Checkpoints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kristallnacht

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

Nettavisen has a report (my tr.):

Police turned away Jews

09.11.04 21:44

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the Switch

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

Appearances

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

Update 11/11/2004

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

Antecedents

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

Ukrainian Election - II

Anastasia Bezverkha
Civic Campaign PORA
____________
NEWS RELEASE

To: Domestic & Foreign News Agencies

6 November 2004 Kyiv, Ukraine

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

In brief the report states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



--
best regards,
Anastasia Bezverkha
Civic Campaign PORA

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

(via Chris & Laura Brown)

Freedom's Foes

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

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

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

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

Basayev - IX

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

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

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

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

Margins of Victory

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

Party Piece

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

Pure Bush
05.11.2004
[passage omitted]

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

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

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

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

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

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

(via Marius, with thanks)

The Party's Over

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


Tua Forsström (my tr.)

The Season

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

Algerian Salafism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukrainian Vote Count

Via RFE/RL

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

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

The Greatest Crime In History

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

Albert Camus, talking to Howard Mumma in The Wearied Existentialist

Yushchenko vs. Yanukovych

EDM reports that

YUSHCHENKO WINS FIRST ROUND OF UKRAINE'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

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

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

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

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

Geometry

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

- Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude

Postmodernism and Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

Ukrainian Election

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

(via RFE/RL)

Sakharov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Information wars

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

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

And on Kavkaz Center:

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

Read the whole post here.