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Oud 11 oktober 2004, 18:11   #1
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Putin the poodle
John Laughland says that the Russian President has adopted an attitude of appeasement in the face of relentless US expansion Under communism, the ‘open letter’ was a device by which political hacks publicly advocated certain policies. The party hierarchy was then usually only too happy to comply, as happened when the 1968 ‘Letter to Brezhnev’ from a group of Czechoslovak commies begged Soviet tanks to crush the counter-revolution in Prague. The historical resonance was therefore piquant, although presumably unintended, when last week a hundred Western politicians and ‘intellectuals’ published just such a missive, addressed to the heads of state and government of the EU and Nato. In it, they attacked the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, saying that his authoritarian behaviour rendered impossible any true partnership between Russia and Western democracies.

These assorted members of the New World Order foreign policy apparat — from Václav Havel and Richard Holbrooke to Glenys Kinnock and William Kristol — complain that Vladimir Putin is exploiting the Beslan massacre to undermine democracy in Russia, and that he is adopting ‘a threatening attitude towards Russia’s neighbours’. Oddly enough, their views mirror exactly those expressed by Colin Powell on 14 September: the supposedly dovish Secretary of State waited for just over one tasteful week after the Beslan massacre before berating Putin for rolling back democracy and instructing him to negotiate a political solution with the Chechen ‘rebels’. The rules of the ‘global war on terror’ evidently do not apply to the Russians after all.

The days seem long past when, in 2001, President Bush ‘looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes’ and saw a man he could trust. But then he was right. Ever since Putin came to power on New Year’s Eve 1999, he has been the very opposite of a dictator or an imperialist. He has preferred instead to adopt an attitude of appeasement in the face of relentless US expansionism. During Putin’s presidency, Russia has been geopolitically weakened far beyond even the catastrophes inflicted under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and yet the so-called tyrant in the Kremlin has done absolutely nothing to stop it.

Since 2000, three former Soviet republics — the Baltic States — have joined Nato. This puts the West’s military arsenal within 40 miles — and a few seconds — of St Petersburg, because the Baltic States have never signed the 1990 CFE (Conventional Armed Forces in Europe) treaty which limits the movement of conventional forces in Europe. It also means that the major Russian naval base at Kaliningrad is now physically surrounded by Nato and EU states. Hundreds of US troops have also been installed in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, even though the Caucasus is geostrategically key and traditionally in the Russian sphere of influence. A US-controlled pipeline is soon to take oil from the Caspian Sea across Azerbaijan and Georgia, and both these countries are already on the fast track to join Nato itself. US military bases have also been created in two key former Soviet republics, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, part of a new archipelago of American bases in Central Asia.

In 2002, Washington told Moscow that it was walking out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty which forbids the development of anti-missile weapons systems; this will render the Russian nuclear deterrent useless. In April, Nato signed an agreement with Kiev, the historic birthplace of the Russian nation, which clears the way for Nato troops to enter Ukrainian territory without delay if the alliance so requires. American strategists working on the Black Sea region call for Russian troops to be pushed out of their last few remaining pockets abroad: in Ukraine; in nearby Transdnistria, between Ukraine and Moldova; and in Abkhazia in western Georgia. To top it all, in April the CIA published a report which predicted — and many Russians think encouraged — the break-up of Russia herself, with oil-rich Siberia conveniently escaping Moscow’s control.

Since 2000, moreover, the West has either organised or approved the overthrow, by various means, of the heads of state of Yugoslavia, Lithuania and Georgia, in all cases strengthening Western and weakening Russian influence. All across the territory of the former Soviet Union, and in Russia itself, the West pays for numerous pro-Western non-governmental organisations, media outlets and ‘independent’ politicians to harass elected governments. And it has added insult to injury by encouraging post-Soviet states to humiliate their indigenous Russian minorities: in September Latvia, an EU and Nato member state, started to dismantle minority language-teaching in state schools, a policy which many Latvian Russians believe is intended to drive them out of the country.

This Western policy has met with little but the occasional protest from Mr Putin’s ministers. On occasions, they have actively collaborated with it. In November 2003 Igor Ivanov, the former foreign minister, helped the Americans to engineer the overthrow of President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia, who was replaced by an even more grotesque Western puppet than he, Mikhail Saakashvili. Russia helped the Americans defeat the Taleban in 2001 by encouraging the pro-Russian Northern Alliance to do their dirty work in Afghanistan. And far from Russia using her energy resources to exercise any kind of geopolitical leverage on Western Europe, as the hundred grandees seem to imply, the only country from which Russian gas supplies have ever been cut off is Belarus, the most pro-Russian state among all the former Soviet republics.

In support of the charge that Putin has muzzled the media, the Russian president’s enemies cite the sacking of the editor of a national daily, Izvestiya, for publishing inappropriate photographs of Beslan. But they do not say Britain is a dictatorship, in which Piers Morgan, Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies have all lost their jobs. In fact, the worst attack on a journalist in Russia came last July when Paul Klebnikov was shot dead in the streets of Moscow: he was known as a harsh critic of both Boris Berezovsky, the exiled anti-Putin oligarch, and of the Chechen rebels. And perhaps I blinked, but I don’t recall the grandees who now attack Putin for increasing the power of the Russian state having criticised either the creation of the US Department of Homeland Security post 9/11 or, for that matter, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The key to these double standards lies, quite simply, in oil. The letter writers, like other strategists, refer obliquely to Russia’s supposed ‘threat to Europe’s energy security’ and several of them actually work for Yukos, the oil company owned by the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who also funds Mr Putin’s political opponents in Russia. American oil companies, including those with links to members of the Bush administration, are at present trying to buy up controlling stakes in Lukoil: with oil at $50 a barrel and rising, the neocons’ original plan to drive the price down by pumping out huge quantities from Iraq is in tatters, and so American strategy is now to gain influence over Russian oil production. Putin’s problem is not that he has resisted the West, but that the West’s appetite for servility grows with the feeding.

John Laughland is a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group, www.oscewatch.org



Tijd voor Vlaanderen om eens van zich te laten horen
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Oud 11 oktober 2004, 21:13   #2
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Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door C uit W

Tijd voor Vlaanderen om eens van zich te laten horen
Welke waardevolle inbreng zou een dwergstaat als Vlaanderen kunnen leveren in deze kwestie?
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Oud 13 oktober 2004, 13:59   #3
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Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Phrea|K
Welke waardevolle inbreng zou een dwergstaat als Vlaanderen kunnen leveren in deze kwestie?
Ah, het individu is heilig, en 6 miljoen mensen zijn quantité négligable?
Waarom waren de Russen in 1830 zo bezorgd om ons (we waren met nog minder)?
En waarom houden ze zich dan zo bezig met zegge en schrijve 5,5 miljoen Georgiërs?
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Oud 8 november 2004, 22:05   #4
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Citaat:
Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door C uit W
Ah, het individu is heilig, en 6 miljoen mensen zijn quantité négligable?
Waarom waren de Russen in 1830 zo bezorgd om ons (we waren met nog minder)?
En waarom houden ze zich dan zo bezig met zegge en schrijve 5,5 miljoen Georgiërs?
1) Omdat "wij" met de Belgische afscheiding toen de eerste significante breuk (samen met de Franse julirevolutie) in de akkoorden van Wenen vormden, akkoorden waar Rusland zich als kampioen van de reactionaire machten als voornaamste verdediger had opgeworpen.
2) Omdat die Georgiërs in hun achtertuin zitten tiens!
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Oud 9 november 2004, 20:16   #5
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Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door zorroaster
1) Omdat "wij" met de Belgische afscheiding toen de eerste significante breuk (samen met de Franse julirevolutie) in de akkoorden van Wenen vormden, akkoorden waar Rusland zich als kampioen van de reactionaire machten als voornaamste verdediger had opgeworpen.
2) Omdat die Georgiërs in hun achtertuin zitten tiens!
2 Keer juist, en 2 keer wordt dat 'dwergstatenargument' genegeerd, dus het is geen argument.

(Ik hoopte dat Phrea|K dit zelf ging posten )
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Oud 30 november 2004, 18:17   #6
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Deze past hier ook nog bij:
Citaat:

US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev
(Ian Traynor guardian - 26-11)




With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.

In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered.

Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.

In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.

US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.

In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.

In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.

Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.

There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organise the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organised exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.

The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.

In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organise mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.

If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.
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