Global Politician: Medvedev-Merkel duo have started campaign to excuse Stalin, Hitler
Adolf Hitler and Josef StalinAdolf Hitler and Josef Stalin
Yesterday, 22:28
Yuriy Syrotyuk writes: Ukraine’s leadership must remember that cowardly policies of ignoring threats, humbly accepting brutal invectives and hoping to “appease the aggressor”, be it Moscow or Berlin, will always lead to catastrophic results. Danger looms over Ukraine and the states unfriendly to us do not even think it necessary to hide this. The realization of this fact must unite the Ukrainian nation so that it will resist any violation of our sovereignty. Medvedev-Merkel duo begun a campaign of excusing Stalin and Hitler (link)
Japan and Russia have never signed a peace treaty over World War II. The reason for this is that there is a dispute over four islands off Hokkaido that were occupied by Soviet forces that were once in Japanese hands. A 1956 Japanese-Soviet joint declaration signed in Moscow stated that Shikotan island and the Habomai islets would be returned to Japan after a peace treaty was concluded between Japan and the Soviet Union.
The Japanese call the islands the ‘Northern Territories’ and the Russians call the islands the Southern Kurils.
Japan has rejected the Russian solution to the land dispute. Russia has offered that they would return two of the four islands seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Japan expects that all four will be returned. Japan has been flexible on the timing of the return of the islands and the recognition of Japanese sovereignty.
According to a 2006 report by the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic Studies, the “Northern Territories” problem is a multilaterally created bilateral problem. “Chapter II of the San Francisco Peace Treaty specified that Japan renounced Southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, but did not specify these territories’ recipient or their precise boundaries. The treaty was legitimized in a multilateral framework in being signed by forty-nine countries, but the signatories did not include the USSR.” According to the report, agreement to transfer Southern Sakhalin and the Kurils from Japan to the USSR was reached by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at their Yalta Conference in February 1945. When the parties saw that the San Francisco Treaty did not include clear boundary demarcations, the problem arose which led to there being no peace treaty between Russia and Japan.
In 1951, Prime Minister of Japan S. Yoshida, speaking at the Conference in San Francisco, stated:
… With respect to the Kuriles and South Sakhalin, I cannot yield to the claim of the Soviet Delegate that Japan had grabbed them by aggression.
At the time of the opening of Japan, her ownership of two islands of Etorofu and Kunashiri of the South Kuriles was not questioned at all by the Czarist government. But the North Kuriles north of Urruppu and the southern half of Sakhalin were areas open to both Japanese and Russian settlers. On May 7, 1875 the Japanese and Russian Governments effected through peaceful negotiations an arrangement under which South Sakhalin was made Russian territory, and the North Kuriles were in exchange made Japanese territory. But really, under the name of “exchange” Japan simply
ceded South Sakhalin to Russia in order to settle the territorial dispute. It was under the Treaty of Portsmouth of September 5, 1905 concluded through the intermediary of President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States that South Sakhalin became also Japanese territory.Both the Kuriles and South Sakhalin were taken unilaterally by the Soviet Union as of September 20, 1945, shortly after Japan’s surrender. Even the islands of Habomai and Shikotan, constituting part of Hokkaido, one of Japan’s four main islands, are still being occupied by Soviet forces simply because they happened to be garrisoned by Japanese troops at the time when the war ended.
The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR A.A. Gromyko, speaking at the Conference in San Francisco, stated:
“The rights of the Soviet Union to the southern part of the Sakhalin Island and all the islands adjacent to it, as well as to the Kurile Islands, which are at present under the sovereignty of the Soviet Union, are equally indisputable.
Thus, while resolving the territorial questions in connection with the preparation of a peace treaty with Japan, there should not be any lack of clarity if we are to proceed from the indisputable rights of states to territories which Japan got hold of by the force of arms…
Similarly, by attempting to violate grossly the sovereign rights of the Soviet Union regarding Southern Sakhalin and the islands adjacent to it, as well as the Kurile Islands already under the sovereignty of the Soviet Union, the draft also confines itself to a mere mention of the renunciation by Japan of rights, title and claims to these territories and makes no mention of the historic appurtenance of these territories and the indisputable obligation on the part of Japan to recognize the sovereignty of the Soviet Union over these parts of the territory of the USSR.
We do not speak of the fact that by introducing such proposals on territorial questions the United States and Great Britain, who at an appropriate time, signed the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations, as well as the Yalta Agreement, have taken the path of flagrant violation of obligations undertaken by them under these international agreements.”
The omission of text in the peace treaty that specifically stated that Japan acknowledged the sovereignty of the USSR over southern Sakhalin and the Kurils resulted in the Soviet Union’s delegation refusing to sign the San Francisco Peace Treaty.
Soon thereafter, the 1956 Joint Declaration of Japan and the USSR was signed on October 19, 1956 in Moscow and was ratified on December 7, 1956.
Not Quite Rapprochment
The disputed territory was discussed at the opening of Russia’s first liquefied natural gas plant. In February, OAO Gazprom opened the new plant on the Sakhalin Island. According to the Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, who attended, Russia is “building a window to Asia” and it will provide about 7% of Japan’s LNG
demand. He is the first Japanese Prime Minister to visit the island since World War II. According to the BBC, Mr. Aso and Mr. Medvedev spoke after the inauguration of the LNG plant and they have accelerated their efforts to resolve the territorial dispute without leaving it to future generations.
According to the Moscow Times, President Medvedev and Japanese Prime Minister Aso met on the sidelines of the Group of Eight meeting in L’Aquila, Italy. They exchanged views on the dispute of the Kuril Islands. They have “agreed to disagree.”
On June 11th, the lower house of the Japanese parliament amended a bill on what Japan calls the Northern Territories and declared the islands “historic territory of Japan.” Russia’s reaction and response at the time was disapproving. On July 3rd the upper house of the Japanese parliament approved that the four southern islands of the Kuril chain belong to Japan.
“These actions by Japan are out of place and unacceptable. It is well known that the South Kuril Islands legitimately went over to the Soviet Union and then to Russia on the basis of the results of World War II. Consequently, any ‘return’ of those territories has never been, is not, and cannot be considered,” the document said.
“It is a bewildering fact that Tokyo has recently decided to escalate its illegitimate territorial claims on Russia. First, unacceptable statements on ‘the illegal occupation of the South Kurils by Russia’ were made at the highest governmental level, and now Parliament is persistently voicing the objective of ‘returning’ them,” the statement continued.
“It has not gone unnoticed for Moscow that the further development of visa-exempt exchanges with Russians living on the islands and the ‘rejuvenation’ of the Japanese participants of the so-called ‘movement for the return of the northern territories’ have been named among ‘methods’ of achieving the goal of ‘the earliest possible return of the islands,’” it said.
“The fanning of territorial claims on Russia, with the attempt to tie visa-exempt exchanges between Russia and Japan to this, does not promote bilateral dialogue on signing a peace treaty and may impede contacts in the border regions of the two countries,” the statement said.
Prior to the parliamentary moves, political analyst Ekaterina Koldunova said that ownership of the Kuril Islands is an issue of strategic importance for Russia since it’s the country’s access to the Pacific Ocean.
Whether or not the Kuril Islands are as strategically important to Russia as the islands may have been a few decades ago has been a topic of discussion among other strategic experts.
Since, Russia’s State Duma responded to the parliamentary moves suggesting that the Japanese parliament disavow its decision in order to further talks on a peace agreement.
As recently as August 8th, Japan has been sending delegations to the islands under visa-free exchange programs. On August 8th, a delegation of 64 Japanese teachers and students visited Shikotan Island under a bilateral visa-free exchange program. In order to deepen mutual understanding between Japan and Russia toward a solution of the territorial dispute, the exchange program was launched in 1992.
Russia has interpreted the June parliamentary decision as a dangerous precedent in world politics and in the Asia-Pacific region and as a threat to Russia’s national security, according to Vladimir Kozin, an independent political analyst. Kozin also has said that from the Russian perspective the June parliamentary move has been
regarded as an attempt to redraw postwar borders already fixed by international law.
However, while the debate now seems to have shifted to be centered on the parliamentary decisions in Japan, whether both parties will ever try to achieve the conditions as set out in the 1956 Japanese-Soviet declaration in order to move forward on a peace treaty seems less probable at this point. So does the prospect of using the framework of international law. Should a problem that started in a multilateral framework be solved within another multilateral framework like the UN? Both countries are using domestic politics to assert their historical claims to the territory and are not looking for mutually acceptable solutions to the dispute. While Japan has been hoping for an official end to World War II by resolving the Kuril dispute, Russia has been for years emphasizing that stronger trade ties will normalize Japan-Russia relations.
Japan has since stated that there would be less economic cooperation in Russia’s Far East without progress in finding a solution to the territorial problem. Japanese Prime Minister Aso has expressed his frustration with the status quo by stating that “Japan cannot be satisfied with this situation. Unless Russia takes practical steps to sign a peace treaty, we will be unable to develop partner relations with it in the Asia-Pacific region.” The impact to both economies might not be deserving casualties.
Analysts have been considering how Aso’s clear-cut statement will affect Japanese business owners who might be willing to conduct business in Russia even without a political solution surrounding the Kuril Islands dispute.
Most recently, Federation Council of Russia Chairman Sergey Mironov arrived in Sakhalin Region on August 11th in order to get acquainted with the Kuril Islands and to get to know the social and economic situation in the region.
It has labeled the Japanese parliamentary initiative as “the most unfriendly gesture, which is insulting to the Russian people.”
Over the years, solutions as to how to resolve the territorial issue have included involving a third party, especially the United States, in the negotiations. Other solutions have included cooperative ways to share the land, a two island solution, and retaining the status quo.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus (L) with Russian Ambassador to the Czech Republic Alexei Fedotov on Jan. 7
Summary
A day after the Czech Republic expelled two Russian diplomats, Russia expelled two Czech diplomats Aug. 18. Such tit-for-tat expulsions are not uncommon, but the Czech Republic’s expulsion of the Russian diplomats likely is linked to Russian plans to undermine support for a U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) installation on Czech soil. Russia has proven before that it can influence public opinion abroad, and the Czech population is already divided over the U.S. BMD issue.
Analysis
Russia expelled two Czech diplomats Aug. 18, according to an announcement from a Russian official. This came in response to the Czech Republic’s expulsion of two Russian diplomats a day earlier. The Czech government accused the two Russian diplomats — one of them a deputy military attache — of spying for the Kremlin.
Such tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats are not uncommon, especially between Russia and European countries which still are home to a large number of Cold War-era “diplomats.” In the past few months alone, Russian diplomats allegedly involved in spying have been expelled by countries such as Ukraine, Estonia and the United Kingdom, and Moscow has promptly sent these countries’ diplomats back home in response.
But the occurrence in the Czech Republic is a bit more intriguing. According to STRATFOR sources, the Czechs are accusing the expelled Russian diplomats of working directly for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, with the goal of influencing public opinion against the construction of a U.S. radar facility on Czech soil. This radar facility is a key part of the United States’ controversial plan to develop a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Russia sees this plan as a strategic threat. Though Washington has said the BMD system is not meant to be used against Russia but to serve as a defense against rogue states like Iran, this provides little relief to Moscow. Russia is not as worried about the BMD system itself as it is about the associated U.S. boots on the ground.
Russia has proven over the years that it can be quite effective at masterminding grassroots movements abroad that are in line with its interests, such as the Russian-supported anti-nuclear movement in the West during the 1960s (which still maintains a level of support to this day). Moscow has also strongly asserted itself in the
former Soviet republics to maintain influence, promoting Russian interests via outlets such as religion and youth groups and other social movements. In a recent address, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev advocated the building of Russian “cultural centers” in Ukraine and referred to the two countries’ shared history and brotherhood.
Russia’s efforts to influence Czech public opinion — if that is in fact what the expelled diplomats were doing — are facilitated by the split among the Czech population over the BMD issue. A recent poll indicated that 68 percent of the population is against a BMD installation on Czech territory, with many seeing it as an unnecessarily provocative move. Furthermore, the Czech government is perennially fragile and divided. Former Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek’s government fell only months ago in the middle of the Czech Republic’s EU presidency. The current caretaker government of Prime Minister Jans Fischer remains just as unstable, and BMD plans are one of the most divisive issues.
The activity of alleged Russian spies in the Czech Republic suggests that Russia is still working in its own way to advance Moscow’s interests abroad. The Czech government’s weakness and the population’s division on the BMD issue make it easier for Moscow to influence the Czech anti-BMD movement rather effectively, and create a big headache for both Prague and Washington.
August 16, 10:22 PM · Joe D’Aquisto - Tucson World Travel Examiner
Russia’s NS 50 is the largest Icebreaker in the world.
Canada has recently begun Military exercises in the North Arctic region of their Country. This has been an ongoing discussion over the last few years. Canada, USA, Denmark, Norway and Russia are the only 5 countries that lay claim to regions of the Arctic. Due to global warming many of the ice caps and glaciers are melting and scientists believe there may be valuable natural resources such as minerals and even oil.
There has been a lot of speculation as to who will control the Arctic territory. Back in 2007 Russian explorers planted their flag on the seabed below the North Pole which caused a lot of ruckus and controversy among the other countries. Although this topic has been somewhat under the radar expect to see more coverage as time progresses and more ice starts to melt.
The Canadian Forces are attempting to show strength. The country’s military is not viewed as very powerful by most other nations and Denmark and Norway’s defense forces are significantly smaller than Russia’s or the United States. Denmark has just fewer than 23,000 active military members, Norway has around 27,000 and Canada is at right around 66,000. Russia has the 5th largest active duty military behind China, USA, India and North Korea. If you were to count active and inactive duty members, Russia would outnumber the United States.
Unlike Antarctica, which has a treaty that restricts territorial claims, there is no agreement on the Arctic region. So questions about drilling and territorial claims or even who would be responsible for environmental damage are very unclear.
Security expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org speculates that whoever has the best access to the Arctic region is most likely to control that area and right now it is Russia. Arctic sea ice is usually 1 to 3 meters up to (9 feet) thick. It is thickest during autumn and winter and shrinks during the spring and summer. Researchers have studied this for the past 50 years. It takes a special kind of ship called an “Icebreaker” to penetrate this ice. As of 2008, Russia reportedly had 6 Icebreaker boats, working to increase their fleet to 14. The USA has 2 that are worn out and very old. Russia also boasts of owning the world’s largest one, completing it in May of last year. These boats can take a long time to manufacture, up to 10 years. Canada has 2 active Icebreakers and has had this technology for over 100 years.
For more information on Icebreaker statistics navigate to:
Canada is also concerned by the melting of ice each year through their Northwest Passage area, again according to scientists to be the result of global warming. This passage area if melted could be a key area that links the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, providing a significant shipping route for the country.
For statistics on World Military population navigate to:
Alexei Nikonov (2nd left) and fellow members of the Russian punk rock group PTVP pose for a picture at a band rehearsal in St. Petersburg on August 10. Brashly shouting out his lyrics in crowded, smoky clubs, Nikonov zeroes in on provocative themes that most musicians here ignore — authoritarianism and injustice in today’s Russia.
Brashly shouting out his lyrics in crowded, smoky clubs, Alexei Nikonov zeroes in on provocative themes that most musicians here ignore — authoritarianism and injustice in today’s Russia.
Nikonov, the outspoken singer of Saint Petersburg-based punk rock band PTVP, saves much of his venom for Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, referring to him as a “pig” in one of his most strident songs.
“We live in a feudal society,” Nikonov fumed in a backstage interview before a recent concert. “Everything is decided by one person, the dictator. The dictator decides everything.”
This is not the sort of opinion one can find anymore on Russian television channels or most radio stations, where criticism of the government faded away after Putin became president in 2000.
Though Putin stepped down last year to become prime minister, he is still widely seen as Russia’s true ruler.
Meanwhile Russian rock music lost much of its rebellious spirit after being at the forefront of perestroika, the liberal reforms introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, musicians and critics say.
Ironically, some of the leading figures in 1980s rock now perform at patriotic concerts organised by the Kremlin.
But in Saint Petersburg, a city long seen as Russia’s “window to the West”, a handful of bands have defied the trend and continue to speak out.
They include PTVP, whose full name translates as “The Last Tanks in Paris,” and some veteran bands who complain of being marginalized on television and radio because of their politics.
“Most bands, for some reason, have become conformist and most music is just fun,” said Sergey Chernov, a music columnist for the St. Petersburg Times newspaper who has followed Russian rock since the 1980s.
“PTVP are unique in touching on political and social subjects. There are probably two or three well-known bands who do this.”
In 1981, when Saint Petersburg was called Leningrad, Communist authorities allowed the opening of the Soviet Union’s first legal rock-music club.
Though closely overseen by the KGB, the Leningrad Rock Club became the heart of a vibrant scene in which many bands inserted veiled protest messages into their songs, which won enormous popularity as perestroika anthems.
But with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the old censorship vanished and capitalism became the new master of Russia’s music industry.
The result was the “degradation” of Russian rock, said Mikhail Borzykin, the frontman of Televizor, a band which got its start in the Leningrad Rock Club and which is now one of Russia’s few politically outspoken rock groups.
“When it comes one’s position as a citizen, it has become unfashionable to express it openly. There is an attitude that politics should be separate from art,” Borzykin said.
The crushing of media freedom under Putin also had a devastating effect, as television and radio stations were taken over by Kremlin-friendly owners who feared the slightest hint of dissent, Borzykin said.
“All show-business managers are connected, through rent or other financial obligations, to officials,” he said.
“So they are very afraid of losing their small business by getting into any conflicts, even petty ones, with the authorities.”
Last year, Televizor — which means “Television” — got into a conflict with a Saint Petersburg television channel that asked them to do a live performance, then canceled it after reviewing the songs Borzykin planned to sing.
The channel said it was because the songs contained inappropriate words, but Borzykin called it political censorship.
For radically outspoken PTVP, which was founded in 1996 in the small town of Vyborg near Russia’s border with Finland, the problems are even worse.
Several times over the years, police rushed the stage and stopped concerts after Nikonov sang about Putin, and once in Vyborg he was hauled off to jail before being freed without charges, band members recalled.
“It is mostly provincial towns that are afraid,” Nikonov said.
The band is undoubtedly disrespectful to Putin, especially in its 2002 song “FSB Whore,” whose title refers to the KGB’s post-Soviet successor agency, which Putin once led.
The song’s lyrics are: “Don’t listen to anything! / He always lies to you! / Putin, Putin, Putin! / A pig will find filth everywhere!”
Whether due to censorship or simply the limited appeal of its raw punk rock, PTVP’s songs virtually never appear on television or radio. The band plays at clubs where it has a small but loyal following.
“They have a clear point of view on what’s happening in Russia today on the political front,” said Pavel Isakov, a young fan at the recent PTVP concert in Saint Petersburg.
“They have the right approach to this, the position that young people share, and not what the media like to promote.”
Russia to Build Berlin-Style Wall in Abkhazia, Georgia Says
August 17, 2009
By Helena BedwellRussia plans to build a “Berlin- style” wall along the de facto border between Georgia and its separatist region of Abkhazia, Georgia’s Foreign Ministry said.
“This once again proves that Russia’s real intention is to turn Abkhazia into a military outpost and to isolate the region from the rest of the world,” Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister Davit Jalaghania told reporters in the capital Tbilisi today.
Abkhaz Foreign Minister Sergei Shamba said planned improvements of border defenses “may involving building a wall in some areas that are considered dangerous.” The Abkhaz government is still demarcating the border, which runs along the Inguri River, Shamba said by telephone from the regional capital Sukhumi.
Russia routed Georgia’s U.S.-trained army in a five-day war last August over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Moscow later recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as sovereign states, a move condemned by the U.S. and many European countries. Russia has agreed to defend both regions’ borders.
Russia has deployed 1,700 soldiers in Abkhazia and will increase that number to 3,636 by the end of this year when renovations are completed at its military base in the region, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said on Aug. 12. The number of Russian military personnel stationed in South Ossetia is slightly smaller, Serdyukov said.
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Letters to the editor should be sent by fax to (7-495) 232-6529, by e-mail to oped@imedia.ru, or by post. The Moscow Times reserves the right to edit letters.
Rereading my recent Moscow Times columns, I find that their negative tone conveys a wrong impression. Actually, I believe that the decade since Vladimir Putin became prime minister has been Russia’s Golden Age. I’m eager to set the record straight — not only because it is August, often a calamitous month in Russia, but also because troubling signs, ranging from the worsening economic crisis to increasingly brazen political murders, are multiplying.
Over the past 10 years, Russia has prospered. Consumers have not had as wide a choice of goods and services — which they can also afford to buy — since 1913. Oil wealth may not have been divided equitably or used rationally, but money has trickled down, at least in Moscow.
By the standards of the recent past, Russians have been remarkably free. There are no limits on foreign travel, and everyone can maintain contacts with foreigners without fear. Aside from the main television channels, journalists can generally write whatever they wish and criticize and ridicule even topmost officials. There is religious freedom and no ideological line that artists and writers must toe. Access to the Internet remains unrestricted.
Until the war with Georgia, Russia had been at peace with its neighbors. It still respects post-Soviet borders, even though it lost historic territories and a large number of Russians are stranded in former Soviet republics.
All in all, the next generation may look back at the Putin era with nostalgia. However, it is precisely the root of the problem. First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov this year declared that Russia could become the world’s most attractive country to live in by 2020. His words deserve to be carved in stone, along with that fabulous declaration by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: “The current generation of the Soviet people will live under communism.”
Based on every parameter — from incomes, life expectancy and environmental protection to highway quality, corruption, crime and legal protection — Russia is actually one of the worst places to live, at least in Europe. In 10 years of oil-fed prosperity, it has become even less attractive in some ways. Ugly nationalist, illiberal and intolerant forces have become more vociferous, and nostalgia for putative Soviet greatness and revanchist dreams has come to the fore. Any regime change in today’s Russia is bound to be for the worse.
I recently spoke to an American businessman who praised Putin highly — if only because Putin has kept out some very angry people with very murky ideologies. However, the fact that those murky ideologies are on the rise is largely the fault of the Putin regime. At home, it opted for crony state capitalism, rewarding its inner circle by increasing the role of the state in the economy and rolling back liberal reforms. In foreign policy, Russia engaged in a low-grade confrontation with the West, accusing the United States of infringing on Russia’s spheres of influence and picking petty diplomatic squabbles with its neighbors.
Russia is living in a self-imposed international isolation and has an inefficient, nontransparent economy dominated by corrupt bureaucrats and well-connected clans. Shameless personal enrichment has become the sole preoccupation of its elites, who see themselves as temporary caretakers. Much like the Soviet Union, the system fears change and has no mechanism for changing peacefully. Unlike the Soviet Union, however, it offers no solidarity of equal poverty and no hope for a better future. Now, there are the haves and the have-nots and an every-man-for-himself mentality. It does not make for a pretty picture.
Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.
Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) — East Europe’s economies, most of which endured record output declines last quarter, look poised to start recovering from recession in the second half as key export markets in western Europe return to growth.
Industrial production contracted at a slower pace in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia in June, helping the Slovak and Czech economies to grow last quarter from the first three months of the year.
“These are definitely green shoots,” Raffaella Tenconi, a Prague-based economist at Wood & Co., said in a phone interview. “For 2010, there’s definitely mounting evidence that GDP projections will be revised upwards.”
Eastern Europe’s export-reliant economies need a western European recovery to revive their manufacturing sectors and spur job growth. After Germany and France exited their recessions last quarter, prospects have brightened for a resurgence of demand that might help the region’s emerging economies expand.
“We see a good chance that the economic decline has already bottomed out in the region,” said Laszlo Bencsik, Chief Financial Officer at OTP Bank Nyrt., the Hungarian lender with units in Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
The forint traded at 274.56 per euro at 9:24 a.m. in Budapest, from 271.84 late on Aug. 14. The zloty fell to 4.1927 per euro from 4.1453 and the koruna slipped to 25.772 against Europe’s common currency from 25.686.
Worst Over?
The second quarter may have been the worst for most of the region’s economies.
The Czech Republic on Aug. 14 said its output contracted at a record annual pace of 4.9 percent last quarter, after shrinking 3.9 percent in the previous three months. Romania on Aug. 13 reported an annual economic contraction of 8.8 percent in the second quarter after slumping 6.2 percent in the first three months. Hungary’s economy fell an annual 7.6 percent last quarter, after shrinking 6.7 percent in the first quarter.
In Slovakia, where output grew on the quarter, the economy contracted an annual 5.3 percent in the second quarter, compared with a 5.6 percent slump in the previous three months. Poland is the only eastern European country to have avoided a recession.
At the same time, the decline in Czech industrial output eased to 12.2 percent in June from 22.1 percent at the start of the quarter. Hungary’s industrial output fell an annual 18.8 percent in June, compared with 22.1 percent in May.
Growth
The Czech economy may grow 1.4 percent next year, according to a Bloomberg survey of 11 economists, with separate surveys forecasting economic expansion in Poland, Russia and Slovakia. Three of eight forecasters expect Hungary’s GDP to increase in 2010. The median forecast is for a 0.5 percent contraction.
Even so, the recovery may be slow, after recessions left most governments hampered by swollen budgets, forcing them to push through austerity measures that may hurt demand, said David Oxley, a London-based economist at Capital Economics.
Hungary, Latvia and Romania have the added burden of meeting budget deficit targets set by the International Monetary Fund, which provided emergency loans to the countries to help them finance their deficits.
“There are signs of easing though it’s still quite a grim economic picture overall for eastern Europe,” Oxley said in a phone interview. “It’s too early to talk about a return to sustained growth.”
Oxley forecasts quicker recovery for Poland and the Czech Republic and a protracted road back to growth for Hungary, Romania and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where he said budget constraints are tighter.
As the Lithuanian President Grybauskaite admitted the NATO has no plan a defence plan for the Baltic States. A custom NATO defence plan for the Baltic States could be expected no earlier than in two years time.
As the BNS writes, a small state has to consider a mixed model for its armed forces, not excluding a certain extent of conscription, Grybauskaite on 28 July told the press after receiving the oath of office of Lithuania’s new Army Chief Major General Arvydas Pocius.
“A little country can think and consider mixed options. Especially as NATO, as you are aware, doesn’t have a defence plan for this region, and won’t have one for another two years at the least,” Grybauskaite said.
The shape Lithuania’s army reserve could take on, i.e. whether this would require reinstating mandatory military training for Lithuania’s youth, is still the object of discussions, Grybauskaite said.
“I haven’t heard any specific proposals, meaning at this time I have nothing to discuss in this respect,” the president spoke.
The North Atlantic Alliance’s developments on a specific defence plan for the Baltic State are yet to be clearly formulated and communicated.
Lagos — Five Lithuanian sailors kidnapped off Nigerian coast have regained their freedom after 11 days under their ordeal, Baltic state’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Rolandas Kacinskas, announced on Friday.
“I can confirm that the kidnapped sailors are free and in good health,” Kacinskas told AFP.
The five men are due to return home within two to three days, he added. Beforehand, they are due to undergo medical checks and be questioned by Nigerian authorities. The Lithuanian-flagged refrigerator vessel, Saturnas, was attacked off Nigeria on August 3 by unidentified men.
The ship had a total crew of 14, all of them Lithuanian citizens. The attackers did not seize the vessel itself but left in a high-speed boat with the hostages.
No information about the captors or means used to win sailors’ release has been made public.
The Saturnas belongs to Lithuania’s Limarko Shipping Company, but like the government, the company had refused to comment on attempts to free its employees.
Last month, militants also freed six foreign crew members of a chemical tanker seized more than two weeks in the Niger Delta region.
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Marine biologists have been thrilled to hear of two porpoise sightings in the Baltic Sea in recent days. The blunt-snouted mammals, relatively common off Sweden’s west coast, have become almost extinct in the Baltic.
The Swedish Museum of Natural History is currently carrying out studies on the health, susceptibility to pollution, and genetics of the endangered species.
“To get two reports from the central Baltic in such a short space of time is fantastic,” said museum researcher Anna Roos in a statement.
“We generally just get the occasional report per year form the Baltic Sea and we now encourage anybody who spends time around the Baltic Sea area to keep an eye out for porpoises and report observations to us via our website,” she added.
The museum said the first of the two recent sightings was recorded south-east of Stora Fjärdholmen in the Stockholm archipelago. The second came a week later when a group of five to ten porpoises was spotted between the Söderarm and Tjärven lighthouses north-east of Norrtälje.
Porpoises are small-toothed whales and are related to dolphins. But, unlike dolphins, they can be hard to spot as they are quite shy and rarely leap out above the water’s surface.
Baltic Sea porpoises often die after becoming entangled in fishing nets and are listed as Critically Endangered.
Posted on : 2009-08-17 | Author : DPA
News Category : Europe
Riga - The presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania urged their people Monday to remember the events of 20 years ago that helped lead to the collapse of Communism. Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, Valdis Zatlers of Latvia and Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania released a joint statement calling on their citizens to take part in a Baltic unity run called “Heartbeats for the Baltics.”
As the Baltic states are currently experiencing the deepest recessions in the European Union, all three presidents stressed the need to revive the spirit of the “Baltic Way,” the name given to the human chain created on August 23, 1989, to call for the re- establishment of the three countries’ independence.
Some 2 million people participated in the original event, forming a 600-kilometre unbroken chain from Tallinn, through Riga, to Vilnius.
The Heartbeats for the Baltics event will see thousands of runners following the same route in a 24-hour relay race starting in Vilnius on August 22.
Estonian President Ilves said: “Let’s stay together in Estonia, and also with our friends in Latvia and Lithuania. I think that this run through three countries is a good idea which everyone should support.”
President Zatlers of Latvia spoke of “a new Baltic Way” that would “confirm unity,” while Lithuanian President Grybauskaite said it was “very important” to stand together.
“We can reduce the negative consequences of the recession, undertake greater responsibilities and be more courageous in dealing with the challenges of our age,” Grybauskaite said.
Besides the Heartbeats for the Baltics run, several other activities are planned to mark the occasion. Motorcylists will be riding the route in a parallel event, with flying clubs participating in an airborne version.
On August 23, the Karksi municipality from Estonia and the Nauksene municipality from Latvia will unveil a memorial for the 20th anniversary of the Baltic Way in the Lilli-Ungurin border crossing point, writes the National Broadcasting/LETA.
The monument depicts seven life-sized human figures cut from the metal wall, standing, hand-in-hand. The author of the monument is the Latvian artist Andris Dunkurs who works with metals.
On behalf of Estonia, the minister of foreign affairs Urmas Paet, professor Rein Taagepera and the Viljandi County People’s Front leader Arnold Kimber will give speeches at the opening ceremony. Tõnis Mägi, Ieva Akuratere and local performers will perform.
A symbolic Baltic Way chain will be formed with those who attend the ceremony and a folk party will follow the ceremony.
On August 23, the Karksi municipality from Estonia and the Nauksene municipality from Latvia will unveil a memorial for the 20th anniversary of the Baltic Way in the Lilli-Ungurin border crossing point, writes the National Broadcasting/LETA.
The monument depicts seven life-sized human figures cut from the metal wall, standing, hand-in-hand. The author of the monument is the Latvian artist Andris Dunkurs who works with metals.
On behalf of Estonia, the minister of foreign affairs Urmas Paet, professor Rein Taagepera and the Viljandi County People’s Front leader Arnold Kimber will give speeches at the opening ceremony. Tõnis Mägi, Ieva Akuratere and local performers will perform.
A symbolic Baltic Way chain will be formed with those who attend the ceremony and a folk party will follow the ceremony.
As of this Monday, the Russian Federal Agency for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Supervision introduces temporary restrictions on the imports of Lithuanian dairy products.
According to the site vesti.ru/LETA, four Lithuanian milk processing companies were banned from exporting milk, sour cream, curd and butter to Russia. The Russian veterinary service reported that these dairy products contained the prohibited antibiotic tetracycline.
Russian specialists intend to visit and inspect these Lithuanian companies in the short-run.
The Lithuanian State Food and Veterinary Service reacted to the document concerning the prohibition of exports which was presented by the Russian Federal Agency for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Supervision and inspected the companies.
Another nine companies have also been crossed out from the list of exporters due to non-compliance with Russia’s regulations: several meat processing companies, suppliers of fish and refrigeration products. A total of 110 Lithuanian milk processing companies export to Russia.
ARLINGTON, Va. – The Washington Capitals have hired Arturs Irbe as the organization’s goaltending coach, vice president and general manager George McPhee announced today. Irbe replaces Dave Prior, who recently resigned after 12 years with the club to spend more time with his family.
Irbe, 42, is a native of Riga, Latvia, and served as the goaltending coach for his hometown Dinamo Riga last season in the Kontinental Hockey League. He has also worked with the Latvian national team, which he represented in the 2002 and 2006 Olympics. Irbe is also a former teammate of Capitals’ assistant coach Dean Evason, as both players were with the San Jose Sharks from 1991-93.
Irbe native is a 13-year NHL veteran and played for San Jose, Dallas, Vancouver and Carolina. He played in 568 games and compiled a career record of 218-236-79 while appearing in two NHL All-Star Games (1994, 1999). His last NHL season was 2003-04, and he finished his NHL career with a 2.83 goals-against average and an .899 save percentage. Irbe played professionally in Europe after he left the NHL and retired completely after appearing in six games with Slovakia’s HK Nitra in 2006-07.
Irbe is fluent in English, Latvian, Russian and also speaks some German. He was selected in the 10th round, 196th overall, in the 1989 NHL Entry Draft by the Minnesota North Stars. He spent five years in the San Jose organization and made his NHL debut in the 1991-92 season when he appeared in 13 games. Irbe played in 74 games for the Sharks during 1993-94 and set an NHL record (since broken) by playing 4,412 minutes in the regular season. He spent the 1996-97 season with Dallas and the 1997-98 season with Vancouver before joining Carolina for the final six years of his career.
Irbe became a fixture in the Carolina net and played more than 50 games in each of his first four seasons with the Hurricanes. He registered career-best marks in GAA (2.22) and in save percentage (.923) during the 1998-99 season, his first with Carolina. He played a career high 77 games during the 2000-01 season and a year later he helped lead Carolina to the Stanley Cup final.
Afghan women queue in Kandahar on Aug. 1 to learn how to vote in the upcoming Afghan presidential election
Editor’s Note: The following is an internal STRATFOR document produced to provide high-level guidance to our analysts. This document is not a forecast, but rather a series of guidelines for understanding and evaluating events, as well as suggestions on areas for focus.
1. Peres’ meeting with Medvedev: Israeli President Shimon Peres will be making his way to Sochi this week to meet with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. In this particularly contentious geopolitical environment, the Russians and Israelis will have plenty to discuss. With pressure piling on Iran and U.S.-Russian negotiations unraveling, Israel will demand that Russia stay out of its Middle Eastern turf and refrain from providing critical weapons support to Iran. By the same token, the Russians will want guarantees from the Israelis that they won’t assist the United States in arming the Georgians and Ukrainians in the former Soviet periphery. Keep in mind that the Russians have already engaged in high-level visits to Turkey, Germany and Poland recently. Israel is yet another U.S. ally that the Russians need to keep close. Work the intelligence channels and see if the Israelis and Russians are able to see eye to eye on these security concerns.
2. Iran’s domestic political situation: Keep a close eye on the Iranian domestic scene this week. In an attempt to keep the protest fires alive and defame the regime, reformist leaders are pushing allegations that jailed Iranian protesters were raped and tortured, but the political figures that hold the real power, like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, appear to be backing down. Will the supreme leader be able to get his regime back in line with threats, or will it take a more forceful crackdown to silence the reformists? Signs of an intensified crackdown plus information we are getting on arms being smuggled to Iranian protesters could indicate more trouble ahead. We especially need to follow up on these rumors of arms shipments to see if Iran’s foreign adversaries — namely the United States and Saudi Arabia — are willing to go to such lengths to up the ante with Tehran.
3. Afghan elections: Afghanistan will be holding national elections Aug. 20. Incumbent President Hamid Karzai is still leading in the polls, but his opponents are starting to close in, which could lead to a run-off. The outcome of these elections is not that important — we expect the government to be just as fractured as before. Still, watch for any last-minute political deals in the lead-up to election day. We also need to closely monitor the Taliban attitude toward the polls. Some Taliban groupings in remote areas are making temporary peace deals with the government ahead of these elections, which could be indications of Kabul’s chances of success in Taliban negotiations after these elections are wrapped up.
4. U.S.-Colombian talks: A Colombian delegation will travel to the United States this weekend to put some of the finishing touches on an agreement to increase U.S. access to Colombian bases to compensate for the loss of an Ecuadorian base from which the United States conducts counternarcotics operations. Bogota and Washington are far closer allies than Quito and Washington, and U.S.-Colombian military cooperation by itself is established and routine. The single most important element of this development will be any shifts in mission focus and military objectives as the base of operations shifts from Ecuador to Colombia.
5. The European economy: Trade and construction statistics for the European Union are supposed to be released this week. Given the rather surprising increase in quarter-on-quarter gross domestic product growth for France and Germany that came to light this past week, we are going to need to drill down into these numbers to better determine how long it might take for the Europeans to pull out of this recession and address their underlying economic weaknesses.
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John Brennan, the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, last week approvingly recalled a key point in the speech Barack Obama delivered in Cairo in June: “America is not and never will be at war with Islam.” Unfortunately, that statement ignores the fact that the decision as to whether the United States is at war with anybody is not entirely up to our leadership or people. The real question is: Is ‘Islam’ at war with us?
It is certainly true that hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over are not seeking to wage war against the U.S. or other non-Muslim states. America has, as Brennan noted in his remarks before the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Aug. 6, a powerful interest in not making all those who practice Islam into our enemies.
Yet, it would be a grave mistake to construe the problem we face as Brennan proceeded to do in his speech at CSIS: “We are at war with al-Qaida which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda.” He described that agenda as seeking “to replace sovereign nations with a global caliphate.”
Unfortunately, that is the stated goal of all those who adhere to what authoritative Islam calls Shariah — a number that includes many millions of people the world over. Brennan’s speech made no reference to this wellspring of jihadism.
Of course, not all those who embrace Shariah are prepared to use terror against us. Shariah requires though that if its adherents do not actually engage in violent jihad, they must support it through financial or other means. After all, according to Shariah, the purpose of jihad is to bring about the triumph of Islam over the entire world. Shariah commands that the faithful must use violence where possible to advance that objective, and non-violent means where not.
By failing to recognize this justification and catalyst for the threat we face, Obama and his administration effectively foreclose the possibility of countering it effectively. Worse yet, in their understandable desire not to give gratuitous offense to Muslims, the U.S. government has repeatedly deferred to those who are most easily and most vocally offended.
Specifically, the latter — notably, the putatively non-violent, but virulently Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and its myriad front organizations — have come to dictate what our officials can and cannot say about the danger posed not just by al-Qaida and its “violent extremist allies,” but by all those who embrace the teachings, traditions, institutions, and dictates of what authoritative Islam defines as “mainstream”: Shariah.
This practice effectively disenfranchises American Muslims who reject this Shariah program — precisely the sorts of people we should most want to empower. Last week, I discussed this problem on our talk radio program with someone who is trying to do something about it: Rep. Sue Myrick of North Carolina.
To hear Gaffney’s interviews with Myrick and Sen. John Cornyn go here now.
As it happens, Myrick’s district is not far from where Daniel Patrick Boyd and other alleged “homegrown” jihadists were reportedly plotting attacks abroad, and possibly here. What is more, the financial sector so prominent in the Charlotte community she represents is also a prime target of one of the most insidious forms of what author Robert Spencer calls “stealth” jihad: Shariah-compliant finance.
Myrick, a co-founder of the House anti-terror caucus, recently convened a meeting to afford “moderate” Muslims an opportunity to interact with representatives of various federal law enforcement and other agencies responsible for securing this country. According to Myrick, some of the officials seemed to be discovering for the first time that there are practitioners of Islam who do not embrace the seditious tenets of Shariah — and who were extremely concerned about the government’s almost exclusive reliance on those who do.
Fortunately, decisions in federal court in recent weeks may produce some urgently needed policy course-corrections. Judge Laurence Zatkoff in the Eastern District of Michigan recently cleared the way for accelerated and wide-ranging discovery in connection with a suit brought by a Michigan Iraq war veteran, Kevin Murray, against the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. Murray is challenging on constitutional separation of church-and-state grounds the practice of a U.S. government-owned company, the insurance conglomerate AIG, promoting Shariah-compliant products.
It seems likely that the depositions that will now be taken by Murray’s legal team — securities litigator and Shariah expert David Yerushalmi and attorneys at the Thomas More Law Center, led by its director Richard Thompson — will shed important light on the federal government’s understanding of authoritative Islam’s seditious program. It may also reveal the extent to which U.S. officials have, with their failure to comprehend the true nature of the threat we face, acted, either wittingly or unwittingly, in ways that have enabled it to metastasize further.
Whether through the revelations of this law suit or through the work of influential legislators like Myrick, the time has come to recognize that even if we insist we are not at war with Islam, the authorities of Islam are at war with us. Only by so doing can we connect with and empower our natural allies in this war — Muslims who want to enjoy liberty in a Shariah-free America. And only by so doing, do we have a chance of prevailing.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times, and the host of the nationally syndicated Secure Freedom Radio.
Arguably one of the most memorable lines in Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical Caritas in Veritate (charity in truth) is that “a humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism.”
The tendency in today’s society to emancipate itself from God’s laws by denying his existence is a concern Benedict XVI has repeatedly expressed, even before he was elected Pope. He believes such an atheistic worldview is leading societies down a path that increasingly disrespects the dignity of all human life, whether it be in the form of abortion, euthanasia, or the destruction of human embryos in the name of science.
On Aug. 9, he returned again to the theme in front of a large crowd that had gathered to see him at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome. Referring to the examples of saints and martyrs, he said they showed through their actions the difference between “atheistic humanism and Christian humanism, between holiness and nihilism.”
The Pope drew particular attention to two Catholic saints: Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan priest, and Edith Stein, a Jew who became a Catholic nun. Both of them were martyred at Auschwitz — a camp that, he said, showed in stark terms the hellishness of a place that denies the existence of God. It was “an extreme symbol of evil,” the Pope said, “of the hell that comes to earth when man forgets God and when he is replaced, usurping from him the right to decide what is good and what is evil, to give life and take life.”
But the Pope warned this phenomenon isn’t confined to the Nazi death camp, nor is it a relic of the last century, but is an ever growing menace in today’s world. “On the one hand, there are philosophies and ideologies, but also on an increasing scale, ways of thinking and acting that extol the freedom of man as the only principle, as an alternative to God, and thus transform man into a god, whose system of behaviour is of an arbitrary nature,”
Benedict XVI explained, “On the other hand, we note the saints who, practicing the gospel of love, make reason of their hope, show the true face of God who is love, and at the same time, the true face of man, created in the image and likeness of God.”
Benedict XVI said he believed the examples of these saints “provide a credible and comprehensive answer to the human and spiritual questions which give rise to the deep crisis of the contemporary world: charity in truth.”
Towards the end of Caritas in Veritate, the Pope spelled out these arguments in greater detail, but no less succinctly. “Without God, man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is,” he wrote. “Man cannot bring about his own progress unaided, because by himself he cannot establish an authentic humanism. Only if we are aware of our calling, as individuals and as a community, to be part of God’s family as his sons and daughters, will we be able to generate a new vision and muster new energy in the service of a truly integral humanism.”
He added: “The greatest service to development, then, is a Christian humanism that enkindles charity and takes its lead from truth, accepting both as a lasting gift from God. Openness to God makes us open towards our brothers and sisters and towards an understanding of life as a joyful task to be accomplished in a spirit of solidarity.”
However, ideological rejection of God and an atheism of indifference, oblivious to the creator and at risk of becoming equally oblivious to human values, “constitute some of the chief obstacles to development today,” he said.
“A humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism. Only a humanism open to the absolute can guide us in the promotion and building of forms of social and civic life — structures, institutions, culture and ethos — without exposing us to the risk of becoming ensnared by the fashions of the moment.”
But the Pope doesn’t believe in imposing this view on others; to do so would contradict the essence of Christian humanism. Rather he takes an approach in keeping with his scholarly background: by appealing to reason. In his book “Without Roots”, published when he was a cardinal in 2004, Benedict wrote of his hope that debating the rationality of the church’s arguments could help “close the gap between secular ethics and religious ethics and found an ethics of reason that goes beyond such distinctions.”
It’s yet to be seen whether Western societies, particularly European ones, have ears to hear these arguments, or if they will increasingly prefer to continue along a destructive path that denies God’s existence.
But one thing’s for sure: Benedict XVI isn’t going to leave this issue anytime soon.
Pakistani soldiers look on from a mountain during a patrol in Dir on Aug. 3
Editor’s Note: The following is an internal STRATFOR document produced to provide high-level guidance to our analysts. This document is not a forecast, but rather a series of guidelines for understanding and evaluating events, as well as suggestions on areas for focus.
1. Militants in Pakistan: Baitullah Mehsud of Pakistan’s Tehrik-e-Taliban was the de facto leader of coalitions of militants opposing the rule of the Pakistani state, and his death heralds the beginning of a busy week in the South Asian state. Militants who are able will undoubtedly be launching retaliation strikes, while the United States and Pakistan will try to take advantage of the leadership vacuum and subsequent security holes to increase their attacks and exploit the intelligence opportunity at hand. Now that the United States has pulled the Mehsud thorn out of Islambad’s side, Washington will expect Islamabad to cooperate more with U.S. efforts to track down militants in Afghanistan as well. However, we are likely to see a giant gap re-emerge between U.S. and Pakistani policy as the Pakistanis seek to retain a sufficient number of militant assets across the border. Mehsud was responsible for granting sanctuary to many militants not only from Afghanistan, but also from further north in former Soviet Central Asia as well. A great many people may suddenly find themselves with the driving need to be elsewhere. And they are all armed. Keep track of the militant flow.
2. Iranian internal politics: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been inaugurated and now it is Cabinet selection time. Those who opposed his re-election are out for blood, and his Cabinet appointees will serve as targets of opportunity. That will be the noise. The substance will be the seemingly deteriorating relationship between Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and what key players like Expediency Council Chairman Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani are doing to contain the president. Watch the news for the fluff, but the real story is what is going on among these men.
3. China and Namibia: Between Aug. 11 and Aug. 14, a Namibian court is expected to hear bail applications and make a ruling on whether to release frozen assets for three defendants involved in the corruption case against Chinese-owned Nuctech, which is linked to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s son, Hu Haifeng. There is not much to watch for apart from the actual sentencing, but this case has brought corruption charges close to the Chinese president at a time when the Chinese government is undertaking major anti-corruption measures to boost public confidence and stave off social dissatisfaction.
4. Tensions between Russia and Georgia: Aug. 8 is the anniversary of the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. So far there are no signs of the mass civilian evacuations that immediately preceded the 2008 conflict, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to take it easy. There are many reasons the Russians might want an easy war right now. Watch not only for population movements, but also the disposition of Russian-allied Chechen forces. There are 40,000 troops in Chechnya and Ingushetia, and many likely would be used in any new conflict.
5. NAFTA summit: The leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United States will meet Aug. 9-10. We have no reason to expect any major outcomes from the summit, but whenever the leaders of three of the world’s most powerful states meet it is worth keeping an eye open.
6. Russia’s meeting schedule: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met this week with the Turkish leadership, and in the coming week Russian President Dmitri Medvedev will meet with the leaders of Finland and Germany. Russia is trying to secure the neutrality of these three states in the brewing fights he expects with the Americans. All three states are leaning toward neutrality (albeit for radically different reasons). Obviously we need to watch the meetings and gather what intelligence we can, but we also need to watch the partners of the states closest to these three — the United States, the Swedes and the French. They will be the ones most immediately interested in the outcomes of these meetings.
7. European economics: Germany releases its second-quarter growth figures this week. Right now the “hope” is to have the economy shrink by “only” 6 percent this year. This figure will tell us just how dark it is going to be before the dawn — or before it gets pitch black. Moreover, with German elections fast approaching, the statistics could give a last minute boost — or a last minute snag — to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A Pakistani tribal militia gathers at a military camp in the northern Swat Valley on Aug. 6
Summary
The death of Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has set off a scramble to succeed him, with at least one potential replacement reportedly killed in an intra-Taliban power struggle. The Pakistani government will now be able to exploit its opportunity to further split the Taliban command structure.
Analysis
The struggle over the leadership of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) -– the leading Taliban faction in Pakistan -– hit a fever pitch Aug. 8 as rival leaders clashed in a meeting called to decide who would succeed now-deceased TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud. STRATFOR sources in Pakistan are reporting that at least one — and possibly more — of Mehsud’s potential successors has already been killed in these clashes.
Baitullah Mehsud was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike Aug. 5 in South Waziristan. Mehsud, along with his second wife and seven to eight body guards, was asleep on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house when the drone struck at around 3 a.m. local time, according to a Pakistani security source. One of the leading contenders for Mehsud’s position, Hakeemullah Mehsud, gave an interview to the BBC’s Urdu service Aug. 8 in which he denied the reports that Baitullah Mehsud was killed. It appears now that Hakeemullah likely gave that interview to buy the TTP some time to designate a new leader, or perhaps to help his own chances to succeed Mehsud.
But choosing a new leader to command the TTP has proven to be a deadly undertaking. Immediately after the drone strike, the Pakistani Taliban in the Zangara area of South Waziristan reportedly locked down a five-kilometer security perimeter and cut the telephone lines in an attempt to conceal the news of the TTP leader’s death. The Taliban leaders then launched a three-day majlis-e-shura, or leadership council meeting, in Laddah, South Waziristan to decide who would take Baitullah Mehsud’s place.
Hakeemullah Mehsud is perhaps the most prominent among the list of successors. He started out as the TTP leader’s driver and then rose in stature to command three out of seven of the tribal agencies in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) -– Orakzai, Kurram and Khyber -– on behalf of Baitullah Mehsud. Though Hakeemullah is respected among many of his associates for his operational experience in these areas, he faces a number of rivals in South Waziristan where the TTP political leadership has been based.
Another leading contender is Wali-ur-Rehman, a cousin and deputy to Baitullah Mehsud from the Alizai Mehsud tribe. Unlike Hakeemullah, who is an operational commander, Wali-ur-Rehman is considered more of a political strategist for the TTP and is believed to have many supporters within the shura.
STRATFOR sources in Pakistan said that when the TTP senior leadership met to decide on Baitullah Mehsud’s successor, a fight broke out and the Taliban commanders started shooting at each other. Unconfirmed reports are now flooding in claiming that Hakeemullah, Wali-ur-Rehman and a third associate — Mufti Noor Wali — died in the fighting and now a little-known Taliban commander in Barwand — Azmat Ullah — has jumped up a few places in the succession line.
Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik has thus far said only one of the leaders has been killed. STRATFOR sources have also reported that drones were seen flying near the area where this shura was being held, which naturally heightened tensions and contributed to the clashes.
As expected, the death of Baitullah Mehsud has created an immense intelligence opportunity for Pakistani forces. Unlike their jihadist counterparts in Afghanistan, the Taliban node in Pakistan lacks a well-developed majlis-e-shura process, where tribal elders play a critical role in the organization’s decision making. Such political immaturity means that succession is far more likely to be decided by the barrel of the gun than any real deliberative process, which will only exacerbate the existing rifts within the Taliban. Moreover, the list of successors to Baitullah Mehsud are quite young (most, like Baitullah Mehsud, are in their 30s) and will struggle to command the respect necessary to bring the group back in line. Baitullah Mehsud had both the political acumen and operational experience to lead the TTP, but any individual prospective successor lacks this combination of skills.
Pakistan’s military and intelligence services are forging ahead to exploit this intelligence opportunity and widen the rifts amongst these Taliban factions. The Pakistani military already had deep reservations about extending a major offensive on the scale of Swat into the restive tribal agency of South Waziristan, but after the death of Baitullah Mehsud, such an offensive can perhaps be avoided. This is essentially an intelligence war now, where Islamabad can divide and conquer the TTP — the one Taliban organization that proved capable of launching suicide attacks beyond Pakistan’s northwest periphery and into the Pakistani urban interior.
With TTP commanders ready to spill blood over succession, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate has a number of inroads to penetrate the organization and fortify a tribal-militant front against the Taliban. The ISI has been building support through other tribal factions, including one led by Maulvi Nazir, who hails from the Wazir tribe in South Waziristan, and one by Hafiz Gul Bahadur of the Utmanzai tribe in North Waziristan, though Gul Bahadur in the weeks preceding Mehsud’s death had adopted a hostile attitude toward Islamabad, ordering a suicide attack against a military convoy in North Waziristan that killed nearly two dozen soldiers and officers.
Pakistani forces already put a major dent in the Taliban’s network in Mohmand and Bajaur agencies in the FATA prior to the Swat offensive in neighboring North-West Frontier Province. Baitullah Mehsud’s death in South Waziristan indicates that Pakistani intelligence has had major successes in the TTP’s home base. If Hakeemullah was one of the successors killed in the clashes, the Taliban’s operations in Kurram, Khyber and Orakzai, will also have taken a major hit. In other words, the Pakistani military is regaining the upper hand in the northern, southern and central parts of the volatile FATA region, which will make life much more difficult for the foreign fighters in al Qaeda hiding out in the area. A message from al Qaeda’s central command should be expected soon in an attempt to rebuild confidence, but it will be difficult to conceal the extent of damage that Baitullah Mehsud’s death has had on the Pakistani jihadist network.
Very few people in the West know what is going on inside the Muslim world and what it portends for them. The fact is that through the dominant media, such as CNN, Americans are subjected to much of the same misinformation with regard to Islam that I grew up with inside the Muslim world. The result is that Americans are in the dark attempting to formulate their strategy of how to defend themselves against the threat of terror, domestic jihad and Sharia. While Americans get ridiculed for being “Islamophobes,” the Muslim world itself is undergoing a huge and painful awakening.
For instance, a prominent Egyptian lawyer and women’s rights activist, Nagla Al Imam, recently announced her conversion to Christianity in Cairo, Egypt. The announcement brought shock waves in and beyond Egypt. This is perhaps the first case ever of its kind, where a Muslim woman, who is also a Sharia expert, has openly challenged Islamic apostasy laws from within the Muslim world.
Ms. Al Imam’s incredible courage was on display in an internet chat room, where she announced that she is not afraid, will stand up for the human rights of apostates and refuses to leave her homeland, Egypt. This was immediately followed by attacks and calls (‘fatwas’) for death of the 36 year-old graduate of Al Azhar Islamic University.
Egyptian media not only reported the threat but also participated in the attacks. Ms. Al Imam was literally entrapped by a TV station ‘Al Mihwar’ with the pretext of inviting her for an interview. Upon arrival to the TV studio she was told the show she was to appear on was cancelled. She was then taken forcibly to a room where she was held against her will for hours inside the studio. She was assaulted, threatened and insulted by several people. She was able to escape, and went to her internet chat room telling the world what happened and said she will demand protection from the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Such action is common not only against apostates but anyone who deviates from the dictates of Islam or demands reform. Many Muslim journalists, intellectuals and feminists who consider themselves Muslims but are critical of Sharia are often intimidated, threatened or even killed for the slightest independent views using the apostasy card to keep them quiet.
Another recent case in Egypt is that of a brilliant intellectual by the name of Sayed Mahmoud El Qemany. He was recently accused of apostasy even though he denied it on TV and insisted he is still a Muslim. But fatwas of death were immediately issued against him. Mr. El Qemany recently wrote the following:
“I was granted the State Award for Social Sciences, on June 25th 2009. The hard-line radical militant groups considered that the state has adopted this intellectual secular trend
officially, infuriating the mentioned group which called on the State to withdraw the prize with the declaration of my defection from Islam and excommunication which means in our country, I could be slain; any citizen is allowed to kill me and be awarded by God in Paradise. The following parties have participated in the statements of atonement:
1 - Al-Azhar Scholars Front headed by Yahya Ismail Habloush, which issued the first statement of atonement on July 10, 2009.
2 – The Islamic Group (condemned terrorist group) issued a statement of atonement on July 10, 2009.
3 - The Muslim Brotherhood hailed the atonement, and were presented at the parliament by Hamdi Hassan requesting the withdrawal of the award and the declaration of religious-defection and excommunication on July 7, 2009. The Muslim Brotherhood also declared my excommunication on Mohwar Channel on July 11, 2009 and on Al Faraeen Channel on July 13, 2009.
4 - The Salafi (Fundamentalist) Group (condemned terrorist group) dedicated its Internet site named “The Egyptians” for excommunicating me and incitements to kill me, since the date of obtaining the prize until today.
5 – Al Nas channel, which represents the theoretical side of bloody terrorism which declared excommunication and demanded “all citizens who can” to kill me immediately, on July 24 and 25, 2009.
6 - The Hisbah Sheikh Youssef Al Badri in Egypt declared on the channel “ON TV” on July 3, 2009 that I have cursed God and the Prophet Mohammad in my books even though I have challenged him and others to refer to a single text written by me where such claims were made. Due to this proclamation, he has issued an incitement to kill me.
7 - A member of the Al-Azhar scholars, Sheikh Mohammed El Berry, on Mihwar TV Channel on July 11, 2009 announced my atonement as he also said that he did not read any of my writings since he does not read “garbage”. He repeated the same words on the channel “ON TV” on July 22, 2009.
8 - Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the former Chairman of the “State Religious Affairs Advisory Board”, issued a statement declaring my infidelity and calling for slaying me for “insulting the Prophet of Islam, the God of Islam” on July 24, 2009.
9 - The Sheiks of more than 5000 mosques on Friday prayers on July 24, 2009 declared the incitement to kill me, especially in my hometown, which led to the rampage against my family and relatives, and that could possibly evolve to some serious consequences in the coming weeks.
Due to the above, I call upon the conscience of all humanity in the free world to come to me and my children’srescue by providing moral support and the condemnation and denunciation of the radical thinking with quick solutions to save us from the danger that is luring around us. This is a distress call to all bodies and individuals. A call to the consciences of every free individual in the world.
Signed: Sayed Mahmoud El Qemany- Researcher.”
In spite of the cover up, this is perhaps the first time in the history of Islam that Muslims finally have access to the truth about their own religion, thanks to the Internet and satellite dishes (invented by infidels). There are daily news reports of heart-broken Muslims who say they cannot believe what is written in Muslim scriptures and say that Muslims have been living under the greatest lie in human history. Others simply deny and say that it can’t be so. While Saudi Arabia is spending billions to Islamize the West, many Muslim prisoners of Islamic submission are dying or leaving the religion quietly.
The relatively few number of Muslims who dare to convert to Christianity do it in extreme secrecy. That is because the penalty for leaving Islam is death in all schools of Sharia, both Sunni and Shiite. Those who wrote Sharia centuries ago knew that keeping Muslims in total submission would be very difficult to maintain, and thus they established barbaric laws condemning Muslims to death for exercising their basic human rights to choose their own religion. Sharia never entrusted its enforcement only to the formal legal system. Islam promises heavenly rewards to individual Muslims who take the law into their own hands. Sharia also states that the killers of apostates and adulterers are not murderers and therefore are not to be punished. That is why, for Islam to achieve 100% compliance to Sharia enforcement, Muslim individuals are encouraged to take matters into their own hands.
The end result is a chaotic society where everything happens behind closed doors but at a very heavy price to interpersonal relationships. Fear and distrust of others exists in all Muslim societies. Muslims are not just distrustful of the West, but they are distrustful of one another. In Muslim society, people are often more afraid of their neighbors and family members than of the police. Thus, we see husbands or fathers pressured to apply Sharia by killing an adulterous wife or daughter, or a perfect stranger participate in the killing of an apostate in the public square. Very few get arrested or punished for such crimes across the Muslim world. The ingenious Sharia uses vigilante street justice to bring about Islamic submission. That is why civil unrest and honor crimes go wherever Islam goes. The power of Islam comes from turning Muslim against Muslim — with a reward in heaven.
The above two examples of Islamic tyranny are not unique to Egypt, but exist in all Muslim countries. Islamic tyranny is encapsulated in a law that some Muslims claim to be their religious right in America. Many American citizens who left Islam are living in constant fear from Islamist individuals and groups right here, in the land of the free and home of the brave. I am one of them.
MINSK, Belarus – Belarusian officials says that a massive statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin collapsed on a man who was hanging from it, killing him on the spot.
The Emergency Situations ministry said Monday that the 21-year-old man was drunk when he climbed onto the five-meter (16-feet)-high plaster monument early Monday and hung from its arm. It then broke into pieces and he was crushed.
The statue in the southeastern Belarus town of Uvarovichi was built in 1939.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is a staunch admirer of the Soviet Union, and the nation still has numerous Soviet-era monuments to the revolutionary leader.
MOSCOW — The Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, assailed his Ukrainian counterpart on Tuesday, blaming him for anti-Russian policies that he said had brought relations between the countries to “unprecedented lows.”
In a letter to Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, posted on the Kremlin Web site on Tuesday, Mr. Medvedev announced that Russia would not send its new ambassador to Ukraine as planned, “given the anti-Russian course of the Ukrainian leadership.”
Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, Volodymyr Khandogiy, said at a news conference in Kiev that the Foreign Ministry was disappointed by Mr. Medvedev’s decision to put off the arrival of Russia’s ambassador, the Interfax news agency reported.
Relations between Russia and Ukraine have ranged from turbulent to openly antagonistic since Mr. Yushchenko took power in 2005 after a bloodless uprising known as the Orange Revolution, ousting a political clan backed by Moscow and largely seen as corrupt.
In his letter, Mr. Medvedev said relations between Russia and Ukraine had reached their lowest levels since the Soviet Union collapsed. He lashed out at Mr. Yushchenko’s pro-Western policies, especially his efforts to seek NATO membership, which Russia views as a national security threat.
On a visit to Ukraine last month, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said the United States would continue to support Ukraine’s NATO bid, once again highlighting the issue, which is unpopular with many Ukrainians.
Mr. Medvedev expressed anger at Mr. Yushchenko’s suggestion that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet would be evicted from the Ukrainian port city of Sevastopol when its lease expired in 2017. He also dismissed as a “nationalistic interpretation” Mr. Yushchenko’s insistence that a famine that ravaged Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s was genocide against the Ukrainian people by Soviet authorities.
Mr. Medvedev’s most pointed criticism on Tuesday was in response to Mr. Yushchenko’s unequivocal support for the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, during Georgia’s brief war with Russia last August over South Ossetia, a separatist Georgian region.
“Kiev has adopted an openly anti-Russian position regarding the Saakashvili regime’s military attack on South Ossetia,” Mr. Medvedev wrote in his Web posting. “Ukrainian weapons killed peaceful citizens and Russian peacekeepers.”
Ukraine has never denied selling weapons to Georgia, claiming such sales complied with international law. The United States and Israel, among other countries, also have incensed Russian authorities by selling weapons to Georgia, and last month Mr. Medvedev said Russia would impose sanctions on any company still doing so.
Mr. Yushchenko has complained that the Kremlin has sought to limit Ukrainian sovereignty, in part by imposing costly economic blockades in response to perceived slights. In recent years, Moscow has placed embargoes on Ukrainian products like milk and meat. Moscow has also occasionally shut off the flow of natural gas through Ukraine, restricting energy supplies to Western Europe, which receives about 80 percent of its Russian gas through Ukraine.
Mr. Medvedev’s remarks seemed to indicate that the Kremlin would no longer be willing to work with Mr. Yushchenko, who is seeking re-election in a presidential vote in January. “Russia hopes that a new political leadership in Ukraine will be prepared to establish relations between our countries that in practice will address the real aspirations of our people and the interests of strengthening European security,” Mr. Medvedev said.
In Ukraine’s last presidential elections, which touched off the Orange Revolution, Moscow was criticized for its open support of Mr. Yushchenko’s main challenger, Viktor F. Yanukovich.
At that time, Mr. Yushchenko was a political hero in Ukraine, his face scarred by an unsolved poisoning attempt, for which he blamed Russia. Now his ratings are in the single digits, and Mr. Yanukovich is favored to win the election.
In a statement posted on his party’s Web site on Tuesday, Mr. Yanukovich said normal relations between the current administration in Ukraine and Russia were impossible. “The first thing we will do upon taking power will be to revive normal, neighborly, equal and mutually beneficial relations with our strategic partner, Russia,” he said.
August 11, 2009 by The Associated Press / KARINA IOFFEE (Associated Press Writer)
KUBINKA, Russia (AP) — Nikolai Kulikov, a 51-year-old Army officer, says bitterly that he gave his best years to the Russian Army.
Kulikov did a series of assignments across the Soviet Union and spent the past 10 years as head of security at the Air Force base in Kubinka, 40 miles west of Moscow.
But today, he is one of 200,000 military officers who face early retirement, as Russia conducts a sweeping reform that will eliminate the jobs of six out of every 10 members of its top-heavy officer corps.
The government says reducing the ranks of senior officers is just one of the changes needed to turn a behemoth institution of more than 1.1 million personnel into a modern army trained to fight terrorism and regional conflicts. But many in this army town say the reform doesn’t take people into consideration.
“When I entered the Army back in 1975, I thought I’d be given a certain kind of lifestyle, you know, stability, housing, status,” said Kulikov, sitting in the temporary two-room apartment he shares with his 23-year-old son. “But after two decades, I have nothing to show for it. This place is exactly the size of a jail cell.”
Kulikov has been waiting for a new apartment for 13 years, but claims he was removed from the waiting list several times because he angered his bosses. He also says corrupt officials are demanding $40,000 for his “free” apartment.
The reforms to the army were announced after Russia’s conflict with Georgia last year. Russia’s army was designed in the Soviet era to fight huge tank battles with NATO on the plains of Europe, and it had a surprisingly hard time crushing Georgia’s tiny, lightly-armed military. The Georgians shot down at least four Russian aircraft in five days, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin outraged.
Russia is not shrinking the size of its armed forces, the world’s fifth largest. As it reduces the number of senior officers, Moscow plans to increase military spending and promote or recruit more junior officers — molding a fighting force that more closely resembles that of the United States, among others.
Most critics of the restructuring recognize it is needed. But many here are worried about the backlash from in effect firing hundreds of thousands of officers at a time when the economy is shrinking and millions are unemployed.
To soften the blow, the military is offering its retired officers a pension of about $400 a month and a free apartment. But many say they’ve been waiting for permanent housing for years and no longer believe in the government they spent decades defending.
“I feel very disappointed and bitter,” said retired Col. Vyaslav Solyakov, 51, chainsmoking on the porch of the trailer his family has been living in since 2002. The trailer sits at the edge of a parking lot and is home to 12 families, who share two bathrooms and one kitchen. It was supposed to be temporary housing, but seven years later, they are still there.
“During the upheaval, they needed the Army to protect the country, but when we need the government, it’s not there,” said Solyakov.
Inside the trailer, the conditions are dire. Some rooms have mold on the wall, and most are only big enough to fit a bed and a small table.
“I feel totally betrayed,” said Solyakov’s wife, Nina. “On the weekends, when everyone is home, people have to stand in line to wash the dishes. It hurts to even think about it.”
Vyacheslav Solyakov retired last spring. But like thousands of other families, the couple has been in limbo, living in temporary housing provided by the military while awaiting a permanent apartment. They share a small room with their 13-year-old daughter, Valeria, where the walls shake from the washing machine next door. Their 32-year-old son, also in the Army, sleeps in the living room.
Military analysts say the reforms are painful, but necessary.
“The system we have is hugely inefficient,” said Aleksander Golts, a liberal commentator who frequently speaks on military issues. “We have two officers overseeing one soldier. It can’t continue.”
It’s not clear what kind of help the government will provide beyond the pensions and promised apartments. More than two dozen training centers have already been opened around the country, but what they can actually accomplish remains to be seen, Golts said. Many officers’ skills are outdated, making it a challenge to transition them into the civilian work force.
“What they really need to do is issue a one-time payment of 180,000 rubles ($6,000) to make sure people don’t starve in the first couple of months,” he said.
Retired military officers have staged protests throughout the country in recent months, saying the reform is not well thought out and will actually make the country more unstable.
Meanwhile, some younger officers are getting restless too. Their meager salaries — about $250 a month — are hardly enough to support a family on, making a civilian career more tempting.
“Why should I torture myself on this job when I can earn five times more in a civilian post?” said Vladimir, a 27-year-old airplane technician who declined to give his last name because he feared retribution from his superiors. “If I don’t get my free housing by the end of the year, I’m leaving.”
Associated Press Writers Douglas Birch and Volodya Isachenkov contributed to this report.
Teenage girls work on laptop computers while wating for a bus in Moscow
August 12, 2009
Siloviki vs. Cyberspace
Sovereign Democracy vs. Social Networking
The Vertical vs. The Horizontal
There’s been plenty of material on the tubes over the last week marking the ten-year anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
But the piece that really caught my eye was a commentary titled “Two Anniversaries” by Igor Yakovenko, which was published this week in “Yezhednevny Zhurnal.” (h/t to Paul Goble over at Window On Eurasia for this post that brought it to my attention.)
Yakovenko, the general secretary of the Russian Journalists’ Union, notes that Putin’s rise a decade ago coincided with the establishment of the blog Live Journal, which has since become a sounding board and platform for a wide range of political opinion and commentary. Live Journal’s appearance, Yakovenko argues, was the true beginning of the Internet era in Russia.
Over the past ten years, as Putin and his team siloviki have been painstakingly building their authoritarian power vertical, and justifying it with the ideology of sovereign democracy, Yakovenko says a quiet counter-revolution has been gathering steam below the decks:
Putin’s ‘vertical’ has cut itself off from the population by eliminating elections and erecting a border between itself and the population…a border much more effective than the state borders of the Russian Federation. As a result, the population has begun to build their lives and channels of communications independent of the authorities. They have begun to build their ‘horizontal.’
The building blocks of the horizontal have evolved over time — from Live Journal to Facebook to Twitter and Skype — allowing like-minded Russians to stay informed, network with each other, and remain plugged into a global culture.
Yakovenko says the horizontal’s battle against the vertical often “looks ridiculous” — like “David fighting Goliath or Guttenberg challenging the church’s monopoly on the truth.” But he adds that when the vertical looks at the horizontal “it always sees its imminent death.”
For most of the past decade, the Kremlin has concentrated most of its censorship efforts on controlling the macro narrative — meaning television — while largely leaving the Internet (and even a lot of print media) alone. Who cares if a few malcontents in Moscow vent their frustration online, they reasoned, as long as we control the airwaves — and the masses.
But the role Twitter and Facebook played in the recent Iranian and Moldovan elections appears to be causing a rethink. And the first big target seems to be Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services.
Late last month, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs warned that Skype and other foreign VoIP services are a threat to national security (and their corporate profits), in part because they are resistant to eavesdropping by the intelligence services:
Without government restrictions, IP telephony causes certain concerns about security. Most of the service operators working in Russia, such as Skype and Icq, are foreign. It is therefore necessary to protect the native companies in this sector.
There is little doubt that the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs was working hand-in-glove with the authorities. The union has established a working group with the ruling United Russia party to draft legislation to safeguard against the risks posed by Skype and other VoIP services.
With the economy tanking, living standards eroding, and citizens getting restless, the last thing the authorities need is a for people to be Skyping and Tweating their discontent until it snowballs into uncontrollable social unrest.
And in case efforts to prevent cyber-discontent from turning into street action fail, the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi recently announced plans to form militias, made up of disadvantaged teenagers armed with stun guns, to patrol Russia’s streets to quell potential unrest.
Vladimir Putin made his first visit to Abkhazia, Georgia’s breakaway region, and pledged massive spending to turn it into a Russian military fortress.
Mr Putin chose the first anniversary of the ceasefire that ended Russia’s war with Georgia to travel to Abkhazia’s capital, Sukhumi. He promised almost $500 million (£320 million) to build a military base and reinforce the de facto border with Georgia.
“Russia is going to deploy its armed forces in Abkhazia and take the necessary efforts to build a modern border guard system in co-operation with the relevant Abkhazian authorities. All these factors are serious guarantees of the security of Abkhazia and South Ossetia,” Mr Putin said.
He warned that Russia would defend Abkhazia against any attempt by Georgia to reclaim the territory by force. He said that a new conflict could not be ruled out as long as President Saakashvili of Georgia remained in office.
“Given today’s Georgian leadership it is impossible to exclude anything,” he told Abkhaz journalists.
“However, a repetition is going to be much more difficult for them this time… the events of August 2008 should teach them that talking only from a position of power is pointless.”
Georgia’s Foreign Ministry condemned the visit as a “provocation carried out quite in the tradition of Soviet special services”, a reference to Mr Putin’s past as a KGB agent.
Giorgi Kandelaki, deputy chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Georgia’s parliament, said that Mr Putin’s visit was ”an illegal crossing of Georgia’s borders, which is a crime”.
Russia recognised Abkhazia and Georgia’s other separatist region — South Ossetia — as independent states after the war last August, a decision condemned by the United States and the European Union. Only Nicaragua has followed the Kremlin’s lead and, technically, Mr Putin crossed Georgia’s border illegally to visit Abkhazia.
Such details were of no concern to Abkhazians who greeted the man they regard as a liberator. A group of mothers chanted “Putin is our guardian angel” as he laid flowers at a memorial to fighters killed in the war of 1992-93, when Abkhazia first broke away from Georgia’s control.
Mr Putin later toured a maternity hospital where he was introduced to twin boys who had been born 30 minutes earlier. Liana Achba, the head of the hospital, said that the babies would be named Vladimir and Dmitri in honour of the Prime Minister and President Medvedev.
“It’s up to the parents to decide,” Mr Putin answered.
He travelled to Sukhumi with Russia’s ministers for defence, transportation and regional development as well as officials from Russian Railways and the oil company Rosneft.
Mr Putin told Sergei Bagapsh, Abkhazia’s President: “This is not a random choice of colleagues who are present here today… large-scale joint operations are planned in virtually all the spheres that my colleagues represent.”
Rosneft later announced that it expected to develop oil fields off Abkhazia’s Black Sea coast. To Georgia’s fury, Abkhazia is also expected to provide building materials for projects in the nearby Russian city of Sochi, which is hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Mr Putin recalled that he had last visited Abkhazia as part of a student labour brigade in the Soviet holiday resort of Gagra. He said: “I earned what was in those times an enormous sum — 800 roubles. With the money I bought an overcoat which I wore for 15 years.”
His visit took place as Ukraine accused Russia of having “imperial complexes”. The row flared after Mr Medvedev attacked the “anti-Russian” policies of President Yushchenko of Ukraine.
Vera Ulyanchenko, Mr Yushchenko’s chief of staff, said that Russia’s leaders were trying to bully neighbouring states and constantly needed “the idea of a foreign enemy”.
Mr Medvedev attacked Mr Yushchenko’s support for Georgia in last year’s war, saying that Ukrainian weapons had killed Russian troops in South Ossetia. Ms Ulyanchenko said that the war was the result of a “policy of provocation” by Russia.
With Brockton’s St. Casimir Church slated to close later this month, the Rev. Stephen P. Zukas is poised to head one of the last remaining Lithuanian Catholic churches in New England: St. Peter Lithuanian Church in South Boston.
Parish closings have been personal as well as professional for Zukas:
His childhood parish, St. George Lithuanian Catholic Church in Norwood, closed in 2004. His father’s childhood parish, Immaculate Conception Lithuanian Church in Cambridge, closed in 2006, he said. His mother’s childhood parish, St. Casimir Church of Worcester, is slated for closure by the Diocese of Worcester next year, Zukas said.
Next summer, Zukas will be the only Lithuanian-speaking pastor of a Lithuanian church under age 80 in all of New England, he said.
“I try not to think about it too much because I find it a little intimidating,” he said.
Zukas said he plans to be involved in the final Masses at St. Casimir, as well as concelebrate the closing Mass, expected on June 29.
Beyond the church closings, Zukas said a shortage of priests will eventually affect his availability to serve the Lithuanian community exclusively.
He will always have fond memories of the Lithuanian events he attended in Brockton, he said.
“It was a way for the greater Lithuanian community to come together, enjoy each other’s presence and renew old friendships,” he said.
Once St. Casimir’s closes, “I’m going to do my best to reach out to those who have Lithuanian language needs,” he said.
PAINTING WAR AND PEACE: On Aug. 8, young protesters expressed their anti-war feelings by painting in front of the Russian embassy in Vilnius.
VILNIUS - The Lithuanian non-governmental organization Youth for Georgia held a protest demonstration on August 8, in front of the Russian embassy in Vilnius, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the five-day Russian-Georgian war. Some 80, mostly young protesters took part. They condemned continuing Russian occupation of some 20 percent of Georgia’s territory, where the states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both recognized only by Moscow were established as the result of the war.
Europe News Lithuania protests Russian “discrimination” against haulers By DPA
Aug 11, 2009, 12:12 GMT
Vilnius - Tensions between Lithuania and Russia rose Tuesday, as a growing number of Lithuanian truckers travelling through Latvia experienced delays at the Russian-Latvian border.
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vygaudas Usackas summoned Russian Ambassador Vladimir Chkhikvadze to complain about what he described as the unfair treatment of Lithuanian hauliers by Russian officials.
Last week, Usackas raised the question of the truckers’ difficulties with Igor Levitin, Russia’s minister of transport. Usackas claimed then that tightened customs control measures were being applied only to Lithuanian trucks.
‘The discrimination (against) Lithuanian road carriers does not correspond to the constructive and pragmatic relations between Lithuania and Russia,’ Usackas said in a press statement.
Usackas added that he had sent a letter of protest to the European Commission with a request to guarantee equal conditions for European Union road carriers and to guarantee that they are not discriminated against on the basis of their nationality.
The situation on the Latvian-Russian border, where queues this week have stretched around 12 kilometres, was ‘intolerable,’ Usackas said.
Chkhikvadze told local press after the meeting there was no political motive behind the build-up of traffic and said he expected the issue to be resolved at a Wednesday meeting in Moscow between Russian and Lithuanian customs officials.
‘Unfortunately, the current situation shows that there has not been such close cooperation (between border officials),’ he said.
Lithuanian trucks were being stopped because they had accounted for the greatest number of border crossing violations, he said.
Long lines of hauliers waiting to cross into Russia have become a regular phenomenon in recent years.
Lines can extend for up to 50 kilometres at the Terahova border crossing, with hauliers sometimes forced to wait more than a week to cross the European Union’s eastern border.
Many cite deliberate delaying tactics by Russian customs officials, and queues often display a remarkable capacity to build up and disappear just as quickly.
Industrial production in Latvia in June 2009, compared to May, increased by 1.4%, which is the fifth highest monthly increase in the European Union (EU), according to the latest data from Eurostat. Lithuania registered a 1.2% increase, whilst Estonia registered a 0.1% reduction.
Ireland registered the highest one month increase in industrial production – 9.3%, followed by the Netherlands – 2.1%, Poland – 1.7%, and Finland – 1.5%. Overall, industrial production in the EU decreased by 0.2% in June, compared to May, writes LETA.
Denmark registered the largest one month reduction in industrial production – 2.7%, followed by Italy – 1.2%, Bulgaria – 1.1% and Slovenia – 1%. Lithuania registered a 1.2% increase in industrial production in June, whilst Estonia registered a 0.1% reduction.
Compared to June of last year, industrial production in June 2009 decreased by 15.6% in the EU, and by 17% in the euro-zone. Estonia registered the largest yearly fall in industrial production – by 30.1%, followed by Slovenia – 22.2%, and Italy – by 21.9%. Only Ireland has been successful in increasing industrial production – by 2.6%.
This past June, compared to June 2008, Latvia registered a 18.5% reduction in industrial production, which was the seventh biggest fall in the EU.
VILNIUS - Training exercises for the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian members of the Baltic Battalion staff are to be conducted Aug. 4-6 in the Grand Duke Algirdas Mechanised Infantry Battalion in Lithuania, reports news agency ELTA. The training will be conducted around the Combat Readiness Plan 2009, to improve soldiers’ skills in planning and fulfilling the full range of NATO Response Force tasks. The Baltic Battalion personnel will focus on improvements to operational planning skills,
NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T: On July 30, President Dalia Grybauskaite says “no” to IMF help though The Financial Times tells a slightly different story.
VILNIUS - On July 30, newly elected Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite gave her first wide-ranging press conference in the presidential palace. She spoke in her usual tough style proving that Edward Lucas, a senior writer at The Economist, was right nicknaming her the ‘Steel Magnolia’ because of her tough character. Among other topics, Grybauskaite spoke about the International Monetary Fund, the building of a new nuclear plant in Ignalina, Guantanamo prisoners, and future foreign visits.
Apartment prices have decreased by 0.9% in the five major Lithuanian cities (Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipeda, Siauliai and Panevezys). For June 2009, prices of apartments in Lithuania decreased by 2.9%, shows the Lithuanian apartment price index (OHBI).
The OHBI fixed in June shows that prices of apartments decreased by 27.9% during the latest 12 months, which is the largest drop in prices over the entire history of the Lithuanian housing market.
For the period since the beginning of estimating the OHBI (in January, 1994) to December, 2007, when the highest price level for apartments was fixed, prices for apartments in the five largest Lithuanian cities increased 8 times.
Despite the economic depression, Estonia will continue preparing for extensive weapons procurement, writes the National Broadcasting/LETA.
In the next ten years, the country is planning to invest 60 billion kroons into developing the defence forces.
The minister of defence Jaak Aaviksoo noted that Estonia’s defence needs do not depend on whether the country is in the middle of a financial crisis or not.
In addition to the co-operation with its allies in ATO, Estonia prioritizes its intelligence and communications capacity and improving the efficiency of the anti-aircraft units. It is important also to reconstruct the armored units where one of the options is purchasing tanks.
Not all plans in the initial schemes seem realistic as they were approved in the beginning of the year. “The plan has been devised for the next ten years, but if we will not manage all of it in ten years, we will at least have a clear project and may take longer,” said the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces, Lieutenant General Ants Laaneots.
The minister of defence said that the most difficult matters concern procurements as global prices have not been affected by the economic depression. “Unfortunately, not all of the things that were initially planned to be purchased can be bought this year and perhaps also not next year, but initially we have postponed these procurements,” he explained.
Estonia’s plans require defence spending to rise to 2% of GDP next year already.
An expert of the Bank of Estonia stated that the deceleration of economic decline refers to a possibility that the lowest points of the cycle may have been reached, writes Postimees Online/LETA.
“Although in the year-on-year comparison, the economic decline in the second quarter was the highest, in the quarter-to-quarter comparison the decline has slowed down,” said the economist of the Bank of Estonia Peeter Luikmel.
“The fast decline in the volumes of industrial production that took place at the end of last year and in the beginning of this year has slowed down in the month-on-month comparison,” he noted, adding that exports volumes have not decreased during the past few months and the abrupt surge in the number of unemployed persons in the beginning of the year has slowed down.
“The expectations of the industrial sector and of households have also improved somewhat,” said Luikmel.
According to him, real GDP in Estonia in the first half of the year fell to the level it was at in the year 2005.
“The decline of economic activity in the second quarter is generally in compliance with the spring outlook compiled by the Bank of Estonia,” said Luikmel. He added that in order for the principal scenario of the outlook to become a reality, a slight improvement of the economic environment in the second half of the year in comparison to the first half should take place.
“At the same time, the lack of clarity in possible developments in the external environment is still great and hence one cannot rule out the possibility that the risk prognosis in the spring outlook of the Bank of Estonia might become the reality, if negative developments will take place,” added Luikmel.
In a flash estimation regarding the second-quarter GDP statistics in Estonia, Danske Bank on the other hand commented on Wednesday that the decline of 16.6% is a much better result than expected by the bank itself and a number of other analysts, writes Äripäev.ee/LETA.
“It seems that the bottom in economic decline has been reached,” noted the Baltic analyst of Danske BankVioleta Klyviene.Danske Bank expected Estonia’s economy to decline by 19.4% in the second quarter and the average estimation for the decline by analysts was that of 18%.
Danske Bank projects that in the second half of the year, Estonia will take a slight turn towards improvement, although the statistical comparative basis will also play an important role here.
According to Klyviene, stabilising developments have been displayed in retail trade in Estonia, but the volume of manufacturing has continued in a free-fall for several months already. Most sectors in the economy are in a decline and therefore the domestic demand outlook is rather negative.
For the entire year, Danske Bank predicts that the GDP decline in Estonia will this year be 13-15% and no remarkable recovery will be expected for the economy next year, either.
Klyviene stated that Estonian economy is in a better state than other Baltic economies, but the fast decline in GDP is putting increasing pressure on the State’s finances. Despite budget cuts, there is a great risk that the State budget deficit will this year be higher than the allowed 3%.
On September 6, 2009, it is planned to unveil a monument to the Lithuanian nation, language and Lithuania’s Millennium in the central square of Marijampole. The solemn monument was created by famous sculptor from Marijampole Kestutis Balciunas, reports ELTA/LETA.
The construction of the monument 19 meters high and weighting 300 tonnes started in the square in the end of March this year, when a capsule with a letter for future generations was installed into its foundation.
The monument is being erected on a quadrangle granite foundation, the corners of which symbolize four Lithuanian ethnographic regions – Aukstaitija (Highlands), Zemaitija (Samogitia), Dzukija and Suvalkija, the daily Draugas writes.
The monument is to cost about 2.5 million litas (723,960 euros). Part of this sum was granted by the Lithuanian Government, Marijampole Municipality also contributed considerably, however, almost 1 million litas (289,580 euros) is still lacking. The surnames of those contributors who donate over 1000 litas (290 euros) are to be immortalized on the monument.
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Officials say the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to hold Gitmo detainees.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists, combining military and civilian detention facilities at a single maximum-security prison.
Several senior U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as possible locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
The officials outlined the plans — the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama’s order to close the prison camp by Jan. 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil — on condition of anonymity because the options are under review.
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said Friday that no decisions have been made about the proposal. But the White House considers the courtroom-prison complex as the best among a series of bad options, an administration official said.
To the House of Representatives’ Republican leader, it’s an “ill-conceived plan” that would bring terrorists into the U.S. despite opposition by Congress and the American people. “The administration is going to face a severe public backlash unless it shelves this plan and goes back to the drawing board,” said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for Rep. John Boehner.
For months, government lawyers and senior officials at the Pentagon, Justice Department and the White House have struggled with how to close the internationally reviled U.S. Navy prison at Guantanamo.
Congress has blocked $80 million intended to bring the detainees to the United States. Lawmakers want the administration to say how it plans to make the moves without putting Americans at risk.
The facility would operate as a hybrid prison system jointly operated by the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
The administration’s plan, according to three government officials, calls for:
–Moving all the Guantanamo detainees to a single U.S. prison. The Justice Department has identified between 60 and 80 who could be prosecuted, either in military or federal criminal courts. The Pentagon would oversee the detainees who would face trial in military tribunals. The Bureau of Prisons, an arm of the Justice Department, would manage defendants in federal courts.
–Building a court facility within the prison site where military or criminal defendants would be tried. Doing so would create a single venue for almost all the criminal defendants, ending the need to transport them elsewhere in the U.S. for trial.
–Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.
–Building immigration detention cells for detainees ordered released by courts but still behind bars because countries are unwilling to take them.
Each proposal, according to experts in constitutional and national security law, faces legal and logistics problems.
Scott Silliman, director of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, called the proposal “totally unprecedented” and said he doubts the plan would work without Congress’ involvement because new laws probably would be needed. Otherwise, “we gain nothing — all we do is create a Guantanamo in Kansas or wherever,” Silliman said.
“You’ve got very strict jurisdictional issues on venue of a federal court. Why would you bring courts from all over the country to one facility, rather than having them prosecuted in the district where the courts sit?”
Legal experts said civilian trials held inside the prison could face jury-selection dilemmas in rural areas because of the limited number of potential jurors available.
One solution, Silliman said, would be to bring jurors from elsewhere. But that step, one official said, could also compromise security by opening up the prison to outsiders.
It is unclear whether victims — particularly survivors of Sept. 11 victims — would be allowed into the courtroom to watch the trials. Victims and family members have no assumed right under current law to attend military commissions, although the Pentagon does allow them to attend hearings at Guantanamo under a random selection process. That right is automatic in civilian federal courthouses.
“They’ll have to sort it out,” said Douglas Beloof, a professor at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, and an expert on crime victims’ rights. He said the new system “could create tension with victims who would protest.”
The officials said that another uncertainty remains how many Guantanamo detainees would end up housed in the hybrid prison.
As many as an estimated 170 of the detainees now at Guantanamo are unlikely to be prosecuted. Some are being held indefinitely because government officials do not want to take the chance of seeing them acquitted in a trial. The rest are considered candidates for release, but the U.S. cannot find foreign countries willing to take them. Almost all have yet to be charged with crimes.
Two senior U.S. officials said one option for the proposed hybrid prison would be to use the soon-to-be-shuttered Standish maximum-security state prison in northeast Michigan. The facility already has individual cells and ample security for detainees.
Getting the Standish prison ready for the detainees would be costly. One official estimated it would cost over $100 million for security and other building upgrades.
Several Michigan lawmakers, including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin and Rep. Bart Stupak, both Democrats, have said they would be open to moving detainees to Michigan as long as there is broad local support.
But the political support is not unanimous. Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee who is seeking his party’s nomination for governor next year, is against the idea.
Administration officials said the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth is under consideration because it is already a hardened high-security facility that could be further protected by the surrounding military base.
It’s not clear what would happen to the military’s inmates already being held there. Nearly half are members of the U.S. armed forces, and by law, cannot be housed with foreign prisoners.
Kansas’ Republican-dominated congressional delegation is dead set against moving Guantanamo detainees to Leavenworth. Residents told Sen. Pat Roberts at a town hall meeting in May that 95 percent of the local community opposes it.
Administration officials say they are determined to keep to Obama’s promise of closing Guantanamo in January as a worldwide example of America’s commitment to humane and just treatment of the detainees.
Glenn Sulmasy, an international law professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, said the prison-court complex will “be difficult, but it’s logical.”
“This is all based on closing Gitmo by 2010, which seems to be a priority, and if we are going to do it, we have to step up to the plate and find solutions to the conundrum we’re facing,” said Sulmasy, who agrees with the administration’s efforts. “And this seems to be the most pragmatic way ahead.”
WASHINGTON — A pair of nuclear-powered Russian attack submarines has been patrolling off the eastern seaboard of the United States in recent days, a rare mission that has raised concerns inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies about a more assertive stance by the Russian military.
The episode has echoes of the cold war era, when the United States and the Soviet Union regularly parked submarines off each other’s coasts to steal military secrets, track the movements of their underwater fleets — and be poised for war.
But the collapse of the Soviet Union all but eliminated the ability of the Russian Navy to operate far from home ports, making the current submarine patrols thousands of miles from Russia more surprising for military officials and defense policy experts.
“I don’t think they’ve put two first-line nuclear subs off the U.S. coast in about 15 years,” said Norman Polmar, a naval historian and submarine warfare expert.
The submarines are of the Akula class, a counterpart to the Los Angeles class attack subs of the United States Navy, and not one of the larger submarines that can launch intercontinental nuclear missiles.
According to Defense Department officials, one of the Russian submarines remained in international waters on Tuesday about 200 miles off the coast of the United States. The location of the second remained unclear. One senior official said the second submarine traveled south in recent days toward Cuba, while another senior official with access to reports on the surveillance mission said it had sailed away in a northerly direction.
The Pentagon and intelligence officials spoke anonymously to describe the effort to track the Russian submarines, which has not been publicly announced.
President Obama spoke by telephone with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia on Tuesday, but it was not clear whether the subject of the submarines came up, although another source of friction between the two countries did. Mr. Medvedev called Mr. Obama to wish him a happy birthday and the White House said the president used the opportunity to urge Russia to work through diplomatic channels to resolve rising tensions with Georgia.
The submarine patrols come as Moscow tries to shake off the embarrassment of the latest failed test of the Bulava missile, a long-range weapon that was test fired from a submarine in the Arctic on July 15. The failed missile test was the sixth since 2005, and some experts see Russia’s assertiveness elsewhere as a gambit by the military to prove its continued relevance.
“It’s the military trying to demonstrate that they are still a player in Russian political and economic matters,” Mr. Polmar said.
One of the submarines is the newer Akula II, officials said, which is quieter than the older variant and the most advanced in the Russian fleet. The Akula is capable of carrying torpedoes for attacking other submarines and surface vessels as well as missiles for striking targets on land and at sea.
Defense Department officials declined to speculate on which weapons might be aboard the two submarines.
While the submarines have not taken any provocative action beyond their presence outside territorial waters of the United States, officials expressed wariness over the Kremlin’s motivation for ordering such an unusual mission.
“Anytime the Russian Navy does something so out of the ordinary it is cause for worry,” said a senior Defense Department official who has been monitoring reports on the submarines’ activities.
The official said the Navy was able to track the submarines as they made their way through international waters off the American coastline. This can be done from aircraft, ships, underwater sensors or other submarines.
“We’ve known where they were, and we’re not concerned about our ability to track the subs,” the official added. “We’re concerned just because they are there.”
Once among the world’s most powerful forces, the Russian Navy now has very few ships regularly deployed on the open seas. Moscow has contributed warships to the international armada searching for Somali pirates. In addition, a flotilla of Russian warships participated in exercises with Venezuela last year.
MI5 is facing allegations that it mistakenly recruited Al Qaeda sympathizers who were trying to infiltrate the British secret service.
Patrick Mercer, a Conservative member of Parliament, is demanding a probe into claims six Muslims were thrown out of MI5 because of concerns about their past.
Two of the six allegedly attended Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan while the others had unexplained gaps of up to three months in their resumes.
Mercer, counter-terrorism sub-committee chairman, told Sky News that MI5 is believed to have detected two sympathizers at a “fairly early stage” of their secret service training.
The others allegedly did not make it through vetting procedures.
However, Mercer wants clarification on how successful the security services have been at detecting enemy infiltrators.
“This is exactly the sort of work that MI5, MI6 and the other security services should be up to,” he said. “Of course, they should be attracting recruits from all sorts of different backgrounds, diverse backgrounds. The fact remains, it is not without risks… a subversive organization that is worth its salt will, of course, try to infiltrate.”
A government spokesperson said the service “takes vetting very seriously.”
“All candidates are required to undergo the most comprehensive process of security vetting in the UK.”
Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein poses in Khartoum on June 13, 2009.
Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein poses in Khartoum on June 13, 2009.
A Sudanese journalist facing 40 lashes for wearing “indecent” trousers said she is willing to be whipped 40,000 times in an effort to bring attention to the country’s harsh laws, the AFP reported Monday.
Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein — an employee with the media department of the United Nations Mission in Sudan — will reportedly receive her punishment Tuesday after waiving the immunity granted to UN workers.
Article 152 of Sudanese law calls for 40 lashes for anyone “who commits an indecent act which violates public morality or wears indecent clothing.”
Sudanese authorities arrested Hussein and 12 other women for wearing trousers deemed inappropriate at a restaurant in Khartoum on July 3.
The two other women are also facing charges, according to the AFP.
“I’m ready for anything to happen. I’m absolutely not afraid of the verdict,” Hussein told the AFP.
“If I’m sentenced to be whipped, or to anything else, I will appeal. I will see it through to the end, to the constitutional court if necessary,” she said. “And if the constitutional court says the law is constitutional, I’m ready to be whipped not 40 but 40,000 times.”
Hussein told the news agency that her “main objective is to get rid of Article 152.” She said the article is “against both the constitution and sharia,” the Islamic law that governs northern Sudan.
MOSCOW — Russian troops in the breakaway province of South Ossetia have been put on increased combat readiness amid rising tensions on the de facto border with Georgia, according to officials.
Andrei Nesterenko, the spokesman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, said Tuesday the move was a response to Georgian “provocations” and meant to prevent more violence.
“The most important thing now is to prevent escalation and not to allow skirmishes to grow into bigger clashes,” Nesterenko said.
The situation near South Ossetia has become increasingly tense as the first anniversary of the Russian-Georgian war approaches Friday, with Georgia and Russia blaming each other for provocations and intentions to resume fighting.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called U.S. President Barack Obama late Tuesday “to wish him happy birthday,” and during the conversation the two leaders “discussed the situation in Georgia and the need to decrease tensions in the region,” the White House said in a statement.
Obama “reiterated the importance of working through established crisis management mechanisms such as the Joint Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism and underscored the need for international monitors,” the statement said.
The Kremlin said in a statement that Obama and Medvedev discussed the “lessons of last year’s Georgian crisis.” There was no elaboration.
Obama said during a recent summit in Moscow that Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected.
The August 2008 conflict erupted after escalating exchanges of fire between Georgia and Moscow-backed South Ossetian forces.
South Ossetia’s separatists and Georgian authorities have accused each other of firing guns and mortar rounds on several occasions over the past few days.
The separatist leader, Eduard Kokoity, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that “there is a danger that August 2008 will be repeated.”
“Today, Georgia’s military is more combat-ready and has a stronger potential” than during the run-up to last year’s conflict, Kokoity said.
In the latest incident, Monday night, South Ossetia’s separatist authorities said three mortar rounds were fired into South Ossetia from Georgian-controlled territory. Georgian authorities denied the claim and accused separatists of firing rocket-propelled grenades at a Georgian checkpoint near South Ossetia. No one was hurt.
The European Union said it was concerned about mutual accusations of shelling and other incidents, but added that EU monitors in Georgia had seen no evidence confirming them so far.
“The EU urges all sides to refrain from any statement or action that may lead to increased tensions at this particularly sensitive time,” the international organization said in a statement late Monday.
EU monitors are the only international ones remaining in Georgia, but they are blocked from traveling inside South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another breakaway region in Georgia.
An EU-brokered truce ended the five-day August war between Georgia and Russia. Russia sent in thousands of troops and tanks that routed the Georgian military and drove deep into Georgia.
Georgian authorities claimed they had to launch the artillery barrage on Tskhinvali, the provincial capital, because Russian troops had moved into South Ossetia hours earlier. Russian officials denied this, and claimed the country acted to protect its peacekeepers and civilians there.
After the war, Russia recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations and permanently deployed thousands of troops there.
The only other country to recognize the regions’ independence is Nicaragua.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said in an interview with France’s RTL radio broadcast Tuesday that there is a risk of a new conflict because Russia was putting constant pressure on Georgia. He said Georgia would not engage in conflict with Russia but would defend itself if necessary.
Meanwhile, a senior Russian diplomat voiced concern about what he said were U.S. plans to provide military assistance to Georgia.
“Washington is playing the key role in rearming the Georgian military machine,” Grigory Karasin, a deputy foreign minister, said in comments reported Tuesday by the Interfax agency. “It would be in the interests of Georgian democracy … to refuse to arm this country at all.”
South Ossetia’s Kokoity echoed Karasin’s sentiments, saying countries that arm Georgia “are responsible for any further (military) developments.”
On Tuesday, U.S. officials said that they have not ruled out providing defensive weapon systems for Georgia despite warnings by Russia.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow told lawmakers at a Senate hearing that U.S. military aid to Georgia was focused on training and modernization of Georgia’s military.
But he added that “other forms of assistance can take place. Nothing is off the table.”
Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon said at the same hearing that there “is no arms embargo on Georgia.”
The U.S. is discussing a Georgian request for $16 million in military aid this year, with most of the money intended for training and technical assistance. But Washington reacted coolly after Saakashvili told The Washington Post that Georgia was interested in acquiring heavy weapons for defensive purposes.
Madonna has been attacked by Roman Catholics in Poland for a decision to stage her Sticky and Sweet concert on an important feast day.
Published: 10:55AM BST 05 Aug 2009
Madonna has been attacked by Catholics in Poland for a decision to stage her Sticky and Sweet concert on an important feast day.
Religious leaders have said that the decision to hold the concert, at an old Warsaw airfield, on August 15 is “blasphemous” since it coincides with the Feast of the Assumption, the day Roman Catholics believe that the Virgin Mary was taken to Heaven.
August 15 is also the Armed Forces Day, a combination of a religious and patriotic festival, since the Virgin Mary is believed to have defended Poland first from invading Swedes in 1655 and then against the Soviet Army’s cavalry in 1920.
In August, Poland, which is generally considered to be the centre of European Catholicism, is awash with pilgrims.
But this year, the faithful are flocking to the centre of Warsaw to pray for God to prevent Madonna’s concert, and open-air masses are being planned to mobilise support for the campaign against her.
They are also considering whether to take legal action against the organisers of the concert.
The Polish Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for establishing the first free trade union movement in the communist world, is among those preaching against the Material Girl.
“It’s a Satanic provocation,” Mr Walesa told The Times.
“I am a man of faith and ask for such events not to happen on such an important feast in my religion.”
Father Stanislaw Malkowski, one of the protest leaders, said the concert was “a profanity and blasphemous”.
“This is an attack by the devil on our immaculate Catholic nation, “said Father Malkowski.
It is not the first time the Material Girl has caused controversy in the Catholic world.
The video for her song, Like a Prayer, featured burning crosses and a kiss with a Christlike figure, while her Confessions tour three years ago saw the star crucified herself while wearing a crown of thorns.
At least one Cardinal has called for her to be excommunicated and German prosecutors considered, but later dismissed, charging her with deliberately offending religious communities.
MOSCOW – The Russian Foreign Ministry has announced that it might take retaliatory measures against Lithuania for barring the editor-in-chief of Russia’s Regnum Information Agency, Modest Kolerov, from entering Lithuania, RFE/RL’s Russian Service reports.
2 dead in Lake St. Clair rescue attempt are identified
BY CHRISTINA HALL
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
The Macomb County Sheriff’s Office identified today the man and his 13-year-old nephew who drowned Tuesday on Lake St. Clair.
The pair was identified as Ricardas Repsys, 59, a priest from Southfield who was the administrator of Divine Providence Lithuanian Church in Southfield and his nephew, Toutvydays Skudas of Lithuania, who was visiting the area, according to sheriff’s news release.
Repsys’ other nephew, an unidentified 29-year-old man also of Lithuania who was visiting, was swimming when Skudas jumped into the water and began to have problems staying above the surface about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to the release.
Repsys then jumped in to try to rescue the teen, leaving a 72-year-old Warren woman alone on the 20-foot Southbay pontoon boat that was about one mile off Jefferson Avenue near 12 Mile in St. Clair Shores.
No one was wearing life jackets.
The woman, who was not identified, tried to throw life jackets to the trio, but was unable to reach them, the sheriff’s office said.
The 29-year-old tried to rescue Skudas and Repsys, but was unable to reach them and tried to flag down help.
He was pulled from the water unconscious and treated at Mt. Clemens Regional Medical Center, the sheriff’s office said.
The teen was found about 4:30 p.m. and rushed to St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit, where he was pronounced dead a short time later. His uncle’s body was found before 6 p.m.
Investigators previously said the woman who remained on the boat isn’t related to the victims. She called 911.
The Macomb County Medical Examiner is expected to conduct autopsies today on Repsys and Skudas.
No region has been affected by the global financial crisis quite like Central Europe, where a heavy burden of foreign debt, accumulated during the boom years of the 2000s, must be repaid in 2009. Not all Central European states are burdened by the same external debt load, but most face cutting social welfare expenditures as they sign on for relief from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Administrations old and new will have a tough time protecting their currencies and stimulating growth at the same time.
Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing series on the global recession and signs indicating how and when the economic recovery will begin.
Central Europe is at the epicenter of the global financial crisis. The region became the top destination for foreign capital in 2002, overtaking East Asia; but since September 2008, it has experienced a massive outflow of foreign capital that threatens to crash the region’s currencies. The region founded its growth largely on the influx of foreign loans that are now in danger of appreciating in real value as domestic currencies depreciate.
Part 1 of this two-part analysis looked at the problems and policy options faced by Central Europe as a whole; Part 2 examines the economic and political situations unique to each country. For the purposes of this analysis, Central Europe is defined as Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia. We exclude Austria, Slovakia and Greece because those countries are in the eurozone.
Of the three Baltic states, Latvia has thus far suffered the most from the financial crisis. However, in terms of macroeconomic indicators, Estonia is not much different than Latvia. Estonia’s gross external debt, most of which is privately held, is 116 percent of GDP, compared to Latvia’s 124.6 percent. Furthermore, Estonia and Latvia both have a very high percentage of foreign currency-denominated loans in their loan portfolios (86 percent and 90 percent, respectively). Were Latvia to abandon its currency peg to the euro, Estonia’s kroon would likely devalue as well because of investor pressures on the region as a whole.
Meanwhile, unemployment in Latvia is soaring, reaching 17.2 percent in June, compared to 7.5 percent in 2008. With one prime minister ousted in February, the current four-party coalition is looking shaky, especially as it attempts to implement the rigid austerity measures of the IMF.
Lithuania is not doing any better, with a 22.4 percent-of-GDP decline in the second quarter. Lithuania does have less of a reliance on foreign currency lending — 66 percent of total lending is in foreign currency — but it still has enough that a serious currency depreciation caused by a devaluation in Latvia would hurt many consumers and businesses.
The Baltics remain the most volatile region in Central Europe and the most likely flash point for social angst over austerity measures and the effects of the recession. One should not discount the possibility that Lithuania and Estonia could ask for an IMF loan or that further political changes are in store.
VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — A Lithuanian maritime expert says that any negotiations with pirates about the release of five Lithuanian sailors abducted in Nigeria could last months.
Petras Bekeza, the chairman of Lithuania’s sailors’ union, says that the pirates who seized the crew members of a Lithuanian ship on Monday while it was docked in a Nigerian port may not have known that the small nation of Lithuania is in a deep economic crisis.
Bekeza said Wednesday the Lithuanian owner of the ship that the hostages were working for does not have the money to pay a ransom.
Officials from Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry and Litmarko, the private company that owns the ship, are refusing to provide information for fear of jeopardizing the hostages’ safety.
According to an opinion poll, 11% of Lithuanian respondents who have borrowed think that they might face financial problems when repaying their loans.
In the opinion of the respondents, financial burden will be mostly felt by elderly people and the residents of smaller towns. Among those polled 85% of borrowers stated that they would be able to fulfill their financial obligations, informs ELTA/LETA.
According to the results of the survey conducted by the Lithuanian Consumer Institute in June, less than a third (29%) of respondents took loans.
The Transport Ministry of Lithuania has decided to allocate 100 million litas (28.964 million euros) from the Cohesion Fund of the European Union (EU) to the reconstruction of Lazdynai bridge in Vilnius in 2009.
The decision was made after reviewing the priorities of transport projects that were to receive funds and with regard to the application of the capital’s municipality.
According to the plan, the Lazdynai bridge will be expanded to eight lanes from the existing four ones. It is also intended to reconstruct the Oslo St, access to the bridge and distribution systems. The work is to be carried out by November 2010. The total value of the project stands at 125.51 million litas (36.35 million euros).
The joint-stock Baltic Coal Terminal has handled a record amount of coal in one day – 77,027 tons, LETA was informed by the marketing director of the Baltic Association of Transport and Logistics, Galina Molockova.
This record amount of coal was handled on July 30 at Ventspils Port, as the coal was later transported to Great Britain.
In July, Baltic Coal Terminal handled over 350,000 tons of coal, but since March, when the terminal began operation, a total of 1,450,000 tons of coal have been handled.
The chairman of the board of Baltic Coal Terminal, Ilja Sokolovs, admits that the situation in the global coal market has improved a bit, and with the heating season approaching, there is traditionally an increase in demand for coal.
However, the terminal’s success is more dependant on Latvian Rail (LDz) transportation tariffs, instead of the situation within the global coal market, Sokolovs said, adding that LDz’s tariffs are much too high and is not helping expand the increase in coal cargo transportation through the country.
As reported, last year, Baltic Coal Terminal operated with LVL 550,461 in losses. In 2007, the company posted LVL 256,626 in losses.
A new trial over the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya is due to begin on Wednesday. But her friends and relatives say the hearings are fundamentally flawed and a new investigation is needed.
AFP - Russia’s failure to convict those behind the murder of journalists creates a climate of impunity that increases the peril of such work, the editor of slain reporter Anna Politkovskaya said Tuesday.
“This atmosphere of impunity is responsible for the number of crimes against journalist,” Dmitry Muratov, the editor-and-chief of Novaya Gazeta, the paper for which Politkovskaya worked, told journalists in Moscow.
His comments came a day before the start of a new trial over the murder of the investigative reporter.
But Politkovskaya’s friends and relatives say the hearings — ordered after the supreme court annulled a February acquittal of the suspects accused in her 2006 murder — are fundamentally flawed and a new investigation is needed.
The men on trial are all accused of being accessories to the murder, but the authorities have still failed to find the triggerman, let alone identify the mastermind of the killing.
“The situation is paradoxical in Russia: the assassins of journalists feel socially closer to power than journalists themselves,” Muratov said.
The murders may even feel they are acting in the state’s interest, he said, pointing to the psychology of the man jailed for the 2002 killing of another Novaya Gazeta journalist Sergei Zolovkin.
The convicted assassin wrote then-president Vladimir Putin for a pardon arguing he had served Russia’s interest by eliminating a traitor, he said.
Since 1993 at least 40 journalists have been murdered in Russia in apparent contract-style shootings, according to the Center for Journalist in Extreme Situations in Moscow.
But no suspect has been named for ordering any of these crimes, it added.
The Novaya Gazeta newspaper alone has seen four of its journalists murdered since 2001.
Politkovskaya wrote dozens of articles for Novaya Gazeta and a book called “Putin’s Russia,” accusing Putin of strangling democracy and detailing horrific abuses during the Kremlin’s war in Chechnya.
She was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building on on October 7, 2006.
Central European and Baltic states are worried following the first public address of new NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who called for a “strategic partnership” with Russia, reads daily “Guardian”, Media reports from London.
Alarmed by the Russian invasion of Georgia and its implications for their own security, the former Soviet satellites of the Baltic and central Europe are appealing to the White House for stronger security guarantees. The new NATO members are worried that better relations between Moscow and the west could come at their expense.
They said their hopes for better relations with Moscow had been dashed and they felt increasingly bullied.
“Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods … It challenges our claims to our own historical experiences. It asserts a privileged position in determining our security choices. It uses overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation, in order to advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic orientation of central and eastern Europe.”
The central Europeans complained that security guarantees under article five of the NATO Charter have effectively been allowed to lapse over the past decade and are demanding that a new “strategic concept” should reinforce, in military planning and operational detail, the alliance’s commitment, for example, to the three former Soviet Baltic states, reads the “Guardian”.
Lithuanian border guards on July 30 asked Kolerov to step off the train from Moscow to Vilnius and told him that Lithuanian migration authorities consider him an undesirable alien.
Kolerov, who had a valid visa for travel in the Schengen zone, was on his way to the Lithuanian capital to take part in an international conference on Russian-Lithuanian relations.
Speaking to journalists after border guards refused to let him into the country, he said that the Lithuanian media falsely depicted him as an adversary of Lithuania.
Kolerov used to run a Kremlin department on ties with CIS countries.
Paramilitary troops patrolled the streets of a town in eastern Pakistan yesterday after Muslim radicals burned to death eight members of a Christian family, raising fears of violence spreading to other areas.
Hundreds of armed supporters of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an outlawed Islamic militant group, burned dozens of Christian homes in Gojra over the weekend after allegations that a copy of the Koran had been defiled.
The mob opened fire indiscriminately, threw gas bombs and looted houses as thousands of frightened Christians ran for safety. “They were shouting anti-Christian slogans and attacked our houses,” Rafiq Masih, a resident of the predominantly Christian colony, said. Residents said that police stood aside while the mob went on the rampage. “We kept begging for protection, but police did not take action,” Masih said.
Police and local officials said that at least eight people, including four women and a child, were killed in the fires. Two others died of gunshot wounds. Residents said that the casualties were much higher; one claimed that the number of dead could be in the dozens as many bodies were still buried under the rubble. Shahbaz Bhatti, the Minister for Minorities, said that 40 Christian homes were torched in rioting. He said there was no truth to allegations that a Koran had been defiled, and accused the police of ignoring his appeal to provide protection to Christians.
Tension started mounting last week after Muslims accused three Christian youths of burning a copy of the Koran. They denied the allegations, but clerics called for their death. On Saturday, hundreds of supporters of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an outlawed Sunni sectarian group, poured into the town from surrounding districts. The group is believed to have close links with Al Qaeda and has been involved in several terrorist attacks targeting security forces in recent years.
Television footage showed armed men running through the streets, gunfire, and women and children wailing. Blackened furniture lay outside burning homes, while a group of people rushed a man suffering from burns on a cart through the streets. Rehman Malik, the Interior Minister, said that the paramilitary troops were sent after police and the local administration failed to control the situation. Security forces were also placed on high alert to prevent violence from spreading to other towns of Punjab.
Several senior U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as possible locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
The officials outlined the plans — the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama’s order to close the prison camp by Jan. 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil — on condition of anonymity because the options are under review.
White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said Friday that no decisions have been made about the proposal. But the White House considers the courtroom-prison complex as the best among a series of bad options, an administration official said.
To the House of Representatives’ Republican leader, it’s an “ill-conceived plan” that would bring terrorists into the U.S. despite opposition by Congress and the American people. “The administration is going to face a severe public backlash unless it shelves this plan and goes back to the drawing board,” said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for Rep. John Boehner.
For months, government lawyers and senior officials at the Pentagon, Justice Department and the White House have struggled with how to close the internationally reviled U.S. Navy prison at Guantanamo.
Congress has blocked $80 million intended to bring the detainees to the United States. Lawmakers want the administration to say how it plans to make the moves without putting Americans at risk.
The facility would operate as a hybrid prison system jointly operated by the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
The administration’s plan, according to three government officials, calls for:
–Moving all the Guantanamo detainees to a single U.S. prison. The Justice Department has identified between 60 and 80 who could be prosecuted, either in military or federal criminal courts. The Pentagon would oversee the detainees who would face trial in military tribunals. The Bureau of Prisons, an arm of the Justice Department, would manage defendants in federal courts.
–Building a court facility within the prison site where military or criminal defendants would be tried. Doing so would create a single venue for almost all the criminal defendants, ending the need to transport them elsewhere in the U.S. for trial.
–Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.
–Building immigration detention cells for detainees ordered released by courts but still behind bars because countries are unwilling to take them.
Each proposal, according to experts in constitutional and national security law, faces legal and logistics problems.
Scott Silliman, director of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, called the proposal “totally unprecedented” and said he doubts the plan would work without Congress’ involvement because new laws probably would be needed. Otherwise, “we gain nothing — all we do is create a Guantanamo in Kansas or wherever,” Silliman said.
“You’ve got very strict jurisdictional issues on venue of a federal court. Why would you bring courts from all over the country to one facility, rather than having them prosecuted in the district where the courts sit?”
Legal experts said civilian trials held inside the prison could face jury-selection dilemmas in rural areas because of the limited number of potential jurors available.
One solution, Silliman said, would be to bring jurors from elsewhere. But that step, one official said, could also compromise security by opening up the prison to outsiders.
It is unclear whether victims — particularly survivors of Sept. 11 victims — would be allowed into the courtroom to watch the trials. Victims and family members have no assumed right under current law to attend military commissions, although the Pentagon does allow them to attend hearings at Guantanamo under a random selection process. That right is automatic in civilian federal courthouses.
“They’ll have to sort it out,” said Douglas Beloof, a professor at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, and an expert on crime victims’ rights. He said the new system “could create tension with victims who would protest.”
The officials said that another uncertainty remains how many Guantanamo detainees would end up housed in the hybrid prison.
As many as an estimated 170 of the detainees now at Guantanamo are unlikely to be prosecuted. Some are being held indefinitely because government officials do not want to take the chance of seeing them acquitted in a trial. The rest are considered candidates for release, but the U.S. cannot find foreign countries willing to take them. Almost all have yet to be charged with crimes.
Two senior U.S. officials said one option for the proposed hybrid prison would be to use the soon-to-be-shuttered Standish maximum-security state prison in northeast Michigan. The facility already has individual cells and ample security for detainees.
Getting the Standish prison ready for the detainees would be costly. One official estimated it would cost over $100 million for security and other building upgrades.
Several Michigan lawmakers, including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin and Rep. Bart Stupak, both Democrats, have said they would be open to moving detainees to Michigan as long as there is broad local support.
But the political support is not unanimous. Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee who is seeking his party’s nomination for governor next year, is against the idea.
Administration officials said the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth is under consideration because it is already a hardened high-security facility that could be further protected by the surrounding military base.
It’s not clear what would happen to the military’s inmates already being held there. Nearly half are members of the U.S. armed forces, and by law, cannot be housed with foreign prisoners.
Kansas’ Republican-dominated congressional delegation is dead set against moving Guantanamo detainees to Leavenworth. Residents told Sen. Pat Roberts at a town hall meeting in May that 95 percent of the local community opposes it.
Administration officials say they are determined to keep to Obama’s promise of closing Guantanamo in January as a worldwide example of America’s commitment to humane and just treatment of the detainees.
Glenn Sulmasy, an international law professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, said the prison-court complex will “be difficult, but it’s logical.”
“This is all based on closing Gitmo by 2010, which seems to be a priority, and if we are going to do it, we have to step up to the plate and find solutions to the conundrum we’re facing,” said Sulmasy, who agrees with the administration’s efforts. “And this seems to be the most pragmatic way ahead.”
Officials say the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to hold Gitmo detainees.
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The Americans’ willingness to confront the Russians on an issue of fundamental national interest to Russia therefore requires some explanation, as on the surface it seems a high-risk maneuver. Biden provided insights into the analytic framework of the Obama administration on Russia in a July 26 interview with The Wall Street Journal. In it, Biden said the United States “vastly” underestimates its hand. He added that “Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”
U.S. Policy Continuity
The Russians have accused the United States of supporting pro-American forces in Ukraine, Georgia and other countries of the former Soviet Union under the cover of supporting democracy. They see the U.S. goal as surrounding the Soviet Union with pro-American states to put the future of the Russian Federation at risk. The summer 2008 Russian military action in Georgia was intended to deliver a message to the United States and the countries of the former Soviet Union that Russia was not prepared to tolerate such developments but was prepared to reverse them by force of arms if need be.
Following his July summit, Obama sent Biden to the two most sensitive countries in the former Soviet Union — Ukraine and Georgia — to let the Russians know that the United States was not backing off its strategy in spite of Russian military superiority in the immediate region. In the long run, the United States is much more powerful than the Russians, and Biden was correct when he explicitly noted Russia’s failing demographics as a principal factor in Moscow’s long-term decline. But to paraphrase a noted economist, we don’t live in the long run. Right now, the Russian correlation of forces along Russia’s frontiers clearly favors the Russians, and the major U.S. deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan would prevent the Americans from intervening should the Russians choose to challenge pro-American governments in the former Soviet Union directly.
Even so, Biden’s visit and interview show the Obama administration is maintaining the U.S. stance on Russia that has been in place since the Reagan years. Reagan saw the economy as Russia’s basic weakness. He felt that the greater the pressure on the Russian economy, the more forthcoming the Russians would be on geopolitical matters. The more concessions they made on geopolitical matters, the weaker their hold on Eastern Europe. And if Reagan’s demand that Russia “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev” was met, the Soviets would collapse. Ever since the Reagan administration, the idee fixe of not only the United States, but also NATO, China and Japan has been that the weakness of the Russian economy made it impossible for the Russians to play a significant regional role, let alone a global one. Therefore, regardless of Russian wishes, the West was free to forge whatever relations it wanted among Russian allies like Serbia and within the former Soviet Union. And certainly during the 1990s, Russia was paralyzed.
Biden, however, is saying that whatever the current temporary regional advantage the Russians might have, in the end, their economy is crippled and Russia is not a country to be taken seriously. He went on publicly to point out that this should not be pointed out publicly, as there is no value in embarrassing Russia. The Russians certainly now understand what it means to hit the reset button Obama had referred to: The reset is back to the 1980s and 1990s.
Reset to the 1980s and 90s
To calculate the Russian response, it is important to consider how someone like Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin views the events of the 1980s and 1990s. After all, Putin was a KGB officer under Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB and later Chairman of the Communist Party for a short time — and the architect of glasnost and perestroika.
It was the KGB that realized first that the Soviet Union was failing, which made sense because only the KGB had a comprehensive sense of the state of the Soviet Union. Andropov’s strategy was to shift from technology transfer through espionage — apparently Putin’s mission as a junior intelligence officer in Dresden in the former East Germany — to a more formal process of technology transfer. To induce the West to transfer technology and to invest in the Soviet Union, Moscow had to make substantial concessions in the area in which the West cared the most: geopolitics. To get what it needed, the Soviets had to dial back on the Cold War.
Glasnost, or openness, had as its price reducing the threat to the West. But the greater part of the puzzle was perestroika, or the restructuring of the Soviet economy. This was where the greatest risk came, since the entire social and political structure of the Soviet Union was built around a command economy. But that economy was no longer functioning, and without perestroika, all of the investment and technology transfer would be meaningless. The Soviet Union could not metabolize it.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a communist, as we seem to forget, and a follower of Andropov. He was not a liberalizer because he saw liberalization as a virtue; rather, he saw it as a means to an end. And that end was saving the Communist Party, and with it the Soviet state. Gorbachev also understood that the twin challenge of concessions to the West geopolitically and a top-down revolution in Russia economically — simultaneously—risked massive destabilization. This is what Reagan was counting on, and what Gorbachev was trying to prevent. Gorbachev lost Andropov’s gamble. The Soviet Union collapsed, and with it the Communist Party.
What followed was a decade of economic horror, at least as most Russians viewed it. From the West’s point of view, collapse looked like liberalization. From the Russian point of view, Russia went from a superpower that was poor to an even poorer geopolitical cripple. For the Russians, the experiment was a double failure. Not only did the Russian Empire retreat to the borders of the 18th century, but the economy became even more dysfunctional, except for a handful of oligarchs and some of their Western associates who stole whatever wasn’t nailed down.
The Russians, and particularly Putin, took away a different lesson than the West did. The West assumed that economic dysfunction caused the Soviet Union to fail. Putin and his colleagues took away the idea that it was the attempt to repair economic dysfunction through wholesale reforms that caused Russia to fail. From Putin’s point of view, economic well-being and national power do not necessarily work in tandem where Russia is concerned.
Russian Power, With or Without Prosperity
Russia has been an economic wreck for most of its history, both under the czars and under the Soviets. The geography of Russia has a range of weaknesses, as we have explored. Russia’s geography, daunting infrastructural challenges and demographic structure all conspire against it. But the strategic power of Russia was never synchronized to its economic well-being. Certainly, following World War II the Russian economy was shattered and never quite came back together. Yet Russian global power was still enormous. A look at the crushing poverty — but undeniable power — of Russia during broad swaths of time from 1600 until Andropov arrived on the scene certainly gives credence to Putin’s view.
The problems of the 1980s had as much to do with the weakening and corruption of the Communist Party under former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as it had to do with intrinsic economic weakness. To put it differently, the Soviet Union was an economic wreck under Joseph Stalin as well. The Germans made a massive mistake in confusing Soviet economic weakness with military weakness. During the Cold War, the United States did not make that mistake. It understood that Soviet economic weakness did not track with Russian strategic power. Moscow might not be able to house its people, but its military power was not to be dismissed.
What made an economic cripple into a military giant was political power. Both the czar and the Communist Party maintained a ruthless degree of control over society. That meant Moscow could divert resources from consumption to the military and suppress resistance. In a state run by terror, dissatisfaction with the state of the economy does not translate into either policy shifts or military weakness — and certainly not in the short term. Huge percentages of gross domestic product can be devoted to military purposes, even if used inefficiently there. Repression and terror smooth over public opinion.
The czar used repression widely, and it was not until the army itself rebelled in World War I that the regime collapsed. Under Stalin, even at the worst moments of World War II, the army did not rebel. In both regimes, economic dysfunction was accepted as the inevitable price of strategic power. And dissent — even the hint of dissent — was dealt with by the only truly efficient state enterprise: the security apparatus, whether called the Okhraina, Cheka, NKVD, MGB or KGB.
From the point of view of Putin, who has called the Soviet collapse the greatest tragedy of our time, the problem was not economic dysfunction. Rather, it was the attempt to completely overhaul the Soviet Union’s foreign and domestic policies simultaneously that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And that collapse did not lead to an economic renaissance.
Biden might not have meant to gloat, but he drove home the point that Putin believes. For Putin, the West, and particularly the United States, engineered the fall of the Soviet Union by policies crafted by the Reagan administration — and that same policy remains in place under the Obama administration.
It is not clear that Putin and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev disagree with Biden’s analysis — the Russian economy truly is “withering” — except in one sense. Given the policies Putin has pursued, the Russian prime minister must believe he has a way to cope with that. In the short run, Putin might well have such a coping mechanism, and this is the temporary window of opportunity Biden alluded to. But in the long run, the solution is not improving the economy — that would be difficult, if not outright impossible, for a country as large and lightly populated as Russia. Rather, the solution is accepting that Russia’s economic weakness is endemic and creating a regime that allows Russia to be a great power in spite of that.
Such a regime is the one that can create military power in the face of broad poverty, something we will call the “Chekist state.” This state uses its security apparatus, now known as the FSB, to control the public through repression, freeing the state to allocate resources to the military as needed. In other words, this is Putin coming full circle to his KGB roots, but without the teachings of an Andropov or Gorbachev to confuse the issue. This is not an ideological stance; it applies to the Romanovs and to the Bolsheviks. It is an operational principle embedded in Russian geopolitics and history.
Counting on Russian strategic power to track Russian economic power is risky. Certainly, it did in the 1980s and 1990s, but Putin has worked to decouple the two. On the surface, it might seem a futile gesture, but in Russian history, this decoupling is the norm. Obama seems to understand this to the extent that he has tried to play off Medvedev (who appears less traditional) from Putin (who appears to be the more traditional), but we do not think this is a viable strategy — this is not a matter of Russian political personalities but of Russian geopolitical necessity.
Biden seems to be saying that the Reagan strategy can play itself out permanently. Our view is that it plays itself out only so long as the Russian regime doesn’t reassert itself with the full power of the security apparatus and doesn’t decouple economic and military growth. Biden’s strategy works so long as this doesn’t happen. But in Russian history, this decoupling is the norm and the past 20 years is the exception.
A strategy that assumes the Russians will once again decouple economic and military power requires a different response than ongoing, subcritical pressure. It requires that the window of opportunity the United States has handed Russia by its wars in the Islamic world be closed, and that the pressure on Russia be dramatically increased before the Russians move toward full repression and rapid rearmament.
Ironically, in the very long run of the next couple of generations, it probably doesn’t matter whether the West heads off Russia at the pass because of another factor Biden mentioned: Russia’s shrinking demographics. Russian demography has been steadily worsening since World War I, particularly because birth rates have fallen. This slow-motion degradation turned into collapse during the 1990s. Russia’s birth rates are now well below starkly higher death rates; Russia already has more citizens in their 50s than in their teens. Russia can be a major power without a solid economy, but no one can be a major power without people. But even with demographics as poor as Russia’s, demographics do not change a country overnight. This is Russia’s moment, and the generation or so it will take demography to grind Russia down can be made very painful for the Americans.
Biden has stated the American strategy: squeeze the Russians and let nature take its course. We suspect the Russians will squeeze back hard before they move off the stage of history.
MOSCOW — An interview U.S. Vice President Joe Biden gave to an American newspaper was front-page news Monday in Moscow, where his characterization of Russia as a weakened nation hit a raw nerve.
Biden said Russia’s economic difficulties are likely to make the Kremlin more willing to cooperate with the United States on a range of national security issues.
“I think we vastly underestimate the hand that we hold,” he said in an interview to The Wall Street Journal published Saturday.
Biden’s comments appeared to catch the Kremlin by surprise, coming less than three weeks after President Barack Obama said on a visit to Moscow that the U.S. wants to see a “strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia.”
“It raises the question: Who is shaping U.S. foreign policy? The president or members of his team, even the most respected ones?” said Kremlin foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday downplayed suggestions that Biden was setting a different U.S. policy from that laid out by the president.
When asked whether Obama thought Biden had gone too far in his remarks, Gibbs said the president stated his views on Russia during his recent visit and the vice president agrees with those views.
Gibbs said both leaders believe Russia will do its part to improve relations with the U.S.
Most Russian newspapers put Biden’s interview on their front pages Monday, with headlines casting doubt on Washington’s commitment to forge a more constructive relationship with Moscow.
“Joe Biden unexpectedly returned to the rhetoric of the previous Bush administration,” the newspaper Kommersant wrote.
Moskovsky Komsomolets said Biden, with his “boorish openness,” showed what the Obama administration really thinks about Russia. “We should respond to the Yankees in the same way,” the newspaper wrote. “Any other language, unfortunately or fortunately, they do not understand.”
The papers jumped on Biden’s comments about Russia’s demographic and economic problems.
“They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable,” Biden said in the interview.
Some newspapers and commentators noted that Russians say the same things about themselves. The question, they said, was why Biden made the comments so quickly after this month’s summit by Obama and President Dmitry Medvedev, and after Biden’s own trip last week to Ukraine and Georgia, former Soviet republics whose growing ties to the West are deeply resented in Moscow.
Sergei Rogov, director of the government-funded USA and Canada Institute, was quoted in Kommersant as saying the interview was aimed in part at addressing criticism in the U.S. that the Obama administration was too soft on Russia.
Some commentators said it was wrong to see Biden as diverging from the policy set by Obama, as suggested by Prikhodko.
Biden was most likely expressing Washington’s “Plan B,” said Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister who now heads his own think tank. If the Kremlin proves unwilling to compromise, the United States was likely to reduce relations to a minimum and push Moscow to the periphery of world politics, Milov wrote in the online Gazeta.ru.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an apparent effort Sunday to reassure Moscow, saying on NBC “Meet the Press” that the administration considers Russia to be a “great power.”
“Every country faces challenges,” she said. “We have our challenges, Russia has their challenges. There are certain issues that Russia has to deal with on its own.”
—
Associated Press writer Julie Pace in Washington contributed to this report.
U.S. indicts 7 in N.C. for alleged terrorism plot in Israel
The Raleigh News & Observer |
last updated: July 27, 2009 07:13:26 PM
RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal grand jury in North Carolina on Monday indicted seven men on terrorism charges, accusing them of plotting to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons abroad in an unspecified attacks.
Indicted were: Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39; Hysen Sherifi, 24; Anes Subasic, 33; Zakariya Boyd, 20; Dylan Boyd, 22; Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, 22; and Ziyad Yaghi, 21.
All are charged with conspiring to provide support to terrorists and conspiring to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons abroad.
The charges are related to allegations that they helped raise money and provide training for terrorism operations in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Federal officials will not say where the men are being held.
Daniel Boyd is alleged in the indictment to have practiced “military tactics and the use of weapons” on private property in Caswell County, N.C., in over the past two months.
Public records show that the Boyds are residents of Willow Spring in Johnston County.
According to the indictment, Daniel Boyd, Zakariya Boyd, Dylan Boyd, Hassan, and Yaghi are U.S. citizens and residents of North Carolina. Subasic is a naturalized U.S. citizen and North Carolina resident, and Sherifi is a Kosovo native and U.S. legal permanent resident living in North Carolina.
According to U.S. Department of Justice release, all were arrested at various locations Monday morning by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
The indictment alleges that Daniel Boyd “is a veteran of terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan who, over the past three years, has conspired with others in this country to recruit and help young men travel overseas in order to kill,” said David Kris, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
According to the indictment, Daniel Boyd travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992 where he received “military-style training in terrorist training camps for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,” the Justice Department release stated. The indcitment says he then fought with U.S-allied Afghan forces against Soviet troops then occupying Afghanistan.
From approximately November 2006 through July 2009, Daniel Boyd and the others “conspired to provide material support and resources to terrorists,” the release said, including currency, training, transportation and personnel.
The indictment says that Daniel Boyd and several of the accused travelled to Israel in June 2007 to engage in “violent jihad” but subsequently returned to the U.S. after “failing in their efforts.”
In February 2008, the indictment says, Daniel Boyd solicited funds to help pay for the travel of what it called “additional individuals overseas” to engage in “violent jihad” and in March 2008, discussed with Subasic plans to send two individuals abroad for this purpose.
In July 2008, Sherifi left the U.S. for Kosovo to “engage in violent jihad,” according to the indictment, later returning in April of this year “for the purpose of soliciting funds and personnel to support the mujihaden.”
The indictment also states that Daniel Boyd possessed a variety of weapons as part of the conspiracy to commit murder overseas and provide support to terrorists.
RALEIGH, N.C. — A federal grand jury in North Carolina on Monday indicted seven men on terrorism charges, accusing them of plotting to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons abroad in an unspecified attacks.
Indicted were: Daniel Patrick Boyd, 39; Hysen Sherifi, 24; Anes Subasic, 33; Zakariya Boyd, 20; Dylan Boyd, 22; Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, 22; and Ziyad Yaghi, 21.
All are charged with conspiring to provide support to terrorists and conspiring to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons abroad.
The charges are related to allegations that they helped raise money and provide training for terrorism operations in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Federal officials will not say where the men are being held.
Daniel Boyd is alleged in the indictment to have practiced “military tactics and the use of weapons” on private property in Caswell County, N.C., in over the past two months.
Public records show that the Boyds are residents of Willow Spring in Johnston County.
According to the indictment, Daniel Boyd, Zakariya Boyd, Dylan Boyd, Hassan, and Yaghi are U.S. citizens and residents of North Carolina. Subasic is a naturalized U.S. citizen and North Carolina resident, and Sherifi is a Kosovo native and U.S. legal permanent resident living in North Carolina.
According to U.S. Department of Justice release, all were arrested at various locations Monday morning by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
The indictment alleges that Daniel Boyd “is a veteran of terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan who, over the past three years, has conspired with others in this country to recruit and help young men travel overseas in order to kill,” said David Kris, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
According to the indictment, Daniel Boyd travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992 where he received “military-style training in terrorist training camps for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,” the Justice Department release stated. The indcitment says he then fought with U.S-allied Afghan forces against Soviet troops then occupying Afghanistan.
From approximately November 2006 through July 2009, Daniel Boyd and the others “conspired to provide material support and resources to terrorists,” the release said, including currency, training, transportation and personnel.
The indictment says that Daniel Boyd and several of the accused travelled to Israel in June 2007 to engage in “violent jihad” but subsequently returned to the U.S. after “failing in their efforts.”
In February 2008, the indictment says, Daniel Boyd solicited funds to help pay for the travel of what it called “additional individuals overseas” to engage in “violent jihad” and in March 2008, discussed with Subasic plans to send two individuals abroad for this purpose.
In July 2008, Sherifi left the U.S. for Kosovo to “engage in violent jihad,” according to the indictment, later returning in April of this year “for the purpose of soliciting funds and personnel to support the mujihaden.”
The indictment also states that Daniel Boyd possessed a variety of weapons as part of the conspiracy to commit murder overseas and provide support to terrorists.
St. Paul, Minn. — A federal grand jury in St. Paul has indicted two men on terrorism charges, in connection with the ongoing investigation of missing Somali men.
The indictment, which was filed in February but unsealed Monday, names Abdifatah Yusuf Isse and Salah Osman Ahmed of Brooklyn Park with providing material support to terrorists, namely themselves.
The indictment also charges the men with conspiring to “kill, maim, and injure” outside of the U.S. It says Ahmed boarded a Northwest flight last December from Minneapolis to Amsterdam with a final destination of Somalia to “fight jihad in Somalia.”
Ahmed is also charged with lying to the FBI.
E.K. Wilson, spokesman of the FBI office in Minneapolis, confirmed that the indictments were connected to the investigation of missing Somali men believed to have joined a terrorist group fighting in their homeland.
Wilson said authorities arrested Ahmed, of New Brighton, in that town Saturday without incident. He declined to comment further. “The investigation continues,” he said.
About 20 men from Minnesota are believed to be fighting in Somalia’s civil war. The first wave left in 2007. Authorities think one of those early travelers, Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis, blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Somalia last fall.
charged with providing material support to terrorism, and
conspiracy to kill people outside of the U.S. (Photo courtesy of Anoka County)
Federal authorities today unsealed a five-month-old indictment charging two Twin Cities men with terrorism conspiracy in their native Somalia.
One of the men, Salah Osman Ahmed, had been a fugitive but had been apprehended recently and appeared before a federal magistrate today. He is to have a detention hearing Thursday.
Federal officials would not say when or where he was taken into custody.
The other man, Abdifatah Yusuf Isse, was arrested in February and has been held since then, said his attorney, Paul Engh, of Minneapolis.
The indictment says that at least Ahmed, of Brooklyn Park, traveled to Somalia in December 2007 with another person “so that they could fight jihad in Somalia.”
Engh — who is required to have a security clearance just to defend Isse — said that because virtually all of the case remains sealed, he couldn’t discuss the case.
“I can’t do that without talking about something that’s sealed,” he said. “I can’t even say if they traveled together. I’ve read a ton of stuff and I’d rather not comment on the substance of it. I’m totally aware of the facts. I’m well-versed in what’s going on, but I really can’t say much.”
Similarly, the office of outgoing U.S. Attorney Frank Magill declined comment. “Our office is not issuing a news release on the Salah Ahmed indictment. Our office also has no statement regarding the indictment,” said David Anderson, a spokesman for Magill.
Federal officials have been investigating claims that some young male Somali refugees in the Twin Cities have been recruited by Islamic groups to fight in their homeland.
A fourth young Somali-American man who disappeared from the Twin Cities in recent years apparently has been killed in Somalia, a local community leader said Sunday night.
Omar Jamal, executive director of the St. Paul-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center, said his group had received word that Zakaria Maruf, 30, of Minneapolis was killed in combat.
Maruf is one of an estimated 20 men from the Twin Cities suspected of going to Somalia to fight in the Islamist Shabaab insurgency in the country’s civil war. Last weekend, relatives and community leaders said another from the group — Jamal Bana, 20 — also had been killed in Somalia.
Another young Somali man from Minneapolis, Shirwa Ahmed, is believed to have carried out a suicide bombing last October as part of coordinated attacks that targeted a United Nations compound, the Ethiopian consulate and the presidential palace in Hargeisa, capital of the Somaliland region.
FBI Director Robert Mueller said in February that the bomber had probably been “radicalized” in the Twin Cities.
In June, the Minneapolis family of another young Somali, Burhan Hassan, said they believed he had been killed and buried in Somalia.
Isse and Ahmed were each charged with a single count of providing material support to terrorists, as well as a count of conspiracy to “kill, kidnap, maim and injure.” The alleged incidents occurred between September 2007 and December 2008, the indictment claims.
The dates coincide with the disappearance of the first wave of young Somali men from the Twin Cities.
The recruitment of the Twin Cities men can be traced to a group of Somali immigrants from Northern Europe and other countries who traveled to Somalia in 2005 to fight with the Islamist movement, a senior law enforcement official said, according to a New York Times report Sunday. A handful of those men later went to Minneapolis and helped persuade the first large group from the Twin Cities to leave for Somalia starting in late 2007, the official said.
The material support, the indictment alleges, was “namely personnel including themselves, knowing and intending that the material support and resources” were going to be used to kill, kidnap or injure people in a foreign country.
The conspiracy charge alleges that they conspired with each other “and others, known and unknown to the grand jury,” to engage in terrorism.
The indictment alleges that on Dec. 6, 2007, Ahmed boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Amsterdam, “with a final destination of Somalia.”
Ahmed is named in two additional counts of making false statements to FBI agents. The first of the counts alleges that while he knew people on his December 2007 flights to Somalia, on July 30 he told the FBI that he didn’t know anyone on the flights.
The second of the charges claims that he traveled with others on the flights, but on Dec. 8, he told the FBI that he traveled alone.
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 29, 2009 5:17 PM
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urged Americans on Wednesday to join a “collective fight against terrorism” that combines the efforts of individuals, companies and local, state and foreign governments.
Answering critics who have accused the Obama administration of downplaying the risk of terrorist attacks, Napolitano said the threat has not abated and outlined an approach that emphasizes burden-sharing as federal spending and political support for post-Sept. 11 security measures wane.
“I am sometimes asked if I think complacency is a threat. I believe the short answer is ‘yes,’ ” Napolitano said, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York before visiting the World Trade Center site destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“But I think a better question is this: Has the U.S. government done everything it can to educate and engage the American people? The answer is ‘no,’ ” she said.
In what aides called a major counter-terrorism policy address, Napolitano noted that American hotels were targeted in bombings this month in Jakarta, six Americans were among 164 people killed in a commando-style assault in Mumbai in November and three Americans were among 54 killed in a Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in September.
To confront a terrorism threat that “is even more decentralized, more networked and more adaptive,” she said, counter-terrorism efforts also need to exploit the values of “networks.” For example, the nation needs better technology, training and linkages to share information with 780,000 local law enforcement agents, Napolitano said, promising to strengthen 70 state-run intelligence “fusion centers” that began under the Bush administration.
James Jay Carafano, an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, praised the speech as a nonpartisan, policy-oriented approach that reflects political and budget realities.
“The only fiscally responsible way they can keep levels of homeland security up is to stop doing stupid things that waste money and integrate efforts with other communities and have them work better,” Carafano said. “The old answer, throwing more money at the problem, is not going to be the routine.”
He also noted that Republicans accused Obama this winter of softening his stance by abandoning the phrase “war on terror” and faulted Napolitano for not mentioning the word “terrorism” in remarks prepared for her first appearance before the House. This time she used the word or its variants 23 times in a half-hour speech.
Still, Napolitano laid out few new programs, mostly signaling continuity with work begun under former President George W. Bush. But she faulted approaches that stoked public alarm while asking little from individuals to improve society’s resilience against attacks.
“The consequences of living in a state of fear, rather than a state of preparedness, are enormous,” Napolitano said. “For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security.”
She also singled out the need for greater cooperation from companies.
“More than dollars,” Napolitano said, the nation needs “the active engagement of employers” who control most critical targets, such as power plants and communication systems to help identify them and plan how to secure them.
In a blunt warning, she added, “We may be better prepared as a nation than we were on 9/11. But we are nowhere near as prepared as we need to be.”
It may become a criminal offence to infringe on “historical memory” about WWII
What is worrying Russia? Why is the country convinced that it is the victim of a campaign to make it look bad?
President Dmitry Medvedev recently announced the setting up of a commission to counter the falsification of history. He said this was becoming increasingly “severe, evil, and aggressive”.
“This is absolute poppycock,” says Robert Service, professor of Russian History at Oxford University. “History is all about argument. There is no absolute historical truth about anything big in history.”
Mr Service dismisses the Russian leader’s suggestion that his country is facing some kind of academic aggression.
Instead, he sees a desire to dominate, worthy of the most repressive totalitarian regimes of fiction.
“President Medvedev, following in the path of his predecessor President [Vladimir] Putin, wants to control history,” he says.
“And he wants to control history as a means of controlling the present. This is the classic George Orwell scenario.”
‘Hysterical reaction’
Many Russians, though, agree with their president.
Natalia Narochnitskaya, a former deputy in the Russian parliament and now a member of the new Historical Truth Commission, says that she is surprised by what she terms the “almost hysterical reaction” in the West.
“In the Western media especially, there is a certain prejudice against Russia and Russian history,” she says.
“They always feel that Russia since, you know, Ivan the Terrible, is a certain country which is off the European civilisation.”
“ In August there will be such a yelling about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, saying that that was the step that led to the Second World War ”
“In August there will be such a yelling about the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, saying that that was the step that led to the Second World War”…
Ask a few more questions, though, and these two apparently separate views begin to converge.
At least, they agree on what the key issue is - World War II. And here lies the clue as to the real reason for the establishment of the new commission.
This is what appears to anger today’s Russian historical establishment: accounts of Red Army crimes on the march to Berlin; assertions by the Baltic countries and others in Eastern Europe that Soviet forces came as occupiers as much as liberators; any suggestion that Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were anything but complete opposites and bitter enemies.
Here, perhaps, there is a clue as to the timing of the commission’s founding.
Next month sees the 70th anniversary of the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Hitler’s Germany, something Ms Narochnitskaya expects the West to make a lot of noise about.
“In August there will be such a yelling about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, saying that that was the step that led to the Second World War, and that Germany and the Soviet Union were two equal, disgusting, totalitarian monsters.”
Nationalist sentiment
Why does this matter today? Do these arguments have any great importance beyond the walls of universities? In Russia, the answer is yes.
“ So many people are speaking about strong, Orthodox Russia, military power… The commission is partly a response to this atmosphere ”
Tamara Eidelman Moscow history teacher
The country sees its victory over Hitler’s forces as the greatest moment of the 20th Century.
The war is sometimes discussed in the news media as if it were a recent event, not increasingly distant history.
Any attempt to tarnish the glory of that triumph is seen as a deliberate attempt to make Russia look bad.
Russia’s past haunts its present. Recognising that, the authorities want to rule the version of the past which dominates today.
Tamara Eidelman, who teaches history at a Moscow High School, feels surrounded by nationalist sentiment.
“So many people are speaking about strong, Orthodox Russia, military power,” she says.
“It is something that is very strong in historical tradition and in popular opinion. This commission is partly a response to this atmosphere.”
The authorities want to rule the version of the past which dominates today
The creation of this commission seems to go to the heart of what troubles modern Russia.
The chaos which followed the collapse of communism left many Russians deeply distrustful of politics and officialdom.
President Medvedev has complained of the corruption and “legal nihilism” which plague his country.
Russia’s leaders today know that they need this shining, sacred, memory of victory to give their people something to believe in.
In the near future, it may even be backed up in law.
The Russian parliament is on its summer break at the moment, but legislation is being considered - legislation that would make it a criminal offence to “infringe on historical memory in relation to events which took place in the Second World War”.
James Rodgers was formerly the BBC’s Moscow correspondent.
Natalia Narochnitskaya, member of the Historical Truth Commission
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The US conducted a second Predator airstrike in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of South Waziristan today.
Unmanned Predator strike aircraft pounded a Taliban convoy, killing 25 fighters and destroying five vehicles.
“We have reports that 25 militants have been killed,” an intelligence official told Reuters.
The US was “gunning for a HVT [high value target],” or a senior al Qaeda or Taliban leader, a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal. “We believe there were some foreign al Qaeda fighters in that convoy.”
The attack on the convoy was the second today, and the third in 24 hours. Earlier today, eight Taliban fighters were killed when Predators fired six Hellfire missiles on a Taliban training camp in Karwan Manza. The camp is run by Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.
Yesterday’s strike on a Taliban training camp in the village of Zangra in the Ladha region killed 12 Taliban and four al Qaeda fighters.
South Waziristan is a major focus of the US air campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Of the 29 US strikes carried out in Pakistan this year, 21 of them took place in South Waziristan.
Baitullah Mehsud’s territory has been hit 13 times and Mullah Nazir’s areas have been hit eight times. Both Nazir and Baitullah host al Qaeda training camps and shelter senior leaders of the terror group. Seven of the last nine attacks have targeted Baitullah’s camps and safe houses.
The US is well on its way to exceeding last year’s total of 36 airstrikes in Pakistan.
WASHINGTON – US administration officials said Tuesday that terror suspects tried before military commissions can claim some constitutional rights, including protection against evidence obtained through coercion.
The commissions, Assistant Attorney General David Kris said, should only allow evidence from detainees’ voluntary statements or else risk having convictions thrown out on appeal in higher courts.
“It is the administration’s view that there is a serious risk that courts would hold that admission of involuntary statements of the accused in military commission proceedings is unconstitutional,” Kris told the Senate Armed Services Committee in written testimony.
Adding the safeguards upholding “due process” principles in the US Constitution would help commission convictions stand up on appeal, Kris told the panel.
His comments, echoed by the Defense Department’s general counsel, Jeh Johnson, reflected a debate within the administration and in Congress over how to prosecute detainees under revised rules for the controversial military tribunals.
Republican Senator John McCain questioned the Justice Department official’s view, saying he was surprised to hear that terror suspects at Guantanamo, the US naval base in southern Cuba where 229 “war on terror” detainees remain, enjoyed constitutional protections.
“I did not know, nor know, of any time in American history where enemy combatants were given rights under the United States Constitution,” McCain said.
The US Navy’s judge advocate general, Vice Admiral Bruce McDonald, told the senators he rejected the Justice Department’s opinion.
The admiral argued that the legal principle of voluntary statements from the accused made sense in ordinary criminal cases but was impractical for the military commissions, which he said were handling suspects picked up on the battlefield.
Instead, McDonald proposed a list of “considerations” to be taken into account by the presiding judge, including whether a statement was taken on the battlefield or in subsequent detention.
For detainees at the controversial prison camp facing possible prosecution, much of the evidence against them comes from “involuntary” statements in interrogations, legal analysts say.
The Senate hearing focused on a proposed bill, which McCain helped draft, that would introduce new rules for the commissions designed to make trial procedures resemble courts-martial.
In May, President Barack Obama said he would keep the military commissions set up by his predecessor, George W. Bush, to prosecute detainees at Guantanamo but pledged to reform the system.
Human rights groups sharply criticized Obama over his decision to retain the commissions and to allow for the possible indefinite detention of terror suspects.
The latest proposed changes to the commissions amounted to “tinkering,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said.
“The military commissions are fatally flawed and no amount of tinkering will fix them,” ACLU senior legislative counsel Christopher Anders said in a statement.
“The system is set up to ensure convictions, not give defendants an impartial hearing.”
One of Obama’s first acts after taking office in January was to order a four-month suspension of the commissions.
Obama also promised to close the prison camp by January 2010.
At the hearing, administration officials said they were not ready to predict how many of the remaining detainees would be tried in federal courts, military commissions or held indefinitely.
The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Wall Street Journal 7/3/2009
Wherever Jim Hansen is right now — whatever speech the “censored” NASA scientist is giving — perhaps he’ll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don’t count on it.
Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he’d given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.
Ken Fallin
Alan Carlin, 35-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran
So much so that one of President Barack Obama’s first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, “As administrator, I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that “the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over.”
Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency. In March, the Obama EPA prepared to engage the global-warming debate in an astounding new way, by issuing an “endangerment” finding on carbon. It establishes that carbon is a pollutant, and thereby gives the EPA the authority to regulate it — even if Congress doesn’t act.
Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,” the report read.
The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from “any direct communication” with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: “The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” (Emphasis added.)
Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.” Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.
The emails were unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Republican officials are calling for an investigation; House Energy Committee ranking member Joe Barton sent a letter with pointed questions to Mrs. Jackson, which she’s yet to answer. The EPA has issued defensive statements, claiming Mr. Carlin wasn’t ignored. But there is no getting around that the Obama administration has flouted its own promises of transparency.
The Bush administration’s great sin, for the record, was daring to issue reports that laid out the administration’s official position on global warming. That the reports did not contain the most doomsday predictions led to howls that the Bush politicals were suppressing and ignoring career scientists.
The Carlin dustup falls into a murkier category. Unlike annual reports, the Obama EPA’s endangerment finding is a policy act. As such, EPA is required to make public those agency documents that pertain to the decision, to allow for public comment. Court rulings say rulemaking records must include both “the evidence relied upon and the evidence discarded.” In refusing to allow Mr. Carlin’s study to be circulated, the agency essentially hid it from the docket.
Unable to defend the EPA’s actions, the climate-change crew — , led by anonymous EPA officials — is doing what it does best: trashing Mr. Carlin as a “denier.” He is, we are told, “only” an economist (he in fact holds a degree in physics from CalTech). It wasn’t his “job” to look at this issue (he in fact works in an office tasked with “informing important policy decisions with sound economics and other sciences.”) His study was full of sham science. (The majority of it in fact references peer-reviewed studies.) Where’s Mr. Hansen and his defense of scientific freedom when you really need him?
Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition.
President Obama today offered to scrap plans for a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe if Russia helped to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb.
He appealed in Moscow for a new era of partnership between Russia and the United States to fight the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states and terrorist groups.
“That is why we should be united in opposing North Korea’s efforts to become a nuclear power and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” he said.
Russia strongly opposes US plans to site the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, which Washington says is necessary to defend against a surprise attack from Iran. Mr Obama made clear that he was willing to strike a deal with the Kremlin.
“I know Russia opposes the planned configuration for missile defence in Europe . . . I have made it clear that this system is directed at preventing a potential attack from Iran and has nothing to do with Russia,” Mr Obama said in a speech to students graduating from Moscow’s New Economic School.
“I want us to work together on a missile defence architecture that makes us all safer. But if the threat from Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes is eliminated, the driving force for missile defence in Europe will be eliminated. That is in our mutual interest.”
A failure to uphold agreements to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons would turn international law into “the law of the jungle”. The US and Russia had learnt to respect a “balance of terror” during the Cold War, but “we have to ask whether 10 or 20 or 50 nuclear-armed nations will protect their arsenals and refrain from using them”.
In a speech laced with compliments for Russian culture, and notably light on concerns over democracy and human rights abuses, Mr Obama said that America wanted “a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia”.
He paid tribute to the “unimaginable hardship” suffered by the people of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany. Future threats required “global partnership and that partnership will be stronger if Russia occupies its rightful place as a great power”.
Mr Obama continued: “In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonising other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over.
“Any world order that tries to elevate one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game — progress must be shared. That is why I have called for a ‘reset’ in relations between the United States and Russia.”
Mr Obama stood up for Ukraine and Georgia against Russian efforts to prevent them seeking membership in Nato, saying that states “must have the right to borders that are secure and to their own foreign policies”.
“Any system that cedes those rights will lead to anarchy. That is why this principle must apply to all nations – including Georgia and Ukraine,” Mr Obama said. He stopped short of criticising Russia for recognising the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states after last August’s war with Georgia.
Mr Obama pulled his punches over the state of Russian democracy and individual freedom, disappointing liberal critics of the Kremlin. He made no direct criticism of Russia but instead declared that America had an interest in “democratic governments that protect the rights of their people”.
“The arc of history shows us that governments which serve their own people survive and thrive; governments which serve only their own power do not,” he said. “Governments that represent the will of their people are far less likely to descend into failed states, to terrorise their citizens, or to wage war on others.”
Mr Obama insisted that America “will not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country”. He admitted that the US had “not always done what we should have on that front”.
“I will work tirelessly to protect America’s security and advance our interests. But no one nation can meet the challenges of the 21st century on its own, nor dictate its terms to the world. That is something that America now understands just as Russia understands,” he said.
Earlier, Mr Obama met Vladimir Putin for the first time and praised his “extraordinary work” as president and prime minister. The tone of the meeting at Mr Putin’s country residence was in stark contrast to Mr Obama’s criticism of him last week as a man with “one foot in the old ways of doing business”.
Over a Russian breakfast of smoked Beluga and tea from a samovar, served up by waiters in folk costumes, Mr Putin told his guest: “We associate your name with the hopes of developing our relations.”
Mr Obama said that their meeting provided an “excellent opportunity to put US-Russian relations on a much stronger footing”. A senior US official later told reporters that the President had changed his view of Mr Putin and was now “convinced the Prime Minister is a man of today”.
July 7 (Bloomberg) — U.S. President Barack Obama lauded Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for his service to Russia, continuing a three-day push to overcome the animosities of the George W. Bush era.
“I am aware of not only the extraordinary work you have done on behalf of the Russian people in your previous role as prime minister — as president — but in your current role as prime minister,” Obama told Putin after more than an hour of talks at the premier’s residence near Moscow.
Obama and Putin’s protégé and successor Dmitry Medvedev reached agreements yesterday on nuclear arms and Afghanistan, which Obama said marked a “new start” in relations between the two nuclear superpowers. The two leaders called for a reduction of atomic warheads by as much as a third, while Russia also agreed to allow the transit of U.S. arms shipments to troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Relations had reached a post-Cold War low under the last U.S. administration because of disagreements over the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a proposed U.S. missile shield in Europe and Russia’s war with Georgia.
While Obama, 47, and Medvedev, 43, “had a symbolically successful day” yesterday, the U.S. president’s meeting with Putin, 56, was “key” to the relationship because Putin is still the dominant political figure in Russia, said Andrew Kuchins, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
‘Ability to Charm’
Most Russians believe Medvedev is controlled by Putin, a poll showed last month. Sixty-eight percent of respondents in a Levada Center poll said Putin controls Medvedev, while 19 percent said the president acts independently.
“Obama’s ability to charm is his greatest strength and Putin is not a guy that can be charmed,” Kuchins said late yesterday.
After four hours of meetings in the Kremlin yesterday Obama told reporters that he and Medvedev, a fellow lawyer by training, had succeeded in their goal to “reset relations” between the U.S. and Russia. “After less than six months of collaboration, we have done exactly that,” Obama said.
That represented a 180-degree turn from Bush’s first meeting with Putin, then Russia’s president, at a summit in Slovenia in 2001. Bush told reporters then that he had “looked the man in the eye” and found Putin trustworthy, adding: “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
Cash Stockpile
In his eight years in the Kremlin, Putin consolidated political power, tamed the country’s new billionaires and led Russia’s resurgence in international affairs. Russia’s economy, contracting now for the first time in more than a decade, grew an average of 7 percent a year under Putin, as the price of oil, the country’s main export earner, climbed from $20 a barrel in 2000 to more than $100 when he stepped down in May 2008.
Russia amassed the world’s third-largest cash stockpile, increasing 30-fold to almost $600 billion before the war with Georgia a year ago. Putin also turned OAO Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer, into a geopolitical weapon as the state- run company’s market value surged from less than $5 billion to more than $330 billion.
Today, Putin, a KGB colonel during the Cold War, returned Obama’s compliment.
“With you we link all our hopes for the furtherance of relations between our two countries,” Putin said. “We are very glad to see you here and welcome you here in Russia.”
Published: July 7 2009 14:14 | Last updated: July 7 2009 14:14
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.
His attack on unbridled capitalism and unregulated market forces was also accompanied by a strong critique of some international aid agencies, which he accused of encouraging abortion, sterilisation and imposing contraception. The pontiff, elected to the papacy in 2005, stirred controversy on his first visit to Africa in March when he said that use of condoms exacerbated the Aids crisis.
While the pontiff’s call for a new political authority is unlikely to go down well with the G8 heads of government, his plea for financiers in particular to refocus on ethics will be reflected in a G8 communiqué bearing the imprint of Italy and Germany in their push for stronger and more co-ordinated “global standards”.
In common with some of the more regulatory-minded members of the G8, the pope does not reject globalisation outright but seeks more forceful implementation of common rules and standards.
Pope Benedict’s emphasis on the need for “forms of redistribution of wealth” is also likely to fuel the debate at the summit – to be attended by 39 heads of government and international institutions – over the failure of several rich nations, most notably Italy and France, to honour past aid commitments.
Vatican observers noted that the timing of the encyclical, the most important transmission of papal teaching on key issues, demonstrated the readiness of Pope Benedict to intervene directly in political developments. Within Italy, the interventionist pontiff has been attacked by secularists for what they see as his unwarranted interference in domestic Italian affairs.
The German-born pope said the “true world political authority” would have the duty to “manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result”.
It would be ”regulated by law” and ”would need to be universally recognised and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights”.
Enterprises needed a profoundly new way of understanding business that would respect the dignity of workers and foster the “common good by prioritising ethics and social responsibility over dividend returns”.
”Today’s international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise,” he said.
“Above all, the intention to do good must not be considered incompatible with the effective capacity to produce goods,’’ he wrote. “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity so as to not abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.’’
Pope Benedict will meet Barack Obama, US president, on Friday at the close of the three-day summit which is being held near the central city of L’Aquila, devastated by an earthquake in April and still experiencing strong aftershocks.
The encyclical addresses a broad range of other issues, including migration, terrorism, sexual tourism, population issues, the environment, bioethics, and energy.
Three hours after arriving at the Kremlin yesterday, President Barack Obama signed a preliminary agreement on a new nuclear arms-control treaty with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The agreement — a clear road map for a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) — commits the U.S. and Russia to cut their nuclear weapons to the lowest levels since the early years of the Cold War.
Mr. Obama praised the agreement as a step forward, away from the “suspicion and rivalry of the past,” while Mr. Medvedev hailed it as a “reasonable compromise.” In fact, given the range of force levels it permits, this agreement has the potential to compromise U.S. security — depending on what happens next.
Ryan Inzana
In the first place, locking in specific reductions for U.S. forces prior to the conclusion of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is putting the cart before the horse. The Obama administration’s team at the Pentagon is currently examining U.S. strategic force requirements. Before specific limits are set on U.S. forces, it should complete the review. Strategic requirements should drive force numbers; arms-control numbers should not dictate strategy.
Second, the new agreement not only calls for reductions in the number of nuclear warheads (to between 1,500 and 1,675), but for cuts in the number of strategic force launchers. Under the 1991 START I Treaty, each side was limited to 1,600 launchers. Yesterday’s agreement calls for each side to be limited to between 500 and 1,100 launchers each.
According to open Russian sources, it was Russia that pushed for the lower limit of 500 launchers in negotiations. In the weeks leading up to this summit, it also has been openly stated that Moscow would like the number of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles (SLBMS), and strategic bombers to be reduced “several times” below the current limit of 1,600. Moving toward very low numbers of launchers is a smart position for Russia, but not for the U.S.
Why? Because the number of deployed Russian strategic ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers will drop dramatically simply as a result of their aging. In other words, a large number of Russian launchers will be removed from service with or without a new arms-control agreement.
The Obama administration will undoubtedly come under heavy pressure to move to the low end of the 500-1,100 limit on launchers in order to match Russian reductions. But it need not and should not do so. Based solely on open Russian sources, by 2017-2018 Russia will likely have fewer than half of the approximately 680 operational launchers it has today. With a gross domestic product less than that of California, Russia is confronting the dilemma of how to maintain parity with the U.S. while retiring its many aged strategic forces.
Mr. Medvedev’s solution is to negotiate, inviting the U.S. to make real cuts, while Russia eliminates nothing that it wouldn’t retire in any event.
This isn’t just my conclusion — it’s the conclusion of many Russian officials and commentators. Russian Gen. Nikolay Solovtsov, commander of the Strategic Missile Troops, was recently quoted by Moscow Interfax-AVN Online as saying that “not a single Russian launcher” with “remaining service life” will be withdrawn under a new agreement. Noted Russian journalist Pavel Felgengauer observed in Novaya Gazeta that Russian leaders “have demanded of the Americans unilateral concessions on all points, offering practically nothing in exchange.” Precisely.
Beyond the bad negotiating principle of giving up something for nothing, there will be serious downsides if the U.S. actually reduces its strategic launchers as much as Moscow wishes. The bipartisan Congressional Strategic Posture Commission — headed by former secretaries of defense William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger — concluded that the U.S. could make reductions “if this were done while also preserving the resilience and survivability of U.S. forces.” Having very low numbers of launchers would make the U.S. more vulnerable to destabilizing first-strike dangers, and would reduce or eliminate the U.S. ability to adapt its nuclear deterrent to an increasingly diverse set of post-Cold War nuclear and biological weapons threats.
Accepting low launcher numbers would also encourage placing more warheads on the remaining ICBMs — i.e., “MIRVing,” or adding multiple independently targeted warheads on a single missile. This is what the Russians openly say they are planning to do. Yet the U.S. has long sought to move away from MIRVed ICBMs as part of START, because heavy MIRVing can make each ICBM a more tempting target. One measure of U.S. success will be in resisting the Russian claim that severely reducing launcher numbers is somehow necessary and “stabilizing.” It would be neither.
Third, the new agreement appears to defer the matter of so-called tactical nuclear weapons. Russia has some 4,000 tactical nuclear weapons and many thousands more in reserve; U.S. officials have said that Russia has an astounding 10 to 1 numerical advantage. These weapons are of greatest concern with regard to the potential for nuclear war, and they should be our focus for arms reduction. The Perry-Schlesinger commission report identified Russian tactical nuclear weapons as an “urgent” problem. Yet at this point, they appear to be off the table.
The administration may hope to negotiate reductions in tactical nuclear weapons later. But Russia has rejected this in the past, and nothing seems to have changed. As Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin of the Russian Academy of Sciences said recently in Moscow Interfax-AVN Online, “A treaty on the limitation and reduction of tactical nuclear weapons looks absolutely unrealistic.” If the U.S. hopes to address this real problem, it must maintain negotiating leverage in the form of strategic launchers and weapons.
Fourth, Mr. Medvedev was quoted recently in RIA Novosti as saying that strategic reductions are possible only if the U.S. alleviates Russian concerns about “U.S. plans to create a global missile defense.” There will surely be domestic and international pressure on the U.S. to limit missile defense to facilitate Russian reductions under the new treaty. But the U.S. need for missile defense has little to do with Russia. And the value of missile defense could not be clearer given recent North Korean belligerence. The Russians are demanding this linkage, at least in part to kill our missile defense site in Europe intended to defend against Iranian missiles. Another measure of U.S. success will be to avoid such linkages.
In short, Russian leaders hope to control or eliminate many elements of U.S. military power in exchange for strategic force reductions they will have to make anyway. U.S. leaders should not agree to pay Russia many times over for essentially an empty box.
Finally, Russian violations of its existing arms-control commitments must be addressed along with any new commitments. According to an August 2005 State Department report, Russia has violated START verification and other arms-control commitments in multiple ways. One significant violation has even been discussed openly in Russian publications — the testing of the SS-27 ICBM with MIRVs in direct violation of START I.
President Obama should recall Winston Churchill’s warning: “Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure and more than sure that other means of preserving peace are in your hands.” There is no need for the U.S. to accept Russian demands for missile-defense linkage, or deep reductions in the number of our ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers, to realize much lower numbers of Russian strategic systems. There is also no basis for expecting Russian goodwill if we do so.
Mr. Payne, a professor of defense and strategic studies at Missouri State University, is a member of the Perry-Schlesinger Commission, which was established by Congress to assess U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities. This op-ed is adapted from testimony given before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on June 24.
Lithuania is holding festivities to mark 1,000 years since the country was first mentioned in historic chronicles. It is also 20 years since the nation intensified efforts to split from the USSR. The BBC’s Olexiy Solohubenko looks back at 1989 and asks how far the country has come.
Dancers at this year’s song festival celebrate the country’s 1,000 years
Vytautas Landsbergis sits next to his grand piano and talks about music, politics and memories of 1989.
Two decades ago, the music professor - and now member of the European Parliament - was leader of the Sajudis movement struggling for Lithuanian independence.
“Of course we knew it would be very tense, and we knew that we could be crushed, but we also knew that we had no other choice and that it was the time for Lithuania to regain its freedom, despite the threat of tanks,” he says.
Vytautas Landsbergis: Professor, president and MEP
Soviet tanks did come to the streets of Vilnius in 1990 and 1991 - one of the few places when the Kremlin thought military power could still win.
Before the tanks there were behind-the-scene talks. The irony was that the Soviet president Gorbachev had to confront not just the independence movement but also the Communist Party of Lithuania, which also wanted independence.
Prison cells
At one meeting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was filmed castigating Lithuanian leaders: “You are not savages, you will never leave,” he shouted.
Algirdas Brazauskas, a former president and prime minister of Lithuania, and 20 years ago the leader of the Lithuanian Communist Party, chuckles as he recalls how the authorities in Moscow clung to Soviet illusions.
“For them it was not an illusion. They thought things would actually stay the way they were. They formed a commission on Baltic affairs which included five or six Politburo members, the head of the KGB [Viktor Chebrikov] and Defence Minister Marshall Yazov.
“They will again and again tell us to come to Moscow, and there I would sit at one end of the table and they would sit at the other and they would lecture me for two or three hours like a child.”
He was threatened on many occasions, he says, “and not only threatened but specifically told they would use all available means - the army, the KGB - to put the Lithuanian situation under control.”
Vytautas Landsbergis later discovered one aspect of the plan to deal seriously with the independence leaders.
“Of course we could be executed,” he says. “Later, after we declared independence, we learned a strange thing: it appears that the prison cells in the KGB building in Vilnius which used to hold 20 prisoners were all freshly painted and had bunks for two - with fresh linen.”
“I was told it was for us,” he smiles, “in case some Western politicians would start asking about the fate of Lithuanian political prisoners - see, they are in jail, but what a nice jail it is…”
Poland’s dramatic rejection of communist rule in 1989 had a great influence on Lithuania as it struggled to break from Moscow. Baltic solidarity also played a key role - all three countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) used singing festivals as a means of peaceful protest, and the events of 1988-91 have become known as the “singing revolution”.
A key event took place on the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, on 23 August 1989, when hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians joined hands with Latvians and Estonians in a human chain across the Baltic states.
It was the strongest signal to Moscow that independence was on the cards - and the strongest signal to local leaders that, should they support independence, the people would support them.
Home-grown leader
Dalia Grybauskaite was elected as an independent with 60% of the vote
Lithuania has come a long way since then.
The biography of Dalia Grybauskaite, just elected as Lithuania’s new president on an independent ticket, reveals something about the national mood.
The outgoing president, Valdas Adamkus, spent most of his life in the United States, returning only after independence.
Ms Grybauskaite has one foot in the West and one in the East. She studied in Moscow and the US as well as Vilnius, and has spent the last five years in Brussels as Lithuania’s European commissioner.
“I think it gives the message that Lithuania has finally got its own leaders, who were born here, grown here, studied everywhere, took the best of all societies,” she says.
“And as a person of my generation I was living in both societies and we’ll try to bring the best that we had in all societies and to try to live for a better future of our country.”
Lithuania’s singing revolution gave people here the opportunities and risks of a free market and free society.
While there may be some lingering nostalgia among older citizens for the stability of Soviet times, the new generation feels firmly a part of Europe.
The EU flag here is more visible than in many other countries of Europe - it’s a statement, an affirmation of where Lithuania belongs.
Vilnius - The Baltic nation of Lithuania is bracing for a nationwide party as it prepares to mark its symbolic 1 000th birthday and give itself some respite from a daily fare of economic crisis headlines.
Lithuania’s woes - the economy is expected to shrink around 18% this year - have cast a shadow over its capital Vilnius’ year-long status as a European Capital of Culture.
That has left the country of 3.4 million people determined to put on a show on Monday, when it marks its national day with a combination street partying and official ceremonies with guests such as the monarchs of Denmark, Norway and Sweden plus the presidents of neighbouring republics.
Lithuania declared independence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1990. Like many ex-communist states, however, it has been keen to underline that it is no newcomer on the map of Europe.
Its national day, for example, commemorates the 1253 coronation of its first king, Mindaugas. The reconstructed palace of Lithuania’s monarchs will be inaugurated as part of festivities that also include a performance by a choir of 11 000.
“Because our country’s so small, I think this event is very important. All the more so, because Lithuania is again an independent state,” said Ernesta Darguziene, head of a folk ensemble.
Adding extra flavour to the celebrations is the 1 000th anniversary of the first attested mention of Lithuania, in the Annals of Quedlinburg, an 11th century chronicle named after a German monastery.
A 1009 entry in the now-lost annals –whose content survived in a 16th century copy - recounts the death of a Christian missionary, Saint Bruno.
The chronicler said he was killed by a blow to the head during a pagan attack in “confinio Rusciae et Lituae” - the borderlands of Russia and Lithuania.
“Just as Christopher Columbus discovered America, so Saint Bruno discovered Lithuania,” said Lithuanian historian Alfredas Bumbliauskas.
Saint Bruno’s demise otherwise failed to put Lithuania on the map, but religion was to pull it into the spotlight centuries later.
Lithuania only formally converted to Christianity at the end of the 1300s, making it Europe’s last formally pagan nation.
The switch came after the Vatican authorised a crusade and colonisation drive in the Baltic by the German-rooted Teutonic knights, but also because Lithuanian ruler Jogaila converted when he was offered the throne of neighbouring Poland in 1386.
That launched a golden age.
In 1410, Jogaila and Lithuanian leader Vytautas crushed the Teutonic knights at the Battle of Grunwald. In 1569 their successors created a Polish-Lithuanian federation which wielded power from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
But amid war and political intrigue the joint state was wiped off the map in 1795 by imperial Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Until World War I, Lithuania was just a province of the Russian empire, which sought to crush nationalism and even banned the Lithuanian alphabet.
It declared independence in 1918 after the empire collapsed into revolution. Freedom was short-lived. The Soviet Union invaded in 1940, Nazi Germany in 1941, and the Soviets returned in 1944.
Democracy campaigners launched an independence drive in the 1980s that eventually led to the March 1990 breakaway.
Moscow refused to give in. An attack by security forces on protestors in Vilnius in January 1991 left 13 dead, and the Soviets continued beatings and shootings for months.
Lithuania finally won recognition from Moscow after the failed coup by hardliners in the Soviet capital in August 1991. In 2004, its pro-Western drive culminated with admission to the European Union and Nato.
“Today, thanks to our membership of the EU and Nato, we have more than 30 allies. We’ve never had so many. We’re starting off our second millennium better than ever,” said Bumbliauskas.
Biographical Research on Czeslaw Milosz, Lithuanian Nobel Laureate
Christopher James Heyworth
July 03, 2009
Reprinted from the Lithuanian e-zine, LABAS, which owns the copyright, I assume.
Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel laureate and longtime UC Berkeley professor whose emotional and intellectually expansive poetry and prose were colored by his experiences from the wartime horror and political upheaval of the 20th century, died Saturday at his home in Krakow, Poland. He was 93. Milosz, who abhorred totalitarianism, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980, as Solidarity worker protests were beginning to shake communist rule in Poland.
One of his best-known works, “The Captive Mind,” published in the early 1950s, is an analysis of the plight of intellectuals under communist dictatorship. But he was a masterfully adept writer known equally for his poems, essays, translations and scholarly work.
“He had the combination of enormous compassion and tenderness for being,” said Jane Hirshfield, a Marin poet who became friends with Milosz after meeting him at an Angel Island picnic around 15 years ago. “Then that’s coupled with this enormous gravitas of spiritual inquiry and also the ingredient I had never seen before, which was the moral authority that comes from his relationship to history.”
Robert Hass, a UC Berkeley professor and former U.S. poet laureate who translated about a dozen of Milosz’s poetry books, said, “He had a huge appetite for life, but he’d seen so much horror that he didn’t think he should like life.
“He had the idea that he could somehow redeem all the suffering if he could find a way to grasp the nature of his own experience of life and words. That was his great quest. It’s the passion that made him a great poet.”
Milosz has been frequently described as a poet of witness and a preserver of memories. He used language to recall moments — eating lamb, swimming with a childhood friend — and make them radiantly alive years later.
Milosz lived through Poland’s World War II Nazi regime and the Stalinist tyranny that followed. After the war he was a diplomat for communist Poland, but he broke with the regime. After 30 years in exile in France and the United States, he returned to Poland after the country won freedom in 1989.
Milosz was born in 1911 to a Polish-speaking family in Lithuania. While he studied law at the University of Vilnius, he published his first book of poems in 1936. Later he wrote about his Lithuanian childhood in the novel “The Issa Valley,” published in 1981, and “Native Realm,” an autobiography.
During World War II, Milosz joined the socialist resistance to Nazi- occupied Warsaw and published an anthology of anti-Nazi poetry. He was a witness to the Warsaw uprising of 1944.
“His poetry of the war years is a very powerful poetry of witness,” Hass said. “There was a kind of anguished moral clarity in his vision in those years.”
After the war, he served as a Polish diplomat, but he broke with the regime and sought political asylum in Paris and then in the United States. During the peak of the Cold War, his writings did not reach his native country because of communist censorship.
Milosz had been drawn to Marxism as a young man. His defection reflected his fundamental rejection of dictatorship and the way communist dogma could suffocate spirit and ideas.
Milosz was a little-known poet when he joined the Slavic Languages and Literature Department at UC Berkeley in 1960. But by the early 1970s, young poets were hitchhiking to Berkeley to hear him speak, Hass said, and in later years, people would be “hanging on chandeliers” to see him.
With his famously bushy eyebrows and craggy features, Milosz was an unmistakable figure on campus, where he taught for more than 20 years.
California figured into some of his poetry. In “A Magic Mountain,” he wrote about the loneliness and wild disorientation he felt in a place so far from home. His 1969 book, “A View of San Francisco Bay,” chronicled his experiences as an outsider looking for his place in the United States.
Though a serious man who had witnessed many atrocities, he also had a great sense of humor and a hearty laugh, Hirshfield said. She remembers sitting on the patio of his house in the Berkeley hills, explaining New Yorker cartoons to him. “He wasn’t necessarily au courant with all the references,” she said, but once he got it, he would laugh and laugh and laugh.
Milosz married Janka Dluka in 1944. She died in 1986. In 1992, he married Carol Thigpen, a historian, who died in 2003. He is survived by two sons, Anthony and John Peter, both of Oakland.
Milosz’s latest book, “A Second Space,” which Hass translated to English with him, comes out in the fall.
CAPITAL OF CULTURE: The charming city of Plunge beat stiff competition to take out the prestigious title.
VILNIUS - Plunge (pronounced Ploong-geh), a lovely little city in the northwestern Lithuanian region of Samogitia, has won the competition for the Lithuanian Capital of Culture 2009 and offers a wide range of entertainment this year including three discovery routes.
“Plunge’s project suggests a new approach to Plunge as the city of arts. The art celebration will reveal historical pathways of culture, which have connected Plunge, Berzoras, Plateliai, Zemaiciu Kalvarija and other cities of the region for centuries,” Vytautas Balciunas, a culture historian and head of the evaluating commission said.
The city, which is 27 kilometers from Telsiai, inherited the title from Zarasai, which was the Capital of Culture 2008, and left behind 16 other rivals across Lithuania, to win the competition organized by Vilnius European Capital of Culture 2009.
New cultural spaces, cultural experiments and cultural manifestations by local artists are being implemented as part of the event. Main events will kick-off on June 19, when musicians, poets, sculptors and other artists will take over the city. Various exhibitions, a sculpture park, memorial plates and performances are also planned.
The celebration will continue until June 21, but new cultural tourism routes; the music-literature route, the route of historical possibilities, and the sacral-historical route, will be open for exploration throughout the year.
The music-literature route includes a traditional international festival of brass orchestras (June 20), the Mykolas Oginskis festival (Aug. 29 – Sept. 26), and more. There will also be a musical flea market where young Lithuanian musicians will play everything from folklore to modern music and interpretations of brass instruments.
Visitors are invited to many musical performances and exhibitions in open spaces and untraditional places such as a former Soviet factory, the old Plunge water tower, at Gandinga mound, and other places.
The route of historical possibilities is an exploration of lights and music installations in the Plunge industrial region, which includes the city bus and railway stations and bus stops. Poetry and music performances will take place on the roof of a building, in a clock-tower, in a museum at night, and in churches.
The sacral-historical route features a camp for families (June 21-28) and artists (Aug. 7-9) in Pakutuvenai – an area near Plunge, which is famous in Lithuania as the oasis of peace and love. Pakutuvenai is known for the church of St. Anthony of Padua and the Farmstead of Reconciliation where people who are lost in this world can find peace. Visitors can see old wooden churches in Plunge, and baroque churches in Gintaliske, Berzoras, Plateliai, Gegrenai, Alsedziai. The churches will host sacral music concerts, poetry readings and events marking the 600th anniversary of the christening of Samogitians.
Besides the cultural tourism routes, Plunge has always been a place worth seeing and the recent aesthetic improvements, make it a true gem. The city hosts a few hotels and many ethnographic country farmsteads for accommodation. As for sightseeing, there are nine reservations; six natural landscape objects preserved by the state; four parks; thirteen mounds; 40 monuments of architecture; 29 monuments of art and sculptures, and three mythological stones throughout Plunge region.
Lithuanians To Gather In Hartford, All Over World, For Anniversary
Courant Staff Report
July 4, 2009
Members of the Lithuanian American community plan to gather Tuesday afternoon in Hartford to mark the 1,000th anniversary of the first written reference to Lithuania by singing the country’s national anthem.
A gathering sponsored by the Lithuanian American Community of Greater Hartford is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, 53 Capitol Ave., Hartford. The high point of the gathering will be at 2 p.m., (9 p.m. in Lithuania) when all sing the Lithuanian national anthem, “Lietuva Tevyne Musu,” which means “Our Homeland Lithuania.”
Lithuanians around the world will sing the anthem at the same time, said Danute Grajauskas of Glastonbury, president of the Lithuanian American Community of Greater Hartford.
Lithuanian Americans from throughout the state have been invited and Grajauskas said she is hoping for a good crowd. A reception in the church hall will follow.
The Republic of Lithuania is home to about 3.5 million people. Despite decades of domination by Russia, then the Nazis, and then the Soviet Union, Lithuania relied on Catholic traditions and memories of independence early in the 20th century to preserve its national identity. The nation reclaimed its independence in 1990 during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Vilnius Mayor Vilius Navickas, who brought the idea of Disneyland theme park to Vilnius from his official visit to Chicago in the U.S.A. has received negative responses from both Disneyland company and Legoland.
Walt Disney Parks and Lego Group investors were proposed to consider the possibility to erect high-class entertainment park in Vilnius with their own finances. It became clear from the responses that the companies are not currently planning to make investments into the Baltic region, reports ELTA/LETA.
“By sending letters to these companies we just checked whether such a possibility existed. We expected such a variant too, however, our provision that a theme park that would be attractive to both Lithuanians and guests from abroad should be erected does not change,” mayor’s advisor Darius Indriunas told the daily Vilniaus Diena.
Have the happiest and safest of holidays on this, the 233rd birthday of our great nation!
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NAWA, Afghanistan (AP) - U.S. Marines suffered their first casualties of a massive new military campaign Thursday as they engaged in sporadic gunbattles along 55 miles of Taliban-controlled heartland in southern Afghanistan.
One Marine was killed and several others were injured or wounded on the first full day of the assault, the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the fall of Taliban government in 2001.
The offensive will test the Obama administration’s new strategy of holding territory and letting the Afghan government sink roots in Helmand province. The insurgency has proven particularly resilient in this area, where foreign troops have never before operated in such large numbers.
Iran: ‘Anti-Revolutionary’ Elements Will Not Be Freed - Official
June 29, 2009 | 1621 GMT
Iranian Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei said “anti-revolutionary” activists arrested during the demonstrations following the disputed June 12 election will not be freed, Fars News Agency reported June 29. Ejei said that those arrested fall into three categories, including “decision-makers, those executing the decisions and anti-revolutionary elements,” and said that those determined to be decision-makers and those who executed decisions will be held until authorities determine what to do with them, but that anti-revolutionary elements will not be freed. He said that those arrested for damaging public or private property will be freed after they pay compensation for the damages.
The deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Mohammad Saeedi, met in Moscow with the chief of Russian atomic corporation Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, on June 30 to discuss new ways to expand “peaceful nuclear cooperation” between Iran and Russia, Xinhua reported.
The Obama administration doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths about global warming. And they don’t want you to hear them, either. As Democrats rush on Friday to pass a $4 trillion, thousand-page “cap and trade” bill that no one has read, environmental bureaucrats are stifling voices that threaten their political agenda.
The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.
On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc.” On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency’s climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:
“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. … I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”
Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the “process” of ramming the EPA’s endangerment finding through. Truth in science took a back seat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from “a very negative impact.”
In another follow-up e-mail, McGartland warned Carlin to drop the subject altogether: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”
But, of course, the e-mails show that EPA had already predetermined what it was going to do — “move forward on endangerment.” Which underscores the fact that the open public comment period was all for show. In her message to the public about the radical greenhouse gas rules, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson requested “comment on the data on which the proposed findings are based, the methodology used in obtaining and analyzing the data, and the major legal interpretations and policy considerations underlying the proposed findings.” Jackson, meet Carlin.
The EPA now justifies the suppression of the study because economist Carlin (a 35-year veteran of the agency who also holds a B.S. in physics) “is an individual who is not a scientist.” Neither is Al Gore. Nor is energy czar Carol Browner. Nor is cap-and-trade shepherd Nancy Pelosi. Carlin’s analysis incorporated peer-reviewed studies and, as he informed his colleagues, “significant new research” related to the proposed endangerment finding. According to those who have seen his study, it spotlights EPA’s reliance on out-of-date research, uncritical recycling of United Nations data and omission of new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures and a new consensus that future hurricane behavior won’t be different than in the past.
But the message from his superiors was clear: La-la-la, we can’t hear you.
In April, President Obama declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” Another day, another broken promise. Will Carlin meet the same fate as inspectors general who have been fired or “retired” by the Obama administration for blowing the whistle and defying political orthodoxy? Or will he, too, be yet another casualty of the Hope and Change steamroller? The bodies are piling up.
“The KGB was an excellent opportunity to learn about the West, read banned literature and learn about financial markets. Above all it was an education that was unavailable to most of my countrymen, which was valuable later in life.”
Ukraine’s SBU is declassifying the files selectively
Ukraine is opening up part of its old KGB archive, declassifying hundreds of thousands of documents spanning the entire Soviet period.
But the move to expose Soviet-era abuses is dividing Ukrainians, the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse reports from Kiev.
Deep in the bowels of Ukraine’s former KGB headquarters there is a deathly silence. Thousands of boxes, piled floor to ceiling, line the walls. Each box is carefully numbered and each one contains hundreds of documents: case notes on enemies of the former Soviet state.
Behind each number, there is a story of personal tragedy.
Ivan Severin was “liquidated” in 1947, his case notes state
Volodymyr Viatrovych, the chief archivist, pulled out a brown cardboard folder stuffed full of documents: case number 4076. At the centre of the case is a letter, dated 1940 and addressed to “Comrade Stalin, the Kremlin, Moscow”.
“Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,” the letter starts. Nikolai Reva wanted Stalin to know the facts about the great famine of 1932-33, when millions died as a result of the Soviet policy of forced collectivisation.
Like many at the time, Mr Reva believed that Stalin was being kept in the dark, and that if only he knew what was happening, he would surely put a stop to it.
But his letter landed him in the Gulag. He was eventually rehabilitated - 25 years later.
Many met a harsher fate.
Leafing through one of many macabre photo albums, Mr Viatrovych pointed to a picture of Ivan Severin, shot in the head by the Soviet security services. Under the picture, in very neat handwriting, is written: “Liquidated, 3 April 1947″.
Criminal prosecution
Mr Viatrovych is helping the victims’
relatives to uncover the truth
Mr Viatrovych and his team are helping people to find out what happened to relatives and loved ones, often decades after they disappeared.
But the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), now in charge of the files, is declassifying them selectively.
They are concentrating on older cases, like that of the “liquidated” Mr Severin, who was part of a guerrilla campaign against Soviet rule in western Ukraine after World War II.
The authorities are preparing to mount a criminal prosecution in relation to the famine, or Holodomor , as it is known in Ukraine, though it is doubtful whether there is anyone still alive to stand in the dock.
But SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko hopes this is just the beginning.
“As soon as Russia starts to open and uncover its archives, there will be more and more truth about the real history,” he said. At the moment, he added, Russia is not being especially co-operative.
But there is another obstacle to complete disclosure, and that is the Ukrainian Security Service itself. They are the ones deciding which files to declassify.
I put it to Mr Nalyvaichenko that the SBU is, after all, a successor to the KGB. He came out on the defensive.
“First and most important for me - we are not a successor to the KGB. That’s according to the law,” he said.
Could he state categorically that no-one working for the SBU today had formerly worked for the KGB?
He could not, admitting that 20% of his employees were former KGB officers. Some analysts in Ukraine believe that is a conservative figure.
It seems unlikely that SBU officers who worked for the Soviet KGB in the 1970s and 80s will be enthusiastic about declassifying documents that could incriminate them. Even if, as Mr Nalyvaichenko pointed out, the SBU is trying to recruit younger staff.
‘Not worth it’
But not all young Ukrainians have an exclusively negative view of their 20th-Century history.
“ To start a process of lustration after 18 years of independence would lead society to the brink of civil war ”
Dmytro Tabachnyk Historian and opposition MP
In Kiev, there is a vast monument to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany: a sprawling bronze relief of soldiers bearing guns and bayonets.
“We love our history,” said Svitlana, a young schoolteacher from the southern city of Odessa, on an outing with her class.
She was not keen for the children in her charge to be forced to examine the darker chapters of Soviet history.
“The past is the past,” she said. “The history of the famine, the killings, all the things Stalin did. I don’t think we should bring them up. There’s enough violence today as it is. If we start blaming each other… It’s just not worth it.”
‘Witch hunt’
More than 200,000 bodies may be
buried in Bykivnia, outside Kiev.
The idea of airing the past as part of a healing process, and excluding members of the former regime from positions of authority - a process known as “lustration” - is being actively promoted by some in the Ukrainian administration.
But it is highly controversial. Dmytro Tabachnyk, a historian and opposition lawmaker, thinks the notion is absurd.
“It’s a witch hunt,” he said. “To start a process of lustration after 18 years of independence would lead society to the brink of civil war.”
In a forest just outside Kiev, the tree trunks are tied with thousands of white scarves.
The scarves are embroidered in the traditional Ukrainian way, with red-and-black geometric patterns, and each one symbolically represents a life lost to Soviet oppression.
Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police would bury executed political prisoners at Bykivnia. No-one knows exactly how many bodies lie buried in this wood, but some estimates put the figure at more than 200,000.
But, says Nico Lange, the German director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Kiev, Ukrainians must stop blaming the Russians for their past, and start looking inward.
“Ukrainians have a tendency to perceive themselves as only victims of those historical processes,” he says.
“But coming to terms with the past really starts when you start uncovering also your own involvement: the oppressions by your own state, the offenders who are from your own people. If you do this work, this very painful work, the truth will finally set you free. And you will not invite new dictators to oppress you again.”
The Germans have experience of confronting their own past, both following World War II, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But it will take a lot of united political will for such a process to get under way in Ukraine.
And it may be that, for the moment, there are still too many people alive and in positions of power, who were involved with the Soviet regime in one way or another.
English Russia is a blog that collects odd and often negative picture stories from Russian-speaking countries, mainly for the amusement of westerners
There’s nothing unusual about pictures of cheerleaders in microskirts and bikini tops, but it’s still slightly surprising when the girls are sporting red stars and the racy photos are credited to the Red Army. That’s part of the charm of English Russia.
The site says: “English Russia is a daily entertainment blog devoted to the events happening in Russian speaking countries, such as Russia (Russian Federation), Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, etc. Everyday something interesting happens in the countries occupying 1/6 of the populated world.”
English Russia picks up “cool stuff” from other sites in the area and republishes it with a commentary – sometimes serious, often not – in slightly imperfect English. Typical fare includes embarrassing old adverts and album covers, building disasters and collections of odd people.
It’s gratifying to learn, for example, that some Russians like to dress up as “medieval warriors”, even to the extent of building and burning down wooden castles. It’s not really any different from mock battles between cavaliers and roundheads or re-enacting battles from the American Civil War, but it has a freshness that comes from unfamiliarity.
English Russia also has a cutting edge that comes from the rivalry between East and West that followed the second world war. Dozens of American and European web sites publish the same sort of stuff, and nobody is bothered. In English Russia, however, it becomes subversive. You wouldn’t expect state controlled media to publish a big selection of pictures of the abandoned and trashed AZLK factory where Moskvich cars were built, and it’s still striking when English Russia does it.
Not everyone likes the see the “Soviet dream” in ruins, and only 5% of the site’s visitors are from Russia. One reader, Anton, complains: “The site is full of negative info about my native country. Looks like an American anti-Soviet propaganda of Cold War times. Have you guys seen anything in Russia except drowned tractors, street fights and drunk subway bums?”
Of course, it’s not meant to be a realistic portrayal of Russian life. Indeed, in a telephone interview in 2007, “Tim” refused to give The Moscow Times (and thus The New York Times) his full name, saying that “as a serious Web designer, he did not want his name associated with the site”.
However, English Russia does sell advertising, and it has the potential to make money. According to Compete, the site gets 185,385 US visitors a month, so its audience could be around 500,000 people, and it claims 200,000 daily page views. Whether it will ever be able to exploit its potential remains to be seen.
For now, the best way to explore English Russia is to ignore the category tags such as Business, Culture and Economics and hit the tag cloud. The biggest tags include Russian People (303 items), Russian Art, Russian cars, Russian girls, and Moscow. It’s tagging is so random that what you’ll get is pot luck, but you’ll probably find at least a few entertaining things.
An opposition activist from the Siberian city of Kasnoyarsk has died in prison in what authorities describe as a suicide. Prison officials say Rim Shaigalimov, an active member of the Other Russia coalition, jumped from a fourth-story window on June 27th. Relatives, meanwhile, suspect foul play.
Shaigalimov, 52, was on the seventh month of a five-year sentence for hitting a police officer with a flagpole during a demonstration, a charge he repeatedly denied.
The Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an inquiry, which has already described Shaigalimov as a problem prisoner prone to suicide.
According to the inquiry, Shaigalimov died on the way to the hospital after he jumped from the fourth story window of a high-security building. Prison officials said that the suicide was caught on a surveillance system camera.
The activist’s wife, Lyudmila Shaigalimova, told the Kasparov.ru online newspaper that her husband never had suicidal tendencies, and that he had feared for his life in prison. She believes he may have been killed, and is pressing for an independent investigation. She also asserted that Shaigalimov’s body showed signs of injury not related to his fall.
Shaigalimov, a former opera singer and photographer, had taken part in more than 100 opposition demonstrations, some of them solitary pickets. He was a member of the Other Russia coalition, and a one-time deputy to the organization’s alternative parliament, the National Assembly.
MOSCOW — A year after Dmitri A. Medvedev succeeded Vladimir V. Putin as president, most liberal Russians have cast aside hopes of a real political thaw from above.
But as activists recall the watershed political event of 20 years ago — the remarkable gathering of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the first democratically elected body in the Soviet Union — there are signs of a growing demand for civic discourse. Meanwhile cultural life, so often a bellwether in Russia, carries faint but unmistakable echoes of the opening under perestroika, the restructuring of Soviet society that Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced in the 80s.
The financial crisis has helped stoke these tendencies: the Kremlin, no longer able to guarantee that Russians, whether ambitious or not, feel the benefits of free-flowing oil wealth, is giving ground in the cultural sphere. But some manifestations are highly politicized.
In May, for instance, the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners organized a concert to raise money for dozens of prisoners and other people under investigation, including journalists, scholars, Chechen terrorism suspects and former executives of Yukos, the oil company that was dismantled by the state.
The concert, at a 1,300-seat venue, was almost sold out. Its slogan, “For Your Freedom and Ours,” was a motto made famous by eight daring protesters who unfurled banners on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The show was headlined by Yuli Kim, a singer who gained fame in the Soviet dissident era, and Viktor Shenderovich, a satirist who was a fixture on post-Soviet television in the 1990s but was relegated to radio after angering the Kremlin.
Mr. Shenderovich, as master of ceremonies, said from the stage that there had been no difficulty in attracting performers.
“We hope such concerts will become a tradition,” he said. “We have a long line of people calling us who said they would be honored to join us next time.”
Mr. Kim sang old songs, saying they had new resonance. “‘Lawyer’s Waltz’ is over 40 years old,” he said, introducing a song he wrote then about the Soviet dissidents of 1968 and the lawyer who tried to defend them against preordained court rulings.
“Now it could easily be sung in the middle of the Basmanny Court,” he said, referring to the court hearing many of the cases involving Yukos and its imprisoned founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Those cases have become shorthand for what human rights advocates say is a justice system manipulated by the Kremlin. Mr. Kim also sang a song of the Soviet youth movement, which he recast last year as a ditty about a newly resurgent spy mania.
If in the 1990s Russians struggled to survive, or scrambled to make money, and in the Putin era raced to outdo one another in consumerism, people now seem to have rediscovered the need to gather and talk, in updated versions of the Soviet kitchen.
Kvartirniki, or “apartment concerts,” a staple of the Soviet underground, are undergoing a revival, and invitation-only salons are competing with nightclubs. Glossy magazines talk of the “new sincerity” and “new spirituality,” reporting that well-to-do Russians, licking wounds from the crisis, would rather sit at the kitchen table than patronize another fancy restaurant.
Lectures on subjects from art and architecture to the environment to spirituality are drawing large crowds, another throwback to the late 1980s.
Aleksandr Shatalov, a literary and social critic, said during an interview that this reflects a pent-up need for both creativity and political discourse.
“In the absence of politics and a real opposition, art is once again taking up the function of expressing an alternative opinion,” he said, noting that such artistic events and lectures tend to be sponsored by rich Russians who want to “make up for lost time.”
But they are not the only sponsors. Some such events have distinct roots in the Kremlin, according to Vadim Belov, editor of Socialist, a magazine published by Spravedlivy Mir, or Just World, an institute created by Sergei Mironov, chairman of the Russian Senate. Mr. Belov organizes roundtable debates for the magazine.
United Russia, the party created and headed by Mr. Putin, dominates Parliament. It also plays host to roundtables at glamorous sites near the Kremlin for famous actors, business executives and political scientists who voice ideas for Russia’s future.
“The authorities, with the help of these people, are trying to create the semblance of public opinion,” Mr. Belov said. That has also meant opening discourse to a wider circle. Mr. Medvedev teased liberals in April, Mr. Belov said, when he invited harsh critics like Irina Yasina and Dmitry Oreshkin, who has called Putin “baby Hitler,” to join a presidential commission on human rights.
“The authorities have opened a Pandora’s box that has coincided with society’s demand for civic activity,” said Mr. Belov, an eclectic figure who cites the theory of civil society of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and says the Kremlin fears a loss of control and a replay of perestroika, which was also originated from above and “ended tragically.”
“It had one set of goals, but the result ended up being completely opposite to the desired goals,” Mr. Belov said of perestroika under Mr. Gorbachev. “I think the fear that history will repeat itself is once again preventing this mechanism from being set off to the maximum.”
Perestroika was also associated with large public demonstrations, the likes of which have not been seen since. But virtual demonstrations have become a staple of Russian-language blogs, which seem to unite around a new cause each week.
Among recent subjects that have driven bloggers to question the entire Russian system: an off-duty police chief who went on a shooting rampage in a supermarket; a police officer who killed a pregnant pedestrian in a hit-and-run; and a little girl whose return from foster parents in Portugal with her apparently alcoholic mother to an impoverished Russian village was touted by most of the state-run media as a diplomatic triumph.
Veterans of perestroika are skeptical that any of this has meaning beyond a still unfocused, random group on the Internet.
“Sometimes it seems that something is happening, but sometimes it seems that things are going in the wrong direction,” said Aleksandr Daniel, a historian who was an ally of Andrei D. Sakharov and one of the founders of Memorial, the human rights organization. “Often it turns out that organizations such as the D.P.N.E. are at the center of public life,” he said, referring to a nationalist group against illegal migration.
During perestroika, liberals also had their counterpoint in such nationalist groups as Pamyat.
Anna Sevortian, a young activist, moderates a new debate series at the Sakharov Museum, called “Echo of 1989,” about the seminal Congress of People’s Deputies and its meaning today. She describes the newfound interest in lectures as the result of discovering “infotainment.” Perestroika, in her memory, was different.
“There’s a suspense in society again, but it’s not the cheerful one of the first perestroika years,” she said.
The FINANCIAL — According to Civil Georgia, the United States maintains close ties with Georgia and Ukraine and is not going “to trade anything” with Russia regarding NATO expansion or missile defense, Michael McFaul, the U.S. President’s special assistant and senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, said.
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He said in a briefing on July 1 that planned visit of the U.S. Vice President to Georgia and Ukraine , two weeks after President Obama’s visit to MOSCOW on July 6-8, was “a signal of our support” to those two countries.
He said in a briefing on July 1 that planned visit of the U.S. Vice President to Georgia and Ukraine , two weeks after President Obama’s visit to MOSCOW on July 6-8, was “a signal of our support” to those two countries.
“We are not in any way, in the name of the reset [of relations with Russia], abandoning our very close relationships with these two democracies, Ukraine and Georgia,” McFaul said.
He said that Washington remained committed to the principle of NATO ’s open door policy.
“The principles have been laid out well before our administration. We have not messed with those at all,” he said. “If countries meet the criteria, if they do the reforms that qualify, if the people of those countries want to join NATO , and if they provide security to the alliance… then the negotiation is open. And that pertains to Georgia and Ukraine and other countries in the region.”
RECONSTRUCTED: The massively expensive and controversial Palace will open its doors on July 6.
VILNIUS - As Lithuania celebrates its Statehood day on July 6, the most important event is the solemn official opening of the restored Palace of the Grand Dukes – a prospective symbol of national pride. The rebuilding of the Palace is also the most important project in the Millennium of Lithuania program, and the biggest cultural investment since 1991.
The statehood day is celebrated to commemorate the coronation of Lithuania’s one and only king – Mindaugas – and the Millennium birthday party will continue throughout 2009, because Lithuania counts its history from 1009.
President Valdas Adamkus, other state leaders and official guests from foreign countries are planning to participate in the opening event on July 6 at 1:30 p.m.
A fortified wooden settlement at the site of the Palace existed from the 4th to 8th centuries, and was transformed into a castle during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. It is believed that in late the 15th century the Grand Duke Alexander Jagiellon moved his residence from the Upper to the Lower Castle. The Palace flourished until late 19th century, when Russian czarist officials were ordered to destroy it completely (including the foundations).
Reconstructed but not fully completed, the Palace will open its gates to the public on July 7. Visitors can get acquainted with authentic remains of the historic residence, the reconstruction project of the Palace, interiors of representative halls and its impressive elements – portals, stoves, floors, ceilings, fireplaces, and the courtyard.
From July 7–26, every day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., free excursions for groups of up to 25 people will be held at the Palace in Lithuanian, English, German, Polish, Russian and other languages. It is necessary to register for an excursion in advance (more information can be provided by e-mail ekskursijos@valdovurumai.lt).
The planned exhibitions will not be displayed at the Palace but for the moment will be presented in the Museum of Applied Arts. Three international exhibitions will be displayed: “Wawel in Vilnius, From the Jagiellons to the End of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” “Lithuania in Ancient Historical Sources,” and “The Art of Balts.”
After July 26, the Palace of the Grand Dukes will be closed again and there will be no more excursions before the mounting works are finished, which might take a year, according to the administration.
The restoration of the Palace is a project led by a former President of Lithuania Algirdas Mykolas Brazauskas, despite skepticism of many Lithuanians – including current President Adamkus and prominent historian Alfredas Bumblauskas.
Most skepticism has been raised by the alleged lack of conception, clear financial planning and dubious historical value of the restoration. However, as the Palace has been built, debates on necessity of the project have lost their meaning.
“We already have the palace, it is erected, and this is the reality. Now we have to ensure that the palace serves Lithuanian people and Lithuanian history, that it represents Lithuania. The question of the need and expedience is closed,” said Adamkus in 2007.
Over 200 million litas (58 million euros) have been invested in the restoration project, while another 20 million litas needed to fully complete the Palace by July 6 were denied by the Lithuanian Government in March.
In 2000-2001, the Lithuanian Parliament adopted the law on reconstruction of the Palace of the Grand Dukes. Restoration efforts were considered to be of foremost importance – both culturally and historically, since it represents the return of a significant symbol of Lithuania’s sovereignty and the restoration of the country’s historical rights.
from ABC 7 News - http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0709/636849.html
(Sports Network) - The New England Revolution signed Lithuanian forward Edgaras Jankauskas to a Major League Soccer contract, pending U.S. P-1 Visa approval, it was announced on Wednesday.
“We are pleased to sign Edgaras,” Revolution Vice President Michael Burns said. “He is a very experienced player at both the club and international level, and he is a proven scorer who can hold the ball up well. We expect he will be a good fit for our team and we’re anxious to get him acclimated to MLS.”
Jankauskas has more than 18 seasons of experience in the European professional leagues, playing in Lithuania, Russia, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, France, Scotland, and most recently with AEK Larnaca in Cyprus, Belenenses in Portugal and Skonto in Latvia.
Once added to the Revs’ roster, the 34-year-old Jankauskas will occupy an international roster slot.
Members of Central Massachusetts’ close-knit Lithuanian community will gather, “with God,” for the last time this weekend for a regularly scheduled Sunday Mass at St. Casimir Church on Providence Street.
The red brick church, which prominently overlooks Interstate 290 on lower Grafton Hill, was one of five city parishes shuttered last summer by Bishop Robert J. McManus as part of a reorganization plan aimed at coping with the dwindling number of diocesan priests, changing demographics and other factors.
Although he formally closed it, Bishop McManus allowed parishioners to attend Sunday Masses conducted in their native language for another year. The 12-month reprieve ends tomorrow — coinciding with the termination of the Rev. Richard A. Jakubauskas’ services as chaplain to the Lithuanian community.
Effective July 1, Rev. Jakubauskas, the former pastor of St. Casimir, will direct his efforts full time to his duties as pastor of St. Peter Church in Petersham, Our Lady Queen of Mission Church in Royalston, and Our Lady Immaculate Church and St. Francis of Assisi Church, both in Athol.
“It’s sad that the bishop is doing this,” said Raymond Jakubauskas, one of several parishioners who have been trying to convince the bishop to reconsider his decision to shut down the parish. “He’s just set against us.”
Although regularly scheduled Sunday Masses will no longer be held at the 114-year-old church, chancery and other church officials said funerals, baptisms and weddings may still take place.
Raymond L. Delisle, a diocesan spokesman, said there may also be allowances for the celebration of special events, such as services on feast days that are important to Lithuanians, or on dates that are significant on the calendar in Lithuania.
Some parishioners said, however, that the end of weekend Masses signals the formal dissolution of the St. Casimir parish “family.”
Even with the demise of regular services, some parishioners are still looking for ways to maintain bonds. Some thought has been given to scheduling regular prayer services at Maironis Park in Shrewsbury.
Congregants last year had asked Bishop McManus to reconsider his decision. After he declined, a group of parishioners said they would appeal to Vatican officials.
Chancery officials said St. Casimir was closed because the parish had an aging membership, and, based on the number of baptisms and marriages that had occurred at the church over the years, they expressed little hope for the parish’s growth.
Parishioners countered that they were devoted to their faith and that their church was in good financial shape and its physical plant was in excellent condition.
Tomorrow’s service, which will start at 10 a.m., will be in Lithuanian. It will include a candle-lighting ceremony and a procession of American, Lithuanian and parish organization flags.
Children, including the parish’s Cub Scouts, and other parishioners, are expected to attend, dressed in colorful ethnic garb.
The Mass will be preceded at 9:30 a.m. by a prayer vigil.
When it was announced that St. Casimir’s would be closed, chancery officials suggested that parishioners join the congregation at St. John Church on Temple Street, which had assumed the assets of St. Casimir. Many parishioners said they have appreciated the efforts of the pastor at St. John, the Rev. John F. Madden, to welcome them into his parish.
Parishioners said, however, that only about 20 families decided to join.
They said a good number of St. Casimir parishioners did not live near their church but had attended nonetheless because they wanted to worship with others in the Lithuanian community. When the bishop announced the closing of St. Casimir, those parishioners chose to go to churches closer to their homes.
Rev. Madden, through chancery officials, declined comment.
TALLINN (AFP) - - Tens of thousands of Estonians and Lithuanians will sing in huge choirs this weekend as the Baltic nations host traditional song and dance festivals that thrived even during harsh Soviet times.
Estonia’s “To Breathe as One” festival runs July 2-5 in the capital Tallinn with some 37,000 performers — singers, dancers and musicians — due on stage.
An audience of up to 200,000 is expected to watch two gigantic open-air concerts on Saturday and Sunday as well as dance performances involving thousands.
Visitors can also witness the spectacle of nearly 40,000 performers parade through Tallinn in national costumes Saturday afternoon ahead of the evening concert.
The events can be viewed over the Internet via the Estonian TV website at http://www.etv.ee/otse/?mis=etvotse
More than 42,000 singers, musicians and dancers are also expected in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius — a 2009 European capital of culture — this weekend for a song extravaganza.
The 18th edition of the festival held every four years since 1924 runs until July 6.
With huge numbers of participation and viewers expected, it appears that severe recessions in both Baltic states have not dampened public enthusiasm for the events.
Estonia’s festival, now held every five years, first began in 1869 and became a venue preserving national identity and fostered resistance under nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation which ended in August 1991.
Baltic neighbour Latvia also has a venerable song festival tradition dating from 1873. Held every five years, its 24th edition took place last year and drew nearly 40,000 performers.
With a population of 1.3 million, Estonia along with its ex-Soviet Baltic neighbours Lithuania (3.4 million) and Latvia (2.3 million) joined the European Union and NATO in 2004.
Prime Minister of Lithuania Andrius Kubilius claims that there are no painless ways to reduce expenditures left, so now the only possibility is to consider complicate and socially delicate matters.
Andrius Kubilius.
“One cannot discover miraculous ways to reduce the gap between revenues and expenditures. This can be achieved by either increasing some taxes or reducing expenditures. Unfortunately there are no easy or painless lines in the reduction of expenditures, that is why we are submitting an entire series of proposals starting with the increase of the value added tax, increase of SoDra payments, to reduction of public sector salaries, pensions and social benefits, extension of the retirement age, managing of self-government finances, in order for deficits to disappear there,” Kubilius told Ziniu Radijas.
On Wednesday, he proposed trade unions to launch discussion on the national agreement “For Secure Future of Lithuania”, informs ELTA/LETA.
Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus has arrived on a working visit to Poland to participate in the ceremonies of the commemoration of the 440th anniversary of the Union of Lublin, a union between Lithuania and Poland formed back in 1569, reported BC presidential press service.
The President of Lithuania attended Holy Mass and viewed the treasures of Lublin Cathedral, together with President Lech Kaczynski of Poland and President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine. President Adamkus laid flowers at the Monument to Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and unveiled a memorial plaque “From the Lublin Union to the European Union”. At John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Valdas Adamkus will be awarded an honorary doctoral degree. Later today, the Heads of States will take part in the celebration events at the Lublin Union Monument, visit the Holy Trinity Chapel at Lublin Castle, and participate in the ceremony to commemorate the 440th anniversary of the Lublin Union.
The Union of Lublin was signed on July 1, 1569, in Lublin, between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland, to create a single state, the Commonwealth of Two Nations. The Lublin Union established that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland was to be ruled by the King of Poland and governed with a common parliament, the Sejm. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania retained the status of a sovereign state, with its own territory and the executive power with the treasury and the army.
In the evening, President Adamkus will go to Torun to attend the opening ceremony of the Lithuanian-Polish House. The President will meet with members of Torun community in Torun University and present a book about his presidency published in the Polish language.
The president comes back to Vilnius Thursday night.
The average seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate in the 27 European Union (EU) member states was 8.9% in May 2009, and the unemployment level in Latvia – 16.3%, was the second highest in the EU in May, according to latest data from the EU statistical office Eurostat. Unemployment rate ion Estonia made 15.6% and in Lithuania – 14.3%.
In 2007 and up to mid-2008, Latvia had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the EU. Last October, for the first time since 2005, the unemployment level in Latvia exceeded the average EU unemployment level. Since December of last year, Latvia has continued to register the second highest unemployment rate in the EU.
In May, the lowest unemployment rates among the EU member states were recorded in the Netherlands (3.2%), Austria (4.3%), Cyprus (5.3%), Denmark (5.7%) Slovenia (5.9%), and Czech Republic (6.1%).
The highest unemployment rates were registered in Spain (18.7%), Latvia (16.3%), Estonia (15.6%), Lithuania (14.3%), Ireland (11.7%), and Slovakia (11.1%).
The euro area unemployment rate reached 9.5% in May, compared with 9.3% in April. This May, the unemployment level in euro area was the highest since May 1999. However, in the EU, it was the highest since June 2005. In May 2008, the average unemployment rate in the EU was 6.8% and 7.4% in euro area.
Recently, the unemployment rate has increased in all the EU member states. The highest increases in a year’s time were observed in the Baltic States: from 3.9 till 15.6% in Estonia, from 6.1 till 16.3% in Latvia, and from 4.7 till 14.3% in Lithuania.
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Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.
If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
Associated Press
Steve Fielding
Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.
In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)
The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.
Credit for Australia’s own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published “Heaven and Earth,” a damning critique of the “evidence” underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist — and ardent global warming believer — in April humbly pronounced it “an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.
The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia’s House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.
Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute’s annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn’t.
This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on “unconvincing green science.” The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.
Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That’s made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won’t be alone.
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim in Baghdad on March 3
Summary
STRATFOR learned June 25 that ailing top Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim’s health has worsened. Al-Hakim was a key player in both Iranian and U.S. plans for the future of Iraq, and his death will complicate matters for Iran. Meanwhile, U.S. forces are preparing to withdraw from urban areas in Iraq on June 30. The main question is whether Iraqi security forces are ready to take on more security responsibilities at a time when a lot could go wrong in their country.
STRATFOR learned June 25 that the condition of ailing top Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim has deteriorated and that U.S. military authorities are preparing for his death. Al-Hakim, who had long received treatment in Tehran for lung cancer, leads Iraq’s largest and most pro-Iranian Shiite political party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). Al-Hakim’s worsening condition comes at a very critical time, considering that he has been a key player in both U.S. and Iranian plans for post-Baathist Iraq.
As far as the Iranians are concerned, al-Hakim’s death will complicate matters as they seek to consolidate the gains they have made in Iraq since the rise of a Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. Iran is embroiled in a huge internal power struggle between rival conservative factions that came out into the open with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial election victory June 12. A loss of a key foreign policy asset at a time of intense domestic turmoil limits the extent to which Tehran can counter Washington’s moves to finalize the security environment in Iraq.
U.S. plans revolve around a June 30 deadline for the implementation of a key phase of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that requires U.S. troops to complete the withdrawal of combat forces form Iraqi cities. This will not be a sudden or rapid process; the United States has been preparing for this deadline for months, carefully monitoring the progress of Iraqi security forces and slowly drawing back. Nor will the process be uniform. As per a deliberate vagueness in the text of the agreement, U.S. forces likely will retain a significant presence in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul, the scene of continuing jihadist violence.
The SOFA is the guiding document crafted to oversee the transition of day-to-day security responsibility from U.S. troops to Iraqi forces in preparation for a 2011 withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from the country. Since the agreement’s signing in December 2008, Iraqi forces have taken on more of these responsibilities, while U.S. forces have moved into more of an advisory capacity. Iraqi forces have been running the routine street patrols, checkpoints and other security facilities and have been taking an increasingly greater role in counterinsurgency operations against jihadists.
That said, in places like the capital and Mosul, Iraqi troops still depend heavily upon U.S. troops. Therefore, as U.S. forces transition from tactical oversight to strategic oversight, the main question is the extent to which Iraqi forces will be able to maintain the relative calm that has existed since 2007, when the U.S. military turned Sunni nationalist insurgents who were fighting U.S. troops into critical forces combating al Qaeda in Iraq. The next few months will be a crucial test for Iraq’s security forces, revealing whether they can act as a national force or whether they will succumb to ethno-sectarian struggles. In turn, the Iraqi forces’ success (or lack thereof) will determine the degree to which U.S. forces will have to intervene to stabilize the situation. It should be noted that most of the violence in Iraq has been in urban areas — the same areas from which some 130,000 U.S. forces are leaving under the SOFA.
With their independence and proficiency still a work in progress, it is unclear how capable and willing Iraqi security forces are to perform in a manner that will prevent another descent into sectarian bloodshed. A larger concern is that the violence level in Iraq has remained steady in recent months, with periodic attacks taking place across the country. In the past few days there have been two noteworthy attacks, in Kirkuk and Baghdad, on Shiite targets affiliated with the movement of radical Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Realizing that this is the time to try to stir up ethno-sectarian tensions and stage a comeback, suspected jihadists have carried out suicide attacks. The June 30 pullback date is also a symbolic time for attacks, as it gives the impression that the jihadists are driving U.S. forces out and that Iraq remains unsafe.
The principals of the country’s three major ethno-sectarian groups have an interest in making sure that the political disputes among them do not escalate to the point of violence. In spite of their intention to remain peaceful, they run into problems when they try to pursue their respective political objectives. A particularly problematic issue is the lingering — and potentially explosive — induction of Sunni tribal militiamen affiliated with the Awakening Councils into the state’s Shiite-dominated security apparatus. Despite his moves away from Islamist sectarian politics and toward a secular Iraqi national platform (which gave him significant gains in recent provincial elections), Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants to limit Sunnis’ power, and thus has refused to allow more than 20 percent of these militiamen into the security apparatus. Though the Awakening Councils also made significant gains in the provincial vote and have a bigger stake in the system, there is still a major concern that many of these tribal fighters could revert to their old ways.
At the intra-Shiite level, internal rivalries continue to simmer even though al-Hakim’s ISCI performed badly in the provincial polls and the al-Sadrites’ political and military power has been diminished. After al-Hakim’s death, his successor — likely his son Ammar al-Hakim — will need to consolidate his hold over the movement and ward off rivals’ attempts to take advantage of the opportunity provided by the power vacuum. Iran, which has played the various Iraqi Shiite factions off one another, will have to re-establish an intra-Shiite balance of power. Iran also could try to stir up trouble in Iraq in order to reposition itself in relation to the United States after the Iranian election crisis.
In northern Iraq, the Kurdish bid for greater autonomy pits the Kurds against the Sunnis and Shia. Furthermore, the Kurds will be holding their own regional elections this month. With President Jalal Talabani — leader of one of the two major parties in the Kurdistani alliance that controls the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) — nearing retirement from political activity due to health conditions, the internal balance of power among the Kurds is also in play. The ongoing dispute over sharing energy revenues between the federal government and the KRG and tensions over the future status of the contested oil-rich northern region of Kirkuk are also issues that could easily create security situations.
In other words, there is a lot that can go wrong at a time when Iraqi forces are supposed to demonstrate that they can function as a national force capable of keeping the various ethno-sectarian groups in Iraq from succumbing to multi-directional centrifugal forces. Therefore, the next several months — especially ahead of the Jan. 30, 2010, parliamentary elections that could shake up the political establishment formed after the 2003 regime change — will be very telling in terms of the Iraqi factions’ abilities to keep their disputes within acceptable parameters.
From the U.S. point of view, the Iraqi forces’ performance will be critical in terms of Washington’s ability to focus on Afghanistan and ultimately disengage militarily from the Islamic world.
This Friday the film “The Stoning of Soraya” will open in selected cities around the country. Given the current events in Iran this film is not only timely but we understand very moving and compelling. We wanted to make sure our members in selected states were aware of the film and, if there is a showing anywhere near you, we urge you to take it in this weekend. (Click hereto open a PDF image with a list of the cities and theaters).
THE STONING OF SORAYA M.
Release Date: NY/LA - June 26, 2009
Distributor: Roadside Attractions and MPower Pictures
Director: Cyrus Nowrasteh
Co-writers: Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh and Cyrus Nowrasteh
Produced by: Stephen McEveety, John Shepherd
Cast: Shohreh Aghdashloo, Jim Caviezel, Mozhan Marnò, Navid Negahban, Ali Pourtash
THE STONING OF SORAYA M. is the heart-rending film based on the International best-selling book by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam which stars Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo (HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG), Jim Caviezel (DÉJÀ VU, THE THIN RED LINE) and Mozhan Marnò (CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR) as Soraya. The film was the runner up for the Audience Award at the Toronto 2008 Film Festival, with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE taking first place. It is a film that dramatizes with unflinching power the suffering endured by one Islamic woman in the name of religious custom and the heroism of another woman who was determined to share her story with the world. The Stoning of Soraya M. unmasks the cruelty of an Iranian husband who sought to get rid of his wife, and the hypocrisy of the mullahs who colluded with him. It builds to a climax that breaks the heart and expands viewer understanding, delivering a film that is as riveting as it is unforgettable. Shohreh Aghdashloo gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the woman of courage who bore witness to The Stoning of Soraya M. Opening in select markets on June 26.
22 June 2009By Lilia ShevtsovaState visits don’t usually influence world politics. But the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama to Moscow on July 6 to 8 might become an exception. Obama has a unique chance to tell the world what U.S. policy toward Russia will be under his administration. He could provide an understanding of whether that strategy will be high-priority or pushed to the back burner. He could clear the air about his thinking about Russia’s neighbors, the other former Soviet republics that Moscow views as its “areas of privileged interests.” He could help Europe define its “Eastern dimension.”
Taken together, Obama’s insight on these issues could give us a clue as to what foreign policy his administration will chose — that of the 20th century or, more likely, what philosopher Francis Fukuyama called “realistic Wilsonianism,” a combination of pragmatism and values.
The outcome of Obama’s visit to Moscow will depend on the willingness of the U.S. side to see the differences between the national interests of Russia and the interests of Russia’s ruling elite.
The interests of Russian society, which is longing for openness, social welfare and the supremacy of the rule of law, do not contradict the interests of the United States. The problem is in the Russian elite, which would like to integrate into the West but at the same time is trying to close the rest of Russian society from the West and consolidate it through decidedly anti-U.S. rhetoric.
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Obama may take the easy route of conducting talks with the Russian elite only. By doing so, he could accomplish his goals of reaching an agreement on a replacement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires in December, and setting up a framework for ongoing consultations between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. At the same time, Obama could make progress on trade and security issues, both of which are high on the U.S.-Russian agenda.
Supporters of realpolitik on both sides of the Atlantic — people who say U.S.-Russian relations need to be developed on a foundation of common interests and not be tied to Russian domestic issues – are calling on the White House to embrace talks with the Russian elite. Some in this camp find Russia’s transformation in the 18 years since the Soviet collapse to be a hopeless endeavor and are urging Obama not to irritate the Kremlin. Others are using realpolitik to promote their own interests and to legitimatize the current Russian system of government.
It is clear that the Russian government would support Obama’s embrace of realpolitik. Interestingly, relations between Russia and the United States during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency were built on a foundation of realpolitik, and their ideologists are the same people who today are giving advice to the White House on how to go about “resetting” ties. But this old foundation for ties failed to avert a crisis in relations that reached post-Cold War lows last year. Who can guarantee that the old prescriptions being offered to Obama will work effectively today?
Obama, however, might offer Russia his own version of pragmatism, showing that his vision of “resetting” ties differs from what is expected in Moscow. During his visit, he could demonstrate to the Kremlin that Russia is not a priority for him and suggest that all cooperation be kept low profile. Such a stance would deal a blow to the hopes of the Kremlin elite who expect a comeback of “special relations” with the United States. The elite would then resort to a well-known mantra of “we are being ignored and humiliated” and again try to prove their importance by “breaking windows” in neighboring countries.
Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4 gave proof that the U.S. president has embraced a new way of strategic thinking. But could he deliver a speech in Moscow that manages to simultaneously call for a transformation of Russia and take into the account the West’s errors in its dealings with Russia in the 1990s? Such a feat seems unlikely. Western “engagement through transformation” politics don’t go over well in Russia. Moreover, the U.S. neocons who tried to make the world a better place with their “spreading democracy” campaign have not yet been forgotten.
Therefore, it would be understandable if Obama decided to adopt the simplest approach: downgrading ties with Russia. But the Kremlin could end up offended if Washington decides to attach no special status to the “resetting” of U.S.-Russian ties. Moreover, pro-Western Russians would be disappointed by Obama’s unwillingness to take a value-based approach to Russia.
So Moscow might turn into a trap for Obama. The White House has little chance of being able to cooperate with the Kremlin without making some concessions to the Russian elite. However, such cooperation promises to promote the current Russian system, which functions with the “besieged fortress” mentality in which Russia is surrounded by enemies. If Obama takes a value-based approach, his opportunities on security will be limited.
Nevertheless, Obama might try to pull off something in Moscow that no other U.S. president has succeeded in doing: reaching an agreement with the Kremlin on issues of common interest and at the same time offering a different world vision to Russian society.
The significance of rhetoric and other gestures during state visits should not be exaggerated. But with Obama’s visit, the words of a person who is recognized by many as a world leader hold a special value. If Obama mentions key issues like modernization, freedom, contentiousness and respect for neighboring countries’ sovereignty, his words will have an impact that goes well beyond the pro-Western Russians waiting for some encouragement from the United States. His words in Moscow could be heard in Kiev, Tbilisi, Warsaw and Berlin. Crucial conclusions could be made in those capitals about Washington’s strategic viewpoint — or its absence.
Obama’s choice of words is not the only important part of his visit. With whom he decides to meet will also be essential. It is one thing if he sits down with human rights leaders and the opposition and quite another if he agrees to meet with representatives of the Kremlin-appointed “civil society” and pro-Kremlin political parties.
Whether Obama will let the Kremlin use him in its own games is also of great importance. Obama could unknowingly end up promoting or undermining one of the two players in the ruling tandem — President Dmitry Medvedev or Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Obama is coming to a country mired in an economic crisis. The political system is paralyzed and the leaders are disorientated. He has an opportunity to come to Russia and address Russians as an embodiment of change. But for change to happen, he needs a strategic vision and an understanding that Russia is not just another board piece in a U.S. geopolitical chess game. Russia is a challenge.
Lilia Shevtsova is a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center and chair of the Davos Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Russia.
Window on Eurasia: Medvedev Tells Arabs Russia is an ‘Organic Part’ of MuslimWorld
Paul Goble
Vienna, June 24 – In what many are certain to view as his response to US President Barak Obama’s Cairo address earlier this month, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told a meeting of the Arab League there yesterday that Russia is “an organic part” of the Muslim world and opposes Western efforts to promote democratic change in the Middle East.
“Islam,” Medvedev told his audience, “is an inalienable part of Russian history and culture, given that more than 20 million Russian citizens are among the faithful. Consequently, he said, “Russia does not need to seek friendship with the Muslim world: Our country is an organic part of this world” (www.i-r-p.ru/page/stream-event/index-23456.html).
But two other of the Russian leader’s comments were likely to be even more welcome by members of the Arab League. On the one hand, he said Moscow opposes Western efforts to promote democratic change in the region. And on the other, he called for creating a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem (www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=dujour&div=299).
Because of its own history, Medvedev said, Russia is sympathetic to “the striving of Arab countries to combine in their development the most contemporary trends with respect for national and religious traditions.” That is the only way, he said, “to strengthen political stability and to achieve economic prosperity and social well-being in the region.”
The Russian president argued that the Arab world had much to “teach” others as the world struggles to overcome the global crisis, which Medvedev said, bears “a civilizational character” and consequently, “any efforts at mentoring, the promotion of democratization, or even more direct interference from outside here, in [his] view, are absolutely impermissible.”
Moreover and in what many will see as a direct response to Obama’s support for democracy and human rights and the American president’s criticism of authoritarianism, Medvedev said that “any attempts” to “create a universal model of development” and extend it “to the entire world will not work” or will “unfortunately” lead to a catastrophe.”
And with respect to the Palestinian issue, the Russian president said that “the chief task now is the rapid renewal of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations” because “the pause which has arisen in them has dragged out too long,” a development which he said is generating “ever greater concern.”
Medvedev suggested that the upcoming Moscow conference on the Near East could play an important role in leading to the creation of “an independent, sovereign and viable Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, living in peace and security with all the countries of the region, including Israel.”
During the same visit to Cairo, Medvedev and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak signed a strategic partnership agreement outlining the directions of bilateral cooperation between the Russian Federation and Egypt over the next ten years as well as a number of specific accords on a variety of questions (www.i-r-p.ru/page/stream-event/index-23454.html).
Medvedev’s remarks, which were only underscored by Moscow’s agreements with Egypt, were clearly intended to send a message to Arab and Muslim countries around the world that the Russian Federation is prepared to support their authoritarian regimes in the name of stability.
Moreover, the Russian president’s words were equally clearly intended to signal Western governments and especially Washington that Moscow is now prepared to actively oppose any moves to promote democracy and human rights in this region and to press Israel for concessions opening the way to the establishment of an independent Palestine.
But Medvedev’s argument may have the greatest resonance where he did not intend it: within the Russian Federation itself. Muslims there are certain to read his comments as the basis for making greater claims for their community and for opposing the newly intensified efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church to dominate the ideological scene there.
(RTTNews) - Moody’s Investor Services on Thursday downgraded the ratings of six banks in the Baltic region. The banks include BIGBANK in Estonia, Siauliu Bankas in Lithuania along with the Baltic International Bank, the Norvik Banka, Mortgage and Land Bank and the Trasta Komercbanka banks in Latvia.
The agency said the rating actions were driven by the speed and depth of the deterioration in the Baltic economies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and its impact on the banks‘ standalone creditworthiness, as measured by their bank financial strength ratings (BFSRs).
Moody’s said with the three economies in deep recession, corporate defaults were rising and this could lead to significantly increased losses on the banks’ corporate loan portfolios. Moreover, the rating agency expects delinquencies in the banks’ retail portfolios to rise, reflecting higher unemployment, lower income levels and a likely further decline in house prices.
The agency expects these potential losses and substantial provisioning needs to weaken Baltic banks’ profitability and capital positions over the next two years.
Moody’s said the probability of a devaluation in the Latvian lats has declined, owing to the Latvian parliament’s approval of a fiscal package that was welcomed by the EU and IMF. However, the firm noted that a devaluation cannot be ruled out completely, as economic and social pressure in Latvia will continue to be high for sometime.
`The case was confirmed by the local AIDS centre, which has appropriate agents for the test,` Romualdas Sabaliauskas said.
Lithuania has confirmed its first case of the A (H1N1) flu virus, the Public Health Agency said on Friday.
“The case was confirmed by the local AIDS centre, which has appropriate agents for the test,” Romualdas Sabaliauskas, head of the Centre for Emergency Situations under the Ministry of Health, told Reuters.
“He is a sailor and was recently on a trip to India. He probably caught the flu in India,” he said.
“The man is currently at home. He had a very mild flu with no hospitalisation necessary.” All three Baltic states now have confirmed cases of the new flu strain.
The fourth edition of “Consumers in Europe”, jointly published by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities and the General Directorate Health and Consumers of the European Commission presents a comprehensive set of data on consumer markets and consumer protection issues in the EU. In the EU27 in 2007, 46% of households lived in flats, 30% in detached houses and 22% in semi-detached or terraced houses. The share of households living in flats was highest in Latvia (72%), Estonia (69%), Spain (66%) and Germany (62%). In Lithuania 59% of residents live in flats.
The percentage of households living in detached houses was largest in Slovenia (65%), Hungary (57%), Romania (56%) and Denmark (48%), while for semi-detached or terraced houses, the share was highest in the United Kingdom (59%), Ireland and the Netherlands (both 55%).
In Lithuania, 59% of residents live in flats, 32% – in detached houses and 9% reside in semi-detached houses.
In 2007, 65% of households in the EU27 owned their dwelling, 21% paid rent at market rate, 8% paid rent at a reduced rate and 7% of households occupied free accommodation. More than half of households owned their dwelling in all Member States (except in Germany) with the highest proportions in Romania (96%), Lithuania and Slovakia (both 89%) and Hungary (87%). The lowest percentages of households owing their dwelling were observed in Germany (46%), Austria (52%), the Netherlands (56%) and Denmark, France and Poland (all 58%).
Household energy consumption consists of energy delivered to households for space heating, sanitary water heating, cooking and electrical appliances. Fuel for personal transport is not included. In the EU27 in 2007, households consumed 285 million tones of oil equivalent (toe) of energy. Of this energy, 40% came from natural gas, 24% from electrical energy, 15% from petroleum products, 12% from renewable energy, 7% from district heating and 3% from solid fuels. The highest shares of consumption of natural gas were found in the Netherlands (72%), the United Kingdom (67%), Italy and Hungary (both 57%). For electrical energy, the largest proportions were observed in Malta (70%), Sweden (51%) and Cyprus (46%). Greece (50%) had the highest share of consumption of petroleum products, followed by Ireland (39%) and Cyprus (36%).
The strongest shares of renewable energy consumed by households were found in Latvia (50%), Estonia (39%) and Portugal (37%). For district heating, the highest proportions were found in Estonia (38%), Sweden and Lithuania (both 37%); while for solid fuels the largest shares were observed in Poland (29%) and Ireland (16%).
In 2008, 16% of consumers aged 15 years and over in the EU27 had made a formal complaint in the last 12 months to a seller or a provider. The largest shares of consumers complaining were found in Sweden (34%), the Netherlands (25%), Germany and the United Kingdom (both 24%), Finland (23%) and Denmark (22%) and the lowest in Bulgaria (4%), Latvia and Portugal (both 5%), Lithuania and Romania (both 6%).
In the EU27, just over half (51%) of those having made a complaint were satisfied with the way their complaint had been dealt with. The highest levels of satisfaction were found in Slovakia (80%), Slovenia (73%), the Czech Republic and Austria (both 68%) and lowest in France (30%), Spain, Latvia and Hungary (all 39%).
In 2008, a quarter of the EU27 population aged 15 years and over made a cross-border purchase in another Member State. The highest shares of persons making cross-border purchases in another Member State were observed in Luxembourg (68%), Sweden (59%), Denmark (56%), Austria (53%) and Finland (51%), and the lowest in Bulgaria and Portugal (both 9%), Greece (10%), Italy and Romania (both 13%).
In the EU27 in 2008, 17% of the population made cross-border purchases while on holiday or business trips, 9% made specific trips for shopping, 7% purchased over the internet and 2% made mail orders. A third of the EU27 population was prepared to use another EU language when purchasing goods and services in another country.
On Thursday, Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Vygaudas Usackas conferred the award of honour of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “The Star of Lithuania’s Millennium” on President of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus for his merits to the diplomacy of the country. On behalf of the diplomatic service, the minister thanked President Adamkus for his brilliant lessons in diplomacy and leadership, wisdom and patience, vision and collective work for the sake of Lithuania, reported BC the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“The Lithuanian diplomatic service has received Western experience, amazing energy and optimism, tolerance and understanding from you. I would not make a mistake by saying that only due to your trust and devotion to Lithuania, our diplomatic service has tackled many challenges that seemed invincible and, thus we matured and grew stronger,” said Foreign Minister Usackas while presenting the award. “You have taught our diplomatic service to lean on principles and values during most complicated days.”
The award of honour of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “The Star of Lithuania’s Millennium” was established on the occasion of Lithuanian’s millennium in 2007 to honour persons for their merits to the state of Lithuania and its foreign policy.
“The Star of Lithuania’s Millennium” is conferred on citizens of Lithuania and foreign countries for their special merits of promoting Lithuania’s name, fostering and developing relations among countries, also for their extraordinary merits in the civil service. “The Star of Lithuania’s Millennium” was also conferred on former Minister of Foreign Affairs Algirdas Saudargas for his substantial contribution to Lithuania’s foreign policy.
So far, “The Star of Lithuania’s Millennium” has been conferred 102 times.
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With Twitter’s help, the youth of Iran take on the ayatollahs.
By PEGGY NOONAN
America so often gets Iran wrong. We didn’t know when the shah was going to fall, didn’t foresee the massive wave that would topple him, didn’t know the 1979 revolution would move violently against American citizens, didn’t know how to handle the hostage-taking. Last week we didn’t know a mass rebellion was coming, and this week we don’t know who will emerge the full or partial victor. So modesty and humility seem appropriate stances from which to observe and comment.
David Gothard
That having been said, it’s pretty wonderful to see what we’re seeing. It is moving, stirring—they are risking their lives over there in a spontaneous, self-generated movement for greater liberty and justice. Good for them. In a selfish and solipsistic way—more on that in a moment—the uprising, as it moves us, reminds us of who we are: lovers of political freedom who are always and irresistibly on the side of the student standing in front of the tank or the demonstrator chanting “Where is my vote?” in the face of the billy club. Good for us. (If you don’t understand who the American people are for, put down this newspaper or get up from your computer, walk into the street and grab the first non-insane-looking person you meet. Say, “Did you see the demonstrations in Iran? It’s the ayatollahs versus the reformers. Who do you want to win?” You won’t just get “the reformers,” you’ll get the perplexed-puppy look, a tilt of the head and a wondering stare: You have to ask?)
If the rebels on the street win, however winning is defined, they, being more modern and moderate than the ruling government, will likely have a moderating influence on their government. If the rebels on the street lose, however that is defined, this fact remains: Something has been unleashed, and it won’t be going away. A thugocracy has been revealed as lacking the support and respect of a considerable portion of its people, and that portion is not solely the most sophisticated and educated but, far more significantly, the young. Half the people in Iran are under 27. When the young rise against the old, the future rises against the past. In that contest, the future always wins. The question is timing: soon or some years from now? (A heartening Twitter feed Thursday, from Andrew Sullivan’s site: “Fact is, we’ve seen variety of protesters grow: young+old, students+professionals, women in chador+westernized students.”)
Stifling and corrupt religious autocracy has seen its international standing diminished, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is among other things a Holocaust denier, has in effect been rebuked by half his country, and through free speech, that most painful way to lose your reputation, which has broken out on the streets. He can no longer claim to speak for his people. The rising tide of the young and educated seems uninterested in reflexively hating the West and deriving their meaning from that hatred.
To refuse to see all this as progress, or potential progress, is perverse to the point of wicked. To insist the American president, in the first days of the rebellion, insert the American government into the drama was shortsighted and mischievous. The ayatollahs were only too eager to demonize the demonstrators as mindless lackeys of the Great Satan Cowboy Uncle Sam, or whatever they call us this week. John McCain and others went quite crazy insisting President Obama declare whose side America was on, as if the world doesn’t know whose side America is on. “In the cause of freedom, America cannot be neutral,” said Rep. Mike Pence. Who says it’s neutral?
This was Aggressive Political Solipsism at work: Always exploit events to show you love freedom more than the other guy, always make someone else’s delicate drama your excuse for a thumping curtain speech.
Mr. Obama was restrained, balanced and helpful in the crucial first days, keeping the government out of it but having his State Department ask a primary conduit of information, Twitter, to delay planned maintenance and keep reports from the streets coming. Then he made a mistake, telling the New York Times in terms of our national security there is little difference between Mr. Ahmadinejad and his foe, Mir Hossein Mousavi, which may or may not in the long run be true but was undercutting of the opposition.
What now? Americans, and the West, should be who they are, friends of freedom. Iranians on the street made sure they got their Twitter reports and videos here. They trust us to spread the word through our technology. A lot of the signs they held were in English. They trust us to be for change and to advance their cause, and they’re right to trust us.
Should there at this point, more than a week into the story, be a formal declaration of support from the U.S. government? Certainly it’s time for an indignant statement on the abuses, including killings and beatings, perpetrated by the government and against the opposition. It’s never wrong to be on the side of civilization. Beyond that, what would be efficacious? It must be asked if a formal statement of support for the rebels would help them. And they’d have a better sense of it than we.
If the American president, for reasons of prudence, does not make a public statement of the government’s stand, he could certainly refer, as if it is an obvious fact because it is an obvious fact, to whom the American people are for. And that is the protesters on the street. If he were particularly striking in his comments about how Americans cannot help but love their brothers and sisters who stand for greater freedom and democracy in the world, all the better. The American people, after all, are not their government. Our sentiments are not controlled by the government, and this may be a timely moment to point that out, and remind the young of Iran, who are the future of Iran, that Americans are a future-siding people.
A small point on the technological aspects of the Iranian situation. Some ask if the impact of the new technology is exaggerated. No. Twittering and YouTubing made the story take hold and take off. But did the technology create the rebellion? No, it encouraged what was there. If they Twittered and liveblogged the French Revolution, it still would have been the French Revolution: “this aft 3pm @ the bastille.” It all still would have happened, perhaps with marginally greater support. Revolutions are revolutions and rebellions are rebellions; they don’t work unless the people are for it. In Iran, Twitter reported and encouraged. But the conviction must be there to be encouraged.
The interesting question is what technology would have done after the Revolution, during the Terror. What would word of the demonic violence, the tumbrels and nonstop guillotines unleashed circa 1790-95 have done to French support for the Revolution, and world support? Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to continue his blithe indifference if reports of France grimly murdering France had been Twittered out each day?
The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?
Posted By Michael Ledeen On June 20, 2009 @ 4:59 pm In Uncategorized | 168 Comments
I’ve received what purports to be a statement from Mousavi’s Office in Tehran. Like everyone else covering the revolution, I get a lot of material that can’t be authenticated, and one must always take such material with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said, the person who sent this to me is undoubtedly in touch with the Mousavi people on the ground, that much is certain. His information has been proven reliable throughout this period. So while the following open letter carefully puts distance between the author(s) and Mousavi himself, I am quite sure that at a minimum it accurately reflects the state of mind of the Mousavi people.
So here you go:
From the Office of Mr. Mir Hossein Mousavi
To the President of the USA, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama:
Dear Mr. President,
In the name of the Iranian people, we want you to know that when you recently made the statement “Achmadinejad or Mousavi? Two of a kind,” we consider this as a grave and deep insult, not just to Mr. Mousavi but especially against the judgment of the Iranian people, against our moral conviction and intelligence, especially those of the young generation that comprises a population of 31 million.
It is a specially grave insult for those who are now fighting for democracy and freedom, and an unwarranted gift and even praise for Mr. Khamenei, whose security forces are now killing peaceful Iranians in the streets of every major city in the country.
Your statement misled the people of the world. It was no doubt inspired by your hope for dialogue with this regime, but you cannot possibly believe in promises from a regime that lies to its own people and then kills them when they demand the promises be kept.
By such statements, your administration and you discourage the Iranian people, who believe and trust in the values of democracy and freedom. We are pleased to see that you have condemned the regime’s murderous violence, and we look forward to stronger support for the rightful struggle of the Iranian people against the actions of a regime that is your enemy as well as ours.
UPDATE: From Mousavi’s speech on Sunday:
The great participation in this election was, in the first degree, indebted to the efforts for creating hope and trust among the people, to obtain a befitting response to the existing administrative crises and the widespread social dissatisfaction, whose accumulation can target the bedrock of the Revolution and the Regime. If this good faith and trust coming from the people is not answered by protecting their votes, or the people can not react in a civil and peaceful way to defend their rights, there will be dangerous pathways ahead, responsibility for which lies with those who can’t stand peaceful behaviors.
If the high volume of cheating and vote manipulation, that has put a fire to the foundations of people’s trust, is itself introduced as the proof and evidence of the lack of fraud, the republicanism of the regime will be slaughtered and the idea of incompatibility of Islam and republicanism would be practically proven.
UPDATE II: Mousavi has called for a general strike on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the regime is now rounding up Rafsanjani family members. As Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi tells us:
Tabnak Website from Iran reports: Five members of the Rafsanjani family arrested. It is said that his daughter Faezeh who is very outspoken and has been very active in politics for more than two decades has also been arrested. Reportedy Faezeh, her daughter,Hossein Marashi (cousin of Mrs. Rafsanjani nee Effat Marashi), Marashi’s daughter and Marashi’s sister-in-law have been taken into custody as well
More evidence of tensions among the ayatollahs. Hossein Ali Montazeri, an architect of the 1979 Islamic revolution who fell out with the present leadership, said: “Resisting people’s demand is religiously prohibited.” Montazeri, who has been under house arrest for some years, called for three days of national mourning for those killed, in a statement on his website.
This is to be expected, and it’s a tribute to the courage of Montazeri. There’s a reason he’s been under house arrest, after all.
UPDATE V: To show you what’s happening in Iran, today the security forces invaded the central election headquarters in Tehran and arrested everybody there. No doubt because they don’t want any witnesses to the “election circus.” Normally the staff is about 80, but today, Sunday, only 26 had made it to the office. All of which reminds me of a great exchange on Twitter. Somebody had announced an upcoming general strike, and another person replied saying “all you have 2 do is announce a demonstration and Basij will shut down all of Tehran 4 us.”
Article printed from Faster, Please!: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2009/06/20/sunday-morning-in-iran-a-letter-from-mousavis-office/
Two women, one wearing the niqab, a veil worn by the most conservative Muslims that exposes only a woman’s eyes, right, walk side by side, in the Belsunce district of downtown Marseille, central France, Friday June 19, 2009. The French government’s spokesman says he favors the creation of a parliamentary commission to study the small but growing trend of burqa wear in France. Luc Chatel says the commission could possibly propose legislation aimed at banning the burqa and other fully covering garments worn by some Muslim women. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
PARIS (AP) - President Nicolas Sarkozy lashed out Monday at the practice of wearing the Muslim burqa, insisting the full-body religious gown is a sign of the “debasement” of women and that it won’t be welcome in France.
The French leader expressed support for a recent call by dozens of legislators to create a parliamentary commission to study a small but growing trend of wearing the full-body garment in France.
In the first presidential address in 136 years to a joint session of France’s two houses of parliament, Sarkozy laid out his support for a ban even before the panel has been approved—braving critics who fear the issue is a marginal one and could stigmatize Muslims in France.
“In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Sarkozy said to extended applause in a speech at the Chateau of Versailles southwest of Paris.
“The burqa is not a religious sign, it’s a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement—I want to say it solemnly,” he said. “It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”
In France, the terms “burqa” and “niqab” often are used interchangeably. The former refers to a full-body covering worn largely in Afghanistan with only a mesh screen over the eyes, whereas the latter is a full-body veil, often in black, with slits for the eyes.
Later Monday, Sarkozy was expected to host a state dinner with Sheik Hamad Bin Jassem Al Thani of Qatar. Many women in the Persian Gulf state wear Islamic head coverings in public—whether while shopping or driving cars.
France enacted a law in 2004 banning the Islamic headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols from public schools, sparking fierce debate at home and abroad. France has Western Europe’s largest Muslim population, an estimated 5 million people.
A government spokesman said Friday that it would seek to set up a parliamentary commission that could propose legislation aimed at barring Muslim women from wearing the head-to-toe gowns outside the home.
The issue is highly divisive even within the government. France’s junior minister for human rights, Rama Yade, said she was open to a ban if it is aimed at protecting women forced to wear the burqa.
But Immigration Minister Eric Besson said a ban would only “create tensions.”
A leading French Muslim group warned against studying the burqa.
Iran: Rafsanjani Affiliate Calls For New ‘Political Front’ With Mousavi
June 22, 2009 | 1041 GMT
Iran’s Kargozaran political party — which is affiliated with Assembly of Experts chairman Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — has called for opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi to form a new political bloc, with a long-term aim of undermining what it called President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s “illegitimate” government in Tehran, the Financial Times reported June 22. Kargozaran spokesman Hossein Marashi, who predicted that opposition protests would continue, said that Mousavi had become the leader “of a majority who think their rights are trampled on by Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council,” and that he should establish a “political front” to “embrace the defenders of the real Islamic republic” against “those who are distorting it.” He said that Rafsanjani would be able to assist those efforts through his “legal and political positions.”
Italy: Willing To Open Embassy In Tehran To Protesters
June 22, 2009 | 1419 GMT
Italy is willing to take in wounded protesters at its embassy in Tehran in coordination with other European countries, Reuters reported June 22, citing an announcement from the Italian Foreign Ministry. Italy’s decision comes after Sweden began looking into whether European Union countries can develop a plan to open their embassies to protesters, according to the ministry.
DUBAI (Reuters) - If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday.
Pakistan has been battling al Qaeda’s Taliban allies in the Swat Valley since April after their thrust into a district 100 km (60 miles) northwest of the capital raised fears the nuclear-armed country could slowly slip into militant hands.
“God willing, the nuclear weapons will not fall into the hands of the Americans and the mujahideen would take them and use them against the Americans,” Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the leader of al Qaeda’s in Afghanistan, said in an interview with Al Jazeera television.
Abu al-Yazid was responding to a question about U.S. safeguards to seize control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in case Islamist fighters came close to doing so.
“We expect that the Pakistani army would be defeated (in Swat) … and that would be its end everywhere, God willing.”
Asked about the group’s plans, the Egyptian militant leader said: “The strategy of the (al Qaeda) organization in the coming period is the same as in the previous period: to hit the head of the snake, the head of tyranny — the United States.
“That can be achieved through continued work on the open fronts and also by opening new fronts in a manner that achieves the interests of Islam and Muslims and by increasing military operations that drain the enemy financially.”
The militant leader suggested that naming a new leader for the group’s unit in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Basir al-Wahayshi, could revive its campaign in Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter.
“Our goals have been the Americans … and the oil targets which they are stealing to gain power to strike the mujahideen and Muslims.”
“There was a setback in work there for reasons that there is no room to state now, but as of late, efforts have been united and there is unity around a single leader.”
Abu al-Yazid, also known as Abu Saeed al-Masri, said al Qaeda will continue “with large scale operations against the enemy” — by which he meant the United States.
“We have demanded and we demand that all branches of al Qaeda carry out such operations,” he said, referring to attacks against U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The militant leader said al Qaeda would be willing to accept a truce of about 10 years’ duration with the United States if Washington agreed to withdraw its troops from Muslim countries and stopped backing Israel and the pro-Western governments of Muslim nations.
Asked about the whereabouts of al Qaeda’s top leaders, he said: “Praise God, sheikh Osama (bin Laden) and sheikh Ayman al-Zawahri are safe from the reach of the enemies, but we would not say where they are; moreover, we do not know where they are, but we’re in continuous contact with them.”
North Korea’s Kang Nam I cargo ship docking at the port in Yangon, Myanmar, on May 21, 2007
Summary
The United States continues tracking a North Korean cargo ship June 22. The ship, the Kang Nam 1, reportedly is headed for Myanmar via Singapore and is thought to be carrying items prohibited by two U.N. resolutions. The situation illustrates the international community’s resolve and limits in responding to North Korea’s latest nuclear and missile tests.
Analysis
The United States on June 22 continues to track a North Korean cargo ship, the Kang Nam 1, which is suspected of carrying items prohibited under U.N. resolutions 1874, issued in 2009, and 1718, issued in 2006. The slow-motion chase, carried out by the United States with satellites, aircraft, surface and sub-surface elements, serves as a test of the resolve — and limits — of the international community in response to North Korea’s latest nuclear and missile tests.
The ship, one of five similar vessels suspected of being involved in illicit trade in the past, left the North Korean port of Nampo on June 17 and is steaming past China, reportedly bound for Myanmar via Singapore. It is unclear what the cargo is, but various reports and leaks suggest it could include missiles or missile parts for the Myanmar government.
Under the U.N. guidelines laid out in Resolution 1874 (which came in response to North Korea’s May nuclear test), U.N. member states are called on to inspect any North Korean ship on the high seas or in a foreign port that is suspected of carrying sanctioned material specified in Resolution 1874 or Resolution 1718. These include missiles and missile parts, nuclear materials or equipment and anything related to a program to develop weapons of mass destruction. But it also covers conventional arms including small arms, tanks, combat aircraft and armored combat vehicles, as well as a broadly defined category of “luxury goods,” which could include anything from alcohol to automobiles or other consumer goods.
While the justification for a search appears fairly broad, stopping a North Korean ship on the high seas is rather unlikely. Resolution 1874 stipulates that inspection on the high seas requires permission of the flag carrier — in other words, the North Koreans have to be asked and give permission before their ship is boarded. This was one of the ways China and Russia softened the resolution, and the measure has given North Korea the confidence to loudly proclaim that any boarding of its ships on the high seas would be an act of war met with instant retaliation — a threat Pyongyang does not expect to ever fulfill, as no one will board their ships on the high seas under Resolution 1874.
However, the resolution could affect other aspects of North Korean trade. Like the U.S. strictures on Banco Delta Asia a few years ago, which caused many other banks to limit North Korean financial activity out of fear of being targeted by U.S. economic action, the current round of U.N. actions can reduce nations’ desire to allow their ports to be used by North Korean ships even for legitimate trade or activity. Singapore has already said it is ready to take action if the Kang Nam 1 should enter Singapore’s waters and is confirmed to be carrying prohibited materials. In addition, countries that allow ships under their own flags to travel to North Korea or be used for North Korean trade may think twice if there is the potential for interdiction and punitive measures.
In short, the current tracking of the North Korean ship is not likely to become a true flash point. It is more likely to serve the psychological aims of the two sides — it allows the United States and allies to draw attention to questionable North Korean behavior, and it gives Pyongyang the freedom to increase its bluster with little chance of being tested on its resolve.
Vladimir Ryzhkov writes that the Russian government has to open its archives if it truly is interested in fighting falsification of history.
The only way to fight a real battle against the falsification of history – something that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has made a priority after creating a special commission to handle this issue – is to keep government archives as open as possible for historians.
Unfortunately, the Russian government is doing the exact opposite. This secrecy deprives historians access to the most sensitive and important historical documents. Among other things, this is also a violation of the Constitution.
Medvedev’s commission “for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia’s interests” is headed by presidential chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, who will control which documents remain classified and which ones are opened to the public. There are many reasons to be concerned that the documents most essential to an open and honest study and discussion of Russian and Soviet history will remain locked up.
Former President Boris Yeltsin had a much more liberal policy toward releasing government archives. On July 7, 1993, he signed a law governing Russia’s archives that remained in force until 2004. The law stipulated that documents containing state secrets should be declassified and made available to the public in no more than 30 years. Documents containing sensitive information of a personal nature had to be released in 75 years or less.
But under Vladimir Putin’s presidency, a new law was passed in 2004 that imposed far greater restrictions on access to state archives. The 30-year limit disappeared completely. Although Article 25 of the new law states that all documents should be made available to the public, the final decision as to which documents contain state secrets and are held under restricted access is made by the very same commission on state secrets headed by Naryshkin. This means that the public’s constitutional right to have access to archival documents will be rendered meaningless. What’s more, since Article 25 contains no time limits for declassifying documents, the government can keep “inconvenient” or incriminating documents that it considers to be “to the detriment of Russia’s interests” classified forever.
Strangely enough, Russia’s so-called “state secrets” are most vigorously guarded when they relate to Stalin-era documents, which remain the most highly classified. For example, historian Mark Solonin of Samara was recently denied access to the Foreign Ministry’s archives following a request to study documents connected with Soviet-Czechoslovakian relations on the eve of the Munich Agreement in 1938, even though more than 70 years have passed since those events took place.
Most of the documents connected with the 1940 execution of more than 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn, which was carried out by the NKVD [predecessor to KGB] under direct orders from Stalin, also remain locked away. After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin officially acknowledged the massacre and released many related documents from government archives, then-President Putin decided to do an about-face. The chief military prosecutor recently closed the investigation into the tragedy, and even the decision to halt criminal proceedings was deemed classified. The Kremlin’s decision to sweep the matter under the carpet raises the question whether Russia really wants to break with Stalin’s bloody past or whether it has a sick attachment to it.
Also classified – or simply lost or destroyed – are documents from Stalin’s Politburo of 1939 related to the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the partitioning of Poland, the annexation of the Baltic states and the Soviet invasion of Finland.
Documents pertaining to political killings abroad carried out by Soviet secret service agents are still classified, even if decades have passed since the killings took place.
The government continues to deny access to materials documenting the behavior of Soviet forces in Europe in 1945. This automatically provokes speculation that the scale of the looting, violence and rape carried out by Soviet soldiers and officers was greater than we have been led to believe.
Also off-limits are documents connected with the mass deportation of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian citizens on the eve of the outbreak of World War II in 1941 and the expropriation of their property.
Still classified are huge stacks of documents on the Soviet gulags and NKVD crimes. Yeltsin’s decree of June 23, 1992, calling for the full declassification of materials documenting the violation of human rights – and particularly those involving political repression — remains unfulfilled.
It is absurd that documents regarding the famine deaths of millions of people in 1932 and 1933 in southern Russia and Ukraine are still classified. Interestingly enough, Russia never tires of accusing Ukraine of falsifying history when Kyiv claims that the Holodomor, or famine, was an act of Soviet (read: Russian) genocide against the Ukrainian people. Moscow maintains that Stalin’s policy of seizing food supplies was directed against all the agricultural regions of the Soviet Union – mainly Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan – regardless of ethnicity. If that is the case, why doesn’t the Kremlin immediately declassify those documents and expose Stalin’s decisions? In this way, the Kremlin warriors for historical truth could pull the rug out from under Ukraine’s allegedly “brazen attempt to falsify history.”
As a result of all the crimes committed by the Soviet government, tens of millions of innocent citizens were killed or falsely imprisoned. Historians estimate that the number of victims in the Stalin era alone approaches 60 million people; the exact figure is difficult to pin down, and restricting archives will make it even harder to get to the truth. Most shocking is that Stalin came in third place in the “Name of Russia” nationwide television contest held in November for the most notable personalities in Russian history. Moreover, new history textbooks, scheduled to be released in the fall semester, contain a description of Stalin as being an “effective manager.” The creeping rehabilitation of Stalin has been under way for the past eight years, and restricting archives will help keep this process going strong.
The Soviet regime went to great lengths to conceal its heinous crimes from the public. Why would today’s Russia, which boasts a democratic Constitution and which has officially condemned the mass killings and imprisonment during the Soviet period, guard the secrets of the failed, bankrupt totalitarian state so diligently? Perhaps because Russia’s ruling elite view the Soviet model as being worthy of imitation? If so, we may soon see the mustachioed, grinning face of Stalin hanging in bureaucrats’ offices all across the country – side by side with Putin’s portrait.
Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio. This column was originally published in the Moscow Times (www.moscowtimes.ru) on June 9 and is reprinted with the author’s permission. Ryzhkov’s website iswww.ryzkov.ru.
Comment: Dan Foty……It’s a bit strange to see them clinging to the USSR legacy when it would be best to just ditch it. They can be perfectly fine imperialists (with more veneer of a “civilizing mission”) but referencing back to Peter and Catherine the Greats.
The more I look at contemporary Russia, the more I realize the greatness of Ataturk. Despite his many flaws, he grasped one thing perfectly in 1918 and didn’t let up until he fully succeeded in 1923 - that Turkey itself had to be fully liberated from the Ottoman Empire.”
On June 11, Alexander Shchednov, known in Russia’s art circles as Shurik, was hanging up a collage outside the town hall in the southwestern city of Voronezh. The image showed the face of a coy-looking Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin superimposed over the head of a woman in an evening dress, with the slogan, “Oh I don’t know … a third presidential [term] … it’s too much, on the other hand [three is a charm].” But Shchednov never got the chance to display his new work. Before he could hang the collage, he was arrested, becoming the latest in a string of artists to fall victim to the heavy hand of Russian censorship.
Speaking to the opposition website Kasparov.ru, Elena Dudukina of the Voronezh human-rights protection group Voronezh-Chernozemye said Shchednov was asked to give the police a $95 bribe to avoid arrest. When he refused, he was detained overnight and, according to Dudukina, beaten while in custody; Voronezh police say an investigation into the allegation is under way. A trial was scheduled for June 15, with Shchednov charged with “uncensored swearing in a public place.” But the artist never showed up in court, so the hearing has been postponed. (See pictures of the fashions of Russian Czars.)
Shchednov is one of a growing number of artists in Russia who have been accused of breaching censorship conventions and insulting authority. There is no specific law that explicitly forbids anti-Establishment artworks, but law-enforcement figures can easily find loopholes that they can use to detain artists. They are helped by legislation passed in 2002 that forbids the expression of extremism. The law is intended to combat far-right nationalism, but many artists have been caught in its wide net.
The most high-profile case is that of Andrey Erofeyev, former head of contemporary art at Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery. In 2008 he was indicted and charged with inciting religious hatred after putting on an exhibition a year earlier at the Andrey Sakharov Museum in Moscow called “Forbidden Art 2006.” The paintings depicted in the show were considered by authorities to be insulting to the Orthodox Church — one of the works showed a crucified Lenin, another portrayed Mickey Mouse as Jesus. Erofeyev was fired from his job at the Tretyakov in 2008, and his trial is ongoing. “Artists should not be prosecuted just because someone doesn’t like what they do,” says Friederike Behr, a researcher at Amnesty International in Russia. He adds that the antiextremism law itself is not the problem: “There is a good reason for that law to exist. It’s just the interpretation and implementation of the law [which] is worrying.”
Artyom Loskutov, a video artist based in Novosibirsk, Siberia, spent 26 days in prison before he was released on June 10. He had been arrested after helping to organize an art gathering called Monstratsia, which was held in Novosibirsk on May 1. The liberal weekly the New Times reported that 800 people had attended, some of them brandishing political posters with slogans like “Who is in charge?” On May 15, Loskutov received a call from the police asking him to come in for a chat. But having already spoken to authorities two weeks earlier about his involvement in Monstratsia, with no consequences, he declined. Hours later, he was detained by plainclothes police, who then claimed to have found 11 grams of marijuana in his belongings. (Read “The Russians Are Coming.”)
“The marijuana wasn’t mine,” Loskutov, whose art is nonpolitical, tells TIME. “Even if I was a regular drug taker, I knew the police wanted to see me that day. I would not have risked having drugs with me.” Loskutov was released, but his trial is set for later this summer. The artist thinks it will be a litmus test for others. “I think the result will say a lot about the state of art in Russia,” he says. “If I am found innocent, it will prove that there is a certain freedom to express oneself. If I am found guilty, it means we are approaching a critical time for art and artists in this country.”
Artists hoping to avoid becoming a target of Russia’s censorship laws may find themselves forced to take a page out of Ilya Glazunov’s book. Last week, Putin visited Glazunov, one of Russia’s most famous painters, at his studio on the artist’s 79th birthday. The Prime Minister paused in front of a painting of a knight, Prince Oleg with Igor, which Glazunov had completed in 1973. Then he offered his critique that the sword in the painting was too short. “It would only be good for cutting a sausage,” Putin said. (See pictures of Putin’s Patriotic Youth Camp.)
Had this not been Russia, Glazunov might have defended his work. Instead, he complemented Putin on his eye for detail and said he would correct the mistake. Under the current climate, he was probably right to — when it comes to Russian art, going up against the authorities has its consequences.
unidentified persons have opened fire
on Belarusian border guards deployed on
the border with Ukraine
MINSK - As yet unidentified persons have opened fire on Belarusian border guards deployed on the border with Ukraine,
Alexander Tishchenko, spokesman for Belarus’ State Border Guard Committee, told Interfax.
“Unknown persons traveling in cars stopped in front of a unit of border guards en route to their place of service. They opened fire when border guards asked them to move their cars to the side,” Tishchenko said.
“Investigation is currently underway to establish the motive behind the attack and the circumstances surrounding this unprecedented incident,” the official said.
Officers of law enforcement services have already detained six local residents as suspects, Tishchenko said.
“Their [possible] involvement in the crime is being investigated. The authorities are deciding whether or not to open a criminal case,” he added.
Lithuania is among the top five enemies of Russia. This was revealed by a recent public opinion poll in Russia. One can say that the notion of Lithuania as an enemy was inculcated into the heads of common Russians by the Kremlin’s propaganda. This is true, but it does not change the essence of the issue. Unlike in 1990-1991, today Lithuania would not be able to count on moral support from Russians, which was one of the reasons why we were successful in our quest for independence. Later, when we were negotiating over the withdrawal of Russian troops from Lithuania, favourable opinion about us among common Russians was also a very important factor.
Even ten years later, when we were trying to join NATO, one of the arguments our politicians and diplomats used in the talks with the Western partners was a poll that showed the majority of Russians did not object to our membership in the alliance. The poll also said that our membership in the alliance would not harm Russia’s relations with NATO, something Moscow’s politicians were trying to claim. Therefore, Russian politicians drew certain conclusions and started fixing the mistake of their propaganda, which at that time still counter-positioned the “good” Lithuania against the “bad” Latvia and Estonia.
Thanks to the efforts by the Kremlin’s propaganda masters, in 2004-2005 Vilnius got involved in a fierce verbal war against Moscow. The war lasted till 2008 and did not produce anything good for Lithuania: The Druzhba [friendship] oil pipeline was not reopened, the talks over compensation for the occupation damages did not commence, the Medininkai murderers were not extradited. The only thing we achieved was the loss of allies in the EU.
Russia, meanwhile, gained a strong argument in the discussions with the EU and NATO. From dawn till dusk the EU and NATO were told: “Did we not tell you that by accepting those intrigue-loving Baltic states, you would gain a source of constant disagreements with Russia?”
In 2004-2005, Russians’ opinion about the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia has started to get worse. This showed that harming the ties with the closest neighbours in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was a deliberate and pre-planned policy of Moscow.
A fruit of this policy could be observed in May 2007, when during rioting by Russian-speakers in Tallinn hundreds of thousands of Russians, without having been urged by anyone, got involved in cyber attacks against Estonian websites. A year later, we witnessed another result of this policy in Georgia. That time, as the Russian tanks were rolling towards the neighbouring country, not only Vladimir Putin, but also millions of Russians, overcome by chauvinistic orgasm, were demanding to hang Mikhail Saakashvili “by his balls.”
If the Kremlin started some sort of a political or economic pressure campaign against Lithuania, the support from Russian citizens would be just as enthusiastic.
(RTTNews) - Monday, a report by Statistics Lithuania said industrial production dropped 19.3% year-on-year in May, after declining 25.5% in April. After adjusting for labor day effects, production was down 18.4%.
Annually, mining and quarrying output dipped 31.3%, while manufacturing output decreased 19.4%.
Month-on-month, industrial output rose 4.2% in May, following a 4.4% fall in the previous month. Seasonally adjusted, industrial output increased 7.3%.
WARSAW, June 19, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Poland may soon consider passing a new law, similar to the one passed this week in neighboring Lithuania, that bans the media and schools from promoting adverse behaviors to the development of young people, including violence, suicide, and homosexuality.
MP Artur Górski, deputy head of the parliamentary commission on Polish-Lithuanian cooperation, has stated he intends to copy the Lithuanian law and introduce it before the nation’s parliament for passage.
“I have already asked for the translation of the Lithuanian law ‘on the protection of youth’ into Polish,” said Górski, a member of the major opposition party, Law and Justice. “This is a very interesting initiative and no doubt a very necessary one, especially now, when we face a more and more obvious expansion of gay activist circles.”
Górski spoke with the Catholic daily “Nasz Dziennik,” saying he believed the initiative could be ready by the fall. He stated that 50 parliamentarians would be needed to sponsor the measure to bring it to a vote, but added that he believed the proposed initiative would gain more than enough support for its passage, and possibly the support of all the MPs in the Law and Justice Party.
“If you look at the Polish parliament and see the ruling Civic Platform and major opposition Law and Justice, both claiming to be right wing, then there should be no trouble in passing such a law,” Gorski said.
If passed, the Polish equivalent of Lithuania’s law “on the protection of youth,” would ban any public promotion of homosexual, bisexual or polygamous relations among Polish youth. The law also targets public messages directed toward youth that promote violence, horror, suicide, and self-abuse.
The measure would also provide a strong legal barrier to homosexual “Pride” parades that promote the social acceptance, display, and celebration of aberrant sexual behaviors in civil society.
“I think this law is needed also in Poland,” said MP Leszek Deptu³a of the minor coalition Polish Peasants’ Party. “We should protect kids and youth from homosexuality and from promoting this idea. That’s why my opinion on this issue is very clear: if such a project appears, I will sure support it.”
“I am not against people of other sexual orientation, but I think there is no need to manifest and propagate such behaviors,” added MP Stanislaw Rakoczy.
VILNIUS, June 22 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund said on Monday Lithuania’s economy would contract more sharply than it had expected and further sizeable consolidation of the public sector budget was needed. But the Fund backed the country’s currency peg, which keeps the lita pegged to the euro at a rate of 3.4528, as offering a credible path to euro entry if it was supported by government policy. ‘The economy is forecast to shrink by at least 16 percent in 2009 and a further 3.75 percent in 2010,’ Catriona Purfield, head of a visiting IMF delegation to the Baltic state, told reporters at the end of regular consultations. The forecast was a downward revision from a 10 percent contraction estimated in April and Purfield said the risks remained skewed to the downside. Devaluations fears have gripped the Baltic region after several years of strong growth and high inflation turned into deep economic slumps. ‘The currency board is sustainable going forward … We believe that this (Lithuania currency board) is a credible path to euro adoption, but it will need to be supported by strong policy efforts,’ Purfield said. She said the currency board needed strong political backing, including further fiscal adjustments. The IMF said Lithuania needed a ’sizeable further consolidation in the fiscal sector’ of up to 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the medium-term, including the latest proposals, and further reduction in public sector wages. Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, who was present at the briefing, said public sector deficit consolidation by 7 percent of GDP was ‘a big challenge, but possible to accomplish’. He said his government was ready to undertake steps to bring the public sector deficit to under 3 percent in 2011 by implementing structural reforms in the social, health and education sectors. Previously, the prime minister had said Lithuania aimed to keep its budget deficit under 5 percent of GDP in 2009, but the Finance Ministry said last week the deficit might shoot up to 8 percent if no further consolidation was made, as the economy risked contracting by 18.2 percent this year. Last week, Lithuania’s government sent to parliament a bill to raise value-added tax to 21 percent from 19 percent and to cut public sector wages by 10 percent. The IMF said it backed the cost cutting proposals. The Fund also said Lithuania had not sought assistance as did neighbouring Latvia when it agreed to a 7.5 billion euro loan from the Fund and other international donors. ‘Lithuania has not asked for IMF assistance at this stage,’ Purfield said, but she did not exclude it doing so in the future. ‘One can never provide cast iron assurances that financial assistance would never be needed,’ she said. Kubilius has repeatedly said his country had no need to borrow from the IMF. (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis, editing by Mike Peacock) Keywords: LITHUANIA IMF/ (+37064191386; nerijus.adomaitis@reuters.com)
The Latvian economy is in the doldrums. Until recently considered a “Baltic Tiger,” its GDP has contracted to a fifth of its peak value, foreign trade has dropped by 40 percent and the state’s finances are ailing. The government plans to reduce wages for state employees by 20 percent while pensions are to fall by 10 percent.
On the other hand, the prices of some basic goods have gone up, making life more expensive. The same applies to the excise duty on alcohol, which has risen by 50 percent for beer and eight percent for spirits. This is part of the country’s endeavors to introduce some normality of some sort.
What went wrong?
What has precisely gone wrong in such a promising economy? Much can be attributed to the introduction of a flat tax rate and the pegging of the local currency, the lats, to the euro.
The introduction of the flat tax rate meant reduced income to the state. After this tax rate was introduced, the role of the state in the economy was supposed to be minimal. Now, as a result of the global economic crisis and the state’s bigger role as a regulator and provider for the poor and underprivileged, the Latvian government suddenly does not have enough money to go around.
Secondly, the pegging of the lats to the euro meant few possibilities to maneuver in case of a speculative attack or when trying to increase foreign trade profitability by exchange rate manipulation. And Latvian politicians, who are considered to be spendthrift and arrogant, haven’t helped matters. The minister of finance is said to barely be on speaking terms with the prime minister. This has led to a lapse of policy mix coordination.
Fear of an outbreak
The major fear today is whether the problems in Latvia will spill over into Estonia and Lithuania. But could they also spread to Poland?
I am of the opinion that the situation in the Baltic states is proof that not all CEE countries should be treated as emerging markets. They have different economic policies and are in different phases of the development cycle. The problems of Latvia may spill over to Estonia and Lithuania because these economies are interrelated: they are small, heavily dependent on Russia for energy, have introduced flat tax rates, their financial sectors are dominated by Scandinavian financial institutions and they have currencies pegged to the euro. This leaves them little room to maneuver.
On the other hand, they have a small or limited amount of foreign trade with Poland. The relationships between Poland and the Baltic states are political, rather than economic. Thus the chances of a spillover into Poland are very low.
Still in control
By not introducing a flat-rate tax and not pegging the złoty to the euro, Poland has achieved some autonomy in its economy and this sets it apart from other countries in the region.
Of course, there is a danger that investors will treat Poland as an emerging market and lump it together in one basket with the Baltic states, but this would be a false assumption. Poland is growing economically and has the potential to strengthen its economic position, in spite of the problems abounding in other countries. Finally, it conducts a sound policy mix based on free market economics – for example, by leaving the złoty unpegged.
Of course, that does not mean Poland is problem-free, but rather that it has the capability to control the situation. The country has ample foreign reserves, a standing credit line with the IMF, options for additional and massive financing from the EU and, finally, the possibility of introducing austerity measures that can be accepted by society, if properly explained and presented to them.
Dr Richard Mbewe is an expert on macroeconomics and the managing partner & CEO of Atria Real Estate Partners
Eight Baltic Sea states last week (17 June) launched an action plan to connect Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to EU energy networks, providing a signpost for the Swedish Presidency’s agenda for the Baltic Sea region.
18 June 2009 - European Union countries from the Baltic region have signed up to a Baltic Energy Market Interconnection Plan in an effort to more closely integrate the region’s energy sector hitherto dominated by Russia.
“Ending the effective isolation of the Baltic States, which still form an energy island, is an urgent task to deal with,” Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said in a statement.
Eight countries signed Wednesday’s memorandum of understanding: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden and Poland. Norway participated as an observer.
The initiative is expected to lead to the creation of new infrastructure to boost electricity and gas interconnections in the region, increasing the countries’ security, and linking new EU members - and former Soviet Union states - Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to the rest of the bloc’s infrastructure.
Projects envisaged as part of Wednesday’s document may get more than EUR500m ($696m) in financing as part of an EU plan to boost energy investments as an effort to sustain the economy in the current economic downturn, the commission said.
The interconnection projects include new lines between Finland and Estonia, Sweden and Lithuania, and Lithuania and Poland. In addition the offshore wind farms in the Kriegers Flak area should be provided with a combined grid connection solution which would also provide additional electricity trading possibilities by interconnecting Germany, Sweden and Denmark.
Health authorities in Latvia said their country has registered its first confirmed case of swine influenza A-H1N1. Officials said the patient was hospitalized after flying home from a visit to the United States and Canada by way of Berlin. Earlier, the Philippines closed down its lower house of Congress after a 49-year-old woman died from the influenza. Health authorities said the woman, who worked in the legislature, died Friday from heart failure that was aggravated by severe pneumonia. The A-H1N1 strain of swine flu that has spread around the world this year is a highly contagious new virus. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization declared an influenza pandemic for the first time in more than 40 years. The U.N. agency said more than 52,000 cases of swine flu infection have been confirmed worldwide, and 231 deaths, not including the one in the Philippines. On Monday, officials in Montenegro confirmed that country’s first case of swine flu. The victim, a student who recently returned from an exchange program in the United States, is recovering after treatment in a hospital in Podgorica.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
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Iran: 500 Activists Arrested In Growing Crackdown
June 17, 2009 | 1720 GMT
At least 500 activists, including politicians, journalists and students, have been arrested in Iran over the past five days in a growing crackdown aimed at “decapitating” the movement against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, the Guardian reported June 17. At least 100 have been arrested in Tabriz, a Mousavi strong-hold. About 200 were arrested at Tehran University over the June 13 weekend, although many were later released. More than 100 were arrested on June 15 after security forces engaged protesters at Shiraz University.
The move is reportedly creating chaos in the field among the CIA, FBI and military personnel, according to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.
A senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee is accusing the Obama administration of quietly ordering the FBI to start reading Miranda rights to suspected terrorists at U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan.
The move is reportedly creating chaos in the field among the CIA, FBI and military personnel, according to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich. The soldiers, especially, he says, are frustrated that giving high value detainees Miranda rights — the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney — is impeding their ability to pursue intelligence on the battlefield, according to a story first reported by the Weekly Standard.
“What I found was lots of confusion and very frustrated people on the front lines who are trying to, well, make Afghanistan successful for the United States and its allies,” said Rogers, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee.
Rogers, a former FBI special agent who served in the U.S. Army, just returned from Afghanistan and a visit to Bagram Air Base, where he said the rights are being read.
“I witnessed it myself, talked to the people on the ground,” he said. “What you have is two very separate missions colliding in the field in a combat zone. Again, anytime that you offer confusion in that environment that’s already chaotic and confusing enough, you jeopardize a soldier’s life.”
U.S. commanders told FOX News soldiers are not reading Miranda rights to detainees, but those commanders could not speak to whether the FBI was doing so. The practice has not been instituted at detention facilities in Iraq or at Guantanamo Bay, according to U.S. senior military officials.
Asked if the Obama administration had ordered that Miranda rights be read to certain detainees, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “I have no reason to disbelieve a member of Congress. But I don’t know any of the circumstances that are involved around it.”
But Gibbs acknowledged that it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that it was happening.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd denied there has been a policy change covering detainees.
“There has been no policy change nor blanket instruction for FBI agents to Mirandize detainees overseas,” he said in a statement, adding, “While there have been specific cases in which FBI agents have Mirandized suspects overseas, at both Bagram and in other situations, in order to preserve the quality of evidence obtained, there has been no overall policy change with respect to detainees.”
Some senators wonder what would have happened if Khaled Sheikh Mohammad, a self-confessed architect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, had been read his Miranda rights.
“I’d be very concerned if we’re sending FBI agents over to Bagram Air Base in the middle of a military operation to start reading Miranda rights to detainees caught on the battlefield,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said.
When 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured on March 1, 2003, he was not cooperative. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet.
Of course, KSM did not get a lawyer until months later, after his interrogation was completed, and Tenet says that the information the CIA obtained from him disrupted plots and saved lives. “I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal – read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted that his client simply shut up,” Tenet wrote in his memoirs.
If Tenet is right, it’s a good thing KSM was captured before Barack Obama became president. For, the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.
Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”
That effort, which elevates the FBI and other law enforcement agencies and diminishes the role of intelligence and military officials, was described in a May 28 Los Angeles Timesarticle.
The FBI and Justice Department plan to significantly expand their role in global counter-terrorism operations, part of a U.S. policy shift that will replace a CIA-dominated system of clandestine detentions and interrogations with one built around transparent investigations and prosecutions.
Under the “global justice” initiative, which has been in the works for several months, FBI agents will have a central role in overseas counter-terrorism cases. They will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to ensure that criminal prosecutions are an option, officials familiar with the effort said.
Thanks in part to the popularity of law and order television shows and movies, many Americans are familiar with the Miranda warning – so named because of the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona that required police officers and other law enforcement officials to advise suspected criminals of their rights.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.
A lawyer who has worked on detainee issues for the U.S. government offers this rationale for the Obama administration’s approach. “If the US is mirandizing certain suspects in Afghanistan, they’re likely doing it to ensure that the treatment of the suspect and the collection of information is done in a manner that will ensure the suspect can be prosecuted in a US court at some point in the future.”
But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy. “When they mirandize a suspect, the first thing they do is warn them that they have the ‘right to remain silent,’” says Representative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “It would seem the last thing we want is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or any other al-Qaeda terrorist to remain silent. Our focus should be on preventing the next attack, not giving radical jihadists a new tactic to resist interrogation–lawyering up.”
According to Mike Rogers, that is precisely what some human rights organizations are advising detainees to do. “The International Red Cross, when they go into these detention facilities, has now started telling people – ‘Take the option. You want a lawyer.’”
Rogers adds: “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer – you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”
One thing is clear, though. A detainee who is not talking cannot provide information about future attacks. Had Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had a lawyer, Tenet wrote, “I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people.”
Posted by Stephen F. Hayes on June 10, 2009 02:05 PM|Permalink
SAN FRANCISCO – A man serving a 17-year prison sentence for terrorist activities has been given the green light to sue a former US government lawyer who wrote memos that allegedly led to his torture, US media reports said Sunday.
Jose Padilla, a US citizen arrested in 2002 for an alleged “dirty bomb” plot only to have the charges dropped three years later, was jailed in January 2008 for separate charges of providing support to the Al-Qaeda terror network.
Lawyers for Padilla have filed a lawsuit against John Yoo, a former lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, arguing that he was responsible for crafting the legal memos which led to his detention and harsh interrogation.
Padilla, who was held in solitary confinement as an “enemy combatant” for more than three years at a US Navy installation in Charleston, South Carolina, alleges he was tortured.
Padilla’s lawsuit, which demands Yoo be held accountable for his treatment, alleges he suffered “gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a systematic program of abusive interrogation intended to break down Mr Padilla’s humanity and his will to live.”
Yoo, part of Bush’s war council and deputy attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, wrote several memorandums endorsing harsh treatment.
Yoo has argued that the suit should be dismissed because it has not been established that Padilla’s treatment was unconstitutional.
However San Francisco Federal Court Judge Jeffrey White, who was appointed by Bush, said in a written ruling released late Friday that Padilla’s case can proceed.
White found Padilla “has alleged sufficient facts to satisfy the requirement that Yoo set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla’s constitutional rights.”
Tahlia Townsend, a member of Padilla’s legal team, described the ruling as a “a significant victory for American values, government accountability and our system of checks and balances.”
Padilla and his mother, Estela Lebron, are seeking one dollar in damages and a declaration by the court that his treatment was unconstitutional.
Yoo, who is being represented by the Justice Department, so far has declined to comment on the case.
Padilla, 38, dubbed the “Puerto Rican Taliban,” was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport after returning from Egypt and was taken to a US Navy prison in South Carolina.
At his 2007 trial, prosecutors said the former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert traveled abroad to train as a “jihad” fighter, and had asked to receive “violent jihad training” while in Afghanistan in July 2000.
US authorities justified his detention without charge, saying he was an “enemy combatant” who allegedly planned to explode a radioactive bomb in the country.
But when he was transferred to the civilian justice system after three-and-a-half years in military detention, the indictment made no mention of the so-called “dirty bomb” plot.
During the trial, his defense team claimed Padilla had been tortured while in military detention and that the alleged ill-treatment left him unable to participate in his own defense.
A Muslim convert charged with fatally shooting an American soldier at a military recruiting center said Tuesday that he doesn’t consider the killing a murder because U.S. military action in the Middle East made the killing justified.
“I do feel I’m not guilty,” Abdulhakim Muhammad told The Associated Press in a collect call from the Pulaski County jail. “I don’t think it was murder, because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason.”
Pvt. William Andrew Long, 23, of Conway had just completed basic training and was volunteering at the west Little Rock recruiting office before starting an assignment in South Korea. He was shot dead June 1 while smoking a cigarette outside the building, and a fellow soldier, Pvt. Quinton I. Ezeagwula, 18, of Jacksonville was wounded.
Ezeagwula spoke briefly at a news conference at a Jacksonville recruiting center Tuesday, saying he had wounds in his back, head and buttocks from the shooting.
The private, who also had just completed basic training, said he hopes to become a heavy equipment operator in the Army and later serve as a drill instructor. An Army captain repeatedly stopped Ezeagwula from answering questions about what happened during the shooting or his thoughts about the suspect.
Muhammad told the AP he admitted to his actions to police and said he was retaliating against the U.S. military.
“Yes, I did tell the police upon my arrest that this was an act of retaliation, and not a reaction on the soldiers personally,” Muhammad said. He called it “a act, for the sake of God, for the sake of Allah, the Lord of all the world, and also a retaliation on U.S. military.”
In the interview, Muhammad also disputed his lawyer’s claim that he had been “radicalized” in a Yemeni prison and said fellow prisoners that some call terrorists were actually “very good Muslim brothers.”
He also said he didn’t specifically plan the shootings that morning.
“It’s been on my mind for awhile. It wasn’t nothing planned really. It was just the heat of the moment, you know,” said Muhammad, who was arrested on a highway shortly after the attack.
Prosecutor Larry Jegley, who on Monday won a gag order in the case, declined to comment specifically on Muhammad’s remarks.
“I asked for the gag order to protect Mr. Muhammad’s right for a fair trial,” Jegley said. “I’ve never had a situation like this with a gag order and I’m sure Mr. Muhammad’s attorney will take care of it.”
The Associated Press sent an interview request to Muhammad last week, before a judge ordered parties in the case to remain quiet. After Tuesday’s interview, Muhammad’s lawyer Jim Hensley sent an e-mail to the AP asking it to withhold his client’s remarks.
Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.
He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.
“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.
Asked whether he considered the shootings at the recruiting center an act of war, Muhammad said “I didn’t know the soldiers personally, but yes, it was an attack of retaliation. And I feel that other attacks, not by me or people I know, but definitely Muslims in this country and others elsewhere, are going to attack for doing those things they did,” especially desecrating the Quran.
Muhammad was arrested on a capital murder charge in state court and could face the death penalty. FBI spokesman Steve Frazier said Tuesday a federal investigation continues and any information that’s gathered is being shared with local law enforcement. He declined to comment further.
An FBI-Homeland Security intelligence assessment document obtained by The Associated Press last week suggested the gunman may have considered targeting other locations, including Jewish and Christian sites in several eastern U.S. cities.
Muhammad had moved to Arkansas in the spring to work at his father’s bus tour company and had never attended the Islamic Center of Little Rock, a mosque frequented by most of the area’s Muslims, said Iftikhar Pathan, the center’s president.
Pathan said he spoke with most of the nearly 300 people who attend Friday prayers at the mosque and no one knew him. Those at the mosque also spoke with FBI agents in the days immediately after the shooting, he said.
“What he had in his mind, God knows,” Pathan said.
Last week, Hensley said his client, born Carlos Bledsoe, had been tortured and “radicalized” in a Yemeni prison after entering the country to teach English. He was held there for immigration violations, and Yemeni officials have denied mistreatment.
“Those claims … are all lies,” Muhammad said Tuesday. “That never happened in Yemen. The officials dealt with me in a gentle way.”
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The CIA is pushing the Obama administration to maintain the secrecy of significant portions of a comprehensive internal account of the agency’s interrogation program, according to two intelligence officials.
The officials say the CIA is urging the suppression of passages describing in graphic detail how the agency handled its detainees, arguing that the material could damage ongoing counterterrorism operations by laying bare sensitive intelligence procedures and methods.
The May 2004 report, prepared by the CIA’s inspector general, is the most definitive official account to date of the agency’s interrogation system. A heavily redacted version, consisting of a dozen or so paragraphs separated by heavy black boxes and lists of missing pages, was released in May 2008 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
After an ACLU appeal, the Obama administration promised in May to review the report, which consists of more than 100 pages of text and six appendixes of unknown length, and to produce by Friday any additional material that could be released.
CIA spokesman George Little said the agency “is reviewing the report to determine how much more of it can be declassified in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act.”
An administration official said the CIA has not yet forwarded the document to the White House or the Justice Department for final review.
A senior intelligence official who has studied the document defended the CIA’s redactions. “There is a lot about how the CIA operated the overall program of detention and interrogation — not just about how they used techniques — that would be sensitive and rightly redacted,” the official said. “I think the Obama administration has made the correct decision that transparency only goes so far on the national security side.”
Some former agency officials said that CIA insiders are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent disclosures that could embarrass the agency and lead to new calls for a “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s policies.
Two former agency officials who read the 2004 report said most of its contents could be safely released and, if anything, would seem familiar. General information about the agency’s interrogation program has already been made public through the Obama administration’s release of memos by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel authorizing the harsh CIA techniques and through the earlier leak of a 2005 report on CIA interrogations by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The broad conclusions of the inspector general’s report, as well as its specific assertion that some interrogators exceeded limits approved by the Justice Department, have previously been disclosed.
“[CIA Director] Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place,” said a former senior officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity when discussing the still-classified report.
But one intelligence official countered that Panetta “was never a fan of the interrogation program.”
“He’s reached his own independent decisions on these issues. He’s standing up for people who followed lawful guidance” issued to the agency during the Bush administration, the official said.
The report was based on more than a year of investigation, including more than 100 interviews and a review of 92 interrogation videotapes — which the CIA later said it had destroyed — as well as thousands of internal CIA e-mails and other documents. Then-Inspector General John L. Helgerson and his team of investigators traveled to secret CIA prisons and witnessed interrogations firsthand, making them the only observers allowed into the detention sites who were not participants in the program, officials said.
The report’s critical comments helped prompt a suspension of the interrogations for several months, until the agency received fresh affirmations of their legality from President George W. Bush’s appointees at the Justice Department. The CIA’s lawyers and its counterterrorism center also prepared detailed written rebuttals, which the CIA is considering releasing alongside the censored report this week.
According to a summary of the report incorporated in a declassified Justice Department memo, its authors concluded that some useful information was produced by the CIA program but that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks” — the principal justification for using harsh techniques.
The report also expressed particular concern that questioners had violated a legal prohibition against “degrading” conduct by stripping detainees, sometimes in the presence of women, according to a source who has read it. The report said waterboarding, meant to simulate drowning, was used more often than had been proved effective, and it quoted CIA doctors as saying that interrogators from the military’s survival school who took part in the sessions had probably misrepresented their expertise.
The report further questioned the legality of using different combinations of techniques — for example, sleep deprivation combined with forced nudity and painful stress positions, according to sources familiar with the document. While Justice Department lawyers had determined in August 2002 that the individual techniques did not constitute torture, the report warned that using several techniques at once could have a far greater psychological impact, according to officials familiar with the document.
“The argument was that combining the techniques amounted to torture,” said a former agency official who read the report. “In essence, [Helgerson] was arguing in 2004 that there were clear violations of international laws and domestic laws.”
Another former official who read the report said its full text laid bare “the good, the bad and the ugly” and added that “I believe that some people would find offensive” what was done, because it was “not in keeping with American values.”
At the CIA, the report was welcomed by some lower-ranking officials who were privy to what was happening at the prisons and had complained to Helgerson’s office about apparent abuses, according to an official familiar with the study. But it provoked immediate anger and resistance among the agency’s top managers, lawyers and counterterrorism experts, who charged that Helgerson had overstepped his authority and that the report contained factual inaccuracies and a misreading of the law.
A former intelligence official said that at the time, Helgerson seemed to be on a moral crusade: “He was out to prove a theory, and it came across as simply ‘You’re wrong,’ ” said the official, who cited the report’s secrecy in speaking on the condition of anonymity. “He was calling in officers willy-nilly and then bringing them in a second time. It was like he was conducting his own interrogations.” Most of those involved in the program felt at the time, and still do, that they took great pains to follow the law, the official said.
After the report was issued, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet demanded that the Justice Department and the White House reaffirm their support for the agency’s harsh interrogation methods, even when used in combination, telling others at the time, “No papers, no opinions, no program.” At a White House meeting in mid-2004, he resisted pressures to reinstate the program immediately, before receiving new legal authorization, according to a source familiar with the episode.
The Justice Department subsequently sent interim supporting opinions to the CIA, allowing the program’s resumption after Tenet’s departure, and went on to complete three lengthy reports in 2005 that affirmed in detail the legality of the interrogation techniques with some new safeguards that the CIA had begun to implement in 2003.
Helgerson, who retired from the agency this year, declined to comment for this story. A former CIA employee familiar with Helgerson’s views said he has advocated for the release of the whole report, with minimal redactions, so that interested parties can see the context. “The report says a number of things positive about the agency as well as raising some serious questions about the legal underpinnings of the program and the way it was carried out,” the official said.
Staff writers Peter Finn and Carrie Johnson and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia does not need to move toward greater democracy because the financial crisis requires strong leadership, a think-tank close to the ruling party United Russia has said in a report.
The report for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s party appears to pour cold water on President Dmitry Medvedev’s declared intentions of cautiously reforming Russia’s tightly controlled political system.
“It would be more honest and realistic to say that the democratization of Russia’s political system in the near future cannot be a priority…The priority for now is good governance,” the Public Projects Institute, headed by parliamentarian Vladimir Pligin, said in the report released on Wednesday.
It was authored by 100 people including Pligin and public chamber member Alexander Brod.
Its conclusions appeared to chime with those of Putin, Russia’s president from 2000-2008 and now the dominant partner in a dual leadership with his chosen successor Medvedev.
Business daily Vedomosti earlier published unusually frank remarks about Russia’s political system from what it said was an early draft of the report. These were missing from the final version.
“Regional leaders…are appointed via arrangements strongly reminiscent of regional committee secretary nominations in the Soviet era,” the newspaper cited the report as saying.
It said Russia’s tightly controlled media resembled that of the Soviet media during the so-called “period of stagnation” prior to Mikhail Gorbachev’s “perestroika” reforms in the 1980s.
Medvedev has carefully cultivated an image as a liberal since his election, though analysts say he has made very few substantive changes so far. Some believe he is little more than a figurehead installed to appease the West with promises of liberalism and change which will never materialize.
Medvedev has suggested reducing the minimum amount of votes a party needs to gain parliamentary representation and giving the opposition better access to the media. But it remains unclear how big their practical impact will be.
The report for United Russia said the priorities lay elsewhere and implicitly suggested Putin’s 2000-08 presidency as a model for successful government.
“In times of war and crisis, a successful political system becomes charismatic, and therefore, inevitably more authoritarian. A storm requires a captain,” the report said.
REGIONAL LEADERS
Not everyone is happy at the state of Russian politics, particularly at a time when the global financial crisis has plunged the economy into a deep recession.
Last Friday the president of the southwestern Russian region of Bashkoristan, Murtaza Rakhimov, made a strong public attack on the Kremlin’s system of “vertical power” set up by Putin.
“Russia is walking away from the process of democratization… The level of centralization is worse than in Soviet times,” Rakhimov told the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily.
Some commentators played down the significance of Rakhimov’s remarks, saying the veteran leader was about to be replaced and took advantage of his situation to blast the Kremlin. But some of what he said still rang true for critics of the government.
“It’s pretty clear a mass-scale democratization will never take place in Russia,” independent analyst Stanislav Belkovsky said. (Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman, additional reporting by Aydar Buribayev)
The economic outlook for Russia appears bleak, and the road to recovery appears to be a long one. Rising unemployment, falling industrial production and the flight of foreign investment have put a dent in Russia’s massive currency reserves. However, the Kremlin has reasserted its power over the country and is in prime position to overcome its short-term challenges.
RIA Novosti reported that Germany’s armed forces have demanded that the planned route of the Nord Stream gas pipeline linking to Russia be altered.
The paper said the German military had repeatedly voiced concern over the Nord Stream project. The latest statement by the Bundeswehr’s top officials echoed complaints made in January 2007 by commanders of the Northern District based in Kiel, who said construction would be adjacent to zones where the German Army and Navy hold exercises.
In a letter to the defense committee of the country’s lower house of parliament, the Bundeswehr said it was concerned that the pipeline would be laid close to a sea testing ground near the Island of Rugen, which is actively used for naval exercises.
Nord Stream AG, the project operator, has confirmed that the Bundeswehr filed the request during public consultations on the project.
Mr Jens Muller Nord Stream AG spokesman said “We have studied the issue closely and invited the leading international experts to analyze potential risks. Dialogue is currently being held with the relevant German departments. We are sure to find a solution that will relieve tensions over the proposed route.”
The EUR 6 billion pipeline being built jointly by Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea is planned to eventually pump 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year to Western Europe, bypassing traditional transit nations.
By Olexiy Solohubenko
Europe editor, BBC World Service
As the 1989 revolution swept through the countries of Central Europe, tremors went right across the Soviet Union.
At that time, in the Baltic states as well as in Ukraine, the prospects of independence suddenly looked very real.
In a richly decorated office in central Kiev, Leonid Kravchuk is happy to talk about 1989. Then a senior functionary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, he says it was totally unprepared for grassroots protests.
“We were in a full session of the Central Committee one day,” he tells the BBC, “when someone ran up and said, ‘There are two women with a placard outside!’ My God, we stopped the session and I was sent down to investigate.
Leonid Kravchuk ran for president in 1991 and 1994
“ Gorbachev decided to let a little bit of genie out of the bottle. But you cannot let out just a little bit ”
Poet Ivan Drach
“It turned out they wanted money for a rail ticket,” he laughs. “And so had decided to attract attention in this manner. I gave them 40 roubles, but the whole Central Committee was spooked by two women with one placard. There was fear because no-one ever stood against the Party.”
It was the time of glasnost, of openness in the media which the then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced. Poet Ivan Drach took it very seriously.
He says he knows exactly how many people could fit into the hall at the Writers’ Union headquarters in the leafy part of Kiev: 167.
“When we spoke here about the need for change, the hall was always full,” Drach says. “And soon we needed bigger halls, but they were also not large enough.”
No easy ride
So in smoky rooms, writers like Drach decided the time was right for bigger things - and they founded Rukh, or “Movement” in Ukrainian.
At first Rukh’s aims were to support Gorbachev’s reforms against the die-hard regional party elites, but very quickly it became clear that the authorities in Moscow were neither controlling the situation nor capable of grasping what they had unleashed.
“Gorbachev decided to let a little bit of genie out of the bottle,” laughs Ivan Drach. “But you cannot let out just a little bit. It is just like toothpaste - once you squeeze it out, you cannot put it back into the tube.”
What had started as a loyal grassroots group in time evolved into a political movement demanding full independence. This frightened quite a few people, even those who had opposed the Soviet regime for years.
Semyon Gluzman spent 10 years in gulag camps and exile for exposing the abuses of Soviet psychiatry. In his tiny office at Kiev’s main psychiatric hospital with all kinds of awards and accolades displayed on the walls, he says he had genuine fears.
“I will be honest, I thought this country could be more repressive, more anti-Semitic and the party machine here could create its own independent fiefdom and run it the way they wanted. I am glad I was wrong, and Ukraine is more democratic and freer than I thought it would be.”
Yet, independence was not an easy ride. The communist authorities wanted to keep power, by force if necessary.
Phone warning
Threats and intimidation were nothing unusual. “I could write a book about them,” says Ivan Drach. “And the threats were really nasty. As soon as I spoke sharply about the need to break away from Moscow, my son was badly beaten.”
Even high rank did not provide immunity. Leonid Kravchuk, later elected the first president of independent Ukraine, tells of his and Boris Yeltsin’s escape from a hunting lodge in Belarus in December 1991, where they discussed the break up of the Soviet Union with their Belarussian host Stanislav Shushkevich.
“Boris Yeltsin took me to one side,” reminisces Kravchuk, “and told me that we should fly home immediately. We got into our cars, boarded our planes and took off, but did not tell the air traffic control of our routes. Simply, Boris Yeltsin got a phone call from Moscow warning him of danger.”
Of course people in Ukraine were watching events in countries like Poland closely. Writer Andrei Kurkov travelled there at the time, mostly to the mining areas in Silesia.
Leonid Kravchuk ran for president in 1991 and 1994
“ We were romantics, we believed we would change the world quickly… of course it was an illusion ”
Yuri Scherbak
“I envied the Poles,” he says over tea at his dacha outside Kiev. “I thought they were 10 years ahead of us. But then things in Ukraine took off really quickly.”
Many in Ukraine argued that it was much easier for the Poles: one nation, one language, one religion, its own Pope and fairly recent memories of freedom.
Ukraine was and still is a more diverse if not divided country. Ukrainian and Russian compete for linguistic dominance, eastern and western regions compete for power and there are all sorts of ecclesiastical splits that would take ages to explain.
Kravchuk, Shushkevich and Yeltsin discussed the end of the Soviet Union
‘Small steps’
Yet, there was one powerful, uniting factor for all Ukrainians: Chernobyl.
The degree of lies, secrecy and disregard for people’s lives after Chernobyl critically undermined whatever was left of trust in the authorities.
A powerful Green Movement was formed. It could easily bring tens of thousands of people out onto the streets and the authorities could do nothing about it.
Very quickly the Green demands merged with those of Rukh - a better, freer and cleaner Ukraine in every sense of the word.
Yuri Scherbak, a doctor, a writer and later a diplomat was one of the key figures of the Chernobyl movement.
“It was such an amazing time,” he tells me in his top floor flat where his desk is adorned with pictures of him with US presidents and other top politicians.
“We were romantics, we believed we would change the world quickly. Of course it was an illusion.”
Indeed, it was naïve to believe Ukraine would become a European democracy overnight, but in terms of freedom, according to Semyon Gluzman, it is doing much better than most other ex-Soviet states.
“What we need is small steps”, he says. “In fact, I am a specialist in small steps.”
There have also been big leaps in Ukraine over the past 20 years: it may still be building its identity as a nation, but it has a functioning state, relatively free media and, even though it is still a poor country, there have been marked improvements in the standard of living.
The global crisis is hitting Ukraine very hard, and an IMF pledge to help with $16bn (£10bn) may not be enough to put its export-based economy back on track.
In 1991, two years after Leonid Kravchuk’s Central Committee meeting was disturbed by those two women with a placard, I was standing in what is now Independence Square in central Kiev. Next to me was a huge statue of Lenin - but a Lenin with a difference.
Daubed in red paint, with the word “hangman” written across him, he did not survive long.
A week or so later a crane lifted the Lenin off the pedestal and transported him into oblivion.
Over the years Ukraine has travelled a long way, but looking now at the challenges facing it - in the economy and, crucially, in sorting out its messy politics - I keep feeling that winching away Lenin was actually the easy bit.
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The full scale propaganda war of Soviet/Russian/KGB disininformation continues (it never stopped) and how pathetic. “….Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the creation of a body with the Orwellian title of the Commission to Counteract the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests. A linked law is also likely to be passed that will outlaw the “rehabilitation of Nazism” on the territory of former Soviet republics.“ For Russophiles and Russians, the war only begins in 1941 with the invasion of “Baltic territories” by Nazi Germany, never a mention of the fully documented insidious Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 that secretly carved up Eastern Europe and the Baltic Nations between Nazi Germany and the USSR. That treaty which violated international law, initiated WWII with the unprovoked military invasions of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It is worth noting that Gorbachev himself publically admitted Stalin’s signing of the Hitler- Stalin. It is apparent that the recent release of television documentaries such as the PBS (British produced) Behind Closed Doors WWII, the Singing Revolution, Red Terror on the Amber Coast, and Fire and Ice (Finnish Winter War) are creating a serious problem for Putin, Medvedev, and the KGB Kremlin organized “the Commission to Counteract the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests”. It is critical that we do our utmost to promote the viewing of these latest dvd documentaries to a wide American public.
Medvedev bans the ‘falsification of history to the detriment of Russia’
By Shaun Walker in Riga
Thursday, 11 June 2009
In Russia it is not only the future that is unpredictable; often the past is equally in doubt. One minute Leon Trotsky was a hero of the Revolution, the father of the Red Army and a strong contender to succeed Lenin; the next minute he never existed. Until the late 1980s, the 1917 Revolution was the pinnacle of human achievement; suddenly in the 1990s it was seen as an utter failure.
And today again history in the region is turning into an ideological battlefield. When the Red Army poured into the Baltic states at the end of the Second World War, it liberated them from Nazi tyranny – but from the perspective of the subsequent decades of Soviet domination, was it liberation or merely another invasion?
The Russians, of course, have no doubt on the matter: for them it was an heroic national achievement. But for the states which less than two decades ago managed to crawl out from under the Soviet boot, things are not so simple. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, an imposing black box of a building in the heart of Riga, tells the story of Latvia’s time inside the Soviet Union. The Soviet soldiers, glorified as heroes in Moscow, are portrayed as criminals and occupiers, no better than the Germans they defeated.
But now, slamming shut a stable door through which its former subject states long ago bolted, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the creation of a body with the Orwellian title of the Commission to Counteract the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests. A linked law is also likely to be passed that will outlaw the “rehabilitation of Nazism” on the territory of former Soviet republics.
Pressure to stop their much smaller neighbours telling recent history the way they see it has been building for some time. When authorities in Estonia removed a monument to Soviet soldiers from the centre of Tallinn two years ago, riots between police and ethnic Russian citizens of Estonia ensued, and the Kremlin made furious noises. With its new commission and law, Moscow is upping the stakes. Russia accuses the governments of Estonia and Latvia of glorifying partisan regiments which fought on the side of the Nazis.
In recent years, relations between Latvia and Russia have normalised in many spheres, but the Second World War is still a thorny issue. “The one issue which divides us is our interpretation of history,” says Ojars Kalnins, director of the Latvian Institute, a think-tank linked to Latvia’s Foreign Ministry. “Russia could demonstrate a lot to the world if it did what Germany did, and apologised for the actions of previous governments.”
Apologising, however, is the last thing the Kremlin plans to do, and the new commission and law suggest that Russia is moving in the opposite direction, seeking to glorify the Soviet past and silence critics of Soviet communism.
The commission, say critics inside Russia, smacks of a Soviet attitude to history, and the most worrying aspect to be inferred from its bizarre title is that falsifying history in Russia’s interests is quite acceptable.
Last week, a scandal erupted over an article written by a Russian military historian that was posted on the website of the Russian Defence Ministry, blaming Poland for starting the Second World War. The article absolved the Soviet Union from any role in contributing to the start of war, and instead blamed Poland for not acceding to “reasonable” demands from Nazi Germany. The paper was removed after an official complaint from Poland.
A key pillar of Vladimir Putin’s eight-year presidency involved exhorting Russians to feel proud of their history, and he once said that foreign countries should never be able to make Russia feel guilty for its Soviet past. The public appears to agree. A recent survey by a leading Russian polling agency showed that 77 per cent of Russians consider the Red Army to have liberated eastern European countries and given them the chance to develop, while only 11 per cent felt that there was an occupation.
“Those trying to turn everything upside down and portray the Nazi liberator states as invaders have to suffer punishment,” said Valery Ryazansky, a member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party and one of the law’s sponsors. The Russians remain determined to stem the tide of what they see as anti-Russian propaganda. “Such attempts are becoming more hostile, more evil, and more aggressive,” said Mr Medvedev in his online video blog last month. “We must fight for the historical truth.”
One history-making move was not enough for pro surfer Patrick Gudauskas last week at the $145,000 Sri Lankan Airlines Pro in the Maldives Islands. Last weekend, Gudauskas, 23, from San Clemente pulled a second aerial flip during the final and — incredibly — it wasn’t enough. He placed second to Australia’s Owen Wright in what observers described as one of the most exciting Association of Surfing Professionals finals. Wright scored 19.23 out of a possible 20 on his two scoring rides in the final; Gudauskas scored 18.93. The result boosted Wright into the No. 1 position in the ASP’s World Qualifying Series, a worldwide circuit in which hundreds of hopefuls seek ratings points to qualify for next year’s ASP World Championship Tour. Gudauskas, who was No. 27, leapfrogged 20 spots to No. 7. Brett Simpson of Huntington Beach, who finished 37th of 128 in the event, remains Orange County’s top-ranked WQS hopeful, at No. 5. Both Gudauskas and Simpson are nominated for this year’s OC Surfer of the Year contest. Vote for the surfers at ocregister.com/surfer. HISTORY REPEATS Earlier in the tournament, Gudauskas had made history by pulling the first rodeo clown maneuver in an ASP world event — a flying loop paired with a 360-degree lateral twist. It scored him a perfect 10. In the finals, Wright scored a 9.83 on one ride, pulling two major aerials together with a series of solid vertical turns, theASP reported. Gudauskas answered with an 8.94, a series of powerful top-to-bottom turns ending with a floating re-entry he mistimed and couldn’t complete. Had he nailed that move, it could have been his second 10 of the event, observers said. Wright followed with a 9.4 — aerials and vertical bashes — leaving Gudauskas “combo’d,” meaning he’d need more than even a 10 to win. With less than five minutes left, the ASP said Gudauskas “unleashed three incredible top-to-bottom powered turns, lined up the final section, launched and landed another amazing aerial flip to take a perfect 10 points.” It left him still needing 9.24 points to win, but time ran out, the ASP said. HIS REACTION “You know, I feel like I’ve won the event even though I lost,” Gudauskas was quoted as saying. “It was just such an amazing event and incredible final to surf in, and I’m really stoked to have pulled those aerials. I think surfing’s heading to exciting places with these moves, and I’m fully pumped for the rest of the year.” CONTACT THE WRITER: 949-492-5 1 27 or fswegles@ocregister.com
DARA AHMED, ASP AUSTRALASIA San Clemente’s Patrick Gudauskas hits on a rodeo clown aerial flip in the final of the Sri Lankan Airlines Pro in the Maldives Islands. He made history, but finished second.
Jun 12, 2009
TBT staff in cooperation with Estonian Parliament
TALLINN- On June 10, the Estonian Parliament adopted a resolution according to which the Estonian Defense Forces will send an additional unit of up to 140 soldiers toAfghanistan to provide security for the elections in August.
The additional 140 men will doubleEstonia’s contribution to ISAF andEstoniawill thus become the largest per capita military contributor toAfghanistan.
The task of the infantry company will be to help Afghanistan’s police and army in providing security for the presidential and provincial council elections on 20 August. The unit will operate inHelmandProvinceinSouthern Afghanistanand will be stationed there from 1 July to 1 December.
At present, Estoniahas one infantry company, a logistics support unit and staff officers – altogether 150 service members – inAfghanistan. The majority of them, including the infantry company Estcoy-8, are operating in the restiveHelmandprovince under British command. They have participated in several operations against the Taliban and other insurgents as well as carried out joint operations with ANA units. The additional company is planned to serve under US Marines also inHelmandProvince.
The Estonian Defense Forces have participated in the Afghanistanmission since 2003. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) inAfghanistanconsists of the members of 42 countries. To provide security for the elections, additional units will be sent toAfghanistanfrom more than 20 countries belonging to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Since 2006, Afghanistanhas been one ofEstonia’s priority partner countries for development co-operation.Estoniafocuses on supporting the health care sector inHelmandprovince and is also the lead nation. The health sector receives the lion’s share ofEstonia’s resources for civilian co-operation inAfghanistan.Estoniaalso continues to contribute to the education and governance sectors.Estoniahas increased its contribution to the EU Police Mission toAfghanistan(EUPOL Afghanistan).
Tiny Estonia tunes up for giant national-pride choir
By Anneli Reigas – 4 days ago
TALLINN (AFP) — Twenty-two thousand Estonians will sing together in a single choir when their small Baltic nation hosts a traditional festival that preserved national identity through decades of Soviet occupation.
“Competing for your right to sing at least once in your life in that giant choir during our traditional song festival is an essential part of being Estonian,” said Mati Maarits, 50, who has sung in all the festivals except one since 1969.
This year’s event called “To Breathe as One” takes place from July 2-5 in Tallinn, including some 37,000 performers — singers, dancers and musicians from various orchestras — with many people parading through the capital in traditional costume.
Tens of thousands of Estonians from nearly one thousand choirs competed this past winter to join the giant choir which has been the highlight of the traditional event held regularly since 1869.
“For Estonians singing is a way to express our identity,” Maarits said of his homeland, an ex-Soviet state of just 1.3 million which joined the European Union in 2004.
Estonia’s giant song festivals were venues of resistance under nearly 50 years of Soviet occupation which ended in August 1991.
In addition to a traditional repertoire, all song festivals ended with both singers and their audiences of some 200,000 standing and tearfully singing the patriotic song “My Dear Fatherland”.
This was the cradle of what became known as Estonia’s “Singing Revolution”, a string of mass demonstrations against the Soviet occupation that began in 1987 and united 300,000 protesters in song.
The Singing Revolution lasted more than four years, bringing together Estonians in spontaneous acts of musical defiance. In 1991 Soviet tanks failed to crush the independence movement which came to fruition that August.
After sovereignty was restored, fears that the song festival tradition would fail to attract younger generations proved unfounded as tens of thousands continued to compete for a spot on the national stage.
Ants Soots, chief conductor of the song festival, told AFP that the event has lasted for some 140 years because “for Estonians culture is a form to feel our national identity.”
An audience of up to 200,000 is expected to watch two open-air concerts in the capital during this year’s festival.
For participants, most of the cost of attending the festival, including accommodation and meals — literally tonnes of soup — are paid for by the state. Tallinn city council also grants free public transport to all participants.
The song fest will be aired live on television and can be watched via the Internet at the Estonian public broadcasting company site at http://www.etv.ee/otse.
VILNIUS - Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius has confirmed that British bank Barclays will invest in Lithuania in the form of an IT service center sometime in the near future. The new center is expected to create almost 300 jobs by the end of 2009. “It seems that an agreement with one of the biggest world banks Barclays on the establishment of its service center in Lithuania may be successfully signed. This is highly important.
Vilnius International Airport (TVOU) is changing its structure and will dismiss about 180 employees from total 696 employees by October 1, 2009.
The TVOU will carry out only its main functions of serving passengers and planes and intends to join or eliminate its departments with overlapping functions and buy a part of services on the market, reports LETA/ELTA.
“We are pursuing our goals to become a modern, flexible and efficient company,” said CEO of TVOU Tomas Vaisvila. “After analyzing the structure of the company we saw that the company had offered unnecessary and loss-making services as well as offices, thus we decided to abandon them.”
The Baltics have developed a reputation for homophonia…
VILNIUS - The Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) has voted to pass the amended Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information, which would see information about homosexuality banned from schools and other places that can be accessed by youths. “The subject of homosexuality is not welcome in our schools,” a Seimas worker who asked to remain anonymous toldTB.
TALLINN- Master Sergeant Allain Tikko, a thirty-year-old Estonian soldier serving in Afghanistan was killed in an attack on June 15.
“I bow my head in deep mourning in memory of Allain Tikko, an Estonian soldier that has fallen in battle,” President Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote to the family of Tikko.
“Warrant Officer Allain Tikko, who previously served on three foreign missions, was a professional and brave soldier, a reliable comrade-in-arms for his fellow soldiers. It is unfair and disconsolately painful that we now remember him with thoughts of bereavement,” President Ilves wrote.
“Perhaps, along with words of consolation, you can find strength in the knowledge that although Allain Tikko died far from home, he was protecting the security of Estoniaas a NATO ally. Allain Tikko died for Estonia,” the Head of State wrote.
Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis and Foreign Minister Maris Riekstins on behalf of the Government of Latvia have sent letters of condolences to the Estonian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.
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Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged.
Debris from Air France flight AF 447 has been recovered from the Atlantic
French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31.
Flight AF 447 crashed in the mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm.
While it is certain there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out.
Soon after news of the fatal crash broke, agents working for the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), the French equivalent of MI6, were dispatched to Brazil.
It was there that they established that two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic.
A source working for the French security services told Paris weekly L’Express that the link was “highly significant”.
Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections.
There is a possibility the name similarities are simply a “macabre coincidence”, the source added, but the revelation is still being “taken very seriously”.
France has received numerous threats from Islamic terrorist groups in recent months, especially since French troops were sent to fight in Afghanistan.
Security chiefs have been particularly worried about airborne suicide attacks similar to the ones on the US on September 11, 2001.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former U.S. State Department official and his wife have been arrested for spying for the Cuban government for nearly 30 years, the Justice Department said on Friday.
Walter Myers, 72, and his wife Gwendolyn Myers, 71, were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and with communicating classified information to Cuba, the Justice Department said.
They were also charged with wire fraud and acting as illegal agents.
The arrests come as the United States and Cuba have offered glimmers of hope that they might be ready to end years of hostility. In mid-April, President Barack Obama pledged a “new beginning” with Cuba after slightly easing the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Havana.
The Cuban government had no immediate reaction.
According to court documents, the two were recruited in 1979 by a Cuban official who directed Walter Myers to pursue a job at either the State Department or the CIA.
Myers held a number of jobs with the State Department and held a Top Secret security clearance, according to the Justice Department. He retired in 2007.
(Reporting by Andy Sullivan, additional reporting by Tom Brown in Havana)
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.
In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called “sensitive operational information” about the interrogations.
The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed,” Panetta argued.
Although Panetta’s statement is in keeping with his previous opposition to the disclosure of other information about the CIA’s interrogation policies and practices during George W. Bush’s presidency, it represents a new assertion by the Obama administration that the CIA should be allowed to keep such information secret. Bush’s critics have long hoped that disclosure would pinpoint responsibility for actions they contend were abusive or illegal.
Last month, President Obama said he would seek to bar the release of photographs being sought by other nonprofit groups that depict abusive interrogations at military prisons during the Bush administration.
Panetta argued that none of the 65 CIA documents immediately at issue, which the ACLU has sought for several years in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, should be released. He asked U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to draw a legal distinction between the administration’s release in April of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogations and the CIA’s desire to keep classified its own documents detailing the specific handling of detainees at its secret facilities overseas.
He said that while the Justice Department memos discussed harsh interrogation “in the abstract,” the CIA information was “of a qualitatively different nature” because it described the interrogation techniques “as applied in actual operations.”
The “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would provide al-Qaeda “with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds,” Panetta said, describing the information at issue as “ready-made ammunition.” He also submitted a classified statement to the court that he said explains why detainees could use the contents to evade questions in the future, even though Obama has promised that the United States will not use the harsh interrogation techniques again.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s national security program, said yesterday evening that it is “grim” and “troubling” for the Obama administration to say that information about purported abuses should be withheld because it might fuel anti-American propaganda. He said that amounts to an assertion that “the greater the abuse, the more important it is that it should remain secret.” Jaffer said the ACLU is convinced that the public should have “access to the complete record of what took place in the CIA’s prisons and on whose authority.”
Although the ACLU first sought CIA documents related to harsh interrogations in 2004, it moved in 2007 to have the court hold the CIA in contempt following disclosures about the agency’s destruction of the videotapes. The ACLU demanded as a remedy access to internal e-mails and other information that would reveal the contents of the videotapes and who participated, approved or endorsed their destruction.
Hellerstein has repeatedly denied CIA motions demanding that the case be dismissed, but has not declared the agency in contempt. Instead, he ordered the CIA to surrender some of the records and provide details of others it is withholding; the agency has responded mostly by giving the documents to the court under seal.
A federal prosecutor continues to investigate the destruction of the videotapes.
In total, the CIA has said that 580 documents are related to the ACLU’s 2007 request; Panetta said that his statement applies to all of the 65 documents selected so far by the court for potential release and that the CIA will in the future consider releasing “non-operational documents” in the larger set.
In two exhibits given to the court along with Panetta’s affidavit, the CIA said the material that must be withheld includes a photograph of Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida, the first detainee that the CIA believed to be of high value; a lengthy handwritten summary of notes taken after reviewing the videotapes; a five-page account by a CIA lawyer detailing the agency’s policy and legal guidance about the destruction of the videotapes; an e-mail to CIA managers summarizing the opinions of others about the tapes; a six-page account by an agency employee of a discussion with an agency lawyer about the tapes; and a series of e-mails discussing what the CIA should say publicly about the destruction.
It also said that one of the documents summarized “details of waterboard exposures from the destroyed videotapes,” referring to a simulated-drowning technique that Obama and his appointees have said amounted to illegal torture.
Although the CIA frequently redacts sometimes extensive portions of the documents it releases, Panetta said he had “determined that no meaningful segregable information can be released from the operational documents at issue.” Some, he said, were covered by attorney-client privilege, and nearly all contain personal information about CIA employees and others that would, if disclosed, “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Panetta also said he wanted to emphasize that his request was “in no way driven by a desire to prevent embarrassment for the U.S. government or the CIA, or to suppress evidence of any unlawful conduct.” He said his only purpose was to prevent harm to U.S. national security and to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia will rebuild its Soviet-era network of polar stations and use its icebreaker fleet to help support its claim to the vast resources of the Arctic, the man who led a mission to plant a Russian flag on the Arctic seabed said Wednesday.
Artur Chilingarov, a famed polar scientist who was recently appointed the Kremlin’s point man for Arctic issues, said Russia will gather data and resubmit its claim to the United Nations that an underwater mountain range crossing the polar region is part of Russia’s continental shelf.
Under a U.N. treaty, that would make the shelf Russian territory and Russia would have ownership of any of its natural resources.
“Russia won’t leave the Arctic, we will build up our economic and scientific presence in the region,” Chilingarov told reporters. “I’m confident that our claim is fully legitimate.”
Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway have all been trying to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic, which is believed to contain as much as 25 percent of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas. The dispute has intensified amid growing evidence that global warming is shrinking polar ice, opening up new shipping lanes and new resource development possibilities.
Chilingarov said Russia will rebuild a network of polar stations whose number has dwindled from about 100 during Soviet times to just about a dozen now.
Russia’s fleet of six nuclear-powered icebreakers also give it an edge in polar exploration, he said, because they are bigger and more powerful than ships from other Arctic nations.
“Russia has a powerful atomic icebreaker fleet which can get to any area of the Arctic and fulfill any task,” he added. “No other Arctic nation has such potential.”
In 2007, Chilingarov led two Russian mini-submarines on a mission to stake Russia’s claim to the region. The two subs descended 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) to the Arctic seabed, where they collected geologic and water samples and dropped a titanium canister containing the Russian flag.
Chilingarov said putting a flag on the Arctic seabed had a symbolic meaning, but Russia now needed to back up its claim with scientific data.
Moscow first submitted the claim to Arctic seabed in 2001 to the United Nations, but it was rejected for lack of evidence. Chilingarov said Russia may resubmit the claim in 2013 after collecting more data.
A Kremlin strategy paper signed by President Dmitry Medvedev last month singled out the Arctic as one of the areas of fierce competition for energy resources — and even said that battles over energy riches may trigger military conflicts near Russian borders.
But Chilingarov downplayed the danger of military confrontation in the Arctic, voicing confidence that Arctic nations will divide the region’s riches in line with international law.
“We will defend our economic interests, but I don’t foresee any conflicts in the future,” he said.
JERUSALEM – Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano swore in to her official advisory council the head of an Arab American organization whose officials have labeled deadly anti-U.S. jihadists as “heroes” and opposed referring to Hamas as a terrorist organization.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, also has close ties to anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi, whose association with President Obama – first exposed by WND – stirred controversy during last year’s presidential campaign.
The ADC also leads the opposition to domestic anti-terrorism measures taken after the 9-11 attacks, such as watch lists, background check delays for visas and an initiative meant to more comprehensively screen visitors from select Mideast countries or specific individuals labeled as possible national security threats.
Last week, Napolitano swore in Damascus-born Kareem Shora, the ADC’s national executive director, to a position on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, an outside-the-department group of national security experts that advises the secretary. Shora is the first Arab rights advocate on the panel.
At the ceremony in Albequrque, Shora reportedly recounted how he watched with his immigrant father Obama’s address last week to the Muslim world. Shora said his father cried when he heard Obama’s message of reconciliation.
(Story continues below)
ADC glorifies terrorism
The ADC takes an openly anti-Israel line. Its official material has accused the Jewish state of “apartheid” and “atrocities” against the Palestinians. In 2006, a local ADC group drew up a petition calling on the U.S. to stop providing Israel with weapons.
Scores of senior ADC officials have expressed positive views toward terrorist organizations.
In 1994, during one of the main peaks of Hamas suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, then-ADC President Hamzi Moghrabi said, “I will not call [Hamas] a terrorist organization. I mean, I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable. … I don’t believe Hamas, as an organization, is a violent organization.”
Discover the Networks notes that two years later, Moghrabi’s successor, Hala Maksoud, defended the Hezbollah terrorist group.
“I find it shocking,” Maksoud said, “that [one] would include Hezbollah in … [an] inventory of Middle East ‘terrorist’ groups.”
In 2000, new ADC President Hussein Ibish characterized Hezbollah as “a disciplined and responsible liberation force.”
When Israel released Hezbollah prisoners in early 2004, Imad Hamad, ADC’s Midwest Regional Director, openly celebrated the freedom of “the heroes.”
Besides its deadly terrorism against Israel, Hezbollah distinguishes itself as second only to al-Qaida among terror groups responsible for killing the most Americans. It’s responsible for such deadly attacks as the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 299 servicemen, including 220 U.S. Marines.
ADC linked to Khalidi
The ADC is linked to Columbia University’s Khalidi, who spoke at several of the organization’s events. At one speech, in June 2002, the New York Sun documented how Khalidi appeared to condone the killing of armed Israelis.
“Killing civilians is a war crime. It’s a violation of international law. They are not soldiers. They’re civilians, they’re unarmed,” Khalidi said in a recorded address. “The ones who are armed, the ones who are soldiers, the ones who are in occupation, that’s different. That’s resistance.”
The ADC also has collaborated on numerous projects with the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, an organization founded by Khalidi’s wife Mona, and which WND first reported received start-up funds from a nonprofit, the Woods Fund, on which Obama served as a paid director.
The AAAN, headquartered in the heart of Chicago’s Palestinian immigrant community, worked on projects supporting open boarders and education for illegal aliens. Speakers at AAAN dinners and events routinely have taken an anti-Israel line. The organization co-sponsored anti-Israel projects and exhibits.
Khalidi, an apologist for PLO terrorism, holds the position of Columbia’s Edward Said professorship of Arab Studies. Said, a well-known far-leftist intellectual and apologist for Palestinian terrorism, served on an advisory counsel to the ADC.
ADC opposes anti-terrorism screening
According to the ADC charter, the organization seeks to “empower Arab Americans; defend the civil rights of all people of Arab heritage in the U.S.; promote civic participation; and encourage a balanced U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.”
The organization has actively lobbied against the Patriot Act and was reportedly instrumental in scaling back some of the restrictions of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System program, or NSEERS. Shora was personally involved in those efforts.
The NSEERS required persons whose nationality identifies them as a possible security risk to submit to control processes governed by the Department of Justice. NSEERS also targeted specific individuals labeled as possible national security threats, at times making them undergo fingerprinting, photographing and registration.
(CNSNews.com) – The nation’s largest veterans’ organization, the American Legion, criticized President Obama for apologizing for to the Muslim world for U.S. behavior in the in aftermath of the 9/11 attacks during his address from Cairo last week.
“When the president pronounces, as he did in his conciliatory address in Egypt, that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in his words, ‘led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals’, he must, in our opinion, demand equally public admission from the Muslim world,” David K. Rehbein, national commander of the American Legion said in a news release.
Obama, who reiterated his commitment to remove U.S. troops from Iraq by 2012, apologized for the way the U.S. reacted to the 9/11 attacks by Muslim extremists.
“9/11 was an enormous trauma to our country,” he added. “The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals.”
The president also pointed out that he believes the U.S. has a “responsibility” to give Iraq back to its people.
“Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world,” Obama said. “Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”
Rehbein indicated that the commander-in-chief should not be apologizing for “anything” related to Iraq, but instead should ask the Muslim world to admit “that elements within its community have been responsible for egregious acts of terrorism including mass killings, torture and public beheadings – acts that must be contrary to their traditions and ideals.”
“Although The American Legion does not believe that the United States has anything to apologize for, we appreciate the spirit of President Obama’s call for what he termed a ‘new beginning’ in our relationship with the followers of Islam,” Rehbein said.
“Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future - and to leave Iraq to Iraqis,” said Obama.
VetsForJustice.com, a Web site that says it advocates for veteran rights, took issue with the American Legion’s criticism, and defended Obama’s apology as a move that “will improve the role of the U.S. in the Iraq war.”
“I am glad to see a president attempting to make us the good guys again, and honest enough to admit when we may have made mistakes,” VetsForJustice.com founder Billy Kidwell told CNSNews.com.
Many relatives of U.S. troops in Iraq, meanwhile, are quietly seething about Obama’s comments about the war in Iraq.
Last week, a woman whose husband was recently dispatched to Iraq called “The Mark Levin Show” last Thursday to voice her opinion.
“Heather” from Virginia Beach told Levin, a popular nationally syndicated conservative radio talk-show host: “My husband left at 3 a.m. this morning for Iraq and it’s pretty hard to see the president condemning his mission. So, what exactly is he fighting for?”
She added: “It’s just really hard to see that (Obama’s speech) when I came inside the house this morning apologizing for Iraq. What is he fighting for? If he goes out there does he die in vain?”
But Kidwell, a Vietnam veteran, told CNSNews.com that he sees no reason why soldiers should react negatively to Obama’s apologetic tone in regards to Iraq.
“If I were in Iraq it would make me feel proud that my country is big enough to admit mistakes, so we can learn from them, and hopefully choose a different path in the future,” he told CNSNews.com.
“When you put your life on the line for your country one of the most important factors is knowing that the leaders that sent you into harm’s way, sent you for the right reasons. We must never forget that America must be the good guys,” he added.
Gold Star Mothers, an organization comprised of mothers who lost their offspring to the war, declined to comment on the president’s speech.
As recently as last summer, General Motors filing for bankruptcy would have been the biggest news story of the week. But it’s not such a very great step from the unthinkable to the inevitable, and by the time it actually happened the market barely noticed and the media were focused on the president’s “address to the Muslim world.” As it happens, these two stories are the same story: snapshots, at home and abroad, of the hyperpower in eclipse. It’s a long time since anyone touted GM as the emblematic brand of America — What’s good for GM is good for America, etc. In fact, it’s more emblematic than ever: Like General Motors, the U.S. government spends more than it makes, and has airily committed itself to ever more unsustainable levels of benefits. GM has about 95,000 workers but provides health benefits to a million people: It’s not a business enterprise, but a vast welfare plan with a tiny loss-making commercial sector. As GM goes, so goes America?
But who cares? Overseas, the coolest president in history was giving a speech. Or, as the official press release headlined it on the State Department website, “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo.”
Let’s pause right there: It’s interesting how easily the words “the Muslim world” roll off the tongues of liberal secular progressives who’d choke on any equivalent reference to “the Christian world.” When such hyper-alert policemen of the perimeter between church and state endorse the former but not the latter, they’re implicitly acknowledging that Islam is not merely a faith but a political project, too. There is an “Organization of the Islamic Conference,” which is already the largest single voting bloc at the U.N. and is still adding new members. Imagine if someone proposed an “Organization of the Christian Conference” that would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents, and vote as a bloc in transnational bodies. But, of course, there is no “Christian world”: Europe is largely post-Christian and, as President Obama bizarrely asserted to a European interviewer last week, America is “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Perhaps we’re eligible for membership in the OIC.
I suppose the benign interpretation is that, as head of state of the last superpower, Obama is indulging in a little harmless condescension. In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less bloodcurdling sections of the Koran. As socio-historical scholarship goes, I found myself recalling that moment in the long twilight of the Habsburg Empire when Crown Prince Rudolph and his mistress were found dead at the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling — either a double suicide, or something even more sinister. Happily, in the Broadway musical version, instead of being found dead, the star-crossed lovers emigrate to America and settle down on a farm in Pennsylvania. Recently, my old comrade Stephen Fry gave an amusing lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London on the popular Americanism “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” — or, if something’s bitter and hard to swallow, add sugar and sell it. That’s what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it.
The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, “esteemed editor” being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch. Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: “Fundamentally, Obama’s goal was to tell the Muslim world, ‘We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don’t hate us and murder us in return.’” But those terms are too narrow. You don’t have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders. And you don’t even have to hate him if you’re too busy despising him. The savvier Muslim potentates have no desire to be sitting in a smelly cave in the Hindu Kush sharing a latrine with a dozen halfwitted goatherds while plotting how to blow up the Empire State Building. Nevertheless, they share key goals with the cave dwellers — including the wish to expand the boundaries of “the Muslim world” and (as in the anti-blasphemy push at the U.N.) to place Islam, globally, beyond criticism. The non-terrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to western notions of liberty and pluralism.
Once Obama moved on from the more generalized Islamoschmoozing to the details, the subtext — the absence of American will — became explicit. He used the cover of multilateralism and moral equivalence to communicate, consistently, American weakness: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.” Perhaps by “no single nation” he means the “global community” should pick and choose, which means the U.N. Security Council, which means the Big Five, which means that Russia and China will pursue their own murky interests and that, in the absence of American leadership, Britain and France will reach their accommodations with a nuclear Iran, a nuclear North Korea, and any other psycho-state minded to join them.
On the other hand, a “single nation” certainly has the right to tell another nation anything it wants if that nation happens to be the Zionist Entity: As Hillary Clinton just instructed Israel re its West Bank communities, there has to be “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.” No “natural growth”? You mean, if you and the missus have a kid, you’ve got to talk gran’ma into moving out? To Tel Aviv, or Brooklyn, or wherever? At a stroke, the administration has endorsed “the Muslim world”
’s view of those non-Muslims who happen to find themselves within what it regards as lands belonging to Islam: The Jewish and Christian communities are free to stand still or shrink, but not to grow. Would Obama be comfortable mandating “no natural growth” to Israel’s million-and-a-half Muslims? No. But the administration has embraced the“the Muslim world”’scommitmentto one-way multiculturalism, whereby Islam expands in the west but Christianity and Judaism shrivel remorselessly in the Middle East.
And so it goes. Like General Motors, America is “too big to fail.” So it won’t, not immediately. It will linger on in a twilight existence sclerotic and ineffectual, declining unto a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past, but able on occasion to throw out impressive words albeit strung together without much meaning: empower, peace, justice, prosperity — just to take one windy gust from the president’s Cairo speech.
There’s better phrase-making in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, in a coinage of Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Committee on Foreign Relations. The president emeritus is a sober, judicious paragon of torpidly conventional wisdom. Nevertheless, musing on American decline, he writes, “The country’s economy, infrastructure, public schools, and political system have been allowed to deteriorate. The result has been diminished economic strength, a less vital democracy, and a mediocrity of spirit.” That last is the one to watch: A great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower.
Official Puts Career at Risk With Diatribe on Kremlin
By ELLEN BARRY
MOSCOW — The president of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, who has hung on by his fingernails through repeated periods of friction with the Kremlin, pushed his luck last week when he gave a scathing interview to a Moscow newspaper, charging that Russia’s political institutions were “embarrassing to look at” and that the country “is walking away from the process of democratization.”
Murtaza G. Rakhimov, 75, who has led Bashkortostan, an energy-rich southwestern region, since 1990, complained in Friday’s edition of the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets that leaders in Moscow had recreated the top-down, one-party rule that had prevailed during the Soviet Union.
“Right now, everything is decided from above,” Mr. Rakhimov told the newspaper. “The level of centralization is worse than it was in Soviet times. With respect to local people, they carry out a policy of distrust and disrespect.”
He went on to attack United Russia, the governing party led by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, for trying to subjugate homegrown leaders. Mr. Rakhimov was one of United Russia’s founders, and remains a member of its executive council.
“Excuse me, but the basis of a party should be formed from below,” he said. “The people trying to run this party have never commanded three chickens.”
His comments raised eyebrows in Moscow, where commentators have been predicting his ouster for months. The ruling body of United Russia will convene on Wednesday, and could rebuke or expel Mr. Rakhimov, whose presidential term expires in 2011.
The issue puts the party in a delicate position, since a harsh response would “inflict irreparable damage to United Russia’s image as the party reflecting the interests of the regions,” wrote Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, an independent research organization, on the Web site Polit.ru.
Over the decade since Mr. Putin came to power, Moscow has stripped away regional autonomy, chiefly by abolishing the direct election of governors (in Bashkortostan, one of Russia’s 21 ethnic republics, the position is called president).
A handful of regional strongmen like Mr. Rakhimov survived the transition, by virtue of their popularity or the power of their political machines, and each of them has tested the Kremlin by pressing for more autonomy. But the financial crisis has made it riskier to fire these heavyweights.
Russia’s leaders “cannot govern from the center now,” said Maria Lipman, of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “If there is a problem, there is no money to pour over it. This raises a huge dilemma: Do they expand the circle of decision makers, and share part of the authority with those who have the regions in control?”
Mr. Rakhimov’s comments did not seem to leave much room for compromise.
“Some changes must definitely be made,” he told the newspaper. “We are going back in the direction we came from.”
He added: “We could live all right in Soviet times, when people said, ‘At least there is no war.’ But with that approach, we will never build a normal civil society or a legal state.”
Mr. Rakhimov is not a model democrat. Russian human rights organizations have criticized him for police crackdowns and heavy-handed control of business and politics in Bashkortostan, which borders western Kazakhstan. His son, Ural, owns many oil-processing facilities and has become one of Russia’s richest men.
Several opposition commentators theorized that Mr. Rakhimov had spoken out sharply because he knew he would lose his post anyway.
But they did not let that detract from their enjoyment.
“We should celebrate the fact that another radical opposition figure has showed up in Russia, who is not afraid to tell truth directly to power,” commented a journalist, Matvei Gonopolsky, on the radio station Ekho Moskvy. “It is not important why a man tells the truth. It is important that he is telling it. Even if he has one foot over the abyss.”
Divers have found the wreck of a Soviet sub sunk in the Baltic in 1940. Unrelated archive photo. - Foto: FRANDSEN FINN
DER SPIEGEL: A Soviet submarine has been lying on the Baltic Sea floor for almost 70 years, ever since it ran into a Finnish mine in early 1940. Now, a team of divers say they have found the vessel.
When it comes to sea floors, that of the Baltic Sea counts among the most cluttered. Barrels of toxic waste, World War II munitions and a wide variety of other detritus has settled to the bottom of the northern European body of water over the years.
On Tuesday, a team of Swedish and Finnish divers announced the most recent find: a Soviet submarine sunk by Finnish mines in the Winter War of 1939-1940. Speaking to the press on Tuesday, the divers said that they found the S-2 sub near the Aland Islands, located between Finland and Sweden.
“I think it has been 10 years since people started searching,” Marten Zetterstrom, a member of the team which found the sub, said according to the Associated Press. “I’ve been part of it for four to five years.”
Known since February
The divers found the submarine in February, but waited until Tuesday to announce the find so they could confirm its identity. Markus Lindholm an expert based in Aland, said that pictures of the wreck indicate that the front of the submarine was missing, likely destroyed when the vessel cruised into a Finnish mine field in 1940. All 50 people on board were killed.
The war between the Soviet Union and Finland is a largely forgotten chapter in World War II, taking place as it did following the successful Nazi invasion of Poland and before the conflagration enveloped all of Europe. Indeed, much of the West spent the winter of 1939-1940 calling the war with Germany the “Phoney War.”
But as part of the Nazi-Soviet pact which cleared the way for Germany’s war on Poland, Finland was placed in Moscow’s sphere of influence. The Soviets invaded on Nov. 30, 1939, but immediately became bogged down with hopelessly outnumbered Finnish troops putting up significantly more resistance than expected. Additionally, the Soviet’s were hamstrung by military purges carried out by the Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Up to 50 percent of the Soviet officer corps was executed in the purge.
The divers conducted the search at their own expense. “My feelings were mixed,” diver Marten Zetterstrom told Reuters about finding the vessel. “There it was, this war machine that was built to take ships down. I was happy, sad, depressed and elated all at once.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has declared a Finnish diplomat persona non grata for helping a Finnish man illegally spirit his son, who also has Russian citizenship, out of the country.
A ministry statement says Finland’s ambassador was informed Monday of the decision against Simo Pietilainen, a consul at the country’s consulate in St. Petersburg.
The ministry said Pietilainen illegally took Paavo Salonen and his son, Anton, out of Russia. Finnish media reports say the boy was the subject of a custody battle between his father and his mother, who is Russian.
The reports said the incident took place in May. Pietilainen remains in Finland, working for the Foreign Ministry in a different post.
Sweden’s four largest banks can handle loan losses in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania of 150 billion kronor (20 billion dollars) over a three-year period, the Nordic country’s Financial Supervisory Authority said.
“All of the big banks can withstand extreme pressure in the coming period,” the Stockholm-based financial watchdog said in its stress test of Sweden’s four largest banks today. “There is currently no need for any of the big banks to strengthen their capital adequacy based on the regulatory requirements.”
Swedish banks face soaring loan losses in the Baltic States, which are suffering the severest recessions in the European Union, informs LETA/BLOOMBERG from Stockholm.
Swedbank, the largest bank in the Baltics, has 17% of its lending in the region, while SEB, the second-largest, has 13%. Together, the two have lent more than 366 billion kronor in the region.
The watchdog’s “conservative base scenario” forecasts losses on 15% of the banks’ Baltic loan portfolios and on 38% of loans made in Ukraine, while losses in Sweden will reach 1.5%.
That will lead to total loan losses of 203 billion kronor during 2009, 2010 and 2011, while total income will be 296 billion kronor, meaning the four largest banks will remain profitable on an aggregate level.
Swedbank rose 7.7% to 42 kronor at 11:29 a.m. in Stockholm trading. A close at that level would represent the bank’s steepest gain since May 18. SEB added 4.9% to 34.2 kronor while Nordea rose 3% to 61.7 kronor. “Svenska Handelsbanken” gained 4.1% to 140.5 kronor.
Swedbank and SEB will report net losses in 2010 because of their operations in the Baltic states and in Ukraine, the watchdog said. Nordea Bank, the Nordic region’s largest bank, has lent on a smaller scale in the Baltics, while Svenska Handelsbanken has no significant operations in the region.
In the agency’s worst-case scenario, which it regards as “unlikely but not impossible,” loan losses in the Baltics will reach 34% while credit losses in Ukraine will be 58% of the banks’ total lending in the country. Losses in Sweden will stand at 2.1% and at 4.2% in the rest of the Nordic region, resulting in total loan losses of 350 billion kronor at the four largest banks over three years.
“In extreme scenarios, the market will most likely require a higher level of capital, which can place pressure on financing possibilities for banks that are most affected,” the FSA said.
In the worst-case scenario, Swedbank capital adequacy ratio will drop to just under six%, above the legal four% requirement, while SEB and Nordea will fall to about eight%, the watchdog said. In the base scenario, Swedbank capital adequacy ratio will fall to nine%, “Nordea” and SEB to just above ten%, and Handelsbanken to 11%.
The Riksbank, the world’s oldest central bank, has taken measures to ensure it can uphold financial stability in Sweden and provide the Nordic country’s banks with liquidity.
The bank said last month it would bolster foreign reserves by 100 billion kronor by borrowing from
Sweden’s National Debt Office. It said today, on june 10, it plans to borrow three billion euros from the European Central Bank to be “well prepared” to safeguard financial stability and has activated a swap agreement with the ECB, under which it will be able to borrow as much as 10 billion euros (14 billion dollars) in exchange for kronor for as long as three months, to ensure it has enough currency reserves.
President of the Republic of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus attended a reception as part of the international conference „The World Forum for Direct Investment 2009″. Urging the business community not to give in to pessimism, the President underlined he believed that representatives of the business community, who had always been flexible in their approach to new economic realities and challenges, would be the driving force behind success and competition in local and foreign markets.
In his welcome address, the President underlined that Lithuania indeed was one of the most open and flexible economies and markets in Eastern and Central Europe, which was confirmed on many occasions by international institutions and organizations. According to the President, Lithuania’s present policy is geared towards market regulation based on eliminating excessive business restrictions and building the groundwork for economic recovery which is the foundation of success of the country, Informs BC Press Service of the President.
President Adamkus said Lithuania was seeking to be among the first countries back on the track of economic growth, ready to continue its ten-year race towards EU economic standards. “However, we well understand that this will be possible only if we retain Lithuania’s financial stability but also attract many more business people willing to work and invest in Lithuania. It is only through streamlined business efforts to realize its objectives and meet the changing market needs that we can expect to achieve economic recovery,” the President said.
Urging the business community not to give in to pessimism, the President underlined he believed that representatives of the business community, who had always been flexible in their approach to new economic realities and challenges, would be the driving force behind success and competition in local and foreign markets. “I believe in your enterprising skills and spirit and I am sure that the present economic situation will build up your creative talent, which will manifest itself in the successful development of your businesses,” Mr. Adamkus said.
Wall Street Journal: Latvia crisis eases, but worries linger
Nina Kolyako, BC, Riga, 05.06.2009.
The situation in Latvia eased slightly Thursday, but uncertainty remains about whether the country will keep its currency peg, The Wall Street Journal reports today
A commitment by the Bank of Latvia to retain the peg and words of assurance from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund failed to convince traders, who try to sell off the lat. Analysts remain convinced Latvia will be forced to abandon the peg or at least reset it at a lower rate against the euro, a move that could devalue the currency by as much as 30%, writes LETA.
Currency traders expect the lat to drop to half its value against the euro within a year as Latvia struggles to cope with the effects of the global financial crisis, said Bank of America Corp.-Merrill Lynch & Co.
Sebastien Galy, senior currency strategist for BNP Paribas in New York, who has even bet on a lat devaluation, said he figures there’s already a “gentleman’s agreement” among the IMF, EU and Latvia to move the peg, though probably not by this weekend.
On the other hand, Paolo Batori, a strategist at UBS AG in London pointed out that “investors remain nervous about this issue, but an imminent devaluation looks unlikely”.
Latvia’s latest troubles began Wednesday when it failed to find buyers for LVL 50 million in short-term debt. On Thursday, the Latvian government sold LVL 2.75 million to a single bidder at an auction out of a possible 20 million lats available in one-month notes.
Latvia’s situation could spread to its neighbors, creating further headaches for Western European banks that made loans in the area.
As reported, the failed auction yesterday sparked a 16% decline in shares of Stockholm-based Swedbank, the biggest bank in the Baltic States and the share value of SEB, the second biggest lender in the region, dropped 11%.
Swedish banks control around half of Baltic States’ banking market and have made significant investments here through issuing loans. These banks saw their stock prices recover somewhat Thursday, as the Swedish government pledged support to any Swedish banks running into trouble.
Member of board of the Central Bank of Poland Darius Filar announced on Friday that there is a need for more international assistance to Latvia.
“There is a threat that the situation in Latvia may spill over onto the region. This situation is a challenge that requires a reaction on a broader scale than just Latvia, there is a need for more international assistance,” Filar said.
Published: June 5 2009 15:03 | Last updated: June 5 2009 15:03
The first Latvian words I learned were the ones plastered over Riga’s art nouveau façades and brand-new office parks: “iznoma” (“for rent”) and “pardod” (“for sale”). In 2008, Latvia had the world’s fastest-falling house prices, and they’re still dropping. One morning in Café Osiris, Katja Jekaterina, who recently lost her job in real estate, gestured at some property speculators at a nearby table. “They bought a luxury car, a boat, a house, with leverage of 100 per cent because it was possible,” she said. “Now they have this boat and this car but they do not have the gasoline for it.” Every month Jekaterina herself needs to find €700 – her mortgage loan is in euros. If Latvia devalues the lats, she’s in trouble.
VILNIUS – Lithuania supports the further enlargement of NATO, while prospects for the membership of the alliance given to Ukraine and Georgia are encouraging democratic processes in these countries, Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus has said.
“We support strongly the development of the new concept of NATO security, EU-NATO cooperation, and further enlargement of the North Atlantic Alliance,” the presidential press service quoted him as saying at a meeting with German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung in Vilnius on Wednesday.
Speaking about the issue of NATO’s further enlargement, the two agreed on the need to implement the commitment on Ukraine and Georgia’s future membership of the alliance, which was agreed at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008.
“The [Lithuanian] president emphasized that membership prospect s encouraged democratic processes in these countries and promoted stability in the whole region,” the press service said.
The participants in the meeting also focused on Lithuanian-German cooperation in the field of security and defence, security challenges to the Euroatlantic community, NATO-EU relations, and the future of these organisations.
Adamkus said that Lithuania highly appreciated its NATO membership and that it would seek to remain an active member of the alliance, contributing to peace and stability in the region.
Jung, in turn, said that the development of NATO’s new security concept was timely and much needed today.
He said that this process must involve all new members of the alliance, whereas NATO itself must ensure collective defence and strengthen its military response forces so that it can give an immediate response when the need arises. The minister also stressed the need to maintain NATO’s public visibility and said that Germany was currently preparing for a third air-policing mission in the Baltic States.
VILNIUS - Investment experts speaking at an investment conference in Vilnius have said the most important factor for attracting and retaining Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is the communication abilities of people, not their skills or location.
The “street smarts” of employees, at which Lithuanians excel, is underrated business leaders say.
Talking about challenges of FDI in a multi-polar world, Rudi Bric, founder of Hermes Softlab and Senior Vice President for Business development of ComTrade said “whom you know,” is of utmost importance.
Per Andreas Vogts, director of international business development at Lindorff and Managing Director of Lindorff support services in Vilnius said Lithuanians are cheaper and harder working than their counterparts in Norway.
This is a major advantage to the country, which doesn’t have any other specific competitive advantages anymore compared to regional rivals, he said.
“We went for personalities that we knew could build a culture. We didn’t go for competence,” he said about the staff he chooses to complete the company’s eight-month training program.
Though the staff - which he said were some of the most highly educated people he had ever worked with - are the main reason for Lindorff’s investment into the country, he also cited the cost advantage.
“Lithuanians have a positivity to Nordic people and had skilled people – their salaries are 20-25 percent of Norwegian level, the rent here is 70-100 percent of Norwegian levels
ICT (information and communication technology) costs 60-90 percent. These are 80 percent of the costs of the business.”
Despite saying that Lithuania had no specific advantages as an investment location over its regional competitors, he said the country ticked all the boxes for Norwegian development.
“A close proximity to Nordic sites - geographic, cultural, time zone, a competitive advantage to last at least 8 years, a good base for Nordic languages, a future local market for products, the availability of highly qualifies personnel and the acceptability to the Financial Supervision Authority of Norway make it an appropriate country,” he said.
Vogts also said that he has encountered less red tape in Lithuania that he had previously anticipated.
Lithuania has lost some of its original competitive advantage with rising wages, but this shouldn’t be a problem because of the country’s developed skills set, Regimantas Liepa, Managing Director West and Central Europe of Transcom said.
President Valdas Adamkus opened the forum on June 9 and invited the world to look into Lithuania as a potential investment site.
In his welcome address, the President underlined that Lithuania was one of the most open and flexible economies and markets in Eastern and Central Europe, which has been confirmed by international institutions and organizations.
The discussions took place at the World Forum for Direct Investment 2009, held in Vilnius during June 10-11.
Estonia Tuesday ratcheted up its opposition to a planned gas pipeline that Russian giant Gazprom wants to build under the Baltic Sea, saying the potential risks had been sidelined. In a report, Tallinn said that an environmental impact study carried out for the Nord Stream consortium had not calmed its concerns about the controversial project steered by Gazprom and Germany’s E.On Ruhrgas and BASF-Wintershall.
It alleged that assessors failed properly to take into account the risk that the pipeline could break up, claiming they used incomplete or obsolete data on seabed geology, tectonics and seismic activity, as well as the threat posed by shipping, informs LETA-AFP.
It also said that they had failed to demonstrate why an undersea route was better than a land pipeline.
“Estonia has called repeatedly on Nord Stream to consider the alternative option of building the pipeline on land instead under the sea, in the event the pipeline is needed at all,” Foreign Minister Urmas Paet told AFP.
The Nord Stream project, expected to cost around 7.4 billion euros (10.5 billion dollars), is strongly backed by Russia and Germany but still needs approval from other Baltic Sea nations.
Besides environmental concerns, there have also been warnings from some ex-communist countries that it will increase Europe’s direct dependence on Russia for natural gas, which critics claim the Kremlin uses as a political tool.
Moscow counters that the pipeline will help prevent a repeat of the Russia-Ukraine gas crisis, which severely disrupted supplies to Europe in January, since the duct would not pass through transit countries.
Estonia, which was ruled by the Soviet Union until 1991, banned Nord Stream surveys in its waters in September 2007, but the consortium has indicated it still wants to carry out activities there, Paet said.
“We wish to remind Nord Stream that they have to get a license for these activities and it cannot be taken for granted that such licenses will be given,” he warned.
The 1,220-kilometre pipeline would run under the Baltic from the Russian port of Vyborg to Greifswald in northern Germany. The Nord Stream consortium wants to begin pumping gas by 2011.
By Helena BedwellRussia plans to build a “Berlin- style” wall along the de facto border between Georgia and its separatist region of Abkhazia, Georgia’s Foreign Ministry said.
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Ken Fallin
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Ryan Inzana
An opposition activist from the Siberian city of Kasnoyarsk has died in prison in what authorities describe as a suicide. Prison officials say Rim Shaigalimov, an active member of the Other Russia coalition, jumped from a fourth-story window on June 27th. Relatives, meanwhile, suspect foul play.
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Associated Press
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David Gothard
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