Dangerous Travels

Entering the Russia's Backdoor a Step Further

2011-11-30T15:03:00.001-03:00

The popular Yakutian character known as Chiskhaan (Cold Keeper), is the local incarnation of the "Russian Santa" called Ded Marróz (Дед Мороз, Cold' Grandpa) in Russian and "Qor Bobo" (Snow's Grandpa) in uzbek. Costume: Avgustina Filippova

Continuing this strange trip starting in Nome (Alaska) to enter the Russia's backdoor, you can select Magadan as the arrival point instead of Anadyr or Providenya. I know Bering Air do such trip (charter or seat), but I do ignore how much the bill amounts. Stay in touch with Leslie for that.

If you start the asian leg from Magadan, you have got a chance to cross the true Siberian lands trhough the Sakha Republic (aka. Yakutia) taking the Kolyma Highway towards Yakustsk, the capital city of a country the size of Brasil or India. But this is not an as easy as a Trans-Siberian railroad trip. As long as I know, there are not regular passenger bus or train between them. Only some heavy trucks and juggernauts, no more than 1-2 an hour.

The Kolyma Highway (Magadan-Yakutsk, 1197 km) is best known as "The Road of Bones". Guess you why. Here there is a detailed, step by step map. With temperatures ranging +25ºC in summer to -69ºC in winter, both Magadan and Yakutia/Sakha Republic claims to be the "Cold Pole", and this Road of (Bare) Bones cross it.

Here there is a very detailed Yakutian site. And there. Of course, you must to do additional paperwork (LOI, Permits and so) to enter both Magadan and Yakutia. (To be continued...)

Entering Russia's Backdoor

2011-10-27T16:57:00.000-03:00

(click image to enlarge)

Well, well, well… What a stupid idea. But it’s a possible and maybe also a cheap idea also, depending on you needs and pretensions. Have you $600 and time to spent to do all the paperwork? You will get a round trip seat to Providenya fliying 1:00-1:40hs each leg. Put another $400 and you’re in Anadyr in 2:00-2:40hs. Put another $7,200 and you get your own 9-seats Navajo round trip charter to Providenya instead than a seat. If you’ve a heavy load, a Navajo can’t be enough (up to 1400 lbs. all included); you need a King Air (2200 lbs.) or maybe a Raytheon Beech 1900 D (4000 lbs.). And keep an eye watching how much the bill amounts.

But if you’ve $600, you’ve a seat. Round trip to Providenya. Departing from Nome, Alaska, and arriving in Providenya in 0:50 to 1:40 hs. depending on the type of plane the fate has given to you. And you can only arrive to Nome departing from Anchorage daily in Alaska Airline ($450 round trip as of 10/28/2011). And Anchorage can be reached from San Francisco.

The above data was provided to me by Leslie Contreras, Russian Charters, Bering Air, Inc. as of 01/10/2011.

But be cautious: Both Providenya and Anadyr are in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug (district). This means you can’t enter with a simple (?) Russian visa. Nope. You must remember that Russia isn’t simply “Russia” but the “Russian Federation”, a complex nest of republics, regions, districts and so. To enter Chukotka you need to fill an Entry Permission Form (Chukotka Pass) in addition to a Russian visa before departure. Be prepared to discuss hard with Boris, filling out forms, correct, resubmit, seal, wait days, back to discuss with Boris, and so on. Remember also that entering Russia and/or Chokotka requires the infamous LOI (Letter of Invitation) depending upon your passport nationality to obtain the visa. That means you need a letter from a registered local (Russian/Chukotkan) company (usually a tourism company). We Argentinians were exempted from such LOI+Visa mess at least for Russia from 2010 on (Thanks Cristina!)

But let us suppose that you took the time and desire to do so and finally got both the Russian visa and the Chukotka Pass, pay the seat in advance, go to Bering air, chat with Leslie, find avail seats and takes off from Nome. What next? Both Providenya as Anadyr are out of any path to anywhere. No a single road arrives or depart from them. Only you can leave it by plane charters, State copters or some supplies trucks that randomly arrives or leaves them.

Is to bear in mind if you really decide to travel this way. If you do it anyway, better not book in advance inflexible dates or inexorable objectives. Be prepared to change plans on the spot. What's better than knowing what you not expected? If you do not like to travel the hard way, think better to fly Aeroflot and book a room at the Kosmos :)

PS: Berin Air fly Magadan and Petropavlovsk also, but I have no fare quoted. You can reach Leslie Contreras in Nome (Bering Air) to update price and conditions at lucy@beringair.com

Vertical Turkey: Sümela Monastery

2010-07-15T13:31:00.005-03:00

Browsing photos in Google Earth, I’ve discovered a strange architectural jewel in Turkey, far away of the beaten path of Istanbul. It’s called Sümela Manastir (monastery), and he looks like a kind of Jordanian Petra, or maybe, due to the dizziness caused by its verticality, to the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet.

(click to enlarge)

Some references to find it: It’s located in the NE corner of the Anatolian Peninsula, on the slopes of the Zigana Mountains in the Pontic Alps, 200 km. west of Batumi, Georgia, and 50 km. south of the legendary Trabzon (see “Empire of Trebizond”), which in turn lies in the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. You might remember that ancient greeks called it the “Ponto Euxino”, from which derives the “Pontic Alps” in which such jewel is located.

As the tale go, two hermites, Barnabus and Sophronius, encountered here an icon of a caucasian Black Madonna, from which probably might derive the name Sümela (melas = “dark” or “black” in pontic greek). Be it true or not, Sümela Monastery was constructed in this very cliff of 1200 mts. above the sea level and 300 to the valley, in the year 386 AD during the reign of the Emperor Theodosius I.

Since then, many others rulers crafted this valuable archeological site. You can find more info here and here.

Inside views

...More photos

Traditional Kavkaz Lezginka

2010-06-19T18:17:00.007-03:00

A dagestani version of Lezginka
See the women wearing their arkhaligs and
men with their short sleeved Chokhas
headdressed with white Kubankas (or "Papakhi")

Lezginka or Lezghinka (Lezghi: Лезги къуьл; Azerbaijani: Ləzgi) is a national dance of Lezghins popular among many people in the Caucasus Mountains. It derives its names from the Lezgin people; nevertheless, Lezghins, Circassians, Karachays, Balkars, Abkhazians, Kabardins, Turks, Chechens, Mountain Jews, Ingush, Ossetians, Ingilos, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, the Russian Kuban and Terek Cossacks and the various ethnicities of Dagestan have their own versions.

Lezginka can be a solo, couple or group dance. Men and women are dressed in traditional costumes (Chokha); men wear a sword adorned on their side and women in long, flowing dresses. The man, imitating an eagle, dances in quick, concise steps; falling to his knees and leaping up quickly. The woman dances quietly, taking light, small steps - giving the appearance of her floating around the floor. When the dance is performed in pairs, the couples do not touch; the woman acknowledges the man, and dances discreetly about him.

Ukrainian Folk: Bandura

2010-03-24T12:32:00.005-03:00

Anatomy of the Bandura

Also called "Kobza", is a stringed instrument of the psaltery family considered the national musical instrument of Ukraine. It is used chiefly to accompany folk music. The bandura has an oval wooden body; a short, fretless neck attached to the soundboard in an off-centre position; 4 to 8 bass strings running from the neck of the instrument to the body; and 30 or more (sometimes 60) chromatically tuned treble strings stretched over the soundboard. The instrument is played in a seated position, the body of the instrument held on the lap in a nearly vertical position parallel to the torso. The bass strings are plucked with the fingers of the left hand and the treble strings strummed with a plectrum held in the right hand.

A precursor to the bandura was the kobza, a three- to eight-string instrument mentioned in Greek literature of the 6th century. During the Middle Ages it was prominent in eastern European courts, where it was used to accompany singing and dancing. Additional strings were added to the kobza in the 14th or 15th century, when it became known as the bandura, but the term kobza remains a synonym for bandura. By the 15th century the bandura had been adopted by kobzari, professional musicians—many of whom were blind—who used the instrument as an accompaniment for epic ballads (dumy) that recounted the exploits of the Ukrainian Cossacks. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries kobzari were persecuted for expressing nationalistic sentiments in their music, and in the 1930s Stalin ordered the execution of a number of them.

Despite Soviet censure, interest in the bandura increased in the 20th century. Many bandura ensembles and schools were formed, and the instrument, which was by tradition tuned diatonically, now has chromatically tuned versions. At the turn of the 21st century, bandura ensembles continued to be popular in Ukraine.

A little girl playing "Vesnyanka" with the bandura

More Bandura Videos...

Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word

2010-02-21T01:02:00.003-03:00

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though -- as Dave Neiwert ably documents -- it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term.

The issue isn't whether Stack's grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen."

Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials:  "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."

All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.

The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean:  "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist:  he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition."

One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way."  We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.

Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army -- by attacking nothing but military targets -- are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death -- the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft -- are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.

In sum:  a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T -- not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change -- the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning.

All of this would be an interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates.  It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it's only being done to "Terrorists," who, by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a "Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that's the end of that:   uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he's a Terrorist (by which they actually mean:  he's been accused of being one, though that distinction -- between presidential accusations and proof -- is not one they recognize).

If we're really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to people they call "Terrorists," we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It's just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e., The Terrorists).  It's really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word:  its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled.

UPDATE: I want to add one point: the immediate official and media reaction was to avoid, even deny, the term "terrorist" because the perpetrator of the violence wasn't Muslim. But if Stack's manifesto begins to attract serious attention, I think it's likely the term Terrorist will be decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote. His message is a sharply anti-establishment and populist grievance of the type that transcends ideological and partisan divisions -- the complaints which Stack passionately voices are found as common threads in the tea party movement and among citizens on both the Left and on the Right -- and thus tend to be the type which the establishment (which benefits from high levels of partisan distractions and divisions) finds most threatening and in need of demonization. Nothing is more effective at demonizing something than slapping the Terrorist label onto it.

Chechenya: Shamil Basayev at War

2010-02-12T20:56:00.006-03:00

This is a one-hour program produced in 1996 by a Turkish channel, in which Shamil Basayev (then alive) is interviewed by Mithat Bereket. It has no english translation, so, probably you must keep on images and gestures to decode this. But it's worth the spent time.

Those footages were shot in 1996, when the Chechen guerrillas defeated Yeltsin. Four years later, they were annihilated by the Putin' Red Army and Grozny went rubble.

The field commander of the Chechen guerrillas, Shamil Basayev, that looks as a kind of (Wahabbi) Muslim Che Guevara of the Caucasus, maybe was also the Bin-Laden equivalent for the Russians. As I noted here, part of the "Brzezinsky mujahideens" acting in Afghanistan in the eighties, ten years later were engaged in the Northern Caucasus (i.e., in Russia own).

(well, it's too late. I'm going to sleep and maybe tomorrow I will complete that shit)

Some Tips on the Caucassian Culture

2010-02-08T15:29:00.002-03:00

Diversity

Even though the Caucasus is a region that has a sort of a pan-Caucasian identity, it remains greatly diverse in terms of ethnics, religion, politics and culture. Despite some common features, Georgia and Georgians are different to Azerbaijan and Azeri, to Chechnya and Chechens, etc. Sometimes, the bordering states and republics differ so much that a trip from one place to another can come as a civilisation shock. Clear-cut distinctions can be noted e.g. between Ingushetia, closely attached to tradition and Islam, and North Ossetia, definitely the most russified and secularised republic in the region. A trip from Vladikavkaz (North Ossetia capital) to Nazran (Ingushetia’s largest city), separated by a mere dozen kilometres, gives an impression of a trip in cultural space. Whatever is considered a norm in Vladikavkaz (e.g. the way people dress), might raise controversy in Ingushetia.
Two natures of the Caucasus

One should also bear in mind that the Caucasus – to cut the long story short – has two natures. There exists a traditional and even traditionalist Caucasus, an exotic region reminding of the times before the Russian conquest. But there is also a modern, russified, sovietised and partly europeanised Caucasus. It might seem contradictory to you, but not for the people who live there. The same person will behave in a different way while visiting their family in a mountainous village and while socialising with their friends in a big city. Generally speaking, ordinary people, villagers behave naturally, the way they really are, and will not pretend to be someone else. Therefore, a man will not conceal that it is his wife who serves the table, while he sits there and drinks tea with guests. People who want to seem European try to ostentatiously dissociate themselves from some Caucasian customs and prove they are no ‘savages’. They make their wives sit by the table and make small talk, although it seems obvious that she feels uncomfortable doing this and it is not her daily routine. In Muslim countries some people ostentatiously drink alcohol and eat pork to prove they are no stick-in-the-mud Muslims. It is particularly clear in case of middle-aged people who were brought up in the Soviet times and formed by the Soviet propaganda. An increasing share of the younger generation doesn’t act like that. In republics like Dagestan, many young people even flaunt their faith and show that they are practicing believers of Islam.

Different ‘Caucases’

Apart from the two natures mentioned, Caucasus has many shades and differences. One may even say that there are different “Caucases”:
• Urban and rural Caucasus (the distinctions between them are greater that in case of European cities and villages, although the bonds between them are tighter) – e.g. cosmopolitan Baku and traditionalist Azerbaijani provinces;
• North and South Caucasus, divided by many distinctions; for example, people in Dagestan do not regard the Azeri as real highlanders and Caucasians. Dagestan inhabitants look down on Azeri’s habit of men greeting by kissing on the cheek or friends holding hands. Quite similarly, North Ossetians look down on their Southern counterparts (whom they call Kudar) and regard them as “georgianised”;
• Christian and Muslim Caucasus; however, there is no simple distinction into e.g. a Christian Georgia and a Muslim Azerbaijan; there are many regions and communities that do not stick to this description, e.g. the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia;
• Religious and secular Caucasus; the deepest divisions and greatest differences can be found in Muslim countries and regions, while Christian states are less internally divided;
• The conflict regions stand out in the Caucasus – wars, violence and waves of refugees have completely overturned the existing social structures and values, altered typical habits and behaviour, and created a number of different pathologies so far unknown in the Caucasus, such as homelessness, beggary, prostitution, orphanhood, etc.

What you have to know about the Caucasus

Taking all of the above in consideration, the best advice is to get acquainted with the region’s culture, tradition and history before travelling there. This is particularly important, as people in the Caucasus, like almost no other region, are absorbed with their history. At the same time, each nation has its own ethnic history, often conflicting with their neighbours’ version of history. Some sort of ‘indoctrination’ can therefore be expected – the Azeri will argue that the Armenians are not a Caucasus nation and vice versa, Chechens will claim that Ossetians and Dagestan nations are ‘traitors’ and ‘renegades’, while the latter will maintain that all Chechens are ‘bandits’ and ‘kidnappers’. In such a case it’s better not to get into a discussion and just change the topic, as you won’t succeed in changing their mind anyway.

Another reason why it’s worth reading something about the region before going there is that a person that knows something about the region’s history is held in great esteem by the locals. Basic knowledge on the region will also allow you to avoid unpleasant surprises, such as closed borders or travel ban that applies to some territories (e.g. Russia’s entire southern border is closed for foreigners, which is not widely known). Sometimes unaware tourists are planning to cross e.g. Turkish-Armenian or Armenian-Azerbaijani borders that have been closed for over 10 years, following the armed conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

It’s also worth to get acquainted with the current political situation in the Caucasus. This situation is greatly changeable – sudden and dramatic events that are hard to predict in advance, tend to happen there. It is therefore advised to try and be up to date with the current events in the region, so that we do not get taken aback by what we may find when we get there.
The foreigners’ perception

One of the crucial questions we should ask ourselves before going to the Caucasus, is how the region’s inhabitants are going to perceive us. In Yerevan, Tbilisi or Baku a foreigner is no sensation, while it may become one in some mountainous village. People in the Caucasus often find it hard to understand why people would travel so far. So they ask whether we have family in the Caucasus, where we are on a business trip (‘komandirovka’), where is the rest of the group (if we travel on our own or with one more person), etc. If we are working on some NGO projects in the Caucasus, we may get asked about the motives of our involvement. The locals sometimes find it hard to understand that we want to do something disinterestedly of for free or simply because we take interest in the Caucasus.

While in the region, we must be ready to answer numerous personal questions, such as whether we are married and whether we have children (and if we don’t – why not). We may also hear comments that we should get married as soon as possible; people would even volunteer to find a ‘perfect candidate’ for us straight away. They would also ask how much we earn, where we live, what nationality we are and what is our travel destination. These people do not ask questions because they are rude or meddlesome, but because they need to somehow ‘classify’ us according to their way of thinking, and ‘translate’ us through the notions they use. They need to know who we are, where we come from, and what we came for to be able to relate to us and open up. In the Western culture this sort of behaviour is not customary, as someone’s private life, nationality, confession, and marital status are considered to be private. Things are completely different in the Caucasus. So let’s try to be open and in return these people will open, too.

To see the Caucasus, it’s enough to go to Yerevan, Baku or Tbilisi, to go sightseeing as advised in the guidebook and to walk in the mountains. However, to ‘feel’ the Caucasus, to try and understand it, you must get rid of an always-in-a-hurry-tourist approach and the desire to see as much as possible during the two-week vacation. It is worth to succumb to the slower pace of the Caucasus people’s life. It’s worth to linger in one place, because this is when we will see most. The longer we stay in one place, in one village, staying at one family, the more our hosts will open up to us. Neither should you protest if you feel ‘trapped’ by someone’s hospitability. For example, you find yourself in some village and would like to walk around and take some pictures. Instead, you are seated by the table, and endless courses and beverages keep arriving. Subsequent neighbours and family members keep coming around, everyone wants to see you, and people keep asking the same questions. You have to understand that this is what the Caucasus is about. Take your time, as you will have plenty of time to see other things…
Family

The family is the greatest value for people in the Caucasus, and relatives are the ones they can always rely on. Cultivation of family ties is therefore very important. However, a close family in the Caucasus means something completely different than in Europe. A close relative may be e.g. someone’s grandfather’s brother or the grandfather’s brother’s granddaughter (in the Caucasus she would be called a ‘troyurodnaya sestra’ – a half-cousin or second cousin). Numerous, multi-generation families are a rule in the Caucasus.

However, the family relationships in many Caucasus regions are quite peculiar. For example, in traditional Abkhazian communities in-laws never speak to their daughter-in-law, in Ingushetia a son-in-law may only turn up in his in-laws’ house one year after the marriage, and in Chechnya a father must never show his affection for his own children in front of other people. In all Caucasus communities, the elders enjoy great respect, regardless of their sex. Younger family members attend to them, fulfil their wishes and ask them for advice. The young often refrain from drinking alcohol and smoking in front of the elders. Among Chechens, respect for elders (not just seniors, but any people who are older than you) is probably the greatest. A younger person should stand up when an elder enters the room and only sit down, when the elder allows them to. The young ones are not allowed to speak without the elders’ consent.

Respect for parents is also very important; the parents’ will must not be opposed, especially in matters such as marriage (marriages are still being arranged, even in the cities and even among educated people). One also needs their father’s consent to start an education or a job, to leave one’s native village, etc. According to the tradition (especially in the North Caucasus, where it is deeply rooted), the eldest son should live with his parents and take care of them as long as they live. Obligations to one’s parents and the necessity to take their opinion into account are often quite burdensome, but increasingly more often it is the parents who give their children a free hand in many respects.

Children are a ‘gem’ of each family in the Caucasus. As a rule, families have many children, whom they greatly love and respect. Still, a child is a part of a hierarchical family structure, so that it knows its place and is aware that there is children’s world and adult world, and the latter has more rights and privileges. It can be seen very vividly while visiting a Caucasus home. In European families, a child (especially, a small one) is always the centre of attention, which is often quite tiring for the guests. Things are different in a Caucasus family – children usually do not participate in the elders’ gatherings, leave the room when guests arrive (if they are big enough to do that), and when too little, they are being discreetly taken care of by their mothers, so that the guests do not get absorbed.

Hospitality

A Caucasian home is no castle. Quite the opposite, the more frequently the guests arrive and the longer they stay, the more honoured the hosts feel. For example, in Chechnya it is right for the host to ask the guest what he came for and how long he is going to stay only on the third day after the latter’s arrival (even if it is an unexpected guest). In the Caucasus, a guest is held in great esteem and is THE most important person in the house. Therefore the hosts would say ‘feel like a guest’ rather than ‘feel at home’. In many traditionalistic houses, there is a special room for guests (the so-called kunak chamber), the best and nicest room in the house. It is the host’s duty to fulfil the guest’s wishes, to amuse him and provide entertainment and attractions. So, don’t be too modest and use your ‘privileges’, as receiving guests and amusing them is something natural for the Caucasus inhabitants.

While staying at a Caucasian home you should keep several things in mind. You absolutely must take your shoes off, even if you enter a house for just a moment. Sometimes the hosts would ask you not to do this (especially in modern buildings in big cities), although it happens very rarely. Gifts are very welcome, and at the same time they don’t have to be expensive and can be purely symbolic. It may happen that the host will refuse to accept it thrice, which is a kind of a ritual and does not mean that he does not want the gift. A proper thing to do is also ask courtesy questions about the hosts’ and their family’s health, etc. This is particularly significant in Chechnya and Ingushetia, where it has become a custom.

A feast at the table would usually take a long time. Except for religious Muslim houses, we might expect a lot of alcohol on the table. However, unlike in Russia or Ukraine, the hosts hardly ever force you to drink (or drink excessively). A refusal to drink is usually accepted with understanding. It is in fact approved of when a woman refuses to drink or takes just a sip. A key element of drinking is raising a toast, especially in Georgia and Armenia. A tourist would not be forced to propose a toast; although you should try to do it as such a gesture would be very welcome. Before hitting the road, you can prepare a few ‘ready-made’ toasts, and they don’t have to be particularly sophisticated – the really sophisticated ones are a rarity even in the Caucasus.

When you’re a guest in a place, where a foreigner is still a rarity, you should remember that the Caucasus locals enjoy receiving guests and treat it as a great attraction and sometimes even a privilege. A person gains great prestige if a foreigner happens to participate in his son’s or daughter’s wedding or some other ceremony. As a rule, the foreigner becomes a guest of honour and is expected to deliver a speech at such a ceremony. It also happens that the family who hosts a tourist wants to boast such a special guest in front of their neighbours, relatives or friends, and therefore the news about your arrival would be spread very widely.

When you’re a guest at somebody’s place, you’d better forget about ‘freedom’ or spending money. The host will ‘escort’ you for the whole time, and if he can’t, he will ask his son, brother or some other relative or even a neighbour. If you mention that you feel like walking around the village, it will be understood that you want to be shown around. You’d better not object to that, as this might be offensive to the host.

Having said that, you may not get an equally warm reception all over the Caucasus. There are more and more tourist places where the stay is paid for, even in the highlanders’ houses – it is getting common in many regions of Georgia and Azerbaijan (e.g. in very popular Western tourists’ destination – Khinalug village) and in the Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkess republics in the North Caucasus.

If you are going to a place where there is no lodging house, you’d better talk to the head of the local administration (Russian: glava administratsii) or a headmaster. These are usually the people who have been around, talk better Russian, etc. They would either put you up for the night or find some place to stay. While travelling to very traditionalistic regions, such as upper Dagestan, you should first go to a place called godekan – a central meeting place of a town or a village, usually situated in the middle of the place. At any time you will find there elderly men called Aqsaqals, who form an informal community council (Russian: sovet stareyshin). A proper thing to do is to greet these men, introduce yourself, talk for a while and ask whether you can stay at the village. However, women should not shake hands with them and talk to them first, as it is considered improper. Another inappropriate thing to do is to not greet the people we pass by while walking.

Food

The food in the Caucasus is usually diverse; everyone can find something for themselves. In Muslim countries or regions pork is eaten extremely rarely, although we can come across people who do that. However, vegetarians may find it difficult to find diversified food, as meat dishes prevail in the Caucasian cuisine. It has to be added that people in the Caucasus often do not consider poultry or dolma (meat and rice-stuffed grape leaves) to be meat. Having said that, Caucasian cuisine offers a wide selection of cheese, and vegetables and fruits in the summer. However, coffee fiends must keep in mind that coffee is hard to find in Azerbaijan’s restaurants and bars. Coffee is hardly ever drunk in mountainous villages, whereas tea is used in excess (although it is often herb tea, made from herbs picked in the mountains). All kinds of alcohols are of course quite common, especially in Georgia, Armenia and some North Caucasus republics. People drink wine, cognac, beer and vodka (including the famous Georgian grape vodka chacha). However, you will find increasingly many people, especially young ones, in Azerbaijan and Muslim North Caucasus republics, who do not drink at all. There are villages in the North Caucasus (such as Gubden in Dagestan), where you find no alcohol whatsoever for religious reasons. Many Caucasian Muslims (especially in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia) also observe a fast during Ramadan.

Clothing

While travelling to the Caucasus, you don’t need to take particular clothing with yourself. However, you must observe a couple of rules. You must mind the gap between the city and the country. In big cities people usually dress in the European manner, while in the mountains they have a more traditional dress code. Men should avoid wearing shorts, especially in the country, while women should not dress too extravagantly and explicitly. Even though usually people would not comment on your clothes, you’d better avoid the mentioned way of dressing to show your respect for their customs. Also, in regions inhabited by Muslims you should definitely avoid exposing your underwear while your laundry gets dry, as it is regarded obscene.

You should also remember that there are very traditionalistic, even fundamentalist villages in the Caucasus, especially in Dagestan. In such places even a woman who is wearing trousers may get rebuked for ‘indecent conduct’. It’s also worth taking a headscarf that should be put on in mosques. Wearing a headscarf in the mountainous regions, albeit voluntary, would be approved of by the locals as a sign of respect for their customs and traditions. Generally, when you’re in the Caucasus, try to avoid dressing in a ‘Western’, tourist kind of manner – by doing this you are likely to attract the attention of those whom you’d better avoid, such as thieves.

Women in the Caucasus. Man-woman relations

The Caucasus is a region where we can still come across sharp distinctions into male and female social roles. Two separate worlds – male and female one – exist. Representatives of the two sexes rarely spend spare time together (if they’re not related). Men get together within their circle, while women meet within their circle. Men and women usually get together at family occasions, although men usually sit separated from women. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, especially in big cities and in Georgia & Armenia. It seems, though, that the exceptions only prove the rule.

There is also a clear division of roles within a family: a man earns the living and a woman keeps the house, cooks & cleans. In mountainous villages this division is particularly distinct. When guests turn up, it is the man who talks to them, while a woman serves the table. Obviously, man-woman divisions do not concern foreigners; a female tourist is first of all a guest.

Should a woman decide to travel the Caucasus alone, she should exercise great caution, as this might turn out risky, especially in Georgia. A woman on her own can find herself being picked up persistently. There are several reasons for that. In the Caucasus, a woman usually ‘belongs’ to someone. She is a wife, daughter, cousin, sister of a specific man. She is kind of ‘attached’ to the man, which also means that she is under his protection. Therefore a possible ‘beau’ has to take into account that should something happen, he will have to deal with that man sooner or later. Caucasian men reason as follows: if a woman does not ‘belong’ to anyone, and is not attached to any man, it means that she can mine. In such a case she can be easily accosted, as there is no one to defend her. However, if a woman travels with her husband, boyfriend or friend, she has to keep in mind that in some situations she might be completely ignored and looked through. A Caucasian man will talk first of all to a male tourist.

A man travelling across the Caucasus alone will almost certainly get offers to ‘have fun’ with local ladies of loose conduct. A refusal often causes great surprise.

Couples who travel the Caucasus should in turn avoid showing their affection to each other, as it is considered indecent and can be extremely embarrassing to locals, especially in Muslim regions. On the other hand, we should not express our surprise that e.g. in Azerbaijan men greet by kissing on the cheek and hold hands when walking. You can also come across such customs in Armenia (though they are not so common), although certainly not in the North Caucasus, where this would be unacceptable.

Relations with the authorities

The relations with the authorities (be it police or office workers) is the most problematic thing while travelling across the Caucasus. It is a problem first of all in the North Caucasus, mainly in its eastern part (Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan). This is the least stable part of the region, flooded with the military and police due to the conflict in Chechnya and the activity of Islamists. You should therefore expect numerous document checks, examination of your luggage, etc. The whole region is intersected by a network of checkpoints, while the borders between the republics actually remind state borders. Entry into some territories may be very difficult. This mainly applies to Chechnya; according to the law, a foreigner can enter the republic only with a special permit. The authorities’ consent (in this case, the consent of the Federal Security Service, the FSB) is also required to enter all bordering territories. In case of the regions that are popular tourist destinations, it is not difficult to obtain a permit – special tourist agencies will take care of that. They will also help you obtain the temporary registration (Russian: registratsiya) – a tourist needs such a registration if he stays longer than 3 days.

Checks are common during longer journeys; for local police they are often an opportunity to extort bribes from people, especially foreign tourists, who are considered a ‘tasty bit’. Very often policemen would make up alleged offences to force the tourists to pay. Nevertheless, you should avoid paying bribes, which is not that hard. There are ways of dealing with the police’s importunity, the most effective being plain patience. If you are consistent in refusing to pay bribes, at the same time keeping your cool and letting them know you are aware of your rights, they will give up after a while. You should not worry that a bus or a marshrutka (a small bus) will leave without you. Passengers are united by a kind of a team spirit; the driver will also wait until all passengers will be given their documents back and allowed to go. You should avoid kicking up a fuss, shouting, being rude, as it can only worsen the situation. Another way is to pretend you don’t understand Russia or to appeal to their Caucasian hospitality. Even if you have not attended to formalities (e.g. you don’t have the registration), you can try to refer to your unawareness or try to arouse their pity. Only in extreme cases (exceptional importunity or rudeness of the uniformed) you can demand to call the Ambassador of your state. You should also bear in mind that the policemen or the military often stop foreigners simply because they’re curious, as they don’t meet foreigners too often and want to talk to them.

In the South Caucasus the aforementioned problems happen much less frequently. In this region you should avoid travelling to the frozen-conflict areas – the Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as it may turn to be quite risky (especially in the South Ossetia and Abkhazia). While on the mentioned territories, you are not under protection of your diplomatic agencies, as they cannot act freely there.

In official contacts with the authorities (e.g. while working on some NGO projects) proper and formal clothing should be observed (especially in Azerbaijan and Armenia), as it is treated as a sign of respect towards the authorities. The representatives of local authorities must feel that they are important, and that the guests respect their position and status. When you are working on a project in some region, a courtesy visit to the local authorities can help you in accelerating the works.

Travelling

Travelling across the Caucasus is not very problematic. The most convenient way to get around is to take a marshrutka, a small bus that can take you to practically any place in the Caucasus. Marshrutkas are also a basic means of transport in larger cities. At the same time they are the safest one, much better than taxis. All locals use them, and that’s where you can get advice on how to get to a particular place or where to stay for the night. You can trust the marshrutka drivers, who have no vested interest in cheating or misleading you. Another convenient albeit slower way to get around is to take a bus (buses usually run between cities and larger villages).

You can reach the Caucasus by train – there are trains running to the region from Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Astrakhan or Kyiv in Ukraine, among other cities. The major train connections in the region are Moscow-Makhachkala (it runs further to Baku, although you have to bear in mind that foreigners cannot cross the Russian-Azerbaijani border), Moscow – Vladikavkaz, Moscow – Adler, Moscow – Kislovodsk, Rostov-on-Don – Vladikavkaz, Moscow – Nazran, Adler – Vladikavkaz and other. You can also get to Grozny and Gudermes by train, although you will need a special permit. In the South Caucasus, the train network is not expanded. The major train connections are: Yerevan – Tbilisi, Tbilisi – Baku, Tbilisi – Zugdidi, Tbilisi – Batumi, and Baku – Astara. The train that run in the region are usually slow and rather dirty (except for the Tbilisi-Baku connection). The ticket prices are affordable, although you may find it hard to buy a ticket on the day of departure (especially in the North Caucasus), so you’d better do it in advance.

You can also get to the Caucasus by plane. There are direct plane connections to Baku, Yerevan and Tbilisi from Frankfurt, Vienna, Istanbul, Prague, Minsk and Moscow. Recently budget Air Baltica airlines have offered flights to the Caucasus via Riga, Latvia, which is currently the cheapest way to fly there. If you want to fly to the North Caucasus, you can take a plane from Moscow and St Petersburg. There are many large airports in the North Caucasus, including Mineralnye Vody, Makhachkala, Nazran, Grozny, Vladikavkaz, Nalchik, Cherkesk, Sochi, Krasnodar, and Stavropol.

You can also travel by taxis or rented cars, although that would not be advisable: local drivers often take advantage of foreigners, who are not familiar with local prices and situation. Moreover, in the North Caucasus taxis and private vehicles are more often checked by the police. Having said that, taxi drivers may be an excellent source of information. Another good source of information are bazaars. You can have some problems with exchanging money in the North Caucasus (in places such as Makhachkala, Kislovodsk, Pyatigorsk), but in larger cities you will find many cash machines. If we decide to take currencies, it is much better to take US dollars than Euros.

The easiest way to communicate is to speak Russian, although the command of Russian is not equally good everyone (it might be a problem in the South Caucasus, especially in the country). The ones who may have problems with Russian are the young people, who were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the elderly or women in remote villages. The knowledge of English is still an exception, although it is becoming more common among young people (especially in Georgia). You should also bear in mind that Armenia and Georgia have their own alphabets, completely different to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Azerbaijan uses the Latin alphabet, while the North Caucasus for obvious reasons sticks to the Cyrillic one.

In big cities you may find it hard to find a proper place to stay the night. Hotels are usually expensive, and people rarely invite you to stay at their place. There are also state-owned hotels in the North Caucasus that do not admit foreigners. On the other hand, in popular tourist locations (Georgia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkess republic) there shouldn’t be any problems with finding a place to stay. You will find rooms for rent there as well as the tourist centres (Russian: turbaza). In some regions (such as the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia and in the south of Azerbaijan) there are agritourist farms (see e.g. www.pankisi.org). In places that are not frequented by tourists, the locals often offer free stay at their house. However, you should not take advantage of it too much, as the people in that region are usually very poor.

An interesting thing to see while travelling, especially across Muslim regions, are the so-called sacred sites (ziyarats, pirs) located along the roads. Drivers usually stop by, so that the passengers can pray, get some water and leave some loose change. When passing by cemeteries or temples, the drivers also turn the music down, and some passengers say short prayers. At such moment you should remain silent to show your respect for these people’s faith.

Be yourself

While in the Caucasus, behave naturally, do not pretend to be someone you aren’t or force yourself to conform to the surroundings. People in the Caucasus respect those who are proud of their own culture, religion, their country and who have their own firm beliefs and opinions.

A most crucial trait, which you will not be taught by any savoir-vivre handbook, is tact. If you watch the people you meet in the Caucasus with attention, talk to them, take interest in their culture, you will know what is the right thing to do, and what isn’t.

Maciej Falkowski

Translated by Jadwiga Rogoża
Kaukaz.net

The Moscow Seven Sisters

2010-02-04T14:58:00.008-03:00

Seven buildings of Moscow, built from 1947 and 1955 during the Stalin' rule, are worldwide known as 'The Seven Sisters'. They give this particular charm between gothic and baroque that characterizes Moscow.

1. Moscow State University

2. Leningradskaya Hotel

3.Ukrainya Hotel

4.The Kudrinskaya Square Building

5. Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Apartments

6. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs

7. The Red Gates Administrative Building

The Seven Sisters in a Moscow Map

However, (at least) two more buildings in Moscow can be included in the same architectural concept: The Palace o Culture and Science, and the Triumph Palace.

8. Palace of Culture and Science

9. The Triumph Palace (at Warsaw, Poland, as stated by reader Stan Baransky)

Photo credits: Aigars Ievins, English Russia

Particularities of the Saudi House

2010-01-29T16:08:00.005-03:00

King Fahd ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, died in 2005

In case of Saudi Arabia, cradle of the Islam, spiritual center of the Arab and Moslem worlds, and the only State of the world that carries the name of the family that founded it and directs up to today, the political system has been especially rigid. Saud has been from his emergence in the XVIIIth century in the figure of the sheikh Muhammad ibn Saud, the first emir of the Nejd in 1735, the leaders of the wahhabism, a fundamentalist suni sect that takes his name after his founder, Muhammad ibn Abd to the-Wahhab, died in 1787.

The wahhabism rebelled against the decadent and secularized piety of the Ottoman Turks, custodians of that time of the Holy Mosques of Medina and Mecca, with what the religious reform movement acquired from the beginning an important political tint. His orthodoxy lies in the hanbali juridical school most faced towards the Arab thing and the most traditional of the four that bloomed in the abasi caliphate, and which was founded by Ahmad ibn Hanbal, deceased in 850.

The hanbali school prescribes that the sharia or Islamic law comes exclusively from the Koran and from the sunna or six compendia of hadices (named like hadith, there are texts compilations of the facts and words of the Prophet, which shape the tradition and complement the Koran) attributed to Mahoma and his first followers. Opposite to any rationalist innovation, the hanbalism pushes back most of the hadices and the whole jurisprudence (fiqh) of not Koranic or Muslim emanation, as the juridical reasonings endorsed by the consensus of the believers (ichma). Also, it prohibits any declaration of popular devotion based on the religious images, for considering it to be an idolater.

In Arabia, this creed, with his accented strictness and puritanism, impregnated with conservatism the State organized like an absolute monarchy, and to the society, fist-iron submitted to the prescriptions of the sharia, sometimes draconian, on such aspects like the consumption of alcohol and tobacco, the role of the woman and the punishment of the crimes. They adopted the penal code of the hadd, which comprises the amputation of a hand for theft, the flagellation up to the death for drinking alcohol, the stone beating for adultery or the beheading for the most serious affronts. In addition, the State created the Committee to Encourage the Virtue and to Prevent the Sin, and a religious police, the Mutawwain invested of full powers to watch and to punish at once and on the area any Koranic deviation in the conduct of the citizen on foot.

To the eyes of westerns, allien to the the cultural, moral and religious particularities of a proud community of his past of free and warlike men, this system presents the whole aspect of an intolerant medieval feudalism straight carried to the XXIst century, which exercises an arbitrary control on the citizens and which protects rude human rights violations. The case is that the Saudi regime has rested on three domestic props: approximately 4.000 princes who nourish the principal branch of Saud's house, the Faysal (for being progeny for line patrilineal of the grandfather of ibn Saud, Faysal ibn Turki, without forgetting that from Saud's trunk there arose other branches that today comprises between 30.000 and 40.000 people), the Bedouin tribes and the sheikhs, and the Armed forces, of all who he insured himself his allegiance.

After the fabulous enrichment that produced in a nomads' society of the desert the oil discovered and its development at the end of the thirties of the XXth century, Saud watched with special zeal that the massive money inflow was not bringing with it Occident cultural fashions and political ideas, like parlamentarism, the political parties and the laicism of the State, for not speaking about the lightest leftist or socializing whim.

The result has been the unusual symbiosis of the most advanced features of the western technology with the ancestral customs of the inhabitants of the Arabic peninsula. The income for the oil and the tourism related to the peregrination to Mecca or hadj (one of five Koranic obligations, that any Moslem must do at least once in his life) made possible an extremely generous system of social protection that for years lulled the democratic aspirations.

(CIDOB, translated (or so) from the spanish version)

Is al-Qaeda Winning?

2010-01-14T15:28:00.002-03:00

By Marwan Bishara, Al-Jazeera, 01/14/2010

What does it say about Washington's ''war on terror'' that dozen and a half people with paper cutters forced hundreds of thousands of Western troops into the battlefields of the "greater Middle East" region;

That 100,000 foreign soldiers are bogged down in occupied Afghanistan wondering how many dozens of al-Qaeda operatives have remained, if any;

That the most liberal democracy enacted new controversial illiberal laws and unpatriotic practices under its "Patriot Act";

That one shoe-bomber has forced millions of people to take off their shoes every time they take a flight;

That one underpants-bomber will expose every other traveler in most humiliating of ways;

That after US loss of deterrence and prestige as well as trillions of dollars of military and other expenditures, al-Qaeda's top leadership remains at large; its bases/cells proliferate globally; that volunteers continue to flock into its ranks and young supporters to its websites… !!! And above all that it continues to terrorize America and Americans.

So much that one gets the impression that America is fighting a world superpower despite the incredible disparities in capacity, numbers and support.

Is al-Qaeda winning? Has the United States lost?

Hitting the Jackpot
A dozen years ago, a demoralized group with nowhere to go but the hills of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda began targeting America instead of the region's authoritarian regimes hoping to destabilize the region, bloody America's nose and gain popularity.

Its strategy was simple: Draw the US into direct confrontation against and within the Muslim world. Like sheep to the slaughter house, America walked right into its trap.

Al-Qaeda was lucky. With a 'cowboy' and so-called "chicken-hawks" (militarists who ever served in the military) dominating the White House and the Pentagon… military escalation was only a question of time and intensity.
The Bush administration decided to "take the war to the enemy so as not to fight it at home". This is exactly what al-Qaeda hoped for considering it wasn't applying for Green cards for its members.

It all went as smooth as a scripted movie. After the 9/11 attacks at the pillars of its world status, the Pentagon and Wall Street, the wounded superpower went on a rampage. Like a bull in a china shop, it responded with little or no thinking of the consequences of its military actions.

Warmongers took advantage of the threat to US national security to advance their military agenda in foreign policy and the radical American Right exploited what they termed as the threat to "our way of life" to transform America's way of life towards the Right.

Washington called for a "crusade", then changed it into a "war" on terror and under its guise, went on to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq and support Israel's bloody wars in Lebanon andPalestine. It also intervened in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan and put direct pressure on its allies to confront their Islamist movements.

In no time, the US was preoccupied by its draining occupation and costly military operations. And as expected, the terrible human cost only added petrol to the flames of hatred.

Paradoxically, anti-Americanism has been more rampant under "friendly regimes" like in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey etc. than others.

America's unfortunate and disproportionate use of military force to defeat a segmented, mobile and polycentric movement of several hundred core groups of fighters didn't make it any more secure or dissuasive.

As the Obama administration asks for $33 bn extra budget above the already approved $660 bn for 2010, I remember what Richard Meyers, the former head of the US joint chiefs of staff, told me several weeks ago how a decade later, the US still doesn’t have a strategy to deal with "the global insurgency" facing America.

Beyond military
Popular opposition and world denunciations of US military campaign has fallen on deaf ears in Washington. Instead of seriously reversing its military expansion, the Obama administration has accelerated it in the Afghan-Pakistan area and it seems adamant to repeat more of the same in Yemen.

Needless to say, no serious strategic analyst would advise abandoning military power all together. However, Washington's dependency on, even addiction to, firepower has neutralized or nullified all other efforts towards defusing support for al-Qaeda and truly winning hearts.

Good-will gestures provided by President Obama and his attempts to reconnect to the Arab and Islamic world on the basis of "mutual interest and mutual respect" can hardly be heard considering the echoes of drone fired missiles, speeding F-15 jets and rolling tanks.

The more Washington used its military force, the less it won the minds of those it needs most to defeat al-Qaeda: Americans, Arabs and Muslims.

Likewise, US military actions are harming its intelligence and law enforcement work that over the last decade have dealt the greatest blow to al-Qaeda's leadership and organisation.

Zero Sum strategy
As military adventures kill, maim and destroy lives, they create, nurture and build animosities and "alliances" among most unlikely allies, such as a young rich Nigerian that studies in London, a Jordanian doctor that studies in Turkey and an Arab-American soldier trained by the Pentagon, all whom were ready to die to hurt America.

And likewise, counter terror tactics and intelligence work has made it ever more difficult for public diplomacy to "win hearts and minds". Instead of listening to people of the region, it has been spying on them and instead of reading them their rights, it has tortured them in far-away prisons.

And instead of hearing out their concerns and fears, Washington has underlined its own above all others.

In that limited and limiting spirit, for example, mostly impoverished Yemenis that suffer from war in the north, intensive conflict in the south and three decade autocratic regime, must now worry about US fears, and cater to US interests above their own.

Which brings us back to our initial question: al- Qaeda is winning only as far as Washington is running a self-defeating war.

However, one needs to remember that in the self-defeating war on terror, winner and loser is one and the same.

As long as America puts its security preoccupations and political interests about those under its military and strategic domination, the Pentagon and al-Qaeda will feed into one another and the Americans, Arabs and Muslims will continue to be the ultimate losers.

Vanity Fair and Goldman Sachs, the Greedy Sons of Mother Theresa

2010-01-05T20:20:00.010-03:00

Lloyd Blankfein, current Goldman Sachs CEO

Henry "Hank" Paulson, Former Goldman Sachs CEO and Current Treasure Secretary,

the fox caring for the hens

I was ashamed reading this article in Vanity Fair. What a drudges, worried and angelical men! A little more of praises and GS would look like the direct progeny from Mother Theresa. Is this a face wash-down suggested by the PR? My heartstrings got touched, VF! Give me an handkerchief and dry my tears, please!

Such PR operation carried out by VF might be related with this or that? If still we cast some doubt that it is a PR operation destined to soften criticism and wash the face of GS, please read here the article of the NYT titled 'Goldman Sachs Weighs Requirement for Charity'.

Iran at a Glance

2009-12-16T18:30:00.001-03:00

The People
By Christine Foy for the Iran Project

The people of Iran, their history, diversity, and strong traditions dazzle anyone who takes the time to peer into this country's legacy. There are many different ethnicities of people living in Iran. The largest ethnic group is Persian. Although this term is used loosely, it describes Iranians who mostly live in the central plateau and speak Indo-Iranian dialects.

Millions of Azeris live in northern Iran near the border with Azerbaijan. Kurds comprise 8 percent of Iran's population, and they live mostly in northwestern Iran in the Zagros Mountains. Their ethnicity is tied to the Medes, an Aryan people whose migration to the area from central Asia dates back to the Iron Age.

The Lur, however, are considered the closest of any of the Iranian ethnic groups to the original Asian settlers. About half the Lur population are villagers and half are traveling herders.

The Bakhtiaris live near the Iraqi border, and the Baluchi live in the southeast and are a religious minority—being Sunni, rather than Shi’ite Muslims.

The family unit is perhaps the most important social institution of Iran—with the father of the family taking the head position, affecting all major decisions, including inheritance and marriage partners.

Women's role in society has turned to a more traditional one since the revolution brought the establishment of a government obedient to Islamic code. They are encouraged to wear chadors, a body covering from head to foot, and are prevented from using facilities that would bring them into contact with men. Women face widespread discrimination in employment and other areas. However, they retain the right to vote, established in 1963, and women make up over 50 percent of university students.

The Muslim religion runs deep in Iran, and has ever since its founding by Muhammad in the seventh and eighth centuries. There are two main sects of Islam: the Shi’ites and Sunnis. Ninety-eight percent of Iranians are Shi’ite. The two sects disagree over the role of the imam, or spiritual leader.

Farsi, an Indo-European language, is the official language of Iran. However, other languages that are spoken include Kurdish, Turkish dialects, and Arabic.

Iranians are artisans who excel at hand weaving. Their carpets are a major export, second only to oil. Another art form is the miniature—a small extremely detailed painting. Chess is popular in Iran as well as sports, such as wrestling, weight lifting, horsemanship, boxing, tennis, and track. Interestingly, ancient Persians claim to have invented polo and backgammon. There is also a sport unique to Iran. It is called zurkhaneh, a mix of gymnastics and wrestling.

Imperial History of The Middle East

2009-12-08T20:36:00.007-03:00

Obama vs. Fox News

2009-10-26T13:09:00.009-03:00

The Obama administration properly identified Fox News as the Media branch of the G.O.P. and that's right. Btw, they excluded the Fox in media briefings and meetings in which journalists can be summoned. If they're not journalists but political foes, they ought be treated as such. It is not enough to have a media to be considered a journalist. It's ludicrous.

In a brilliant article in The Nation titled "Just Don't Call it 'Journalism'", Eric Alterman says:

"It's a sad symbol of the state of contemporary American journalism that the White House communications office is doing more to maintain the honor of the profession than are many journalists. But that's just what's happening in the contretemps over Fox News. Interim White House communications director Anita Dunn has explained to the press that the White House plans to treat Fox "the way we would treat an opponent.... As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

Now, former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino, says as a derogatory: "Obama's Criticism Of Fox Akin To Chavez Tactics". But... wait: Who, if not the Bush croonies, are less entitled to use the word 'Chávez' as a derogatory word? It is? Why? Please, do yourself a little survey: Look how Chavez is treated in The Nation, Salon, Alternet, etc., and then look the same in the Washington Post, Politico, Mo-Jo, Media Matters, Fox News and so.

To my humble understanding, Chávez is far away from the "Big Satan" nick the rightist press tagged he worldwide. Nor they're morally entitled to do so, at least. Not the "Saddam WMD's"'ers, right?

If someone in the USA had said about his president the half about what the Venezuelan RCTV said on Chávez, it would be jailed for sure. Chávez limited itself to not renewing the State permission to air the propaganda RCTV usually made instead. I published a shocking report on that in my spanish blog. To say nothing on the "Puente Llaguno" affaire, in which the media presented the victims as attackers to try to oust Chávez from the Government in 2002.

Then, again: SOME press do not behave as the press is intend to. And when they behave that way, they can't pretend to be treated so. They must be keep away from the real press treatment. Press criticism is OK and should be encouraged. Rol's usurpation, attacks and ouster attempts is another very different issue.

Such three items in the press behaviour, i.e., rol's usurpation, attacks and ouster attempts, often is known worldwide as 'Colour Revolutions' (CR) or 'Velvet revolutions' or Soft Coups.

To the classical (and successful) CR acknowledged worldwide, i.e., Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, etc., many others were tried (without success yet) in Bolivia and Argentina (2008) and Iran 2009, but they're far from concluded.

In the Argentinian case (where I live), at least, the mainstream media is owned by the rich class, and the message they air say is what the rich class and landowners expects to be assimilated by the masses: Israel is OK, but Palestinians are not, Iran and Venezuela are nearby the evil's axis, Chávez and Ahmadinejad ought to be viewed as cockroaches, and so on.

Is this message familiar to you, live you where you live? Yes, the world press message reach the Argentinian tarmac pristine and without any noticeable distortion. Our 'free press' are no more than local amplifiers of The Global Voice the owners try to sell us.

The Argentinian main media operator, owner of the 73% argentinian licenses share is Clarín. And they ought be charged mainly on ouster attempts they did against our elected President, in a no-yet-so-successful Colour Revolution they tried last year and that they still now try to carry out. Clarín is the Argentinian Fox News Obama's equivalent. But it's another story that deserves itself a further article I will tell you in details anytime soon.

Iran and the Pipelineistan Opera

2009-10-02T13:13:00.007-03:00

Central Asian/Caucasus Gas Pipelines Map: Nabucco (Light Blue, NATO backed)
and South Stream (Purple, Russian Backed)

Jumpin' Jack Verdi, It's a Gas, Gas, Gas

By Pepe Escobar in The Nation

October 1, 2009

Brussels

Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don't be fooled. The New Great Game of the twenty-first century is always over energy and it's taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands of the planet. Call it Pipelineistan. If, in Asia, the stakes in this game are already impossibly high, the same applies to the "Euro" part of the great Eurasian landmass--the richest industrial area on the planet. Think of this as the real political thriller of our time.

The movie of the week in Brussels is: When NATO Meets Pipelineistan. Though you won't find it in any headlines, at virtually every recent NATO summit Washington has been maneuvering to involve reluctant Europeans ever more deeply in the business of protecting Pipelineistan. This is already happening, of course, in Afghanistan, where a promised pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India, the TAPI pipeline, has not even been built. And it's about to happen at the borders of Europe, again around pipelines that have not yet been built.

If you had to put that Euro part of Pipelineistan into a formula, you might do so this way: Nabucco (pushed by the US) versus South Stream (pushed by Russia). Be patient. You'll understand in a moment.

At the most basic level, it's a matter of the West yet again trying, in the energy sphere, to bypass Russia. For this to happen, however--and it wouldn't hurt if you opened the nearest atlas for a moment--Europe desperately needs to get a handle on Central Asian energy resources, which is easy to say, but has proven surprisingly hard to do. No wonder the NATO Secretary General's special representative, Robert Simmons, has been logging massive frequent-flyer miles to Central Asia over these last few years.

Just under the surface of an edgy entente cordiale between the European Union (EU) and Russia lurks the possibility of a no-holds-barred energy war--Liquid War, as I call it. The EU and the US are pinning their hopes on a prospective 3,300-kilometer-long, $10.7 billion pipeline dubbed Nabucco. Planning for it began way back in 2004 and construction is finally expected to start, if all goes well (and it may not), in 2010. So if you're a NATO optimist, you hope that natural gas from the Caspian Sea, maybe even from Iran (barring the usual American blockade), will begin flowing through it by 2015. The gas will be delivered to Erzurum in Turkey and then transported to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.

Why, you might ask, is the pipeline meant to save Europe named for a Verdi opera? Well, Austrian and Turkish energy executives happened to see the opera together in Vienna in 2002 while discussing their energy dilemmas, and the biblical plight of the Jews exiled by King Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), a love story set amid a ferocious struggle for freedom and power, swept them away. Still, it's a stretch to turn aluminum tubes into dramatic characters.

Of course, the operatic theater here isn't really in the tubing, it's in the politics and strategic implications that surround the pipeline. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Nabucco is seen not as a European economic or energy project, but as a creature of Washington, just like the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey that President Bill Clinton and his crew backed so vigorously in the 1990s and which was finally finished in 2005. For those who have never believed the Cold War is over--the Eastern Europeans among them--once again it's the good guys (the West) against the commies...sorry, the Russians...at an energy-rich OK Corral.

The Great Borderless Gas Bazaar

Russia's answer to Nabucco is the 1,200-kilometer-long, $15 billion South Stream pipeline, also scheduled to be finished in 2015; it is slated to carry Siberian natural gas under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. From Bulgaria, one branch of the pipeline would then run south through Greece to southern Italy while the other would run north through Serbia and Hungary towards northern Italy.

Now, add another pipeline to the picture, the $9.1 billion Nord Stream that will soon enough snake from Western Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany, which already imports 41.5 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The giant Russian energy firm Gazprom holds a controlling 51 percent of Nord Stream stock; the rest belongs to German and Dutch companies. The chairman of the board is none other than former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Put this all together and Russia, with its pipelines running in all directions and firmly embedded in Europe, spells trouble for Nabucco's future and frustration for Washington's New Great Game plans to contain the Russian energy juggernaut. And that's without even mentioning Ukhta which, chances are, you've never heard of. If you aren't in the energy business, why should you have? After all, it's a backwater village in Russia's autonomous republic of Komi, 350 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. Built by forced labor, it was once part of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag archipelago. By 2030, however, you'll know its name. By then, a pipeline from remote Ukhta will be flooding Europe with natural gas and the village will be one of Nord Stream's key transit nodes.

While Nabucco as well as South Stream remain virtual, Nord Stream is a Terminator on the run. By 2010, it will be tunneling under the Baltic Sea heading for Germany. By 2011, it should be delivering the goods and a second pipe--12 meters wide, 100,000 tubes long--will be under construction to double its capacity by 2014. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller pulls no punches: this, he says, will be "the safest and most modern pipeline in the world."

How can Verdi lovers possibly compete? In the middle of a global recession, Gazprom is spending at least $20 billion to conquer Europe via Nord and South Stream. The strategy is a killer: pump gas under the sea directly to Europe, avoiding messy transit routes across troublesome countries like Ukraine. No wonder Gazprom, which today controls 26 percent of the European gas market, is expected to have a 33 percent share by 2020.

In other words, in many ways, the Nabucco versus South Stream energy war already looks settled. Nabucco is, at best, likely to be a secondary pipeline, incapable, as Washington once hoped, of breaking the EU away from energy dependence on Russia.

Brussels, predictably, is in its usual multilingual policy mess. Most bureaucrats at its monster, directive-churning body, the European Commission, publicly bemoan the "pipeline war." On the other hand, Ona Jukneviciene, chairwoman of the committees at the European Parliament dealing with Central Asia, admits that Nabucco cannot be the only option.

As for Reinhard Mitschek, managing director of the Nabucco consortium, he tries to put a brave face on things when he stresses, "we will transport Russian gas, Azeri gas, Iraqi gas." As for the top European official on energy matters, Andris Piebalgs, he can't help being a pragmatist: "We'll continue to work with Russia because Russia has energy resources."

From a business point of view, it's tough to argue with South Stream's selling points. Unlike Nabucco, it will offer cheaper, all-Russian natural gas that won't have to transit through potential war zones, and while Nabucco will always deliver limited amounts of Caspian natural gas to market, South Stream, given Russian resources, will have plenty of room to increase its output.

The fact is that, as of now, Nabucco still has no guaranteed sources of gas. In order for the gas to come from energy-rich Turkmenistan, to take but one example, the Turkmen leadership would have to break a deal they've already made with Russia, which now buys all of that country's export gas. There's no way that Moscow is likely to let one of the former Soviet Republics do that easily. In addition, both Russia and Iran could well be capable of blocking any pipeline straddling the floor of the Caspian Sea.
Gazprom will pay to build South Stream, and then distribute and sell gas it already controls to Europe; Nabucco, on the other hand, has to rely on a messy consortium of six countries (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany) simply to finance one-third of its prospective costs, and then convince wary international bankers to shell out the rest.

The Pentagon does the Black Sea

So what does Washington want out of this mess? That's easy. Rewind to then-prospective Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her Senate confirmation hearings on January 13, 2009. There, she decried Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas and issued an urgent call for "investments in the Trans-Caspian energy sector." Think of it as a signal: the new Obama administration would be as committed to Nabucco as the Bush administration had been.

What is never spelled out is why. Enter the Black Sea, that crucial geo-strategic stage where Europe meets the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Enter, thus, Bulgaria, home to a new Pentagon air base in Bezmer, one of six new strategic bases being built outside the US and as potentially important to Washington's future games as the stalwart air bases in Incirlik, Turkey, and Aviano, Italy, have been in the past. (Aviano was the key US/NATO base for the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and the seventy-eight-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999.)

With the Pentagon's bases already creeping within a stone's throw of Southwest and Central Asia, it doesn't take a genius to imagine the role Bezmer might play in any future attack on Iran (something the Russian defense establishment has already taken careful note of). With both Romania and Bulgaria now part of NATO, Article 5 of the alliance's charter now applies. NATO can take action "in the event of crises which jeopardize Euro-Atlantic stability and could affect the security of Alliance members."

In this way, Pipelineistan meets the American Empire of Bases.

Young Turks and Wily Russians

Why is everyone so damn hooked on Central Asian oil and gas? Elshad Nasirov, deputy chairman of the state-owned Azerbaijani oil company SOCAR, sums the addiction up succinctly enough: "This is the place where there is oil and gas in abundance. It is not Arab, not Persian, not Russian, and not OPEC."

It's the Caspian and, unfortunately for Europe, the region could, in energy terms, turn out to be not the caviar for which it's renowned but so many rotten fish eggs. No one knows, after all, whether the EU will ever be able to buy Iranian gas via Nabucco. No one knows whether the Central Asian "stans" have enough gas to supply Russia, China, and Turkey, not to mention India and Pakistan. No one knows whether any of their leaders will have the nerve to renege on their deals with Gazprom.

Ever since a 2008 British study determined that Turkmenistan may have natural gas reserves second only to Russia on the planet, the European Commission has been on a no-holds-barred tear to lure that country into delivering some of its future gas directly to Europe--and not through the Russian pipeline system either. Turkmenistan's inscrutable leader, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, just has to say the word, but despite the claims of EU officials that he has agreed to send some gas Europe-wards, he's never offered a public word of confirmation. No wonder: with Nabucco unbuilt and a pipeline from his country to China still under construction, Turkmenistan can play Pipelineistan games only with Russia and Iran. In fact, Russia essentially controls the flow of Turkmen gas for the next fifteen years.

Should Gurbanguly someday say the magic word--and assuming the Russians don't throw a monkey wrench into the works--he can marry Turkey, as the key transit country, with the EU and let them all sing Verdi till the sheep come home. In the meantime, angst is the name of the game in Europe (and so in Washington).

A declassified dossier from the FSB, the Russian heir to the KGB, is adamant: considering Nabucco's shortcomings, "Russia will remain the primary supplier of energy to Europe for the foreseeable future." Call it a matter of having your gas and processing it, too. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been making the point for years. If Europe tries to snub it, Russia will simply build its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants, to facilitate storage and transport, and sell its LNG all over the world.

Anyway it's worth paying attention to what the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute (where Putin earned his doctorate) has to say. According to the institute, Russia has only twenty years' worth of its own natural gas reserves left. Since Russia plans to sell up to 40 percent of its gas abroad, "Russian" gas may in the future actually mean Central Asian gas. All the more reason for the Russians to make sure that those massive Turkmen and other reserves flow north, not west.

Whatever Washington thinks, the Europeans know that energy independence from Russia is, in reality, inconceivable. Bottom line when it comes to natural gas: Europe needs everything--Nord Stream, South Stream and Nabucco. The bulk of the natural gas in this Pipelineistan maze may well turn out to be Central Asian anyway, and a substantial part could be Iranian, if the Obama administration ever normalizes relations with Iran.

That, then, is the current state of play in the European wing of Pipelineistan. Russia seems to have virtually guaranteed its status as the top gas supplier to Europe for the foreseeable future. But that brings us to Turkey, a key regional power for both the US and the EU. As President Obama has recognized, Turkey is both a real and a metaphorical bridge between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It is also an ideal transit country for carrying non-Russian gas to Europe and is now playing its own suitably complex Pipelineistan game.

Chances are that, like Ukhta in far off Siberia, you've never heard of Yumurtalik either. It's a fishing port squeezed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Taurus mountains, very close to Ceyhan, the terminal for two key nodes of Pipelineistan: the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline from Iraq and the monster BTC pipeline. Turkey wants to turn Yumurtalik-Ceyhan into nothing less than the Rotterdam of the Mediterranean.

Even as it dreams of future EU membership, however, Turkey worries about antagonizing Moscow. And yet, being aboard the Nabucco Express and already fully committed to the functioning BTC pipeline puts the country on a potential collision course with Russia, its largest trading partner. Of course, this does not displease Washington.

On the other hand, the Turkish leadership draws ever closer to Iran, which provides 38 percent of Turkey's oil and 25 percent of its natural gas. Ankara and Tehran also have geopolitical affinities (especially in fighting Kurdish separatism). Together, they offer the best alternative to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia) in terms of supplying Europe with Iranian natural gas. All this, of course, drives Washington nuts.

Needless to say, the Nabucco consortium itself would kill to have Iran as a gas supplier for the pipeline. They are also familiar with realpolitik: this could happen only with a Washington-blessed solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier. Iran, for its part, knows well how to seduce Europe. Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), has insisted Iran is Europe's "sole option" for the success of Nabucco.

Is Russia just watching all this gas go by? Of course not. In October 2007, Putin signed a key agreement with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: if Iran cannot sell its gas to Nabucco--a likelihood, given the turbulence of American domestic politics and its foreign policy--Russia will buy it. Translation: Iranian gas could end up, like Central Asian gas, heading for Europe as more "Russian" gas. With its European and Iranian policies at cross-purposes, Washington will not be amused.

When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to "rethink Nabucco" if the tricky negotiations for Turkey to enter the EU drag on forever, EU leaders got the message (as much as France and Germany may be against a "Europe without borders"). Pragmatically, most EU leaders know very well that they need excellent relations with Turkey to one day have access to the big prize, Iranian gas; and that puts Europe's energy and EU membership inclinations at loggerheads.

Last July in Ankara, Nabucco was formally launched by an inter-governmental agreement. The representatives of Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary were there. Obama's special Eurasian envoy, Richard Morningstar (a veteran of the BTC adventure), was there as well. The Central Asian stans were not there.

But crucially, Gurbanguly, ever the showman, finally made an entrance without ever leaving Turkmenistan, (almost) uttering the magic words in a meeting with his ministers in the capital, Ashgabat, on July 10: "Turkmenistan, staying committed to the principles of diversification of supply of its energy resources to the world markets, is going to use all available opportunities to participate in major international projects--such as, for example, [the] Nabucco project."

At the Vienna headquarters of Nabucco, the mantra remains: this is "no anti-Russian project." Still, everyone knows that Russia's leaders are eager to kill it, and not a soul, from Brussels to Vienna, Washington to Ashgabat, knows how to link Central Asia to Europe via a non-Russian pipeline, at the cost of more than $10 billion, without some assurance that Turkmeni, Kazakh, Azerbaijani and/or Iranian natural gas will be fully (or even partially) on board. Who would be foolish enough to invest that kind of money without some guarantee that hundreds of miles of aluminum tubes won't remain empty? You don't need Verdi to tell you this is one hell of a quirky plot for a global opera.

EU Investigators Debunk Saakashvili's Lies

2009-10-01T12:57:00.005-03:00

New Report on Russia-Georgia War

By Benjamin Bidder in Moscow
Zoom - AP - Der Spiegel

In this Sept. 4, 2008 photo, a girl plays near a ruined building in Tskhinvali.

The EU fact-finding mission on the Russia-Georgia war has published its findings in a much-anticipated report. The authors blame Georgia for the war but also assign partial responsibility to Russia. Both countries have reacted angrily to the findings, with the Russia ambassador to NATO saying the report is only "pseudo-balanced."

The truth about the war between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway republic of South Ossetia in August 2008 sounds somewhat convoluted, at least as expressed in the final report of the independent EU fact-finding mission charged with establishing the causes of the conflict. "Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive on 7/8 August could not be substantiated by the mission," reads the document, which was published Wednesday. To put it more simply: It was Georgia who started the war.

This is the conclusion that the team of European investigators, headed by the Swiss diplomat and Caucasus expert Heidi Tagliavini, have reached after spending almost a year visiting the Georgian capital Tbilisi, Moscow and the locations of the fighting in a bid to reconstruct the course of the conflict. Their findings fill some 1,000 pages.

Just a few days ago, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had insisted in an interview with US broadcaster CNN that no one took seriously reports that his country was responsible for the war. Responding to an interviewer question about a recent SPIEGEL story which reported that the EU committee had put the blame for the conflict on Georgia, Saakashvili said: "Everybody who was there, and there were serious people there, everybody knows what happened." According to Saakashvili's version of events, which he had distributed officially in a government report on the war, the night-time attack by Georgia on the breakaway region of South Ossetia on Aug. 7, 2008 was a preemptive strike directed against Russian armored columns which had supposedly already advanced into South Ossetia.

Already on the first day of the war, the brawny Georgian General Mamuka Kurashvili appeared on television in his dress uniform and boasted that Georgia had decided to "reestablish constitutional order in the entire region."

Indignant Reactions

The EU report, which is extensive, detailed and well-informed, makes clear that the Georgian claims are completely fabricated. "It was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked (South Ossetian capital) Tskhinvali" said Heidi Tagliavini, the mission head, in a statement. Although the EU commission tactfully avoided using the word "lie," the report implies that Saakashvili did not tell the truth about how the war started.

Tbilisi is now predictably outraged at the results of the fact-finding mission. Georgia did not by any means use "disproportionate force," stresses Georgian Reintegration Minister Temur Yakobashvili. "We see Russia's actions as aggression, because the country invaded the Tskhinvali region with its troops."

Russian politicians, for their part, feel that the report's conclusions strengthen their position. "If the commission has acknowledged that it was Georgia who started the war, as Russia has repeatedly said, we can only welcome such a conclusion," said Natalia Timakova, a spokeswoman for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

'Ambiguous Formulations'

Yet the triumphant mood in Moscow was tinged by a hint of bitterness. "The report has a major flaw," complained Sergei Makarov, a member of the Duma for the Kremlin party United Russia and a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. "It does not address the US's role in the conflict."

In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry also expressed its resentment about "ambiguous formulations" in the report -- a reference to passages in which the authors make it clear that they consider Russia to have been partly responsible for escalating the conflict. The report concludes that the mass issuing of Russian passports to South Ossetians, as well as to residents of another breakaway republic of Abkhazia, was in violation of international law. It also criticizes the fact that Moscow trained and armed South Ossetian troops.

In addition, the report's authors conclude that the reason given by Russia to justify the campaign to its own population was completely unsubstantiated. The Russian authorities had claimed that the Georgians had committed a previously planned genocide against the South Ossetian people. According to Kremlin propaganda, the Georgian offensive caused 2,000 deaths in a single night. Russia later reduced its figure for total South Ossetian civilian casualties to 162. "Although it should be admitted that it is not easy to decide where the line must be drawn, it seems, however, that much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defense," the European investigators conclude.

Sentences like this one have irritated the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin. "This report has a pseudo-balanced approach," Rogozin told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "All the parties are criticized a little, including the Ossetians, the Russians and Georgia's Western patrons. But one no longer sees the wood for the trees."

According to Rogozin, the key thing is that the EU mission has clearly stated that Georgia started the hostilities. "But if the Russian military response has been criticized as being too harsh, then this is surely a matter of taste," Rogozin complained. "I certainly think it was still too lax."

Semantics of Turban

2009-09-17T13:04:00.006-03:00

Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim-Khan (1880-1944), Emir of Bukhara, Uzbekistan, photographed by Prokudin-Gorskii in 1911 wearing a blue chapan and a turban

Head-dress as part of traditional costume performs several functions: protective, guarding, cosmogonical and decorative; and it serves as indication of age, gender and status. It expresses personality of its owner. Typical medieval men's head-dress in oriental Muslim countries was turban worn by people of all ages and groups of society. Turban was also an important detail in the attire of clergy. It became the most important exterior feature indicating confessional belonging of Muslims.

Legends have it that the first person to wear turban was Prophet Adam. Historians link its origin to ancient Arabia: in the hot climate of desert it protected the heads of nomadic Semitic tribes from wind and scorching sun. Being included into a mandatory set of Muslim attire, turban has changed its semantics and turned into a sign showing devotion to Islam. Religious significance of this head-dress (amoma, imama in Arabic) was stipulated in a khadith: "Imama embodies dignity of the faithful".

Muslim lawyers, fakikh, dedicated special treatises discussing the rules of making and wearing of imama. In Arab Caliphate not only Muslims, but also people of other confessions were obliged to wear turban. Its colour was officially determined and had to be different from Muslim turbans that were predominantly white. Christians could be distinguished by deep-blue turbans, Jews wore yellow and fire-worshipers red. With time the meaning of turban expanded: imama also became the sign of state power and was worn during enthronement or coming in office, and was included into the set of honorary attire.

With the adoption of Islam, imama became compulsory head-dress also for the nations conquered by Arabs, but at the beginning was considered to be an item that only senior clergy were privileged to wear.

Only in the 13th century, following a special decree of Mukhammed II Ala-Ad-Deen who ruled in Iran, Azerbaijan, Khorasan and other territories in 1200-1220, all his subjects were obliged to wear turban. Since then, turban "entrenched" itself among all segments of medieval feudal Muslim society in Middle Eastern region. It was not permitted to visit a mosque or a cemetery or to pray without wearing a turban. As boys turned to men, their children's hats were replaced with a turban. Taking a turban off one's head when meeting a sheikh demonstrated reverence and respect for the cleric (1, pp. 17-21). One was disgraced if his turban was taken away.

The 15th-l6th century texts from Khorasan and Maverannakhr offer different terms to name the headdress: amoma, imama, salla, dastor, futa... And these names determine its social association as well. Amo-ma/imama is the name used predominantly to refer to turban worn by senior clergy - sheikhs and imams (prayer leaders). Dastor is a parade turban worn on festive or formal occasions mainly by feudal nobility and rulers. Futa is a small turban worn by ordinary people - craftsmen, retail traders and ordinary townsfolk. It has to be noted specifically that turban in the 15th-16th century Khorasan and Maverannakhr was considered to be purely urban head-dress, whereas nomadic people preferred felt hats of different shape and ornamentation (except women who wore turban-like headdress from ancient times) (2, pp. 13-17).

Structurally, Khorasan or Central Asian turban consists of two parts: a small cone-shaped hat called tokiya or kulokha, the height of which varied depending on the current fashion and the length of turban itself -a long piece of fabric wrapped around the hat or kulokha. The manner of wearing a turban, its colour and size gave and indication of a person's social status.

Representatives of secular nobility - khans, sultans, emirs and courtiers - wore a medium size turban that could be wrapped in several different ways. Their turbans were of two kinds: formal (dastor) and one for everyday (futa). "When they reported to Khoja Akhrar that his elder son Khoji Kalon arrived... he removed a futa from his head and replaced it with dastor, and when his son departed he put on his futa again" (3, p. 74).

In the 15 th century dastor was made of fine Indian muslin, silk or other fabric (brocade) of white colour arfd wrapped around a tokiya or kulokha in small puffed folds, with one end at the top hanging loose and resembling a fan. The fabric was wrapped around kulokha so as to cover two thirds of it. The number of turns and puffiness depended on fashion and personality. Sultan Khusain, a Temurid, the ruler of Herat, known for his sloppiness, "sometimes on holidays went to the prayer wearing a small flat turban, poorly wrapped in three turns with a heron's feather stuck into it" (4, pp. 172-173), whereas Nizamaddin, Kazi of Khorasan, "persevered in the splendour of his turban and attire..., so that even the most intent eye could not make head or tail of the folds in his turban that reached extraordinary dimensions" (5, pp. 205-206). A contemporary and the teacher of Alisher Navoi and a prominent philosopher and poet Jami who was also a spiritual mentor of Herat society and a recognized Sufi sheikh, was modest in his daily and personal life. According to Vasifi, he wore a "khoja-ubaydi" hat, around which a turban of "the most negligible size" was wrapped. Modesty of his clothing even resulted in confusing and funny situations: once he was mistaken for his own servant (5, p. 463).

During the second half of the 15th century dastor was wrapped four times without folds, ends down (4, p. 33). In the 16th century Maverannakhr the shape of a turban became taller and neater, and the number of folds increased as people started using finer fabrics, predominantly striped, and a turban was wrapped in such a way that the fabric pattern created a chess design (6, Table 16, Fig. 37, 38). The art of wrapping a turban was complicated one and required certain skills; therefore there existed special servants called dastorbands who were on staff of noble people.

Turban of nobility was adorned with gems and plumage that served both to decorate and protect. Heron feathers were of particular high value, as they were also a symbol of power. Such turban with an egret-plume of heron feathers is pictured on the portrait of Sultan Khusain Bpkara wrought by the famous miniature painter from Herat Kamoliddin Bekhzad. Whereas dastor had to be white, in everyday life nobility could wear coloured futa. Descendants of the Prophet wore turbans of green silk. In the days of mourning people put on black or deep-blue turbans.

Turban made of valuable textiles (muslin, silk, taffeta) was presented as gift and the token of particular favour. Texts often mention that a khan or sultan, as a sign of his favour, presented somebody with a turban, along with other honorary pieces of attire such as gown and sash (Yadzi, Shami, Babur). For example, as evidenced by Nizami Aruzi Samarqandi, Abu Reikhan Beru-ni received from Sultan Makhmud, among other gifts, a brocade turban that had a status of an honorary gift. It was known as dastor-i-kasad.

Turban of senior clergy stood out by its large dimensions - it was significantly larger than turbans worn by people from other groups of society - and had to be glaringly snow-white. A Sufi saw Sheikh Sidi Omar ibn al-Farid in his dream wearing "a huge turban" (8, p. 208). Sufis associated white colour with Islam, as it, like imama itself, was semiotic "bi" - the sign of confessional affiliation, and at the same time was a symbol of purification and spiritual purity (9). In early Temurid period, judging by Herat miniature painting of Bay-sonkur period, clerical turban was wrapped in very voluminous folds around a short quilted cone-shaped kulokha, leaving it one third open at the top. The upper long end of the turban, aloka, was left loose on the right, wrapped around the neck, tucked through the lower turn and hang down on the shoulder. Turban was worn to leave part of the forehead and ears open.

Turban was part of dervish's clothing. Some Central Asian Sufi orders exercised the rite of girdling called shadd, which signified initiation into the dervish brotherhood; the rite involved wrapping one's head with a turban or body with a sash (7, p. 153). A turban on dervish's head meant that he has mastered professional skills sufficiently well and is prepared for the life of a Sufi. Sufic turbans were colored to match the colour of a particular Sufi order. The miniatures of Herat and Maverannakhr show dervish's turban wrapped in two turns around a short hat. According to Navoi, the hat was made of felt and turban of wool (1, p. 19).

The length of a turban should be at least 8 meters, as its other meaning was to serve as a shroud. Should death meet a traveler on the road, the turban fabric would become his cerement. Thus, turban is not only a sign of faith, but also a constant reminder of death and transience of existence.

According to the vakf document of Khusein Khorezmi, in the 15th century Samarqand the length of dervish's turban was 5 zar and was made of taffeta (3, p. 72).

Ordinary people wore a small turban made of cotton, wool or coarse calico of different colours. In the 18th-19th centuries it could be made of checked fabrics or fabrics with other designs.

Due to its high value, a turban could serve as a collateral, for instance, in a drinking shop (Vasifi), and, according to the keen observation of A. Vamberi, function as a "toilet-bad" in which one could keep money, letters, medicines or keys: "He immediately produced the key to the upper room from his dastor" (5).

According to the ancient beliefs, human body was a symbolic representation of the idea of the universe, according to which the world is divided into three parts - the top, the bottom and the middle - accentuated in a costume by a head-dress, collar and belt. Based on these ideas, turban also symbolized the sky (cosmos), and it was no accident that its shape was dome-like.

Thus, in the costume of the 15 th-16th century Kho-rasan and Maverannakhr men's turban was a multifunctional and polysemantic dead-dress, reflecting the entire spectrum of information about its wearer, his ideological, moral, aesthetic, social and age characteristics, Artistic and aesthetic image of turban was based on a balanced proportion between tokiya or kulokha and a fabric wrapped around it, its blinding whiteness and the shape of its folds, the form and outline of which had much in common with grooved dome surface of the beautiful architectural structures of Middle East, giving the Muslim attire a particular beauty and gracefullness.

Zukhra Rakhimova, Sa'nat 2008, Vol. 2

Similarities along the Silk Road

2009-09-10T18:11:00.003-03:00

The renowned Registan Sq., in Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Jamee Mosque in Herat, western Afghanistan

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

2009-08-05T17:17:00.010-03:00

Erik Prince. Photo courtesy: Wired

By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater's motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.

The former employee, identified in the court documents as "John Doe #2," is a former member of Blackwater's management team, according to a source close to the case. Doe #2 alleges in a sworn declaration that, based on information provided to him by former colleagues, "it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct." John Doe #2 says he worked at Blackwater for four years; his identity is concealed in the sworn declaration because he "fear[s] violence against me in retaliation for submitting this Declaration." He also alleges, "On several occasions after my departure from Mr. Prince's employ, Mr. Prince's management has personally threatened me with death and violence."

In a separate sworn statement, the former US marine who worked for Blackwater in Iraq alleges that he has "learned from my Blackwater colleagues and former colleagues that one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information about Erik Prince and Blackwater have been killed in suspicious circumstances." Identified as "John Doe #1," he says he "joined Blackwater and deployed to Iraq to guard State Department and other American government personnel." It is not clear if Doe #1 is still working with the company as he states he is "scheduled to deploy in the immediate future to Iraq." Like Doe #2, he states that he fears "violence" against him for "submitting this Declaration." No further details on the alleged murder(s) are provided.

"Mr. Prince feared, and continues to fear, that the federal authorities will detect and prosecute his various criminal deeds," states Doe #2. "On more than one occasion, Mr. Prince and his top managers gave orders to destroy emails and other documents. Many incriminating videotapes, documents and emails have been shredded and destroyed."

Blackwater Logo: Wikipedia

The Nation cannot independently verify the identities of the two individuals, their roles at Blackwater or what motivated them to provide sworn testimony in these civil cases. Both individuals state that they have previously cooperated with federal prosecutors conducting a criminal inquiry into Blackwater.

"It's a pending investigation, so we cannot comment on any matters in front of a Grand Jury or if a Grand Jury even exists on these matters," John Roth, the spokesperson for the US Attorney's office in the District of Columbia, told The Nation. "It would be a crime if we did that." Asked specifically about whether there is a criminal investigation into Prince regarding the murder allegations and other charges, Roth said: "We would not be able to comment on what we are or are not doing in regards to any possible investigation involving an uncharged individual."

The Nation repeatedly attempted to contact spokespeople for Prince or his companies at numerous email addresses and telephone numbers. When a company representative was reached by phone and asked to comment, she said, "Unfortunately no one can help you in that area." The representative then said that she would pass along The Nation's request. As this article goes to press, no company representative has responded further to The Nation.

Doe #2 states in the declaration that he has also provided the information contained in his statement "in grand jury proceedings convened by the United States Department of Justice." Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury in the aftermath of the September 16, 2007, Nisour Square shootings in Baghdad, which left seventeen Iraqis dead. Five Blackwater employees are awaiting trial on several manslaughter charges and a sixth, Jeremy Ridgeway, has already pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempting to commit manslaughter and is cooperating with prosecutors. It is not clear whether Doe #2 testified in front of the Nisour Square grand jury or in front of a separate grand jury.

The two declarations are each five pages long and contain a series of devastating allegations concerning Erik Prince and his network of companies, which now operate under the banner of Xe Services LLC. Among those leveled by Doe #2 is that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe":

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."

Among the additional allegations made by Doe #1 is that "Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq." He states that he personally witnessed weapons being "pulled out" from dog food bags. Doe #2 alleges that "Prince and his employees arranged for the weapons to be polywrapped and smuggled into Iraq on Mr. Prince's private planes, which operated under the name Presidential Airlines," adding that Prince "generated substantial revenues from participating in the illegal arms trade."

Doe #2 states: "Using his various companies, [Prince] procured and distributed various weapons, including unlawful weapons such as sawed off semi-automatic machine guns with silencers, through unlawful channels of distribution." Blackwater "was not abiding by the terms of the contract with the State Department and was deceiving the State Department," according to Doe #1.

This is not the first time an allegation has surfaced that Blackwater used dog food bags to smuggle weapons into Iraq. ABC News's Brian Ross reported in November 2008 that a "federal grand jury in North Carolina is investigating allegations the controversial private security firm Blackwater illegally shipped assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in large sacks of dog food." Another former Blackwater employee has also confirmed this information to The Nation.

Both individuals allege that Prince and Blackwater deployed individuals to Iraq who, in the words of Doe #1, "were not properly vetted and cleared by the State Department." Doe #2 adds that "Prince ignored the advice and pleas from certain employees, who sought to stop the unnecessary killing of innocent Iraqis." Doe #2 further states that some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy "unfit men" and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were "the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to 'kill ragheads' or achieve 'kills' or 'body counts,'" as well as "excessive drinking" and "steroid use." However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, "Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to 'stop costing the company money.'"

Escorts of Bremer in Iraq, 36 men and 3 helicopters. Photo courtesy: Intelpage

Doe #2 also says Prince "repeatedly ignored the assessments done by mental health professionals, and instead terminated those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men." He says Prince and then-company president Gary Jackson "hid from Department of State the fact that they were deploying men to Iraq over the objections of mental health professionals and security professionals in the field," saying they "knew the men being deployed were not suitable candidates for carrying lethal weaponry, but did not care because deployments meant more money."

Doe #1 states that "Blackwater knew that certain of its personnel intentionally used excessive and unjustified deadly force, and in some instances used unauthorized weapons, to kill or seriously injure innocent Iraqi civilians." He concludes, "Blackwater did nothing to stop this misconduct." Doe #1 states that he "personally observed multiple incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using unnecessary, excessive and unjustified deadly force." He then cites several specific examples of Blackwater personnel firing at civilians, killing or "seriously" wounding them, and then failing to report the incidents to the State Department.

Doe #1 also alleges that "all of these incidents of excessive force were initially videotaped and voice recorded," but that "Immediately after the day concluded, we would watch the video in a session called a 'hot wash.' Immediately after the hotwashing, the video was erased to prevent anyone other than Blackwater personnel seeing what had actually occurred." Blackwater, he says, "did not provide the video to the State Department."

Doe #2 expands on the issue of unconventional weapons, alleging Prince "made available to his employees in Iraq various weapons not authorized by the United States contracting authorities, such as hand grenades and hand grenade launchers. Mr. Prince's employees repeatedly used this illegal weaponry in Iraq, unnecessarily killing scores of innocent Iraqis." Specifically, he alleges that Prince "obtained illegal ammunition from an American company called LeMas. This company sold ammunition designed to explode after penetrating within the human body. Mr. Prince's employees repeatedly used this illegal ammunition in Iraq to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis."

Blackwater has gone through an intricate rebranding process in the twelve years it has been in business, changing its name and logo several times. Prince also has created more than a dozen affiliate companies, some of which are registered offshore and whose operations are shrouded in secrecy. According to Doe #2, "Prince created and operated this web of companies in order to obscure wrongdoing, fraud and other crimes."

"For example, Mr. Prince transferred funds from one company (Blackwater) to another (Greystone) whenever necessary to avoid detection of his money laundering and tax evasion schemes." He added: "Mr. Prince contributed his personal wealth to fund the operations of the Prince companies whenever he deemed such funding necessary. Likewise, Mr. Prince took funds out of the Prince companies and placed the funds in his personal accounts at will."

Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, "If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians." Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.

"Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn't exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated," Kucinich said.

A hearing before Judge Ellis in the civil cases against Blackwater is scheduled for August 7.

Opposition Leader Drops Out of Kyrgyz Election

2009-07-23T20:21:00.007-03:00

MOSCOW — The leading opposition candidate in Kyrgyzstan essentially withdrew from the presidential race on Thursday even before voting had concluded, asserting that widespread fraud had assured the incumbent’s victory.

The candidate, Almazbek Atambaev, a former prime minister, called on the public and international organizations to reject the election as unlawful. Mr. Atambaev instructed supporters who were working as observers at polling and vote-counting stations to leave, and he demanded that a new election be organized.

“The authorities understood that they would lose an honest and free election, which is why they relied on force — relied on force against their own people!” Mr. Atambaev said in a statement.

Election officials dismissed his accusations, saying that the balloting was legitimate. Official results were not expected to be released until Friday morning.

The Russian state news agency said an exit poll showed the incumbent, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, with 67 percent of the vote, and Mr. Atambaev with 13 percent. The opposition called the exit poll false and said it planned to hold street protests against the election. The government said such actions were illegal and would be blocked.

Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia that is host to an important American military base that supports operations in Afghanistan, has regularly faced political turmoil in recent years. It has also been the site of a tug of war between the United States and Russia over influence in Central Asia.

Kyrgyz opposition leader Almazbek Atambaev, center, spoke at a rally in Bishkek on Thursday after the closing of the presidential vote.

Mr. Bakiyev took power after the so-called Tulip Revolution of 2005, which ousted a government that was considered corrupt.

He had been expected to win a second term easily, though there was disagreement in Kyrgyzstan over why. His supporters said he had steered his poor country, which has five million people, through difficult times caused by the financial crisis and had garnered strong popularity.

The opposition has derided him as an autocrat who has persecuted opposition leaders and independent journalists. Many have been arrested, attacked and even killed over the past year.

Mr. Bakiyev has accused the opposition of airing phony charges of vote-rigging in an effort to explain away its lack of popularity. Casting his ballot on Thursday, he declared that the voting would be fair, saying that the Kyrgyz people cared about democracy.

“Each person understands that the fate of the nation, and his own future, depends on his choice,” the president said.

Officials of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were in Kyrgyzstan to monitor the election, and they said they would deliver a preliminary report on Friday.

American officials have generally refrained from criticizing the Kyrgyz government in recent months. They have focused on ensuring that the United States military can remain at the air base on the outskirts of the capital, Bishkek.

In February, Mr. Bakiyev announced that he was closing the base, apparently at the behest of Moscow. But he later reversed his decision after lobbying by the Washington, which agreed to pay more rent.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY, Published NYT July 23, 2009

Interview with Abkhazian President Sergei Bagapsch

2009-07-16T13:45:00.003-03:00

“We Won't Beg for Diplomatic Recognition”

Once a popular holiday getaway for the communist elite, tiny Abkhazia is now a de-facto republic at odds with most of the world. President Sergei Bagapsh spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about his nation's plans, friends and foes -- and prime real estate.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Other than Russia, your neighboring Black Sea states do not recognize Abkhazia as a nation. Are you isolated?

Sergei Bagapsch: We are a small country with around 242,000 inhabitants. At the moment, our connections with Russia suffice to allow us to develop our economy. Of course, we would be happy if Europe was more open toward us. But I think that's just a question of time. At the moment, we are trying to develop economic relationships with Iran, Jordan, Turkey and Belarus. We won't beg for diplomatic recognition.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Up until now, only Russia and Nicaragua have recognized your republic. Did that change anything for the Abkhazian people?

Bagapsch: The most important thing is that our people now know they can have normal lives. We know that it takes time to build an independent state. And we want a state based on a constitution and founded on the norms of international law. That requires new laws and a new way of thinking.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does the Obama administration approach you differently to that of former US President George W. Bush, who called on Abkhazia to stick with Georgia?

Bagapsch: Up until now, there's been no trace of anything like that. The Americans first need to be clear about how they want to deal with the ongoing crisis in Georgia. Experts and political scientists are starting to doubt whether it's a good idea to continue to pay such respect to Georgia's concept of "territorial integrity." That's a good start.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Before the Caucasus war with Georgia in August 2008, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier came to visit Abkhazia. He wanted to try to prevent the impending war. Why do you think his mission failed?

Bagapsch: Steinmeier really impressed me. He's an experienced and talented politician. However, we couldn't accept his suggestion that we approach the negotiations with Georgia without preconditions. Negotiations like that could not have changed the fact that Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was preparing for military aggression against South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Even now, talks with Georgia's leadership are completely useless.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Saakashvili has said that the war is not yet over. Is there any danger of more fighting in South Ossetia and Abkhazia?

Bagapsch: As long as Saakashvili is in charge in Georgia, there will be that danger. Where the opposition is suppressed, there will be a build-up of explosive political tension. And then there are going to be attempts to release that tension onto an external enemy. If Saakashvili takes us on again, he will be destroyed. The man is a natural-born aggressor.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But is Saakashvili the only problem? Doesn't his political opposition also dread having to admit that they have lost Abkhazia for good?

Bagapsch: It will certainly take decades before Georgia will really see what has been going on. The current generation wants to prolong the illusion that Abkhazia is Georgia and that the Abkhazians are Georgians. If European politicians -- German politicians included -- were more long-sighted and more courageous, they might be able to help Georgia free itself of an illusion that only does it harm. The sooner that happens, the sooner we will have the neighborly relations with Georgia that we want.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the Georgia-Abkhazia war in 1992-1993, around 200,000 Georgians fled from Abkhazia. Why can't these people return?

Bagapsch: We have let around 60,000 Georgians return to the Gali district. But the return of all the Georgians who left -- including the ones who fought against us -- could lead to war here. Those who started the Georgian invasion of Abkhazia in 1992 should be held responsible for the fate of those refugees. Rather than contributing toward Georgia's rearmament, the West would be better off giving money to Georgia for the reintegration of the refugees -- and for the reintegration of the refugees in their own Georgian territory, because they all emigrated from Georgia to Abkhazia in the first place.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But isn't it true that you are opposed to the return of those refugees because it would drastically alter your country's ethnic mix?

Bagapsch: That obviously plays a role. When the Georgians were here, we Abkhazians only made up 17 percent of the population. But the most important thing remains the irreconcilable political differences between our two nations. Unfortunately, Georgia is doing everything it can to prolong this conflict.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: There are Russian military bases in Abkhazia, Russian troops guard your external borders, and your currency is the ruble. And, then, you want the Russians to manage your railways for 10 years. Is it possible that you're getting just a little too dependent on Russia?

Bagapsch: We are dealing with the Russian railways because we have to modernize our own. We would be equally pleased to deal with the German railways if they were interested. In any case, there are no completely independent nations in this world. Liechtenstein is dependent on Switzerland, Luxembourg on France. We are all dependent on one another. Georgia is dependent on America; we are on Russia.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The opposition in Abkhazia is concerned that your small nation could turn into "a quasi-nation that lives off foreign financial deposits, like a parasite." Two-thirds of the Abkhazian budget comes from Russian grants. Doesn't that justify a certain degree of concern?

Bagapsch: No country in the world has developed without credit and outside help. Russia builds streets, schools, hospitals and churches -- and we are grateful for that.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You have suggested that foreigners be allowed to purchase real estate in Abkhazia, something that Abkhazian law has blocked until now. Isn't the fear that many Abkhazians have -- that they will be pushed out by rich Russians -- a legitimate one?

Bagapsch: We are discussing this issue. I have suggested that we look at the experiences other nations have had with this issue. Foreigners buy apartments in Spain: They relax there, pay taxes and bring money into the country. On the other hand, houses and land here are being sold to foreigners -- but not in accordance with the laws. As a result, we end up with protracted disputes that overburden our justice system. We need proper regulations. And, in the course of a sensible debate, we should be able to find a workable solution for Abkhazia.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What do you think things will be like for Abkhazia in, say, 10 or 20 years?

Bagapsch: We will be a wealthy, affluent nation because we will have succeeded in swiftly stimulating our economy. There are already British, Czech and Austrian investors who want to get involved here. We are modernizing our airport, and we will soon be able to accept flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg. That will definitely be interesting for German tourists, particularly the ones who may have already been here in the days of the former East Germany.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In December, there will be presidential elections in Abkhazia. Unlike in Russia, it is hard to predict the outcome. Four years ago, there were serious problems with vote counting, the results were considered suspect and there were massive protests. Have things gotten any better?

Bagapsch: Unlike in any other former member state of the Soviet Union, we have an opposition here and an adversarial press. That's good -- and it shows that we have chosen democracy.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But that adversarial press also complains of problems. In February, Inal Khashig, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Chegemskaya Pravda, was allegedly driven to a remote location by some of your friends and relatives. There, he was reportedly reminded of the fate of murdered Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. Does this sort of thing endanger the freedom of the press in Abkhazia?

Bagapsch: Absolutely not. In my years as president, I have never reacted to any written provocations. No one harassed Inal Khashig when he was criticizing the state. It was only when he wrote about my family -- and in a vulgar way -- that my relatives and a few of my close friends got angry. They sat him in the car, and they said to him: "Now it's not just about the president; now it's personal." But that's the Caucasus. Around here, you have to answer for insults like that.

Interview conducted by Uwe Klussmann in Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia
Der Spiegel, 07/16/2009

95 Percent of Bride Kidnappings in Ingushetia are Pre-Agreed

2009-07-07T16:29:00.003-03:00

The majority of bride kidnappings in Ingushetia take place upon prior agreement between the families of the would-be couple. According to Magomed Mutsolgov, a member of the advisory board on human rights in Russia and leader of the human rights NGO "Mashr", only five percent of such kidnappings end with opening of criminal cases.

"In recent years, kidnapping of brides became popular for two reasons: financial - it's easier to agree and kidnap a bride. In this case, many financial expenses are excluded," Mr Mutsolgov explained to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent. His second reason is that in this manner all the sisters have chance to get married.

The human rights activist notes that elders of Ingushetia are actively voicing to stop this practice. Magomed Mutsolgov has added that one should not equate a kidnapping with a "bride stealing" and explained: "A kidnapping is a distress, while a bride stealing in most cases ends in a good big wedding party."

According to the Investigatory Department Ingushetia of the Investigatory Committee at the Prosecutor's Office (ICPO) of the Russian Federation, this year, the republic sees fewer kidnappings of women with the aim of marriage. In the first five months of 2009, Ingushetia registered 18 such cases. Under the Russian legislation "bride-stealing" is same punishable as a kidnapping and entails criminal liability. The Department believes that this tradition should be completely eradicated.

Dmitry Florin; Source: CK correspondent, jul 03 2009, 11:00

Armed mobs spread ethnic strife in China's west

2009-07-07T12:30:00.004-03:00

Death toll rises to 156 in Urumqi riot in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

By WILLIAM FOREMAN, Associated Press Writer William Foreman, Associated Press Writer – 1 min ago

URUMQI, China – Mobs of Han Chinese wielding meat cleavers and clubs and groups of Muslim Uighur men beat people in the streets of the capital of China's Xinjiang region Tuesday. The government imposed a curfew as it tried to stem communal violence after a riot that killed at least 156 people.

Members of the Uighur ethnic group attacked people near the Urumqi's railway station, and women in headscarves protested the arrests of husbands and sons in another part of the city. Meanwhile, for much of the afternoon, a mob of 1,000 mostly young Han Chinese holding cleavers and clubs and chanting "Defend the Country" tore through streets trying to get to a Uighur neighborhood until they were repulsed by police firing tear gas.

Panic and anger bubbled up amid the suspicion in Urumqi (pronounced uh-ROOM-chee). In some neighborhoods, Han Chinese — China's majority ethnic group — armed themselves with pieces of lumber and shovels to defend themselves. People bought up bottled water out of fear, as one resident said, that "the Uighurs might poison the water."

The outbursts happened despite swarms of paramilitary and riot police enforcing a dragnet that state media said led to the arrest more than 1,400 participants in Sunday's riot, the worst ethnic violence in the often tense region in decades.

Trying to control the message, the government has slowed mobile phone and Internet services, blocked Twitter — whose servers are overseas — and censored Chinese social networking and news sites and accused Uighurs living in exile of inciting Sunday's riot. State media coverage, however, carried graphic footage and pictures of the unrest _showing mainly Han Chinese victims and stoking the anger.

The violence is a further embarrassment for a Chinese leadership preparing for the 60th anniversary of communist rule in October and calling for the creation of a "harmonious society" to celebrate. Years of rapid development have failed to smooth over the ethnic fault lines in Xinjiang, where the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) have watched growing numbers of Han Chinese move in.

Wang Lequan, Xinjiang's Communist Party secretary, declared a curfew in all but name, imposing traffic restrictions and ordering people off the streets from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. Wednesday "to avoid further chaos."

"It is needed for the overall situation. I hope people pay great attention and act immediately," he said in an announcement broadcast on Xinjiang television.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang blamed the violence on Rebiya Kadeer, the U.S.-exiled Uighur leader.

"Using violence, making rumors, and distorting facts are what cowards do because they are afraid to see social stability and ethnic solidarity in Xinjiang," he told a regular news conference.

Qin said Kadeer was behind the violence, adding "she has committed crimes that jeopardize national security." Evidence had been found against her, Qin said, but refused to give details.

Sunday's riot started as a peaceful demonstration by Uighurs over a deadly fight at a factory in eastern China between Han Chinese and Uighur workers. It then spiraled out of control, as mainly Uighur groups beat people and set fire to vehicles and shops belonging to Han Chinese.

On Tuesday, some among the Han Chinese mob, who were retreating from the tear gas, were met by Urumqi's Communist Party leader Li Zhi, who climbed atop a police vehicle and started chanting with the crowd. Li pumped his fists, beat his chest, and urged the crowd to strike down Kadeer, the 62-year-old Uighur leader.

"Those Muslims killed so many of our people. We just can't let that happen," said one man in the crowd, surnamed Liu. He carried a long wooden stick and said the Han Chinese were forced to take up arms. People walked by with bloodshot eyes from the tear gas.

To the east, on Xingfu road, Han Chinese residents stoned a car with two Uighurs inside until it crashed, pulling one passenger out and beating him until police arrived, residents said.

Elsewhere in the city, about 200 people, mostly women in traditional headscarves, took to the streets in another neighborhood, wailing for the release of their sons and husbands in the crackdown and confronting lines of paramilitary police. The women said police came through their neighborhood Monday night and strip-searched men to check for cuts and other signs of fighting before hauling them away.

"My husband was detained at gunpoint. They were hitting people, they were stripping people naked. My husband was scared so he locked the door, but the police broke down the door and took him away," said a woman, who gave her name as Aynir. She said about 300 people were arrested in the market in the southern section of town.

The protesters briefly scuffled with paramilitary police, who pushed them back with long sticks before both sides retreated.

Foreign reporters on a government-run tour of the riot's aftermath witnessed the protest and without their presence, the incident might have gone unreported given the media controls.

Groups of 10 or so Uighur men with bricks and knives attacked Han Chinese passers-by and shop-owners midday outside the city's southern railway station, until police ran them off, witnesses said.

"They were using everything for weapons, like bricks, sticks and cleavers," said a Mr. Ma, an employee at the Dicos fast-food restaurant nearby. "Whenever the rioters saw someone on the street, they would ask 'are you a Uighur?' If they kept silent or couldn't answer in the Uighur language, they would get beaten or killed."

It was not immediately clear if anyone was killed in those reported attacks.

Li, the Communist Party official, told a news conference that more than 1,000 people had been detained as of early Tuesday and suggested more arrests were under way. "The number is changing all the time. We will let those who did not commit serious crimes go back to their work units."

The official Xinhua News Agency said earlier Tuesday that 1,434 suspects had been arrested, and that checkpoints had been set up to stop rioters from escaping.

Officials at the news conference said they could not give a breakdown of how many of the dead were Uighurs and how many were Han Chinese.

Sunday's riot started as a peaceful demonstration by 1,000 to 3,000 people protesting the June 25 deaths of Uighur factory workers killed in a brawl in the southern Chinese city of Shaoguan. Xinhua said two died. Messages circulating on Internet sites popular with Uighurs put the figure higher, raising tensions in Xinjiang.

In a sign the government was trying to address communal grievances, Xinhua announced Tuesday that 13 people had been arrested over the factory fight, including three from Xinjiang. Two others were arrested for spreading rumors on the Internet that Xinjiang employees had raped two female workers, the report said, citing a local police deputy director.

The disturbances in Xinjiang carry reminders of the widespread anti-Chinese protests that shook Tibet last year and have left large parts of western China living with police checkpoints and tightened security. Like the Tibetans, Uighur unrest has not been muted by rapid economic development, though the government publicly is unwilling to address ethnic tensions.

The EU Swings to the Right

2009-06-12T15:03:00.000-03:00

European Parliament Election Results by Country

The June 4-7 European Parliament elections delivered a setback for the European left and gains for center-right and right-wing parties across the continent. SPIEGEL ONLINE gives an overview of the results by country.

The 2009 elections to the European Parliament were marked by historically low voter turnout and victories for center-right and right-wing parties. SPIEGEL ONLINE provides a country-by-country breakdown of the election results.

In Austria, the ruling Social Democrats (SPÖ) suffered a serious setback. The SPÖ fell to 23.8 percent, a drop of more than 9 percent, giving it its worst-ever result in a nationwide election. The Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), which is in a grand coalition government with the SPÖ, came first with 29.7 percent, a drop of about three percentage points compared to 2004. A party founded by the euroskeptic journalist and politician Hans-Peter Martin gained 4 percent to win 17.9 percent of the vote, making it the third strongest party. The right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) won just over 13 percent, a gain of nearly seven percentage points, while the Greens slipped from over 12 percent in 2004 to just 9.5 percent. The Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), a right-wing populist party founded by the late Jörg Haider, got just 4.7 percent and failed to make the 5 percent hurdle.

In Belgium, the ruling Christian Democrats came out on top, winning 15 percent, ahead of the Liberal Democrats at 13 percent. The far-right Vlaams Belang or Flemish Interest Party was the obvious loser, falling from 14 to 10 percent, about the same level as the francophone Socialist Party (PS). The Green Party Ecolo, meanwhile, more than doubled its support to 8 percent.

In Bulgaria, the ruling left-leaning Coalition for Bulgaria alliance suffered a setback, winning only around 19 percent of the vote according to preliminary results. The conservative opposition party GERB came first with around 26 percent, while the euroskeptic nationalists of the Ataka Party won more than 11 percent. The election was overshadowed by allegations of vote-rigging, with reports that votes had been bought. The going price for a vote was up to 40 leva (€20), the state radio reported. Experts from the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia had calculated in the run-up to the election that the parties would spend at least €6 million buying votes.

The conservative opposition Democratic Rally (DISY), on the Greek half of Cyprus, had the strongest showing with 36 percent. (The Greek half of Cyprus is the only side that belongs to the EU.) The incumbent, left-leaning Progress Party of Working People (AKEL) received a shade less support at 35 percent.

In the Czech Republic, the conservative Civic Democratic Party (ODS) succeeded in defending its position as the leading party. According to preliminary results, ODS garnered slightly more than 31 percent of the vote, followed by the center-left Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD) with around 22 percent and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM), which got 14 percent. In addition, the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) cleared the 5 percent hurdle to enter the parliament with around 8 percent of the votes. Until new elections are held in October, the Czech Republic is to be led by a crossbench cabinet of experts led by Prime Minister Jan Fischer. The center-right government of ODS politician Mirek Topolanek fell in March following a vote of no confidence in parliament.

In Denmark, the right-wing populist, anti-immigrant Danish People's Party (DVP) led the election. The party increased its share of the vote from 6.8 percent in the last EU election to 15 percent. Since 2001, the party has been the largest in the populist minority government in Copenhagen and is also considered the driving force behind Denmark's tightening of its policies towards foreigners living in the country. The country's opposition Social Democrats suffered a sharp drop at the polling booth, falling from 32.6 percent to 21 percent. Nevertheless, the party still remains, by a slight margin, the country's biggest vote-getting party, just ahead of Prime Minster Lars Lokke Rasmussen's Liberal Party, which scored 20 percent. The Socialist People's Party (SF), the country's socialist and Green party, came in at 16 percent.

In Estonia, the opposition Center Party is out in front with 26 percent, followed by the Reform Party of the incumbent Prime Minister Andrus Ansip at 15 percent. The opposition conservative Res Publica party have 12 percent, while the Social Democrats, who are also members of the coalition government, are at around 9 percent.

In Finland, right-wing populists known for their anti-foreigner rhetoric gained massive ground. The True Finns party increased its share of the vote from 0.5 percent in the last European election in 2004 to 10 percent after joining forces in the election with the conservative Christian Democrats. The second biggest winner was the Green Party, which shares power in the Finnish government, scoring 12 percent in the election. The liberal Center Party of Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen scored around 20 percent and his conservative coalition partner, the National Coalition Party, got more than 22 percent, while the Social Democrats came in at 18 percent.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling conservative UMP party won an easy victory in France, getting 28 percent of the vote. The Socialist Party (PS), a sister party to Germany's Social Democrats, earned only 17 percent -- slightly more than Daniel Cohn-Bendit's Greens, who won 16 percent.

In Greece, according to preliminary results, the socialist PASOK party came in first, winning 36.7 percent of the vote. The conservative ruling party, New Democracy, only managed about 32 percent. The Greek communist KKE party, which won around 8 percent of the vote, will also be represented in the new European Parliament, as will the ultra-conservative LAOS party (around 7 percent), the left-wing Syriza (around 5 percent) and -- for the first time -- the Greek Greens (around 3.5 percent).

In Hungary, the conservative opposition won a landslide victory. According to preliminary results, the Fidesz Party of former Prime Minister Viktor Orban won around 56 percent. The ruling Socialists received only about 17 percent, putting it only slightly ahead of the right-wing Jobbik party, which won about 15 percent.

In Ireland, the incumbent conservative Fianna Fail party of Prime Minister Brian Cowen won only 24 percent, a loss of about 6 percentage points, which means it is no longer the strongest Irish political force in Brussels. Opposition party Fine Gael managed 29 percent. Observers see the results as a condemnation of the Cowen government's domestic policies; the financial crisis has hit Ireland hard. The head of the Libertas party, Declan Ganley, who wants to build momentum for a euroskeptic movement across the entire EU, won just over 5 percent, leaving Libertas in sixth place. The businessman has said he would end his campaign against the Lisbon Treaty if it were to fail at the polls. A referendum planned in Ireland for the fall to ratify the Lisbon Treaty now has a better chance of success.

In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's party easily won the most support. Early results showed his People of Freedom (PdL) party at 35 percent; its coalition partner the Northern League managed around 10 percent. The center-left opposition Democratic Party (PD), however, earned only 27 percent. They were hoping for signs of weakness in Berlusconi's party as a result of recent scandals involving the prime minister.

In Latvia, the parties of the country's Russian minority celebrated surprising successes. The left-wing party coalition Harmony Center garnered around 20 percent of the votes -- twice as many as predicted. The movement For Human Rights in United Latvia, which also represents the Russian minority, came in at around 10 percent. The election's winner, however, was the Civic Union, a party established only last year, with around 24 percent.

The governing conservative Homeland Union - Lithuania Christian Democrats (TS-LKD) party in Lithuania proved to be the strongest force in the European election. According to the first results, the party garnered around 25 percent of the vote, ahead of the left-leaning Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP), which came in at 19 percent.

In Luxembourg, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker's party not only won the national election, but also the European election. The Christian Social People's Party (CSV) garnered around 31 percent of the votes, the liberal Democratic Party (DP) and the social democratic Luxembourg Socialist Workers' Party (LSAP) both got 19 percent, while the Greens came in at 17 percent.

In Malta, too, the conservative ruling PN party came second with just 41 percent of the vote, while the opposition center-left Labour Party (PL) won first place with 55 percent. The PL obviously benefited from its criticism of the government over its allegedly lax attitude to the increasing number of immigrants arriving by boat from Africa.

In the Netherlands, one party was already celebrating victory before the EU-wide elections had finished, a party that until now hasn't counted as one of the country's established parties. Politician Geert Wilders' anti-Islam Freedom Party (PVV) has now become the country's second-largest political force in Brussels, garnering around 17 percent of the votes. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's center-right Christian Democrats (CDA) secured around 20 percent of the vote, and his coalition partner, the center-left Dutch Labor Party (PvDA), got 12 percent. Celebrating together with his supporters, Wilders said the Freedom Party's success was a vote against EU membership for Turkey, against an increasingly large and expensive European Union and against the Dutch government.

In Poland, the center-right incumbent parties have maintained their edge. Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Platform (PO) earned around 45 percent, while the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS), led by President Lech Kaczynski, ran a distant second place with 29 percent. The Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) won 12 percent, while the Polish People's Party (PSL) -- a partner in the ruling coalition which along with Civic Platform belongs to the conservative EPP grouping in the European Parliament -- earned 8 percent.

In Portugal, the ruling Socialist Party (PS) of Prime Minister Jose Socrates suffered an unexpected defeat, winning around 27 percent, a significant drop compared to its 2004 result of 44.5 percent. The opposition conservative Social Democratic Party (PSD) won around 32 percent, a similar result to 2004. The big winner in Portugal was the Left Bloc (BE), an association of radical left-wing parties and independents, which almost doubled its share of the vote to over 10 percent.

In Romania, preliminary results show the governing parties Democratic Liberal Party (PDL, center-right) and Social Democratic Party (PSD) each pulling in more than 30 percent of votes. Ranking third is the opposition, business-friendly National Liberal Party (PNL) with around 17 percent, followed by the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) with around 9 percent. The far-right Greater Romania Party (PRM) garnered around 7 percent and will again have seats in the European Parliament.

In Slovakia, the ruling party also came out ahead. The Direction - Social Democracy party of Prime Minister Robert Fico won 32 percent of the vote -- twice as much as the strongest opposition party, the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKU) headed by ex-Prime Minister Mikulas Dzurinda, which won 17 percent. The extreme-right Slovak National Party had a surprisingly weak showing with 5.5 percent. Voter turnout in Slovakia was particularly low, at 19.6 percent.

The conservative opposition did well in Slovenia, where the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) founded by former Prime Minister Janez Jansa came first with about 27 percent of the vote, according to initial results. The Social Democrats of acting Prime Minister Boris Pahor won more than 18 percent while the conservative New Slovenia party (NSI) won about 16 percent. The liberal parties LDS and Zares won around 11.5 percent and 10 percent respectively.

In Spain, the conservative People's Party won over 42 percent of the vote, gaining 23 seats, compared to the 38.5 percent (21 seats) won by the ruling center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The remaining seats were divided up between smaller and regional parties. The PSOE had already announced in the run-up to the election that it would be satisfied with a draw or a narrow defeat.

In Sweden the opposition Social Democrats came first, with 25 percent of the vote, while Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's conservative Moderate Party (MS) earned about 19 percent. The Greens doubled their support to about 11 percent. But the Pirate Party won the most spectacular victory -- by earning its first seat in Brussels with an 8 percent share of the vote. The Pirate Party wants more rights for Internet users and free flow of data on the Web. Support for the party rose in polls after a court verdict against the Internet data-swap site The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden. The four men in charge were sentenced to a €2.7 million fine and one year in jail for abetting data piracy.

Among the election's biggest losers was the Labour party in the United Kingdom, which saw its support drop from 19 seats in 2004 to 11 and won just 15.3 percent of the vote -- its worst post-war election result. It finished in third place behind the Conservatives (24 seats) and the euroskeptic United Kingdom Independence Party (13 seats). The vote is seen as a damning verdict on Labour, whose leader Gordon Brown is under increasing pressure to resign as prime minister amid an ongoing expense account scandal in the House of Commons. Fourth and fifth place went to the Liberals and the Greens with 13.9 percent and 8.7 percent respectively. The far-right British National Party won four seats -- the first time Britain has elected right-wing extremists to the European Parliament.

Source: Der Spiegel, 06/08/2009

Tens of thousands of people on the stadium demand resignation of Georgian president

2009-06-03T15:28:00.006-03:00

The Opposition leaders' board next to the Parliament, the 26th of May, 2009. Photo by "Caucasian Knot"

The central stadium of Tbilisi, Georgian capital, with the 80,000 capacity is overcrowded. Tens of thousands of opposition representatives and their supporters, including oppositionists from West Georgia headed by Giya Gachechiladze, well-known singer and brother of the opposition leader Levan Gachechiladze, have gathered in order to mark Georgian Independence Day and demand resignation of Michail Saakashvili, Georgian president.

The "Caucasian Knot" correspondent reports that the event is broadcast live in Tbilisi and across regions by the TV channel "Maestro". According to different sources, the opposition event is attended by 65,000 to 100,000 people, including opposition leaders.

Malkhaz Varshanidze, documentary films director, who is at the stadium now has told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent that there are no vacant seats at the stadium, that people already stand on the race tracks and on the pitch, and more and more people arrive.

Irakli Alasaniya, leader of the "Alliance for Georgia", thinks it is possible that, after today's event, opposition parties may expand their activity along three lines. One part will continue street actions for maintaining the feelings of protest among the community, another part will embark on the path of negotiations while continuing to demand that the authorities should comply with the six-item memorandum. The third part will expand its activities abroad in order to involve the western community into a more active participation in the internal processes of Georgia.

Levan Dachicheladze, one of the opposition leaders, states that the opposition is not a political alliance alone. If opposition parties apply different tactics for attaining their goal, i.e. resignation of Georgian president Michail Saakashvili and appointment of early presidential election, this may expand the range of protests.

The Georgian authorities have decided not to interfere with oppositionists and cancelled the traditional Independence Day military parade along Rustaveli Avenue which the opposition promised to frustrate.

Sources at the Georgian MFA note that during Independence Day a gala concert is arranged at the Opera and Ballet Theatre at 18.00, attended by ambassadors, members of the government and artists, while a traditional reception is planned at 20.00 in the hotel "Sheraton Metekhi Palace".

See earlier reports: "Georgian Prosecutor's Office investigates police actions at detaining persons accused of a riot in Mukhrovani," "Director general of the TV company "Maestro" claims the explosion in Tbilisi may have been connected with the film about Ghirgvliany," "Oppositionists are on march from Batumi to Tbilisi."

Author: Tamaz Imnaishvili; Source: CK correspondent.
Caucasian Knot, may 26 2009, 20:00

CIA slipped bugs to Soviets

2009-05-29T14:07:00.003-03:00

Memoir recounts Cold War technological sabotage

In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.

Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War," to be published next month by Ballantine Books. Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of "cold-eyed economic warfare" against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War.

At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it.

'Programmed to go haywire'

"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes.

"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.

"While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," he writes. "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation."

Reed said he obtained CIA approval to publish details about the operation. The CIA learned of the full extent of the KGB's pursuit of Western technology in an intelligence operation known as the Farewell Dossier. Portions of the operation have been disclosed earlier, including in a 1996 paper in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA journal. The paper was written by Gus W. Weiss, an expert on technology and intelligence who was instrumental in devising the plan to send the flawed materials and served with Reed on the National Security Council. Weiss died Nov. 25 at 72.

According to the Weiss article and Reed's book, the Soviet authorities in 1970 set up a new KGB section, known as Directorate T, to plumb Western research and development for badly needed technology. Directorate T's operating arm to steal the technology was known as Line X. Its spies were often sprinkled throughout Soviet delegations to the United States; on one visit to a Boeing plant, "a Soviet guest applied adhesive to his shoes to obtain metal samples," Weiss recalled in his article.

Then, at a July 1981 economic summit in Ottawa, President Francois Mitterrand of France told Reagan that French intelligence had obtained the services of an agent they dubbed "Farewell," Col. Vladimir Vetrov, a 53-year-old engineer who was assigned to evaluate the intelligence collected by Directorate T.

Vetrov, who Weiss recalled had provided his services for ideological reasons, photographed and supplied 4,000 documents on the program. The documents revealed the names of more than 200 Line X officers around the world and showed how the Soviets were carrying out a broad-based effort to steal Western technology.

'Caused a storm'

"Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterrand's sensitive revelations and was grateful for his offer to make the material available to the U.S. administration," Reed writes. The Farewell Dossier arrived at the CIA in August 1981. "It immediately caused a storm," Reed says in the book. "The files were incredibly explicit. They set forth the extent of Soviet penetration into U.S. and other Western laboratories, factories and government agencies."

"Reading the material caused my worst nightmares to come true," Weiss recalled. The documents showed the Soviets had stolen valuable data on radar, computers, machine tools and semiconductors, he wrote. "Our science was supporting their national defense."

The Farewell Dossier included a shopping list of future Soviet priorities. In January 1982, Weiss said he proposed to Casey a program to slip the Soviets technology that would work for a while, then fail. Reed said the CIA "would add 'extra ingredients' to the software and hardware on the KGB's shopping list."

"Reagan received the plan enthusiastically," Reed writes. "Casey was given a go." According to Weiss, "American industry helped in the preparation of items to be 'marketed' to Line X." Some details about the flawed technology were reported in Aviation Week and Space Technology in 1986 and in a 1995 book by Peter Schweizer, "Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union."

The sabotage of the gas pipeline has not been previously disclosed, and at the time was a closely guarded secret. When the pipeline exploded, Reed writes, the first reports caused concern in the U.S. military and at the White House. "NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based," he said, referring to North American Air Defense Command. "Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device." However, satellites did not pick up any telltale signs of a nuclear explosion.

"Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis," he added, "Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry."

The role that Reagan and the United States played in the collapse of the Soviet Union is still a matter of intense debate. Some argue that U.S. policy was the key factor -- Reagan's military buildup; the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan's proposed missile defense system; confronting the Soviets in regional conflicts; and rapid advances in U.S. high technology. But others say that internal Soviet factors were more important, including economic decline and President Mikhail Gorbachev's revolutionary policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Reed, who served in the National Security Council from January 1982 to June 1983, said the United States and its NATO allies later "rolled up the entire Line X collection network, both in the U.S. and overseas." Weiss said "the heart of Soviet technology collection crumbled and would not recover."

However, Vetrov's espionage was discovered by the KGB, and he was executed in 1983.

The Washington Post
By David E. Hoffman
updated 12:13 a.m. ET Feb. 27, 2004

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

2009-05-09T20:13:00.011-03:00

We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.

John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man–a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, “Conscience of an Economic Hit Men.”

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits–Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

John Perkins goes on to write: “I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop.”

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us now in our Firehouse studios.

John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” He is the author of the new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Okay, explain this term, “economic hit man,” e.h.m., as you call it.

JOHN PERKINS: Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring—to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It’s been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It’s only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you become one? Who did you work for?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation’s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950’s, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew of government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time‘s magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed—well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn’t have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.

AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Explain the company you worked for.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan—let’s say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador—and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure—a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you’re not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.” And today we’re going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they’ve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It’s an empire. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It’s been extremely successful.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. You say because of bribes and other reason you didn’t write this book for a long time. What do you mean? Who tried to bribe you, or who—what are the bribes you accepted?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I accepted a half a million dollar bribe in the nineties not to write the book.

AMY GOODMAN: From?

JOHN PERKINS: From a major construction engineering company.

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

JOHN PERKINS: Legally speaking, it wasn’t—Stoner-Webster. Legally speaking it wasn’t a bribe, it was—I was being paid as a consultant. This is all very legal. But I essentially did nothing. It was a very understood, as I explained in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that it was—I was—it was understood when I accepted this money as a consultant to them I wouldn’t have to do much work, but I mustn’t write any books about the subject, which they were aware that I was in the process of writing this book, which at the time I called “Conscience of an Economic Hit Man.” And I have to tell you, Amy, that, you know, it’s an extraordinary story from the standpoint of—It’s almost James Bondish, truly, and I mean-–

AMY GOODMAN: Well that’s certainly how the book reads.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, and it was, you know? And when the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over. I come from a very old New England family, Calvinist, steeped in amazingly strong moral values. I think I, you know, I’m a good person overall, and I think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of sex, money and power can seduce people, because I ceSrtainly was seduced. And if I hadn’t lived this life as an economic hit man, I think I’d have a hard time believing that anybody does these things. And that’s why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Perkins. In your book, you talk about how you helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of dollars of Saudi Arabian petrol dollars back into the U.S. economy, and that further cemented the intimate relationship between the House of Saud and successive U.S. administrations. Explain.

JOHN PERKINS: Yes, it was a fascinating time. I remember well, you’re probably too young to remember, but I remember well in the early seventies how OPEC exercised this power it had, and cut back on oil supplies. We had cars lined up at gas stations. The country was afraid that it was facing another 1929-type of crash—depression; and this was unacceptable. So, they—the Treasury Department hired me and a few other economic hit men. We went to Saudi Arabia. We—

AMY GOODMAN: You’re actually called economic hit men—e.h.m.’s?

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.‘s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia—new cities, new infrastructure—which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn’t buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn’t work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren’t able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had—His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how Torrijos died?

JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. Omar Torrijos had signed the Canal Treaty with Carter much—and, you know, it passed our congress by only one vote. It was a highly contended issue. And Torrijos then also went ahead and negotiated with the Japanese to build a sea-level canal. The Japanese wanted to finance and construct a sea-level canal in Panama. Torrijos talked to them about this which very much upset Bechtel Corporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was Casper Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and that’s an interesting story—how that actually happened), when he lost the election, and Reagan came in and Schultz came in as Secretary of State from Bechtel, and Weinberger came from Bechtel to be Secretary of Defense, they were extremely angry at Torrijos—tried to get him to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and not to talk to the Japanese. He adamantly refused. He was a very principled man. He had his problem, but he was a very principled man. He was an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which—I was there. I had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed. I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There’s no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most—many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where—when did your change your heart happen?

JOHN PERKINS: I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced. The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for me. And, of course, I was doing things I was being patted on the back for. I was chief economist. I was doing things that Robert McNamara liked and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: How closely did you work with the World Bank?

JOHN PERKINS: Very, very closely with the World Bank. The World Bank provides most of the money that’s used by economic hit men, it and the I.M.F. But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the economic hit men are doing. And the only way that we’re going to feel secure in this country again and that we’re going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we’ve put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that. I believe the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of the world. Help—genuinely help poor people. There are twenty-four thousand people starving to death every day. We can change that.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, I want to thank you very much for being with us. John Perkins’ book is called, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

Source: Democracy Now! Dec. 9, 2004

"If Fazlullah does not appear in court when summoned, he will be acting against shariat"

2009-05-05T20:37:00.008-03:00

HARDtalk: “If Fazlullah does not appear in court when summoned, he will be acting against shariat” —Sufi Muhammad, Leader of the TNSM

* Keeping weapons is allowed in Islam
* The military violated the ceasefire
* No objection to a cantonment in Swat
* Democracy is not allowed in Islam

The influential pro-Taliban cleric of Swat, Sufi Muhammad has said that the sharia law does not allow debate on the past, and therefore he will not term what his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah did against the state of Pakistan during the last year and a half as haram or halal. In an exclusive interview with Daily Times’ Peshawar Bureau Chief Iqbal Khattak in Mingora city, the 74-year-old cleric said keeping weapons is Islamic, and that he did not demand that the Taliban surrender their weapons after a peace deal with the NWFP government. Excerpts follow:

Daily Times: You said in a 2005 interview with us that what Al Qaeda and the Taliban are doing in Pakistan is haram. Are Maulana Fazlullah’s activities over the last sixteen months also haram?

Sufi Muhammad: Yes, I said that about Al Qaeda, but not about the Taliban. Let me say...that debate on past happenings is disallowed in Islam. A hadith sharif says, what has happened in the past should not be discussed.

But how can we proceed without debating the past?

The hadith sharif says a Muslim should not discuss past happenings because he may not remember all the [details] and, therefore, he may...sin by not speaking the truth.

A majority of Swat residents do not think the peace deal recently signed between the TNSM and the NWFP government will last long.

God Almighty does everything; he builds and destroys countries.

Residents also doubt whether peace is possible in the presence of armed Taliban.

Everyone keeps weapons. People in Peshawar have weapons with them.

You support keeping weapons?

Yes, you can keep weapons with you.

Did you ask Fazlullah to surrender weapons after the sharia law deal?

Keeping weapons is halal in Islam.

President Zardari said recently that force would be used if the Taliban do not surrender weapons in Swat.

His statement is childish...immature.

With sharia law in Swat, there will be a complete ban on music and girls’ education, and people will be forced to grow beards?

There are five subjects — judiciary, politics, economics, education and the executive. The judicial subject will be with us, the rest is beyond our control.

The Taliban are kidnapping government officials and killing soldiers, yet you still hold the army responsible for ceasefire violations.

Kidnapping cases are taking place all over the world. The military violated the ceasefire.

The military says some of its soldiers were shot dead while bringing water.

No. This is not the case. The soldiers were not killed near any stream.

Are soldiers moving freely in Swat after the peace deal?

No. The military cannot move freely unless peace is restored.

After peace is restored, will the army leave Swat?

This is Pakistan’s army and Swat is within Pakistan’s borders. I will have no objection if a military cantonment is established here.

Locals say innocent people have been killed. Will the aggrieved families be able to get justice?

I have told you already: we will not discuss what has happened in the past. Sharia law does not allow this.

If a court summons a key Taliban commander, will he appear before the court?

If Caliph Umar (RA) can appear before a court, then why can’t others?

So Fazlullah will also appear in court if summoned?

If he does not...he will be acting against the sharia law.

What you did in Malakand in the 1990s and then in Afghanistan in 2001 you called ‘jihad’. Are Fazlullah’s activities over the last 16 months in Swat also jihad?

I do not want to speak on this.

What are Fazlullah’s plans after the peace deal?

He will support imposition of sharia law.

You have termed democracy ‘infidelity’. But Maulana Sami-ul Haq, Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain Ahmad are taking part in the democratic process.

Democracy is not permissible in sharia law. I will not name [these leaders] but they are taking part in infidelity. I will not offer prayers if one of [these leaders] is leading those prayers.

Do you intend to export
sharia law to other parts of Pakistan?

If people help me, I will. Otherwise, no. *

Source: Daily Times.pk, 05-05-2009

Georgia Alleges Russian Role in a Coup Plot

2009-05-05T20:15:00.006-03:00

Vano Shlamov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Georgian security forces on their way to the Mukhrovani army base near Tbilisi on Tuesday.

By OLESYA VARTANYAN and ELLEN BARRY

Published: NYT, May 5, 2009

TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia announced Tuesday that it had put down a brief military mutiny that aimed to disrupt NATO military exercises, ratcheting up tensions a day before the exercises are scheduled to begin over Russian objections.

Georgian forces surrounded a tank battalion 25 miles outside of Tbilisi, whose leaders Georgia accused of planning the uprising. A few hours later, most of the unit’s 500 soldiers surrendered, and several of their commanders were detained.

President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russia was hoping to derail the military exercises, which he called a “symbolic event.”

“We are asking our northern neighbor to refrain from any provocations,” he said, in a televised interview.

Russia immediately denied any role in the unrest.

“This is not the first time we have been accused of interference without evidence,” said a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We would like to reiterate that Russia, as a matter of principle, doesn’t interfere in Georgia’s domestic affairs.”

The exchange raised the already high temperature ahead of the exercises, run by NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, which includes nonmembers. NATO has described the plan as routine and small-scale — around 1,000 soldiers will take part in field exercises — but Russia complains that, less than a year after its war with Georgia, any NATO training there are provocative.

Armenia, Serbia and Kazakhstan have said they will pull out of the exercises in solidarity with Russia. Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov notified NATO on Tuesday that Russia was pulling out of a long-anticipated NATO-Russia Council meeting scheduled for May 19 in Brussels in protest of the exercises, as well as NATO’s expulsion of two Russian diplomats on suspicion of spying.

Carmen Romero, a NATO spokeswoman, said Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer “regrets this decision” and hopes to reschedule the meeting soon.

She said the exercises would go on as scheduled.

Dmitri O. Rogozin, Russia’s envoy to NATO, warned that the exercises “may significantly affect the stability of the entire South Caucasus.”

“How can one insist on these exercises with such stubbornness and persistence?” he said, in comments aired on Russian television. “If these exercises were held at NATO’s insistence in some psychiatric hospital it would be a much more adequate decision than holding them on the territory of the Georgian state.”

Details of the Georgian mutiny emerged throughout the day on Tuesday, leaving many in the capital glued to their televisions.

Shota Utiashvili, a top official in Georgia’s Interior Ministry, said authorities learned at 6:30 a.m. that a tank battalion stationed at Mukhrovani — five miles from the site of the planned military exercises — publicly announced a mutiny. He said the unit’s 500 soldiers had sealed off the base and would not allow Ministry of Defense officials to enter.

“What happened is that battalion commanders told the soldiers that the Russians were attacking them and they had to take combat positions,” Mr. Utiashvili said. Around noon, he said, the soldiers learned from news reports that their commanders had misled them and surrendered. Authorities “didn’t know the scale of the mutiny” and were relieved to discover that it was small and isolated, he said.

In the morning, officials confidently asserted a Russian hand in the plan, but by afternoon they were more cautious. Mr. Utiashvili said it is “not exactly clear” whether the accused plotters had Russian support.

“To have a legally sound case we need more information,” he said. “This morning we had some evidence, and from that evidence one would follow that Russia was involved.”

Incriminating surveillance footage was broadcast all day on Georgian television.

In a video, which had been edited, Gia Ghvaladze, a former major in the Georgian special forces, describes plans to overthrow Mr. Saakashvili’s government on behalf of Russia. Mr. Ghvaladze says the plan was to approach Tbilisi with a column of 250 troop carriers and backup from 5,000 Russian troops, and talks about killing six of Mr. Saakashvili’s closest advisors.

Mr. Ghvaladze was arrested Monday night on charges of organizing a mutiny. By Tuesday evening, police had arrested 13 suspects, according to the Interior Ministry.

The unfolding events left much of Tbilisi spellbound — or paralyzed. Traffic thinned out on the city’s streets, and when Natia Kuprashvili, 29, tried to teach her class at Tbilisi State University, her students’ cell phones began to ring so wildly that she gave up and went in search of a television.

But in the end, she said, “it is very hard to understand what really happened here.”

Roman Apakidze, 30, concluded that a mutiny did take place, but that the government was distorting it for political purposes.

“I just don’t like the way the government is handling this information — it is real information terror against ordinary people, what they do,” he said. “It is better not to turn on the television at all.”

Olesya Vartanyan reported from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Ellen Barry from Moscow.

Data on the number of Tbilisi protesters diverge

2009-04-16T15:38:00.001-03:00

apr 09 2009, 21:00

Georgian journalist Irakliy Berulava, who is present in the venue, has treated the data about the number of participants in the protest rally in Tbilisi, reported by some mass media, to be frankly false.

"As to 50 or 80 thousand persons in Rustaveli Square - it's a lie. If we do an absolute approximation, there're some 20-25 thousand protesters - this is maximum. But the leaders of the opposition have obviously not expected this," Mr Berulava said to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent. He has quoted the latest speeches of oppositionists.

"President of Georgia has failed to answer the hopes imposed on him in November 2003," said Irakliy Alasaniya, leader of the "Alliance for Georgia". In his opinion, President Saakashvili had promised to unite the country and solve social problems, but failed to do it. "He has exhausted out people's patience and should resign," Berulava quotes speakers as saying.

In the course of his appeal, Mr Alasaniya has also stated that the change of power should be "exclusively peaceful and gained through people's endurance."

Irakliy Berulava reports that the speech of Levan Gachechiladze, former leader of the United Opposition, was tougher and more radical. "Misha, leave before we've come! You have no right to rule the country! A coward is not wanted here!" Mr Berulava quotes Mr Gachechiladze as saying.

In her turn, Nino Burdzhanadze, ex-speaker of Georgian Parliament, has apologized for "being in power and unable to save the nation from tyranny."

However, Georgian and Russian media give highly diverging data about the number of participants of the rally. The "Newsru.com" Internet-based edition wrote at 4 p.m.: "According to different sources, in the square in front of the Parliament, in Rustaveli Avenue and adjacent streets there are from 120 to 130 thousand persons."

"It's a usual case of 'political mooneye', typical for all rallies. If an assembly is in support of official power, the media fed from the state crib will write that the rally was, say, 50,000-strong, while the opposition, covering the same action will write - 5000," Mr Berulava has noted. "Same with opposition's actions."

"The point is how you count. The Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) counts persons per square meter with account of the crowd density and the total area filled. Such data is not absolutely exact, but close to reality. But here we have one subtlety - these data is for an internal official report. For the media it'll be announced as prepared in bosses' offices," Dmitri Berkut, a former employee of special MIA's subdivision said to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

See earlier reports: "Ivanishvili: Georgian authorities get ready to April 9, soldiers had to give away their mobile phones," "Six activists of movement "Why?" detained in Georgia," "President of Georgia invites opposition to dialogue."

Author: Dmitry Florin; Source: CK correspondent

Riot Police Crack Down on Anti-Communist Protests

2009-04-08T20:29:00.005-03:00

POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN MOLDOVA

Riot police have regained control of Moldova's parliament after anti-Communist demonstrations turned violent Tuesday. At least 170 people were injured and one person died during the riots, which are in reaction to the Communist Party's victory in Sunday's election.

The Eastern European country of Moldova has plunged into a political crisis following Sunday's parliamentary election, with the capital Chisinau seeing its worst political violence in decades.

An uneasy peace settled over Chisinau on Wednesday after riot police regained control of the parliament and the president's office early on Wednesday morning. Dozens of protesters gathered early on Wednesday for yet more demonstrations, but there was no sign of the violence that had marked Tuesday's protests.

At least 10,000 people, mainly young people and students, took to the streets of Chisinau Tuesday in protest against what they said was a rigged election result. Protestors stormed the parliament building and ransacked the interior. They threw chairs, tables and computer equipment out the windows and lit a large fire in front of the parliament, where they burned furniture and other objects. A small group managed to break into the president's office.

Fighting broke out between protesters and police in the streets of the capital. Police responded with water cannon and tear gas.

The demonstrators, mainly young people and students, carried Moldovan, Romanian and European Union flags and shouted anti-Communist slogans. They accuse the Communists of having rigged Sunday's vote, in which the ruling Communist Party got almost exactly 50 percent, and are calling for new elections. They say Moldova, which is one of Europe's poorest countries, has no future if the Communist Party stays in power. The three main opposition parties managed to get a combined 35 percent of the vote.

According to state television, one woman died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside the parliament. The Interior Ministry said there had been 193 arrests and that around 96 police and 79 demonstrators had been injured. Interior Ministry spokeswoman Ala Meleca said the police would use firearms to restore public order "if necessary."

Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin accused pro-EU opposition parties of being behind the protests, which he called an attempted coup. In a statement read out on state television, he called the opposition "fascists (who) want to destroy democracy and independence in Moldova." On Wednesday he said he was "running out of patience" with protesters.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the protests were a plot aimed at undermining Moldovan sovereignty and blamed forces supporting a union with Romania.

The leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, Vlad Filat, accused the government of reneging on an earlier agreement to recount Sunday's election. He told the news agency Reuters he feared "very serious repression" and warned that "political leaders and participants" might be arrested.

The newly elected parliament has until June 8 to appoint a new president. Voronin is constitutionally barred from serving a third term. The ruling Communist Party, which has been in power since 2001, has taken a more pro-European course in recent years after initially adopting a staunchly pro-Russia stance.

Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe, with an average monthly wage of €175. Many Moldovans, especially young people, work abroad and many in the country support reunification with Romania, which would mean joining the EU. Moldova was part of Romania from 1918 to 1940 and approximately 800,000 of its 3.4 million inhabitants have already applied for Romanian citizenship.

Der Spiegel, 04/08/2009

Another Foe of Chechen Leader Shot Dead Abroad

2009-03-30T16:02:00.007-03:00

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Published: New York Times, March 30, 2009

MOSCOW — A former Chechen general and foe of Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, was shot to death over the weekend in the Persian Gulf enclave of Dubai, the victim of an apparent assassination, the police there said on Monday.

Kazbek Vakhayev/European Pressphoto Agency

Sulim Yamadayev, right, talking to a member of the Russian forces.

The victim, Sulim B. Yamadayev, was shot at least three times outside an elite apartment complex in Dubai, but it was unclear exactly when the attack took place, or whether he died immediately or only on Monday as some press reports have claimed.

Still, the killing bears the imprimatur of other assassinations carried out against Chechens in Russia and abroad who have run afoul of Mr. Kadyrov and his government.

In January this year, a Chechen hit man tracked down and killed Umar S. Israilov, a former bodyguard of Mr. Kadyrov, who had received asylum in Austria after accusing the Chechen president and officials in his circle of kidnapping, torture and murder.

Mr. Yamadayev’s brother, Ruslan, was shot to death in his car last September as he waited in a traffic jam in Moscow just outside the White House, the government building that houses the offices of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Kadyrov’s government has denied responsibility for these deaths and others, and Alvi A. Karimov, Mr. Kadyrov’s spokesman, said on Monday that the president had no information about the killing of Mr. Yamadayev in Dubai.

But Mr. Yamadayev, a decorated general and, until last year, commander of his own heavily armed fighting force in Chechnya, was perhaps Mr. Kadyrov’s most powerful and well-known adversary, and had often clashed openly with the president.

A separatist fighter in Russia’s first Chechen war in 1990’s, Mr. Yamadayev, 36, later switched allegiances and fought with pro-Moscow-forces in the second war that began in 1999. He was later named head of the Vostok Battalion, a contingent of former separatists co-opted into the Russian army that became notorious for its daring raids on militant hideouts as well as its callous disregard for civilian casualties.

For their service, Mr. Putin awarded both Mr. Yamadayev and Mr. Kadyrov the Hero of Russia medal, the country’s highest honor.

Mr. Yamadayev ultimately emerged as something of an independent power center in Chechnya. He was backed by Moscow, but his growing authority inevitably brought him into conflict with Mr. Kadyrov, whom the Kremlin has invested with almost total authority to return stability to Chechnya after more than a decade of war and turmoil.

In April last year, an altercation on a Chechen country road between troops from Mr. Yamadayev’s Vostok Battalion and guards from Mr. Kadyrov’s motorcade ended in gunfire. According to some reports, Mr. Kadyrov personally intervened to avoid bloodshed.

Shortly after, Mr. Yamadayev was stripped of his command and charged with involvement in kidnappings and murders, though there have been persistent reports that he commanded his Vostok troops in fighting during Russia’s war with Georgia last August.

According to Russian press reports, Mr. Yamadayev, his wife and their six children left Russia in December.

A reporter for The New York Times in Dubai contributed reporting.

Southern Africa rejects Madagascar's new leader

2009-03-19T13:33:00.007-03:00

By THULANI MTHETHWA Associated Press Writer, in Salon

Mar 19th, 2009 | MBABANE, Swaziland -- Southern Africa will not recognize Madagascar's new leader, an army-backed politician who ousted an elected president, key regional leaders said Thursday.

After a mini-summit about the Indian Ocean island, in Swaziland on Thursday, the main decision-making committee of the Southern African Development Community also urged the African Union and the international community not to recognize Andry Rajoelina as president and called for a return to "democratic and constitutional rule in the shortest time possible."

After months of street protests, Marc Ravalomanana resigned as Madagascar's president Tuesday and placed power in the hands of the military. Within hours, the military announced it was making opposition leader Andry Rajoelina president.

The regional leaders meeting Thursday said that if Rajoelina refuses to relinquish power to Ravalomanana, the bloc would recommend imposing sanctions.

Madagascar is a member of the regional bloc. Thursday's meeting, chaired by Swazi King Mswati III, included Mozambican President Armando Guebuza, South African Defense Minister Charles Nqakula, and the bloc's executive secretary, Tomaz Salomao.

Earlier Thursday, Zambian Foreign Affairs Minister Kabinga Pande called Rajoelina's coming to power in Madagascar "a setback and danger to the entrenchment of democracy and constitutional rule on the continent which should not be allowed to take root."

In a statement in government papers Thursday, Pande also called for the suspension of Madagascar from both the Southern African Development Community and the African Union. The AU was to have held its annual meeting in Madagascar later this year.

An AU committee was to meet Friday, to examine whether the events in Madagascar constituted a coup, which would lead to Madagascar's automatic suspension.

Rajoelina has accused his ousted rival of misspending public funds and undermining democracy, and said Wednesday his rise was a victory for "true democracy" over dictatorship. He had promised new elections within two years.

France, Madagascar's former colonial power and current main donor, said that two years was "too long" to wait for elections.

Ravalomanana had accused Rajoelina of seeking power by unconstitutional means, since under the constitution the opposition leader was too young to become president.

Some of Rajoelina's anti-government protests had led to deadly clashes. The deaths of at least 25 civilians last month cost Ravalomanana the backing of many in the military, and a mutiny spread and gained popular support.

Associated Press Writer Lewis Mwanangombe in Lusaka, Zambia contributed to this report.

The Gaza Bombshell

2009-02-12T18:55:00.006-02:00

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way. Photo illustration by Chris Mueller; left, by Debbie Hill/Sipa Press; right, by Issam Rimawi/ApaImages/Polaris; background by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters/Corbis.

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

by David Rose, Vanity Fair, April 2008

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.”

On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father and five others to erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they found themselves surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas’s rival, Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “They took us to a house in north Gaza,” abu Dan says. “They covered our eyes and took us to a room on the sixth floor.”

The video reveals a bare room with white walls and a black-and-white tiled floor, where abu Dan’s father is forced to sit and listen to his son’s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, he and two of the others were driven to a market square. “They told us they were going to kill us. They made us sit on the ground.” He rolls up the legs of his trousers to display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: “They shot our knees and feet—five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.”

Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.

A clue comes toward the end of the video, which was found in a Fatah security building by Hamas fighters last June. Still bound and blindfolded, the prisoners are made to echo a rhythmic chant yelled by one of their captors: “By blood, by soul, we sacrifice ourselves for Muhammad Dahlan! Long live Muhammad Dahlan!”

There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas’s national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. Dahlan insists that abu Dan was tortured without his knowledge, but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be brutal.

Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as “our guy.”

The United States has been involved in the affairs of the Palestinian territories since the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. With the 1993 Oslo accords, the territories acquired limited autonomy, under a president, who has executive powers, and an elected parliament. Israel retains a large military presence in the West Bank, but it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”

The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.

It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.

According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”

Preventive Security

Bush was not the first American president to form a relationship with Muhammad Dahlan. “Yes, I was close to Bill Clinton,” Dahlan says. “I met Clinton many times with [the late Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat.” In the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords, Clinton sponsored a series of diplomatic meetings aimed at reaching a permanent Middle East peace, and Dahlan became the Palestinians’ negotiator on security.

As I talk to Dahlan in a five-star Cairo hotel, it’s easy to see the qualities that might make him attractive to American presidents. His appearance is immaculate, his English is serviceable, and his manner is charming and forthright. Had he been born into privilege, these qualities might not mean much. But Dahlan was born—on September 29, 1961—in the teeming squalor of Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, and his education came mostly from the street. In 1981 he helped found Fatah’s youth movement, and he later played a leading role in the first intifada—the five-year revolt that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation. In all, Dahlan says, he spent five years in Israeli jails.

Muhammad Dahlan at his office in Ramallah, January 2008. Photograph by Karim Ben Khelifa.

From the time of its inception as the Palestinian branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood, in late 1987, Hamas had represented a threatening challenge to Arafat’s secular Fatah party. At Oslo, Fatah made a public commitment to the search for peace, but Hamas continued to practice armed resistance. At the same time, it built an impressive base of support through schooling and social programs.

The rising tensions between the two groups first turned violent in the early 1990s—with Muhammad Dahlan playing a central role. As director of the Palestinian Authority’s most feared paramilitary force, the Preventive Security Service, Dahlan arrested some 2,000 Hamas members in 1996 in the Gaza Strip after the group launched a wave of suicide bombings. “Arafat had decided to arrest Hamas military leaders, because they were working against his interests, against the peace process, against the Israeli withdrawal, against everything,” Dahlan says. “He asked the security services to do their job, and I have done that job.”

It was not, he admits, “popular work.” For many years Hamas has said that Dahlan’s forces routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method was to sodomize prisoners with soda bottles. Dahlan says these stories are exaggerated: “Definitely there were some mistakes here and there. But no one person died in Preventive Security. Prisoners got their rights. Bear in mind that I am an ex-detainee of the Israelis’. No one was personally humiliated, and I never killed anyone the way [Hamas is] killing people on a daily basis now.” Dahlan points out that Arafat maintained a labyrinth of security services—14 in all—and says the Preventive Security Service was blamed for abuses perpetrated by other units.

Dahlan worked closely with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and he developed a warm relationship with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, a Clinton appointee who stayed on under Bush until July 2004. “He’s simply a great and fair man,” Dahlan says. “I’m still in touch with him from time to time.”

“Everyone Was Against the Elections”

In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that American policy in the Middle East was turning in a fundamentally new direction.

Arafat was still in power at the time, and many in the U.S. and Israel blamed him for wrecking Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by launching the second intifada—a renewed revolt, begun in 2000, in which more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians had died. Bush said he wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose new leaders, ones who were not “compromised by terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.”

Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader, was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

In public, Rice tried to look on the bright side of the Hamas victory. “Unpredictability,” she said, is “the nature of big historic change.” Even as she spoke, however, the Bush administration was rapidly revising its attitude toward Palestinian democracy.

Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial moderate wing that could be strengthened if America coaxed it into the peace process. Notable Israelis—such as Ephraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency—shared this view. But if America paused to consider giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was “milliseconds long,” says a senior State Department official. “The administration spoke with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ With Hamas’s election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.”

The first step, taken by the Middle East diplomatic “Quartet”—the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations—was to demand that the new Hamas government renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and accept the terms of all previous agreements. When Hamas refused, the Quartet shut off the faucet of aid to the Palestinian Authority, depriving it of the means to pay salaries and meet its annual budget of roughly $2 billion.

Israel clamped down on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, especially into and out of the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Israel also detained 64 Hamas officials, including Legislative Council members and ministers, and even launched a military campaign into Gaza after one of its soldiers was kidnapped. Through it all, Hamas and its new government, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, proved surprisingly resilient.

Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began holding talks with Hamas in the hope of establishing a “unity government.” On October 4, 2006, Rice traveled to Ramallah to see Abbas. They met at the Muqata, the new presidential headquarters that rose from the ruins of Arafat’s compound, which Israel had destroyed in 2002.

America’s leverage in Palestinian affairs was much stronger than it had been in Arafat’s time. Abbas had never had a strong, independent base, and he desperately needed to restore the flow of foreign aid—and, with it, his power of patronage. He also knew that he could not stand up to Hamas without Washington’s help.

At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as she expressed her nation’s “great admiration” for Abbas’s leadership. Behind closed doors, however, Rice’s tone was sharper, say officials who witnessed their meeting. Isolating Hamas just wasn’t working, she reportedly told Abbas, and America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections.

Abbas, one official says, agreed to take action within two weeks. It happened to be Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast during daylight hours. With dusk approaching, Abbas asked Rice to join him for iftar—a snack to break the fast.

Afterward, according to the official, Rice underlined her position: “So we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”

“Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Let’s wait until after the Eid,” he said, referring to the three-day celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. (Abbas’s spokesman said via e-mail: “According to our records, this is incorrect.”)

Rice got into her armored S.U.V., where, the official claims, she told an American colleague, “That damned iftar has cost us another two weeks of Hamas government.”

“We Will Be There to Support You”

Weeks passed with no sign that Abbas was ready to do America’s bidding. Finally, another official was sent to Ramallah. Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, is a career foreign-service officer with many years’ experience in the Middle East. His purpose was to deliver a barely varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.

We know what Walles said because a copy was left behind, apparently by accident, of the “talking points” memo prepared for him by the State Department. The document has been authenticated by U.S. and Palestinian officials.

“We need to understand your plans regarding a new [Palestinian Authority] government,” Walles’s script said. “You told Secretary Rice you would be prepared to move ahead within two to four weeks of your meeting. We believe that the time has come for you to move forward quickly and decisively.”

The “talking points” memo, left behind by a State Department envoy, urging Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to confront Hamas. Enlarge.

The memo left no doubt as to what kind of action the U.S. was seeking: “Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline: … they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it The consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be clear: If Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”

Walles and Abbas both knew what to expect from Hamas if these instructions were followed: rebellion and bloodshed. For that reason, the memo states, the U.S. was already working to strengthen Fatah’s security forces. “If you act along these lines, we will support you both materially and politically,” the script said. “We will be there to support you.”

Abbas was also encouraged to “strengthen [his] team” to include “credible figures of strong standing in the international community.” Among those the U.S. wanted brought in, says an official who knew of the policy, was Muhammad Dahlan.

On paper, the forces at Fatah’s disposal looked stronger than those of Hamas. There were some 70,000 men in the tangle of 14 Palestinian security services that Arafat had built up, at least half of those in Gaza. After the legislative elections, Hamas had expected to assume command of these forces, but Fatah maneuvered to keep them under its control. Hamas, which already had 6,000 or so irregulars in its militant al-Qassam Brigade, responded by forming the 6,000-troop Executive Force in Gaza, but that still left it with far fewer fighters than Fatah.

In reality, however, Hamas had several advantages. To begin with, Fatah’s security forces had never really recovered from Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s massive 2002 re-invasion of the West Bank in response to the second intifada. “Most of the security apparatus had been destroyed,” says Youssef Issa, who led the Preventive Security Service under Abbas.

The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after Hamas’s legislative victory, meanwhile, was that it prevented only Fatah from paying its soldiers. “We are the ones who were not getting paid,” Issa says, “whereas they were not affected by the siege.” Ayman Daraghmeh, a Hamas Legislative Council member in the West Bank, agrees. He puts the amount of Iranian aid to Hamas in 2007 alone at $120 million. “This is only a fraction of what it should give,” he insists. In Gaza, another Hamas member tells me the number was closer to $200 million.

The result was becoming apparent: Fatah could not control Gaza’s streets—or even protect its own personnel.

At about 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 2006, Samira Tayeh sent a text message to her husband, Jad Tayeh, the director of foreign relations for the Palestinian intelligence service and a member of Fatah. “He didn’t reply,” she says. “I tried to call his mobile [phone], but it was switched off. So I called his deputy, Mahmoun, and he didn’t know where he was. That’s when I decided to go to the hospital.”

Samira, a slim, elegant 40-year-old dressed from head to toe in black, tells me the story in a Ramallah café in December 2007. Arriving at the Al Shifa hospital, “I went through the morgue door. Not for any reason—I just didn’t know the place. I saw there were all these intelligence guards there. There was one I knew. He saw me and he said, ‘Put her in the car.’ That’s when I knew something had happened to Jad.”

Tayeh had left his office in a car with four aides. Moments later, they found themselves being pursued by an S.U.V. full of armed, masked men. About 200 yards from the home of Prime Minister Haniyeh, the S.U.V. cornered the car. The masked men opened fire, killing Tayeh and all four of his colleagues.

Hamas said it had nothing to do with the murders, but Samira had reason to believe otherwise. At three a.m. on June 16, 2007, during the Gaza takeover, six Hamas gunmen forced their way into her home and fired bullets into every photo of Jad they could find. The next day, they returned and demanded the keys to the car in which he had died, claiming that it belonged to the Palestinian Authority.

Fearing for her life, she fled across the border and then into the West Bank, with only the clothes she was wearing and her passport, driver’s license, and credit card.

“Very Clever Warfare”

Fatah’s vulnerability was a source of grave concern to Dahlan. “I made a lot of activities to give Hamas the impression that we were still strong and we had the capacity to face them,” he says. “But I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.” He had no official security position at the time, but he belonged to parliament and retained the loyalty of Fatah members in Gaza. “I used my image, my power.” Dahlan says he told Abbas that “Gaza needs only a decision for Hamas to take over.” To prevent that from happening, Dahlan waged “very clever warfare” for many months.

According to several alleged victims, one of the tactics this “warfare” entailed was to kidnap and torture members of Hamas’s Executive Force. (Dahlan denies Fatah used such tactics, but admits “mistakes” were made.) Abdul Karim al-Jasser, a strapping man of 25, says he was the first such victim. “It was on October 16, still Ramadan,” he says. “I was on my way to my sister’s house for iftar. Four guys stopped me, two of them with guns. They forced me to accompany them to the home of Aman abu Jidyan,” a Fatah leader close to Dahlan. (Abu Jidyan would be killed in the June uprising.)

The first phase of torture was straightforward enough, al-Jasser says: he was stripped naked, bound, blindfolded, and beaten with wooden poles and plastic pipes. “They put a piece of cloth in my mouth to stop me screaming.” His interrogators forced him to answer contradictory accusations: one minute they said that he had collaborated with Israel, the next that he had fired Qassam rockets against it.

But the worst was yet to come. “They brought an iron bar,” al-Jasser says, his voice suddenly hesitant. We are speaking inside his home in Gaza, which is experiencing one of its frequent power outages. He points to the propane-gas lamp that lights the room. “They put the bar in the flame of a lamp like this. When it was red, they took the covering off my eyes. Then they pressed it against my skin. That was the last thing I remember.”

When he came to, he was still in the room where he had been tortured. A few hours later, the Fatah men handed him over to Hamas, and he was taken to the hospital. “I could see the shock in the eyes of the doctors who entered the room,” he says. He shows me photos of purple third-degree burns wrapped like towels around his thighs and much of his lower torso. “The doctors told me that if I had been thin, not chubby, I would have died. But I wasn’t alone. That same night that I was released, abu Jidyan’s men fired five bullets into the legs of one of my relatives. We were in the same ward in the hospital.”

Dahlan says he did not order al-Jasser’s torture: “The only order I gave was to defend ourselves. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t torture, some things that went wrong, but I did not know about this.”

The dirty war between Fatah and Hamas continued to gather momentum throughout the autumn, with both sides committing atrocities. By the end of 2006, dozens were dying each month. Some of the victims were noncombatants. In December, gunmen opened fire on the car of a Fatah intelligence official, killing his three young children and their driver.

There was still no sign that Abbas was ready to bring matters to a head by dissolving the Hamas government. Against this darkening background, the U.S. began direct security talks with Dahlan.

“He’s Our Guy”

In 2001, President Bush famously said that he had looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him to be “trustworthy.” According to three U.S. officials, Bush made a similar judgment about Dahlan when they first met, in 2003. All three officials recall hearing Bush say, “He’s our guy.”

They say this assessment was echoed by other key figures in the administration, including Rice and Assistant Secretary David Welch, the man in charge of Middle East policy at the State Department. “David Welch didn’t fundamentally care about Fatah,” one of his colleagues says. “He cared about results, and [he supported] whatever son of a bitch you had to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know best. He was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy.”

Avi Dichter, Israel’s internal-security minister and the former head of its Shin Bet security service, was taken aback when he heard senior American officials refer to Dahlan as “our guy.” “I thought to myself, The president of the United States is making a strange judgment here,” says Dichter.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who had been appointed the U.S. security coordinator for the Palestinians in November 2005, was in no position to question the president’s judgment of Dahlan. His only prior experience with the Middle East was as director of the Iraq Survey Group, the body that looked for Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction.

In November 2006, Dayton met Dahlan for the first of a long series of talks in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Both men were accompanied by aides. From the outset, says an official who took notes at the meeting, Dayton was pushing two overlapping agendas.

“We need to reform the Palestinian security apparatus,” Dayton said, according to the notes. “But we also need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”

Dahlan replied that, in the long run, Hamas could be defeated only by political means. “But if I am going to confront them,” he added, “I need substantial resources. As things stand, we do not have the capability.”

The two men agreed that they would work toward a new Palestinian security plan. The idea was to simplify the confusing web of Palestinian security forces and have Dahlan assume responsibility for all of them in the newly created role of Palestinian national-security adviser. The Americans would help supply weapons and training.

As part of the reform program, according to the official who was present at the meetings, Dayton said he wanted to disband the Preventive Security Service, which was widely known to be engaged in kidnapping and torture. At a meeting in Dayton’s Jerusalem office in early December, Dahlan ridiculed the idea. “The only institution now protecting Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza is the one you want removed,” he said.

Dayton softened a little. “We want to help you,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Iran-Contra 2.0”

Under Bill Clinton, Dahlan says, commitments of security assistance “were always delivered, absolutely.” Under Bush, he was about to discover, things were different. At the end of 2006, Dayton promised an immediate package worth $86.4 million—money that, according to a U.S. document published by Reuters on January 5, 2007, would be used to “dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza.” U.S. officials even told reporters the money would be transferred “in the coming days.”

The cash never arrived. “Nothing was disbursed,” Dahlan says. “It was approved and it was in the news. But we received not a single penny.”

Any notion that the money could be transferred quickly and easily had died on Capitol Hill, where the payment was blocked by the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. Its members feared that military aid to the Palestinians might end up being turned against Israel.

Dahlan did not hesitate to voice his exasperation. “I spoke to Condoleezza Rice on several occasions,” he says. “I spoke to Dayton, to the consul general, to everyone in the administration I knew. They said, ‘You have a convincing argument.’ We were sitting in Abbas’s office in Ramallah, and I explained the whole thing to Condi. And she said, ‘Yes, we have to make an effort to do this. There’s no other way.’ ” At some of these meetings, Dahlan says, Assistant Secretary Welch and Deputy National-Security Adviser Abrams were also present.

The administration went back to Congress, and a reduced, $59 million package for nonlethal aid was approved in April 2007. But as Dahlan knew, the Bush team had already spent the past months exploring alternative, covert means of getting him the funds and weapons he wanted. The reluctance of Congress meant that “you had to look for different pots, different sources of money,” says a Pentagon official.

A State Department official adds, “Those in charge of implementing the policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where it would end up—with a military showdown.” There were, this official says, two “parallel programs”—the overt one, which the administration took to Congress, “and a covert one, not only to buy arms but to pay the salaries of security personnel.”

Israel and the Palestinian territories. Map by Joyce Pendola.

In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

The scheme bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal, in which members of Ronald Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an enemy of the U.S. The money was used to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban. Some of the money for the contras, like that for Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of U.S. lobbying.

But there are also important differences—starting with the fact that Congress never passed a measure expressly prohibiting the supply of aid to Fatah and Dahlan. “It was close to the margins,” says a former intelligence official with experience in covert programs. “But it probably wasn’t illegal.”

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets. News of the shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio that the guns and ammunition would give Abbas “the ability to cope with those organizations which are trying to ruin everything”—namely, Hamas.

Avi Dichter points out that all weapons shipments had to be approved by Israel, which was understandably hesitant to allow state-of-the-art arms into Gaza. “One thing’s for sure, we weren’t talking about heavy weapons,” says a State Department official. “It was small arms, light machine guns, ammunition.”

Perhaps the Israelis held the Americans back. Perhaps Elliott Abrams himself held back, unwilling to run afoul of U.S. law for a second time. One of his associates says Abrams, who declined to comment for this article, felt conflicted over the policy—torn between the disdain he felt for Dahlan and his overriding loyalty to the administration. He wasn’t the only one: “There were severe fissures among neoconservatives over this,” says Cheney’s former adviser David Wurmser. “We were ripping each other to pieces.”

During a trip to the Middle East in January 2007, Rice found it difficult to get her partners to honor their pledges. “The Arabs felt the U.S. was not serious,” one official says. “They knew that if the Americans were serious they would put their own money where their mouth was. They didn’t have faith in America’s ability to raise a real force. There was no follow-through. Paying was different than pledging, and there was no plan.”

This official estimates that the program raised “a few payments of $30 million”—most of it, as other sources agree, from the United Arab Emirates. Dahlan himself says the total was only $20 million, and confirms that “the Arabs made many more pledges than they ever paid.” Whatever the exact amount, it was not enough.

Plan B

On February 1, 2007, Dahlan took his “very clever warfare” to a new level when Fatah forces under his control stormed the Islamic University of Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and set several buildings on fire. Hamas retaliated the next day with a wave of attacks on police stations.

Unwilling to preside over a Palestinian civil war, Abbas blinked. For weeks, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had been trying to persuade him to meet with Hamas in Mecca and formally establish a national unity government. On February 6, Abbas went, taking Dahlan with him. Two days later, with Hamas no closer to recognizing Israel, a deal was struck.

Under its terms, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas would remain prime minister while allowing Fatah members to occupy several important posts. When the news hit the streets that the Saudis had promised to pay the Palestinian Authority’s salary bills, Fatah and Hamas members in Gaza celebrated together by firing their Kalashnikovs into the air.

Once again, the Bush administration had been taken by surprise. According to a State Department official, “Condi was apoplectic.” A remarkable documentary record, revealed here for the first time, shows that the U.S. responded by redoubling the pressure on its Palestinian allies.

The State Department quickly drew up an alternative to the new unity government. Known as “Plan B,” its objective, according to a State Department memo that has been authenticated by an official who knew of it at the time, was to “enable [Abbas] and his supporters to reach a defined endgame by the end of 2007 The endgame should produce a [Palestinian Authority] government through democratic means that accepts Quartet principles.”

Like the Walles ultimatum of late 2006, Plan B called for Abbas to “collapse the government” if Hamas refused to alter its attitude toward Israel. From there, Abbas could call early elections or impose an emergency government. It is unclear whether, as president, Abbas had the constitutional authority to dissolve an elected government led by a rival party, but the Americans swept that concern aside.

Security considerations were paramount, and Plan B had explicit prescriptions for dealing with them. For as long as the unity government remained in office, it was essential for Abbas to maintain “independent control of key security forces.” He must “avoid Hamas integration with these services, while eliminating the Executive Force or mitigating the challenges posed by its continued existence.”

In a clear reference to the covert aid expected from the Arabs, the memo made this recommendation for the next six to nine months: “Dahlan oversees effort in coordination with General Dayton and Arab [nations] to train and equip 15,000-man force under President Abbas’s control to establish internal law and order, stop terrorism and deter extralegal forces.”

The Bush administration’s goals for Plan B were elaborated in a document titled “An Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency.” This action plan went through several drafts and was developed by the U.S., the Palestinians, and the government of Jordan. Sources agree, however, that it originated in the State Department.

The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

The drafts called for increasing the “level and capacity” of 15,000 of Fatah’s existing security personnel while adding 4,700 troops in seven new “highly trained battalions on strong policing.” The plan also promised to arrange “specialized training abroad,” in Jordan and Egypt, and pledged to “provide the security personnel with the necessary equipment and arms to carry out their missions.”

A detailed budget put the total cost for salaries, training, and “the needed security equipment, lethal and non-lethal,” at $1.27 billion over five years. The plan states: “The costs and overall budget were developed jointly with General Dayton’s team and the Palestinian technical team for reform”—a unit established by Dahlan and led by his friend and policy aide Bassil Jaber. Jaber confirms that the document is an accurate summary of the work he and his colleagues did with Dayton. “The plan was to create a security establishment that could protect and strengthen a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel,” he says.

The final draft of the Action Plan was drawn up in Ramallah by officials of the Palestinian Authority. This version was identical to the earlier drafts in all meaningful ways but one: it presented the plan as if it had been the Palestinians’ idea. It also said the security proposals had been “approved by President Mahmoud Abbas after being discussed and agreed [to] by General Dayton’s team.”

On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. The secret was out. From Hamas’s perspective, the Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.

“We Are Late in the Ball Game Here”

The formation of the unity government had brought a measure of calm to the Palestinian territories, but violence erupted anew after Al-Majd published its story on the Action Plan. The timing was unkind to Fatah, which, to add to its usual disadvantages, was without its security chief. Ten days earlier, Dahlan had left Gaza for Berlin, where he’d had surgery on both knees. He was due to spend the next eight weeks convalescing.

In mid-May, with Dahlan still absent, a new element was added to Gaza’s toxic mix when 500 Fatah National Security Forces recruits arrived, fresh from training in Egypt and equipped with new weapons and vehicles. “They had been on a crash course for 45 days,” Dahlan says. “The idea was that we needed them to go in dressed well, equipped well, and that might create the impression of new authority.” Their presence was immediately noticed, not only by Hamas but by staff from Western aid agencies. “They had new rifles with telescopic sights, and they were wearing black flak jackets,” says a frequent visitor from Northern Europe. “They were quite a contrast to the usual scruffy lot.”

On May 23, none other than Lieutenant General Dayton discussed the new unit in testimony before the House Middle East subcommittee. Hamas had attacked the troops as they crossed into Gaza from Egypt, Dayton said, but “these 500 young people, fresh out of basic training, were organized. They knew how to work in a coordinated fashion. Training does pay off. And the Hamas attack in the area was, likewise, repulsed.”

The troops’ arrival, Dayton said, was one of several “hopeful signs” in Gaza. Another was Dahlan’s appointment as national-security adviser. Meanwhile, he said, Hamas’s Executive Force was becoming “extremely unpopular I would say that we are kind of late in the ball game here, and we are behind, there’s two out, but we have our best clutch hitter at the plate, and the pitcher is beginning to tire on the opposing team.”

The opposing team was stronger than Dayton realized. By the end of May 2007, Hamas was mounting regular attacks of unprecedented boldness and savagery.

At an apartment in Ramallah that Abbas has set aside for wounded refugees from Gaza, I meet a former Fatah communications officer named Tariq Rafiyeh. He lies paralyzed from a bullet he took to the spine during the June coup, but his suffering began two weeks earlier. On May 31, he was on his way home with a colleague when they were stopped at a roadblock, robbed of their money and cell phones, and taken to a mosque. There, despite the building’s holy status, Hamas Executive Force members were violently interrogating Fatah detainees. “Late that night one of them said we were going to be released,” Rafiyeh recalls. “He told the guards, ‘Be hospitable, keep them warm.’ I thought that meant kill us. Instead, before letting us go they beat us badly.”

On June 7, there was another damaging leak, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Abbas and Dayton had asked Israel to authorize the biggest Egyptian arms shipment yet—to include dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. A few days later, just before the next batch of Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in Egypt, the coup began in earnest.

Fatah’s Last Stand

The Hamas leadership in Gaza is adamant that the coup would not have happened if Fatah had not provoked it. Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief spokesman, says the leak in Al-Majd convinced the party that “there was a plan, approved by America, to destroy the political choice.” The arrival of the first Egyptian-trained fighters, he adds, was the “reason for the timing.” About 250 Hamas members had been killed in the first six months of 2007, Barhoum tells me. “Finally we decided to put an end to it. If we had let them stay loose in Gaza, there would have been more violence.”

“Everyone here recognizes that Dahlan was trying with American help to undermine the results of the elections,” says Mahmoud Zahar, the former foreign minister for the Haniyeh government, who now leads Hamas’s militant wing in Gaza. “He was the one planning a coup.”

Zahar and I speak inside his home in Gaza, which was rebuilt after a 2003 Israeli air strike destroyed it, killing one of his sons. He tells me that Hamas launched its operations in June with a limited objective: “The decision was only to get rid of the Preventive Security Service. They were the ones out on every crossroads, putting anyone suspected of Hamas involvement at risk of being tortured or killed.” But when Fatah fighters inside a surrounded Preventive Security office in Jabaliya began retreating from building to building, they set off a “domino effect” that emboldened Hamas to seek broader gains.

Many armed units that were nominally loyal to Fatah did not fight at all. Some stayed neutral because they feared that, with Dahlan absent, his forces were bound to lose. “I wanted to stop the cycle of killing,” says Ibrahim abu al-Nazar, a veteran party chief. “What did Dahlan expect? Did he think the U.S. Navy was going to come to Fatah’s rescue? They promised him everything, but what did they do? But he also deceived them. He told them he was the strongman of the region. Even the Americans may now feel sad and frustrated. Their friend lost the battle.”

Others who stayed out of the fight were extremists. “Fatah is a large movement, with many schools inside it,” says Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which continue to fire rockets into Israel from Gaza. “Dahlan’s school is funded by the Americans and believes in negotiations with Israel as a strategic choice. Dahlan tried to control everything in Fatah, but there are cadres who could do a much better job. Dahlan treated us dictatorially. There was no overall Fatah decision to confront Hamas, and that’s why our guns in al-Aqsa are the cleanest. They are not corrupted by the blood of our people.”

Jaberi pauses. He spent the night before our interview awake and in hiding, fearful of Israeli air strikes. “You know,” he says, “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.”

The fighting was over in less than five days. It began with attacks on Fatah security buildings, in and around Gaza City and in the southern town of Rafah. Fatah attempted to shell Prime Minister Haniyeh’s house, but by dusk on June 13 its forces were being routed.

Years of oppression by Dahlan and his forces were avenged as Hamas chased down stray Fatah fighters and subjected them to summary execution. At least one victim was reportedly thrown from the roof of a high-rise building. By June 16, Hamas had captured every Fatah building, as well as Abbas’s official Gaza residence. Much of Dahlan’s house, which doubled as his office, was reduced to rubble.

Fatah’s last stand, predictably enough, was made by the Preventive Security Service. The unit sustained heavy casualties, but a rump of about 100 surviving fighters eventually made it to the beach and escaped in the night by fishing boat.

At the apartment in Ramallah, the wounded struggle on. Unlike Fatah, Hamas fired exploding bullets, which are banned under the Geneva Conventions. Some of the men in the apartment were shot with these rounds 20 or 30 times, producing unimaginable injuries that required amputation. Several have lost both legs.

The coup has had other costs. Amjad Shawer, a local economist, tells me that Gaza had 400 functioning factories and workshops at the start of 2007. By December, the intensified Israeli blockade had caused 90 percent of them to close. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population is now living on less than $2 a day.

Israel, meanwhile, is no safer. The emergency pro-peace government called for in the secret Action Plan is now in office—but only in the West Bank. In Gaza, the exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition—including the new Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.

Now that it controls Gaza, Hamas has given free rein to militants intent on firing rockets into neighboring Israeli towns. “We are still developing our rockets; soon we shall hit the heart of Ashkelon at will,” says Jaberi, the al-Aqsa commander, referring to the Israeli city of 110,000 people 12 miles from Gaza’s border. “I assure you, the time is near when we will mount a big operation inside Israel, in Haifa or Tel Aviv.”

On January 23, Hamas blew up parts of the wall dividing Gaza from Egypt, and tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed the border. Militants had already been smuggling weapons through a network of underground tunnels, but the breach of the wall made their job much easier—and may have brought Jaberi’s threat closer to reality.

George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice continue to push the peace process, but Avi Dichter says Israel will never conclude a deal on Palestinian statehood until the Palestinians reform their entire law-enforcement system—what he calls “the chain of security.” With Hamas in control of Gaza, there appears to be no chance of that happening. “Just look at the situation,” says Dahlan. “They say there will be a final-status agreement in eight months? No way.”

“An Institutional Failure”

How could the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? Neocon critics of the administration—who until last year were inside it—blame an old State Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman instead of solving problems directly. This ploy has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, Central America, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during its war against Iran. To rely on proxies such as Muhammad Dahlan, says former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, is “an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” Its author, he says, was Rice, “who, like others in the dying days of this administration, is looking for legacy. Having failed to heed the warning not to hold the elections, they tried to avoid the result through Dayton.”

With few good options left, the administration now appears to be rethinking its blanket refusal to engage with Hamas. Staffers at the National Security Council and the Pentagon recently put out discreet feelers to academic experts, asking them for papers describing Hamas and its principal protagonists. “They say they won’t talk to Hamas,” says one such expert, “but in the end they’re going to have to. It’s inevitable.”

It is impossible to say for sure whether the outcome in Gaza would have been any better—for the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for America’s allies in Fatah—if the Bush administration had pursued a different policy. One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse.

Scorpions: Still Lovin' You

2008-12-03T18:34:00.006-02:00

Uploaded by Scorpions

No Clear Goals for Transdniestria

2008-11-14T12:35:00.009-02:00

// The price of the question (Kommersant, 14/11/2008)

The history of relations between Moscow and Chisinau and all of Russian policy toward a Transdniestrian settlement has been checkered. In 2001, Communist Vladimir Voronin became president of Moldova thanks in large part to his position in favor of closer ties with Russia. By the time he was reelected in 2005, he had made a complete turnabout, rejecting the famous “Kozak memorandum” and advancing a platform on the country’s future in Europe. In recent months, Russia’s influence on both banks of the Dniester seems to have grown, leading to a variety of expectations.

The simplified view is that Russia should sell them a solution to the problem that is acceptable to it – with a guarantee of Moldova’s neutrality and a confederative government, with Transdniestria having the right to secede should the rest of Moldova unite with Romania. It should promise Chisinau massive economic aid, pressure Tiraspol, interests the politicians personally in the outcome and, in short, engage in classical diplomacy as practiced by a major regional power with weaker neighbors.

But for some reason, that is not happening. Three reasons can be proposed. First, the habit remains of looking at Moldova as a post-Soviet country in its 17th year of independence. If it is seen as a historical part of the Balkans region, everything looks different. The Balkans are part of the European integrative areal. Small and poor Moldova has a different future in that context. After Romania entered the European Union in 2007, that prospect became more real for Moldova at the individual level, if not at the institutional. Evidence of that are the stubbornly, or not so stubbornly, denied rumors of Moldovan residents’ mass receipt of Romanian citizenship. No matter how skeptical one looks at the EU’s initiatives for “Eastern partnership” and “Black Sea synergy,” they have a positive resonance in small countries.

Second, Russia has no common border with Moldova. When Ukraine’s interest in the region was limited to the preservation of various corrupt systems linked to Transdniestria, that fact was not particularly meaningful. But since Orange Kiev has completely gone over to Brussels’ side, it is very important for measuring Russia’s potential.

Finally, Russia’s real strategic, and even tactical, interest is still not clear. That makes the parties involved wary and makes them look for support elsewhere. What does Russia need a settlement in Transdniestria for? Only to show that Moscow can act more wisely than the West did in Kosovo? It still will not make up for the loss of image from the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. So no one should be surprised it this phase of Moscow’s policy in the region has a checkered end as well.

Arkady Moshes, director of the Russian program at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

Comments: Transdniestria is a breakaway territory of Moldova. It’s a rogue state with its own flag, currency, armed forces, authorities, newspapers and so, but it has not been recognized by any other state –not even Russia-. Because of this status, Transdniestria is a legal “black-hole” for drug, weapons and ammo smugglers.

It’s easy to understand that the interest of the government of Tiraspol is to keep at all costs the actual status quo, comfortable situation which allows him to follow its commercial activities of sales of weapon and narcotic across the world with complete impunity. In effect, international law is not applied in this zone of frozen conflict.

Anew My Lai: Loe Sam, Pakistan

2008-11-11T17:46:00.013-02:00

"President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to make the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan a top priority. The Bajaur campaign serves as a cautionary tale of the formidable challenge that even a full-scale military effort faces in flushing the Taliban and Al Qaeda from rugged northern Pakistan."

...

"A Heap of Rubble (NYT, 11/11/2008)

To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it.

The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt.

As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.

The aerial bombardment was necessary, Pakistani military officials say, to root out a well-armed Taliban force.

The Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force responsible for security in the tribal areas, say 83 of their soldiers have died and 300 have been wounded since early August. That compares with 61 dead among forces of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan in the first four months of 2008.

...

Yes, he knew the people who had lived here were now bereft. “I know many have suffered because of our actions,” Major Saeed said. “But the government is going to take care of them."

Pakistan is (and was) ruled by a couple of Washington puppets: Zia 'ul Haq, then Pervez Musharraf, and now took office Asif Ali Zardari (widower of Benazir Bhutto) aka "Mr. 10%". That guy is taking care of them. Right from a heap of rubble.

Afghanistan: Game Over?

2008-10-30T15:01:00.007-02:00

This way ended Najibullah Ahmadzai after the Soviet withdrawal of Kabul. Will this happen with Hamid Karzai when the NATO moves back?

From The New York Times, 10/30/2008

“KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government and its allies in the region have begun approaching the Taliban and other insurgent groups with new intensity to test the possibilities for eventual peace talks, Western diplomats and Afghan officials here say.”

“…Security has deteriorated to the point that a growing chorus of Western diplomats, NATO commanders and Afghans has begun to argue that the insurgency cannot be defeated solely by military means. Some officials in Kabul contend that the war against the insurgents cannot be won and are calling for negotiations…”

“…But some officials fear that without a turnaround in the security situation, the Afghan government and the international forces here will not be in a strong bargaining position.”

Uzbekistan: Musical Spring in Boysun

2008-10-28T14:13:00.018-02:00

The second year successively in the south of Uzbekistan, in fantastically beautiful places of Boysun in Surkhandarya region has been held the Open Folklore Festival "Boysun bahori". This event is connected with the fact that in 2001 UNESCO included Boysun in a list of nineteen cultural spaces, which were awarded the title "Masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage of humanity". Revival of ancient traditions, national values and their further development is one of priorities in development of culture of Uzbekistan. In this region national traditions and customs, songs and dances, crafts and rituals, historical style in dressing have been preserving almost in absolute purity, which inhabitants of Boysun hallow. This rich heritage became a basis of already traditional Festival "Boysun bahori", which again welcomed on its concert stages national ensembles from Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan, modern designers of national costume from our country and Kyrghyzstan.

Yulduz Uzmonova - Sanamgina

In comparison with literature and history that are as if fixed memory of the people, various, wise and well constructed, the folklore (both poetic and musical) is in a greater degree eternal, not getting old feeling of boundless and unexhausted forces - equally in pleasures and in troubles. Even in complicated and refined, if to view in the aspect of subject, rhythm or musical - verbal character, folklore genres we are always captured and amazed by spontaneous perception of the world, natural emotions and opinions in their expression. Typical national features of each people, its way of thinking, specificity of mental and emotional models are shown in full extent in national songs, folk tunes and epic legends. As a specific phenomenon of the national culture it concentrates the poetic, musical, theatre and ethnographic traditions. Obvious evidence for that became the Second Open Folklore Festival "Boysun Bahori" in Boysun of Surkhandarya region, which was held on the date of the second anniversary of UNESCO proclaimed the cultural space of Boysun as "Masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage of humanity". Four festival days became a bright holiday for Boysun's inhabitants, for whom national songs, instrumental folk tunes, dances, legends, dressing, pieces of the applied arts, rites and customs form a natural way of life. The Festival became also an art parade of folklore ensembles from Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan, epic storytellers and young fashion designers. It became a scientific and creative dialogue among art critics, philologists, ethnographers, historians and architects from France, Germany, Korea, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan.

Shaxzoda – O’zbeqizlar

With warm heart Boysun welcomed visitors and participants of festival "Boysun Bahori". The Boysun people have seen and have heard ceremonial songs and dances of various regions of Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan, enjoyed the art of national storytellers - bakhshi and akyns, admired the modern models of national clothes created by designers from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. During festival days was working the festival fair of Boysun national crafts' products and the exposition of the Uzbek folk musical instruments of the Tashkent master, Mukhammadnazyr Yunusov. The Festival shows and concerts were arranged not only in Boysun, but also in kishlaks of Sairob, Derbend and Shurob; visitors and participants of the festival were warmly welcomed by inhabitants of Djarkurgan and Sherobad districts of Surkhandarya region. All festival actions, concerts, competitions and fair were held in the historical and ethno - folklore park "Boysuntog", but the inflow of spectators was such huge that concerts and performances of folklore ensembles and national storytellers simultaneously were arranged on improvised stages in Boysun itself.

The Festival concerts and shows were concerts of folklore music on a background of natural landscape. It is worthy to see how the performances of folklore ensembles and bakhshi were merging together with the unique nature and foothills of the Boysuntog. The specific "concert aura" at the festival has been filled up not only by the breath of the spectators (in most cases the youth from Boysun and neighbouring kishlaks), but by the voices of nature, an atmosphere of everyday life and noisy holidays. In a word, everything becomes not only adequate, but even required when we want to let know to the listener the true destination of folk songs. I seem a moment has come when a person wants beauty, great and deep sincerity and a natural melody, which would penetrate into heart. And this music sounding from the stage of the folklore festival satisfied hearing, but also awaked all best strings of a person heart, a person living today.

Anvar Sanaev - Dunyo Chiroylik

National songs bewitching tunes of sybuzgy, chang-kobuz or dombra - all of them becoming a treasure of the listener, brought him true pleasure, caused the pride in a person, and to a certain extent made people better, helping them in their life and activity. Plasticity, ease, tempo and depth of improvised reactions in reply to the changes of scenic conditions is a main feature of folklore art. Instant transformation of role, genre of performance, a program and a scenic manner is one of the necessary properties of any folklore ensemble, which aspires to reproduce authentic folklore on the concert stage of the festival "Boysun bahori".

Each ethnos is rich in its history of culture and life, which externalized essence of national traditions. But no culture can keep its vitality just remaining a keeper of traditions. Traditions exist in order to be developed and to add new values to ancient ones that were accumulated for centuries of cultural progress. Such approach is capable to feed a fresh tree of culture and life of the people, to form a character of our contemporary. The super task of a folklore concert is overcoming "artificial concert form", that is each folklore ensemble by means of its concert program or the subject action, reproducing a certain ritual or tradition tries to make the concert fresh and dynamic and "to stir", to make active its participants, involving them in a dialogue with the spectators. The performance of folklore ensembles and leading artists of Surkhandarya at the opening ceremony of the festival was recognized a national holiday - sayil. Performances of the national folklore ensemble "Boysun" with original and ritual songs along with original national dances typical of the southern areas of Uzbekistan presented by the dance group of Regional Association "Uzbekraks" formed a core of the holiday.

Twelve groups took part in the show of folklore ensembles, including three children's folklore ensembles, "Zilola" from Kamashinsky district of Kashkadarya region, "Kuralai" from Boysun district of Surkhandarya region and "Gulguncha" from Boysun district of Surkhandarya region, whose concert program included children's songs accompanied with original ritual games. The folklore ensemble "Baiozi kukhiston" from Tadjikabad district of the Republic of Tadjikistan demonstrated the most ancient ceremony of rainmaking, accompanied with ancient ritual songs and dances with proper attributes, such as doll dressing. Ancient labour songs formed a core of the subject concert program of the folklore ensemble "Sarbozi" from Kattakurgan district of Samarkand region. Very expressive and emotional was the concert program of the folklore ensemble "Doston" headed by National bakhshi of Uzbekistan, Abdulla Kurbonnazarov from Khoresm.

Setora – Ayrimagin

The ancient family rite and national songs accompanying the ritual "Beshkarti" was performed by the ensemble "Zomin saikali" from Zamin district of Djizak region. Rites and rituals of Surkhandarya region connected with calendar and family celebrations were shown by the folklore ensemble "Bubilguio" from Shurchin district of Surkhandarya. A theme of the native land, makhallya, the careful relation to nature sounded in the performance of the folklore ensemble "Mardona" from Vobkent district of Bukhara region; the ancient family rite "Aidar of tui" (cutting of boys' hair) accompanied with ritual songs in the program of ensemble "Amir tulkini" from Nukus of the Republic of Karakalpakstan; a public holiday ceremony accompanied with a variety of national songs and dances was demonstrated by the folklore ensemble "Khilola" from Karsha district of Kashkadarya region. During the recesses between performances of the folklore ensembles the spectators were applauding the improvised termas, fragments from dastans and poetic dialogues between Uzbek bakhshi and Kazakh akyns - winners of traditional storytellers' competition in Termez within the program of the festival "Boysun bahori" - Shodmon bakhshi Khujamberdiev (the 1st premium), Etmishbai Abdullaev (Khoresm), Abdumurod Rakhimov (Kashkadarya) and Boboraim Mamatmurodov (Surkhandarya, the 2nd premium each), Abdanazar Paionov (Surkhandarya), Abdukahhar Rakhimov (Kashkadarya) and Jumabek Subanov ( Tashkent region, the 3rd premium each) and others.

Twenty designers participated in the competition of national dressing style and design. In comparison with the last year the geography of participants extended - Tashkent, Bukhara, Zerafshan, Boysun, Shurchi and Kyrgyzstan. Grand Prix was won by Kuchina Natalia (Tashkent), Boibetova Galina, Syztkazieva Nurkabai, Bekmambetova Zuhra (Kyrgyzstan) and Tatyana Budilova (Zarafshan) were also awarded; the young designer from Boysun Dilfuza Saidova received the monetary premium from Andrea Loenberger.

Within the festival program were held the International scientific conference "Problems of National Cultural Traditions Preservation" and a meeting with UNESCO experts, where was approved the long - term program on the operation and technical equipment of the Boysun complex scientific expedition and of the Center of Boysun folk crafts, preservation and development of folk applied arts. Successful was the presentation of the first issue of "Boysun Scientific Expedition" (Tashkent: Scientific Research Institute of Fine Arts and SMI - group, 2003). The festival was finalized with a bright concert of the group "Yalla" headed by the National artist of Uzbekistan, Farrukh Zakirov, which became an exciting event left a deep trace in hearts of the Boysun people.

The Second Open Folklore Festival "Boysun bahori" became a real holiday of folk culture, and it has proved that folk songs, dances, traditional clothes, crafts and rites are not just preserved, but continue to live actually. And our rich treasury of folk songs is a component of the culture too, and its carrier, the people, has been still perfectly performing them. Perfect demonstration of that at the festival has become the best source for education of the youth.

Author: Rustambek Abdullaev
Source: San'at

The Sweetest Voice of the Caucasus

2008-10-21T21:01:00.003-02:00

I'm twice the lucky I was. Finally I've found two more .mp3 from Malika Utsaeva.

On How to Kill the Murka

2008-10-12T22:15:00.007-03:00

Murka (Мурка), along Katyusha, Kalinka an a few others, is maybe the most acknowledged russian traditional folk song. However, Mikhail Gulko does its best to kill it in that charlestonesque version.

I prefer this tango-like version. But I'm seekin for a genuine R-U-S-S-I-A-N version.

The Freddie & Fannie takeover, or on how to clothe the naked king… again

2008-09-10T19:43:00.007-03:00

On Sunday, before on Monday the Asian markets were pronouncing his judgment, american government decided to rescue the two mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, “investing” some plumbers’ $200 billions. And they're the 'world's plumbers', I would add, since bucks’re printed in the States but stockpiled worldwide.

For sure, that not solve the problem of rising foreclosures and falling house prices, but maybe can add some slowdown to the final landslide.

With a weaky dollar and rising prices of commodities, a huge amount of money flooded the emerging markets during the first six months of 2008. However, and due to a bunch of reasons, emerging markets’re plummeting nowadays.

Those reasons can be named as “geopolitical worries” in Russia, “fears of a bubble” in China, “overgrowt” in Hungary, “political turmoil” in Ukraine and Pakistan, “rising inflation” in Viet Nam, “muckraking” in Argentina, and so on. All those markets plummeted from 46 to 60% from then on, and emerging market sovereign bond yield spreads have risen to 330 basis points over Treasuries.

But, wait a minute… where they’re heading for? To the States. And as in an argentinian motto for a former presidential campaign, I can tell you “Follow me, I’m not going to screw you!”.

Yes. They’re “quality flying” right to the wolf’s mouth. Few months ago, to say Baring, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Mac, Mae, Washington Mutual, Merryll Lynch, AIG, and etc. were “blue chip” equivalents. And what now? Either they’re selling most of its prized asset or they’re being rescued right from their ashes by the representatives of the world’s plumbers. World keynesianism. All to be charged "democratically" on them. How much the chinese golden card will support to be charged that way?

If capitalism was a religion, I would say that his followers ate up already their own bishops and now they go for the cardinals. When the Pope? Are the own capitalism's foundations who are rattling.

In 2001, an oil barrel was costing U$S 20-25. Today it costs U$S 114-140. In 2001, gold was costing U$S 150; today it costs U$S 800. And similar remarks can be drawn from the 23 remaining staple products of the S&P Index. That is to say, more than 550%. Does anybody believe seriously that the American inflation is 3-4%/yr? I repeat: SERIOUSLY? Or will it be that to say 'the king is naked' would uncover the hell's doors?

Either the world pundits lost their compass and should be fired right now, or they need to visit a psychotherapist in a hurry, or simply they´re trying to screw us through an hand oiled, blind-eyed, and/or a well spin-doctored press.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: the Empire’s Adviser

2008-09-09T14:02:00.020-03:00

The outrageous strategy to destroy Russia
by Arthur Lepic

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s former adviser, embodies the continuity of U.S. foreign policy whether it is democratic or republican. A great admirer of Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski has always defended, praised and shown an absolute respect for the master’s two diplomacy concepts: the balance of the powers theorized by Metternich and George Kennan’s containment doctrine. Zbigniew Brzezinski recommends how Russia should be militarily weakened and intimidated. He is convinced that the best way to achieve it is by destabilizing its border regions, a political strategy that arouse the interest of former presidential candidate John Kerry’s team who recruited his son Mark Brzezinski as its foreign policy adviser.

Based on George W. Bush’s speech during year 2000 presidential campaign, a rigid, even aggressive attitude towards Vladimir Putin’s Russia would have been expected -according to his adviser “hawk” Wolfowitz’s doctrine. But, instead, we have seen an unprecedented approach in the political relations of these two great nations. And this has happened after September 11, 2001.

For many observers and analysts there was an agreement between Putin and Bush not to criticize Russian military operations in Chechnya whereas Putin would ignore American interventions and interferences in the Middle East.

This explanation does not really value September 11 facts. It actually considers them as an abstraction and the same with Kremlin’s position on this. We can say that Republican administrations have always attached too much importance to the Middle East whereas Democrat’s political tradition on foreign policy has been more focused in Eurasia.

To design its strategy towards the former USRR and then on the Easter states, recently emancipated from the Soviet influence, Democrats have trusted -since Jimmy Carter took power- a brilliant, unscrupulous and anti-Russian man: Zbigniew Brzezinski.

This well-known professor’s doctrine has many followers outside of the Democratic Party because it has defined the actual imperative of the empire’s survival and prosperity: the conquest of Eurasia.

This professor was born in Warsaw in 1928, the son of a Polish diplomat. At the age of ten, Brzezinski immigrated to Canada when his father was distinguished. He did his degree and his master at the University of Mc Gill, Montreal, and then his PhD at Harvard in 1953. After that, he became an American citizen and married the daughter of Czechoslovakia’s former president Eduardo Benes.

Between 1966 and 1968 he was a member of the Council of Policy Planning of the State Department where he developed the “peaceful involvement” strategy towards the Soviet Union in the framework of the Cold War. In October 1966, he convinced President Johnson to modify the strategic priorities in order to have the “thawing-out” before the German reunification.

During 1968 presidential campaign, Brzezinski was the head of the working party in charge of democratic candidate Hubert H. Humphrey’s foreign policy, who would lose to Richard Nixon.

The Inspiring Leader of the Trilateral Commission

At the beginning of the 1960s, Brzezinski distinguished himself as an analyst when prophetically announced the appearance of bigger actors in the world power. He was talking about Europe and Japan whose economies have had a rapid growth after WWII.

In an article published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1970, he talked about his vision of this “new world order”. «A new and more daring vision is needed - the creation of a community of developed countries capable of efficiently handling the problems of mankind. Apart from the U.S. and Western Europe, Japan should be included (...) A good start would be a council formed by representatives of the U.S, Western Europe and Japan, which will hold regular meetings among the heads of governments and less relevant personalities.»

In 1970, Brzezinski also proposed new ideas in his new book Between two Ages [1] where he explained that the moment to balance world power had arrived and it had to be in the hands of a new global political order based on a trilateral economic tie between Japan, Europe and the U.S. The revolution in production techniques and the transformation of the heavy industry into electronics had to cause a disruption of political systems and a new generation of power elites. David Rockefeller, excited about these concepts, hired him to create the Trilateral Commission and appointed him director. The commission was officially established in 1973 and gathered important personalities related to world trade, the international banking system, governors and the big European, Japanese and American media.

When the first oil crisis took place, the main concern of these world finance masters was to get rid of the foreign debt of developing countries by strengthening the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was also about strengthening and extending U.S.’s hegemony - by that time vulnerable due to its military defeat in Viet Nam- in every geographical boundary of the Eurasian continent where they were very influential after WWII

This mission, if analyzed from an outsider’s point of view, depicts Brzezinski as a peace advocate, a man in favor of multilateral relations and diminishing world tension (Cold War) and -to the eyes of the extreme right- as a man inspired by Marxism.
The best to be done in order to implement the plans of the Trilateral Commission was to make one of its members the President of the United States.

President Carter and the Double-Dealing

Since the creation of the Trilateral Commission, shepherd Jimmy Carter was among the members of Rockefeller-Brzezinski’s team. He has opened the first trade offices of the state of Georgia in Brussels and Tokyo and this turned him into the ideal model or the founding concept of the Commission. [2] For his nomination as an election candidate and to the presidential election in 1976, Rockefeller used his relations in Wall Street and put Brzezinski to work, whose academic influence assisting democratic candidate Jimmy Carter was very helpful for wining the election. And, of course, when Carter won the elections, Brzezinski was appointed national security adviser. [3]

As president, Carter stated the reduction of the military nuclear arsenal of the two blocks (U.S. -USRR) as a priority. However, the Soviet SS-20 missile crisis aimed at Europe forced Carter to deploy the Pershing missiles, an action that ruined his efforts, whether they were sincere or not, and caused the reciprocal distrust of the two countries.

It can be affirmed that by that time, the Soviet block had good reasons to believe that its adversary was involved in double-dealing: the U.S. military defeat in Viet Nam forced it to keep certain reserve in the strategic and military fields whereas Brzezinski was working on his war plan to set a trap for the Soviet Union and force it to come into a peripheral conflict.

The destabilization of the Afghan communist regime and the financing and delivering of the first weapons to anticommunist Jihad followers in 1979 caused, as expected, the intervention of the Red Army in Afghanistan. Brzezinski had the support of Pakistan intelligence and espionage services, the fearful ISI.

When the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur interviewed Brzezinski in 1998, he admitted that the equipping of Bin Laden’s anti-Soviet troops was before the Russian invasion and was aimed at provoking its reaction:

Le Nouvel Observateur: Former CIA director, Robert Gates, says in his memoirs: the American secret services assisted Afghan mujahedeen six months before the Soviet invasion. By that time, you were President Carter’s adviser and you played a key role on this. Do you confirm it?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of the story, the CIA began to assist mujahedeen in the year 1980, that is, after the invasion of the Soviet army against Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the truth that remained secret until today is quite different: it was on July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed his first order on the secret assistance to Kabul’s pro-Soviet regime opponents. That day I wrote a memorandum to the President in which I told him that that assistance would cause the Soviet intervention (...) we did not force the Russian intervention, we just, conscientiously, increase the intervention possibilities.

NO: When the Soviets justified their intervention by affirming they were fighting against a secret American interference nobody believed them, though they were telling the truth. Don’t you regret it?

Z. Brz.: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its objective was to lead the Russian to the Afghan trap, and you want me to regret it? The very same day the Soviets crossed the Afghan border I wrote the following to President Carter: «This is our chance to give Russia its Viet Nam» (...).

N.O.: Aren’t you sorry either for favoring Islamic fundamentalism and providing weapons and consultancies to future terrorists?

ZBrz.: What is the most important thing when you look at world history, the Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire? Some excited Islamists or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War? [4]

When Brzezinski talked about «some excited Islamists» in this interview, he did not underestimate Al Qaeda’s power. He just described the reality of what the neo-conservatives has turned into a myth while justifying their world crusade. It is obvious that none of the members of the Council on Foreign Relations would be so categorical.

Objective Alliance with China and Unconditional Support to the Shah of Iran

Even when Nixon and Kissinger were cautious about besieging the Soviet Union and restored relations with China, a number of Carter’s closest advisers did not support this rapprochement Brzezinski had in mind.

When Carter became President, he stated he would establish a dialogue with the USRR and keep the People’s Republic of China at a distance. But, his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, opposed Brzezinski anti-Russian obsession and Carter had no choice but to conciliate its administration’s antagonism.

Usually, the mediator between these two poles was Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. future ambassador to the UN and John Kerry’s foreign policy adviser during his campaign, along with Mark Brzezinski, Zbigniew’s son. According to Cyrus Vance and some others in favor of establishing the dialogue, like democrat renegade Averell Arriman, the triangular logic of besieging would only lead, at its best, to a misunderstanding with the USRR, not to mention war.

They recommended dialogues on disarmament and cooperation with the Soviet Union to neutralize the Third World conflicts. The re-establishment of relations with China kept on; Brzezinski even completed a joint program of strategic cooperation and managed to have good personal relations with Deng Xiaoping, something that has really helped him nowadays.

Brzezinski’s distrust towards the USRR can be perceived again in his attitude towards Iran, which under the Shah’s regimen was considered as a bastion against the Soviet influence in the Middle East. Brzezinski promised Shah his support until the last moment and requested U.S. military intervention to keep him in power even when part of Carter’s administration, led by his Secretary of State, opposed it.

However, Washington’s concrete actions were implemented according to the state Department’s point of view and despite all negotiations with the generals that defeated Shah to guarantee a moderate regime in the country; it was Khomeini who took power after a popular seafloor spreading. Khomeini joined Carter at Camp David negotiations in 1977 and played a key role in the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt without even being present in the most important debates. However, when the USRR was the main topic, he was always there.

The Russian Threat and the American Supremacy

In 1989, Brzezinski quit his job at Columbia University where he taught since 1960 to work on Ukraine’s independent status plan. This marks the beginning of his compromise to prevent the resurgence of Russia as a superpower. He defended Russia’s integration to the Western system and the “geopolitical multiparty system” in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

He also developed a “plan for Europe” that included NATO’s expansion to the Baltic republics, a dream that came true when three of them joined NATO in 2002. During the 90s he was the special envoy of the American President to promote the most important oil infrastructure project of the world: the Baku-Tbilissi-Ceyhan pipeline which was his best opportunity to prevent the resurgence of Russia. He has also been, since 1999, the president of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, whose headquarters are located at the Freedom House facility. This position allows him to intervene in peace negotiations between the Russian government and independence fighters led by Mashkadov. However, the truth behind these good will “democratic” activities is to assist independence followers to maintain a war in the area, like the Afghan one, to weaken Russian and to keep it away from the gains of the Caspian Sea.

Brzezinski’s doctrine («The power ruling Eurasia will control two of the most economically advanced and productive areas of the world») is related to NATO’s expansion to the East, something the Clinton’s Administration actively worked on. But, how could they sell NATO to Europeans? «The European region located in the Western border of Eurasia and next to Africa is much more exposed to the risks of the increasing global disorder than a more politically united, military powerful and geographically isolated America (...).

The Europeans will be more exposed to risk if an imperialist chauvinism encourages Russia’s foreign policy», said Brzezinski to National Interest magazine in year 2000. [5] The whole thing is quite clear: the deployment of NATO’s forces around Russia was a preventive measure. If Russia’s reaction is to be defensive, it means that it is planning to restore its empire and totalitarianism.

Brzezinski has been working also as a consultant for BP-Amoco and Freedom House in Azerbaijan. His objective is to worship Heidar Alyiev’s image and in a New York Times interview he characterized the dictator as a «nice guy». [6] Brzezinski justifies Aliyev’s Anglo-Saxon support by explaining that after seven decades of communist government nobody can expect Azerbaijan and the former Soviet republics to become democratic nations in such a short period of time.

Even when Aliyev’s political repression increased during the last few years and the gains from the Caspian Sea diminished, Azerbaijan was still considered by Freedom House as a “partially free” country. In 1999, Secretary of State and Brzezinski’s disciple, Madeleine Albright, invited Heidar Aliyev to NATO’s anniversary ceremony. On their part, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine organized some joint military maneuvers, sponsored by NATO’s “Association for Peace” program, on April 16, 1996. [7]

Despite his activities as BP-Amoco and Freedom House’s consultant, Brzezinski assisted a system of funds and NGOs (non governmental organizations) in support of the former Soviet top-classes, intellectuals and elites.

As an initiative of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, whose chairman was Brzezinski, a meeting between the main leaders of the Chechnya movement was held from August 16 to August 18, 2002 in Lichtenstein, two months after the one held in Bassaiev and Maskhadov, where an agreement was signed on the mutual direction of the “Armed Forces of the Ichkeria Republic of Chechnya”. The participants concluded that Chechnya should not longer be a part of Russia, that a real autonomy was necessary and the time to negotiate with Maskhadov had arrived. But, was Beslán’s hostages event, as claimed by Bassaiev, part of Chechnya independence demand process or part of Russia’s destabilizing process? [8]

Several questions could be raised if we take into account that the main consequence of this action was a tightening of tensions between North Odessa and neighboring Inguchia, that is, a much more relevant balkanization of the region.

Nowadays, Brzezinski is very active in CSIS but he still the brain of the Democrats foreign policy program, something that is quite evident in candidate Kerry and his partner John Edwards’s obsession with Russia. Following Mark Brzezinski’s advises they chose as their main priority Russia’s nuclear disarmament in a moment in which it has recovered the same oil production it had before its demise and is benefiting widely of the current oil prices which has allowed it to double its defense budget. Therefore, Russia’s nuclear arsenal is not, as John Kerry says, a present-day threat.

Kerry’s real objective is related to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s strategy of Russia’s subordination but, from now on, it will be much more difficult to convince the world public opinion of Russia’s evil and totalitarianism. [9] Therefore, it is necessary to provoke its reaction as was done with the Afghan case in 1979, because Russia will have no problems with its energy supply in the next decades, a real concern the U.S. has. This is why in some recent Wall Street Journal and Novaya Gazetta interviews, Brzezinski characterized Vladimir Putin as «Russian Benito Mussolini».

Arthur Lepic, French Journalist, member of the French section of Voltaire Network and specialized in energy and military affairs.

Published originally in Voltairenet, 22 October 2004

[1] Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era, Harper publishing house, 1971. French Edition, Révolution technetronique, Calman-Lévy publishing house, 1971.

[2] The Trilateral Commission will also lead French President Giscard d’Estaing to choose one of its members, Raymond Barre, professor of economics and political unexperienced, as Primer Minister.

[3] Brzezinski included in his team Madeleine K. Albright (whose father served in Czechoslovakia during Eduard Benes’s government, Brzezinksi’s father in law) and the two theorists of The Clash of Civilization, Bernard Lewis and Samuel P.Huntington.

[4] Le Nouvel Observateur, No. 1732, from January 15 to January 21, 1998, p.76.

[5] Quoted in George Szamuely : «Bribing Montenegro - It didn’t work», antiwar, June 15, 2000.

[6] «Freedom spells B-A-K-U», Counterpunch Magazine, 1999.

[7] See: «Freedom House, quand la liberté n’est qu’un slogan», Voltaire, September 7, 2004. Article written in French that will soon be published by Red Voltaire.

[8] Marivilia Carrasco : «Beslan: responsibility of slaughter points towards the Anglosaxons», Voltaire, September 19, 2004.

[9] Thierry Meyssan: «115 atlantists against Rusia», Voltaire, November 26, 2004.

Grindaboð! Something is rotten in Denmark…

2008-08-28T19:59:00.018-03:00

By Norberto Ovando. He reports the slaughters of caldrons (or pilot whales) that are realized in the Faroe Islands located in the North Atlantic Ocean, and that are an autonomous territory of the kingdom of Denmark. The ancestral ceremonies of the grindaboð and the grindadráp, open the hunt.

Perhaps they do not be easy to find the Faroe Islands in a map, but once you know where they are and what they do: you will never forget them!

The Faroe Islands are an autonomous territory inside the kingdom of Denmark. They are constituted by 18 green islands that arose from the sea in right center of the North Atlantic Ocean. And his motto to sell them in the world is “Allow that nature takes possession of you ”.

The official language is the feroense and it has his roots in the ancient norse. The official page of Denmark promotes them this way: "Allow you to go for the sensations. Breath deeply and allows that the purity invade your mind ”. This way they amuse themselves in the Faroe Islands.

When the summer comes in the North Hemisphere and the whales continue his migratory path, they approach the islands in search for food, because the waters are less deep, more warm and rich in food.

Such an awaited day has arrived, the pilot whales or common caldrons as they are known, already are here. A watchtower has shouted the voice of alarm and the crafts go out to the sea in his search.

The whale pilot has long fins and completely black, is a dolphin that measures from 3 to 7 meters, it weighs between 4 or 5 tons and they are extremely social and that characteristic is made use for ambush them and lower them up to the shore.

From the boats they thrown stones that serve to lead them towards the wished destination, at the time they corner them and guiding towards the bay. The whales of behind push those of ahead and the gregarious spirit of those cetacean does that the herd goes grouped towards his dramatic end.

When the whales approach to the beach they crowd and remain trapped, they are hundred and hundred that can neither step back nor advance. On the coast, the people, warned for hours, impatient waiting. The whales have returned after the long and cold winter.

The schools have given a holiday.

The herd has fallen down in the trap the man has layed them.

It begins "grindaboð" and the "grindadráp".

These two words in language feroés mean "whale at sight " and “to hunt whales”.

The people see the boats and they shout grindaboð!, grindaboð! and the adolescents who will lead the slaughter, they will "demonstrate" this way his entry to the adult age, his virility, wait to the whales in the shore where they stranded and without being able to step back since the boats block to him the way behind, and begins the slaughter.

With a hook to fix them, called blásturongul and a saw they do a wound in the spine trying to cut and to break his principal arteries, while the pain that is provoking them cut them to the animals they do that these shake his bodies desperately trying to be liberating of the killers, and once achieved the deep cut it begins the big bled, being the causer that the sea is dyed of blood-red.

Meanwhile from the shore the children see in this space become infested with blood proveniente of the cruel slaughter of more or less 900 animals every year, that not always die rapidly; the adults observe calmly this barbarism.

Every year thousand caldrons or pilot whales are massacred. The caldrons, the most intelligent dolphin has the peculiarity of approaching the persons for pure curiosity.

The caldron, which scientific name is Globicephala melas or Globicephala macrorhynchus is a cetacean of the family of the dolphins and is catalogued as species threatened with special interest, appearing also in the Red List of the World Union for the Nature - IUCN - like of low risk.

The hunting in the Faroe Islands is a topic of great controversy in the recent years especially for the inhuman methods used in the hunting and the question of if this is necessary from a socio-economic or nutritional point of view.

Some studies have determined that the meat of the caldrons or whales pilots can be a risk for the health of the consumers due to the big quantity of pollutants found in her, i.e. metals as the mercury, the cadmium, policlorobiphenils (PCB) and other organoclorines.

The fishing industry generates the majority of the income of the feroenses. In fact, the fishing products constitute 97 % of the volume of the entire exports of the islands.

The blood’ dyed sea and the brutal slaughter before the sight of the whole world, is an image that in the XXIst century strikes the conscience of million citizens of different countries and of groups conservationists of the round world.

Norberto Ovando

Vice-president Friends of the National Parks Association (AAPN) World Commission of Protected Areas Expert (WCPA) of the UICN, Latin-American Network of Protected Areas (RELAP)

Original article (in spanish) here

Danish embassies worldwide: Help us to stop this atrocity. Please call or write to the Danish Embassy in your country. They can be reached here. And write too to the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Faroese Parliament and the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Faröese Prime Minister's Office.

A SAMPLE TEXT IN ENGLISH, SPANISH, DANISH AND SWEDISH

English: Mr. Governor of the Faröe Islands: I know of the slaughter of pilot whales who is carried out in the Faröe Islands, and I realize that everywhere animals are killed for human feeding. Nevertheless, the character of popular festivity you give it in the Faröe Islands, does not allow me to infer that the above mentioned slaughter is carried out exclusively to feed. Rather it is alike the bitter spectacle of the bullfights, in which it is enjoyed the suffering of beings that do not have any real possibility of defending themselves from his attackers. Entire families are murdered every year this way, before the laugh and the pleasure of the assistants. On behalf of a great part of the humanity, to whom these atavistic behavior turn out to be shocking and incomprehensible, we ask you respectfully to stop doing what you do right now. We ask you to dictate right now the laws that prohibit this slaughter intended to satisfy the sadism and the cruelty. We will much acknowledge your quick response to this claim.

Spanish: Sr. Gobernador de las Islas Faröe: Sé de la matanza de ballenas piloto que se realiza en las Islas Faröe, y soy consciente de que en todas partes del mundo se matan animales para la alimentación humana. No obstante, el carácter de festividad popular que se les asigna en las Islas Faröe, no me permite inferir que dicha matanza se realice exclusivamente con el fin de alimentarse. Más bien se asemeja al amargo espectáculo de las corridas de toros, en la que se disfruta del sufrimiento de seres que no tienen ninguna posibilidad real de defenderse de sus atacantes. Familias enteras son asesinadas todos los años de este modo, ante la risa y la complacencia de los asistentes. En nombre de una buena parte de la humanidad, a la que estas costumbres históricas nos resultan chocantes e incomprensibles, le pedimos con todo respeto que dejen de hacer lo que hacen ya mismo. Le pedimos que dicte ahora las leyes que prohiban esta matanza destinada a satisfacer el sadismo y la crueldad. Le agradeceré mucho una pronta respuesta satisfactoria a este pedido.

Danish: Herr Guvernør på øerne Faröe: Jeg kender til aflivning af pilot hvaler, der finder sted i Øer Faröe, og jeg er bevidst om, at i alle dele af verden dræbe dyr til konsum. Men karakteren af festivity mennesker, der er tildelt i Øer Faröe, ikke tillader mig at antage, at sådanne drab er lavet kun til at brødføde sig selv. Tværtimod, det ligner den bitre syn af tyrefægtning, som nyder godt af de lidelser væsener der ikke har nogen reel chance for at forsvare sig mod deres angribere. Hele familier bliver dræbt hvert år på denne måde, at latter og selvtilfredshed af publikum. På vegne af en stor del af menneskeheden, som Disse historiske vaner er chokerende og uforståeligt for os, beder vi med al respekt at stoppe gør, hvad de gør nu. Vi beder nu diktere de love, der forbyder denne massakre på at opfylde sadisme og grusomhed. Jeg ville sætte pris på din hurtige meget tilfredsstillende svar på denne anmodning.

Swedish: Herr Guvernör på Faröarna: Jag fick veta om avlivning av så kallade pilot valar som äger rum på Faröarna, och jag är medveten om att i alla delar av världen dödar man djur för mänskliga konsumtion. Men den typ av folklig högtidlighet som slakteriet har på Faröarna tillåter mig inte att dra slutsatsen att detta endast görs för näringslivskäl. Snarare liknar det den bittra spektakel av tjurfäktning, som har lidandet för varelser som inte har någon verklig chans att försvara sig mot sina angripare. Familjer av djur dödas varje år på detta sätt, till skratt och självgodhet av tittarna. I namn av en stor del av mänskligheten, för vilket dessa historiska vanor är upprörande och obegripliga, ansöker vi med all respekt att omedelbart stoppa göra vad ni gör. Vi ber er lagstifta en förbjudning av detta massaker riktat för tillfredställa sadistiska och gryma aspekter av den mänskliga varelsen. Jag skulle uppskatta väldigt högt ditt tillfredsställande svar på denna begäran.

Or translate yourself here.

Stepan Bandera

2008-07-08T17:47:00.014-03:00

Stepan Bandera was an Lviv born Ukrainian nationalist leader who defeated both nazi Germany and Soviet Union under the WWII and died poisoned by the KGB in Munich, 1959[1].

He headed the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), a carpathian guerrillas created in 1942 as the military wing of the violent, fascist[2] and Ustasha-like OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) created in Poland, 1929 and inspired by Dmitro Dontsov.

However, having the same nazi-fascist roots than the Ante Pavelic’s Ustashas and Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael, they added the Nazis as enemies when UON partisans were imprisoned by the Gestapo for declaring the Independent Ukrainian State (1941).

His steps are nowaday followed by the Main Commander of All-Ukrainian Unit "Tryzub" (Trident), Colonel Dmitry Jarosh, colonel Vasyl Ivanyshyn, before by the OUN predecessors Eugeny Konovalets and Yaroslav Stetsko, and some other groups as the UNSO (Ukrainian National Self-Defence), International Anti-imperialistic Front (IAF), with ramifications to the Caucasus, as the Movement for Decolonization of Caucasus (under Ahmad Sardali).

On October 18, 2007, the Lviv City Council adopted a resolution establishing the "Award of Stepan Bandera”.

Notes:
[1] as was acknowledged by former KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov in an interview with Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2005.
[2] A slogan put forth by the Bandera group and recorded in the July 16, 1941 Einsatzgruppen report stated: "Long live Ukraine without Jews, Poles and Germans; Poles behind the river San, Germans to Berlin, and Jews to the gallows". Once the OUN was at war with Germany, such instances lessened.

Denarius

2008-06-09T19:40:00.005-03:00

At first, the denarius had begun to be minted in the Republic in 211 BC, and contained 4.5g of silver. Some 500 years later, it was debased to a 2% in silver. A day in 275 AD, an Eastern merchant rejected a payment made in denarius. The end of the Roman Empire had begun.

Further attempts of Diocletian to regain the empire by dividing it first in two and then in four only worsen the things up, and from then on the Roman Empire only knew a permanent landslide up to formalizing his disappearance in times of Romulus Augustus in hands of Odoacer.

In 2001, oil barrel was costing U$S 20-25. Today it costs U$S 114-140. In 2001, golden was costing U$S 150; today it costs U$S 800. And similar remarks can be drawn from the 23 remaining staple products of the S&P Index. That is to say, more than 550%. Does anybody seriously believe that the American inflation is 3-4%/yr? I repeat: SERIOUSLY? Or will it be that to say 'the king is naked' would uncover the hell's doors?

Do you smell some similarities between this little story and the rising quantity of money the world ask you for a oil barrel, a ton of staple food or the commodity name-it-as-you-want? Me too.