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From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 8/28/2008 6:48 AM
August 25th 2008 · Prague Watchdog / Dzhambulat Are     
    
    
Harun al-Rashid in Gudermes
Harun al-Rashid in Gudermes

By Dzhambulat Are

GROZNY, Chechnya – It is no secret that a considerable number of today’s Chechen officials, whose duties include the regular swearing of a public oath of loyalty to Russia, are former separatists. Also among them are quite a few men who served, no less faithfully, all the Ichkerian presidents, starting with Dudayev and ending with Maskhadov. To make reference – whether positive or negative – to the former Chechen leaders within the walls of state institutions is almost a crime, and so recent Chechen history long ago emigrated to the kitchens of private homes.

But, as the Latin proverb says, what is permitted to Jove is not permitted to the ox. Ramzan Kadyrov frequently avails himself of the right to recall the recent past whenever he wants to find arguments in favour of the simple thesis that though life was bad before it is better now. The last time he did so was on August 21 at a government meeting in Grozny, where, among other things, the problem of endemic drunkenness in Chechnya was discussed.

Ramzan Kadyrov accused the Maskhadov government of hypocrisy. He said that “by swigging vodka in the bathhouse themselves while meting out canings to people who’d taken one sip”, they had discredited the very concept of Sharia. Kadyrov recalled how under Maskhadov people who had imported vodka into the republic were released in exchange for bribes, while those who were found with a bottle they had saved for the festive table were given the maximum punishment prescribed by the law.

“Maskhadov himself drank vodka, even though he promulgated Sharia law. His bodyguards told me how they used to go to Aushev’s to take a sauna, where they knocked back vodka and swilled wine,” Kadyrov said. At the government meeting in question there just happened to be an eyewitness, whom Ramzan asked to confirm his words.

Having thus given away the secrets of Maskhadov’s court, Kadyrov talked about the present situation with regard to the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the land that is entrusted to him. The picture painted by the president was none too rosy. Deciding to emulate the example of the eight century Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Ramzan Kadrov secretly spied on the lives of his compatriots in nocturnal Gudermes and found himself impelled to pursue a drunken 17-year-old youth. The youth made off in a car at enormous speed, and when he was caught turned out to be one of Kadyrov’s close relatives.

But his drunken teenage relative apart, he was also struck by how openly the Chechens of today indulge in various sins. Not only do they no longer hide their cigarettes from their elders as they used to – they have absolutely no compunction in drinking vodka at the side of the road, placing the bottles directly on the roofs of their cars.

Actually, the endemic drunkenness in Chechnya is nothing new. If we are to be blunt, it is the result of a deliberate policy which dates back to Soviet times. For it was then that in order to secure advancement in their professional careers the natskadry [national minority officials] underwent a kind of rite of unification which involved acquiring a knowledge of the science of heavy vodka drinking. In modern times the practice has been updated by the military authorities. Chechens who drink during the “mop-ups” [zachistki] are automatically granted something akin to the absolution of sins in accordance with a simple logic: if he’s drinking it means he’s not a Wahhabite.

But despite the fact that it is now time for the struggle against drunkenness to begin, we may be certain that Ramzan Kadyrov is not about to impose Sharia law in the republic. Since the very phrase inspires a persistent aversion in people, he intends to stiffen the moral fibre of Chechnya’s citizens by applying the law of the ancient Adats. Of course, Kadyrov is aware that they must not clash with Russian law. It is just a manner of speaking, a verbal quibble aimed in the Kremlin’s direction.

At the meeting, Kadyrov revealed an important secret: among the fighting units of the guerrilla leader Dokka Umarov there are apparently men who have been planted there in order to gather information on the plans of the armed underground. For example, a group of Caucasus Emirate forces recently planned an attack on the Kadyrovites in the village of Saadi-Kotar. However, their scheme was uncovered thanks to timely information received from Umarov’s entourage. Six members of the group were successfully killed in an ambush. According to Kadyrov, three of them had joined the guerrillas only recently. Thus, in the opinion of the head of Chechnya, Umarov and his Arab instructors are sending new recruits into battle while they themselves take it easy up in the mountains. But what made Kadyrov most indignant of all was the fact that several girls had gone off to join the underground. “What sort of jihad do they plan to wage with the guys in the forest?” the Moscow-backed Chechen leader wondered.

Meanwhile, the republic’s authorities are also trying to take the members of the armed underground unawares by using non-traditional methods of struggle. Of late they have begun to operate through the guerrillas’ relatives. This is done in the following manner: while being videotaped, the families and loved ones of those suspected of belonging to the underground are forced to read out appeals to their relatives, asking them to leave the forest. Women tormented by the constant expectation of calamity are forced to renounce their sons and curse them for having disobeyed their parents.

In the city of Argun the local authorities have decided to expel the relatives of mujahedin from their village. The forcible removal of criminals from their local communities was tried once before. But matters have not yet gone so far as the strict application of Vainakh law. It looks very much as though during the over-zealous Chechen President’s recent visit to Moscow he received a snub from Kremlin officials who explained to him that questions relating to the deportation of populations lie exclusively within the jurisdiction of the federal leadership. When he got back to Chechnya, all that Kadyrov would say was that he did not intend to subject his compatriots to repression, but was simply conducting educational work with them. Doing so, however, according to the laws of the mountains – laws that still wait in the wings.

Compromat.ru archive photo

(Translation by DM)

http://www.watchdog.cz/?show=000000-000015-000006-000045&lang=1

From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 9/8/2008 7:18 PM
Journalists under threat of death in Caucasus     

Makhackala/Nalchik/Agency Caucasus – A journalist was murdered in Dagestan and another seriously wounded in Kabardino-Balkaria–two events that came shortly after Magomed Yevloyev, a journalist and owner of the news website Ingushetiya.ru, was killed on Sunday while he was in police custody.

Telman Alishayev, a reporter of the Islamic television channel Chirkey, was hospitalized after he came under fire while he was in his car on Tuesday in the Separatornii district of Makhackala, capital of Dagestan. Alishayev died while he was in the hospital in Makhackala, said Mark Tolchinski, spokesman for the Interior Minister. He was known for his documentaries, especially the ones about Wahhabism.

Miloslav Bitokov, Executive Editor of the independent Gazeta Yuga, and his son, came under fire from three people, one of them masked, while Mitokov was parking his car outside his home in Nalchik, capital of Kabardino-Balkaria. Bitokov was given medical treatment in the hospital for his injury to the head as well as to his nose. Bitokov’s colleagues said that he received death threats because of he was critical in his writings of the local administrators.

ÖZ/FT
04/09/2008
 
http://www.ajanskafkas.com/haber,20100,detay.htm

Georgia: Shock and Anger as Russia Recognise Breakaway Regions

Analysts in Tbilisi say decision to recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia will rebound on Moscow.

By Mikhail Vignansky in Tbilisi (CRS No. 457, 27-Aug-08)
A crowd several thousands strong is rallying outside the Russian embassy in Tbilisi, with many participants carrying Georgian flags and banners saying “Stop Russia!”.

“The world has now seen the real face of Russia,” said one protester, 24-year-old Dato. “The country is an aggressor; it’s an empire of evil.

“We have nothing in common with them, they’ve wiped out everything, they’ve declared war on us, they’ve been trying to occupy us, annex our territories, and all of it is happening in the 21st century.”

On August 26, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev recognised Georgia’s two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as independent states. His final approval followed decisions passed by the two houses of parliament the previous day.

“I had been expecting it, but the news that Medvedev had signed the document gave me the shivers, and I cried,” said Marina, one of the protesters outside the Russian embassy, who is herself a refugee from the Abkhazian war of the early Nineties which left the region a de facto separate entity, albeit an unrecognised one.

The secretary of Georgia’s Security Council, Alexander Lomaia, said Russia’s move had brought the relationship between the two countries to a halt “for a long time to come, if not for good”.

Lomaia said Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had no legal significance for Georgia, as sovereignty over the two territories were underpinned by its constitution.

President Mikheil Saakashvili described Moscow’s decision as “absolutely illegal” and a “strategic mistake”.

In a televised address after an emergency meeting of the Security Council, Saakashvili spoke of a “Russian imperialism newly reborn”, and assured his people that Europe would not tolerate the redrawing of national borders.

“Georgia will come out of this crisis ten times stronger – we won’t be brought to our knees. And may God preserve us,” he said.

Some diplomats and analysts had expected Saakashvili to break off diplomatic relations with Russia, but he did not go as far as that, although the Georgian parliament may yet seek to do so.

“I’m depressed, I’m at a loss,” said Dmitry, a 41-year-old engineer. An ethnic Russian, Dmitry was born in Tbilisi and has spent all his life there.

“I hope attitudes towards Russian people in Georgia won’t change, whatever the Russian leadership does.”

Dmitry had been planning to meet former classmates to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their leaving school, but the war foiled their reunion.

One of the group of friends, Khristo, came back from Greece especially for the party. An ethnic Greek, he emigrated in the mid-Nineties to Salonika , where he works as a medical equipment engineer.

“In Tbilisi I left behind one small part of my heart – my school friends,” said Khristo.

Driving from Turkey to Georgia by bus, he never made it as he was held up at Borjomi, 190 kilometres from Tbilisi, because of the Russian incursions into Georgia.

“For the two days I was on the road, I only heard snatches of reports about the war. But what I ultimately saw was not at all what I had expected to see,” he recalled. “There were Russian tanks on the main highway connecting Tbilisi with the country’s west. We could not proceed on our way, and it also transpired that the Russians had blown up the railway.”

Temur Yakobashvili, the Georgian state minister in charge of reintegrating Abkhazia and South Ossetia, told IWPR that Russia’s decision would be a headache for that country, by isolating it from the international community.

“Russia is trying to legitimise ethnic cleansing,” he said. “No serious country will support it in these efforts.”

He added, “What kind of independence are they talking about, when there are only 45,000 people living in Abkhazia and 15,000 in South Ossetia?”

In its conflict with Moscow, Tbilisi has urged the international community to condemn Moscow’s actions unequivocally, and highlighted the Russian incursions into areas south of Abkhazia including the key port of Poti – far from the South Ossetian conflict zone.

In these western regions, local residents have staged a series of rallies in which the central slogan is “Hands off Georgia!”

Georgian commentators are predicting that Russia’s military actions and now its diplomatic recognition of the two territories will backfire on it.

“Russia will fall victim to its own moves, as they are sure to lead to instability in Russia,” said former foreign minister Irakli Menagarishvili, who now heads the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tbilisi. “Overall, world stability has been placed in jeopardy. The empire of evil has reared its head again.”

Caucasus expert Mamuka Areshidze said the populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were now “doomed to live next to Russian military bases”.

Despite the continuing protests near the Russian embassy in Tbilisi, the mission’s spokesman Alexander Savinov told IWPR, “The diplomats have been working as normal. Ambassador Vyacheslav Kovalenko is in situ. The consular division continues to issue visas to Georgia citizens.”

Meanwhile, Khristo is already planning his next attempt to join his friends in Tbilisi in five years’ time.

“I’m going to start saving up again for another visit,” he said. “I hope there are no Russian troops in Georgia on the 30th anniversary of our graduation.”

Mikhail Vignansky is a Tbilisi-based commentator with the Vremya Novostei newspaper.
 
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=crs&s=f&o=346442&apc_state=henpcrs

From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 9/14/2008 11:21 AM
Friday, September 12, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Putin Deploys Russian Media against the West While Attacking Western Coverage of Moscow’s Georgian Moves
Paul Goble

Vienna, September 12 – Vladimir Putin yesterday lashed out at what he described as the anti-Russian attitudes animating Western media coverage of Moscow’s moves in Georgia, even as his government used Moscow’s rapidly expanding control of the Russian media to step up its ongoing disinformation campaign against the West.
At a press conference last evening at the Valdai discussion club meeting, Putin was asked why Russian forces had gone beyond the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. His response, says a great deal about how Putin views the world and why he clearly believes that he can win a propaganda war (www.polit.ru/news/2008/09/12/valda.html).
Instead of directly answering the question, he responded that the query didn’t surprise him. “What surprises me,” Putin said, “is something else: just how powerful the propaganda machine of the West is.” He said he “congratulate[d]” its organizers. “It is remarkable work! But the result is poor. And it always will be because this work is dishonest and amoral.”
And then he added that as far as Russia’s advance into Georgia was concerned, everyone should “remember how the Second World War began. On September 1, fascist Germany attacked Poland. Then they attacked the Soviet Union. Were we supposed to go back only to the [pre-war] borders and stop there?”
“Moreover,” Putin continued, “not only Soviet forces entered Berlin – there were Americans, French, and British.” The armies of these countries didn’t stop at their borders because it was necessary not only to repel the invader but to ensure that “an aggressor must be punished.”
Besides the tendentiousness of this argument – Putin neglects to recall that Hitler invaded Poland after concluding a pact with Stalin that allowed Soviet forces to move into that country as well – and his invocation of the defeat of Nazism — which for Moscow is a moral solvent in which all Soviet crimes dissolve – there are two other important aspects to his remarks.
On the one hand, Putin is clearly seeking to equate what the Georgian government did with what Hitler did, an ideological line certain to whip up emotions. And on the other, Putin’s lashing out at the Western media coverage is not only a reflection of his own anger at being challenged on anything but an effective cover for what he and his regime have been doing.
In the course of his time in power, as almost all media watchdog groups have documented, Putin has worked to intimidate or shut down any media outlets critical of him and his siloviki, a process has accelerated in recent times. (On this, see, among many others,
newsland.ru/News/Detail/id/295329/, and www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/67/18.html.)
But almost all the attention that this unfortunate process has attracted has focused on the ways in which Putin’s policies are denying the citizens of the Russian Federation of the information they need to be able to function as well-informed citizens and to hold their government accountable for its actions.
Beyond any doubt, Putin’s attack on media freedom has that as its first target, but it is increasingly obvious that he is using his expanded control over the Russian media to spread misinformation and disinformation about and also to Western media outlets that make use of Russian news agencies.
Misinformation, the spread of completely false reports, is the less serious threat. Typically, reportage that is completely false is not only easily identified but quickly challenged, as for example when Interfax reported that a Russian book on Islam was about to be published in Iran, something the Iranians quickly denied (www.islamrf.ru/news/russia/rusnews/4478/).
But disinformation is another matter. As the West’s best students of the subject, Natalie Grant and Vladimir Volkov, have pointed out, disinformation almost always involves the careful mixing obviously true things with false ones that some will find plausible or at the very least difficult or impossible to check.
As a result, disinformation, especially if its dissemination begins in what many would view as a more or less reliable media outlet, quickly gets picked up by other sources that use it in good faith, something that adds credibility to the disinformation that helps those who have launched it in the first place
A recent example of this was the report in Moscow’s “Kommersant” that suggested that the Azerbaijani government had neither treated visiting U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney with the respect he and his office are due nor agreed with his arguments on the continued, even growing importance of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline and of a trans-Caspian line as well.
Because the “Kommersant” report was the first article on the Cheney visit and because it appeared to be consistent with what some expected, it drawn on by many writers in the West — including the present author who then issues a corection — and then repeated by others, who did not go back to the original source or take note of denials by Azerbaijani and American officials.
There are other examples of such disinformation, but there are three important conclusions to be reached, all of which put new or more precisely restored from Soviet times burdens on those who are trying to keep track of what is going on in areas that Moscow cares very much about delivering a particular message.
First, Western writers need to be far more skeptical of all reporting coming out of Kremlin-controlled or Kremlin-influenced publications, something that will slow down the news cycle but perhaps lead to better reporting and certainly to a fuller appreciation of what kind of rulers Russia now has.
Second, Western governments who are involved in activities that the Russian government has an interest in misinforming the world about need to be far more pro-active in ensuring that they get repots out about what really has taken place so that the Putin government cannot “set the weather” not only in the Moscow media but in the Western media as well.
And third, people in both Russia and the West need to remember that the worst action a regime can take against news media outlets is not to close them but, as Putin has, to subvert them into purveyors of a pastiche of truths, half-truths, and lies, an action that makes it difficult to learn the truth but easy to see the nature of the state that uses this approach.
Posted by Paul Goble at 2:53 PM
 
http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/09/window-on-eurasia-putin-deploys-russian.html

From: Eagle_wng

Friday, September 19, 2008
Window on Eurasia: Duma Deputies Applaud Proposal to Restore Dzerzhinsky Statue to Lubyanka Square
Paul Goble

Vienna, September 19 – The removal of the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, from in front of KGB headquarters in Moscow was an iconic moment in the collapse of communism there in 1991, a step that many saw as a guarantee that the kind of repression he sponsored would never return.
But yesterday, members of a Duma committee applauded a proposal by the country’s former deputy procurator general to restore the statue of the first Chekist to its former place of honor, yet another indication of the way in which the political pendulum is swinging in the Russian Federation at the present time.
And even the possibility that Dzerzhinsky will again stand in Moscow gives especial urgency to a proposal by the Czech government this week to set up a Europe-wide center for the study of totalitarianism and its victims so that nothing will be forgotten lest the kind of historical revisionism Russia is now engaging in open the way for new horrors.
Speaking to a session of the Duma Security Committee, Vladimir Kolesnikov, the former prosecutor, called for returning the statue of Dzerzhinsky to its former place, a proposal that the deputies applauded and that the leadership of the Communist Party said it would bring up at a session of the Moscow City Duma (grani.ru/Politics/Russia/Parliament/Duma/m.141598.html).
The committee was convened so that deputies could receive a medal marking “the 130th birthday of F.E. Dzerzhinsky” (which took place last year) from Valentin Timofeyev, head of the Union of Veterans of State Security, whose group is upset that the statue is now lying unprotected and exposed to the elements.
Some deputies appeared to support the return of Dzerzhinsky to Lubyanka Square because they wanted to honor him; others appeared to back it because he was “part of our history” and should not be ignored; and still others because they believe the statue would serve as a reminder of what he did and what must not happen again.
But whatever the balance of forces is in the committee and whether in fact this idea goes forward, the restoration of the statue, which stood in front of KGB headquarters from 1958 to 1991, would be seen by many Russians and others as a clear indication of a reversal in the direction Russia appeared to take after the fall of communism.
Not surprisingly, Russian human rights activists are horrified by this possibility. Oleg Orlov of Memorial said that “Dzerzhinsky is only a symbol” but that the next step will be the return of the kind of power he represented,” a tragic indication that Russia has not broken with the past (www.newizv.ru/news/2008-09-19/98318/).
Instead, he continued, “many bureaucrats want to sit between two stools,” thus in the words of “Novyye izvestiya,” returning the old Soviet order while preserving their current business opportunities.” And Tatyana Lokshina of Human Rights Watch denounced the idea of restoring the statue as an insult to “the thousands of the victims of repression and their families.”
Even as Russian deputies were applauding such a move, Pavel Zacek, of the Prague Institute for Totalitarian Studies, told the European Parliament that the EU should create a union-wide institute for the study of totalitarianism and a museum about its victims, a step that would help the continent come to terms with its past (euobserver.com/9/26773/?rk=1).
In June of this year, the Czech Senate adopted the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, under the terms of which this institution would be created, and in January 2009 the Czech Republic will assume the EU presidency and push for its implementation.
Even though more than half of the members of the European Parliament have reportedly signed a declaration supporting the idea, there is certain to be resistance both from member governments fearful of what such a step would mean in their relations with Moscow and those concerned about reopening the darker pages of Europe’s own past.
One reason why Moscow will look askance at this idea is that the Czechs have also suggested that August 23rd become the day for Europeans to remember the victims of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism. That date, of course, is the anniversary of the Molotov –Ribbentrop Pact that led to the occupation of the Baltic states and opened the way for World War II.
Posted by Paul Goble at 9:30 AM
 
http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/09/window-on-eurasia-duma-deputies-applaud.html

From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 9/23/2008 11:22 AM
CAUCASIAN KNOT / NEWS

20/9/2008
Chechnya forms 437 precinct electoral commissions

The Chechen Republic has finalized formation of Precinct Electoral Commissions (PECs). The overwhelming majority of PEC members are the persons who had worked for all the recent elections held in the territory of the Republic.

The “Caucasian Knot” correspondent was told at the Republic’s Electoral Commission of Chechnya that the total number of local commissions will be 437. They include 3379 members in total. The overwhelming majority of them – 2880 persons had worked in electoral commissions since 2000.

Formation of local electoral commissions was done by a mixed principle. Some members are representatives of public organizations, some were recommended by political parties, and there are also people nominated by local population. About one third of the members are representatives of youth organizations and just young people.

According to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) of Chechnya, the precinct electoral commissions will start their work on September 22. Their basic mission is to draw up the voters’ lists, issue, if necessary, the so-called absentee ballots (made by the CEC in the number of five thousand pieces), and run the explanatory work among the population.

The official agitation electoral campaign for presidential elections started in Chechnya on September 12.

See earlier reports: “Seven parties found eligible for parliamentary elections in Chechnya”, “Chechnya’s parliament to become unicameral”, “No foreign observers to watch elections in Chechnya and Ingushetia”.

http://eng.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/engnews/id/1229364.html