Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin Speak out Against Putin’s Reforms

Tell me...

When was the last time that the electoral college elected a president other than the one who won the votes in the respective States?

Does the fact that we USED to appoint rather than elect Senators, and that today we elect them mean that we are more or less of a representative society today then we were yesterday?

Does the fact that Putin's political Party will appoint Governors and representatives instead of allowing the people to elect them via popular vote mean that Russia is more or less of a representative society today than they were yesterday?

Same with England.

Russia is moving backwards, and all you did by posting those examples, is to prove that they are.

A Separate War - Why Putin's Chechnya war isn't America's fight.December 2, 2002, The New Republic

The New Republic December 2, 2002 Editorial A Separate War Why Putin's Chechnya war isn't America's fight.

All the evidence suggests that Vladimir Putin is about to retaliate against last month's terrorist attack on a Moscow theater with characteristic ruthlessness. His generals have halted a planned troop pullout from Chechnya and vowed a renewed Russian offensive. Putin himself has stepped up his rhetoric, vowing never to negotiate with Chechnya's elected president. And the Russian Duma has voted to amend media laws to further restrict press coverage of future military actions in the breakaway republic.

Given Russia's past forays into Chechnya, these developments ought to be a matter of some concern in Washington. Human rights organizations have documented Russian abuses in Chechnya in gory detail--including, in one recent case, the discovery of the burned remains of nine civilians killed by Russian forces. At least 140,000 Chechens have been forced to flee the province. Yet, so far, Washington has shown virtually no concern at all. President Bush has declared this a "'time of solidarity" with Russia. Speaking with European reporters earlier this week, the president explained that America's "good friend" Putin should "do what it takes to protect his people from ... terrorist attacks"--implicitly acceding to Putin's long-standing argument that his actions in Chechnya are of a piece with the U.S. war on terrorism. They're not. Russia clearly faces a threat in Chechnya, but, Putin's spin notwithstanding, that threat is secession, not global Islamic terrorism. Unlike the killers in Bali and at the World Trade Center, the Chechens have a specific, local grievance: They want autonomy or independence. According to Thomas de Waal, co-author of a comprehensive book on Chechnya titled Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus, most Chechens are liberal Sufi Muslims who have no sympathy for Islamic fundamentalism and whose decade-long campaign has focused on one goal: leaving Russia. (Chechens are far more likely to dress in leather jackets or traditional headscarves than chadors.) What's more, in part because the region is surrounded on three sides by Russian troops and on the fourth by high mountains, few Islamist volunteers have traveled to Chechnya from abroad.

Putin's American apologists say the United States can't afford to be squeamish about human rights in Chechnya because we need Russia's help in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. But, in fact, it is precisely because of geostrategic concerns that the United States must distinguish Russia's actions in Chechnya from U.S. efforts against global Islamist terrorism. Giving Moscow a free pass in Chechnya--as the Bush administration seems strongly inclined to do--will further alienate moderate Muslims around the world from U.S. goals and interests. Indeed, Islamists have already begun using Russian atrocities in Chechnya as an issue with which to bludgeon the United States. On his latest audiotape attempt to reach his target audience--young Muslim men--Osama bin Laden explicitly refers to Chechnya. Islamic extremists in Britain have highlighted Chechnya in speeches, calling on followers to fight the United States and its allies to the death. Islamist leaders in Pakistan have made the plight of Chechen Muslims a central focus of their anti-Western diatribes.

Even the New Republic gets it.

So, you are basing your opinion on what totalitarianism calls itself?

Tell me then...who bothers you more: National Socialists, or Nazis?

And of course, you know it was a Chechen because they all have an extra head, and Putin told you that it was a Chechen.

Putin didn't need to say a word. www.amina.com (Chechen Republic Online) used to host links to these videos, or ones like them, before they went offline. To say that they were p*ssing their pants in glee was an understatement.

If the videos were faked by the Russians to frame the Chechens, yet the Chechens were still claiming them as their own, well....

What did he do that was "evil" and what did he do that was Soviet? Like I said - you are delusional.

In a way I feel sorry for you and those like you. For 50 years or so you had a certanty in your lives - it was simple back then when the Soviets were in power. Nostolgic dementia I think the term is.

And of course you know they were Chechens running that site because the Putin government told you, and you know that Putin's KGB training would never allow him to lie.

How could you describe taking away the people's rights to elect their own governors and representatives as something within "the framework of democratic freedoms that have become Russia's most valuable achievements over the last decade"?

The local legislators can vetoe Putin's choice and Putin has to make another. This is because in some parts of the country there are immigrant chechens and islamics voting in unethical governors, or pro-terrorist governors, who helped by looking the other way before Beslan happened.

It's a lot like what happened/is happening in Hamtranck Michigan, only add in more - that the governor and politicians ended up allowing the local terrorist Albanian mafia to plant explosives in a school.

It is all about protecting children. The chechens are filthy rich! They have millions to spend on bribes.

Basayev once said he could bribe his way all the way to Moscow with a truckload of explosives.

Each time the chechens have attacked Russia, they have been able to get stuff in with bribes. Many to policemen and local politicians. How do you think they got all those explosives into the place in back of the Moscow theatre?

Each time, the chechens have managed to kill a lot of Russians and/or the Russian military has come out of it looking foolish and inept.

Putin figured some drastic changes are in order, and these are it. He will personally be responsible for the oblast leaders, and only choose those whom he trusts to not accept bribes.

How many Russians have turned and gone pro-chechen? Enough to make him wary of trusting just anyone.

Oh I read that on the chechen mailing list. They were drooling over the video, asking for copies of it. It was a European who posted about the video, which she picked up in a kiosk in Grozny, she said.

"Putin didn't need to say a word. www.amina.com (Chechen Republic Online) used to host links to these videos"

.com?

If Russian websites are .ru, why would a Chechen site be a .com?

You really should do what I did - monitor and read the chechen lists and websites for awhile. You will learn a great deal.

Nazisism was a world conquering ideology and philosophy as was Communisim.

What I wrote at 158 applies to you as well:

Now I ask you what will be the result let us say of a Putin dictatorship? Communisim? Communisim seeks to spread the revolution? Nazisim's racial empire?

What exactly do you think - do you charge - will Putin do with his powers?

Wall Street Journal January 8, 2003

Putin's Other Chechen Campaign By CYNTHIA SCHARF

Ms. Scharf, a former Moscow-based journalist, now resides in London.

Days after Russia's worst-ever suicide bomb attack, which killed 80 people in the heart of Grozny, Russian President Vladimir Putin rang in the New Year with the cheery observation that his country was "meeting its future properly." His comments were not intended to be ironic.

Neither, for that matter, was the Russian daily Izvestia's headline in October proclaiming the Moscow hostage-taking crisis as Russia's "moment of truth." But three months after that lamentable event, truth about the blood-stained catastrophe that is Chechnya remains one of the last things the Russian public is likely to hear from its leaders -- or its media. Instead, Russian authorities have intensified their efforts to control what journalists report about the war.

Truth, of course, was one of the first casualties of the separatist conflict in the Caucasus. Three years of hideous carnage have been publicly whitewashed by Russian authorities that have at best ignored and at worst supported the acts of murder, torture, kidnapping and brutality inflicted upon Chechen civilians by Russian forces. While President Putin is undoubtedly aware of these egregious abuses, the Kremlin has done its utmost to pressure and intimidate journalists from reporting them. The result is a whitewashed portrayal of the Chechen conflict that has left Russian readers with little sense of the war's true costs -- in casualties, manpower, resources, military morale, and last but not least, national conscience.

Unfortunately, Mr. Putin has not used the October attack as an opportunity to learn from the wrongs of the past. Instead, he seems ever-more determined to add to them. To date, the Russian president has vilified and ostracized the moderate Chechen leadership (including elected president Aslan Maskhadov); forcibly evicted Chechen families from refugee camps in Ingushetia; stepped up zachistki or violent mopping-up operations against civilians in Chechnya; and clamped down still further on the Russian media. Taken together, these actions demonstrate that Russia's "moment of truth" has been hijacked by a president intent on perpetuating the Kremlin's lies about this war.

Given Chechnya's centrality to Mr. Putin's political future, coverage of the war is a matter of vital concern to the Russian president. Until recently, Russian authorities have shied away from legal means of controlling the media. Instead, they have employed a variety of carrots (selective favoritism and/or state funding) and sticks (financial pressure, management reshufflings, specious visits from the FSB, personal harassment) to exert the Kremlin's authority. Of course, there are also more overt means of pressure, including arrest, kidnapping, violence and death threats, which have been used against several Russian journalists -- including Anna Politkovskaya, Grigory Pasko and Andrei Babitsky.

Over the last three years, Russian security forces have made Chechnya -- and now its neighbor Ingushetia -- walled-off ghettos, sealed from the eyes and ears of all but a few score of journalists whose movements inside the province are controlled assiduously. Journalists are routinely denied entry to Chechnya if their reports are deemed critical of Russian forces. Countless bureaucratic restrictions (including mandatory military escorts) are imposed on the movements of those who manage to report from inside Chechnya.

Journalists, including foreign reporters, have been detained, interrogated, physically threatened and expelled from the area by security forces for refusing to comply with the Russian authorities' "see-no-evil, hear-no evil" guidelines. According to Andrei Babitsky, most Russian print journalists and nearly all of the broadcast media practice a "fairly rigorous degree of self-censorship."

But Mr. Putin is a shrewd politician, and he is under some international pressure -- albeit wincingly feeble and opportunistically applied -- to respond to accusations of Russian abuses in Chechnya. To maintain his carefully constructed image as a liberal in Western eyes, the Russian president knows he cannot appear too heavy-handed in stifling democratic institutions, including the press.

Mr. Putin's recent veto of amendments to Russia's law on the media is a clear example of his strategy to stifle criticism of the war effort while appearing publicly to be a defender of press freedom. These amendments, passed in near unanimous zeal by the parliament after the hostage crisis, banned any reporting that served as propaganda for extremist activities or provides justification for resisting antiterrorist operations.

Instead, the Russian president has proposed that lawmakers make another, less heavy-handed effort to amend the country's decade-old media law, this time with journalists' active assistance. It remains to be seen whether this calculated fifth-column strategy to co-opt journalists into emasculating their own independence will succeed.

Of course, those who have suffered most from the Kremlin's campaign to stifle the truth are the Chechen people themselves, whose suffering has been an unending nightmare of Dantian proportions. As Mr. Babitsky has noted, the Kremlin led campaign to silence reporting on Chechnya many times has enabled the Russian military operate in a climate of lawlessness, with no legal accountability for the ongoing crimes committed by its forces against civilians.

Mr. Putin knows all too well that without public information, without witnesses, there is no possibility of accountability, and no end in sight to the bloodshed. In perpetuating the mixture of denials and lies that feed this war, Mr. Putin is leading his country up a blind alley. Moreover, he is jeopardizing the security of all its citizens -- Russians and Chechens alike.

In the end, there are no victors in this war, for the crimes committed in Chechnya serve to dehumanize both societies. In confronting Chechnya, Russia is looking into a mirror, darkly, for it is battling with itself and the legacy wrought by its terror and brutality. Mr. Putin wishes to deny the consequences of this truth. In so doing, he is compromising not only his country security, but also its conscience.

"Oh I read that on the chechen mailing list. They were drooling over the video, asking for copies of it. It was a European who posted about the video, which she picked up in a kiosk in Grozny, she said."

ROTFLMAO!!!!!

The WSJ...

Everyone gets it except the useful idiots.

Bring back the Soviet Union.

I've addressed some interesting article to "All" that you should look over. It seems when you kick a dog long enough, even a Muslim dog, it will bite.

Kavkaz is run by this man and I was working with Johnathan when he got this info, btw.

In fact we were on to the Nord Ost attack before it happened, we thought. We knew something was up with Kavkaz a few days before but Johnathan was unable to help me get the site up that kept teasing me when I signed on.

Udugov was in Turkey for some time and Russia was pressing for extradition, but Turkey let him escape.

But I speak the truth about these people, they are barbaric enough to make the word seem meaningless. And that goes for many of them, not just a few.

NEWSMAX Thursday, Sept. 9, 2004:

These people are barbarians? According to your guy Putin, 75% of "these people" voted for Alkhanov -- that's Alkhanov, the guy supported by Putin.

So either Putin is lying barbarian and his elections are dishonest or 75% of Chechnya is non barbarian.

Which is it?

Would you like me to find the posts for you?
You won't find them funny to read, believe me. It is very sick.

If Russian websites are .ru, why would a Chechen site be a .com?

If Russian websites are .ru, why is site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria a .info?

(http://www.chechnya-mfa.info/ - has pics of plenty of Russian atrocities -- you'd like it)