Free Republic

The US is turning on old friends in Europe, writes John Laughland. Before he denounced the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" that overthrew him, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power. Originally a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa before it was adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book...

A human-rights group that defends dictators DURING the cold war, the leafy streets of north Oxford were a hotbed of anti-communism. Dons had close links to dissident and émigré outfits and spent their holidays enjoying the frisson of semi-clandestine trips behind the Iron Curtain to help subvert the evil empire. Now, at the Oxford-based British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), some veterans of that struggle are playing a rather different role: noisily defending a grim lot of east European politicians against the imperialism of western do-gooders. At first sight it seems baffling. Characters such as Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Alexander...

A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.' It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being...