Mark Almond Oxford

Arab governments alarmed by crackdown on British Summertime protests

2011-08-09T03:42:00.000-07:00

AliBababa News Agency (10.30 am Mekka/ 10am GMT) –

“Londonistan in Flames – People overpower Bourgeois Police State.”

Londonistan – The bourgeois minority regime of Cameron, Clegg and Crony has been shaken by widespread People Power demonstrations across Britain for a third night running. Summertime protests have sent a chill wind of hope through Britain's long repressed people. "Fear of the police has gone," dissident youth leaders claim. "It's a free for all society now or never."

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has broken his silence by warning the regime not permit rioting to reach Saudi sovereign territory in the Mayfair district of the British capital and to introduce reforms at once. Other world leaders have joined the chorus of condemnation of the increasingly isolated Cameron clique. The Syrian foreign minister, Walid Haged, has welcomed the joint condemnation of Cameron's regime by the Arab League and African Union and suggested the UN Security Council should authorise all necessary means to stop repression by regime thugs of the street protests. Analysts expect the ban on heroin exports to Britain announced jointly by Afghanistan and Burma could add to the pressure-cooker atmosphere in Britain which is 100% dependent on narcotics imports.

The regime has pinned its hopes for international legitimacy on next year's Londonistan Olympic Games which were controversially awarded to bourgeois Britain despite signs that its economy was overheating and popular anger against the regime rising. Threats of a boycott by the highly-regarded Omani-burka clad beach volley ball team could be a humiliation too far for Cameron's clique.

Reports of foreign interference in the British crisis have been rejected by expert analysts. Instead domestic tensions are seen as the only cause .The Yemeni professor of protestology, Bahce Kewi, explains "The ruling Consumerist Party finds that thirty years of its strict ideological dominance has not bred a docile youth. Young people are aware of a cyber-world beyond Britain where values like free access to the internet are normal. They can't wait to join the cashless society and get their hands on stuff for nothing."

Rejecting the empty slogans “You Can’t Buck the Market” and “There is No Alternative,” indignant youth across Britain have stormed the ruling regime’s local headquarters setting fire to symbols of Consumerist dominance and removing telecommunications and internet monitoring equipment from branches of the feared Curry’s organization in towns across the country.

With unverifiable but plausible reports of more than a thousand deaths in the Arsenal district of north Londonistan where a crowd estimated at a million strong overwhelmed the hated Met riot squads to occupy the Consumer Electronic Outlets Center, its seems likely that the popular protests could spread from the simmering suburbs even to previously loyal uptown areas like Kensington and Cholsey where many regime supporters have their luxurious barricaded villas.

Recognising the growing unrest, the secular Consumerist regime has tried to ban the traditional hoodie and mask outfit worn by the nation’s discontented youth as a rejection of the tie-less suit-wearing “official” style. This has only inflamed the mood of desperation in the capital’s teeming suburbs like Cronydon, where uncollected garbage is piled up for two weeks at a time.

AliBaba’s reporters are not allowed into Britain but using social networking sights and videophone images uploaded via MagiKarpit internet portal, our team of experienced journalists supported by expert analysts have put together a clear picture of the crisis in Britain.

Analysts report that the British regime’s claim to democratic legitimacy masks the reality that it is drawn from the minority bourgeois tribe, and especially from the Etonian clan with its headquarters west of London overlooking the country’s main airport at Heathrow.

Dissidents inside Britain as well as reform-advocates outside the country at the Damascus-based British Underground Liberty League have provided international media with 24/7 updates via Foxglove and the Gaggle-website Rumors with an exhilarating insight into a popular uprising by brave young people in their millions who have exposed the hollowness of the Consumerist ideology.

The regime’s own media like the Bourgeois Broadcasting Corporation try to portray the popular protests as outbursts of criminality and refer to the occupations of Consumerist branches as looting, AliBaba’s satellite channel has been able to contact one Twitteringham resident via Blackberry outside a “liberated” shopping center. To protect his identity, Alibaba is calling him “The Finger.” Using a brand-new handset to outwit secret police surveillance, The Finger told Alibaba that “We ain’t dun nuffin wrong. The doors was open and we are protecting the property in our own way.”

This kind of spontaneous organisation at grass-roots level has baffled the previously all-powerful Consumerist regime. Unable to rely on the Army for crowd control because of the large Oik majority in the ranks, the bourgeois regime is floundering as its levers of power no longer react to commands.

Desperate measures are being used in some areas according to reliable tweets. The sinister silence of veteran bloggers like the Mosside community organiser, The Spliff, shows the extremism of the hardliners according to human rights observers who are increasingly concerned that Manchester's failure to rise in revolt alongside nearby Liverpool suggests that the regime's widely-reported use of chemical weapons there is true.

Expert analysts suggest that deep-seated socio-economic resentments are at the root of the protest movement as a tiny elite is suspected is ripping off state revenues to fund lavish lifestyles at the expense of the People. Corrupt bourgeois-run banks have been bailed out with billions taken from the country’s oil revenues while queues of the unemployed waiting for famine relief outside hospitals wait for months on an end for the chance of a drip-feed.

Fears of a sectarian split in Britain have also been voiced by some foreign academic observers. They point out that shops owned by the widely-hated bourgeois minority were attacked across the country and fear that if the Cameron regime fell, then isolated bourgeois communities could face copy-cat revenge attacks for their decades of profiteering at the expense of the long-suffering people.

Signs of internal dissent within the Consumerists have been detected. Defections from the regime have been reported. The finance vizier, George Osborne, has been sighted in California where Alibaba’s internet sources suggest he has stashed the regime’s gold reserves. Meanwhile Defence Minister, Liam Fox, is in Spain, though the regime insists that he remains loyal and “is directing operations from his hotel.” However, the fact that the Prime Minister’s own wife, Samantha and children have been flown to safety in Italy suggests that David Cameron himself is not confident of the regime’s survival.

Increasingly isolated, Cameron and his fellow Etonian clan member, Boris Johnson, who runs the City, have turned to the snakeheads of the regime, the so-called COBRA group. [COBRA = Coordinating Bourgeois Reaction Army – AliBaba editorial] Along with the Specials, a bourgeois militia who form the regime’s Reactionary Guards, COBRA are threatening to flood the streets of Britain’s cities with merciless politically-correctional “volunteers.”

With the stock-market in free fall and international sanctions in the offing, the economic basis of the Consumerists’ ability to buy off protest and pay off loyalist thugs masquerading as policemen and Specials is waning fast.

Banning popular sports like soccer threatens to put more youth onto the streets while formerly regime-backing footballers like David Beckham have gone into exile in Los Angeles rather than play the beautiful game in a Wembley stadium converted into a make-shift prison.

If Consumerism falls in Britain how long can it last in its hardline center, the United States, is a question being asked by analysts. Despite its clandestine nuclear weapons programme and mercenary militias called Contractors, even Washington’s hold over its own long-suffering people looks shaky. With flash mobs reported in Philadelphia and Newark, the ayatollahs of Wall Street are having to devote all their security resources to protecting the bourgeois heartland.

This leaves Cameron's dictatorship desperately exposed. The British regime’s only hope to keep the masses off the streets for a fourth night of protests is the weather forecast. Loyalists are praying for a rain of terror to come in from the Atlantic coast and keep the people power movement indoors. God-willing the cloud of Consumerism will be lifted from the long-suffering Britons before the end of Ramadan.

AliBaba Breaking News - Britain's puppet-parliament recalled for emergency session. After decades of docility rumors of a Westminster Palace putsch are spreading as are reports of a new tough state security law. Cameron says Olympic Games to go ahead over dead bodies.

NATO helps Gaddafi look Libyans in the eye

2011-05-01T15:05:00.000-07:00

After Buckingham Palace was bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz, the present Queen’s mother is supposed to have said, “Now we can look the East End in the eye.” In a war any sense that the rulers are immune to the risks and privations affecting ordinary folks is damaging to their leadership. Britain's royal family was grateful to Hitler for targeting their palace. Colonel Gaddafi must be feeling the same after NATO killed his youngest son and three grandchildren late on Saturday night.

His spokesman emphasised that the “Brother Leader” now shared the sacrifices made for forty days and forty nights by other Libyan families. By missing the Colonel and killing the kids, NATO has given the Colonel a huge boost just as trouble was growing on the Tunisian front as well as carrying on in Misrata and in the east beyond Brega. The man who outlived Reagan’s onslaught in 1986 has done it again.

Only the perverted predatory mentality of NATO’s target-selectors could locate a harmless son of Gaddafi as well as his children, and then think it was a smart move to kill them. It would be bad enough if this blunder was simply what some Nevada-based geek-in-uniform assumed would make a neat kill, but it is obvious that frustration with the failure of Gaddafi to fall after a few cruise missile strikes six weeks ago has led the NATO leaders to think that de-capitation is the way out of the war which they launched with gay abandon.

Until 30^th April, the logic of NATO’s air campaign was to concentrate its fire on Gaddafi’s foot soldiers while endlessly repeating the demand that the Colonel and his sons leave Libya. This seemed a crude ploy to get ordinary Libyans to ask why their boys were dying while the Gaddafi clan were unharmed. Splitting your enemy is a time-honoured tactic in warfare. Instead of wearing down Libyan morale and undermining the regime’s legitimacy by leaving the Gaddafi clan free to chat to Western channels, while ordinary soldiers died, NATO has given Gaddafi’s clan a blood bond with its supporters.

Generals are often accused of fighting the last war. The humanitarian bombers are repeating the propaganda from their Kosovo intervention in 1999. Mass murder, government organised rape camps with mercenaries fired up on Viagra, and so on are the staples of Washington’s increasingly hysterical denunciations of Gaddafi as it turns out that his family has more support than the glib proponents of hellfire missiles as humanity’s preferred way to protect civilians would have had us believe.

The UN Security Council resolution 1973 made not distinction between the obligation to protect unarmed civilians in Libya. But NATO's interpretation is that Gaddafi’s civilian supporters are collateral damage under the guise of “command and control centres” in short trousers.

No strategist in their right mind would do what the witches sabbath of Hilary Clinton, Susannah Rice and Samantha Powers has cooked up for fighting Gaddafi. But the male chorus in this tragedy is no more worthy of respect. Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron are the new Bill Clintons as promiscuous in their use of high-tech weapons as he was, only not yet caught in flagrante with an intern. Attributing rational military motives to these posturing humanitarian warmongers in Washington, London and Paris is obviously a mistake. They clearly live on another planet from the humanity whom they claim to protect.

Maybe they hope to draw the Gaddafi family out for Saif al-Arab’s funeral. Remember the Western elite is devoted to The Godfather. It is the template of their style – look at the hoods who surround them for security and the black-windowed armoured limousines in which they travel – as well as their international policy-making. As Francis Ford Coppola demonstrated on celluloid funerals make a good place to eradicate rival clans. Their advisers will have told them that Arab culture requires a public burial with father and brothers in attendance. Vultures used to haunt desert graves, now predators hover above them.

Just as George W. Bush deliberately sought to exterminate the male members of Saddam Hussein’s family in Iraq, killing not only his odious sons but other junior members of the clan as well as executing the former dictator, so now the same logic is at work in the Obama-Cameron-Sarkozy mindset. Of course, the mirror-image of that familicidal mentality would be for a Libyan to target Queen Elizabeth and her sons, grandsons and other male relatives, all in uniform for the wedding of Flight-Lieutenant Wales on 29^th April. Michelle Obama and the kids live in America’s command-and-control HQ and mobile missile-launching communications accompany her husband even when he is spending quality-time with his daughters so they are collateral damage in-waiting by Dad’s definition. As for Carla Bruni…

The Duke of Wellington rounded on an officer at Waterloo for suggesting that Bonaparte was within range: “Generals of armies have more important things to do than shoot at each other.” But since then Obama-Cameron-Sarkozy axis has rewritten the rules of war: family members are now fair game. When it comes to decapitating a regime, the kids are included too.

No normal person would wish the families of Western leaders to face the kind of brutal evaporation which their fathers and power-moms direct at humanity’s enemies, but the West itself is no longer ruled by people with normal humane values. The rhetoric of humanitarian war blinds them to any common humanity with anyone on the enemy side of whatever age or infirmity. Who can doubt that a colour-blind and morally-blind person would see no reason to spare the Cameron kids if firing on Downing Street anymore than Cameron baulks at sacrificing Gaddafi’s grandchildren?

Little wonder, the royal newly-weds’ honeymoon was suddenly cancelled on Saturday. So much of William and Kate’s nuptials was choreographed around their parents’ and grandparents’ weddings that it was a fair guess that like Princess Elizabeth and Philip they were going to fly to Malta to start their honeymoon before going on to Kenya where three generations of Windsors have enjoyed cementing their relations. Malta is too close to Libya for comfort and Kenya’s Muslim minority might not be too friendly to a serving NATO officer.

William Wales has been put in the firing line not only by his uniform but by his prime minister. David Cameron could defend himself by saying that he has willingly put Sam Cam and their “kids” at risk for the humanitarian cause but instead tried to weasel out of his responsibility by denying that NATO was targeting Gaddafi and sons. It is peculiarly distasteful that our humanitarian warriors want to claim the credit for their high-sounding motives but never to carry the can for the blood shed in pursuit of them. Their inability to take responsibility is the worm gnawing away at any remaining naïve public faith in their sincerity.

Ironically, Gaddafi would have been regarded as the embodiment of bombastic mendacity without rival until Sarkozy, Cameron and the Nobel Prize-winning predator Barak Obama opened their mouths to explain their actions. Suddenly the Colonel has serious rivals for the status of least credible statesman of the age. Is there any indictment of these gentlemen’s humanitarian bloodletting than that a Libyan government spokesman’s account of the death of three children is more credible than their sleazy denials, obfuscations and shifting of responsibility? The proponents of humanitarian intervention constantly insist that they want an end to political leaders using force with impunity. Doesn’t making rulers responsible for civilian casualties begin at home?

Of course, Tony Blair’s Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, explained after Kosovo, there is no question of Western leaders going to Hague for any innocents killed by their order. Command responsibility did not apply to them. The “end of impunity” is for weak wogs, not nuclear-armed fops like Cameron, Sarkozy or Obama. But that reality of power can only fuel the rage of people belonging to lesser races subject to international law. Terrorism not freedom is the likely outcome of NATO’s stupid determination to make a martyr of Gaddafi. Sadly, with their armoured cars, blast-proof walled homes and swarms of security hoods, any anti-Western terrorism will not hurt the Western elite. Only little people will pay the price of our rulers’ folly. From Pakistan to the shores of the Mediterranean the predator has become the promoter of terrorism not its nemesis.

Libya - 100 Years of Bombing, or Is Fascism the Forgotten Root of Humanitarian Intervention?

2011-04-01T12:38:00.000-07:00

The celebrations of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification in March, 2011, were overshadowed by the crisis in Libya. Coinciding with Italy’s birthday, Silvio Berlusconi’s government decided to make seven air bases available to NATO allies for the bombing of Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

By coincidence, this was one hundred years since the Italians invented aerial bombardment and initiated its practice precisely over Libya. A century later, the bomber returns to the scene of its bloody birth. Clio seems to take a perverse enjoyment in ensuring that history repeats itself, first acting as imperialism then as humanitarian intervention, without even needing to change the stage-set.

On 1^st November, 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped the first bomb from an aeroplane. According to the Ottoman authorities it hit the military hospital in Ayn Zara in the Libyan desert. The Italians strongly denied targeting an installation protected by the Geneva Convention. Modern aerial warfare and the propaganda battle which has accompanied it ever since was underway from the start.

Lt. Gavotti’s four bombs were modified hand grenades, but soon the Italians had learned how to drop incendiary bomb and shrapnel bombs – what we would now call cluster munitions.

The initial impact of aircraft overhead was alarming and disorientating to the forces below. Panic spread as an airplane engine was heard approaching. But soon enough the Turks and Arabs below learned the limitations of aerial bombardment and their terror subsided. The Italians decided that they had to increase the terrorising effect of their bombing and strafing to keep the enemy on the run. The Italian pilots also realised that fixed targets like villages or oases were easier to find and strike than mobile guerrillas.

The British Arabist, G.F. Abbott who was with the mixed Turkish-Arab forces resisting the invasion noted that they soon recovered from their fear partly because bombs which fell into the sand tended to explode harmlessly. But he added, “The women and children in the villages are practically the only victims, and this fact excited the anger of the Arabs.”

Antagonising the civilian population was an unfortunate side-effect of the bombing which became a major factor in turning the Italian invasion into a protracted counter-insurgency.

When the idea of occupying Libya as a fiftieth birthday present to themselves was turned into practice in September, 1911, Italians were assured of a quick victory there. They were told that the Ottoman Turkish regime was thoroughly hated by the Arabs living there and that a warm welcome could be expected for the soldiers bringing civilization and liberation from the Sultan’s tyranny. To use modern parlance, Italians were encouraged to expect a cakewalk. The media assured the soldiers, “Arab hostility is nothing but a Turkish fable.”

Gavotti’s dropping of the first bombs in history barely a month into the campaign was evidence of how quickly the Italians realised that things were not going to plan. Resistance in the main cities like Tripoli was quickly crushed but in the great expanses of territory even the 100,000 troops deployed by Italy were not enough to regulate a thousand-mile-wide country stretching deep into the Sahara. The newly-invented airplane offered a way of displaying Italian power across vast swathes of land which were in effect controlled by local Arabs who preferred the Muslim Turks to the Christian Italians – not least when the Italians preached civilization via shrapnel bombs dropped from a few thousand feet.

The alleged cruelty of local Arabs and Turks towards captured Italian soldiers was one of the justifications for the widening use of reprisals from the air and on the ground in Libya. In a fight against uncivilized folk like them the rules of war could be suspended. But the Libyans proved harder to terrify into submission than Rome anticipated.

Nevertheless, on 9^th November, 1911, the Italian government declared victory, even though the war was only just beginning. With the mission far from accomplished, the war was vastly more costly than Italians had expected. Characteristically, the prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, lied to Parliament in Rome saying the war had cost 512 million lire. That was a huge figure given that the War Ministry’s last annual peacetime budget was only 399 million lire. But in reality off-balance sheet accounting hid another billion lire in costs of the war against the Ottoman Empire over Libya. As for the human cost, 8,000 Italians were killed or wounded. No-one counted the Arab dead.

Although the Italian elite had economic aims in occupying Libya wrapped up in nationalist and civilizational rhetoric, oil was not the Italian motive. Only at the end of the Fascist period was any serious exploration undertaken which indicated that oil lay beneath the desert. Libya’s first major oil strike was outside Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte in 1959. At the end of thirty years of Italian rule, salt was still Libya’s main export. Italians were fed the idea that Libya would return to being the bread basket of the Mediterranean as it had been under the Roman Empire. Few in 1911 seem to have realised that the desert had spread over the Roman fields and cities long ago.

As the war dragged on enthusiasm in Italy waned but the newspapers and instant books of the day record how united the opinion-makers were in support of the war at its opening shots. Above all, there was admiration for the airmen dealing death from the sky. The cult of the pilot soaring across the sky while clinically disposing of a dot-like savage foe below was born.

The greatest living Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzion immediately sought to immortalize Lt. Gavotti’s act in his Canzone della Diana. (A few laters in the First World War, D’Annunzio would take to the skies over Vienna and drop leaflets threatening bombs to come.)Giovanni Pascole sentimentalised the feats of Italian pilots as the Libyan war passed it first Christmas in La Notte di Natale. The Futurist, Filippo Marinetti, took the air over Libya itself to urge Italian soldiers below to fix bayonets and charge.

Everybody seemed to support the invasion at the beginning. The great philosopher and future anti-Fascist, Benedetto Croce declared –apparently without irony - that occupying Libya was a worthy birthday gift to Italy on the fiftieth anniversary of its unification. The 1907 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, E.T. Moneta, became the first – though by no means the last recipient of the dynamite fortune’s largesse – to anticipate Barak Obama's faith in aerial bombardment as a tool of progress for humanity and therefore declared it was not against his pacifist principles. The Catholic hierarchy had been hostile to the secular not to say Masonic Italian political elite but it endorsed Giolitti’s crusade in Libya with as much enthusiasm as its predecessors had backed the original version over eight hundred years earlier. The meeting of the poetry scholars of the Dante Aligheri Society on 20^thSeptember, 1911, broke up with cries of “To Tripoli!”

It was not only Italian proto-Fascist intellectuals like D'Annunzio and Marinetti who swooned at the thought of a pilot soaring high over the desert dealing death to savages below. Sweden's Gustaf Janson described the intoxicating sense of unbridled power and of the pilot's impunity in action against primitives below whose air defence was incapable of revenging their casualties: "The empty earth beneath him, the empty sky above him and he, the solitary man, sailing between them! A feeling of power seizes him. He was flying through space to assert the indisputable superiority of the white race. Within his reach he had the proof, seven high- explosive bombs. To be able to sling them from the heavens themselves - that was convincing and irrefutable."

A few Italians protested the naked aggression. It was left to the extremist Socialist newspaper editor, Benito Mussolini, to make the most unconditional rejection of the war. He was arrested after dismissing the national flag as a “rag to stick on a dunghill” in a speech denouncing the war in Forlì.

This was a stark contrast with the attitude of the ex-Marxist in power as Duce of Fascism after 1922. The airplane and the destructive power it could project enthralled Mussolini the Fascist as it had repelled Mussolini the Marxist. He declared that the airplane was “the first Fascist.” He became a born-again bomber.

Mussolini’s rejection of Marxism and his embrace of the thrill of ultra-modern war was simultaneous. Almost as soon as he came to power, Mussolini was taken up for his first flight by the war ace, Mario Stoppiani, who described the Duce’s “enthusiastic delirium” with the experience. Then he learned to fly (and to the alarm of his more pedestrian ally, Hitler, would take charge of the controls of planes with the timid Fuehrer on board.) Until George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin has there been a political leader who piloted himself so publicly?

The airplane was also used to suppress his opponents: Mafia bosses and Libyan tribal chiefs would be taken for a one-way flight out over the Mediterranean and pushed to their deaths in the sea below.

Mussolini developed the use of air power to repress rebels in Libya and eventually broke their resistance after almost twenty-five years occupation. In Ethiopia he took his war for civilization to new depths. Fascist Italy announced it would abolish slavery there but first it had to conquer the natives. The exiled Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, described to the League of Nations how the Italians used crop-spraying techniques designed to kill insects to poison his people. Mussolini’s regime made no bones about its methods and did not hide behind cant about having “no reports of civilian casualties.”

Flying Fascists became the order of the day as Mussolini became expansionist in the mid-1930s. His eldest son, Vittorio and his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, took part as pilots in bombing Ethiopia.Mussolini’s son, Bruno, wrote a lyrical description of what it was like to watch Ethiopians explode like petals when he dropped his bombs among them.

Bertrand Russell saw Bruno Mussolini's evocation of air power's immaculate ability to destroy puny humans as embodying the reality of the modern totalitarian regimes, but worse still of a future world controlled from the air. Russell asked, "If one could imagine a government that governed from an aeroplane... wouldn't such a government get a completely different view of its opposition?" Russell feared that a regime of air power would "exterminate" any resistance or dissent. He thought the bomber rendered mass conscript armies redundant and highly-skilled mercenaries would replace them willing to do the bidding of their masters rather being part of the people: "“We seem now, through the aeroplane, to be returning to the need for forces composed of comparatively few highly trained men. It is to be expected, therefore, that the form of government, in every country exposed to serious war, will be such as airmen will like, which is not likely to be democracy.”

But the Italian Fascists were to discover that air power was a two-way street. Libyans and Ethiopians could not declare “no fly zones” over Rome or bombard Florence, but after 1940, the British then the Americans could.

Italian pioneering efforts at air warfare were widely admired and imitated. Fiorello La Guardia was trained to fly by Italian instructors after the United States entered the First World War in 1917. The American pioneer of bombing, Billy Mitchell, recognised Italy’s role as an air power pioneer and became an admirer of the Fascist regime, calling it in 1927 “one of the greatest constructive powers for good government that exists in the world today.” Like Mussolini’s air chiefs, Mitchell was a moderniser who got left behind by the pace of change: he agreed with the Fascist airmen that aircraft carriers had no future.

In Britain, too, there were close links between Fascism and flying. Lady Houston, who funded Supermarine’s embryo Spitfire to compete in the Remy Schneider Flying Trophy also offered £200,000 to the British Union of Fascists led by flying enthusiast Oswald Mosley – so her contribution to defeating Fascism was greater than the effect of backing the British Union of Fascists – aspects of the patriotic myth which are omitted the Leslie Howard film First of the Few (1942).

Even today there is the odd, even erotic, irony that Mosley’s step-granddaughter, the glamorous model Daphne Guinness is amorously linked to Bernard-Henri Levi, the chief French exponent of bombing as the path to freedom in Libya – a strange misalliance between the Repubblica Salo and the République Sarkozyste, or a reconciliation of a false dichotomy?

But whatever the role of other countries in pioneering air flight or even Fascism, Italy can fairly claim to have got both off the ground. It put the warplane in the sky soon enough with a Fascist at the joy-stick. Giulio Douhet was the first serious strategist of bombing. Although he backed Mussolini, Douhet’s career as a practitioner of airpower was stymied in Fascist Italy by rivals with better party credentials.

One of the few dissenting voices in 1911 belonged to a schoolboy in Ferrara who would become the second most famous Fascist after Mussolini not least for his flying exploits. Then the fifteen year old Italo Balbo broke with the nationalist atmosphere and published an article denouncing the invasion of the territory which he would come to rule after 1933 as Mussolini’s viceroy. But in the meantime Balbo became Italy’s own Charles Lindbergh – a celebrity pioneer aviator who criss-crossed much of the globe to demonstrate the new Fascist regime’s commitment to the most modern manifestation of power – the airplane.

Back in 1911 like Mussolini, Balbo was an odd man out. Of course not every future Fascist opposed the war. Sergio Panunzio, for instance, remonstrated with the young Balbo for publishing an article against the pro-war consensus: “Why? To go against the grain, against reality, against the government.” Panunzio anticipated the classic Fascist argument that right was made by the might of media opinion and the might of state power.

Italians were to be proud of pioneering military aviation in the cause of civilization. In 1911, Italians achieved a series of aerial firsts: the first night flight, the first aerial photograph, the first aerial bombing – and the first plane to be shot down. Some pedants pointed out that if balloon-launched explosives were included then it was Italian territory which was the first target of bombing as far back as 1849. Then the Austrians besieging rebel Venice sent balloons filled with explosives drifting across la Serenissima which crashed onto the Austrian troops on the other side causing the first casualties of aerial friendly-fire. The governor of Libya, Balbo himself, fell victim to friendly fire when his three-engined plane was shot down by his own anti-aircraft forces at Tobruk on 28^th June, 1940. In 1941, Bruno Mussolini was also killed testing a new plane. The airplane was beginning to eat the Fascists and the nation which gave birth to its military role.

Rejecting any romantic nostalgia for the days of one-on-one fighter-pilot duels in the First World War, Balbo was the proponent of launching “hundreds and hundreds” of planes into the sky in future wars. Mass attacks were to be the Fascist approach to aerial warfare – but Mussolini’s regime was stronger on intimidating bombast than putting resources into such a vast expensive programme. It was the democracies who built and deployed the first fleets of heavy bombers.

As the Second World War progressed, northern Italy was especially badly hit by bombing as the Allies advanced to drive out the Germans and destroy Mussolini’s Salo regime. Leaving aside the human cost, the cultural losses were enormous. Buildings like La Scala in Milan or the Bramante church housing Leonardo’s Last Supper in its miraculously unscathed refectory could be rebuilt but the works of art in them like the Mantegna fresco of the Life of St. James in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua were lost when shattered by Allied bombs.

The impact of the Second World War left Italians deeply suspicious of getting involved in warfare, let alone bombing former colonial territory. In 1999, Italy broke the tabu. Led by ex-Marxists, the Italian government accepted the use of their country as the main launching ground for airstrikes on Serbia over Kosovo briefly part of Mussolini’s inglorious new Roman Empire (1941-43). Fishermen in the Adriatic still moan about the risks of falling victim to NATO ordinance dumped in the sea. But now a regime with “post-Fascist” participation competes with the post-Marxists to justify Italy’s renewal of war over Libya just in time for the centenary of a Italy as the mid-wife of aerial warfare.

On this morbid anniversary, the crusade for civilization then has become a crusade for human rights today. The machinery of the contemporary crusaders may be faster than the bi-planes of 1911 and the bombs are certainly vastly more explosive, but the unanimity of the politicians and media across the West are a strange echo of Italy’s echo-chamber of mutually reinforcing propaganda from the men in power and men of the press. But today there isn’t even a Mussolini in parliament or the media to oppose air power as a force for progress!

Sources

Italians have written extensively about the war for Libya in 1911 and the invention of aerial bombardment by their fellow countrymen. Useful English sources include:

Richard Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the First World War(Macmillan: London, 1983), Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011), Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007), Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing translated by Haverty Rugg (Granta: London, 2001), Bertrand Russell, Power with an introduction by Kirk Willis (Unwin, 1938, reprinted by Routledge: London, 1995), Dan Segre, Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1987), David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War. Europe, 1904-1914 paperback edition (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000), and John Wright, The Emergence of Libya: Historical Essays(Society for Libyan Studies: London, 2008).

Was It Just a Dream? Egypt's Revolution: 'People Power' or Military Coup?

2011-02-14T13:05:00.000-08:00

“Now our nightmare is over. Now it is time to dream.”

Wael Ghonim (New York Times – 13th February, 2011)

“I'm still trying to untangle the emotions and impact of the Egyptian revolution
in my own mind… For me, the contagious euphoria of Friday and Saturday has
been replaced by a Sunday morning letdown. Last night, as I made my way
through "liberated" Tahrir Square in Cairo, I was o vercome by sadness… It
oddly felt like an era is over.”

Dan Murphy (Christian Science Monitor – 13th February, 2011)

Was it all a beautiful dream? The Western world's broadcasters and print-journalists repeatedly characterised the celebratory atmosphere in Cairo and other Egyptian cities after Hosni Mubarak's resignation late on 11th February as like a rock festival or a big party. It was the happy ending to die for - or was it the end?

On Monday, the crowds who had defied the feared Mukhabarat of Mubarak melted away when told to go by the new ruling junta. When red-capped military policemen cleared away the remaining revellers or protestors, as you prefer, and the detritus of their Glastonbury-style camp, with them it was clear that People Power Egyptian-style was not what it had been all cracked up to be. But when or where in the last twenty years has the hype been followed by the fuflillment of the people's hopes?

While the world's media was focussed on the crowd scenes in Tahrir Square, regime-change as an inside-job was under way. Only Sky News Tim Marshall predicted from Day One of the protests that the most likely outcome of the protests was that the Egyptian Army would take power. Other on-the-spot reporters were whipped up by the exuberance of their own partisan reporting into insisting that the momentum of the People was unstoppable.

Now the spontaneity of the events is being called into question. The New York Times has a track record of raining on the People Power parade - when it is all done and dusted - and setting the record straight, but only once its editorial line has won. Until the object of popular derision, who happens also to have outlived his usefulness to the White House, has been toppled, the New York Times leads the pack of sententious insistence that only the People are involved. No suggestion of external political forces or internal power-plays is allowed to detract from the purity of the morality play on the streets of captal city X. From Belgrade to Tbilisi with a sidestep to Bishkek, the Times has always told the full story only once the telling cannot influence events.

Already it has begun to name the people forming international links with training centres and cash and technical aid from outside Egypt. Before long as with the Serbs or Georgians who thought they had played the decisive role, the celebration of the backroom cadre of People Power veterans who guide the spontaneous steps of each infant democracy will be "all the news that's fit to print." Instead of Arabic names our old favourites, Collonel Gene Sharp, the "Clausewitz of People Power," George Soros, "the Paymaster-General of People Power" and the various goatee-bearded NGO activists will get their commendations from the very media which decried any suggestion that a foreign hand might be in play. (In the meantime, for starters, see David D. Kirkpatrick & David E. Sanger, "A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History" in the New York Times - 13th February, 2011.)

But what of the generals? Surely their patriotism and professionalism puts them above suspicion of having any interest except Egypt's own at heart?

In realty it seems Mubarak and the generals were engaged in a wrestling match - with Washington acting as a hardly impartial umpire. Remember the demonstrations kicked off while the Egyptian Defence Minister, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and the chief of staff, Sami Enan were in the Pentagon.

Washington has been concerned about the succession to the aging autocrat. Mubarak falls in a long line of former favourites who stayed on too long and risked destabilising their own regimes by putting family interests ahead of the ruling military group as a whole.

From Romania in 1989 to Egypt today, the people who go out on the streets - however well justified their grievances and whatever their courage in risking the first steps of public defiance - in practice seem to act as stage extras while a coup d'etat is carried through while the world watches their defiance not realising it is a popular pageant rather than People Power.

Just as Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu offended Communist sensitivities and the ambitions of better-qualified apparatchiks by promoting his son, Nicu, as well as his wife, Elena, so Mubarak - an old friend by the way of the Ceausescus - offended key elements in his regime by letting his son, Gamel, and other family members and cronies not only look set to succeed to the most prestigious job but also he let them get too much of the economic pie.

The military takeover after Mubarak's resignation was not a break with Egyptian political tradition but a continuation of it.

Inside the miltary regime which has ruled Egypt since 1952, there was tension between the generals with ambitions to succeed Mubarak and his grooming of his son, Gamel, as successor. Even the generals who did not imagine themselves as president, resented the growing intrusion of Mubarak fils and his cronies into areas of business traditionally reserved for the military.

Despite all the huffing and puffing about Egyptians' pride in their armed forces, Field Marshal Tantawi's exploits in 1973, in reality the Egyptian army has long been much less effective at defending the country than defending the interests of the officer corps. Like many other African armies, Egypt's is better understood as a protection racket rather than the protectors of the nation.

As a study prepared at Fort Leavenworth for the US military from as long as 14 years ago showed, the Egyptian Army was engaged in an offensive to control the rapidly privatizing Egyptian economy - rather as China's People's Liberation Army has its fingers in many private business pies. Ironically, Mubarak's nepotism was a threat to the military's own insider-deals.

Of course, dynastic succession was very unpopular with ordinary Egyptians who have been squeezed between the rapacious demands of the competing factions within the regime as well as by the impact of rapid inflation pushing up food and fuel prices. Mubarak loyally followed the Washington consensus in reducing subsidies to the poor, but not fast enough to keep in favour there, but more than fast enough to alienate ordinary people, even ordinary policemen. (Don't hold your breath for a "populist" candidate proposing more social protection in the promised elections. Free marketeers from micro-parties are already the favoured candidates with the people who decide such matters.)

Mubarak, however, had antagonised the Americans - not because he only went to Israel once or let anti-Israeli television shows run on state TV - but because he was beginning to let Chinese businesses into Egypt. He was also talking about energy deals with the Russians. No doubt, he would take his cut but Washington did not like to see Egypt less dependent on its largesse. The generals still got a huge handout from America and knew that Chinese businessmen, even with a PLA background, would be much better at business than them.

US geopolitics and the self-interest of the Egyptian general-managers ran together. Mubarak was becoming a threat to the mutual longterm interests of Washington and his generals.

Having asserted their authority and sent the demonstrators packing with the backing of the self-appointed leaders of the Facebook generation, the generals can now get down to what they do best: their business is running Egypt's business.

Although the generals doled out some food on Monday in poor parts of the big cities to reinforce the message that people who stayed away from public meetings would get a pat on the head.

What of the indomitabe proponents of People Power?

The Google executive whose spontaneous twitterings we were told set the whole thing in motion suddenly sent out a very different message once the generals had issued their orders. According to CNN on Sunday, Wael Ghonim told the People to get off the streets and forget about politics: "Dear Egyptians, go back to your work on Sunday, work like never before and help Egypt become a developed country." But neither Mr Ghonim nor CNN mentioned that 25% of Egyptians would be going back to work for the generals in one way or another. Mubarak's corruptioon, cronyism and skimming of contracts was an intolerable affront to the Egyptian People, but their patriotism enables them to see the Army's businesses as all for the good of the nation.

Maybe the generals will keep their promise to hold elections in six months. But will they be really any freer and fairer than those under Mubarak? After all the people counting the votes and controlling the streets look set to be very similar to those in place for past elections. Like so many other states which have undergone the excitement of People Power as a response to corruption and election fraud, in Egypt the fall of the old boss does not seem to have shatterd the old regime.

Back in France in 1789, Louis XVI's government was dispersed long before he was decapitated in 1793: none of his ministers or provincial governors were in office six months after the fall of the Bastille. Real revolutions tend to become more radical, and that it is not necessarily a good thing., but they are more than one-act teasers like our post-modern dramas. Nowadays, revolution seems to be an inverted fairy story with a happy ending at the beginning: it is all over so quickly that most of the old regime's loyal servants hardly have time to turn their coats before they resume work in the same office.

Dream or nightmare?

Who can say for certain, but don't ask the Egyptian generals, they are just busy getting Egypt back to business.

Ghost of Regime-Change Past: Enron’s Frank Wisner Jr does Dad’s Job in Egypt

2011-02-02T02:25:00.000-08:00

Barak Obama’s slogan in 2008 was “Yes, we can.” By choosing as his point-man to guide Egypt’s future, the son of one of the CIA most famous “can do” covert operatives , Obama has shown once again that his promise of “Change We Can Believe in” did not rule out changes which turn the clock back.

On 31^st January, the U.S. State Department admitted that Frank Wisner Jr was in Cairo but did not disclose when he arrived. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt, 1986-91, Mr Wisner is Washington’s special representative for the crisis facing the Egyptian regime. But for any historian of regime change, the name Frank Wisner is a familiar one. It conjures up a ghost from the CIA’s past covert role in “revolutions” and regime change in Iran, Central America and South-East Asia. Sometimes Papa Wisner’s boys toppled opponents of the United States, sometimes the victims were old friends who had lost their usefulness.

Today’s arbiter of Egypt’s future, Frank Wisner Jr has “regime change” in his DNA.

Although Washington is busily dispensing with the services of allied gerontocrats like Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, it is an irony of the age of “People Power” that the White House chooses men with a careers stretching back deep into the Cold War-era of dirty tricks and covert operations as its representatives to guide young democracies in their wobbly infancy.

Now 73 years old, Frank Wisner Jr’s childhood was marked by extensive separation from his father because Frank Wisner Sr. was a wartime OSS agent. Wisner Sr. made the transition to the newly-established CIA in 1947. As head of operations and deputy director, he played a key role in countering Communism. To Wisner Sr. anything which he thought might tend to Communism if only by not bending Washington’s way was to be sabotaged and destroyed. From the Philippines in the early 1950s, Iran in 1953 via Guatemala in 1954 to South Vietnam in 1963, Frank Wisner’s fingers were in every regime-change pie. But he was more than just the advocate of manipulating the politics of foreign states.

Like several other key CIA officials in the first two decades of the Agency’s existence, Wisner was fascinated by mind-control. He encouraged research on brain-washing of individuals, something which the democracies had to learn to counter sinister Chinese and North Korean practices on U.S. PoWs in Korea. He encouraged the use of drugs like LSD in experiments on unwitting American civilians. (He may even have experimented on himself – as several other privileged U.S. insiders did.)

But controlling the minds of the Western public was his key goal. Wisner controlled unregistered funds with which he paid journalists and media proprietors. In the 1950s for the first time, young American journalists working for obscure newspapers or Mid-Western outlets with no obvious appetite for news from beyond the Prairies appeared able to live in exotic and expensive locations. Swarms of goatee-bearded civil society activists and new media specialists have followed in their footsteps in the last two decades.

Frank Wisner Sr is most famous for his indiscrete claim that he had so many agents and assets in the American and Western media that he could play the press like a “mighty Wurlitzer.” In the age of coordinated Twitter, Facebook and blogging campaigns, old man Wisner’s image of a cinema organ making the world’s mood music in a crisis might seem old-fashioned, but its essence - a coordinated campaign within the supposedly free media by strategically-placed intelligence assets – seems less anachronistic today than ever as countless breathless journalists for innumerable outlets seem to recite from the same script.

Frank Wisner Sr’s frenzy of subversive activity was liberally fuelled with booze. Nervous breakdowns rarely kept him long from his Langley desk but his erratic behaviour worried the more sober-suited spooks. Instead of sinking into an embarrassing alcohol-soaked retirement, he did the Agency a final favour in 1965 and shot himself – a tragic hero of the undercover world.

But should the son be judged in the light of his father’s career or habits?

The official line is that after a classic upper class[1] education at St. Albans and Princeton, Wisner Jr passed up the chance to serve his country in the CIA but took on the more open and honourable profession of diplomat instead. But, like several of his contemporaries, Wisner has mixed diplomacy, business and backstage influence in ways which have been very successful – but not explored by a free media as tame as in his father’s heyday when it comes to querying Washington’s power elite’s modus operandi.

Like Richard Holbrooke, Frank Wisner Jr cut his teeth in South Vietnam in the early 1960s as the U.S.-backed Diem regime came to a bloody end with Washington’s connivance but the rhetoric of democratization U.S.-style carried on. A generation later Holbrooke would denounce Serbs as “war criminals” for participating in the kind of pacification programme - targeted assassination, village clearances, and so on - which he helped advise on back then. Frank Wisner Jr was closer to the heart of the action in Saigon. Eight years earlier his father had played a key role in installing President Diem as President of South Vietnam. He was awarded an über-Mubarak 98.2% of the vote in the election called to confirm his installation in office. (Afficionados of CIA-sponsored Cold War film propaganda will remember the end of Joseph Mankiewicz’s cynically-twisted version of Greene’s Quiet American with its thanks to “the elected president of Vietnam”.) By the time young Frank’s membership of an obscure State Department-Pentagon overlap-unit in the U.S. embassy in Saigon was listed Diem’s star had waned in Washington and he was murdered in October, 1963, in a CIA-sponsored coup while his brother achieved what Robert Kennedy called the “unique feat” of committing suicide in custody with his hands tied behind his back! Young Frank learned how to stabilise a “nascent democracy” in tough conditions back then.

Another young member of the U.S. team in Vietnam then was Kenneth Lay. Mr Lay would leave public service – a Pentagon liaison team – to join the energy industry, but never lost contact with his comrades in the battle for democracy in Vietnam.

Although Frank Wisner Jr. carried on in the underpaid US diplomatic service, his path just kept crossing Ken Lay’s growing energy empire. His ambassadorship in the Philippines was devoted to promoting US investment – to be precise the purchase of Subic Bay power stations by Lay.

It was during his time in India that the Wisner-Lay axis reached its apogee and began to unravel the U.S. economy.

At the end of October, 1997, Wisner joined the board of Enron. He had just finished his stint as ambassador in India where he had represented U.S. interests since 1994. He had done much to promote the Texas-based energy giant’s activities in India. It was in India that Enron’s complex web of financial fraud began to unravel. No doubt the State Department took the line that what was good for Enron was good for America – certainly it was good for certain American diplomats.

Enron was desperate to get the Dabhol power project in Maharashta state. The U.S. embassy fought hard, some say dirty, to get the Indians to sign up to a deal which required the state to guarantee the profits of the foreign private investor. It was emblematic of the new world order: profits would be private but any losses, environmental costs and so on would be borne by the people. But without Wisner on hand and with turbulent local democracy electing officials who were not take with Socialism for the Foreign Rich, things began to go wrong. By 2001, Enron was both India’s biggest foreign investor and losing money there hand over fist. Sucheta Dalal noted that February, “The fact that Frank Wisner, the aggressive and high profile former US ambassador to India, promptly joined the Enron Corporation board of directors after leaving the country, has done nothing to enhance the power company's credibility. If that were not enough, Wisner's successor Richard Celeste chose to emulate his predecessor and used a farewell visit to Bombay to openly lobby for Enron and threaten the state government.” [2]

As in California at the same time, Enron was reaping the whirlwind of its successful lobbying to weaken state regulation of electricity prices and hike them, but as in California its early super-profits had soured into soaring losses. Indians could not and would not pay Enron’s inflated prices – but Enron needed their cash to flow through its complicated fraudulent financial system to keep it afloat.

Like the other members of the Teflon Texas political elite, Wisner Jr walked untainted from the wreckage of Enron. A guardian angel hovered over his career and reputation – maybe Dad put in a good word with the patron saint of greed for him. American newspapers always call him “respected” but never mention Enron and his name in the same column.

After the Enron debacle, Wisner went on to bigger and better bankruptcies. He became a member of the board of AIG, but though it went belly-up in 2008 taking umpteen billions of U.S. taxpayers dollars, Frank Wisner Jr’s unblemished reputation lives on.

Contrary to the “idiot leftists” who see capitalism as the determinant of politics, the careers of a Wisner or his fellow late AIG director Richard Holbrooke compared with the humiliating fate of Enron’s Ken Lay show it is political insider-status that enables a power-broker to survive insider-dealing admissions as Holbrooke himself made in 1999 on the eve of the Kosovo War which he did so much to promote.

To sit on the board of one economic Titanic without noticing the icebergs looming ahead might seem unlucky, but to grace two capsized engines of capitalism like Wisner looks careless – except when you have his aura. Money might buy influence, even protection. Power guarantees it.

Promoting Kosovo’s independence, despite the evidence of unsavoury criminal activities by the politicians whom Washington backed was Frank Wisner’s main “diplomatic” activity in retirement. Just as Dad had turned a blind eye to the drugs smuggler from Marseilles to the Mekong Delta who helped the anti-Communist fight after 1947, so his boy seems to have been unconcerned about evidence in the possession of the US government and its European allies that the KLA had a profitable sideline in corruption, drug smuggling to Western Europe, people trafficking and – it is alleged by the Council of Europe – even organ trafficking.

Just as his father’s CIA saw exotic micro-peoples in South-East Asia – Hongs and Karens – as valuable allies in the main struggle despite their involvement in the heroin trade, so promoting weak, criminalised micro-states has been part of his son’s “foreign policy.” Such entities are dependent on protection by a great power. Being Mafioso-states, they understand and respect power.

Egypt is a very big state with 80 million people, but its internal regime based on intertwining family and corporate interests with the mechanisms of state power to guarantee them is not essentially different from other U.S. allies of convenience.

Wisner Jr. did not drop his interest in Egypt after he had served there as ambassador during the painful period, 1986-91, when Mubarak began “reforms” cutting living standards and privatizing. This process has gone on until now with good GDP figures which pleased foreign investors but masked the reality of growing poverty for the many while a relative few profited from the “growth.” Mubarak was a poster boy for economic reform in the Arab world and took no nonsense from whinging populists.

In recent years, Wisner has worked for the Washington lobbyist firm, Patton Boggs, which has lucrative contracts on behalf of the Egyptian government, including the military. Polishing Egypt’s public image has been one of Patton Boggs’ tasks. Maybe, today, President Mubarak will be asking whether he got his money’s worth.

In 2005, Wisner endorsed Mubarak’s decision to stand for re-election as President of Egypt and suggested that in a free and fair election 65% of Egyptians would endorse their president since 1981. But there was a sting in the tail of his endorsement: “All of these are factors, plus the fact that this is clearly the last time President Mubarak will stand for re-election. His age is such that [Egypt] is clearly in a transition period, with something else to follow.”[3] However, as we anticipate a post-Mubarak regime, Wisner also had a s sting in the tail for naïve democrats who believe that Mubarak’s slow motion resignation means that someone entirely new and untainted by service in the Mubarak camp will be his successor. Wisner remarked, “The political culture of Egypt is to vote for stability.”

On 1^st February, an anonymous US official – possibly Wisner himself – told AP, “Wisner and Mubarak are friends and the official said the retired ambassador made clear that it was the U.S ‘view that his tenure as president is coming to close.’”[4]

Frank Wisner Jr has been director of the appropriately-named Pharaonic American Life Insurance Company (ALICO) in Egypt since 2007. He also serves on the board of Hakluyt, the British “investigative” company which may employee a higher proportion of ex-spooks than any other company on either side of the Atlantic. Along with Pentagon’s Ken Bacon, Wisner has shown his charitable side serving on the board of Refugees International. Cynics will be unkind enough to recall his father’s involvement, along with Allen Dulles, in infiltrating charities aiding so many refugees in Europe after 1939. America needed agents and information, refugees need help – for them it is a matter of life or death. But association with an intelligence service via a charity could be fatal too as some of those who got help from the proto-CIA ended up shot by Hitler or later by Stalin as spies, real or imagined.

But it is Wisner’s role today as the pivot of America’s regime-change agenda in Egypt which makes him so important despite his invisibility. The man in the shadows has strings to pull which are anchored at the Archimidean point of world politics in Washington.

It is not just a case of easing out Mubarak but of making sure that all of what Tony Blair would call the “good he has been doing” is carried forward. Not only must Egypt’s next president be a reliable ally in the Middle East peace process, but under the guise of democratic legitimacy, real or media-hyped, he must also pursue the economic agenda which has undermined Mubarak’s regime.

When American officials from Obama downwards repeatedly couple their calls for democratisation in Egypt with demands for market reforms, the old Enron devil inside Frank Wisner knows what that must mean for Egypt’s impoverished masses. If tens of millions of Egyptians are angry with Mubarak about getting poorer already, what will they make of the final abolition of any subsidies on food and energy?

Mr Wisner is such a “respected” diplomat that no-one in the official media has queried possible conflicts of interest arising from his business activities in the country whose political system he is reshaping so selflessly. Future privatizations are part of the reform agenda being pressed on Egypt. Could it possible have occurred to the former director of Enron and AIG as well as of the Pharaonic American Life Insurance Company that a privatization on the epic scale worthy of the land of the Pharaohs is looming: the Suez Canal was nationalised by Mubarak’s first patron, Gamel Abdul Nasser, won’t it be a neat sign that People Power has truly triumphed in Egypt when ownership of the Suez Canal is returned to private, preferably international owners? And then of course, the Aswan dam’s electricity generating capacity can only improve if foreigners with expertise in the energy field give a helping hand….

Asking who has the power to profit from People Power is an undiplomatic question. Maybe it is wiser to leave it in the shadows where Wisners prefer to remain.

[1] Married to the French President’s stepmother, the former Christine Sarkozy, Wisner is bi-lingual in French which helps in North Africa especially where French culture lingers among the elites.

[2] See Sacheta Dalal, “The Enron crisis reaches a crisis point” Rediff.com (8^th February, 2001): http://www.rediff.com/money/2001/feb/08dalal.htm.

[3] Quoted @ http://mideastwire.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/wisner-on-egypt-in-2005-mubarak-would-win-65-of-the-vote-in-a-free-election/.

[4] See Matthew Lee, “AP source: Obama envoy tells Mubarak time is up” AP (1^st February, 2011): http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/ap-source-obama-envoy-824086.html.

After Mubarak - Mubarak?

2011-01-30T02:03:00.000-08:00

Egypt’s “People Power” revolution seems to have shaken the foundations of the corrupt regime of Hosni Mubarak. President for thirty years, Mr Mubarak has found that even putting his army on the streets of Cairo has not quelled popular discontent.

But the Egyptian people lack a Mandela-style popular leader to replace Mubarak. Neither the ex-weapons inspector Muhammed El Baradei nor the US and Soros-backed opposition groups led by men like Ayman Nour enjoy much popular name recognition or support outside the educated elite.

All that unites 80 million Egyptians is revulsion for their autocratic leader since 1981.

Mubarak’s deep unpopularity has been exposed for all to see. But happens next? While all eyes have been on the street protests it looks as though the Egyptian Army was staging a silent coup d’etat. They have pressed Mubarak into appointing his intelligence chief as Vice-President. This means if Mubarak resigns, a military man will replace him.

The new Vice-President, Omar Soleiman, has served as intelligence boss for twenty years. Will the street protestors accept him?

A big component of the crowds have been supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. They have no reason to like the new Vice-President and many reasons to fear him. He led the crackdown on radical Muslims in Egypt. He is politely called "intelligence chief" by Western journalists and "respected" but the respect felt for him is best understood when translated from the Sicilian. Soleiman headed what in Saddam's Iraq or Assad's Syria would be labelled "the feared Mukhabarat" or secret police. His no-holds-barred approach to dissent in the past silenced many critics of Mubarak once and for all.

But Western diplomats and Israeli politicians know and like Soleiman as an urbane negotiator. With him heir to the hated “Pharaoh” Mubarak, Washington and London can breathe easier. The Middle East’s key country will be in safe hands. But will the people of Cairo calm down? Mubarak has signalled that he will leave office at the latest when his term expires this November. How many Egyptians will want his Vice-President to slip suavely into his place?

Rumours abound that Soleiman had planned for this moment. His group of seniot security officials regarded Mubarak's preferred successor, his son, Gamal, as a playboy who could not be relied on to exercise power effectively. He could lose control because of the nepotism required to install him. The generals did not want a succession like that but don't want the regime - their regime - to fall.

Many other "People Power" revolutions from the bloody fall of Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 to the so-called "Rose Revolution" in Georgia in 2003 have seen regime-insiders use the cover of popular protest to ease an elderly dictator aside. In June, 1990, Romania saw a brutal crackdown on those who still took People Power seriously. It was not until November, 2007, that Georgia's President Saakashvili sent his security forces out on the streets to smash opposition there.

Will Egypt's revolution avoid that kind of cynical cosmetic change? The risk must that if “People Power” simply replaces Mubarak with his chief enforcer until now, Egypt will explode uncontrollably next time. Replacing Mubarak with Soleiman as the man the West can do business with, could mean the next-but-one Egyptian president is no friend of ours.

Oxford historian, Mark Almond, is Visiting Professor in International Relations at Bilkent University, Turkey.

(A version of this article appeared in the Sunday Mirror on 30th January, 2011.)

Kyrgyzstan: Central Asia’s Poverty-Stricken Roundabout Revolves Again

2010-04-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

Pity poor post-Communist Kyrgyzstan.

The bloody events in its capital, Bishkek on Wednesday 7th April are only the most recent round in the political infighting there. Even the flight of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, apparently to his southern stronghold of Osh suggests that continued political violence remains a possibility. But it is the naïve belief fostered by Western media that the violent sacrifice of over 70 lives must mean fundamental change which distracts from understanding the recurring cruel realities of post-Communist politics in Kyrgyzstan.

It is almost exactly five years since Bakiyev’s predecessor, Askar Akaev, took the presidential plane to exile in Moscow. Then the regime-change was greeted as the triumph of “People Power” and the beginning of true democracy and prosperity. This year’s revolution was bloodier than in 2005 but anyone with a memory will recognise not only the street-scenes of pillage and blood-stains but even the faces of the leading revolutionaries.

Despite the new regime’s familiar faces, Western media are reporting the upheaval in Kyrgyzstan as the sign of a geo-political earthquake in the strategically sensitive Central Asian state. Back in 2005, it was quickly clear that the new regime was pro-American. What about 2010’s crop of Kyrgyz revolutionaries and their role in the “Great Game” for control of the Eurasian heartland?

Did the Kremlin’s Hidden Hands pull the rug from under Bakiyev?

The Russian premier, Vladimir Putin, spoke dismissively of the ousted president Bakiyev’s corruption and nepotism on the day of the uprising. Bakiyev’s prime minister complained about Russian media coverage of the crisis as it developed. Putin however telephoned Rosa Otumbayeva, the head of the self-proclaimed interim government and treated her as the legitimate authority in Kyrgyzstan. This showed Moscow imprimatur for the new regime. But are Western conspiracy theorists right to detect the Kremlin’s hidden hand behind the violent events in Bishkek?

The standard explanation by Russophobe media is that Putin was anxious to force the closure of the US airbase at Manas just outside the Kyrgyz capital. The conspiracy theory is that the Russian regime is anxious to make life difficult for the US troops occupying Afghanistan. Since Manas is a key link in the Pentagon’s re-supply route the New Cold Warriors see it as the nodal point of the new “Great Game” between Washington and Moscow for control of the oil, natural gas and opium-rich Central Asian states.[1]

Although Askar Akaev, who was ousted in 2005, has been interviewed by Russia Today[2] saying that his successor had discredited himself by being too close to the United States and by downgrading relations with Russia, official Russia seems to be engaged in much less of a New Cold War than either US neo-conservative ideologists believe or the victims of US-sponsored “colour-coded” revolutions in 2003-05 would like to think.

After all, on the very day of the coup in Bishkek, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev was in Prague to sign the new START nuclear arms treaty with President Obama. Medvedev’s government agreed in 2009 to facilitate the re-supply of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan by allowing transhipment of supplies across Russian territory to Central Asia. If the Kremlin is playing a Machiavellian game to undermine the United States, the only rational explanation of Russia’s direct assistance to the US war effort in Afghanistan is that Medvedev and co. are encouraging Obama’s desire to be bogged down there! Only the more paranoid of the Pentagon’s grand strategists can really believe that is Russia’s game.

Russia’s acceptance of the new regime fits a pattern of acquiescence in US-backed regime change.

In October, 2000, Vladimir Putin sent his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, to Belgrade to persuaded Slobodan Milosevic to concede defeat in the Yugoslav presidential elections to the US-backed candidate, Dr. Kostunica. In November, 2003, Ivanov went to Tbilisi to tell Eduard Shevardnadze to relinquish office to Mikheil Saakashvili, the US-sponsored leader of Georgia’s “Rose Revolution.” In April, 2004, Ivanov was on hand to usher Saakashvili’s regional rival, Aslan Abashidze, on to his plane and exile in Moscow. In 2005, Russia gave Kyrgyzstan’s Askar Akaev asylum but recognised the regime which came to power in Bishkek even though Western media broadcast pictures of US-funded resources being used to back the opposition to Akaev.[3]

The Moldovan Model

In April, 2009, a violent uprising in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, prefigured the events in Bishkek on 7-8th April. A year ago in Europe’s poorest country, post-Soviet Moldova, a similar violent scenario was played out. Parliament was stormed and new elections forced. Like Kyrgyzstan, Moldova had been highly praised in the 1990s as a model of economic reform and admitted into the World Trade Organisation by passing laws and regulations embracing pure capitalism while the real economy crashed.

Like Kyrgyzstan, Moldova is dirt poor and under-developing as each year went by since the collapse of Communism. The Moldovan President, Vladimir Voronin, had made the mistake of drifting into economic dependence on Russia as his country’s economy and society imploded under the burden of poverty induced by the shock therapy imposed on the advice of Western experts and the Soros Foundation. The mob in Moldova stormed the Parliament and forced fresh elections. Naked power rather than the people’s will had been demonstrated and the Moldovan electorate wisely voted for the representatives of parties backed by the mob rather than anyone disliked by it. Russia even accepted this outcome. The EU and USA applauded it.

Both Kyrgyz and Moldovan societies were heavily dependent on remittances from migrant workers scratching a living in Russia or other countries. The financial crash of 2008 and the continuing lack of demand for unskilled labour has had a cruel effect on Kyrgyz and Moldovan migrant workers. At the same time, energy prices in particular have shot up. The last straw for ordinary Kyrgyz in their bleak mountainous Central Asian homeland was the dramatic hike in electricity and natural gas tariffs at the start of 2010. With the arrival of spring, the destitute could come out onto the streets to protests.

The problem for ordinary people in Kyrgyzstan as elsewhere in the post-Soviet realm is that popular protests may topple regimes, but “The People” cannot hold power for themselves. Only a few people can actually sit in office as ministers. It is those with “experience,” however dubious, who fill the ministerial posts in any new regime In Bishkek, political insiders who had fallen out with Akaev before 2005 and then Bakiyev afterwards have been scrambling to occupy vacant ministerial posts.

Any consideration of who constitutes the new regime in Bishkek as well as Russia’s track-record of accepting and even facilitating “colour-coded” revolutions since October, 2000, must put the neo-con conspiracy theories aside.

New Regime, Old Faces

The Financial Times quoted the former Soros-supported activist, Edil Baisalov as saying, “"What we are seeing is a classic popular uprising. This is a revolution, and it is bloody."[4] Certainly since the Moldovan events, “velvet revolutions” have gone out of fashion but how much change is really heralded by the bloodshed in Bishkek?

Although in Western media Rosa Otunbayeva’s biography begins in 1991 like so many reformers favoured by Washington, her political career began as an official of the Soviet Communist Party as far back as 1981. Like the rest of the Kyrgyz elite applauded periodically as model reformers since 1991, the current self-proclaimed president’s skills at in-fighting and career-building were not honed in the Westminster school of politics but the Leninist one. Explaining the self-proclaimed interim president of Kyrgyzstan to its readers, the international mining magazine, Mineweb declared that she was already “known as the Thatcher of Kyrgyzstan”![5] In fact, she had served as both Akaev’s foreign minister until 1997and then after a brief interval as an ambassador to the UK for instance, she became leader of the opposition Social Democrats, and foreign minister again after the “Tulip Revolution” in 2005. Later she fell out with President Bakiyev before re-staging her role in this year’s bloody re-run of the Tulip events.

Rosa Otunbayeva told Russian Mir TV, “"The security service and the interior ministry, all of them are already under the management of new people.” But the “new people” turned out to be old-hands in these jobs. For instance, the new defence minister, Ishmail Isakov, was Bakiyev’s defence minister from 2005 until 2008. Last October, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for abuse of office. As in Soviet days, charges of corruption are often made in Kyrgyzstan for political reasons but sadly the facts of corruption by office-holders are commonplace. The new interior minister, Bolotbek Sherniyaov, was key organiser of the 2005 revolution.

These new ministers have Soviet-era pasts which the Kremlin will know about but they have also been deeply-engaged with US government agencies and US-based organisations like the Soros Foundation (in whose office I met Mrs Otunbayeva fifteen years ago, for instance).

The new leadership has reassured his contacts in Washington that Manas can continue to function as the Pentagon’s forward base in Central Asia. Despite their failure to control the anti-Bakiyev crowd, the Kyrgyz special forces trained by US contractors at Tokmok, seen firing their guns, wearing US-style desert fatigues and coal-scuttle helmets on the streets of Bishkek seem set to continue to receive US training and subsidy. Maybe they will do a better job when the next poverty-stricken crowd demonstrates for another regime-change.

New Regime, Old Policies

This rotation within the post-Communist regime’s personnel bodes ill for Kyrgyzstan’s future. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the poverty-stricken Central Asian state has repeatedly undergone traumatic changes. Yet a huge gulf has yawned between Western media coverage of the country and the harsh reality of life there. Worse still, US-funded NGOs specialising in regime-analysis and regime-change show no willingness to learn from their past mistakes nor a readiness to be a little more modest about promoting personalities or policies as the salvation of countries like Kyrgyzstan which have gone downhill following previously approved recipes or leaders. While life has lurched from bad to worse for ordinary people in Kyrgyzstan, on the few occasions the outside world has taken note of events there it has been to announce a re-birth of society and hope rather than to warn against repeating mistakes or following mirages of freedom and prosperity.

The US organisation Freedom House has a dubious track record in the Central Asian state. For years it acted as an advocate of the Akaev regime before suddenly turning on it in 2004 and promoting the regime-change in 2005. At first, Freedom House endorsed the Bakiyev regime but in 2009 it downgraded Kyrgyzstan to a “not free” country.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on 12th January, 2010, that “Kyrgyzstan -- once the center of pro-democracy hopes in Central Asia -- moved from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’ category. The downgrade was due… to claims of voter irregularities in the country's July 2009 presidential election, consolidation of power in the executive branch, and new restrictive legislation on freedom of religion. The setback means the entire region of Central Asia is now rated ‘not free.’…” RFE/RL cited Freedom House’s Central Asian analyst Christopher Walker as saying, “the hopes that bloomed in 2005 for Kyrgyzstan and the region are now history.” According to Walker, “Kyrgyzstan has turned out to be a sour disappointment in terms of political rights and civil liberties, and has trended downwards over the last two years.”[6] But such disappointment has not stopped the inter-locking world of US democracy promotion agencies and private foundations like Soros from dropping yesteryear’s favourite and extolling a new champion of freedom.

Remember the “Tulip Revolution.” Dan Fried, still the key State Department architect of US policy promoting so-called “People Power” under President Obama as well as Republican presidents, told us in October, 2005, “Kyrgyzstan experienced what the people there call the March events. Some people call it the Tulip Revolution… An authoritarian president was overthrown because of widespread revulsion at perceived massive corruption and other factors. There followed elections which were just about the freest the region had seen and you have a reformist leadership trying to move the country ahead and trying to get it on its feet.” If the new presidential elections in six months are held and produce another 86% landslide like Bakiyev’s poll in 2005 will the US State Department wait five years to denounce electoral manipulation?

This year’s violent events seem set to repeat the Kyrgyz syndrome of regime change, international approval, followed by further corruption until poverty provides those who lose out in the inevitable in-fighting over the country’s few spoils with enough discontented young men to rush the police cordon around government house. The so-called “Tulip Revolution” in 2005 was, like other “People Power” revolutions, not a fundamental regime-change but a change within the regime. Is the current chaos in Kyrgyzstan the prelude to another game of political musical chairs or something more profound?

North-South Split

One possible spoke in the wheels of the rotation of government posts within the elite is the ousted Bakiyevs refusal to resign. Instead he has fled to his home base in the south of the country protected by Central Asia’s highest mountain chain.

In 2005, there was an initial north-south split. But then, it was Bakiyev’s southern backers who set the revolution rolling. The first sign of the crisis was when crowds attacked government offices and the police in the city of Osh.

Osh at the eastern end of the Ferghana Valley was a key centre in the Central Asian smuggling trade. Situated on the border of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan but also a centre for Afghan and Tajik traders. Bakiyev’s retreat to his homebase raises the risk of a split inside Kyrgyzstan. Certainly in 2005, the smugglers backed him in what was euphemistically called a “free market revolution”! Will the ex-president be able to buy back power? Certainly, the US-led coalition has done nothing to fight the drugs mafia whose smuggling routes criss-cross Central Asia from Afghanistan via Kyrgyzstan to the West – unless verbal denunciations of the evil of opium are to be counted part of the Pentagon’s arsenal of smart weapons. Anyone challenging the Kyrgyz affiliates of the heroin trade would be putting their political careers on the line.

Manna for Manas

What is the role of the Manas airbase which figures so prominently in conspiracy theory accounts of the Kyrgyz coup?

The US military presence in Kyrgyzstan was dramatically increased after 9/11. Until then, small contingents of special forces and intelligence agents – plus “private contractors” – helped train the Kyrgyz security forces and to observe local Islamic militants and events in nearby Afghanistan. The US invasion of Afghanistan after 7th October, 2001, transformed the military relationship between the superpower and the “Switzerland of Central Asia.” The Soviet-built long runway at Manas airport outside Bishkek was ideal for US transport planes. The proximity of Kyrgyzstan to Afghanistan meant that a host of intermediary operations as well as supply from the US homeland could be facilitated through it.

Washington’s local favourite in the 1990s,Askar Akaev, agreed to the US use of Manas for a minimal payment. As the years of Operation Enduring Freedom rolled by he began to ask for a more generous rent. Then his standing as a democrat and economic reformer went into free fall – whither it should have dropped years earlier.

After Akaev’s fall, the Bakiyev regime agreed to keep the base, but his clan too needed cash and Kyrgyzstan has no oil or gas, or even opium of its own, to squeeze as a cash cow.

At first at the start of 2009, it seemed Bakiyev was part of a Russian plot to shut US out of access to Manas. President Medvedev granted Kyrgyzstan a generous line of credit at the height of the crisis with the Pentagon when Bakiyev and his tame parliament had refused to prolong the deal for US use of Manas. But once he had the Russian cash up front, Bakiyev suddenly agreed to let the Pentagon use the air field for US$117 million per annum.

The agreement runs for one year at time. The current agreement runs out in June. Getting in on the negotiations and the sweeteners which drip off such contracts made this spring in Kyrgyzstan particularly tense. Bakiyev’s concentration of economic power and rent-collection in his immediate family and their clan’s hands outraged Kyrgyzstan’s class of reformers who feel entitled to a cut.

It is instructive to contrast Russian and US approaches to the politics of aid. The Russians subsidise societies with loans for projects whereas the Americans buy the political elite with rent. Russia agreed to grant Kyrgyzstan US$2 billion in 2009 but it was tied to economic aid projects while the United States paid US$117m in rent. Even though economic aid would certainly be ruthlessly skimmed by the Bakiyev clan’s control of the economy, the rent for Manas constituted a direct grant to the ruling family. At least if they have lost power, the manna from Manas will cushion their exile.

Anyone wanting to understand the principles of the much-touted reform process now about to re-start in Kyrgyzstan could do worse than listen to Swedish shock therapist turned Washington insider, Anders Aslund. He reassured worried Americans straight away on 7th April itself that the Manas Airbase was safely in their hands. “This is very much on a pecuniary basis.” Aslund added, “The US pays a substantial amount to hold the airbase” and it continue to hold it regardless of regime.”[7]

Reform-Revolution-Reform - - - the Roundabout Revolves Again

Western media seem unable to escape from the stereotype of any and every new Kyrgyz ruler as “reformer.” For instance, Isabel Gorst’s report on the events of 7th April, 2010, carried the sentence, “Mr Bakiyev introduced sweeping government reforms that transferred management of the economy and security to new bodies controlled by his family and close associates”![8] If those were “reforms” what would bad policies be? If past form is any guide, we can expect any successor to Bakiyev to be lauded as the new Jefferson of Central Asia, and so on.[9]

Even as the crisis unfolded, the Peterson Institute reassured Beltway insiders reporting arch-shock therapist, “Anders Åslund says the overthrow of President Baikyev was led by pro-democracy forces that will likely continue reforms and maintain ties with Washington.”[10] In other words, the policies which have impoverished the population and promoted periodic brutal revolt and plundering will continue. Pity poor Kyrgyzstan, with such faithful friends and sponsors in Washington it has no hope of escaping from the syndrome of reform followed by impoverishment and then revolution. The continuation of the downward spiral seems pre-programmed.
Maybe ordinary Kyrgyz would welcome someone who plotted a different course from the tragic one pursued for two decades now, but sadly their tiny in-fighting political class has nothing to gain from abolishing a rent-seeking relationship with the Pentagon or other foreign sponsors. Until Kyrgyzstan stops the cycle of regime-change and finds new political leaders it looks doomed to repeat its unhappy past.

[1] For a British neo-cold warrior version of events, see Simon Tisdall, “Kyrgyzstan: a Russian revolution?The US is on the back foot in Central Asia after Vladimir Putin appears to be winning a round in the new Great Game” in The Guardian (8th April, 2010): http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/08/kyrgyzstan-vladimir-putin-barack-obama
[2] Broadcast 2.30pm GMT, 9th April, 2010.
[3] See Manon Loizeau, Revolution.com. L’evoluzione della Guerra fredda (23rd July, 2007): http://www.ariannaeditrice.it/articolo.php?id_articolo=12759 & http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm? fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=45233954 for one Bishkek-based Freedom House US activist’s comment, “We’ve got wrapped up in that story of velvet revolutions, orange revolutions. I keep saying, ‘I want to see a green revolution.’ Bring in the money!” as he waves some US currency.
[4] See Isabel Gorst, “Bishkek curfew as dozens shot dead “ FT.com (7th April, 2010): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c3b7f250-421e-11df-9ac4-00144feabdc0.html
[5] See Dorothy Kosich, “Kyrgyz revolution unlikely to affect Kumtor – Centerra” Mineweb (8th April, 2010): http://www.mineweb.co.za/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page34?oid=102291&sn=Detail&pid=102055.
[6] See Nikola Krastev, “Democratic Decline Continues across Former Soviet States” RFE/RL (12th January, 2010): http://www.rferl.org/content/Report_Democratic_Decline_Continues_Across_Former_Soviet_States_/1927675.html
[7] See “Uprising in Kyrgyzstan” Peterson Institute for International Economics (7th April, 2010): http://www.piie.com/publications/interviews/interview.cfm?ResearchID=1538.
[8] See Isabel Gorst, “Bishkek curfew as dozens shot dead” FT.com (7th April, 2010): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c3b7f250-421e-11df-9ac4-00144feabdc0.html.
[9] Who has forgotten Strobe Talbott’s ineffable encomium of Akaev in 1994?: “We here in Washington think of President Akaev as the ‘Thomas Jefferson’ of Kyrgyzstan, and of Central Asia— and that's not just because he can quote from the writings of one of our own Founding Fathers. After hearing him engage Vice President Gore in a long and animated conversation about the potential of the information superhighway, I realized that President Akaev has more than a bit of Benjamin Franklin in him as well.”
[10] See “Uprising in Kyrgyzstan” Peterson Institute for International Economics (7th April, 2010): http://www.piie.com/publications/interviews/interview.cfm?ResearchID=1538

In the Shadow of the Bronze Soldier

2008-08-19T07:20:00.000-07:00

In May, 2007, I wrote a paper on the nostalgia for the Nazi-era collaborators in the Baltic States, especially as manifested in Estonia by the ex-prime minister, revisionist historian and Milton Friedman prize-winner, Mart Laar. Since Mr Laar acts as an adviser to the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as a propagandist on his behalf in the American media, it seemed appropriate to republish the paper, In the Shadow of the Bronze Soldier: Estonia Removes Red Army Memorials and Restores SS Graves. Mr Saakashvili's racist rhetoric about Russians as a race of "barbarians" has filled the airwaves in the West. It is not surprising Saakashvili's Georgia has imitated Estonia in building an occupation museum recalling "Russian occupation" under Stalin-Djugashvili, Ordzhonikidze, Enukidze, Beria and many other "Russians" presumably operating under Georgian aliases! (Sadly, the museum is routinely closed during the power-cuts which plagued Tbilisi before the current crisis.) Georgia also imitated the "freedom-loving" Baltic States by broadcasting TV documentaries sympathetic to the few Georgian Waffen SS collaborators who fought to defend their country from Soviet occupation in Holland in 1945 just as Dutch, Belgian and Scandinavian "volunteers" defended their homelands in Estonia in 1944. In reality, many Balts resisted the Nazis as did so many Georgians, but in the New World Order their service to the defeat of Hitler is at best ignored but at worst and increasingly it is denounced as treason to the New Europe, whose leaders assembled alongside Mr Saakashvili in Tbilisi included the American-Lithuanian President, Valdas Adamkus, who has the distinction of being the last European head of state to have fought in the Second World War - in German uniform.

In the Shadow of the Bronze Soldier:

Estonia Removes Red Army memorials and Restores SS Graves

“Their goal was to sweep away all traces of the
‘former world,’ starting by destroying monuments…”

Mart Laar[1]

An uneasy calm has descended on Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, and other cities since two nights of rioting, at the end of April led to hundreds of arrests, scores of injuries and one death.[2] The disorder was sparked by the sudden decision of Prime Minister, Andrus Ansip, to remove the Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier, from a traffic island in Tallinn.

The Prime Minister had promised to leave the statue undisturbed until after the 9th May anniversary of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. When officials of the Estonian Ministry of Defence suddenly moved to dismantle it on the night of 26-27th April, this enraged members of the Russian minority in particular since they saw the statue as symbolising the defeat of the mortal enemy of Slavs like themselves as well as genocide against Jews. Ansip’s action ignored warnings from representatives of the Russian minority, including MPs like Vladimir Velman, who predicted, "There's going to be trouble as soon as the shovel touches the ground."[3]

In addition to the protests it provoked in the Russian minority regions across northern Estonia, the removal of the statue also enraged official Russia. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the Estonian decision to move the statue and exhume the war dead at the site “blasphemous” while President Putin most likely successor, Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov, called for Russia to take counter-measures to punish Estonia at the very least economically by speeding up the construction of ports on the Russian part of the Baltic coast to take away transit traffic from Tallinn’s harbour.[4] Oil supplies from have been interrupted, officially for “maintenance” reasons.[5]

The Bronze Soldier in Tallinn was by no means the only war memorial to become the focus of controversy in Estonia in recent years. It is true that in the run up to the Estonian general election on 4th March, Ansip’s Reform Party and the radical nationalist Res Publica movement had made removing the Soviet memorial a key rallying point in their campaigns, but both neo-conservative nationalist parties had already made clear that if they back anti-Soviet iconoclasm they had much more tender concerns about the fate of monuments glorifying Estonians and other collaborators who took Hitler’s side in the Second World War.

Pitting the Estonian majority against the Russophone minority was a successful political ploy in the general election in March The election results enabled Ansip to ditch the less nationalistic Centre Party from his coalition and bring into the ruling coalition the Res Publica movement, whose leader, Mart Laar, has been the chief ideologue of an anti-Soviet historical revisionist movement which denigrates even the anti-Nazi struggle of the Red Army and presents the Estonian Waffen SS troops as “freedom fighters.”[6]

As the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany approaches on 8-9th May, Western European governments must consider the implications of the Estonian government’s decision to pull down the local symbol of the Red Army’s victory of Nazism. What should Mr Ansip’s rush to remove the Bronze Soldier tell Old Europe about its new partner’s attitude to Europe’s darkest period, the Second World War? What are the implications of a sudden revival of anti-Soviet but also anti-Russian feelings in NATO and the EU’s new member, Estonia? Many West Europeans failed to see that Tallinn was not just going to be a “stag party and piss-up” stop where the over-paid sexual inadequates of London and Frankfurt could buy cheap “tossage”,[7] it was also going to be in the front line of a united Europe’s relations with its neighbour, Russia, Western Europe’s major gas supplier and also a nuclear armed super-power.

Official Estonian rhetoric as well as the Estonian media slide between anti-Soviet justifications for the removal of the Bronze Soldier and anti-Russian slogans, so that the battle over the monument is not just about the Communist past of Estonia and how the country should deal with relics of the Soviet occupation, it is also about how Estonia sees its substantial Russophone minority – at least 25% of the population, probably close to one-third – and how it sees itself in relation to neighbouring Russia.

EU and NATO states should not be comfortable with the nationalist arguments coming from official Tallinn, which often involve rehabilitation of collaborators with Hitler and provocative acts towards Russians at home and abroad. The EU has repeatedly committed itself to an ideal of an anti-Fascist Europe where neo-Nazi apologetics and xenophobia were anathema, but Estonia is only today’s acute case of how some of the recent members of EU and NATO see partnership in “New Europe” as an occasion for historical revisionism which would risk putting its proponents in prison in Germany or Austria, for instance.

The Bronze Soldier was not the first controversial war memorial

“When a nation cannot face up to its history, it
will live like a human being suffering from a
permanent neurosis.”

Mart Laar[8]

From the huge Waffen SS cemetery and memorial at Lestene in Latvia to the reconstructed battlefield and war graves of the mixed Estonian, Nordic and Benelux Waffen SS men at Sinimäe in north-east Estonia , a wave of commemoration of the men who fought for Hitler more than sixty years ago is sweeping across the Baltic States. When Flemish veterans of the Waffen SS and their skinhead admirers gather at this time of year to hail Hitler’s volunteers, it is scandalous if any Belgian politician joins them,[9] but in the Baltic States official figures defend the reputation of their own veterans of the Waffen SS.

Arguing that Latvians and Estonians were “conscripted” and only fought to defend their homelands, locally-produced books and museums present a rose-tinted view of the “black legions.” While demanding that Russians to face up to the crimes committed by their Communist forebears, the Waffen SS in the Baltic States are presented as freedom fighters. This ignores the fact that the Waffen SS units core membership came from locals who collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis in attacks on the Jewish minority as the German armies advanced in 1941. These so-called police units often went on to serve in other parts of the occupied USSR as Jew- and partisan-hunters before returning to provide the core personnel for the Waffen SS units which Hitler only authorised in 1943 after his army suffered catastrophe at Stalingrad. Even then Nazi Germany did not offer the Balts even a Vichy-style Quisling status as an collaborationist state, but kept them firmly occupied. Even if it is true that most members of these units only joined up as the tide of war turned against Germany and was coming towards their home territories again, this means that they served when the Holocaust was intensifying as Hitler stove to annihilate defenceless enemies inside his Reich as his dreams of conquest failed. In reality, Baltic SS-men were found defending Hitler’s bunker in April, 1945, or fighting deep inside Germany like Alfons Rebane, whose reburial in Estonia in 1999 was authorised by Mart Laar’s government.

Although most Western media have ignored the growing tension over the glorification of German collaborators in Latvia and Estonia, at least until the removal of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn provoked disorderly protests on 26-28th April, in fact in the issue of monuments to war dead from the Second World War has been simmering for almost five years.[10] In the run-up to the admission of Estonia and Latvia to NATO and the EU the issue of the ghosts of both Soviet and Nazi pasts was ignored by the West even though diplomats and journalists in the Baltic States cannot have been in ignorance. Many of the books glorifying the local “freedom fighters” in the Waffen SS have been translated into English and are prominently displayed in bookshops in Tallinn and Riga.

The Bronze Soldier was not the first monument to Estonia’s war dead which has been the subject of fierce political controversy. In fact it was a memorial to Estonians who fought in Hitler’s Waffen SS which first provoked disorder and vandalism in Estonia almost three years ago. Already in 2004, the re-erection of a monument from Pärnu honouring Estonians who fought in the Waffen SS on Hitler’s side in the village of Lihula had provoked outrage on the part of anti-Fascists in Estonia, both Russophone and Estonian, as well as in neighbouring Russia. The removal of the Lihula SS monument in September, 2004, in turned provoked outrage among Estonia’s dominant right-wing political elite – and provoked the fall of the government which had authorised the Lihula monument’s removal.

At first sight, the action of the Estonian authorities to remove a monument commemorating Estonian volunteers in the Waffen SS from the graveyard in the south-western village of Lihula on 2nd September, 2004, was a clear sign of commitment to the anti-Nazi principles of the EU. Estonia was facing up to the shadow side of its past and not giving an alibi to its Nazi collaborators by insisting on the unique evil of Stalin’s Soviet Union. But it was the very voices calling loudest for Russians to face up to the past, which screamed out fury at the desecration of the Waffen SS memorial.

The police faced violent resistance from sympathisers with the “freedom fighters” of 1944 to their action in removing the monument: seven out of eleven police vehicles deployed at the cemetery had all of their windows smashed, for instance. Tires were punctured and vehicle bodies dented. A Soviet-era Estonian-language war memorial in the same Lihula cemetery was vandalised and number of acts of vandalism obviously stimulated by the events in Lihula took place across Estonia over the next few days.[11]

The monument had originally been erected in the nearby coastal town of Pärnu two years earlier. Then the soldier carved on the stone wore the collar flashes and helmet runic symbol of the SS. That version of the monument was soon removed. The SS runes were scratched off and the bowdlerised monument was re-erected in Lihula at a ceremony attended by about 2,000 people, some in modern Estonian military uniform. The monument’s patron, Tiit Madisson, is a resident of Lihula where he is deputy mayor. Mr. Madisson has had a chequered career, enjoying the unique distinction of being imprisoned for his views under both the Soviet regime and in the new Estonia after independence was restored in 1991.

With two colleagues I observers visited Lihula on 31st August, 2004. They had arranged to see Tiit Madisson at 3pm. When they arrived at the mayoral offices they were asked to wait fifteen minutes to twenty minutes. When they returned they were informed that Mr Madisson was in fact in Tallinn for a ceremony at the new Occupation Museum in the Estonian capital and would not return until late at night (“after 10 pm”). However, two Estonian journalists from the Centre Party’s newspaper, Kesknädal, who were also waiting to interview Mr. Madisson about his monument admitted that they had been asked to wait until the “English” had gone!

Although he is also the author of a book about the New World Order - Maailma uus Kord – which seems to rehash the argument that Jewish influences steer US foreign policy, it may be appropriate to dismiss Mr. Madisson as a marginal small-town politician, one of life’s recidivist awkward squad of nay-sayers whose views, even if objectionable, are hardly typical. However, Mr. Madisson was not alone in his desire to see the reputation of the wartime Estonian SS Legion defended. If Madisson is a decidedly minority taste even in Estonia, then former prime minister, Mart Laar is a very different figure.

Mr Laar used the decision to remove the SS memorial from Lihula to attack the Estonian Prime Minister, Juhan Parts, for doing so. Mr Parts had explained the decision to remove Mr. Madisson’s memorial: “The government’s decision was right. We had to protect the Freedom Fighters from any kind of Nazi [associations]. But – and I say this in the Estonian press – this was a difficult decision that inevitably caused a lot of emotions.” The distinction between Freedom Fighters and Nazi associations is not an easy one to make when so many of those praised in Estonia as “freedom fighters” against Stalin’s Soviet Union wore SS uniform. Premier Parts proposed a suitable monument would be ” the erection of a memorial – Freedom Statue – to the people who fought and died for the independence of the Republic of Estonia and the victims of the violence of foreign powers which would be government-funded.[12]

Mr Parts proposal for a less provocative memorial to Estonians who fought Stalin in the 1940s regardless of their uniform drew a swift rebuke from probably Estonia’s best-known politician in the wider world, Mart Laar. Mr Laar came to prominence in the late Soviet period as the author of a book about the anti-Soviet resistance in Estonia, War in the Woods, an account of how ex-Waffen SS soldiers fought the occupying Soviet forces as partisans or as the Nazis called them “werewolves.”

In 2004, Mr. Laar “recommended that the prime minister apologize to the freedom fighters for what has happened” at Lihula. As far as Laar was concerned it was the removal of that monument which drew bad publicity for Estonia. He referred to “the problems that have come after the removal of the monument – I mean the wave of cemetery vandalism that has really given Estonia foreign political problems.”

For Mr Laar leaving Madisson’s monument in place would have been the better solution since “If the Lihula monument itself was relatively unknown in Europe, then news about the post-removal reaction has definitely reached Europe and does not provide any positive publicity for Estonia.” It seems that if a pro-SS monument could have remained in place without drawing adverse comment in the rest of the EU, Mr.Laar would have left sleeping Nazis to lie.

Laar argued – correctly as it turned out - that “the authority of the government and prime minister has been severely damaged and it is difficult to say whether it can be restored.” Mr. Laar’s verdict on the importance of nostalgia for men who fought in SS uniform sixty years ago for current Estonians is a depressing one. He seems to suggest that the widespread impoverishment of many living Estonians at the hands of the country’s current political establishment of which he has been a leading member since 1991 is less relevant to Estonians than symbols from a dark past.[13]

A web search quickly reveals, for instance, that North American white supremacists and their global brethren were outraged by the removal of Madisson’s monument. The international neo-Nazi website Stormfront hosted many contributions to the cult of the Baltic SS legionaries.[14]

Modern white supremacists are a little more subtle than their heroes of yesteryear. If they can find suitable quotations (in or out of context) from members of ethnic groups they normally despise, then they are happy to cite them. For instance, Nuxxs, an Estonian member of the Stormfront web-discussion group contributed the argument: “It is interesting but even the local Estonian jews [sic.] understand why Estonians fought in SS and they have expressed their understanding and support.”[15]

Presumably Nuxxs was referring to declarations like “Estonia’s Jews are loyal to Estonia” by Elhonen Saks published in the Centre Party’s newspaper, Kesknädal, on 25th August, 2004.[16] Many readers might well feel it somewhat unsettling that an Estonian Jews should feel it necessary to issue a public loyalty declaration. It is not exactly the norm in today’s “Old Europe” to require minorities to declare their loyalty to the state – though maybe it is coming to us from the New Europe.

New Europe’s Old Demons

"The difference between them was that the Germans
enslaved us and took our land. But the Russians
destroyed the Estonian nation. They opposed - and
still oppose - Estonian independence."

Alfred Karmann (Forest Brother)[17]

Self-pitying and self-justifying claims that the Soviet regime was genocidal towards the Estonians are exaggerated. Stalin’s regime was undoubtedly cruel, but compared with the complete deportations of the Crimean Tatars or Chechens for instance, the scale of deportation in the Baltic States was surprisingly modest. It cannot be compared to the pretty near complete extermination of local Jews by the Nazis. Yet the myth of a “deported nation” still is widely peddled in the West. In fact, Stalin found many willing collaborators in the Baltic States and local Balts held high office throughout the period of Soviet occupation.

Yet selling the myth of the Estonians as uniquely victimised and of their Waffen SS volunteers as premature foot-soldiers of NATO is not just the work of eccentric extremists like Tiit Madisson.

As a former Estonian prime minister, associate of the Western great and good from the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, who once boasted he was “Mrs. Thatcher’s grandson”, Mr Laar is not a wayward outsider like Madisson giving vent to resentments on the margin of a remote Baltic society.[18] Mr Laar is an astonishingly productive historian of the Waffen SS and its post-war underground resistance group, the Forest Brothers. He may sometimes be criticised for saying that before he introduced “shock therapy” to Estonia in the 1990s he had read only one book about economics – Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose – but he certainly knows his Waffen SS regimental histories. But Mart Laar is also an assiduous networker and proponent of Estonia as a bastion of Western institutions like NATO and the EU Mr Laar is one of the key figures in the “New Europe”. Mr. Laar is a politician with Euro-Atlantic profile. Recently he received the US$500,000 Milton Friedman Prize from the Washington Cato Institute.[19] Back in July, 2003, he took part in the American Enterprise Institute’s celebration “Ronald Reagan - The Legacy for Europe”.[20]

Perhaps it was President Reagan’s controversial visit twenty years ago to the war cemetery at Bitburg with its Waffen SS graves at the end of rows of ordinary Wehrmacht tombs that symbolised Reagan for Laar. The influential neo-conservative Republican think-tank, the Heritage Foundation invited Mr Laar to give its prestigious Krieble lecture when he assured his audience, “Estonia has changed beyond recognition. Sometimes it is hard even for us to remember how this country looked under the socialist system. Estonia is now a modern and vibrant young country, integrating with Western structures like the European Union and NATO with astonishing speed” before advocating a crusade to spread similar effects around the world, ending by appealing to his American audience’s nationalism by quoting the 9-11 passengers who defied the Islamic hi-jackers over Pensylvania, “Let’s roll”![21]

Mr Laar certainly knows how to tailor his message to the audience: no nostalgia for SS-era freedom fighters crosses his lips in Washington where Jewish members of the Friedman prize jury might be less forgiving towards volunteers from across Europe who died in the Waffen SS in Estonia delaying the Red Army’s advance westwards towards Auschwitz, for instance. However, anti-Russian sentiments are still acceptable there. More recently, Mr Laar was a signatory of the anti-Russian “Open Letter” published on 28th September, 2004, by 100 Euro-Atlantic grandees and ideologues denouncing President Putin’s response to the Beslan massacre.[22] Russians may not have been encouraged by Mr. Laar’s claim in mid-September, 2004, “Our joining NATO and the EU have created real preconditions for… relations [with Russia] to improve.” Mr Laar boasted that “The European Parliament actually welcomes the Baltic States’ expertise regarding Russia”![23]

Under the headline “New Europe won’t ‘keep quiet’ until all Europe is New”, Mr Laar wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in February, 2003, enthusiastically backing the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and denouncing Franco-German reluctance to take part.[24] In 2003, Mr. Laar was one of the most prominent former Soviet bloc politicians in the ranks backing President Bush’s war against Iraq and decrying doubters in Western Europe. He also ignored the reluctance of the ordinary public in “New Europe” to back their regimes’ willingness to send token contingents to support the invasion of Iraq along with Tuvalu, Azerbaijan, Georgia and other "model democracies".

The rhetoric of a “New Europe” and for that matter of a “New World Order” is not so novel in Europe east or west. For many in the region it will have uncomfortable echoes of the language used by proponents of Hitler’s anti-Russian as well as anti-Communist New Order in Europe.

Under the new government led by Mr Ansip a number of monuments glorifying Estonia’s 70,000 strong Waffen SS contingent have been erected in the battlefields in eastern Estonia where Dutch and Belgian SS volunteers fought shoulder-to-shoulder with their Estonian comrades against the Red Army (including its own ethnic Estonian contingent). Generous EU-funds subsidise the restoration of these memorials to pan-European Nazi brotherhood-in-arms (though Estonian Red Army dead get no Brussels-subsidised graves). In effect, not only is a historical site being restored to its wartime appearance but the network of trenches and bunkers near Sinimäe and the war graves there are being made into a Mecca for neo-Nazis, especially from Belgium and Holland rather than just military history buffs. The official guide to the “Blue Heights” illustrates the “monuments to the Flemish, Norwegian, and Danish volunteers” who fought side by side with the Estonians against the Red Army in 1944.[25] The battle honours of the “Regiment Danmark” include “Croatia, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Courland, Pomerania, Berlin”![26] When apologists for the Estonian Waffen SS argue that the “volunteers” were fighting to protect their homeland against the Soviet Union, they ignore such battle honours. Hitler’s Bunker was defended to the end by Waffen SS troops from across Europe including the Baltic states.

The bitter but also complex history of Estonian-Soviet relations goes back to the collapse of the Russian Empire after 1917 and the creation of both independent post-imperial states like Estonia and the Soviet Union under Lenin. Stalin’s incorporation of Estonia and the other two Baltic States, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940 was the prelude to the kind of brutal Sovietization already accomplished further east. Yet it is striking that in early autumn, 1991, when Estonia’s independence was restored after decades of Soviet occupation, neither the newly-independent authorities or any large scale public movement sought to demolish or desecrate the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn marking the main Red Army war memorial and the burial site of a number of soldiers killed fighting the Germans. It was more than a decade later before nationalist parties in Estonia took up the issue of war graves and monuments both to the Red Army and local Estonian members of the Waffen SS who fought on Hitler’s side as an electoral battering ram.

The present prime minister of Estonia, Andrus Ansip, came to power in April, 2005, on the crest of nationalist backlash against his predecessor, Juhan Parts, who had tried to rein in the nostalgia for the Waffen SS expressed by the increasingly dominant neo-conservative right in the country. It was Mr Ansip who fastened on the Bronze Soldier as an issue to re-energise Estonian nationalism as an election-winning force.

The Bronze Soldier

"This is not a monument to the victors of the war
but a monument to the destruction of the Estonian
Republic.”
Mart Laar.[27]

Designed by the Estonian sculptor, Enn Roos, the Bronze Soldier was erected in September, 1947 to glorify what the Soviet authorities proclaimed to be the liberators of Estonia from Nazi rule. No doubt, the Soviet myth of Estonia’s willing entry into the USSR was never accepted by most Estonians but many more Estonians fought in Stalin’s armies and served him after 1945 than current nationalist history allows.

The derogatory attitude to both the statue and Red Army soldiers expressed by the current Prime Minister no doubt represents one school of thought, but whether his views are statesmanlike is open to question. Already in May, 2006, Andrus Ansip responded to Estonian nationalist vandalism of the Bronze Soldier by calling for its removal: “Central Tallinn is not the place for symbols of Soviet power and occupation,”[28] A few days before the Bronze Soldier was removed on 27th April Ansip speculated at question time in the Estonian Parliament that the bodies buried at the site were of drunken Soviet soldiers run over by one of their own tanks![29]

Talking to foreign news agencies, Ansip strikes a poser of equidistance between Nazism and Stalinism. In January, 2007, he declared, “Both the swastika and the hammer and sickle are symbols of occupation regimes in Estonia."[30] But domestically his government and supporters have presided over an Estonia which celebrates the Waffen SS and desecrates or at least puts out of sight Red Army memorials.[31]

As far back as May, 2006, Ansip declared at a press conference in Tallinn that the presence of the Bronze Soldier in Tonismagi Square, overlooking the Occupation Museum with its SS legionary exhibits irritated him “personally”: “I see it as a symbol of the occupation, not a monument to war victims, and the sooner the monument is removed from Tonismagi, the better.” Knowing the remarkable capacity of the Western media for turning a blind eye to anti-anti-Fascist attitudes in enthusiastic new NATO member states like Estonia, the Prime Minister correctly noted that “there is no cause to worry that the world community will misconstrue” any removal of Soviet war memorials and war graves.[32]

Although the Estonian foreign minister accused Russia of stage-managing the protests, this is implausible. None of the characteristics of a stage-managed popular event applied in Tallin in late April. The Western media were not on hand nor did studio anchors have a convenient “back story” to hand. Rolling news channels like CNN waited until 28th April to cover the events – very briefly. The protestors did not have multi-media devices to broadcast their heroics nor did they perform suitable funky “people power” antics for their camera-phones nor for the media. If anyone had calculated a benefit from the disorder which followed the surprise removal of the Bronze Soldier it was the Estonian government.

After the removal of the statue and the riots it provoked, one Estonian-blogger admitted the events were not staged by the Kremlin nor to Russia’s advantage. Nor were they to the advantage of Mayor Edgar Savisaar, the Centre Party leader, who warned against removing the statue. The answer to the question: Cui bono? was clear: “Ansip now has a carte blanche. Even Savisaar appears to be stunned by the extent of the riot, and his ‘I told you so’ is rather muted. Ansip's personal success at the elections has given him a carte blanche, and obviously his coalition partners aren't likely to protest any measures aimed against the Russians.” [33]

Estonia’s independence was restored after the failure of the anti-Gorbachev coup in August, 1991. Yet at the time no crowds assembled to pull down the Bronze Soldier and dig up the bodies interred beneath him. It took more than fifteen years for the statue’s provocation to Estonian patriotism to set off this crisis. The removal seems to be the latest climax in the rolling anti-Russian campaign pursued as part of Ansip’s election campaign until March, 2007, but now carrying on in power.

Achieving the removal required the mobilisation of all police resources and security volunteers. The Estonian police blocked residents of the country from coming into Tallinn especially from Narva in the east which is almost 100% Russophone. Anti-Fascists from the fellow EU state, Latvia, were also held at the frontier and turned back as were Russians.

Strikingly, West European anti-Fascist organisations have been silent about the cult of the Waffen SS in the Baltics and the issue of whether the Soviet-era war memorials and war graves should be dismantled and/or moved. If we remember the indignation at the desecration of British war graves and memorials from the First World War in southern Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime, then it is possible to get some idea of the sensitivity of the issue for those who feel related to the dead Red Army soldiers buried around the Bronze Soldier.[34]

What could be more totalitarian than re-writing history? After the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991, in Moscow itself Yeltsin, who in 1977 as regional Communist Party boss had destroyed the Ipatiev house in Sverdlovsk where Nicholas II and, his family were butchered, to prevent it becoming a shrine, now tore down statues of Lenin’s henchmen like Dzerzhinsky. Ironically, today in Estonia it is a government led by a former Soviet Communist Party activist from Tartu, Ansip[35], which is now bent on following this Bolshevik model of iconoclasm.

Although Mr Ansip argued, “My position has not changed. Memorials should unite people. But this specific monument in this specific place divides society, and I am convinced it should not be there,”[36] it is not clear that before the riots Estonians had been homogenised into a nationalist laager. Centre Party leader and Tallinn mayor, Edgar Savisaar had pointed out that 57% of the capital’s residents were against removing the Bronze Soldier.[37] This suggests that a significant number of Estonians don’t agree with the removal of the statue.

Apologists for moving the statue and digging up the dead soldiers argued that the square would make an ideal children’s playground. But far from being a suitable children’s playground, the Tonismagi square where the Bronze Soldier stood is in fact a busy traffic island. No responsible parent would let a small children play so close to speeding cars and lorries and in the midst of fumes, especially not as a well-equipped children’s playground is situated in a quiet setting only a few metres away! There were only political reasons for dismantling the site. Unfortunately, those political justifications were rooted in a sixty-five year long underground struggle not just defeat Communism but to re-legitimise those who collaborated with Hitler as forerunners of an Estonia in the vanguard of a New Europe.

Freedom Fighters or Stormtroopers of a New Europe?

“We should not forget that the European idea
first found its realisation in these troops and
bonds were tied between the European nations
that have not been broken until today.”

Panzergeneral Heinz Guderian on the Waffen SS[38]

Donald Rumsfeld famously made the distinction between Old and New Europe in February, 2003 – to the former Communist new NATo states’ advantage. But whether the US Defense Secretary knew it or not, “New Europe” and the “New World Order” were not such new concepts in Eastern Europe. As Hitler’s former chief of staff, Guderian tried to argue at the time of West Germany’s rearmament and entry into NATO fifty years ago, the pan-European Waffen SS before 1945 was the prototype of an anti-Communist army. That kind of reasoning was rejected then by democratic politicians in Western Europe and America, but it rears its ahead again in the Baltics States today.

On 8th May, 2006, the Estonian Defence Minister, Juergen Ligi, told SS veterans ““Your struggle in 1944 was a struggle for Estonian freedom”.[39] On 3rd September, 2006, Ligi said, “History was such that Estonian sympathies were with Germany, which lost the war, rather than with Russia. It was not Nazi Germany that destroyed our independence, but ‘Red’ Russia, which did more harm to our land. With time, this feeling has become stronger.”[40] What would have become of Estonia in a victorious Nazi New Europe is never fully-explained but Hitler never offered any independence even to collaborating Balts. So Stalin was not the only one bent on extinguishing Estonia’s independence.

Balts fought for bad rulers on both sides. The hero of Mart Laar’s account of the Waffen SS as freedom fighters sponsored first by Hitler, then by the post-war British and American intelligence services is Alfons Rebane. Rebane was still fighting the Red Army on 9th May, 1945 but on Czech soil not in his homeland. He then made an adventurous journey to receive the Knight’s Cross awarded him by Hitler in his bunker from Admiral Doenitz’s shadow Nazi regime in Flensburg! The Baltic SS did not stand and fight only on their home soil, they were deployed and fought courageously for Hitler wherever he sent them until the bitter end _ and even a few days beyond it![41]

The Latvian-born Canadian historian, Modris Eksteins, notes, “Among the last defenders of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery… were eighty Latvian soldiers from the Fifteenth Battalion of the Fifteenth Waffen SS Division. The last commander of this battalion, Lieutenant Neilands, would act as interpreter for the talks on German surrender between the commander of Berlin, General Krebs, and the Soviets. Yet another Latvian, the Soviet Colonel Nikolajs Berzzarins, would become the first commander of Russian-occupied Berlin.”[42] But today only one tyrant’s Baltic soldiers are treated as heroes.

Such is the mood created by ministerial endorsements of wartime collaboration that it encourages a festive attitude to Nazi symbols. In 2006, the art historian, Edward Lucie Smith, drew attention to the iconoclasm promoted even by Centre Party politicians, born long after the war, who liked to cavort in Nazi uniforms. In the coastal town of Pärnu, the modern art museum was under threat from the mayor, Mart Visitamm, who had become mayor at the age of twenty-five. Lucie Smith called him the “recently elected mayor of Parnu with Neo-Nazi connections,” adding in case anyone doubted his claim, “I attach a photograph as proof that this assertion is not made lightly. Herewith is an article from an Estonian paper of August 24, 2004 with the headline: ‘One of the Leaders of Centrist Party Wears a Uniform of the Nazi Army for His Birthday Party.’ This features Mart Visitamm….”[43]

This glorification of old Nazis is almost entirely ignored by Western media. Even George Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Estonia which devotes many web-pages to alleged human rights abuses in neighbouring Belarus ignores nostalgia for the Waffen SS on its own doorstep and the implicit division even of the citizenry of Estonia intro ethnic Estonians and others like the small Jewish minority.[44] The Open Society Foundation in Latvia is mute on the glorification of Hitler’s Legionaries there too and in the past even co-sponsored an apologetic film about the Latvian Legion of the Waffen SS.[45] The Military Museum in Riga sells records of the marching songs of the Waffen SS.[46]

Mart Laar, the chief ideologist of the New Estonia argues that, though the German mobilization of 70,000 Estonian men was a “violation of international law” because their country was occupied, “we have to mention here that, differently from the Soviet mobilization of July-August, 1941, the mobilization of 1944 was supported by the bearers of continuity of… the Estonian Republic.” Laar demands rhetorically, “But surely we can treat… the mobilization of 1944 as the manifestation of their will to fight against another Soviet occupation” and so “the men who followed it can be regarded as freedom fighters.”[47]

In February, 2000, President Lennart Meri included nineteen SS veterans in his honours for those “who contributed to restoring the independence of the Estonian Republic, the consolidation of Estonian society, the fortification of common democratic values and a European cultural climate”![48] In December, 2002, Meri insisted that the Estonian Waffen SS fought for the national interest, but that is not how German strategists deployed them.

The glorification of the Waffen SS legionaries from the Baltic State but also from elsewhere in Occupied Europe is ignored in the mainstream Western media which normally picks up on the smallest manifestations of neo-Nazi nostalgia. The EU is helping to fund a project to restore the trench system near Sinimae in eastern Estonia where Leon Degrelle and the Nazi volunteers from Belgium and the Netherlands fought. Estonian and Latvian spokesmen and their Western media apologists endlessly peddle the line that the Baltic SS soldiers were “conscripted” and unwilling to fight for Hitler, but they fought alongside similar units from Western Europe. Who says Degrelle and his men were not ideological soldiers? Hitler infamously declared that if he had a son, he would like him to be like Degrelle. If the graves and monuments of dead soldiers from the Nazi totalitarian side are to be restored and respected, why should only Red Army monuments and graves be taken down and moved around?

It is difficult to believe that a historian as thorough in his researches as Mr Laar is not aware of the post-war obdurate Nazi sympathies of some of the non-Estonian warriors about whose exploits on the Estonian front he writes so admiringly.: “Junker bombers led by the renowned Major Rudel were sent against Soviet units… Degrelle’s battalion was especially remarkable… By a miracle Degrelle was still able… to stop the [Soviet] breakthrough. He was greatly assisted in this by Rudel’s Stukas, which inflicted heavy losses on the Russian [sic.] tanks…. Degrelle was the first foreigner to be awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves” by Hitler personally![49]

On 27th January, 2006 – International Holocaust Day – candles were placed on the graves of the 780 German soldiers buried in Parnu on the Baltic coast. What message was that gesture supposed to send? Oddly enough it was a message which was only picked up outside Estonia by the Russian media.[50] It seems politically incorrect in the West to note neo-Nazi nostalgia in the “New Europe”.

The “forest brothers” were part of the Nazi leave-behind resistance in both Eastern and Western Europe which the German propaganda called “werewolves.” For instance, the current president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, was sent back by the German military in late 1944 to Soviet-occupied Lithuania to try to make contact with anti-Communist resistance there – a futile and short-lived adventure.

The extremism of some of these “forest brothers” is encapsulated in an interview with an elderly SS veteran shown in the video archive section of Tallinn’s Occupation Museum.[51] With a taste for Goetterdaemmerung worthy of his German sponsors, the man tells how after 1945, he had hoped for a Third World War between East and West – but sadly was condemned to decades of occupation. That kind of all-or-nothing mentality is not conducive to a moderate foreign policy.

The kid gloves treatment accorded by Western media to the nationalist nostalgia for wartime heroics in the Baltic States contrasts with the international media’s vigilance towards any manifestation of neo-Nazism in Germany. Estonian politicians, too, are alert to nostalgia for the totalitarianism of the past, but only abroad.

Germany

“Can you imagine that the [German] Federal Agency for the
Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Intelligence
Service [BND]saw the foundation day of the Gestapo as their
Foundation day?”
Toomas Ilves[52]

Of course no-one can imagine contemporary Germany honouring the Gestapo, but what President Ilves, the child of Nazi-era émigrés from Estonia seems incapable of grasping is that modern Germans cannot imagine their state-sponsoring monuments to the “heroics” of the Waffen SS and dismantling or sidelining the graves and memorials of the Red Army or the other Allied forces who defeated Nazi Germany. Ilves may be right to point out that President Putin’s own career in the KGB and his publicly-expressed respect for the Chekists does not comfortably with Westerners, but the role of Nazi collaborators as so-called Freedom Fighters in the Baltic States, sponsored by the CIA, MI6 and even their old German controllers now in the BND after 1945 leaves many Westerners with a bad taste in the mouth too.

Germany today may be ruled by the children and grandchildren of Nazis or ay least of those who did noting to oppose Hitler, but modern Germans and the German state thoroughly reject the Nazi heritage. Compare the attitude of today’s Germany towards the war memorials and war graves of the victorious allies, especially the Red Armies with what prevails in Tallinn and Riga.

When neo-Nazis desecrated the Soviet war memorial in East Berlin which is undoubtedly a monumental expression of victory over Nazi Germany (unlike the modest scale of the Bronze Soldier in Tallinn), nobody in authority in Germany doubted that the site should be restored. Whenever Soviet war graves have been vandalised, the authorities have not used neo-Nazi agitation as an excuse for declaring the graves a source of “controversy” and removing them from public view. Yet in New Europe, the children of the collaborators (some of parents who served Hitler, some of parents who served Stalin, many of parents who collaborated with whoever seemed set to be global hegemon).

When former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, criticised the decision to move the Bronze Soldier and exhume the Red Army soldiers as “without pity or grace” and “contradicting every standard of civilised behaviour”[53], his meetings scheduled for 8th May with President Ilves and Premier Ansip were cancelled.[54] Estonia’s authorities are opposed to the planned gas pipeline from Russia under the Baltic to Germany. Mr Schroeder chairs the oversight board of the company constructing the pipeline. For many, the former Chancellor epitomises Russo-German reconciliation – his father was killed by the Red Army in 1944 – for neo-0conservative critics of his business and family links to Russia – he has adopted two Russian orphans – Schroeder is a new Ribbentrop.[55] Ironically, on 6th June, 2000, during the first ever visit by a German Chancellor to Estonia, Gerhard Schroeder had expressed his “great respect” for the country’s treatment of its Russian minority![56]

Neighbours

“Latvians have been asked to knit mittens as gifts to
delegates at a NATO summit later this year - but
without a traditional swastika motif.”

Laura Sheeter[57]

Some of the Nazi nostalgia in the Baltics is is so kitschy it seems sometimes more comic than sinister. But the use of the swastika as a fire-symbol in Latvia, for instance, when it was chosen by the inter-war fascist Thunder Cross (Perkonkrusts) movement as its symbol is hardly innocent folklore.

The expensive development of new Waffen SS memorials in Latvia contrasts with the sorry state not only of Soviet war memorials there, but also of the sites of Nazi atrocities in the country.

When I last visited the most important Nazi concentration camp in Latvia at Salaspils, south-east of Riga near Ogre, in the run up to the NATO Summit in the Latvian capital, there was only one over-worked member of staff who had simultaneously to clean the site and distribute what little information was available. Weeds were growing up outside among the monuments and cobwebs were visible inside the display cabinets. Its run down state was in sharp contrast with the Latvian-American historian, Andrew Ezergailis’s description of the place under Communism: “In the broader context of Soviet-Latvian historiography one must also include the Salaspils memorial park, which is one of the most grandiose in Europe. Although the park was not built to commemorate the Jewish victims alone, the Jews certainly were subsumed under the victims of Nazism. Even during the darkest days of Brezhnevite anti-Semitism the tourist guides did not fail to mention that Jews were killed in Latvia.”[58]

Early collaborators in the murder of local Jews often had a chequered past. Some of the most notorious collaborators with the Nazis had a Communist past. There were multiple turncoats, like, for instance, Viktors Arājs (1910-88) who started out as a nationalist law student joining the “Letonia” fraternity, only to switch to Marxism-Leninism earning a Soviet university diploma in March, 1941. Although he was anxious to make a career under Communism, Arājs turned out to have a black mark in his record as far as the Stalinists were concerned – his service as a policeman in independent Latvia. The Nazi invasion saved him from a dead end job in Soviet Latvia and enabled his sadistic ambitions to be fulfilled after all. Later on to their shame Western intelligence agencies regarded such a creature as an ally in the Cold War.[59] Yet Arājs has apologists today even if most Latvian historians tend to concentrate on their Waffen SS members who joined up in 1943 and after.

Even Andrew Ezergailis uses the argument that collaborationist Latvians only joined up in Hitler’s forces after the murder of Jews was completed: “ Soviet propaganda has attempted to link the Schutzmannschaft battalions to the killing of the Jews, but it must be noted that the first of these battalions were organized only in late 1941 and early 1942, when the Jews of Latvia were already dead.”[60] Yet many of the first para-military units organised to aid the Nazi occupiers in Latvia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union had taken part in “spontaneous” anti-Jewish atrocities immediately after the German invasion in June, 1941.

Similarly, as the British historian, David Cesarini, reports, “In Estonia the Selbstschutz annihilated the small Estonian Jewish population for the Germans.” Although there was no sign of widespread public support for the mass arrest of local Jews by the Estonian collaborationists, when ‘all male Jews over 16, with the exception of physicians and the appointed Jewish Elders, were executed by the Estonian self-defence units under supervision of the [SS] Sonderkommando’, nor was there any partisan resistance to it or sabotage of it.” Estonians and Latvians were not alone in not sabotaging the Holocaust. That was a commonplace reaction to the Nazi targeting of Jews, even in the occupied Channel Islands. No-one can blame ordinary Balts for being no more heroic than ordinary people elsewhere. What is problematic today is the heroisation of those whose armed service prolonged the agony of the Second World War.

The Baltic Waffen SS legionaries are not alone in enjoying a re-writing of their history to exculpate them from the charge of serving the Holocaust by arguing that their military service only started after the extermination of Jews had been completed in their home region. Even Yale’s Tim Snyder makes the same case for the Ukrainian Galizien Waffen SS division: “The SS-Galizien was not used for any major actions against the Jews, because the Final Solution had already been carried out.”[61] In other words, these Waffen SS men did not make Western Ukraine Judenrein, they were just fighting to keep it that way! But as in Latvia and Estonia many of the most enthusiastic early recruits to the Waffen SS had earned their spurs as ideological soldiers in the anti-Jewish police units which helped the Germans from June, 1941.

In Ukraine nostalgia for the country’s collaborators with Hitler was encouraged by the Orange Revolutionaries. President Yushchenko might have presented himself at the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, but back home he had signed a letter defending a newspaper editor who had made the absurd claim that Ukrainian Jews fought for Hitler! The Orange regime also favoured full pensions for Waffen SS veterans and so on. At the height of the Orange Revolution, James Meek reported from Lvov, “Would the Jewish community be pleased to see the pin-up poster of a wartime Ukrainian soldier in SS uniform on the wall of the Memorial office”?[62]

In Romania on 20th February, 2007, a court rehabilitated the wartime dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, on the grounds that his invasion of the Soviet Union at Hitler’s side which recovered Bessarabia, now the independent state of Moldova, from Soviet control between 1941and 1944, did not constitute a “crime against peace” because the territory rightfully belonged to Romania![63] During the Romanian-German occupation of the region at least 500,000 Jews were murdered there.

Step-by-step the Nuremberg condemnation not only of genocide but “crimes against peace” is being watered down or set aside.

Occupation Museums, or institutionalised Russophobia?

“No man, no force can abolish memory.”

Franklin Roosevelt (1942)

It is one of the comforting myths of Western liberal civilization that history cannot be falsified and the truth will always out to confound tyrants and their collaborators. Desirable though it must be for truth to triumph, there is no iron law of necessity. Far from seeing unblemished history emerge from the ruins of lying Soviet communism, the post-Cold War world has seen new myths, propaganda and deceits on the march.

Tragically, even well-intentioned people can lose sight of objectivity or be deceived. Also people want to be deceived. Myths play so much a part in our self-perception that our devotion to them is very strong, if selective. When a myth no longer serves our self-esteem, too often we find new ones.

The history of the Baltic States is like a matrioshka doll. Recurrent self-serving myths hide inside each other, ready to pop up at the convenience of politicians as they swap their allegiances from one ideological colour to another.

The history museums in Baltic capitals covering the twentieth century, the epoch of occupation, are in many ways astonishingly informative but the dominant message extracted for popular consumption from them is a myth of unique victimhood, which ignores or plays down the role of some Balts in the tragedies and crimes of the era.

Riga and Vilnius as well as Tallinn have museums devoted to the era of Soviet Occupation and the Second World War. Indeed, they have started a trend in other post-Soviet republics for so-called Occupation Museums which act as centres for a new cult of the nation as victim of Russian Communism and a way of exculpating locals from their service to Stalin and his successors by emphasising that the “revolution came from abroad”, specifically from Russia.

The catalogue of the Latvian Occupation Museum baldly states: “Soviet rule was doubtless the lesser evil for the Jewish population. On the other hand, Nazi repression mechanisms could easily seem less brutal to Latvians after the terror of the Communist rulers.”[64] Since Nazi repression only affected the relatively few ethnic Latvians who defied German occupation, naturally the majority which passively or actively collaborated with Hitler’s local satraps were not as endangered as Jews were by virtue of their identity. Stalin was cruel to Latvia, but he did not seek to exterminate all Latvians, only those that posed a real or imagined threat to his regime. Hitler wanted to kill all Jews regardless of whether they resisted his regime or not. The Occupation Museum’s anonymous cataloguer cannot grasp the basic difference between the way in which the two occupation regimes treated components of the Latvian population. For instance, the catalogue lumps collaborators and victims together noting, “It is calculated that some 200,000 inhabitants of Latvia were outside Latvia at the end of the war… Among them were Latvian legionaires, forced labourers and inmates of concentration camps.”[65] Note the order in which the exiles are listed: the SS legionaries take priority over forced labourers and concentration camp survivors.

Latvia has, however, settled its border dispute with Russia, while Estonia still denies the legitimacy of the current post-Soviet border with Russia. Despite the routine denigration of the role of Estonians from neighbouring regions of the Soviet Union in post-1944 Estonia – routinely called “Yestonians” by Laar – Estonian nationalists insist on their right to Russian territory. The recently deceased Estonian president Lennart Meri “was particularly fond of a map depicting the Baltic region in the 17th century, when the Swedes were at the height of their power and the boundaries of Estonia stretched far inside what is now Russia. ‘It's my favourite map…But I always try to stand in front of it when the Russian ambassador comes to visit.’”[66] Note how Meri’s nostalgia for Estonia’s lost Lebensraum depended on the reality of Swedish imperial power three hundred and fifty years ago, just as today’s implicit demands on Russian territory rely on American influence if on anything to be achievable. Will the Estonian tail wag the Washington dog?

Estonian nationalists accuse Russia of neglecting even repressing the rights of the Finno-Ugric minorities in Russia. Mart Laar, President Ilves and others including Lennart Meri were involved in campaigning to protect the linguistic and cultural rights of the Mari people.[67] Estonian nationalists demand minority rights for their blood brothers which they deny to non-Estonians in their own country. In reality, Russia permits and pays for far more extensive minority language. Education and culture than in Estonia.

Anyone visiting Russian ghettoes in Estonia can see how discriminatory public spending policy is. As part of a silent process of ethnic cleansing, Russian districts have poorer roads, street lighting and general maintenance. This public policy discrimination compounds the economic disadvantages faced by non-Estonians – which are exacerbated by the Language Police’s regulation of economic exchanges even between Russophones.[68] It is not only in places like Paaldiski where Soviet-era “colonists” were settled that this double standard in public provision is evident. Even in districts inhabited by Russophone Old Believers for three hundred or more years, who therefore meet the criteria for Estonia citizenship without needing to pass tests because their ancestors lived there before 1940, are visibly less well-maintained than “pure” Estonian districts.[69]

Estonia’s main newspaper, Postimees wrote about “the Unknown Russian Scum” in its editorial on the rioting which saw the few looters as typical of the un-acceptable and un-wanted Russian minority:
“For 15 years, in Estonia, we talked about integration... Officials and politicians preached to us how loyal all these comrades whom we inherited from the Soviet Motherland were. And their kids, they are just like ours own, they study the language and all that. But when Estonian state has got just a bit tougher, has touched just a bit on the feelings of the retired Soviet servicemen, this so far unknown creature reared its true and ugly face. From behind the bronze mask an entirely new — or, more precisely, a forgotten old — face was staring at us. This wasn’t a soldier, nor any civilized human being at all. This was the Russian scum. And we have almost forgotten about his existence.”[70]

Such abusive language may have been masked in the decent obscurity of Finno-Ugric language, but enough Russians do speak the state language to read that message and pass it on.

Maybe the headline writer was over-reacting to the riots in Tallinn, but other more thoughtful Estonian voices explicitly blame Russians not Soviet Communists in general, nor Estonian Communists in particular, for the crimes of Communism and demand from the Russian people alone an apology.

Under the headline “When will Russia say ‘sorry’?” in The Wall Street Journal (Europe) on 20th August, 2004 Mart Laar holds Russians responsible for the crimes of Stalin. He does not blame “Germans” for Hitler’s atrocities, nor Georgians for Stalin’s.[71] Decrying the failure of Moscow to face up to the grim Soviet past, Mr Laar declared, “Worse yet : Russia refuses to say three simple words to the victims of communism: We are sorry!” Whereas he refers to the German forces attacking Warsaw in 1944 as “Nazis”, for Laar the Soviet forces are “Russians”.

By using explicitly anti-Russian rhetoric in attacks on the Stalinist past, racist propaganda masquerades as a demand for historical justice. The Estonian example is spreading across the old Soviet Union. It makes geo-political sense to isolate the Russians in a ghetto of responsibility for Stalin, at least from the perspective of those who want to smash any cultural let alone economic and political links between ex-Soviet populations, but constantly referring to Soviet-era bad guys people as “Russians” even when they were not Russians but belonged other ethnic groups is a sinister fiction not history.

The Vilnius Genocide Museum is a good example of this ethnically-cleansed and re-written history. John Czaplika reports that among the list of names of martyrs on the façade of Vilnius’s “Museum of Genocide” – “i.e. the genocide perpetrated against the Lithuanians” by the Soviet Union are “some of these heroes of the Lithuanian resistance against the Soviets [who] may have been at the same time Nazi collaborators who cooperated or took active part in the eradication of the Jewish communities in Lithuania.”[72]

The latest example of the vogue of Occupation Museums in conscious imitation of the Tallinn model is the Occupation Museum in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Apart from setting up an anti-Russian exhibit, anti-Russian and pro-Nazi sentiments can be heard in the post-Rose Revolution official Georgia media. In November, 2006, Georgian TV showed a documentary praising the little-known Waffen SS volunteers from Georgia in World War Two. The Georgian Waffen SS were double-turncoats. Based on the island of Texel in occupied Holland at the end of the war, they tried to curry favour with the victorious Allies by turning their German supplied guns on the surrendering Wehrmacht. In those days, British and Canadian officers did not appreciate such treachery and permitted the German soldiers to shoot back against their erstwhile comrades-in-arms.

Georgia’s endorsement of the myth of Russian occupation ought to face an insurmountable problem: who occupied Georgia in 1921 on behalf of the Soviet Union if not the Georgian Communists Joseph Stalin (born Djugashvili), Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Enukidze, Beria…?! Only a Stalinist mentality could re-write history so grotesquely and hope to impose such an absurd historical scenario on people.

By attributing Communism and its crimes only to Russians, the new Occupation myth is deeply racist as well as inaccurate. Russophobia is the only racism which it is not only safe but even chic to voice in the West today, partly because like all pervasive institutionalised racisms even those who don’t share the animus don’t notice anything unusual about it. For instance, the Economist’s Edward Lucas has a blog happily linked to the self-proclaimed xenophobe blog “La Russophobe”. Is it possible to imagine an Economist journalist linking to the “Anti-Semite” or even the “Islamophobe”?[73]

Back in Estonia, this Russophobe stance questions the validity of the citizenship of those ethnic Russians and other non-Estonians who take part in public life. In his history of Estonia, Laar implicitly denies the legitimacy of ethnic Russian members of the Estonian parliament, recalling that in 1992, “[Edgar] Savisaar’s government used the votes of Russian deputies”[74] to pass emergency economic legislation. Should only ethnic Estonians determine the economic fate of the country? Where else in Europe – apart from Latvia – could democratically elected members of parliament be regarded as illegitimate by a hero of the West? Or is the conclusion more alarming: where next in the New Europe - which is to spread to us all if Mr Laar has his way[75] – will duly elected members of parliament be de-legitimised on ethnic grounds?

Much of the myth of the Baltic States is predicated on their status as “plucky little republics” with languages “on the verge of extinction” under Soviet rule because of “massive” inward migration from Russia, but united in ethnic solidarity against Russian Communists overlords. But in reality, Estonian Communists ruled the roost.

For instance, in a Council of Europe-sponsored history of Estonia, readers discover en passant that the Estonian Comunist Johannes Käbin, became First Secretary of the Estonian Communist Party in March, 1950, while Stalin still had three years to live – and remained in that post until 1978! – yet Käbin is portrayed as someone who “did not prove to be a passionate Stalinist, nor a man to carry out extreme Russification in the Estonian SSR, as local Stalinists who had supported him had hoped.”[76] In other words, the only good Communist is an Estonian Communist.

In reality the mobilization of Estonian nationalism after 1989 as in Latvia and Lithuania depended on a “dialectical contradiction” – to use the Marxist-Leninist term relished by Western intelligence services at the time – that the Balts were over-represented in key functions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In fact, compared with their share of their population Estonians held 134% of factory directorships, Latvians 124% and Lithuanians 115%.[77] As in Armenia and Georgia at the same time, suddenly the “red barons” turned into nationalists and their workers who were used to being bussed to Communist Party rallies on the say-so of the boss were now told not to chant long live the USSR but to repeat the new nationalist slogans instead. Similarly the “Singing Revolution” took place at festivals originally revived and sponsored by Stalin after the Second World War as part of the Soviet Union’s promotion of minority cultures.[78]

After the free market replaced the planned economy in 1991, the ex-local Communist elite kept in place – unless they were Russians. Anton Steen found that in the post-Communist elites in the Baltic States, Estonia had the highest percentage of membership in the Communist Party and Komsomol before 1991. 73% of the Estonian political elite (almost entirely ethnic Estonians) had belonged to these Soviet-era elite bodies. 70% of Estonia’s top businessmen had been Communists compared with 80% in Latvia where the percentage of ex-Communist political leaders was higher – 75% - than in Estonia but some of the elite in business are from the Russian or other non-Latvian minorities. Only 58% of the Lithuanian post-Communist elite had belonged to Soviet-era Communist organisations. Among intellectuals those fearless defenders of free thought, 82% of Estonian elite intellectuals had been Communists with 72% of Latvian intellectuals having belonged to the Party, but only about 50% of Lithuanians.[79]
In other words, precisely because the Kremlin under Brezhnev had promoted a generation of local young Communist opportunists to executive posts – as Mart Laar notes[80] – they were in a position to turn on their Muscovite patrons under perestroika when the West offered them a better deal. (Will they renege on the West if the price is right in the future?)

Ironically, in the run up to the restoration of their independence in 1991, neither Estonia nor Latvia faced a solid front of Russophone pro-Soviet resistance. Without the active support of some, and the tacit acceptance of many non-“natives” restoring independence would have been much more difficult if not impossible. The pro-Soviet Interfronts were never able to mobilise most of the “colonists” who were soon to lose their citizenship in independent Estonia or Latvia.

It is the peculiarity of the sudden turn of the newly-independent “nativist” political classes on their Slav minorities which requires explanation. Glib references to Stalin’s cruelties after 1945 rather miss the point that similar deportations and forced collectivisation had been imposed by his minions across the Soviet Union. Stalin’s injustice was even handed but now certain nationalists want to claim a unique martyrdom even when their own families collaborated with the Soviet regime or did not suffer under it.

The BBC’s “Russia analyst” Steven Eike says, “Seen from the Estonian perspective, the history of the country's annexation and occupation by the Soviet Union is simple. Soviet troops entered the country in June 1940, as a result of a secret agreement between Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Nazi Germany. Except for the three-year period in which they were ejected by the Nazis, they stayed right until the collapse of the Soviet state itself at the beginning of the 1990s.”

What went on during the period when the Red Army was “ejected by the Nazis” is ignored and then the conclusion is reached that what is provoking the tension and violence in Tallinn “is the striking, nationalistic rhetoric permeating coverage of the issue by Russian state media, especially television, which is the major information source for Estonia's Russians.” Certainly it is true nationalistic and anti-Estonian voices have been loudly protesting in Russia – and some of the loudest complaints have been made by Defence Minister, Sergei Ivanov (President Putin’s most probable successor) and foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov – but to ignore the Estonian nationalist and revisionist rhetoric coming from high-ranking politicians in Talllinn is surely to miss the point of the growing crisis.[81] Russian-speaking residents of Estonia would surely notice the gulf between their daily reality and Moscow propaganda if it was so wide. After all, Russophones voted in large numbers for pro- independence candidates in both Estonia and Latvia 1990 because the Kremlin’s claims about the benefits of Soviet life did not match their experience. What has embittered them is the discovery that just being anti-Soviet did not make them worthy to be citizens of the newly-independent Estonia or Latvia which tossed them aside at independence. Nor did Russophones or many “native” rural dwellers benefit from the shock therapy practised by Mart Laar’s regime. Behind the myth of the booming Baltics lies poverty, depopulation and despair – splitting the people into “natives” and “colonists” helps divide and confuse them, while promoting an electoral bloc among the Estonians whipped up into a hysteria about the threat to them posed by the ghosts buried at the feet of the Bronze Soldier.

An Unnecessary Crisis

“NATO membership is the equivalent of buying
a suit of armour for 2% of income.”

President Toomas Ilves[82]

Estonia’s membership of NATO and the EU seems to have emboldened its leaders into pursuing increasingly aggressive nationalist and anti-Russian policies, confident that the United States and the rich West will back them up. Instead of extending a security umbrella to enable small post-Soviet states to develop their democracy and economies without fear of external aggression, NATO and EU membership risks becoming a way in which nationalistic elites can mask domestic unpopularity by playing up xenophobia. Was this what the Washington Treaty (1949) or the Treaty of Rome (1957) hoped to achieve for post-World War II Western Europe?
Everyone knows that relations between Russia and the West are souring. Given the resentment felt by many Russians towards the West for its support of the plundering of their country under the Yeltsin regime, handing a propaganda ace to anti-Western Russian activists hardly seems sensible. Western criticisms of President Putin’s regime will ring hollow in Russian ears if the same Western politicians and media who denounce “creeping dictatorship” in Russia can be heard and read apologising for the Waffen SS and backing today’s National Bolsheviks and Baltic nationalists. Can it really be in the interests of NATO and the EU to hand anti-Western opinion in Russia a propaganda ace by backing Nazi nostalgics in the Baltics? Do ordinary people in America and the old EU share the contempt for the dead Soviet soldiers expressed in Tallinn and Riga and by David Duke’s websites?

The almost complete silence in Brussels, Washington and other Western capitals about the officially-sponsored nostalgia for so-called SS freedom fighters in the Baltic States and revisionism elsewhere in the New Europe contrasts with the activism of Western governments, media and NGOs elsewhere when the odour of anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism emerges – or with their belligerence towards non-EU and non-NATO members. Silence implies consent. That Western silence is deafening for Russians and other potential victims of the New Europe’s politics of nostalgia .

The West’s silence also has the effect of marginalizing truly “Western” voices in countries like Estonia. People who challenge the ethics or merely doubt the wisdom of the state-sponsored new history face ostracism. Just before the Ansip government moved to remove the Bronze Soldier, twelve Estonian professors from four different universities published an open letter calling for the statue to be left in place and suggesting that no single official version of Estonia’s twentieth century history was adequate to meet the differences about the past in the minds of the country’s inhabitants.

The well-known economist and newspaper columnist, Rainer Kattel, and his colleagues argued, “The problem is not in the Bronze Soldier’s location, but in the widely different and in many respects contradictory treatments of history” which Estonians, Russophones and others held about the past, especially the period after 1940. The professors argued, “Estonia’s long-term interest is internal stability and being taken seriously internationally. Removal of the Bronze Soldier will damage both.”

It was striking that Joel Alas of The Baltic Times emphasised that Rainer Kattel and his colleagues were not the usual suspects – “Russian-pandering politicians within Estonia “ – but “all the signatories are native Estonians” – reason would not sound sweet, or possibly even be heard at all, if it was not “native”.[83]

Rainer Kattel and the eleven other academics had written a sensible and enlightened letter. But the Ansip government was not prepared to listen to Estonians who doubted the wisdom or the justice of removing the statue. Revenge for the humiliation of Lihula was required. If a new statue to the Waffen SS could not go up in peace, then no Red Army soldiers should rest in peace either, seems to have been the attitude.

If ever a crisis was unnecessary, it is the one over the Bronze Soldier. If the Estonian authorities had not chosen to make an issue out of it, no controversy would have arisen. For most of the year the Bronze Soldier stood unnoticed on his traffic island. Around the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany flowers were placed at the statue’s feet. If left alone, how many people noticed it, let alone felt affronted by it.

Removing the Bronze Soldier from the centre of Tallinn and rebuilding Degrelle’s trenches near Sinimae may seem to re-write history in a comforting way for Estonia’s current rulers and their fellow travellers in the West, but far from exorcising the totalitarian past, this obsession with re-shaping yesteryear shows how trapped by the Nazi-Soviet past New Europe’s frontline is today, trapped also by their personal and their families’ recent pasts too. This makes Estonia’s militant elite so different from Old Europe and even North America. Neo-conservative Russophobes and Milton Friedman’s militant admirers may overlook this but inside Estonia and outside the Baltics, digging up the war dead and juggling with monuments looks increasingly alien who hoped that the end of Communism meant the end of the re-writing of history, not just another round in the battle to control the future by controlling the past.

Estonia’s foreign minister, Urmas Paet – backed by his Nordic counterparts in Helsinki and Stockholm, has alleged that Russia’s responses to the removal of the Bronze Soldier “are a European Union problem." Mr Paet has made all sorts of allegations, which sound like the stuff of cheap spy thrillers but if true indicate how active Estonia’s KAPO secret police is. According to Radio Free Europe on 2nd May, Mr Paet, “alleged that Russian Embassy officials in Tallinn ‘met in very bizarreplaces, such as the Tallinn Botanical Gardens, with the ringleaders of the unrest,’ and that several cyber-attacks "against the Internet pages of Estonian government agencies and the office of the president ... originated from specific computers and persons in Russian government agencies, including the administration of the president ofthe Russian Federation"! (The FSB obviously has Estonian-speaking hackers since they put an apology on Premier Ansip’s web-page for his misleading statement that he would not remove the Bronze Statue until after 9th May.) Needless to say, Mr Paet knew that “demonstrations led by the pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi outside Estonia's Embassy in Moscow are essentially holding embassy personnel "hostage," and that the demonstrators are being "paid 550-1,000 roubles [$21-$39] per day bythe Kremlin"! Minister Paet demanded that the EU respond "full strength," which "might result in the suspension or cancellation of negotiations between the European Union and Russia." Cancellation of an EU-Russia summit set to take place inthe Russian city of Samara on May 18 should be "seriously considered.”

Estonia may be becoming a problem for the EU. Brussels admitted a country with a problematic past, with an oppressive attitude to minorities and an aggressive attitude to its neighbour, Russia, without thinking through the consequences. Whatever Russia’s problems with her own past, the EU needs to tell its new members like Estonia, Latvia and Romania that re-writing their Nazi and collaborationist past breaks the spirit of the Treaty of Rome. It should not let the Baltic werewolves spook Europe’s future relations with Russians or our Slav neighbours in general for the sake of a misplaced solidarity which has no moral basis.

What the exiled dissident artist, Vitaly Komar, had to say about the anti-Soviet iconoclasm in Moscow after the collapse of the anti-Gorbachev coup in August, 1991, applies to today’s Estonian storm-troopers of a New Europe most had hoped buried long ago. Maybe many of Estonian nostalgics are trying to mask their Communist and Komsomol pasts with super-patriotism and Russian-beating but in that they are no different from the very Russian post-Soviet opportunists they denounce. After the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in Agust, 1991, what the exiled Soviet Dissident Vitaly Komar remarked about the toppling of Communist icons in Moscow could apply to Tallinn today:

“Bolsheviks topple czar monuments, Stalin erases Old Bolsheviks, Khrushchev tears down Stalin, Brezhnev tears down Khrushchev… This is old Moscow technique: either worship or destroy…. Each time it is history, the country’s true past, which is conveniently being obliterated. And usually by the same people!”[84]

Notes

[1] For Estonia’s leading nationalist historian and politician on the sins of the Soviet occupation after 1944, see Mart Laar, War in the Woods. Estonia’s Struggle for Survival, 1944-1956 (Compass: Washington D.C., 1992), 45. Mr Laar shows no sign of a sense of irony when describing the totalitarian re-writing of history by Communists while providing the ideological justification for today’s ex-Communist Estonian elite’s anti-Soviet rewriting of history
[2] Demonstrations or rallies are banned in Tallinn until 11th May, 2007. See http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=11488690&PageNum=0.
[3] Quoted in Gary Peach, “Statue Symbolizes Grudges against Russia” AP (22nd April, 2007): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070422/ap_on_re_eu/erasing_soviet_symbols.
[4] For the Russian responses, see http://www.tltnews.net/2007/03/24/russian-estonian-relations-to-be-seriously-damaged, http://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/17684/ & http://www.metimes.com/%20storyview.php?StoryID=20070427-071031-9053r
[5] See http://euronews.net/index.php?page=info&article=420134&lng=1.
[6] Among his many publications presenting service in the Waffen SS as patriotic and “freedom fighting”, see Mart Laar, Estonia in World War II translated by Tiina Mällo (Grenader: Tallinn, 2005).
[7] See http://www.tallinnpissup.com/ for the Western civilization on offer in Estonia’s capital.
[8] See Mart Laar, ““When will Russia say ‘sorry’?” in The Wall Street Journal (Europe) (20th August, 2004).
[9] The Interior Minister, Johan Sauwens promptly resigned when caught at such a gathering in 2001. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1322388.stm
[10] A monument depicting an Estonian SS soldier was erected and then removed from Pärnu in July, 2002. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2148732.stm.
[11] See Aleksei Gunter, “Riot police help remove controversial WWII monument” in The Baltic Times (9-15th September, 2004), 1 & 3.
[12] See http://www.baltictimes.com/art.php?art_id=11020
[13] See “Problems arise when countries lack courage” in The Baltic Times (16-23rd September, 2004), 18.
[14] See David Duke’s website: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=149866&page=5&pp=10

[15] See http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t= 149866&page=1&pp=10

[16] See Elhonen Saks, “Eestis elavad juudid on Eeestile lojaalsed”in Kesknädal (25th August, 2004), 2.
[17] Quoted by a Swedish security analyst, Vilhelm Konnander, who shows Nordic solidarity with the Estonians but his argument that “Regarding that Estonian people reacts to have russian monuments to honour the russian soldier is in my mind very understandable, its like having a statue in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv honoring SS or Gestapo….” Would probably not lead Israelis to endorse the consequence of the sentiment that “For Estonians and other baltic people, even the Nazi occupation was better than the Russian” and therefore honour the Waffen SS. See http://vilhelmkonnander.blogspot.com/2006/05/estonia-stalemate-in-russian-relations.html
[18] See http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0010502.html for a brief outline of Mr. Laar’s career and policies.
[19] See http://www.cato.org/research/articles/cpr28n4-3.html.
[20] See http://www.aei.org/events/eventID.348/event_detail.asp .
[21] See http://www.heritage.org/About/Community/KriebleLecture.cfm
[22] For the text and cosignatories see http://home.earthlink.net/~nordicpress/arhiiv/VES40_04/
[23] See “Problems arise when countries lack courage” in The Baltic Times (16-22 September, 2004), 18.
[24] See http://www.aei.org/research/nai/news/newsID.16116,projectID.11/news_detail.asp
[25] For the West European pilgrims, see http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/est070501.
[26] See Die Blauen Berge, 1944 text by Mart Laar Suypported by the Defence Ministry of Estonia
[27] Quoted in Gary Peach, “Statue Symbolizes Grudges against Russia” AP (22nd April, 2007): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070422/ap_on_re_eu/erasing_soviet_symbols. In 2002, Kristin Kalamees created a video installation, “Eternal Flames” recording the fantasy of a young Estonian girl of falling in love with the Bronze Soldier before turning against him and wanting to dynamite the statue to make way for a happier fantasy conclusion by dreaming about the statue of Estonian nationalist writer, Anton Hansen Tammsaare See http://www.flashartonline.com/OnWeb/GO%20EAST.htm
[28] See http://mosnews.com/news/2006/05/22/volunteerstallinn_.shtml.
[29] See “Estonian prime minister: Drunken looters are buried under the Bronze Soldier Monument” (24th April, 2007) www.regnum.ru/english/817953.html
[30] See Luke Harding, “Estonia keen to escape Soviet hangover” The Guardian (24th January, 2007): http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2007/01/24/estonia_keen_to_escape_soviet_hangover.html
[31] Because of the public controversy the Bronze Soldier though not the rest of the monument from Tonismagi has been placed in the military cemetery in Tallinn, but across Estonia and Latvia tourists can see the pedestals of Red Army memorials and damaged graves – sometimes close to the new SS monuments as in Lestene.
[32] See Regnum.ru (26th May, 2006).
[33] See Flasher, “Estonica Riot” (27th April, 2007): http://estonica.eu/.
[34] Coincidentally with the build up to the Bronze Soldier’s removal, Turkey celebrated the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in 1915 with representatives of the former invaders from Britain, Australia and New Zealand suggesting that a controversial EU candidate country can teach some new members how to deal with the past.
[35] For Andrus Ansip’s Communist Party past as “head of the organisational department” of the Soviet Party in Tartu in 1988, see his official biography at the Estonian government website: http://www.valitsus.ee/?id=1466&tpl=1007.
[36] See “Estonian President approves Soviet memorial demolition law” Ria Novosti (11th January, 2007)
[37] http://en.rian.ru/world/20070425/64373816.html
[38] Quoted from his foreword to SS Obergruppenfuehrer, Paul Hausser’s Waffen SS im Einsatz in edited by the Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters of the GDR, SS im Einsatz. Eine Dokumentation ueber die Verbrtechen der SS (Kongress: Berlin, 1957), 590.
[39] See Regnum.ru (9th May, 2006).
[40] See Regnum.ru (3rd September, 2006). Nobody in Britain needs reminding of the scandal which engulfed Prince Harry when he attended a fancy-dress party in an Afrika Korps uniform with added swastika arm-band.
[41] For Rebane’s war service, see the Waffen SS website @ http://www.ritterkreuztraeger-1939-45.de/Waffen-SS/SS-Startseite.htm.
[42] See Modris Eksteins, Walking Since Daybreak. A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the Heart of the Twentieth Century (Papermac: London, 2000), 218.
[43] See Edward Lucie Smith, “Springtime for Hitler? An Urgent Plea to Save a Small Estonian Museum From Neo-Nazis” in Counterpunch (7th February, 2006): http://www.counterpunch.org/luciesmith02072006.html
[44] See http://www.oef.org.ee/et/.
[45] See See http://www.sfl.lv/. The documentary film, Latvieš Leğions screenplay Uldis Neiburgs; editor Inara Kolmane.(1998) is available with English and German subtitles.
[46] E.g. “1943-1993. Ka Var Aizmirst. Legionaru dziesmas” (1992). When I bought a Novosti pamphlet, There’s No Going Back to the Past. On the nationalist demonstrations in Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius in August, 1987 (Moscow, 1988) in Collets in Charing Cross Road almost twenty years ago, I was inclined to dismiss as Soviet disinformation the claim by one anti-independence Tallinn resident that Tiit Madisson, led a crowd in Tallinn on 23rd August, 1987, in singing the words of the SS legionary song, “Our legion is marching and it’s step is firm. Our decision is death or victory,” but Mr Madisson’s subsequent activities confirm the charge that he was a always a dissident of the ultra-right rather than the human rights activists extolled by Western media. What is striking is that SS-swing can be openly sold in official buildings and not a peep from the West’s officially anti-Nazi establishments.
[47] See Laar, Estonia in World War II 30-31.Emphasis added.
[48] See Kommersant (16th February, 2000).
[49] See Laar, Estonia in World War II, 47-51. The “renowned” Rudel remained an unrepentant Nazi active among émigrés in Argentina and then in the neo-Nazi Deutsche Reichs Partei in West Germany until his dying day in 1982. See http://www.achtungpanzer.com/gen9.htm. For Degrelle, see Martin Conway, Collaboration in Belgium. Léon Degrelle and the Rexist Movement, 1940-44 (Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1993).
[50] See Regnum.ru (3rd February, 2006). On 11th April, 2006, International Holocaust Remembrance Day saw the desecration of Jewish graves at Kalevi Liiva.
[51] See http://www.filmi.arhiiv.ee/index.php?lang=eng. The Tallinn Museum has toned down some of the more controversial aspects of its exhibition which is remarkably thorough, by, for instance, removing the life-size Waffen SS soldier with flame-thrower which used to greet visitors at the start of the exhibition.
[52] See Ilves’s comments on Russian President Putin’s KGB past and attitude to the Soviet secret police in Munich on 10th February, 2007: www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2352336,00.html. The Estonian State Security rejoices in the acronym: KAPO. See http://www.kapo.ee/.
[53] See NTV “Schroeder attakiert Estland” (27th April, 2007): http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:C3fF4k0NNKYJ:www.n-tv.de/795802.html+Schroeder+Estland&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8. Schroeder added that those who criticised Russia for not meeting Western standards should speak out about Estonia’s actions, “after all” Germany respected and maintained Soviet war memorials and graves. See http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=2860851
[54] See www.regnum.ru/english/821191.html
[55] See the comments of the former Polish Defence Minister, Radek Sikorski, in 2006: http://euobserver.com/9/21486 & http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/05/news/poland.php.
[56] See http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang2000/september00/rede-des-deutschen-bundeskanzlers--gerhard-schroder--vor-dem-estnischen-parlament-am-6--juni-2000-in-tallinn.html. Schroeder also emphasised Germany and Estonia’s common interests in the fate of the Baltic Sea.
[57] See Laura Sheeter, “No swastikas' for Nato mittens” BBC News (20th August, 2006): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5268950.stm.
[58] See Andrew Ezergailis, “The Holocaust in Latvia” @ http://vip.latnet.lv/LPRA/ezerg_intr.html
[59] See Margers Vestermanis, “Der lettische Anteil an der ‘Endlösung’” in edited by Uwe Backes, Eckhard Jesse & Rainer Zitelmann, Die Schatten der Vergangenheit. Impulse zur Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus (Ullstein: Frankfurt-am-Main, 1992), 443.
[60] See Ezergailis, “The Holcaust in Latvia” @ http://vip.latnet.lv/LPRA/ezerg_intr.html
[61] See Tim Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (Yale UP: New Haven & London, 2003), 166.
[62] See James Meek, “Divided they stand” in The Guardian (10th December, 2004) @ http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1370514,00.html
[63] See http://english.hotnews.ro/What-the-newspapers-say-February-20-2007-articol_44345.htm.
[64] See Latvijas Okupacijas Muzejs, 1940-18991/Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (Riga, 2002), 75. This is a quasi-official document since it has a “dedication” by the President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga
[65] See Latvijas Okupacijas Muzejs, 1940-18991/Museum of the Occupation of Latvia (Riga, 2002), 85.
[66] See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news2006/03/30/db3004.xml.
[67] See e.g. http://www.ugri.info/mari/. Western activists include former CIA analyst, Paul Goble among others.
[68] The Language Police cannot, of course, regulate all exchanges but the possibility of its punitive intervention hangs over intra-Russian business activities, as the Amnesty International report showed.
[69] The 1999 Language Law was welcomed by the German EU Commissioner, Guenther Verheugen. See http://ec.europa.eu/comm/external_relations/news/2000/06_00/ip_00_626.htm.
[70] Emphasis added. Quoted by http://www.regnum.ru/english/821085.html.
[71] Maybe Mr Laar’s tenderness towards Georgians reflects his role as economics guru to President Saakashvili. See http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:pmVyUwFW3LIJ:web-static.vm.ee/static/failid/002/ER_42.pdf+Laar+Saakashvili&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&ie=UTF-8
[72] See John Czaplicka, “The Palace Ruins and Putting the Lithuanian Nation into Place: Historical Stagings in Vilnius” in edited by Daniel J. Walkowitz & Lisa Mayer Knauer, Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Duke University Press: Durham & London, 2004), 181 and 188 note 29.
[73] See Edward Lucas, “Estonia is right and Amnesty is wrong”: http://edwardlucas.blogspot.com/2006/12/estonia-and-amnesty.html
[74] See Laar, Estonias’s Way, 268.
[75] See Laar’s “New Europe won’t ‘keep quiet’ until all Europe is New”, from the Wall Street Journal (20th February, 2003) which contains in a nutshell the ex-Soviet citizen-turned New European ruler’s dialectical profession of faith – “To survive and overthrow dictatorship, people here had to stand by values--even if sometimes that meant hiding them deeply inside yourself” - at the American Enterprise Institute’s website: http://www.aei.org/research/nai/news/newsID.16116,projectID.11/news_detail.asp. What remains hidden “deeply inside” such people from their Soviet upbringing and what crisis for the EU or NATO might yet reveal it?
[76] See Tannberg, Tõnu, Mäesalu, Ain, Lukas, Tõnis, Laur, Mati & Pajur, Ago, History of Estonia translated by Anu Õunapuu, Leelo Linask, Kristjan Teder & Ester Roosmaa (Avita: Tallinn, 2002 edition), 291.
[77] See Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union. A Study in the Rise and triumph of Nationalism (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1997), 104.
[78] For Stalin’s promotion of minority cultures – as opposed to the Cold War Western propaganda based on Nazi émigré accounts of the suppression of the USSR’s languages to get sympathy in the United States and Western Europe - see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-39 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2001). Russian was promoted as the universal second language – like English in the United States or U.K. – as the language of inter-ethnic communication, so that Tajiks could read Estonian dissertations, and Estonians learn about Armenian literature without having to learn 16 different languages.
[79] See Anton Steen, Between Past and Future: Elites, Democracy and the State in Post-Communist Countries. A Comparison of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Ashgate: Aldershot, 1997), 35 & 38-39.
[80] “The mid-1960s was still a time of hope for Estonia… Estonians started to join the Leninist Komsomol [Youth wing of the Communist Party] more actively.” This policy of entryism into the Estonian branch of the Communist Party was intended by these Estonian Young Communists to enable them “to take it over themselves by making a career in the Communist Party.” See Mart Laar, Estonia’s Way translated by Hanna-Helena Dunning (Pegasus: Tallinn, 2006), 191. Despite the constant threnodies about Estonia’s sufferings at the hands of the Soviet Union from 1944 until 1991, Laar the economist occasionally lets slip truths which a propagandist should keep silent about: “Throughout the whole Soviet period Estonia had received energy from Russia at subsidised prices…”! See Laar, Estonia’s Way, 268.
[81] See Steven Eike, “Views Diverge on Estonian History”, BBC News (27th April, 2007): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6599145.stm
[82] Speaking to an audience in the Oxford Union (19th February, 2007)
[83] See Joel Alas, “Keep the soldier: Estonian professors” in The Baltic Times (26th April – 2nd May, 2007), 1-2.
[84] Quoted in Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art. Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (Reaktion: London, 1997), 348 note 50.

Caucasian Bloody Circle.

2008-08-10T23:49:00.000-07:00

I hate to say "I told you so", but already in August, 2004, I suggested Mikheil Saakashvili was likely to imitate his ousted predecessor Eduard Shevardnadze in everything from lapping up praise from Washington while feathering his cronies' nests with Western aid money to launching a disastrous war against the separatists. Shevardnadze's debacle in 1993 prefigured Saakashvili's today. The difference then was that Russian troops - with Clinton's approval - rescued Shevardnadze from his infuriated and rebellious Georgian subjects. Today, Saakashvili's imitation of his former patron, Shevardnadze, has taken on Neronic proportions. Will he be able to close this bloody Caucasian circle without falling? Who will prop him up and at what price?

On 10th August, 2004, The Moscow Times published this article:

"US Blinded by Love for Saakashvili

by Mark Almond

Can the Caucasus ever escape from the cycle of coups and violence that have beset the region since the collapse of the Soviet Union? Not if the rhetoric of Georgia's new 36-year-old President Mikheil Saakashvili is anything to go by.

Before setting out on a visit to the United States last week, Saakashvili announced that he had given an order to fire on all ships – including cruise ships – that violate Georgia's territorial waters. "I say this so that tourists who are now coming to Abkhazia will hear it," he told reporters Aug. 3.

Saakashvili's rhetoric echoes the justifications given by Soviet officials in 1983 after a South Korean airliner was shot down for violating the Soviet Union's "sacred, sovereign airspace," as Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov put it at the time. More than 200 civilians were killed. But Georgia today is run by a team of thirty-something post-Soviets educated in the West. Shouldn't it behave in a very different way?

Sadly, Saakashvili's approach to asserting Georgian sovereignty contains more than echoes of Soviet practice. More recent blood-soaked disasters in his country's history seem to set a precedent. On Aug. 14, 1992, the Georgian government's conflict with Abkhazia escalated from words to armed combat when Tbilisi sent its motley army into the coastal region to assert Georgian sovereignty. The orgy of murder, plunder and rape that followed engendered a bitter Abkhazian backlash. One year later, the Georgian army had fled and a third of a million Georgian-speaking civilians followed the defeated rabble out of Abkhazia.

Despite his bloodthirsty rhetoric directed at Georgia's two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Saakashvili enjoys bipartisan support in Washington. Even at the height of a bitter domestic election campaign, the supporters of both U.S. President George W. Bush and challenger John Kerry have nothing but praise for the Columbia Law School alumnus. George Soros may have pledged millions to oust Bush, but he has boasted that his money helped to install Saakashvili in power last November. The Open Society Institute helped train the protesters who toppled Eduard Shevardnadze to the applause of the Bush White House.
Yet support on both sides of the aisle for a Georgian president with a tough approach to separatism is nothing new.

Twelve years ago, when Shevardnadze stormed back to power in the ex-Soviet republic he had led as Communist Party boss until 1985, the Washington consensus backed the first President Bush's endorsement of the new Georgian president even though he had toppled an elected predecessor. In 1992, the State Department and international observers accepted Shevardnadze's claim to have received over 90 percent of the vote. Last January, neither the State Department nor international observers saw anything suspicious in official results showing that 97 percent of Georgians voted for Saakashvili.

There is an almost Orwellian aspect to the way in which the U.S. establishment has erased its love affair with Shevardnadze from the pages of history while it carries on in exactly the same fashion with his successor. After all, then-Secretary of State James Baker went to Georgia in 1992 to praise Shevardnadze's anti-corruption drive and democratization efforts, even finding time for a photo-op with the notorious mafioso Dzhaba Ioseliani.

In 1999, James Baker presided over the ceremony awarding Shevardnadze the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Then in 2003 the same James Baker returned to Georgia and blasted the Shevardnadze regime for corruption and election fraud.

Baker's message was clear: Washington's love affair with Shevardnadze was over.
Now Washington embraces Saakashvili with the same ardor. Watching Saakashvili's tirades against separatists and his enthusiastic reception in the United States is like witnessing a crazy rerun of Georgia's smash-up in 1992.

Saakashvili may have ousted Shevardnadze with only a few broken skulls – what the media call a "bloodless revolution" – but Abkhazia and South Ossetia may be tougher nuts to crack. Shevardnadze's police and army could be bought off to serve a new master. But the rebels have no obvious way of reintegrating themselves into a Georgian force.

Don't be taken in by the carefully staged photos of Georgian troops in U.S.-style uniforms under banners reading "USA-Georgia, United We Stand" arranged for the benefit of Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld. The hundred-plus U.S. soldiers training Georgia's new army complain that different men show up for training every day, rendering the exercise pointless.

Maybe Georgia's army is better dressed than Shevardnadze's ragtag paramilitaries in 1992, but uniforms do not make soldiers. Whether Saakashvili's forces will prove any better disciplined on the battlefield than their predecessors remains to be seen. Let's hope it is still not too late for the president to back away from putting them to the test.

It is true that, apart from a few beatings, Saakashvili recovered control of Adzharia in May without serious bloodshed. But Adzharia is very different from the two breakaway regions that Saakashvili is provoking now.

Adzharians are Georgians and would have seen violence with Saakashvili's forces as a civil war. Adzharia lacked an army. Abkhazians and Ossetians have no fellow feeling with Georgians. They speak different languages. More importantly, they suffered from the ravages of Shevardnadze's paramilitaries in the early 1990s and they know that many of Saakashvili's hard-line supporters were among the gangs that looted Sukhumi in August 1992 under the guise of "restoring national unity." Abkhazians and Ossetians have soldiers who fought in the past against Georgian invaders and routed them.

Is it worth risking another bloody conflict? Another round of ethnic cleansing would be the result if Saakashvili won. If you were an Abkhazian or Ossetian listening to his daily rants threatening retribution, would you trust the new Georgia to treat you and your family any better than the discredited Georgia of Shevardnadze?

Like Iraq or Sudan, Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus are awash with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. A Caucasian tinderbox may be about to catch fire. If it does, Americans in the region could carry the can for Washington's failure to rein in Saakashvili's aggressive tendencies.
People there know he studied at Columbia. They cite Soros' backing for him, including his payment of many ministers' salaries. When told that Soros' Open Society Institute has nothing to do with the Bush White House because it is a nongovernmental organization, Georgians just laugh. So when people across that unstable region hear Saakashvili threatening to sink tourist boats, an invisible logo flashes through people's minds: "Made in America."

Neither candidate in the U.S. presidential race may be thinking much about ex-Soviet Georgia this summer. Electoral college votes in the South are probably uppermost in their minds. But if the United States stands by and lets Saakashvili invade Abkhazia or South Ossetia, the president's enemies will regard him as Washington's proxy.

Resistance to any rash attack by Georgia could easily spawn terrorism. The pipeline that Washington has promoted to carry oil across Georgia from the Caspian Sea could prove as vulnerable to sabotage as any in Iraq. American personnel operating in Georgia could also be targets if Abkhazians, Ossetians and their friends decide to target the people they see as Saakashvili's sponsors.

As the United States' attention is locked on its own presidential battle, real conflict is looming in the Caucasus, and Americans there could pay the price for repeating the mistakes of 12 years ago. Certainly, ordinary people there on both sides of the tattered cease-fire line have little cause for optimism.

CAUCASUS CONFLICT

2008-08-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, 7th August, 2008, conflict between Russia and Georgia exploded after President Saakashvili sent in his troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia clashing with Russian peacekeepers as well as South Ossetian forces. As a frequent visitor to Georgia and South Ossetia since the end of the Soviet Union, various media asked for my views which usualy differed from the "experts" who had not been there. Here are some of my responses (as edited by the newspapers which published them):

(1) The Guardian (9th August, 2008) :

Plucky little Georgia? No, the cold war reading won't washIt is crudely simplistic to cast Russia as the sole villain in the clashes over South Ossetia. The west would be wise to stay out.

For many people the sight of Russian tanks streaming across a border in August has uncanny echoes of Prague 1968. That cold war reflex is natural enough, but after two decades of Russian retreat from those bastions it is misleading. Not every development in the former Soviet Union is a replay of Soviet history.

The clash between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, which escalated dramatically yesterday, in truth has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain's widely unexpected military response with the comment: "No great power retreats for ever." Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev.

Back in the late 1980s, as the USSR waned, the red army withdrew from countries in eastern Europe which plainly resented its presence as the guarantor of unpopular communist regimes. That theme continued throughout the new republics of the deceased Soviet Union, and on into the premiership of Putin, under whom Russian forces were evacuated even from the country's bases in Georgia.

To many Russians this vast geopolitical retreat from places which were part of Russia long before the dawn of communist rule brought no bonus in relations with the west. The more Russia drew in its horns, the more Washington and its allies denounced the Kremlin for its imperial ambitions.

Unlike in eastern Europe, for instance, today in breakaway states such as South Ossetia or Abkhazia, Russian troops are popular. Vladimir Putin's picture is more widely displayed than that of the South Ossetian president, the former Soviet wrestling champion Eduard Kokoity. The Russians are seen as protectors against a repeat of ethnic cleansing by Georgians.

In 1992, the west backed Eduard Shevardnadze's attempts to reassert Georgia's control over these regions. The then Georgian president's war was a disaster for his nation. It left 300,000 or more refugees "cleansed" by the rebel regions, but for Ossetians and Abkhazians the brutal plundering of the Georgian troops is the most indelible memory.

Georgians have nursed their humiliation ever since. Although Mikheil Saakashvili has done little for the refugees since he came to power early in 2004 - apart from move them out of their hostels in central Tbilisi to make way for property development - he has spent 70% of the Georgian budget on his military. At the start of the week he decided to flex his muscles.
Devoted to achieving Nato entry for Georgia, Saakashvili has sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan - and so clearly felt he had American backing. The streets of the Georgian capital are plastered with posters of George W Bush alongside his Georgian protege. George W Bush avenue leads to Tbilisi airport. But he has ignored Kissinger's dictum: "Great powers don't commit suicide for their allies." Perhaps his neoconservative allies in Washington have forgotten it, too. Let's hope not.

Like Galtieri in 1982, Saakashvili faces a domestic economic crisis and public disillusionment. In the years since the so-called Rose revolution, the cronyism and poverty that characterised the Shevardnadze era have not gone away. Allegations of corruption and favouritism towards his mother's clan, together with claims of election fraud, led to mass demonstrations against Saakashvili last November. His ruthless security forces - trained, equipped and subsidised by the west - thrashed the protesters. Lashing out at the Georgians' common enemy in South Ossetia would certainly rally them around the president, at least in the short term.

Last September, President Saakashvili suddenly turned on his closest ally in the Rose revolution, defence minister Irakli Okruashvili. Each man accused his former blood brother of mafia links and profiting from contraband. Whatever the truth, the fact that the men seen by the west as the heroes of a post-Shevardnadze clean-up accused each other of vile crimes should warn us against picking a local hero in Caucasian politics.

Western geopolitical commentators stick to cold war simplicities about Russia bullying plucky little Georgia. However, anyone familiar with the Caucasus knows that the state bleating about its victim status at the hands of a bigger neighbour can be just as nasty to its smaller subjects. Small nationalisms are rarely sweet-natured.

Worse still, western backing for "equip and train" programmes in Russia's backyard don't contribute to peace and stability if bombastic local leaders such as Saakashvili see them as a guarantee of support even in a crisis provoked by his own actions. He seems to have thought that the valuable oil pipeline passing through his territory, together with the Nato advisers intermingled with his troops, would prevent Russia reacting militarily to an incursion into South Ossetia. That calculation has proved disastrously wrong.

The question now is whether the conflict can be contained, or whether the west will be drawn in, raising the stakes to desperate levels. To date the west has operated radically different approaches to secession in the Balkans, where pro-western microstates get embassies, and the Caucasus, where the Caucasian boundaries drawn up by Stalin, are deemed sacrosanct.

In the Balkans, the west promoted the disintegration of multiethnic Yugoslavia, climaxing with their recognition of Kosovo's independence in February. If a mafia-dominated microstate like Montenegro can get western recognition, why shouldn't flawed, pro-Russian, unrecognised states aspire to independence, too?

Given its extraordinary ethnic complexity, Georgia is a post-Soviet Union in miniature. If westerners readily conceded non-Russian republics' right to secede from the USSR in 1991, what is the logic of insisting that non-Georgians must remain inside a microempire which happens to be pro-western?

Other people's nationalisms are like other people's love affairs, or, indeed, like dog fights. These are things wise people don't get involved in. A war in the Caucasus is never a straightforward moral crusade - but then, how many wars are?

· Mark Almond is a history lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford
mpalmond@aol.com
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/09/georgia.russia1

(2) The Daily Mail (9th August, 2008):

'The war in South Ossetia could be the most dangerous flashpoint since the Cuban crisis', says top historian.

Yesterday a small war in the Caucasus became a major international flashpoint. Until now, almost no one had heard of Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia.
But as Russian tanks and troops rolled into the disputed territory from the north, after Georgian troops invaded from the south, the world suddenly faced a major crisis. South Ossetia has a population of fewer than 100,000 and is nestled on the southern slopes of the mountainous Caucasus region which divides Europe and Asia.

The region is riven with ancient tribal rivalries between its mountain peoples, and this has often led to warfare in the past.

The tribes of the Caucasus have fought each other since history began and long memories and grievances have fed a vendetta culture.

In the past, their skirmishes have gone unnoticed. But today a conflict in the Caucasus could draw in the world's great powers.

A glance at the map shows why Russia is involved. The disputed land lies on Russia's southern border which, ever since the breakup of the Soviet Union, has bitterly resented Georgia's independence.

Since 1992, South Ossetia has run its own affairs after defeating a rag-tag Georgian army's attempt to control it.

Most inhabitants of breakaway South Ossetia have now opted for Russian passports rather than Georgian ones.

Russian troops have patrolled the dividing line between the Georgian troops and Ossetians as 'peace-keepers' for the last 15 years and Russia has suffered casualties in skirmishes between the two sides.

But the West, too, has interests in the region. Running through Georgia from the Caspian Sea in the east to the Black Sea is an oil pipeline bringing BP's crude from Azerbaijan to the West.
Anyone filling their car's petrol tank this weekend won't need reminding how sensitive an issue oil supplies are at the moment.

For the Georgian government, the pipeline crossing the country is a guarantee of Western support against their local, Russian-backed enemies in South Ossetia.

Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili does everything he can to endear himself to the West in general and America in particular as the obvious counter-weight to Russia.

George W. Bush's portrait is widely displayed in Georgia. (Vladimir Putin is the political pinup for Ossetians.) President Saakashvili makes no bones about his desire to join Nato.
Predictably, the Kremlin's reaction to that has been one of fury.

American contractors and other Nato personnel have been involved in training the Georgian army and helping plan its operations, and the Russians see this as proof that the West was behind the sudden strike into South Ossetia this week.

As a result, the Russian army launched its own massive counter-stroke. The risk is that just as Russian 'peacekeepers' have been killed by the Georgian attack so the Nato personnel advising Georgian forces may take casualties as the Russians blast back.

If a Nato soldier is killed by a Russian shell the global temperature will rise alarmingly.
This is a high stakes game - and not just for Georgia.

For the deep involvement of Russia and the U.S. in this ostensibly local skirmish means the world is suddenly closer to a clash of nuclear superpowers than it has been since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

At least then Kennedy and Khrushchev were in charge of their countries' policies and could negotiate as if playing a chess match between superpower grandmasters.

But this time local Caucasian warlords are muddying the waters for both the White House and the Kremlin. Yet it is not the Cold War which offers the best historical guide to the crisis which threatens world peace.

In many ways it is the assassination by Serbs of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 that prefigures the messy, complicated and often irrationally aggressive politics of the Caucasus today.

This, of course, was an event which appeared to be the result of local grievances but, because of the alliegances of the then great powers, had a domino effect which spiralled into the Great War. On that occasion, Austria and its ally Germany demanded that Serbia be punished. But Britain backed Russia's support for Serbia - ironically in the light of the present crisis, Russia was then our ally. The result was worldwide slaughter.

Neither Russia nor the West wants this conflict in the Caucasus to get out of hand. But history shows that small countries can draw their patrons into a war which is not of their choosing.
The West, led by the U.S., will not want to be seen to let down its local partner. Likewise, Russia will want to stand by South Ossetia.

What happened in the Balkans in 1914 is the classic example of lesser allies drawing their powerful backers into a conflict which had nothing to do with them directly.
And I fear that the South Ossetia could be a terrible trigger point for our time, just as Sarajevo was in 1914.

In 1919, only five years after Sarajevo, our foreign secretary Arthur Balfour opposed getting involved in the civil wars then convulsing the Caucasus.

He told the Cabinet: 'If they want to cut their own throats why do we not let them do it?. I should say we are not going to spend all our money and men in civilising a few people who do not want to be civilised.'

Idealists will be horrified by such attitudes, but people who remember how catastrophic wars get started by chivalrous interventions should beware of taking sides. If Russia respects our real interests in the region, why should we fight to decide whether Georgians rule Ossetians or vice-versa?

Does either Moscow or Washington really want to go over the brink for the sake of a small partner? We avoided superpower mutual suicide during the Cold War but could this Caucasus conflict trigger it today?

Both George Bush and Vladimir Putin are in Beijing and have been talking about the crisis. Let us hope and pray that they act together to win an Olympic gold for peacemaking.

Mark Almond is a lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford.

Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1043090/The-war-South-Ossetia-dangerous-flashpoint-Cuban-crisis-says-historian.html

(3) The Sunday Mirror (10th August, 2008):

THIS DAVID AND GOLIATH BATTLE IS A RASH AND SUICIDAL FOLLY

By Mark Almond Oxford history Don and a regular visitor to Georgia

Standing up to a bully is admirable but picking a fight with a heavyweight champion is suicidally foolish.

Yet that is what tiny Georgia’s president Mikhail Saakashvili did when he invaded the breakaway region of South Ossetia – despite the presence of Russian troops holding the line between the feuding peoples.

No rational person in the West wants to see NATO face off against a nuclear-armed Russia. Yet dragging us into his war with Russia seems the only way Saakashvili can survive.
Bombastic Saakashvili, 40, seems to have taken his backers in Washington and his enemies in Moscow by surprise. But having watched him in action in Georgia for a decade I’m not surprised he has upset the applecart.

Even more than most politicians, Saakashvili likes to be the centre of attention. It must be frustrating to be president of a poverty-stricken small state when you want to strut the world stage.

A Soviet border guard when the USSR collapsed in 1991, young Saakashvili was whisked across the Atlantic to study. He fell in love with America and became a wannabe Yankee – loud and brash.

Sponsored by the US, he led the “Rose Revolution” in 2003 which toppled the West’s former favourite in Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze. George Bush praised him as a regional role model and it went to his head.

The new president built a palace dominating the Tbilisi skyline. His police don’t allow it to be photographed – as I found out to my cost when I tried. They are even heavier-handed with his domestic critics. Last November the opposition took a thrashing for demonstrating in the street. Dissidents get locked up in crowded jails rife with torture and tuberculosis. Political opponents are packed in the same cramped cells as hardened criminals – a Soviet way of punishing dissent.
Saakashvili’s wife has compared him with Georgia’s most infamous son, Stalin. But Stalin wasn’t reckless. Saakashvili has staked ordinary Georgians’ lives on proving himself the man to face off against mighty Russia’s strong man, Vladimir Putin.

He forgot Goliath came to David looking for a fight – not the other way around. With his reckless gamble in ruins, Saakashvili faces a grim future at home. Unpopular because he has done nothing to relieve his people’s poverty, now he looks like a loser. too.

Georgia’s position on the tectonic plates between Russia and NATO means the West has an interest in avoiding a geopolitical earthquake. Saakashvili’s personal fate is small beer compared with the risks of a new East-West confrontation.

With fighting spreading, the situation gets worse by the hour. It even threatens the West’s one concrete interest in the region – the oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea. It is time to damp down this conflict before it sets off an uncontrollable wild fire.

There is no happy outcome likely. Western intervention would be suicidal, Western posturing will be farcical.

The least bad option is that Russia wins back control of South Ossetia and stops its bombing. Unsatisfactory that may be, but at least it would stop the killing.

Source: http://www.mirror.co.uk/sunday-mirror/2008/08/09/world-leaders-appeal-for-peace-as-russian-bombers-blitz-neighbouring-georgia-115875-20690492/

Environmentalism's Sub-Prime Crisis, or 1st April as Eco-Fool's Day

2008-03-30T16:05:00.000-07:00

“He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were first to be put into phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, “Voyage to Laputa”, chapter 5.

Despite criticisms by its own chief environmental scientist, the British government is bent on requiring petrol pumps to contain at least 2.5% of bio-fuels from 1st April. Even as the evidence mounts that the dash for bio-fuels is causing food shortages for the poor around the Third World and food-price inflation for the poor in the First World, nothing can alter the Diktat that petrol tank not the stomach comes first. Global Warming has become the sales-pitch for the crudest hucksters since the South Sea Bubble.

As the housing market goes into meltdown, the last surviving sector of speculative growth is the “Green Economy.” With EU and British government-mandated and tax-payer-subsidised requirements for so-called “renewable” energy, the only bubble still inflating in the global economy is coloured green. The dollar may be losing value but the alchemy of speculative environmentalism is still profitable. The Greenback can still make money provided it is backed by Green laws and rules which require the public to stump up at prices well beyond even the rise in the cost of oil.

Only a Swift could satirise the corrupt machinations and insider deals which have enabled a cabal of politicians, scientists and public relations spooks to hoodwink the population into paying up for Hot Air as the solution to their energy needs.

Almost three hundred years ago, Swift lampooned the experts of the Royal Society of his day with as “The Grand Academy” which mixed scientific speculation and speculative investment in South Sea Bubble-style projects for human betterment, which might not work but were exceeding profitable.

On his travels, Gulliver described new energy-saving schemes which actually cost more than what they replaced and didn’t work. Anyone who has watched giant high-tech windmills not turning on breezy days despite the taxpayers’ largesse which put them there will recognise that no joke is new – particularly not one at the people’s expense. Gulliver described how the projectors replaced an old mill with a new one further away from the stream which needed artificial means to pump water “on the plea that water agitated by wind and air upon a height… would turn the mill with half the current of a river…” in other words speculation and paper money would produce wealth! “After employing an hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off… putting others upon the same experiment with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.”

Swift’s Academy in Lagado is involved in “projects” i.e. money-making schemes. – Swift pre-empted today’s commercial-led research where pure science cannot swim in a sea of funding only for projects with a commercial application – and the only commercial applications with prospects of profit require tax-payer subsidy.

Recycling wasn’t invented yesterday. Three hundred years ago enterprising projectors were inviting the public to subscribe to innovative and profitable ways of returning used matter to its pristine state. The South Sea Bubble saw a host of recycling schemes “projected” to the public. One company offered a means for extracting silver from lead, another for making salt water fresh, as well as the Georgian equivalent of the dot.com for a wheel for perpetual motion, and "an undertaking which shall in due course be revealed." The purest “green” project in George I’s day was peddled by an early environmental entrepreneur who offered to turn sawdust back into boards and gathered several hundred subscriptions before running off to recycle their cash abroad.

Swift’s members of the Academy of Lagado were the first scientists whose experiments were part of their double role as “projectors.” Nowadays when no scientific research which requires expensive apparatus and laboratory space can get going without sponsorship, the marketing possibilities of the research are an essential component of the funding application. No scientist, however distinguished, receives government funding or private sponsorship just to follow his experimental hunches. If there isn’t a backend in sight for the donors then no funds are forthcoming.

So much public cash is available for Lagadan projects to generate energy by taking the crops out of the mouths of the starving and refining them into the fuel tanks of the environmentally-friendly 8-cylinder hybrid that any alternative research would be irrational – i.e. not on the gravy train.

Just as the sub-prime debacle has resulted in an orgy of “socialism for the rich” as state banks print billions to save the ueber-bonused bankers who misread the mortgage market so catastrophically, so the bio-fuel, wind farm, carbon exchange projects are all funded by the public purse. To get into the racket, it is true that you have punt in a low percentage of “venture capital” which can be written off against tax if your lobbyist doesn’t persuade in his greasy way the government inspectors to grant a license to re-cycle the cash many times over from the obligatory surcharge required of the consumer of such “renewable” energy. Nice profit if you have the start up cash. Guaranteed by those who haven’t. Millions of suckers have to cover the cost and the profit.

Y2K set a precedent. “Experts” predicted doom as the world’s computer systems would go haywire on 31st December, 1999. They cashed in as “consultants” solving a problem which turned out not to exist when un-upgraded computers carried on functioning normally but at much less cost. The Y2K hysteria was a typical “Bubble”. Canny “experts” got their cronies in the media to whip up a scare and then cashed in as worried punters paid for up-grades which they didn’t need. With the dot coms already wobbling badly, Y2K was a welcome boost to the speculators’ income flow. Only the sucker in the street was any worse off.

Rather like “off-balance-sheet” liabilities of the banks, most re-cycling does not involve restoring the trash to some useful end. In reality the vast bulk of “re-cycled” material is simply moved from one jurisdiction to another. The Laputa Council Refuse Department send trucks of material for re-cycling to Lagoda Recycling Ltd. – for a hefty fee paid by the council tax payers. Instead of wasting money and energy on trying to turn the garbage back into something useful, Lagoda Recycling Ltd. transfers responsibility to its Romanian subsidiary, RomTrash which in turn exports it from the EU to its Albanian joint-venture, AlbShet. By now any environmental auditor cannot keep track of the waste’s “trash miles”, not least because his bi-cycle can’t keep up with the fleet of 44 tonne trucks hauling the stuff around the ever-so-environmentally-friendly EU. Most rubbish which isn’t sent to places like Albania or China, simply gets dumped in an EU country like Romania which turns a blind eye to the rules, not least because it doesn’t like to waste paper printing them for the benefit of its own ineffable local enforcement officials who deal only in green paper.

Swift was of course writing on the eve of windmills going out of fashion. Even his eye for human folly masking avarice could not have anticipated that three hundred years later, gormless taxpayers would be subsidising the industrial production of concrete towers with steel or aluminium wings which consume more electricity to make them than thirty years of irregular gyration can recover – but all mightily under-written by taking from the poor to give to the rich projectors.

As the deadline for mixing 2.5% of bio-fuel with every litre of petrol sold in Britain looms on 1st April, it looks as though the intellectual underpinnings of the speculative web of carbon credits and subsidised fuel production is about to unravel just as the sub-prime mortgage crisis burst on an unsuspecting and gullible public. Needless to say even if April Fool’s Day is the Eco-gullibles’ feast day, it will be the public which picks up the bill for this carbon-free re-inflation of the South Sea Bubble.

Tony Herod Converts in Time for the Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents

2007-12-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

Tom Lehrer remarked that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Strangely, it has taken thirty-three years for satire’s funeral rites to be performed appropriately, if belatedly, by the Catholic Church in the run up to Christmas, 2007.

Sarky, Carla and the Canons

En route to visit his troops in Afghanistan, France’s hyper-active newly-divorced President, Nicholas Sarkozy, found time after his weekend of nookie at Disneyland hotel with Carla Bruni, ex-supermodel, 39 on the penultimate Sunday of Advent, to be inducted as canon of St. John Lateran, the oldest basilica in Rome and the seat of the Pope as Bishop of that eternal city.

Of course, he is not the first French head of state to be an adulterer in the eyes of the Catholic Church. In fact, apart from Charles de Gaulle, it is difficult to think of a chef d’état since St. Louis who didn’t transgress the fifth commandment in office.[1] The Catholic Church ranks tradition alongside revelation in the Bible as its sources of truth. Since 1604, whoever rules in Paris has got to be a canon of St. John Lateran – with a few principled exceptions whose ideas of principles were not Catholic. Back then the Pope, Clement VIII, made Henri IV a canon of his own cathedral despite the King’s up-and-down married life and his status as an ex-Calvinist – well, actually an ex-Catholic who turned Calvinist before rediscovering Catholicism on St. Bartholomew’s Night, 1572, and then abandoning Catholicism because of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Night, only to discover that “Paris is worth a mass” and returning to the Catholic faith of his fathers. Since Henri IV’s time, French monarchs and heads of state have enjoyed the privileges of a canon the Lateran – the right to ride a horse in its precincts and so on.[2] Nevertheless as the first canon of St. John’s to authorize a divorce[3] - his own at that - Sarkozy certainly sets a precedent for his successors to match, or even surpass. Catholic tradition is certainly evolving in ways which Tom Lehrer could not have parodied.

Very Private Man Converts Very Privately – Reuters, AP, BBC, SKY News (exclusive)

Just when Advent seemed to have burst its most incongruous cracker with Sarkozy’s “canonisation”, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and a galère celebrity-seeking suffragan bishops, FCUK friars and posh priests showed that New France cannot compete in the bad taste stakes with New Britain. With the media-shyness that had distinguished his career of bloodshed, bamboozle and back-handers, Anthony Lynton Blair put aside time from the reading the Koran – “To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is... The Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance”[4] – to condescend to announce his “conversion” to what the Koran abhors! But don’t worry. Tony didn’t believe in Labour doctrines when, “with great humility as a member of another faith” – the faith of his fathers was Tory - he made his entry into Old Labour straight, if Bunny will forgive the word, from Oxford.

Hollowing out Old Catholicism

One Labour leader retired defeated, another retired promoted (to the EU) and a third simply died to make way for Tony the Convert. We will never know how any Serbs, Afghans and Arabs would have welcomed the option of retirement or being kicked upstairs as an alternative to boosting Tony’s conversion career through mega-death, but their transition to an alternative after-life made possible, perhaps even probable the Miracle of 22nd December.

All exegetics know that no miracle in the New Testament wasn’t without its foretelling in the Old Testament. In the same way, the conversion of Tony Blair to New Catholicism follows a pattern set in the Book of Old Labour.

If Tony Blair had not come into the world born of a virgin Tory, he could not have risen to be leader of Old Labour after the fortuitous death of John Smith foretold in the Book of Kelly.

As leader of what he called New Labour, Tony Blair gutted the traditional faith of the old Labour Party. Instead of Clause 4’s Socialism, Tony preached the worship of Mammon. Labour sold its soul, gained, well not the whole world, but at least the United Kingdom.

Once Bible-reading Christians worried that the New Testament faith would be corrupted by the temptation ton relapse into the worship of Baal. But with New Catholicism launched by the conversion of Tony Blair, Catholics should consider how their newest soul-mate used New Labour to create New Britain.

Tony must think to himself: I hollowed out Christian Socialism, why shouldn’t I go the whole hog and gut Christianity itself?

Blair’s New Britain – New Jerusalem or Old Gin Lane?

Walking in the early evening through Advent Oxford, the passer-by has to step carefully to avoid the lightly frozen pools of vomit left near the city’s many empty churches by the twenty-four hour drinking pushed through in the last years Blair. Saturnalia not Christmas is Blair’s feast-day. Drunks, druggies and whores hardly old enough to be his daughter cluster in garish streets as frenzied bourgeoisie shops as if the credit crunch will pass with a few Alker Seltzer.

Promoting degraded public behaviour while spouting spin about ASBOs and “community values” was just part of the split personality of the newest of New Catholics. Even a public bribed with its own money and drunk credit began to weary of the forked tongue of Blairism. But not the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

Of course, Blair did not invent the abuse of alcohol in Britain. No, he was happy to joke to the US Congress in July, 2003, that one of the Pankhursts had written to Kier Hardy “shortly before the election, June 1913”[5] , saying she had been studying Britain carefully and there was a worrying rise in sexual immorality linked to heavy drinking.” Blair, by then a regular at Mass often apparently scoffing the Host, scorned such concerns as devout New Catholics do. To laughter from the pork-barrel born-again bombers in the Senate chamber, Blair sneered, “We all get that kind of advice, don't we?”[6] The problem with Blair is that he inherited Britain’s woeful drink culture with its litany of battered wives, partners, girlfriends and children and pushed through a law to make matters worse. Whenever it has been a matter of promoting degrading behaviour Blair stood in the front rank.

Public policy under Blair didn’t “do God.” No doubt secular Britain wouldn’t have tolerated it, but why should Catholics welcome into their midst the man who preserved tooth-and-nail Britain’s status as the abortion capital of Europe, New and old. Tony Herod blocked every attempt to reverse that position – even Number 2 in the abortion charts was too low for him. Yet he managed also to preside over an explosion of children born out of wedlock. No denying there is genius at work there.

Like his grinning, giggling, gush-alike successors in the New Conservative and Very New Liberal Democratic Parties, David “Class A” Cameron and Nick “No God” Clegg, Tony Blair represents the New Class of post-Communist profiteer politicians. The more the proles are degraded by drink, drugs and analphabetism the more chance there will be for Ewan. Nicky, Leo and their class-like to stay in charge of global Britain in a post-national methadone-dependent world.

“Profitable are the Peacemakers for they shall protect the share-price of BAe Systems”

For those who believe God will not be mocked – even by those who have paid in advance – there was the coincidence on 22nd December, 2007, of Tony’s discreet conversion in the cardinal’s private chapel with only family, friends and St. Rupert’s press in attendance with the revelation that he had mentioned “business interests” in connection with his directive to halt any investigation of bribes allegedly paid by BAe Systems to various Saudi princes (in the spirit of inter-faith dialogue between New Catholic bombers and Old Islamic hand-choppers).[7] Readers of the DaTony Code might be the sort of “conspiracy theory nuts” to think that there could be any connection between the Blessed Blair’s world tour making evangelical speeches in favour of using BAe Systems products to kill Arabs who haven’t got them in return for bribes from Arabs who are terrified of the sort of Arabs who might take a rather Old Testament approach to bribery and Blairism. But New Catholic cardinals, bishops and friars are too busy reading the share prices. After all, didn’t Christ Himself - or as He is now known “The Lead Investor” – tell his stakeholders the Parable of the Steward of who knew how to make a killing on a bear market?

However, if we think about his Connaught Place pad’s various valuations since he bought it on a mortage of 40 times his annual salary - as the Bible says, “If ye seek the causes of the sub-prime crisis, look no further” - New Catholics have to admit that it is true that Tony has been better at killing than making a killing but, in what Cardinal’s Investments, like to think of as a broad market there is place even for distressed assets.

It was his blood-soaked little humanitarian adventure in Iraq that made Blair’s rhetoric of compassion and principle choke even the most gullible – except for the clergy, after all faith in the impossibly improbable is their business. But even the Westminster Cathedral canons might notice that Blair spells their title with two Ns. As the dwindling bands of Christians prepared to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, the warmonger of our age was celebrated in the Cardinal’s private chapel.

Separation of Church and State, Or PsychoCatholicism?

Defending the exuberant joy at Tony’s conversion, New Catholic clerics adorned Murdoch’s satellite channels to bring the Good News that Herod had renounced his old faith but intended to carry on behaving in the same way. Sky News broadcast convoluted efforts by a Bishop Stack to explain that Blair’s private life had no connection with his public activities in the past, nor apparently with his continued insistence that his conscience is clean would the split personality of Blair be healed in his New Catholic future.

Neither New Catholic Blair nor Canon Sarkozy had any problem with the godless preface to the (defunct) European constitution. Both were happy to sign a document referring to the humanist traditions of Europe, but its religious traditions, for good or ill, went down the memory hole. Yet each prattles on about the importance of faith in their lives and communities, particularly in front of American audiences who lap that sort of thing up and pay well for it from retired Europeans in need of a cash advance on God’s grace.

In March, 2005, Tony Herod told the BBC abortion was a "difficult issue". That was when he was backing the hardline on-demand Bunker group. Blair used a classic piece of spin, which an old fashioned parish priest might call a lie. The New Herod declared, "However much I dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalise a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice.”[8] Of course, no-one advocating the reduction of the time limits for abortions – the issue of course was not the abolition of what the Catholic Church regards as murder – was suggesting that women who had abortions should be “criminalized.” The suggestion was that the NHS would not pay for late abortions of fetuses who could clearly survive outside the womb thanks to the progress of medical science. Blair could not stomach letting any child escape.

How many children – actual infants and toddlers (let’s move on, to use Tony’s favourite closure term, from the aborted foetuses) have died as a result of Tony’s bombing raids. The maternity hospital in Belgrade took a little shaking in 1999, but nothing to disturb the conscience of a New Catholic. As for Iraq’s infant mortality rate of 600,00 children before Tony upped the adult mortality rate in March, 2003, for a Herodian “clean conscience” that was to quote Madelaine Albright, the Magdalen of the New World Order, “a price worth paying.”

Ambrose as Bishop of Milan humiliated the apparently all-powerful Emperor Theodosius because his subordinates had massacred a lot of people in the Middle East in 386. Instead of waiting for Iudex Huttonus to explain that the victims had got what was coming to them though the Emperor had not had any plans to give them a taste of cold steel, Ambrose demanded public penance from Theodosius before he would let the Lord and Master of the Roman world take communion in his own capital. In 1077, the Pope, Gregory VII, kept the Emperor Henry IV waiting for three days in the snow at Cannossa before the barefoot penitent monarch was admitted to the papal presence and absolved.

But for Tony Blair it was “This way to His Eminence’s altar-rails”. Clearly, the New Catholic Church approach is to invite the impenitent, brazen, blood-stained war-profiteer into the private chambers for mutual congratulations. What was it Christ used to say: Go and sin some more?

No confession is valid if the penitent does not intend to repair his wrongs. You cannot confess to theft, receive absolution from the priest, even from the Cardinal Archbishop of West-Novelty, and decide to keep hold of the ill-gotten gains without fore-fitting the absolution and committing a mortal sin – well not unless you’re a New Catholic. Then you just smile, pocket the proceeds and say, “Time to move on.” The excellent choir of West-Novelty Abbey will hymn along in four, sometimes eight parts “Time to move on.”

Maybe Tony Blair’s private life is impeccable and his devotion to Cherie would put us all to shame in the Sarkozy camp, but for all that the rest of us have a myriad sins and flaws, how many murders would it take for us simple sinners to get on the Cardinal’s red carpet? The psychology of the split between Blair's public and private personae suggests a new mental disease needs to defined for people whose public acts and public faith clash to crudely. Blair is the first certifiable new type Psycho-Catholic. In the past mass-murdering Catholics like Philip II at least were consistent in their dogmatic beliefs and brutal acts. The New Herod of our New Age would be classified as a hypocritical killer but for the strength of his faith in the New Faith of Say-one-thing, Shoot another.

Tony and the Donatists

Everyone knows that St. Augustine issued a magisterial rebuke to the Donatist heretics, who were foolish enough to believe that immoral, corrupt, abusing or time-serving clergy could not legitimately carry out their sacerdotal functions. Just because Westminster Cathedral houses a den of celebrity-fawners[9] in its sacristy doesn’t mean that they cannot perform the miracle of transubstantiation. Nor is the capacity of such priests to hear confessions and forgive sins in the least affected by their bedazzlement that one of the Lords of the New World Order has whispered his transgressions through the confessional gauze.[10]

But, without infringing the secrets of the confessional, it would be interesting to know what the tariff is these days for the sins of the Great-and-Not-So-Good. How many Hail Marys was Dr. David Kelly worth? Or are there enough Rosary beads in the world to atone for the collateral damage to Iraq’s children?

With a celebrity in the sacristy, little wonder the New Catholic Pharisees have no time for more than lip-service for the poor would-be convert. I know at least one young man who was considering conversion to Catholicism whose soul was lost to the Church because he was repelled by the antics of the televised clergy cooing over the conversion of the Typhoon fighter’s lead salesperson. How many others confused the sleazy clerics with the sacraments of the Church and walked away? The Cardinal might have mumbled a few words of concern for the poor and migrants in his Xmas homily but the sous-texte was pure New Labour globalism. Instead of asking why so many well-educated Poles have abandoned their homes to come to Britain to do menial low-paid labour tom dsustain Blair’s boom, the Cardinal demands only that other poor people put out of jobs by the low wage migrants should nbot complain that the New Class gets its cleaners, plumbers and prostitutes at a knock down price. The New Pharisees understand why there was no room in the inn for an un-married woman with child who looked set to be a burden on the “welfare-to-work” agenda.

The New Catholic version of Christ’s injunction “to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things which are God’s” seems to require us “to pander unto Celebrity and leave to the losers things which have no headline value.” Blair is the Baal of our day. Admiration of Blair is the idolisation of the banality of evil in its post-modern form – always smiling, always lying, always killing. If Blair believes in the Resurrection, we should be careful to check at Easter that he doesn’t think it was Judas who rose again.

Bishop Harries of Oxford, who supported Blair’s wars and to be fair Major’s and Thatcher’s too, responded in an ecumenical spirit to the news of the New Catholic convert. Hardly surprisingly, a cleric who could boast about passing a Bible to the newly converted Eduard “Giorgi” Shevardnadze and found him “truly Christian”, welcomed Tony Blair’s conversion recalling Christ’s words “in my father’s house there are many mansions”. In New Catholic-Post-Anglican interfaith-dialogue-speak this is correctly translated as “The Market has space for buy-to-let as well as loft-conversions” – but even Bishop Harries is not as up with trendy theo-speak as he once was.

When Satan converts (if he hasn’t already), the Westminster archdiocese canonical estate-agents in Christ will no doubt see the Devil’s “first contract” (New Catholic for old-believers’ “first communion”) with his homo-diabolical partner Beelzebub and other cash-for-honours cronies, not “robed and in the sanctuary” so much as booted-and-suited in the canonical VIP lounge, as the convert’s joyous “first-step-on-the-property-ladder-to-heaven.”

Supermaket Conversion – Load your trolley now!

Mrs Blair is not quite a private citizen. Her own religious beliefs and practice are cited by the New Catholic clergy as the route Tony took to the bosom of Mother Church, but Cherie’s capacity for faith is broader than even the Catholic Church.

As one journalist who has backed Blair’s bombing with gusto has pointed out, “Cherie Blair found her devout Catholicism no impediment to flirtations with New Age spirituality - inviting a feng-shui expert to rearrange the furniture at No 10 and wearing a ‘magic pendant’ known as the BioElectric Shield… ‘a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals’ that surround the wearer with ‘a cocoon of energy’ to ward off evil forces.”
As Francis Wheen remarked on Cherie’s enthusiasm for pagan charms, “The catholicism - if not Catholicism - of her tastes was further demonstrated in 2002 by the revelation that she employed a former member of the Exegesis cult, Carole Caplin, as a ‘lifestyle guru’. Through Caplin, the prime minister's wife was introduced to an 86-year-old ‘dowsing healer’, Jack Temple, who treated her swollen ankles by swinging a crystal pendulum over the affected area and feeding her strawberry leaves grown within the ‘electro-magnetic field’ of a neolithic circle he had built in his back garden”!

The Catholic Church used to burn witches, now they are invited into the Cardinal’s private chapel. Progress of a kind, I suppose, but even the spirit of charity can be taken a little far when it turns a blind eye to Satanic rites.

Ambrose and Augustine battled against astrology and every other kind of pagan superstition lodged in the minds of first generation Christians high and low-alike, but for the New Catholic Church to pander to people who shop around the global supermarket of quack-faiths 2007 years on after Christ’s birth passes belief. Neither Catholic doctrine nor science has any hold over the minds of people who take part in hocus-pocus of the kind Tony and Cherie solemnly practiced in summer, 2001.

They were there to celebrate another election triumph helped along by the miraculous conception of little Leo which appears not to have been an intercession of St. Invitrio as many devout Blairites believed, but of older pre-Christian cults. In Mexico his parents had a "rebirthing experience" under the supervision of one Nancy Aguilar while holidaying on the Mexican Riviera in the summer of 2001. The Times's reported,
"Ms Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out ... Within the Temazcal, a type of Ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks, to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs' 'energy flow'. Ms Aguilar chanted Mayan songs, told the Blairs to imagine that they could see animals in the steam and explained what such visions meant. They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before 'rebirth' and venturing outside. The Blairs were offered watermelon and papaya, then told to smear what they did not eat over each other's bodies along with mud from the Mayan jungle outside. The prime minister, on holiday just a month before the 11 September attacks, is understood to have made a wish for world peace. Before leaving, the Blairs were told to scream out loud to signify the pain of rebirth. They then walked hand in hand down the beach to swim in the sea”![11] Then Revelation of St. John on the holiday hotspot of Patmos seems` rather tame by comparison with the vision of Blair.

“King Herod has no plans to massacre the innocents – Reuters”

Anyone familiar with Tony Blair’s refrains of “I have no plans” to Bomb Serbia or Invade Iraq in the run-up to his better known acts of aggression won’t be surprised to recall that as late as March, 2005, in the run-up to the general election, the BBC reported, “Mr Blair… denied he planned to join his wife and four children in the Catholic faith despite regularly taking communion…”[12] Tony could not even leave political calculation about his conversion. He could not tell the truth even about that.

Tony Blair’s life in politics showed that in the battle between snobbery and socialism, social climbing would always smother social democracy. Now in his religious phase, Blair shows us that celebrity flouts sanctity with equal aplomb.

The wages of sin are sweet for the New Age Catholic. Who now says, “War profits no man”? Tony has it all - the six-figure lecture fees for ten years of signing off on public contracts, six wars and three occupations can buy, and now he has the mandate of heaven too. Even Herod never had the whole-hearted approval of the priests of the Temple even though he never burnt offerings to pagan gods or swam in the birthing pool. Two thousand years on Tony’s got God sown up. Who says there is no such thing as progress?

In the spirit of the New Catholicism, let me wish a Merry Massacre of the Innocents and a Hypocritical New Year to You All!

--------------------------------------------------

[1] Catholics list adultery fifth in the Commandments, most Protestants put it seventh but in the New World Order it reads, “Thou Shalt Not be found out.”
[2] See Dominique Dhombres, “Une étrange procession à Rome” in Le Monde (22nd December, 2007): http://www.lemonde.fr/web/imprimer_element/0,40-0@2-3232,50-992398,0.html
[3] As Chief Magistrate of the Republic, Sarkozy had to authorize his wife, Cecilie’s divorce petition since under the French Constitution the Head of State may not be sued even in a civil case without his own say-so.
[4] See Tony Blair ,“A Battle for Global Values” in Foreign Affairs (January-February, 2007): http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070101faessay86106-p0/tony-blair/a-battle-for-global-values.html.
[5] Like almost all historical references made by Tony Blair in his career this is inaccurate, refrring to a non-event. There was no general election in 1913 – not until December, 1918 – but making history has always been his forte rather than telling the truth about it.
[6] See “Transcript of Blair’s Speech” (17th July, 2003) CNN.com: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/07/17/ blair.transcript/. Blair’s former deputy premier, John Prescott, remarked, “Well, it doesn’t come as any surprise to me... Of course, there was a point when Tony was walking around with a Koran and a Bible. It looks like Catholicism has won out in the end.” Quoted in The Sunday Times (23rd December, 2007): http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3087345.ece.
[7] On 6th December, 2006, Tony Herod wrote the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that the corruption investigation into BAe had to stop "not least because of the critical difficulties present to the negotiations over the Typhoon [fighter jet] contract." Quoted in The Daily Telegraph (23rd December, 2007): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/24/nblair124.xml.
[8] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4349581.stm.
[9] Note that clergy who have taken vows of celibacy, many also of chastity, cannot be what Australian theologians call “star-f**ckers” for obvious reasons even if the Devil tempts them in that direction.
[10] Though they might remember that the martyr Saint Martin of Tours faced his most terrible temptation when Satan appeared to him dressed as Christ the Ruler of the World in all the earthly glory imaginable.
[11] See Francis Wheen in The Guardian (27th January, 2004): http://politics.guardian.co.uk/redbox/story/%200,9029,1131916,00.html
[12] See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4349581.stm.

Georgia: The Strange Silence of George Soros

2007-11-14T07:31:00.000-08:00

by Mark Almond

Time was when no street protest happened anywhere across the old Soviet Union without billionaire philanthropist George Soros popping up all over the media to express his support for those struggling for an “open society” against police armed with every weapon in the crowd-control arsenal. When thousands of Georgians protesting in front of the country’s parliament were dispersed on 7th November, 2007, by baton-wielding robo-cop-style policemen using the latest low-frequency “non-lethal” technology to disperse the crowd and low-tech clubs to smash up television and camera equipment which had given the wrong impression of the event, it seemed the ideal place and occasion for George Soros to grandstand his commitment to democracy, civil society and non-violence.

After all less than four years earlier, Mr Soros had taken a lot of credit for the establishment of the new regime in Georgia led by his protégé, Mikheil Saakashvili following the “Rose Revolution” in November, 2003. Mr Soros and his house-guest, Mark Malloch Brown then of the UNDP, arrived in Tbilisi shortly after the fall of Eduard Shevardnadze and the election of Saakashvili with 97% of the vote as President of Georgia to announce that Mr Soros and the UN would donate generous funds to boost the salary of the President and other public officials to combat the endemic corruption which had afflicted the country under the old regime.[1]

On 22nd March, 2004, Saakashvili’s long-term aide, Kote Kublashvili, the administrator of the secret fund, told the Georgian Times, that the new fund’s “main attention will be focused on the employees of the law-enforcement agencies.”[2] In the last reference I can find to the Georgian fund by Mr Soros on the BBC Radio 4 “Today” programme on 31st December, 2005, Mr Soros still explicitly included the Georgian police among the recipients of his money.

Without millions of dollars from Mr Soros, Malloch Brown’s UNDP and the mysterious Cyprus-based “Golden Fleece Fund” from Georgia’s new commander-in-chief down to the lowliest billy-club wielding Georgian policeman the standard of living of the men who proclaimed the shining light of anti-corruption campaigners in the Caucasus would have been as poor as that of the policemen who stood aside rather than defend the Shevardnadze regime in November, 2007. As the Russian journalist and Saakashvili admirer, Pavel Felgenhauer pointed out just before the Georgian special forces gave the protestors a taste of the “black aspirin” on 7th November, Georgian officers now get up to US$1,000 a month.[3] That makes obeying orders very profitable if a little costly to the Western taxpayers and Mr Soros who have picked up so much of the tab.

Maybe it was just naiveté on the part of George Soros and Mark Malloch Brown that led them to think that upping the pay of Georgian security officers would make them less self-seeking and more supportive of civil society. Poverty may encourage corruption, but were the executives of Enron driven to steal hundreds of millions of dollars because they were poorly-remunerated? Isn’t often the case that if people can get away with corruption despite higher salaries they will steal as much as they can – especially if as head of government or police officers they face no superior who can restrain or indict them? Surely Mr Soros’s own well-advertised success at acquiring wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and his continuing to play the markets well after his first few billion was in the bank suggests that he understands that greed has no natural limit.

I have looked anxiously everyday at the news wires in case the philanthropist was ill and had lost the power of speech and writing, even of signing off on grants to the myriad off-shoots of his Open Society Foundation. They too seemed paralysed by the silence at Open Society HQ. No-one has stepped into the open to state what Saakashvili’s sponsor thinks now about the regime which he did so much to bring to power.

But the silence is only about Saakashvili’s onslaught on the Georgian public and media. Mr Soros has been repeatedly in public expressing his views about the decline of the dollar _ and even his billions of greenbacks may buy him less influence abroad than his wealth once did.

In the past, books, articles, interviews have poured forth from the self-styled “philosophical speculator”. No-one would accuse George Soros of reticence about expressing his opinions about how to put the world to rights. Quite often he even put his money where his mouth was. Nowhere more so than in post-Soviet Georgia. Yet suddenly silence. Even as the tear gas drenched Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue and the Imedi TV studios were smashed up by special forces, the prophet of the Open Society held his tongue.

Of course, despite his claims to promote openness and transparency, Mr Soros has behaved in the past in a secretive way to restrict public debate.

For his talk of his ideal of an Open Society, closing media access has been one by-product of the success of what George Orwell might also have called “The Open Society.” For instance, in the early years of Yeltsin’s reign as Russian President Soros played a key role in the April, 1993 referendum on privatisation. It was a surreptitious intervention. According to the Washington Post’s David Hofman: “Chubais… deployed a secret weapon to help Yeltsin win the April referendum. Chubais privately met with George Soros, the Hungarian-born superfinancier and philanthropist, who was in Moscow to launch a program to help scientists. Soros agreed to bankroll the pro-Yeltsin referendum campaign, the first but not the last time he would come to the rescue of the reformers.” The champion of openness agreed to a roundabout offshore financial facility which was invisible to Russia’s voters and almost certainly illegal. Hoffman reports, “A Chubais representative, a Westerner, went to Switzerland and made the financial arrangements for a $1 million transfer from Soros to offshore [emphasis added] accounts that Chubais could draw on for the campaign. The money helped the Yeltsin forces buy advertising to drown out the voices of the opposition.”[4] Chubais enthused, “Soros backed then really played a positive role” helping the oligarchs to get a stranglehold on Russia’s resources. So the prophet of the Open Society and the sponsor of Transparency International put his money behind the stifling of debate and closed off avenues to alternative opinion.

Maybe Soros hopes that the fuss about police brutality in Georgia will die away if he stays silent. But can he really hope that the subjects of what he joked was no longer the Soviet Union but “the Soros Empire” will not notice his silence?[5]

Maybe his un-characteristic silence is a product of shame at having backed another failed hero, who turned from clean reformer to corrupt autocrat without in reality in changing his way of operating at all. Back in Ukraine, for instance, Soros backed Leonid Kuchma before dropping him in favour of Viktor Yushchenko, who has since been dropped in favour of Julia Timoshenko… It would be easy to play a cruel game of no prizes for guessing who backed Kuchma for president in 1994 saying, “Kuchma is made of a different fibre. The manager of an important enterprise in the military-industrial complex, he is orientated toward problem solving,”[6] before urging “"The West must take a clear position denouncing Mr. Kuchma's behavior and actions. There is no way for the international community to continue to do business with Mr. Kuchma.”[7] A similar litany of praise by Soros for Shevardnadze followed by condemnation could be easily drafted.

In the past, Soros has had no problem ditching politicians whom he had backed when they disappointed him or stepped out of line in some way. Is his silence today about Saakashvili’s clampdown a sign of shame or indifference to then regime’s resort to force to stay in power.

It is a maxim of English law that silence implies consent. If George Soros doesn’t open his mouth soon, then Georgians and people around the world may well conclude that George Soros is still backing Saakashvili. If Soros is still putting his money behind the swagger sticks thrashing Saakashvili’s opponents then what he means by an “Open Society” will be clear to all. The Soros Empire will have become the Silenced Society.

------------------------------------

[1] The programme was announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 22nd January, 2004.See “OSI and UNDP Announce New Programme to Support Governance Reform in Georgia” (23rd January, 2004): http://www.soros.org/initiatives/cep/news/georgia_20040123.

[2] See “UNDP, Soros Fund Salaries for Georgian Officials” in The Georgian Times (22nd March, 2004).

[3] See Pavel Felgenhauer, “Saakashvili: Defiant, Ready for Action” [!] in Eurasia Daily Monitor (7th November, 2007): http://jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2372568.

[4] See David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs. Wealth and Power in the New Russia (Public Affairs: Oxford, 2002), 202 and 510 note 52.

[5] As early as 1993, Soros quipped, “Just write that the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.” See Robert Slater, Soros. The Unauthorized Biography (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1996), 135.

[6] See Soros on Soros. Staying Ahead of the Curve with Byron Wien & Krisztina Koenen (John Wiley: New York & Chichester, 1995) 167.

[7] See The Financial Times (2nd March, 2001).

Black Roses: Georgia’s Reformers Fall Out

2007-11-03T11:21:00.000-07:00

Black Roses: Georgia’s Reformers Fall Out -

Georgia’s Transition from ‘People Power’ to Caucasian Cockpit

by

Mark Almond

Introduction:

“Georgia has made stunning progress in carrying out substantial economic, judicial and state reforms… that should allow Georgia to become a prosperous liberal market economy and a fully-fledged democracy governed by human rights and the rule of law. Georgia has set an example for the whole region and beyond.”

Council of Europe rapporteurs Matyas Eorsi & Kastriot Islami
(13 September 2007)[1]

“The style of Saakashvili’s governance … has made dishonesty, injustice and oppression a way of life. Everyday repression, demolition of houses and churches, robbery, ‘kulakization’, and
murders, I would stress, murders, have become common practice for the authorities.”

Ex-Defence Minister Irakli Okruashvili
(25th September, 2007)[2]

On Friday 2nd November, 2007, the centre of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, was occupied a huge crowd demanding the resignation of President Mikheil Saakashvili.[3] It was exactly four years since Saakashvili had cried foul about Georgia’s parliamentary elections and set in train the protests which brought him to power on 23rd November, 2003. While Western media have largely ignored the tail-spin in the popularity of Georgia’s arch-populist, the waves of criticism and protest denouncing the erstwhile hero of the so-called “Rose Revolution” take place against the sensitive geo-strategic backdrop of Georgia’s dispute with Russia over the status of its breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Whether the protests peter out or achieve their stated goal of forcing early elections, the myth of People Power has been tarnished once more by the reality of the power struggles and back-stabbing among yesteryear’s “reformers”.

The current crisis in Georgia began when the two leading figures in the “Rose Revolution”, Mikheil Saakashvili and Irakli Okruashvili had a spectacular falling out. Having served as Prosecutor-General purging supporters of the ousted president Eduard Shevardnadze and then as Defence Minister, Irakli Okruashvili, dramatically left Saakashvili’s government in November, 2006. After ten months of public silence, on 25th September, 2007, Mr Okruashvili announced he was launching a “Movement for a United Georgia”.

At the press conference launching his challenge to President Saakashvili, Okruashvili declared, “I want to tell you… recent developments in the country, the fascist tendencies and the steps taken by the authorities against the Georgian state, have made us [the new political party] come together before the public in this team…” Then he declared, “The style of Saakashvili’s governance, which has gone beyond the limits, has made dishonesty, injustice and oppression a way of life. Everyday repression, demolition of houses and churches, robbery, ‘kulakization’, and murders, I would stress, murders, have become common practice for the authorities.”[4]

Such as the shock effect that it was only two days later, after launching his new opposition party with this litany of charges against his former long-time political ally and personal friend, President Mikheil Saakashvili, that Irakli Okruashvili was arrested and taken to Tbilisi’s notorious Isolator Number 7, the scene of well-documented torture of political prisoners since 1991. After he had recanted his charges against the President but confessed to his own crimes in a video session with interrogators but without his lawyer present, Mr Okruashvili posted bail of US$6 million and was released.[5]

At the same time as the former top two of Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” in 2003 were at each others’ throats making blood curdling threats and accusations, events in Burma were being reported with same kind of naïve enthusiasm for “People Power” which has left a bitter taste in the mouths of impoverished and oppressed Georgians. They have twice experienced coups d’etat (in 1991 and 2003) lauded in the West as expressions of the will of the people. Even as Okruashvili and Saakashvili traded accusations of murder and treason in Tbilisi, Georgia’s revolution in 2003 was actually been cited as a model by Western media for the saffron-robed monks of Burma protesting against the military government there.[6]

Only people bewitched by the myth of “People Power” could think that given Georgia’s disillusionment any good come from another coloured-coded revolution endorsed by the same journalists and “human rights” activists who have praised Georgia as a model for change. Many of the Western groups who funded and trained the so-called “rose revolutionaries” in Georgia in 2003 have been behind the scenes of the “saffron revolution” in Burma. If Burma’s military rulers should go the way of Eduard Shevardnadze will Burma fall through the floor into the same politics of corruption, drugs smuggling and backstabbing which have pock-marked Georgia’s tragic post-Soviet history.

Proponents of “People Power” from the Caucasus to South-East Asia ignore the poverty, oppression, disease and death which have followed events like the “Rose Revolution.” Western media like The Economist and so-called human rights watchdogs like the Council of Europe have a lamentable record of fellow travelling with successive corrupt and cruel regimes in Tbilisi since 1991. It is not too much to say that there isn’t any bad situation which the nexus of Western intelligence agencies, media and human rights agencies cannot make worse, while singing their own praises as the proponents of a new dawn of human happiness.

The infighting and mutual accusations of crime, corruption and killings among the Rose Revolutionaries is the starkest case yet of the reality of a post-People Power country contrasting with the myth peddled abroad in the Western media. No journalists who painted a rosy picture of the new rulers of Georgia has yet come forward to correct, let alone apologise for their myth-making under the guise of reporting.

When friends fall out: Mikheil Sakashvili & Irakli Okruashvili

“Georgia has produced strong leaders. Stalin, Beria, Gamsakhurdia. Even Shevardnadze, before he got addicted to power. They looked beyond Georgia. My husband does the same;

he fits in the tradition. This country needs a strong hand. It is incredibly important that
respect for authority returns... I think my husband is the right person to frighten people.”

Sandra Roeloffs aka Mrs. Mikheil Saakashvili[7]

“After the revolution, the spring cleaning… Every week has brought fresh arrests of the great and not so good… The whole country is being treated to this televised humiliation, directed personally by the new prosecutor-general… He is also planning further arrests.”

Tim Whewell, “Newsnight”, BBC2 (8th April, 2004)

“This is what official Tbilisi is like nowadays: American workaholic management, West-orientated management, no political unpredictability so typical of the Kremlin”!

Anna Politvkovskaya[8]

They were buddies. Blood brothers. Soul-mates in the fight for democracy against corruption. Every authoritative voice – The Economist, New York Times, the BBC, even the martyred Anna Politkovskaya – assured us that Mikheil Saakashvili and Irakli Okruashvili were the best and brightest hopes for an end to the post-Soviet quagmire of corruption and political in-fighting. So how did it all go wrong?

Readers can be forgiven not knowing that it has all gone wrong. For instance, the BBC reporters who filed successive upbeat stories about the Saakashvili-Okruashvili double have fallen strangely silent when it comes to accounting for their spectacular bust-up.

BBC2’s Newsnight’s Tim Whewell used never to tire of telling us about Irakli Okruashvili’s dynamism as prosecutor: “another day, more arrests” which “doesn’t leave the chief corruption buster with much time for his wife and daughter.” Considering the prosecutor and the president , he assured viewers less than four years ago – admittedly an age ago in media memory – they were “the youngest, most photogenic government in the world…” Apparently photogenic equalled public spirited in Whewell-speak.[9]

In America, too, regime-friendly journalists emphasised the new order’s youth as if it equalled a moral quality. Saakashvili’s regime was a kind of Camelot in the Caucasus according to the Washington Post’s Peter Baker who gushed about the new class ruling Georgia in 2004: “Saakashvili has built the former Soviet Union's first generation of leaders outside the historically Western-oriented Baltic republics, a team whose members look like him -- in their thirties, Western-educated, untainted by the old system.” Taking his argument from Saakashvili himself, Baker quoted the new President , "Absence of experience is an asset in itself. Because what kind of experience was it? Experience at being corrupt. Experience at being part of the old system that didn't work."[10] Georgians have a long history of gulling gullible journalists. After all fellow traveling was invented by hacks hanging on Stalin’s every word, but any anthropologist or sociologist would point out that young people are the most socialised to the dominant system. It is all they have known. In this case it is all their parents and grandparents knew and served. Far from representing an automatic break with Soviet behavioural norms in Georgia, Saakashvili and his generation exemplified the way Sovietised Georgians operated within a patronage system dominated by a distant all-powerful boss. Shevardnadze saw the sun rise in Moscow “where Lenin lies”, Saakashvili sees the sun rise in the West in Washington. Both Shevardnadze and his erstwhile apprentice know how to utter the slogans of the patron while running their satrapy as usual. Sadly, Georgians expect that, and are certainly adapted to mouthing grand principles while doing dirty deals.

Gori gets a Bad Reputation

“Today I'm traveling with the deputy governor of this province, Vasil Makherashvilli, who's personally masterminding a sting operation in a neighboring town that started off from a complaint on the hotline. I should say that Vasil isn't exactly what you might think a deputy governor would look like. He's only 26. He comes from a non-governmental organization that specifically existed to monitor corruption. He's a very broad-shouldered young man in a standard black leather jacket and jeans.”

Tim Whewell of the BBC

“Misha Karelli, the 28-year-old governor in Gori. He's entertaining me at a sumptuous feast. I must say, it's hard not to be charmed by Georgia's new rulers. You don't often find such honesty and idealism among leaders in this part of the world. The Georgian government is so overwhelmingly popular. You can see it might be tempted to misuse its authority. But I'm more worried that its goal of ending corruption is simply too ambitious.”

Tim Whewell of the BBC[11]

Celebrated in the Soviet-era as Stalin’s birthplace – with a magnificent museum to enshrine the city’s most (in)famous son’s first home – Gori has played a symbolic role in Georgian politics since independence. Both in 1995 and again in 2000 Eduard Shevardnadze chose the city as the launch-pad for his presidential election campaigns. In November, 2003, Mikheil Saakashvili’s stormtroopers assembled at the foot of the largest standing statue of Stalin in the world before setting out on their “bloodless” assault on the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi.

It wasn’t only the BBC’s Whewell who swooned at the sight of so much leather and six o’clock shadow fighting crime. Theresa Freeze of the neo-conservative bastion of Caucasus studies, Johns Hopkins, quoted Misha Kareli declaring, ““Shida Kartli has been the region most active in combating corruption.”[12]

But now it has all gone wrong.

As early as June, 2005, newspapers reported that smuggled goods were being sold in Shidra Kartli shops owned by the governor’s family.[13] By September, 2005, a journalist was badly beaten after filing reports which implicated the governor in smuggling.[14] Although Western media like The Economist and CIA-endorsed outfits like the Jamestown Foundation attribute all the smuggling in the Gori region to the neighbouring breakaway province of South Ossetia, local school children know that smuggling is inherently trans-boundary and therefore it takes at least two to smuggle. It seems from the current charges that the big profiteers were on Georgian-controlled soil among Georgian officials (as before 2003).

After Okruashvili disappeared into Tbilisi’s No7 prison, Vasil Makharashvili was arrested along with Misha Kareli and other members of what the government prosecutors alleged was a mafia group involved in smuggling and other organized crime activities as well as bribe-taking centred on Gori.[15] It may well be that their support for Irakli Okruashvili’s new party was their greatest crime in the eyes of the Saakashvili political clan, but the dewy-eyed Western media which had portrayed the leather-jacketed Gori boys as Galahad’s of the struggle for democracy and honest government surely owe their readers and viewers an explanation.

Just as the Western media once swooned over Shevardnadze and his crooked crew before discovering that, one by one, they were mafiosi and oligarchs, so now Saakashvili’s most intimate allies from the Rose Revolution are being exposed as crooks, smugglers and embezzlers. It is a kind of poor man’s version of Stalin’s purge of his ex-comrades among the Old Bolsheviks of 1917

Silence has replaced this kind of reportage: “Ten o’clock at night but that’s still early in the prosecutor-general’s working day and we’re still on the move. An hour later we’ve arrived in Gori where Irakli [sic.] was first governor after the revolution, another pal aged 28, a former anti-corruption campaigner is his replacement.”[16] Back in spring, 2004, Whewell followed the Eliot Ness of the Caucasus on his nocturnal purge: “Until recently in Georgia a visit from men in masks probably meant you were about to be kidnapped but now it’s just the police…”! But in this case, it was the arrest of “a prominent MP said to be linked to organised crime.” In words dripping with cruel irony today, Whewell gloated about Okruashvili’s public degradation of a political opponent: “The while country is being treated to this televised humiliation directed personally by the new prosecutor general… This after all is what the revolution was for.”

Tim Whewell’s breathless report about Okruashvili’s crackdown on smuggling in Gori in April, 2004, showed the racket-boosters with “their ultimate democratic weapon – a hidden camera” and followed Vasil Makharashvili who was in charge of the “sting” operation. Makharashvili takes the incriminating video to his boss, Okruashvili who “is cool as ever but clearly pleased.” It is a “victory for the new honest Georgia”. Now, not only has Okruashvili been accused of the economic crimes which he was prosecuting but even his “pal”, the “former anti-corruption campaigner,” Makharashvili, was arrested for the same abuses of office.

In his days of unbridled power, Okruashvili told the BBC the meaning of the Rose revolution in November, 2003. Those who did not understand “what is happening in November have lost their jobs.” Even Whewell admitted that the idea that “failure to understand the meaning of the revolution has a slightly ominous sound in Gori. This is the home town of a man who turned informing into a patriotic duty. Stalin is still revered here as nowhere else in the world. He stands guard now over a pioneering experiment which encourages Georgians to turn informer again.”[17]

Briefly, even Whewell interviewed a critical local journalist who had a muck-raking programme on Rustavi-2 before 2003. Banned at the end of Shevardnadze’s regime – and its banning was one of the charges against Shevardnadze’s rule - Akaki Gogichaishvili’s programme was not resumed under Saakashvili and he told Whewell, “I am not very confident about democracy maintaining in this country.”

But such was the buzz of photogenic prosecuting activity that these warning words were soon forgotten. So much of the Western media followed suit. It was cool to condemn first and arrest afterwards. When he was still Saakashvili’s “iron fist”, Okruashvili like his boss was repeatedly quoted demanding people be imprisoned. On 4th January, 2005, he named four officials of the Defence Ministry in a press conference and declared, "I want to see these people in jail within a month.”[18]

Within three years, Okruashvili found himself peremptorily in jail.

Who decided on the arrest of Okruashvili so soon after he established an opposition party?

President Saakashvili is clear that there is a separation of powers in Georgia. When he was asked in mid-October on RenTV whether he had ordered the arrest of his “old friend” Okruashvili, Saakashvili roundly declared, “I don’t issue such orders, I have never done so, nor will ever do. In our country such issues are decided on the basis of supremacy of law. Very often I learn news from television, this is very normal.” But other evidence suggest that Mr Saakashvili’s years studying the US constitution at Columbia did not clarify the separation of powers quite as much as he suggests. When Ilan Greenberg of the New York Times interviewed the Georgian President in 2004, he recorded an interruption to their conversation: “On the phone, Saakashvili hesitated for just a moment and then shouted, ‘To jail!’ and slammed down the receiver.”[19]
Controlling the courts has been a central part of Saakashvili’s “reforms”. When ex-Supreme Court Justice Tamar Laliashvilli refused to resign to make way for a crony of the president, even though offered her salary for the next ten years, she was accused of taking bribes and sacked – or so she claims. Laliashvili is waiting for the European Court of Human Rights to hear her case.[20]

Immediately after the Okruashvili purge began, President Saakashvili announced on 4th October that "I have taken the decision to create an anticorruption group answering only to the president.”[21] This seemed again to show that acting as prosecutor, judge and jury comes naturally to the Columbia and Strasbourg-trained human rights lawyer of yesteryear. The President’s dissident former foreign minister, Salome Zurabishvili pointed out that Mr Saakashvili’s intensification of his rhetorical attack on corruption eerily recalls the fin-de-regime of his predecessor: “Shevardnadze established the anti-corruption commission in the period of his regime’s sunset.”[22]

Whatever Mr Okruashvili’s faults – and how a young man with a long career in Georgia’s notoriously badly-paid public service could find six million dollars to post bail is a mystery – his real crime was threatening to challenge Mikheil Saakashvili in next year’s presidential elections. Precisely because Okruashvili knows how presidents are really made in Georgia[23], his entry into opposition to Saakashvili was deeply sinister for the sitting president. The current purge atmosphere in Georgia combined with heightened nationalist hysteria with regularly staged spats with Russia over the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia seems to be the opening salvo in Mr Saakashvili’s re-election campaign, or maybe it is just his survival strategy.

The Trail of Bodies, or How the Caucasian Knot Tightened

“I am not saying that Zhvania was murdered, but what I
can say at this point is that Zhvania’s corpse was actually
brought into the flat where it was apparently discovered.”

Irakli Okruashvili[24]

Every “People Power” revolution has had its murder mystery from shooting of Benigno Aquino on his return to Manila in August, 1983, via the “student” allegedly beaten to death by the Czechoslovak police on 17th November, 1989 who turned out to be a Communist secret police agent, the spate of kidnappings and killings in Serbia which culminated on 12th March, 2003, with the martyrdom of the anti-Milošević premier Zoran Djindjić at the hands of a para-military who had helped him to power on 5th October, 2000, to the as yet unsolved poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine in September, 2004. Yet the official explanations of the death of Prime Minister, Zurab Zhvania, due to a gas leak while paying a late-night visit to the apartment of a young male friend in Tbilisi on 3rd February, 2005, never convinced many people in Georgia that Zhvania’s death was an accident.[25]

When Okruashvili accused the Saakashvili regime of murder, mbezzlement, intimidation and fraud, he also attacked the man regarded by many observers as the true power behind Saakashvili’s throne. Among other things, Okruashvili accused Gigi Bokeria of destroying a church for gain. Mr Bokeria is at the heart of the inner circles of the global People Power enterprise. He was the Rose Revolutionary who ran the Soros-funded Liberty Institute and organised the Kmara (Enough) youth movement which was the public face of the mob which gathered to storm the Parliament building on 23rd November, 2003. An index of how influential Mr Bokeria is was the glimpse of him smoking a large cigar [!] in the Washington offices of Bruce Jackson, NATO-expander-in-chief and LOckheedMartinMarieta alumnus, in the French documentary film Revolution.com. La conquête de l’est (Revolution.com. The Conquest of the East).[26]

Okruashviliu also accused Saakashvili of ordering an attack on Valeri Gelashvili, a former MP from the opposition Republican Party. Gelashvili was badly beaten by armed men in central Tbilisi in July 2005.
“Saakashvili didn't want to get rid of him [Gelashvili],” Okruashvili said. “He only ordered him to be beaten him up and the task was perfectly executed by [Interior Minister Vano] Merabishvili.” Then the businessman, Sandro Girgvliani, murdered on 28th January, 2006, beaten at an insiders’ restaurant in the capital. Okruashvili pointed the finger again at Interior Minister Merabashvili

Although a short stay in the Isolator was enough to bring Mr Okruashvili to his senses and have him recant his charges including then allegation that “Zhvania’s corpse was actually brought into the flat where it was apparently discovered,” since the relatives of Zhvania and the other dead man point out that neither man’s fingerprints were found at the site of their apparent deaths, the mystery of their fate has not been solved for most people by assurances from the authorities that the Prime Minister’s death was the sort of leaking gas accident that happens all too often in Tbilisi![27]

Zhvania had been a potential rival to Saakashvili for the presidency having enjoyed Shevardnadze’s patronage too and acted as his premier before shifting to the new Western-backed reformer, Saakashvili. Unlike both Saakashvili and Okruashvili, Zhvania was not an abrasive man-of-action, but a behind-the-scenes deal-maker. In contrast to the two younger men, Zhvania tried to manoeuvre opponents into concessions rather than browbeat them. His death seemed to signal the likely ascendancy of the hardliners around Saakashvili like Okruashvili. But in the Machiavellian politics of reform in Stalin’s homeland, the dialectics of power and profit are the only logic at work. Although Okruashvili seemed to be a likely beneficiary of Zhvania’s death, the removal of the Prime Minister who had acted as a moderator on the more extreme and bellicose statements and initiatives of both Saakashvili and Okruashvili actually facilitated the marginalisation of the man from Gori. As Saakashvili eyed re-election, removing his former closest henchman became a logical step – a young man like Okruashvili might get impatient for his turn at the top.

Did Saakashvili want to car-bomb the Rupert Murdoch of the Caucasus?

“Saakashvili told me [Badri] should be got rid of the
way it happened to Rafik Hariri.”

Irakli Okruashvili

Irakli Okruashvili’s claim that President Saakashvili wanted the Georgian oligarch, Badri Patarkatsishvili removed by a car bomb was only one of the sensational allegations made by the ex-defence minister on the television channel, Imedi, which is a joint-venture between Mr Patarkatsishvili and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Badri Patarkatsishvili has links to both Russia’s exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky as well as to Rupert Murdoch. Berezovsky and Murdoch enjoy intimate contacts. Back in September, 2004, “Mudlark” put an intriguing item in his column in the Financial Times entiled, “Kremlinology”: “Rupert Murdoch and exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had lunch yesterday at the Savoy Grill. The two men exchanged warm greetings with a bear hug and kisses on each cheek. Murdoch’s News Corporation has outdoor poster interests in Russia and watches for other opportunities there but what was message was intended for whom by a meeting so meant to be noticed?”[28] With friends and business partners like those it is little wonder that Badri Patarkatsishvili’s private jet has unlimited access to British airports at a time when Britain’s government insists it has tightened up border controls to keep out ex-Eastern bloc criminals, other dubious types and is checking even legitimate travelers more closely.

The Imedi headquarters in Tbilisis decorated with the flags of two superpowers: the United States of America and Murdoch’s News Corporation.[29] The Imedi website carries a Fox News banner at the top of its homepage.[30]

Badri Patarkatsishvili met Murdoch in New York on 25th September.[31] At about the same time as the Badri-Murdoch summit, Okruashvili appeared on their Georgian television channel, Imedi, to launch his sensational charges against President Saakashvili. Badri insists that he doesn’t have editorial oversight of the Imedi’s programming, but then Mr Murdoch has said much the same about the London Times or Fox News.

As his relations with the Saakashvili regime soured, on 31st October, it was announced by Imedi TV that Badri had “granted his shares” to Murdoch’s News Corp.[32] Then Badri flew back from his London base, home to so many distressed oligarchical folk, and announced modestly, ““I am not a person with an experience in staging demonstrations, but I decided to come here just to look into your eyes and tell you: I have no ambition of having any official position; the only ambition I have is to be an ordinary citizen of Georgia who will be able to build united and prosperous Georgia. I believe that we have enough wisdom to solve problems through political means.”[33]

Badri’s words echo the classic sentiments offered by People Power advocates denying their ambition for high office. Who said? “The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public; he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin – and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for… The inner most foundation of his ‘political’ undertaking is moral and existential.”[34] Those were Vaclav Havel’s sentiments as he embarked on his march on Prague Castle and twelve years in office! With Okruashvili’s forced exile, maybe Badri is stepping up to the plate as Georgia’s next Great White Hope.

Having demanded media freedom for their onslaught against Shevardnadze in 2003, Bokeria’s former colleagues in the Liberty Institute drafted a media bill backed by the Georgian government which would have regulated what journalists could say, even what they could wear on screen! That was too much for Mr Murdoch’s local representative, F. Lewis Robertson, who called it a “real tragedy”, which it must have been to arouse his concern since Mr Robertson never found a problem with home channel Fox’s balance: “I am a big Fox News watcher … I never got that they were leaning to the right,.. [T]hey always had two sides of the story."[35] Badri may be less high-minded than Mr Murdoch and the idea of offering both sides of the story is not one which Georgia’s journalists have ever taken on board despite 15 years of media education courses and studies at Columbia’s journalism center.

One of Okruashvili’s allegations on 25th September was that Gigi Bokeria himself was behind the destruction of a half-built Orthodox Church in Adjara in May, 2005. This was portrayed as an attack on the Georgian Church. Although many observers might think that Patriarch Ilia II had discredited himself by his subservience to successive regimes since the Brezhnev era, maybe because Georgia’s “reformers” have also gone from Marxism via the Young Pioneers via the Komsomol, Party to the Market Economy they seek his endorsement as what they understand as moral authority. Neither Saakashvili nor Bokeria can have missed the significant mission of charity which took place on 3rd October when the secretary of the Georgian patriarch handed the imprisoned Irakli Okruashvili “fruit, prayer-book, psalms, a cross and candles.”[36] Ilia II has always been guided, no doubt, by the Holy Spirit, and so has always backed the winning side in Georgian politics in his long tenure in office. Mr. Saakashvili and Gogi Bokeria may rue the day when they demolished one church too many.[37]

Big Brother is Watching You

“Georgia has made significant progress in outlining and beginning the implementation of judicial reform… But there must be continued progress, especially in ensuring the independence of the judiciary. We also feel that there is a need for greater transparency on the part of the political establishment – in order to better explain and debate reforms with the general public, strengthen their credibility and consolidate the democratic process. This is one more area on which we will keep a close eye in the run-up to your Parliamentary and Presidential elections next year…”

Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO secretary-general, 4th October, 2007[38]

At the beginning of 2007, Richard Holbrooke, the would-be next Democratic Secretary of State declared, “the 38-year-old Saakashvili represents almost everything the United States and the European Union should support."[39] But as the year progressed ominous signs appeared that the Georgian President was no longer the darling of the West.

Even the new hyper-active President of France who celebrated victory night by denouncing Russia’s “crimes” in Chechnya has distanced himself from his Georgian counterparts Russophobe rhetoric. Saakashvili may have over-estimated his standing as a “blood brother” of Nicholas Sarkozy. Despite their shooting-from-the-lip approach, Sarkozy is President of France not of an aid-dependent Caucasian state which does not control much of its territory. The French Defence Minister, Herve Morin, was quoted by Reuters as saying, “Despite all the affection and friendship we have for the Georgians...and I've said this to the head of the Georgian government, it can only happen if it is not seen as an additional threat to Russia.”[40] In short Sarko has told Saaki to cool it.

The surprise visit of NATO secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, later on 3rd October was an indication of how alarmed Western security circles were by the developments in Georgia. Although Mr Saakashvili tried to show Scheffer’s visit as backing him personally, the NATO bureaucrat pointedly called for more reforms of the judiciary and improvements in the democratic performance of Georgia – and this was the gist of the Voice of America report on his visit.[41] Scheffer told a hastily assembled audience of students at Tbilisi University, “There is a need for greater transparency on the part of the political establishment in order to better explain and debate reforms with the general public, strengthen their credibility and consolidate the democratic process.”[42] Then at the beginning of November, Washington’s point man for People Power, Assistant Secretary of State, Dan Fried, appeared in Tbilisi and met the opposition leaders.

Mr Saakashvili won’t need reminding that Shevardnadze’s former soul-mate, James Baker III, who once endorsed his ex-Soviet counterpart for the accolade of the Enron Prize, turned up in Tbilisi five months before the dénouement of the “Rose Revolution” to inform the then Georgian President that Washington was withdrawing the mandate of heaven and transferring it to the youthful Saakashvili.

Mr Saakashvili’s natural reaction to adversity is to lash out. Referring to his critics, Saakashvili told his press conference with NATO chief, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, ““My duty is not to calm them down. My duty is to make them even more nervous.”[43] This is not model democrat-speak and it embarrasses the Western big cheeses Saakashvili needs to keep on board to provide the financial and military aid which underpins his regime.

Reform in One Family

“Three years ago I detained Saakashvili’s uncle Temur Alasania
for taking a bribe of 200 thousand USD, but the president made
me release him.”

Irakli Okruashvili (25th September, 2007)[44]

Twenty years ago Romanians joked that under Stalin the Soviet Union had achieved Socialism in One Country, but Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu had gone one better and created Socialism in One Family. Nowadays, Georgia increasingly looks like a one family state. Mikheil Saakashvili’s father abandoned the infant and his mother and he became close to her family. His uncle, Temur, is one of those extraordinary networkers whose career flourished across the old Soviet Union giving him contacts among the nomenklatura from Tbilisi to Kiev especially, but out into the wider non-Communist world. The collapse of the Soviet Union found Uncle Temur already well-established across the Atalantic.

Temur Alasania owned property in New York and so it was natural for the young Mikheil to stay in his uncle’s property in New York when he studied there and worked for the law firm, Patterson, Bellknap, Webb & Tyler.[45] His human rights studies at Columbia were helped by lodging at the nearby family apartment. Log cabin to White House may be the American way but Georgians know family connections count for everything.

Even though the number of flights to Tbilisi – excluding oligarchical private jets – has fallen in recent years, the capital was granted a brand new airport complex to add to the one added under Shevardnadze. Every Georgians “knows” that Uncle Temur mediated the project. Unfortunately, hardly had the grandiose new airport been declared open that its roof blew off. The Western donors presumably stumped up again to put it back on.

Other Alasania clan members have sen their stock rise since 2003. Saakashvili is alleged to have helped his half-brother, Giorgi, to his position as an adviser to one of the operators of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline.[46] Even his mother, Guili, plays a number of roles including manager of grants at the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, Georgia / George Mason University![47]

Of course, allegations of the First Family’s domination of the Georgian economy are challenged. Suggests that as many as five families actually control the country’s economy and have divvied it up between them.[48]

On 25th October, 2007, the Georgian Ombudsman’s office distributed the following report by email: “The Public Defender responded to the speech of the President of Georgia on the Government meeting, where Mikheil Saakashvili spoke about meat mafia existing in the country. “Our goal is to destroy any kind of monopoly in Georgia, like we destroyed meat mafia last year in accordance to my order. We won’t let anybody to have such privilege and exclusive in Georgian economy in any branch” – stated the President.

However, the Ombudsman’s inquiry suggested a different conclusion.

“The case was related to the crime committed in the result of direct instructions of David Kezerashvili, Chief of Financial Police at that time (currently the Minister of Defense of Georgia) towards Austrian meat production company “Schirnhoffer”. It is indicated in the Report, that in spite of resolution of this problem the guilty persons, who created problems to the foreign investor and violated Georgian legislation, were not punished. And Georgia has lost the investor, who refused to implement his plans and made investments in our country.”

In other words, according to this report, the current Defence Minister, Kerazashvili, was part of the very group that his patron has promised to “destroy.” This combination rhetorical anti-corruption with politically-targeted arrests corrodes public trust in the Georgian government – at least at home.

Saakashvili’s supporters would point out that Okruashvili’s “party” was a similar nest of cronies from his clan and career networks. Among those arrested at the same time as the fallen anti-corruption angel were close colleagues. For instance, Dimitri Kitoshvili was a partner at the law office “Okruashvili & Company” before entering politics and rising to become President Saakahvili’s spokesman. (The current spat is between two closely-related ‘families’, and like any family quarrel all the more bitter.) Kitoshvili was accused of helping Okruashvili pressure an arrested businessman, Jemal Svanidze, to hand over shares in the mobile phone cash cow, Geocell. Kitovishvili turned state witness to get bail by incriminating Okruashvili as shown in a video on Georgian TV which does not acknowledge the presumption of innocence among other Council of Europe norms which the Shevardnadze regime signed onto when Mikheil Saakashvili was Justice Minister.[49] Another fallen clan member, Mikheil Kareli is from Tkviavi – the same village as Okruashvili.[50] On and on the clan lists go but under Western eyes they are ignored.

Although studies of nepotism and clan networks under regimes disapproved of in the West are routinely published giving names and other precise details of the “We know where you live and do business”-variety[51], Saakashvili’s Georgia has been spared until now this Namierite approach to the politics of reform – as Shevardnadze’s was until it lost favour in the West. When will Georgetown or Oxford or the Central European University, let alone Transparency International analyse the family trees of the public officials whose salaries George Soros pledged to pay out of his own funds to put corruption in the dustbin of Georgia’s history.

The Ceauşescu of the Caucasus?

“At the maximum I need a two-room apartment, one office,
and a few rooms for my staff."

Mikheil Saakashvili

On 6th January, 2004, the Soros-US taxpayer co-funded website “Transitions online” reported on “Georgia: A President without a palace” relaying to its readers Saakashvili’s assurance, “At the maximum I need a two-room apartment, one office, and a few rooms for my staff." The editorial argued enthusiastically that the decision by the “master populist” to stick to a two-room flat “could also entrench support for a man who, on 4 January, won a level of support usually seen only in autocratic regimes”! Sadly, for readers relying on Transitions online for information, the magazine never got around to telling them that before long Mr Saakashvili decided that populism is good but palaces are better.

Within weeks Mr Saakashvili took over the former headquarters of the gendarmerie from Nicholas I’s time whose neo-classical portals looked down from a commanding height across Tbilisi. Like a Ceausescu reborn (and enjoying the same level, of support in Washington and Western Europe as the Balkan bulldozer in his heyday), Saakashvili set about demolishing the fine old building and hectares of (often Armenian houses) behind it to create space for --- a Presidential Palace worthy of a “master populist.”

In November, 2006, Members of the European Parliament were still being assured by their official information service, “President Saakashvili lives in a 3-room apartment in a private residential building in Tbilisi with his wife, Sandra, and their two sons.”[52] By now, Mr Saakashvili was giving regular press conferences including with EU dignitaries on the grand balcony overlooking Old Tbilisi.

When I tried to photograph the new palace in July, 2005, I was detained by Saakashvili’s police. An unidentified man with steel grey hair looking very un-Georgian photographed me from inside an unmarked car, while the Georgian cops told me, “You wouldn’t be allowed to photograph the White House or Buckingham palace would you?” My attempt to explain to them photographing the façade of either the White House or Buckingham Palace were about the only things ordinary people could do in relation to their heads of state’s residences cut no ice. For the first time since Romanian police destroyed my photographs of Ceausescu’s new Palace of the People seventeen years earlier in July, 1988, I saw my amateur photography deleted from the record – in democratic Georgia![53]

Although in 2003 Goirgi Arveladze, the president’s spokeman said that only a “facelift” costing “a few thousand laris” was involved. Soon the project took on grotesque proportions.[54]

Arbitrary interference with businesses and other property owners has become the order of the day as the loyal reformers around Saakashvili and the First Family cash in on his tottering hold on power before it may be too late. For instance, the Public Defender has condemned the manner in which the Sony Centre on Rustaveli Avenue in central Tbilisi was raided and shut down with considerable damage to the property. Other businesses like Lavari 2 and the Rustaveli café have suffered similar damage during raids by heavy-handed officials. The Ombudsman’s report refers to the “complete disdain” of the officials responsible for their legal obligations. Significantly, the 200 police officers who took part in the eviction of the Sony Centre on 14th August, 2007 were acting on behalf of the new owner of the building, the Ministry of Economic Development, which ignored the lease arrangements already in operation between the tenants and the former owner.[55] This kind of high-handed action by Georgian state officers has been replicated across the country since 2004 when private property (for instance, on the valuable coast near Batumi after May, 2004) has been seized without due process. There is a strong suspicion that private profit motivates actions ostensibly carried out for public purposes or supposedly to enforce the law.

Before the Rose Revolution, Mr Saakashvili made frequent attacks on the destruction of Tbilisi’s extraordinarily rich architectural heritage by property speculators close to the Shevardnadze regime. However, since November, 2003, the pace of urban destruction has rapidly increased. George W. Bush’s visit in 2005 involved a Soviet-style reception rally in Freedom Square where the gaps in the surrounding nineteenth century buildings due to speculative demolitions were masked by posters of the distinguished guest and Georgian soldiers on exercise. Reformers can expropriate and bulldoze
What they like to the greedy applause of Western insiders.

Backing much of the euphemistically-named urban “refurbishment” is the scandal-prone European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the so-called “glistening bank” after its own lavish Ceauşist headquarters in London became the focus of scandal in the 1990s.[56] The EBRD ignores the racist undertones of much of the reasoning for whose property is emptied of people and “refurbished” and for whose benefit.

Saakashvili’s loyalist, Besik Jugheli, who leads the National Movement in the Georgian Parliament, dismissed those likely to be displaced by redevelopment or disadvantaged by the new property tax as non-Georgians: “Mainly Armenians, Azeris, Kurds and other nationalities live in the historic districts… It is not directed against Georgians”![57] Only Armenians…

Nationalism informs so much of the rhetoric of the Saakashvili regime that it may not notice how offensive its racism towards non-Georgians is. But surely the Open Society advocates and civil society NGOs in the West along with the Council of Europe, OSCE and inter-governmental human rights agencies ought to sit up and take notice. Consistency on human rights observation has never been one of the virtues of the OSCE and Council of Europe and their incestuous friends in the NGO community. Georgian regimes have got away with murder while receiving the highest marks from their human rights and democracy assessors, so there is little reason to think that a bit of forced expropriation and ethnically-biased demolition will worry the Council of Europe in Strasbourg or the OSCE in Vienna.

Rather like Ceauşescu towards the fin-de-regime, Saakashvili’s nationalist rhetoric has intensified. The Romanian dictator suddenly demanded Russia return Moldova to its rightful owners in 1989, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have become ever more frequent subjects of provocative statements and sudden visits by helicopter to the border zones.

Saakashvili has made increasingly bizarre statements. At the end of August, he assured the media that the Mother of God had personally intervened in Georgian affairs more than once! For instance, the Virgin had acted to thwart a grenade attack on the equally devout George W. Bush when he was in Tbilisi 2005, and again She had prevented a stray missile from exploding earlier in August.[58]

In case, nationalism and religion are not sufficient to rally the faithful, Mr Saakashvili has also started doling out good old-fashioned dole to the poor. TV sets have been donated from the presidential hands as well as modest one-off payments to pensioners. On 21st December, 1989, Ceauşescu was cut short making similar promises of better pensions, etc. Will Saakashvili buy off his domestic critics and keep his foreign backers on board?

Saakashvili on the Slippery Slope?

“Mikheil Saakashvili has the charm and energy of youth, the advantage of good English, and a clear commitment to liberal democracy, which he proposes to apply to the whole of his country. His arrival on the scene, his popularity, and his policies offer living proof that things can go right in the southern Caucasus.”

Robert Cottrell of The Economist (9th August, 204)[59]

“Mr Saakashvili is losing the aura he once had of being the sole undisputed leader of Georgia. In the past he has faced down critics with histrionics and theatrical brinkmanship. A sober response, not so far in his political repertoire, may now be called for.”

Anonymous in The Economist (4th October, 2007)[60]

With even The Economist backing away from its unqualified endorsement of the regime and with a united opposition headed by former Saakashvili insiders calling for a mass protests on 2nd November, Georgia looks set for a turbulent period. None of Georgia’s three presidents since independence in 1991 has left office at the end of a normal term in office. Violent upheaval has been the Georgian way. Whether Mikheil Saakashvili will buck this trend and leave office after a constitutionally-mandate period remains to be seen, but the odds are shortening on another Georgian revolution. Ordinary Georgians have seen no benefit from the coups in 1991 and again in 2003 which were hailed in the West as “People Power” pure and simple. However disillusioned Georgians and other long-suffering people around the world may be with the West’s cult of revolution, so long as bogus revolutions to suit geo-strategic purposes can be passed off as the work of the people, then Georgians will have to suffer another false dawn of freedom and prosperity.

Mikheil Saakashvili will know better than most that dissidents in Georgia are only interviewed by key Western media or quoted by the International Crisis Group when the regime’s fate has been decided in Washington. Shevardnadze’s regime was beyond reproach until the very same media analysts and academics who had praised his anti-corruption record and struggle for democracy suddenly announced that he led a deeply-flawed kleptocratic regime. Observers of “straws in the wind” will recall the sudden appearance of an anti-Shevardnadze article by Georgetown’s Charles King in the National Interest in 2001.[61] Early in the current crisis, a similar “Nina Andreevna”-style article by an “apprentice editor” appeared on 28th September recounting sympathetically a visit of anti-Saakashvili politicians to Washington.[62] When Zviad Gamsakhurdia sought asylum in the West after the pro-Shevardnadze Putsch drove him out of Georgia in January, 1992, Washington and London did not deign to reply. Now his son, Konstantin, is received in the halls of influence by some of the same long-serving political elite who derided his father. Saakashvili knows that such people don’t host luckless outsiders, only potential future insiders.

Looking back to the twilight of Shevardnadze’s regime, Saakashvili will need no reminding that he was then the regime-insider-turned-crusader for honesty and fair elections. Maybe Okruashvili’s spell in the Isolator will give him Khodorkovsky-style credentials: he can be sold as a martyr for our common ideals to Westerners whose memories may not be so short that they have forgotten the Rose Revolution of four years ago and who will need a new saviour with an even more fairy-tale “back-story” than either Shevardnadze or Saakashvili. Even the authorities’ bundling of Okruashvili out of the country before the mass demonstrations began on 2nd November suggest that he is still seen as a threat, but maybe Okruashvili’s video-confession will discredit him – opening the way for a more plausible anti-corruption champion like Salome Zurabishvili. Ms. Zurabaishvili would probably enjoy the backing of France’s own lead-from-the-mouth president Nicholas Sarkozy, who appears less enamoured of his Georgian counterpart’s loquacity at their meetings than Mr Saakashvili may think. Sarkozy likes to do the talking.

Ms. Zurabishvili who was France’s ambassador to Georgia before becoming Georgia’s foreign minister originally endorsed Saakashvili in The Washington Post in 2004 saying that Saakashvili was “the last chance for Georgia.”[63] But in mid-October, Ms Zurabishvili told the Azeri press agency, “I have never been Saakashvili’s ally. Salome Zurabishvili always supported democratic development of Georgia. I have always tried development of Georgia as a democratic, independent and free state. I have never been supporter of Saakashvili and his party.”[64] Already using the presidential third person when speaking of herself, Ms. Zurabishvili may have grounds for seeing herself as the Benzir Bhutto of the Caucasus.

To survive in office, Saakashvili may have to jettison what is left of his commitment to Council of Europe's judicial standards – after all, they never got in the way of Shevardnadze’s security forces throughout the 1990s. It was only when the powers-that-be in the West decided to moved Eduard Shevardnadze along that the Council of Europe began to reproach his regime for its use of torture or appalling prison conditions. There will be little comfort for Saakashvili that the Council of Europe’s Secretary-General, Terry Davis, was the rapporteur who approved Georgia’s application to join that august body while Shevardnadze still basked in Western approval. Davis was one of the first to turn on Shevardnadze and endorse Saakashvili, in turn Davis was promoted to top Euro-human rights bureaucrat. Since his predecessor, Walter Schwemmer lost the Secretary-Generalship of the CoE for criticising Saakashvili’s way of governing after the Rose Revolution we may doubt if Mr Davis will make such a vulgar error if Georgia’s turbulent politics throw up a new hero of the people.

The choice between the likes of Saakashvili and Okruashvili is not a choice of principles. Both are rhetorically anti-Russian, pro-NATO, pro-market and so on, and, like their predecessors in the Georgian in-fighting of the early 1990s, both lead clans with tentacles into the dark corners of Georgian society – a murky reality which their Western admirers prefer to ignore today as they did when glamorising Shevardnadze, Ioseliani and Kitovani after 1991.

Only one thing is certain: the international claque which awarded Shevardnadze so many ovations after the 1991 coup before booing him off the world stage four years ago, and which then went on to sing Saakashvili’s praises from the same hymn-sheet, will be on hand to hail his successor provided only that his promises of prosperity and honesty prove as hollow as his predecessors’ declarations of principle. Until Western governments, media and human rights groups acknowledge their record of enthusiastic support for failed regimes in Georgia in the past and show contrition and shame for their role there , there is no hope of international support for real reforms, worthy of the name, in Georgia or elsewhere. Even if Saakashvili falls, ordinary Georgians will still suffer the dead-weight of the West’s unapologetic backing of corrupt and feuding regimes. The downward spiral in the Caucasus is far from over.

------------------------------------------

Footnotes

[1] See Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), “Stunning Progress Achieved in Georgia is an Example for the Whole Region and Beyond” (19th September, 2007): http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/Press/StopPressView.asp?ID=1958. The World Bank which backed Shevardnadze has no problems with his successor according to the Washington Post's Maria Sanchez, "today Georgia is the best performer in fighting corruption and the second-best in terms of a functioning rule of law in that region, according to the World Bank's latest governance report"! See her "Rule of Law Declines in Latin America" in Seattle-Post Intelligencer (8th August, 2007), but criticism comes from the sponsors of the Rose Revolution at Freedom House. Christopher Walker of FH says, "the judiciary stands as an exception that is a thorn in the side of the country's larger reform ambitions." See Daria Vaisman, "As Georgia reforms, judiciary under scrutiny" in The Christian Science Monitor (17th September, 2007).
[2] See “Irakli Okruashvili’s Speech at the Presentation of His Party” in Civil Georgia (25th September, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15862.
[3] Le Monde put its size at 70,000. See http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3214,36-974149@51-628857,0.html.
[4] See Civil Georgia, “Okruashvili’s Speech at the Presentation of His Party” (25th September, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15862.
[5] See Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Georgian Ex-minister Withdraws Saakashvili Allegations” (8th October, 2007): http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/10/05E8BAC8-8624-4CF4-8DB2-BEFD2BF0936C.html
[6] After one passing reference, CNN International , for instance, ignored the Georgian crisis though it aired adverts for “Invest in Georgia” with its slogan “The Winner is Georgia” including on 2nd November, 2007.
[7] Quoted by Richard W. Carlson, “Georgia on his Mind. George Soros’s Potemkin Revolution” in The Weekly Standard ix, 35 (24th May, 2004): http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/%20Articles/000/000/004/104ygtvi.asp?pg=2+Stalin+Saakashvili+Beria&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8. For the original Dutch version, see the weekly "HP/De Tijd" (6th February 2004), 27. I am grateful to Maarten Doude van Troostwijk for this reference.
[8] See Erin Arvedlund, “Rose Revolutionary” in Columbia Magazine (Winter, 2005): http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Winter2005/saakashvili.html.
[9] See Tim Whewell’s report on BBC2 “Newsnight” (8th April, 2004).
[10] See Peter Baker, “Building a Democracy” in The Washington Post (22nd May, 2004), which pleased the Saakashvili regime so well it was placed on the official website: http://www.georgiaemb.org/DisplayMedia.asp?id=341
[11] Both quotations from BBC2 “Newsnight” (8th April, 2004).
[12] See Theresa Freese, “Security, governance and Economic Reform in Shida Kartli” in Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst (19th May, 2004): http://www.cacianalyst.org/view_article.php?articleid=2413
[13] See “Charges from the ‘Right’ – Smuggling continues in Shida Kartli” in 24 Hours (16th June, 2005): http://www.24hours.ge/index.php?n=264&r=1&id=1523
[14] See Reporters without Borders (9th September, 2005): http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14929
[15] See e.g. www.mediascrape.com/News/ViewNewsItem.aspx?newsItemId=32884&rootVideoPanelType=1.
[16] See Tim Whewell, “Newsnight” BBC2 (8th April, 2004).
[17] The Rose revolution was in fact launched from the foot of Stalin’s statue in Gori by Mikheil Saakashvili and his “pals”, but the symbolism of the departure point for their Mussolini-style “March on Tbilisi” is lost on Western journalists.
[18] See Jean-Christoph Peuch, “What's Behind Defense Minister's Fraud Charges?” RFE/RL ( 6th January, 2005): http://www.kvali.com/kvali/index.asp?obiektivi=show&n=242
[19] See Marianna Makisimovskaya, “Georgian President saddened by frozen relations with Russia” RenTV (13th October, 2007): http://www.eurasianet.org/posts/101507ru.shtml, & Ilan Greenberg, “The Not-So-Velvet Revolution” in the New York Times Magazine (.30th May, 2004): http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/053004NYT_Saak.shtml.
[20] See Manfred Quiring, “Der Glanz des Reformers Saakaschwili ist verblasst” in Die Welt (2nd October, 2006): http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article156932/%20Der_Glanz_des_Reformers%20Saakaschwili_ist_%20%20verblasst.html
verblasst.html.
[21] See “Georgia`s Saakashvili Vows to Fight Graft”, Javno (4th October, 2007): http://www.javno.com/en/world/clanak.php?id=86992.
[22] See “Opposition Slams Saakashvili” in The Georgian Times (5th October, 2007): http://www.geotimes.ge/index.php?m=home&newsid=7097
[23] An even younger Okruashvili worked in the Georgian Central Election Commission in 1995 when it validated Shevardnadze’s election as president. Two weeks before that stitch-up I pointed out that the boxes containing the tens of thousands of signatures endorsing Shevardnadze’s nomination contained blanks below the top sheet. Britain’s Foreign Office denounced me as biased. The Soros-funded Transitions (now on-line) which has yet to report on the Saakashvili-Okruashvili bust up, carried Jeremy Druker, “War of the Monitors” in Transitions (February, 1999), 14-21, repeating the FO’s false claim that my visit was funded by it when I was in Georgia for the Norwegian Helsinki Committee knowing that Whitehall backed Shevardnadze blindly. My real crime in the eyes of British diplomats may have been reporting that the wife of a Georgian Mafioso in Jaba Ioseliani’s Mkhedrioni gang was a secretary in the British embassy and that the drugs-and-people smuggling racketeers intended to make good use of that!
[24] See “Okruashvili Ups Ante on Former Allies” Civil Georgia (26th September, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15869.
[25] See this Group’s “Georgia: Power Cut” (February, 2005): http://www.bhhrg.org/CountryReport.asp?CountryID=10&ReportID=242
[26] Manon Loizeau’s film is sympathetic to the People Power network, but too honest in its portrayal of them and their behaviour for general release and is now only available on Russian voiced-over web-sites. See e.g. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?%20fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=45233954. In the same film, Mr Saakashvili is shown looking nervously at Mr Jackson after a speech and saying, "Did I get it right?"
[27] See http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15869
[28] See Clay Harris/Mudlark column: “Kremlinology” in The Financial Times (16th September, 2004).
[29] See Molly Corso, “Georgia: ‘We Report, You Decide’ – New Media Motto?” in Transitions online (29th January, 2007): http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/printf.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=%204&NrIssue=202&NrSection=1&NrArticle=18207&tpid=10&ST1=ad&ST_T1=job&ST_AS1=1&ST2=body&ST_T2=letter&ST_AS2=1&ST3=text&ST_T3=aatol&ST_AS3=1&ST_max=3 [30] Go to Imedi.ge/en.
[31] See “Georgia will serve as a hub for News Corporation’s further expansion “ Civil Georgia (26th September, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15882
[32] See Badri Patarkatsishvili grants his shares of TV-Radio Broadcasting Company “Imedi” to “News Corp” Imedi (31st October, 2007): http://www.imedinews.ge/en/news_read/74738
[33] See Civil Georgia, “Patarkatsishvili Addresses Protest Rally” 92nd Vovember, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=16169.
[34] Quoted in H. Gordon Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe (St.Antony’s/Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1989), 134. As ever Kundera’s irony undercuts post-Communist pretensions as much as Stalinist dogmas: “LIVING IN TRUTH. Such is the formula set forth by Kafka somewhere in the diaries or letters. Franz couldn’t quite remember where. But it captivated him. What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating. From the time he met Sabina, however, Franz had been living in lies.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim (Faber & Faber: London, 1985), 112. Was he thinking of Havel’s many infidelities towards Olga Havlova?
[35] Quoted by Corso, “Georgia ‘We Report, You Decide’…”
[36] See “Secretary of Catholicos-Patriach Visited Okruashvili in Prison” in Prime News online (3rd October, 007): http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:uA_D59sNPMUJ:eng.primenewsonline.com/%20news/123/ARTICLE/15889/2007-10-3.html+Patriarch+Georgia+fruit+Okruashvili&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1
news/123/ARTICLE/15889/2007-10-3.html+Patriarch+Georgia+fruit+Okruashvili&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1.
[37] For the church incident, see Civil Georgia, “Opposition Outcry over Church Demolition” (18th May, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15145, & http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15869 where Mr Bokeria dismissed Okruashvili as a “frightened fantasist”, maybe with good reason.
[38] See “Scheffer Lays Out Priorities” in Civil Georgia (4th October, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15950
[39] Quoted by Thomas de Waal, “The Georgia Factor” in The Moscow Times (12th January, 2007), but the weathervane of Western policy in the Caucasus de Waal cautioned, “The media is less free than it was three years ago, the rule of law is frequently subverted by politicized court cases, minorities still feel uncomfortable. This is not a model government and it does not deserve” Holbrooke’s unqualified praise.
[40] See “French Minister’s Remarks – Wrong Message to Russia – Burjanadze” in Civil Georgia (4th October, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15949
[41] See “NATO Chief: ‘Door is Open’ for Georgia to join alliance” VoA (4th October, 2007): http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-10-04-voa30.cfm
[42] See AP, “NATO chief calls for transparency, judicial independence in Georgia” in International Herald Tribune (4th October, 2007): http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/04/europe/EU-GEN-Georgia-NATO.php
[43] See “Scheffer’s Visit ‘Highly Successful’ – Saakashvili says” in Civil Georgia (4th October, 2007): http://www.geotimes.ge/index.php?m=home&newsid=7094.
[44] See Zaza Jgharkava, “Ladies and Gentlemen, after Much Anticipation Okruashvili Shoots His Load” in Georgia Today (29th September, 2007): http://www.georgiatoday.ge/article_details.php?id=3601#
[45] See Chad Nagle, “New World Order Playground. Georgia 2005. US approved "democracy" in the wake of "the Rose Revolution" Global Research.ca (10th October, 2005): http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NAG20051010&articleId=1063
[46] See “Mikheil Nikolozovich Saakashvili: The Revolutionary as Man and Myth”
[47] See http://www.traccc.cdn.ge/about/structure.html
[48] See M. Alkhazashvili, “Fight against corruption once again the marquee bout” translated by Diana Dundua in The Messenger (11th October, 2007): http://www.messenger.com.ge/issues/1461_october_11%20_2007/opi_1461.html
[49] See Civil Georgia (28th September, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15905 [50] See Zaza Jgharkava, “Ladies and Gentlemen, after much anticipation Okruashvili shoots his load” in Georgia Today (4th October, 2007): http://www.georgiatoday.ge/article_details.php?id=3601#
[51] See e.g. Gulnoza Saidazimova, “NEW TURKMEN PRESIDENT STILL BOUND TO CLANS, NEPOTISM” in RFE/RL Newsletter xi/188 Part 1 (11th October, 2007).
[52] See “President of Georgia to address the House” (9th November, 2006): http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/briefing_page/12350-313-11-45-20061106BRI12349-09-11-2006-2006/default_p001c003_en.htm.
[53] See “Do Not Photograph Saakashvili’s Palace!” Georgian Times (Aug. 1, 2005). Shortly afterwards the newspaper was “taken over” and the new editorial line excluded negative news.
[54] Arveladze quoted in “Saakashvili starts reforms with renovation of his palace” (9th January, 2004): http://www.georgadze.org/?article_id=167
[55] See “Sozar Subari Demands To Repair Damage To “Sony Center” And “Lazeri 2” Prime News (11th September, 2007): http://eng.primenewsonline.com/news/123/ARTICLE/15216/2007-09-11.html. The Ombudsman’s office has distributed an extensive report on these cases, see Concerning Unlawful Eviction of “SONY CENTRE TBILISI” Ltd and “LAZERI-2 TBILISI” (11th September, 2007).
[56] See Civil Georgia, “EBRD Invests in Georgia’s Property Sector” (16th October, 2007): http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=16030.
[57] Quoted in Göran Therborn, “Transcaucasian Triptych” in New Left Review 46 (July/August, 2007), 86-87.
[58] See Liz Fuller, “Georgia again increases Defence Spending” in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline II (30th August, 2007).
[59] See Robert Cottrell, “Time to Challenge Russia” in Transitions online (9th August, 2004): http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=76&NrSection=2&NrArticle=12704&tpid=10.
[60] See “Saakashvili’s test: A worm in the bud of the rose revolution” in The Economist (4th October, 2007): http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9905499

[61] See Charles King, “Potemkin Democracy” in The National Interest (Summer, 2001). Mr King is a professor at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown.
[62] See Dougherty http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?id=15642.
[63] See Peter Baker, http://www.georgiaemb.org/DisplayMedia.asp?id=341
[64] See APA, “Azerbaijan’s Taking Lead in South Caucasus may cause Biggest States to lose Interest in Georgia” (17th October, 20070; http://en.apa.az/news.php?id=37245. Given the poverty and oppression visited on Georgia during the period of Great Power interest many Georgians might welcome Western indifference to their fate.

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Mark Almond is Lecturer in History at Oriel College, Oxford. He has visited Georgia a dozen times since 1992 on behalf of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group and (in 1995) the Norwegian Helsinki Human Rights Group. He only expresses his own opinions.