03 Monday Feb 2014
Tags
Pakistan, political, politics, religion, religious persecution, sectarian conflict, Shiite, Sunni
Pakistan – Abbas Zaidi on the Masking of Sunni Persecution of Shiite Muslims
“Dawn’s obfuscation of the Shia genocide in the aftermath of Mastung massacre”, Let Us Build Pakistan – 2/2/2014.
30 Thursday Jan 2014
Tags
ethics, humanism, morality, obligation, political, politics, Syria, Yarmouk Camp
You have asked a difficult question. The sentimental guidance offered by Hillel the Elder seems insufficient in the face of immense suffering, not only in Syria, but in Burma (genocide targeting a tribal Muslim people), in Congo (the land of child slaves and child soldiers), and a thousand other places (probably fewer, but still, it’s pretty bad): “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I?”
What is our humanity? What is our obligation as regards the humanity of others?
Gaza officialdom may bleat, hate, and whine about Zionists, but Gaza business and labor and basic service providers work every day with Israel in the interests of commerce and development.
Jews go everywhere — even to the other side, lol — where need exists.
With everyone else, we / Jews / Israel are helping Syrians with emergency medicine and supplies — not leading the pack (I don’t know who is) but there even with a minimum of recognition.
The remaining residents of the Yarmouk Camp, kept separated from Syrian, used as tools for some future Arab war of annihilation to erase Jewry and Judaism (the better to claim originality for Islam, I guess), are starving — being made to starve — between armies. What did they — now women, children, and old men — do to deserve or bring on that fate?
No one has intervened militarily in Yarmouk Camp because no one outside of the Syrian conflict knows how to play a rescue operation, much less coordinate one with so many parties ringside.
In 2007, Lebanese Defense Forces managed to evacuate Nahr al-Bared, another refugee “camp”, by checking through residents at one gate and busing them away to another camp. By agreement with other Arab states, they were forbidden to enter Nahr al-Bared, so they got the residents out, left the foreign fighters in, and using tanks razed the entire city, once of 30,000 souls, to the ground — and then they bombed what was left of resistance in tunnels.
Yarmouk? It’s like watching people drown and no one can get through the sharks surrounding them to save them.
Since day one of live fire, Syrians on the receiving end — now millions either dead, maimed, displaced, or refugee — have begged the world for help, and the great politicians surrounding have played like gamblers at a felt table: one wants things to be as they were, primarily because the money was very good with the way things were — and it’s still very good with the way things are; another wants a moderate messianic miracle, i.e., an Arab democracy, capitalist, open, and in love with Israel.
Some 130,000 casualties later plus six million souls robbed of their former lives and their businesses, jobs, and homes, business seems to be booming around the care of the victims of war, not that it’s making money, but it seems easier delivering tents, clothing, food, and water, and some medicine to those bereft than it does producing sufficient international cooperation to remove Assad, shut down the al-Qaeda affiliates, and freeze Syria (no pun intended) into a state (of existence) approachable for constitutional and physical reconstruction.
* * *
In an unprecedented incident yesterday, Wednesday, Turkish jets attacked a Jihadist convoy on Syrian soil after 2 of their own military vehicles had been fired upon near the Turkish/Syrian border.
The incident happened near the Cobanbey border crossing in the south of Turkey. The jets reportedly destroyed a pick-up, a truck and a bus all belonging to the extreme Jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL or ISIS). There were no casualties on the Turkish side.
IN UNPRECEDENTED MOVE TURKISH JETS DESTROY ISIS CONVOY IN SYRIA AFTER ITS MILITARY COMES UNDER FIRE | altahrir, news of Islam, Muslims, Arab Spring and special Palestine; SYRIA NEWS | Peter Clifford Online – 1/30/2014.
I don’t know whose using money to sew so much chaos in the middle east, but now pressured by an immense refugee challenge, the want to get at its sources all around may be quite high.
It appears yesterday’s strike by Turkey involved a clear tit-for-tat exchange of fire, but the Turkish military, which has traded with Israel for its hardware, more a while ago, I’m sure less today, and has NATO cooperation in the region, is the more formidable power.
Perhaps the Turks have also had enough of “spillover” from Syria’s civil war.
Israel ‘cuts arms sales to Turkey’ – UPI.com – 4/26/2010.
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29 Wednesday Jan 2014
Tags
My name is Abu Amr. I am thirteen, from Bin Laden Front. I studied the teachings in the book of Allah to defend the Muslims in Syria. I pray to Allah that I am granted martyrdom (6:56)
Syria: Al-Qaeda’s New Home – YouTube – 21:56 – Vice News – 1/22/2014
“So many twisted minds . . . This leaves me speechless! :-/” said “SymbolX” in the comments section of the above video posted.
* * *
Syria||Darya||Assad barrel bombs 29-1-2014 – YouTube – 1/29/2014.
* * *
So many twisted minds, indeed!
Having to do with what you saw demonstrated (I can’t authenticate video without wider cooperation from media) in the above video:
Syrian government forces dropped barrel bombs on rebel-held districts of Aleppo Wednesday, killing 13 people as they pressed an assault southeast of the northern city, a monitor said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported more than 20 barrel bombs had been dropped on the town of Daraya, southwest of the capital Damascus.
Barrel bombs kill 13 in Syria’s Aleppo, says NGO – Al Arabiya News – 1/29/2014.
The video preceding this section’s quotation features one explosion.
Imagine nineteen more battering the same area.
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In the romance of the west, aristocrat or pioneer, some grandfathers take their 13-year-old boys hunting, it’s true. Age of Bar Mitzva, of passage into basic adulthood with some emotion and responsibility . . . it’s not bad. You can still build model airplanes, go scouting, play Little League baseball, collect butterflies, snitch a smoke, and such; however, good or bad, we usually wait another four or five years before putting a boy in uniform, and then putting the boy in uniform in harm’s way.
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However, what I’ve just described is life beside the presence of western humanism, its institutions, and its laws
Out of school, on the street, in the field, things might be different.
You’re Not Taking Him – Stand by Me (7/8) Movie CLIP (1986) HD – YouTube – posted 10/5/2012.
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29 Wednesday Jan 2014
Tags
ethics, morality, political, political psychology, politics, refugees, starvation, war crimes, Yarmouk Camp
On YouTube, “TeachESL” noted (two days ago), “the man at 0:53 says: “We do not want Palestine or something. We want them to get us out here. We ask for Israeli citizenship, we do not want the right of return, we have sold Palestine. We do not even know anything about Palestine! We do not want Mahmoud Abbas. There are 1 billion and 300 million Muslims and they can do nothing! If there were even a single Israeli child in the Yarmuk camp, the problem would have been solved a long time ago.”
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So what may the Jews do, whether of Israel or the Diaspora?
I know: these are the sworn enemies of Israel, determined to overlook the defeat of Arab armies in a war of annihilation (of the Jews, period) in 1948; brainwashed to believe the Land of Israel magically, innately Arab when the ground itself tells of the continuance presence of Jewry on the land for more than 3,000 years and beyond; and trained by anti-Semitic image, lies (like “The Protocols”), by bombastic and narcissistic and manipulative power to hate Jews and erase Judaism, which is more a world to discover than extinguish, and a good and great world at that. And yet there they are, the residents of Yarmouk Camp, trapped between a tyrant and his equally tyrannical opponents.
Neither Bashar al-Assad nor al-Nusra could give a flying crap about what they — no one else, not Israelis, not Russians, not Americans, God forbid — are doing to the humanity they have overrun and subjugated for the amusement of their own immense and unbridled egos.
Jews have stood against that kind of tyranny since the Exodus from Egypt, and whether in fact or in our heads makes no difference.
Jewish ethical universalism, whether joined by hand-wringing Christians or forward-looking Islamic Humanists, cannot today — and as too many among the powerful may do — look away from Yarmouk Camp.
The twisted rhetoric of The Palestine Chronicle (the fulcrum for that in language behavior splits loyalty away from integrity) notes the following:
There is no doubt that the Yarmoukian Palestinians are in Syria because of a historic injustice imposed upon them by a settler-colonial enemy that does not spare any effort to exacerbate their suffering and prolong their exile. However, this indisputable historic occurrence should not blind us from the fact that independent of what Israel has planned to increase Palestinian suffering, the party responsible for the current crisis (and here I must reiterate my emphasis on the word ‘current’) is the brutal and inhuman Syrian regime and its leader Bashar El-Assad.
How Not to Be in Solidarity with Palestinian Refugees in Yarmouk? | Palestine Chronicle – 1/17/2014.
It’s good to see someone wising up.
It’s late in the day but welcomed, if with a grain of salt, nonetheless.
* * *
In the Yarmouk camp, more than 55 people have died from hunger and the majority of children are suffering from malnutrition, according to Abdullah al-Khatib, a Palestinian activist living there. Most people are consuming soup made from water and spices, Khatib said, and some are reportedly eating grass for survival.
Starving to death in Syria’s Yarmouk camp – Features – Al Jazeera English – 1/29/2014.
Reminder: Russian President Vladimir Putin means to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in business (possibly unless or until he runs out of money or his sponsor in Tehran, that kindly smiling white bearded sower of sorrows, does — and that’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future).
* * *
I have long believed that that I’d engage Gideon Levy’s discourse in its disingenuous Israel-bashing facet, and so I might do so here with suggestion that the IDF — who else? — magically and miraculously transport the Yarmouk Camp to someplace peaceful like Judea and Samaria.
Bar’el was restrained as he referred to Yarmouk as resembling a World War II ghetto, and even this description fell on deaf ears. Only 20,000 people remain in the camp, where 150,000 lived before the civil war. Only the weak and helpless remain – to live in destruction under siege. The rest have suffered their second expulsion . . . . After the terror of Yarmouk, Israel should show a measure of humanity. It should try to save the 20,000 besieged residents – natives of this land, remember – and declare that its gates are open to them to reunite with their families.
Israel, save the Palestinians in Syria’s Yarmouk refugee camp – Opinion Israel News | Haaretz – 1/22/2014.
Nonetheless, disagree though we may — and as may the Yarmouk Camp resident quoted — we are all standing by watching a war crime in the making.
* * *
What is remarkable is that the save Yarmouk initiative has infiltrated all fields and has been adopted and picked up by political groups that have not seen eye to eye.
Crisis in Yarmouk camp in Syria unites Palestinians – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East – 1/27/2014.
I’ll say!
Although the Al-Monitor article confines itself to telling of the in-solidarity feelings inspired between Fatah and Hamas and pro-Palestinian groups, that I’ve played up this story tells that our barriers may not be as strong as we believe.
Crime is crime.
Yarmouk surviving off stray animals: resident | Al Akhbar English – 1/29/2014.
20,000 people in Yarmouk camp face starvation | GulfNews.com – 1/29/2014.
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29 Wednesday Jan 2014
Tags
dictatorship, foreign affairs, humanism, malignant narcissism, Obama, political, politics, Putin, Syria
The United States has picked up where it left off more than a month ago and started shipping nonlethal aid to Syria in hopes that al Qaeda won’t seize it and keep it from reaching its intended rebel fighting recipients.
U.S. restarts aid to Syria, hoping al Qaeda won’t seize it again – Washington Times – 1/28/2014.
Officials may have strengthened the chain of custody by winnowing down the trustworthy to “Free Syrian Army Supreme Military Council members”.
Last night’s State of the Union Address by President Obama emphasized domestic economic progress and de-emphasized foreign policy, and that to the extent that American involvement in the Islamic Small Wars appears to have been pared back to the 12-year-presence in Afghanistan and the diminishing of Islamist strength in that theater with but a nod to the whack-a-mole games played with drones and special forces and familiar to Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
* * *
The number of al-Qaeda linked fighters active in Syria has mushroomed from 2,000 to more than 30,000 in just two years, a senior Israeli intelligence official has warned . . . .
Over 30,000 al-Qaeda linked fighters’ in Syria, Israeli official claims – Telegraph – 1/25/2014.
Syrians, ordinary Syrians, Syrians who bake bread or lay brick, Syrians who were hungry three years ago at the hands of their kleptocrat government and sought a better deal for themselves, have been suffering mightily between the malignancies of their regime and a now strong portion of the regime’s challengers.
Where’s Putin now?
Not a word.
Web search “Syria Putin al-Qaeda” and the top page list comes back with the mud slung in early September: it’s the Americans that have backed al-Qaeda.
We know it’s not true.
Americans have backed the above mentioned “Free Syrian Army” led, nominally, at least, by General Salim Idris. That army has found itself forked between the brutal dictator — this is one who flew jets against large noncombatant populations — and the equally unconstrained primitives of the al-Qaeda affiliates.
Read the still recent headlines:
FSA chief: Free National Army is a pipe dream « ASHARQ AL-AWSAT – 1/16/2014.
‘We don’t have long,’ say Syrian rebels locked in battle with Al Qaeda, Assad | Fox News – 1/17/2014.
President Obama turned up the populist card last night with brags about progress in the American system within its borders, from energy independence to health care, and while he proffered continued support for nascent democracies in war torn space, he made clear that American troops were staying at home.
* * *
“Dozens of Antonov 124s (Russian transport planes) have been bringing in armored vehicles, surveillance equipment, radars, electronic warfare systems, spare parts for helicopters, and various weapons including guided bombs for planes,” a Middle East security source said.
“Russian advisers and intelligence experts have been running observation UAVs around the clock to help Syrian forces track rebel positions, analyze their capabilities, and carry out precision artillery and air force strikes against them,” said the source, who declined to be identified.
Report: Russia stepping up military aid to Syria’s Assad | JPost | Israel News – 1/17/2014.
Perhaps in Putin’s cold political calculus, Syria will be held in The Bear’s paw at any price to Syria’s humanity.
President Bashar Assad’s military and the Free Syrian Army may wake up to realize that their enmity may be misdirected, for the true axis is not, has never been, Assad vs al-Qaeda but rather The People vs Assad. Forget about that old rusty post-Soviet chain: Russia – Syria – Iran | Saudi Arabia – NATO – America.
Syria is.
Syria exists for Syrians.
Syrians internally displaced or made refugee by war — about nine million souls (6.5 million IDPs; 2.1 million refugees) — need peace and home for themselves, and all they have for getting that are two armies, in body, and their differential in leaderships, that should be the last to be at their own throats.
As much hell comes from misguidance and propaganda helped along by a surrounding sea of greed.
Obama’s America with NATO returned to a defensive posture would seem to have zero interest in intervention in Syria apart from keep General Idris’s enterprise in sufficient weaponry for maintaining the three-way stalemate while talk-talk-talk fills time.
Putin’s Russia, which well may view Syria as part of its post-Soviet inheritance, seems immune to humanitarian overtures apart from bending, twisting, and spinning it some around Bashar al-Assad, who in state propaganda and RT has been made to look like a blameless angel.
So far as may be gleaned from the news online, Putin’s in it for the money and to maintain an anti-western post in a client buffer.
Compared to Putin’s glory — and how glorious that glory will be at the $50 billion Winter Olympics in Sochi — the depth and expanse of civilian Syrian suffering, in state and splayed out in the refugee camps of hosting neighbors, would seem by comparison invisible.
Here’s another cycle in headers:
Russia And China Provide Practically No Aid To Syrian Refugees | ThinkProgress – 9/3/2013.
Russia Provides $10M to Syrian Refugees | World | RIA Novosti – 10/1/2013.
Russia to Send Additional Humanitarian Aid for Syrian Refugees in Lebanon — Naharnet – 11/25/2013.
Donors Offer $2.4 Billion to Aid Syrian Civilians, but U.N. Says More Is Needed – NYTimes.com – 1/15/2014.
Get the picture?
Perhaps this will help: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s $50-billion Olympic Games | Toronto Star – 6/25/2014.
Disclaimer: I confess I now write with a “nice pen”, acknowledged as such by an expert. It’s best feature is its 21 karat gold medium-fine nib, so I know a little bit about fine things too! But my fine things would seem fit to living in a cabin, which is more or less how I live (but I can dream).
* * *
I have seen the face of suffering and hate online in many faces. Someone has been lied to or manipulated; someone has a mind confined to state media or a wallet meagerly fattened by the patronage of a despot, a shameful situation where conscience and ethics have not been entirely extinguished. What may be done to repair that person? Or, collectively, such people captive to closed information (remember: mouth – ear – mind – heart) systems?
I don’t know.
I do know the world online is larger than the space in which I live and the freedom to speak has its complement in the freedom to read, listen, or watch widely with great curiosity and with some ambition and discipline as regards discerning the nature of things.
Syria talks face immediate hurdle of Assad’s refusal to step down | World news | The Guardian – 1/19/2014
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27 Monday Jan 2014
Score one for the political freedom that is freedom of speech:
With Ukraine’s political crisis deepening, protesters left the ministry after Justice Minister Olena Lukash warned that she would call for a state of emergency. But at the end of the day, Lukash said the anti-protest laws that went into effect on January 16 would be repealed and the protesters who occupied her ministry would receive amnesty — as long as they cleared out of “all seized premises and roads.”
Ukraine bends on protest law, offers amnesty – CNN.com – 1/27/2014
American colloquial observation: “Without the First Amendment, all of the others are worthless.”
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27 Monday Jan 2014
Old wisdom (Hillel the Elder): “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?”
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Reference Image: LiveLeak.com – Myanmar Muslim mutilations alarm world: Analyst (comments) – 1/21/2014.
Note 5/8/2014: after so many months with this post live, I’ve elected to remove the image of two children hanging from rafters allegedly victims of the persecution of of the Muslim Rohingya in Burma. As agitprop or testament, the picture had a visceral impact in real time and space — i.e., it was not bounded in the long ago of historical artifact — and in part because they are someone’s children, nephew and niece, cousins, playmates, and so on, I thought it time to leave the picture at its central vector.
There are some other pictures published on BackChannels that I would regard as “war porn” — the artifacts of conflict-linked violence, from bombing to stoning to firing squad to beheading: how much do you need to see? How much do I need to inadvertently promote in relation to commentary?
For visual impact, there’s plenty for finding online, but here I hope to generate insight beside observation in politics and political psychology.
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I fear to tread.
As noted (ftac) to the Pakistani friend who shared the image in a forum:
I’ll share this image. Although it seems natural for Muslims to view what is happening in Burma as a Buddhist-on-Muslim genocide, the state itself remains a military junta (with cosmetic reforms, if that much) hostile to Buddhist political power — its suppression of its own “Orange Revolution” was brutal — and otherwise cultivating through neglect the fears and resentments attending primitive tribalism. The Burmese leadership is holed up in its own paradise, basically, and the country as a country and culture have been left to go to hell, which is where they are today.
Parlayed in the way of other special interest religious press that plead their own victimization in the world, the above obscenity has at least as much to do with the global reserve of primitivism and tribalism as it does with Buddhist aggression, not that Buddhists and much of the rest of the world have not been pissed off by the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas (and only Buddhists would have the discipline to take that kind of aggression in stride). However, this is not to suggest that whatever is working within some portion of the Burmese Rakhine People does not conflate with their religious identity.
The photograph as downloaded from Live Leak seems to have no EXIF or IPTC data. Somebody made the recording somewhere, and it can neither be authenticated nor denied as recent or valid.
Remarks on Burma from the Committee to Protect Journalists: Burmese journalist jailed for three months – Committee to Protect Journalists – 12/20/2013; Burma falters, backtracks on press freedom – Reports – Committee to Protect Journalists – 6/13/2013.
Dark space — censorious, cordoned, private — abets autocrats, dictators, malignant narcissists. Whether geographically convenient — distant from airports, communication centers, and roads — or enforced in back rooms in the mafia way, informationally “dark space” hides evil.
President Obama may come away from Burma with the pasted on rictus telling nothing about what he’s thinking, apart from choosing his battles carefully and disengaging from most, but, lately, it seems that was has been happening in Burma isn’t staying in Burma.
Local people and senior police officers, speaking off the record, told us the southern section of this beautiful island is gangster territory – the hood of human traffickers, who run a number of secret prisons from the jungle floor.
Nightmare island where traffickers imprison Burma’s Rohingya – Channel 4 News – 8/8/2013.
Harrowing stuff.
Secret prisons. Human trafficking. Slave labor.
And not really out of the “back of beyond.”
In fact: Thailand.
However, one may call the true region Thailand’s dark space and, perhaps, corrupt edges.
It’s hard to tell.
While “The Majors” in the news business dip their toes in the bloody waters, for the most part, there seems to be some up-to-the-minute coverage in the blogosphere (I’ve been working with this post for a couple of hours and am surprised that it took the search string “Burmese military Royhinga genocide” to find it: Rohingya Blogger
* * *
Since the second Rohingya massacre in October, the Burmese people have watched the world ignore or misrepresent what many experts are calling a genocide. President Thien Sein has been on a world tour, where he has been met with open arms, receiving a 21-gun salute in Australia and getting $5.9 billion of international debt canceled. Canada has opened its first-ever Burmese embassy, and multinational resource corporations are queuing for contracts. No one is in the mood to bring up genocide, even when a third massacre was openly planned for this month.
The Rohingya Movement, as Seen by a Journalist in Burma | VICE United States – 3/27/2013.
▶ Bangladesh: Rohingya Refugees – YouTube – 4/9/2013.
Related (50 minutes): ▶ ROHINGYA in Arakan, Burma! Al Jazeera Investigates – The Hidden Genocide – YouTube – 12/9/2012.
The initial enthusiasm surrounding recent political reform in Burma has recently given way to reminders of the dark legacy of the nation’s past. Among the most notable of these expositions was a July 2013 cover story published by Time Magazine in which journalist Hannah Beech showed that the specter of past crimes against humanity, including genocide, have resurfaced in Burma and that extremist forces in the country have focused their attention upon the Muslim minority within the Buddhist-majority state.
New report: High risk of genocide in Burma – 9/9/2013.
Today happens to be the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, which I have been following via Facebook, but while it’s rightly a day for the Jews, my people, to honor the memory of the dead, to reflect on unimaginable suffering, to rejoice in life and statehood in the possession of the Land of Israel, it is also perhaps not the day to leave the next day to rest on the laurels of the last one.
This day, while reflecting on the murder of six million Jews and the miraculous survival and recovery of Jewry worldwide and the jewels that are Israel and Jerusalem that have stood symbolically and in real space and time against despotism for thousands of years,perhaps we should look again and with dogged persistence into the inhumanity displayed in the despicable photo that tops this post and the mentality in Burma, its government, and then in southeast Asia that has so brutalized and demeaned the Rohingya.
Thai police rescue hundreds of Rohingya in raid on suspected traffickers’ camp | Reuters – 1/27/2014.
The UN had “credible information” that 48 Rohingya Muslims had been killed in violence in early January.
BBC News – Burma violence: UN calls for Rohingya deaths inquiry – 1/24/2014.
Burma: Investigate New Killings of Rohingya | Human Rights Watch – 1/23/2014.
It is estimated that there are currently 800,000 to 1 million Rohingya living in Burma. Since the 1970’s the regime in Burma has been trying to drive out or restrict the Rohingya.[5] This sentiment was put into law in 1982 when it created a Citizenship Law, which mandates that a person must prove their Burmese ancestry dating back to 1823 in order to have freedom of movement and access to other basic rights such as education in the country.[6] (Recall: Armenian Genocide and Nazi Germany). This law is one of the prime reasons why the Rohingya have become “stateless.”
The ICC: Protection for the Rohingya? | – 1/6/2013.
Rohingya Arakanese faces genocide in Burma, n.d.
Burma — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Rakhine people – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BBC News – Rohingya Muslims feared killed in new Burma Rakhine violence – 1/17/2014; Myanmar frustrated by U.N. criticism of Rakhine violence – World Report – World – Dalje.com – 1/24/2014; Violence in Northern Rakhine State – Financial and Business News – MENAFN – 1/24/2014; Violence in Northern Rakhine State – U.S. Department of State – 1/24/2014.
Genocide Emergency – Myanmar: The Rohingya
Wood, Graeme. “A Countryside of Concentration Camps.” New Republic, January 21, 2014.
27 Monday Jan 2014
BBC News – Ukraine justice minister in state of emergency warning – 1/27/2014; In Pictures: Ukraine unrest continues – In Pictures – Al Jazeera English – 1/27/2014; EU steeled for bruising encounter with Putin over Ukraine – FT.com – 1/27/2014:
“This is not a ‘business as usual’ summit,” said one EU ambassador. “It is time to take stock of where we are in relations with Russia. We will not be discussing any of the nuts-and-bolts issues.”
▶ Angry Riots: Ukrainians set up catapult to fire at police – YouTube – 1/27/2014.
Kiev may represent the edge of Putin’s reinvigorating of the Russian state as an entity made larger than itself with a ring of buffering client states.
At 5:19 in the above clip, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt notes, “We have European values, we have European principles, we have European rights, that we must uphold in each and every European country.”
President Putin’s sumo wrestling on behalf of the future of resurgent Russian empire runs into numerous modern issues, starting with the neglect of the Russians themselves outside of the circles of immediate cooperation, influence, and power, which, of course, is part of what makes an autocracy what it is. In earlier days — the good old days! — tanks may have handily quelled the rioting in Kiev; today, those tanks may turn against the imposition of a new Ukrainian-Russian cooperative in the absence of a genuinely transformed Moscow.
However, as one friend has reminded me several times this winter, Russia (Putin) owns the cash and gas supplies and has used them for political leverage. Kiev’s own heavy-handed laws (who taught them how to be so tough and stupid?) have mightily encouraged the hard line in the state’s opposition:
“Everyone here’s looking at a 10-year jail sentence — the laws are in place,” said Vladimir, a 53-year-old entrepreneur from Kiev who’s been at the camp from the start and declined to give his last name for fear of reprisal. “We’ll be here until we win, otherwise our fate is sealed. There’s no third option.”
Ukrainian Violence Raises Stakes at Kiev Protest Camp – Businessweek – 1/26/2014.
The conversion of Ukraine’s discomfort into stark black-and-white terms devolves directly to the government, which by imposing draconian measures eliminated the Ukrainian people’s post-Soviet customary sense of freedom of speech.
The new law, which bans all forms of protests, was published in the official Golos Ukrainy, or Voice of Ukraine, newspaper, raising fears that the government would use excessive force to quell dissent.
The opposition and the West have condemned the bill, demanding that it be reversed, but the Interior Ministry said at least 32 protesters had been arrested in the most recent round of demonstrations.
Violence as Ukraine anti-protest law enacted – Europe – Al Jazeera English – 1/21/2014.
An older Moscow would have rolled in the tanks and troops, but that was then. This is now, and President Viktor Yanukovych, which I would gamble the opposition sees as a Putin puppet and protege, has instead of repealing a brutal set of protest laws offered his opposition a token place at his table. (Reference:Ukraine president says he’ll name rival as prime minister, but opposition demands more – The Washington Post – 1/25/2014; Ukraine President Offers Prime Minister Post to Opposition Leader – WSJ.com – 1/25/2014).
As he has with Syria, Putin has handily kept himself out of the spotlight. Of course, RT’s in no position to pursue this line of analysis, and then too . . . what’s he done but helped Ukraine with money and kept the gas supply moving?
From the Brookings Institution:
Putin’s Russia Goes Rogue – YouTube – 1/23/2014
In an open letter to President Obama, the two featured in the video, Fiona Hill and Steven Pifer, stated the following:
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine look to the United States, not just the European Union, for support. A joint U.S.-EU stance has the greatest prospect of countering Russian actions. We recommend that you instruct the State Department to coordinate policy steps with the European Union and key members, including France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, to bolster the “targeted” states and assist them as Russia increases its economic and political pressures.
Putin’s Russia Goes Rogue | Brookings Institution – 1/23/2014.
Primers
What you need to know about the protests in Kiev, Ukraine | News.com.au – 1/23/2014. At the end of the clip up top, a protester says to the camera: “What is wrong in Ukraine? We want a revolution. What is wrong in Ukraine? This is what is wrong. The government is against people.”
Batkivshchyna – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The party wants to prosecute “Law enforcement involved in political repression”[79] and to impeach current Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his “anti-people regime” to “return Ukraine to the path of European integration”.
There’s a mighty page ahead of the statement quoted.
My impression is that the Soviet Era really is just ending and it has brought Ukraine — as it has Syria — to a crossroads. Ukraine’s position is much easier than Syria’s, of course, but The Bear isn’t going away either although by way of Putin the leadership has taken a detour (the big one step backwards) into the 19th Century, God bless him, and that leaves Russia’s future — the two steps forward! — quite open as regards its becoming a responsible state genuinely devoted to internal pan-Slavic interests.
Svoboda (political party) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
According to party leader Oleh Tyahnybok, Svoboda is not an ‘extremist’ party; he said that “depicting nationalism as extremism is a cliché rooted in Soviet and modern globalist propaganda”.[46] He also stated that “countries like” Japan and Israel are fully nationalistic states, “but nobody accuses the Japanese of being extremists”.[46] According to Tyahnybok, the party’s view of nationalism “shouldn’t be mixed with chauvinism or fascism, which means superiority of one nation over another”, and that its platform is called “Our Own Authorities, Our Own Property, Our Own Dignity, on Our Own God-Given Land”.
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When I sat down post on BackChannels this morning, I thought I would wrap up global turmoil in a page, starting with Ukraine but moving swiftly to Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on, and one might do that from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, which is the World Wide Web, but in depth and expanse, even the smallest conflict in the world turns out incredibly rich, and what the reader-writer is going to get is a snapshot, a glimpse along the surface of political reality.
In schematic, to say Putin –> Ukraine : Ukraine <–> Europe might prove out and be all one needs, but oh the devils in the details! Nonetheless, I believe it has fallen to Vladimir Putin to return Russia to Russian glory in a Russian manner — and we’re going to see that extraordinary effort and expense in some Bond movie glamour at Winter Olympics in Sochi very soon (not “hot off the press” these days, but one-hour cool on the web: Welcome to Sochi, the security Games – CNN.com – 1/27/2014) — and to question the democratic socialist values of the west with an assertion about feudal power and aristocracy.
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