The story of how opposition figure and social activist Yevgeny Roizman beat the authoritarian system and won the mayoral race in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city, is truly amazing. It’s a story about raw courage and what it means to be a man.
Russian democracy – when in my opinion it inevitably breaks out – will not look like what we are used to in the EU. Think the politics of Turkey or Israel. For example in the Urals the most popular politician is Evgeny Roizman. He’s an opposition activist, a nationalist, a poet, half-Jewish and a democrat. But not exactly a liberal – he runs a vigilante organisation that locks up drug addicts and incarcerates them in private lock-ups in the forest where they are cuffed to beds and given only water, bread and garlic in this horrific “cold Turkey” treatment. Roizman though is an unbeatably popular man in the Urals – in a democratic Russia he’d be the mayor of Ekaterinburg, the governor of Sverdlovsk oblast – or more.
The bold italics are mine.
Wikipedia notes of the new Mayor of Yekaterinburg, “Roizman was a State Duma deputy between 2003-2007 and attempted to run for parliament from the Fair Russia party in 2007, but was taken off the election list after a conflict with Fair Russia leaders.[6] He is a political ally of Prokhorov[7] and is supported by the Civil Platform party.[8]”
It would seem Russia is now truly democratic.
Well, perhaps with Roizman’s election it is a little more so for its politics having become a little less totally manageable.
Incidentally, my inner jury is out as regards how to think about President Putin in his inhabiting the role of autocrat.
Putin is a master at having it both ways. Without acknowledging that more Syrians have been killed with Russian-supplied weapons than with poison gas, he could with a straight face insist that all countries stop feeding the flames in Syria so that his Geneva II peace process can flourish.
“The diplomatic duel” between the Moscow and Washington over what to do with Syria’s chemical weapons had ended in “the great victory of Russia,” Kiselyov declared, while the Obama Administration had seen its “geopolitical amateurishness swept away, leaving only the ruins of narcissism.”
However, now that our ironically lovely term “narcissism” has crept into the greater political conversation — soon, I expect to see “malignant narcissism” elsewhere (than here) plus, perhaps, an empty variant in “political narcissism” — we may be treated to the spectacle of the image hypersensitive vigorously denying interest in the management of their image while, in effect, desperately trying to maintain and improve their image.
🙂
It may be difficult leaving the center of one’s own universe and one’s own uniquely valued place in it, but the demand associated with Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere along the contours of the Islamic Small Wars is exactly that in immediate service to ameliorating suffering brought about by political chaos, conflict, decay, excessive ambition, and the monstrous attitudes held by some with regard to the life and the lives of others.
Oh superpower leaders, whether or not image matters, act as if it doesn’t and — I am having a Kumbayah moment — show the love.
Selflessly.
______
To understand Moscow’s policy toward Syria, it is important to understand that Russia sees Syria as part of its Mediterranean policy and not a part of the Middle East. The Arab Middle East has been a relatively low priority in Russia’s foreign policy. The Mediterranean, however, and especially the Eastern Mediterranean region, is a policy priority for Moscow.
The “Arab Spring” (more like the “Arab Springboard” and pretty much out of control at that), Mubarak’s fall from grace in Egypt, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia’s pique with these suddenly shifting political sands, and Russia’s neglect of a post-Soviet Syria long due for an overhaul would seem to have made way for this Sumo match that has pitted Anglo-Sunni interests against Russo-Baathist ones in Damascus and overshadowed a nascent developing Russo-Saudi oil rivalry.
Plainly, Syria remains in Russia’s sphere of influence as a critical asset — more than a buffer, a block to political Islam in relation to the seventh dimension 😉 in which the Kavkaz Center worldview would apply; more than a client state and trading partner, the host of a strategic port; and more than an inconvenience, a base for New Russian Influence in the Region: how Putin has eluded taking public responsibility for all of this (not to mention returning Maher al-Assad to business in the battle space), I do not know.
The Saudis were on the brink of victory, and Asad’s use of gas took it away from them. That’s why they are so angry with Asad, and with the West as well, which did not take the necessary steps immediately, to act without discussions, without votes, without Congress and without Parliament.
Related Heritage Foundation Video Published June 27, 2013
“Look, I’m not just talking about Snowden and Syria,” Mr. Obama said. “What about Pussy Riot? What about your anti-gay laws? Total jackass moves, my friend.”
Who else in St Petersburg publicly declared, as he did, that Syria’s “so-called chemical weapons attack” was in fact “a provocation staged by rebels, in hope of winning extra backing from their foreign backers”?
In making that categorical claim, the Russian leader left little room for compromise and ended up looking, perhaps, somewhat isolated.
For real, Bridget Kendall writing for the BBC reports that eleven countries endorsed a statement agreeing that evidence associated with Syria’s most recent chemical weapons attack “pointed to Syrian government culpability.”
As suggested here, also recently, the world is witness to a war about integrity and power.
Indeed, it is one thing for Putin to go about the business of restoring Russian grandeur and might and adjusting his state in a Russian way to the new day — and let Russians respond to that as they may: it is another thing to abet the state-driven barbarism on display daily in both Iran and Syria and to become identified with it.
Perhaps the two boys are playing an old game with old cards and broken chips.
“I see you lost some states there,” says one.
“The cause lost some states, but, you know, people don’t change much. They’re still ours, and I see there’s more like them on the table.”
* * *
It’s an evil old game cooked by one party with crude assumptions: the other cannot walk away; the other cannot win; the other is there for beating and controlling; the stakes will be useful, pleasing, but of themselves are not important.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Thursday the United States — which, in addition to being one of his country’s chief adversaries, has led the push to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government over chemical weapons — has no right to make “humanitarian claims (given) their track record” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Putin said this week that any one-sided action would be rash. But he said he doesn’t exclude supporting U.N. action if it’s proven that the Syrian government used poison gas on its own people.
“Leaning forward” is one of Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite expressions. An old cold-war term, familiar to soldiers and spies, it means the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks. “I want every one of you to know how forward-leaning we are,” the secretary of Defense told a room full of Marine generals and Navy admirals at the North Island Naval Air Station, near San Diego, last month.
This morning’s live feedfrom Fox featuring President Obama and Prime Minister Reinfeldt stunned me, really, as being the most open, most candid, most off-the-cuff press conference I’ve been aware of since the inauguration.
In it, Obama talked about Syria every which way — either he couldn’t get away from the subject or the reporters could not — including asserting that a transition from the Assad regime seemed impossible given the tens of thousands of civilian lives taken by the regime. Obama then noted that President Putin seemed to disagree with that logic, thereby throwing the policy-on-Syria hot potato to Putin who may look increasingly disingenuous and transparent clinging to his lines on behalf of Bashar and Maher al Assad.
If the “center will not hold” will there be a center?
When I started receiving the CTC Sentinel (from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) I don’t believe I was vetted in any way but, so my impression was, on a controlled list for a publication neither secret nor to be redistributed.
Again, that was some years ago, and here I may be merely befuddled, paranoid, whatever.
Over the years, I’ve kept reference to CTC to myself and partially for the effects of its “granularity” — the detail in reported relationships — involved in combat arenas from Afghanistan to Somalia. Such material, I thought, wouldn’t tell anyone involved on any side of “field operations” what they didn’t already know, but it would suggest how deeply American defense intelligence and analysis gets into societies of interest, and that may have promoted some resentments in my social networks.
A few weeks ago I had cause to ask CTC (Facebook) about distribution and got back this answer: “We publish all of our research in the open source (on our website and in social media), and from there, we don’t have any control over its distribution.”
So there.
Short of subscribing to Jane’s, taking lonely walks (in the rain) around Foggy Bottom, and hanging out in Georgetown (now that I’m 90 minutes northwest of all of that — way out of town!), I think the following two links to Combating Terrorism Center and Foreign Policy (Magazine) reports are pretty good — and granular.
Rebels have been told by these states that they must endorse the SMC and its politics to gain access to future arms shipments.[5] Recently, the United States, the United Kingdom and France have all indicated that they will channel money and possibly weapons via the SMC.[6]
The SMC has provided wildly varying estimates of the total number of fighters in its member groups. In June 2013, Idris claimed to control 80,000 fighters, but days later an SMC representative insisted that the true figure is 320,000.[7] In practice, a meaningful headcount of rebels is almost impossible to make, both due to the scarcity of reliable information and to myriad problems of definition.[8] There is no disputing, however, that most of Syria’s large rebel factions have chosen to publicly align themselves with the SMC, recognizing it as the best way to tap into Gulf, Western and other support.
“We should all be aware of the fact that when revolutionary – not evolutionary – changes come, things can get even worse. The intelligentsia should be aware of this. And it is the intelligentsia specifically that should keep this in mind and prevent society from radical steps and revolutions of all kind. We’ve had enough of it. We’ve seen so many revolutions and wars. We need decades of calm and harmonious development.”
Yes, sir! Says I, but, say, didn’t you put Maher al-Assad back in the fray?
We’re not going to get away from Syria’s chief challenge and problem, i.e., that of an absent middle or moderating political base that has left much of the the conflict “on the ground” to tyrants and extremists.
The AP interview covers, among a few other items, Putin’s views on CWs, S-300s, Obama, Snowden, gays, and terrorists.
I’ve maintained that Syria has been for decades in Russia’s sphere of influence — and across quite a few military, political, and trade issues — and rightly in the post-Soviet period should have been of concern to Russians. It may have been so but with the Assad regime and society overall still difficult and remote in its own right.
As an aside here, the spy games popping up through Manning, Assange, and Snowden (oh my!) have been a much obscured part of the Islamic Small Wars throughout the range. For Pakistanis, “ISI” is ever on the lips but equally off the radar and inscrutable; for Somalis, the Al Qaeda types come and go — I got my first online news glimpse in the Islamic Courts Union era and my last somewhere between Al Shabaab and a separate raid on kidnappers that raised a lot of unanswerable questions, starting with, “So how did you guys (SEALS) know who, where, and when?”
The world “behind the curtains”, from diplomatic missions to intelligence operations coursing through every sector of state-defined societies is immense, and it’s foolish to think that those hidden hands (plus eyes and ears and mouths) are not playing around in Syria.
Indeed, these are the best of times for the writers (and movie producers) of spy thrillers.
* * *
At stake in Syria, perhaps beautifully so, is a test of the definition of political and social obligation to others.
It’s much easier to express that when children, displaced persons, and refugees are the subject of whatever topic may be at hand: such are the victim of horrific circumstance and a portion of the soul of the world evident in the NGOs and the United Nations and all who support them comes out to do its thing, which is being helpful in the absolute worst conditions.
The spectacle of jets flown against neighborhoods, mass beheading, savage, if symbolic, cannibalism, and, finally, the taboo of chemical warfare brings something else into display, and it confronts these two incredibly unique men, President Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama with exactly what each might detest or fear most: differentially, a test of conscience on one hand, and a test of courage on the other: however, neither the former nor latter involve Syrians per se.
Instead, they involve the political grammars and structures on which the present has arrived, and in light of the savagery exhibited in Syria, as much seem to have grown old and to be moving out of favor.
I’ve been deliberately oblique in this last section, but fit to context, I think the poetry about right.
According to opposition figure Ayman Abdel-Nour, Al-Assad told the Syrian media recently that the regular army’s inability to take the city of Daria near Damascus after 120 days of non-stop shelling was because of the presence of foreign contingents fighting in the city, including Israelis and US commandos, for example.
However, the regime itself has been involved in forming the armed groups and of being a key mover in some of them. During the first year of the uprising, the regime released more than 60,000 prisoners by presidential decree, which facilitated the creation of the armed rebel groups and served its interests in painting them as criminals and former prisoners.
Nearly 47 amateur video clips reportedly filmed on the morning of the attack and showing the impact on civilians had been authenticated by French military doctors, according to the intelligence. French evidence gave details of other suspected chemical attacks, in the towns of Saraqib and Jobar in April, which now appeared to have killed about 280 people, the report said.
On 11 June 2013, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that President Assad’s position had led to the current situation in Syria. He stated on Russian state media that:
“Syria as a country was rife for some kind of change. And the government of Syria should have felt that in due time and should have undertaken some reform. Had they done that, what we’re seeing in Syria today would have never happened.”
Last year, the Syrian government presented the UN Security Council with lists of hundreds of foreign nationals who had been killed fighting against government forces in Syria. The lists included mercenaries from Arab countries, Europe, and Russia’s North Caucasus region, including Chechnya.
Russia evacuated 116 Russian citizens and nationals of other ex-Soviet states on two planes belonging to the emergencies ministry which flew them from the Syrian port city of Latakia, the ministry said on Wednesday.
The flights came as expectations grow of Western military action against president Bashar al-Assad’s regime over claims it used chemical weapons in an attack outside the Syrian capital last week.
Yet Russia continues to vote with the Palestinians at the United Nations, to invite Hamas to Moscow, to help Iran with its nuclear programme and to sell missiles to Syria, which then end up in the hands of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. In truth, a degree of disconnect has marked Russia’s relations with Israel ever since its foundation in 1948.
Russia has been (quietly) channeling civilian and military assets out of and away from Syria for some time, so while its talk supports the Assad regime, its walk appears in the other direction.
Whatever Russia’s true underlying stance may be — I happen to think it has to do with making money at the moment — its interests may reside more with the wild, wild west than with the interests of Islamic theocracies (and also more with the Greek Orthodox Church and Russia’s own grand heroic mythos than with emulation of foreign comic book inventions).
While Russia plays around with what it wants “Syria Next” to look like — because “Syria Dark Star” (as I like to call it) has had its bridges leading back to the recent past burned, most of them by its itself through relentless bombing and tank campaigns — it has become a general war zone for all comers.
One might ask whether in its post-Soviet existence, Mother Russia has any obligations to Syria’s constituency in its entirety, and if so, what those might be, and what it needs to do to fulfill the obligations of the relationships, that as opposed to merely fulfilling arms deliveries contracts.
On 11 June 2013, President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that President Assad’s position had led to the current situation in Syria. He stated on Russian state media that:
“Syria as a country was rife for some kind of change. And the government of Syria should have felt that in due time and should have undertaken some reform. Had they done that, what we’re seeing in Syria today would have never happened.”[67]
(I’d quote from source “67” but it wants me to subscribe. If it were just one outlet or a few, maybe, but for the fast overviews I’ve been doing, I will need a sponsor with deeper pockets than my own and as good an attitude about looking at what “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” look like worldwide from the Second Row Seat to History, the common shared news platform provided by the World Wide Web).
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