Guerillas Without Guns

TABLE OF CONTENTS {masterlist}

2007-06-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

This was originally conceived as a book, or series of books, and some sections still flow into each other naturally, so I just realized I should put together a Table of Contents masterlist that can make the site as readable as a partially-assembled book. It'll fill in as we go, and the gaps will shrink. Some sections I never finished. Some I never will. Most are too verbose. Some have been altered a bit for this website, and some posts have been written or assembled outside the book format. I'll figure it all out.

I – Nonviolence and the New World Order: Between Cold Wars

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival [and deter] potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
– Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Planning Guidance, 1992
“A plan to achieve that objective will usually consist of a phased series of campaigns […] designed to strengthen the oppressed population […] and to weaken the dictatorship.”
- Gene Sharp, From Democracy to Dictatorship

- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
-> East-West 1989: The Twin Pillars of Nonviolence
-> Iraq and the New World Order at the End of History
-> Euro-NATO: How the West was Run
-> Gene Sharp: Master of Noviloent Warfare
-> Weaponizing Nonviolence: Col. Helvey - a former soldier and officer turned man of peace helps translate Sharp for battlefield use.
-> The American End: Overt Ops/A Bi-Partisan Effort: National Endowment for Democracy, NDI, IRI, Arlington, Ackerman, etc...
-> Soros Money and the Open Society
-> Some Notes on Timing and Consent

II – Gotov Je: Yugoslavia and the Otpor Precedent

"Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle."
– Col. Robert Helvey, to Serbian activists in Budapest Hungary, mid-2000
“It should be clear to all, after the past ten years, that NATO isn't attacking Serbia because of Milosevic; it is attacking Milosevic because of Serbia.”
- Slobodan Milosevic, October 2 2000
“Regarded by many as Eastern Europe's last great democratic upheaval, Milosevic's overthrow may also go down in history as the first poll-driven, focus group-tested revolution.”
– Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, December 2000

- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
-> The Heart of Serbia / Point of No Return
-> Divide and Conquer / State Sponsors of Terror
-> The Limits of Air Power / The Pariah’s Club: Post-war Serbia: Milosevic still in charge, and making new friends. the time to move draws close...
->Milosevic's Pipeline Plans Prevented (brief - moved from another section)
-> Biting the System: Otpor's Origins
-> The Bulldozer Revolution: October 2000 - Milosevic has left the building
- Behind the Fist: Helping Hands at Hungarian Hotels
- Fallout: Radioactive, Political and Otherwise
->Otpor Fallout: Just Another Weapon
->- Radioactive Fallout
- Territorial Fallout
- Political Fallout: A prolonged, tragic sorting of loose ends
- A New Direction for Otpor: Eastward

III – No to Saddam, No to Peace: Why there was no Iraqi Otpor

“To achieve the third choice, we need help. Not with armies or with money. We need help in the form of nonviolent training to protect ourselves from Saddam and his agents. We can do it, but we need help now.” – Ismael Zayer, exiled Iraqi opposition leader, early 2003

- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
-> Zimbabwe / Iraq 2003: The Limits of Nonviolence
-> Zayer and Helvey: No to Saddam, No to War
- Washington: No to Zayer, Yes to Force Presence
- Transforming the Middle East

IV – Reviving Great Russia: Low Tide, Russia’s 9/11, and the Rise of Putin
- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
- Pipelines From the Black Hole - The Caspian Great Game as backdrop for the New Cold War
- Bleeding Russia: Oligarchs, Collapse, Bail-out... Then Revival
- The Terror of 9/99 / Putin Ascendant (see below)
-> The Terror of 9/99 {masterlist} - new masterlist with links to posts on another CL blogsite
- America's War on Terror, Meet Russia's (coming soonish - previously neglected in the shuffle)
- State Control and Oligarch Retrieval : Putin moves to Reverse the 90s.
- Reviving Great Russia / The Switch is Flipped

V – Roses and the Power of Conviction: A Bold First Move in the Caucasus
- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
- Georgia’s Place on the Chessboard / The Old Order
- The Story of Three Idealists: The Saakashvilis and Zhvania
- Kmara, Liberty Institute, and the Mark of Soros
- The Rose Revolution: Misha Takes Tbilisi
- The New Order in Tbilisi
- Mr. GasPutin, South Ossetia, and the Wine Wars

VI – The Bridgehead is Extended: Ukraine and the Orange Sunrise
- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
- Ukraine's Fate and the Brzezinski's Flanking It
- Ukraine: The State of Play in 2004: President Kuchma, PM Yanukovych, Russian influence, estern ambitions, Tymosheno and the emerging opposition. "Oligarch wars."
- Pora and the Yushchenkos: High Time for a Revolution
-> Pora! High Time for a Revolution
->The Yushchenkos: On the Right Path For Ukraine
- Like a John Le Carré Novel: Yush Poisoned!
- Blue Twilight / Orange Dawn
- Western Winds That Fed the Fire: Orange Revolution assistance from Europe and the US. Trying to keep an appearance of distance...
- A Preventive Operation: Help from Inside
- Away From Russia
- The Poisoning Investigation
- Splits and Reversals / An Uncertain Future
- The Geopolitics One More Time… Closing the Bridgehead

VII – The Bridgehead Meets the Bulkhead: Power Plays in Central Asia
- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
- The New Great Game History repeating itself: Russia's interests in Central Asia clash with the Anglo-American aliance
- From Shanghai with Love: Origins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
- After the First Snows in Afghanistan: The US Incursion, basing, and response
- Russia’s Grip on Kyrgyzstan: The scrable for Central Asian basing - Washington's post-9/11 interests vs. Russia's enduring interests.
- Bulb of Opposition / The Tulip Revolution
- An Uglier Turn / Akayev Flees
- Hopes of Reform Shot Dead / The SCO’s Controlled Burn
- The SCO Holdouts: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan

VIII – Showing America the Door: The Tide Turns in Uzbekistan
- Original Sub-Sections, -> Posted Sections, -> Addenda/New Divisions
- America’s New Ally: Terror vs. Terror
-> Andijan and the Truth Massacre
- Rakhimov’s Paradise: The Missing Link?
- After Andijan: A Victory for the Eurasian Bloc
-> International Order, 7/7, the First Eviction
- Peace Mission 2005: An Assault on the Unipolar World

The rest of the book - the revolutions that failed and on Oborona in Russia, on ethical and tactical issues, etc., was never even properly organized.

IX - Where the Fist Failed: The Regimes that Didn’t Crack or Weren’t Attacked
- Original Sub-Sections -> Addenda/New Divisions
- Turkmenistan: Turkmenbashi's Dreamland
- Azerbaijan:
- Armenia and Moldova: Not Ripe for Revolution
-> Armenia: Not Ripe for Revolution
-> Update: Election 2007 - Coming in May
- >Moldova: Grape Revolution Squashed - coming soon
- Zubr in Belarus: Outpost of Tyranny/Jeans on the 16th

X - untitled and unfinished chapter on Democracy Promotion etc. inside Russia and counter-trends

XI - untitled and unfinished chapter on further observations and criticisms of weaponized nonviolence in its current uses
- See from Ch I, "Some Notes on Timing and Consent" for a basic outline of my own gripes

THE BULLDOZER REVOLUTION

2007-06-24T19:51:00.000-07:00

THE BULLDOZER REVOLUTION:
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns / Chapter 2
Posted June 24 2007

As Milosevic’s tottering regime came up against the “NATO foot soldiers” of Otpor in 2000, the group and its allies also looked ahead and worked to co-opt as much of the security forces as possible. For example, the young members of Otpor sent bouquets of flowers to the military on Army Day. An article in Peace explained that “such tactics recruited sympathizers in numbers that would not be apparent until the final days of the regime, when soldiers and police stood by while massive crowds stormed the Serbian parliament.” [1]

As the September 2000 election neared, the Serbian president banned international observers from monitoring elections, which were carried out on Sunday the 24th. The opposition claimed victory, with DOS leader Vojislav Kostunica winning over 50 percent support and declaring himself the “people's president.” But others were not so sure, and the Federal Election Commission called for a second ballot set for October 8, saying neither candidate won an outright majority. [2] Another top DOS leader, Zoran Djindjic announced “we will call people onto the streets and tell them not to leave until [Milosevic] gives up power.” [3] Djindjic said the opposition would call for continued protests, including a strike campaign and boycotts of schools, offices, theaters and cinemas. [4]

By this time, Milosevic’s Red Berets had evolved into an independent, self-perpetuating power, and when the regime began to crumble in mid-2000, they switched sides and negotiated a nonaggression pact with Djindjic, assuring him that they would refuse any orders to crack down on demonstrators. [5] With this floodgate opened, a coal miners' strike set the ball rolling; when Milosevic sent Interior Ministry soldiers to break the strike, thousands more citizens turned out in solidarity, blocking streets with barricades and their bodies. [6]
Mass protests in front of the Parliament building, Belgrade, Oct. 5 2000.

The strikes spread and by the 5th the country had come to a virtual standstill, except in the capital, where crowds swelling into perhaps hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters marched and swarmed around, over, and into all the official buildings. The central square was hazed with smoke from fires started by the protesters, lending to the air of chaos as police simply refused to crack down and the insurgents took the whole area, notably the State-run broadcasting apparatus. [7] Kostunica told supporters at a Belgrade rally that Serbia had been “liberated,” a message broadcast to the world. European and world leaders called for Milosevic to admit the obvious and step down as he finally did the following day. [8]

Otpor’s Ivan Marovich proudly boasted that Otpor and the people of Serbia had thus “organized the control of the elections by the civil society.” [9] When that alone proved insufficient, with Milosevic declaring victory anyway, they also helped organize the control of Belgrade, which finally did the trick. The actions of Otpor could not be credited entirely with the results, but they were by all accounts a huge, probably decisive factor in this bloodless revolution that achieved what NATO’s bombs had not. And their spirit of fun was infectious, leaving its mark on the October 5 uprising, dubbed “the Bulldozer Revolution.” It got this unofficial title when a man inspired by Otpor’s lead drove his bulldozer into the building of RTS, Serbian state television, which had been a symbol of Milosevic's rule. (this was a new building, the original having been recently destroyed by NATO bombs).

In the months following, Otpor members were the cause celebré of Serbia and the world at large and their clenched fist logo started popping up everywhere. Especially in Europe, politicians, rock stars, soccer teams and more brandished it proudly. Representatives of the group were even handed a special “Free Your Mind” award at the November 2000 MTV Europe Music Video Awards in Stockholm. MTV Europe’s CEO praised the youngsters’ “constant struggle against injustice and oppression.” [10] Americans in general were faintly pleased but basically unaware of the entire episode. Serbs were by and large elated. It had all seemed so easy once they figured it out – “break the fear,” follow the lead of the superbly-trained and confident young activists, take a clever, flawlessly printed sign and join the thousands of others doing the same. Like a powerful drug secretly administered in their sleep, the whole episode was liberating and exhilarating, almost too good to be true.

Sources:
[1] From Peace Magazine Apr-Jun 2003, p.10. Author=John Bacher; Title=Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance; URL=http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v19n2p10.htm
Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance
John Bacher
[2], [3], [4] Fletcher, Philippa. “Opposition Pressures Milosevic To Resign.” Reuters. St. Petersburg Times (Russia). Issue #607 (0), Friday, September 29, 2000.
http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=12704
[5] Aaron, Paul. “The Anguish of Nation Building: A Report from Serbia.” World Policy Journal. Volume XXII, No 3, Fall 2005.
http://worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj05-3/aaron.html
[6], [7], [8] A Force more Powerful: Films: Bringing Down a Dictator: Chronology of Events.
http://www.aforcemorepowerful.org/films/bdd/story/chronology.php
[9] Htet, U Min. “Serbia: Demise of a Dictator.” BBC News. September 16 2005.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/burmese/learning/story/2005/09/050912_transition_prog12.shtml
[10] BBC News. “Madonna's MTV triumph.” November 17, 2000.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1027299.stm

PIPELINES FROM THE BLACK HOLE

2007-06-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

POWER PLAYS ON THE CASPIAN
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 4/7/07

Absent the binding force of Soviet-era political and military control, a power vacuum that Zbigniew Brzezinski called in 1997 “the black hole” hovered over the void, once Soviet, “middle space” in the “Grand Chessboard” of Eurasia. Russia was eventually bound to regain its regional power and at least some of its global reach, so Western efforts were stepped-up to politically and economically integrate more former SSRs along the path to Europe taken by the Baltic states. The window of opportunity could be only so long before Russia got its shoelaces untangled and started closing the West’s lead, but until then it was largely land-locked and ice-bound; the USSR had enjoyed direct access to ice-free ports in the Baltic and near-total domination of the Black Sea, its window onto the Mediterranean and world markets. Now it had lost most of its south Baltic ports (retaining the Kaliningrad exclave and of course St. Petersburg in the north) while access to the Black Sea relied on close relations with independent Ukraine, which took a joint role in managing the Black Sea Fleet and maintained a fluctuating relationship with Moscow.

Unlike the Baltic and Black Seas, the Caspian’s value for shipping is only local; its prime value lay in that its littoral basin held the remains of a vast inland sea that left behind widespread oil and natural gas deposits, known since the 1970s at the latest and used by the Soviet Union to add to its vast Siberian gas reserves. The Caspian’s oil supplies are moderate, but its supplies of natural gas are huge, believed to be about 250 trillion cubic feet or 5% of world total, and well-placed to help feed the growing energy demands of Europe, Russia, China, or India. Like the Black Sea, the Caspian basin was once nearly totally dominated by the USSR, but after 1991 was dominated by Iran and the independent nations of the Caucasus and Central Asia, with Russia only maintaining a decent toehold on the north shore, from which pipelines carry Russia’s share of oil and gas north, near the war-torn Muslim autonomous region of Chechnya. (Brzezinski, it must be noted, is the chaorman of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), which calls itself “the only private, non-governmental organization in North America exclusively dedicated to promoting the peaceful resolution of the Russo-Chechen war.")

While the “black hole” and the Caspian’s promise beckoned Western interest in the 1990s, the Eurasian powers still had the clear advantage in Caspian export routes; Russia’s Soviet-era pipeline system provided the most established route to the vast markets of Europe. China had the possibility of eastbound landlines, if dauntingly long, mountainous, and set to feed in through its own Kosovo, Muslim-dominated Xinjiang. Southbound routes could feed markets in India, China, and all of East Asia by sea, most easily making their way to port and tanker via Iran. Indeed as the only nation with access to both Caspian and Persian Gulf supplies, Iran has among the world’s most developed pipeline systems, but so long as it was ruled by the Ayattolahs, Iran was not to be rewarded with Western investment.

Caspian export routes, existing and proposed. General contours of Russian-Iranian-Chinese-dominated systems vs. the American-led model.

So American and Western planners sought to get as much as possible of the fuels out right by China, Russia and Iran, and so looked in two directions for pipelines in open areas where they could muscle in on the action (see map). One direction is east and as south as possible, away from Russia and around Iran, with the ultimate target of markets in South and East Asia. The main problem with this route was that they would all of necessity cross Afghanistan, which was in the 1990s embroiled in civil war with no end in sight, and in 2007 much the same, although now with a solid US military boot in the door a favorble outcome seems possible - eventually.

The other main window of opportunity was due west across the Caucasus states of Azerbaijan and Georgia, the rocky alley between Russian and Iranian turf. These Caucasian pipelines could then connect via Turkey to the Mediterranean, to pipelines - running through the Balkans - into Europe and its vast energy markets. Other planned lines could snake beneath the Black Sea to enter Europe at Bulgaria, and flow west through Macedonia (split from Yugoslavia in 1991) and end on the Albanian coast.

(all this is covered in slightly greater depth here).

SOME NOTES ON TIMING AND CONSENT

2007-06-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

ROOFIES FOR REVOLUTION?
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted May 2 2007

The first time there was a general consensus in Washington on using Soros and NED money, IRI, NDI and OSI skills, and the principles laid out in From Dictatorship to Democracy in a battlefield setting would be in the year 2000. The “force more powerful” would rattle Serbia, the heart of a disintegrating Yugoslavia, to sever the supply of Slobodan Milosevic’s power, as we’ll see in detail in the following chapter. The key to the success of the tactic is in the timing, knowing when it will be effective. The timing considerations, as they were taken into account before the Serbian campaign, must be made on a number of levels, including historical, technological, biographical, and immediate political timing.

For an insight on historical timing, it must be noted that mass nonviolence as a way of achieving power is a relatively new phenomenon. Historically, most rebellions have been either violently victorious or violently suppressed. But with the evolution of global interconnectedness, greater media coverage, and political liberalism, wider avenues were opened in the 20th century, which saw the movements of Gandhi, King, Walesa, Mandela, Suu Kyi and on and on. Shifting public perception of war and peace also played a role. The horrors of total war as seen in the first World War had made pacifism incredibly popular, but the even greater horrors of the sequel conflict highlighted the dangers of pure pacifism – sometimes war was preferable to an unjust peace as agreed to disastrously at Munich. The advent of nuclear weaponry in the course of that monstrous war again made non-violence seem an attractive alternative by making violence so exceptionally dangerous to life on Earth itself. But this came just as the menace of Stalin’s Soviet Union made clear the need for continued struggle if not outright war. As we’ve seen, it is precisely this series of historical developments that drove the evolution of Gene Sharp’s thinking towards the peculiar notion of weaponizing mass non-violence.

The advent of nuclear weaponry is thus an important underpinning, but the other end of technological timing that could help aid these nonviolent actions came decades later. As Jonathan Mowat pointed out, the internet, cell phones, instant and text messaging, and the other communications breakthroughs have been used “to rapidly steer angry and suggestible ‘Generation X’ youth into and out of mass demonstrations and the like.” [1] This capability only developed in the mid-1990s, just in time to play a role in Serbia in 2000.

By 2005 American programmers were working with a Serbian activist in developing a computer game called A Force More Powerful, clearly a franchise of Ackerman’s book and TV series. Ian Traynor explained for the Guardian that the game is won “by outwitting and toppling regimes through techniques of non-violent guerrilla activism.” [2] Ackerman’s mark is also to be seen on his co-project with Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, the top US weapons designer. They hope to produce new communications technologies that could be used to facilitate “youth movement insurgencies.” “There is no question that these technologies are democratizing,” Ackerman stressed. “They enable decentralized activity. They create, if you will, a digital concept of the right of assembly.” [3]

By biographical timing I mean that activists of a certain age and class are called on to flesh out these insurgencies. The West’s planners looked to the American left as evidenced in the protest movements of the 1960s and after, and most recently at the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999. Middle class youth with a liberal education, internet access, a little energy and time to spare and a certain mixture of insulation and teen angst create the right mindset to throw a fist in the air at public rallies. Young people bring to the table energy, free time, rebelliousness and an optimism not yet ravaged by years in the adult world, and bring less of that desire for stability that often comes with age. The young are always ready to rebel against the forces of the old and the corrupt, and they are “cleaner,” more innocent, and more lovable than the old. All these are important elements in their primarily psychological campaign, but most importantly, the young represent the future, and so by manifesting Washington’s vision, they give it the mark of the inevitable course of events.

Another key feature of the 18-24 age bracket, the prime recruiting pool, is their lack of wisdom and general malleability. As with military recruiters, these are apparently also positive traits for the recruiters of nonviolent insurgents. And they’re more prone to peer pressure and illogical mass psychosis; Jonathan Mowat noted a 1967 report from the UK’s Tavistock Institute (the psychological warfare arm of the British military) that noted the then-new phenomenon of “swarming adolescents” found at rock concerts. Author Dr. Fred Emery reported the swarming was associated with “rebellious hysteria,” and predicted that with more study the phenomenon could be controlled effectively. By the end of the 1990s, he predicted, these hormonal mobs could be used at will to bring down a national government. [4] Jonathan Mowat, in his brilliant synthesis, noted “the tactic of swarming” at work as a “a new philosophy of war, which is supposed to replicate the strategy of Genghis Khan as enhanced by modern technologies […] intended to aid both military and non-military assaults against targeted states through what are, in effect, ‘high tech’ hordes.”

And what brought this approach to warfare to the streets of Belgrade, Serbia in 2000 is the final consideration, immediate political timing. Once the technology and the right activist demographic has been identified, mass political resistance is a powerful force that can indeed “restrict or sever the supply” of a dictator’s power, as Sharp noted, but not always “when needed,” as if on cue. First, the behind-the-scenes plotters must be in agreement with the wishes of the mobilized citizenry, or the citizens must be brought around to supporting the plotter’s decisions. In order for support from Washington to flow to a viable movement willing to support its agenda, the political goals of both parties must be synchronized and manifested in the opposition leader(s). This is one of the trickier parts, but deals can be and would be made time after time.

Non-violent resistance can drive a corrupt regime from power, but more often such attempts at a widespread uprising end in mass arrests or even mass killings - think Rangoon 1988, Tiananmen Square 1989, and a thousand smaller, less bloody examples spanning human history. Far more potential rebellions are simply not even attempted due to citizen apathy or fear, as in the 21st century USA; so a mass movement could do better if it had a good “marketing department” to excite involvement, or was helped by a powerful and sympathetic outside force to neutralize the terror of state power. Such help could be either indirect (diplomatic support, etc) or direct (financial or tactical support). There would be no troublesome weapons shipments to learn of as with the debacle of illegal US support to the Contras in Nicaragua, but the idea is still much the same – support the opposition to destabilize and hopefully sever the targeted regime. There’s no law against that yet.

This can lead to charges of engineering other country’s affairs, an action that carries unpleasant aftertastes of Imperialism. However, as supporters would argue, only part of the equation can be engineered from without – a revolution also must have, first and foremost, a fertile soil of political discontent in order to take root, and to appear legitimate, the new leadership must be voted on by the subjected people.

Thus a good metaphor for this type of intervention is a consensual sexual tryst – both partners may well agree to the act (the revolution) after a period of intense courtship, mutual flattery, and heavy petting (financial and diplomatic support, promises of obedience to the West’s aims). Appropriately, the teeming hordes of turned-on activist teenagers would play the part of the hormones, coursing through the body politic of the targeted partner and driving to the inevitable end. Even two consenting adults may not enter into sex with the same set of facts or the same motives. One may be drunk or otherwise impaired, or there may be a serious power imbalance in which one partner is clearly, creepily compelling the other, pushing himself on her in the motel hallway. And no matter the mood right before and during the act, the two may be left with very different feelings about the whole thing in the morning. But still, it’s not rape – that would be war.

Next: The Heart of Serbia/Point of No Return

Sources:
[1], [3], [4], [5] Mowat, Jonathan. “Coup d'État in Disguise: Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template.” Global Research. Center for Research on Globalization. February 9 2005. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOW502A.html
[2] Traynor, Ian. “Young Democracy Guerillas Join Forces: From Belgrade to Baku, activists gather to swap notes on how to topple dictators.” The Guardian. June 6 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1499871,00.html

THE NEW GREAT GAME

2007-05-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns/Chapter 7
Posted 5/9/07

Russia’s response to the assault on its European periphery states in 2003-2004 demonstrates two unique and related historical patterns. The first is Russia’s split personality, straddling the arguably imaginary line that separates Europe from Asia. Russian thinkers have tackled the issue of Asian vs. European identity for centuries. Peter the great tried to settle this in 1703 by founding St. Petersburg and tying Russia into Europe’s affairs, but during the Great Game with England over Central Asia in the 1800s again European vs. Eastern/Asian/other became the paradigm. Since the Bolsheviks moved the capitol back to Moscow, and more so since the collapse of the USSR, Russia's European aspirations have been lessened in favor of a centralizing view that looks south and east as well as west.

The other key factor is Russia’s tactic of withdrawal when threatened, as they did when Napoleon invaded. Moscow was abandoned and burnt to the ground, leaving nothing for the French army, most of whom died in the attempt to get back home ahead of winter. When things get rough on the European front, Russians pull back to the east, relying on the continental vastness of their Eurasian territory to wait out the crisis.

2004-05 was such a time, and indeed Russia’s power focus has to a remarkable degree shifted east as ambitions in Europe slid into political obscurity. It’s not so much that the Kremlin has abandoned its plans for Europe as that it is diversifying its holdings and making contingency plans for an uncertain future there. So Putin’s Moscow started taking greater interest in increasing control over its former Central Asian holdings; the independent but cooperative nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and to a much lesser extent ‘neutral” Turkmenistan.

The Central Asian Republics seemed relatively safe from the Orange Revolution type of tactic. In Europe there is the EU, NATO, and a long history of Democratic institutions and mindsets. But these landlocked Muslim-dominated nations, resource-rich but impoverished and still run largely on Soviet habits and older memories, lie in an area still jointly dominated by “great power rivals” Russia and China. Central Asia is a long way from Brussels – and so as the democratic bridgehead struggled to cross the last spans of Europe, this was the Bulkhead of Russia’s Eurasian power outside its own borders.

The area also represents the heart of “the Grand Chessboard” of Eurasia as portrayed by Zbigniew Brzezinski. He describes this region as the “Eurasian Balkans,” encompassing the Caucasian and Central Asian flanks of the former USSR plus Iran and Afghanistan. Compared to the European Balkans, “the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize,” at twenty times the size and presenting an enormous zone of instability “astride the inevitably emerging transportation network meant to link [Eurasia’s] western and eastern extremities.” [1] Thus as in times ancient, the region was to be the crossroads of Eurasia, host to a 21st Century Silk Road as Unocal called it – pipelines, fiber optic cable, superhighways, all facilitating further globalization of a previously under-tapped region.

There was more than transport at stake though; Central Asia straddles the Himalayan foothills, producing a tectonic cornucopia of mineral wealth, including tin, gold, and platinum in large quantities. And to a world increasingly thirsty for oil and natural gas, Central Asia has stood out for one key reason – the energy reserves of the Caspian Sea; Fortunes and political careers were made and broken in what Ahmed Rashid in 1997 dubbed “the New Great Game.” After 9/11 we found that the prize was not as big as originally thought, (and hence the war was not about that). But by mid-2006, world oil prices climbed from a pre-9/11 baseline of about $25 a barrel to well over $70 a barrel, US News and World Report noted in their September 11 2006 issue “the stakes have suddenly shot up,” and interest is now as intense as ever. [2]
---
Next: From Shanghai with Love: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Sources:
[1] Brzezinski. "The Grand Chessboard." 1997. Page 124.
[2] Fang, Bay. “The Great Energy Game.” US News and World Report. Vol 141, no. 9. September 11 2006. p 60-62.

TURKMENBASHI'S DREAMLAND

2007-05-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
November 2006
Re-posted 4/23/07

Turkmenistan is an interesting case, nearly 5 million inhabitants, 98% Muslim, in the former Soviet space, on the Caspian, and ruled by perhaps the most bizarre and repressive dictator in the region. And yet it is a nation remarkably undisturbed by the democracy guerillas that had struck further west in Georgia and Ukraine, an ambiguous “revolution” as per Kyrgyzstan’s “tulip Revolution,” or Andijan-style unrest as happened further east. It is the calm at the eye of the Central Asian storm.

Rich in natural resources but with per-capita incomes at sub-Saharan African levels, the country is held under the effectively permanent rule of dictator Saparmyrat Niyazov, or “Turkmenbashi” (father of the Turkmen people) as he calls himself. Niyazov first assumed leadership of the Turkmen Communist party in 1985, and thus headed the government of the Soviet Republic during its last years. The republic of Turkmenistan declared independence in 1991 just before the collapse of the USSR and soon joined the CIS, signing the divorce papers as it were along with the other republics. Afterwards though Niyazov and the government at Ashkabad refused to join any other such organization, in pursuit of a “status of permanent neutrality,” which was accepted by the UN General Assembly in December 1995. The country retained its membership in Russia’s CIS, though never agreeing to the mutual defense clause that later morphed into the CSTO, and in August 2005, Turkmenbashi downgraded the country officially to CIS “Associate Member,” an exclusive sort of friendly non-membership. [1]

One of the many tributes erected to and by the great “Turkmenbashi”

Like Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan, Turkmenbashi has instead focused on apolitical pipeline diplomacy, since independence encouraging foreign investment in its oil and gas reserves. Niyazov works with everybody, West and East, boasting huge deals with Russia’s Gazprom, planning pipeline to China, and hoping for Western sponsored paths south through Afghanistan. The city of Krasnovodsk on the Caspian coast was named in 1993 “Turkmenbashi” after the President and served as the oil hub, commercial capital, and center of ego for the country. While cooperative with western economies, Niyazov is not the model of a democratic leader by a long shot, with arguably the worst record on democracy is in the region. The city naming is a telling sign of what most observers agree is Niyazov’s cult of personality; in the manner of Stalin or Hussein he has monuments and portraits of himself erected everywhere to remind citizens of their beneficent ruler.

In 1992 Turkmenistan’s first post-independence constitution enshrined Niyazov as head of government as well as head of state – President and Prime Minister. He promised on taking the post that within a decade all Turkmen families would own a house and a car. He was later re-elected to the post in a direct popular ballot in which he stood unopposed, and his rule was extended indefinitely in 1999, with parliament giving Niyazov the legal right to rule for life with no need for elections. [2] He modified this the following year, announcing that he would step down by no later than 2010, after reaching the age of 70. In early 2003 Niyazov started making good on his cars promise, handing out free Mercedes-Benzs to top officials whose loyalty he needed, just as he announced a new commission, as the BBC described, “to monitor foreign trips by politicians, and to track the movements of foreigners within Turkmenistan.” [3]

The BBC’s official timeline of Turkmenistan notes the idiosyncratic nature of his rule, marked by ironic choices of a ruler undisturbed in his delusions. In August 2002 Niyazov ordered the months of the year renamed after himself, his mother and his spiritual guide, the Ruhnama. In August 2004 he ordered construction of a grandiose ice palace in the middle of the Turkmen desert, and in November had to explain this project at a Turkmen-Uzbek summit on water resources. And in February 2005 the president went under the knife for eye surgery, just after suggesting all Turkmen hospitals other than those in capital should be closed to save money. [4]

Niyazov’s total suppression of opposition is unparalleled: In November 2002 the president easily survived an armed attack on his presidential motorcade as it drove through Ashkabad. Authorities blamed “mercenaries” acting for exiled opposition leaders who in turn accuse Niyazov of arranging the incident as excuse to crack down. Within the month opposition activist and former foreign minister Boris Shikhmuradov was arrested, accused of masterminding the attack and sentenced to life imprisonment. More than 40 others were convicted and jailed along with him. Another crackdown in mid-2005 saw Deputy Prime Minister Elly Kurbanmuradov, a senior figure in the energy sector, sacked and jailed for 25 years on corruption charges, and Rejep Saparov sacked as head of presidential administration and sentenced to 20 years in jail for corruption. [5]

Thus Turkmenistan has avoided the destabilizing aspects of divisive politics and continues to provide a perfect totalitarian state with its enforced stability, everything the West claims to be against. Indeed, the US State Department and the rest admit the truth of Niyazov’s regime – Freedom House, banned from the country, listed it in 2005 as "not free," noting "Turkmenistan remained one of the most repressive societies in the world” in 2005. [6] Yet we see no reports of real US aid to opposition parties, training of youth movements or the like – no Kostunica or Saakashvili reported here, no Otpor-Kmara-Pora-Zubr equivalent reported.

Some would argue that state repression is to blame for the lack of democratic activism, and certainly the evidence is there. But there are other factors at work – Belarus is remarkably oppressive and hard-line as well, but Zubr and Malady Front have thrived with Western support and coordinated diplomatic offensives, launching campaigns every other year for the six years now (2001, 2003, 2005-06). But Turkmenistan, with even less democracy and a more unreasonable ruler, has remained remarkably quiet. And as far as diplomatic pressure, sanctions and trade restrictions, pressure has not been applied on these levels either to any meaningful degree as has happened in Belarus. Turkmenistan was not listed as an “outpost of tyranny.”

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Niyazov is also an enthusiastic, long-term partner in US drive to tap the Caspian – had been party to Unocal’s Turkmen-Afghan-Pakistan pipeline. Back in 1995 Niyazov and Pakistan’s PM Benazir Bhutto commissioned a feasibility study of Afghan pipeline. [7] Both leaders had initially backed a rival pipeline offered by Argentine company Bridas, and Niyazov signed an exclusive contract with them. But while it took something like a coup to get Pakistan's mind to change, Niyazov was then the first to see the potential in Unocal’s version and broke his contract with Bridas, who later sued Unocal for $15 billion, finally awarded $47 million in 1998. They tried suing Unocal in Texas also, but the international court threw the case out, saying they had no jurisdiction; the case was based on Turkmen law; which it turns out is basically Niyazov’s whim. [8] Unocal spokesman John Maresca later noted with no apparent irony that the region was “dynamic and changing. Business contracts can be rescinded without warning.” [9]

Niyazov’s switch shows both his ambition and his impatience. Ahmed Rashid, in his book Taliban, revealed the hopes that Niyazov had nurtured that Turkmenistan’s oil and gas exports would make his country “the new Kuwait,” as he described it back in 1991 (interestingly, just as Kuwait was recovering from an invasion with U.S. help.) Niyazov is self-interested enough to be a constant ally of whoever supports the project and offers him the highest return on his nation’s investment. And the backing of the U.S. government is certainly a plus for any pipeline plan in the post-Cold-War world. It could also help him deliver on that Mercedes promise. Rashid noted “Niyazov saw that Unocal could become the means to engage a major U.S. company and the Clinton administration in Turkmenistan’s development.” [10] And he was putting his own country’s neck on the line; the government of Turkmenistan was listed as a financial partner in the CENTGAS consortium, holding a 7% stake scraped together from the nation’s scant funds. [11]

After the worst of the afghan campaign passed in early 2002, it was reported that “with the demise of the Taliban, talk of a new pipeline has begun to resurface.” [12] But even as Niyazov rules undisturbed in dreamland, the TAP pipeline has still not come to fruition by late 2006, with a new insurgency in Afghanistan rivaling anything since the fall of the Taliban just as world oil prices surged and made the pipeline yet more desirable.

Postscript: Turkmenbashi is dead. He expired from heart attack on December 20 2006. Under the constitution, the Parliament chairman Ovezgeldy Atayev should have become the interim leader, but deputy prime minister Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov was named instead on the 22nd. He explained that Mr Atayev had been sacked after a criminal probe was opened into his activities on the 21st. [13]

Sources:
[1] REF/RL "CIS: Turkmenistan Reduces Ties To ‘Associate Member.'" August 29, 2005. Acc. June 21 2006 at: http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/08/26dab4c9-5ba1-4193-86e7-62fc991f8a6c.html
[2]"Turkmen leader to rename calendar." BBC News. August 8 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2181151.stm
[3] "Top Turkmens to get free Mercs." BBC News. February 5 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2729053.stm
[4] "Turkmenistan: Profile." BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/country_profiles/1298522.stm
[5] various - google the names
[6] Turkmenistan – 2005 Overview. Freedom House. http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=22&year=2005&country=6852
[7] "Timeline of Competition between Unocal and Bridas for the Afghanistan Pipeline." World Press Review. December 2001. http://www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/pipeline_timeline.htm. Accessed via: http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/119.html
[8], [10] Rashid, Ahmed. "Taliban." 2001.
[9] Maresca, John J. Testimony to Hose Subcommittee on International Relations. February 1998. Accessed January 9, 2005 at: http://propagandamatrix.com/testimony_by_john_j_maresca.html
[11], [12] Blagov, Sergei. "Bold Turkmen project in the pipeline again." Asia Times. February 9 2002. http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/DB19Ag01.html
[13] "Turkmen leader pledges stability." BBC News. December 22 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6204561.stm

EURO-NATO: HOW THE WEST WAS RUN

2007-05-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns/Chater 1
Poated 5/11/2007

One of the prime avenues for containing and steering the power of the EU into conformity with the Anglo-American Alliance was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Also called “the Western Alliance:” the US, UK, Belgium, France, et al, NATO was the grand World War II Alliance minus the USSR. After forming in 1949, NATO took in Greece and Turkey (1952), and then West Germany (1955), but afterwards sat steady for decades as it stared Moscow down, never used its mutual defense clause, and remained a potential military force only.

Yet despite the final crumbling of the Warsaw Pact and even the USSR itself, the objects of its vigilance, NATO remained and looked for a new mission. In a 1992 Pentagon report leaked before scrubbing, then Undersecretary of Defense for policy Paul Wolfowitz offered a role for NATO if not a mission. The report admitted “we must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO, particularly the alliance’s integrated command structure.” This command structure keeps the United States in the loop so that the Europeans could not make military or security decision the US was unwilling to sign off on. Indeed, Wolfowitz noted how this arrangement would allow NATO to remain “the primary instrument of Western defense and security as well as the channel for U.S. influence and participation in European security affairs.” [1]

CFR heavyweight and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the same role for NATO. In his 1997 strategic tome The Grand Chessboard, he took a placating line that the organization’s leadership should eventually give Europe a greater role, coequal with Washington in a 1+1 (US + EU) formulation. While he noted the existing “American primacy within the alliance,” European membership was set to grow, and thus “NATO will have to adjust.” [2] But in an accompanying article for Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the CFR, he wrote more frankly:

“With the allied European nations still highly dependent on US protection, any expansion of Europe's political scope is automatically an expansion of US influence. […] A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of US policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States...” [3]

To date, NATO remains Europe’s only credible security force, is now in fact waging wars over its member’s interests while expanding its member list (and therefore possible conflict trigger-points), and the US has consistently promoted European expansion, especially the CFR people.

Who exactly is pulling whose strings in this arrangement is a matter of contention. Some, like John Laughland, would argue that Europe has thus been made the “51st state of America,” [4] while some Americans claim their country has been “Europeanized” as the economic powerhouse to bolster the European order. More likely neither side holds the reins exclusively, and a carefully managed confluence of interests is the wellspring of this trans-Atlantic union we call the West. Either way, regarding Russia and its sphere, it can be treated as a unified and hungry whole. Upon the USSR's collapse, if not before, the West set to wooing the former Warsaw Pact states; Internal political and economic reforms, once verified, could lead to inclusion in the solidifying EU and even NATO, then taking new applications as it considered its new agenda.

It was known Russia could not react favorably to NATO expansion, as noted in a 1995 analysis by Alexei K. Pushkov, onetime adviser and speech-writer for Premier Gorbachev, an eminent Russian mind. The report was published in Strategic Forums, an offshoot of National Defense University in Washington, and warned that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe or beyond would lead to seven key problems. Pushkov listed among these: “deepening of the gap between Russian and Western civilizations,” “an unwelcome influence on internal Russian politics,” and “a rebirth of the Russian sphere of influence among the former states of the Soviet Union.” On this point, he explained “if Russia considers itself geopolitically cut off from Europe and the Euro-Atlantic community, it would have no choice but to strengthen its historical sphere of influence.” [5]

Most ironically, Pushkov predicted, the expansion of this tool of Western security could well lead to “a weakening of overall European security” by expanding the number of NATO’s mutual defense trigger points while simultaneously increasing the tensions with Russia over those, and by encouraging “a new militarism in Russia.” Expansion would surely be seen in Moscow as an unfriendly act of distrust, no matter the spin put on it, and could cause Russia “to become a more independent player, less constrained by a real or illusionary partnership with the West.” Pushkov warned “Russia might well become a loose cannon in world politics” with “very serious” effects on world stability.

Yet in March 1999 the NATO blithely accepted applications from former Warsaw Pact states Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, expanding its geographic scope greatly at the expense of Russia’s recent sway. Others got in the queue; Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the last Republics fused into the USSR and first to leave, ran away and joined this circus. A later round of NATO additions in March 2004 scored all three, its first former SSRs, along with Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and the alliance’s first former Yugoslav republic, Slovenia.

left: NATO states vs. Warsaw Pact in 1988, Iron Curtain highlighted.
right: NATO vs. Russia’s sphere (CIS) in mid-2004

During the Cold War the West always maintained they propped up the Iron curtain to keep the Soviet wolf at bay – in its time that may have been true, but once the fence fell, every bit of devouring has been in an easterly direction as the Euro-Atlantic community expands deeper into Eurasia and what was being called the post-Soviet Space, with Russia’s influence receding like a melting glacier.

Next: Gene Sharp: Master of Noviloent Warfare

Sources:
[1] Tyler, Patrick E. "US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop A One-Superpower World: Pentagon’s Document Outlines Ways to Thwart Challenges to Primacy of America." The New York Times. March 8, 1992.
http://work.colum.edu/~amiller/wolfowitz1992.htm
[2] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives." New York. Basic Books. 1997. First Printing. Page 76
[3] Zbigniew Brzezinski, "A Geostrategy for Eurasia," Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997.
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html
[4] Laughland, John. “Becoming the 51st State.” Antiwar.com. May 20, 2003
http://antiwar.com/laughland/?articleid=2071
[5] Pushkov, Alexei. "NATO Enlargement: A Russian Perspective." Strategic Forums. July 1995. http://www.ndu.edu/inss/strforum/SF_34/forum34.html

HOPES OF REFORM SHOT DEAD/SCO'S CONTROLLED BURN

2007-05-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without guns/Chapter VII
Posted 5/9/07

Following the ambiguous “Tulip Revolution” of March 2005, Kurmanbek Bakiev was confirmed the second President since independence with an election on July 10. He received an astounding 89% return of the vote (turnout 53%), partly based on his new political alliance with opposition leader Felix Kulov, released from prison with all charges dropped and soon appointed Prime Minister as agreed to before the election. Bakiyev was inaugurated on August 14, and the old parliament agreed to dissolve, and all seemed in order: another successful Color Revolution.

President-elect Bakiyev meets with Rumsfeld, Bishkek, July 2005

On April 14 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld met the acting President Bakiev, who assured the Americans that they could keep using the Ganci Air Base. [1] For Washington the status quo was thus largely maintained, though the new government was not strongly embraced. Something went wrong with the Tulip revolution - The violence in Osh and Jalal-abad should have been a clue. The government was thereafter locked in widespread power struggles and accusations of corruption and even murder. Parliament went on to reject some of the more reform-minded and Western-oriented among the opposition, including Roza Otunbayeva, one of the driving forces behind the early, more “legitimate” phase of the Tulip Revolution. [2]

One “legitimate” opposition leader that did make it into the new government, though he didn’t stay long, was Azimbek Beknazarov, whose 2002 jailing had led to the bloody protests that caused Bakiyev to resign as PM and join the opposition. President Bakiyev rewarded Beknazarov with the post of Prosecutor General, and IWPR explained that the new PG aggressively launched a series of investigations into corruption and criminal activity by Akayev era officials, including a former Central Electoral Commission chief, the head of the Kyrgyz National Bank, and former-PM Nikolai Tanaev. On September 19th, Beknazarov finally got parliament to strip the immunity normally accorded to one of its members - Aydar Akayev, recently-elected son of the ex-president – to allow corruption charges against him to proceed. Later on the same day, President Bakiev dismissed Beknazarov, officially for improper procedures in another investigation. [3]

Other powers behind Akayev’s ouster, like Bamayan Erkinbayev, a ‘controversial businessman’ [ie - mafia-connected] also took power. Once accused of being behind deadly gun battles over control of a local marketplace, Erkinbayev was also a popular politician who entertained presidential ambitions. But he stepped aside for the Bakiev-Kulov coalition, and reportedly helped to organize the southern ‘protests’ which eventually brought them to power. Afterwards he was rewarded with a seat in parliament and the chairmanship of the national Olympic Committee The BBC noted the wide concern that the new influence of “shady businessmen like Mr. Erkinbayev is one of the most worrying trends of the past year.” [4]

Erkinbayev was only in government a few months before he was killed by gunmen on September 22, in an incident widely attributed to his business dealings. [5] Worse, this was only one of at least seven leading and controversial politicians shot dead in various incidents between June 2005 and May 2006. Among them was new MP Tynychbek Akmatbayev, head of parliament’s Committee on Law Enforcement, but reportedly connected to organized crime and embroiled in a long-running feud with new PM Felix Kulov. During an October visit to a prison near Bishkek to calm an uprising there, Akmatbayev and his entourage were somehow engulfed by the rebellion and he was shot dead in the chaos. [6] There were rumors that Kulov had been involved in engineering Akmatbayev’s killing, as Byzantine as such a plot would have been.

After his bother’s death, Ryspek Akmatbayev’s, himself widely thought of as a major mafia kingpin, was asked if his family feud with Kulov could lead to bloodshed. Ryspek responded “nobody [else] needs to suffer […] I suggest that we meet man to man. I will kick his ass, and that will be that.” [7] And he was working his way up, in April 2006 winning a special election to represent his home district in parliament, [8] though he was unable to take up his seat immediately because of pending murder charges against him. [9] His election prompted international condemnation from the West and even Russia expressed concern about the possible “criminalization” of Kyrgyz politics. [10] That noise didn’t last long though - Ryspek himself was reportedly shot dead as he left a Bishkek Mosque on Wednesday May 10. Akmatbayev’s aides carried his body away before police could investigate. The city police chief told the media “I can see spent gun cartridges and blood, but no bodies.” [11]

On the political front, there was some improvement in the political and civil sphere, as noted in the west: Freedom House upgraded the country from “Not Free” to “Partly Free” in 2006 based on “the continuing permissive environment for the promotion of civil liberties and political rights.” They noted a “mixed” record, including increased media freedom and local elections in December 2005 went off “with only ‘rough irregularities.” [12] But despite these “positive steps forward,” the good news was far outweighed by the bad; continued financial hardships across the country fed a deepening sense of dispirited frustration, by BBC reports. [13] Of course the government remained upbeat and established a new national holiday marking the anniversary of the Tulip Revolution, which president Bakiyev described as “the triumph of justice.” To mark the first anniversary, the new government threw a nationwide party on March 24, but BBC News released an article explaining that the “so called” tulip revolution was in fact “no revolution:”

“Many residents of this poor Central Asia republic are still not in the mood for a party. ‘There was never a time in the history of Kyrgyzstan when the confidence of the people in their government was so low,’ said Edil Baisalov of the Bishkek-based NGO, the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society. An international think tank, the International Crisis Group, has gone further, labeling the nation a ‘faltering state.’” [14]

From early on Bakiyev was supported by government-sponsored youth groups; RFE/RL reported in July 2005 on a youth team headquartered in Gorky Square, Central Bishkek. They operated from a yurt (a traditional nomadic tent) stocked with music equipment, national costumes, and T-shirts and baseball caps printed with slogans like “We are for Bakiev!” [15] Their support proved needed as the president’s popularity took a nose-dive in the wake of Beknazarov's dismissal and Erkinbayev's assassination. Bakiev’s approval rates reached their lowest point on September 24, when thousands of protesters took to the streets of Jalalabad to again demand a president’s resignation. [16] Hinting at the methods of the “Tulip Revolution,” another RFE/RL piece from November warned of “the frightening prospect of a rent-a-mob free-for-all” which could lead to many ends, “including an authoritarian drive to reestablish order.” [17]

The Tulip revolution was first lumped in with the Orange and Rose Revolutions, and taken as another victory for the West. But it didn’t work quite right – the protests weren’t properly done, all the bloodshed was discouraging, and the reforms have not come. It seems the West’s Tulip Revolution was hijacked from within via Erkinbayev et al, paid off by the new government first with the ballot then the bullet to wash its hands of once useful but now embarrassing criminal benefactors. There may well have been behind-the-scenes Akayev/Bakiyev deals to stage the president’s flight to Russia to complete the drama. I sense Russia’s or China’s complicity in this episode, and it certainly would serve their interest. It would allow the SCO leaders to publicly take yet another “hit” and exaggerate the perceived extent of the color revolution campaign. This would justify their own counter-measures – which would come within weeks - while causing no real lasting change. A SCO-planned upheaval would preempt any real pro-West color revolution, as it were preventing a forest fire with a controlled burn.
---
Next: The SCO Holdouts: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan

Sources:
[1]

THE AMERICAN END

2007-05-08T16:19:00.000-07:00

OVERT OPS/A BIPARTISAN EFFORT
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 5/8/07

In the last yeas of the Cold War and afterwards, efforts in Washington mushroomed to help further the USSR’s decline and usher the suddenly-nations shaken loose away from Moscow and into the Western system. Over time, many of the individuals, governmental, non-governmental and semi-governmental groups and think tanks would take up and champion Sharp’s and Helvey’s strategies in their quest for spreading “democracy,” “human rights,” and “open markets” around the world.

Neither the revolutions of 1989 nor the “color revolutions” of the early 21st Century would not have gotten far without the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), founded in 1983 to assist fledgling democracy movements in the Third World. One of the arcitects of the legislation establishing the NED, Allen Weinstein, pointed out in 1991 “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” As the NED was created, the CIA had been wounded and sidelined by the revelation of its clandestine operations, its powers and reach limited. So ironically, attempts to gain influence abroad were shifted over to a more overt approach by the Reagan Administration. William Blum wrote in Rogue State [2000], the hope was that this would “eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.” [1] While it describes itself as a private non-profit organization, the NED is in essence a government agency, staffed by high-profile politicians and receiving the majority of its funding from Congress, allocated by the State Department as their policies see fit. The NED’s government funding was $40 million in 2004, roughly doubled in 2005 at the request of the once non-interventionist president Bush. [2]

NED co-founder and prominent CFR member Mark Palmer is a key figure in this story; he boasts a long bi-partisan record as a presidential speechwriter and as a diplomat, from Nixon’s administration to the 1990s promoting “freedom” and “people power” abroad. Starting with work for the SNCC during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Palmer “has witnessed and practiced the power of organized nonviolent force in achieving freedom and justice,” as his State Department bio reads. He put this training to work as ambassador to Hungary in 1989, “helping persuade its last dictator to leave power” by stepping out of his office and “demonstrating in the streets of Budapest” along with the masses. [3] After leaving government proper Palmer became a venture capitalist, investing in liberalized media in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, arguing for the democratizing force of a free media floated with US dollars. He’s written a book called Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 [2003], and continued to advise the Clinton and Bush regimes, helping persuade them to initiate new democracy policies, including for the first time promoting Western-style Democracy in the Arab world. [4]

The NED Palmer helped launch spends a large portion of its budget on grants to two organizations: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and the International Republican Institute (IRI). They are the global wings of the Democratic and Republican parties, respectively, and NED support, critics point out, has allowed the two parties to pursue their own foreign policy agendas under the radar of government oversight. Yet despite their respective parties’ heated shows of disagreement for the home audience, the two agencies usually work side-by-side in their overseas freedom-building exercises, though often focusing on different aspects.

Many of the Republican Party’s top internationalists do some work with the International Republican Institute; chaired by John McCain, the IRI’s ranks also include Lawrence Eagleburger, Chuck Hagel, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Brent Scowcroft. The majority of its funding comes from the federal government via the NED to “support the growth of political and economic freedom, good governance and human rights around the world” and to “strengthen free markets and the rule of law.” The IRI claims credit for helping organize and maintain a unified political bloc that won elections and held the reins of power in Poland from 1997 - 2001 and was thus able to help steer Poland into joining NATO during that window. [5]

The IRI has had its hands in some decidedly anti-democratic operations, like the 2002 Venezuelan coup that removed the elected Socialist president Hugo Chavez, replacing him with American-friendly free-market supporters. The Venezuelan population in fact used something like Sharp’s tactics – mass strikes and demonstrations - to demand the re-instatement of Chavez, thus dramatically re-affirming his popularity and strengthening his grip on power. It was a debacle for the American plotters and president Bush, whom Chavez called “an asshole” for allowing the plot, and the IRI was strongly criticized by its NED benefactors for the episode. The IRI is also accused of funding activities connected to the successful and only slightly violent 2004 Coup d’etat that had Haiti’s elected president Aristide deposed and allegedly kidnapped away to Africa by US soldiers “to prevent bloodshed.” [6] Perhaps due to the success of this campaign, putting the US effectively in control of the interim government, the NED issued no vocal criticism of the IRI’s role.

On the other side of the aisle, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) is headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and also includes Tom Daschle and a roster of former Democrat White House hopefuls – Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, and Geraldine Ferraro. Boosted by their constituency’s greater acceptance of foreign interventionism, the NDI maintains a global network of “volunteer experts” who help them provide “assistance” on every continent “to build political and civic organizations, safeguard elections, and promote citizen participation, openness and accountability in government.” As far as supporting coups and the like, the NDI seems to have a cleaner record than the IRI, and by my research seems relatively true to its name. Or perhaps they just can’t handle getting their fingernails dirty like the Republicans do?

In 2004, the NDI and its Republican counterparts joined forces in Iraq, jointly helping to form political parties and monitor the January 2005 elections for the National Assembly. The Washington Post explained how the NDI “focused on organization while IRI, in a division of labor, focused on message.” [7] The effort was orchestrated from NDI office in Baghdad where a multinational staff delivered training to selected activists and political leaders to get out the vote. [8] American politicians have the skill sets necessary to read and manipulate public opinion, essential as they are to American political survival. Their support and advice would be highly useful in a country like Iraq, unaccustomed to the ways of electoral politics. But only approved parties could benefit from this useful training; the NDI-IRI program had no competition, remaining “the only game in town” as the Post put it. [9]

The spread of democracy via direct people’s action has been supported by various foundations and think tanks outside the government proper but staffed with influential elites, a nexus that journalist Trish Schuh calls “the regime change industry.” [10] The most enthusiastic support for Sharp’s post-military weapons system came from specific think tanks like the Albert Einstein Institution itself and from dedicated individuals like CFR Director Dr. Peter Ackerman. Ackerman is the founding chairman of the Washington-based International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (CNC), another key supporter of the Sharp approach. Ackerman helped define the subject with his 1994 book Strategic Nonviolent Conflict, his Emmy-nominated 2000 documentary series A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, and his companion book of the same name co-authored with former US Air Force officer Jack DuVall. At the time, Duvall was president of CNC, and along with Ackerman has worked side-by-side with Colonel Helvey in spreading the word.

Freedom House is a widely cited monitor of the various levels of freedom worldwide, serving as a guide to where the Sharp approach would be desirable to use. Chaired by former CIA Director and key Rumsfeld policy Adviser R. James Woolsey, and vice-chaired by the illustrious Mark Palmer, Freedom House has also been involved in hosting seminars and training opposition leaders (see [link-chapter III]) and has reportedly been approved for “covert action” inside Iran. [11] Together with CNC’s DuVall, Woolsey is also a director at the Arlington Institute, a “futurist” organization created in 1989 by former Chief of Naval Operations advisor John L. Peterson “to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms,” it boasts, through introducing “social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation.” [12] In other words, AI wants to put the peace movement to work in the war industry.

Next: Soros Money and the Open Society

Sources:
[1] Blum, William – Rogue State. Page number lost...
[2] Duncan, Benjamin. “Venezuela: What is the National Endowment for Democracy up to?” Al Jazeera, via Venezuelanalysis. May 04, 2004 http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1169
[3], [4] “Mark Palmer.” Wikipedia. Last modified August 17 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Palmer
[5] “Solidarity Electoral Action.” Wikipedia. Last modified June 21 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akcja_Wyborcza_Solidarnosc
[6] Kurlantzick, Joshua. “The Coup Connection.” Mother Jones. November/December 2004. http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2004/11/11_401.html
[7], [9] Vick, Karl and Robin Wright. “Coaching Iraq's New Candidates, Discreetly: U.S.-Funded Programs Nurture Voting Process.” Washington Post. January 26, 2005; Page A01 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36582-2005Jan25.html
[8] Ashkenaz Croke, Lisa and Brian Dominick. "Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote." New standard. Dec 13, 2004. http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1311
[10] Schuh, Trish. “Mehlis's Murky Past; US and Isreali Proxies Pushing the Next Neo-Con War
Faking the Case Against Syria.” Counterpunch. November 18, 2005. http://www.counterpunch.org/schuh11182005.html
[11] Dinmore, Guy. "Bush enters Iran 'freedom' debate." Washington Post. March 31 2006. Accessed from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/03/31/BL2006033100695_pf.html
[12] The Arlington Institute. http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org/

THE STORY OF THREE IDEALISTS

2007-05-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

THE SAAKASHVILIS AND ZHVANIA
Adam Larson / Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns/Chapter 5
Posted February 2007

While useful to Washington, Shevardnadze was ever more unpopular with his own people, whose patience was wearing thin on territorial integrity and those economic issues as well as widespread official corruption, which the president seemed incapable of stopping. Presented in 1999 by his old friend James Baker with the esteemed “Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service,” by 2003 Shevardnadze’s government was increasingly seen as plagued with corruption, mismanagement, and secrecy. [1] These problems steadily drained Shevardnadze’s power like a hole in his gas tank and strategically vital Georgia began to look rather vulnerable to another round of instability and violence, sure to put the brakes on any pipeline with a “T” in the middle. Major protests had been staged off-and-on since 2001; criticism from the media was squashed with raids on the opposition stations, while political protest was met with dismissal of the government. US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced at one point “an unstable Georgia automatically results in an unstable Caucasus,” a statement some took to mean that rather than expend more political capital propping Shevy up, the Americans should “ditch him to ensure stability.” [2]

There are certainly other reasons as well for the US to support Shevardnadze’s ouster, like the attractiveness of the well-formed, popular, and more firmly pro-West opposition leader - 36-year-old Mikhail Saakashvili. His role in this episode is the U.S.-supported front-runner who had spent years cultivating an image as a youthful, optimistic crusader against corruption and the forces of the old. Saakashvili is a skillful demagogue, promising a brighter, more liberal future aligned less with Moscow than with London and Washington – pure gold for frustrated voters, especially the young and naïve.

Saakashvili was born in Tbilisi, but came to power as an international man, reportedly fluent in seven languages. He is married to a Dutch woman, Sandra Saakashvili-Roelofs, a human rights crusader, founder of the humanitarian foundation SOCO, and author of the autobiography The Story of an Idealist (2005). Not only is she Saakashvili’s Western wife, illustrating his desire to marry Georgia into Europe, the two also met and solidified their partnership in the system and cities of the Euro-Atlantic community.

"Misha" in the early '90s

A 25-year-old Mikhail graduated college in Georgia with a degree in international law in 1992 and briefly worked in the new government under Shevardnadze. This early on, someone in Washington saw promise in the budding leader and extended him a fellowship from the newly-created and Soros-funded Edmund S. Muskie/Freedom Support Act (FSA) Graduate fellowship Program. Under this program Saakashvili received law degrees from Columbia University in 1994 and the George Washington University law school in 1995.

He also studied at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, where in 1993 he met fellow student Sandra. The two of them wed quickly and moved to New York where she worked at Columbia while he studied there, and later she worked at a Dutch law firm while he worked with an American one in Manhattan during 1995. They were busy people. Not a lot of time for romance I would guess.

Later that year, Mikhail was approached in New York by his old Georgian friend Zurab Zhvania, then working on behalf of President Shevardnadze to recruit promising young Georgians to join his party, the Georgian Citizens Union. By the end of the year, Saakashvili and Zhvania had both returned home and won elections for seats in parliament, serving together under the party’s banner. Sandra relocated with Mikhail and worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross and at the Consulate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Tbilisi. [3] (keep the red cross in mind when looking at the new flag adopted after the Sakkashvilis came to power - coincidence?)

Next: A Warm Relationship: Kmara, Soros, Saakashvili

Sources:
[1] Cohen, Ariel. “Shevardnadze’s Journey.” Policy Review Online. April/May 2004. http://www.policyreview.org/apr04/cohen.html
[2] Feinberg, Leslie. “Washington and the coup in former Soviet Georgia.” Worker’s World. January 22, 2004. Accessed at: http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/georgia0122.php
[3] Sandra Roelofs Biography and Activity. Communications Office of the President of Georgia. 2005. http://www.president.gov.ge/?l=E&m=2
[4] Georgian Justice Minister resigns. RFE/RL Newsline, Vol. 5, No. 179. September 20 2001.
http://www.hri.org/news/balkans/rferl/2001/01-09-20.rferl.html
[5] Areshidze, Irakly “Georgia’s Mounting Opposition.” Eurasianet. January 21 2003.
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/rights/articles/eav012103.shtml
[6] Areshidze, Irakly “Tbilisi City Council Controversy Deals Blow to Political Opposition in Georgia.” Eurasianet. November 12 2002. http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav111202a.shtml
[7] Traynor, Ian. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev.” The Guardian. November 26 2004. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html

WESTERN WINDS FEEDING THE UKRAINIAN FIRE

2007-05-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

When asked on December 2 about possible Russian intervention in Ukraine’s election President Bush stressed “I think any election, if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence.” The official government position remained that neither Russia nor the US nor any other country should interfere in the free elections of a sovereign nation. Both Pora And US officials insist this policy was adhered to, and there was no U.S. funding or direct support to the youth movement at the heart of this transformation nor to any particular candidate. Both the yellow and black wings of Pora claimed they relied almost solely on domestic and overseas Ukrainian financial support. [1]

This is not true of course - Yellow Leader Vladyslav Kaskiv noted “the campaign’s initial funding was supplied by PORA founders” but grew with time to include American support for activist training via “small grants provided by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Freedom House and the Canadian International Development Agency.” Totaling only $130,000 US by Kaskiv’s account, “unlike its counterparts in Serbia and Georgia, [Pora!] received only minimal financial support from the international community.” [2] Taras Kuzio also pointed to the Yellow Pora’s having tapped into Western funds sent to the Freedom of Choice Coalition, of which they were part. For their pivotal election monitoring in Crimea, the coalition also received training from Freedom House in August 2004. [3]

Such help was more limited and indirect than in Georgia, at least in relation to the size of the Ukrainian playing field. But in fact it seems reasonable to deduce that less was needed. By 2004 the system was set up and rolling; the fear had been broken in Serbia, and the bloodless victory in Georgia had shown that the pattern was to continue. Thus when someone told the Ukrainian people “it’s time,” they jumped on board quicker and followed the lead of the other revolutions they remember. Officially, the US government spent $41m funding the original trial run against Milosevic in 1999-2000. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m, one third the original cost, and for a much larger prize. [4]

As supporters point out, the eighteen Pora members who traveled to Serbia to train with the US-trained Otpor veterans paid their own way, as presumably did those who traveled to Tbilisi to learn from the Serbian-trained Kmara vets. But the bright future they planned held promised rewards of its own, and with the precedents of recent years to learn from, they had good reason to expect success. It would seem the Orange Revolution would be well worth the price of a few bus tickets. The question that remains is what the activists drew from these pilgrimages to the sites of previous civil insurgencies. Such travels would risk making the revolution appear part of the then well-known pattern of U.S. backed/engineered revolutions, but the risk was seen as worth it to learn the secrets of the trade in an unbroken chain of enlightened masters, all on NATO, NATO-occupied, or NATO-allied soil.

American political support of these campaigns in general is bipartisan and also highly popular and few would bother to complain over such a utopian brand of political engineering. But Ukraine was especially touchy, and those who were worried voiced their concerns. US Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) delivered testimony on December 7 2004 citing the large amounts of American taxpayer’s money that was funneled into the Ukraine election despite the non-interference rules. “There are so many cut-out organizations and sub-grantees that we have no idea how much U.S. government money was really spent on Ukraine, and most importantly how it was spent,” Paul said. What was known, he explained, was that “much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and that […] millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.” [5] Paul elaborated:

“The US government, through [USAID], granted millions of dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), which is administered by the US-based Freedom House. […] PAUCI then sent US Government funds to numerous Ukrainian NGOs. […] Consider the Ukrainian NGO International Center for Policy Studies […] funded by the U.S. government through PAUCI. On its Web site, we discover that this NGO was founded by George Soros' Open Society Institute. And further on we can see that Viktor Yushchenko himself sits on the advisory board!” [6]
Paul concluded that “Congress and the American taxpayers have a right to know […] how much U.S. government money was spent in Ukraine and exactly how it was spent,” and called for an investigation by the Government Accounting Office. [7] So far there has been no such investigation.

Some Western aid came in outside government channels. In September 2005, former President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk accused London-based Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky (aka Platon Elenin) of financing Yushchenko's presidential campaign. Kravchuk showed documentation of money transfers from Berezovsky’s companies to companies controlled by Yushchenko’s official backers. The exiled tycoon has confirmed these transfers, which he said were arranged at meetings with Yushchenko's representatives in London, even though financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine. [8]

The Russian News and Information Agency explained “from his London villa, the ex-oligarch is focusing his armed-struggle activities not only on Moscow […] but also on Kiev […] to help propel compliant political forces to power.” [9] They cited recent publication of “what is said to be the transcript of a telephone conversation between Berezovsky and Yulia Tymoshenko” in late 2004:

Berezovsky: “What the hell are you waiting for in the square? You should lead people there, now! You must take the institutions of power into your own hands...” Tymoshenko: “Yes, my Boris... We will be seizing one site per day starting tomorrow. Railways, airports - business as usual...” [10]

This recording sounds suspiciously like the script of a Russian-produced radio drama, but some combination of evidence led Jack Straw, who headed the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office at the time, to be “struck by Berezovsky's putsch aspirations,” as RIAN put it. He threatened to cancel the Russian’s refugee status, stating that someone who had been granted protection should not “use the UK as a base from which to foment violent disorder” abroad. [11]

Nonetheless most of the help for the revolution was provided from native Ukrainians and the wealthy Diaspora communities banded together, donating money and needed items and volunteering time. As we’ve seen, municipal leaders like Kiev mayor Olmchenko were instrumental in allowing the protests to flourish. Others who sympathized with the movement pitched in by not doing things like cracking down. Petro Rondiak noted: “the riot cops were laughing at our jokes and I certainly doubt they would put up much resistance if...” [12] The authorities simply refused to clamp down on their fellow citizens and all remained peaceful.

As per Sharp’s strategy the protesters did what they could to co-opt the security forces, but in this case, for whatever reasons, the main effort behind this co-option came from within the security services themselves, the final stroke of which came just in time to prevent the Orange Revolution from turning red with blood.

next post: A Preventive Operation: Help From Within

ARMENIA: NOT RIPE FOR REVOLUTION

2007-04-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
Guerillas Without Guns/Chapter 9
Posted 4/23/07

An ancient center of Christianity, Armenia was made an SSR around Christmas of 1920. Memories of Soviet-era repression of the Armenian Church did not keep the former SSR from signing on to Russia’s CIS at independence, and later the CSTO as Russia’s only remaining close partner in the Caucasus. But the government at Yerevan also has created a full market economy, allowing high economic freedom and low corruption by CIS standards, and has even gained membership to the WTO as of 2003. Robert Kocharian, second President since independence, has ruled from Yerevan since 1998. The Armenian election process is often criticized in the West, [1] but opposition parties are allowed, and have formed into the Justice Bloc coalition.

Again the transition to independence here was not smooth, with the early 90s witnessing a fierce Armenia-Azerbaijan war over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The conflict claimed over 20,000 lives before it was ended with a Russian-brokered cease-fire and OSCE-brokered peace talks in 1994. Nikolai Kovalyov, former head of Russia's FSB, insisted in early 2004 that Armenian activists had trained alongisde Pora and Kmara kids at the “U.S.-funded camps in Serbia” [2] Following Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Western and Russian media predicted that Armenia could be the next setting for a “color revolution.” Some Armenian media outlets went so far as to suggest names for that would-be revolution, including “The Apricot Revolution” and “The Peach Revolution.” [3]

It started with Armenia’s presidential election in March 2003 followed by parliamentary elections in May; big changes were possible just months before the Rose revolution would finally announce the opening of the color phase in neighboring Georgia. Widespread complaints about voting irregularities and general discontent helped opposition parties, but they failed to “fully capitalize” on this, and the protest campaign fizzled. Again in 2004 an upheaval as planed, but the authorities resorted to tough tactics like illegally blocking the bus system into Yerevan to prevent masses of opposition supporters from joining the rallies there. [4]

Opposition parties were predicting big changes again in April 2005 as parliamentary elections again drew near. But analysts pointed out their organizational weaknesses, lack of a charismatic leader comparable to Saakashvili, and the competition and bickering between the challengers for the slot - Artashes Geghamian and Stepan Demirchian. They jointly announced a boycott of parliament in early 2004, hoping the progressives absence from the government would gain them wider popular support. Instead, one year later EurasiaNet explained, “the boycott appears to have only denied the opposition an opportunity to express their opinions on the national stage.” Given the failures of the past, and the relative lack of urgency there, the population was not enthusiastic about revolution in 2005. “The peach has not matured yet,” the Yerevan-based daily Aravot concluded. The 2005 campaign fell apart and there are no new elections until 2007 – they missed their chance for the time being. [5]

Sources:
[1] "Armenia." Wikipedia. As modified on September 3 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia
[2] Feinberg, Leslie. “Washington and the coup in former Soviet Georgia.” Worker’s World. January 22, 2004. Accessed at: http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/georgia0122.php
[3], [4], [5] Khachatrian, Haroutiun. ARMENIA’S OPPOSITION: IN SEARCH OF A REVOLUTION Eurasia Insight. April 19 2005. http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav041905.shtml

A PREVENTIVE OPERATION:

2007-04-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

HELP FOR THE ORANGE REVOLUTION FROM THE INSIDE
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 4/23/07

Despite the little-seen bull import of Western assistance, most of the help for the Orange Revolution was provided from native Ukrainians and the wealthy Diaspora communities who donated money, space, supplies, time, and energy. As we’ve seen, municipal leaders like Kiev mayor Olmchenko were instrumental in allowing the protests to flourish. Others who sympathized with the movement pitched in by not doing things like cracking down. Petro Rondiak noted: “the riot cops were laughing at our jokes and I certainly doubt they would put up much resistance if...” The authorities simply refused to clamp down on their fellow citizens and all remained peaceful. As per Sharp’s strategy the protesters did what they could to co-opt the security forces, but in this case, for whatever reasons, the main effort behind this co-option came from within the security services themselves. And some of the assistance came just in time to prevent the Orange Revolution from turning red with blood.

The behind-the-scenes intrigue was well-related in an unprecedented January 2005 piece in the New York Times by Ukraine expert C.J. Chivers, who interviewed dozens of people involved, including ex-president Kuchma, to assemble his account. Chivers explains how Smeshko’s SBU and other Ukrainian security Agencies (collectively called siloviki) played an unusually powerful role throughout the Revolution – on behalf not of the government they worked for but of the opposition. Oleg Ribachuk, Yushchenko's chief of staff, called this siloviki support “a very important element” that aided their cause “professionally and systemically.” [2]

Opinions on motives differ – Yulia Tymoshenko felt the intelligence agencies were “hedging their bets” in a “complicated game.” But Ribachuk felt they were real allies who “risked their lives and careers” to help keep Yanukovych out of office. [3] They were reportedly motivated by personal aversion to serving a president Yanukovych, who was in his youth convicted of robbery and assault, besides his connection with corrupt businessmen, his unpopularity, and willingness to use fraud. Smeshko in particular reportedly loathed Yanukovych intensely. “They were doing this like a preventive operation,” Ribachuk said of the siloviki intervention. [4]

SBU Director Ihor Smeshko, back-channel ally of the Revolution

Long before the election, the siloviki and the opposition opened quiet lines of communication, including General Smeshko's assignment of an SBU general as secret liaison to Mr. Ribachuk. [5] Ribachuk said that he ultimately had several SBU contacts, with whom he met regularly. The officers leaked him documents and information from the offices of the President and Prime Minister, he said, and were sources for much of the material used in the opposition's media campaign. Particularly useful was the November 24 publication of a recording in which Yanukovych officials discuss exactly how the vote would be fixed: “we have agreed to a 3 to 3.5 percent difference in our favor. We are preparing a table. You will have it by fax.” General Smeshko refused to discuss the tapes in detail with Chivers. “Officially, the S.B.U. had nothing to do with the surveillance of Yanukovich campaign officials. Such taping would be illegal in this country without permission from the court. I will say nothing more.” [6]

After the November run-off fraud, The SBU leadership met at Smeshko’s office, and “contemplated a public resignation,” but as Chivers explains “decided to try steering the gathering forces from a clash, and to fight from within.” “Today we can save our faces or our epaulettes, or we can try to save our country," the spy chief was recalled as saying. [7] Chivers reported that at this time, late November, “General Smeshko agreed to provide [Yushchenko] eight specialists from the elite Alpha counterterrorism unit - a highly unusual step - and to arrange former SBU members to guard the campaign.” [8] It turns out this was agreed to in a secret meeting not three months after their last meeting on September 5, after which Yushchenko had “fallen ill” and essentially blamed Smeshko or his cronies for poisoning him. All indications are that Smeshko’s Alpha troops continued to protect Yushchenko’s campaign nonetheless, though from exactly whom is unclear.

The protection extended beyond the candidate himself and over the whole Revolution. As protests escalated, on the evening of November 28 over 10,000 troops from the Kuchma-allied Interior Ministry – 3,000 armed with guns, the rest with riot gear - were mobilized to Independence Square to put down the protests, by the order of their commander Lt. Gen. Sergei Popkov. [9] As the military convoy rolled into the night Kiev moved towards what Chivers called “a Soviet-style crackdown that could have brought civil war.” [10] But then the Siloviki stepped in. Oleksander Galaka, head of GRU (military intelligence) made calls to “prevent bloodshed.” Senior officials with the SBU learned of this mobilization and moved quickly to warn opposition leaders. SBU Director Ihor Smeshko claimed to have warned Popkov to pull back his troops, as has Maj. Gen. Vitaly Romachenko, the military counter-intelligence chief. [11] Popkov indeed pulled back and bloodshed – a Tiananmen Square in Europe - was narrowly averted.

Next: Away From Russia

Sources:
[1] [1] Rondiak, Petro. “Kiev resident and supporter of the revolution: E-mail messages sent to friends abroad.” The Ukrainian Weekly, January 2, 2005, No. 1, Vol. LXXIII http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2005/010522.shtml
[2] – [11] Chivers, C.J. “Back Channels: A Crackdown Averted: How Top Spies in Ukraine Changed the Nation's Path.” The New York Times. January 17, 2005. Accessed via: http://www.ukrainiantime.com/news.html

DIVIDE AND CONQUER/STATE SPONSORS OF TERROR

2007-04-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

THE DARK SIDE OF THE WEST'S STRATEGY FOR YUGOSLAVIA
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
4/19/07

Slobodan Milosevic had charted an effective but unremarkable career in the Socialist party as a typical toady who was fiercely supportive of orthodox Marxism. But he was also an international banker and economic moderate who favored partial privatization of the economy and closer cooperation with the Americans, who saw him as a “breath of fresh air” in the 1980s. [1] Milosevic was a master sculptor of his media image, and knew just how to destroy an opponent politically. After protracted power struggles with President Stambolic, Milosevic emerged as the highly popular President of Serbia in 1989, just as the Warsaw Pact was crumbling away to the north.

He would be President of the Yugoslav Federation as well, but not until 1997, by which time the former SFRY had been nearly dismantled. Over the 1990s, four of six republics seceded, finally leaving only Serbia and Montenegro in a “rump” Yugoslavia. This was not simply a passive process but one helped along by outside powers. Greek peace activist Evangelos Mahairas took issue with the United States effectively cutting off aid to Yugoslavia as a whole in 1990, promising money to the six republics individually if they held separate elections. [2] Thus from 1990 on, the breakup of Yugoslavia was nearly inevitable as the West, notably Germany and the US, extended recognition to one Republic after the other that broke free from Belgrade’s control.

In fact if seen as intentional, this is essentially a divide-and-conquer strategy, as was being done with the former Soviet sphere. The plan is to decentralize, create multiple poles of power, get competition working in your favor and cut bilateral deals with independent states. By the mid-1990s the world was left with a mess of five bickering fragments (in alphabetical order): Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and “Yugoslavia” (or Serbia and Montenegro, capital at Belgrade). Serbia also contained two autonomous provinces: Vojvodina in the north (capital, Novi Sad) and the now well-known southern region of Kosovo (capital at Pristina). While Milosevic's critics allege he sought annexation of Serb-dominated areas in the neighboring republics under the banner “all Serbs in one State,” apologists explain that his role in this process was reactionary, seeking to keep Yugoslavia from disintegrating under outside pressure. In 1991 Serbia went to war with Croatia and again in 1992 fighting broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s worthy of note that both of these conflicts occurred only after the republics in question had moved to secede, putting at least some of the impetus for conflict outside Milosevic’s court, an important but often overlooked factor in assigning blame for the ensuing destruction.

Fighting and Byzantine political maneuvers roiled the region for the next few years. The second conflict in particular grabbed the world’s attention, with Muslim Bosniacs pitted against Serbian forces and local Serb paramilitaries. This violence triggered in response the first offensive use of NATO – not the first since the end of the Cold War, but the first ever - in 1995. Dubbed Operation Deliberate Force, NATO’s fierce bombing of Serb positions had the Bosnian War decided and called off before the year was out. Peace was re-established with the Dayton Accords but sanctions were imposed and Yugoslavia was left a Pariah state, withdrawing from the European mainstream (the OSCE) and even leaving the United Nations.

As war raged in the north during the early 1990s, Kosovo languished under total Serbian governance with the Albanian majority locked out in an apartheid system. Poverty and unemployment reached catastrophic levels, swelling the ranks of the dispossessed, desperate, and well-armed. On April 22, 1996, four attacks on Serbian civilians and security personnel were carried out simultaneously in several parts of Kosovo. A hitherto unknown organization calling itself the “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) claimed responsibility, and it all went downhill from there. Milosevic cranked up the pressure of repression and ushered in the widely publicized phase of paramilitary terror: prison camps, mass rapes and massacres ensued – at least in Western accounts - and demanded the West’s leadership.

Criticism from Washington and Brussels cited the violence in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo as unilateral Serbian “ethnic cleansing,” casting Milosevic as the Hitler of the 1990s, seeking to kill or drive away as many innocent Croats/Bosniacs/Albanians as possible and Serbianize the regions by force. While not entirely untrue, this is a simplification of the situation that serves to distort the issue and give NATO moral carte blanche. For example, Western citizens heard hardly a mention of outside involvement in the Yugoslav civil wars like that presented by Canadian economist, researcher, and critic of globalization Michel Chossudovsky. In an essay written in October 2001, he brought attention to a 1994 report of the London-based International Media Corporation which noted tacit US approval of transfer by Iran of weapons to the separatists in Bosnia. Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers were even landed in Croatia and marched into Bosnia, and the report further noted that “the United States is now actively participating in the arming and training of the Muslim forces of Bosnia-Herzegovina.” [3]

These charges were serious enough to be used by a Republican Party Committee report published in 1997 that criticized the Clinton administration for “complicity in the delivery of weapons from Iran to the Muslim government in Sarajevo.” It noted the policy’s personal approval by he U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, NSC Director Anthony Lake, and President Clinton himself. [4] Despite the political heat this could have applied to Clinton, such activities served the interests of the Anglo-American empire, which are bi-partisan, and so it was allowed to be buried and forgotten as focus shifted to other scandals, making such support into an invisible weapon that made Milosevic’s action seem yet more unjust as he seemed to battle the brave Bosnians for no good reason except blind ethnic hatred.

Such covered-up outside support is also seriously alleged to have flowed in Kosovo, to the militant KLA. Michel Chossudovsky tackled this angle as well, citing British military sources to argue that “the task of arming and training of the KLA had been entrusted in 1998 to the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Britain's Secret Intelligence Services MI6” along with former British Air Force vets from the 22 SAS Regiment and private Anglo-American security companies. [5] On the other end, the KLA is linked by some evidence to Osama bin Laden’s Islamist and criminal activities in the Balkans; Chossudovsky cited Kosovo as part of the conduit for Afghan opium on its way to refineries and markets in Europe. Supplying roughly 80% of the street supply there, this massive operation is said to have helped bin Laden fund his operations in Afghanistan, and the KLA was reportedly in on the trade. [6] And on the return end, it’s well known that along with Kashmir and Chechnya, Kosovo was one of the main export regions for Islamist militants training at the Afghan camps.

A brief survey of Chossudovsky’s evidence shows that the Bin Laden-KLA-Anglo-American link and the Iranian-Bosnian-Anglo-American link both follow a similar pattern; both helped provoke Belgrade into open hostilities, both times followed up with NATO wars against Serbia. There was enough evidence all in all for US-based Bosnian Serb historian and analyst Srdja Trifkovic to call this “the biggest unknown scandal of the Clinton years.” “Throughout the 1990's,” Trifkovic wrote, “the U.S. government effectively aided and abetted bin Laden's operations in the Balkans, long after he was recognized as a major security threat to the United States.” [7] Bin Laden was not the big enemy just yet, and at the time it seems plausible that he and his allies were seen as simply convenient tools to help pry Yugoslavia apart.

This would be well within the lines of how Osama had begun his Islamist adventures in Afghanistan. At the urging of National Security Adviser Brzezinski, president Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the anti-Communist opposition in Kabul on July 3, 1979. With this aid, “we didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would,” Brzezinski explained. [8] Thus the Soviet invasion of December was the result of a conscious American plan to trick the USSR into “its Vietnam War,” with the Muslim guerillas secretly funded, armed, and trained by the U.S. and its allies (notably Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) to “make the Soviets bleed for as much, as long as possible” [9] Zbig continued to boast of this whole deal as “an excellent idea” even as late as a January 1998 interview with a French paper. Just six months before bin Laden started blowing up American embassies. [10]

Next: The Limits of Air Power/The Pariah’s Club

Sources:
[1] Sell, Louis. Page 140-141.
[2] Mahairas, Evangelos. The Breakup of Yugoslavia.
[3], [4], [5], [6] Chossudovsky. “Osamagate.” Center for Research on Globalization. October 9, 2001. Accessed December 15, 2004 at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html
[7], [8] December 2001. Chronicles Intelligence Assessment. Srdja Trifovic “Osama bin Laden: The Balkans Connection.” http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/December2001/1201CIA.htm
[9] CNN. Cold War Experience. Episode 20. Soldiers of God. Accessed November 9, 2005 at: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/20/script.html
[10] Johnson, Chalmers. Abolish the CIA!. November 5 2004. Accessed November 6, 2005 at: http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=6583§ionID=11

PORA! HIGH TIME FOR A REVOLUTION

2007-04-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

THE WORD ON THE STREET IS “NOW!”
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 4/8/07

It should be no surprise that Ukrainian democracy guerillas looking to drift their country closer to Europe would want to tap into the well-established nexus of western-funded and native-organized revolutionary movements. Initially links between Otpor vets and a first wave of Ukrainian activists were established in 2003. [1] Just as Kmara picked up the methods and logo of Otpor in Belgrade in 2003, eighteen young Ukrainians made their own pilgrimage to that same Mecca of revolution in the spring of 2004. They met with Otpor leaders at a seminar in Novi Sad before returning home to put the valuable lessons to use.

Otpor even sent its own volunteers into Ukraine to work with the youth movement forming there. Indeed, two of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, [2] and Marko Markovych [3] were turned away at the border when they attempted entry. (Markovych later applied for citizenship in Ukraine to work on revolution there full time) But others got in just fine when they were needed, and taught the Ukrainians what they knew. One of the Serbian trainers, Sinisa Sikman, later explained “we helped educate them on how to campaign, how to organize themselves, how to focus their message and energy and motivate voters.” [4]

Pora! Logo as pictured on their flag – note the absence of a fist.

The brave and optimistic young people who rose up in Ukraine chose as their obligatory one-word slogan Pora! (“It’s Time”). While Kmara in Georgia seems to have been created specifically for the 2003 anti-Shevy campaign, Pora was first formed in 2002 from the hard-core activists who had participated in “Ukraine Without Kuchma!” and other protest movements from as far back as 2000. [5]

There were actually two wings formed, Yellow Pora and Black Pora, with divided responsibilities. The yellow wing focused on candidates and political-level work, essentially a constituent party within the emerging “Freedom of Choice” coalition. [6] Black Pora made its first public moves in early 2004, posting fliers across the country in March calling on Ukrainians to remove “Kuchma-ism” from their minds. It was the kids of the black wing who linked up with Otpor in 2003, and it was they who more closely mimicked Otpor, keeping the decentralized structure, and focusing on branding activism and mobilizing the street protests.

While Pora drew great inspiration from Otpor, they chose not to directly mimic their iconography as Kmara had in Georgia. The Ukrainian activists instead developed their own images; their equivalent of the clenched fist was a ticking clock set at 11:45, incorporated as the “O” in the Cyrillic rendition of P-O-R-A. And they made excellent use of graphics, from the “Orange Sunrise” pyramid to ones with more aggressive imagery such as a giant boot crushing a cockroach. These were repeated ad infinitum on mass-produced t-shirts, posters, pamphlets, bumper stickers, etc.

Pora started to work “weeding out” corrupt officials; who was a weed and who a flower was sorted out by blacklists, compiled by both yellow and black wings. Yanukovych's Regions party cited these lists as reason enough for the Security Service to ban Pora as terrorists seeking another popular coup as had occurred in Georgia. [7] Indeed, Liberty Institute’s Givi Targamadze, along with several other Georgian parliamentarians visited Kiev and shared their knowledge and experience of civil disobedience with the newly created Pora. Targamadze allegedly used a televised interview in Ukraine to give activists specific instructions about things such as seizing strategically important buildings. [8] Kmara delegates were also allegedly involved in this trip, and Pora sent its own representatives to Tbilisi to learn more from Kmara members on their own turf.

Well-advised and eventually numbering in excess of 10,000 members, Pora used civil disobedience and Otpor-Kmara-style street theater tactics to agitate against Kuchma’s regime in Kiev and elsewhere. Ian Traynor noted “their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime.” Pora member Alina Shpak explained their approach; “we mocked the power as much as possible. You can't be afraid of someone you're laughing at.” [9] So they weren’t afraid of Kuchma’s designated successor, who was laughed at widely for the “egg incident;” on a September 24 visit to western Ukraine (Ivano-Frankivsk), an opposition activist threw an egg at Yanukovych in public. BBC News explained the victim “collapsed to the ground, groaning and clutching his chest. Initially hospitalised in intensive care, he recovered within hours and went on television to say he felt sorry for the ‘wayward’ youngster who had thrown the egg.” [10] Pora-types noted the loser-like behavior and took heart.

Not everyone was so daring, and as in Serbia, the young activists organized harmless, humorous street happenings. For example Pora dumped a mound of pumpkins in a Kiev street in a “Pumpkins for Yanukovych” action. This had the benefit of keeping to the orange color scheme decided on for the revolution, chosen for its cheerful vibrancy and its discernability from the traditional Ukrainian colors blue and yellow – taking the yellow and shifting it to orange, directly chromatically opposed to blue, the color of the governing party. But the main thing about pumpkins in Ukraine, and the point of the action, is the rural custom of a girl rejecting an inferior suitor by handing him one. It was an inderect, culturally appropriate, and pointed way of telling Kuchma he was out - the people had accepted a different husband.

Sources:
[1], [3], [5], [6]. [7] Kuzio, Taras. "Pora! takes two different paths." Eurasia DailyMonitor. February 2 2005.
http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?volume_id=407&issue_id=3218&article_id=2369186
[2]. [4] Vasovic, Aleksandar. "At root of Ukraine's revolution, the disciplined crowd." San FranciscoGate. December 11 2004. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/2004/12/11/international1342EST0526.DTL
[8] Anjaparidze, Zaal. "Georgian Advisers Stepping Forward in Bishkek." Eurasia Daily Monitor. Volume 2, Issue 59 (March 25, 2005) http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=407&issue_id=3276&article_id=2369483
[9] Traynor, Ian. "Young democracy guerrillas join forces: From Belgrade to Baku, activists gather to swap notes on how to topple dictators." The Guardian. June 6 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1499871,00.html
[10] Profile: Viktor Yanukovych Last Updated: Monday, 27 March 2006, 13:22 GMT 14:22 UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4038803.stm

GEORGIA: THE OLD ORDER

2007-04-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

SHEVARDNADZE AND GEORGIA'S PLACE ON THE CHESSBOARD

The former Soviet republic of Georgia, birthplace of Josef Stalin, is a fractious little land in the volatile and strategically important Caucasus - a ridge of mountains between the Caspian and Black Seas shoehorned between Russia, Turkey and Iran (and, yes, the origin of the word “Caucasian.”) Georgia shares borders with former SSRs Armenia and Azerbaijan, in a near-constant war over disputed territory. Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge is just across the border from the conflict-torn Russian republic of Chechnya, and frequently absorbs Chechens hiding from Russia’s reach. Georgia itself is torn by internal divisions; separatist struggles between ethnic Russians and Georgians in Abkhazia killed thousands and marred the country’s transition to independence in the early 1990s. A United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) was set up in 1993 to monitor the cease-fire, its mandate renewed by the UN Security Council every six months. UNOMIG remained for a decade before being expanded in 2003, and in 2006 is still in place, awaiting a final settlement thirteen years later.

Russians were among the UNOMIG observers but were excluded from its military security force. However peace-keepers under Russian command were also deployed in Abkhazia alongside the UN, part of the overall pattern of domination Moscow reserved in Georgia, part of the southern outpost of Moscow’s withered Empire. Though an agreement to pull the troops out was reached with the OSCE-brokered Istanbul Accords of 1999, a controversial rotating force of Russian troops and heavy weaponry remains in Abkhazia into 2006, with smaller forces and Russian-sponsored militias remaining in the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Ajaria.

As late as 2001 Russian troops had been sent into the Pankisi Gorge to ferret out Chechen rebels, but the Russian role there was taken over by Georgian troops, trained since May 2002 by American Special Forces as part of its “War on Terror.” In addition to fighting Chechen bad guys, Political analyst Matthew Riemer succinctly explained, the U.S. policy was “to strengthen an independent, Moscow-free Georgia that would eventually become a member of NATO and the European Union,” a shift that would be enabled by privatization and Western capital injections. [1]

The most obvious investment was in westbound Caspian oil pipelines; Georgia’s capital Tbilisi was attractive to Western investors as the middle link in at least two ambitious Europe-bound pipelines through the Caucasus alley. Both originate in Baku, Azerbaijan and pass through Tbilisi before diverging. The more famous of the two is set to end at Ceyhan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. A consortium of companies headed by British Petroleum backed this Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, and President Bush has endorsed it by name as furthering his energy policy as work began on laying it in May 2003. [2] The Baku-Tbilisi-Supsa (BTS) pipeline was set to end at Georgia’s coast to feed 120,000 to 150,000 barrels a day of Azerbaijani oil into an underground pipeline beneath the Black Sea to Europe. Soros’ EurasiaNet described how these pipelines “will allow both Georgia and Azerbaijan to more effectively resist geopolitical pressure exerted by Russia.” [3] The flip side, of course, is the ability they could give the West to exert such leverage against Russia.

President Shevardnadze, problematic US ally and target of the Rose Revolution

In these efforts the West worked closely - or tried to - with long-term Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. He was a former Soviet heavyweight: KGB officer, Chairman of Georgian Communist Party, and Soviet Foreign Minister from Gorbachev’s ascendancy in 1985. In December 1990 he dramatically resigned both his post and his Party membership, complaining of a resurgence of hard line military types. “Boys in colonels’ epaulettes are pushing the country to dictatorship,” he declared in a speech from the floor of the Supreme Soviet on his resignation, eight months before those boys would try to overthrow his ally Gorbachev. [4]

After the USSR collapsed, Russian President Yeltsin sent Shevardnadze to reign in the chaos in his native Georgia, where President Zviad Gamsakhurdia had been deposed in a coup while the region of Abkhazia had moved to split and civil war broke out. He took effective control in Tbilisi in mid-1992, and when stability allowed was finally elected president in mid-1995. While somewhat dictatorial by Western standards, Shevardnadze was no Milosevic. He had charted a path amenable to the US, generally playing Russia and the West against each other as so many other nations did during the Cold War. In 1994-1995, he collaborated with Azerbaijan’s leadership on a Western-backed transportation and energy corridor the Europeans dubbed Transportation Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia (TRASECA). The BTS oil pipeline was the first phase of this ambitious endeavor that Ariel Cohen noted “will create relatively few jobs and relatively little transit-tariff revenue for Georgia.” [5]

As Soviet Foreign Minister “Shevy,” as the Americans came to call him, had been a great help in the prelude to the 1991 Gulf War; he grew so close to Secretary of State James Baker, the Texan once sang the standard Georgia on My Mind to him in one of their less formal meetings in Wyoming. [6] The Georgian leader also proved a workable ally in the post-9/11 world; in addition to allowing American special forces in 2002, he also offered enthusiastic support for the controversial 2003 Iraq War. Georgia was a proud member of the “Coalition of the Willing” (with 400 troops as of mid-2005, including special forces, medics and engineers, at least seven wounded so far.) [7] President Shevardnadze addressed his countrymen as the war opened, explaining that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was “a totalitarian regime […] which poses a threat to the whole region.” He reiterated the Washington line that the coalition was forced to take on the role that the UN Security Council should have fulfilled (Recall Russia’s resounding “Nyet” vote). He also noted that a Georgian-US partnership “could help Georgia resurrect its territorial integrity and resolve a number of economic issues.” [8]

Yet while useful to Washington, Shevardnadze was ever more unpopular with his own people, whose patience was wearing thin on territorial integrity and those economic issues as well as widespread official corruption, which the president seemed incapable of stopping. Presented in 1999 by his old friend James Baker with the esteemed “Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service,” by 2003 Shevardnadze’s government was increasingly seen as plagued with corruption, mismanagement, and secrecy. [9] These problems steadily drained Shevardnadze’s power like a hole in his gas tank and strategically vital Georgia began to look rather vulnerable to another round of instability and violence, sure to put the brakes on any pipeline with a “T” in the middle. Major protests had been staged off-and-on since 2001; criticism from the media was squashed with raids on the opposition stations, while political protest was met with dismissal of the government. US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced at one point “an unstable Georgia automatically results in an unstable Caucasus,” a statement some took to mean that rather than expend more political capital propping Shevy up, the Americans should “ditch him to ensure stability.” [10]

ZAYER AND HELVEY: NO TO SADDAM, NO TO WAR

2007-04-11T23:25:00.001-07:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted April 11 2007

Ultimately weaponized nonviolence failed to replace outright war in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean some people didn’t push to give peace a chance to bring down the Butcher of Baghdad. As the long-suffering citizens of Iraq turned out for the October 2002 Presidential “election,” it was clear that there was little chance of change by that route. Banners across the country urged Iraqis to vote “Yes, yes, yes for Saddam,” a message reinforced by both outright State power and by state radio repetition of Hussein’s campaign song – reportedly I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, another sign of his relentless cruelty. [1] As with previous elections, marked ballots were used so those who voted no, no, no against Saddam would be known, and thus the Iraqi dictator hoped to match the 99.96 percent affirmation he had previously claimed. Exiled opposition leader Ismail Zayer described the election as “a forced pledge of loyalty […] The whole practice is a fiasco, orchestrated by a regime that does not believe in the people's voice. […] Their real voices, if given the choice, will say no to Saddam loud and clear.” [2]

Iraqi dissident and No to Saddam founder Ismael Zayer in 2004

Zayer had already been saying it himself for a while, and working with other Iraqi exiles had formed his own organization actually called “No to Saddam.” The organization was patterned to some extent on Otpor and was committed to severing Saddam’s dictatorship with massive strikes and other nonviolent civil insurgent tactics. [3] He proposed that the world should neither tolerate Saddam’s Tyranny nor resort to carpet bombing – Zayer called his approach “The Third Choice.” [4] “We have already succeeded in establishing a small network within the country and are planning a clandestine media campaign,” promised Zayer, a journalist by trade. [5]

One demonstration he seems to have organized early on “really opened people's eyes.” Demonstrators in Baghdad shouted pro-Saddam chants as cover for taking over the streets, refusing to allow their patriotic display to be dispersed even by warning gunshots. Saddam was not looking for an excuse to crack down as the US war machine loomed, and so no one died. “Many thought such protests were not possible,” Zayer said, but they had been emboldened by the positive example. [6]

He had hoped initially to forge a millions-strong civil insurgency, and approached US decision-makers about helping him. While overall support remained muted and Zayer’s group received almost no media coverage even after the war, some influential people in the regime change industry did answer the call. John Bacher reported in Peace magazine that a seminar was held in 2001 to discuss the possibility of such a campaign. Hosted by Peter Ackerman’s Center for Nonviolent Conflict, Woolsey’s Freedom House, and the US Institute for Peace, this reported gathering occurred “almost a year after the successful nonviolent Serbian Revolution of 2000,” so right around the time of the September 11 attacks, one would presume before. Details like exact date, location, speakers and itinerary remain unclear, but it seems to have been in Western Europe.

This 2001 seminar was followed by a two-day workshop in Washington called “Prospects for Democratic Change in Iraq,” held at American University on May 24 and 25 2002. It was organized by the Iraq Institute For Democracy, based in “Iraqi Kurdistan” and sponsored by Freedom House. A tentative itinerary I located online listed the legendary Robert Helvey as set to speak right before lunch during session two, “Civilian-based Resistance and Regime Change in Iraq.” Jack DuVall and Peter Ackerman from the Center for Nonviolent Conflict were also to present in this session; collectively they were to address three topics: “1. The record of nonviolent conflict in bringing down a dictator 2. Developing a strategy for Iraqi civilian resistance 3. International assistance for civilian-based action in Iraq.” [7] At this session as in his earlier venture in Burma, Bacher explained, “Helvey's military experience helped persuade skeptical Iraqi exiles that nonviolence is a viable approach.” [8]

Helvey's strongest supporter at the May strategy session was reportedly Ismael Zayer, and for the next year Helvey proceeded to help him pursue the Third Choice, delivering preliminary training to 50 leaders of No to Saddam. [9] Presumably the group was considered a central element of any such planned upheaval, but “unfortunately,” Bacher reported, “[Zayer’s] effort was not assisted by other countries and only thousands of Iraqis took part - far short of the millions he had hoped for.” He diligently continued the crusade, asking European supporters to send monitors to future Iraqi elections. In a phone interview on the eve of the Iraq War’s commencement, Zayer pleaded that “to achieve the third choice, we need help. Not with armies or with money,” he explained from his home in the Netherlands. “We need help in the form of nonviolent training to protect ourselves from Saddam and his agents. We can do it, but we need help now.” [10]

Next: Washington’s answer: No to Zayer, Yes to Force Presence

Sources:
[1], [2] “In Iraqi vote today, choice is Hussein or ... Hussein.” St. Petersburg Times (Florida). Compiled from Times wires - published October 15, 2002. http://www.sptimes.com/2002/10/15/Worldandnation/In_Iraqi_vote_today__.shtml
[3], [4], [8], [9], [10] Bacher, John. “Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance”
Peace Magazine. Apr-Jun 2003, p.10. http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v19n2p10.htm
[5], [6], Bacher, John. “The Price for Peace: How a Cool $45 million could solve Saddam problem.” http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2002-12-05/news_story4.php
[7] Partial Schedule of event, found at: http://www.kurd.org/events/SinjariConf.html

COL. HELVEY: WEAPONIZING NOVIOLENCE

2007-04-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
April 11 2007

The president of the Albert Einstein Institution as of 2006 is retired US Army Colonel Robert Helvey, a longtime proponent of Sharp’s theories. More than anyone else it has been Helvey who has weaponized his mentor’s ideas of nonviolent conflict and put it to use in the field. He holds a BA and MA from Marshall University, is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College, and US Navy War College. [1] He has 30 years of experience in Southeast Asia, including two tours of duty in Vietnam (awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, January 1968). [2] Helvey has also worked with the U.S. Defense Intelligence College, which is in turn connected to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in which he was reportedly an officer. [3] Exact details of his life and career remain somewhat vague, but among other posts he held, from 1983 until 1985 Helvey was a US military attaché at the American Embassy in Rangoon, the capital of Burma. The Colonel later described how he became dismayed by the utter futility of the two-decade-old US-backed armed struggle against the military dictatorship there. [4]

Col. Robert Helvey, leading strategist of nonviolent struggle.

He spent his last years of military service mulling over this dilemma, the final year in an academic setting. Curiously, he wound up with a senior fellowship at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, where he happened to hear about a lecture on nonviolent sanctions to be given by the department’s esteemed professor Gene Sharp. Helvey later recalled how Sharp “started out the seminar by saying 'Strategic nonviolent struggle is all about political power,” spurring Helvey to muse “Boy is this guy speaking my language, that is what armed struggle is about.” [5] An article from Peace magazine, April 2003 explained:

“From conversations with Sharp and like-minded colleagues at the Albert Einstein Institution, Helvey learned a systematic strategy of resistance. For example, he learned to avoid exposed situations that could lead to heavy casualties such as the protest in 1988 when 3,000 unarmed students were massacred in Rangoon. He came to see that even greater pressure could be applied to the regime with less risky tactics, such as having people simply stay at home during a general strike.” [6]

After officially retiring from the Army in 1991, Helvey took Sharp’s ideas to a wider audience of influential people. He soon secured funding to go back to Burma to spread his message and, if possible, test the technique. From 1992-98 Helvey made over a dozen trips to the Thai-Burmese border to meet with leaders of pro-democracy groups there. He developed and taught a six-week course, with students cycling through in shifts to work on confidence building, identifying the regime's weaknesses, and forming “usable pressure groups.” When confronted by Burmese leaders who scoffed at non-violence against the thugs in charge, Helvey started using the more militant-sounding phrase “political defiance,” which, he stressed, “like military struggle, is both an art and a science. To be effective, it must be studied and carried out with skill and discipline.” [7]

The training Helvey brought to Burma is still used, in line as it is with the non-violent tactics stressed by “the Lady,” Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Modern Burma’s founding father. Helvey describes Suu Kyi, under house arrest for years, as “the symbol of the entire pro-democracy movement. Without her, the movement has not demonstrated the ability to take on strategic struggle.” It was reportedly at Suu Kyi’s urging that Sharp's book FDTD was translated, published, and smuggled into Burma. [8] So far the repressive regime is still in power, but Suu Kyi maintains a strong following and has gradually been given more freedom, and thankfully there have been no more massacres like the one in 1988. But direct success or not, Helvey adopted and championed Sharp’s approach to winning conflicts, retired and became a man of peace heading the AEI as it embarked on its many adventures. Over the following years and the course of this book, Helvey would fulfill an important niche in the real-world implementation of Sharp’s ideas in over a half-dozen countries. Some of his handiwork will play a role in the following chapters.

Next: The American End: Overt Ops/A Bi-Partisan Effort

Sources:
[1] About AEI > Staff & Board > Bob Helvey, President. Accessed at: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations.php3?action=printContentItem&orgid=88&typeID=7&itemID=48&User_Session=346723d93fdd7b3f54352c8c92b94d2f
[2] First Cavalry Division Distiguished Service cross Recipients. Acc. June 12 2006 at: http://www.1stcavmedic.com/DSC-CAV.htm
[3] Mowat, Jonathan. “Coup d'État in Disguise: Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template.”
GlobalResearch.ca February 9, 2005. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MOW20050209&articleId=437
[4], [6], [7] Bacher, John. "Robert Helvey's Expert Political Defiance." Peace Magazine Apr-Jun 2003, p.10. http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v19n2p10.htm
[5] Mowat, Jonathan. "The new Gladio in action? Ukrainian postmodern coup completes testing of new template." Online Journal. March 19 2005. http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/031905Mowat-1/031905mowat-1.html
[8] Rozen, Laura. "Dictator downturn: It just isn't as easy being a tyrant as it used to be." Salon. February 3 2001.
http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2001/02/03/dictators/print.html

THE HEART OF SERBIA/POINT OF NO RETURN

2007-04-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

At the heart of a disintegrating Yugoslavia is the ancient land of Serbia, a nation with a strong sense of self and a long memory. A particularly poignant and long-standing element of Serbian nationalism is the “Kosovo myth,” a 600-year old specter hovering over a site called Kosovo Polje (the field of blackbirds), from which the modern region of Kosovo in southern Serbia takes its name. It was here that Serb forces were vanquished in a major battle with the Islamic Ottoman Turks in the year 1389, an epic loss marked every year, on June 28, as the vidovnan, or St. Vitus’ Day - the most significant date in the Serbian calendar. For centuries they nurtured the dark memory under Turkish rule, only to emerge by struggle and Ottoman decay and re-enter “the European mainstream” in the early 1800s. The re-emergence of the Serbian kingdom into a much-changed Europe opened them to new oppressors. Serbia and its surrounding areas were wrangled over by the Austrian empire (and increasingly Germany) – who had the advantage of proximity – and the Russian empire, which had the advantage of common Slavic identity with the Serbs and a serious drive to gain influence over the shipping lanes to warm water ports to the Mediterranean Sea.

By the early 1900s the Austro-Hungarian Empire had taken effective control of the region that would become Yugoslavia, to the dismay of Russian-supported Serb nationalists. In the spring of 1914, a small group of them associated with the “Black Hand” society was tipped off that Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand would visit the Capital, then Sarajevo, to oversee regional military operations. His date of arrival was listed as June 28. One of the young men involved later fumed “how dared Franz Ferdinand, not only the representative of the oppressor but in his own person an arrogant tyrant, enter Sarajevo on that day? Such an entry was a studied insult.” To clarify that it was the date that clinched the deal, the conspirator noted “only four letters and two numbers were sufficient to make us unanimous, without discussion, as to what we should do about it.” [1] The Archduke’s killing on the 525th commemoration of the vidovnan of course set into motion the chain of events that led to World War I, which finally eliminated the power of both the Ottomans and the reviled Austrians, but also killed half of Serbia’s male population.

Of course this also laid the groundwork for the Second World War in which the area was jointly occupied by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. After the war was done and the Axis was knocked down, Soviet-organized Communist rule took hold over the area, merging six republics together into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Marshal Tito ran the country tightly during nearly the entire Cold War, but after a falling out with Stalin in 1948, he pulled his nation from the Warsaw Pact and until his death in 1980 charted a more moderate Socialist course outside the Iron Curtain, earning points with the West. Tito’s Yugoslavia posed an unusual case for America and Europe - neither a puppet nor an outright enemy, and an important member of the global Non-Aligned Movement, playing both sides against each other for maximum gain.

Serb nationalism was of course suppressed at this time in the interest of Yugoslav unity (“a weak Serbia makes a strong Yugoslavia” was the gist), but beneath the culturally muting blanket of Socialist harmony, it was a nation deeply gouged by the ridges and valleys of the Balkan Mountains and by its intense history long before being glued together in 1945. The six republics were peopled with a tense ethnic mix of Serbs, Croats, Bosniacs, Albanians, and others; many were Muslims, a remnant of centuries of Ottoman rule. Like a mini-USSR, it was ideologically Socialist and composed of numerous smaller republics united around a dominant central state (with Serbia as its Russia). Like the USSR, the glue could only hold so long.

After Tito died, the Kosovo myth was re-introduced by Serb nationalists in the 1980s in Kosovo itself, peopled with a mix of Muslim ethnic Albanians and Christian ethnic Serbs. The efforts of Kosovar Serbs to increase their population – and thus power - were outstripped by the astounding Albanian birthrate; it was the region’s Albanians, 78% of the population and overwhelmingly Muslim, who made Kosovo far and away the most densely populated part of Yugoslavia. Louis Sell, a US State Department veteran involved in the diplomatic efforts in the 1990s explained how in March 1989, the Serbian Parliament adopted a constitutional amendment stripping Kosovo of autonomy; the intention was clarified with a rally held by the newly elected president in a Kosovar town three months later. On the 600th commemoration of the Vidovnan, Slobodan Milosevic dropped onto the stage from a helicopter to dramatically welcome a million mostly Serbian attendees to “Kosovo – the heart of Serbia.” [2] He had invited American and European diplomats to the speech but they declined, and this day has been widely seen as the point of no return that led to the Kosovo conflicts, the next major test of the New World Order.

Next: Divide and Conquer/State Sponsors of Terror

Sources:
[1] The Murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, 28 June 1914. Borijove Jevtic. Eyewitness to history. Ed. John Carey. New York. Avon Books. Page 442.
[2] Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. London. 2002. Duke Universiry Press. Page 88.

STATE CONTROL AND OLIGARCH RETRIEVAL

2007-04-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

PUTIN MOVES TO REVERSE THE '90s
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 4/6/07

Putin’s Kremlin has largely reversed the privatization trend of the 1990s, notably reasserting effective state control over the media sector. District newspapers were reined in early, and the techniques that worked there were then used to bring more politics and less dissent to the pages of national newspapers [1] - like the Moscow Times, which had so recently published rather damning doubts about the Ryazan incident. [2] By 2002 the television networks were being taken over by a new management style, and by the time of an October 2005 piece that was allowed in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, “all programming on Russia's three national television networks was strictly state-controlled: usually determined at weekly meetings between network executives and presidential administration officials.” News broadcasts have become nearly identical regurgitations of the Kremlin line, and to squelch any dangerous spontaneity, “live broadcasts have almost been eliminated.” [3]

The oil and gas sectors went through a similar process. The most dramatic move on this front was the June 2005 government stock purchase in the mammoth gas company Gazprom, giving the state a stake of over 50%, a controlling interest. Thus Putin had effectively re-nationalized a company that supplies about one fourth of Europe's gas needs. This was neither the first move nor the last; the previous year the government seized a portion of the Yukos oil conglomerate over past-due back taxes, and since then has used its growing control over the world’s largest supply of natural gas to exert leverage on its neighbors and on Europe.

Closely related to this trend was the new President’s approach to the Yeltsin-era privatization Oligarchs – at least those that crossed his path as he charged into their turf. One of them, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in addition to helping drain the treasury, had basically created Yukos, advocated popular liberal policies, and used his vast wealth to finance two liberal parties opposed to Putin. [4] In October 2003 he was arrested on tax and fraud charges, just months ahead of Putin’s buyout of a portion of the company over related issues. Khodorkovsky was convicted and sentenced in May 2005, in the old school tradition, to eight years in a Siberian penal colony. [5]

Berezovsky representing “Russian Business” outside the embassy in London, May 2004.

Perhaps the most politically active of the Oligarch lot, former media mogul Boris Berezovsky - accused of gangster-ism and murder but nothing proven - started losing his vast empire in 2000 under Putin’s efforts to regain state control of the media. Fearing prosecution for corruption at home he fled and was offered asylum in London. Moscow has sought his extradition but the request was repeatedly blocked on the grounds that the U.K. had given Berezovsky political asylum and the status of refugee. The Russian News and Information Agency (RIAN) complained pointedly that “Berezovsky's deposits in British banks and the renewed vigour he brought to the local real estate market seemed more important [to London] than the legal request of a supposedly friendly nation.” [6] In 2003 Boris changed his name in the British courts to Platon Elenin, which he reportedly swiped from the lead character in a biographical movie made about himself. [7] Contrary to normal rules he was allowed to make some controversial travels in 2003 on a visa with this name. Still at large in 2006 as the “No. 1 man on Russia's most-wanted list,” RIAN announced that he was to be the test case for a tough new approach to retrieve the Diaspora Oligarchs. [8]

Animating Moscow’s desire to get their hands on the exiled tycoon is his ongoing agitation for pro-West revolutions in the former SSRs, and his public campaign to link the “abominable autocrat” Putin to the 9/99 apartment bombings that helped bring him to power. Berezovsky first announced this campaign with a March 5, 2002 press conference in London, here he announced: “I am sure the bombings were organised by the FSB. It's not just speculation. It's a clear conclusion.” He clarified “I'm not saying Mr. Putin gave an order to blow up those buildings, but at the least he knew the FSB was involved” as he blamed Chechen rebels and punished them to the tune of a major war. Berezovsky called on a British explosives expert and a former FSB officer to support his claims, which were based mostly on the size and sophistication of the operations. He also cited the Ryazan incident as proof that the FSB was involved in placing wired bags of Hexogen “sugar” in at least one apartment block during the crisis. [10]

The same day as his press conference, an official from Putin’s suddenly ominous government again blamed Chechnya and announced that Berezovsky was not to be trusted. In addition to his long-alleged links to Chechen mafia figures, he was also being investigated for links to rebel leaders and to the murder of a senior Russian police officer in Chechnya. [11] Whatever protests they may lodge against the tycoon, London will not be likely to hand him over any time soon.

Next: Reviving Great Russia/The Switch is Flipped
Sources:
[1], [3] Simonov, Alexei. “Transformations of the Fourth Estate.” Original source: Nezavisimaya Gazeta. October 7, 2005. translation by Tatiana Khramtsova, appeared in Johnson's Russia List on October 10, 2005.
http://www.sras.org/news2.phtml?m=457
[2] Reynolds, Maura. “Ryazan Fears Darker Truth of Bombings.” The Moscow Times. January 18, 2000.
http://eng.terror99.ru/publications/013.htm
[4] Greene, S.A. “Kremlin Targets Jewish Tycoons In War on Critics.”
Forward. October 31 2003. Via NCSJ.
http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/103103Forward_Khod.shtml
[5] Country Profile: Russia. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/country_profiles/1102275.stm
[6], [8] Simonov, Vladimir. “Bad news for wanted Russian expatriates in London.” Russian News And Information Agency. July 3 2006. Accessed at:
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20060703/50805984.html
[7] “Boris Berezovsky.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Berezovsky
[9], [10], [11] Steele, Jonathan and Ian Traynor. “Former ally links Putin to Moscow blasts.”
The Guardian. March 6, 2002 http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,662476,00.html

RUSSIA’S GRIP ON KYRGYZSTAN

2007-04-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

CAPTAIN ASKAR AKAYEV AT THE HELM, MUTINY BREWING
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Written mid-2006, posted 4/5/07

It certainly did not go unnoticed that these arrangements totally bypassed Russian and Tajik offers and seem designed to undermine the SCO by skirting recognition of the bloc in favor of nation-to-nation deals. This backdrop of a quiet American military presence in the former Soviet Space held for the next three years as the revolutions unfolded in Georgia and Ukraine and resentments grew sharper. The next move in America’s campaign came soon after Ukraine – perhaps too soon and too far east. In Kyrgyzstan, the US basing agreement was followed by an attempt – if tentative - at a Ukraine-style revolution there, a bold stab into a stronghold of loyalty to mother Russia.

The former SSR is nestled in the Himalayan foothills, sharing convoluted borders with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and China’s western frontier. Despite a total lack of Caspian Sea hydrocarbons, Kyrgyzstan is an energy exporter, with hydro-electric stations fueled by raging mountain runoff promising enough power to attract substantial American investment. Political scientist Igor Ryabov summed up “Turkmenistan has gas, Kazakhstan has oil, and Kyrgyzstan has its water.” [1]

The dramatic peaks of the Tien Shan mountains also divide the country into numerous regions and remote valleys. The most important general split for the study at hand is between the poorer south (dominated by the Ferghana Valley with its restive Muslim majorities), and a well-developed north (dominated by the Capital, Bishkek). Nationwide the population of about five million is about half Kyrgyz and 20 percent Russian, [2] 75% Muslim and with an average per capita GDP of $1600. [3] Kyrgyzstan has grappled with forging a united sense of nationhood since independence, but has often failed; ethnic clashes in the south during the 1990s killed hundreds of people. [4]
The local Russian population holds great sway in the capital, and in May 2000 Russian was declared an official state language, given equal in status with Kyrgyz. Bishkek is also home to a Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University, which trains political elites in the Russian tongue and is financed by the Russian government. [5] Bishkek and the north, closer to Russia in more ways than one, ruled the scene as it had under the old Soviet system. Askar Akayev, while born in the South (Jalal-Abad), rose to leadership among the Soviet-era elite. A mathematician and physicist by education who wrote his doctoral thesis on holographic systems of information storage, he was appointed in 1990 to the new post of President of the more autonomous republic. [6] Akayev held his position in Bishkek after independence and for over a decade past that. In a country racked by mafia crime and corruption, the president earned a reputation as a crusader against the opium smuggling criminal networks. Yet the situation has remained chaotic and unstable; Bishkek has seen more than its share of mafia-connected political assassinations, and the voters had had more than enough.

The US basing agreements had upset the status quo - Russia and China sought to reaffirm their prerogatives in the region, and a year later, in October 2002, Kyrgyzstan and China’s People’s Liberation Army staged their first-ever joint military exercise to co-ordinate their response to terrorism. Carried out along the common border, these were the first bilateral anti-terror exercise conducted by SCO members. [7]

But it was Russia that really rushed in to bolster Eurasian power. At the same time as the exercise with China, Moscow’s Anti-Terrorism Center decided to open in Bishkek its first regional division outside of Russia. Putin announced the idea of the Bishkek branch as “countering the threats from the south” - Islamist militants and opium flowing from American-occupied Afghanistan. [8] This was followed in November [9] and December [10] 2002 by joint Kyrgyz-Russian announcements on the dangers of terrorism and the importance of unity against it.

Two days after Christmas, an explosion at Bishkek’s main market killed seven people and injured scores. The very same day but a thousand miles away, a truck bomb detonated at the government’s headquarters in Chechnya, killing fifty and wounding hundreds. The immediate impression was of synchronized acts of terrorism aimed at Russia and its allies, and suspects linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan were later arrested, tried and convicted. [11] But early reports had described a container of fireworks at the market going off, detonating a gas tank in a freak accident, an account still reported as fact in a few spots. [12] Some western media outlets seem to buy the Kyrgyz version of events, and even tie the terrorists in to an alleged plot against America. [13] But otherwise the western media remains vague or ignores the episode altogether. The BBC’s timeline simply calls it an explosion, and a State Dept. chronology of every Islamist terrorist attack includes the 12-27 blast in Chechnya, but not the one in Kyrgyzstan. Either way, the synchronicity of the blasts helped tie Russia and Kyrgyzstan together on the counter-terror front just two months after the decision was made to set up the Bishkek center to that very end.

Russian military assembled at the Kant air base, Kyrgyzstan, in 2004.

A year later, Russia again marked its territory, this time on the military front, throwing a new wrinkle into the great game with Uncle Sam. In early October 2003, Putin announced the opening of a new Russian air base at Kant, near Bishkek. This was the first air base outside of Russia’s borders since the end of the Cold War, hosting Russian Air Forces as part of the CSTO’s Collective Rapid Deployment Forces. [14] The Kant base was about eighteen miles from the Americans’ Ganci base, which had been in operation for two years. A BBC correspondent traveled for the opening of the new base and to see both it and the existing American one. He joked a bit about conditions at Ganci but slammed the vibe at Kant, where it:

“wasn't so much efficient and mechanical as a bit cloak and dagger. The base was shabby and broken-down. Scruffy conscripts were wiping the jets down with filthy rags. […] Security men in overcoats strode to and fro. I felt like I was on the set of a James Bond movie, witness to some clandestine […] chess moves in an international power play.” [15]

President Putin arrived for the dedication, declared the base open, watched an air show, and addressed the media. The BBC reporter asked Putin “are you just opening this base because the Americans have one here?” “We're partners with the Americans,” Putin responded. “I'm sure we'll co-operate.” With that he closed the press conference and walked away. [16]

An agreement was reached in May 2004 by which soldiers at Kant would receive the same status as the diplomatic mission’s technical staff, making them effectively immune to criminal prosecution in Kyrgyzstan. [17] Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Askar Aitmatov visited Moscow in mid-February 2005 and immediately announced two decisions; to send more Russian military equipment and weaponry to the Kant air base, and to deny the U.S. request to deploy AWACS reconnaissance planes at Ganci air base. Aitmatov said on the 14th that a decision was made that an AWACS deployment would not fit the mission of Ganci “which is to provide support to the operation in Afghanistan,” not to spy on Russia and other SCO signatories. [18] So the government there seemed to have sided with the Russians, encouraging a slow growth of their capabilities there while curtailing or at least limiting the Americans’.

Sources:
[1] Arutunyan, Anna. “Geopolitics at Heart of Kyrgyzstan Unrest.” MosNews. March 23 2005 http://www.mosnews.com/interview/2005/03/23/kyrgyz.shtml
[2], [5] Olcott, Martha Brill. “Regional study on Human Development and Human Rights – Central Asia.” Human development background report 2000. United Nations Development Program. Accessed May 22 2006 at: http://hdr.undp.org/docs/publications/background_papers/Olcott2000.html
[3] Kyrgyzstan: Almanac Facts. Acc June 24 2005 at: http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/kyrgyzstan/index.shtml
[4] “Kyrgyz Leader Akayev Defies Protests, Rules out Force.” MosNews. March 23 2005. http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/03/23/kyrgyz.shtml
[6] “Askar Akayev.” Wikipedia. Last modified September 22 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Askar_Akayev
[7] “Twelve Military exercises: A chronology.” China Daily. August 19 2005.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-08/19/content_470467.htm
[8] Socor, Vladimir “CIS Antiterrorism Center: Marking Time in Moscow, Refocusing on Bishkek.” Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Washington D.C. November 3, 2002. Accessed April 10 2006 at: http://www.iasps.org/strategic/socor10.htm
[9] Burke, Justin. “CIS antiterrorist centre in Kyrgyzstan ensures unity and cooperation.” Eurasianet.org. December 18, 2002. Accessed April 10, 2006 at: http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/kyrgyzstan/hypermail/200212/0029.shtml
[10] Text of report by Kyrgyz Radio first programme, Bishkek, December 19 in Russian 1500 gmt http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/kyrgyzstan/hypermail/200212/0037.shtml
[11] http://www.eurasianet.org/resource/kyrgyzstan/hypermail/200307/0060.shtml
[12] http://www.securisk.com/alerts/alertdisplay2.asp?Country=KYRGYZSTAN
[13] Baker, Peter. “A Confessed Bomber's Trail of Terror: Uzbek Details Life With Islamic Radicals, Turn Back to Violence.” Washington Post Foreign Service. Thursday, September 18, 2003; Page A01
[14], [17] “Russian Military in Kyrgyzstan Granted Diplomatic Immunity.” MosNews. May 11 2004. http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/05/11/kyrgyz.shtml
[15], [16] Grammaticas, Damian. “Military rivalry in Kyrgyzstan.” BBC News, Bishkek, October 25 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3211825.stm
[18] Saidazimova, Gulnoza. “Kyrgyzstan: Is Bishkek Moving Toward Russia Ahead of Elections?” RFE/RL via EurasiaNet. February 15 2005.
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp021505.shtml

OTPOR FALLOUT: JUST ANOTHER WEAPON

2007-04-05T16:37:00.000-07:00

Once the initial sweetness of Otpor’s example and the bloodless revolution faded, a sort of saccharine aftertaste in the Serbian mind became evident. Brian Pozun wrote for Central Europe Review in early 2001:

“Ostensibly, the movement accepted Western aid to promote their goal of a purged, democratized Serbia. When it became clear, however, that Western governments were involved, many in Yugoslavia and elsewhere began to wonder what sort of return those generous governments will want on their investment in Otpor. [1]

Citing Milosevic’s ads that had Otpor’s fist stuffed with American dollars, Pozun explains, “many are left wondering just how far off the ad really was.” In another play from Milosevic’s propaganda campaign, the President made public an intercepted, top-secret CIA plan to remove him from power by supporting Otpor and other such groups. But the paper Milosevic cited was in fact an openly available plan to unseat him by supporting and training the opposition. It was a memorandum to the US Congress, written by Daniel Server at the US Institute of Peace, recommending a trial run of Sharp’s and Helvey’s strategic nonviolence. It was Milosevic’s secret police that made the changes to make it appear secret and CIA-sponsored, and thus sinister. [2] But again, despite the creative license, the paper was otherwise presented as written, and we must wonder how far off the mark Milosevic really was.

Peace magazine in 2003 described how American support for Otpor “benefited from a temporary consistency and coherence in American foreign policy during the Clinton presidency, which actually pursued the strategies advocated by Gene Sharp.” [3] The Server letter Milosevic cited led to Congressional approval of $41-$45 million for the project (overall estimates vary). While NATO set its bomb sights, the article explains, “sanctions were applied in a more targeted fashion. For example, they were not applied to municipalities that voted to support opposition politicians.” To further the freeing of Serbian minds in other towns, Radio transmitters were set up in Eastern Europe and organized into a “Ring Around Serbia,” beaming in western media like the BBC, Agence France-Presse, and Voice of America. Other actions approved included the US Treasury Department’s freezing of Milosevic’s assets tracked down to banks in Cyprus. [4] Not being able to pay one’s security forces can’t help one’s cause.

The revelations that Otpor in fact had been part and parcel of the well-orchestrated American-led campaign that had also produced the bombings and the ‘Allo ‘Allo re-runs eroded the widely held view of Otpor as spontaneous, grass-roots people's movement. While they were still free of Milosevic and sanctions, the sunshine of public optimism was now overcast with doubts. Serbia’s youth had been co-opted into a “post-military weapons system” of the NATO campaign, a troubling precedent to ponder. Originally they had felt their country was under attack because of their leader’s wrongdoing, but now had to reflect on one of Milosevic’s last speeches; on October 2, as Otpor and the DOS “NATO foot soldiers” closed the noose on him, Milosevic explained that his people had it all backwards. “It should be clear to all, after the past ten years, that NATO isn't attacking Serbia because of Milosevic; it is attacking Milosevic because of Serbia.” [5] Just three days later the attack was complete, Milosevic was removed from the scene, and the DOS took control of Serbia and started selling it to the West.

TERROR OF 9/99 {masterlist}

2007-04-02T15:00:00.001-07:00

Originally posted at the 12/7-9/11 Treadmill Page
Re-posted at Guerillas Without Guns 4/6/07
All sub-post links lead back to the other page

This post is to organize all those related to the "Terror of 9/99," the series of apartment bombings in Russian cities in 1999 that triggered the Second Chechen War and paved the way of Vladimir Putin to the Presidency. Since the beginning, Putin's career has been shadowed by widespread suspicion that Putin or an ally, not Chechen terrorists, was actually behind the bombings. like the hardcore 9/99 Truthers, I believe the Russian state was behind the campaign, though the full story is certainly more complex. I sense weird forces at work.

Notes on terminology/weird thoughts about weird coincidences:
9/99 is itself not a universally accepted name for the episode, but I took it up due to its catchiness and similarity to the branding of 9/11, which helps me illustrate my argument about that event. I first saw the term on the English-language Russian site Terror-99. I'm not sure, but I would guess that this site excellent and damning website is supported by Boris Berezovsky and other questionable anti-Putin characters - so while their facts seem fairly solid and the case itself is remarkably easy to make, I question their true motives. I also got a bit of a chill one day when I realized recently that 9/99 upside down is 666, the mark of the Beast. I don't believe in such nonsense, but many others do, and some have gone to pains to avoid the branding. Wikipedia's "Russian Apartment Bombings" page mentions the number "9/99" only in the sources, referring to the above website. A Google search of "9/99" shows a few sources, including me, and "terror of 9/99" reveals only Terror99.ru and myself. (Gulp). I'm on Putin's radar with the illicit inverted 66/6.

But what else could he expect? A series of bombings with 300 dead as they slept, dated 9/4, 9/9, 9/13, and 9/16 - with no precise date, we could pick the midpoint between the two middle bombings (which is reasonable since these happened in the capital and killed the most) - but that gives us 9/11, which doesn't have the same emergency implications as it does in America and it was left unused for the Americans' use two years later. But it wasn't about a single day, but rather a month, that bleak and nervous September as block after block was demolished - Black September 1999 - the Terror of 9/99 on the precipice of the Millenium. Some say it was Putin's 666 devil deal for power, the most logical name for it has that built right in, and if he did it himself, he had to have known this would happen. Couldn't it have waited 'till October?

Oh well - I guess as in America people see what they want to - those predisposed to see fire and horns see that, the rest who can't stomach the thought and face the obvious would argue Putin couldn't or wouldn't do that. Facts are of secondary nature to such strongly held beliefs and rarely can do much to change them. But it's worth a try.

Aftermath of 9/13 in Moscow, New President Putin resolute in January, Russian troops re-enter Grozny in October - kind of the wrong order I guess but you get the picture.

Wikipedia entry: Russian Apartment Bombings. They cite September 8 for the first bombing in Moscow, but I stick to the date from the Terror 99 site, which is from Russian Primary sources. Plus 9/8 throws off the spooky 9/11 hinge point.

- 9/99 part I: Putin's Godsend

- 9/99 part II: The Ryazan Incident - The Bombing that didn't Happen?

- 9/99 part III: The Investigation - The official investigation, PR campaign, the Kovalev Commission, its supporters, and its troubles. people die here.

- 9/99 part IV: The Conspiracy Theory - an "independent" investigation formed in London, pushed by exiled oligarchs, KGB/FSB defectors, and US Seantors. More people die here, and Europe is thrown into a subcontinent-wide radiation scare.

Next: State Control and Oligarch Retrieval

UKRAINE: THE STATE OF PLAY IN 2004

2007-03-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/20/07

President Leonid Kuchma, isolated in November 2003

About a year after the rose Revolution in Georgia, the Otpor-Kmara template was again applied to great effect in the much larger and more vital former Soviet Republic of Ukraine. Here the nonviolent sniper sights were set on the corrupt, repressive, allegedly murderous government of Leonid Kuchma that – coincidentally, of course – was increasingly allied with Moscow. Kuchma was first elected to the Ukrainian Parliament in 1990, staking out a role in the Committee on Defense and State Security. After independence Kuchma was appointed Prime Minister in 1992, but resigned in late 1993 to run for the presidency on a platform of boosting the economy by restoring economic relations with Russia. Kuchma won the race in 1994 and soon signed a ‘Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership’ with Russia, and endorsed a new round of talks with the CIS. But he also arranged a $730 million loan from the Washington-based IMF, signed a special partnership agreement with NATO, and even raised the possibility of membership in the alliance, a pretty radical idea by Ukrainian standards. [1]

As for democratic procedure, as Canadian-Ukrainian journalist Taras Kuzio pointed out “under Kuchma, Ukraine never experienced free elections.” [2] After a scam re-election in 1999, serious problems for Kuchma’s regime began in November 2000. Opposition leader Oleksandr Moroz and others had accused President Kuchma of involvement in the abduction and killing of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, a prominent critic of the regime whose headless corpse was found in the woods after he went missing in September. The November release of incriminating recorded conversations, including an order from Kuchma’s own mouth to have Gongadze kidnapped, launched what came to be known as the “cassette scandal,” or “tapegate.”

Kuchma's former bodyguard was named as the source of the secret recordings, which Kuchma claimed were computer-generated forgeries. But his popularity at home and abroad sank as many others were convinced and as further revelations came from the tapes, if noticed a bit late. In 2002 Washington was alarmed to learn that the tapes also revealed an apparent transfer of a sophisticated Ukrainian defense system to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. [3] As a result, Kuchma was boycotted by the US and other Western governments for a time, and Ukraine turned increasingly to Russia for support, saying the country needed a “multivector” foreign policy that “balanced” Russian and Western interests with, hopefully, Ukraine’s own.

He also started referring to Russian as “an official language,” which was lucky news for Viktor Yanukovych, whom Kuchma appointed as Prime Minister in November 2002. Yanukovych hailed from Donetsk, the Russo-centered eastern capital of industry and was extremely unpopular in Kiev. Yanukovych was a criminal thug in his youth, accused of massive corruption in power, and while fluent in Russian, Yanukovych was considered clumsy with the Ukrainian language. The West’s planners frowned and turned back to their plan books.

Fashionista billionaire and sweetheart of the West Yulia Tymoshenko

In early 2004 Ukraine was set to join Russia’s United Economic Space along with neighboring Belarus. This prospect was blasted by rising Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko as “one free-trade deal that won’t free trade.” She warned “the treaty will only entrench post-communism's corrupt and criminal business practices, not increase trade or prosperity […] The proposed 'united economic space' will also have its own norms - the ways of the oligarch, the corrupt bureaucrat, the crony capitalist, and the politically motivated prosecutor.” [9]Ironically, she is generally classed as a crony capitalist (whose cronies were simply not in power at the moment) and among the wealthiest of Ukraine’s oligarchs. While unpopular with many of their citizens, the West, and the West’s political allies in Kiev, Kuchma and Yanukovych remained in power and fully capable of stealing elections. If only there were a way of preventing that…

In the context of a great game with Russia, the emphasis on Ukraine is understandable - it’s the biggest thing one can take from Russia besides Russia itself. It seems a stretch to even attempt such a move, but apparently the successes of Belgrade and Tbilisi had left some people feeling very cocky. One should not be surprised if the western planners would play this touchy game a bit more carefully than they did in Georgia. Indeed, promoter of “democratic transformations” Michael McFaul noted that “in the years leading up to the 2004 votes, American ambassadors in Ukraine insisted that no U.S. government money could be provided to any candidate.” Instead, McFaul explains, the US simply urged the Orange Revolution on from the sidelines as they chose their own leaders and their own direction. Directly U.S. sponsored education seminars for activists have not yet been reported to my knowledge. Richard Miles was not made ambassador there. But while the U.S. government and its linked NGOs emphatically deny that they were involved in any real way, the same thumbprints are all over this case.

MILOSEVIC'S PIPELINE PLANS PREVENTED

2007-03-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 4/7/07

Caspian export routes, existing and proposed. General contours of Russian-Iranian-Chinese-dominated systems vs. the American-led model.

One window of opportunity for Caspian Sea oil and gas export was due west across the Caucasus states of Azerbaijan and Georgia, the rocky alley between Russian and Iranian turf. These Caucasian pipelines could then connect via Turkey to the Mediterranean, to pipelines - running north through the Balkans - into Europe and its vast energy markets. Other planned lines could snake beneath the Black Sea to enter Europe at Bulgaria, and flow west through Macedonia (split from Yugoslavia in 1991) and end on the Albanian coast.

Before he was driven from power, Slobodan Milosevic had seen these same pipeline dreams and hoped to squeeze Yugoslavia’s way into the Caspian oil rush. He looked to a north-running route with Caspian oil piped from Greece (after being shipped from Ceyhan) and into Europe proper. In 1997 talks began on the Yugoslav portion, a pipeline running north from Macedonia to Belgrade, pumping 200,000 barrels a day to the refinery at Pancevo. It would pass through Kosovo, and would enable Yugoslavia to become a net exporter, shipping oil and petrochemical derivatives along the Rhein-Main-Danube highway to Europe’s markets. Yeltsin’s Russia was reportedly interested in aiding Milosevic, allowing him to tap into a major Russian pipeline to further boost his export potential.

But then those pesky rebels started rocking the boat in Kosovo, and when the war finally came, among the targets NATO chose for the fiercest bombardment were Serbia’s oil refineries, oil storage sites, petrochemical plants, and the infrastructure of ports and bridges along the Danube River. It was made clear that so long as Milosevic remained in power, such ambitions would remain out of reach. So the noble work of Otpor to bring freedom and decency to Yugoslavia also – as an unintended side effect of course – closed the way to Russian-sponsored pipelines tied in with Milosevic’s closed economy. Any such northbound pipeline that may be built will now have a name like Exxon, BP, or Shell attached.

(for more on Caspian pipelines, read here).

THE LIMITS OF AIR POWER/THE PARIAH’S CLUB

2007-03-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Stage is Set for the Bulldozer Revolution
Adam Larson / Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 3/13/07

As pressure grew over the situation in Kosovo, Yeltsin’s Russia pursued diplomacy, trying to make a name in the international community as a peace-maker while protecting the interests of its client state. The US played along with the Rambouillet conference of early 1999, though Milosevic was accused of leveraging such periods of calm to push his campaign deeper into Kosovo. With talks thus deemed counterproductive, Washington led the formation of an offensive coalition to solve the crisis. President Bush, confronted with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, had used the UN Security Council, the mark of the New World Order. But this time the plan was different. In 1995, Clinton pursued NATO as the venue of action instead, circumventing Russian and Chinese involvement in the decisions. [1] When the peace process broke down over Kosovo, it was again decided to pursue the Euro-Atlantic route and NATO again decided on war.

NATO, it seemed, had found its new mission and reaffirmed it on March 24, a bare twelve days after announcing its expanded power with the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czezh Republic. The campaign opened with bombs on Serb forces in Kosovo, eventually moving to Serbia itself. Operation Allied Force was waged entirely from the air, though there were threats of ground invasion late in the campaign. Civilian installations such as power plants, petrochemical plants, water processing plants and the state-owned broadcaster were intentionally targeted, and the Chinese Embassy was also hit, allegedly a simple accident.

CNN reported May 18 that “NATO launched its 55th day of air strikes against Yugoslavia on Monday,” with a “decided downturn […] from around 600 sorties daily to just 343. NATO said bad weather forced the cancellation of most flights.” [2] Such a massive bombardment was sure to kill civilians, as was made clear by well-publicized events like the apparently purposeful attack directly on an Albanian refugee convoy that killed 87. [3] Yugoslav reports of total civilian deaths ranged as high as 6,000, while Western estimates range from 500-1500. Even this number was artificially inflated, NATO said, by Milosevic’s use of “human shields” bussed in to potential targets and confined there to die. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon estimated that up to half of all civilians killed in the NATO air campaign may have been deliberately placed around bombing targets. He said such incidents stand as evidence of the “depravity of Milosevic,” thus demonstrating the justness of the war that was having over 600 bombing runs a day pounding those targets anyway. [4]

Under siege, Milosevic hung on stubbornly with solid support from Russia under President Yeltsin. On April 7, Milosevic met with a Russian envoy who stated that Russia condemned NATO's “criminal aggression on Yugoslavia,” insisted it should stop immediately, and passed on the Russian people's “support for and solidarity with the people of Yugoslavia.” [5] The air war evidenced the growing rift between the US and Russia as NATO took up its offensive military role. They had signed a “Founding Act” for cooperation in 1997 – that is between Yugoslav wars. When this failed to have Moscow consulted or even informed before the second campaign, they quit the partnership program and again adopted an adversarial stance with NATO. [6]

On June 10 Milosevic agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and the bombardment ended, though Milosevic’s power survived the conflict. The bombs had failed to force him to surrender, and in many ways nationalism had increased under foreign aggression. And he was reportedly ready for a bold new venture. According to a December 1999 article from the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), the Yugoslav leader entertained dreams of “an axis stretching eastward,” allied with Lybia, Iraq, and North Korea – and possibly China and/or Russia - as a sort of Pariah’s club who felt abused by the West for having chosen a different path. Belgrade state media described this proposal as “a coalition of free states ranged against the New World Order.” [7]

In late 1999, IWPR noted, delegations from the governments of Iraq and North Korea visited Belgrade as China delivered $300 million of ‘humanitarian’ aid. As Serbian Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic pointed out, “Yugoslavia has many friends in the world.” [8] Serbian Information Minister Aleksandar Vucic and Vojislav Seselj, Deputy PM in the Federal Government, jointly emphasized the need for these friends to move closer together in the “struggle against American imperialism and hegemony.” [9] Baghdad and Belgrade were working towards a deal whereby outstanding Yugoslav loans to Saddam’s government could be repaid in oil, as well as early talk on a “medicines for oil” deal. [10] So not only was Milosevic still in power, the butchers of Baghdad and Belgrade were moving closer together, both despite American-led wars and continued sanctions, hoping to scrape together enough of their own resources to trade and create a small outcast economy. The West’s policy of starving nations out by excluding them from the global economy was set to backfire by pushing aside one too many and creating a viable fringe bloc, with the colossal, if faint, possibility of Chinese and Russian inclusion.

Milosevic looked forward to presidential elections in Moscow and Washington to set the tone for his next plans. In Russia, Milosevic was distrustful of “Washington’s man” Yeltsin, reportedly banking on Communist Gennady Zyuganov as next Russian president. IWPR reported that Milosevic felt Zyuganov could forge “a military-political alliance between Russia and China, which would of course include Yugoslavia.” And on the American front he was looking for the Clinton team that had so harassed him to simply go away. IWPR predicted that “a victory by the Republican and isolationist candidate George Bush Jr. in the US would likely lessen Washington's will to get involved overseas.” [11] As 2000 dawned, the US direction was yet to be seen but it was clear Putin was in power in Russia, and while not a communist he was keen on reviving Soviet policies and as time would show he had his own geopolitical ambitions, some indeed involving Milosevic’s hoped for alliance with China (a point to which we’ll return in later chapters). Washington clearly felt that the time to take out Milosevic was short – preferably before the US elections.

As Gene Sharp would later tell an interviewer, “when violence fails, people don't say violence doesn't work. They keep the belief that violence is the most powerful thing they can do even though it has proved to be a disaster.” [12] This was the perfect time and place to prove that attitude wrong. Serbia in 2000 provided the fertile soil of political discontent by the tractor-load. Political analyst Dejan Anastasejevic explained the source of this sullen mood:

“The people turned against [Milosevic] because he lost four wars in a row. He initially had a very large support but once he lost four wars, people started to look at you and thought may be you are not a very competent man. Also living standard in Serbia went sharply down during his rule because of the sanctions by the United Nations. People wanted these sanctions lifted so that they could live like normal people. And only way they saw that could happen was to remove Milosevic from power.” [13]

So even the discontent can be engineered from without as in this case - bombs and sanctions were direct decisions of the nations targeting Milosevic for removal. But either way the idea was planted in peoples’ minds – there is only one way out of this situation and Milosevic is blocking the exit. As Metta Spencer explained in Peace magazine, “Sharp has shown that dictators require the assistance of the people they rule - their skills and knowledge, their material resources, and especially their submission.” Once these were broken in Serbia, Spencer claims with only some hyperbole “Sharp's strategy brought down Milosevic.” [14]

Next: otpor! "Biting the system."

Sources:
[1] Justin Logan and Ted Galen Carpenter. “NATO Insists on Poking Russian Bear.” Cato Institute. January 27 2006. Accessed via MosNews. http://www.mosnews.com/commentary/2006/01/27/russianbear.shtml
[2], [4] “NATO says 'human shields' account for bombing deaths Albanian troops clash with Serbs.” CNN. May 18 1999. http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9905/17/kosovo.03/
[3] “Who NATO Killed.” Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Counterpunch. 1999. Accessed at: http://www.counterpunch.org/dead.html
[5] “Yugoslavia's Milosevic meets with Russia's Seleznyov.” April 7 1999. Accessed May 4, 2006 at:
http://www.serbia-info.com/news/1999-04/07/10606.html
[6] De Haas, Marcel. ''N.A.T.O.-Russia Cooperation: Political Problems Versus Military Opportunities.'' Power and Interest News Report. May 29 2006. http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=498&language_id=1
[7], [8], [9], [10], [11] Sunter, Daniel. “Milosevic Dreams Of Military Axis To The East.” Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Dec 17 1999.
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=bcr&s=f&o=245700&apc_state=henibcr1999
[12] Spencer, metta. “Transcript: An Interview with Gene Sharp.” Peace Magazine. July 9, 2003. http://www.why-war.com/news/2003/07/09/aninterv1.html
[13] Htet, U Min. “Serbia: Demise of a Dictator.” BBC News. September 16 2005. http://www.bbc.co.uk/burmese/learning/story/2005/09/050912_transition_prog12.shtml
[14] Spencer, Metta. “Gene Sharp and Serbia: Introduction: Nonviolence versus a Dictatorship.” Peace Magazine Oct-Dec 2001, p.14. http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v17n4p14.htm

POLAND AND CHINA, 1989

2007-03-13T03:36:00.000-07:00

East-West: The Twin Pillars of Nonviolence
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
Posted 3/13/07

By 1980 the Cold War, a grinding state of indirect conflict between a developed, Capitalist “West,” and a developing, Communist “East,” had been going on for over three decades. The Capitalist nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were arrayed from North America across Western and Southern Europe to hedge in any encroachment of Soviet Communism further west, and bound by their mutual defense clause to consider an attack on one nation an attack on all. Any such attack was predicted to come from NATO’s nemesis, the Communist nations of the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led alliance of Eastern European countries with its own mutual defense clause to prevent any capitalist encroachment further east. Both sides were heavily armed with vast nuclear arsenals capable of ending or seriously complicating all life on Earth, both connected to these mutual defense triggers. Since anybody attacking anything in Europe could easily lead to the mutually assured destruction of Soviet-US nuclear war, the two political bulldozers stared each other down, idling in high gear. Arms reduction talks and other détente policies had calmed the situation some, but as 1980 opened on Europe the Iron Curtain still held firm for both sides in a long-term status quo stalemate.

By decade’s end it would be torn down and the Cold War ended. It is indeed ironic that Warsaw Pact, which had been signed in and named for the Polish capital, began to fall apart most dramatically in that same nation. Solidarity, a labor union-turned political player challenged the Communist government starting in 1981 with labor strikes and other such nonviolent means. Throughout the 1980s, Solidarity was suppressed by the hard line Jaruzelsky government, but continued its disciplined nonviolent actions in the underground, pursuing reforms based on Catholic social teaching as opposed to Communist rule.
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, supported by Washington and Rome, campaigns for President of Poland in May 1989.

The group had as its rallying figure electrician-turned-dissident Lech Walesa and enjoyed robust supported from the CIA, Reagan’s Washington in general, and the Roman Catholic Church (under its first Polish pope, John Paul II). In 1988 they gathered enough steam to launch a final wave of strikes; the economy ground nearly to a halt, and the government was forced to open negotiations. Soon the Solidarity party was allowed to stand candidates in elections, and their leader Walesa was overwhelmingly elected president of Poland at the end of 1989; the Communists were driven out and a new day dawned.
Beyond Poland’s borders, Solidarity’s decade-long example had sparked imitators, whose own struggles crested that same year. Czechoslovakia saw Vaclav Havel's “Velvet revolution,” and Hungary and Bulgaria also saw revolutions in late 1989. Romania’s brutal leader Nikolai Ceausescu was given the Mussolini treatment, executed along with his wife on Christmas Day, their corpses shown on worldwide TV. But of course the most vivid and widely remembered story of the year was the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9 to an exuberantly united Germany (it wasn’t physically torn down for another year). The events of 1989 announced the sudden and final end for the Soviet-led eastern bloc. Spectators in Washington, London, and Brussels watched with a mixture of satisfaction and professed surprise as people power expressed with primarily bloodless uprisings allowed the “democratic West” to finally win the Cold War in Europe as the last decade of the 20th century began.

Further east but earlier that same year, another attempted revolution against Communist rule didn’t go so well. Chinese president Deng Xiaoping’s policies of liberal reform went too far by the standards of many citizens, and not far enough in the eyes of others. This fragmented discontent rose above the surface in Beijing, with protest activities beginning in April. By May the activists started a hunger strike centered on Tiananmen Square, and solidarity strikes spread across the country, threatening the economy. Authorities first tried to quell the protests non-violently, but the decision was finally made to concede nothing to the demonstrators, who were seen as tools of external “bourgeois” powers.

Martial law was declared on May 20, and the government ordered units of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to regain control of the city on June 4. Tanks were sent to crush through roadblocks erected by protesters, and PLA troops reportedly fired directly into the crowds without warning. Casualty estimates vary widely; Chinese authorities cite 400-800 killed, others cite deaths in excess of 2,000, besides perhaps tens of thousands injured and/or imprisoned. This was called the “June 4 incident” in China, and the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” in the west, which imposed various sanctions and other punishments over the episode. Nonetheless, the idea of a dictatorial East won the day in China and the “People’s Republic” carried on much as it had.
The lone protester, identity and fate still unknown, who famously but briefly held up a PRC tank column at Tiananmen Square, June 4 1989.

The massacre at the “gate of heavenly peace” revealed starkly the dangers of mass opposition as a tool of pressuring or toppling governments. This gloomier side, along with the more positive examples in Europe, sent a mixed message for nonviolent protesters as the 1990s opened. The Warsaw Pact, with its leadership in Moscow teetering, had been broken and Eastern Europe freed. But the PRC had not been on the brink of collapse and so remained intact in all its repressive efficiency. Many lessons can be drawn from this dichotomy, depending on one’s perspective, but clearly Solidarity and Tiananmen presented the twin pillars of civil insurgency – the peaceful and successful vs. the brutally suppressed. At the risk of over-simplification, the events of 1989 presented an East-West polarity that would leave an impression for decades and would evidence itself as the 21st Century's round of transformations played out.

Next: Iraq and the New World Order at the End of History

IRAQ AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER AT THE END OF HISTORY

2007-03-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

Adam Larson
Caustic logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Posted March 7 2007
updated and edited a bit, 11/11/09

The USSR’s demise came not a minute too soon for Washington’s grandest ambitions of world power. Near the end of his tenure, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was setting himself up to assume a major continued role in the world. His domestic legacy of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (economic restructuring) had greatly softened the Soviet image in a world that he noted was growing more interconnected and self-aware. He apparently fancied himself a bit of a latter-day Woodrow Wilson, and publicly laid his utopian plans for an end to the Cold War and its replacement with something called a “new world order,” to be led by the USSR and the US working in harmonious tandem. He first announced this on December 7 1988 at a UN assembly: “further world progress is now possible only through the search for a consensus of all mankind, in movement toward a new world order.” [1]

He wasn’t the first to use the phrase; it’s been a perennial favorite of idealist rhetoric since at least World War I and is even on our US currency. But his specific formulation was unprecedented in that it came from a Soviet leader and that it was taken serious by many worldwide, premised deftly on the concerns of the day. He offered a partial Soviet surrender as it were, an end to economic blocs and creation of one global capitalist economy if with local variations. He foresaw beyond this a gentler world of great power cooperation, wider democracy and social justice, environmental protection, nonviolent conflict resolution and of course nuclear disarmament. Gorbachev’s proposal was seen by many as a rambling pipe dream, but his idealism boosted Soviet influence in Europe, and in 1990 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Of course there were motives other than pure high-minded Pollyannaism at work; with a mismanaged economy in decline and a military drained by the eight-year war in Afghanistan, Gorbachev’s plan seems to have been to replenish Soviet power with his bold injection of intellectual capital. When you’re short on both guns and butter, a good enough idea may help fill the gap. The premier explained that despite the disagreements that had held the past in a chokehold, mutual respect was the to be the new paradigm. “For a new type of progress throughout the world to become a reality, everyone must change,” he stressed in June 1990. “Tolerance is the alpha and omega of a new world order.” [2]

Bush and Gorbachev meet at Malta to discuss the shape of the New World Order, December 2-3, 1989

Washington and the newly elected president Bush were left on the defensive by this visionary approach, accepting the Soviet leader’s basic premise but dithering on committing to it in a definitive way. In their memoir of power A World Transformed, Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft explained their concern about losing leadership to Gorbachev if they followed his lead, and the counterbalancing fear that the Europeans might stop following Washington if it seemed to drag its feet on the yellow brick road to the future. [3] The Malta Conference of December 2-3 1990 was supposed to re-open the East-West discussion of the shape of the new world, but the results were disappointing, with Bush again criticized for a lack of commitment to Gorbachev’s ambitious divination. Famously weak on “the vision thing,” in retrospect it almost seemed Bush was waiting for something to point him in the right direction to chart his own map towards a new world - one with Washington taking the lead.

As the tougher-minded in Washington saw it, partnership with Moscow was less necessary by the end of 1989; the writing was on the wall and the hawks were preparing for a different new world order - one without the Soviet Union. Gorbachev’s soft attitude and the general Soviet weakness freed their hand to pursue hot war over their own interest with less reservation than in the past. The initial test of this freedom of movement was the US conflict with Panama of December 1989, just weeks after Malta. With charges of drug dealing by president Noriega as justification, this easily-won, small-scale neighborhood war began the “reluctant sheriff” phase of America’s self-appointed post-Cold War military role.

But that “reluctant sheriff” called his next high-noon showdown within less than a year. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had just escaped a draining eight-year war with Iran, and in August 1990 responded to a string of apparently American-sponsored provocations by ordering a full invasion and annexation of his tiny, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. The Americans had first told him they had “no opinion” on such “Arab-Arab disputes” as the border disagreement with Kuwait, but once carried out, this brazen act was taken as the first real challenge to the nascent and ill–defined new world order. [4] At this point Bush finally took the linguistic offensive, tapping into Gorbachev’s vein of optimistic ideals in a speech on September 11 1990:

“Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a new world order - can emerge: a new era - freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. […] Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. […] [Gorbachev] and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come.”

Bush stressed in his speech “this is the first assault on the new world that we seek, the first test of our mettle.” America rose to the occasion with its ready and eager military and an increasing momentum of international resolve. Gorbachev was reportedly torn between his desire for purely peaceful ends and the obvious (linguistic) similarity of Washington’s approach to his own vision of cooperation. [5] Working with Secretary of State James Baker, Bush pulled every trick in the book, not least flattery, to swing Soviet opinion behind the war plan in hopes of unanimity in the UN Security Council.

Permanent member China was persuaded to abstain, voting neither way, Yemen and Cuba (then two of the ten rotating members) were the only no votes (repaid with more sanctions) and the USSR followed Washington’s lead, joining 11 other yes votes on Security Council Resolution no. 678 in November 1990. Saddam was thus given a deadline of January 15 to withdraw or face UN forces, and so Bush, Baker, Shevardnadze, et al. had forged the first Security Council-approved military action since the fluke of approval for the Korean conflict at the UN’s dawn in 1950. This sudden usefulness of the UN was new, it was all about world order, and would go down as Bush’s legacy, not Gorbachev’s.

All it took was some serious follow-through, and the forces were already built up in neighboring Saudi Arabia – ostensibly neither to attack Iraq nor to liberate Kuwait, but only to defend the Saudi Kingdom from what the Americans insisted was a realistic threat of an Iraqi invasion. The military machine that assembled itself during late 1990 in sprawling bases in the Saudi desert were primarily American and British, no Soviet troops took part. Bush offered to have Soviet troops in the coalition, as noted by then National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, but Gorbachev apparently declined the honor. [6] It was the largest American military buildup since the Vietnam War, and designed to finally wash that war’s bad taste from America’s maw. By the end of the year, over a half-million soldiers and a mind-boggling arsenal of advanced weaponry was announced as offensive capable and ready to enforce Security Council Resolution 678.

For whatever reason, Saddam failed to withdraw by the deadline. Air strikes began a few days after and through late January and all of February pounded targets across Iraq with a bombardment that rivaled anything since World War II. On February 22, Iraq agreed to a Soviet-sponsored cease-fire agreement calling for a withdrawal in three weeks to be overseen by the Security Council. The US rejected the proposal and kept bombing, two days later launching the final phase with coalition ground forces pushing through Kuwait and into Iraq. Saddam finally surrendered and the US shot up some of the (retreating? withdrawing?) columns. But Bush refused to push on to Baghdad. Saddam was left in power though locked in a “box” of sanctions and weapons inspectors, to be policed by the world community.

Immediately after the war was finished, President Bush lauded the cooperative spirit of world community – the US and USSR were on the same side! He declared in a speech on March 6, 1991:

“The Gulf war put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed that test. […] Even the new world order cannot guarantee an era of perpetual peace. But enduring peace must be our mission. Our success in the Gulf will shape […] the new world order we seek.”

In this process, Gorbachev had followed hopefully, but the war had been an American game and by now so was the Cold War. 1990 saw a weaker Moscow granting more autonomy to the constituent republics, and 1991 was mired in deeper crisis yet with Russia’s role in the USSR itself coming into question. Just six months after the end of the Gulf war, a coup by Communist hardliners had the premier sidelined for three days in August amid a nationwide “emergency.” This spurred strong international condemnation and threats, massive strikes and protests from the Russian public, and deft moves by an emerging new class of West-friendly leaders like Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

The liberal Gorbachev was thus restored but the final slide had been entered. Half the Republics took the chance provided by the coup’s chaos in Moscow to declare independence, and the USSR’s final dissolution was recognized by all parties in December. As 1992 dawned, the Pro-West Yeltsin was in power in the new Russian Federation, by far the largest of the newly independent constituent republics. Where there had been one massive, monolithic nation there now stood massive Russia (with its south Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad) and fourteen smaller republics.

Some semblance of a regional cooperation framework was maintained with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The creation of the CIS in December 1991 is what officially marked the end of the USSR. It was agreed to by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to ensure a “civilized divorce” of the republics, yet it continues on to the present time, eventually including all the former SSRs minus the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, who sought to escape Russia’s sphere as totally as possible.

The Cold War was over and the West officially emerged victorious. It was a heady time in Washington and a bit of a dreamland. Influential American thinker Francis Fukuyama even wrote about the “end of history,” first in a 1989 article and later in a 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama explained “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism.” Fukuyama defines history narrowly as the development of political ideologies, and so the emergent liberal democracy constitutes the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and as such marked the termination of the historic process. [7] History is over because we had won, Fukuyama’s case seems to run. We put the period at the end of the sentence because all of history has leading up to the perfection we are. We the liberal Democratic New World Order, we the Last Men of the West.

Next:
Euro-NATO: How the West was Run
Sources:
[1], [2], Wikipedia. “New world order.” last modified 21 July 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_world_order
[3] George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft. A World Transformed, ISBN 0679752595, pp. 42-43.
[4] Clark, Ramsey. The Fire This Time: US War Crimes in the Gulf. New York. Thunder’s Mouth Press. First edition, First Printing. 1992. Page 12-19.
[5] Aldrich-Moodie, Benjamin. “Negotiating Coalition: Winning Soviet Consent to Resolution 678 Against Iraq”
Woodrow Wilson school of Public and International Affairs. WWS Case Study 1/98
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cases/papers/negotiating.html
[6] see [3], pp. 361-364.
[7] Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History and the Last Man. (intro) Penguin. 1992.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

SOROS MONEY AND THE OPEN SOCIETY

2007-03-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
Poated 3/2/07

Even more outside the government, billionaire financier George Soros is an indispensable private source of support to utopian ideas like Gene Sharp’s. Born 1930 in Hungary as Giorgy Schwartz, his father changed the family name to avoid revealing their Jewish identity to the Nazi occupiers. The name Soros has a double meaning; Hungarian for “designated successor” and also “will soar” in the short-lived international language Esperanto. The elder Schwartz was fluent in both languages and knew exactly what a Messianic name he had chosen for his son. [1] young George lived through the Nazi takeover but was old enough to leave the country once the Communists took over. He slipped out and moved to London to study economics and quickly went into business, predicting and exploiting currency fluctuations (“the weaknesses of capitalism,” he explains) to his own benefit. [2] In 1956 he moved to New York and in 1973 established Soros Fund Management, which ranked as the world's largest hedge fund by the 1990s. [3] With remarkable investment returns, by 2000 the firm had made him one of the richest men in the world at a personal worth fluctuating around $7 billion.

Soros is not universally admired; he has been called ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ for his bet against the British pound in 1992, Malaysian authorities accuse him of bringing down their currency during Asia's 1997 financial crisis, and French authorities have fined him millions for insider trading. [4] He has also praised Europe’s unified currency, the Euro, and repeatedly banked against the US dollar while predicting the general collapse of the world economy. The Asian financial crisis followed by a similar monetary collapse in Latin American presented a threat of a “disintegration of the world capitalist system,” Soros warned the US Congress in September 1998. [5]

George Soros, billionaire speculator and freelance freedom financier

As he made his fortunes on Wall Street and increasingly in the financial centers of Europe, the politics of Eurasia were never far from Soros’ mind. In the 1980s he offered support for the Solidarity labor movement in Poland as well as Czech activists and opposition leader Vaclav Havel. In 1993 Soros established The Open Society Institute (OSI), a grant-making foundation to promote the usual – democracy, human rights, etc., with special emphasis on openness to new ideas and the “free expression of critical thought” as the wellsprings of a democratic “open society.” [6]

Through OSI and other foundations he has either started or joined, Soros has financed efforts towards “open societies” in more than 50 countries around the world, donating in the neighborhood of $450 million each year. [7] Since he began his crusade, Soros has given away more than four billion dollars, which makes him an international philanthropist on the world-shaping scale of Carnegie and Rockefeller, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his pains. [8] From a geopolitical perspective, his works are in line with U.S. policy; Jonathan Mowat writes that Soro’s donations “always dovetail with those of the NED.” [9] In fact he is a member and former Director of the CFR, the authors of the American end of the Anglo-American world strategy. Indeed the fiercest denunciations of Soros’ crusades have been lobbed by nationalists and deposed leaders at the short end of his financial stick.

But Soros has also been targeted by the American right, notably the National Rifle Association, for alleged one-world order tendencies and promoting disarmament of all citizens in a gun-free world, and by DAMADD (Dads And Moms Against Drug Dealers) as a “villainthropist” financier of the global drug trade. [10] He is indeed a supporter of liberal causes, once called “the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization” in 1996 after dropping money to support two state ballot initiatives legalizing medicinal marijuana. [11] In domestic politics, Soros is generally more keen on Democrats, and had been a regular but modest donor.

But he also has links with certain Republicans, like the Bush family. Soros had been a partner in the Carlyle Group with George Bush sr. and, until late 2001 anyway, members of the bin Laden family. [12] He had also owned nearly a third of Harken Energy in 1986 when the company purchased (bailed out) Spectrum7, a failing Texas oil company that had been run into the ground partly by George W. Bush, then the vice president’s son. The Nation’s Washington correspondent David Corn asked Soros why in 2002. “I didn't know him,” Soros was reported to explain. “He was supposed to bring in the Gulf connection. But it didn't come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. He was not much of a businessman.” [13]

Nor would he be much of a President in Soros’ eyes. The billionaire crusader has since turned to purchasing influence not through but against his old business partner, targeting the president for regime change like some third world dictator. “Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God,” Soros once said. “He's leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence.” [14] There was an ominous familiarity to childhood memories; the post-9/11 statements of Bush functionaries like Attorney General Ashcroft “reminded me of Germany, under the Nazis. […] It was the same kind of propaganda about how ‘We are endangered’ and ‘We have to be united.’” [15] As Germany was under Hitler, “America, under Bush, is a danger to the world,” he warned. Soros has called Cheney and the other the neoconservatives surrounding the president “a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism.” [16]

As the 2004 election approached, he compiled his concerns into a book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power. In it, he argued for a collective approach to security and increased foreign aid, an investment in a more peaceful world where Western interests could be achieved without gross violence or destabilizing nationalism. “It would be too immodest for a private person to set himself up against the president,” he said of his book’s argument. “But it is, in fact the Soros Doctrine.” [17]

A central tenet of this was the removal of Bush and his cronies from power. Defeating Bush in 2004 was “a matter of life and death” for Soros and “the central focus of my life.” He built on this theme, delivered lectures to this effect, and as the election and a chance to drive Bush and Cheney from office loomed he set to dishing out money. Soros' generous support for “527” voter-mobilization groups like the anti-Bush “Move On” organization became a focus of criticism; the Republican National Committee lashed back that “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party.” [18] By November 2003 he had committed $15.5 million to groups dedicated to ousting Bush, much more than he had donated to Democratic elections before. His total by Election Day was reportedly $23.5 million, and he pledged “if necessary, I would give more money.” [19] When asked if he would trade his entire fortune to defeat Bush, he responded “if someone guaranteed it.” [20] But Soros had nothing on Diebold and Jeb’s Florida as far as shaping the election and he knew it - so he still has most of his fortune and lives to fight another day. And again, Europe was never far from his mind – his handiwork plays a crucial role in the events of the following chapters.

Next: Some Notes on Timing And Consent

Sources:
[1] “George Soros.” Wikipedia. Last Updated December 10 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soros
[2], [3], [4] Boselovic, Len. “Billionaire raps Bush on tour: Hedge-fund chief woos GOP moderates.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. October 6 2004. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04280/391035.stm
[5] Vann, Bill. “Latin America's crisis spells social upheavals.” World Socialist Website. September 18 1998.
http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/sep1998/lat-s18.shtml

ZIMBABWE/IRAQ 2003

2007-02-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

THE LIMITS OF NON-VIOLENCE
ADAM LARSON
CAUSTIC LOGIC / GUERILLAS WITHOUT GUNS
Posted 2/27/07

American support like that offered in Serbia was not universally supported – there were exceptions. In Africa, for example, Zimbabwe was in its own turmoil at the same time; strongman Robert Mugabe had spawned his own opposition, the leaders of which were inspired by other revolutionary struggles around the world. They immediately acted after seeing the dramatic success of Otpor in Belgrade. Laura Rozen wrtote for Salon in February 2001:

“Hours after Milosevic fell in October, anti-government protests swept through Zimbabwe as parliamentary elections approached. Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai vowed to stop ‘Africa's Milosevic.’ “Mugabe has committed genocide against a minority, rigged elections, ignored the rule of law, and created a state which is internationally isolated," Tsvangirai said Oct. 6, just as Milosevic was conceding defeat in Belgrade. “We have given Mugabe a warning. A similar situation to Yugoslavia cannot be avoided.” [1]

But of course such a thing could be avoided and was. Nothing like the Bulldozer Revolution happened in Zimbabwe at that time. There are opposition leaders on the scene, Tsvangirai foremost among them, and by early 2005 he was finally receiving help from Colonel Helvey and others, according to the Christian Science Monitor. [2] But the public has not rallied behind the opposition to a large enough degree and as of mid-2006 Mugabe is still in power.

This citizen “apathy” has been blamed on many factors, but two that Helvey pointed out as key obstacles were hunger and AIDS. “When people are starving, it's awfully hard to promote democracy,” he explained. Roughly 40% of the nation’s 12 million people are near starvation, according to a recent report. In such circumstances, “you can't have 1 million people sitting in the streets of the capital for 17 days,” Helvey elaborated. “There's not going to be food for them.” Then there's AIDS. In 2002, the official HIV infection rate was 27 percent, one of the world's highest and thought to have gone up since then. Helvey wondered in such a climate, “who's got the energy to protest?” [3] Thus it seems Helvey’s tactic falls flat in places like Zimbabwe, where reforms are most urgently needed.

But perhaps the apathy regarding reform there lies elsewhere. It could be that Zimbabwe simply offered too few riches to be seen as worthwhile in Washington. This possibility indicates one key moral weakness of the strategy – while promising to remove a reviled dictator without resort to violent war, like war it tends to work only where the US is looking to invest; no type of conflict is waged if a target nation hasn’t enough to offer.

However, and for other reasons, Sharp’s nonviolent conflict also got no real support against Saddam Hussein in Iraq which clearly does have massive resources – primarily one of the world’s largest supplies of petroleum in an age of shrinking supplies. The U.S. was already in a state of war against a reviled dictator there; after the fierce bombardment of its infrastructure in 1991, Iraq continued to marinade in economic sanctions through the Clinton years, punctuated with occasional air strikes whenever Saddam was perceived as trying to sneak out of his “box.” No fly zones enforced by the U.S. ostensibly to protect Kurds in the North and Shiites in the South left most of Iraq beyond Baghdad’s effective control. Iraq was thus progressively weakened; even as Saddam himself retained his elaborate network of grandiose palaces, the nation’s people were wracked with malnutrition, water-borne disease, and epidemic deformities possibly caused by US-deposited Depleted Uranium munitions. On top of this the sanctions and inadequate oil-for-food program held fast. Madeleine Albright even told 60 Minutes in 1996 (she was UN Ambassador at the time, soon-to-be Secretary of State) that the reported 500,000 children who had died from the sanctions were “worth it,” although it was a “hard” calculation. (She later explained that she regretted making this admission and should instead have deflected the question by blaming the peoples’ suffering on Saddam, as was standard.) [4]

The sanctions regime thus dragged on into the twilight of the Clinton years as the Serbian situation unfolded. But one way or another it was set to change. It was the re-emerging superpower rival Russia that started leading the charge to end sanctions and bring Iraq, even with Saddam Hussein in charge, back into the mainstream oil economy. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov explained to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in mid-2000 that the Russian government was “in favor of mitigating the limitations imposed on Russia by the sanctions.” This position was supported by French president Jaques Chirac, who further called the sanctions “dangerous, inhumane, and inappropriate.” [5] The London Financial Times reported on September 12 2000 “the Russian and French positions are giving Iraq hope that the sanctions, if not lifted, will soon become meaningless.” Deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz explained in an interview with the magazine “Iraq's practically becoming more like Cuba vis a vis the US. […] Everyone else is trading with Cuba, this is going to be the future of the matter.” [6]

A different course to ending sanctions was coalescing in the US, crafted by neoconservative Republican power hopefuls as part of a plan to preserve “the global Pax Americana.” The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the by-now infamous think tank featuring names like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Woolsey, had formed in 1997 to promote a strong, bold, well-funded military and unapologetic globe-molding neo-imperialism informed by “American values” and “American interests.” The PNAC’s guiding document for making the 21st century a New American one was its September 2000 report Rebuilding America’s Defenses. The report took a belligerent tone towards Iraq, outlined along with Iran and North Korea (soon Bush’s “axis of evil”) as the three biggest troublemakers in the global system. Russia and China were listed as competitors to contain. Tensions with Russia, China and France would lead to deadlock in the UN Security Council, specifically over Iraq, so the report focused on willingness to take unilateral action or rely on ad-hoc coalitions.

The described high-tech high-cost military “process of transformation,” and its geopolitical aims including in Iraq, would be difficult to achieve, the report noted, without the realization of “a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl harbor.” This report was released and utterly ignored in September 2000, a year before that precise event was delivered and just months before a large PNAC contingent took the reins of power along with George W Bush in the deeply troubling 2000 Election. Among the signatories of that report were Paul Wolfowitz, who would be Deputy Defense Secretary, no. 2 to fellow PNACer Rumsfeld, and Scooter Libby, who would be Chief of Staff to fellow PNACer Cheney; that is, the top aides the top PNACER’s at both the Pentagon and White House.

The dust had just settled in Serbia after the bulldozer revolution when Bush was sworn-in. For the next eight months, as widely noted, Bush’s foreign policy just sort of drifted about amid growing domestic problems – to much of the world this seemed a lull, as if they were waiting for something to show them the way. After the September 11 attacks and the announcement of a worldwide “War on Terror,” Rebuilding America’s Defenses was for all intents and purposes adopted by the administration as the master strategy for the new generational struggle. Defense secretary Rumsfeld and his team got their direction, coordinating with Cheney at the White House, and began pushing events towards Iraq. Bush delivered a speech at the wounded Pentagon on October 11, 2001, announcing his firm dedication to the PNAC vision, and that 9/11 was indeed the fulfillment of their “new Pearl Harbor” prophecy. In response to the report’s call for increased Pentagon budgets, Bush assured them “in the missions ahead for the military, you will have everything you need, every resource, every weapon, every means to assure full victory for the United States and the cause of freedom.” [7]

But when it came to Iraq, this did not include the Sharp-Helvey nonviolent “post-military weapons system” so recently proven in Serbia. The PNAC had in 1999 targeted Milosevic for downfall and urged Clinton and Congress to take the actions they finally did. [8] One would think they’d be aware of and pleased with Colonel Helvey’s work with Otpor, which had finished the job. Likewise, the PNAC had their sights set on Saddam Hussein, but of course, there was no such utopian revolution in Baghdad, only war and occupation.

The PNAC’s 2000 report said the US had long wanted a “more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” backed up by a “substantial American force presence” in the region, a need which they emphasized “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” [9] Such a military presence was then extant but threatened in Saudi Arabia; in August 2001 Crown Prince Abdullah in fact quietly and informally requested US forces to leave so he could avoid “the fate of the Shah of Iran.” [10] To get a new force presence, an internal revolution was not what was needed. It was not Otpor and their revolution that left NATO troops in Yugoslavia after all, but the earlier military conflict. And after more than a decade of brutal sanctions and bombs, it was unlikely that any internally produced new regime in Iraq would invite American basing there if given the choice. So the force presence would have to be hammered in, which seems to have been the plan from step one.

Next: Zayer and Helvey: No to Saddam, No to War

Sources:
[1] Rozen, Laura. “Dictator downturn: It just isn't as easy being a tyrant as it used to be.” Salon. February 3 2001 http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2001/02/03/dictators/print.html
[2], [3] McLaughlin, Abraham. “In Zimbabwe, people power fails to ignite.” Christian Science Monitor
from the March 22, 2005 edition Accessed June 12, 2006.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0322/p01s04-woaf.html
[4] Richman, Sheldon. “Albright Aplogizes.” The Future of Freedom Foundation. November 7 2003. http://www.fff.org/comment/com0311c.asp
[5], [6] Hoyos, Carola. “Russia in New Push to Lift Iraq Sanctions.” Finanacial Times. September 12 2000.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/council/russ0009.htm
[7] President George W. Bush's Pentagon Memorial Speech. October 11, 2001 Copied October 19, 2004 from: http://www.september11news.com/PresidentBushPentagon.htm
[8] “Mr. President, Milosevic is the Problem.” Project for a New American Century, International Crisis Group, Balkan Action Council, and Coalition for International Justice. Open letter to the President of the United States. September 20, 1998.
[9] Project for a New American Century Rebuilding America’s Defenses September 2000 Page 14.
[10] Pipes, Daniel “The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations.” The National Interest. Winter 2002/03 http://www.danielpipes.org/article/995

MISHA TAKES TBLISI

2007-02-26T02:43:00.000-08:00

THE ROSE REVOLUTION AND ITS FIRST THORNS
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/25/07

On the day before the election, November 18, small rallies of a few hundred Saakashvili supporters each were reported in cities across Georgia. The crowd at Zugdidi swelled to thousands on Election Day as they prepared to mobilize, led by Misha himself under the plan to march halfway across the country and into his capital to claim the election victory. [1] The march was delayed to allow more time to prepare, but the procession finally snaked its way along the rough route of the BTC line and arrived in Tbilisi like an invading army on the 20th.

In the meantime, the election had been called in the President’s favor, as expected, so the opposition swarms took up positions around the parliament building and dug in for a fight. Others joined from Tbilisi itself and other cities; over 100,000 people were bused in from the countryside in an operation organized by Kmara, who also set up loudspeakers and a giant television screen amid the crowds. [2] For three days the downtown area was a thriving hub of human energy, protesting, networking, and listening to speeches by opposition leaders. The Rose Revolution that thus formed took its name from the roses Saakashvili and his supporters handed out to symbolize their nonviolent intent and the beauty of the transformation at hand. The opposition prima donna reportedly waved a long-stemmed rose in Shevy's face at one point, shouting “Resign!” [3]

The opposition to the opposition also mobilized. On the day before the election an estimated 10,000 supporters of the Revival party boarded chartered buses in Batumi, capital of the contested autonomous region of Ajaria. Ajaria’s de facto president Aslan Abashidze was normally a Russian-leaning opponent of Shevardnadze’s but was willing to form an alliance to keep Saakashvili out of power; he had just toured Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia on the President's behalf to bolster support from those countries' leaders. [4] The Revival activists were soon marching on Tbilisi’s streets to counter Kmara and its allies, with 600 of them keeping a night vigil in front of parliament. [5] The head of Revival's Tbilisi branch told reporters “we demand that the whole of Georgia stand united under a single motto: ‘No to fascism, No to extremism, No to civil confrontation.’ Let us all defend Georgia's constitutional order and respect the legitimacy of the state.” [6]

Otpor-trained Mikhail Saakashvili exhorts his followers in Tbilisi.

Kaha Lomaia, director of Georgia's branch of the Soros Foundation explained that Kmara’s message “was very close to the hearts and minds of people. People listened to them.” [7] It’s less clear who exactly Kmara themselves were listening to, but on the third and final day of the Revolution the demonstrators and Mr. Saakashvili acted so in unison they nearly resembled an army and its general. The final battle was won in less than twenty-four hours, as dramatically detailed in a BBC News timeline. Despite the Rose occupation of the capital, the new parliament was set to convene on the morning of November 22. Before the session even started, at 10:21 am, Misha proclaimed that Shevardnadze had 45 minutes to admit defeat in the elections and disband his sham parliament. An hour later protesters advanced on the presidential palace towards a line of police who turned them back by firing smoke bombs. At 1 pm Shevardnadze, ignoring Saakashvili’s threats and the crowds, opened the parliament session. Fifteen minutes later protesters stormed the parliament building itself and took it - Shevardnadze left by a side door. [8]

Inside the chamber, the usurper Saakashvili declared dramatically “the velvet revolution has taken place in Georgia!” Meanwhile the President gathered with supporters in the cold outside the building telling them “I will only resign by constitutional means.” He declared a state of emergency amid what he called an attempted coup d'etat, and withdrew to the presidential palace where security had been beefed up. Opposition leader and Saakashvili ally Nino Burjanadze announced assumption of the presidency until things sorted themselves out.

Later in the afternoon, Misha called Shevy and told him he could stay in office for a transitional period if he only agreed to early presidential elections. Twenty minutes later, a crowd stormed the palace, apparently a reminder that he had little choice. [10] The whole thing had begun as a wrangle over parliamentary elections, but now a referendum on the presidency itself was forced onto the agenda. At the end of the day, what happened looked suspiciously like a CIA-sponsored coup of days past, this time simply masked by the popular uprising of the Rose Revolution and the coronation was to be by popular demand.

2004: Miles awarded the State Department's Robert C. Frasure Award for “peaceful conflict resolution.” 2005: ends his tenure as US ambassador in Tbilisi. March 2006: nominated Executive Director of the Open World Leadership Center, a Congressional body founded in 1999 to bring emerging economic, political, and cultural leaders from Russia, Ukraine, etc. to study in the US.

The next day Shevardnadze bowed to the inevitable and turned the reins over to Burjanadze until Saakashvili could be confirmed by election. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov was present, having flown in the previous night to manage the Russian aspect of the crisis. [11] After talking with the ousted president and sizing up the situation, Ivanov announced in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper “there are enough facts proving that what happened in those days wasn’t spontaneous, it didn't arise suddenly. Of course there were preparations and the U.S. ambassador was involved, as Shevardnadze himself admitted.” [12] Shevy was now more open about the forces behind his overthrow, pointing out to the media that Richard Miles, the U.S. ambassador in Yugoslavia and allegedly involved in organizing the overthrow of Milosevic, had been posted as ambassador to Georgia shortly before the roses were distributed.

Some remained faithful to Shevardnadze even after all this. Aslan Abashidze’s “fiefdom” of Ajaria refused to recognize Saakashvili, and Tbilisi responded by imposing sanctions and closing off the border. Fearing an invasion, Abashidze blew up the bridges into the region in May, but was finally forced – by mass protest, of course - to step down and flee to Russia. [13] Batumi was at the time host to a dozen Russian Military bases, but after the mini-revolution there, Tbilisi has pushed for their removal, reaching an agreement with Moscow in 2005 that all Russian forces will be withdrawn by 2008. [14]

Abashidze’s self-imploding show of diehard support was too little too late to save Shevardnadze’s power. The ousted President was reportedly “stunned” by what he perceived as Washington's betrayal. “I was one of the staunchest supporters of the U.S. policy. When they needed help on Iraq, I gave it,” he lamented. “I don't have an explanation to what has happened here.” [15] Almost certainly the answer lies in his relationship with Russia. He’d been sent to Tbilisi in 1992 by Moscow, after all, and if he’d been allowed to observe the scale of the American offensive in the former Soviet space that soon unfurled, Moscow-Tblisi relations could well have thawed even to the melting point. But for whatever reason, he was taken out of the game first. He did not go into exile, though he was invited by the Germans, and remains free though in forced retirement in his homeland.

Saakashvili’s desired early election came a little over a month after he demanded it, on January 4, 2004. It must be noted that with five-year terms and Shevardnadze’s last election in April 2000, the next election wasn’t set until some time in 2005. Thus with elections called at least a year in advance, the Rose Revolution’s leader took in a whopping 96 percent of the vote, a stunning result even with a narrowed playing field in which the parties had no time to field strong candidates. Such results, if pulled by any other post-Soviet despot, would be taken as a sure sign of fraud in what nearly everyone calls a divided and fractious country that had after all hosted large anti-Saakashvili protests even before he took the capital and pushed his speedy coronation. Yet Western observers batted nary an eyelash as he claimed only 4% of the country voted against him, and simply took the results as a simple display of the man’s overwhelming popularity

LIKE A JOHN LE CARRE NOVEL: YUSH POISONED!

2007-02-23T04:33:00.000-08:00

2004: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE RUINED FACE
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/23/07

As Ukraine hovered with the two Viktors (opposition leader Yushchenko and PM Yanukovych) running neck and neck for the presidency in the Halloween 2004 election, things got spooky. On the night of September 5, the opposition front-runner attended a small private dinner meeting with senior Ukrainian officials, including Ihor Smeshko, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU, successor to the Ukrainian KGB). The meeting was held at the cottage of Volodymyr Satsyuk, recently resigned from the SBU to focus on his other job in Parliament. Yushchenko brought along none of his security detail, and in the end he brought along only his campaign manager David Zhvania, who had arranged the meeting. Yushchenko later explained that, for whatever reasons, this dinner was the only time he did not take security measures to test his food.

But Viktor's wife Kateryina, keen as she is, said that she tasted ‘a metallic-smelling medicine’ on her husband's lips after he returned home. Yushchenko went straight to bed and fell seriously ill by the next morning. He toughed it out for a few painful days before checking in at a private clinic on the 10th by which time the mysterious illness had reportedly caused severe internal problems and nerve paralysis on the left side of his face. As September wore on, his doctors were powerless to stop his face from erupting in a dense gray mask of Chloracne cysts. The results weren’t clear right away, but his doctors concluded he would live and should continue campaigning while they ran more tests.

The Rudolfinerhaus clinic Yushchenko checked into was in Vienna, Austria, and presided over by a Dr. Michael Zimpfer, who explained in December, nearly three months after the fact, “at the present stage, we are still investigating the hypothesis of poisoning. However, we have not found any indication that a chemical or biological substance has been employed.” Further complicating diagnosis was the four-day delay between the outbreak of the ailments and his arrival at the hospital, and Yushchenko’s early refusal to allow biopsies of his face (he didn’t want it wrapped in gauze while campaigning). RFE/RL confirmed that “Yushchenko, upon his release from the clinic, said the doctors' statements proved he had been intentionally poisoned. In fact, the Viennese doctors left this open as a possibility, but reached no definitive conclusions.” (emphasis mine)

Yushchenko soon after his alleged poisoning.

But even with this lack of evidence, the medical team finally decided on a “descriptive diagnosis,” not to be taken as conclusive, that Yushchenko had suffered from severe, intentional dioxin poisoning, reportedly the second-highest dose on record. Dioxins are a class of pervasive industrial pollutants, and everybody has some dioxin in their systems. But Dr. Zimpfer said tests showed Yushchenko’s blood samples contained more than 1,000 times the normal amount of TCDD, a particularly toxic form.

These chemicals are not efficient killers; they cause cancer and predispose one to other ailments like diabetes – if they kill at all, it’s indirectly and after years. Only a few cases of acute poisoning are on record. One unsolved case from 1997 had five textile workers poisoned with a particularly strong isomer of dioxin; two fell gravely ill but neither died. This worst-case scenario happened, of all places, in Vienna - the very City Yushchenko would travel to for his diagnosis seven years later.

While the experts concur that dioxin usually takes weeks or months to show symptoms, Yushchenko fell ill the very morning after his September 5 dinner with Satsyuk and Smeshko. Campaign manager David Zhvania believed in the poisoning theory, and pointed the finger at President Kuchma or Russian elements working through organized crime figures. But he denied the “stupid theory” of a poisoning at the dinner he had arranged, citing a more probable poisoning while Yushchenko was in the Crimea (loaded with Russian mafia types) in late August. But Yush himself continued to favor the more dramatic and less logical story that implicated top leaders directly; in a 2005 interview with CNN, he was asked if he’s been poisoned at the Sept. 5 meeting. He replied “most likely.”

Dr. Zimpfer at the Rudolfinerhaus supported the theory as well; “we suspect involvement of an external party, but we cannot answer as to who cooked what or who was with him while he ate.” An excellent article by paleo-conservative writer Justin Raimondo sorts out the doctors at the center of this high-pressure situation; the widely-quoted Dr Zimpfer was the President of the clinic's Board of Supervisors, an administrative figurehead and not hands-on in the case. The chief medical doctor was named Lothar Wicke, and it as he who initially oversaw Yushchenko's treatment and held a press conference just after his patient's first visit. Before the international media, he accused unnamed individuals of spreading “medically falsified diagnoses concerning the condition of Mr. Yushchenko.”

Wicke never outright revealed who was telling what lies, but Zimpfer reportedly told him at one point “Yushchenko's people will not be happy and will take other measures.” An article from the UK Telegraph, one of the rare mentions in the Western media, claims that Wicke’s “life was threatened after he cast doubt on the diagnosis” and that “the clinic came under intense pressure from Mr Yushchenko's entourage to diagnose poisoning,” with or without evidence. As the pressure mounted, Wicke finally resigned his position on December 9, removing himself from the picture. The case was taken over by Dr. Nikolai Korpan, who was certain of a poisoning scenario; asked if the aim of the poisoning had been to kill the opposition candidate, Dr. Korpan snapped “yes, of course.” Raimondo clarifies that Korpan is “a surgeon, not a specialist, brought in by Yushchenko on the occasion of his first visit to Vienna.”

The Ukrainian authorities of course denied the charge that they had been involved in any poisoning. There is “no logic in such an accusation,” said Taras Chornovyl, Yanukovych's campaign manager. Other supporters voiced their own concerns. Stepan Havrysh, a political ally of Yanukovych said that while he pitied Yushchenko in his plight, “I'm afraid, two weeks before the vote, it's all political technologies.” This is a term usually reserved for public relations and election strategies. Others simply used the episode to taunt Yushchenko, speculating that his sudden disfigurement was from Herpes or some other disease a moral degenerate might pick up. Others have cited his long history with alcohol and food-triggered illness, and wondered if he didn’t drink too heavily and gorge himself on foods he knew would make him sick.

No matter the truth, Orange revolution supporters and Pora-types were sure the corrupt regime had tried to silence their leader. “Everybody knew he was poisoned so we didn't really need official tests,” said Anatoly Klotchyk, with all his nineteen years of wisdom to draw on. Likewise, the western media primarily took the word from the Vienna clinic that implicated Yanukovych or his Russian backers. The UK paper The Observer in December uncritically quoted an official in the Yushchenko camp that the poisoning was “clearly planned by professionals, perhaps former employees of the KGB.” Yushchenko “has confronted the disease in a fighting spirit,” the Observer article noted, “appearing during the mass protests without cosmetics to tell them that his scarred face was that of the dirty politics of Ukraine.” He went further than simple metaphor on Sept. 21; standing before the assembled Ukrainian Rada, he told the nation’s lawmakers through his cyst-covered face “do not ask who is next. Every one of us will be the next.”

Yet at the same time he wanted no immediate investigation into who poisoned him - and had hit-listed the entire parliament - until after the December election. “I don't want this factor to influence the election in some way – either as a plus or a minus,” he told the press. “This question will require a great deal of time and serious investigation. Let us do it after the election – today is not the moment.” The government’s investigation went ahead anyway, but a New York Times piece by C.J. Chivers from late 2004 noted “a chief obstacle has been Mr. Yushchenko himself, who has used the poisoning almost as a theme in his campaign, but has not fully cooperated with the authorities, even as the trail of his would-be assassin grows cold.” He was “busy with his campaign,” and besides, as campaign manager Zhvaniya explained, they had no faith that the official investigation would be anything other than a whitewash that would conceal the involvement of the authorities and their Russian backers.

Jane’s Intelligence Digest summarized the downside of the episode for Moscow-Washington relations. When coupled with other, known, Russian involvement in Uraine’s politics, news of the poisoning was “likely to lead to a reassessment of Western foreign policy towards Putin's increasingly authoritarian Russia.” The Observer compared this bizarre cloak-and-dagger episode to the “Cold War world of a John le Carré novel.” For those unfamiliar, a John le Carré novel is a fiction, penned in the west, crafted to glamorize a great Anglo-American struggle against Russia. It should be taken as no small irony that Kuchma’s or Moscow’s alleged choice to try to poison the opposition leader into submission should have caused such a reverse effect, giving him a projected ten-point boost to 60% projected vote, according to one Ukrainian analyst, who summed up “if we suppose this was organized by the authorities, who wished to disfigure [Yushchenko], then they lost.” He survived the attempt, unembarrassed and just as ambitious as ever. “Everything is going well,” he told supporters, wrapped in an orange scarf as he returned to campaigning. “I plan to live for a long time and I plan to live happily. I am getting better health every day.” And soon, of course, he would be President of Ukraine.

Sources:
- “Probing the Plot to Poison Ukraine's Yushchenko.” St. Petersburg Times. Issue #1044(10), Tuesday, February 15, 2005. http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=2747
- Chivers, C.J. “A Dinner in Ukraine Made for Agatha Christie.” New York Times. December 20 2004.
- Yushchenko's Poisoning: The Background” Jane's Intelligence Digest. January 21, 2005. Added January 27 2005 to http://eng.maidanua.org/static/emai/1106783418.html
- Associated Press. “Doctors seek cause of Yushchenko illness.” USA Today. December 8 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-12-08-austria-yuschenko_x.htm
- Bransten, Jeremy. Ukraine: Doctors Debate Whether Opposition Leader Was Poisoned. RFE/RL. September 24, 2004. http://rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/09/6346bded-0125-4d10-a4ee-296efffb6eba.html
- Schechner, Sam. "What Is Dioxin, Anyway?" Slate. December 13, 2004. http://www.slate.com/id/2110979/
- Loof, Susanna. “Ukrainian Presidential Candidate Viktor Yushchenko Poisoned With Dioxin.” Associated press. December 11 2004. http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/2004/Ukrainian-Yushchenko-Dioxin11dec04.htm
- Raimondo, Justin. "The Yushchenko 'Poison Plot' Fraud: He's poisoning Ukrainian politics with lies." Antiwar.com. December 15, 2004. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4164
- Pancevski, Bojan. "I received death threats, says doctor who denied that Ukrainian leader was poisoned." Telegraph. March 27 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/27/wukr27.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/03/27/ixportal.html
- Stoyanova-Yerburgh, Zornitsa. “Who Poisoned Yushchenko?” Worldpress.org. December 13 2004. http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/1995.cfm
- Nagle, Chad. “Booze, Salo and Mare's Milk... Did Yushchenko Poison Himself?” Counterpunch. December 20 2004. http://www.counterpunch.org/nagle12202004.html

FROM SHANGHAI WITH LOVE

2007-02-22T16:05:00.000-08:00

THE SCO BEFORE AND AFTER 9/11
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns

Western access to the "Eurasian Balkans" of Central Asia relied on the post-Cold War dissolution of Soviet power that opened the area to outside influence – and such a situation was not necessarily permanent. Brzezinski noted in 1997 early fears of a new convergence of native Eurasian power: “if the middle space [Russia and former USSR] rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South [Central Asia] or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor [China], then America's primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically.” Indeed, the seeds for all these possibilities were already sown as he wrote the words.

Perhaps the most interesting of these started as the quaint-sounding “Shanghai Five” organizations that was formed in 1996 with signatory nations China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. With official languages of Russian and Chinese, they worked to resolve border and disarmament disputes between themselves, apparently a regional house-cleaning in preparation for a more muscular campaign.

In their sixth annual meeting, June 2001 in Shanghai, sixth member Uzbekistan was admitted and the group re-named itself the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with stated aims of fighting ethnic and religious militancy and promoting trade and foreign investment. Gradually in the years since then, the SCO also came to be seen as an alternative to US power in Central Asia; by the middle of 2005 its platform was broad enough to entice Mongolia, Iran, Pakistan, and India to sign on as observer states and consider joining (see map). Obviously the possibility of membership for any of these states is loaded with deep implications for the existing world system, a hope for many and a fear for others that has underpinned events in Eurasia in the years since.
Shanghai Cooperation Organization: member states and observer states. Note the total domination of Eurasia this could lead to.
From the beginning, the member governments of the SCO had been focused on collective security, counter-terrorism work, and anti-narcotics operations. They thus shared a concern over the lawless state in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, rife with civil war and oozing out a steady stream of Islamic fundamentalism, trained terrorists, and opium. The training camps attributed widely to bin Laden’s al Qaeda were primarily meant to usher in Islamist governments in regional states and areas like Xinjiang, Chechnya, and Uzbekistan, so this was clearly a paramount regional concern. The Taliban’s prime sponsor, Pakistan, was nowhere near the SCO at the time, but India, Iran, and Russia had all teamed up to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban however they could. The Alliance was offered safe haven in Tajikistan to bolster its position on Afghanistan’s northern fringe. After 9/11 and the commencement of Washington’s “War on Terror,” the SCO issued a sort of ‘told-you-so’ statement on January 7 2002:

“As close neighbors of Afghanistan we had for an extended time been directly subjected to the terrorist and narco threats emanating from its territory long before the events of September 11 and had repeatedly warned the international community of the danger posed by those threats. That was why the SCO member states became actively involved in the anti-terrorist coalition and took measures to further intensify the SCO's work on the anti-terrorist front.” [3]

Sources:
[1] Brzezinski. "The Grand Chessboard." 1997. Page 124.
[2] Fang, Bay. “The Great Energy Game.” US News and World Report. Vol 141, no. 9. September 11 2006. p 60-62.
[3] Joint Statement by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Beijing, January 7, 2002) Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. http://www.shaps.hawaii.edu/fp/russia/sco_3_20020107.html

ZUBR IN BELARUS

2007-02-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

OUTPOST OF TYRANNY / JEANS ON THE 16th
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/20/07

The seeds of an Orange-style revolution in landlocked Belarus had been planted earlier, less than a year after Otpor’s success in Belgrade when, in August 2001, US ambassador Michael Kozak helped organize a near identical campaign in Minsk. [1] Robert Helvey has also left his footprint there, according to his AEI bio, probably for this early venture but possibly at some later time. But with a weak opposition ticket and Luka maintaining moderate public loyalty, the 2001 movement failed to catch on and the election that year rolled on to an inevitable Lukashenko victory. “There will be no Kostunica in Belarus,” the president declared in reference to the recent events in Serbia. [2] For the time being that was true and Lukashenko remained in power, but over the next years as Georgia and Ukraine fell with their own new leaders installed, the danger became real again as the 2006 presidential elections began to draw near.

There was a list of possible Belarusian Kostunicas – more than one could simply make disappear. There was Mikhail Marinich, an opposition politician jailed in December 2004 for allegedly stealing office equipment, charges he insisted were politically motivated, and was denied early release in September 2005. [3] There was Alexander Kazulin, leader of Social Democratic Party, who tried to crash a conference being addressed by Lukashenko in early 2006, arrested and allegedly beaten by police. [4] Most prominent among them was Alexander Milinkievic, the candidate put forth by the United Democratic Forces of Belarus (UDFB) coalition; Milinkevich would prove a key leader of the turmoil to come but has somehow escaped much jail time.

The distinctive and bold Zubr logo

Belarusian youth opposition leaders had been meeting with Otpor veterans since 2001, when Ian Traynor reported that ambassador Kozak “organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs traveling from Belgrade.” [5] After these meetings, presumably in neighboring Lithuania, a youth group had emerged for that year’s failed revolution. This time their simple, catchy name was “Zubr,” Belarusian for Bison. As in America, the bison is a national treasure and a symbol of resolute strength, of which a Belarusian nature preserve hosts the last big herds. Metta Spencer noted in Peace “it is clear that Zubr was developed, or at least conceptualized, using Otpor as a model.” [6] The group also offers Sharp’s FDTD (in English) from their website, which it stresses is dedicated to “Honor! Motherland! Freedom!”

Zubr activists strike a telling pose at their 2003 hockey action

The early-rising movement was well established and active for a second time even before their Georgian counterparts in Kmara really got going. In a move reminiscent of an Otpor anti-Milosevic campaign, thousands of posters with slogan “He must go!” were glued in the center of Minsk in late January 2003. Two members were arrested for their part in this campaign. [7] To break the fear they used innovative street theater like the February 2003 hockey match that pitted a team of local Zubr kids against “Luka’s” team, headed by a captain in a mustachioed goalkeeper’s mask. The Zubr website reported the “team of young patriots was very rallied. In dictator’s team just the opposite - every player played his own game. [The captain] was shouting at his teammates, and beating them with his stick. He was trying to show the way they must play but he was falling every time.” [8]

Their protest activities seem to have sloughed off after this; Lukashenko imposed government control over all foreign funding meant for local NGOs and banned foreign funding of any political activities in the country. [9] Ambassador Kozak was rotated out to calm tensions, and replaced in September 2003 with new hand George A. Krol. Things remained fairly quiet for Zubr until the flames were fanned by Washington; Following passage of the Belarus Democracy Act in 2004 and as the 2006 election drew near, the rhetoric heightened and the noose tightened. Lukashenko’s regime was listed by Secretary of State Rice, in her confirmation hearing, as one of six “outposts of tyranny,” alongside North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Burma, and Zimbabwe. [10] The phrase took. “I am ashamed America has labeled us an outpost of tyranny,” a Belarusian citizen told a BBC reporter during an opposition rally. “I'm here to try and change that.” [11]

April 2005 saw Secretary Rice visiting first Moscow and then Vilnius, capital of rebellious former SSR Lithuania and just a few miles from the Belarus border. On the 20th, at an informal meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Rice said it was “time for a change” in that “outpost of Tyranny” next door. The comment prompted a reply from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in town to represent Russia and discuss its links with NATO. Lavrov said Russia “would not advocate what some people call regime change anywhere. You cannot impose democracy from the outside.” [12]

Nonetheless, a group of seven Zubr affiliates tried to cross the border into Lithuania to meet that “outside” the night of Rice’s speech. They claim they were harassed, but ultimately released, by Belarusian authorities. This delayed their arrival by more than two hours, a Bush official complained. Rice greeted the dissidents at a hotel the next day, April 21, reassuring them “while it may be difficult and long and at times even far away, there will be a road to democracy in Belarus. We admire your courage, and we admire your dedication and we want you all to know you are in our thoughts.” After the meeting, the youths told the media that they planned to organize a re-run of Ukraine, beginning that very autumn. Rice, at her own news conference, said the US is not calling the shots or interfering in any way other than moral. Referring to the kids she’d just met, she said “these are the people who know what's best to do.” [13]

Indeed they did and were on the case within days. Early May witnessed about 100 Zubr kids demonstrating for half an hour on a main street in Minsk, holding pictures of Viktor Gonchar and then dispersing quickly before police could arrest them. [14] During the election campaign Zubr officially linked up with and leant support to opposition leader Milinkievic of the UDFB, and over the next months the politicians and their street ambassadors gradually picked up steam.

And they picked up cash contributions, down payments on and investments in the possible revolution. Jauhen Afnagel, the nominal leader of Zubr, says their funds come “from our friends, in Belarus and outside Belarus.” The “inside” of Belarus, with its state-controlled economy, has none of the disgruntled, super-rich, private-sector businessmen like those that funded Ukraine’s revolution, so much more aid should be expected to come from abroad. Zubr and other like-minded groups have drawn funds from, at least, the Swedish Social Democrat party, Poland-based East European Democratic Centre (IDEE), and Washington’s NED. [15] A U.S. Embassy spokesperson in Minsk admitted vaguely “the U.S. government supports a broad range of youth groups and believes that the development of democratic values among youth is a priority of U.S. government assistance.” A leader of Malady Front, an opposition youth movement in support of Zubr and its goals, said “through Ukraine, we have big plans for cooperation with the Soros Foundation, which […] has helped bring together many youth organizations, covering the whole of Belarus.” [16]

By September - six months before Luka’s 2006 presidential referendum – they had something like a revolutionary critical mass as the economy soured and new corruption scandals were broadcast by the US-funded opposition media. September 7 saw a protest at the Polish Embassy in Minsk where Pro-Russian Slavic unity protests (‘neighbors should be friends’) stood against the Polish-supported opposition kids of Zubr and Malady Front, declaring “Poland + Belarus = Solidarity.” [17] Like Solidarity or any such transformative movement, it needed a unifying symbol or theme, the color in the revolution. Lukashenko proclaimed “in our country, there will be no pink or orange, nor even a banana revolution.” Zubr's Afnagel saw defensiveness in this statement: “he keeps saying that there will be no revolution in Belarus – why would he say that if revolution is not an option?” Rumors circulated that the mutiny would be called the Cornflower Revolution, named for a ubiquitous blue flower in Belarus. “It is too early to say what color the revolution will have,” Afnagel said in early September. “The color is not important. It is not even important whether it will be a revolution or some kind of a change.” [18]

The final inspiration this time came from a September 16 public demonstration marking the 6-year anniversary of the disappearance of Viktor Gonchar. After Belarusian police seized the banned red and white old Belarusian flags flown by the opposition, Zubr activist Mikita Sasim reportedly raised his denim shirt, declaring it their new flag. Conveniently, there is also the well-known association of denim with Western culture, immediately recognized by the opposition as a symbol of protest against Lukashenko's Soviet-style policies and identification with USA, Elvis, and NATO. After this an unofficial custom emerged for Zubrs to wear jeans or jean jackets on the 16th of each month to memorialize Gonchar and the missing others, and thus the “Jeans Revolution,” or “Denim Revolution” was named.

In December, the parliament approved tough new penalties for those who would try to change the government or even pass out information regarded as “harmful to national interests.” In the early months of 2006, dozens of Zubrs were arrested at their many demonstrations and actions. There were reports of harassment of “Zubrs” going about their other activities; some were jailed for minor offenses, or imprisoned for drugs planted on them by security officers. More replaced them, and while it was no Kiev, they were determined to claim victory either by the ballot or, failing that, by the Jeans Revolution.

Sources:

ANDIJAN AND THE TRUTH MASSACRE

2007-02-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

A STUDY IN PERSPECTIVE
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/20/07

“Without warning, the soldiers opened fire into the crowd. Bodies fell like mown hay, row upon row.” - Galima Bukharbaeva, eyewitness to the massacre at Andijan, May 13 2005

Uprisings near Kyrgyz-Uzbek border in late 2004 and mid-2005. 1=Kokand, 2=Andijan, 3=Korasuv, 4=Osh, 5=Jalal-a-Bad

In the early months of 2005, a peaceful protest began outside a city courthouse in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, not far from Tashkent but nearer to restive Kokand and the Kyrgyz city of Osh just across the border, where the “Tulip” mutiny would soon go down. This was the heart of the rebellious Ferghana Valley, where development has lacked in a densely populated and heavily Muslim area - Uzbekistan’s Kosovo. The gathered protesters were demanding the release of 23 local businessmen who had been arrested and charged, wrongly their supporters said, with supporting the local Akramiya movement, a designated terrorist group. This was problem number one in the episode’s reporting in the West – Karimov calls everyone he dislikes a terrorist, so few believed the charges. The protest thus seemed to have a strong basis as day after day it assumed the scale of an extended, mostly peaceful, vigil.

The headcount before the courthouse grew as spring brought better weather. But late on the evening of Thursday, May 12, some of the protesters were arrested and taken to the town's jail, and the stage was set for a bizarre and tragic chain of events. I’ve drawn primarily on BBC News reports, which have their shortcomings on specifics of the incident (a point to which we’ll return). A mysterious band of armed men stormed the jail just hours later, in the pre-dawn hours of Friday the 13th, and freed the 23 accused men, their supporters and “scores” of other inmates. The militants also raided an armory or two and seized a larger cache of guns. BBC’s reports make little note of the curious fact that the police station, military unit and jail that were attacked that morning are clustered into a 1-2 km radius of each other. Worse, Pravda later noted, “for unknown reasons” this obviously dangerous complex is located just on Andijan’s outskirts, not far from downtown. Pravda noted “in 13 years of Uzbekistan's independence the town administration has not hit upon the idea of transferring the jail to a new adequate place.”

An uncertain number of these mysterious men, now heavily armed, then marched north from the prison with the rising sun about 4 km to the site of the protests in downtown Andijan. The raiding party appeared on the streets as the day’s rally began, and some of the militants reportedly took a role in organizing the protests. But most of the thousands of demonstrators in the main Square “are ordinary people,” the BBC stressed, “and the atmosphere is calm.” The crowd swelled to about 10,000 by early afternoon, with the ordinary things - speakers vented anger at repression, economic problems, and trade restrictions. Protesters joined in chanting slogans against Karimov and the Uzbek government, as in any normal rally.

But this was not normal in Uzbekistan; these peaceful petitioners had been provided a special environment on that day. Someone, between the militants and the protesters, had blocked all the roads to the city center with buses and debris, and somehow by this time were in control the area, “including government offices.” No countervailing security forces seemed to be anywhere, aside from the ten police officers the gunmen were holding hostage. The rest had apparently fled or been killed, and so the “protesters” were thus given temporary de facto right of assembly; score one for freedom. But as the warm day wore on, rumors circulated about government troops and tanks amassed out at the airport.

When such events had happened in Kyrgyzstan just weeks earlier, President Akayev had said the mutiny was designed to provoke a violent crackdown, a bait he would not take. In the end, he lost control and fled to Russia. Now that cities were being taken over just across the border on Uzbek soil, it would become apparent that Karimov had a different philosophy on the issue. Security forces reportedly were given orders to “eliminate” the single group they said was behind both the storming of the prison and seizure of government buildings.

Uzbek soldiers gather as if expecting enemy fire.

Troops finally attacked the occupied administration building, along with the crowd blocking their way to it. The exact timing is hazy, with BBC citing a 6:00 pm attack, while dissident journalist Galima Bukharbaeva took note of the bullet hole through her press pass and notebook that was punched at about 5:20. The initial assault reportedly opened with a convoy of armored vehicles opening fire on the crowd without warning, killing several and pushing a wave of panicked people away from the square. Hovering military helicopters also opened fire on the crowds, eyewitnesses said. The BBC’s accounts feature no word of return fire from the militants who had seized the town, although they noted that the crowd that surged north on Cholpon Prospect included numerous gunmen and their hostages. They wound up on the town’s outskirts at School no. 15, where a waiting armored car reportedly fired straight into the crowd which stopped surging anywhere about then.

Andijan locals pass by the dead the day after the massacre

What came to be known as the Andijan massacre ended in hundreds of dead people, estimated as high as 1,100, but most hover closer to 6-700. A doctor in the town told the BBC she saw “at least 500” dead bodies at the school, which had been turned into a temporary morgue. After everyone able to get away had fled, eyewitnesses say the security forces went around finishing off the injured as they lay on the ground. Another observant eyewitnesses told the BBC she saw soldiers receive a shipment of government-supplied Vodka, drink it, and then shoot women, children, and wounded in an indiscriminate drunken stupor. The bodies of women and children were not evident among the official counts, these eyewitnesses and humanitarian groups say, because the authorities had hidden them to bolster the illusion that this was a purely male military encounter.

An evident logical disconnect here is why children, and women if they’re thought of as off-limits innocents, were brought along to this militant event. Bukharbaeva explained this simply: “parents brought their children to see the unprecedented spectacle,” and failed to take the kids back home because while “the rebels expected that the army would move against them,” the peaceful crowd “had no inkling of its fate.” Sure they were being led by convicted terrorists, the West seems to be saying, but they were probably wrongly convicted, after all. And sure, they had just been broken out of prison and heavily armed, chased the cops away and took some hostage, took over the city’s seat of government, and blocked the roads into downtown. But otherwise it was a peaceful protest by non-terrorist people who were simply fed up and wanted change. This is the perfect thing to bring your children to – not just as human shields but as spectators of a brave new future opening up – at least until the authorities stepped in with their unprovoked and unexpected slaughter.

In the official version, president Karimov placed blame for the unrest solely on Islamic extremist groups whose aims of “hatred and denial of the secular way of development […] are unacceptable for us.” Government estimates of the casualties were 187 people killed, including 94 terrorists. He explained that Uzbekistan’s territorial integrity was at stake; “they are brainwashing young people with ideas of creating a unified Islamic state.” He said his troops were forced to shoot the terrorist “demonstrators” as they tried to break through police lines (which by the BBC account didn’t exist – an advancing column is not a police line). Karimov insisted any deaths of innocents were at the hands of the “terrorists.” After all, as Karimov asked his accusers, “how could I give the order to shoot at my beloved people?”

29 men were declared wanted, but 12 of those had already fled to neighboring Kyrgyzstan and, the government says, offered refuge by the new government there. RFE/RL noted the “strained relations” following Bakiyev’s July decision to allow over 400 Uzbek refugees to be airlifted from Kyrgyzstan to Romania. But 15 of the remaining 17 were caught and put on trial in October, charged with terrorism, shooting hostages and belonging to banned Islamic groups. All pled “fully guilty” at first opportunity. The instant confessions naturally raised concerns of coercion and possibly torture. The UN commission on human rights protested that there were “serious inadequacies” in the conduct of the trial: the ill-defined nature of “terrorism,” no independent cross-examination of the defendants, a lack of physical evidence, and the fact that “all but one eyewitness account at the trial mimicked the government’s version.” All were convicted and sentenced to terms from 14 to 20 years.

The government’s case continued well beyond the initial wanted list and into multiple trials; by the end of the year 151 people had been convicted in connection with the events at Andijan, including 19 soldiers and five policemen found guilty on December 23 for “negligence and dereliction of duty.” All but one of the series of trials were held behind closed doors, to protect state secrets that may arise in the testimony and to protect the defendants and witnesses, the Supreme Court said. [25] The West took this secrecy as a sign of official guilt and dismissed the trials as a farce of justice.

Karimov’s government has gone past exculpating itself for Andijan to blaming Washington. The government brought attention to the testimony of one defendant at the Andijan trials that the U.S. embassy in Tashkent had a role in organizing the violence. Daniel Fried at the State Department strenuously denied this charge. “These allegations are ludicrous. The assertions that the U.S. supports an attack by Islamic extremists after fighting four years against exactly such people is not credible,” he said. Finally we see a western admission that Karimov had been fighting terrorism – not just his citizens - at Andijan. The Islamist-terrorist-separatist charge against the Andijan suspects, while politically motivated and almost certainly a distortion of the truth, is still a more solid a label for what happened than any proposed in the West. Karimov’s charges of Islamist separatism have routinely been met with the non-answer that innocents were killed at Andijan because, it seems, the Western media has no actual answer to the charge.

An early BBC report from the 13th – after the seizure of the town but before the government attack - explained that “at this stage the identity of the gunmen who stormed the prison is not known, and it is not clear what, if any, connection they have to the people organising the demonstration.” A search of over a dozen BBC News stories on the subject from the following months reveals no further clues, and one year on, Ian McWilliams wrote for them “who organised the prison breakout and whether they had outside help is still unclear.” The reason for the lack of clarity is not poor journalism or official censorship but rather the fact that “the Uzbek government has repeatedly refused to allow an independent investigation.” And in the absence of absolute “independent” clarity, they haven’t bothered to even clue us in on any leads or possibilities.

But to imply a total media blackout is disingenuous. Back on July 13, the two-month anniversary of the tragedy, a group of twenty foreign diplomats and journalists from eight countries including Russia, India, and China were invited by the Government of Uzbekistan to wander freely around Andijan for a single, pre-selected afternoon and investigate for the truth themselves. The BBC chose to sit out this Tashkent-managed petting zoo, but Russia’s Pravda paper sent a correspondent, Aloke Shekhar, who offered the following day “a truthful report of this trip without any hint at politics.” Unlike the BBC, which bemoaned the lack of an “independent” inquiry, Pravda’s reporter assured his readers “the truth cannot be hidden under cover. Sooner or later we will learn the truth about these tragic events.”

By this article’s account, which squares perfectly with the Karimov-Putin line, the militants are still described as “unidentified persons” but believed to be organized by “Islamic movement of Turkestan, Hizb-ut-Tahrir and Akramists,” some of them identified as foreigners. In the pre-dawn hours a group of 50-60 attacked an Interior Ministry post and military unit No. 45605, seizing a total of 334 weapons to add to their own arsenal. Then they attacked the local jail, rushing in with guns blazing, and freed 737 prisoners, ordering them to “run away otherwise you will be killed.” One freed prisoner – presumably back behind bars - told Shekhar that the militants “wanted to once again stage the Kyrgyz scenario. It was obvious that they were acting in line with a well prepared plan.”

Most convincing to Shekhar was the video shown by the Uzbek authorities that “froze the hearts of everyone.” It was allegedly shot by the terrorists themselves in real-time as they carried out their “protest” activities. We are told the video shows the beating of policemen by the mob, the burning of buildings, the manufacture of explosives, and scenes of men firing the seized weapons and shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Shekhar summed up “without any hint at politics:” “Only authorities know when the film will be presented to the public. But one thing is clear: this film is a heavy slap to the West. […] It is high time the West descended from the heavens and faces the truth.”

Instead, on October 26 BBC News reported it was pulling out of Uzbekistan entirely “due to security concerns.” The Tashkent office was to close for at least six months “pending a decision on its long term future.” The regional director said “over the past four months since the unrest in Andijan, BBC staff in Uzbekistan have been subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation which has made it very difficult for them to report on events in the country.” So they allowed themselves to be “intimidated,” and official statements notwithstanding, the exact cause–and-effect relationship between this harassment and the BBC’s incomplete reporting is just as unclear as the public’s picture of what actually happened at Andijan.

Sources:
- Weinstein, Dr. Michael A. ''Intelligence Brief: Uzbekistan'' Power and Interest News Report. June 23, 2005. http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=318&language_id=1
- How the Andijan killings unfolded. BBC News. May 17 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4550845.stm
- “Andijan - two months later: A truthful report from Uzbekistan's Andijan” Pravda. Front page / World. July 14 2005. http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/92/373/15802_andijan.html
- Norton, Jenny. “What lies behind Uzbek protests?” BBC News. May 13 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4543847.stm
- Bukharbaeva, Galima. “Witness to a Massacre. An Uzbek reporter risked her life to tell the world of Andijan assault.” Dangerous Assignments/ Committee to Protect Journalists. Posted October 25, 2005 at:
http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2005/DA_fall05/galima/galima_DA_fall05.html
- Gandelman, Joe. “Uzbekistan Political Turmoil Worsens As Putin Backs Government.” The Moderate Voice. May 15 2005
http://www.themoderatevoice.com/posts/1116134918.shtml
- Kimmage, Daniel. “Central Asia: Holding On To Power .“ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. November 14 2005
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/11/44D3EF33-3F8F-4E0A-806E-520F146DBA93.html
- “Jail demand for Andijan suspects.” BBC News. October 26 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4378816.stm
- Saidazimove, Gulnoza. "Uzbekistan: Authorities Reject UN Accusations Over Andijon Trials." Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. December 27 2005. http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/12/e94929a5-af45-4e0d-8b00-29097fd28820.html
- "U.S. Promises to Leave Airbase in Uzbekistan." Mosnews. September 28 2005. http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/09/28/ustoleave.shtml
- MacWilliam, Ian. "Outlook bleak in wake of Andijan." BBC News.May 11 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4761821.stm
- "'Harassed' BBC shuts Uzbek office." BBC News. October 26 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4380166.stm

INTERNATIONAL ORDER, TERROR OF 7/7, THE FIRST EVICTION

2007-02-20T10:17:00.000-08:00

Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
2/20/07

The Eurasian powers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, faced with the runaway stream of pro-West revolutions, made their most serious counter-moves in July 2005. The offensive was heralded by a joint Russo-Chinese statement on “the international order of the 21st Century” signed by Presidents Hu and Putin, on June 1 in Moscow. [1] Putin summed up “the declaration reflects our understanding of the diversity of civilization, and makes a call not to impose models and standards through force or the threat to use force.” [2] The declaration announced a new vision of a multi-polar world order as seen in the emergence of the SCO, which was set to hold a major summit four days later.

On July 5, three weeks after the Andijan massacre, the Defense Ministers of the signatory countries met in the Kazakh capital of Astana to plot their next moves towards that international order. Australian news reporter Emma Griffiths, who attended, explained how the leaders of “the Shanghai six […] condemn the west for supporting political changes in former soviet republics,” and stated their general objection to what they called “monopolizing or dominating international affairs,” a statement she described as “a thinly-veiled attack on the US.” [3] Even more thinly veiled was their firm request for a timetable for U.S. bases to leave Central Asia; it was time for Washington to precisely define “temporary,” and let the regional powers know when they should expect to start running security there themselves. [4] Russian political analyst Georgy Arbatov stated of this decision:

“For the first time some common political positions beside cooperation against terrorism were expressed, primarily by addressing the question to the United States about how long American military bases are planned to remain in central Asia. That means that China, Central Asian states and Russia are not willing to contemplate American military presence in central Asia as a permanent factor for the indefinite future. This presence was associated with the operation in Afghanistan, with the operation in Iraq. Those two operations are not yet finalized, but some timeframe is an interesting issue for the countries of the region and certainly they do not want Americans to stay forever.” [5]

July 5 was also the first summit to host the four newly-agreed observer states Iran, India and Pakistan (Mongolia had already been involved), and thus represented what PINR called “a one-two punch to Washington's ambitions in Central Asia” and “the most forceful challenge to U.S. interests in Central Asia since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.” [6]

But the SCO summit was of course eclipsed in Western minds by the higher profile G8 summit of the world’s top eight leaders in Scotland, and by the higher-yet profile of the terrorist attack that came in its midst. Presidents Hu and Putin had probably planned a follow-up lecture on “international order” and overstaying welcomes for their G8 partners, with that gathering in Tony Blair’s UK commencing only one day after their people had reached their verdict in Astana. But the 7-7 London rail bombing on the second day of that summit cast a long shadow over the proceedings with three near-simultaneous explosions on the underground rail lines at 8:50 am followed by a bus blast in Tavistock Square at 9:47. Hundreds were injured, many gravely, 52 people plus the four suicide bombers were killed and the Capital city of the country hosting the world’s eight most powerful leaders was shut down for much of the day.

No matter the full truth behind the incident, a perceived, successful al Qaeda attack with over fifty killed in the European capital of the Anglo-American Alliance would do nothing but strengthen their resolve to stay in Iraq and in Central Asia (especially considering the alleged Pakistani Madrassah link to the attack), and make Russia’s and China’s geopolitical nitpicking un-cool by again demonstrating why the bases are there. The 7/7 attack gave all the G8 World Leaders a chance to reiterate their commitment to the cause; Putin himself expressed his condolences over the attacks and called on all countries to remain united in the “fight against international terrorism,” to which America’s Central Asian bases were of course also dedicated. [7]

So Putin and Hu just skipped out on the diplomacy and went ahead with what many see as their plans for the development of the SCO into the “NATO of the East.” It has a long way to go, but member states seem to be cooperating on the grand strategy issues. Uzbekistan had preceded the July ultimatum with an announcement on June 16 that night flights into and out of Karshi-Khanabad were to be banned. [8] Tashkent also placed limits on daytime landings of C-17s and other heavy transport aircraft, allegedly because the planes were damaging the runway. [9] It also served as a reminder that the Uzbek authorities still called the shots at K2, but the Americans simply worked around the issue, re-routing heavy cargo flights through Ganci in Kyrgyzstan and shifting its search-and-rescue flights to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.[10]

After the SCO summit Uzbek officials went further, entirely renouncing the agreement allowing US forces to use the base. On July 29, just days after Rumsfeld’s tour around Uzbekistan, Tashkent delivered a diplomatic note to the US Embassy, giving US military authorities six months to shut down Camp Stronghold Freedom and vacate K2. [11] Ariel Cohen, the Heritage Foundation’s Russia expert, fumed in an article published August 18: “In the post- 9/11 era, this is the first time that a U.S. ally has not only abandoned the battlefield—as Spain did in Iraq—but also shown American servicemen the door. After years of complaining that the United States has not done enough to counter terrorist threats, Karimov did what his Islamist foes have demanded all along: He demanded an end to the American “infidel” presence in Uzbekistan.” [12]

On August 26, Uzbekistan's Senate voted to back Karimov, affirming it was time for the Yankees to leave. [13] In late September State’s Daniel Fried came to Tashkent and coldly confirmed that Washington would comply. “We intend to leave it without further discussion,” Fried said. “We respect this request by the government of Uzbekistan.” On November 21 the US military closed the base for good, and the Russian news agency Interfax reported that the last US military plane left the base after a short ceremony. [14]

In testimony before Congress in late October, Fried had said he recently met with Karimov and reiterated Washington's call for an independent inquiry into the Andijan matter. “We will continue to urge the government of Uzbekistan to reverse its current path and to embrace reform as the only way to achieve long-term stability,” he testified. [15] Karimov did not change course, and in November signed an agreement on closer military cooperation with Russia. [16]

OTPOR'S ORIGINS

2007-02-19T17:00:00.000-08:00

OTPOR! BITING THE SYSTEM
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
November 2006
re-posted 2/17/07

As the second NATO bombing campaign against Serbia came and went in early-mid 1999, it was the young who led the way out of NATO’s fire and into the West’s frying pan. “Otpor!” is a Serbian word for “Resist” or “Resistance.” It was chosen as a name for a presumably sincere group of dissident students at the University of Belgrade in October 1998. [1] They were reportedly incensed at Milosevic’s repressive media laws, and immediately launched a graffiti campaign across downtown Belgrade, leaving images of their name and their clenched-fist symbol. An early Otpor early website reportedly explained “the fist itself is conceived as the symbol of individual initiative, that the time and energy of every single person should be invested to bring about change. This symbol of personal courage was born with the first public manifestation of RESISTANCE, a leaflet called "Bite the System." [2]

As NATO air strikes poured over their territory and people rallied around the government in early-mid 1999, Otpor’s public activities paused; people refused to rise up in apparent solidarity with the people bombing their country. But in the disastrous aftermath of the bombings, late 1999 and into 2000, the students resumed, taking bigger bites further beyond the campus. Otpor took root in the south and the rural areas; there were eventually more than eighty branches of the movement, with each branch representing a Serbian city. [3]

In Belgrade, an Otpor-led street campaign against Milosevic targeted the minds of the capital’s electorate. They drew on existing American mental technologies, seeking to brand their name and message into the brains of Serbia. Ivan Marovic, a leader of the Otpor movement explained “our idea was to use corporate branding in politics. The movement has to have a marketing department. We took Coca-Cola as our model.” [4] Marovic also described to a BBC Malaysia reporter the techniques used in their campaign, involving creativity, humor, and an uncommon application of strategic psychology:

“In the first phase, we used symbolic street actions. Small number of people would organize the action, which would symbolize the problems they were facing in their own towns. These actions were not something that were too dangerous, so people could easily join and by doing that they could show that they were not satisfied with the situation in the country. With these actions that had a dosage of humour and laugher we managed to break away fear which was the main problem facing [them] under Milosevic’s dictatorship.[5]

In early May the political front shaped up with the emergence of a unified Opposition coalition; eighteen political parties merged into the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). By this time, Otpor itself was ready to challenge the President directly; in the two years since the group’s inception, it had grown to at least 70,000 members, a force to be reckoned with. The police fought back, but no matter what the authorities did, the movement just got bigger. Thousands of young protesters were arrested. Perhaps hundreds were beaten and interrogated, but the movement’s leadership proved tough to ferret out; Otpor prided itself on the fact that the group had no single leader or hierarchical structure, which rendered ordinary suppression nearly impossible.

Radio Free Europe reported that “Otpor is a state of mind rather than an organization,” a contention backed up by Nis Deputy Mayor Toplica Djordjevic, a Milosevic foe, who told RFE/RL “how many people are in Otpor in Nis I cannot say. But how strong are they as an idea, as a movement -- that is easy to say. Otpor is everywhere. Otpor is an idea that young people embrace and struggle for with full force and full legitimacy.” [7]

The Otpor logo and its advertisement by activists in Belgrade, 2000. Ivan Marovic: “We took Coca-Cola as our model.”

On May 13 a Socialist Party ally of Milosevic, Bosko Perosevic, was gunned down in Novi Sad. The assassin was quickly arrested and accused of membership in Otpor and the SPO opposition party, based on literature found in his apartment. Otpor claimed the evidence was planted, and responded shrewdly that same day with a “surrender action,” handing their membership lists over to the authorities – and to the media. They were apparently banking on the PR move as a sign of innocence, but the government accelerated its repression and arrested many of the activists on the lists anyway, calling them “fascists” and “terrorists.” [8]

Once the youth movement went public, it was no longer a matter of ferreting them out – everybody knew who Otpor were and they were all so cute and brave. Opposition activist Slobodan Vuksanovic touted the movement’s appeal is Serbia as “young people who certainly are not trusted for their experience. They cannot be experienced. Rather, they are trusted because they are clean.” [9] Srdja Popovic, the 27 year-old self-described “ideological commissar” of Otpor, explained that their nonviolent methods had been designed “to show how superior, how advanced, how civilized” they were, and the approach worked quite well. [10] Ordinary citizens, realizing their own children were members, gradually came to accept the movement as the inevitable face of the future. Andrew Mueller interviewed “Otpor’s nominal figurehead,” 20-year-old Branko Ilic. Ilic described the group’s role in the success, describing himself and his comrades as “guerrillas without guns.” [11]

On July 17 Milosevic, having pushed through Parliament a constitutional amendment that would allow him two more terms as president, announced early elections scheduled for September 24, perhaps afraid his popularity would fall after that. [13] As the political opposition moved towards greater unity, Otpor focused on securing the upcoming elections for the opposition. Their prime achievement to this end was their 2000 Gotov Je (“He’s Finished”) pre-election campaign. Over two million stickers announcing this belief were placed around Belgrade and elsewhere to mobilize as many disaffected voters to the polls as possible to vote their conscience – this time they weren’t going to let it be stolen.

So the fight moved to a different level; the government issued a statement blaming all unrest on the cross-pressure from NATO-controlled information warfare and the activities of “an internal fifth column.” [14] Milosevic ran a series of ads targeting Otpor as “NATO foot soldiers” and tools of foreign powers; the spots cleverly had the trademark Otpor fist clenched around a wad of American dollars. [15] The public at the time dismissed the campaign as a cynical lie from a desperate ruler, solidifying in their minds that indeed “Gotov Je.”

Sources:
[1],[6] Pozun, Brian. "Planning for an Uncertain Future." Central EuropeReview. February 26 2001. http://www.ce-review.org/01/8/pozun8.html
[2] "Bulgarian paper says CIA is tutoring Serbian group Otpor." From the Bulgarian newspaper The Monitor. Translated by Blagovesta Doncheva. (Posted 9-8-00) http://emperors-clothes.com/news/cialectures.htm
[3] Sell, Louis. Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. Page 339.
[4] Traynor, Ian. “Young democracy guerrillas join forces: From Belgrade to Baku, activists gather to swap notes on how to topple dictators.” The Guardian. June 6 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1499871,00.html
[5] Htet, U Min. "Serbia: Demise of a Dictator." BBC News. September 16 2005. http://www.bbc.co.uk/burmese/learning/story/2005/09/050912_transition_prog12.shtml
[7] Naegele, Jolyon. “Yugoslavia: Otpor Launches Get Out the Vote Campaign.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. July 18 2000. http://www.rferl.org/features/2000/07/f.ru.000719154500.asp
[8] Human Rights Watch. http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/eca/serbia0601.htm
[9]
[10]

BLEEDING RUSSIA: A DARK DECADE

2007-02-19T01:29:00.000-08:00

OLIGARCHS, COLLAPSE, BAILOUT... THEN REVIVAL
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without Guns
Re-posted 2/17/07

For Washington and London, the ability to start making these pipeline power plays was both an effect and hopefully a further cause of Russia’s diminished regional power. Behind this seems to be a campaign to drag the Eurasian giant into the Euro-Atlantic Community kicking and foaming at the mouth if need be, an aim laid out well by Brzezinski in 1997: “Russia’s only real geostrategic option – the option that could give Russia a realistic international role and also maximize the opportunity of transforming and socially modernizing itself - is […] the transatlantic Europe of the enlarging EU and NATO.” Russia should follow this lead, Brzezinski warned, if it wanted to avoid “a dangerous geopolitical isolation.” [1]

But the exact terms of integration remained unclear; Russians somehow took Washington’s talk around 1992-93 of a “mature strategic partnership” as a revival of Gorbachev’s “new world order” scenario, a more-or-less co-equal global alliance of mutually existing great powers. Fawning praise, false promises, and the opening of economies ensued in a long and nearly snuggly phase that allowed what Brzezinski summed up as the Russian street’s expectation of “a global condominium.” Zbig noted in retrospect:

“The problem with this approach was that it was devoid of either international or domestic realism. While the concept of a “mature strategic partnership” was flattering, it was also deceptive. America was neither inclined to share global power with Russia nor could it, even if it had wanted to. […] once differences inevitably started to surface, the disproportion in political power, financial clout, technological innovation and cultural appeal made the “mature strategic partnership” seem hollow – and it struck an increasing number of Russians as deliberately designed to deceive Russia.” [2]

So it was not America’s fault, but the fact that Russia was simply not up to the role. But the 1990s did see economic liberalization in Yeltsin’s Russia, with the widespread privatization of the previously state-run enterprises and moves towards a full market economy, openness to foreign investment, and general integration with the Western system. The major enterprises were taken over by a new generation of Russian capitalist pioneers and black-marketeers known as “the Oligarchs.” First introduced to the scene by Gorbachev in the late 1980s under his perestroika campaign, President Yeltsin supported this process and provided the Oligarchs with rich pickings, and the very small group soon acquired vast interests in all sectors of the economy. But in the end analysis, everyone agrees that the oligarchs did not rescue the Russian economy but rather bled it dry. Journalist Ann Williamson, author of How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy, explained to the House Committee on Banking in her September 1999 testimony:

“Directors stashed profits abroad, withheld employees’ wages, and after cash famine set in, used those wages, confiscated profits and state subsidies to ‘buy’ the workers’ shares from them. The really good stuff – oil companies, metal plants, telecoms – was distributed to essentially seven individuals, ‘the oligarchs,’ on insider auctions whose results were guaranteed beforehand. Once effective control was established, directors - uncertain themselves of the durability of their claim to newly acquired property - chose to asset strip with impunity instead of developing their new holdings.” [3]

Profits thus gained were laundered and deposited safely in Western bank accounts outside of Russia’s reach, with the depositors sometimes following their money out the door. Passed off as the result of mismanagement and shortsighted greed, the draining of Russia’s treasury is usually termed as “capital flight,” a rather passive sounding process. But investigator Michael Ruppert sees geopolitics at work in this “scheme to loot Russia’s wealth and park it in the west.” Once they were granted positions of economic power, Ruppert maintained in his 2004 book Crossing the Rubicon that “the Empire loved the oligarchs because they were simple and could be easily controlled with money.” [4]

Ruppert also noted how the “assistance” program to usher Russia into capitalism took off under the Clinton administration in 1993. A team headed by vice president Al Gore worked in concert with Goldman Sachs, Harvard’s Institute for International Development, the IMF, and the World Bank. This team, as Ruppert summarized, “worked in partnership with the government of Boris Yeltsin to re-make the Russian economy. What happened was that Russia, in the words of Yeltsin himself, became a “mafiocracy” and was looted of more than 500 billion in assets, and its ability to support a world-class military establishment smashed.” [5] What a convenient turn of events against this recently identified potential rival.

Yeltsin had initially renounced all claim to former Soviet glory and empire: “Russia does not aspire to become the center of some sort of new empire […] history has taught us that a people that rules over others cannot be fortunate.” [6] But by 1997 as Brzezinski wrote his book, new ideas about Russia’s role were starting to gel in Moscow that showed signs of renewed ambition. Straddling the boundary between Europe and Asia, the idea of a special “Eurasianism” took hold; as Yeltsin’s former Vice President Aleksandr Rustkoi explained “Russia represents the only bridge between Asia and Europe. Whoever becomes the master of this space will become the master of the world.” [7] Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev said at around this time Russia “must preserve its military presence in regions that have been in its sphere of interests for centuries.” [8]

But not much was possible with the economy still in a weak transitional state. The first slight economic recovery began in 1997, but this was cut short by the Asian financial crisis that hit its markets late in the year. The nation toughed out the financial burden through the first half of 1998, but things got edgy as the money dried up. In May a campaign of pensioner’s strikes was joined by miner’s strikes and others – the people took matters into their own hands, blocking railway lines to demand unpaid back wages. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov led the growing calls for Yeltsin and his newly-appointed PM Sergei Kiryenko to resign. [9]

Perhaps in desperation, Russia finally turned to the West and sought an IMF bailout, what Ruppert calls “the kiss of death for any country.” [10] The IMF reported it was strapped, and “entering a region in terms of our financing where we are in grave difficulties.” [11] Washington feared the alternative – a Russian devaluation of the ruble (their equivalent of the dollar), leading to an international financial chain reaction. [12] On July 20, the IMF Executive Board approved its portion ($11.2 billion) of a $22.6 billion international bailout. This emergency package was intended to help Russia maintain the value of the ruble while the government implemented reforms necessary to create long-term stability.

Muscovites line up to get their money out of the bank before the economy crashes, 1998

On August 14, president Yeltsin assured the west that the loan had worked, stating clearly that the ruble would not be devalued. But a bare three days later, PM Kiriyenko announced that the government would devalue the ruble after all, by a stunning 34 percent, and declared a 90-day foreign debt moratorium. The bottom dropped from beneath the Russian economy that very day, leading to a total collapse comparable to the crash that hit America’s markets in 1929.

Mass unemployment and a sharp fall in living standards for most of the population ensued. Unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and related social problems wracked the region in late 1998. CNN billed “Russia’s year of agony” as one of the top ten stories of the year, and it also spread into neighboring countries like Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, that remained tangled with their neighbor’s economy. Many in Washington were furious; Ariel Cohen and Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation noted “it is now painfully clear […] that the massive bailout failed in both of its missions: The ruble was devalued, and reforms are not likely to be implemented.” Cohen and Schaefer blamed Russia for failing to reform its economy and the IMF for consistently loaning to them anyway, calling on Congress to cut off funding to the fund. [13]

The crisis did not last too long though on the Russian end; by whatever connection, it was only after the loan and the devaluation of the ruble and the debt default that Russia’s economy began improving on the back of strong gas exports in 1999. The weak ruble made imports expensive and boosted local production, creating greater self-reliance or “autarky,” the opposite of the economic “dependency model” behind the western system. Russia entered a phase of rapid economic expansion, the GDP growing by an average of 6.7% annually in 1999-2005 on the back of higher oil prices, a weaker ruble, and increasing industrial output. It has gone from bankruptcy to large foreign reserves, and by 2001 Russia was seen as a major rising player on the world scene for the first time in nearly a decade. In retrospect the IMF episode almost looks like a grand kiss-off to the West: “Thanks for the so-called assistance, comrades, but we’ll just recover what we can and manage it ourselves from there...”

Behind the official reasons for the 1998 bailout there had been deeper fears than the value of the ruble. The youngest and richest among the economy draining Russian Oligarchs is Roman Abramovich, in 2006 Russia’s richest man and the 11th richest person in the world, worth $18.2 billion. [14] Abramovich is a proud Jew and supporter of Israel, and he’s not alone; the top tier of Oligarchs were primarily Jews, a fact that contributed negatively to a trend all too familiar from the history books: a nation in crisis after losing a major struggle, feeling betrayed by the West and turning to renewed nationalist glory and – at least in certain cases - increased suspicion of the Jews among them. The specific anti-Semitism has of course become highly unpopular since the Holocaust, and precise charges have remained muted – but overall a repeat of Germany circa 1932 seemed a danger; the British free trade magazine The Economist ran a story on July 15 warning that an abrupt devaluation:

“could spell doom for the banking system, bring down the Kiriyenko government and, as one American diplomat put it, ‘signal the end of liberal Russia.’ […] Might the deadly mixture of economic chaos, public anger and sense of national humiliation that fuelled fascism in Weimar Germany flare up in Russia now? […] Such fears appear to have been taken seriously enough in Washington for the US administration to deem the situation in Russia to be a global strategic threat."[15]

Five days after this story ran the package was approved, but on this front as well the bailout seems to have had little effect. Prime Minister Kiriyenko was sacked in August. Yeltsin tried to bring back his predecessor Viktor Chernomyrdin, but in September compromised on Yevgeniy Primakov. In May 1999 Yeltsin sacked Primakov, replacing him with Sergey Stepashin, who served until August when Yeltsin replaced him with rising star Vladimir Putin. Putin was thus the fifth PM in eighteen particularly rough months, and as a relative unknown, seemed an expendable who likewise would be sacked in due time. But he found a lever that allowed him to stay on, and by the estimates of a growing body of opinion, the feared fascist regime came to power in Moscow despite the best efforts of the internationalists.

Next: Terror of 9/99, Putin Ascendant

Sources:
[1] Brzezinski p. 118.
[2] Brz 100-101
[3] Williamson, Anne. “The Rape of Russia.” Testimony before Committee on Banking and financial Services, US House of Representatives. September 21 1999. http://www.russians.org/williamson_testimony.htm
[4] Ruppert - Crossing the Rubicon - easily controlled with money
[5] Ruppert page 88
[6] Brzezinski p 99.
[7] BRZ 109.
[8] Brz 107
[9] “Russian Trains: New Kiriyenko government faces first major test.” CNN. May 20, 1998. http://cnn.hu/WORLD/europe/9805/20/russia.govt.crisis/
[10] Ruppert – kiss of death
[11], [12] IMF protected US banks in Russian bailout. By Nick Beams. 21 July 1998. World Socialist Web Site. http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/july1998/rus-j21.shtml
[13] "The IMF's $22.6 Billion Failure in Russia." Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., and Brett D. Schaefer. Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum #548. http://www.heritage.org/Research/RussiaandEurasia/em548.cfm
[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Abramovich
[15] IMF protected US banks in Russian bailout. By Nick Beams. 21 July 1998. World Socialist Web Site. http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/july1998/rus-j21.shtml

UKRAINE’S FATE AND THE BRZEZINSKIS FLANKING IT

2007-02-17T15:54:00.000-08:00

A FAMILY PROJECT
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic / Guerillas Without guns
posted 2/17/07
last edited: 2/27/07

In the context of a great game with Russia, the emphasis on Ukraine is understandable - it had been the 2nd most powerful Republic in the USSR and its agricultural heartland. It is the birthplace of the Kievan Rus, the original Slavic culture that Russians trace their own culture back to. It is home to about 10 million ethnic Russians, roughly 20 percent of the entire population there, shares hundreds of miles of common border with Russia, and provides a historically useful buffer space from European invasions, which seem to occur every so often. It has absorbed Napoleonic and Nazi assaults, massive famine, and the Chernobyl disaster and continues to be one of Russia’s biggest trading partners and the place most Russian gas pipelines to Europe run through. Clearly, Ukraine as a geopolitical prize is epic; it’s the biggest thing one can take from Russia besides Russia itself. It seems a stretch to even attempt such a move, but apparently the successes of Belgrade and Tbilisi had left some people feeling very cocky.

American designs on securing Ukraine in the Western camp go back at least to 1997, when Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book The Grand Chessboard, described Ukraine as one of five key “geopolitical pivots” for control of Eurasia (the others being Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey, and South Korea). Furthermore, the CFR heavyweight pointed to Ukraine as the final target in extending the “democratic bridgehead” - the contiguous chain of pro-West Democracies like France and Poland - across Europe and right to Russia’s doorstep. An article in Foreign Relations (the official publication of the CFR) explained that this was targeted against Russia: “[T]he heart of the book is the ambitious strategy it prescribes for extending the Euro-Atlantic community eastward to Ukraine and lending vigorous support to the newly independent republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, part and parcel of what might be termed a strategy of “tough love” for the Russians” Even the magazine noted a bit too much tough in the love: “Brzezinski's test of what constitutes legitimate Russian interests is so stringent that even a democratic Russia is likely to fail it.”

And this tough love ran in the family, with Brzezinski’s son Ian having been an advisor to the newly-independent Ukrainian parliament (director of international security policy at the Council of Advisers) from 1993-94, while also serving as Executive Director of the CSIS American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee. Note that Brzezinski’s tenure ended in the same year Kuchma came to power and turned the country east. Ian has since then continued lobbying from the outside to bring Ukraine into the EU-NATO fold. “Ukraine should be a central component of the West's strategy for Europe.” the younger Brzezinski explained to congress in 1999. But before the adoption could be completed:

“Ukraine will have to make, on its own, the difficult internal decisions necessary to overcome its economic stagnation, its rampant corruption, and its polarized politics. […] After a decade of billions of dollars of Western assistance, the initiative must now come foremost from a Ukraine characterized by aggressive reform.”

Ian was appointed shortly after 9/11 to be the Pentagon’s representative to its European NATO partners and a pivotal part of the decision of who will join next. But his hopes of internal reform started to seem less likely as 2004 dawned with President Kuchma and the PM set to take his place disinterested in such changes and steadily gravitating to the East and Moscow’s sphere.

This is where Viktor Yushchenko, Pora!, dioxin, and the Orange Revolution come in.
After coming to power in Kiev, Yuschchenko played well to Western audiences from day one. When he made his first visit to Washington in early April 2005, he gave a rousing speech to the assembled Congress, receiving a standing ovation as the hero of the Orange Revolution, a white Nelson Mandela who had suffered poisoning, not prison. It is relatively rare, and usually considered a high honor, for a foreign leader to be invited to address a joint session of Congress. CNN ran live coverage, and was sure to have Mark Brzezinski - Ian’s brother – present for analysis. The onetime director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs for the National Security Council and foreign policy advisor to the John Kerry presidential campaign was hopeful that Yushchenko could “show the Ukrainian people that he can not only talk the talk, but walk the walk in terms of essential transformations within Ukraine.”

On a working visit to Poland at the end of August, a still faintly scarred Yushchenko had a photo taken with Ian and Mark’s father, the exalted Zbigniew Brzezinski in the land of his birth. They clasped hands and gazed smilingly at each other as NDI’s Madeleine Albright looked on with a grin. The “democratic bridgehead” had been extended as Zbig had prescribed eight years earlier, and he seemed very happy about the whole affair. The decade-running family project had yielded tangible gains, but the situtaion would soon complicate and the smiles would fade.

GENE SHARP, MASTER OF NONVIOLENT WARFARE

2007-02-16T16:50:00.000-08:00

NATO had been signed into existence in Washington just four months before Moscow announced its first atomic detonation in August 1949 and ushered in the looming mutual nuclear terror that marked the Cold War. At that same time a young student at Ohio State University named Gene Sharp took note of the changed landscape. He later explained that he was deeply concerned with the threat of nuclear annihilation, the role of war, and the limits of peace when confronted with, for example, a Hitler or a Stalin. In 1951 Sharp graduated with a Masters degree in Sociology, and set on a path of continuing education, working on this tension between conflict and pacifism, seeking a workable middle road that neither rejected conflict nor embraced violence.

His particular focus at Ohio State had been on Gandhi’s non-violent movement in India, a scope that widened after Sharp moved to England to earn a doctorate in political theory from the esteemed Oxford University in 1968. By then he had already begun taking research appointments at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, where he took a faculty position after Oxford, over the next three decades earning a reputation as Harvard’s “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare.” [1]
At the heart of Sharp’s intellectual career is the organization of a system whereby civil resistance could be used, when negotiation and persuasion has finally been ruled out, to peacefully overthrow a government. At its brilliant core is the realization that in order to remain in power, a leader needs the support of people who remain loyal; a government’s power is to a large extent centered in the heads of its citizens (not to mention its politicians, business leaders, military personnel, etc.) Thus if those people can be brought to break the shackles of mental slavery and recognize that they are the source of the state's power, they can refuse their obedience and their leaders will be left helpless and vulnerable.

Sharp’s later catalog of writings is impressive: The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) is widely considered the definitive study of nonviolent struggle. Making Europe Unconquerable (1985) focused on a civilian-based defense for Western Europe, a theme further developed in the provocatively titled Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System (1990). In these books he argued that organized nonviolent defiance could deter or turn back even well armed occupiers or depose internal tyrants. The latter book was reportedly put to use in the early 1990s by the newly independent governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania “in planning their defense against Soviet efforts to regain control.” [2]

Dr. Gene Sharp, the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare,” in 2005

It’s worthy of note both the admission that these ideas represented a weapons system, and that as with other weapons systems, it is initially morally couched as purely defensive in nature. This is Pentagon-level stuff, and indeed Sharp is no granola-munching hippie pacifist. He does not spend much time critiquing the underlying aims of military conflict; his gripe is with the unnecessary violent effects – he sought not so much to stop wars as to achieve their goals by other means. In fact he has said that military thinkers understand him better than “peace people.” [3]

To further solidify his mission, Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in 1983, dedicated to “advancing the study and use of strategic nonviolent action in conflicts throughout the world.” [4] Einstein was chosen as the namesake because, as the AEI website explains, “at various times he was a war resister, a supporter of the war against the Nazi system, and an advocate of world government” and later saw “the potential of nonviolent struggle.” [5] Einstein was impressed enough that he provided a foreword for Sharp’s first book in 1960. [6] The book was called Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, yet Sharp rejected the spiritual core of that moral power. In a 2005 interview he explained his research into Gandhi’s struggle was based “not [on] pacifism, not on any mahatma nonsense, but on pragmatic nonviolent struggle.” [7]

Sharp watched with approval the wave of revolutions across the former Soviet empire and its client states 1n 1989-91, and in 1993 he released an early version of his most widely-read book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (abbreviated FDTD). The book was first published not in English, but in the four major Burmese dialects, printed by installment in newspapers in Thailand, and smuggled into neighboring Burma (Myanmar), where a long-running struggle of citizens against a repressive regime was underway. [8] The book was also put to use in existing US-sponsored tactical training of Burmese opposition forces, a case we’ll look at below.

So far the book’s suggestions have not been carried through to regime change there, but besides the four initial-run languages, FDTD has since been translated into more than twenty different languages, including Arabic, Belarusian, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Indonesian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Ukrainian and spread worldwide on well-funded winds. Through the 1990s and with strong support from a growing network of powerful individuals and organizations, the book served widely as a handbook for all the peoples of Eastern Europe, Central or East Asia and Latin America emerging from Communist oppression or hoping to emerge from any other oppression that was disfavored in Washington.

As Sharp notes, once a dictator’s “sources of power” have been located and the public mobilized, “then the population will be able, when needed, to restrict or sever the supply of those sources.” [9] He does not specify who would decide just when such a severing would be needed, but others have had plenty of good ideas. And once a dictator is deposed, even nonviolently, the question remains of who would then take the reins of power, which after all abhors a vacuum. When one leader replaces another, it’s sometimes called a “coup d’etat,” often an anti-democratic procedure with which the US government prefers not to be associated (not that that always stops them). Whatever his original intentions in this endeavor, Sharp wound up designing a template for what journalist Jonathan Mowat would later come to call “the postmodern coup d'etat,” one that sneaks in under cover of a people’s movement. [10]

A final irony - Sharp's initial talk of a "post-military weapons system" seems well-intentioned enough, a reflection of a hope that the we were moving towards a post-military world. But by the year 2000 his nonviolent template was set to remove a foreign head of state in Serbia, the heart of a disintegrating Yugoslavia which had just whethered two separate NATO bombing campaigns and tightening UN sanctions. Since Sharp's notions were finally used there to finish what the bombs had begun, the "post-military" descriptor takes on a less phiolosophical, more tactical quality. It's not about warfare in a weaponless world, it's about the warfare the commences post-militarily - when the actual bombing is done.

Next: Weaponizing Nonviolence: Col Helvey

Sources:
[1], [2], [6] "Gene Sharp: A Biographical Profile." Peace Magazine. http://www.peace.ca/genesharp.htm
[3] Transcript: An Interview with Gene Sharp. Conducted by Metta Spencer, Peace Magazine. July 9, 2003. http://www.why-war.com/news/2003/07/09/aninterv1.html
[4] Albert Einstein Institution – website – mission
[5] Albert Einstein Institution. “About our Name.” Accessed May 12 2006 at: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsf7bd.html
[7] Secor,Laura. "War by other means: Boston's Gene Sharp learned how to turn nonviolence into a weapon - and helped quite literally change the world." Boston Globe. May 29 2005. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/05/29/war_by_other_means/
[8] Rozen, Laura. "Dictator downturn: It just isn't as easy being a tyrant as it used to be." Salon. February 3 2001. http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2001/02/03/dictators/print.html
[9] Book Review: "Waging Nonviolent Struggle:20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential." Gene Sharp, Porter Sargent Publishers, 2005, Boston, 598 pages. John Bacher (reviewer)http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/v21n3p28.htm
[10] Mowat, Jonathan. “Coup d'État in Disguise: Washington's New World Order "Democratization" Template” Center for research on Globalization. February 9, 2005. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOW502A.html

GWG Mark III

2007-02-16T03:31:00.000-08:00

Something fudamentally wrong with the last page even after the drastic surgery. hopefully THIS ONE won't keep crashing my internet browser! No posts tonight. I'm angry and sleepy.