One of them is 14-year-old

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 09:09 - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Moscow, it seems, has regained the ability to effectively utilize propaganda and is now openly conducting an "information war" parallel to its military campaign. The public relations battle this time stands in stark contrast to pearl necklace the bungled media policy during the 1994-1996

Chechen war. So how does one penetrate the "spin" and gain a real understanding of the situation in the breakaway republic? With great difficulty.

The Chechen authorities and commanders of militant forces in the republic have not helped either - they are as secretive as the Russians about the nature of the struggle.

Moreover, in recent years reporters have been more prized in the North Caucasus as valuable kidnap victims than as helpful mediums to relay the true situation in Chechnya. As a result, few journalists have ventured into the republic.

One thing is certain about Russia's campaign in the southern republic, however, ordinary Chechens are no longer talking about independence, much less fighting for it. The choice today is between life and death, and they are struggling for their survival.

Almost every refugee interviewed for this article said they believe that Russia wants to rule a republic free of Chechens.

The displaced say that if the Russian authorities really wanted to eliminate "terrorists" - such as field commanders Shamil Basayev and Khattab - the military would not be bombing civilians and randomly targeting villages. Nowhere else in the world, refugees say, are surface-to-surface missiles being used to fight terrorism.

The victims of the Russian Armed Forces' tactics in this campaign are much in evidence - some 40 wounded refugees lie in the central hospital of Sunzha in Ingushetia.

One of them is 14-year-old Yusup Magomedov from the Chechen village of Novo-Sharoi.

Yusup was playing outside with 18 other children near his house on the morning of Oct. 23 when a tank shell exploded nearby. Eight of the children died and Yusup was badly wounded in the legs.

"I tried to take him to the Urus-Martan hospital [in Ingushetia], his mother, Leila Magomedova, says, "but the federal authorities [didn't] open the corridor [out of Chechnya] for a long time."

The boy and his mother spent five days waiting at the border.

Doctors appealed to border guards to allow the two civilians to pass, "but they would not provide a corridor," Magomedova says.

"On the sixth day, a physician came up to me and, crying, said that if a corridor had been opened earlier my son could have been able to silver pearl necklace preserve his legs."

Yusup's legs were amputated above the knees inside Chechnya. Shortly after, Russia opened the border with Ingushetia. But that was also an ordeal. "We spent some three hours in the ambulance at the border as guards searched us with dogs," Magomedova recalls. "I feared my son would die and even thought about how I would bury him. ..."

Meanwhile, Magomedova's husband and three daughters remain in Chechnya. She doesn't know how they are living, nor does she know what she and Yusup will do next. The pair have no money, and Yusup is in need of additional surgery to avoid the onset of gangrene.

Another refugee, Luiza Asukhanova, was in the central market in the Chechen capital Grozny on Oct. 21 with her 15-year-old daughter, Zurikhan, when a missile struck. The blast tore the girl's arm off above the elbow and imbedded shrapnel in her stomach.

Luiza recounted the scene shortly after the attack. "I saw parts of human bodies being torn off, but people didn't seem to notice," she says. "They ran, jumping over dead bodies. I also ran, pulling my daughter with me as she was too stunned to move."

Zurikhan Asukhanova says she only wants peace. "I don't want bombs falling any more."

The leg of another refugee, Ibrahim Susayev, 45, was torn off by a missile fragment. Two of Susayev's relatives died in front of him in the same attack. "I didn't want to leave my farm and cattle behind," Susayev says, explaining his decision to remain in Chechnya after hostilities began in September. "I hoped to pull through - and, anyway, where would I have gone?"

Ibrahim does not condemn the Russian people for the war, but he does condemn the Kremlin.

Asked whether he would be prepared to fight Russian forces, Susayev replies, "What for? I cannot defeat Russia."

The attitude of Col. Anatoly Khrulyov, commander of the Kavkaz checkpoint between Chechnya and Ingushetia, infamous for its scenes of scores of refugees caught in a bottleneck after the military closed it, is typical.

"I don't understand why these refugees [still] want to wholesale pearl jewelry go back to Chechnya," Khrulyov said after a number of Western journalists asked him to let them speak to refugees. "There is no business for them there!"

America's hegemonic

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 09:08 - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

Bush is scheduled to be in Russia for almost four days. This seems to be a very long time just to say that Washington appreciates Moscow's participation in the war against terrorism. How many days does it take to express thanks that no real fuss was created by Russia when the Bush administration announced unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty? How many hours will it take Bush or one of his handlers to cultured pearl jewelry convince the Russian leader that free trade is only beneficial if doesn't hurt industries back home?

We can expect a lot of backslapping and shashlyk-eating at the summit, but no boozing, as Bush found religion on his 40th birthday after years of hard partying. Content-wise, the summit could be a bit sticky for both sides, as anything of substance would likely lead to more domestic criticism of Putin's pro-West stands ¨C especially on the subject of what Russia has gained from this "new relationship."

Bush clearly is a politician who prefers sound bites. Putin, disappointingly enough, appears to be reading from the same lackluster page as his counterpart. Russia and Putin can and need to do better.

The upcoming summit is odd: There is no real reason to meet. I am reminded that an important arms-reduction agreement is being prepared for signing, and Jackson-Vanik may be repealed beforehand. But both are really meaningless in the scheme of things.

Both issues address the past relationship, not the present, including how both countries can and need to move forward. The Bush administration does not have a vision for its relationship with Russia ¨C it is too preoccupied with trying to prove that the foreign policy of the current president's father, who served from 1989-93, was correct. Putin can take comfort in a strange way ¨C it's a Bush roadshow, which means it is a Russia sideshow. At the very least, Bush will demonstrate that Russia is important only because he likes Putin. This is not an acceptable U.S. foreign policy concerning Russia.

A new arms-control agreement between the two countries serves America's geopolitical purposes and gently disguises Russia's economic weakness. Russia can protest all it wants, but the dollars and cents of arms control caught up with the country a long time ago. The Bush people are doing Russia a favor by not rubbing it in too much. In the longer term, Russia's security interests are really about economic reform at home. Significantly downgrading differences concerning an arms-control agreement is a strategy Putin should pursue, or, at the very least, he should use such differences to bolster Russia's economy. Trading a tough stance on arms control for support of a future bilateral energy agreement makes a lot more sense.

Repealing Jackson-Vanik is more an American embarrassment than a favor for the Kremlin. If Washington can recognize Kazakstan as a market economy, why is there even debate to recognize Russia? Leakage of various political and policy agendas came to an end long ago. That the Bush administation accepted Pakistan's recent presidential referendum without a fuss, but still has to convince Congress that the Russia of today is different from the Soviet Union, is something verging on surreal.

Putin will be patient because he has to be. Bush helps veil his counterpart's shortcomings and failings. The quagmire of Chechnya defines the failure to understand nationalism in the past century, and the meaning of national identity in the new one. The conflict serves as a daily, senseless testament to the Soviet legacy of misunderstanding.

Putin claimed in his annual state of the nation address that the war was over, though 21 pro-Moscow police officers were killed that same day in Chechnya ¨C presumably as he was speaking. America's hegemonic, rhetorical and very real presence helps countries like Russia cling to the past.

The United States is making the same Cold War mistakes. The new century has not created a new way of thinking. Rather, the Cold War mentality has been transmuted; old vessels have been refilled with a different wine. Little has been learned, and now the stakes are dangerously higher. U.S. foreign policy is creating a conflict of cultures ¨C the obvious design of the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. Russia is only following because of hapless short-term political designs. Resolving the Chechnya crisis is a Russian problem; it should not be internationalized on the back of the United States' desire for revenge and satisfaction.

Is a meaningful U.S.-Russia relationship possible? Of course it is. All that is needed is sober political will and dialogue. But as long as the United States continues to freshwater pearl jewlelry obfuscate its foreign policy, this is illusory. Clearly, the U.S. military is unmatched in the field, but American politicians remain amateurs in the diplomatic realm. Russia is a country that can and has admitted to some past mistakes; it can tell us where we have gone wrong. Putin's Russia has the chance to demonstrate how past thinking has failed. Unfortunately, my sense is that Putin remains ambivalent ¨C not unlike his domestic agenda.

World Trade Organization.

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 09:08 - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

There won't be any primitive populism, it seems. But the government is also unlikely to take the energetic measures needed to akoya pearl necklace resolve the most difficult economic and political problems.

This is clearly illustrated by the government's economic policy. The economic outcome for 2002 was modest ¨C GDP growth of 4 percent. But the government calls this a success and has forecast a similar rate of growth for 2003. The calculation is psychologically sound: Russians are willing to see any growth as an achievement. After all, the stagnation persisted right through the 1970s-1980s and was followed by a decade of uninterrupted decline accompanied by high inflation and repeated losses of personal savings. After this experience, four years of growth and no economic upheavals seems like a real blessing.

But economists know that four years of growth after 30 years of stagnation and recession aren't enough to resolve any of the country's persistent problems. It's also clear that lasting but slow growth isn't enough to really improve the social climate. Essentially, Russia has to repeat China's feat of achieving annual GDP growth of 8-10 percent for more than 20 years.

The problem is that, as an older industrial country, Russia no longer has a huge pool of labor in the villages eager to head into the cities. Instead of copying the Chinese model, Russia has to find its own sources of growth. Above all, it has to bring down taxes on manufacturers.

Everyone agrees with this, it seems. From time to time the president calls on the government to be more ambitious in its economic objectives, and the government talks about the need to reduce taxes. But rather than dramatic tax cuts, what we see is an imitation of tax reform. It's not hard to understand why this is, given that freshwater pearl pendant  tax cuts mean cuts in state spending, which in turn inevitably affects the interests of various political forces.

A similar imitation of activity is going on in foreign policy. At first glance, Russia has strengthened its positions in the developed world, becoming a full-fledged member of the G8, gaining official recognition as a country with a market economy and getting close to joining the World Trade Organization.

But at the same time, Russia still hasn't solved any of its strategic problems. This is true to the west, where Russia hasn't yet obtained an acceptable solution to the Kaliningrad issue, and to the south, where the country has been losing ground in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is also true to the east, as can be seen by the Japanese prime minister's recent visit to Moscow during which intensive negotiations on a peace treaty and resolution of the territorial dispute between the two countries made no headway at all.

The imitation of action in solving the most complicated and dangerous problem of Chechnya has been particularly futile. The Kremlin has declared its desire for peace and really does need the war to end, it says it wants a political rather than a military solution and that it is willing to hold negotiations. But the surprising thing is that it doesn't know who to negotiate with, as if it doesn't know who exactly it is fighting.

It's obvious that the military operation, having become a guerilla war, means the federal forces are fighting the Chechen population. Logically then, negotiations must be held with this same population, that is, with whomever it has elected as its representative.

It's well known that most of the population considers its representative to be Aslan Maskhadov, the president it elected lawfully and with Moscow's approval. But the Kremlin doesn't want to leisure chairs talk to Maskhadov.

Indeed, Moscow has found a way of overturning the argument that Maskhadov is the lawfully elected president by preparing a referendum on a new Chechen constitution and new presidential elections, which Akhmad Kadyrov, appointed head of the Chechen Administration by the Kremlin, hopes to win. Of course, Moscow can organize a referendum and elections under the gun barrels of the 100,000-strong federal force in Chechnya, but how will this bring the end of the guerilla war any closer?

The current government has benefited from exceptionally favorable economic and political circumstances that have enabled it to achieve some more or less acceptable results merely through making an imitation of activity, but these circumstances, starting with high oil prices, will not last forever. Genuine far-reaching economic and political change is needed if the country is to be ready to handle well whatever challenges the future will bring. Above all, this means completing the market reforms that have yet to be fully implemented and ending the war in Chechnya.

Any serviceman

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 09:06 - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link

"I believe that what happened is a shame on the authorities," said Tonya, a teenager sitting in a city square surrounded by peeling Soviet-era buildings. "[President Vladimir] Putin promised to restore the might of Russia¡¯s military fleet ... and what has happened is his fault."

"The whole course of events proved that the authorities did not do enough to pearl jewelry wholesale save the crew because they didn¡¯t want to," added Sergei, a middle-aged fisherman sitting on a bench drinking a lunchtime beer.

Once a relatively prosperous port city, Murmansk has experienced a severe economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with unemployment rocketing. Many residents talk about leaving, and those with any possibilities for life elsewhere are deserting in droves.

But despite the bleak conditions, just a couple of days before the announcement that the crew had been lost, there was still hope among the public that someone might be saved.

Even Sunday morning, eight days after the accident and a day before the official announcement that all the sailors had perished, people gathered at the small, newly built church of St. Nicholas near the city center for a special prayer service for the Kursk crew.

"What happened to them is so unfortunate, and we set our hopes in God," said Tatyana, attending the service with her teenage daughter, Snezhana. Others concurred that God was with those sailors who had already died, but shell pearl jewelry  that there was still hope for the remainder.

"Any serviceman who swears to his motherland is ready to give his life to his neighbor," said Father Andrei Amelin, the church priest. "Many sins are forgiven through a martyr's death. Those who may be dead already are in heaven, I¡¯m sure."

The clergy at an old wooden Murmansk church traveled Sunday morning to the village of Vidyaevo ¨C next to the naval base where the Kursk was stationed and from which it departed on its final voyage ¨C to comfort the family members arriving from across Russia and the CIS. Mass prayers were conducted nonstop since the crisis began.

• Long journeys

The families, many of whom took the long and arduous journey to Murmansk by train, were met at the railway station by naval officers.

"This is a very unusual task for me," said Capt. Alexander Fedosov. "I would prefer that I never have to carry out such a task again."

The naval officers accompanied the family members of the Kursk crew ¨C running the gauntlet of journalists at the station wanting to question them ¨C to buses waiting to take them to Vidyaevo. Few families, having traveled vast distances and consumed by worry and grief, wanted to speak to the media.

"It¡¯s OK for him to come to express sympathy with the families. If I were allowed to go to Vidyaevo, I would, too," said Lyudmila, an elderly woman walking her dog. She said that even if Putin had arrived earlier, it would not have done any good.

But most believed the president should have come to pearl strand the scene of the disaster much sooner and that there was more that could have been done.

Leslye Orloff

Posted on November 10, 2009 at 09:02 - 0 Comments - Post Comment - Link