Following Obama’s Kind Words, Putin’s Slaughter of Dissidents Continues
Since he first came to power a decade ago, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has had two claims to fame: he fixed the broken Russian economy and he pacified Russia’s war-torn separatist regions in the Caucasus. Having done so, he claimed the right to unlimited power.
But over the past year, both of these claimed achievements have proven entirely fraudulent. Faced with the global downturn, Russia’s economy has suffered far more than any other major nation. Its stock market has virtually disappeared, it suffers double-digit inflation and unemployment, its GDP is currently contracting at the rate of over 10 percent (a far worse recession than America’s), and it hasn’t even felt the full fury of its domestic subprime crisis yet.
And the Caucasus? Well, it’s in flames.
In Dagestan, in Ingushetia, and in Chechnya, separatist rebels are at open war with the state, killing police officers by the score and even striking down high-ranking public officials with ease. Experts refer to large parts of the region as “battlefields” with more than 300 deaths, including at least 60 civilians so far this year. The Kremlin has ignored issues of economic development in the region, allowing profound racial and social divides to emerge.
And I would argue that the Kremlin’s biggest failure in the Caucasus is one it doesn’t even recognize as a problem — namely the total inability to prosecute its own war crimes.
Human Rights Watch has just condemned Russia’s policy of allowing its military forces to set fire to civilian homes in retaliation for acts of separatist violence, placing the lives of innocent children at risk. Only truly epic failure would cause a regime that claims U.N. Security Council membership to authorize polices this barbaric.
Indeed, Russia has been repeatedly convicted for state-sponsored murder in the European Court for Human Rights, yet no serious attempt has been made by the Kremlin to affect reforms.
The response of the Putin regime has been singular: vest its handpicked strongman in the region, Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, with unlimited power to crack down on the separatists. Recently, the horrific consequences of this decision became bone-chillingly clear: Kadyrov has begun assassinating his enemies in civil society throughout the region and even abroad.
The most recent victim was by far the most appalling — prize-winning journalist Natalia Estemirova.
Kidnapped in Grozny on Wednesday, she was found hours later shot in the head and dumped at the roadside in Ingushetia.
Every word Obama utters is “ill advised.”
Here in America we have a great deal of difficulty comprehending what it’s like living under that type of regime. We need to appreciate the bravery of those who risk their lives to deliver the truth to the population. They functioned as unarmed, unprotected soldiers in the field, and every free person on earth should look at what just happened with a very serious eye.
While we still have the freedom to express our dissident points of view, we need to keep in mind that Obama has assigned 30+ “czars” to supplement his position of power. How long will it be before WE become the targets of political assassins?
Time to reset the reset. Back to Reagan.
None of this will dissuade the freak Obama from his psychopathic opinion of himself, the fantasy of his god like powers. the beauty of his words, and words alone, the freak being almost incapable of actually managing substantive policy developments.
That goes double for “Tough guy” Rahm Emanuel, the 4ft 2in former ballet dancer who the little girls used to beat up in the schoolyard.
TO: Kim Zigfeld, et al.
RE: Shouldn’t Be Too Long….
….before we start seeing such happening here.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
P.S. I wonder if Rick Moran will STILL consider Obama HIS president when the dissidents start dropping like flies amongst US…..
The empathy-advocate-in-chief won’t lift a finger to defend the soldiers of freedom. Pontius Hussein Pilate!
Russian dissidents to Obama: Your kindness is killing us!!!
Within 2 weeks of Obama’s speach in Egypt, muslim crowds attacked another Coptic church.
While it would be unfair of me to claim a an exact moral — or rather, an immoral — equivalence between Putin and Obama at this moment (Obama is not yet killing those who oppose him), there ARE disturbing similarities.
1) They both seek immense power.
2) Each is intolerant of dissent.
Obama’s Dept. of Homeland Security considers peaceful protesters (e.g. Tea Party participants) to be “right-wing extremists” — and potential threats to national security. And Obama’s Dept. of Defense has prepared training documents that label protests as a form of “low-level terrorism.”
Any U.S. president who fails to recognize free speech and lawful assembly as constitutionally protected rights has the potential to morph into something more dangerous. A Putin, perhaps.
Unfortunately, “The One” asked Putin, with a wink and a nod, how to pull it all off.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
‘leader of the free world’ is on the way to being a term of the past…
9. bikermailman:
Yep. ‘leader of the third-third-third world’ just doesn’t have the same, nice ring to it though eh?
Putin was the KGB twin-face of evil in the USSR and is so in Russia today. Obama,his soul mate,is the face of evil in the U.S.
bikermailman, no the term will still be used. It will mean someone else, other than the occupant of the Oval Office.
Does anyone want to take odds that stories like this one are gathering dust at the CIA, and other intelligence agencies?–>
Risking his life to get the story; Russian journalist Sergei Kanev exposes corruption and half expects to be killed for it
Ellen Barry. Edmonton Journal. Edmonton, Alta.: Jun 21, 2009. pg. E.3
Abstract (Summary)
A specialist in police corruption and organized crime, he crosses powerful people and half expects to be killed for it. Their work is increasingly marginalized, so that most Russians never learn what corruption or human rights abuses have been uncovered. [...] while most do not blame the government for the attacks themselves, they say failure to investigate and punish the crimes has set a permissive, and dangerous, tone.
» Jump to indexing (document details)
Full Text
(1248 words)
Copyright CanWest Digital Media Jun 21, 2009
After the most recent attack on Sergei Kanev–attempted strangulation with a wire, in his apartment’s stairwell here –his editor visited him and delicately suggested that he take a six-month sabbatical from crime reporting, in America.
Kanev still chortles with delight recalling this story, as if he had been advised to take up tap dancing. He is the kind of reporter who sleeps with a police scanner beside his bed. Without work, “I would die of boredom,” he says.
And yet, his life has bent under the weight of danger. A specialist in police corruption and organized crime, he crosses powerful people and half expects to be killed for it. He has rigged up two cameras inside a bag he carries with him, so there will be a record if someone comes for him. His most recent girlfriend long since threw up her hands, so only his parents are left to beg him to quit the job, saying fear for his safety is wrecking their old age.
“I understand them,” says Kanev, 46. “I have no answer for them.”
This has been a brutal year in Russia, not just for muckraking journalists, but also for human-rights workers and a whole network of advocates who investigate public officials and extremist groups.
In the past year alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented three killings of journalists and 19 work-related assaults. Amnesty International has documented one killing of a human-rights worker and 16 attacks during the same period.
Bit by bit, in the era of Vladimir Putin, the ranks of people willing to hold the powerful to account are thinning. Their work is increasingly marginalized, so that most Russians never learn what corruption or human rights abuses have been uncovered. And while most do not blame the government for the attacks themselves, they say failure to investigate and punish the crimes has set a permissive, and dangerous, tone.
“This is the point where people are justifiably making decisions about the rest of their lives,” said Tanya Lokshina, deputy director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch. “You can’t keep approaching people and telling them, ‘I have this spare room in my apartment, and you are welcome to stay there for a couple of months.’ That is not a solution to the problem.”
Kanev is not the most obvious standard-bearer for press freedom. Stout, ruddy and a chain smoker, he could be equally mistaken for a Russian beat cop or a bandit circa 1992, the kind with “a raspberry-coloured sport coat and a huge mobile phone,” said Dmitri A. Muratov, editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, where Kanev works as a freelancer.
He is also a reporter for Line of Defence, a true-crime show on Moscow’s Third Channel.
If the Soviet Union had lasted, Kanev might have remained what he was, a disc jockey expressing his dissent by playing Donna Summer, who had been blacklisted by the Communist Party for “propagandizing sex.”
But the deluge of the 1990s swept through his disco — two fatal attacks unfolded on his watch–and he volunteered to work the graveyard shift for a television news show.
By 2005, his material had become consistently critical of the police, and he lost his job at Russia’s NTV network.
That is how he wound up writing for Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper known for two things: its pugnacious assaults on the Russian government, and the number of its staff members who have been murdered.
“The most dangerous thing right now is not to criticize the authorities,” said Yulia Latynina, a columnist at the newspaper. “It’s to criticize people who can kill you. The people Kanev writes about can kill. That is his problem.”
The amiable chaos of the newspaper’s office froze up in January, when a masked gunman fatally shot Stanislav Markelov, the newspaper’s lawyer, and a young reporter, 25-year-old Anastasia Baburova.
That brought to five the number of employees who had died under violent or suspicious circumstances since 2000, and the first since the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found shot to death in her elevator in October 2006.
Muratov, the editor, put two of his reporters under armed protection and instituted a policy under which any reporters with sensitive information are required to publish immediately, reducing the benefit of killing them.
Kanev, for his part, shrugs off the idea that protection is even possible. “Look, if you want a safe job, work in a library,” he likes to say. In the meantime, he goes about his workday with what can only be called joy.
Onarecent Tuesday, Kanev climbed a staircase behind a mattress salesroom and was led into an office where a tired-looking businessman recited the details of his son’s kidnapping.
A few hours later, at the newspaper’s office, he received a gaunt, black-suited visitor from the Interior Ministry. As he walked the man out, Kanev was so happy with what he had learned that he actually began to skip down the hall, making the linoleum squeak.
“It’s like a thread,” he says. “You pull it, and pull it, and pull it.”
Kanev learned about risks early in his career, when six thugs tied him to a chair with speaker wire and pressed a scalding iron to his chest, demanding he surrender a videotape.
Since then, he has ratcheted up his ambitions. Early columns on police kickbacks and petty corruption have given way to detective work on Politkovskaya’s murder and on a kidnapping ring based in Uruguay–a case in which he suggests that former or current government security agents play a role. The stakes have grown, along with his sense of mission.
“We try to reach our citizens to say, ‘Look, people, it’s enough,’ ” Kanev says. “Let’s take back our country.”
Last August, as Kanev was returning to his apartment, two men slipped into the stairway behind him. One wrenched away his bag, full of law enforcement documents, and the other tightened a wire around his throat, leaving him slumped in the stairwell.
His mother, Nina, heard about it from a television report, deepening her despair over her only child. She has spent years trying to convince him that the work he does is not worth the sacrifice.
“It’s useless. It’s like hitting a stone wall with your forehead,” says Nina Kaneva, 71, a retired kindergarten teacher. “You can hit it as long as you want and get bruises and lumps if you’re lucky, or otherwise get crippled, or lose your life. How does that address injustice?”
Kanev’s angry response is from the family’s history:When Nina Kaneva was four, her father was arrested as an enemy of the people, and she never heard from him again. Nina Kaneva hid the story, afraid that she would be ostracized. “I tell her, ‘All your life you were afraid to talk,’ ” Kanev says. “I don’t want to live that way.”
And so, this bargain: He signs his name to every article. If, walking in his darkened stairwell, he senses someone behind him, he switches on the cameras in his backpack.
And when young people come to him to ask about investigative journalism, he can no longer in good conscience encourage them.
“First I tell everything I know,” Kanev says. “Then I say, ‘Maybe you can find another profession.’ ”
Credit: Ellen Barry; New York Times News Service
When it comes down to it, Putin is the big league, obeyme is a wannabe. When the time comes, Putin will eat him alive.
Hey, Obama is the new Michael Jackson.
what about all the journalists murdered while bush was in office? No one gave a sh!t then.. funny how it’s political now.
While I am conceding that my post might appear callous, even repugnant considering its spirit but my intention is to approach to these events from a different angle within the context of our discussion.
As soon as I hear about the actions of human right organizations, human right watchers, human right “activist”, human right writers, NGO-s etc. my suspicion spring into action and the Soros financed HRW, the Saudi/leftist supported Amnesty Int. Seymour Hersh and his propagandist ilk, the million of obscure, conspiratorial group pursuing hidden agendas come to mind.
We cannot know who is who in this tragic death of aforementioned journalist and I take no stand neither pro nor con because I am not privy to anything that pertains to Russia…
Can it be that Putin (- Vlad the Impaler II. -) simply doesn’t permit the destruction of Russia by similar, corrosive elements which are about to destroy the US? Can’t you see the tragicomedy surrounding Gitmo, the deification of this Kenyan nobody? The press, the orgy of talking heads Anti-American rants in the medium?
Isn’t a noble concept of Putin that defamation of WWII Russia is punishable by law? Instead of spitting on your homeland which is the decent thing to do in the US.
I have an appreciation towards those people who are proud of their country, their culture, history and willing to protect those values like Putin does. The self hatred that permeates this country has reached epic proportion and the bitter comeuppance must befall in due time and deservedly so.
I’m surprised that Obama didn’t learn anything from all that Cyrillic literature he perused, memorized, and can recite in the native Russian.
I see a lot of bitching, but nobody offering any solutions. How surprising!
Obama and Putin. I wrote this down months ago – back when Obama was being inagurated…
http://hyphenatedamericans.blogspot.com/2009/01/game-we-all-can-play-name-that.html
Re Deep Brain Diarist: “I see a lot of bitching, but nobody offering any solutions. How surprising!”
Where are YOUR solutions?
“Deep” Brain Diarist,
You mean solutions like the “Stimulus”, sorry, I mean “Recovery Bill”?
These Russian assassins are enabled by and then protected by the government establishment. Medvedev’s mutterings today relative to bringing Estemirova’s killers to justice are, of course, a joke. The killers are usually elevated to prestige positions after their cowardly acts.
And Barack Obama was recently over there bowing and scraping to these despicables bullies who want to re-establish empire and, in typical Soviet fashion, destroy any source of criticism. This US President really does seem to be most comfortable around the world’s tyrants.
Joe Biden has a solution- Let’s send all our troops to Okinawa, and divide Iraq into three countries. Yeah, that ought to work. Oh, this is about Russia?? Okay, Joe???? How about we send all our troops to Okinawa and divide Russia into…….
Here are a few lines from A RUSSIAN DIARY by Anna Politkovskaya who was killed by Putin’s people in 2006:
“The Presidential administration swings into action. In Tula the clowns have organized a meeting…the new approach of the presidential administration: meetings populated with ‘their’ people. Old folk are paid a fee to attend…the corrupting of our people continues, and our people are wholly willing to be corrupted.
“The meetings are organized by local authorities after a coordinating phone call from the Kremlin….governors who have grown fat from bribe taking waddle onto the platform…they promise, as they have been told to, that social welfare payments are on the point of being increased and that everything will again be exactly as it was before the law was passed. Dad after day these meetings are the lead item on the television news. February 3.”
Read A RUSSIAN DIARY…..
….and pretend if you can that the dynamics recorded by this martyred journalist are not happening in the United States right now.
7. Mike Murray…you are right on top of it. Read this book and expect to feel your skin crawling.
I was not anticipating that for myself. I simply wanted to read the book to inform myself about the experiences (and murder) of a Russian journalist post-Soviet Union and to try to understand Chechnya and Beslan better.
She simply records from day to day the events, the public comments, the private perceptions, the dug-up facts.
We are not imagining the smell in the air.
ked5:
When it comes down to it, Putin is the big league, obeyme is a wannabe. When the time comes, Putin will eat him alive.
Putin already did this to the mullah in the White House when Obama caved in to the
Russian offer when he was over there doing what Obama does best; being a abject coward, appeaser, and a total fool in front of the world, again.
#18 Deep Brain Diarist:
I see a lot of bitching, but nobody offering any solutions. How surprising!
As mentioned, where are your solutions?
Too bad the program of targeted assainations never was put into effect and expanded to thugs like Putin and other slime balls like him. Go ahead and attack what I have said, let you leftards go for it. I personally have no desires to watch America become AmeriKa under the reckless administration of Barry the “dork” Obama and his administration of commie socialistacrat trolls who lap up everything that flows from the swamp. A complete failure at home and abroad. Are you ready to greet each
other by Comrade, here in the States?
15. tom:
what about all the journalists murdered while bush was in office? No one gave a sh!t then.. funny how it’s political now.
Wow. back to attacking Bush. Get over it already. There is NO comparison to what happened here and what has been going on in Russia for many, many years. Do you study Europe, Russia, the Balkans, Islam by chance. I do, and I spend several hours a day reading and researching the above. I suggest you back to post #12, that David W. Lincoln wrote. Putin is
hunting down any and all opposition that will expose human rights violations or speak of things that are not sanctiooned by the State as controlled by Putin and his henchmen. The Russia of old is alive and well and Obama in his stupidity chooses once again to deal and placate with the totalitarian scums of the world. Russia is using cold war tactics and our leaders are too dumb and blind to see it. Pathetic leadership, if you can call what is D.C. leadership, and I don’t.
Did anyone see the You Tube clip of Obama followed by Medvedev walking along aline of political meet ‘n greaters?
They all, to a man, blanked Obama’s outstretched hand and reached further along for Medvedev’s instead.
That deliberate snub tells us far more than words ever could.
While I agree that Putin and his proxies are perfectly capable of committing this murder, there are some other possibilities in this case in as much as the victim was apparently investigating a recent spate of femicides in the region that have been honor related:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8153536.stm
Are the right-wing cowards now scared Obama is gonna round them up? This is too funny for words. The list of right-wing cowardice grows by the minute.
TO: WarpublicaN
RE: Heh
Hey! SFB!
Drop by MY place and try to ’round me up’.
I got something for ya. And any other idiot that attempts such.
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[I....state your name....do hereby swear to uphold and defend the Constition of the United States, against ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic..... -- part of an oath all officers in the US military take.....]
P.S. Where do you ‘live’?
Maybe we should have a ‘talk’…..
P.P.S. Before anyone starts accusing me of communicating a ‘threat’…..
….maybe people should look at this character WarpublicaN and ask just what HE/SHE is ‘getting at’….