If you ever needed more proof that Russian state-controlled natural gas monopoly is a political weapon of Putin, look no further. I will explain why in a second. For now, read the following article

March 30, 2006 — Russia’s Gazprom said today it would raise natural gas prices for Belarus to European levels by 2007.

Gazprom head Aleksei Miller told Belarusian Energy Minister Alyaksandr Ageyev about the planned change at a meeting in Moscow today.

Gazprom said Minsk would respond by the end of April.

Belarus, a close Russian ally, currently receives gas at a subsidized price of $47 per 1,000 cubic meters — far below prices paid by customers in Europe and Ukraine.

Under a contract signed in December, Gazprom agreed to sell Belarus 21 billion cubic meters in 2006.

Belarus is heavily dependent on gas imports.

Now, let’s review all that has happened in the last few months. In December and January, Gazprom raised the price of natural gas immediately for all of the countries that were previously receiving subsidies. The hardest hit were Ukraine and Moldova, two countries that have taken exceptionally pro-Western stances and have defied Moscow on many occassions. The gas crisis in Ukraine and the subsequent deal especially hurt President Yushchenko, who numerically took a beating at the polls on Sunday. The only country that did not receive a price increase at the time was, you guessed it, Belarus.

The ramifications of the crisis were not lost on deaf ears. Putin’s ally in Belarus, the dictator President Lukashenko, would have suffered a tremendous backlash should prices have been raised — maybe enough to cause a colored revolution. Belarus is highly dependent on these prices to keep its industries competitive at all. Since Lukashenko is such a heavy-handed dictator, repressing even the most basic human rights like free speech and assembly (all the while falsifying elections), his legitimacy rests completely on economic growth. And since most of Belarus’ economic growth is due to state injection of money, which is aided by such low natural gas prices, an increase just before the presidential elections two weeks ago would have been disastrous for Putin.

However, Lukashenko will have to deal with the price increase as soon as next year perhaps. Should the increase even slightly affect the economy, his popularity could plummet with people swelling the ranks of the opposition. Certainly Putin must know this, so it is interesting why Gazprom would decide to raise the prices at all.

I am going to hypothesize a few things. Putin has made it clear that Russia is to become an energy superpower with a good international reputation for being reliable. This means that Gazprom cannot be seen as a political weapon and its price increases (even though it’s obvious due to the different timings) must be applied evenly. Also, the company has undergone a share liberalization that has opened up the company to foreign investment of up to 50%-1 share. The investors are certainly cheering the price increases, and are pushing for it hard, as it means more money in their pockets. It had to happen eventually.

Lastly, there is great personal animosity between Putin and Lukashenko despite their strategic relationship, and this is what will lead us to the end result of the price increases. Gazprom obviously wants control over the gas pipeline in Belarus for itself, so the prospect of being left to sink or swim may force Lukashenko to give it up in order to continue receiving low gas prices. However, regardless of what happens in that case, opposition to Lukashenko will continue to grow stronger and he will face a crisis of being able to govern. This could mean that he would be forced to accept the union proposal that would make Belarus part of Russia. Lukashenko has done everything he can to fight this possibility, but if he has to give up the pipelines and cannot effectively govern, he may just have to cede control of the country to Putin.

Here’s a news item that I found particularly interesting. The first women ever to be accepted into training for front-line combat positions have just graduated from their training and become full-fledged pilots in the Pakistan Air Force.

PAKISTAN welcomed its first female pilots into the country’s air force yesterday, breaking into the all-male front-line bastion of its armed forces.

Saba Khan, Nadia Gul, Mariam Khalil and Saira Batool were among 36 cadets who received their wings after three and a half years of intensive training.

“I want to fly fighter jets and prove that girls can equally serve our country in the best possible manner as men are doing,” Flying Officer Gul, 22, said after graduating from the air force’s academy in the north-western town of Risalpur.

General Ahsan Saleem Hyat, the deputy chief of army staff, said the four had “shown the spirit and courage to rise above the ordinary and break new ground for others to emulate”.

“If Pakistan is to rise to the height that it deserves, both men and women of our beloved land must find equal space and opportunity,” he said.

Carrying rifles and dressed in the same green uniform as their male colleagues - except for a kameez (tunic) flapping over their trousers, and one wearing a headscarf - they paraded before hundreds of family members and diplomats, and took the military oath.

Standing in front of a T-37 training jet, Flying Officer Batool described her training as tough but “very thrilling”.

“My parents, their prayers and my instructors and above all, almighty Allah, helped me achieve this success,” said Ms Batool.

Given that we’re talking about Pakistan here, this is a pretty big deal. On the official level, the male pilots seem accepting of their female counterparts. But I doubt that’s the whole story. Even in the United States many men have problems with women holding combat positions in the military. What this does generate, however, is the acknowledgement that women can do many of the same things that men do. In the very least, they will get respect.

This is a very important step for a country so well known for its abuses against women that go unpunished. While many men may not like this, the key to preventing these abuses is to empower women. By allowing women to take to the front lines, they are proving to be an example of what all women can one day become in the country.

Heck, I’d be afraid not to show them respect!

The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI) , which most of you probably know by reading its reports I use to post both here and on my blog, is desperately looking for help in order to survive and keep on fighting for a just cause : total regime change in Iran and the establishment of a true secular democracy.

Please, read SMCCDI’s Urgent Action, and spread the word as much as you can!

The Wall Street Journal has a must-read op/ed about Darsi Ferrer, the Cuban independent doctor and prominent dissident in Havana and a very good friend of mine.

I told him about this article, given that he hadn’t yet seen it. He’s very very happy and thanks the WSJ for mentioning his story.

The Maldives — tourist paradise on the shores and repressive regime on the inside. Last August thousands of people protested against the criminal nature of President Gayoom’s government. It’s schooled in the way of the Egyptians, putting down basic human liberties and those of women most of all. No democratic opposition is allowed to exist. It is a quagmire of mob-like financial schemes and regional powers like India that don’t care to see change come to the country. When those people went out to protest initially, they went out even harder after opposition leader Mohamed Nasheed was taped being arrested forcefully even though all he was doing was sitting on the square.

Now, a huge demonstration is going on. Except now it’s women protesting, young and old alike. They want police to stop mistreating them and brutally arresting them. They want their rights. Thousands of them.

Hundreds - if not thousands - of women took to the streets of the capital on Thursday demanding greater respect from the police, who stand accused of a number of abusive arrests of female opposition supporters in recent weeks.

Mariya Ahmed Didi, shadow cabinet member and MP for Kaafu atoll, led the protest, which snaked around the main streets of Male???????? for over an hour before finally halting at the artificial beach area. Prominent women gave speeches to the assembled crowd, as did MDP President Ibrahim Ismail, before the protest was called to a halt at around 6pm.

Protest organisers had originally intended to descend on Republic Square but were prevented from doing so by riot police who formed a cordon around the square and the presidential palace.

Although many men also joined in the march, the women led from the front, interlocking arms and chanting for women????????s rights and the release of female political detainees Jenny Latheef, Fathimath Shiuna and Areesha Ali.

From megaphones distributed throughout the crowd, other marchers called for the resignation of the Police Chief, Adam Zahir, and President Gayoom. At one point, a booming chorus of ???????He????????s an animal, an animal??????? Gayoom is an animal,??????? could be heard almost the entire length of Majeedi Magu ???????? the capital????????s main thoroughfare.

As protestors reached the artificial beach, leaders addressed the crowd. Mariya called for a minutes???????? silence in remembrance of those affected by torture and illegal detention. She asked people to think of the children whose parents have been arrested and of families who have lost their sources of income following the detention of male bread-winners. She told the crowd to imagine the physical and emotional pain caused to families by arbitrary arrests.

Prominent Male???????? lady Zuhaira Umar, who was detained during the Black Friday demonstrations, spoke passionately about the need for women to continue fighting for their rights.

She noted that during the demonstration the security forces were positioned only around Gayoom????????s palace and other symbols of his regime. ???????What about the schools? What about the hospitals? What about people in their homes? Where is the protection for them,??????? she asked.

Mariya Ahmed Didi and Ibrahim Ismail, signalling an end to the demonstration, thanked the protestors and urged them to persist in fighting for their rights. People filtered home, while protest organisers gathered up litter caused by the demonstrators.

As most of the marchers left four women, including MDP member Meena Saleem, were reportedly arrested following a dispute with the police. MDP activists Shuiab Ali and Ziyattey were also arrested earlier in the day.

For the vast majority of the protestors, though, the demonstration was trouble-free, with demonstrators and the police avoiding confrontation. Many women said they were overjoyed to have aired their grievances in the first demonstration by women in recent Maldivian history.

The regime tried to ban the demonstration beforehand. It even sent people with the night before to throw at the organizers. Some were even arrested. But that didn’t stop them. Not even the protest babes. In fact, no matter how much the wannabe mullah Gayoom tries to suppress women, he couldn’t even stop men from joining the demonstration, and as evidenced by the photos, there were many.

The predominant religion is Sunni Muslim, with components of Islamic law incorporated into the legal code. Gayoom may be your typical banana republic dictator, but the people of the Maldives are no stereotype of Islamic extremists. Having been repressed since 1978 by Gayoom, they have become fighters for their own freedom. Ever since the Black Friday massacre in August 2004, pressure on the government by the people has become strong and is forcing it to open up to democratic reforms. These women are showing that not only will they not be repressed, but that they are the key to the solution.

You can see photos of the demonstration here and here. Video can be seen here.

Liberian ex-dictator and accused mass murderer Charles G. Taylor
Source: AFP, via Yahoo!

One of the continent’s grisliest mass murderers, Liberia’s ex-dictator Charles G. Taylor, was apprehended in northeastern Nigeria yesterday and shipped back to face justice in a Sierra Leone court run by United Nations prosecutors. He’s charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity.

The UN had made a resolution that Liberia put the thug on trial a couple years ago, and President Bush, meeting with his Nigerian counterpart this week, put a lot of diplomatic muscle into making sure that happened. That’s to his credit because this guy was about to get away again.

Not that it has been easy. Liberia’s new democratically elected president, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, said earlier this year that she had higher priorities than putting the mass murderer on trial. She changed her position in a move that puzzled even experienced Africa watchers, and then asked for his extradition on March 5. My guess is that this was possibly at President Bush’s insistence. The U.S. is trying to be friendly to her, and President Bush sent first lady Laura Bush to her inauguration. Africa is just as critical as Latin America as an important supplier of petroleum, but I think Bush did this to help foster democracy in this long-deprived region. If so, it was to his credit, because finally accountability will come to the leaders of Africa.

And potential despots are going to look at Taylor in the dock and start to think twice about whether they intend to be democrats or dictators. It will have an effect.

The significance of his apprehension is that he will be the first African despot, ever, to face any kind of justice for his depredations. Taylor brought 14 years of civil war to Liberia, killing tens of thousands, and turning it from one of the more liveable and agreeable countries in Africa, to one of the worst hellholes on earth.

A friend was a foreign correspondent in Africa, and had seen plenty of awful places while he was there. I asked him which one was the worst. He told me Liberia.

It was turned into a cauldron of murder, oppression and war by Charles G. Taylor, a place where freakishly angry young men with guns wearing blonde wigs and bras and ballgowns as their war regalia popped drugs and massacred tens of thousands. The war then spread from Liberia to neighboring Sierra Leone, which became the most terrifying area in Africa - where children were tortured, their hands and feet and ears cut off in a bid to terrify.

Taylor was the architect of the “diamond wars” which employed murder in a bid to smuggle diamonds, prompting lots of new legislation in the West about the source-origin of diamonds. He’s also one reason why Canada’s diamond industry took off - for many buyers, Canadian diamonds are the only ones you can be really sure are not connected to these Taylor massacres. He also harbored al-Qaida, in particular, the binladenite thugs who blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing more than 200 innocent Africans in the pre-9/11 era.

Words fail me on this inhuman creature. Can any trial really take care of this monster? But given the stakes of democracy and its attending accountability, can Liberia and Sierra Leone afford not to? Imperfect as it all may be, this is an important new step, a new factor, in the forging of Africa’s democracies.

Here is a small roundup:

SUDAN: THE PASSION OF THE PRESENT reports a roundup of all the news coverage in a long post with some light analysis of events.

GLOBAL VOICES has a superb, thorough roundup of commentators on Liberia, with a concisely written summary of each blog’s thinking in narrative form. Definitely a must-click.

NEW YORK TIMES, which can still afford to pay foreign correspondents, has two very good original stories in these links here and here.

UPDATE: Glenn at Instapundit has found a truly damning piece of information on Taylor’s support for the mutilating massacrers of Sierra Leone. A consultant in Africa was handed a letter written to Taylor’s warlord pal Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone, thanking him for all the weapons and ammo he’d helpfully sent him. The consultant was aghast but the Liberian who gave it to him explained that he wanted the world to know. The text of the actual creepy letter is published in full here.

Thousands of Mexican campesinos in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas have taken to the streets to protest the government’s neglect of their poor state. This isn’t the Subcommandante Marcos blond-haired, blue-eyed internal Sandalista crowd at work, but a spontaneous protest by the poor to seek concrete action from the government to improve their lives. The protestors don’t seem to want a new socialist collective, they just want the darn bridge, devastated after Hurricane Stan, fixed. The other reason for the protest is land. The Chiapas protestors are saying they’ve lost land due to the diversion of a river, making it a title deed issue. Mexico still has very poorly defined title deed and property rights. The shantytowns you see in Chiapas, or any poor country, are the telltale proof of problems with title deed, signalling a denial of access to capital.

The place has always been poor and the government has always neglected it. That’s why the timing of this huge protest is so intriguing. The Vicente Fox government has done a lot to embrace the Mexican protestors of Los Angeles this weekend, incorrectly reading them as their constituency. But they may well have ignited protests of their own inside Mexico.

It’s just a theory because this is a first report, but I think it’s a good one.

U.S.-Americans frequently complain that Mexican illegals come up here because they don’t want to stay home and improve their own country. Coming up here is supposedly “easier.” (Actually, it’s not.) Now, Mexico’s got protests, and they look pretty big, and they don’t look like the usual recognizable leftwing rentamob production, but something new. We’ll keep an eye on this because if Vicente Fox is the legitimate target of this, it will amount a far bigger backlash than any immigration-control measure that might be passed in the states.

This story may be very significant. Read it here.

I just came through reports, in Spanish, about the likely death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The news, strangely, has been given by several news sites, among which the far-leftist Indymedia in Argentina, which quoted some Latin American media as having reported the news. The Cuban regime has immediately dismissed the claims.

I assume that the regime won’t let know about the dictator’s death as soon as he dies.

While we shouldn’t yet celebrate, let me say that I prepared a bottle of champaigne, as Castro’s days of life are very, very numbered.

UPDATE: Given that this report is now believed to be wrong, here is a little Castro humor to cheer you up. -A.M. Mora y Leon

Daniel Duquenal is a French Venezuelan with strong ties — and insights — to both countries. He is also a fervent believer in democracy as a man of the left.

Daniel has written a spectacular essay describing the similarities between France’s angry antirevolution and Venezuela’s under the emerging Hugo Chavez dictatorship. Daniel sees similarities between the French thugs intent on burning Paris down in a bid to preserve their privileges, and the money grabbing and privilege-preserving maneuvers of Hugo Chavez’s vanguard party elite, who also are intent on forcing an unsustainable economic system on Venezuela, explicitly to impoverish it - as Cuba is. Our good friend Daniel writes:

Reactionary Revolutions

No it’s not an oxymoron.

I came up with it watching the news from France where for the first time perhaps in its history people are rioting in the streets to make sure that nothing changes. Yes, that is right. In front of a stubborn youth unemployment, in particular at that crucial ???????first job??????? period, the government tries a rather timid and not well timed program. As a result, the people that are supposed to be the ones who would benefit from that initiative are the ones rioting in the streets while supporting students are been manipulated by the left and trade unions that have not been able to have a single good idea in 10 years. They have managed, with the help of the reactionary and nationalistic right, to screw up the European constitution and now they are trying to maintain a timid, shivering France as far away as possible from the world challenges.

Meanwhile, there is the UK, which has long gone through the painful changes, that keeps forging ahead. Across the border Germany slowly digests East Germany while it sees all of Eastern Europe opening to its economy with their crazed dash to modernity certainly stirring in Germany the changes it has to do to become again the main motor of Europe. Yes, all of these changes are giving Germany and the UK the edge over any other countries in Europe while a scared France remains frozen in place and will even be caught up by Spain who had no problems voting for Europe (if Spain holds together which is another story).

Yes, it is more complex than that but France is showing more and more that it is unable to tinker with a social system that has run its course, a social system that is leaving France with a class structure that bars immigrant????????s children from integrating its society, a system where the youth from more established groups are seeking to validate entitlements instead of seeking adventure. That is why France voted against Europe, why last falls thousands of cars where burned in the streets and why now students are marching so as to make sure that nothing changes. Those are reactionary times and the only surprise is that the reaction is now coming from the left.

Daniel goes on to make these observations about Venezuela:

(C)havismo is very much a reactionary movement, a look to our past and a desire to go back to ???????halcyon??????? days that were never halcyon. In Chavez we have a caudillo, just as those who gave peace to Venezuela by imposing their will. In those days if you did not do politics and followed all the dictates you were assured sustenance. Or so some want to think. With Chavez controlling oil personally many also think that it will be like good days of old where proximity to the leader ensured that you to receive the occasional gift. Democracy? What a crazy idea! Back to the Cacique rule!

Still not convinced? I realized this reaction to its full impact and implications when Maria Lourdes Urbaneja was Health Minister. Then she was in charge of establishing a new pension plan in agreement with the 1999 constitution…She was interviewed then as to the great plan her office was coming up with. But the interviewer managed to have her say that her wonderful plan would not apply to the Central University professors, from where she came. They would keep their own plan, much better of course ???????they have acquired these benefits and cannot surrender them??????? were more or less her words. Change is good for the others, not for the ones that managed UNDER the old regime to get privileges and that intend to write them in stone under the new regime.

And this is what many in the chavista ???????elite??????? fight for, to enshrine their privileges, past of present, regardless of the ability of the country to afford it. That is why they are preparing themselves to go back to old and antiquated labor laws that were modified in the mid 90ies because the State was unable to fulfill its commitment to its own workers. It failed to do so but the people in charge now think they know better than the laws of economics. Thus why the chavista elite forges ahead in re-creating a welfare state that only existed in the imaginary before Chavez came to power, a welfare state that failed in spite of oil money because of inefficiency and corruption just as chavismo is outdoing any form of incompetence and corruption that we have ever seen in our rich past on that matter.

In short, both Venezuela’s and France’s revolutions are backward-looking because they seek to entrench privileges at the expense of the less entrenched, particularly the poor.

There is nothing quite as sharp as French logic. Daniel has written a thoughtful and fascinating essay, devoid of any cliches with fresh insight. You can read the whole thing here.

The Dutch are deeply concerned about Venezuela’s renewed threats to take over the nearby island of Curacao as its dictator, Hugo Chavez, flexes his military muscles with an unprecedented arms buildup and condemns the Dutch for their colonialism on the island. Seeking to add more territory of his own, his stated aim is “regional integration,” which is an emerging term that bears more watching. One Chavista foreign ministry official explained it this week as the growing federation between Cuba and Venezuela, which he euphemized as “alternative models.” But his description of that “alternative” was very specific: the Cubanization of the country.

Francisco Toro, who is a Venezuelan in the Netherlands, says it’s a surprisingly prominent issue in the country, but for now, thinks it may be politicians posturing for election concerns. Posturing or not, it’s something that people running competitively for office are betting that voters will respond to. In parliament, Francisco reports, the official scene looked like this:

Yesterday, members representing a majority in the upper house of the Dutch parliament called on the defense and foreign affairs ministers to get on top of the Chavez threat. Citing Chavez’s recent arms purchases, Liberal (in euro-speak, right-wing) member of parliament Zsolt Szabo called Dutch defenses on the island a “swiss cheese” and urged the government to take control of defending the islands.

The U.S. has stepped up its military activity in the region, probably in response to its NATO ally’s concerns. I don’t think this would be merely to help some parliamentarian get elected, not at the expense of Iraq, where every troop counts and forces are overstretched.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, Chavez has exploded as a campaign issue, with the right-leaning PAN party of Vicente Fox using Chavez’s raging diatribe against Fox last November at the hippie-studded Summit of the Americas as campaign material, apparently to scare or warn the voters into voting for PAN. This clearly is an indication that Chavez’s efforts to intimidate Fox have backfired badly, because Chavez apparently is a very effective campaign tool for the right wing. Besides that, the charges that Chavez is meddling, based on this reputable Mexican news source, seems to be real and an investigation has been sought.

In Bolivia, opposition congressmen are expressing concerns about a new ID program to be administered by Venezuelan and Cuban “technicians” which is likely to facilitate election fraud in congressional elections. That shows how far “fraud” and “Chavez” and “Venezuela” have come to be associated with each other in foreign politics. That item is here.

Chavez, who made filthy, uncouth, sexist comments about leading candidate Lourdes Flores - comments that actually were about having sex with the woman - is also despised in Peru. Alek Boyd has some descriptions of all the meddling charges used against him in that campaign, and in other countries.

Clearly, Chavez is not a figure of love around the world, but becoming synomymous with different aspects of international intimidation. These don’t involve the U.S., but other states. He’s a campaign stock figure and an accused meddler. This trend is not going to stop in the foreseeable future. It will also probably cost him potential allies that he might need in some UN vote or for some IMF bailout, given that he is spending his country into the ground with low-value-added, pure-consumption, zero-investment value handouts that will benefit mainly a small party elite.

Offending power players can probably be done for a certain amount of time, but like teeth, they can only be pulled out once. He trades with the U.S. and makes oodles of cash off our oil habit, so he’s probably thinking that he can get away with offending anyone. Make no mistake though: the U.S. is seeking to forge an alliance against the communist caudillo and so long as people respond to fear images, it’s likely to foster the sought-after united front at some point.
So much for his phony “revolution.” But it does explain the flip side of his weapons buildup as his response.

Over 40 bloggers have mulled and mused about German-American relations in a new carnival feature put together by the secret diplomats who once ran Daily Demarche, that late lamented cool blog that exposed the seamy underbelly of pinstripe diplomacy.

German-U.S. relations are currently seen in a tattered state over the Iraq War, but Germany is one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners, and the two nations have much in common as overachievers in many fields on the world stage. (How ’bout that German medal count at the 2006 Olympics!) Not only that, Germans are the largest U.S. ethnic group - larger than Mexicans! - and one of the most integrated into the American story, which is the benchmark of successful democratic revolution.

There’s plenty to think over in this otherwise little-discussed but hardly insignificant topic. Read it here.

Racial and ethnic violence is becoming more visible in Russia as some high profile cases have entered the news. There have been many explanations given for this rise of racial extremism. What tends to be missing however is the view that this is all connected to the general reconfiguration of Russian national identity.

The first high profile case was this weeks sentencing of Alexander Koptsev, 21 years old, to 13 years in prison for attacking worshipers at a Moscow synagogue. On January 11, Koptsev broke into the synagogue with a knife. According to witnesses he began shouting ???????I will kill Jews!??????? and slashed nine people before he was wrestled to the ground. Koptsev was sentenced for ???????ethnically and religiously motivated attempted murder.???????

But while Koptsev sentencing is justified, many were shocked this week when a group of eight youths were convicted of hooliganism, while a ninth was acquitted for the killing of Khursheda Sultanova, a 9 year-old Tajik girl who was murdered by a group of youths with baseball bats as she walked home with her father and 11 year old cousin. This is how Amnesty International describes the incident:

???????At around 21.00 on 9 February 2004, Khursheda Sultanova was returning to her home in St Petersburg with her father Yusuf Sultanov and her 11-year-old cousin Alabir Sultanov. As the Sultanov family reached the courtyard by their home they were set upon by a gang of youths carrying knuckledusters, chains, sticks and knives. During the violent assault that ensued, the attackers are reported to have shouted racist slogans at the victims, such as “Russia for Russians”. Khursheda Sultanova died at the scene of the attack from excessive blood loss ???????? according to police reports she had been stabbed 11 times in the chest, stomach and arms. Yusuf Sultanov sustained head injuries during the violent attack but reportedly refused hospitalization. Alabir Sultanov ???????? who later managed to hide under a nearby parked car to avoid further injury ???????? also sustained head injuries and received hospital treatment.

According to reports, several youths were detained by police soon after the attack and then released without charge. A criminal investigation into the murder has been opened, although the alleged racial intent of the attack has so far not been acknowledged by the authorities.???????

Yet despite this gruesome account, the court didn????????t charge the youths under Russia law for extremism and racial violence.

No one was more shocked than the father, Yusuf Sultanov. “No one told me that there will be a trial today,” he said in an RFE/RL article. “I did not received any written notice. And it is strange that they confessed earlier and now say they are not guilty. I could not understand. I am completely shattered as to why they do not want to punish murderers.”

Racial violence is on a steady rise in Russia. Immigrants mostly from Africa, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and other southern former Soviet Republics have been the victims. Concern for their citizens safety has led the Organization of African Unity to call for the Russian government to do something about racial violence against Africans. And just today, the St. Petersburg prosecutor????????s office has opened an investigation into the internet posting of a text called ???????Street Terrorism Handbook,??????? which urges readers to attack anyone who has violated ???????white order.??????? According to the St. Petersburg Prosecutors Office, there were 23 racially motivated deaths in 2004 in St. Petersburg alone. There were 34 in 2005. In Moscow there have already been 38 murders of Tajik migrant workers this year. Most, if not all, of these were perpetrated by skinheads.

In an article submitted to David Johnson????????s Russia List (#73), Michigan Professor of Sociology Vladimir Shlapentokh put the problem of racial extremism in Russia in the context of the long historical role of the hatred of others in Russia culture, and the present day difficulties of post-Soviet life. In the end he argues that while ???????crying wolf??????? about the specter of Russian fascism has been a frequent tactic by Russian liberals and Western critics since the collapse of Communism, today????????s extremism has new elements that can????????t be so easily ignored. The increase of racism and xenophobia from ???????below??????? is what is most alarming. According to a poll conducted in 2005 by the All Russian Center of Public Opinion 58 percent of those polled agreed with the slogan ???????Russia for Russians.??????? This was up from 46 percent in 1998. In addition, in February 2006, another poll by the Center found that only 8 percent connected this slogan to fascism.

Xenophobia, nationalism, and racism have only been exacerbated by politicians, like the Rodina (Motherland) Party, who in the Moscow City Duma elections in December used a television advertisement that equated Caucasian migrants to ???????trash.??????? Rodina was banned from participating in the elections as a result.

These views have also been generated from other areas. The ???????colored revolutions??????? in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, the push for NATO to expand eastward and the increasingly cool relations with the United States have increased Russians???????? view that they are embattled by the West. This view goes conveniently with the already held notion that the United States was directly responsible for the economic horrors of ???????shock therapy??????? in the 1990s. The emergence of a new cold war around the US attempts to facilitate the spread of Western-style democracy in former Soviet space has not only cooled relations between leaders, it has increased the skepticism of the legitimacy of ???????colored revolution??????? itself.

This of course has only increased the faith in Putin as a leader, his use of Russia????????s energy might to influence its former Republics, and support for authoritarian rulers like Viktor Lukashenko, to name a few.

It also doesn????????t bode well for liberalism in Russia. In anything the liberal center has dropped out of the political spectrum. The center is now firmly dominated by Putin????????s United Russia Party, which vows to serve as a stable alternative to both left and rightwing extremism. In fact, there have been several proclamations by Putin, United Russia, and their youth organization, Nashi (Our Own) against fascism. In a meeting with CIS leaders in May 2005, Putin declared that ???????Nazism, extremism and terrorism are threats that feed on the same ideology.???????

Platitudes against these aside, many have charged the Putin government with passively fanning the flames of xenophobia. The recent allegations that the British were using a rock to spy on Russia, the legislation tightening foreign NGOs, as well as the use of the media to denigrate Ukraine and Georgia after their ???????colored revolutions??????? are often cited as examples.

The question, however, remains why. Many point to the manipulation of the public by elites. Others point to the long tradition of Russian hatred of the Other. Some even blame the vestiges of Stalin. I personally find these insufficient though not without impact (however I do reject the Stalin explanation. Everything seems to place blame on Stalin as if Russia hasn????????t changed in the last 50 years). Instead, I would argue that along with all of this is a reconfiguration of Russianess itself. The collapse of an overarching national category of Soviet opened a space to be refilled by a more ethnic based nationalism. This is a process going on in most former Soviet states. Nationalism has existed but was suppressed in the Soviet period, and now a process of redefinition is occurring. The old symbols are gone thus new ones need to be created. The recent law before the Duma on ???????On the foundation of State national politics of the Russian Federation??????? is just one indication. I????????ve dealt with this law elsewhere. This sense of Russianess is in part formulated through the Other????????migrants coming into Russian cities as cheap labor; nations on its border which are moving out of its traditional imperial orbit; a sense of inferiority on the national stage; a reevaluation of the Soviet period, its achievements, and the place of Russians in it; the development of a historical continuity between Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia through the placing of leaders like Lenin and Stalin in the tradition of Peter the Great and Nicholas I. All of these are contributing to a new Russian national idea. And all them are predicated in distinguishing Russian from non-Russian.

None of this is new in the history of nationalism. Benedict Anderson argued long ago that nationalism is based on the creation of an ???????imagined community??????? of peoples based on similar ethnic, religious, geographical, or cultural backgrounds, while at the same time distinguishing them from Others. British national identity was formulated in relation to the French. And the French, the British. The American national identity is a combination of relations between internal and external others. The list could go on and on.

But the (re)formation of national identity often includes violence. Russia is no different in this respect. The brutality of the war in Chechnya and Russia????????s refusal to let it have independence is connected to this. As is the reason why the response to Belsan was more than the shock of horrific violence against children; it was also viewed as a violation of Russia itself. Shamil Basayev knew this as he placed the attack within the context of Russian patriarchy. He explained it as more than an attack on Russia????????s policy toward Chechnya, but also as a direct attack on Putin????????s ability to protect Russian children.

Whether racial extremism will become the official ideology of Russia is doubtful. But this doesn????????t mean that it will cease to exist from ???????below??????? or be used by those ???????above??????? for political purposes. However, one cannot ignore the role its playing not only in how Russians evaluate the Others inside and outside their country, but also in how they evaluate themselves as a people, a culture, an ethnicity, and as a political identity.

Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert who risked death for ‘apostasy’, has been granted political asylum in Italy, where he arrived overnight. It would be great if he might be able to get in touch with us Italian activists once he’ll be living over here with the due protection.

In the meantime, and totally off topic, I’d like you to read my op-ed at Tech Central Station, regarding the Italian election, which is just less than two-weeks away.

As many of you know, in the former communist countries have been created institutes to study the files of the communist intelligence services. In Romania, we have the National Council for the Study of the Former Communist Secret Service Archive (CNSAS). After 16 years from the Revolution against Ceausescu????????s regime, and the atrocious Securitate, we have today people who worked within the Securitate or closely cooperated with it, in key positions, in Parliament, Government, and the Presidential Institution.

Ticu Dumitrescu, the man who has initiated the law which established the CNSAS should have finally been elected as President of the institution. But, as many times in Romania, the fairness did not overcome the petty interests and the anxiety of the ones who were part of the Securitate.

Ziua daily wrote the following about Ticu Dumitrescu:

???????He would have been the moral guarantee that the use of the new and controversial law wouldn’t have turned into national shows or real bluff or even worse (???????).He is a man who spent long years in prison so that we can now be free. Under Stalinist and Communist terror, this man managed to keep his being unstained. Whenever needed, he is ready to fight for the nation’s good. He is not crazy for money, honors or power. The interior elections in CNSA have caused new political crisis within the PNL (the National Liberal Party) -PD (the Democrat Party) Alliance. The Liberals are accusing the Democrats of breaking the agreement to support Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu to become head of CNSAS. PD candidate Corneliu Turianu won presidency over CNSAS yesterday. Ticu Dumitrescu, author of the law to unveil the ex Secutitate, resigned right afterwards, invoking a ???????plot???????? coordinated by Emil Boc, with the knowledge of President Basescu. (…)???????

???????The law settling this institution is full of traps. A group of people will be in charge of the institution. Since the law allows for investigations on 1,300,000 files and on a part of the 100,000 files classified for the time being, of course there is a real risk that certain files should be picked and others ignored, for reasons related some parties’ political interests. A guarantor is needed for avoiding such situations. Ticu Dumitrescu would have been a moral guarantor. The law allows any person to demand research on somebody else’s past. There will be thousands of such requests, some of them really motivated. Others will be attempts to get even. And may others will be used in the battle for power, tools conceived to crash adversaries. A handful of people will have to make a difference between what is grounded and what is groundless, what is fair and what is unfair, what is well meaning and what is ill meaning. Neither cleverness nor common sense is enough. There is need of a moral guarantor.???????

Most of the mass media today is speaking about the upper hand of the services, and their abject plot to put their man as head of the CNSAS. Approximately 30 employees of the CNSAS have made a human chain in front of the Institution, as a sign of support for Ticu Dumitrescu. They (and the Liberal Party) are asking to repeat the elections. It is worrisome to realize how much power the intelligence services, especially the elements that were part of the Securitate have in what it should be today, a democratic, transparent Romania. More about the CNSAS activity (better said lack of it) till this moment, you can find here:
http://www.worldsecuritynetwork.com/showArticle3.cfm?article_id=12617&topicID=32

This issue has put under question the cohesiveness of the ruling Truth and Justice alliance. It looks like the two parties (PD and PNL) have different aims, and they use any opportunity they have to sabotage one another. The big loser here is the Romanian people, who for years???????? assists at these backstage dirty games, as a helpless spectator.

I don’t have an awful lot that I can add to this, but it needs to be noted.

If I’d set out for the library a half-hour earlier one day, I’d have wound up either in or walking right past where the Aranykez bomb went off — it is a REALLY central location in downtown Budapest. We’ll have to keep our fingers crossed, but unless there’s some corruption issue going on, it’s hard to see what these yahoos would have to gain by threatening election violence.

Mass protests against a labor law making it easier to fire young workers have ignited throughout France. The law will allow employers to fire workers under 26 years old without cause. Over 700,000 people filled the streets of Paris alone, while estimates around the country top 3 million. Transportation, businesses, universities and other services have been paralyzed in a general strike. Pictures can be seen here. These mostly peaceful protests follow more violent actions by youths that began weeks ago. While the some may focus on the minor incidents of vandalism in hopes to disparage them, but the fact of the matter is that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin????????s government is paralyzed. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, and potential presidential rival in next year????????s elections, has broken with the Villepin????????s firm stance and has suggested the government suspend the legislation and enter talks with union representatives. But many suspect that Villepin will not make a move until a constitutional court rules on the validity of the law on Thursday.

France has a history of mass labor protests and strikes. 1968 is the most well known. But it was ten years ago that millions public workers went on strike when then Prime Minister Alaine Jupp???? froze civil servant wages and attempted to lower retirement age.

While some will point to the fact that the strong influence French unions and Leftist politics has on France have contributed to the high unemployment. The very youths that are currently protesting face an unemployment rate of 22 percent. But such views are the typical mantra of capitalists who want to weaken labor in order to lower wages and increase profits. One thing is for sure: the class struggle continues despite triumphant claims that the capitalist model is the natural and best system. Many people in France disagree. According to a poll cited in the International Herald Tribune, France was alone in disagreeing that ???????the free enterprise system and free market economy??????? is the best economic model. Only 36 percent of French respondents agreed with the capitalist model.

Given the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization undercurrent of the general strike, it is not surprising that the protests have not generated similar sympathy and outcry from Western governments has did the much smaller protests in Belarus. While Western governments were quick to condemn Lukashenko????????s brutal use of riot police to disperse protesters, silence reigns in regard to the youths in France. Some will say it????????s because the protests in Belarus were peaceful, while those in France have used violence. Such excuses ring hollow. The truth is one that is replayed over and over: when you are against capital violence against you is justified, when you protest for capital, violence against you is a violation of human rights. One need not belabor this hypocrisy. It is an ideologically clear and tired story that has been propagated by capital since its inception.

It is wonderful to see working people stand up and use their collective power in their own interests and reclaim democracy at a time when it is so wedded to free market ideology.

Democratic opposition protestors who were arrested over the past week following historic demonstrations have gone on a hunger strike. They are rotting in prison cells after having their bodies battered and bruised by riot police for absolutely no reason; being denied even the most basic human rights.

Twenty political prisoners in Belarus are on hunger strike, rights advocates have said, drawing attention to conditions at a jail where about 400 opposition supporters are being held.

The rights defenders said on Tuesday that the prisoners are being held in crowded conditions, and are being denied water and the right to receive care packages.

The activists were taken to detention at Zhodino, about 50km east of the capital, from Minsk’s central square after police broke up a camp of demonstrators campaigning against the results of presidential elections on March 19 regarded by many in Belarus and abroad as fraudulent.

Up to 18 inmates were squeezed into cells designed to accommodate five, the rights advocates said.

“People are protesting ÄagainstÅ the mockery and terrible conditions of confinement in the jail,” said Valentin Stefanovich, an activist from the Vyasna rights centre, referring to 20 prisoners who have entered the fifth day of their hunger strike.

Over 1000 people were arrested who were protesting against the Lukashenko regime. They are a mix of hardcore activists who camped out overnight on October Square and simple supporters who tried to bring the former food. The prisons in Minsk are so crowded, in fact, that many of the detainees have had to be brough to prisoners just outside of the city. Like the article says, several times the capacity of people are being squeezed into tiny cells and being denied basic care. Family members and friends don’t know where their loved ones are and can’t bring them food. Most are going to be sentenced for fifteen days of administrative detention simply for protesting. They are prisoners of conscience.

The point of the hunger strike is both to protest the regime as well as to draw both international and domestic sympathy toward their cause. The EU and U.S. are going to be slapping sanctions on Belarus, but the best thing they can do is use pressure to get these people released and back out campaigning for the opposition. These are some of the most important grassroots actors in the democratic movement and are necessary for spreading the word.

Caspar Weinberger, who was the defense secretary under the great Ronald Reagan, has died at age 88.

The great defense secretary was a key player in the destruction of the Soviet Union, leading a $1 trillion military buildup that drove the monstrous communist regime — responsible for 40 million dead — straight into the ground. He was a low key man who made a high historic impact. He never spoke in a fiery or blunt manner, as Donald Rumsfeld might. He just spoke softly and carried the biggest of any big stick.

He was a great supporter of Freedom Fighters in Central America, and led an honorable post-political life as a wise statesman who wrote fine columns about world events and served as the Chairman of the Forbes magazine board. I thought so highly of him.

One of the great revolutionaries of the 1980s, he did his part to destroy tyrants, using novel methods of economic warfare to shake out bad systems that are economically unsustainable. He knew this, and his era gave us so much knowledge of the emerging concept of democratic revolution. He did it because he really believed in democracy and freedom.

Here is what the great Ronald Reagan had to say about him as he presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor:

Yes, Cap has been the point man in the effort to rebuild our nation’s defenses, and he has assembled an unparalleled record of achievement. But I bet if you were to ask him what his proudest achievement was he would say restoring morale in our Armed Forces and bringing back pride in our country’s uniform. And Cap can take a lot of the credit for the fact that, as one base commander said to me, the young men and women coming into our military are some of the smartest, best-educated, most highly motivated he had ever seen.

But Cap’s tenacity comes from another source as well: a recognition of the tragic reality of a world divided, a world torn between those who believe in freedom and cherish the value and dignity of each individual human soul and forces implacably hostile to those ideals.

Now, Caspar Weinberger has gone to his eternal reward.

Rest in peace, Caspar Weinberger: democratic revolutionary, freedom fighter and great American.

UPDATE: The brilliant Herb Meyer, who led President Reagan’s President’s Foreign Intelligence Board, knew Cap Weinberger well and has written a beautiful tribute to the great man on The American Thinker. It’s an absolute must-read here.

UPDATE: Academic Elephant has a fine mishmash of posts and ideas and links here. And the Thinking Pachyderm notes this BEAUTIFUL tribute to Cap Weinberger on this link here that will be sure to move you. Cap was so great.

UPDATE: Eric has kindly sent me a fine link to a British tribute to Weinberger and it’s full of interesting new information I never knew about him here.

UPDATE: A Chicago radio talk-show doyenne has a lovely tribute to Cap Weinberger, with her own personal account of meeting the man, here.

Starting with 2007, Mihail Kogalniceanu military base will serve as the general headquarters of the newly formed Eastern European Task Force. In this context, Romania and the Black Sea area will become one of the most important outposts for the American Army in Europe.

The Romanian Ziua daily made two assumptions on this topic, 1) that US will invest in its bases from Romania around $60,000,000, 2) the American anti-missile shield might be located in Romania.

The next project of the United States, as detailed by General James Jones will be the Caspian Guard. Its aim is to improve the capacities of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan to prevent and respond, if necessary to the threats of terrorism, drugs, human trafficking, etc. and it will ease the US efforts to keep an eye in Iran????????s maneuverings in the region.
You can find more information????????s about the Caspian Guard, here:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/caspian-guard.htm

Parliamentary elections held in Ukraine yesterday ushered in the resurgence of the Regions of Ukraine bloc, led by former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. Pundits are mockingly calling it the ???????Blue Revolution,??????? and after seeing over half the results counted, one would be hard-pressed to deny that Yanukovich has adapted to the new environment and has become an adept politician on his own ???????? with the help of a few American PR firms and a campaign style similar to the old Orange one of 2004. He has changed positions, calling for Ukraine to join the EU and serve as a bridge between Europe and Russia.

Yet because of the immense amount of corruption and electoral scandals that occurred under Yanukovich, many want to see the Orange coalition rebuild itself so as to prevent a backslide in the reforms that have been undertaken since early 2005. The emergence of Yulia Tymoshenko????????s bloc with some 23% of the vote over President Yuschenko????????s bloc, which won only 16%, shows that she has become the more senior partner in a possible parliamentary coalition. Combined with a minor partner, the Socialists, they could beat out Yanukovich and form the next government.

However, there are still major disagreements between the two and Yushchenko has not ruled out a possible coalition with Yanukovich himself. Tymoshenko????????s often-times populist policies, including price controls re-privatizations that led to small economic crises and a slowdown in overall economic growth, contradict greatly with Yushchenko????????s pro-market stance. So while Tymoshenko may be calling for the quick formation of a new government so as ???????not to further disillusion the people,??????? I would be surprised if he agrees.

It must be remembered that this is all occurring within the backdrop of the new constitutional changes, which establishes a parliamentary system. The old system allowed the president to appoint and sack the prime minister, but now the prime minister????????s position is clearly based on malleable coalitions based on negotiations between parliamentary blocs.

This means that a renewed Orange coalition will likely take a distinctly populist tone, what with Yulia Tymoshenko????????s bloc and the Socialists making up a large portion of the coalition. Furthermore, a coalition between Yushchenko????????s bloc and Yanukovich????????s bloc will take a tone based largely on the latter????????s positions. Yushchenko????????s Our Ukraine party will serve as something of a largely moderating and pragmatic force within whichever coalition he decides to join.

Most importantly, because Tymoshenko and Yanukovich have ruled out a coalition with each other, the most desirable coalition for each side is with Yushchenko. This puts him in an extremely favorable negotiating position that, while his party may have won less votes than both of the other two, may mean that he comes out on top regardless of which side he joins. Due to the constitutional reforms, Yushchenko????????s party can break with its coalition partner at any time and form a new coalition. What this means is that we are likely to see further pro-market and Western-oriented reforms no matter who the senior coalition partner is.

The one thing that is being forgotten most in this entire debate is that the OSCE has graded the parliamentary election as being free, fair, and overall democratic. This signifies that, despite whoever forms the next government, democratic consolidations have been made since the Orange Revolution. In the very least, the people have won a very important victory that won’t be rolled back.

I co-hosted two interviews on Belarus and Burma at Global Crisis Wacth/Clandestine Radio. The first, Belarus-related, starts from the minute ‘1 and had our dear friend Robert Mayer as guest. The second, Burma-related, starts from the 22′40 minute. Listen to them here

I’d like to thank GCW/CR’s Nick Grace and Rich Lafayette for granting me and Robert the opportunity to speak on radio!

A very brave independent Cuban journalist is on his 57th day of a hunger strike for the right to Internet access in Cuba. Guillermo Farinas Hernandez’s case has gotten little media attention, but it’s an important struggle for freedom of information inside news-starved Cuba. Castro knows very well the power of the Internet and its challenge to his brutal and increasingly tattered dictatorship. That’s why he’s repressing the brave ones who dare challenge his rule … not with guns, but with a hunger strike for free information. Guillermo’s, now in its 57th day, is showing no signs of stopping. To the hemisphere’s worst tyrant, this is intolerable. But he’s banking on the world not noticing. As bloggers, we must not let him be right.

Val Prieto at Babalu blog has an impressive blogburst encompassing the work of dozens of bloggers who are making an effort to get the word out at a time when independent Cuban journalist Guillermo Farinas cannot, at this site here.

UPDATE: The excellent Fausta Wertz at Fausta’s blog has the other half of the blogburst with a sizable collection of links and a super roundup that can be read here.

It was sometime in the 1970s. I was a kid in a public school in Southern California. I had to report a news article in front of my class on that day. My mother in her bathrobe and coffee that morning picked out the article and cut it out for me. I read it. I did not like it. Some blonde lady named Isabel Peron, had lost her position as president, in some country called Argentina. I had only heard of the country earlier by watching the Miss Universe pageant. But wow, a woman president! Except that she sounded incompetent and had a chagrined look on her face in the photo as she was being cast out. It did not inspire me. Years later, when I read the history, I found out that the incompetence of this ex-nightclub dancer and second wife of dictator Juan Peron, was much worse than the news article reported.

The exit of Isabel Peron lit the fuse to Argentina’s decade-long Dirty War. Generals took over and gave the hemisphere its most violent and horrible secret war against suspected internal dissidents ever waged. At least 30,000 people disappeared - and they were all killed. They were tortured first, often with cattle prods and then killed in a couple of horrific ways - one was that they were drugged, stripped naked, and ’sent up’ on Wednesdays. That ’sent up’ meant that they were put aboard helicopters and hurled out naked and alive over the open sea, off the icy Bahia Blanco waters. There were a couple concentration camps, but most were just killed. These Dirty War generals wanted to eliminate their dissidents very quickly. A few bones eventually washed ashore but most of the dead were never seen again.

Who were these evil people who did this? They were vile generals, led by a monster named Jorge Videla. He was an old style caudillo who assured U.S. policymakers that he was only eradicating ‘communists.’ The U.S., deep in the throes of Kissingerian ‘realpolitic,’ and anxious about the Cold War, to its discredit, believed him. Videla led various military people, including a navy “mechanic’s school,” into becoming monsters, who were surprisingly, motivated largely by theft and what they could steal from their victims. In the end they amounted to little more than gangs in black leather jackets with gangland solidarity and gangland accountability only to themselves. You can read about these thugs in Vuelo, an excellent account of the war told from the point of view of a torturer, by Horacio Verbitsky, who himself was an ex-leftist guerrilla.

It’s true that communists did wage a terrible war themselves in Argentina, blowing up shopping malls, shooting innocents and spreading terror ahead of it. They were imitating their hero, Fidel Castro, who was spreading that evil, via Che Guevara and others, in this era. And he inspired many more to act similarly after Guevara’s ignominious 1967 death in Bolivia.

But there were only about 300 such guerrillas in Argentina and many, like Verbitsky, actually escaped pretty easily.

The people who didn’t escape were Argentina’s middle class. Young people, students, labor union organizers, teachers, political dissidents. They were grabbed off the streets in their thousands, with the scariest year of it in 1976, the year Jimmy Carter’s administration took power in the U.S., his weakness emboldening the tyrants.

Most of the victims were left-leaning in some small way, but they were democratic left, civil society people, and more important, not the violent ones. By the time ‘Victim Number 30,000′ was reached, they weren’t leftwing at all. They were just victims of a monstrous military machine that seemed to target the nation’s young people.

My friend Brenda, an Argentine, told me of her mother’s terror when one of the creepy Ford Falcons of the Dirty Warriors followed her for no apparent reason on one day in Buenos Aires near the wane of the Dirty War. She had no idea what the men in the Falcon wanted but she knew they were coming to get her. She got away. Brenda’s family is rightwing and very middle class.

A random young Swedish teenager, age 15, her name was Dagmar Hagelin, wasn’t so lucky. She was the daughter of a Swedish diplomat, and grabbed off the street as a subversive, tortured, and murdered the same way as the rest of them. No one knows the full fate of what happened to her except that her death was a ‘mistake.’ And there was no accountability.

Victims’ families desperately tried to learn the fate of their relatives. The Dirty Warriors slammed the doors in their faces and made their lives a nightmare for asking. Some of these inquiring relatives were actually killed. And these generals fully expected to get away with it, for Argentines were largely peaceful, democratic people that gangsters under state imprimatur possessed no fear of. For they were the source of fear.

The Dirty War Generals were finally thrown out in 1983 by Argentina’s democratic revolutionaries. These generals had brought Argentina war and defeat in the Falklands, for, having destroyed all property rights and human rights, they moved on to the next atrocity they thought they could get away with — a war invasion of someone else’s country. It took mighty and resolute Lady Thatcher, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, to destroy them, something the broad international left even today remains in denial about. For when tyrants grow this brutal, it’s military force — not U.N. resolutions, not world condemnation, not signing petitions — that is the only real solution.

The Dirty War generals also ruined Argentina’s economy. They had raised public spending — for state-sponsored murder — by more than 300% - worse than anything that later President Carlos Menem ever did - triggering the ruinous hiperinflacion that so destroyed Argentina in the 1980s. To this day, there is nothing, not even currency devaluation, that scares Argentines more than hiperinflacion. Only Bolivia’s runaway hyperinflation in that era was worse.

Another Argentine friend, Diana, I remember working with in San Francisco in the 1980s. She had to do moneychanging for her dad the oil businessman at the bank each day - because they were desperately trying to lock in the value of the cash before inflation snapped it away. The Dirty War generals were responsible for all of this, in addition to their murderous evil against their fellow citizens. I don’t think this nation has ever quite healed. When I went to Argentina to report its meltdown in 2002, the most free-market libertarian people there spoke of the Dirty War in the darkest of terms — and some of them, too, had to flee into exile.

Today, 30 years on, Argentines are commemorating the monstrous Dirty War that did so much damage to their country. Over 100,000 Argentines rallied in the streets of Buenos Aires this past weekend to remember the dead. Randy Paul at Beautiful Horizons has a fine writeup of what happened in Argentina in the 1970s well worth reading here and here.

UPDATE: Marc Cooper has a riveting must-read account of his own experiences during the Dirty War in Argentina — note that theft detail, which also had been described in Verbitsky’s memoirs, among many other things — posted here.

I’ll never forget him.

Fabrizio Quattrochi, the brave Italian man in Iraq who told his brutish Islamofascist kidnappers at the moment of his murder that he had no intention of dying with a hood on his head and tried to tear it off, saying he would show them ‘how an Italian dies’ struck a fearsome blow against the cowards perpetrating the war on terror. He not only exposed them as inhumanly evil, he ruined their crummy snuff-murder propaganda movie, which was the reason they killed him in the first place.

His actions achieved the exact opposite effect of their evil intentions. His courageous response hurt terrorist recruiting and thereby terrorism’s cause. He struck a blow against the cheap cowardly acts of terrorism by showing authentic courage.

After all, who would want to join a bunch of animals after seeing the example of Fabrizio? Who would want to be a terrorist after that? Terrorists join terrorist movements to appear to be heroes to their peers. There can only be one hero. And Fabrizio showed them in the most real way possible who the hero was.

Terrorists lost, big. And in death, in martyrdom, really, Fabrizio Quattrochi made a strong impact on the world. No, I will never forget him.

Via Pajamas Media, I found a fine item from Winds of Change, noting that posthumously, Quattrochi has been awarded a gold medal for bravery by the Italian government. They have a few worthy links on the subject, like this one here, explaining why Fabrizio mattered.

I hope his name and his example grows in the world as the real heroism it was. It should.

Sunburnt and exhausted, I return from the biggest rally for immigrant rights in the history of Los Angeles. Five hundred thousand mostly Latino, mostly young, and mostly protest-babe-caliber people marched in the streets of This Proud Capital Of The Third World to demand a halt to various immigration control measures in Congress - like building a wall and making it a felony to help illegal immigrants - and, more importantly, to plead for opportunities for advancement and citizenship. There has never been anything like it.

This is a seismic shift in the political landscape of the U.S.A

How very unlike France, whose embittered immigrants just want to wreck things, or whose frightened, distrustful students just want to preserve their privileges! Here we have something incredibly different, the crie de coeur of the people who share our society, just pleading for a right to inclusion. So that they can get better jobs, so that they can get house mortgages, so that they can freely travel to see their relatives in Mexico, so that they can avail themselves of all the privileges and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship - and I am not kidding, they were pleading for citizenship - and transform this country with a new dynamic wave of their own contributions, too.

The U.S. currently only has visas for 10,000 low-skilled workers from countries like Mexico. It’ll takes more high-skilled workers, but even those numbers aren’t enough. The U.S. clearly has need for 12 million workers, because that’s the number who’s here illegally right now. 12,000,000! And the U.S. only hands out visas for 10,000! And make no mistake, we’ve got a 4.7% unemployment rate, we definitely need the help.

We are living in the most dynamic society in human history and we aren’t even getting the people we need! More and more, visitors here notice labor shortages all over the place - at the rentacar, at the phone service lines, everywhere. We are this closed fortress and yet our own history shows that we have this amazing ability to integrate immigrants no matter where they come from! We take the dregs of other societies and convert them into the world’s most dynamic, successful people! It’s called FREEDOM!

Who are these people? Look around. After the rally, I headed down to Orange County … and noticed that everyone is Latino. They’re young, they’ve got money, they’ve got lots of little kids around them, they are the future of Orange County and the bellwether of the U.S.

Look at America!!!!!!!!!!!!

Back in LA, the tone of the march was not anti-American, not by a long shot. I did not get the feeling many of those marchers really truly hated America. On the contrary, I thought they liked it. All they wanted was a chance to be American.

It’s a complicated issue. How do we give people like this legalization without penalizing the people who have been waiting in line legally, often for years? How do we ensure fairness?

But on the other hand, how do we ignore this?

The great economist Hernando de Soto has pointed out that when a critical mass of illegality is achieved, like, say, squatting on public lands, the U.S. historically has politicians eventually bend to the will of the people. That’s why the 1862 Homestead Act was passed by Abraham Lincoln. This great wave of globalization and immigration is no different. It is in our interest to find some way to resolve this, to give the most dynamic people out there an opportunity, to stop treating them like they are invisible, and, even from a Republican perspective, give them economic opportunity, because historically, any time an immigrant group is allowed to buy houses, they turn into Republican voters. I don’t want to insult any good readers, but sadly, some of the GOP “base” doesn’t remember this detail at all! Cripes it’s such an opportunity!

My suggestion is: Just give them all! If we need them, then give them and us what we all need, a place in society, the right to be.

The Catholic Church is fully with the Latino people on this, and has ordered all parishoners to disobey any law that prohibits the helping of illegal immigrants. They know who their ‘base’
is - young people, young families, people who marry, people who have kids, people who believe in life - in short, Mexicans! Sadly, there are significant parts of the GOP that do not.

Spanish-language radio in Los Angeles was highly instrumental in turning out the masses of people for this rally - in fact, they were a key player - and right under gringos’ noses. Now, there are some within this movement who say this is the broad kickoff of a broad new civil rights movement. On this, I cannot say for sure, but it sure seemed like something happened.

Being a U.S. citizen is increasingly an incredible privilege and honor, and of course it should be. You get a U.S. passport, a U.S. dollar salary, general honesty in government (at least compared to just about any other place except Singapore, NZ and Scandinavia), and real freedom, the freedom to be who you want and be rewarded for it. But all these privileges shouldn’t exist in a closed, undynamic feudal fiefdom, a bell jar, just because the rest of the world is a mess. We got room here. Let in everyone our society needs. A good way know might be in looking at the role played by those immigrants who are already here. I don’t believe in static pie theories. If immigrants are here and contributing, then we do ourselves our favor by welcoming them in.

Source, all photos: Associated Press and Reuters, via Yahoo!

UPDATE: Glenn at Instapundit thinks that the rally itself could be the movement’s undoing, and lays out why it could backfire. He said he had always been sympathetic to individual immigrants but this march seemed to be working against that natural sympathy. He’s also got an excellent roundup from several good bloggers like Mickey Kaus and Virginia Postrel. Read it here.

UPDATE: Here were my thoughts from last year’s rally.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup of posts and essays outlining the problems and difficulties with the immigration issue. It’s a must-click here.