Belarus, Moldova and the Prague Summit

The EU has decided to engage with Alexander Lukashenko by inviting him to a summit of 27 EU government leaders despite Brussels previously having blacklisted the Belarussian leader and imposing a travel ban on him.

The summit is to launch the EU's new "eastern partnership" policy with six former Soviet bloc states, aimed at increasing the influence of Brussels in the Eastern Europe at the expense of Moscow's at a time when economic crisis and political instability looms large.

The decision has annoyed some states and Ian Traynor who writes in The Guardian,

Given Lukashenko's dismal human rights record, repression of the media and opposition, election rigging and the "disappearing" of opponents, the Pragueinvitation is stirring protest and has reignited arguments about whether it is better to isolate or engage unsavoury leaders.

However it seems as though Lukashenko, described as 'head of the most isolated state in Europe', has been singled out for opprobrium simply because he has not made himself into a pliable Western client as have the other invited leaders of Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova.

Yet no mention is made in the same article to the protests calling for the removal of Mikheil Saakashvili who was the EU's and the USA's most reliable and forceful pro-Western client after the Rose Revolution of 2003.

Evidence of double standards the fact that the Georgian president is guilty of war crimes in ordering the attack on South Ossetia on August 2008, rigged elections, repressing the media and cracking down on dissent by shooting protesters with live ammunition in Tblisi in 2007.

The hypocrisy of EU leaders in not wanting to be seen shaking hands with Lukashenko whilst having no problem with inviting him in order to advance its economic interests in Belarus is somewhat repellent.

Worse still are those politicians and journalists who having bleated on about 'Russian aggression' against Georgia, thus inverting truth 360 degrees, now see the Prague summit as a chance to advance economic interests with the rhetoric of 'democracy, freedom and human rights'.

Lukashenko has maintained freedom for maneouvre and to assert Belarussian interests by not implementing the disastrous 'shock therapy' experiments that destroyed so many lives in other post-Soviet states.

The average income in Belarus is roughly similar to Bulgaria. It is higher than in militantly pro-Western states like Georgia. It is unfortunate that these post-Soviet republics are only to be seen through the lens of their use for 'us'.

The pipelines are a vital part of Belarus' strategic value and the flow of oil from the Central Asia and the Caucasus as part of the EU's "vital interests", though the word "oil" tends to be the great unmentionable.

Whilst true, there is little point in trying to pretend that states like Belarus are going to sever their ties with Russia: not least as Russia has recently lent Belarus $500millon.

Though the IMF lent some $2.5 billion, that is far less than has been given to other crisis ridden states in Central and Eastern Europe, the most obvious basket case being the Ukraine under Yushchenko.

Unlike the Baltic Republics, which have seen catastrophic collapse of their unstable rentier and debt financed economy, Belarus has not seen such "instability" which is why Lukashenko has been selling his "model" as an alternative in the region.

In fact, Belarus' rate of growth has been more sustained and based on real economic achievement that compares favourably with the Baltic states. Precisely because it rejected the IMF and 'shock therapy'. The same was true with China.

It has been in the position to get aid from both Russia and the IMF which now lauds Belarus' economic progress. This has been achieved without the EU and by rejecting incessant US attempts to fund oppositionist groups to remove Lukashenko.

That's why Charter97 opposes any dealing with Lukashenko with slogans like "No to dictatorial privatisation". As if privatisation plans had been especially democratic anywhere in Eastern Europe.

With regards the new strategy Simon Tisdall wrote,

...the biggest unknown remains the attitude of Russia, which already feels threatened by current trends and retains formidable wrecking power should it choose to wield it. Whether the issue is South Ossetia's "Passport to Pimlico" separatists, Ukraine's gas pipelines, Nato exercises in Georgia, the future of Moldova's Transdniestria region or Azerbaijan's and Armenia's geopolitical orientation, Russia will continue to have a major say in a region it still regards as within its sphere of influence.

Its strange to speak of Russia's "wrecking power", when the EU and US have supported far right Greater Romanian nationalists with their absurd Moldovan 'Twitter Revolution' or nationalist demagogues like Saakashvili who initiate wars against South Ossetia.

Russia will continue to have "vital interests" no less than the EU. Why 'having a say' in opposing NATO expansion in Ukraine and Georgia is equivalent to "wrecking power" only makes sense for those wedded ideologically to NATO and Atlanticist doctrines.

Certainly, Russia has more business in having interests in the Caucusus and Central Asia than the USA does and it has not stopped the USA regarding Latin America as its backyard, as the continued attempts to remove the Venezuelan President Chavez prove.

Mark Almond 'On Ukrainian Nationalism'

Regrettably, I was unable to get down to Mark Almond's CafeDiplo speech in London on April 20th 2009. Here, though, is a brilliant article by Almond for RIA Novosti on 28 November 2008 On Ukrainian Nationalism

Four years ago, the Western media celebrated the victory of Viktor Yushchenko in the long-drawn out Ukrainian presidential elections as the dawn of a new age of prosperity and democracy in the country.

Western strategists saw the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine as confirming the trend of Georgia's Rose Revolution in 2003 for former Soviet republics to seek integration in Western structures like NATO and the EU to the exclusion of Russia.

Although they condemned nationalism as backward-looking in their own societies, in 2004, many Western commentators presented the Orange revolutionaries' Ukrainian nationalism as a positive force. It was supposed to be the engine for Ukrainian progress towards the Western global model.

Today, Ukraine's economy is in deep crisis. Integration with the West has brought recession leaving steel mills and coal mines idle and wages unpaid. As the credit crunch and economic downturn in the West sours even American faith in the blessings of unbridled globalism, all that remains of the Orange project in Ukraine is nationalism. But nationalism in a time of economic crisis is a very rancid ideology.

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Even before the current crisis, the Orange revolutionaries of 2004 had fallen out over how to divide the spoils of office and how far to sacrifice the national interest to NATO membership.

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The bitter personal rivalry between President and his prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko - the key Orange revolutionaries in 2004 - also reflects a deep divide over Ukraine's future economic and strategic orientation.

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As Ukrainian industry grinds to a halt, the country's quarrelling former Orange revolutionaries face a brutal choice. Should they put ideological purity first and pursue the mirage of Western integration for a poverty-stricken population regardless of the Ukrainian people's wishes, or should they put their country's economic well-being first?

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Timoshenko is accused of populism by the President's media backers. And it is true that the Ukrainian prime minister has curried support with the voters by backing economic and social measures which help them. But in a democracy it is usually the candidate with populist policies who wins most votes. As ex-National Bank chief, Yushchenko gives the impression that the key voters in his version of Ukrainian democracy are bankers and oligarchs. Maybe they are, but that is not the democracy promised by the Orange revolutionaries in 2004.

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With early parliamentary elections looming, to be followed by presidential polls next year, President Yushchenko's popularity has sunk to the single digits. Other post-Soviet presidents have bounced back from such unpopular levels, but hardly by using model democratic means. In 1996, for instance, Boris Yeltsin's backers in the new Russian oligarch class used their media monopoly to re-elect Yeltsin despite the deep poverty of most Russians then by playing up the fear of a Communist comeback.

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Today in Ukraine, Yushchenko is trying to play the same game. Using anti-Russian nationalism he has tried to rally the Ukrainian speakers to his side. He tried to cut off access to Russian television channels, popular with Ukrainian as well as Russian-speakers so that only nationalist voices would be heard. Ironically in order to create the kind of slick modern nationalist propaganda, Yushchenko's supporters have had to import expert propagandists from Russia!

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Russian journalists who worked for media oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Gusinsky in 1996 to boost Yeltsin are now in Kiev to revitalise Yushchenko's popular image.

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Things were very different then. In 1996 the grim Soviet past was still tangible in Russia. Yeltsin's propagandists could play on the reality that his only alternative was the unrepentant Communist, Zyuganov. In Ukraine, twelve years later, even with a media monopoly, Yushchenko would face a very different scenario. His main political rivals made their careers after 1991 and have fewer connections with the old nomenklatura than he has.

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Having built up Yulia Timoshenko as the heroine of an independent post-Communist Ukraine during the Orange revolution in 2004, Yushchenko cannot discredit her patriotic credentials without undermining the Orange myth which is the basis of his own rise to the presidency.

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Worse still Yushchenko's failure to clarify how he came to be so disfigured in September, 2004, has come back to haunt his credibility. Then his poisoning was widely claimed to be a sinister Russian plot, but now ex-ministers like David Zhvania suggest it was food poisoning not a criminal act that made Yushchenko's pock-marked face the image of the Orange Revolution and gained him enormous sympathy.

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Yushchenko's personal political crisis comes from presiding over an economic crisis compounded by his naive acceptance of every Western consultants' self-interested advice. Then he has added attempts at media control by decree to deny the problems, which has compounded his failure to live up to his promise of a new openness in government.

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The Western media, including Western-sponsored outlets in Ukraine present attempts to block Russian television not as censorship but as a blow for Ukrainian independence! What viewers in Ukraine is ignored so long as NATO's geo-political interests are served. American government-funded stations like Voice of America and Radio Liberty are allowed to broadcast independent news on Ukrainian channels but not Russian stations.

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Under the guise of promoting a free media market in countries like Ukraine Western taxpayers fund propaganda not only against other countries like Russia but also on behalf of one candidate in the country's political spectrum. Something illegal in the United States itself.Television is tremendously potent propaganda medium. But cruel economic reality may well prove stronger.

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As the economic model promoted by Viktor Yushchenko and his Western sponsors wallows in depression, Ukrainians may ask whether the Orange Revolution marked the rebirth of their country or the last gasp of ideologically-driven politicians. After all, for seven decades Kiev's political class followed the Kremlin's lead blindly. Under Yushchenko it was the White House which laid down the ideological path for Kiev to follow.

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The coming months will decide whether Ukrainians will finally break the shackles imposed by dogmatic models - Communist before 1991 and so-called capitalist since 2004. Electing politicians who put Ukrainians' rational economic interests ahead of ideology or foreign sponsors' geo-political ambitions will be a huge step forward for Ukraine's well-being. But will such politicians get access to Ukrainian media?

Get Your Hands Off Poland !

Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.

It is not only the radical journalist John Pilger who gets it right with regards Obama's failure to scrap the Missile Shield, something which even his foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had said should be indefinitely shelved.

As the Guardian put it in response to Russia's decision on the 27 January not to deploy missile on the Polish border from the enclave of Kaliningrad,

The missile defence shield was one of the most unilateral and reckless military ideas of the Bush presidency. The idea was never liked by the Democrats. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Polish-born and no admirer of Moscow, called it a system that did not work, against a missile that did not exist, for a Europe that did not want it. On pragmatic grounds, he said, Mr Obama should put the programme on the back-burner.

However, Brzezinski's actual line on the Missile Shield is mirrored by Obama's speech in Prague where he used the decision to 'proceed' with the Missile Shield as a way of co-opting Russia into not selling nuclear materials to Iran. As this report shows,

Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski believes if the US and Russia work together they would eliminate the need to install a defense shield in central Europe against the "Iranian threat."A former US national security adviser says the US-Russian “cooperation” on Iran would lead to the shelving of a defense shield plan in Europe.

In an interview with a Polish daily, President Jimmy Carter’s advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said pushing the “reset button” in Russia-US relations is likely to change the situation created by Iran’s nuclear activities.He added that if the US and Russia join forces to mount pressure on Iran it would reduce or even eliminate the need for Washington to deploy a missile shield in Central Europe.

Brzezinski was also on Czech TV on 3 February 2009, i.e over a month before Obama made his Prague Speech, claiming that,

'the U.S. missile defence shield is aimed against a threat that may be real in some ten years, and the Czech promoters of the U.S. radar base should listen to him.

According to this report, coming from Petr Uhl of the Daily Pravo

Brzezinski stated on a Sunday discussion programme that the shield is first of all to protect Western Europe which, however, does not ask for any such protection.....He says Brzezinski knowns Eastern Europe well as he originally comes from Poland andhe is respected by the new administration of Barack Obama.

So whilst one Pole who sees the mission of US global geostrategy as being the advancement of NATO power ineluctably into the areas vacated by the old Soviet Union there are other Poles who have stood up to this. Not enough prominent Poles have stood up to this messianic policy of upping the stakes in the quest to control the Eurasian Heartland.

The Missile Shield is a key part of that geostrategy if necessary: that is, if Iran is not amenable to regime change or colludes too closely with Russia and China.

To his credit, the Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman's, therefore, made a very timely political speech during his debut recital at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. He told the Americans to "Get your hands off my country", being both jeered and cheered, before he played Polish composer Karol Szymanowski's Variations on a Polish Theme.

The very question of whether the USA will build its Missile Shield is still very much in the air. If recent history is anything to go by then no doubt it will. For the USA's overarching geopolitical strategy is to gain dominance over Central Asia, prevent collusion between Russia, China and Iran. This is shared by both Democrats and Republicans.

The Missile Shield is one way of achieving this 'unilaterally', though it might be ostensibly acheived in other ways by winning over Russia first, getting it to co-operate in preventing Iran's nuclear programme and preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons that would enable it to have a more 'independent' foreign policy.

There are genuine dangers in nuclear proliferation but it would help if the USA stopped contributing towards that. Continuing the Missile Shield is a form of proliferation and so it needs to be unilaterally rejected by the USA. Not made conditional on whether Russia and Iran drop their 'regional' plans to prevent the USA gaining dominance over Central Asia.

The simple fact is that it has been US geostrategy that has been a main 'threat' to stability. There is no evidence that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon, though it's obfuscation with regards the IAEA inspectors requests certainly mean Iran does need to be contained by forceful diplomacy

There is no guarantee that the Missile Shield will not go ahead. One official has stated "We'll be evaluating the future of the program based on a number of factors ... whether it will work, whether it will be cost-effective, whether it will reduce the threat and whether that threat can be reduced though diplomacy with Russia and our NATO allies,"

Missing from that list was the public opinion in either of the two Central European states where the shield will be based. When it comes down to it, the Missile Shield will go ahead irrespective of what the majority of people living in Poland on the Czech Republic actually want.

Polish defence minister, Radek Sikorski, made that quite clear on BBC HardTalk when interviewed by Stephen Sackur where the exact threat was not even mentioned and Sikorski, in a somewhat round about way, tried to justify the Missile Shield as part of Poland's national defence interests as part of the alliance with 'the West' through NATO and the US.

'It's true there is no enthusiasm for it....military installations are rarely popular...If we held a referendum each time we wanted to send troops abroad we'd never send troops abroad because, as I say, in democracies we like to be left alone, we don't like risk and we don't like casualties and we don't like the expense....

But you know, military people have a saying-every country has an army, it's own or a foreign one and we in Poland certainly have experienced that one's own army and one's own allies are cheaper than foreign armies'.

That response has nothing to do with dealing with the specific issue at hand: how does the Missile Shield actually contribute to Poland's national security?

The answer, of course, is that it does not and only makes 'sense' if one claims that because having it draws Russia's ire then it is in Poland's interests to use the decision to host the shield, as well as sending Polish troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, to then get concessions from the USA with regards Patriot Missiles and the modernisation of the Polish military.

That still does not get around the fact that the Missile Shield does, in itself, in no way contribute to Poland's security. Sending troops to Afghanistan has no bearing on Poland's defence and can only be justified by the long term geopolitical aim, espoused by Brzezinski, of controlling Central Asia.

That has nothing to do with protecting Poland from some 'Russian threat' that Sikorski always seems to play on as if the Cold War had simply continued with the Communist spectre being replaced by sinister Russian Imperialism. If Afghanistan is primarily about exporting freedom and human rights its does not figure too highly on Sikorski's justifications for the Shield.

The Revolutionary Twit

This is Oleg Brega, the Moldovan film maker and journalist and one of the organisers of the 'Twitter Revolution', an attempt to brand the protests and resistance to the Communist Party's victory in the Moldovan elections as an idealistic and heroic venture of youth against 'totalitarianism'.

According to Amnesty International.

'The group of activists - consisting of Elena Zgardan, Natalia Morari, Artur Gurãu, Ion Tarna, Ghenadie and Oleg Brega, and others - intended to hold a "day of mourning" for the results of Sunday's parliamentary elections. They announced the vigil on social networking sites, by texting on mobile phones and by word of mouth'.

Now Brega does seem to have been on the receiving end of police harassment and was arrested on Wednesday April 8 and had his home and office searched on the suspicion he and his brother Ghanadie were part of an attempt to 'plot a coup' against the elected government.

Yet Brega works for Jurnal TV a pro-opposition station that has been ramping up allegations of the Communists stealing the election all week. Whatever impression Brega is meant to portray, he is not some selfless dissident.

Just the photogenic youthful face of some rather unsavoury far-right nationalists who through Brega have managed to try and manipulate the international media and the language of human rights in order to advocate a different brand of power politics.

A politics that has in the past ( before rebranding) violated human rights, preached hatred of Jewish-Bolshevism, lauded the WW2 Romanian dictator, called for all Russians to be deported and set packing in the early 1990s.

For what 'pro-democracy' activists like Brega et al mean when they refer to promoting democracy' against totalitarianism, is the eternally sinister and seamless Russian-cum-Neo-Soviet threat.

Any government that calls itself Communist just cannot be democratic by definition, even if it is voted for by the majority of people in Moldova. Democracy is only real democracy when 'pro-democracy' activists decide and not 'the people'.

That's why Brega claims in relation to the arrest of the protestors that the jackboot should really be on the other foot.

Brega opines,

"The cases concerning persons who are not convenient for the sitting regime are solved surprisingly fast, while true criminals are free," Mr. Brega said by telephone minutes before talking to prosecutors.

Well, the use of the words 'sitting regime' denote that Brega does not think the government has been elected. The words 'sitting regime' implies that it is illegitimate, an imposition through military power.

Moreover who are the 'true criminals' ?

Well, the government who fomented a protest against itself, of course.

There is something iffy about the way Brega just parrots the opposition conspiracy theory whilst posing as Western style tribune of youthful protest.

I'm a member of Hyde Park, which helped start the protests on Monday morning.But our group ended our involvement on Monday evening because it became clear that the protests were being hijacked by certain forces in order to make a spectacle for the benefit of the ruling party. At 8pm on Monday night, the first day of protests, certain people stayed behind in the central square and started committing illegal acts. I saw 20 people who looked and behaved like drug users. They were at least drunk, possibly on drugs. On Tuesday there were more, around 100, being very aggressive, hard to control, hard to talk to. We understood that the protests were going to be hijacked for other purposes, so our group withdrew. We did not participate in Tuesday's unrest. I believe that the ruling Communist Party provoked them.

Now what actual journalism has Brega carried out ? What research into claims the election was rigged has he carried out ? Nothing. He's just trying to build up a popular momentum of pressure to get rid of a government he just does not like. That's not journalism. It's propaganda.

Brega then dismisses Voronin's claim of Romanian involvement,

As for the president's claim that Romania played a role - it's not at all true. A lot of Moldovans travel to Romania because we feel like one nation, and a lot of Romanians live, work and study in Moldova. But I've seen no sign of Romanian involvement in the street protests.

So he has "seen" no sign of Romanian involvement. He just hasn't seen it. Yet he's totally sure that the Communists orchestrated the riots against their own electoral victory. He has just 'seen' that. He just knows it. Because the Opposition have claimed so.

Even so, beating up protestors is still not right-if it's true.

Yet whether the police are just 'victimising' and 'persecuting' them is an allegation that depends on whether they really were not plotting a coup or some violent event to overthrow a democratically elected regime.

So it's interesting was a bit of digging for the facts can do.

Not least as it turns out that the reason why Brega has advocated the idea of a conspiracy by the Communists to discredit the protests, by sending in agents provocateurs, is to divert attention away from his ethnic nationalist ideology.

All the posing as a 'young idealistic journalist' is plain nonsense. Its all window dressing to get Western support for extreme nationalists. It's a technique that successfully worked in Kosovo after all.

The fact is that that Brega regards the Communist Party as a 'sitting regime' is that he does not think Moldova ought to be a free and independent state at all. It has usurped power from the Romanian state whose incorporation he and the Romanian president support.

For what hasn't been mentioned in the press is that Brega's Hyde Park NGO movement is aligned with Romanian nationalists such as The Unionist Movement from Moldova (UMM).

When the Hyde Park Group had their radio broadcasting rights taken away in 2003 it was "a proof of Bolshevik tyranny against the freedom of expression" and then their website thundered,

Enclosing themselves by a circle of laws made by them for protecting their caste's interests, they think of themselves beyond any critic and threat with these laws those many and oppressed when they try to defend their legal rights, asking for a decent level of life, self-respect and national dignity, removal of the Russian yoke; Romanian people, that are the majority in the RM, ask for the Romanian nation and its historical legally owned territories reunifying. People also ask for respecting the hosting law by the arrived aliens

This view recieved the benediction of Dr Iacob Golovca, the president of the Association for the Liquidation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact's Consequences, who is secretary general of the UMM.

Here appears the joint declaration on Hyde Park's website,

The 23rd of August, 2003 The Anti-Pact Molotov-Ribbentrop NGO's Alliance Prof. Dr. in history Iacob Golovca. The President of the Civic Association for the Abolition of the Consequences of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Oleg Brega President of Hyde Park NGO

As both Brega and Golovca have been involved in stoking up mass nationalist demonstrations against the hated Communists, this would cast doubt on Brega's assertion that his twittering network only expected to organise 1000 demonstrators in Chisinau.

Estimates that contradict his co-twittering comrade Natalia Morari who told Amnesty International that "they expected no more than 300 young people to come and were amazed when so many joined them on Monday, including the leaders of all major opposition parties".

That's really an astounding coincidence. It can not been 'particularly amazing' before on previous demonstrations carried out in Front of tha National Palace to rally against the state control of one TV channel which has broadcast "50 years of lie".

The lies are those which fail to instil in people the secret terms on the Nazi-Soviet Pact that made Bessarabia a part of the USSR.

There is, of course, no mention of the support given by the Romanian dictator Antonescu to Hitler, the fact Bessarabia had only been part of Greater Romania for the years between 1918 and 1940 or that Moldovan supporters of it laud Antonescu.

Nor that the Romanian courts on 20th February 2007 rehabilitated the wartime dictator on the grounds that his joint invasion of the USSR did not constitute a "crime against peace" because Moldova belonged to it.

In fact both the Young Liberals and the the Youth Organization of the Liberal Party (PL) are pretty good at organising mass demos supporting Greater Romanian ideology. As this clipping from Moldova Azi shows they

....staged a flash-mob, on June 28 they called “a live chain of memory”, in front of the Moldovan Presidency, to commemorate the Soviet Union's occupation of Basarabia in 1940

Also most curious is this,

the manifestation was joined by Chisinau's general mayor and PL deputy president, Dorin Chirtoaca

Yes, the same Dirin Chirtoaca who has been making all these claims of "torture" and disappearances. The mayor is clearly involved in a power game and is connected to Hyde Park through these nationalist networks.

The Communist Party isn't forcing Communism or Russification on Moldovans. That's simply the propaganda of those who make the crude equation of the Soviet Union with Russia and that any political party that is called 'Communist' is thus 'objectively' pro-Russian no matter what it does.

The Liberal Party is led by Mihai Ghimpu, one of the key founders of the Moldovan Popular Front which after the dissolution of the Moldovan SSR in March 1990 called for immediate reunification with Romania, purging all non-Moldovans from government and cultural institutions.

It's curious that the "mediahelpmedia" website mentions not a Twitter Revolution but a "Flower Revolution". That harks back to the 'Bridge of Flowers' demonstration in May 1990 when these calls for an ethnically defined Greater Romania were first demanded.

Now Mirai Ghimpu is also no less than the uncle of Dirin Chirtoaca who has accused the Communists of fomenting riots amidst an otherwise peaceful protest. But the Liberal Party bears as much relation to liberalism as the Moldovan Communist party does to Communism.

The Liberal Party ( PL) is closer to Zhirinovsky's Russian party of the same name and the rebranding methods encouraged by supposedly independent NGO's like The Moldova Foundation have failed to dampen the underlying atavistic ethnic nationalism that motivates hatred of all things Russian.

That's where the Kosovo precedent comes in: by goading the state into repression the nationalists can then claim that US intervention must reverse the influence of the Communists and hence the Russians. The intemperate nature of the language points to very much an extreme nationalism.

The fake Oleg Brega is part of that ethnic nationalist network. When they talk about the "liquidation" of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact they mean the Soviet capture of Bessarabia in 1940 but not of Antonescu's subsequent recapture and incorporation of it back into Greater Romania.

The Opposition have written this hysterical Petition, ( Moldova: "Opposition & civil society ask international involvement" ).

We suppose that what happened in Chisinau on April 7 is a part of a plan of discrediting and eventually to exterminate from moral point of view the opposition and to move off the Republic of Moldova from the European vector and to establish a dictatorial regime.

Moreover, the Stephen Roth Institute has commented on the rabid anti-semitism of Mihai Ghimpu and others in the "Liberal" Party,

In 2006 the Romanian public TV channel TVR1 organized a TV-marathon entitled “Great Romanians of All Times,” in which viewers voted Ion Antonescu into third place in the list of “ten great Romanians.” Many of the above-mentioned Moldovan newspapers covered the event enthusiastically, stressing Antonescu’s importance for the Romanian nation. Asked to comment on the results of this television poll for Timpul, right-wing Moldovan politicians such as Vitalia Pavlicenco, leader of the recently established National Liberal Party of Moldova, and Mihai Ghimpu, leader of the Liberal Party and former activist of the Popular Front, all praised Antonescu’s actions during the war.

What these lunatics and anti-semites want is the removal immediately of all 'Russian troops from Moldova' by which they mean also the Transdniester which is de facto a sovereign state with 67% of its population non-Moldovan Slavs. They are itching to re-ignite the conflict with Russia.

After all, in the early 1990s Moldovan Popular Front agitation led to phrases like 'Let's Wash the Streets of Chisinau with Russian blood'.

Despite the attempts by the Moldova Foundation to try and tame this beast into a Western PR friendly opposition, their rapacious nature is still evident.

Now that none of this would not excuse any beatings meted out by the police but it would definitely cast doubts over whether these advocates of victimisation and reprisal on ethnic nationalist grounds can be trusted not to lie and exaggerate for political advantage.

Moreover, if the boot were on the other foot, the Moldovan right wing nationalists might be far more brutal in violating the human rights of ethnic minorities such as the Russian speakers as Brega's hysterical rhetoric about 'the Russian yoke', 'their caste's interests', etc etc.

The Twitter Revolution or Revolution of Twits

The protests in Moldova are already being branded as 'The Twitter Revolution' by the international media who tend to buy into the pseudo revolutionary kitsch and myth of People Power uprisings arising spontaneously against dour faced repressive Communist apparatchiks

The Communist Party was accused of stealing the election through fraud a vote rigging after the election on April 6 have them 50% of the vote. With rioting and police arrests of activists accused of attempting to stage a coup, the opposition is now talking about a Communist police state.

The reality is very different. The result of an election in any case has little to do with allegations of police brutality unless it could be proved that the Communists have deliberately singled out opponents for alleged "torture" as opposed to beatings carried out by the police on their own intiative.

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Election observers have concluded the Communist Party victory in the elections was fair. That basic fact has only been challenged by opposition parties like the 'Liberal Democrats' and 'Our Moldova' for the simple reason that the organisation of the protests has been funded by pro-US and pro-NATO NGOs.

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Unfortunately, the degeneration of the protest into a huge riot has proved embarrassing, with the Communists, led by Vladimir Voronin claiming it was fomented by the Romanians and the opposition claiming that the Communists organised agents provocateurs to discredit the protests.

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The opposition claims are absurd, as the Communists would have no need to try and cause a riot to defend an election they had won and were predicted to win.

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The most likely explanation for the riots is that the financial crisis and frustration at Moldova's failure to join the EU quickly has melded into a hatred for the Communists who are seen as the dead hand of the past preventing it from being as wealthy as neighbouring Romania.

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That feeling has been encouraged by those NGO's like USAID. As Daniel McAdams wrote on April 8 2009 on the Lew Rockwell blogsite,

According to a New York Times article, one of the leaders of the Twitter Revolution claimed she was able to get 15,000 people into the streets with six people, 10 minutes for brainstorming and decision-making, several hours of disseminating information through networks, Facebook, blogs, SMSs and e-mails. That is impressive.

In the same article we are told, correctly, that Moldova is among the poorest countries in Europe. The average monthly salary is approximately 2532 lei, which equals about US$230. Contrasted with the average US salary of approximately US$4,000 per month, this demonstrates the real poverty of Moldova.

Yet according to the website of one of the leading mobile networks operators in Moldova, that Twitter-friendly iPhone would set back a young Moldovan 6,599 lei, or the equivalent of about two and a half times his monthly salary. For an American that would be the equivalent of a US$10,000 iPhone. Not many kids would have one. Even basic high-speed internet access on a lesser instrument would set a young Moldovan back nearly 500 lei per month, or the equivalent of US$800 for an average American. How does this impoverished nation afford such luxuries?

So the disputed election is really about the frustration amongst young people in Moldova who want the sort of neoliberal economy that will deliver them the kind of advanced consumer technology promoted by the US funded NGOs in Chisinau.

A brief glance at the website of one of the Moldovan NGOs leading the effort to overthrow the elected Moldovan government, that of the Hyde Park Organization, reveals an interesting benefactor: at the bottom of the page, next to a seal of the United States, one can read that This website is hosted free of charge through the Internet Access Training Program (IATP). IATP is a program of the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs (ECA), US Department of State, funded under the Freedom Support Act (FSA).

Digging a bit further, one can see on the website of the US Agency for International Development that the United States government, through cut-out organizations like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, is funneling large sums of money to Moldova for programs with such fascinating titles as Strengthening Democratic Political Activism in Moldova (SPA). USAID boasts that this program is cultivating new political activists who can formulate and pursue concrete political objectives… No doubt.

Another program, titled the Internet Access and Training Program may hold a clue as to where all these Twitterers came from. According to the US government, this program provides local communities with free access to the Internet and to extensive training in all aspects of information technology.

The aim of regime change is present in the usual jargon of NGO's through the,

"Moldova Citizen Participation Program", whose goal is to build… "the capacity of citizens to create tangible and positive change in their own communities through civic activity and democratic practices…by providing training, mentoring, and funding for citizen-initiated projects and strengthening the capacity of NGOs and citizen groups to mobilize their community, advocate for change, and hold government accountable"

Many of these so-called 'People Power' revolutions that buy into this corporate speak able to appealto the young who resent the boredom of their lives in a largely poor and backwards agricultural society and the lack of Western consumer freedoms that the Communist Party seem to be not interested in.

For the Communists are supported by older Moldovans who have a decisive numerical advantage because many of the young have moved into Romania and Greece, both in the EU, for work and so the young remaining in Moldova believe that EU entry, NATO and friendship with the USA will constitute their economic salvation.

Unfortunately, dynamic, heroic and 'motivated' young Moldovans, being energised by the technological mass protest synergies of Twitter technology in spreading the message to protest, are simply a mathematical x in the geopolitical algebra of getting Moldova into NATO and allowing global corporations to but up Moldovan assets.

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The absurdity of this is that Voronin isn't even 'anti-Western': he is for eventual entry into the EU. The problem is that he only supports co-operation with NATO and not full membership in the way that thrusting and up and coming highly successful democracies like Albania do.

As in Ukraine in 2003 there is this curious situation whereby the nationalists are fighting for the independent right to sink their power in with 'the West', i.e NATO, through closer ties with Romania, where Moldova is supposed to belong ( though it hasn't since 1940 and older Moldovans don't really care much for reunification)

The Romanian president is also using the Moldova question in order to play the nationalist card which he hopes will stave off discontent that will come in the wake of the economic crisis. He also came to power by ramping up the accusations of fraud in the Nov 2004 election and is facing another election this year.

The other comparison with Moldova is with Georgia in the 2003 'Rose Revolution' where accusations of electoral fraud were used to get rid of Shevardnadze, an old time Communist relic who had been in the West's good books until he was seen to be making a diplomatic rapprochement towards Russia.

As McAdams points out,

'In 2003 Voronin was our democrat when he stuck it to Russia over the breakaway region of Transnistria, refusing to sign on to the Russian settlement plan. When Voronin later mended fences with Russia the long knives came out for him. In the words of one observer of the region, this current revolt is against the communists (Voronin) who were yesterday the democrats against the communists in Transnistria'.

Voronin is, just like Schevardnadze, a leader who is no longer valued now that Romania is in NATO. So he can be toppled by a choreographed coup dressed up as a popular defence of democracy. Its no more democratic than the rigged election in Georgia that gave Saakashvili some 97%.

Except that the Western observers are agreed that the election was fair.

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Something that still has not stopped some people seeing the stone throwing thugs and violent students trashing the Moldovan Parliament as wonderful idealistic fighters for democracy. Or believing that the twitterers are sterling democrats instead of NGO hirelings or US educated think-tank fanatics.

Why Ukraine should not be part of NATO.

Amidst the welter of pro-NATO propaganda it's difficult to find reasonable and informed commentators on Ukraine. Anatol Lieven is one exception.

Lieven is an ethical realist who has been deeply critical of the way Western politicians have demonstrated an ignorance of history and the political reality in potential accession states like Ukraine.

Unlike Central European nations, Ukraine has a more ambiguous relationship with Russia and the strong nationalists nationalists tend to be only from Western Ukraine, from the Hutsuls of the Carpathians to those in L'viv who look West because it has great tourist potential and would benefit from being in the EU. It has nowhere else to go.

Indeed, parts of Western Ukraine, esp Eastern Galicia, remain far poorer than the East of Ukraine where there is still a manufacturing industry, mining and lucrative trade links with Russia.

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Many in the Russophone East prefer maintaining good relations with Russia and see NATO entrance as pointless.

.

Here is Lieven's view from 'Don't Pick a Fight you can't Finish, Mr Miliband' ( The Times 26 April 2008.)

"On Ukraine, Mr Miliband should study carefully a range of reliable opinion polls showing that by a margin of about three to one, ordinary Ukrainian voters are opposed to Nato membership. This is not only because they want good relations with Russia, but because they fear being dragged into disastrous American wars in the Muslim world.

Even when it comes to the wider question of alignment with the West rather than Russia, the Ukrainian majority in favour of the Western line is slim - about 53 to 47 per cent to judge by the last Ukrainian presidential election. We should have learnt by now from the ghastly examples of Bosnia and elsewhere that a narrow numerical majority is simply not enough when existential national issues are at stake.

In other words, it is Nato's eastward drive, not Russian ambition, that is the greatest threat to Ukrainian stability and unity. A realistic British policy towards Ukraine should mean a genuine commitment to help it to develop economically, socially and politically in ways that will gradually draw it closer to the West and may one day make European Union membership possible. Under no circumstances should it mean plunging Ukraine into a disastrous crisis for the sake of a Nato alliance that cannot and will not defend it anyway".

The left wing journalist Neil Clark ( First Post 10 October 2008 ) has also drawn attention to the ethnic divisions and geopolitical angst that many Ukrainians feel at being pressurised by pro-Western politicians with a precarious democratic mandate seeking EU and NATO accession as imperative.

His rhetoric about a "Second Crimean War" is somewhat exaggerated but the general point that forcing NATO accession will polarise Ukraine and inflame ethnic tensions is important.

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Not least as the collapsing economy and the bankrupt government of the 'Orange Revolutionaries' is leading now in 2009 to protesters coming out on to the streets demanding its removal.

"When Khrushchev gave the Crimean peninsular to Ukraine in 1954 it was a pretty meaningless gesture given that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and under the Kremlin's control. But the majority of the two million people who live on the peninsula are ethnic Russians who were and remain loyal to Moscow, ­ unlike the majority of Ukrainians who were delighted to split from Russia in 1991 when the country became independent. I lose count of the number of Russian flags I saw flying in the streets of Sevastopol.

By contrast, the yellow and blue national colours of Ukraine were nowhere to be seen. Ukraine has been in political paralysis for the past month since the 'Our Ukraine' party of the country's pro-western president Viktor Yushchenko pulled out of the ruling coalition after the bloc led by Yushchenko's bitter rival, the photogenic prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, sided with the opposition pro-Moscow faction. This week Yuschenko dissolved parliament and called a general election for December 7. The stakes for the future of the Crimea could not be higher.

What is fuelling anti-Ukrainian and pro-separatist sentiments is the determination of Yushchenko to forge ahead with his plans for Nato membership. "The Americans and their puppet Yushchenko want Ukraine in Nato and the Russian Fleet to be booted out of Sevastopol," student Misha Lebedev told me in a cafe off the city's main 'Lenina' street . "But here the people will never allow that. If Ukraine joins Nato then Crimea will leave Ukraine. It's as simple as that. We are Russians and we will never accept that Russia is our enemy."

From Kiev, Yushchenko plays the wounded victim. "I am convinced, deeply convinced that the democratic coalition was ruined by one thing alone - human ambition," he said, pointing the finger of blame at Yulia Tymoshenko as he announced what will be the country's third general election in three years. "The ambition of one person. Thirst for power, different values, personal interests taking precedence over national interests." But nearly everyone I spoke to in Sevastopol was of the same mind: the West's desire to expand Nato to Russia's borders is seen as a blatant example of imperialist aggression ­ just as the British/French attack on Sevastopol was seen in 1854. "Nato is about encircling Russia. If they persist in this policy, there will be a war," warned pensioner Alexander Petrov. "The Russian fleet will never leave Sevastopol."

The best way to avoid a break-up of the Ukraine - and the very real prospect of war -would be for western hawks to accept that Ukraine, because of its internal divisions, will never be a suitable candidate for membership of Nato. But last month's hardline anti-Russian speech in Kiev by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband - in which he reiterated Nato's promise made in April this year that both Ukraine and Georgia would eventually join Nato - hardly augurs well.

On December 7 the dreams of the Nato expansionists may be dashed by the Ukrainian people themselves. Like the great pragmatist Yulia Tymoshenko, they may well decide that staying friends with Moscow is a more attractive alternative than a second Crimean War and vote accordingly"

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Mark Almond on Russia and Turkey,

Since Obama's visit to Turkey, there has been much written about its strategic importance as a bridge between East and West and it's rapprochement with the old historical enemy Russia. For centuries Russia and the Ottoman Empire were mortal enemies.

Now they are co-operating as regional powers in order to maximise their strategic location along the transit routes that link the oil and gas of the Middle East and Central Asia to the EU and the USA.

*

That's why Mark Almond and Norman Stone seem to be focusing so much on Turkey, though Almond has written more on Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Almond is always interesting because unlike the Political Projectors in EU think-tanks he has retained independent thought.

It's interesting that both Almond and Stone are now at Bilkent University in Ankara. Stone is Professor of International Relations whilst Almond is Visiting Associate Professor.

*

Both are involved in the British Helsinki Human Rights Group which exposes the hypocrisies of liberal 'humanitarian' imperialism which is often a fig leaf justification for petroleum realpolitik, money power, asset stripping, corporate globalisation.

The BHHRG was founded in 1992. It is run from the Oxford home of historian Professor Norman Stone, who has on occasion taken part in BHHRG activities, and was co-founded by his wife Christine Stone and fellow Oxford historian Mark Almond (who is also its chairman). Its trustees comprise Mark Almond, Anthony Daniels (who writes for the Daily Telegraph under the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple), John Laughland, Christine Stone and Mary Walsh.

Almond, Daniels, Laughland and Stone are members of Britain's conservative intelligentsia and are regular contributors to British newspapers.

( From Wikipedia )

As Almond has emphasised, the problem with think-tanks and organisations like the OSCE is that their 'experts' are there to find what they are required to in order to fulfil those 'democracy' and 'reform' checklists that fulfil the neoliberal Western business model's prescriptions.

One need only find out who is backing them by checking online in the 'About Us' Section to find that they are not independent academics-rather the Academicians or Political Projectors on Swift's floating fantasy island Lagado in Gulliver's Travels.

Such people have a habit of group think, of only seeing what they want to see in Eastern Europe. Trying to refit reality to fulfil social science textbook definitions. The same is true of Turkey which is regarded largely on the basis of how useful it is for 'us' in the EU.

The same is true of Ukraine, a pawn in a geopolitical chess game where democracy is regarded as nothing more than a way to coalition enough opinion to support either pro-Western or pr-Russian politicians who care only for serving themselves and their foreign backers.

Neoliberal and Atlanticist think-tanks ignore 'the people' as ends in themselves and regard them as nothing but a mathematical x in some political algebra in which the correct PR strategy and choreography can create a momentum for change in favour of Western geostrategy.

That is of controlling pipeline routes, gaining strategic advantage in the conflict to control the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. Nations like Turkey and Ukraine are thus regarded as parts of a 'Grand Chessboard' by geopoliticians.

The interests of people there are considered important only in so far as they fall in line with what 'the West' demands.

This power game is termed 'democratic geopolitics' in which the West backs the aspiration of the people to be free from corruption and authoritarianism of the elites.

The reality on the ground is very different for those who have travelled and lived in Eastern Europe or in the Caucusus or observed the gimcrack reality beneath the PR spin about the New Democracies.

That's clear from the debacle in Georgia in August 2008 and also from the way the EU has sententiously dealt with Turkey. The reality is that not all those interested parties in Turkey, any more than in Ukraine, are demanding to be part of the EU.

Mark Almond: Extract from 'Losing Turkey' 8 June 2008,

'The US and the EU are evidently convinced that Turkey has nowhere else to go. The Turks, they think, will fatalistically accept any snub. But this cozy assumption overlooks a tectonic shift in Turkey's geo-political position.

Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey looked to the newly-independent Central Asian states in a mood of pan-Turkic romanticism. These ancestral homelands exercised a hold on Turkish imaginations, but today it is business opportunities, energy resources, and other practical matters rather than ethnic unity that are creating a loose Turkic "commonwealth."

Most striking is Turkey's renewal of relations with Russia without damaging its ties to the newly independent post-Soviet states. Turkey's ancient antagonism toward Russia briefly revived when the Soviet Union imploded. In the early 1990s, some Turkish generals saw the humiliation of Russian troops in Chechnya as part of a long-awaited revenge.

But, while Russia (and Iran) were once Turkey's great geopolitical rivals, today they are export markets and energy suppliers. Energy is the key to Turkey's new geopolitical position. Its industry and population are growing dynamically, so its energy demands are producing geopolitical synergy with Russia and Iran, neither of which can afford to cut the flow of oil and gas without provoking a massive internal crisis.

Meanwhile, as Turkey's attitude toward its neighbours has changed, its governing elite has watched the EU embrace ex-communist countries with far shakier market economies and shorter democratic records. As one Turkish general put it, "If we had joined the Warsaw Pact rather than Nato, we would be in the EU by now."

Then again it might have been far poorer with dismal rates of economic growth and even greater levels of mass migration to Western Europe of the kind acheived by neoliberal 'shock therapy' and 'reforms' in Eastern Europe

Obama, the Missile Shield, and Russia.

"As long as the threat from Iran exists, we will go forward with a missile defence system"

Obama in his speech in Prague ( 5 April 2009 )

Obama must change the perception among developing countries that nuclear proliferation does not affect them.

Andrew Grotto, The Guardian ( 7 April 2009 )



Well, Obama can try but he won't succeed if he only wants to change the perception. Those who can see through propaganda couched in sententious language tend to understand that the reality is more important than manipulating the perception.

But, then again, one should not forget that Obama is there to convince craven liberals that the free world is going to be OK because the USA is powerful and 'Eastern' European states are not on their own with regards facing Big Bully in Russia or other 'rogue states'.

But beneath the political choreography, this fact is obvious.

Unless he changes the reality of the USA consistently upping the ante in the global arms race, by finding a a strategy through missile technology that will give it unchallengeable hegemony, he is going to be no different nor better than George Bush.

Under Bush, the USA has consistently sought to evade the terms of the ABM Treaty by developing counter-missile missiles that would negate the importance of nuclear weapons whilst giving the advantage to the offense. That's the way the USA works.

This is omitted by Andrew Grotto because , naturally, the USA is beyond the 'ideological struggles of the past'. As if the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Dick Cheney and Saakashvili's belligerence towards Russia and rhetoric of a 'New Cold War' was not 'ideological'.

Just as Tony Blair was 'beyond ideology' in the liberal fantasy world of all those uncritical Obamagasmic fawners and flatterers in the media and PR world. Such people crave salvation through believing in the USA because the facts are too stark to contemplate.

The facts are as follows.

The renewal of a Star Wars Program dating back to the time of Reagan in the 80s, through the so-called 'Missile Defense Shield', is part of a broader global strategy of offense, even if the term 'missile shield' suggests that the reality is otherwise.

The strategy is this; to advance US and NATO power into Central Asia by neutering Iran as a regional player through developing the technological means to make Russia's signatory to the treaty obsolete and making nuclear weapons possession irrelevant.

Under Reagan it was a Utopian strategy to end the Cold War. With the demise of the Soviet Union it has been renewed by neoconservative hawks as a means of ensuring a world in which the USA is the uncontested unipolar power.

That's why Iran is believed to be developing nuclear weapons because by all psychopathologically 'rational' accounts it should be if it wants to avoid the fate of Iraq. Not least, there is still no hard evidence that Iran has or is even close to developing nuclear weapons.

The IAEA did not find conclusive evidence that it had.

Now Obama in Prague has made the cancellation of the missile shield something that only may happen dependent upon what Iran does: yet the reason 'rogue states' like Iran might be developing nuclear technology is because its the minimum they can do to avoid being invaded.

The missile shield to be 'hosted' by Poland and Czech does not even guarantee that any such nuclear weapons as Iran might develop could even be intercepted: much of the push for it is because it's a 'pork barrel project' to keep the military-industrial complex going.

That naturally is accepted by neoconservative ideologues like the Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski ( he of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank that includes David Frum, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle etc ) who exploited the Russo-Georgian conflict to clinch the lucrative deal.

In the Catch 22 world of Radek Sikorski any reaction from Russia with regards the imminent downgrading of its Great Power status, through the missile shield or through allowing Saakashvili a free hand to shoot dead Russian peacekeeping troops in Georgia, can only be dealt with by proceeding ahead with the policies that make the missile shield 'necessary'.

For despite all the reassurances that the missile shield is not 'aimed at' Russia it does allow the USA to project its power in Central Asia along with a whole host of other expansionist moves that have been going on since the 1990s-including placing US military bases in ex-Soviet republics on a permanent basis to fight 'the War on Terror'.

The 'missile shield is ostensibly defensive: but having shield in one hand does not mean there is not a sword in the other. It is part of an offensive global strategy that aims to fulfil the prediction of British political geographer Sir Halford Mackinder who wrote in 1904 at the height of European imperial power,

'He who rules Eastern Europe commands the heartland.
He who rules the heartland commands the World Island.
He who rules the World Island commands the World'.

The missile shield is intended to prevent collusion between Russia, China and Iran that might thwart US ambitions to gain control over the oil and gas in Central Asia and to maintain unrivalled global dominance: it is the great gamble for it that has led the US to take such reckless moves in recent years, from the Iraq War to backing Saakashvili in Georgia.

So the missile shield is about securing US global dominance and for the EU keeping the oil coming at stable or falling prices needed to maintain its high levels of consumerism. It's not much to do with an attempt to secure lasting global security through mutual renunciation.

Indeed it's very unlikely in any case that that the missile shield could ensure security because 'rogue states' will be able to send up rockets into orbit with debris to pollute space and to negate the effectiveness of satellite based anti-missile defences.

Such facts make a farce of this absurd propaganda peddled by those like Grotto when he opines,

For the past eight years, many developing countries that oppose nuclear proliferation have nevertheless resisted key measures to strengthen the global non-proliferation regime. They regularly cited the Bush administration's stubborn adherence to an outdated nuclear weapons policy as the primary reason, arguing that it is inconsistent with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Well, the reason they have is because the Bush administration sought to use technological means to get around the ABM Treaty which would make more sense than adhering to the less effective NPT which has not applied to either the USA, the UK or Israel.

Such cynicism and power hunger was shown by the ex-British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon when he boasted about the possible use of low yield "bunker busting" bombs to attack 'rogue states'.

That kind of declaration only makes the use of nuclear weapons less unthinkable and increases the incentive for less powerful states to develop their own bombs. Not least when the US's conventional power is so overwhelming that it can impose itself on other nations at minimal cost.

The Centre for European Reform, Turkey and Russia.

The fact that he ( Obama ) is visiting Turkey as part of a European – not a Middle Eastern – tour shows where he thinks Turkey's future lies: in the EU. He expressed his support for Turkey's membership application, not once but twice: first at the EU summit in Prague at the weekend and then again during his speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday.

Facts always need interpretation as Katinka Barysch writing in the Guardian today quite obviously knows. For the CIA World Factbook terms both Russia and Turkey as 'transcontinental' powers' and so there is no more need to believe Turkey is more part of Europe than Russia.

Yet the crude propaganda which demands Turkey be put on track for EU membership, as though it were some 'historical inevitability' of the sort once held by Soviet Communists, is due to the fact that Katinka Barysch works for the Atlanticist 'think-tank' The Centre for European Reform.

It has on its advisory board people like Lord Robertson, he of the Project for the Successor Generation, a network funded by US billionaire Howard Pew of the Sun Oil Company, and like Lord Kerr who is Deputy Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell plc.

This think-tank has it as an aim to advance US interests in Europe, in particular the 'new' European states like Poland, and the Baltic Republics which conform more obediently to carrying out the US's geostrategic imperative of expanding NATO eastwards.

Turkey along with Ukraine and Azerbaijan are three of what Obama's foreign policy advisor Brzezinski terms the five essential global geopolitical pivots, control over which is essential if the USA is to form a successful Transatlantic bloc that will drive a wedge between Russia and Turkey and hence between Russia and Iran.

The ulitmate game plan is to control the Eurasian heartland and prevent collusion between Russia, China and Iran that would affect the West's control over the Middle East and thus control over the oil.

The threat of contructing the missile defence shield is also integral to this overarching global strategy, though Brzezinski is officially on record as having opposed it-at least in the way the neoconservatives of Bush were pushing for it no matter what Russia thought.

Even so, the underlying hostility towards Russia and how to 'handle' it stands out amidst the otherwise bland power jargon used on the CER's website whenever Russia is mentioned,

"The EU is concerned about Russia's autocratic tendencies, its use of energy resources for political purposes and its bullying of smaller neighbours"

"..the ability of Europe and the US to deliver on shared objectives is increasingly constrained by the influence of a rising China and a resurgent Russia".

Note the hypocrisy of singling Russia out for using energy for political purposes when it underlies the entire thrust of US geopolitical strategy in Central Asia, though the means to do that differs depending on who is in power in the USA.

For neoconservatives during Bush's presidency the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was primarily about achieving control of the globe's second largest reserves as a bargaining lever in dealing with a rapidly industrialising and energy hungry China.

Yet for Obama, who voted against the 2003 Iraq invasion, the better strategy is concentrating on the longer term use of soft power, the micromanaging of client states like Georgia, which are more 'European' and capable of pro-Western 'democratic reform', and bringing Turkey back onside after it rejected in the use of its bases for use against Saddam Hussein's state.

Russia is just the Bear to be contained and ultimately to be broken up into different states if it is ever to become a democracy that can be acceptable and manageable for the West. That's why Alexander Solzhenitsyn was correct to see NATO expansion as a form of 'encirclement'.

The hostility towards Russia is palpable not only in Barysch's anxiety that Turkey just might not see it wholly in its interests to become part of the EU and the repetition of the Big Lie that Russia started the war with Georgia and not that Georgia started it.

For Georgian and Ukrainian entrance into NATO is part of the same strategy of integrating geostrategic nations,whose transit routes for the oil of the Caspian and Middle East are considered a vital interest, permanently and irrevocably into the transnational structures of 'the West'.

Hence Barysch opines,

The irony is that the Turkish accession process is at risk of breaking down at exactly the time that Turkey's strategic importance to the EU is rising. Following Russia's war with Georgia last August, the Europeans are acutely aware that they ignore the smouldering conflicts of the Caucasus at their peril. Turkey is a vital country in this region.

There is no "irony". Twisting the documented facts to advance the geopolitical power agenda of the US led version of the EU ( hence the meaning of 'European reform' in the CER's title) is routine Orwellian practice worthy of the Ministry of Truth in 1984 in what is to be the new Oceania.

The hostility to Russia is clearly a result of the revival of 'Old' Europe in Germany and France engaging diplomatically with Russia again and opposing the expansion of NATO into places like the unstable Georgia, destabilised by neoliberal shock therapy and plunging living standards.

Not least when they are led by autocrats like Saakashvili who practice torture and promote racism towards minorities as well as being responsible for war crimes in shelling defenceless civilians with grad rockets and cluster bombs. But , of course, it just must be 'Russia's war'.

Moreover, as Mark Almond has written in The Times today,

Gone are the days when the EU could consider itself the only game in town. Applicants had to queue up and wait their turn at the Eurocrats' leisure. While President Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, discuss snubbing Turkey, the EU's leaders ignore the new geopolitics of Turkey's position between energy- poor Europe and energy-rich Russia, Central Asia and the Middle East. These latter countries are good customers, buying a lot of Turkish industrial goods

Officially, all Turkish parties still support EU entry, but in practice alternatives are under consideration - they are courting new customers in a crescent from Russia to the Gulf.

Turkey's national interest lurks below the surface. A key interest is access to oil and gas for Turkey's energy-hungry industries. This means Turks have already undergone an historical revolution in attitudes to the old enemy, Russia. As a group the EU is Turkey's biggest trading partner, but Russia is the most valuable single country.

Entrance of Turkey into the EU is all about circumventing Russia and isolating it just as is the support for Saakashvili's vote rigging corrupt regime.

Just as Georgia lies on the transit route for Caspian oil along the BTC pipeline, Turkey is the country through which the oil from Iraq (Kirkuk-Yumurtalik pipeline), Azerbaijan and Kazakstan (Baku-Ceyhan pipeline) and natural gas from Turkmenistan (Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline project), Azerbaijan (Sahdeniz project) and Iran is to be transported to Europe in the 21st century.

That gives Turkey a key strategic role that it need to not subordinate permanently to Western interests and ambitions.

For Turkey does not need NATO and the EU as states like Georgia and Ukraine are being led to believe. It is a regional player in its own right that need not regard itself as some supplicant tapping on the doors of the EU. It is quite possible that Turkey can turn elsewhere and remain independent.

For Turkey's economic growth is higher than most EU nations and has not been based on unsustainable debt booms of the kind promoted by the West that are now unravelling in the one time 'tiger economies' of the Baltics, in Hungary and in Ukraine as it teeters on the brink of total bankruptcy and political upheaval.

That makes a farce of Barysch's call to action on speed up Turkish accession to the EU as though it were a given if the EU says 'yes we can' to Turkish membership.

...rather than hitting back at Obama's remarks, European leaders should explain how they intend to achieve strategic objectives such as energy security and a stable neighbourhood while at the same time reneging on their pledge to negotiate with Turkey for full EU membership.

Well, Sarkozy and Merkel should proceed first by resolutely not following CER's advice, taking into account Russia's legitimate interests. So it should stop falsifying the facts and denying Georgia's aggression in South Ossetia in order to stampede ethnically divided nations like Ukraine and Georgia into the EU and NATO.

Poland 'needs' Cluster Bombs against Russia.

To it's great discredit Poland did not sign up to the Oslo Treaty banning cluster munitions last year when almost every other nation in Europe did-except, of course, Russia. The USA, predictably enough, did not sign it either.

There is nothing surprising in the refusal of Global Players like Russia and the USA but Poland is not a Great Power. On the face of it, there might seem nothing to lose by banning these indiscriminate and inhumane weapons.

So the Polish refusal has been rationalised in a number of curious ways. In an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza in September 2008. the Polish Defence Minister Bogdan Klich claimed he had not endorsed the Dublin Convention because,

'This isn't just a whim. We need those weapons to defend our territory. In fact, a debate has been going on about this type of munitions'.

How on earth cluster bombs are essential for 'defending' Poland and against whom is unclear from this statement. Whether he has in mind firing cluster munitions against Russia or Belarus or whether he thinks their use in mortar attacks in Afghanistan constitutes 'defence'.

Yet the callousness and stupidity of Poland's leading politicians doesn't stop there. The Stop Cluster Munitions coalition had a Ban Bus that went to Warsaw on November 15th which reports,

'An unwise comment by Polands Foreign Affairs Minister Mr. Radoslaw Sikorski, that he had survived a cluster bomb attack and it wasn't that bad, made it easy to get media attention. Stories about the campaign and the ban were run on TV and radio and in the press. The Ban Bus, CMC and ICBL team met with Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Mr. Przemyslaw Grudzinski. They reiterated their call on Poland to sign the CCM in Oslo and to ratify the Mine Ban Convention without further delay. The officials stated that Poland needs to keep landmines and cluster munitions just in case and that it would use them only in self-defense, on its own territory. Which was commented on by Branislav as pure MADNESS'.

Clearly, Radek Sikorski was either trying to be funny or else he doesn't give a fig about those who get blown up by unexploded cluster bombs.

After all, he is a member of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank for neoconservatives who believe fervently that the military industrial complex is good for the USA and for the liberation of the globe from the "Axis Of Evil".

Sikorski no doubt thinks the arms industry is good for Poland which is why he was so quick to sign the deal to build the missile shield following the propaganda campaign in Poland to portray Russia as the aggressor against Georgia in the conflict of August 2008.

War and weapons are always good business. Krasnik in Poland is a large producer of cluster bombs based in Kielce and sells the vast majority of its munitions to the Polish military. They account for 10% of sales to it, or more, according to Krasnik spokesman Dariusz Szlafka.

Chief of General Staff Gen Franciszek Gągor justified it to Gazeta Wyborcza thus,

'There are no humanitarian weapons.... 'Our munitions have inbuilt security features. If a missile doesn't explode, it will go into autodestruct mode after a specified period of time. So while this isn't a "humanitarian" weapon, it's a selective one. There's no possibility of it killing a person who happens upon an unexploded shell like this'.

There is something very Kafkaesque about the logic employed by Polish generals and politicians.
General Gagor states that there are 'no humanitarian weapons' as all are designed to kill.

Yet presumably not all are designed to kill indiscriminately and nobody could claim that, as with nuclear weapons, that their collective use would be so universally destructive as to ensure mutual deterrence.

However, to state that there are 'no humanitarian weapons' only to then go on to say with reference to a cluster bomb that 'whilst this isn't a humanitarian weapon' implies the underlying logic that some weapons might be more humanitarian than others. Which is alluded to by calling cluster bombs 'selective'.

Now it certainly is 'selective' for the many civilians who happen to come across them and get blown up or have limbs blown off. Obviously they won't get blown up if the bomblet has already 'gone into autodestruct' but he doesn't say what the 'specified time' is and if someone 'happens' on it before it will explode.

The claim that Poland needs cluster bombs as a defence against Russia is also absurd.

Firstly, Russia is just not going to invade Poland because Poland is already part of NATO and Article 5 states that any attack upon it would constitute a collective attack on all NATO members. So this argument is spurious.

Secondly, the only place where Polish troops have cluster munitions in practice has been in Afghanistan where they are equipped with mortars containing them. Afghanistan is not a war that has much to do with defending Poland from Russia.

Thirdly, the refusal to sign the convention is really also part of some petty nationalistic power game. Russia did not sign it, so Poland won't. Because we do not like Russia and Russia is our Eternal Enemy.

The malicious and petty Lilliputian desire of small people to stamp their feet and shake their little fists at the Russian Brobdingnag to bait it is one is no less vainglorious than Saakashvili in Geoegia is when thumbing his nose and ramping up the rhetoric at those nasty great Russians.

This was the reason last september just after the Russo-Georgian War for the doltish President Lech Kaczynski riding in a motorcade towards South Ossetia with Saakashvil only for it to be fired on by mysterious gunment alleged to have been Russian backed Ossetian militias.

It was an act of provocation, designed to boost Kaczynski's nationalist credentials at a time when the popularity of his PiS party is somewhat low and when millions of younger Poles have shown what they think of Poland's petty minded chauvinistic nationalism and bigotry by migrating.

More generally, Poland's elite see NATO as an organisation that can be used to settle a historical grudge match with Russia. By baiting the bear, they can then run back to the USA and the West who can lecture the 'big bully' about it's aggression.

As the Warsaw Business Journal Reports,

Poland has argued that it won't sign the treaty until the same is done by its neighbor Russia. Polish generals have also said that the country cannot afford to produce a different weapon that would be more precise. Among the supporters will include the majority of EU and NATO member states.

Essentially the Polish politicians and generals are just playing power games with Russia and are sulking that NATO did not take a tougher line line on Russia. For cluster bombs are no more orecise than the grad rockets fired by Georgia and Russia in the recent conflict.

Yet significantly it was Georgian forces who initiated hostilities when its forces killed 15 Russian peacekeepers and then proceeded to rain death and destruction down on Tskhinvali on the night of August 7 2008, killing 400 people as they slept.

Presumably, the Polish elites are thinking they need cluster bombs in the same way Georgia needs them.

Yet why the generals would need a weapon that was 'more precise' against a non-existent and purely theoretical invasion that would, if used, end up blowing up as many of their own citizens is curious.

It isn't as if Polish troops would ever be in a situation like Georgia unless they attacked Russia.

According to Amnesty and other rights groups like HRW,

... cluster bombs, which were deployed by both Georgia and Russia, resulting in numerous civilian casualties and the contamination of large areas of land with unexploded ordnance.

Giorgio Gogia of HRW said,

"Many of the [displaced farmers], after returning, could not collect their harvest because their fields were contaminated by clusters bombs posed by both Georgian and Russian troops".

The existence of unexploded cluster bombs is set this winter to compound the suffering of ordinary civilians as the cold winter in the Caucusus sets in. Perhaps this is what insane Polish generals and politicians mean by 'defence' and 'protecting' their civilian population.

What is shameful and hypocritical is that PM Tusk and others like Radek Sikorski were part of Solidarity which was officially committed to non-violence in trying to organise the transition from Soviet imposed Communism to democracy.

Now they refuse to sign a treaty that even Britain has signed and that would stop the killing and maiming of thousands upon thousands of civilians, men, women and children.

Mark Almond to give Lecture on Ukraine

If possible I intend to get down to Central London to see the following talk by Mark Almond on Ukraine.

The title is Mark Almond: Ukraine - What is the Significance of the Orange Revolution?
20 Apr 2009 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM and will be held at Cafe Diplo.

The advert on VisitLondon states,

Mark Almond discusses the significance of the Orange revolution five years on and the geopolitical importance of the Ukraine. The crisis over gas supplies has shown the importance of the Ukraine in relations between Russia and the west and it remains to be seen whether Ukraine will join Nato. Almond teaches at Oriel college, Oxford and has spent time in the Balkans and the former Soviet bloc. He is a frequent commentator in the media on current affairs in Eurasia and is writing a book on the colour-coded or people power revolutions.

I will wait with eagerness for Almond's book on People Power Revolutions, as almost everything else has been written by neoliberal propagandists like Askold Krusheknicky's pathetic An Orange Revolution : A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History.

Now that the consequences of Yushchenko's economic policies of debt fuelled consumerism have almost bankrupted Ukraine, it will be interesting to see how hard the demonstrators calling for the removal of the Orange Revolutionaries will get treated and how the Western media elite will portray them.

For if there is popular resistance to governments operating pro-Western neoliberal economic policies then they tend to be smeared as right wing fascists, as were those in 2006 protesting against Gyurscany's admission he had' lied morning, noon and night about the economy'.

The crackdown in Budapest involved ski masked policemen without ID numbers using tear gas, baton charges and beating up peaceful protestors who were supporting the nations main opposition part Fidesz and not the neo-Fascist Jobbik.

None of that, of course, compares with Saakashvili's recourse to live ammunition when dispersing protestors in Tblisi in 2007, something that media conscious liberals payed almost no attention to at all compared with the much filmed and commented upon Rose Revolution-all funded by Western NGO's.

Almond also is one of the few historians who mentions the reality of how Western interest in the gas and oil pipelines influences the coalitioning of political forces within nations like Ukraine and how democracy is manipulated and micromanaged by the West as much as it is by Russia.

The only people who are not really considered important are the Ukrainian voters themselves who have their hopes of a future Ukraine without the corrupt kleptocracy dashed : the Orange Revolution was led, after all, by Yulya Timoshenko, a woman who made a fortune buying up gas companies at a fraction of their real cost.

Others historians of Ukraine like Andrew Wilson tend to just dismiss all that because it does not fit in with the cosy and reassuring Colour Revolution narrative. Such seems to be the case not only in Ukraine but in Britain with New Labour and the USA with Obamamania.

As early as 2002, Almond seemed to sense the futility of 'Our Ukraine', the party that propelled Yushchenko into power during the Orange Revolution. Almond wrote this article for the New Stateman after visiting L'viv ( Eddie George Takes Over Ukraine ),

'A decade of economic reform has produced unemployment and poverty. Even in collapsed societies such as Georgia or Moldova, I had never seen people not only rummaging in dustbins, but putting valuable scraps of food from them directly into their mouths. I saw two women do that in central Lviv. As for the beggars, they were too numerous to count.

Everybody has relatives working abroad, usually illegally. Pathetic columns of locals pour across the nearby borders into Poland, Slovakia or Hungary to do menial work and peddle their wares, often their bodies, in countries that seem poor to western Europeans but are beacons of prosperity to Ukrainians. Children are left in the care of elderly relatives, and run riot in villages where the working-age population has been plunged into unemployment by the collapse of the sole, Soviet-era employer.

Yet in this region, the absolute majority of voters are supposed to have trooped to the polls to endorse the coalition "Our Ukraine", which is led by a 40-year-old, US-trained former central banker, Viktor Yushchenko, who embodies "shock therapy" Ukrainian-style. His chief ally, Yulia Tymoshenko, is the formidable former boss of a privatised energy concern.

It is as though the voters of Scotland's central belt had spurned the Labour Party to back a new party led by Eddie George and the chairman of Scottish Power. Yet Ilia Semenov, programme director at Radio Lux, a local station, says that Yushchenko is like a "messiah" to western Ukrainians, despite being an easterner by birth.

Nationalist sentiment dominated the rhetoric of the election campaign, but bread-and-butter concerns will dominate the agenda of the newly elected MPs, a finely balanced mix of likely Yushchenko supporters and communists.

A key factor in Yushchenko's popularity was that he is not President Leonid Kuchma.......

Yushchenko was not always against the president, whose impeachment for abuse of office he now demands. Kuchma was Yushchenko's patron and appointed him premier in December 1999, only to recognise him as a rival and remove him less than two years later.

Ukraine's western creditors and the International Monetary Fund were unusually enamoured of Yushchenko, and indulgently allowed him to relax fiscal discipline enough to pay off some back wages and pensions that had gone unpaid for years.

That populist step was the basis of any economic appeal, but his future programme aims to make Ukraine meet western standards - which means more cuts. Many of the European Union's demands on any Ukrainian government would spell further social crisis, especially in the west of the country.

The west has shown little sympathy for nationalism elsewhere in the post- communist world. And the opinions of some of Yushchenko's vocal supporters, such as the paramilitary Unso (Ukrainian National Self-Defence) group, would normally lead to ostracism: they call for veterans of the Waffen SS to receive pensions comparable to those for Soviet partisans.

If Yushchenko and his allies come out on top in the forthcoming battle to replace Kuchma and take control of the next round of privatisation, Yushchenko's more florid nationalist rhetoric will be forgotten - at least by him.

Once the power struggle over the presidency is resolved, Our Ukraine's electorate is likely to find that the hardships of the past decade of transition were just the beginning. Time will tell whether they were turkeys voting for Christmas, but on Easter Sunday, the city that gave birth to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch voted for more pain with little hope of economic gain.

As the scale of Ukraine's economic collapse in the wake of the 'credit crunch' shows, the neoliberal policies of Yushchenko were flawed from the beginning and will have a terrible impact on ordinary Ukrainians.