Sport and Politics: an Olympic history

Munich 1972 was the first Olympics I remember. Aged 8 I have hazy memories of Olga Korbut in the ring, Lasse Viren and Valery Borzov on the track, Mark Spitz in the pool and hooded men in the Village. The Palestinian involvement was an early indication to me the Olympics was about far more than just sport. Here in the middle of the Cold War, the US and USSR were once again battling for supremacy in Germany.   

Only six nations nations have topped the OIympic medal tally: USA (16), Soviet Union (7), China (1), Germany (1), France (1) and Britain (1). The US dominated most of the 20th century but the Russians beat them in 1956 and 1960. As the space race intensified, the US regained control in the 1960s.  By Munich it was the turn of the USSR to come out ahead again. I remember this strange thing called “East Germany” with their forbidding looking athletes running a very creditable third well ahead of their western rivals despite a population of just 16 million people to the West's 50 million plus. They would rub salt in fellow German wounds with another home soil victory in the World Cup two years later in the only time they would ever meet (the West lost that battle but won the war against the Dutch in the final). 

With the pride of communism on the line, the 70s and 80s were the glory era of East German sport. It was the German College for Physical Culture which produced with ruthless efficiency the coaches, trainers and sports medicine personnel responsible for East Germany's remarkable success. There was drugs and cheating there but there was also genuine success. The problem was, as 1980 Olympic 110-metre hurdles gold medallist Thomas Munkelt said, “we ran our sports by the performance principle, but not our economy."

The 1980 Olympics was East Germany’s first high water mark. It was also the year any doubt the Olympics wasn’t political was wiped out with the west’s boycott after Afghanistan. Without the US, the East Germans ran second to the Russians. The Russians got their own back and boycotted Los Angeles in 1984. They cited “security concerns, chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria whipped up in the United States” but no one was in any doubt it was tit-for-tat. 

Little brother East Germany wasn't there either but Ceausescu’s Romania was the one Communist Bloc that ignored Konstantin Chernenko’s directive and they finished second to the Americans. 1984 was notable for another reason. Five years earlier, the IOC decided to rename the Republic of China to Chinese Taipei. With Taiwan downgraded, China would not lose face by competing for the first time since 1952.  They finished a creditable fourth in their first outing.

The Seoul Olympics in 1988 was the first truly global Olympics. It was also the first since Montreal to feature the US and the Soviets. East Germany were there too and they forced the Americans into third place. Other eastern bloc countries in the top ten were Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. The Chinese dropped to 11^th.  But East Germany’s second high water mark was to mark a rapidly changing tide. 

The stunning collapse of Eastern bloc Communism meant the medal table in Barcelona looked radically different. The USSR was the last to go in 1991 so there was still a strong “Unified Team” consisting of 12 of the old 15 Soviet republics. They were still unified enough to win the most medals a year later. It would be the last time Moscow would finish in front. East Germany was gone and China was back up to fourth behind the united Germany. There was still an East German clone in Barcelona as one of the last of the Communist countries Cuba finished fifth.

There was further change in the New World Order of Atlanta 1996. On home soil, the Americans finally beat the Russians for the first time since 1968. China stayed fourth but cut the gap on Germany as they were doing in the real world. In Sydney, China beat Germany and got the same amount of medals as the hosts (58) but with 28 golds to Australia’s 16. At Athens, China went clear as number two to the Americans. They got fewer medals than the Russians but as they did in Sydney, they knew how to get gold.

In Beijing they did to the Americans what they did to the Russians four years before. The US had 110 medals to China’s 100 but it was 51-36 to the hosts in golds.  China’s remarkable powerhouse economic advance was on display in Beijing and the last four years have accelerated the trend. it will be no surprise, that even without home advantage, they get more medals and golds than anyone else in London.

Sure enough, they have won the first gold of the 2012 Olympics (though arguably that honour belongs to Specsavers). Top-ranked Yi Siling of China captured the first gold medal of the London Olympics in the women's 10-metre air rifle at Royal Artillery Barracks on Saturday. Another Chinese woman, Yu Dan won the bronze.  If the 21^st century is the Asian century, then the place to watch for proof will be the Olympic Medal tally. It won’t be too long before the likes of India and Indonesia become the new East Germany – but getting the economics right as well as the sport.

Have yourself a very Orthodox Christmas

Minus all the Western commercial hoopla of 25 December, 300 million members of the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrated its Christmas today. The day is celebrated on January 7 according to the old Julian calendar by the Russian, Serbian, Georgian and Jerusalem Orthodox Churches and Mount Athos monasteries commemorate the birth of Jesus 13 days after Western Christmas. Unlike the Catholic Church where the Pope in preeminent, there are 14 autocephalous churches in the Orthodox community, though the mother church is Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the “first among equals”. Photo: Orthodox priests lead a Christmas service at the Bosnian Orthodox Church in Sarajevo (Amel Emric / AP)

At the 1459 Council of Florence monks from the self-governing Mt Athos in Greece refused to let Catholic and Orthodox Churches in return for Western military help against the Turks. As a result Constantinople fell to the Ottomans but Orthodoxy survived doctrinally intact. In today’s Istanbul as in many places across southern and eastern Europe, Orthodox Christian worshippers plunged into chilly waters to retrieve crucifixes in ceremonies commemorating the baptism of Jesus. Hundreds from Istanbul's now tiny Greek Orthodox community and Greek tourists attended the Epiphany ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters. About 20 faithful leaped into the cold Golden Horn inlet to retrieve a wooden cross thrown by the spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. Apostolos Oikonomou, a 40-year-old Greek man, clinched the cross. "This year I was the lucky guy," he said. "I wish everybody peace and happy New Year."

Over 5,000 worshippers gathered at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ Our Saviour including outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his wife Svetlana. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called on the congregation to withstand the “cult of hasty lucre”. Archpriest Sergius Zvonarev of the Moscow Patriarchate said the day was both a solemn ritual and joyous celebration, Zvonarev said the Russian Orthodox Church remained loyal to the Julian calendar which regulated church life and traditions for centuries. “It reveres these traditions as the entire civilized world used to live by them in the past,” he said.

Orthodox Christians gathered in Bethlehem in front of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the Church of the Nativity. Barely days after a fight between various Christian sects over territorial rights in the church, the Mayor of Bethlehem Victor Batarseh said the theme of this year’s celebration was Palestine celebrates hope. “Our message in these days is love and peace to all especially in the Holy Land”, Batarseh said. Over 2,000 scouts from all over the West Bank held a parade through Bethlehem with their marching bands and bagpipes.

Many in Bethlehem say the best band is the Syriac Orthodox Scouts’ pipers. Bethlehem’s Syriac Orthodox community is proud to trace its roots to the ancient Aramean peoples and are among the few people left that speak the language of Jesus, Aramaic. The scouts were established in 1958 and became internationally successful in sports in the 60s and 70s. After the Oslo Accords, their pipers became President Yasser Arafat’s military band. One former band member said they were in Gaza playing the bagpipes for Arafat when the news of Rabin’s assassination was announced. “They thought it was a Palestinian who had killed him so they would not let us leave Gaza,” he said. Today they took centre stage in Manger Square.

In Egypt, Copts nervously celebrated the day as sectarian violence continued, the first Christmas in the post Hosni Mubarak era. US President Barack Obama used the occasion to call for the protection of Copts and other minorities. "I want to reaffirm the commitment of the US to work for the protection of Christian and other religious minorities around the world," he said. The call comes after the military rulers cracked down on a Coptic march in October. Coptic Pope Shenouda III commended Islamist leaders, who attended the Coptic Church service. "We all celebrate together as Egyptians,” Shenouda said.

Media miss the news in first Aussie Wikileak

Oblivious to the fact that one of the dreaded new media was providing the scoop, the Australian newspaper reported on its front page today the first Wikileaks document to mention Australian officials was “Rudd’s plan to contain Beijing”. It’s hardly surprising The Australian would go data-mining for the thing that would most embarrass the Federal Government. But it’s hardly surprising too they got it wrong.

In the haste to follow a narrow political agenda, the Oz skipped over far more substantive elements to the story. Not only that, they also misquoted Rudd. The first line of Paul Maley’s front page story said Rudd had warned the world "must be prepared to deploy force” if China didn’t co-operate with the international community.

Compare this to what the cable actually said:
Rudd argued for “multilateral engagement with bilateral vigour” - integrating China effectively into the international community and allowing it to demonstrate greater responsibility, all while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.

Suggesting the world has a Plan Z for China that involves force is a long way from advocating it and certainly doesn't make it “Rudd’s plan”. It wasn’t just The Australian that took this slanted approach. The ABC took a similar tack with the material saying it was Rudd's "suggestion that the US use force against China in a worst case scenario”.

It was nothing of the sort and a poor way of using what was remarkable information put out in the public domain. The ABC added insult to injury by turning it into a petty domestic squabble by harvesting a meaningless quote from Julie Bishop about “disturbing reading”. Don't read it Julie, if it disturbs you.

Beyond this dross, the reportage ignores some major issues discussed when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met Australian PM Kevin Rudd in Washington on 24 March 2009. Private Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and his army of Wikileaks helpers deserve praise for putting the material in the public domain nine years ahead of schedule. The cable about the meeting 09STATE30049 was marked “confidential” which is a mid-level security due to be released into the public domain in 2019.

The meeting talked about problems in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Russia, China was the biggest topic. Some of it was just polite platitudes with Rudd buttering up a valued friend but most of it was extremely useful and informative sharing of intel among allies.

Rudd told the Americans one possibility was the little-known philosophy of Kang Youwei which he said provided China’s idea of a harmonious world and could potentially fit in well with the West’s concept of responsible stakeholders. He also said Hu Jintao did not have the same level of power as former leader Jiang Zemin.
“No one person dominated Chinese leadership currently, although Hu’s likely replacement, Xi Jinping, had family ties to the military and might be able to rise above his colleagues,” Rudd told Clinton.

He also noticed an important distinction between China’s attitude to Taiwan and Tibet. With the former it was purely “sub-rational and deeply emotional” (because China has no intention of disturbing the status quo on Taiwan) while the more concrete hardline policies against the latter were designed not only to show who was boss in Llasa but to send a message to other minorities within mainland China.

Rudd also told Clinton the Standing Committee of the Politburo was the real decision-making body in China which then passed decisions to the State Council for implementation. He saw the new Asia Pacific Community initiative as a bulwark against any Chinese plans to issue an Asian Monroe Doctrine, but understood American reluctance to get involved in another international initiative. Rudd did say the 2009 Australian Defence White Paper was a response to Chinese power, something most people assumed but he could never admit publicly at the time.

In return for this information, Rudd wanted Washington’s intelligence on Russia so he could prepare for an upcoming meeting in Moscow. Conversation centred on the power struggle between Medvedev and Putin with both sides agreeing the President’s desire for “status and respect” could drive him closer to western thinking. But it was an outside chance.

On the AfPak situation, both parties agreed there was no point in “total success” in Afghanistan if Pakistan fell apart. Pakistan needed to drop its obsessive focus on India and attend to its western border problems.

What comes across in the cables I have read is not so much the “brutality and venality of US foreign policy” as its growing impotence. This is the reason the US is after Assange. It is the embarrassment he has caused them rather than the exposing of any international secrets that angers them so much.

The one phrase that sums up the problem was uttered by Hillary Clinton to Rudd in relation to China: “how do you deal toughly with your banker?” A damn good question and given China is our banker too, one Australian media should be asking. “Rudd’s embarrassment” has nothing on our media’s for missing the real news.

Red Cross say Kyrgyzstan situation is "an immense crisis"

The International Committee of the Red Cross say at least 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes as a result of the crisis in southern Kyrgyzstan. An ICRC team which arrived in the remote area yesterday said Uzbek authorities have registered 75,000 adult refugees and an unknown number of children in Uzbekistan while tens of thousands remain stranded on the Kyrgyz side of the border. "We've seen for ourselves and also heard about pockets of displaced people ranging from several hundred to several thousand in number, so it's impossible to say with any certainty exactly how many people have been forced to flee their homes,” said Séverine Chappaz, the ICRC's deputy head of mission in Kyrgyzstan. “It's an immense crisis."

ICRC staff visited the main detention centre in Kyrgyzstan’s second biggest city Osh where they delivered food provided by the World Food Programme to around 1,000 detainees. It was part of an emergency WFP operation to deliver food to 13,000 people affected by the humanitarian crisis. WFP said transporting aid from the capital Bishkek was difficult, as roads are not safe and commercial trucking companies are reluctant to risk their vehicles. “This crisis is unfolding rapidly and WFP is mobilising its global expertise to ensure that the vulnerable – particularly women and children – do not suffer,” said WFP’s Executive Director Josette Sheeran. “We implore all sides to ensure humanitarian access to the vulnerable, trapped by the crisis.”

Officially almost 200 people have died in that crisis though the real death toll is likely to be much higher. Osh, the stronghold of former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has been the epicentre of violence between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbek people for a week, though the roots of the violence date back a couple of months. Bakiyev was ousted from government in April in a coup that left 75 dead and hundreds injured in fighting between police and protesters. Ex-Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva said the opposition had taken over the reins of government and driven Bakiyev from office. Otunbeyeva was subsequently installed as interim leader.

However Bakiyev refused to accept the coup despite having lost the support of his Kremlin backers. He was first elected president in 2005 and re-elected in 2009 though there was a strong suspicion of electoral fraud in both elections. After the coup Bakiyev initially fled to Osh before eventually going to Kazakhstan. Bakiyev remained popular in the south of the country and it is not difficult to imagine his supporters being behind some of the violence that erupted spectacularly last week. The new Kyrgyz government was quick to blame Bakiyev for the violence. It said he hired "provocateurs" to instigate the deadly riots and they complained of a lack of international support, saying: "We were left alone with the enemy in the most difficult days."

However Kyrgyzstan’s most difficult days were not entirely Bakiyev’s fault. Clashes erupted on 11 June with the large Uzbek population of the city targeted by gangs. It soon spiralled out of control with possibly a thousand people dying in the clashes. It is not entirely clear who is driving the violence but it is tapping into ancient enmities. Ethnic Uzbeks make up 14 per cent of the country's population of 5.3 million but are almost half the population of Osh and neighbouring Jalal-Abad. In echoes of ethnic conflicts elsewhere, they are also a target being overly represented in the commercial class. Ex-pat Craig Murray in the British Telegraph suggests the violence may have been orchestrated by Moscow to undermine the overly Liberal Otunbeyeva regime.

The Kyrgyz administration has declared a state of emergency in the Osh and Jalal-Abad provinces and the next most important date for the interim regime is 27 June. On that date there will be a constitutional referendum to pave the way for parliamentary elections in October. The new leadership is determined to hold the vote, which it needs in order to entrench its legality. "The situation in Osh is stabilising. We have enough forces," said Azimbek Beknazarov, an interim deputy premier. “We need this [referendum] like air. Everyone who calls themselves a Kyrgyz citizen must vote."

Russian and Polish leaders commemorate 70th anniversary of Katyn Massacre

The Russian and Polish Prime Ministers attended a memorial service yesterday to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre near the modern-day Russian city of Smolensk. Polish PM Donald Tusk accompanied Vladimir Putin to a memorial at the site where 4,500 Polish prisoners of war were killed by Soviet security forces during World War II. Putin admitted the Soviets told cynical lies for 50 years about what happened at Katyn while Tusk urged Putin to ensure all Soviet-era archives related to the massacre are open to researchers. It was the first time leaders of both countries attended the service. (photo: Reuters)

The massacre remains a deeply troubling event for Polish-Russian relations. In 1940 Poland had temporarily ceased to exist (not for the first time) as the Nazis and the Soviets carved it up under the terms of their Non-Aggression Pact. The NKVD interned about 125,000 Polish prisoners of which 40,000 were still in their hands in early 1940 and these were held at various camps across the west of the Soviet Union. The internees underwent a lengthy interrogation to weed out those who had no Communist sympathies.

On 5 March 1940 Stalin’s head of the NKVD secret police (which would eventually become the KGB after Stalin’s death) Lavrentiy Beria wrote a letter to his boss. The letter stated a large number of former officers of the Polish Army, Police, political groups and intelligence services were held in NKVD prisoner-of-war camps in Ukraine and Belarus. They were all, he wrote, “sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system.” Beria accused them of counter-revolutionary activities and “anti-Soviet agitation”. He urged 25,000 of them be tried before special tribunals and be applied the “supreme penalty: shooting”.

Stalin was one of six other Politburo leaders who signed off on Beria’s letter. The 25,000 on Beria’s list were deemed enemies of the state. Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. If Poland ever became independent again, its leaders would not forgive the Soviets for their treachery in attacking in unison with the Nazis. The obvious solution in his eyes was to eliminate those leaders. The three main camps where they were held were Kolezsk, Starobielsk and Ostashtov. Kolezsk camp housed about 5,000 Polish military officers and was close to Katyn Forest, about 20km from the city of Smolensk. Between April and May 1940, the NKVD transferred about 4,500 prisoners to the forest to be executed one by one, all under the cover of darkness. Similar numbers died at the two other camps and more still died in Belarus and Ukraine. The final death toll was in excess of 22,000.

What made Katyn special was that it was found out. Polish workers found mass graves there as early as 1942 but no one would believe their claims. The official Russian story (now that they had switched sides after the German Barbarossa invasion) was that Polish officers were released in the east and went missing in Manchuria. In April 1943, retreating Wehrmacht soldiers found a mass grave at Katyn and Goebbels used it as a propaganda weapon to sow discord between the USSR and Poland. It very nearly worked with Free Polish leader General Sikorski threatening to break off the alliance. His unexplained death two months later proved very convenient for Stalin.

When the Russians re-took Katyn they destroyed the cemetery Polish Red Cross had put in place. They held a commission which whitewashed the incident and blamed the Nazies. With bigger fish to fry, the Western Alliance overlooked the matter and resisted internal pressure to investigate the matter further. The Russians tried to include it as a German war crime in the Nuremburg trials but had to drop it due to lack of evidence. In Communist Poland it was dangerous to mention Katyn, but that very danger meant the memory remained cherished through the years. As the Warsaw Pact collapsed in 1989, Russian scholars admitted the truth about Katyn and a year later President Gorbachev finally publicly stated the NKVD had executed the Poles, and confirmed there were two other burial sites similar to the one at Katyn.

In his speech yesterday at Katyn, Putin firmly put the blame on the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime. This is part of Putin’s agenda to placate the Poles. Last August Putin praised Polish soldiers and citizens for their bravery in resisting the Nazis at an anniversary ceremony in Poland observing the start of World War II. Russia has also invited Poland to take part in the WWII Victory Day parade on Red Square this year for the first time. And last week, a Kremlin-run television channel showed “Katyn,” an Oscar-nominated film by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda which had screened only a few times in Russia. With Poland encouraging the US to host its missile shield, it is likely all be part of a grand Faustian bargain. But for now we may enjoy a rare Putin truth while it lasts.

UPDATE Saturday, 10 April.
The anniversary ceremony has been completely overshadowed by the shocking plane crash which killed the Polish president and many of the country's elite on the way to Katyn.

Moscow bombings: Putin and Medvedev have only themselves to blame

Russian authorities have blamed North Caucasus separatists for yesterday’s Moscow underground attacks without releasing a shred of evidence in support or any claims of responsibility. The death toll in the Lubyanka and Park Kultury metro station bombings rose to 39 today after a young woman died in hospital. 71 others remain in hospital, five critically injured. Russian Intelligence services say the bombs were planted by two women wearing belts packed with the explosive hexogen and metal shrapnel. It was FSB boss Alexander Bortnikov who said those responsible had links to the North Caucasus but he offered no supporting evidence of his charge.

Meanwhile Russia’s tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee leaders Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin tried to outdo each other in fatuous condemnation without either making any effort to apply wisdom to the situation. Medvedev said “they were simply beasts” without really saying who these beasts were. But whoever “they” were, Medvedev went on to make the ludicrous claim “I don’t have the slightest doubt: we will find and wipe out all of them.” Putin was no better, apparently blaming the attack on dogs or horses when he said those responsible for the attacks would be “destroyed”.

The fact is the Russian government is sowing what it reaped with these and other so-called terrorist bombings in recent years. After the Russian annihilation of Chechen separatists in the 1990s, the opposition has turned to a more extremist Muslim leadership with Saudi Wahhabist leanings despite the fact that most people in the area have peaceable Sufi leanings. The extremists want to declare a Caucasus Emirate and have killed 5,000 people since 2002 in their jihad against Moscow.

The Guardian said the two latest targets appeared to have been carefully chosen to represent a symbolic attack on Russia’s government. The first bomb went off opposite the headquarters of Russia’s FSB anti-terrorism intelligence agency at Lubyanka in the city centre. They say the second bomb may have been intended for Oktyabrskaya station, next to Russia’s interior ministry in the city’s south west.

However it is not beyond the realm of possibilities these may have been false flag operations. The FSB has form in this department. In the Russian apartment bombings of 1999 which led directly to the Second Chechen War, the failed attack on the building in the city of Ryazan was carried out by FSB operatives who were arrested by police. A hugely embarrassed then FSB director Nikolai Patrushev laughed off the incident as a “training exercise”. Those in Grozny did not see the funny side of it as 50,000 civilians were killed in the massive military assault.

Chechnya has had peace of a sort since then but it is a Russian imposed peace and a low-level insurgency continues. And as the Guardian’s Tom Parfitt said last year, Chechnya’s peace is based on murder. Its Kremlin backed government is run by a 33-year-old thug named Ramzan Kadyrov who was appointed by Vladimir Putin. Kadyrov brooks no dissent in his fiefdom, and his soldiers have repeatedly been accused of torture, kidnappings and extra-judicial killings. He has killed off his political and media opponents while Moscow has turned a blind eye. As Parfitt notes Russia has signed “a Faustian pact with [Kadyrov] to quell insurrection and stop terrorist attacks reaching the Russian heartland, in exchange for wide autonomy on his home turf.”

But that is proving an elusive goal. Chechens are still succeeding in bringing the war to Russia’s own turf. The two suspected suicide bombers are part of what the media loves to dub “black widows”. These were women who lost husbands or brothers to the Russian war and who made a spectacular leap into public consciousness during the Moscow theatre siege “dressed in black chadors, their waists and chests adorned with bombs”.

But while the bombs might be hidden behind chadors, the war of ideas is hidden by the bombastic rhetoric of Putin and Medvedev. Their naked greed and imperialism is taking Russian into a dangerous and almost fascistic phase. They have plundered the country’s wealth, killed with impugnity and destroyed the hopes of democracy inherited from the work of Mikhail Gorbachev. They are the real murderers, the “beasts” which should be “destroyed”.

Yanukovich and Tymoshenko to run-off for Ukraine president

Ukraine’s pro-western president Viktor Yushchenko has been defeated in the presidential election leaving opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to compete in a run-off ballot. Yanukovich led in first round of voting with 36.6 percent of the vote, while Tymoshenko picked up 25.8 percent, according to an exit poll conducted by local television channel Inter. The incumbent got only 5.2 percent leaving him in fifth place behind Sergei Tigipko, a former economy minister, who gained 13.5 percent. About two thirds of Ukraine’s voters turned out to vote. It will be ten days before the Central Election Commission releases official results but there is no doubt who will be in the run-off on 7 February.

Viktor Yushchenko’s crushing defeat was not unexpected after period of legislative deadlock, lagging reforms and economic doldrums. But it represents an end to the Orange Revolution which began in the last presidential election in 2004 when he was poisoned with dioxin. Both Yanukovich and Tymoshenko have signaled a return to pro-Russian politics. Both run-off candidates have also said they will abandon efforts for Ukraine to join NATO.

Russia remains the truculent big brother to which any winner will need to answer to. They curbed natural-gas deliveries to Ukraine three times in the last five years, withheld a new ambassador to Kiev and accused Yushchenko of supplying arms to Georgia during the war with Russia in August 2008. Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, called the first round result a “win-win situation” for his country. “Whoever becomes the next president will be much less ideological and more businesslike,” he claimed.

At first glance Yulia Tymoshenko does not seem like a natural Russian ally as a close confederate of Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution. Like Yushchenko her power base is in the west of the country. Her election priorities were a fairer society and more government efficiency, and she also pledged innovation-driven economic reform and better welfare provisions. But she has forged a close relationship with Vladimir Putin who personally negotiated an end to last year’s gas cut with her.

Apparently believing herself to be the reincarnation of Eva Peron, Tymoshenko claimed her biggest success during her two year tenure as Prime Minister was leading Ukraine out of financial crisis. She told Ukrainian TV last week the country has come out of the GFC “stronger, not shattered, not in pieces, not devoid of blood, or lost," She said her government had renewed the aviation industry, built a new hydroelectric station, and led the way with agriculture production. “[We] managed to reach leading positions in the agrarian sector in the world...[and] did not let the agrarian sector to drop its production even half a percent,” she said. “We are building what is needed for the Euro 2012.We modernized factories. Yes, it was difficult, but during a crisis, things are difficult."

But despite Tymoshenko’s rhetoric, Viktor Yanukovich remains the favourite to become the next president. He is a two time prime minister taking the role first from 2002-2004. This was the springboard to the presidential campaign of 2004 in which he was backed by Russia and early results gave him a victory. His win was then thrown out by the courts after street protests and he was condemned for fraud and abuse of power. But Yanukovich wasn’t finished as a political force. He bounced back two years later to regain the Prime Ministership in 2006 and is now is benefiting from disappointment with Yushchenko's failure to stop bickering with his supposed allies including Tymoshenko.

Yanukovich draws most of his support from the Russian-speaking areas of the industrial east and the south. He has promised an economic revival, new jobs, pay raises, judicial reforms and tax-free policies for small enterprises for five years. Yanukovich is a Russian speaker with only halting ability in Ukrainian. But he is no longer the Russian lapdog he was five years ago. Since 2004 Ukraine has effectively created a distinct new national consciousness by banning Russian on national television and in university entrance exams.

The runoff election will be tight and the role of third placed Sergei Tigipko will be vital. As well as being an economic minister, Tigipko was a central banker and a former adviser to both Yanukovych and Tymoshenko. Though officially staying neutral for now, he has in the past expressed interest in working as prime minister under either. He will probably be able to name his price to guarantee either candidate victory.

Non-Proliferation report calls for 90 percent reduction in nuclear weapons

The International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament used today’s meeting of the Japanese and Australian Prime Ministers to release a report asking the US and Russia to drastically reduce their nuclear arsenal. The report calls for the two biggest nuclear powers to reduce the number of warheads from 22,000 to 500 each by 2025. Australian and Japanese Commission Co-Chairs, Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, presented the report to Kevin Rudd and Yukio Hatoyama at a ceremony at the Japanese Prime Minister’s residence. Former Australian foreign minister Evans said the report set a target date of 15 years “to achieve a dramatic 90 per cent reduction in the world’s nuclear weapons.” (photo of Titan Nuclear Missile Museum, Tucson, Arizona by jmuhles)

The 230-page report entitled “Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers” (see synopsis) says its finding are timely for four reasons. Firstly it says nuclear weapons are most inhumane weapons ever conceived and as serious a problem as global warming. Secondly it is sheer dumb luck they have not been used since 1945 and as long as any state has nuclear weapons others will want them. Thirdly, the status quo increases the possibility of nuclear weapon falling into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist groups. Lastly, there is a new opportunity presented by new US and Russian leadership “committed to disarmament action”.

The report concentrates on the US and Russia as together they own 96 percent of the world’s 23,000 nuclear weapons. The remaining 1,000 are owned by France, UK, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. Iran and North Korea may also have the technology. Half of all warheads are deployed and the two major powers have 2,000 weapons ready to deploy with a decision window to launch of five to ten minutes. The possibility of nuclear terrorism or a “dirty bomb” combing conventional explosives and radioactive isotopes can also not be discounted.

The report endorses the use of civilian nuclear energy as proven method of providing base load power without carbon emissions but says its likely expansion in the coming decades will present proliferation and security risks. The dangers will be exacerbated if accompanied by enrichment facilities at the front end of the process and reprocessing at the back end. The result could be “a great deal more fissile material becoming potentially available for destructive purposes”.

The key to success, says the report, is delegitimizing nuclear weapons as something marginal and unnecessary to national security. The authors prefer a phased approach to getting to zero nuclear weapons admitting it would be a ‘long, complex and formidably difficult process”. The short term goal to 2025 is to reduce warheads to 10 percent of current levels with agreed “no first use” doctrines among all players. The report was unable to specify a timeframe for complete elimination but argued “analysis and debate” on the matter should commence immediately.

The key policies from the document are: Next year’s Non-Proliferation Treaty review should agree on a new 20-point consensus for action replacing 2000’s “Thirteen Practical Steps”; the US and Russia should reduce their combined arsenal to 1,000 warheads and no other nation should increase its arsenal; all states should have a “no first use doctrine”; reduce the instant usage of warheads; Conventional weapons imbalances may need to be addressed; all countries (including the US) should ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban treaty immediately; and all nuclear-armed states should stop the production of fissile material for weapons production.

The report said the non proliferation efforts also needed to be beefed up. Key policies included: application of the IAEA Additional Protocol; IAEA compliance to concentrate on technical matters and stay out of politics; the UN Security Council should regard withdrawal from the NPT as a punishable threat to peace; and the IAEA should make full use of its powers. The report also acknowledged that that the three non-NPT states Israel, India and Pakistan are not likely to become members soon and they should be encouraged to participate in “parallel instruments and arrangements” to meet similar obligations to the NPT countries.

It also looked at the threat of terrorism. It recommended the adoption of the 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material which insists on greater information sharing between nuclear powers. It also urged a Code of Conduct for safety of radioactive sources to control “dirty bomb” material and supported the emerging science of nuclear forensics. The report supported civilian nuclear power and called for assistance to extend it to developing nations. It called for new technologies for spent fuel treatment, increased plutonium recycle and spent fuel take-back by suppliers (including Australia) to reduce accumulations in a large number of countries. It strongly supported spreading the fuel cycle process across nations to build global confidence and aid verification of sensitive fuel cycle activities.

Evans and Kawaguchi acknowledged the political difficulties of doing something that was difficult, sensitive and expensive. They said it needed leadership to prevent inertia, knowledge of the magnitude of the problem, confidence in the strategy moving forward, and having an international process to back it up. All will be difficult to achieve. While it was no surprise that non-nuclear nations Japan and Australia welcomed the report, the US and Russia were ominously silent. Getting the two major powers to see its sense will be a herculean task for the coming years. Nevertheless the report is welcome as a road-map, however optimistic, of how to get to a future without nuclear weapons. It is an important vision as nuclear weapons remain a deep and dangerous threat the world has taken too much for granted since the end of the Cold War.

EU report hammers Russia and Georgia over South Ossetian war

A new report has blamed both sides for the war between Russia and Georgia last year over the breakaway province of South Ossetia. 800 people died, several thousand others were wounded and 100,000 people became refugees in the conflict. The report of the war in the Caucuses last year was commissioned by the Council of the European Union using 30 European military, legal and history experts. Sadly, it says, the fighting did not end the political conflict nor were any of the issues that lay beneath it resolved (photo of Russian-Georgian border by opendemocracy).

The report was the result of an independent EU fact finding mission undertaken three months after the war. Its terms of reference were to investigate the origins of the conflict particularly in regard to issues of international law, humanitarian law and human rights. The inquiry is the first of its kind under the auspices of the EU and was conducted by a core team of three led by Swiss Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini.

The conflict has deep roots in the region with a long history of hostility and suspicion between the different national traditions of the area. Soviet federalism hid the hatred for 70 years but the chaos that followed the break-up of the USSR added to the mistrust. Georgia grew in assertiveness after the Rose Revolution of 2003 displaced the rule of former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze Meanwhile Russia held a policy of a privileged “near abroad” where it did not easily accept events deemed detrimental to its interests.

International peacekeepers had patrolled the troubled autonomous provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia since the mid 1990s but a general lack of interest prevented these forces from being effective. Georgia inherited the two provinces as part of the old Soviet republic of Georgia but both felt alienated by nationalism in the new independent country.

In 2004 the newly elected Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili requested to join NATO while increasing military spending from 1 percent of GDP to eight. The US gave its support with military aid and Bush’s “beacon of liberty” speech in 2005. These actions did not go down well in Moscow.

Russia supported the independence of the two republics but was not supported by international law. Recognition of breakaway entities by a third country is deemed unlawful interference in the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the affected country according to Principle I of the Helsinki Final Act. Russia added to the hostility by conferring mass citizenship on South Ossetian and Abkhazian citizens.

In 2008 tensions mounted further as both sides flew jet fighter and unmanned flights over the ceasefire lines. Russia brought more troops into the area and both sides exchanged fire on the South Ossetian border. In July-August both sides carried out large military exercises and South Ossetia started to withdraw its civilians to Russian territory. The stage was set for all-out war which began on 7 August when Georgia attacked the Ossetian town of Tskhinvali.

The official reason for the attack is confused. The military leader claimed it was aimed at restoring Georgia’s constitutional borders but this was later revoked by Tblisi as “unauthorised”. The real reason, said the government, was a “defensive operation” response to a Russian attack. However the Russian counter-attack did not begin until a day later.

But when it did arrive it was devastating. In the next five days, Russian ground troops supported by the Navy chased the Georgians out of South Ossetia and into Georgia proper. They set up military positions in a number of Georgian towns, including Gori, Zugdidi, Senaki and Poti. Hostilities concluded after Abkhaz units supported by Russian forces seized territory in the upper Kodori Valley.

Russia said its military actions in Georgia were a “peace enforcement operation” while Georgia called it an “aggression”. The international community refused to take sides other than call for an end to the fighting. On 12 August then-EU president Nicolas Sarkozy went to Moscow and Tblisi where he hammered out a six-point ceasefire plan. Russian forces ignored the ceasefire for several days before withdrawing into South Ossetia and Abkhazia after 22 August.

The EU report went on to lay blame for the conflict. It said the Georgian shelling of Tskhinvali on 7 August was unjustified but so was the South Ossetian response “outside of the purpose of repelling the Georgian armed attack.” The report also labelled the Georgian attack on Russian peacekeepers as unjustified. It said Russia had the right of defence to these attacks but said the Russian response was “disproportionate”.

The counter-attack on Georgia was not “remotely commensurate” with the original incident and had no humanitarian or genocide justification. Georgia had the right to act in legitimate self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter. In a matter of days, says the EU, the pattern of legitimate and illegitimate military action had been turned on its head.

The report recommended Georgian constitutional reform as a long-term solution to the problem. This would mean a meaningful degree of autonomy of Abkhazia and South Ossetia within a federal Georgia. Up to now such discussions have stalled on Georgia’s refusal to countenance secession powers for the federated states. The report also recommended the building of more mutual trust and bilateral co-operation and an end to the creeping Russification of the two breakaway provinces. Russia was no longer an honest broker, it said, but more concerned with its own strategic interests.

The report concluded that the situation is now even more difficult that it was before the war. There were no winners in this conflict and relations between Russia and Georgia are at an all-time low. Worse still, it threatens to destabilise the entire region. The international community could do more to get negotiations started but it requires a willingness of Russia and Georgia to solve the problem. “This needs to be done now,” ended the report.

CPJ report condemns Russia’s treatment of journalists

A damning new report from a US-based watchdog says Russia’s treatment of journalists is worse now than it was during the Communist era. 17 journalists have been murdered there since 2000 and in only one case have the killers been caught and punished. Only Iraq and Algeria are more dangerous for members of the press. According to the report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) this represents “a sorry record for a great and powerful nation that embarked on democratisation after more than 70 years of brutal repression”. (photo credit: Argenberg)

The mixed messages on Russia appear in CPJ's report “Anatomy of Justice: The Unsolved Killings in Russia” released last week. It shows secrecy, corruption, lack of accountability, and conflicts of interest routinely thwart justice in the murders of journalists in Russia. As well as expressing outrage, the report offers guidelines and evidence for restarting investigations into unsolved murders. “When journalists are threatened, democracy itself is threatened,” it warned.

The report laments the apathy of the Russian people who seem unconcerned by the murders. CPJ says this is because the vast majority get only government-filtered news, so outrage has been muted. The 17 journalists who died were uncovering the truth in a wide range of topics: organized crime, corporate corruption, bribe-taking among public officials, and unrest in the Northern Caucasus republics. In each case authorities pretended there was another motive involved such as robbery or a personal grudge so as not to investigate the political element of the killings.

Take the case of Aleksei Sidorov, editor of Tolyattinskoye Obozreniye who was killed in the Volga region city of Tolyatti. Sidorov had exposed organised crime and government corruption in the car-manufacturing city (“Russia’s Detroit”) as did the editor who preceeded him, Valery Ivanov. Assailants shot dead Ivanov and 18 months later stabbed Sidorov repeatedly with an ice pick. The official version was Sidorov was killed in a random street brawl after he refused a stranger’s appeals for vodka. As in many similar cases, investigators made no efforts to check out his records, interview witnesses, or visit his news organisation.

The Novaya Gazeta newspaper has suffered more than most for its courage in exploring Russia’s underbelly. Three of its best reporters - Igor Domnikov, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and Anna Politkovskaya – have been murdered. In February, three defendants in the Politkovskaya trial were found not guilty after the evidence presented against was skimpy. Though the case is now being retried, no one expects justice to emerge. “Once again, the state had given the masterminds an easy pass,” said the CPJ. “Only the small fry were in the dock.”

CPJ says the failure to achieve justice reflects shortcomings at every level: political, investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial. The poor record of solving journalism-related killings stands in sharp contrast to Russia’s stated record in solving murders among the general population. One of the country’s top law enforcement officials, Aleksandr Bastrykin, has said the vast majority of murders have been solved in recent years. Bastrykin, however, has publicly acknowledged discovering who ordered the Politkovskaya murder would be much harder.

The Kremlin must take a large slice of the responsibility for the problem. It has marginalised critical journalists by barring them from state-controlled national television and obstructing their work through regulations and bureaucratic harassment. Murder investigations are secretive affairs, marred by conflicts of interest and frequently influenced by external political forces. Investigators have failed to follow up on journalism-related leads or question professional contacts while police have concealed important evidence without explanation. It is hardly surprising to find many of those murdered were among the harshest critics of the Kremlin.

CPJ have recommended the Prosecutor General order a thorough re-examination of all 17 cases. It should pursue unchecked leads, track down wanted suspects, and examine professional motives. Where there are conflicts of interest, cases should be reassigned. Investigators and prosecutors should also communicate clearly and regularly with victims’ families. Until this is overturned, the Russia media system will continue to be based on self-censorship leaving many important areas under-investigated or completely uncovered. CPJ said the international community had a role in holding Russian leaders accountable for their record. Key institutions such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe need to resist Russian attacks that claim they should not concern themselves with human rights. The murdered 17 deserve nothing less. Also, it is in their own vested interests to do so. "An undemocratic Russia is a threat to international stability," CPJ said.

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom

A little-known researcher in Moscow’s Gorbachev Foundation has done the world an extraordinary favour when he smuggled secret 1980s Politburo papers out of Russia. Last week Pavel Stroilov published documents that revealed the leaders of the Western World were lying when they said they wanted a united Germany. Stroilov copied more than 1,000 transcripts of Politburo discussions before they were sealed off. Among the many astonishing details there are a meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher where the British PM said he should pay no attention to Nato communiqués. The reality was that Britain and France (and presumably the US too) feared a united Germany even more than the red menace in Moscow. (picture: AP)

But to some people this was hardly a revelation that the West preferred the devil they knew. The Telegraph noted that Thatcher herself alluded to the Moscow lie in her 1993 autobiography when she said she was “apprehensive” about the prospect of a united Germany. Meanwhile Spiked’s Marxist writer Mick Hume says the revelations should only be a shock to those who take “the anti-Soviet statements of Western leaders at face value.”

Hume points to an invariable human failing: the tendency to believe what we see or hear. Information is a valuable commodity but a dangerous one too and it hardly surprising the Russians (like those in power in the West) place an embargo on all sensitive government records until well after the events have taken place and the participants are either retired or dead. But now that this is in the public sphere it has changed from being tacit to explicit knowledge. It can be taken from place to place, it can be internalised, and it can become personal knowledge. Knowledge transfer is a learning process and relies on wide dissemination of information.

It is the role of the world’s media to provide that information fully and fairly. As soon as an English translation is available, Stroilov’s thousand documents should be published in full either in print or online. But as the great 19th journalist Lincoln Steffens found out, some information would never be printed by any newspaper. Steffens was idealistic but would never report on police brutality or political corruption because the complaints were coming from “faddists: co-operators, socialists (a few), anarchists, whom nobody would listen to.” By nobody, he meant his editors, wealthy readers and the city’s elite.

Arguments about what information should be in the public domain are complicated by the current push for media owners to start charging for online content. The push goes against the grain of those who believe “information should be free”. Jeff Jarvis is one of the most strident voices against paying for content. He says it is costly, it impacts branding, there are other free sources and perhaps most important it takes “the content out of the conversation.” No one can talk about something they cannot see.

Jarvis is also a big fan of the power of Googlejuice and that company’s CEO has his own view of whether information is worth paying for. Eric Schmidt told a group of British broadcasting executives last week that general news publishers would find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available. Schmidt agreed with the commonly-held opinion that the information had to have niche value such as business news to work.

There is a good reason why this is so. People will pay for information they think they can make money from. As American essay and programming language designer Paul Graham wrote earlier this month, consumers never really paid for content and publishers never really sold it either. Graham says the price of books, music and movies depends mostly on the format and there is no additional charge for quality or quantity. The content is in fact irrelevant. Selling information is a distinct business from publishing, says Graham. Those who can’t sell their content will have to give it away and make money indirectly or embody it in things people will pay for.

Graham says giving it away is the future of most current media. But those in the business are slow to accept this conclusion. Meanwhile it is giving every indication of a business in crisis. Newspaper jobs have fallen from more than 450,000 in 1990 to fewer than 300,000 today. Jarvis calls the media the first “post-industry.” But as communications theorist Dennis McQuail wrote, the Information Society so beloved of Jarvis has no core of political purpose, just an inevitable logic of its own. In this, there is an ideological bias towards free market outcomes.

Stroilov’s documents don’t fall into the niche business content category. No-one is going to make money from knowing what went on in secret Kremlin meetings in 1989. But they are important for all that. They contribute greatly to the public knowledge about the mendacity of leaders, the problems of ideology and the course of history. Gorbachev and Thatcher were unable to stop the Berlin Wall from falling, and the West could not stop Germany from re-uniting. Despite such diversions that followed such as the Wars on Drugs and Terror, the fall of Communism would eventually reveal the West’s true preoccupation – making money.

Did the Russian FSB try to kill Facebook and Twitter?

(photo by Bird Eye).
The western world made three decisive strikes against militant Islam today but found itself surprisingly helpless against a new and dangerous opponent in cyberspace. The day began with Hilary Clinton vowing support for Somalia’s tenuous Transitional Government in its war against Al Shabaab who were implicated in the failed army barracks attacks in Melbourne earlier in the week and who are now threatening to take control of Mogadishu. Then came the news from the BBC that a missile from an unmanned US drone has probably killed Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani Taliban leader and that country's most wanted man. And Al Jazeera announced this evening that Indonesia has arrested Noordin Top, the Jemaah Islamiyah mastermind suspected to be behind the 2002 Bali bombings and the recent Jakarta hotel bombings.

But while the war on what was formerly known as terror remains the uppermost threat for Clinton and her State Department, they also need to seriously consider a new and dangerous cyber-enemy that emerged in the last 24 hours. For a couple of hours yesterday, and again intermittently today, a combined and concerted attack crippled the social network sites Facebook, Twitter and Live Journal.

While that may seem like a trivial offence to those who don't use social networks, the attacks are anything but trivial. Facebook’s quarter of a billion world population is the envy of most religions while Live Journal bloggers make 200,000 updates a day. And it was the Obama Administration that asked Twitter to suspend routine maintenance so the Iranian opposition could mobilise its forces in an attempt to topple the president.

So while no-one died and there were no pictures for the media, the overnight DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was as much an important attack on the public sphere as 9/11 was. In a DDOS attack, hackers compromise unsecured computers with viruses or other malware. These infected hosts are then instructed by the attacker's computer visit a targeted site, simultaneously and repeatedly. A bomb of connection requests detonates at the receiving end taking out legitimate traffic in the process.

Often DDOS is spam related, but Facebook’s chief security officer Max Kelly said this latest one was politically motivated. Kelly said the outage was caused by a deliberate attack on sites used by a pro-Georgian activist. He said it was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting the activist to keep his voice from being heard coinciding with the first anniversary of the nation’s brief and bloody war with Russia. One cyber-aspect of that war was Russia’s attacks on Georgian websites using DDOS and defacement techniques.

Kelly declined to lay today’s blame on Russia or Russian nationalists, but said: “You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet.” The intended victim of the attack was the Georgian with the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in Georgia). He/she had accounts on all three different sites (Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal) that were attacked. The blogger had attracted attention because LiveJournal users received spam that appeared to come from Cyxymu’s account.

Bill Woodcock, research director of the Packet Clearing House, a non-profit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic told the New York Times yesterday the attack was an extension of the Russia-Georgia conflict. He said he found evidence that the attacks had originated from the Abkhazia, the disputed border territory that caused the war. Woodcock wouldn’t commit to who was at fault. “One side put up propaganda, [and] the other side figured this out and is attacking them,” he said.

Given Russia’s access to superior technology, the most likely culprit would have to be the FSB (formerly the KGB) who have form carrying out this tactic on internal political enemies. However if it was Russia’s fault, libertarian Midas Oracle thinks the attack may have backfired despite the temporary annoyance. All the Russians achieved, said Midas, was to hand Cyxymu a megaphone. The Internet remains a double-edged sword.

Russian human rights activist Natalia Estemirova murdered in Chechnya

Another human rights campaigner has been silenced in the time-honoured Russian fashion as Natalia Estemirova was abducted and then murdered in Chechnya. Four men seized the 50 year old Estemirova as she left for work in the capital Grozny yesterday morning. She shouted out "I'm being kidnapped” before the men dragged her into a waiting vehicle. Her body was found later that day dumped on a main road near the village of Gazi-Yurt in the neighbouring federal republic of Ingushetia. She had been shot twice in the head and chest.

Estemirova was an acknowledged expert on abuses in Chechnya where the long separatist war has morphed into a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. She documented hundreds of cases of torture carried out by Chechen security forces. In recent years, she focused on kidnappings that she believed had been carried out under the authority of the Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov. The 32 year old Kadyrov inherited Chechnya on the death of his father and runs the state as a personal fiefdom with the complete backing of the Kremlin.

Estemirova has had several run-ins with Kadyrov. In March 2008, after Estemirova criticised a law requiring Chechen women to wear head scarves, Kadyrov summoned her to his office and threatened her. Estemirova was so frightened she went abroad for several months. But she eventually felt compelled to return to fulfill her fate. Estemirova’s human rights group employers Memorial were quick to blame Kadyrov for her murder. Chairman Oleg Orlov put a statement on the Memorial's website where he said Ramzan had already threatened and insulted her and considered her a personal enemy. "I know, I am sure of it, who is guilty for the murder of Natalia,” Orlov said. “His name is Ramzan Kadyrov."

Kadyrov was also implicated in the murder of Estemirova’s close friend, the journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya was an implacable critic of Russia’s policy in Chechnya and was shot dead outside her Moscow apartment in 2006. When asked whether he was responsible for that death, Kadyrov’s response was “I don’t kill women”.

No one has ever been charged for Politkovskaya’s murder and anyone who has tried to subsequently seek justice in the matter has been gunned down. Her lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot dead in Moscow in January this year. A young investigative journalist named Anastasia Barburova was also killed when she tried to apprehend Markelov’s murderer. In a chilling postscript to the double murder, a party of Russian nationalists brought champagne to the murder scene the following day to celebrate the “elimination” of their enemies.

Russia continues to be one of the most dangerous places in the world for investigative campaigners, particularly journalists. In 2008 two died in Russia’s troubled southern republics (Dagestan and Ingushetia). The Kremlin has been of little help in solving any of the murders. Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika blamed Politkovskaya’s death on people “trying to destabilise Russia from abroad”. The administration’s most implacable enemy, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (co-founded by Mikhail Gorbachev) has been worst affected with four journalists murdered in eight years. The Reporters sans Frontieres Russia report for 2008 found that, independent newspapers shut down and journalists were imprisoned for attending opposition rallies. In a frightening reminder of Soviet practices, at least two reporters were forcibly sent to psychiatric hospitals for criticising local authorities.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has piously claimed to be “outraged” by the latest murder in Chechnya and has ordered an investigation. But given that Russian leaders have made similar unfulfilled promises in the past, there is little reason to believe this one will lead to anything substantial. Especially as it is extremely likely that the killers are either acting under the orders of the Russian Government or at the very least, have the tacit approval of Putin to remove unwanted critics of the administration. Russia remains a place where political murders are committed with impunity.

Newsy.com's report on the killing:

Belarus tiptoes towards the West

Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko appeared to be making signals to the West when he said yesterday he would not immediately recognise the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The normally fiercely pro-Russian president also said he was in no rush to station weapons on Belarus’s western border in response to the US missile defence system to be based in Poland. Taken together the two statements reveal Lukashenko may be about cool relations with Moscow in order to do a deal with the US and the EU.

The EU is happy to encourage these signs that a tense relationship with the West may be on the mend. EU foreign policy head Javier Solana, noted that Belarus had taken the positive step of releasing a number of political prisoners. Solana talked about the EU “rewarding that behaviour”. Neighbour Poland has been at the forefront of the push for normalisation and wants Europe to remove sanctions it imposed on Belarus after a dubious presidential election in 2006 in which Lukashenko won with 82.6 percent of the vote.

While Lukashenko is showing no signs of loosening his iron-clad grip on Belarus’s polity, there are several indications he is about to come out from Russia’s warm embrace. Previously Lukashenko was at the forefront of calls to reunite Belarus with its large Russian neighbour, but now is backing away from that idea. On Monday he said recent events in the Caucasus meant Belarus’ joining the Russian Federation was unacceptable. “You know that there were such ideas in due time. Today many politicians acknowledge, though not out loud, that I was right,” he said. “This is absolutely not needed, either for Belarus or Russia. Otherwise, Russia will simply lose a reliable ally and a subject of international law.”

Belarus has relied on Russian gas to fuel its economy and annual imports 21 million metric tons of Russian crude. This is almost three times as much as it needs for its domestic economy. The surplus allows Belarus to refine the rest and sell the product at profit to the EU. However relations with Putin's regime have cooled since Russia ended subsidised oil and gas supplies last year. The new price, $100 per thousand cubic meters more than doubled the previous price of $46 and was exacerbated by a separate decision by Russia to impose a customs duty of $180 per metric ton on Russian oil. In response Lukashenko imposed a Belarussian transit fee on Russian oil bound for Europe.

Alexander Lukashenko has run Belarus on Soviet economic lines and was a dogged supporter of Russia, even proposing the two countries unite. He came to power in a landslide 1994 election. He deliberately played up to his pariah role in the west by cultivating relationships with the leaders of Iran and Cuba. Lukashenko is a dogmatic leader who harassed opposition voices and removed an awkward parliament in 1996. He rewrote the constitution four years later to favour himself by allowing presidents to serve three or more terms.

His authoritarian style was noted as far back as 1991 when he supported the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev as a then member of the Belarusian parliament. Since 2006, he has been in talks with Russia to form a “union state” But the happy relationship soured after Moscow demanded that Minsk pay market prices for its energy. The regime is now faced with crippling fuel bills and in need of new friends. Hence Lukashenko’s subtle overtures to the west. The US responded last week by suspending some economic sanctions against Belarusian companies. However other key sanctions remain, including the freezing of bank accounts of the state-controlled oil and chemical company, Belneftekhim. Lukashenko’s latest announcements may prove to be the key to defrosting the lucrative oil account in the west.

Gori story: Russian troops stall in Stalin’s birthplace

Russian troops remain stationed in the eastern Georgian city of Gori despite agreeing to a ceasefire on the weekend. Russia seems in no hurry to carry out its part of the bargain and leave. Gori is not Ossetian territory, it is Georgian. Nevertheless the Russians don’t appear to be in a hurry to leave the town of 60,000 people. Russia is ignoring the protests of NATO as “biased” saying they won’t withdraw, at least back to Ossetia, until Georgia fulfils its commitments in the ceasefire plan.

But with the ceasefire terms favouring Russia, Georgia will baulk at fulfilling its commitments first, ensuring a continuation of this game of ‘chicken’. The short term six-point plan brokered by French President Sarkozy involves Russia ending its military operations, returning behind the line where the war started and not using force again in Georgia. In return, Georgia would return its armed forces to their permanent locations. The plan doesn’t address the longer-term issue of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. But it is unlikely that Ossetia will be part of Georgia in any longer-term plan.

Gori should be safely Georgian under such a plan though it doesn’t seem that way at the moment. Situated just 75km upstream of the capital Tblisi on the Mtkvari River, Gori is Georgian heartland. It is also the birthplace of Joseph Stalin. The town is home to one of the few remaining extant monuments to the 20th century Soviet dictator. The number of visitors to its Stalin museum was recently on the rise, though the museum gave a carefully edited account of his life omitting such events as the Great Terror that killed millions. The museum is closed at the moment as a new terror of sorts surrounds Gori.

Journalists from the British newspaper The Independent reached the city on Monday by taking back roads. They say Russian soldiers gathered outside the front of the badly damaged Stalin museum and took cell phone pictures of each other. Underneath Stalin’s statue in the town square was where Georgian troops mustered before attacking the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. Now the Georgian troops have fled, leaving only Russians and the world’s media to freely roam the streets.

Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher is also in Gori at the moment. Like the team from the Independent, Fisher sees little sign of a Russian withdrawal in the wings. On the contrary, he says more men and machines are heading further into Georgia than those coming out and sees Gori as a Russian base for further action. He says the Russians are laying out defensive positions to the road to Tbilisi. Fisher quotes Alexander Lomaia, a Georgian national security adviser who has been in the town since the Russians arrive. “Last night the Russian general promised that they will start pulling out at 10 this morning,” said Lomaia. “But I've just seen him again [and] he said that the pullout is not a major issue he is dealing [with], right now".

But while journalists flock to the danger zone, locals have fled. Four out of every five people in Gori fled the city when it came under Russian land and air attack. Some have drifted back but food is scarce. The town is physically dominated by the medieval fortress of Goris-Tsikhe, which was greatly damaged in a 1920 earthquake. But it has not, to my knowledge, been further damaged in this conflict.

Some say it likely the Russians may now stay in Gori until at least 26 August. On that date, the Russian parliament is set to meet to discuss the South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence recognition requests. Some analysts think that the emboldened Russians may simply ignore these requests and annex the two states, though it is possible that could create a rod for their own back. However Radio Netherlands has also reported Russian puppet President Dmitry Medvedev saying all Russian soldiers will have left Georgia by Friday at the latest. How true that statement will turn out, depends on whether it has been cleared by the real Russian power: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Stephanie Rice and South Ossetia: Of bread and circuses

Twenty-year old Stephanie Rice took out Australia’s first gold medal in the Beijing Olympics on the same day as Russia intensifies its war with Georgia. No connection really, though you’d have to ask which you’d rather read about if you didn’t have a dog in the fight. Rice has glamour in spades, while the South Ossetian conflict merely has spades.

Stephanie Rice is a full-on media figure, whose mistakes, or blessings, include publicly dating other high-profile swimmers and posting police uniform poses on her Facebook page. But yesterday, she swam a 400m individual medley in a time of just under four and a half minutes. It was the fastest ever at that event and won the gold medal. The silver went to Kirsty Coventry, a white girl from the stolen nation of Zimbabwe. Coventry not only did well for the pariah state, it was also the first medal of any colour in the Beijing Olympics for the entire continent of Africa.

But while most of the eyes of the world are on the various complexities of Beijing, elsewhere nations of the world are at war. Such war is in direct violation of the Olympic truce, the concept of ekecheiria (“holding of hands”) that was enforced during the ancient Olympics. Although some historians now say the idea that ancient Greeks stopped their wars for the Olympics is a nonsense, it hasn’t stopped aid agencies calling for a modern Olympic truce. In 2007 China sponsored UN Resolution G/A 62/L.2 "to promote peace, dialogue and reconciliation in areas of conflict during and beyond the Olympic Games period."

But the nations of Russia and Georgia are not interested at the moment in promoting peace, dialogue and reconciliation. Instead they are engaged in a slowly escalating and complex conflict that has the potential to drag in the wider international community. The war is not totally unexpected, though I got it wrong in May when I thought the flashpoint would be Abkhazia.

Instead the fight is happening several hundred kilometres inland. But South Ossetia is not too dissimilar from Abkhazia. Both are breakaway republics with leanings to Moscow, but for which the rest of the world still believes belongs to Georgia. The name "Georgia" itself is western European and of disputed heritage. The locals call themselves Kartvelebi and their country Sa-kartvel-o “the land of the Kartvelebi”.

Next to the Kartvelebi live the Ossetians. Ethnic Ossetians speak a language similar to Persian (Farsi). But in the Soviet Union 1991 divorce settlement, it was broken up into North and South with North Ossetia given to Russia and South Ossetia given to Sakartvelo. Ever sensitive to names, Georgian see the use of the word "north" in the title North Ossetia as misleading. In their eyes, the Russia owned North Ossetia is the only Ossetia. Georgia prefers to call South Ossetia by either the ancient name of Samachablo or, more recently, Tskhinvali region.

If given the choice, Ossetians would probably rather be free of both Russia and Georgia. But that is the least likely outcome. Georgia has sovereignty in its favour and the cosying up with NATO. But pro-Western Georgian President Saakashvili has overplayed his hand. An actual war in South Ossetia or Abkhazia would mean disaster for Georgia. Both republics have been defacto independent nations since the 1990s. Russia has more natural sympathy among the local population and is more powerful locally. In this new cold war theatre, Russia will now use the Ossetian excuse to dismiss Saakashvili as a bargaining chip to withdraw.

But the media’s attention will be more on Beijing than Tbilisi. Amusingly, one media may have given the impression the Georgia at risk was in the US’s deep south, though when I checked the source AFP story this evening, the Google map was even more bizarrely pointed to Brno in the Czech Republic. For now Saakashvili must cut his losses, consolidate his country's fragile growth, address local abuses such as police brutality, and hope his connections with NATO will stop Russia from invading. Meanwhile, back in Beijing, Stephanie Rice’s exploits will be honoured with an Australian postage stamp.