Why Putin Needs To Arrest Madonna

Following their sentence to two years in prison, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina - the members of the Russian punk collective Pussy Riot - have become an international cause célèbre. And one performer eager to take up the mantle for Pussy Riot is Madonna, who appeared on stage at her concert last week in St. Petersburg, Russia, with the words Free Pussy Riot written on her back.

But Madonna did something else during that show. To further show her displeasure at the Pussy Riot verdict (not to mention Russia's tepid support for Gay Rights), Madonna also stomped on a Russian Orthodox cross.

Let's reflect on that for a moment: Tolokonnikova, Samutsevich and Alyokhina each received two-year year sentences for their performance within Moscow's Christ the Savior cathedral on the grounds of “promoting religious hatred”. Yet aside from some loud music, bad dancing and profanity, Pussy Riot did nothing aside from make a purely political statement; they caused no damage to the cathedral, nor did they utter anything against the Orthodox religion, they recited their punk prayer to the Virgin Mary asking: “Holy Mother, Blessed Mother, drive Putin out!” It certainly was not disrespectful to anyone aside from Vladimir Putin.
On the other hand, Madonna decided to step on the symbol of the Russian Orthodox faith, which seems more like an act of “religious hatred”? And before justifying Madonna's actions as an act of free speech/free expression, let us for a moment contemplate what the reaction would be if at a concert in Tel Aviv, Madonna decided to stomp on the Star of David to protest some action by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Putin could actually use Madonna's protest to his advantage. Everyone regards the Pussy Riot trial as an attempt to stifle dissent in Russia by charging these women with crimes far outside of the scope of what they actually did; it is seen as a politically-motivated prosecution pure and simple. Putin could deflect, or attempt to deflect, these charges by calling for the arrest of Madonna on the same grounds of promoting religious hatred thanks to her act of outright religious vandalism.

It would be a fascinating way for Putin to turn the tables on his critics.

Russia's Tatarstan Mufti Mystery

Who tried to kill the Mufti?  That's the Question in Russia after last week's car bomb attack on Mufti Ildus Faizov, one of the top clerics in Russia's historically Muslim Tatarstan region, and a man greatly respected by the Kremlin for his promotion of a moderate, peaceful brand of Islam, which stands in stark contrast to the Islamic-fueled insurgency in Russia's Northern Caucasus region.

Initial fears were that Faizov and one of his closest associates Valiulla Yakupov, were targeted by Islamic insurgents from the Caucasus because of their moderate views – Faizov was badly injured in the car bombing but will survive; Yakupov was shot in the head in a separate attack and killed.  Caucasus Islamists may still be behind the attack, though an alternate theory, that the two men were attacked over a business deal, is gaining more credence following the arrest of five men over the weekend. 

The five have ties to a man named Rustem Gataullin who was the former head of the Idel-Hajj company – a firm that organize tour packages for Russian Muslims who want to complete the Hajj, the journey to the holy city Mecca that all Muslims are suppose to undertake once in their lifetimes.  Faizov took over operations of Idel-Hajj in 2011, there is a theory that it is this switch in leadership is the motivation for the attacks.

This would be a good news/bad news scenario for Russia.  On the good side, it would at least dismiss  the idea that the attempted assassination of Faizov was the beginning of a new offensive by the Caucasus Islamists, who in the past have staged high-profile terror attacks in Moscow that have included aircraft and subway suicide bombings.  On the bad side though, if the attack on Faizov was nothing more than an attempted “hit” over a business deal gone bad, this could be an indication that Russia was backsliding to the era of the 1990s when business-related murders were somewhat common – a fact that could likely have a chilling effect on foreign investment in Russia.

Meanwhile, the Russian government is responding to the attack in a sadly predictable way, by trying to impose a media blackout on the whole affair. According to Radio Free Europe, the government in Tatarstan recommended that journalists limit their coverage of the event to stories about life in the capital city (and site of the attacks) Kazan, and only seek comment from a short list of pre-approved “experts”.  An editor of an independent newspaper in the region called the government response “near hysterical” and noted that information on the incident was still freely available on the Internet.     

Could Khodorkovsky Be Freed?

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that pardoning jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a good idea. 

Four days ago, the human rights council appointed by Russia's soon-to-be-ex President Dmitry Medvedev recommended that the President pardon Khodorkovsky before turning the office over to Vladimir Putin; I made the same case recently in an op-ed over at PolicyMic that freeing Khodorkovsky would not only be the right thing to do, but would also assure more of a legacy for Medvedev than simply being remembered as Putin's temporary seat-filler.

Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest man and the head of one of Russia's most-powerful corporations, the oil conglomerate Yukos.  But Khodorkovsky broke an unspoken agreement between Putin and the oligarch class with his donations to a political party in Siberia.  The full legal force of the State was soon brought down on Khodorkovsky, who in 2003 was charged and eventually jailed for tax evasion.  In late 2010, Khodorkovsky was charged again on largely the same evidence and years were tacked on to his sentence, time enough to keep him in jail through the presidential elections held earlier this March.

Khodorkovsky's supporters have long contended that the tax evasion charges were a personal vendetta on the part of Vladimir Putin, arguing that if this was the legal standard, then all of Russia's oligarchs should be jailed.  Even though Medvedev has the power to pardon Khodorkovsky, his supporters are not optimistic.  For one, it seems that in order to get the pardon, Khodorkovsky would have to admit his guilt, something Khodorkovsky refuses to do since he contends he's not guilty of anything.  An admission of guilt is not necessary for a pardon under Russian law, a point ruled on several times by Russia's Supreme Court, though there is a belief that Medvedev would insist on one in order to give Khodorkovsky his pardon. 

This could also simply be an excuse for Medvedev not to exercise his pardon power.  Khodorkovsky's backers further believe that ultimately the decision on whether or not to pardon Khodorkovsky will come from Putin, not Medvedev.  Putin and Khodorkovsky have an active dislike of each other.  In the past Putin has dismissed claims that Khodorkovsky's prosecution was politically-motivated and has insisted that “thieves should sit in jail,” for his part, Khodorkovsky has issued a series of letters from his prison cell in Russia's remote Far East condemning the Putin presidency for failing to fight corruption and for concentrating political power within the Kremlin.    

London's Thug Revolution

A quick thought on the riots gripping London, and now a host of other British cities. As the rioting stretches into a fourth day, some are citing recent austerity measures pushed forward by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as a rationale. To pull Great Britain out of its economic doldrums, the Cameron government pushed forward a package of budget cuts, many complain the budget ax fell the hardest on the nation's poor. The explanation goes that the riots then are a reaction by poor inner city youth to cuts in education and assistance programs, a lack of jobs and to being trapped in a cycle of poverty.

This explanation is crap.

For one, there already were massive street protests against the austerity budget, staged as Parliament was voting on the bill. But unlike the current rioting, these protests, despite being massive in scale, were peaceful. The catalyst for the current protests was the police shooting of an allegedly unarmed man several days ago. Calls went out for a peaceful protest against police tactics, and the public gathering was in fact peaceful at first, though some within the crowd had different ideas sparking off the ongoing riots.

In coverage of the event though, few of the self-styled “protestors” mention the police shooting as the reason they're in the streets now. A few have uttered vague notions about being angry at a lack of jobs, but more telling are Blackberry messages collected by the BBC blasted out by “organizers” of the rioting. Far from calls for social justice, the messages tout what a great opportunity it is to steal stuff. One urged London street gangs to set aside whatever turf battles they may be having and join in on the orgy of theft; another said it was a great time to steal and spread fear – a message which seems to stray into the area of domestic terrorism.

The notion then that this is some sort of social justice action then is ridiculous, more accurately it is a concerted effort by petty criminals and self-styled anarchists to kick a hole in the fabric of society, as well as High Street shop windows, merely to enrich themselves. This isn't to say that there are not some real issues of social justice and social inequity at play in England (it is wise for people in the United States to take note since many of these same conditions are brewing here as well), or that budget cuts haven't hit the poor and vulnerable disproportionately hard. Nor is this to say that people shouldn't take to the streets in protest and to demand that their rights, their views, be taken into account when those in power make decisions that affect their lives. But to try to link the burning of local businesses and homes or the assaulting and robbing of people in a neighborhood by a gang of neighborhood thugs to these larger social justice issues only serves to make a mockery of them. What's happening in London, and other cities across Britain isn't the striking of a blow for the working class, it is thugs running wild, pure and simple.

Update: This afternoon a YouGov Poll showed that not only did a vast majority of Britons think the government should take a harder line with the rioters, one-third thought the police should be using live ammo on them.

Notes on Norway

A few quick thoughts following the tragic terror attacks in Norway last Friday that have left as many as 76 people dead. If you followed the events as they happened on Friday, you will recall that details were slow to emerge, especially about the perpetrator and any possible motives. Of course a lack of information did nothing to stop posters on Internet chat boards from afixing the blame on the usual suspects – Islamic terrorists. The standard arguments were trotted out: That this is just what we should be expecting since Islam is a religion of hate, that it was the goal of Islamic extremists (and by extension of all Muslims) to create one global caliphate under sharia law; blame was assigned, Norway's immigration laws were just too lax and that this was inevitable as they took in refugees from the Arab world (like war-displaced Iraqis); and motives were suggested, primarily Norway's support for NATO missions in Afghanistan and Libya.

Of course the perpetrator turned out to be a white Norwegian guy, who in America we would describe as being a “Christian conservative”. He seems to hold himself up as some sort of crusader, warning that Norwegian (and European) identity was being lost due to immigration and who hoped that his attack would spark a inter-cultural civil war within Europe.

The obvious take away here is not to jump to conclusions when some horrid event like this occurs. Evil comes in all colors and creeds. Are there Islamic extremists who would gladly perpetrate such an act? Surely there are. But it is just as wrong to scapegoat an entire religion of a billion people for the actions of a splinter minority as it would be to call Christianity a religion of hate because of this man's actions. The terror attacks in Norway seem to be turning the focus of European security agencies onto far-right groups across Europe, many of whom have been preaching an increasingly hateful anti-immigrant (which depending on the group, can be aimed at Muslims, Africans, or even other Europeans) message. These groups will likely fall under increased scrutiny following the Norway attacks. It's worth mentioning that when the US Dept. of Justice issued a report warning of the same possibility among American extremist anti-immigrant groups, the DOJ was roundly condemned both by Republican politicians and by the taste-makers on the Right, talk-radio hosts, even though it was a man who identified with America's home-grown far-right anti-immigrant/anti-government who was responsible for the worst pre-9/11 terror attack in American history, the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City.

One final note, during their coverage of memorial services in Norway on Monday, the BBC reported that a number of Muslims were attending services being held in cathedrals around Oslo. When one Muslim was asked by the BBC why they were attending a service in a church, they replied that it was a house of God, and that they felt the need to attend and express their grief. As Norwegians.

Stunning Corruption, Even For Afghanistan

Tomorrow President Obama is scheduled to make another “major” announcement on America's decade-long involvement in Afghanistan. There has been a lot of talk about Afghanistan in the blogosphere and among the punditocracy recently, circulating mostly around US troop levels and whether or not its a good idea to talk with the Taliban. But one major story getting almost no attention is the ongoing mess surrounding the Kabul Bank, a situation that could cripple the entire country.

We first talked about the Kabul Bank late last year when the institution collapsed after the top executives – including a former professional poker player and President Hamid Karzai's brother Mahmoud - essentially used the Kabul Bank as their own personal slush fund, ripping the institution off to the tune of approximately $900 million, using the money to invest in half-built luxury villas in Dubai, a dysfunctional national airline and the reelection fund of Hamid Karzai. To put that in perspective, Afghanistan's total Gross Domestic Product is only about $12 billion. And to make matters worse, the Kabul Bank hosts the payroll accounts for the nation's army, police and civil servants (a kick-back for the Karzai reelection fund); the loyalty of the first two is already an open question, so one can only imagine what would happen if they didn't get paid. The Guardian's Jon Boone has put together a wonderfully detailed account of the stunning corruption affecting the Kabul Bank.

In fact, the only thing more stunning has been the Afghan government's official reaction to the Kabul Bank scandal. Shortly after the collapse, Hamid Karzai scolded foreign accountants hired by international agencies to oversee the bank for not preventing the fraud – in other words, he blamed the international community for not keeping his brother from robbing the nation's largest bank (which is almost as good a definition of chutzpah as the boy who kills his parents then asks the judge for leniency because he's an orphan). Currently the International Monetary Fund is negotiating with Afghanistan for a bailout of the Kabul Bank, but here too Afghan officials are putting on a great display of kleptocratic arrogance. Not only does the IMF want strict controls put in at the Kabul Bank to prevent the outflow of capital into the pockets of the bank's top execs, they also want people to go to jail for running the bank into the ground in the first place. Seems reasonable, well to everyone that is except Afghanistan's Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal who accused the IMF of “playing games” for trying to instill a sense of fiscal responsibility and good corporate governance to the Kabul Bank and said that the government was “running out of patience” with the IMF - no word on what Zakhilwal or the Afghan government will do to make good on that threat.

Unless the Kabul Bank is reformed though a host of international aid groups are threatening to withhold further donations to Afghanistan – why throw money down a rat hole is the prevailing thought among them. Currently, foreign aid makes up about 40% of Afghanistan's budget, so this loss would be a big blow to the country. And the whole Kabul Bank affair has seriously undermined faith in the banking sector among average Afghans. It’s also another example of the incredible corruption and incompetent leadership of a country in which the United States has already invested far too much.

Divac, Eagleburger And Non-Intervention

What can you learn about non-interventionist foreign policy from a former NBA player? Surprisingly, a good bit. This past weekend I happened to watch another installment of ESPN's excellent documentary series 30 for 30, the subject of “Once Brothers” were Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic. The two were stars of Yugoslavia's national basketball team and were both trying to break into the NBA in the early 1990s at the same time as their country was coming apart. Divac, a Serbian and Petrovic, a Croatian, had been extremely close, but their relationship ended as Serbian-led Yugoslavia went to war with Croatia and Slovenia after the two former republics declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Divac inadvertently became Public Enemy #1 in Croatia for refusing to take a Croatian flag during a post-victory celebration for the Yugoslav national team a few months earlier, an act that would help to drive him and Petrovic apart. Petrovic's untimely death in a car accident ended any chance of reconciliation between the two former friends. “Once Brothers” featured the story of Divac's first trip back to Croatia in 20 years to visit Petrovic's parents.

The Yugoslav War also came up in discussions about the legacy of recently-deceased former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Though he no longer served in government, the jowly, bespectacled Eagleburger was a frequent guest on the news-talk circuit, speaking on issues of US Foreign Policy. In the 1990s, Eagleburger had been adamant about the US not intervening in the Yugoslav conflicts. From a humanitarian standpoint it was a tough call. The Yugoslav War was the worst conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, civilians bore the brunt of the fighting, and thanks to advances in satellite technology and the birth of 24-hour news outlets like CNN, images of the war were beamed into homes around the world. But Eagleburger argued that Yugoslavia wasn't America's fight and that we would be quickly drawn into a conflict that would last for years. The United States stayed out of the conflict – for awhile at least; by 1995 the US-led peace talks resulted in the Dayton Accords that ended fighting in Bosnia, the United States was also later the driving force in a NATO bombing campaign that brought about an end to the last stage of the Yugoslav conflicts, the fighting between Serbia and its breakaway region, Kosovo in 1999.

You could probably write a series of novels on what might have happened if the US hadn't followed Eagleburger's advice and had intervened in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. If current examples are any indication, we'd likely still be engaged in the region in a big way. Eight years after the start of Gulf War II, the United States is still in Iraq and is arguing to stay for awhile longer to support the fragile Iraqi government; ten years after going into Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden, the US is still there as well, fighting the insurgent Taliban even after the death of OBL and with plans to stay until 2014, at least; and coalition forces seem to be getting more deeply involved in Libya, with NATO stepping up airstrikes against Gadhafi's regime. This last one is probably the best analogy to what could have happened in Yugoslavia – it is easy to see the US (and maybe a reluctant coalition of European nations like France and Great Britain) going in to set up “safety zones” for civilians and quickly being drawn into the fighting on the side of the Croats/Slovenians against the Soviet/Russian-backed Serbs, just as NATO is now supporting the Libyan rebels against Gadhafi in that supposedly “humanitarian” intervention.

It's no doubt that the fighting in Yugoslavia was bloody, resulting in far too many civilian deaths, but the countries that emerged seem to be doing pretty well today: Slovenia is a member of the European Union and a prosperous and popular tourist destination; Croatia too is doing well after recovering from the war and is in the final stages of becoming an EU member; even Serbia is emerging from almost two decades of largely self-imposed isolation from Europe, thanks to the policies of nationalist leaders like Slobodan Milosevic, and is now looking towards a future in the EU. Conversely Bosnia, where the warring Bosnian, Croat and Serb factions were wrestled into a peace deal in the Dayton Accords 15 years earlier, remains a deeply divided state; about once a month an op-ed will appear with a dire warning about Bosnia's impending collapse. Kosovo meanwhile is fairing little better – its independence is still not recognized by more than half of the members of the United Nations and their government is alleged to have more in common with the Sopranos than the Founding Fathers.

“Once Brothers” ended with Divac traveling to Zagreb, Croatia. Many of the Croats recognized him, but few approached, still apparently harboring ill-feelings towards him from two decades earlier. But the streets themselves were peaceful and well-kept, and Divac himself was warmly greeted by Petrovic's parents. A post-script to the story said that he was slowly rebuilding his former friendships with other Croats from the former Yugoslav national team like former NBA-er Toni Kukoc. Perhaps the message here is that intervention, however well-intentioned it may be, in the long run isn't the best course of action and that warring people need to find their own ways to peace.

Gadhafi and Bin Laden's Strange Link

Quick quiz: name the first country to issue an international arrest warrant for the now-deceased Osama bin Laden. The United States you say? No. Kenya perhaps for the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi? Or Saudi Arabia? Great Britain? Spain?

Nope. It was Libya.

A comment on The Guardian's liveblog of developments in the bin Laden story reminded me of this fact, reported here by Sky News. Way back in March 1998, the government of Moammar Gadhafi (yes, that Gadhafi) issued an arrest warrant for bin Laden in connection with the murder of a German man named Sinvan Becker and his wife, who were supposedly visiting Libya as tourists. Only Becker wasn't merely a tourist, he was one of German intelligence's top analysts on Islamic threats in the Arab world. He and his wife were murdered by four gunmen in the town of Sirte in 1994. The Libyans claimed the gunmen worked for a group called "al Muqatila”, al-Qaeda's branch office in Libya. In 1998 the Libyans passed information about the murder, and bin Laden's supposed involvement, off to Interpol, which then issued the international arrest warrant against bin Laden.

It is a strange world…

More On The End Of OBL

While the world continues to try to digest the news of the death of Osama bin Laden, speculation is naturally falling on what will become of his terrorist baby, al-Qaeda. Over at the Global Public Square, Fareed Zakaria is arguing, perhaps optimistically, that bin Laden's death with also be the death knell for al-Qaeda – that stripped of their spiritual head the organization will become adrift and will eventually burn itself out. On CBS during their Sunday night coverage, Lara Logan (and it's great to see her back to work) wondered if bin Laden had been betrayed by a member of his inner circle, or at least by one of their respective underlings, and if so what impact it would have on al-Qaeda as a whole?

That made me think of the mafia here in the United States. In their heyday during Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s, the idea of omerta (“silence”) was strong – if you were picked up by the police or the feds, you didn't talk about the mafia's operations or members, “this thing of ours” to quote Tony Soprano. But the idea of omerta began to fade as the years went on, particularly after anti-racketeering laws were passed that basically meant that even if you were a low-level foot soldier you could face the same kind of charges - and jail time - that would be awaiting The Boss if he ever got arrested. More mobsters started to talk when they were inevitably arrested, which sent more mobsters to jail and seriously undermined the effectiveness of the whole criminal enterprise. The leaders of the mafia families became more and more insulated out of fear of being betrayed by one of their colleagues (think about how nervous Tony Soprano always seemed), and worried more about finding the “rats” within their organizations than in actually engaging in money-making activities, which left them less able to manage their criminal empires, which in turn became less and less effective.

Could then a similar thing happen to al-Qaeda and it's frachises? Bin Laden himself had apparently not only withdrawn from the active operational role he played pre-9/11, but in these last few years he seemed to have become a hermit, holed up in a sprawling, barb-wire encircled “mansion” in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Now that even these precautions seem not to have helped keep him safe, will the leaders of al-Qaeda's franchises – the Pakistan operation, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen, mostly), al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa) – isolate themselves further? The best part, from an anti-terror perspective, is that bin Laden doesn't even have to have been betrayed by a follower, the other leaders in al-Qaeda only have to believe that he was and they will act accordingly.

This likely isn't the end of al-Qaeda, just like the arrests of a number of capos hasn't been the end of the mafia in America, but it will likely lead to a far less effective organization and one that is even less capable of pulling off a major 9/11-style (or London or Mumbai for that matter) attack in the future.

Karzai Family Values

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is engaging in another war of words with Western officials active in his country, this time over the management of Afghanistan's financial sector. Last September, Kabul Bank, the country's largest private lender and the institution that handles government and military payrolls for Afghanistan, nearly collapsed. The Kabul Bank wasn't done in by the global recession and credit crunch, but rather by good, old-fashioned mismanagement: Bank insiders used a series of fraudulent loans to suck close to a billion dollars out of the bank, nearly its entire asset base. Western firms including PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte were suppose to be providing consulting services and oversight for Afghanistan's fledgling financial sector, so Karzai is now slamming the foreigners for not seeing the collapse of Kabul Bank coming and taking steps to prevent it. Of course it is worth noting here that Kabul Bank's third-largest shareholder was a man named Mahmoud Karzai, and before you ask, yes, he is the brother of Hamid Karzai.

So President Karzai's complaint boils down to this: The Western companies overseeing the Kabul Bank should have kept the Karzai family from ripping it off.

Once again I find myself asking, “is this guy serious?” in relation to Hamid Karzai (here it might be worth while brushing up on the activities of his other brother, Ahmed Wali). “Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid to these individuals and organizations to help the banking system of the country and they failed in their task,” Pres. Karzai said on Monday. It is almost tempting to say that he has a point; USAID, the US government agency that oversees foreign aid ended their contract with Deloitte in March because Deloitte's inspectors at Kabul Bank failed to see all of the bogus loans being written that led to the institution's near collapse. But of you go back a little further to the original stories surrounding the September banking crisis, reports at the time said that Mahmoud Karzai and other Afghan officials at the bank actively opposed moves suggested by the consultants, such as adopting Western-style accounting standards at the bank and refused to allow an independent audit of the bank's books. In essence, Deloitte was asked to oversee a bank without access to its inner workings, a situation that seemed doomed to failure.

Karzai's critique of the Western agencies involved with his country's economic sector follow a recent pattern of behavior with him, which has been basically to launch a series of scathing attacks against the foreign forces (both military and civilian) active in his country. One could say that it is nothing more than a transparent ploy to shift attention away from his own corrupt and ineffective government and try to put the blame for his country's problems elsewhere. During Monday's address, Karzai promised that “whoever was involved in leading the bank into crisis, all those people will be brought to justice.” Somehow I doubt that Mahmoud Karzai will be among those people.

Egypt, Wisconsin

The Canadian alt-rock band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet once recorded a zippy little song called “Egypt, Texas”; listening that song recently, I wondered, could the same type of protests that drove Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt and now threaten to drive Gadhafi out of Libya happen in the United States? Far-fetched? Perhaps, but as recently as December 2010, who would have thought that we'd see popular uprisings in some of the Middle East/North Africa's staunchest autocracies? The protests had a common theme: the masses rising up against a government wholly unresponsive to their needs and uncaring about their plight. And though that lens, the ongoing protests in Wisconsin start to look remarkably familiar.

For more than a week, thousands (at times tens of thousands) have rallied in Madison, Wisconsin to speak out against Gov. Scott Walker's plan to impose not only cuts to the salaries and pensions of the state's teachers, but also a plan to essentially strip their union of its collective bargaining rights. Since the union had already agreed to the monetary cuts Walker's attack on collective bargaining rights can only been seen as what it truly is: a naked attempt at union-busting wearing a cloak of fiscal responsibility, a fact that Walker inadvertently confirmed to a journalist posing as one of his primary backers, billionaire businessman Scott Koch, the faux-Koch replied by saying: “Well, I tell you what, Scott: once you crush these bastards I’ll fly you out to Cali and really show you a good time,” to which Walker laughed in reply. Walker is not alone, governors, Republican governors, in New Jersey, Ohio and Indiana to name a few states, have launched their own attacks against the unions, blaming them for their respective states' financial plights (in New Jersey at least, the real culprit is more than a decade of fiscal mismanagement by the state government). It is shaping up as the Republicans final assault in their decades-long War on the Working Class, a war that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s – consider for a moment that the average inflation-adjusted wage has not increased since the Reagan era. The roots of this conflict though reach back even further, to the opposition against Franklin Roosevelt's “New Deal” package of social programs, something today's era of conservatives mark as the point from which we “lost” the Constitution (for a concise treatment of the conservative “Constitution in exile” movement, see the current issue of The Week magazine).

Strict conservatives see union rights, the minimum wage, environmental and labor protection laws and a host of other social programs as blatantly unconstitutional; their goal is to repeal them. All of them. In the process, they hope to turn the country back to the glory days of the 90s, the 1890s that is; a time known as the Gilded Age for its ostentatious concentrations of wealth thanks to laissez-faire government policies. Of course the 1890s were also a time of grinding poverty for the majority of Americans, who toiled six or seven days a week (children included) for wages that barely, and often did not, provide a living wage for themselves and their families. Today were seeing many of the same wild concentrations of wealth – today individuals in the top 1% income bracket control 43% of the nation’s wealth, though we still have the labor and environmental protections won over the course of decades in place, for now.

Sadly the Democrats in recent years have offered little in the way of opposition. So effectively have conservative voices dominated the economic debate that the Democrats today largely go out of their way to show they can be just as hard on the poor as their Republican counterparts. Case in point, President Obama's recent cuts to home heating assistance programs, since, he argued, fuel prices have dropped lessening the need for assistance. This may be true of natural gas prices, but in the cold Northeast, many houses are burn heating oil, not natural gas, and heating oil prices have been steadily climbing. It was an act of either utter, or willful, ignorance on the part of the President, but also one that shows how out of touch he is with the needs of the low-income population in his own country.

In short, America is coming to have the same type of out-of-touch government, which focuses its efforts not on meeting the needs of the masses but in serving the desires of the elites that we saw in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, etc. Unfortunately, the only mass movement we've seen in the United States recently has been the faux-populism of the Tea Party: a collection (I think) of well-meaning people suffering with the economic realities of America in the 21st century, who have unfortunately been taken in by a collection of shills for the nation's elites; for example much of the early organization of “Tea Party” events came from Freedom Works, a DC-based lobbying firm run by former House Republican Dick Armey – not much populism there. The hidden hand of the elites behind the Tea Party, working in concert with compliant media outlets like Fox News, have skillfully managed to conflate the concerns of the average citizen involved in Tea Party rallies about the direction of their country is headed with the conservatives “Constitution in exile” agenda: that a cadre of “liberal elitists” is trying to “dismantle” the Constitution and “take their country away from them.” So Tea Party activists fight to dismantle the very protections that insure they at least make a living wage, that they have clean air to breathe and water to drink and that their children are ensured a basic public education. George Orwell would be proud.

That is why it is impossible to overstate the magnitude of the protests going on in Wisconsin, and that have been bubbling up in other states, since this is true populism at work: Americans lobbying their government for redress of issues affecting their lives. So far Gov. Scott Walker has taken the Hosni Mubarak approach of ignoring their demands, while former US Senator Rick Santorum went the Gadhafi route and compared the Wisconsin protesters to drug addicts.

It is quite likely that Gov. Walker's ham-handed, billionaire-fueled attempt at union-busting will prevail in Wisconsin; the only thing preventing it is a boycott by Democratic lawmakers, hardly a sustainable situation. When that happens it will be a setback not only for labor, but for small-“d”-democracy in the country as a whole as tens of thousands of workers will have ample proof that their government does not have their interests at heart. More will become disillusioned, more will turn away from a political system that relies on the participation of its citizens; remember that demos is Greek for “the people”. What we've learned in this winter of protests in the Arab world is that people will live for a long time under oppressive, non-responsive regimes, until one magical day, for one random reason, they do not any longer – the wave of uprisings in the Arab world were all sparked by the suicide of one young fruit vendor in Tunisia. And every day our government grows a little more unresponsive, a little more indifferent to the plight of its people is one more day we move closer to Egypt, Texas; and Egypt, Wisconsin; and Egypt, Ohio...

Body Snatchers Redux

Last Tuesday the Council of Europe voted to endorse a 27-page report accusing the prime minister and other members of Kosovo's government of operating a human organ smuggling ring during the Kosovo-Serbia War in the late 1990s. The alleged ring was discussed earlier in this post, but in short, a branch of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) known as the Drenica Group is accused of smuggling both Kosovars and captured Serbian soldiers into Albania, where they were executed and their organs harvested for transplant (for a tidy profit of course). This is on top of other more run-of-the-mill criminal activities Drenica is said to have engaged in like drug smuggling and prostitution. The man in charge of the Drenica Group at the time is Kosovo's current Prime Minister Hashim Thaci; much of the leadership of what then was the KLA is now Kosovo's government.

The Council of Europe report will do nothing to boost the image of Kosovo, which had already taken a hit over allegations that their most recent parlimentary elections were far from fair and open. Nor will they help to change a perception that Kosovo is less of a country than it is a massive criminal enterprise. Black market activities, like drug smuggling, are said to make up a large chunk of Kosovo's economy; in fact the joke going around Russia when Afghanistan recently recognized Kosovo's independence was that this marked the first time that a drug supplier had recognized the independence of one of their major dealers.

But the heinous nature of the crimes – the murder of people to sell their organs – trancends mere criminal activity. Not surprisingly, the government of Kosovo is vigorously denying the charges and Thaci is even threatening to sue the author of the report, investigator Dick Marty, for libel. What remains to be seen is if the European Union will take up the charges laid out by the Council of Europe. As Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee notes: “given that a number of Western countries, including the US, have now formally recognised Kosovo it's an open question whether there's the political will to pursue Hashim Thaci.” Good question indeed.

And frankly, for all their talk about support of human rights, the European Union has been fairly weak in taking steps to actually protect them, especially among certain less-favored populations: the Roma (or Gypsies) in Central Europe, ethnic Russian minorities in the former Soviet Baltic republics and African migrants in places like Italy and France. Since Kosovo is a pet project for the EU and the Serbs, at least until recently, were cast in the role of Europe's bad guys, it will be interesting to see if the EU takes the allegations contained in the Council of Europe report seriously. I won't be holding my breath.

Airport Bombing Rocks Russia

By now you have probably heard about the suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport that has killed at least 35 and wounded 180 others, many of them seriously. The attack was the worst act of terror in Russia since a suicide bombing in the Moscow Metro killed 40 last March. While no one has yet claimed responsibility for the blast, it's probably not a stretch to assume that terrorists from Russia's restive North Caucasus region are responsible.

I think that the attacks are especially interesting in the light of a news report circulating in the Russian media last week that militant Chechen leader Doku Umarov had been killed in an operation by Russian special forces soldiers. Officially, the Russian government isn't offering any proof of Umarov's death and have been somewhat downplaying the reports, noting that Umarov's demise has been falsely reported before. But at the same time, they are saying that, for all they know, Umarov could be dead. The timing of the Domodedovo bombing then becomes very interesting, could it be a statement by the terrorists that they are still a lethal force, despite the loss of their most public leader?

It will also be interesting to see what the political fallout from the attack will be for Russia's ruling tandem of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. Medvedev has already made the usual statements leaders make at times like this about bringing perpetrators to justice, etc., though for nearly a decade now Russia has failed to find a solution to their North Caucasus problem. Even the subcontracting of the security situation to Chechnya's President/Warlord Ramzan Kadyrov seems now to have been a failure since the problem of Chechen terror has simply migrated to neighboring republics like Ingushetia and Dagestan, which see terror attacks (albeit smaller-scale ones than Domodedovo) on a near-daily basis. Last year Medvedev correctly noted that a big factor behind the growth of militancy in the North Caucasus was the grinding poverty and lack of development in the region, but the Domodedovo attack coming on the heels of last month's murder of Russian soccer fan Yegor Sviridov by a group of men from the North Caucasus – an act which sparked several riots in Moscow – isn't likely to leave many Russian wanting to offer aid and support to their North Caucasus countrymen. What could further hurt Medvedev/Putin are reports that Russia's state security force, the FSB, were tracking what we'd call in the United States several “persons of interest” in the days before the attack, yet security levels at the airport were not raised. Among the comments posted online that I read yesterday was one from a Moscow resident saying that the FSB was more concerned about breaking up political opposition rallies than they were about actually protecting the citizens of Russia.

One final note – kudos to the BBC for their coverage of the airport attack yesterday, which included a constantly-updated ticker of breaking news.

Update - The Guardian newspaper is now reporting that a Chechen "Black Widow" female suicide bomber is suspected to have carried out the Domodedovo attack. Dmitry Medvedev also slammed officals for the lax state of security at the airport.

Baby (Doc) Come Back

In what's either the biggest act of political hubris in a long, long time, or the execution of a cunning plan to retake power, Haiti's former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Port-au-Prince last week after two decades in exile. His sudden arrival threw the country's already shaky political establishment into turmoil; for his part, Duvalier said he was returning to help his country rebuild after the massive earthquake that leveled large parts of Port-au-Prince and killed perhaps as many as 300,000 people – though he offered no explanation on why then he waited a whole year to make his return.

And that has people speculating that Duvalier is hoping to take advantage of the political vacuum which currently exists in Haiti. The presidential elections held last November have been marred by charges of fraud and vote-rigging; a run-off between the two top candidates still hasn't been held. Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince remains a city of rubble and refugee camps with an out-of-control crime rate. This seems to have spurred former Duvalier loyalists to lobby their boss to fly in from exile in Paris to try to retake the reins of power, a motivation at least partially confirmed by Duvalier's lawyer, Reynold Georges, who said of his client in an interview with al-Jazeera: “he is a political man. Every political man has political ambitions.” Georges added that under the new Haitian constitution that he helped to draft, Duvalier has the legal right to stand for election.

So far though, Duvalier has only stood before a Haitian judge to answer charges of corruption and embezzlement dating back to the end of his reign in 1986. Baby Doc Duvalier ruled Haiti from 1971 to 1986, taking over for his father Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The rule of the Duvalier clan was marked by authoritarian rule and widespread human rights abuse; the Duvaliers kept power in large part thanks to a brutal militia known as the Tonton Macoutes. When Baby Doc was finally overthrown in a popular revolt, he is said to have taken a large chunk of the national treasury with him into exile, nearly $6 million of which still lies frozen in a Swiss bank account. A Haitian judge now has three months to decide whether the criminal case should continue against Baby Doc Duvalier; meanwhile he'll likely be staying in Haiti whether he wants to or not, his passport was seized by Haitian authorities.

As for the question of why would Haitians even want a brutal dictator back in the first place, it is likely an expression of just how frustrated people are over the slow pace of reconstruction in Port-au-Prince. Despite pledges of billions of dollars in foreign aid, little work in the capital has actually been done. Much of the money is tied up in political and bureaucratic red tape, and Haiti's current political turmoil isn't helping the situation. It is worth noting that the crowd who met Duvalier at the airport included a fair number of young people, all of whom were likely born after he fled to Paris. They don't remember the brutality of the Duvalier regime, but have only heard the stories of how Haiti was once not an economic basket case. Given the current sorry state of affairs, it is a powerful image.

Duvalier's return has also prompted speculation that another ousted Haitian leader may stage his own comeback: former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was driven from power by another coup in 2004. Unlike Baby Doc though, Aristide is said to still have broad support among the Haitian population. For his part, Aristide insists that the coup against him wasn't a popular uprising, but rather a manufactured revolt secretly backed by the United States because economic reforms he proposed to fight poverty and improve the lives of average Haitians would have a negative impact on American business interests in Haiti. According to this editorial by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Aristide's decision to disband the Haitian army also factored into the United States' decision to support his ouster, since the army's main duty was to protect the country's small, but powerful upper class as well as international business interests, primarily from the United States, Canada and France. Weisbrot goes on to cite information contained within the Wikileaks dump of US foreign policy cables that contend to show the United States pressuring Brazil, the nation heading up the UN coalition supposedly providing security in Port-au-Prince, not to allow Aristide to return to Haiti from exile in South Africa.

The official position of the US State Department is that Aristide's return would only confuse the political situation in Haiti. But with near anarchy on the streets of the capital, an indefinitely-postponed presidential election and the return of a brutal former dictator, it's hard to imagine how Aristide's return could possibly make things worse.

Russia Roiled By Ethnic Riots

Though under-reported in the West, during the past few weeks, Russia has been dealing with some of the worst ethnic rioting seen in the country since the end of the Soviet Union. The catalyst for this situation was the murder on December 5 of Yegor Sviridov, an ethnic Russian soccer fan by another group of Russians from the Northern Caucasus region outside of a match by the club Spartak Moscow, and the subsequent release of the perpetrators by the local police. This sparked a protest by thousands of ethnic Russians outside the gates of the Kremlin on December 11. Egged on by members of nationalist and ultra-right wing groups within their numbers, the protest soon turned into a full-blown riot the elite OMON unit of the national militia struggled to contain.

While most Americans think of Russia as a nation filled exclusively with, well, Russians, it actually is a diverse, multiethnic society made up of dozens of ethnic groups. A vast, multiethnic society living together in peace was one of the big propaganda points touted by the old Soviet Union. But when the Soviet Union broke up into 15 independent nations in 1991, old ethnic tensions began to bubble to the surface. In Russia today, both Russian citizens originally from the old Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, as well as migrant workers from those now-independent countries today, often find themselves the target of racist attacks – Central Asian workers tend to fill the same role in Russia that migrant Mexican workers do in the United States. Russians from the North Caucasus region in southwestern Russia also face widespread discrimination. The North Caucasus region is home to Chechnya, so the common assumption in Russia is that all North Caucasus residents are terrorists (or potential terrorists) and they tend to be treated accordingly.

Unfortunately in the 16 years since the beginning of the first Chechen War, unrest from Chechnya has spread across the North Caucasus to other Russian republics like Dagestan and Ingushetia, and the conflict has evolved from a struggle by Chechen militants for independence for their homeland into one that has become increasingly wrapped up in an al-Qaeda-style battle to create a fundamentalist Islamic state – all factors that feed the “all North Caucasus people are terrorists” meme within Russia. One reason this Islamic fundamentalism has found fertile ground in the region is the generally lousy living conditions found in the North Caucasus – unemployment is ridiculously high as is the poverty rate, while local officials are horribly corrupt – all problems acknowledged by President Dmitry Medvedev. Unfortunately the Russian government's response hasn't been to encourage development and crackdown on corruption in the region, but rather to give a free hand to brutal local leaders like Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov in dealing with dissent, a strategy that has succeeded only in creating more (and angrier) dissent.

Corruption also directly led to the recent riots in Moscow; the perpetrators of the fatal attack on Sviridov were released from custody after a bribe was apparently paid to the police. But again, this reality failed to bring about the expected response from Russian officials – namely an investigation into rampant police corruption, but instead brought just more political window dressing: namely a visit by Prime Minister Putin to the grave site of the murdered soccer fan, Sviridov. That and the assignment of Russia's newest superstar to the case – Anna Chapman, who was recently named to the advisory board of the “Young Guard”, a pro-Kremlin youth group, to whom she gave the kind of vague and bland speech you expect from politicians today, case in point: “we must transform the future, starting with ourselves!”

For his part, during a nationally televised address, Putin seemed willing to attack the problem of unauthorized protests within Russia, but his focus quickly shifted from ethnic strife and soccer hooligans to liberal political protests. Perhaps to emphasize the point, on December 31, one of Russia's best-known left-wing politicians, Boris Nemtsov was arrested during one of the “31” protests in Moscow – for the past year, liberal groups have publicly gathered on the 31st day or every month that has one in support of the 31st article of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees the people the right to peacefully assemble. Previously, the small gatherings were quickly broken up by the police, though the October 31 rally was allowed to go on with an official approval from President Medvedev. That wasn't the case for the December 31 protest, which was not only broken up, but saw Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister not only arrested but also sentenced to 15 days in jail.

Just as Russia chose to react to the allegations of police corruption brought forward by Novorossiisk policeman Alexei Dymovsky by creating “Dymovsky 's law” - a law that didn't punish corrupt officers, but rather those who blew the whistle on them, Russia once again seems intent on applying the wrong remedy to a problem – treating ethnic strife by arresting political critics of the Kremlin.

Khodorkovsky: A Political Prisoner Jailed Again?

On Monday a Russian court found Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty for a second time based on his time as the CEO of Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company. The guilty verdict doesn't change Khodorkovsky’s immediate circumstances, he has been locked up in a prison in Russia's Far East since his arrest in 2003 on charges of tax evasion; what the verdict does is ensure that Khodorkovsky won't be getting out of jail next year after serving the eight year sentence he received in 2003.

For a very detailed recounting of the Khodorkovsky saga, check out Martin Sexsmith's book Putin's Oil (or for a recap, check out my review of Putin's Oil). In short, Khodorkovsky was jailed for willfully evading taxes while serving as the head of Yukos during the 1990s; in his defense, Khodorkovsky said that he followed the tax laws as best he could during the chaotic 1990s, when Russian tax laws were constantly changing, and in essence he was arrested for not accurately anticipating what the tax laws would be and not paying accordingly. In fact, the tax situation in Russia in the 90s was so confused, that the tax charges could have been levied against any members of Russia's oligarch class, who also used the economic upheaval as an opportunity to amass huge personal fortunes. That Khodorkovsky was singled out for punishment is clear indication to Kremlin critics that Khodorkovsky’s prosecution was in fact politically motivated (that any number of oligarchs could have been prosecuted, but weren’t, was a thought echoed in a fair number of comments made by Russians on the BBC’s coverage of the verdict).

They say that Khodorkovsky’s real crime was to break a “gentleman's agreement” between Vladimir Putin and the oligarch class where Putin promised to give the oligarchs a free hand in running their business empires so long as they stayed out of politics; Khodorkovsky made some relatively minor contributions to the Kremlin's political opposition in the early 2000s, soon after he found himself arrested at a Siberian airfield on the tax charges. Perhaps it is ironic that Khodorkovsky’s political donations came as part of his philanthropic efforts to build a civil society within Russia at a time when his fellow oligarchs were happy to take their money out of the country and spend it on luxury flats in London and enormous private yachts.

Khodorkovsky’s second prosecution will do nothing to dissuade critics of the idea that once again Russia's legal system is being used for political purposes. Sexsmith's book paints a picture of Putin fearful that Khodorkovsky could at long last be the symbol Russia's political opposition needs as a rallying point; it's not a coincidence then that Khodorkovsky’s original sentence would expire with enough time for him, hypothetically, to enter the 2012 presidential race. For his part, in writings from his Far East prison, Khodorkovsky has come to see himself as a “martyr” for modern Russia. Critics ask why Khodorkovsky, and his business partner Platon Lebedev, were put on trial now on charges that date back more than a decade. To further complicate matters was the judge's decision to postpone his ruling from mid-December until yesterday, a time when most Russians are preoccupied with the upcoming New Years and Orthodox Christmas holidays; perhaps the hope was that the ruling would be lost in the holiday shuffle. Western observers though have taken note, with even the US State Department expressing “concern” over the verdict and the flimsy evidence offered at trial.

Khodorkovsky’s actual sentence likely won't come for several more days as the judge has said he will not give word on punishment until he finishes reading the entire 250-page verdict. Whether this will affect foreign investment in Russia also remains to be seen.

Kosovo Body Snatchers

Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was probably planning to spend the week celebrating his party's victory in his country's first national elections, instead he is defending himself from charges that he ran a ring of international body thieves.

The allegations go back nearly a decade to the time when the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was fighting an insurgent campaign against Serbian paramilitaries as well as the Serbian government, which was trying to pacify the rebellious region of Kosovo. The Serbs were charged with a host of war crimes against the population of Kosovo, charges that eventually resulted in a NATO-led bombing campaign against Serbia, followed by the partition, and eventual independence, of Kosovo from Serbia. But rumors persisted that the Kosovars were committing atrocities of their own, namely that they were taking civilians and captured Serbs, killing them, and then selling their organs for transplant on the black market, rumors that we have previously discussed here. With officials in Kosovo, Albania -where many of the murders and transplants allegedly took place - and EULEX (the European Union security force dispatched to Kosovo for much of the 2008) unwilling to take the allegations seriously, it seemed like they would remain rumors that is until Dick Marty, a special human rights investigator for the Council of Europe, released a report this week saying that he had proof of the body-snatching ring.

Prime Minister Thaci was obviously upset by the rumors and has branded them as an attempt to slander his fledgling state. But there are a few things worth considering: much of the current Kosovar government is made up of former members of the KLA, Thaci included; and before the KLA became allied with the West in their struggle against the Serbian government, they were listed by a host of governments (the United States included) as a potential terrorist organization with possible links to al-Qaeda (we also learned this week that some felt the KLA put more effort into fighting rival factions in Kosovo then they did the Serbs). Even though they may no longer be considered to have terrorist links, the factions of the old KLA are thought to be closely allied with organized crime groups in Kosovo and Albania; much of Kosovo's economy is currently based on activities like smuggling and other criminal activities, along with foreign aid payments and remittances by Kosovars living abroad, not exactly the basis for a thriving economy.

Kosovo has been a political football for the past several years between the US and key European powers like Great Britain and France on one side and the Russians with their traditional allies the Serbs on the other. Kosovo and Serbia spent much of the 2000s engaged in a UN-brokered set of talks to determine Kosovo's final status, a process that was short-circuited in 2008 when the Kosovars decided to walk away from the talks and declare independence and the US/UK/France decided to recognize them as the world's newest nation. The rationale given by the Western powers was that it was a necessary step to ensure another ethnic conflict didn't break out between Kosovo and Serbia, but Serbia was a much different country in 2008 – the nationalists who had driven the Kosovo conflict were out of power and the country was looking to align itself with greater Europe – it was hard to think another round of conflict was in the offing. The move rather felt like delayed payback to Serbia for causing so much mischief in the 1990s, along with an attempt to weaken the Russian position in Europe by weakening one of their allies.

As such, the Europeans didn't bother to give the persistent rumors of the Kosovo body snatching ring a proper investigation, at least until Marty came along; nor have they taken much action to quell the hold organized crime has over the country, despite the fact that – thanks to Wikileaks – they were well aware of the crime situation. Frankly, its hard to imagine what Kosovo's economy would be based on, the nation is relatively small, landlocked, and has a sparse population – the question of whether it could be a viable state was apparently not considered in the rush to recognize its independence.

It will be interesting to see how Europe moves forward with Kosovo. In addition to the body snatching ring, which Marty promises to present evidence of in the coming weeks, there are also reports from the region that there were widespread irregularities in last weekend's election that saw Thaci's party win a solid majority; certainly not good signs for the future of the Western power's pet project.

You Think This Would Be News: Cheney Indicted

You really would think news that former Vice President Dick Cheney was likely to be indicted on charges of bribery by the government of Nigeria would at least rate a mention on the nightly news, but apparently not. So in case you likely missed this story, Nigeria's anti-corruption agency is set to levy charges against Cheney and a host of other top officials from the oil industry services company Halliburton over charges that a Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, bribed a number of Nigerian government officials to win approval for the construction of a natural gas liquefaction plant. This plant would allow KBR to export liquefied natural gas (or LNG) by ship from Nigeria. While KBR and Halliburton have since split up, the charges date back to before 2007, when KBR was still a Halliburton subsidiary, and presumably to before 2001 when Cheney was still the head of Halliburton.

KBR has already agreed to pay more than $180 million in fines to the government of Nigeria.

Of course even if indicted it is impossible to believe that Cheney would actually go to Nigeria to stand trial. But the charges shouldn't just be dismissed as the act of a grandstanding government. Nigeria is Africa's most populous nations and one of the economic powers of the continent. It is also a major supplier of crude oil to the United States and is a growing exporter of LNG.

Wikileaks Russia: Batman and the Mob

Frankly a lot of the Wikileaks document dump of “secret” communications from US embassies and ambassadors around the world was pretty underwhelming – a topic I'll explore a little more fully in an upcoming post on The Mantle. Not surprisingly, some of the cables dealt with US-Russian relations. Grabbing the headlines is an assessment by one Moscow embassy official that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was playing “Robin” to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's “Batman”, and a comment that today's Russia seems like less of a nation-state and more of a country-sized mafia operation with a cadre of well-connected government and security service officials getting a cut of all the major projects around the country. These are not new ideas, in fact they're fairly standard critiques from pundits from both outside Russia and within. Dig a little deeper though and the discussion gets at least a little more interesting.

The assessment of the US officials is that Medvedev is actually sincere in the many reforms of the Russian state he has proposed during his term as president, only to have them shot down by his counterpart, Prime Minister Putin. The official goes on to suggest that the Medvedev and Putin factions are in open conflict within the Kremlin, though the two primaries appear have yet to go toe-to-toe.

Hopefully the US official is at least partially right. It would be nice to think that Medvedev is sincere in the reforms he has put forward – which have ranged from reigning in Russia's endemic corruption problem, to establishing a high-tech manufacturing sector a la America's “Silicon Valley” in an effort to move Russia away from extraction industries like oil and natural gas, to addressing the sadly low life expectancy among Russian men (roughly 60 years), to protecting journalists and the freedom of the press. Since he took office from Putin in 2008 (under the Russian constitution, Putin could not run for a third term as president) there have been volumes written speculating on the true nature of the Putin-Medvedev relationship: they call their President/Prime Minister act a “tandem rule”, critics say though that Medvedev is merely a seat-warmer for Putin who can run for President again in 2012 (the constitution only bans three consecutive terms). I've speculated here a few times about their relationship, so it would be nice to think that Medvedev truly does want to address some of Russia's really serious problems. Where I hope the US official is wrong is when they suggest that Medvedev is too weak-willed to actually stand up to Putin, since Medvedev is likely the last hope Russia has to tackle some of these issues, at least for the near future.

Another interesting tidbit from the Wikileaks Russia section dealt with Chechen Warlord/President Ramzan Kadyrov. The cables included an anecdote about Kadyrov attending a wedding in Chechnya where he presented the couple with a modest gift of gold bullion before hopping into his heavily-guarded caravan of SUV and taking off. One onlooker said that Kadyrov didn't spend the night in the same place twice due to security concerns. That directly contradicts not only Kadyrov's carefully-crafted image as a regional strongman, but also his oft-repeated arguments (which Moscow bought into at least for awhile) that Chechnya was once again a safe and peaceful part of the Russian Federation.

Journalists Again Targeted in Russia

At the time this post is being written, Oleg Kashin, a journalist with the Russian newspaper Kommersant is lying in a Moscow hospital in a coma, the result of a savage beating outside of his apartment. Even though a number of high-profile journalists have been attacked, some murdered, in Russia during the past decade, Kashin's attack was particularly brazen; he was beaten with a metal rod and suffered numerous injuries to his head – including two broken jaws – a broken leg and fingers. Robbery appears not to have been the motive since his wallet and iPhone were left with Kashin (this MSNBC story includes security camera footage of the attack on Kashin).

And here's where on Law and Order they'd say that a pattern is emerging; Kashin was the third reporter beaten in such a manner. In November 2008 journalist Mikhail Beketov was assaulted outside of his home, and received a beating so severe it left him with brain damage and confined to a wheelchair; earlier this week a third journalist, Anatoly Adamchuk, was assaulted outside of the offices of his newspaper Zhukovskiye Vesti. Two threads link the three beatings – one, in each case along with a severe beating around the head, each journalist also had their hands smashed, in Beketov's case smashed so badly that several of his fingers had to be amputated; since journalists earn their living by typing – an act hard to do without the use of one's fingers – the beating of the hands sends a pretty clear message. The second common link is that prior to the beating each had written stories about historic, old-growth (and supposedly protected) forests being cut down for road-building projects, often involving well-connected land developers: in the case of Kashin and Beketov it was the Khimki Forest, a project recently suspended by President Dmitry Medvedev after some high-profile attention was cast on it by U2's Bono and Russian rock icon Yuri Shevchuk; in Adamchuk's case it was a similar project through the Tsagovsky Forest.

The inference most will likely draw is that in each case the journalists were attacked because of their writing about the controversial destruction of what should be protected public lands by people acting on behalf of the wealthy developers pushing the highway projects (road development is considered one of the most lucrative types of construction in Russia) either with the blessing of officials in the Kremlin or at least without the fear of angering them. Perhaps aware that this is the likely conclusion people will draw, Medvedev has pledged swift action and, according to Kommersant, has assigned “experts from the Prosecutor General's Office's Investigative Committee who have solved a number of high-profile cases” to the investigation. A bill was also introduced in the Duma that would grant journalists the same level of protection given to politicians, making an assault on them punishable by life in prison if the attack were grave enough. On the surface, both are strong actions aimed at getting justice for the victims and preventing future attacks, but Russia in the 21st century has a poor record of actually catching those who assault and kill journalists making all of the eventual arrests and punishments a moot point.

And just to add insult to injury, literally, this week Beketov was found guilty of slandering Khimki's Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko, who filed suit against Beketov for criticizing his administration for letting the Khimki Forest be clear-cut for the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway project. While the judge in the case was sympathetic to Beketov, who was physically unable to speak due to the injuries he sustained in the 2008 beating, he fined Beketov $160 for “tarnishing the honor and professional reputation” of Strelchenko, a fine he then waived on a technicality.