August 2006 Archives

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Court of Resort

August 30, 2006 03:25 AM

I've never spared much thought for the European Court of Human Rights. And who could, with such competition to consider from so many other institutions of preening European forwardness? But if this court can return ownership of a major steel mill to the crooked Ukrainian billionaires who not long ago stole it through plainly illicit insider dealing - well then, in that case it will have shown itself to be a meddlesome agent of corruption to be manipulated by venal European elites. And therefore deserving of very close attention.

Link · Europe | Ukraine

CAIR-bears

August 29, 2006 10:33 AM

Milbank at his best, reporting Monday's CAIR-sponsored press event, where "Israel" critics Mearsheimer and Walt obligingly went that extra mile for their hosts.

When the two professors finished, they were besieged by autograph- and photo-seekers and Arab television correspondents. Walt could be heard telling one that if an American criticizes Israel, "it might have some economic consequences for your business." [My emphasis]

You might suddenly thrive! I think that's what he means....

[Hat tip: Glenn]

Link · American Politics | Islam | Israel | Jews | News Media

The Living Constitution

August 23, 2006 10:11 AM

When it's not being used as a dinner napkin by Rada deputies, Ukraine's constitution provides parliament with a basis for interminable, circular debates. To wit: The majority coalition has passed a law that forbids the constitutional court from judging the constitutionality of the 2004 constitutional reforms. Is this constitutional? Who knows! But Yushchenko signed it! - presumably while Regions Party deputies paraded his testicles around the parliamentary chamber in a mason jar.

For the record, and as noted by the Kyiv Post, the court review is mandated in the constitution. In fact, initial reforms were approved by the court in 2004. The problem is that the approved version was then re-written and re-ratified by the Rada. The court never got a crack at the "final" version.

WORTH WONDERING: If the court takes up the 2004 reforms, will Regions Party apparachiks - now in control of domestic affairs - enforce the "law" that prohibits the review? The reason they passed the law in the first place was to head off any challenges to their authority....

AND ANOTHER THING: If the court reviews the 2004 reforms and overturns them, who exactly, uh, enforces that ruling? Regions Party officials? Um, okay.... And when's the next flight out of Kyiv?

Link ·

Cat Nips

August 19, 2006 06:19 PM

Jimmy Carter is hawking a book, and that means reconnecting with his core constituency - Europe. Recently he sat for an interview with Der Spiegel - and, from the sounds of it, Der Spiegel sat on his lap, nuzzling its wet little nose against the former president's neck and purring softly, as they shared an understanding known only to effete Europeans and our creepiest ex-president. A sampling of the, uh, questions:

SPIEGEL: You also mentioned the hatred for the United States throughout the Arab world which has ensued as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Given this circumstance, does it come as any surprise that Washington's call for democracy in the Middle East has been discredited?

SPIEGEL: What makes you personally so optimistic about the effectiveness of diplomacy? You are, so to speak, the father of Camp David negotiations.

SPIEGEL: One main points of your book is the rather strange coalition between Christian fundamentalists and the Republican Party. How can such a coalition of the pious lead to moral catastrophes like the Iraqi prison scandal in Abu Ghraib and torture in Guantanamo?

SPIEGEL: You've been called the moral conscience of your country. How do you look at it yourself? Are you an outsider in American politics these days or do you represent a political demographic that could maybe elect the next US president?

SPIEGEL: Does America need a regime change?

Just keep the hat out, Jimmy. They'll keep cranking the organ.

Link · American Politics | Europe | News Media

The Grass Grows and Grows

August 19, 2006 05:58 PM

It has emerged that the "conscience of Germany" served in the Waffen SS as a teen - a secret he had managed to hide for more than 50 years. Who would have believed it? Okay, other than me, who would have believed it? Okay....

Link · Europe | History

Heavy Weighs the Crown (of Thorns)

August 19, 2006 09:47 AM

In an otherwise almost perfectly unhelpful review of European hostility toward Israel, the Economist magazine did include one detail that caught my attention:

It is also often the right in Europe, linked with anti-Semitism in the past, that is most supportive of Israel today. Britain's Conservative Party, for instance, not always known for its admiration of Jews or Israel, is now the most pro-Israel party. In Italy, which invented fascism, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Gianfranco Fini's formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, are more pro-Israel than the government. In Spain, the centre-right opposition was highly critical of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, when he donned an Arab headscarf to show solidarity during the Lebanon war. [My emphases]

Is this guy for real? Sheesh.

And I don't know what to make exactly of this next bit.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert on Israel and Europe at Oxford University, argues that “Europeans see Israel as the embodiment of the demons of their own past.” The European Union is supposed to have traded in war, nationalism and conflict for love, peace and federalism. But Israel now reminds Europeans of darker forces and darker days.

Ottolenghi is a well-regarded and widely published scholar. I doubt the quote is meant - or that the author intended - to suggest that, in the image of Israel, the European elites see a reflection of their vulgar past and are repulsed by it.

Rather, I think it's meant to suggest that, in today's "progressive" Europe, Israel is a pesky reminder of their culpability in genocide, and Europeans resent that.

So how does that account for the hostility toward Israel? Why can't the Europeans just feel guilty for their betrayals and resolve never again - well, from here on out, at least - to allow genocide in their midst?

Because the oversized moral vanity of today's European progressives cannot allow it. The acceptance is too painful. The Europeans therefore seek to rationalize their culpability by reference to the putative culpability of Israel - Jews, that is - in comparable crimes.

This is not precisely - or rather, exclusively - a matter of antisemitism. It is not a conscious or unconscious wish that someone will "finish the job" that Europe started. The impulse can best be expressed as: If only the Jews would stop provoking, people wouldn't see the need to slaughter them every so often. In this view, people who seek explicitly to kill Jews - let's say, Hamas or Hezbollah - are cast as the original victims, as people who can't be held responsible for their actions because they've been driven to extremes by Jewish aggression.

European antisemitism is a factor, without a doubt. The Economist suggests that attitudes toward Israel have shifted across Europe as Israel has transformed, becoming more powerful and more aggressive. Maybe so. But Israel has nothing on Iran, or North Korea, or China, or even Russia, when it comes to extraterritorial threat - and yet a solid majority (60 percent) of Europeans consider little Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace? Guilt alone cannot account for an outlook that ridiculous.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a Polish acquaintance recently. She was lecturing me on the need to understand why someone would strap explosives to himself, walk into a pizza parlor, and blow up a bunch of strangers. I told her that there is no way to understand this - that nothing could be "understood" to induce someone to do something so depraved. It is the act of someone too sick with purposeful hatred to act otherwise. Yet I couldn't budge her. She steadfastly maintained that one shouldn't be too quick to reach judgments - this failure to "understand" is what starts wars etc. At least this appeared to be her attitude... until she told me (in order to reveal her ecumenism) about a visit she had made at some point to a women's social event at a synagogue. All was fine there until one woman evidently felt moved to suggest that Jews were the "chosen" people of God. Yeah, I know. It's not like that's explicitly stated in the Torah or anything, right? Still, this was evidently the first time she (a Catholic) had encountered this perspective. And it was traumatizing. According to her, she suddenly felt physically ill, disgusted, disoriented to the point she had to flee the premises lest she make a scene. Now, if you're asking me whether I believed her story, my answer is no. Maybe she was at a synagogue; maybe this business about the Chosen People arose; but beyond that I'm skeptical. (For that matter, I don't think I've ever heard a Jew utter the words "Chosen People" without the accompaniment of an ironic smirk. History demands irony in such instances.) Nevertheless, I couldn't help being struck by the contrast in attitude. Here she was, almost perfectly ambivalent about suicide bombing - but undone by what she took to be the suggestion that Jews were somehow superior in the eyes of God. (She better not read the Koran!) I wondered whether this dichotomy might have something to do with the fact that Poland contributed the greatest share of Jews to the gas chambers. They were The Chosen, alright.

Link · Europe | History | Jews | Middle East

NADIYA OLEKSIVNA SVITLYCHNA (1939 - 2006)

August 13, 2006 11:03 AM

Kudos to Morgan Williams and his indispensible Action Ukraine Report (to sign up, email Morgan at morganw@patriot.net) for calling attention to the death this week of Nadiya Svitlychna, a dissident who made freedom possible for millions by making tyrrany impossible for the Soviet authorities.

In December 1970 in the city of Vasylkovi, Kyiv region, she and Y. SVERSTYUK found the body of their murdered friend, the artist A. HORSKA, organized the funeral and arranged for a monument to be placed on her grave.

After the "January cull" of 1972 (the second wave of arrests), Svitlychna was summoned to the KGB for questioning virtually on a daily basis in connection with the case against her brother. Each time she parted with her two-year old son Yarema as though for good. Her son was also used by the KGB as an "argument" in the investigation.

A month before her actual arrest, during one of the questions, they
announced her arrest and demanded that she sign a form stating whom she authorized to bring up her child.

"There were tears. Fear, doubts, bargaining with my soul: should I agree to compromise for the sake of my child", - these were the thoughts that ran through her head when the head of the investigation unit, the notorious Parkhomenko said: "We are giving you 24 hours - think long and hard". She did not believe a single word.

It then transpired that on that day I. DZIUBA had been arrested, and a large number of searches carried out, including of Svitlychna's home. They removed the books of V. STUS "Fenomen doby" ["A Penomenon of our time"], A. Avtorkhanov "Technology of power", Mykhailo OSADCHY "Bilmo" ["Cataract"], a manuscript by Danylo SHUMUK, poems, articles, extracts, letters - 1800 items in all.

Svitlychna was arrested on 18 May 1972. Her son was taken from the crèche by KGB agents and put in a children's home in the city of Vorzel near Kyiv. It was only through the efforts of Nadiya's sister-in-law, L. SVITLYCHNA, that the family was able to collect him from there and take him to his grandmother in the Luhansk region.

Svitlychna spent almost a year in the isolation cell of the KGB on
Volodymyrska St. She was accused of having held and distributed samizdat.

Her response to the provocative questions of the investigator was as
follows: "I am simply a person whom life gave the good fortune of meeting with a wide range of creative people. Persecution against them I perceive as persecution against me".

The investigation protocols also read: "I admit guilt in that, having a higher education and a certain amount of life experience, I still believed laws which contradict each other, I considered that the Constitution of the USSR is the highest Law and this is not the case since it is constantly violated. I promise that when I am released with my small child, I will not read anti-Soviet literature.

However I cannot swear that I will not read anything at all, since I am a literate person, while the criteria are not clear, what one can read and what is not allowed".

On 23-24 May 1973 Nadiya Svitlychna was sentenced by the Kyiv Regional Court under Article 62 Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR ("Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda") to 4 years labour camp.

She served her sentence in the Mordovian political labour camp, No.
ZhKh-385/3 in the settlement of Barashevo, the Tengushevsk district.

Together with other prisoners she actively participated in protests, hunger strikes. A month before the end of her sentence, Svitlychna was taken to Luhansk to choose a place to live, effectively in "exile", although she had firmly decided to return to Kyiv.

She returned in May 1976. She was refused registration, not able to get a job, and threatened with arrest for "parasitism". She and her son lived with her sister-in-law, L. SVITLYCHNA, who was regularly fined for "infringements of passport regulations".

In autumn 1976 she had the courage to send a declaration to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the government rejecting her citizenship, basing this move on the savage punishment meted out to Levko LUKYANENKO, Petro GRIGORENKO, Viacheslav CHORNOVIL,Vasyl STUS, Stefaniya SHABATURA and other decent people.

She explained her decision with the following words: "It would be below my dignity to remain the citizen of the world's biggest, most powerful and most developed concentration camp". She sent copies of this declaration to the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

Remember her the next time you hear from American "dissidents" like Tim Robbins.

Link · Ukraine

We Few, We Unhappy Few

August 9, 2006 07:03 AM

Finally, a British scientist has proven that Ukraine is an unhappy place.

According to White’s version the unhappiest people are inhabitants of Burundi (178th place), Zimbabwe (177th place) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (176th place). A bit happier are inhabitants of Moldova (175th place) and Ukraine (174th place). 173rd place belongs to Sudan, 172nd – to Armenia, 171st – to Turkmenistan, 170th – to Belarus and 169th to Georgia.

White created his map of happiness on the basis of an analysis of responses of 80,000 people from all over the world. “When people are asked whether they are satisfied with their life, people from countries that have a good healthcare system, a higher per capita GDP and access to education are more inclined to give positive answers,” White noted. The scientist acknowledges that those factors are not ideal criteria of happiness, but argues that these data are the most available.

So Ukraine isn't actually the unhappiest place. A lot of Ukrainians are going to be unhappy about that.

I see an opportunity here for a Magical Misery Tour package. It would start maybe in Zimbabwe, where you'll be rousted from urban squats by Mugabe's goons and sent to the countryside to "farm"; then on to Congo, where you'll enjoy refugee status for a week and fall victim to a UN pedophilia ring; then it's on to a three-day bender in the Zaporizha oblast of Ukraine, at the end of which you lose your factory job and howl angrily at a Chernobyl reactor; from there, you head to Sudan for some ethnic cleansing....

This package will be a hit in Germany. Can't you already hear the commercial jingle?

The Magical Misery Tour
Is going to let you view graves
Make you see men turned to slaves
Take it today....

Link · Ukraine

Meet the new boss - same as the old boss

August 3, 2006 06:03 AM

Man, did I screw this up

In Ukraine a politician can always fall back on the virtues of "unity." So it is with today's agreement to appoint Viktor Yanukovich as prime minister. President Yushchenko didn't just get politically bear-whacked by a lumbering, dull-witted circus creature - he united the country!

I'm not sure this unity ploy is going to pass muster among Ukrainians hoping for someone with... well, with a shorter rap sheet.

Twice, in 1968 and 1970, Yanukovych was convicted and imprisoned for robbery and bodily injury. During 2004 presidential election, he announced having been acquitted of guilt back in 1978. However, no documentation has been presented, which raised suspicions of forgery. [link here]

Thug life fo-eva.

That 1978 declaration is suspect. In fact, the crime for which Vik claimed vindication was somewhat more egregious than the ones listed above. I will not name it, because I have been unable to find a link just yet.

And no, Ukrainian blog reports do not constitute independent confirmation that it occurred.

While I'm looking, I thought you all might like to see a photo of one of Yanukovich's poll workers from election night.

One day, perhaps he too will have things expunged from his criminal record. I thought it wise to get this photo of him early that evening, in case some shenanigans went down and he disappeared. Fine, call it profiling. The way I see it, don't walk around in a stocking cap unless you want people to think you're a burglar.

As it happened, our friend seemed far more interested in observing us, the international observers. Specifically, our group's young Polish gal, Anya. We escaped when he fell asleep around 6 a.m.

Anyway, back to Yanukovich. Although he clearly had leverage in the negotiations - his party breezed to a plurality win in the Rada elections - many people are simply going to be shocked by this outcome. Throughout, the consensus seemed to be that, no, Yushchenko would not dissolve parliament - his party would probably fare even worse in a second round of elections - and, no, he would never settle for Yanukovich. There would have to be some compromise candidate. Some humiliations are too great even for Yushchenko, who by now is a connoisseur of the art. The constitutional changes that went into effect at the new year have greatly enhanced the power of Ukraine's prime minister, whoever it might be. So, in choosing Yanukovich, Yushchenko would essentially be appointing his presidential rival to an office higher than the one he lost. For a president who has insisted that Ukraine must join NATO and the WTO - maybe even the EU - this was a neat way to tell his new Western friends that he seriously blew it. Which he did.

Now he's waving - but not revealing - a National Unity Pact, signed by Yanukovich, that supposedly commits Ukraine to its current West-leaning direction. Maybe so. Yanukovich's party - Regions - is essentially a consortium of thieving oligarchs. And if they understand anything, it's that their future business opportunities lie in the West. (Indeed, Rada membership gives full license to pursue them.) So perhaps they can unify behind a common agenda.

And who knows - the spirit of unity might just prompt the new prime minister to learn Ukrainian. Anything's possible, I guess.

Link · Ukraine