Human rights advocate Harry Wu dies

The great human rights advocate Harry Wu sadly has passed away. Here is how Wu is commemorated by the Washington based Laogai Research Foundation, which he founded:

It is with great sadness that the Laogai Research Foundation announces the passing of its founder, Harry Wu, who died in Honduras this morning at the age of 79. Mr. Wu was vacationing with friends when he passed away.
Harry Wu was a Catholic and a well-known presence on Capitol Hill for his defense of people who suffered in China’s brutal Laogai camps. The Laogai are China’s forced prison labor camps that began under Mao and continue in China today.
While a college student, Mr. Wu was sentenced to 19 years in China’s Laogai after being labeled a counter-revolutionary for speaking out against the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary.
Harry Wu was released in 1979 and came to the United States in 1985 with just $40 in his pocket. Since then, he traveled back to China multiple times to further investigate Laogai camps and promote human rights developments in China. Mr. Wu founded the Laogai Research Foundation in 1992 to gather information and raise public awareness of the Chinese Laogai.
In 1995, Chinese authorities arrested and charged Mr. Wu, then a US citizen, with "stealing state secrets" in retaliation for his efforts to expose human rights abuses in China, among them his participation in a CBS 60 Minutes segment documenting China's vast labor camp system. A Chinese court subsequently sentenced him to another 15 years in prison. Due to the tireless efforts of US politicians, human rights activists, and diplomats, Chinese authorities deported Wu just prior to the beginning of the Fourth World Conference on Women, which Hillary Clinton attended in 1995.
Harry Wu was the author of many books including “The Chinese Gulag”, “Bitter Winds”, and “Troublemaker.” He dedicated his book “Troublemaker” “To the Chinese people who have suffered, who have left, who have stayed; someday soon, no more Laogai.”
Harry Wu spoke out for international labor rights and religious freedom, and against the death penalty, forced organ harvesting, and China’s brutal one-child policy. Harry Wu was a great supporter of the Dalai Lama, a Free Tibet, and 2010 Nobel Prize Honoree Liu Xiaobo.
In 2008, Harry Wu opened the first Laogai Museum in Washington, DC. Mr. Wu was the recipient of many international awards and honors.
Harry Wu is survived by his son, Harrison, and his former wife, Ching Lee. He was beloved by many.

Communist China tortures lawyers

Communist China´s human rights violations should not be forgotten!

Beijing prosecutor and lawyer Tang Jitian was on the grounds of a Chinese black jail last year, investigating a case, when local police officers handcuffed and attacked him.

 

“I was first strapped to an iron chair, slapped in the face, kicked on my legs, and hit so hard over the head with a plastic bottle filled with water that I passed out,” Tang said to Amnesty International of his sudden detention. Three other lawyers with him received the same treatment that day.

 

Under the ever-tightening censorship policies of China’s central government, human rights activists and lawyers in the country have found themselves subject to a brutal, sweeping crackdown this year. On Nov. 12, human rights organization Amnesty International released a new report that tells Tang’s chilling story—as well as dozens of others from lawyers who’ve also been assaulted by the Chinese government.

 

These personal accounts come to light at a crucial time: Next week, China will answer questions from a United Nations anti-torture committee at a conference in Geneva—the UN’s fifth probe into the country’s torture practices.

The problem with today´s politicians: " If no one is in charge, no one can be held accountable"

Markus Somm has written an excellent article in the German blog Die Achse des Guten.

Here is my quick translation of part of it:

Perhaps nothing has made more clear what´s wrong with the present day politicians, than the refugee crisis. Maybe it took this tragedy to open the eyes of the citizens of Europe. Too many politicians enjoy being generous, to help people and to save the world, mostly with money that is not theirs, mostly with decisions the consequences of which they must never wear because they lie far in the future. They often say 'yes, rarely say no.That as so many politicians in the refugee crisis almost instinctively call for international coordination, makes one suspicious. It is symptomatic. When something is "coordinated", as it is always said, it means that a great number of people take part in the decision making - or not - in any case so many that nobody longer understands who has decided what. In other words, who is responsible for what. The present generation of politicians have masterfully managed to blur responsibilities: therefore they are so happy to avoid the decision-making processes of the nation state, where they are clearly seen as rulers, and take refuge in the higher spheres of the supranational, where all and no one are responsible. Who decided? Who's to blame?Nobody knows. Is it the EU? The Commission, the Council of Ministers, the UN and the OECD, or the G-8? Or is it the parliament? If no one is in charge, no one can be held accountable. Borders determine a territory, but they also show where the responsibility lies. Therefore borders are less popular with some politicians. In the EU the view, to know no limits, under the heading Schengen, was made almost a raison d'etre. The more difficult it is now to defend these borders, even the Schengen external borders that had never been lifted on paper.

How true!

If you speak German, you can read the entire article here.

Janet Daley on why Viktor Orban is vilified in Europe

Hungary´s Viktor Orban has lately been vilified by the politically correct class of politicians and journalists. But are they right?  The Telegraph´s columnist Janet Daley gives her take:

The voters who put him in office, it seems, hugely approve of the Orban policy. Imagine that: a European leader who actually chooses to represent the views of his own electorate rather than please the unelected commissioners of the EU. The obvious implication on the broadcast news was that this rise in approval within his own country was somehow indecent: a crass populist stance targeted deliberately at a benighted population. Either Mr Orban was a nasty piece of work who was opportunistically appealing to his countrymen’s worst instincts, or the desires of the Hungarian people were beneath consideration – or both.

Let’s just hang on a minute. Before we are pulled into self-righteous judgments about other peoples and their leaders, we might consider what is at stake. Maybe we need to ask precisely what elected governments are for in modern Europe, and whether a population has to sign up to certain assumptions and attitudes before it is entitled to democratic government. There is an unspoken argument here that goes beyond the immediate refugee problem or that other threat to EU unity, the future of the eurozone. If democratically mandated national leaders can be condemned for being genuinely in tune with their own electorates, what does this amount to?

Read the entire column here.

"Putinism" - Anne Applebaum´s outstanding analysis

An outstanding lecture on Putinism:

 

Anne Applebaum´s report on Putinism

Strongly recommended reading!

Leslie Gelb as Putin´s useful idiot

Vladimir Putin can still count on a number of useful idiots in the US. Leslie Gelb (former correspondent and columnist, former senior Defense and State Department official) is one of them. In his view the US and Europe are solely to blame for Putin´s aggression in Ukraine. And, indeed, the Baltic states should never have been allowed to join NATO!

Here are a couple of excerpts from Gelb´s latest "research":

Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, NATO conferred membership upon much of Eastern Europe. In many cases, this was a sound strategy for the West, Russian resentment notwithstanding. The alliance, however, pushed its advantage provocatively far. It extended its protective wing up to Russia’s borders in the Baltic states.
---

When some neighbors rejected Russia in favor of the West, Moscow chose force. In Georgia, Russia solidified control over the provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A democratic uprising in Ukraine triggered Russian support for revolts in Ukraine’s eastern provinces and the annexation of Crimea.
At some point over the last quarter century, Washington might have realized that the Kremlin was not going to sit around and wait for the West to determine Russia’s fate. Russia’s leaders countered with what came naturally to them—military power—to ensure they would shape their own future.

"Wait for the West to determine Russia´s fate"?!!

Canada´s PM Stephen Harper: There is no return for Putin´s Russia to G7

While Barack Obama has been strangely silent on this, Canada´s PM Stephen Harper hits the right note:

"I don't think Russia under Vladimir Putin belongs in the G7. Period," Harper told the Associated Press. "Canada would very, very strongly oppose Putin ever sitting around that table again. It would require consensus to bring Russia back and that consensus will just not happen."
The G7 suspended Russia from the grouping of leading industrialized nations following its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea last March, but has not ruled out a possible return under changed circumstances.
Harper, who is to visit Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk before heading to Bavaria for the G7 summit, said there was no room for conciliation with the Kremlin in light of the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and its alleged support of pro-Russia separatists fighting government troops in eastern Ukraine.
"This is a country that has shown a willingness to invade its neighbors, to actually seize territory that does not belong to it, and so I don't think we should take this escalation of a hostile military posture lightly. It needs to be treated seriously," said Harper, whose country is home to more than one million people of Ukrainian heritage.

"Qatar and Russia shoul be stripped of the World Cup"

Fortunately there are still journalists who are not afraid of telling the truth:

To hell with diplomatic repercussions; every tournament awarded by Fifa must now be re-allocated or boycotted. To do otherwise would be to endorse or condone near-total corruption.

It is unlikely that Vladimir Putin will unashamedly make the opening ceremony to Russia’s 2018 World Cup a celebration of the annexation of Crimea, or an interpretative dance sequence commemorating the supply of surface-to-air military equipment that resulted in the deaths of 298 people when MH17 was shot down. But the event has clearly been purchased for the further glorification of a president more deserving of the attention of the International Court of Justice than the world’s sporting community.

Russian novelist Mikhail Shishkin on Putin

 "It is impossible to imagine Putin, the gray little KGB colonel, with a book in his hands."

Mikhail Shishkin

(Link)

Boris Nemtsov RIP

Boris Nemtsov RIP

The shooting, on a bridge near Red Square, under the towering domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, ended Mr. Nemtsov’s two-decade career as a champion of democratic reforms, beginning in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, and just days before he was to lead a rally to protest the war in Ukraine. --

He is by far the most prominent public figure to die in such a fashion, though just one in a string of murders of opponents of Mr. Putin, most notoriously the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the human rights researcher Natalia Estemirova and the security service defector Aleksandr V. Litvinenko. And while low-level criminals have been detained in some cases, the investigations in Russia never traced back to those who ordered the murders.

Read the entire NYT article here

Vladimir Putin - "A common criminal dressed up as a Head of State"

 "A common criminal dressed up as a Head of State"

Yes, Vladimir Putin is nothing but a "common criminal dressed up as a Head of State":

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “common criminal dressed up as a Head of State” who ordered the murder of Alexander Litvinenko to stop him exposing him, the inquiry heard.

The former spy was murdered for trying to reveal Putin’s close links to organised crime and a cabal of crime lords who prop up his corrupt regime, it was claimed.

Ben Emmerson QC, representing the Litvinenko family, said the trail behind the “act of unspeakable barbarism” led directly to Putin’s door.

He said Russia was a “Mafia state” where the Kremlin and Russian organised crime syndicates were “indistinguishable”.

Mr Litvinenko could even show crimes committed or authorises by Mr Putin personally, it was claimed.

And the seeds of hatred Putin had towards his former agent which would eventually lead to the murder were first sown in clashes more than eight years before, the inquiry heard.
Putin was a “ruthless and deadly enemy” and “we find Mr Putin's fingerprints as clearly as we find the traces of nuclear material in the forensic evidence”, he said.
In his opening statement to the inquiry, Mr Emmerson said: "Vladimir Putin should be unmasked by this inquiry as nothing more or less than a common criminal dressed up as a Head of State.

Read the entire article here
 

An excellent documentary: "Putin´s Way"

 This excellent documentary on Vladimir Putin and the mafia state he has created is highly recommended:

The documentary does not address the question about how the free world should react to what has happened in Putin´s Russia, but in a separate interview Walter Clemens, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, gives his well founded opinion:


What should the international community do about Mr. Putin?

CLEMENS: He should be indicted and brought before the International Criminal Court. Putin is probably guilty of all types of transgressions the court is authorized to prosecute—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. As Russia’s president or prime minister, Putin dispatched Russian armed forces against the peoples of Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine while keeping them in a province of Moldova. His troops killed between 100,000 and 200,000 Chechens, split off South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, and watched as South Ossetians carried out ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages. Putin’s forces have seized Crimea, putting Tatars as well as Ukrainians at risk. Putin has fomented separatism in eastern Ukraine and sent several thousand Russians to fight alongside the separatists. He may not have intended for his proxies to shoot down a Malaysian airliner, but he provided the equipment and training that permitted them to do so and kill nearly 300 civilians. When weapons based in Russia strike targets inside Ukraine, however, there is no doubt about Putin’s intentions.

Vladimir Putin named most corrupt Person of the Year

"Putin has been a finalist every year so you might consider this a lifetime achievement award. He has been a real innovator in working with organized crime. He has created a military-industrial-political-criminal complex that furthers Russia’s and Putin’s personal interests. I think Putin sees those interests as one and the same."

Another well deserved award for Vladimir Putin:

Vladimir Putin has been named the 2014 Person of the Year by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an award given annually to the person who does the most to enable and promote organized criminal activity.
Putin was recognized for his work in turning Russia into a major money-laundering center; for enabling organized crime in Crimea and in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine; for his unblemished record of failing to prosecute criminal activity; and for advancing a government policy of working with and using crime groups as a component of state policy.

The EU´s foreign policy chief ready for appeasement with Russia

The EU´s foreign policy chief, Italian Federica Mogherini, appears to be ready for appeasement with regard to Putin´s Russia. Hopefully Mrs Merkel will stop her!

BRUSSELS - Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has said the bloc should launch a new “debate” with Russia aimed at ending the “confrontation” over Ukraine.
She told Italy’s La Repubblica daily on Saturday (27 December): “The current situation is very difficult for Russia. It would be in its interest to contribute to ending the conflict. At the same time, we all know that Russia plays an important role not only in Ukraine, but also in Syria, Iran, the Middle East, Libya”.
“We have to open a direct debate with Moscow on our mutual relations and the role that Russia can play in other crises”.
She noted that Ukraine and the US also want a way out.

Vladimir Putin´s press conference on December 18, the birthday of Joseph Stalin

Putin:
"What [The West] is trying to do is chain the bear, take out his claws...what we're trying to do is maintain our sovereignty and independence."

Vladimir Putin has today, on the birthday of Joseph Stalin, held a televised press conference.
The leader of the world´s foremost thugocracy carefully followed the advice of another Russian leader, Vladimir Lenin, when answering questions: "A lie told often enough becomes the truth".

Anna Netrebko - A loyal member of the Putin fan club

The highly overrated Russian soprano Anna Netrebko has again confirmed her credentials as a loyal member of the Putin fan club:

The Russian-Austrian opera soprano Anna Netrebko has given support to east Ukrainian separatists, posing with one of their top political leaders and holding up the flag of Novorossia, a self-declared amalgamation of territory that is seeking independence from Kiev.
Netrebko, who holds dual citizenship, was pictured with the flag during a press conference in St Petersburg over the weekend, where she announced she was donating 1m roubles (£12,000) to the Donetsk Opera Theatre.

Anne Applebaum on Putin and his KGB cronies: "theft on a grand scale"

 "European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi—all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support."

If you only read one article about the mafia state that Vladimir Putin has created, this is the one to read:

In place of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle slowly put into place a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilizing support on a new and spectacular scale. Once the KGB had retaken the country, in other words, it began once again to act like the KGB—only now it was better funded and more sophisticated. Today’s Russian “political technologists” make use of their state-owned media, including English-language outlets such as the TV news channel Russia Today; armies of paid social media “trolls” who post on newspaper comment pages, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites; fake “experts” whose quotes can be presented with fake authority; and real experts to whom Putin’s officials have granted special access, or have simply paid. Former Western ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi—all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support. --


Indeed, in the months since Putin’s invasion of Crimea, it has become fashionable to suggest that the harder-line face that Putin has more recently shown to the world is somehow, once again, the West’s “fault,” that we have provoked Russia into autocratic behavior through our talk of democracy in Ukraine or that—once again—the “reform process” was somehow brought to a halt because the Russians felt threatened by the expansion of NATO or by Western policy in the Balkans.
But after reading Dawisha’s book, and after absorbing the implications of the stories she has so carefully pulled together from so many sources, it is simply not possible to take this argument seriously. Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by a revanchist, revisionist elite with origins in the old KGB. This elite had been working its way back to power since the late 1980s, using theft on a grand scale, taking advantage of the secrecy provided by Western offshore havens, and cooperating with organized crime.
Once in power, the new elite sought to maintain control using the same methods that the KGB always used to maintain control: through the manipulation of public emotion, and by undermining the institutions of the West, and the ideals of the West, in any way that it can. Based on its record so far, it has every reason to expect continued success.

Putin´s Russia summarized in 12 seconds

The Telegraph:

"Russian rouble shaken in biggest one-day fall against dollar since 1998

The currency of Vladimir Putin's Russia has been left shaken by falling oil prices and sanctions related to ongoing tensions in Ukraine" 

An brief summary of Putin´s Russia:

 

Dashcam footage shows a car upside down after it has

been driven into a huge hole in a road in Russia

 

Gorbachev blames the west and lauds dictator Putin

Mikhail Gorbachev accuses the west and does not have a critical word about Putin´s blatant aggression in Ukraine:

The 83-year-old former leader has accused the west – particularly the US – of “triumphalism” after the collapse of the communist bloc.
Gorbachev called for new trust to be built through dialogue with Moscow and suggested the west should lift sanctions imposed against senior Russian officials over its actions in eastern Ukraine.
Before arriving in Berlin, he gave pointed backing to Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying the Ukraine crisis offered an “excuse” for the US to victimise Russia: “I am absolutely convinced that Putin protects Russia’s interests better than anyone else.”
In an interview with the Interfax news agency, Gorbachev admitted that Putin was not above criticism, but he said he did not want others to pick on the Russian leader.

As they say in Finland, "A Russkie is always a Russkie, even when fried with butter".

Gorbachev apparently wants to secure himself a first class ticket in Putin´s thugocracy when it is time to leave ...

Garry Kasparov: "Putin’s bargaining power has been greatly overestimated"

Garry Kasparov´s speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum should be compulsory reading for European and American leaders:

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, it made perfect sense to integrate, to “engage”, with the morally and economically impoverished countries emerging from the Communist Dark Ages. But even after the European Union and NATO were expanded to their logical limits, the West continued to engage with authoritarian nations and leaders who wanted nothing to do with human rights and free markets within their own borders. Countries like Putin’s Russia and China received the economic benefits of engagement with the free world, but never ceased their crackdowns on civil society at home.

[SLIDE: ‘ENGAGEMENT’ PHOTOS: PUTIN WITH SCHROEDER, BERLUSCONI, LIPPONEN G8,]

Putin in particular has been very successful using the free world’s open borders, open press, and open political systems to his advantage. Just a note, that if not for Putin’s blatant aggression in Ukraine the so-called G-8 Summit would have taken place in Sochi last summer. Putin and his representatives have put many prominent Western politicians on his payroll, held fundraisers for political parties, brought influential western companies and executives into his network, and flooded western banks and markets with the easy cash they love, paid for with their own oil and gas money. However, Putin’s bargaining power has been greatly overestimated.

[SLIDE OIL & GAS IMPORT-EXPORT CHARTS]

The free world still has many advantages in this fight, and could have all the leverage it needs, if only it had the courage to use it. The EU, for example, gets only a third of its oil and gas from Russia. Substantial, and in many ways shameful, since it has been clear for years that Putin is not a reliable partner. Russia’s annexation of Crimea took place in March and Europe did nothing for seven months to find an alternative to Russian gas. And of course Norway could be one of the options! Today we still hear that “Europe could freeze” if Putin cuts the gas supply. But Russia exports over 80% of its oil and gas to the EU! Over 80%! Who has the leverage here? By boycotting or taxing those exports, or even making a credible threat to do so, Europe could cripple the cash flow that keeps Putin and his gang in power.
There are other powerful measures that could be employed. Russia’s hundreds of billions of dollars in cash reserves kept in Europe and the US could be frozen, as Iran’s were in 1979; Russian state corporations can be stripped of their cash flow; and Putin’s oligarchs’ assets can be seized to create a rift between the Godfather and his lieutenants. Total isolation is not possible today, but the free world must break all forms of dependency on dictatorships. Engagement with dictators has failed.

[SLIDE OF HEADLINES ABOUT PUTIN’S LOBBYING AND PROPAGANDA IN THE WEST]

This failed engagement policy of the West has given Putin something the Soviet leaders never dreamed of: an open frequency for propaganda and lobbying, and open markets for their natural resources and cash. Russia and China have channels on Western cable TV and teams of influential lobbyists in every capital. But sellers need buyers. Pipelines cannot easily be redirected. Russia’s ruling elite and their families have no desire to live in the country they have so effectively looted and ruined.
So the free world holds the winning cards in this game of geopolitical poker, but keeps folding its hand whenever Putin bluffs – and he does so regularly and successfully. A dictator knows what he must do to stay in power: he must look strong; he fights to survive. Democratically elected leaders are more worried about the next poll, the next election, or passing on tough decisions to their successors. Conflict and sacrifice aren’t winning campaign issues. Western leaders complain about jobs that could be lost from a confrontation, but how many jobs will be lost from global instability when dictators go unchallenged?
But we must fight – now, or later. If we have learned anything about dictators it is that they do not go away on their own. Putin is not a nightmare that goes away when you open your eyes! The longer we wait, the harder it will be. The price keeps going up every day. There is never a safe and easy solution. Sanctions can be effective, but they must be strong enough and fast enough to deter.
Read the entire speech here