Posted on 06/12/2009 6:43:46 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan -- One at a time the government's top critics seemed to go to jail, or simply disappear.
Syrgak Abdyldayev, a local journalist, began to investigate whether the attacks had anything to do with a team of Russian-speaking specialists who arrived last year to advise the Kyrgyz government. He published several scathing articles accusing the government of shunting aside its opponents and turning to Moscow for financial support, including one in February that likened Russian aid to "oxygen for a sinking submarine."
Then Mr. Abdyldayev became a victim. Three men attacked him with metal pipes as he left his newspaper one evening in March, broke both his arms, his ribs and a leg, and stabbed him 26 times in the buttocks.
Times are changing in Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous Central Asian republic that not long ago was a hoped-for springboard for Western-style democracy in the former Soviet Union.
The president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, has steered Kyrgyzstan sharply back into the orbit of Moscow. In January, Mr. Bakiyev jolted Washington by announcing he was evicting the U.S. from an air base that has been crucial to the supply of troops fighting in Afghanistan. And political freedom here, as in Russia, is in decline. The Kyrgyz and Russian governments deny any link to the attacks on Kyrgyz critics.
Associated Press
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 25.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I guess that our policy in Kosovo is coming along nicely.
Just a thought: why not dump our muzzie prisoners there?
Seldom reported driver in this story is the massive Cyber Attack that Russia mounted against the Kyrgyz government.
They are real bastrds the Russians.
http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/another-cyberwar-kyrgyzstan-this-time
Is that anything like the not-so-cyber attack on Yugoslavia?
You have to hand it to Ivan, he defends his interests and doesn’t read Miranda rights to his opponents. Yopu will never see Putin launch an apology tour.
Yep, strangely enough, it appears that we have bet on the wrong horse.
Who would have thought that Russia would end up as the rational thinking good guy?
BTTT!
This is the area where a major war will break out.
Remember that you heard this from me first.
I like your analysis and think this may be the real view of the wanna-be Prez from most other countries.
I’ll remember where I heard it first but, I’ll be hard pressed to remember how to spell your name.
If, on the other hand you spelled it **Wodka Wyborowa**, I might stand a fighting chance.
Kyrgyzstan? Seems mlikely the next war will happen where and when the next state pushes back. I know nothing of the region but am beginning to see Putin’s handiwork has a hard edge to it.
One at a time the government's top critics seemed to go to jail, or simply disappear. Syrgak Abdyldayev, a local journalist, began to investigate whether the attacks had anything to do with a team of Russian-speaking specialists who arrived last year to advise the Kyrgyz government. He published several scathing articles accusing the government of shunting aside its opponents and turning to Moscow for financial support, including one in February that likened Russian aid to "oxygen for a sinking submarine." Then Mr. Abdyldayev became a victim. Three men attacked him with metal pipes as he left his newspaper one evening in March, broke both his arms, his ribs and a leg, and stabbed him 26 times in the buttocks.Weird coincidence. Probably Israeli settlers. Thanks Ernest.
To be added to or removed from this list, please FReepmail me...
Yet we have more than a few misguided FReepers who actually admire Putin!
The murder of internationally renowned Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in early October 2006 was yet another troubling sign of Russia’s retreat into its totalitarian past. Today Frontpage Symposium has gathered a distinguished panel of experts to discuss why Anna Politkovskaya was killed and what the tragic loss of her life symbolizes about the direction in which Vladimir Putin’s Russia is heading.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=BDBFAEF5-5295-400F-807B-83D20FFA285C
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'PUTIN'S RUSSIA' by Anna Politkovskaya:
http://www.annapolitkovskaya.com/
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Col. Alexander Litvinenko
4 Dec 1962 - 23 Nov 2006
"You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value."
Obituary: Alexander Litvinenko
Times of London, 25 November 2006
On April 23, 2002, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian secret service, arrived at Heathrow, supposedly on a stopover before flying on to the Caribbean. Claiming that he was being persecuted by the Russian authorities, he sought political asylum.
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was born in 1962 in Voronezh, south of Moscow. After high school and extended service in the Soviet Army (in which his grandfather was an officer), he graduated from the Interior Forces Military Academy, joining the KGB in 1988.
While his early career was in espionage, by 1991 he had made a name for himself in the organised crime and anti-terror divisions. He also worked in the central apparatus, leading co-operation between the KGB, by then renamed the FSB, and the Moscow organised crime police squad. In 1997 he joined one of the FSB’s most secret departments, specialising in the pursuit of criminal organisations, and became its deputy head.
This exemplary career came to an abrupt end on November 18, 1998, when, in a press conference, he accused his FSB superiors of extortion, corruption and illegal assassinations. The accusations were detailed and seemed credible. He was suspended and in March 1999 arrested and held in isolation in the infamous KGB Lefortovo prison.
He was tried and acquitted in November 1999, but immediately rearrested. In 2000 charges were dropped after he promised to stay in Moscow. He and his family lived under intense surveillance and when they heard that further charges were being prepared, they fled. They flew to Turkey and from there to London.
Tried in absentia and sentenced to nine years in prison, Litvinenko found work in Britain as a postman, while his wife taught ballroom dancing. He continued his campaign against his former employers in interviews and books, and contributed anti-Russian material to a Chechen website. At the time of his death he was investigating the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
He is survived by his wife Marina and his two children.
Alexander Litvinenko, former officer of the Russian secret service, was born on December 4, 1962. He died on November 23, 2006, aged 43
http://www.cicentre.com/Documents/litvinenko.html
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Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security agent fighting for his life in a UK hospital after allegedly being poisoned, has been a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin since before he became president in 2000.
Mr Litvinenko is thought to have been close to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another opponent of the Kremlin who was shot dead last month, and said recently he was investigating her murder. It was after being handed documents apparently relating to the case that he was taken ill more than two weeks ago.
But he is perhaps best known for a book in which he alleges that agents co-ordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people. He now appears to have fallen victim to the kind of plots which he wrote about.
Arrest
Mr Litvinenko, 43, first became a security agent under the Soviet-era KGB, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in its later incarnations.
He is reported to have fallen out with Vladimir Putin, then head of the security service, in the late 1990s, after failing in attempts to crack down on corruption within the organisation. In 1998, he first came to prominence by exposing an alleged plot to assassinate the then powerful tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who himself now lives in self-imposed exile in the UK. He was subsequently arrested on charges of abusing his office and spent nine months in a remand centre before being acquitted.
In 1999 he wrote Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, in which he accused the current Russian security service, the FSB, of carrying out several apartment house bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people. The attacks, which Moscow blamed on Chechen rebels, helped swing public opinion behind Russia's second war in the breakaway republic.
Petrol bombs
Complaining of persecution, in 2000 Mr Litvinenko fled to the UK where he sought, and was granted, asylum. But after settling in an unnamed London suburb, the former spy continued to behave as if on the run, constantly changing his contact details. The Times newspaper reported that over the summer someone tried to push a pram loaded with petrol bombs at his front door. Appearing alongside high-profile opponents of President Putin, he has continued to make allegations about his former bosses. Perhaps most notably, he alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB in Dagestan in the years before 9/11.
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