Stepping Stones to Absolute Power: A Public Sacrifice
C.L.Cook
M1, '05
Way before the 9/11 conspiracy theorists sharpened their pencils and asked the crucial question no-one else would: Cui bono? Who benefits? there was an eerily familiar precedent to the 2001 terrorist attacks in America unfolding in Russia.
The infamous apartment building bombings in 1999 had the effect of bolstering the then-new president, Vladimir Putin's sagging public support during his unremarkable early days in power to a soaring, even heroic status. In the few short months following the bombings, he was also able, incidentally, to bring to fruition his determined effort to take a second swipe at the resolute rebellion in Chechnya. And, maybe in the process, make himself a "War President."
Putin's newly minted Czar-like status lent him the unquestioned authority to "rearrange" the constitution and concentrate legislative power in his own hands. Over the brief few years since the terror campaign against everyday Russians, Putin has managed to use the attacks to reverse virtually all the democratic reforms that resulted from the fall of communism and subsequent break up of the Soviet Union. But, it's not the ghosts of Chechnya keeping Putin up at night these days.
If he appears a man besieged, then he's a perfect portrait of Russia today. The United States and its allies in NATO have drawn a cordon around the former Empire, digesting it slowly with "democracy movements," support of regional tyrants, "shock and awe" extravaganzas in Russian neighbours, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and the emplacement of dozens of "hardened" U.S. military bases across the nation's southern flank.
Whispers of government complicity in the apartment bombings began early on: the heirs of the Soviet have an ingrained suspicion of power. But, who best benefits the apartment building bombings? For many, the answer comes up Putin and his hawkish friends in the military/intelligence complex.
The continued war and occupation of Chechnya hasn't been bad for everybody. Certain Russians, and their confrere elites were, and are, making like bandits. And they're not the only ones.
After three buildings had been felled within the month that black September, former KGB agents were caught by local residents and police planting the explosives in the basement of a fourth building. This arrest grew the whispers to a chatter; a disquiet not quelled by feeble official explanations for the red-handed arrest of their admitted agents.
Lame even as a shoolyard defense, Russia audaciously testified: "The agents were simply testing security." They also maintained, sacks of apparent explosives being laid down by their agents when caught in the act were actually harmless "flour." A feeble lie, made immediately apparent by former military men familiar with expolsives at the scene of the crime.
Or was it a crime? No charges were laid.
So, what we are left to ponder is: Would a president use the secret services of the nation to plan mass murder against his own people to forward a sinister conspiracy to undo democracy and create a military dictatorship?
Who could believe such a claim?
Alyona Morozova's family resided in one of three apartment buildings destroyed in the mad 1999 campaign of mahem that rocked Russia, and was all blamed on Chechen rebels.
Chechyna had already suffered a brutal war that saw the razing of cities on a level exeeding even NATO's destruction of Belgrade and the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. But the Chechens, never shy about inflicting damage against their hated oppressors, accepted no credit for a bombing campaign against civilian targets. Morozova wanted answers, and now says her questions have marked her for murder by those fearing the truth most. And, following her near obsessive investigation of the bombings, she points her finger squarely at Putin.
Today, Alyona Morozova finds herself centre stage in a global diplomacy power play that pits the two old Super Foes nose to nose. By filing for asylum in the United States, and the acceptance by the U.S. of her claims of a Putin-backed assassination plot against her, Morozova has become a new piece on a developing new Great Game board. It's a game that still includes massive destructive capabilties, including nuclear, on both sides. But for now, the more subtle thrust and parry...
Move: Russia - Technology leak to Iran {feint}
Counter: U.S.A. - Alyona Morozova {checkmate}
Though the Bush administration may enjoy Vladimir's discomfiture now, they may find themselves a-dangle on their own petard before long. The parallels between Russia's "little 9/11" in '99 and its greater Broadway production in 2001 have already been drawn, and the full scope of Alyona's story may lead to other loose bricks in the New W. O. It could shake the foundation of what appears an increasingly shook World Order.
For Morozova: She just wants out of a country run by a president who wouldn't think twice about haphazardly murdering neighbours; treating the citizenry as nothing better than serfs; fodder; pawns in a cynical game of self-aggrandizement. Alyona Morozova says she has to go. Too many of her friends and colleagues questioning what happened in September '99 have met with misadventure. Too many fatalities. But, should her story echo too loudly, becoming a precedent-parallel tale, staged in America, Alonya Morozova may want to reconsider her destination.
Look for the Morozova Affair, coming soon. It could prove an unraveling worth watching. -ape
By Gwynne Dyer
PRESIDENT George W. Bush leaves the flourishing metropolis of Mainz tomorrow evening, after meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and flies to Bratislava for a dinner with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. (Mainz? Bratislava? Not Berlin and Moscow? Is Mr Bush avoiding European crowds?) The Russian and American presidents will doubtless maintain a polite facade, but it’s unlikely that Bush will emerge from this meeting to declare once again that "Pootie-Poot" is his soulmate.
The Russian-American relationship is not thriving, and the proof of it is the fact that the United States granted political asylum a month ago to Alyona Morozova, a Russian citizen who claims that her life is in danger because of her role in investigating a series of “terrorist” bombing attacks that killed 246 Russians in September 1999. The chief suspect in the bombings, according to her, is Vladimir Putin.
Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month, including one that left Alyona Morozova’s mother and boyfriend dead under the rubble. There had been peace between Russia and the breakaway republic of Chechnya since 1996, and no Chechen claimed responsibility for the bombings, but then-prime minister Vladimir Putin immediately blamed the atrocities on the Chechens and launched a second war against them that continues to this day.
Boris Yeltsin was in the last year of his presidency then, and he was seeking a way to retire without facing prosecution for the fortunes he and his cronies had amassed in their years of power. Vladimir Putin, former head of the FSB secret police, had recently been appointed prime minister by Yeltsin but was still largely unknown to the Russian public.
The deal was that Yeltsin would pass the presidency to Putin at the end of the year, and Putin would then grant Yeltsin an amnesty for all crimes committed while he was in office. But there was still the tedious business of an election to get through, and Russians who scarcely knew Putin’s name had to be persuaded to vote for him on short notice. How to boost his profile as Saviour of the Nation? Well, a war, obviously.
Alyona Morozova (and many others) claim that Putin’s old friends at the FSB carried out the apartment bombings themselves, in order to give their man a pretext to declare war on Chechnya and make himself a national hero in time for the presidential elections. It would be just one more unfounded conspiracy theory – except that only days after the big Moscow bomb, a resident at a similar apartment building in the city of Ryazan spotted three people acting suspiciously and called the local police.
The police founds sacks in the cellar that they initially said contained hexogen, the explosive used in the other bombings, together with a timer set for 5.30 am. They also discovered that the three people who had planted the explosives were actually FSB agents. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, insisted that the sacks contained only sugar and that the whole thing was a training exercise, and the local police fell silent, but there was no proper investigation.
Alyona Morozova fears the Russian government’s wrath because a number of other people who have tried to investigate the incident have been murdered or jailed on trumped-up charges of “espionage.” So she asked for political asylum in the United States: nothing surprising in that. It’s much more surprising that the US government actually granted her asylum, because it is implicitly acknowledging the possibility that President Vladimir Putin, in addition to being a mass murderer of Chechens, may also be a mass murderer of Russians.
You do not do this to countries you expect to be friends with. It may be the right thing to do, in moral terms, but that has not been a significant constraint on US policy towards trusted allies like Algeria, Egypt and Turkmenistan. Something else is going on here.
Just straws in the wind, but count them. Russia has refused to cut its support for Iran’s nuclear power projects despite all of Washington’s blandishments. Moscow is on the brink of a surface-to-air missile deal with Syria that would give that country the ability to challenge Israeli and even American overflights. The European Union is about to end its embargo on arms sales to China. The EU will go ahead with its Galileo satellite geo-positioning system, which can greatly improve missile accuracy, despite US protests that the existing American system (with fuzzed data for non-US military customers) is good enough for everybody. And it will sell the Galileo data to the Chinese.
There is a realignment going on, and it isn’t about ideology. If Russia were a fully democratic country, its foreign ministry would still be worried by US adventurism in the Middle East. If China were a democracy, it would probably be more active in opposing the American military presence in East Asia. And France and Germany, which are genuine democracies, increasingly see the US as a threat – not to them directly, but to global stability.
This change of attitude is not yet an accomplished fact, and a change of course in Washington could still abort the trend. But most of the world’s other major powers are starting to see the United States as a rogue state, and gradually they are responding to that perception. Nothing George W. Bush will say or do on this European trip is likely to change their minds.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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