I find it unsettling that I even have to consider the question.

 That most Americans oppose the war in Iraq is well established. The latest CBS News poll, in mid-October, found 26 per cent of those polled approved of the way the president is handling the war and 67 per cent disapproved.

 It found that 45 per cent said they’d only be willing to keep large numbers of US troops in Iraq “for less than a year”. And an ABC News-Washington Post poll in late September found that 55 per cent felt Democrats in Congress had not gone far enough in opposing the war.

 Granted, neither poll asked specifically about what this weekend’s marchers wanted: An end to congressional funding for the war. Still, poll after poll has found substantial discontent with a war that ranks as the preeminent issue in the presidential campaign.

 Given that context, it seems remarkable to me that in some of the 11 cities in which protests were held – Boston and New York, for example – major news outlets treated this “National Day of Action” as though it did not exist.

 As far as I can tell, neither The New York Times nor The Boston Globe had so much as a news brief about the march in the days leading up to it. The day after, The Times, at least in its national edition, totally ignored the thousands who marched in New York and the tens of thousands who marched nationwide.  

The Globe relegated the news of 10,000 spirited citizens (including me) marching through Boston’s rain-dampened streets to a short piece deep inside its metro section. A single sentence noted the event’s national context. As a former newspaper editor, I was most taken aback by the silence beforehand. Surely any march of widespread interest warrants a brief news item to let people know that the event is taking place and that they can participate. It’s called “advancing the news”, and it has a time-honoured place in American newsrooms.  

Horrors of Iraq 

With prescient irony, Frank Rich wrote in his October 14 Times column, “We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq…. But we must also examine our own responsibility.” And, he goes on to suggest, we must examine our own silence.  

So why would Rich’s news colleagues deprive people of information needed to take exactly that responsibility? 

I’m not suggesting here that the Times or any news organisation should be in collusion with a movement – pro-war or antiwar, pro-choice or pro-life, pro-government or pro-privatisation.  

I am suggesting that news organisations cover the news – that they inform the public about any widespread effort to give voice to those who share a widely held view about any major national issue.

 If it had been a pro-war group that had organised a series of support marches this weekend, I’d have felt the same way. Like the National Day of Action, their efforts would have been news – news of how people can participate in a democracy overrun with campaign platitudes and big-plate fundraisers, news that keeps democracy vibrant, news that keeps it healthy.

 Joseph Pulitzer, the editor and publisher for whom the highest honour in journalism is named, understood this well.  

In May 1904, he wrote: “Our Republic and its press rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press … can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery…. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

 It’s time for the current generation of journalists – at times seemingly obsessed with Martha Stewart, O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the like – to use that power more vigilantly, and more firmly, with the public interest in mind.  

Jerry Lanson is a professor of journalism at Emerson College in Boston.

http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/world/10163905.html

American Indians intend to build their republic in present US. In order to attain their goal they wants to ask help from UN or other powerful country.

 Yesterday the president of American Indians Association said that they are going to found their own republic and they call all American Indians around the world to come back native and historical land.

In order to reach their goal they want to ask help from UN. If United Nations rebuffs them they will ask help from other powerful and “democratic” country like Iran.

What unbelievable news!!! But in this world it will be happen if you have power and such atomic, thermonuclear and etc bombs then much much money that can buy everything especially Media which can change the opinions of mankind.

By Pepper

Vladimir Putin’s global warning

Less than a decade after its humiliating debt default, Russia’s economy is booming as never before. But President Putin is using his country’s newfound wealth to boost the military, stoke nationalism and, increasingly, to confront the West. Is this the beginning of a new cold war?

Report by Brian Moynahan

Moscow has been washed all summer by the northern sun, lingering over the gilded onion domes of St Basil’s and glowing softly off the cobblestones of Red Square.

 The shoppers are out until late in the elegant galleries and boutiques around the Kremlin wall. Green parasols shade open-air diners, and laughter drifts from the beer gardens. Moscow has never had it so good.

It is just little things, seen and heard, that jar. Posters, Soviet-style, with heroic figures and slogans in retro typefaces, advertise a Kremlin-backed youth group, Nashi. A sense of control is growing, on television, in business, even out driving. Traffic police no longer fine them for their own pocket, motorists say. Shakedowns are now professional, regulated from on high.

Lenin never vanished from Red Square. His mausoleum remains, his museum is being redecorated, and a lookalike has long stood at the entrance to the square, posing for photographs for a few roubles. Stalin was different: reviled as the killer of millions within three years of his death, his body plucked from its place of honour next to Lenin and secretly reburied in 1961.

Stalin’s lookalike has now joined Lenin. That is very new, and the instinct on seeing him with his arm round smiling trippers is to duck, as if he is some still-lethal ricochet from the past.

When the Beatles sang Back in the USSR nearly 40 years ago, the world was in thrall to the cold war, and the prospect of global meltdown was thermonuclear rather than climatic. Those days are here again, or so it seems.

A sea change is taking place in Russia. An ever-pricklier sense of national pride is seen across the board. President Putin mocks the notion of a “unipolar”, American-dominated world. The point was emphasised last month as he and the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, watched their troops assault “terrorists” in joint manoeuvres in the Urals, while a mini-submarine planted a titanium Russian flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole itself.

Relations with the West, particularly Britain, are at their worst in years. Moscow has suspended its participation in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Under CFE, adopted in 1990, Russia moved most of its tanks and other hardware east of the Urals. It no longer has to keep them there. Military spending is running at a post-Soviet record. New nuclear submarines, missiles and aircraft have been commissioned.

Amid talk of a renewed arms race, a £500m all-weather missile-defence system was sold to Iran, £1.5 billion of hardware to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, and missiles to Syria. Bear strategic bombers are back over the North Sea for the first time in 17 years, reviving a traditional photo opportunity for RAF pilots as they see them off. A restored base in Syria will give the Russian navy a presence in the Mediterranean.

Pressure is put on neighbours, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, with threats to natural gas supplies. At home, psychiatric wards are again used to forcibly detain dissidents. Political opponents have been beaten up, journalists have been murdered. The British and Estonian ambassadors have been harassed by Kremlin-approved demonstrators.

It is the government itself that smacks most of Soviet days, however. The KGB, the old security force that spied and suppressed on behalf of the Communist party, is back. It has a new name, the Federal Security Service (FSB). It has emerged as the controlling element in the state. Its basic instincts are now Russia’s: the pursuit of power, suspicion, fear of encirclement, the equation of opposition with anarchy, and extreme sensitivity to slights. The FSB, and the new Russia, do not like to be dissed.

The siloviki, the “men of power” with backgrounds in the FSB and military, sit ever more comfortably in the saddle. They and their friends account for two-thirds and more of the upper reaches of the state. Soviet leaders had to seek consensus within the politburo and the party, and they kept a weather eye on the KGB, too. The siloviki have no such constraints. They run the Kremlin and the government. They control the provinces, where governors are no longer elected by local people, but are appointed by the Kremlin.

They own, run or control the media and large slices of industry. Every ministry now has its ZAO, a “closed shareholder society”, controlled by relations and friends of senior officials. These are used to privatise assets. The railway ministry, for example, controls thousands of advertising sites on stations, in carriages. Spin them off into a ZAO and the spoils are immense.

The FSB’s most famous alumnus is Vladimir Putin himself, a former KGB lieutenant-colonel, and head of the FSB under Boris Yeltsin. He has surrounded himself with men of the same ilk. Several of them, like Putin, are security-service veterans from St Petersburg: Viktor Ivanov, who runs the Kremlin staff, Igor Sechin, the in-house economy expert, Sergei Ivanov, the former defence minister, now first deputy prime minister, a modest-sounding role that gives little hint of his real influence. Sechin is also chairman of Rosneft, the state-run oil major. Viktor Ivanov is head of the board of Aeroflot, Russia’s national airline. Putin’s press secretary is on the board of the biggest television channel.

As well as personal wealth, as a group they control the billions of pounds earned by oil and gas exports. “Russia is well enough off with $40-a-barrel oil,” says an energy specialist. “At $65 and above, it’s head-turning.” Russia is the largest natural-gas exporter. In oil, it is second only to Saudi Arabia. Demand for its gold, platinum, nickel and copper is soaring.

This inflow of money assures Putin’s power base. Parliamentary elections are due at the end of the year, with the presidential poll to follow in March. The siloviki will retain unruffled supremacy. The constitution requires Putin to stand down (though he could return in 2012). Nobody is in any doubt that the transfer of power to his chosen successor will be seamless – he has yet to say whom he will support – and the changes in policy negligible.

Putin is hugely and genuinely popular, and so, by and large, is his muscle-flexing. He has 80% approval ratings, and with reason.

When he succeeded Yeltsin on December 31, 1999, Russia was near-bankrupt. The collapse of the Soviet bloc 10 years earlier had paid a “peace dividend” to the West, and opened up a vast new market and a treasure trove of natural resources for Western companies. But millions of Russians lost their jobs and savings amid the humiliations of a debt default in 1998. Pensioners, servicemen, teachers and scientists went unpaid. The bellhops in Moscow’s new Western-financed hotels were often PhDs.

The country was no longer that of the tsars and the communists. Great lumps were torn from it: the Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, Central Asia… Russians by the million woke to find they had become ethnic minorities on the wrong side of new frontiers. Nato and the EU expanded eastwards, as ex-Warsaw Pact members Poland and Hungary joined the old enemy: as, unthinkably, did the former Soviet countries Estonia and Lithuania.

Seven years of Putin, though, and self-confidence is rising like sap in spring. The pauper who went begging to Western investors has an investment-grade credit rating and the world’s third-largest foreign-currency reserves, £200 billion. The rouble, once shabbily printed, unloved and ever heading south, is strong and spruce. The economy is growing by more than 7% a year: a starry-eyed official report predicts that it will grow two-and-a-half times by 2020, to become the world’s fifth largest.

Rust-bucket towns still abound. A quarter of Russians were rated as poverty-stricken in 2002. But that is down to 12%, and falling. A lick of paint, flowerbeds and functioning fountains lift the ramshackle air of neglect from the cities.

A robust professional middle class has emerged, strikingly so in Moscow. The trickle-down effect from the super-rich in their black Hummers and Cayennes is evident in the colossal and crowded shopping malls.

It is this rare combination of popularity and prosperity that is giving Putin, and those close to him, the chance to reforge Russia with long-term impact. He has given three important insights into his mindset. None is reassuring.

“The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” he said in his state-of-the-nation address two years ago. He added recently that it is time to “stop apologising” for Russia’s past.

He has made it clear, too, that he is deeply mistrustful of the West, which he sees as hellbent on belittling Russia and looting her resources. He gave the Americans a verbal kicking at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in February. “The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres, economic, political and humanitarian,” he said, “and has imposed itself on other states.” US foreign policy, Putin believed, was a recipe for disaster. “The number of people who died did not get less but increased. We see no kind of restraint.” The Americans had “gone from one conflict to another without achieving a fully fledged solution to any of them”.

And he is proud of his KGB roots. “There is no such thing as a former Chekist,” he says. It is a revealing remark. The Cheka was the Bolsheviks’ earliest secret police, and Putin is fast declaring his loyalty to the founders of the police state.

Britain, more than most, is finding the reshaped Russia uncomfortable to live with, with eerie echoes from the past.

The BBC World Service disappeared from FM radio last month, after the last station that was retransmitting it, Bolshoye Radio, was told to drop it in a matter of hours or lose its licence. British Council offices have endured repeated tax inspections – the council’s English teaching is said to be a “commercial activity” – and threats of closure by fire-safety officers.

The traditional tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats have resumed, and so have mutual accusations of spying. Our man in Moscow, Sir Anthony Brenton, suffered months of insults last winter from a rent-a-mob of members of the youth movement Nashi, both in the flesh and on a scurrilous website.

The ambassador incurred their wrath last year by attending a “fascist meeting” organised by the liberal opposition – but including an extreme-left group – to protest at the undermining of civil society in Russia. They got hold of a copy of his diary – a feat that suggests involvement by the FSB – and hounded him mercilessly.

“When I go out to buy cat food, they follow me and start waving banners,” Brenton complained. “Nashi’s links with the Kremlin are well known. Their leader has met with President Putin many times.” The Kremlin, he suggested, could have called them off if it wanted to.

The ill feeling with Britain goes beyond the support for Russia’s dwindling liberals. It was given a specific edge by the poisoning in London last November, with polonium-210, of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who had recently been granted a British passport. Britain claims that he was murdered by Andrei Lugovoi, another ex-KGB man. The use of hugely toxic radioactive material to kill a British citizen in London was seen as a shocking return to Soviet-era habits. The Russians have refused Britain’s demand for Lugovoi’s extradition on the grounds that their constitution forbids it. For good measure, they have repeated their own demand for the extradition of Boris Berezovsky. The billionaire ex-oligarch fled to Britain circa 2000, and was granted asylum, after a spectacular falling-out with President Putin, for whose overthrow he now calls. Berezovsky was close to Litvinenko and claims that Russian agents are trying to kill him, too. He is being tried in absentia in Moscow on fraud charges.

Putin displayed real anger when he discussed the Lugovoi case on television. He said that there were 30 people wanted by the Russians who were “guilty of enormous offences”, including terrorism, but who “are hiding there in London”. The presence in London of Chechens like Akhmed Zakayev, wanted in Russia for armed rebellion, murder and kidnapping, has long been a running sore.

“They give us insulting advice,” Putin said of the British. “They forget that Britain is no longer a colonial power and that Russia was never their colony.”

British companies are feeling the displeasure. “It’s no longer racketeers who are shaking down businesses,” says a veteran of the “gangster capitalism” that flourished a decade ago. “Now it’s men from the ministries and agencies and audit chamber, claiming back-taxes or fines for infringing regulations.”

Oil and gas are most vulnerable, as the Kremlin claws back control of the vital energy sector, the source of Russia’s new wealth and clout. The oligarchs who amassed their billions in the Yeltsin years, before the turn of the century brought Vladimir Putin to power, have been dealt with. They are safely at heel, have fled, or are in prison, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, his Yukos oil empire dismembered in favour of the state-controlled giants Gazprom and Rosneft.

Foreign companies, the British to the fore, are charged with violating the terms of their licences. Oleg Mitvol, the enforcer at the Rosprirodnadzor natural-resources and environmental agency, is expert in the use of green issues as a weapon. So much so that he has been dubbed “the Kremlin’s attack dog”. (“I have been described as many things,” he replied, “but my resemblance to a rottweiler is minimal.”)

He has Shell’s scalp to his credit. He flew reporters to Sakhalin II, Shell’s £10 billion oil-and-gas project off Russia’s far-eastern coast. He accused the company of a string of violations: deforestation, toxic-waste dumping, soil erosion. His objections melted away once Shell ceded a controlling stake to Gazprom. Gazprom also took control of Siberia’s huge Kovykta gas field from BP in June. Mitvol is now expressing tender concern for foreign oil companies. Unannounced checks are being made on foreign concerns, whom he accuses of overstating their reserves. Five are London-listed oil companies.

American encroachment on Russia’s traditional spheres of influence is resented, in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine. Washington’s hand is seen in the “colour” revolutions that swept away Moscow-friendly regimes in Georgia and Ukraine after 2003. Poland and the Czech Republic have been warned that it would be “against their best interests” to allow parts of a new American missile shield to be sited on their soil.

The Kremlin insists that the myth of the pax Americana “fell apart once and for all in Iraq”, and the world must get used to a “strong, self-confident Russia”. It resists tough sanctions on Iran, and bristles at the UN plan to give Kosovo autonomy, Nato’s eastward expansion and the American missile shield.

The new line is backed by a defence budget that has jumped by a quarter to £16.2 billion this year. Sergei Ivanov has announced a £94.5 billion rearmament programme. It is aimed at replacing half of current military equipment by 2015. It includes new early-warning radar, new intercontinental missiles and a fleet of supersonic bombers. The navy is to get over 30 new warships, including new aircraft carriers. Three new submarines are being built. The first, the Yuri Dolgoruky, will be commissioned late next year or in early 2009. It will carry 12 missiles – its sister boats, the Alexander Nevsky and Vladimir Monomach, will carry 16 apiece – each with 10 warheads.

There are plans for a “fifth generation” fighter with a low radar profile and claims that one could be in the air by 2009. Putin claims that the new Russian intercontinental ballistic missile has stealth technology that will allow it to penetrate the American anti-missile shield.

At home, Stalinism, if not being rehabilitated, is certainly less demonised. The Russian Academy of Education has begun a substantial review of history textbooks. A book for teachers on postwar history praises Stalin as “the most successful leader of the USSR”. More than half of Russians aged between 16 and 19 believe Stalin was “a wise leader”.

Ten thousand youngsters went to Nashi’s summer camp at Lake Seliger, about three hours from Moscow. Most of its pleasures – kayaking, swimming, rafting, athletics, blaring techno music – were non-political. Others were not. The camp had its own “red-light district”, ablaze with billboards where the faces of opposition leaders, the former prime minister Kasyanov and the chess champion Garry Kasparov were superimposed onto the scantily clad bodies of glamour models and labelled “political prostitutes”. Lecturers warned campers to be on the lookout for “fascists”. The homegrown ones, they were told, cunningly disguise themselves as “liberals”.

Girl meets boy is part of the agenda, too. Putin has called on Russians to have more children. Nashi does its bit by encouraging members to get married in front of the assembled campers. After they have exchanged vows, the happy couples go to a “love oasis”, whose red tents are decorated with heart-shaped balloons, there, hopefully, to conceive the next generation. This is not some Nazi-style campaign to breed supermen, though, but the result of demographic crisis. The population is falling by 800,000 a year, with abortions thought to outnumber live births, in a country with living space and natural resources to burn. It could drop from 140m now to little over 100m by mid-century.

Opposition parties have lost ground. Only communists retain mass appeal. The others pose little threat to the establishment. Nonetheless, their members are sometimes pursued: the Kremlin, not as self-assured as it seems, takes them more seriously than the electorate.

State influence in the media is all-pervasive.

Ren TV, the last channel to have retained independence in its news coverage, was taken over by a bank friendly to the Kremlin in April. The month before, Ivan Safronov, an independent-minded defence correspondent, was found dead on the pavement below his flat. He had embarrassed the military with exposés of the cover-up of failings during the testing of the new Bulava missile. Last October, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block. She had flayed the regime in her book Putin’s Russia, and was a fierce critic of the war in Chechnya.

Is the cold war on the way back? Have we real reason to fear the Bear?

The nuclear deterrent remains wholly credible. But many old Soviet arms factories are now in foreign countries, production has stopped for years; equipment has been looted. Plans for six new aircraft carriers, for example, look a pipe dream. Even converting an old Soviet-era carrier for the Indian navy is proving a nightmare for the yard that has the contract. No more Ukrainian NCOs or Kazakh infantrymen can be drafted to make up numbers. “Russia isn’t the Soviet Union,” a senior intelligence analyst says flatly. “It’s much smaller. It is no longer the leader of a bloc. The rot has stopped, but its military has suffered 20 years of neglect. Its capability has massively eroded.”

Why, then, the build-up? Partly, at least, it is a response to Western pressure. “The Americans are circling Russia with radars and installing antiballistic missiles close to our borders,” says the defence commentator Colonel Viktor Litovkin. “It’s a matter of serious concern. We are being provoked into a new arms race. That’s not in Russia’s interests. The Americans don’t want another competitor, and their moves to achieve global strike capability are quite provocative.

“Nato has assumed responsibility on a global scale for everything that happens. The West looks as if it’s imposing its ideology on others, just as the Soviet Union did. Fortunately, we’ve recovered from this disease, but the Bush administration has now caught it.”

Constant harping Western criticism – even the revival of the Orthodox church, BBC World said in a lead item last month, was “a matter of deep concern” to some Russians – is another factor. We gave away half of Europe, people say, and much of our own country, without a shot being fired. We answered every question asked of us, and our critics did not say as much as spasiba (thank you). And, if we sell weapons to win friends and influence people abroad, isn’t that exactly what the West does, too?

There is a renewed geopolitical drive, but it is pragmatic and less far-flung. “We can’t be the dead man at every funeral and the bride at every wedding,” says Asian-affairs specialist Dmitri Kosyrev. What concerns Russia most are the countries immediately to its south. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) brings together China, Russia and four Central Asian states. SCO troops held last month’s manoeuvres in the Urals.

“It’s been a huge success,” says Kosyrev. “That’s because the Kazakhs and Uzbeks and others want aid and technical help and as many uncles as they can get. They don’t want lectures. The EU are doing badly in the region because they’re behaving just like mini-Americans, telling people how to live.”

Russia has real energy and financial clout, and is prepared to use them politically. It cut coal exports, timber supplies and freight traffic, for example, to show its displeasure with Estonia. The West does so with its boycotts, Russians say. Why shouldn’t they?

Europe is becoming increasingly dependent on gas from western Siberia. What the Kremlin will make of that remains to be seen. Technical expertise in deep drilling and big projects for liquid natural gas give the West bargaining chips. The Russians point out, too, that energy has always been synonymous with power – “look at the Gulf” – and that the West can hardly complain if market forces are coming into play.

“It was a different Russia, a different world when contracts were signed in the 1990s,” says Tatiana Mitrova, who heads world-market studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Energy Research Institute. “They were very favourable to foreign investors, and BP and Shell did not fulfil all their obligations. Gas prices to Ukraine and Belarus, for example, were heavily subsidised. That couldn’t go on for ever. Our own gas price will be linked to the European price by 2011.”

Global energy is in a transitional stage, and transitions can be awkward. “Opec once supplied and the West consumed,” she says. “Now Russia and Central Asia have become suppliers, and India and China have joined the consumers’ club.” Gas consumers are as dependent on transit routes and transit states as on the original producer.

Those who are most vulnerable to the Kremlin, of course, remain the Russians themselves. Post Iraq, it must be said, the West has lost much of its moral gloss. Its sermons are deeply resented by many. “Guided democracy”, with state control of media, and harassment of opposition and NGOs, is all but installed.

It is a far cry from the browbeaten past. People use the internet, they travel in huge numbers – Tuscany is the new discovery – and they connect with the West in all manner of wacky ways. Moscow has a chapter of Hell’s Angels, an Aerograf festival of stunningly painted cars, an annual stiletto race for girls in 9-centimetre heels.

If they also tolerate siloviki, and applaud strength, it is because the past is in the blood. The West often ignores this.

Senior Western army officers with direct experience of the Russian military emphasise the need to respect them. Patronise them at your peril. “The approach has often been unintelligent,” says one. “There’s been a tendency to belittle them. And to go on seeing them as the enemy. We’re proud of the history and traditions of our services. Well, so are they, and they have every right to be.”

That history is a thing apart, and explains much. A hill above the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk seems almost to groan under the weight of Russia’s past, and its sadness and grandeur. A polished granite stone records the names of Siberians killed in the foreign wars – in Africa, Indochina, even 1930s Spain – to which the Soviet empire despatched them. Another distils the horrors of Stalinism in six words with a date: “The Stalin Repression. The Kalmyk people 1943-57.” The Kalmyks were deported to Siberia. Half were dead by the time they were allowed back.

Couples add a splash of colour as they arrive to get married at the Troitsk church on the hill. Stretch Lincolns were once de rigueur, but the massive Zil, the old politburo limo, has made a comeback. The service, candles glinting in a darkness warm with deep chants of Orthodoxy, links the congregation to the old tsarist Russia that the Bolsheviks tried to kill off. The new leaders have reconnected with the Orthodox church: led by Putin, they attend the Easter liturgy at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, destroyed under Stalin and rebuilt.

Afterwards, the newlyweds go to leave flowers nearby at the eternal flame for the fallen of the great patriotic war. A 1940s tank, “To Berlin!” painted on its hull, stands guard. Inside, a long marble room with surnames and initials on the walls – 1,590 under “K” in this single memorial – reflects the scale of the sacrifice.

It is poignant that so many should, at the moment of marriage, remember those who fought so long before they were born. Revealing, too. In an unforced and intimate way, above all politics and posing, this is a sentiment and pride that all manner of Russians share.

More than any missile, or barrel of oil, that is where their strength lies.

In March, Putin steps down. He may bow out, though still young; he may become a puppet-master from behind the scenes. In any event, viewed from Washington or London, his successor is unlikely to be any less irascible. The Russians don’t see it like that, of course. They see it as defending their best interests.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2439828.ece  

“A soft answer turneth away wrath,” teaches Proverbs 1:15.

Our new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, seems familiar with the verse. For his handling of Saturday’s wintry blast from Vladimir Putin at the Munich security conference was masterful.

“As an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday’s speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time,” said Gates, adding, “Almost.” A former director of the CIA, Gates went on to identify with Putin: “I have, like your second speaker yesterday … a career in the spy business. And I guess old spies have a habit of blunt speaking.

“However, I have been to reeducation camp, spending the last four-and-a-half years as a university president and dealing with faculty. And as more than a few university presidents have learned in recent years, when it comes to faculty it is either ‘be nice’ or ‘be gone.’”

Gates added he would be going to Moscow to talk with the old KGB hand, who will be retiring as Russia’s president around the time President Bush goes home to Crawford. Excellent.

For one of the historic blunders of this administration has been to antagonize and alienate Russia, the winning of whose friendship was a signal achievement of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And one of the foreign policy imperatives of this nation is for statesmanship to repair the damage.

What did we do to antagonize Russia?

When the Cold War ended, we seized upon our “unipolar moment” as the lone superpower to seek geopolitical advantage at Russia’s expense.

Though the Red Army had picked up and gone home from Eastern Europe voluntarily, and Moscow felt it had an understanding we would not move NATO eastward, we exploited our moment. Not only did we bring Poland into NATO, we brought in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and virtually the whole Warsaw Pact, planting NATO right on Mother Russia’s front porch. Now, there is a scheme afoot to bring in Ukraine and Georgia in the Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin.

Second, America backed a pipeline to deliver Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, to bypass Russia.

Third, though Putin gave us a green light to use bases in the old Soviet republics for the liberation of Afghanistan, we now seem hell-bent on making those bases in Central Asia permanent.

Fourth, though Bush sold missile defense as directed at rogue states like North Korea, we now learn we are going to put anti-missile systems into Eastern Europe. And against whom are they directed?

Fifth, through the National Endowment for Democracy, its GOP and Democratic auxiliaries, and tax-exempt think tanks, foundations, and “human rights” institutes such as Freedom House, headed by ex-CIA director James Woolsey, we have been fomenting regime change in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, and Russia herself.

U.S.-backed revolutions have succeeded in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia, but failed in Belarus. Moscow has now legislated restrictions on the foreign agencies that it sees, not without justification, as subversive of pro-Moscow regimes.

Sixth, America conducted 78 days of bombing of Serbia for the crime of fighting to hold on to her rebellious province, Kosovo, and for refusing to grant NATO marching rights through her territory to take over that province. Mother Russia has always had a maternal interest in the Orthodox states of the Balkans.

These are Putin’s grievances. Does he not have a small point?

Joe Lieberman denounced Putin’s “Cold War rhetoric.” But have we not been taking what cannot unfairly be labeled Cold War actions?

How would we react if China today brought Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela into a military alliance, convinced Mexico to sell oil to Beijing and bypass the United States, and began meddling in the affairs of Central America and Caribbean countries to effect the electoral defeat of regimes friendly to the United States? How would we react to a Russian move to put anti-missile missiles on Greenland?

Gates says we have been through one Cold War and do not want another. But it is not Moscow moving a military alliance right up to our borders or building bases and planting anti-missile systems in our front and back yards.

Why are we doing this? This country is not going to go to war with Russia over Estonia. With our Army “breaking” from two insurgencies, how would we fight? By bombing Moscow and St. Petersburg?

Just as we deluded ourselves into believing this war would be a “cakewalk,” that democracy would break out across the Middle East, that we would be beloved in Baghdad, so America today has undertaken commitments, dating to the Cold War and since, we do not remotely have the resources or will to fulfill. We are living in a world of self-delusion.

Somewhere in this presidential campaign, someone has to bring us back to earth. The halcyon days of American Empire are over.

 http://antiwar.com/pat/

By Shodiyor Eshaev

The number of Kazakhstani tobacco growers have reduced as Phillip Morris Kazakhstan – only consumer of tobacco farmers – insisted its contractors to grade tobacco plant into nine sorts.  

 “The labor of growing tobacco is very hard,”- complained, Ayanbek Dautkulov, director of Kazakhstani Tobacco Growers’ Association. Farmers begin his work from Mart and end in February and they have to give up growing tobacco, as Phillip Morris demanded from us nine sort of tobacco leaf instead of six. In Kazakhstan forty-five hundreds hectares are marked out for tobacco growing. It is 0.01 % of the land destined to agricultural products. Every year ninety hundred tons of tobacco is produced in Kazakhstan. Farmers grow Six hundred tons of tobacco.  

We were in Chelek district, in order to know how tobacco is grown and learn work conditions of farmers and their families. 

Chelek tobacco state farm is situated 120 km to east from Almaty. It was one of the biggest state farms that produced tobacco in soviet period.  

We met three-four Cheleki families that were growing tobacco several years ago. Nowadays most of farmer families have quitted tobacco farming. 

There is a big street in Chelek that is called Tabachnaya (means ‘Tobacco’). Now none of the families, living in this street, carry on tobacco.   

“I grew tobacco some years ago. My children grew up and they do not want to continue this business, so I gave up this and started to work as a taxi driver.” – said Teyib aka, an inhabitant.  

A 70-years-old head of the Cheleki family Qural ag’a said, “I gave up growing tobacco four years ago. It is a very hard and not profitable work. Only Uigurs are still busy with this kind of business and some Kazakhs who prefer to hire immigrants”.

 One local housewife said that they had contract with Phillip Morris for produce tobacco plant. But they do not work in field; in order to grow tobacco plant they had hired seven Kyrgyz workers who were in search for a job. They pay them KZT 20 000 (approximately USD 160) per month for living expenses from the advance money, which give them Phillip Morris. The hired workers will get half of the income after finishing harvest.

 We had to go three kilometers far from Chelek in order to find the family that is still busy with tobacco business. Finally we were lucky to meet local Uiguri family.   

A 35-years-old man is a head of the family. His name is Hamid. He lives with his wife Tajigul, a 30-years-old woman, a six-years-old daughter Malika, and his father whose name is Tolegen aka.  

He described the whole process of tobacco growing and showed some equipment used in collecting and preparing tobacco as raw material for tobacco companies.   According to Hamid, the first step is sowing tobacco seeds in hotbed in the middle of March. In 45 days they transfer small tobacco plants into field.   

His family starts picking tobacco leaves in June. That process continues for three months. At the same time, they move to tobacco leaf sewing process.   

Firstly, it is necessary to dry tobacco leaves. Then dried leaves must be put into a special room for two days, where air is humid. It is needed for keeping leaves from cracking. This room is made from can and cellophane.  

The next step is sorting. It is one of the most difficult processes. If the weather is warm, the family usually sorts tobacco leaves in the yard. Otherwise, they will have to do it in the house.  

“You have to examine each leaf in order to identify its quality and sort. We had separated tobacco into three kinds of sorts until this year. Now, I have a contract with Philip Morris and they pointed out to sort tobacco leaves into nine quality levels.” – said Hamid. 

After sorting, tobacco is ready for pressing by a special device. Hamid has to produce ten bales of tobacco in 25 kilograms by the end of October. The sorting and pressing process continues till the middle of February.  

Phillip Morris provides them cellophane, thread and money for the product, but company does not give them any special form and foods. They pay KZT 275 (USD 2) per 1 kilogram of high quality tobacco.  The lowest quality tobacco costs KZT 60 (USD 0, 4).  

“It is very hard to grow high quality tobacco”, said Hamid. Eighty percent of Hamid’s harvest is the 3^rd sort tobacco, which costs KZT 180 (USD 1, 4).  

Last year Hamid gathered three tones of tobacco harvest from 1, 5 hectares. Then his yearly income was KZT 500 000 (approximately USD 4540).  

This year he used 50 hundred part of field for tobacco, as Phillip Morris demanded from him and he is expecting to gather one ton of tobacco. It is three times less than previous year. So, he may get KZT 180 000 (USD 1417). 

According to the director of Tobacco Growers Association, it is possible to get 50 pack of cigarette from one kg tobacco plant. If average price of one pack cigarette is KZT 80, company earns KZT 4000 (USD 32) from one kg tobacco. 

 “Proceeds of this harvest will not be enough for living this year. Anyway, we have cows and with these property we will manage to live,” Hamid said.  

Many mini farms give up to growing tobacco, as it is not profitable for them. First years when Association founded there were approximately nine thousand farmers, nowadays their number reduce to 3 thousand.  

“We raise the problem of increasing prices for tobacco plant every year in government bodies, but there are no results,” –said Ayanbek Dautkulov. “This year company trick us, they increased prices for 30 percent than previous year, but at the same time they increase the sorts also. If farmers get KZT 360 000 from one hectare last year, this year they will get same money despite increasing prices, as Phillip Morris pointed out to sort tobacco leaves into nine quality levels,” – added Ayanbek Dautkulov.  

“I do not understand the demands of company, it will be difficult for high educated specialists to sort out the leaves to nine sort. How will simple farmers do it?” – surprised he.  

Despite there are seven tobacco companies, farmers have to sell their production to Phillip Morris only. Ayanbek Dautkulov complained, that they had no other alternative and they have to perform the order of this company.  

As Phillip Morris Kazakhstan appear some difficulties to farmers, some tobacco growers give up their business but not all farmers do it. “I cannot change my life because I have been growing tobacco for whole my life and cannot imagine something different. I have to work for my daughter’s future life. But my wife and me do not want our daughter to continue this job. We wish her to study well and become a good person in future.” – said Hamid finally.

Phiroz A. Poonawalla

A psychologist from Netherlands, Professor Van der Hoven announced his discovery about the effect of reading the Quran and repeating the word Allah, both on patients and on normal persons.

The Dutch professor confirms his discovery with studies and research applied on many patients over a period of three years. Some of his patients were non-Muslims, others do not speak Arabic and were trained to pronounce the word Allah.

 Clearly, the result was great, particularly on those who suffer from dejection and tension. Al Watan, a Saudi Daily reported that the psychologist was quoted to say that Muslims who can read Arabic and who read the Quran regularly can protect themselves from psychological diseases.

The psychologist explained how each letter in the word Allah affects healing of psychological diseases. He pointed out in his research that pronouncing the first letter in the word Allah which is the letter “A” released from the respiratory system, controls breathing.  

He added that pronouncing the velar consonant “L” in the Arabic way, with the tongue touching slightly the upper part of the jaw producing a short pause and then repeating the same pause constantly relaxes the aspiration.  

Also, pronouncing the last letter, which is the letter “H” makes a contact between the lungs and the heart and in turn this controls the heartbeat.What is exciting in the study is that this psychologist is a non-Muslim, but interested in Islamic sciences and searching for the secrets of the Holy Quran. Allah, the Great and Glorious says: “We will show them Our signs in the universe and in their own selves, until it becomes manifest to them that this Quran is the truth.” (Holy Quran-42:53).

http://www.al-amana.org/article.php?id=182

Journalism students of Central Asian universities and journalists interested in online journalism and using informational technologies in their activity.

Preliminary users are ‘Beginners’ and our aim is to rise up their level to ‘Power users’.

 Purpose

To create a platform for young journalists from Central Asia to develop and improve their skills, both professional and technical, in order to integrate to online global society.

 Mission

Our mission is to create a team of young journalists from Central Asia able to concur with successful western journalists by encouraging them in developing professional skills, covering actual social issues and implementing new approaches in journalism activity.

 Content

The site consists of several main sections:

News – any kind of news related to site mission that site administrators and users find important and necessary to share.

Online master-class – here users may get information about western-style of writing news stories and feature stories. Professors of journalism department will be main consultants of running this section.

Ads – info about seminars, scholarships, workshops, exchange programs and so on.

Blogs – blogs of stories’ authors, site creators, users, journalists.

Milestone

A short-term milestone list for web-site launch

·          set up a content management system

·          get 10 stories related to site content

·          prepare calendar list of actions and events

·          develop a strategy of running this site

·          install a feedback system

·          set up an online polling system

Our team that consists of three students at the moment has a vision of this site. We also have some contacts from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan that will help us to run this site and add more useful links and sources for the site users. Moreover, we expect that some international and local organizations working in journalism field will also encourage our efforts. We need to know more about site managing system and implementing other kind of technical recourses that allows using multi-media to make this site useful and working.

Shodiyor Eshaev

Zarifa Tajiyeva

Soleh Yahyayev

 

By David Ignatius

MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin made headlines last weekend when he blasted the Bush administration for its “almost uncontained hyper-use of force” that has created a world where “no one feels safe.” If he had been a Democratic presidential candidate, it would have been a standard stump speech. But coming from a Russian president, his remarks had pundits ruminating about a new Cold War.  

I was in the audience in Munich when Putin made his speech, and the tone seemed to me more one of resentment than belligerence. He was proud, prickly, defiant — a leader with all the Russian chips on his shoulder. You could hear his inner voice: We let you dismantle the Berlin Wall. We folded the Warsaw Pact. We dissolved the Soviet Union — all on your promises that you wouldn’t take advantage of our weakness. And what did we get? Nothing! You surrounded us with NATO weapons.

Putin’s comments may be jarring to Americans, but they express a bitterness that’s widespread here. His generation of Russians grew up in a country that claimed the status of “superpower,” and they don’t like being taken for granted. Putin, a former KGB officer with a black belt in judo, has been pugnacious in standing up for his country’s interests, and Russians seem to like that. In the latest opinion polls, his popularity is well above 70 percent. I met with one of Putin’s top aides yesterday in a building that once housed the headquarters of the Soviet Communist Party. “We want to work together with you,” he explained. “But please open your eyes. We will never accept that the sole power in the world will be the U.S.”Russia is back. That’s the real lesson I take from Putin’s blunt comments. A country that was near collapse after the fall of Soviet communism has regained enough confidence and stability to take a verbal shot at its old rival. “We are emerging from nothing,” the Putin aide told me. To explain the Putin phenomenon, the Kremlin’s chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, recently compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another president who brought his country back from economic disaster and restored its pride. Like FDR, Putin is using “presidential power to the maximum degree for the sake of overcoming the crisis,” Surkov said.

Visiting here for the first time since 1990, I am struck by how everything in Russia is different, and everything is the same. Driving in from the airport, you see the familiar monument marking the farthest German advance in World War II — a testament to the Red Army’s fierce resistance to foreign invasion. And next to it is the Mega Mall with its huge Ikea showroom — a foreign invasion that, in the end, proved unstoppable.

In Red Square, the somber stones of Lenin’s tomb are a reminder of Soviet power. But across the way, in what used to be the drab GUM department store, are glittering displays of the latest fashions from Vuitton and Dior.

What hasn’t changed is Russia’s neurotic relationship with the West. Russian friends tell me the country feels unloved and unappreciated — a political doormat that Western powers think they can walk on at will. That’s the frustration that surfaced in Putin’s speech in Munich.

By Russian standards, this is something of a golden age. Putin recently touted some of the country’s achievements: Russian average incomes increased 10 percent in 2006 over the previous year; the economy grew by about 6.7 percent; inflation was in single digits for the first time in many years. Russia’s currency reserves rose to $303 billion, the third-largest in the world, and its “stabilization fund” of energy profits was nearly $100 billion. All this in a nation that in 1998, on the eve of Putin’s presidency, was essentially bankrupt.

The new Russia has a moment of opportunity. America, far from the “unipolar” superpower Putin describes, is weakened by the Iraq war and is badly in need of allies. If Putin is wise, he can play a pivotal role in resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis — and thereby restore some of Russia’s lost diplomatic clout. Or he can keep complaining that nobody appreciates his country — and let his old rival struggle a while longer in the Iraq quagmire.

Was Putin’s Munich manifesto an “invitation to dialogue,” as one of his aides told me? Or was it a warning shot from a newly confident Russia that is rather enjoying America’s troubles? If Putin wants to play a role in stabilizing the post-Iraq world, he is pushing on an open door. But does he have the vision and political will to seize the moment? 

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR2007021301094.html?sub=new

THESE are clearly unprecedented times in international politics. And despite the harsh manner of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech at Munich notwithstanding, it did point to most of the reasons responsible for the situation. Except for the highest offices in Washington, there is near unanimous international consensus that the Bush administration’s attempt at employing the neocon ideology has been a marked failure, of colossal proportions, with disastrous economic, political and humanitarian repercussions.  

It is clear that over the last five years especially, the United States has pursued a hegemonic, uni-polar agenda, setting dangerous international precedents while trying to establish its writ as the world’s sole centre of power. The Russian president is spot on in implying that because of America’s bypassing the United Nations in using military force, weaker nations’ insecurity is pushing them to arms races. More so because “nobody can hide behind international law” anymore.

The sharp rebuke from the American contingent was no doubt predictable. But those defending Washington must have noted how their rhetoric reeked of double standards. It is simply not possible to deny that America has “overstepped its borders in all spheres” and “imposed itself on other states”. It is also hard to rebut the claim that the US has picked fight after fight “without achieving a full-fledged solution to any of them”. And in doing so it has left behind a  trail of needless death and destruction, with no justification whatsoever.

Furthermore, as lopsided as Washington’s foreign policy has been, the domestic political spillover is not less grim and long-term. Like the rest of the world, America’s polity’s pundits are realising how the constitution empowers the seat of the president to potentially wreak bloody havoc in all corners of the globe, in face of mounting domestic, international and even Congressional disapproval.

Despite these facts, there is no admission of mistakes having been made from Washington, remorse being a far-off thing. That means any attempt at addressing many of the US-created disasters is definitely not around the corner.

President Putin has done the right thing by calling a spade a spade. Other world leaders should bolster this stance, lest the unprecedented times take more turns for the worse.

 http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/editorial/2007/February/editorial_February24.xml§ion=editorial&col=