2009 28
Making friends with Russia and China
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Middle East with No Comments
Russia suffers from Islamic terrorism. China suffers from Islamic terrorism. The USA is involved in two lethal and expensive wars against Islamic terrorism. It seems that the Obama administration is connecting the dots and beginning to deal with China on this matter. I think the same should be done with Russia. If the most destabilizing threat to our security is Osama Bin Laden´s successors armed with nuclear devices why not collaborate with nations with whom we have much more in common, than say with the Taliban, to avoid this threat. Moreover these nations are geographically much closer to the epicenter of Islamic violence than USA and in the case of Russia have fought the same enemies as the USA. And there many other reasons to collaborate beyond the real, yet not probable threat, of massive nuclear terrorism. Russia and China were communist dictatorships. Now they are capitalist and autocratic – not yet democracies in our sense of the word, but certainly much closer to us than in the 70s. This evolution alone seems to be a move in the right direction and reason enough for closer ties. With Bush, I had the feeling that the old hawks running foreign policy just could not accept that Russia and China had greatly changed for the better. With Obama and Clinton, we may realize that the era of forcing others to be like you is over and a new year of “we both have our flaws but we can still be friends” is here. Moreover, in the “terrible abuses” competition, the USA is up there as well. As far as human rights are concerned, with the death penalty, Guantanamo, Abu Gharb and air bombings of civilian populations, there´s more harm that has been done by the USA than Russia and China combined in the last 20 years. So let´s be friends.
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Artjom on March 2, 2009 ·
To XL,
Where does your information come from? CNN? Or you personally have been in Chechnya during the both wars?
What about USA causing havoc in Iran and Afghanistan? Or CNN again makes you think, that this is all for good?
Artjom on March 2, 2009 ·
I’m sorry, not Iran, but Iraq
XL on March 2, 2009 ·
“The soldiers took the girl into an empty house and sometime later they returned her, saying “Hide this bitch somewhere. More soldiers are coming after us, they will kill and rape her anyway.” She was seventeen or eighteen. This is not the only case; a married woman was also raped. But people keep it a secret, they say she was not raped because it causes such great shame. People just don’t speak about it.”
Malcolm Hawkes, “Russia/Chechnya: February 5: A Day of Slaughter in Novye Aldi,” Human Rights Watch (2000).
“the British Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture published “Rape and Other Torture in the Chechnya Conflict”– the first systematic and substantiated study to produce medical and psychological documentation of thirty-five asylum seekers (nineteen women and sixteen men) from the Chechnya conflict at the Medical Foundation’s treatment centre in London. Sixteen women and one man disclosed that they had been raped. In thirteen of the cases the rape was allegedly carried out by Russian soldiers, in three cases, the alleged perpetrators were said to be Russian police officers…
The medico-legal reports prepared by professionals who had years of experience dealing with victims of sexual violence provided evidence that rape as a method of torture is broadly and consistently being used as a tool of war in the Chechen-Russian conflict. ”
“On the night of March 27, 2000, after celebrating his daughter’s birthday, Around midnight, Budanov in a drunken rampage, together with three other soldiers, kidnapped eighteen-year-old Kheda (Elza) Kungaeva from her father’s home and brought her to a secluded military encampment. During the interrogation, Budanov allegedly beat, raped, and strangled Kheda Kungaeva, and then ordered his men to bury her. “
Artjom on March 3, 2009 ·
To XL
Russian-speaking and Russian is not the same. And don’t you want to read, how Chechens were torturing Russian people in villages and enslaving them, raping women and killing men? Uh? What about American soldiers in Iraq? Open your eyes!
During any war, the majority of organizations will blame the so-called agressor. So in the Chechen war it was Russia, and of course most of the American organizations made “reports”, that all the Russian soldiers were bastards, raping local women and killing men, but none of these reports describes, what Chechens did with Russians before and during the war! The same goes with war in Iraq: all reports just say how bad Americans are, and they are! But the thing is that Iraqi soldiers also torture American soldiers. You cannot say, that one is good and another is bad by just blindly following the media, especially American.
A nice example is the recent war in Georgia. The whole world was saying, that it was Russia who started the war. But later, when it was already evident, who started, Saakhashvili told on a TV, that it was Georgia, not Russia.
Make your own conclusions
XL on March 4, 2009 ·
Artjom
You can not equipare the acts of russian army on the Chehchen war with the acts of the US army in Iraq…
US Army doesn’t accepts that his soldiers rape ladies.
Artjom on March 9, 2009 ·
But it does accept a lot of other things
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XL on March 1, 2009 ·
DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT THE ARMY THAT FIGTH IN CHECHENIA COULD BE AN ALLIED OF A CIVILIZATED COUNTRY???
THE SAME ARMY THAT USED TO PATROL THE STREETS SEARCHING NICE GIRLS TO BE RAPE AND LATER KILLED TO ACUSED THE INDEPENIST… DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT IS AN ACCEPTABLE PARTNER???
I DO NOT BELIEVE.
THIS CAN OF PARTNERS DOESN’T HELP, THEY CREATE MORE PROBLEMS.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT CHINA DOES TO ISLAMIC PEOPLE (NOT TERRORIST, JUST NORMAL PEOPLE WITH FAITH IN ISLAM)