Posts Tagged ‘Newsweek’
Garry Kasparov: Right On, Angela Merkel
The German chancellor tussled with Putin over his human-rights record. Good for her, opposition leader Garry Kasparov tells Eli Lake—but the West must offer more than just talk.
Chess master and Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her denunciation of the Russian government’s human-rights record, but he said she must go further than public statements.
Kasparov provided a statement to The Daily Beast following an awkward public confrontation in Moscow between Merkel and Russian president Vladimir Putin in which Merkel singled out the Kremlin’s harsh sentence of two years in a labor camp for a member of the protest punk rock group Pussy Riot.
“Our friendship won’t be better, our economic cooperation won’t be better, if we sweep everything under the carpet and only say when we’re of a single opinion,” Merkel said to Putin on Friday.
Kasparov, who himself was arrested and beaten for protesting the trial of Pussy Riot, told The Daily Beast, “I am always happy to see a western leader bringing up human rights to Putin, especially to his face in Moscow. I was beginning to think the breed had gone extinct. Chancellor Merkel’s words are welcome, but unless they are followed by action they will be taken by Putin and his gang as just another sign that even when the West actually talks about repression it means nothing, and that it’s all still business as usual.”
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An American in Exile From Moscow – Browder’s tale is a warning to the West.
Had you asked Stalin about Earl Browder, he would have snorted in derision. Ask Putin about Bill Browder, and the reaction will be the same. The Browder family’s tortured relationship with Russian leaders is worthy of a Ken Follett novel.
Earl Browder was the leader of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and during World War II. A Stalin worshiper, he wielded immense influence in the trade-union movement, which grew in power as America’s war machine sucked in millions of industrial workers. During the years of the Hitler-Stalin pact, Browder was a class warrior opposing the “imperialist” war between Britain and Germany. With the Soviet and American entry into the war in 1941, he used his communist machine to lash U.S. workers into heroic feats of output. But as the wartime love-in between Stalin and Roosevelt turned into U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the Cold War, Browder was dismissed by Stalin for not understanding quickly enough the change in line. Instead he and his son, Felix, a brilliant mathematician, fell victim to McCarthyism, living shrunken lives in the anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s.
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Russia has made a habit of sheltering lawbreakers from international
Newsweek
In some countries it’s cool to be an outlaw. Jewel thieves are revered in Montenegro. Counterfeiting makes powerful men in North Korea. Likewise, Russia has made a habit of sheltering lawbreakers from international justice.
The latest case revolves around U.K.-based Hermitage Capital tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who charged that crooked Russian cops had used the company in a complex scheme to steal $230 million. In response, Russian authorities jailed him without trial, and he died in detention after 11 months. A bill now pending in the U.S. Congress would impose U.S. visa bans on some 60 Russian officials and policemen involved in the case. Even so, Russia’s Foreign Ministry is standing by the accused and has condemned the bill as “indecent.” Why does Russia stand by its outlaws? Because connected bureaucrats need to cover their own backsides from international scrutiny.
As the Magnitsky case and others like it demonstrate, many of Russia’s government officials could have a lot to lose if their own practices came under the watchful eye of international law enforcement. Then they would have to face justice-not the corrupt, back-scratching, politically motivated parody that exists in Russia, but the real thing.
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