Can someone help me understand what’s going on in the Ukraine?
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by DougJ| 112 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Women's Rights Are Human Rights
Masha Gessen, in Slate:
… She is one of Russia’s most famous political prisoners, famously released in advance of the Olympic Games in Sochi. With Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, her collaborator in the balaclava-clad art group Pussy Riot and co-defendant in the trial that captured the world’s attention in the summer of 2012, Alyokhina is now refashioning herself as a prisoners’ rights activist. When the two women were arrested, just under two years ago, they were college students who had come up with a prank. It was a prank that changed the way much of the world viewed Russia—and changed their own lives profoundly—but it was still a prank. They emerged from prison on Dec. 23 as political activists seasoned by time behind bars, surrounded by public and media attention in Russia and abroad, and motivated by a need to address the pain and abuse they have experienced and witnessed in prison…
Russian President Vladimir Putin released the members of Pussy Riot—as well as nearly 30 international Greenpeace activists, held since September, and Russia’s other most famous political prisoner, businessman and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky—in a last-minute scramble to save the Winter Olympics, which begin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Feb. 7… The Greenpeace activists went home to their respective countries; Khodorkovsky went to Germany, into what appears to be involuntary exile. Only Alyokhina, 25, and Tolokonnikova, 24, remain in Russia, speaking out. Their message is: Do not buy the newly varnished façade. Russia is continuing to abuse the rights of its own people in ways most cannot even imagine. And anyone who goes to the Olympics, whether as an athlete, a spectator, or an official, in effect condones these abuses.…
“I was worried that no one would be interested in prisoners’ rights,” Tolokonnikova says. “I thought this might be just something Masha and I want to work on because we have experienced it.”
But prison is an object of almost universal fear and interest in Russia. The country has one of the world’s highest percentages of its population behind bars—not as high as the United States, but a key difference is that in Russia the risk of landing in prison cuts across class lines. No one knows the exact figures, but human rights advocates estimate that more than 15,000 and possibly more than 100,000 of Russia’s roughly 700,000 inmates are entrepreneurs sent to jail by competitors or extortionists. And then there are the political prisoners, a population that is growing despite recent high-profile pardons. Opposition activists are arrested seemingly at random; many of them are not leaders but ordinary grassroots activists or even one-time participants in a demonstration.
The goal of this tried-and-true Soviet tactic is to frighten people away from any and all opposition activity. It’s effective, but its flip side is that when Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova speak about the abuse of prisoners, they grab the attention of millions of Russians who fear winding up behind bars themselves. Since leaving prison, they have appeared in public wearing borrowed or donated clothes, all of them unfailingly trendy because the donors are their fans in the media and fashion industries. This sends a stark message: When two young, well-turned-out women talk about being subjected to what amounts to torture, they really call attention to the fact that it can happen to anyone…
“I’ve always admired people who can organize others around a cause,” Tolokonnikova says. “My activism was always pretty individual. But now it’s great to see how we can do it too.” This is Friday night; by Monday morning the original Facebook post will have been shared nearly 2,000 times. The official responses to complaints and inquiries will not come until after the holidays and are most likely to be uninformative, but the point of the post was to let IK-2 know that Victoria Dubrovina’s fate was being watched by thousands of people. That kind of attention can mean the difference between life and death for an inmate…
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Sports
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From Bloomberg BusinessWeek:
… At $51 billion, the Sochi Games are the costliest ever, surpassing the $40 billion spent by China on the 2008 Summer Olympics. The suicide bombings in the Russian city of Volgograd on Dec. 29 and 30 have heightened fears of terrorism and given a renewed focus to security concerns as well as questions of cost. How the Sochi Games grew so expensive is a tale of Putin-era Russia in microcosm: a story of ambition, hubris, and greed leading to fabulous extravagance on the shores of the Black Sea. And extravagances, in Russia especially, come at a price.
Back in 2007, when Russia was bidding to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, the huge amounts it was willing to spend were a point of pride, an enticement meant to win over officials at the International Olympic Committee. Putin traveled to Guatemala City to give a rare speech in English, with even a touch of French, to the assembled IOC delegates, promising to turn Sochi into “a world-class resort” for a “new Russia” and the rest of the world. His pledge to spend $12 billion in Sochi dwarfed the bids of the other finalists from South Korea and Austria.
But since then, as costs have increased, Russian officials have grown less eager to boast about the size of the final bill. “In the beginning, money was a reason and argument for Russia to win the right to host the Olympics,” says Igor Nikolaev, director of strategic analysis at FBK, an audit and consulting firm in Moscow. “But it turned out we spent so much that everybody is trying not to talk about it anymore.” Dmitry Kozak, deputy prime minister in charge of Olympic preparations, has argued that the $51 billion number is misleading. Only $6 billion of that is directly Olympics-related, he says; the rest has gone to infrastructure and regional development the state would have carried out anyway. That may be true, though it’s hard to imagine the Russian government building an $8.7 billion road and railway up to the mountains without the Games.
Bent Flyvbjerg, an expert on what are called “megaprojects” at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University, says the costs for Olympic host nations have on average tripled from the initial bid to the opening ceremonies. In Sochi, costs rose nearly five times. That these Olympics should be the most expensive in history is all the more improbable, says Allison Stewart, a colleague of Flyvbjerg’s at Oxford, because compared with Summer Games, Winter Olympiads involve fewer athletes (2,500 vs. 11,000), fewer events (86 vs. 300), and fewer venues (15 vs. 40)…
Many, many more colorful details at the link.
Long Read: “The Waste and Corruption of Vladimir Putin’s 2014 Winter Olympics”Post + Comments (41)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Security Theatre
Charlie Savage, in the NYTimes:
In what the Pentagon called a “significant milestone” in the effort to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military announced Tuesday that the United States had transferred three Chinese detainees to Slovakia.
The three were the last of 22 ethnic Uighurs from China who were captured after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and taken to Guantánamo…
Their transfers to Slovakia, which the military said were voluntary, came days after Mr. Obama signed into law a new version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. In that law, Congress extended restrictions on transferring Guantánamo detainees into the United States, but relaxed some restrictions on transferring them to other countries.
In a statement he issued when he signed the bill on Thursday, Mr. Obama reiterated his belief that closing the Guantánamo prison was a good policy and suggested vaguely that some of the transfer restrictions might be unconstitutional constraints on his powers, echoing assertions he has made when signing previous versions of the law.
“The detention facility at Guantánamo continues to impose significant costs on the American people,” Mr. Obama said. “I am encouraged that this act provides the executive greater flexibility to transfer Guantánamo detainees abroad, and look forward to working with the Congress to take the additional steps needed to close the facility.”
Limited as this is, it’s progress. For context, couple weeks ago, the Miami Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg, who’s probably done more reporting on the ground at Guantanamo than anyone, talked with Rachel Martin on NPR:
…MARTIN: As I understand it, there is a third group of people, those who have not been cleared for release but there’s not enough evidence to try them. How many are in that situation and what happens to them?
ROSENBERG: There’s 46 of them. They’re called the indefinite detainees, or, as we call them, the forever prisoners. People who the panels and the taskforce of the Obama administration concluded are the enemy, are dangerous but not necessarily guilty of a crime. And we’re holding them kind of as war prisoners. And what happens to them is case by case they’ll get review, and that they will have the opportunity to argue that they’re not the enemy. And there’s these parole panels just getting started in which the forever prisoner and his lawyer, if he has one, can go before a representative of the Pentagon, the Justice Department, Homeland Security, the State Department and make an argument. And they can conceivably get off that forever prisoner list but it’s a long, slow process. And those are the people who they would most like to move to the United States because those are the people who will be the hardest to get out of Guantanamo any other way.
MARTIN: Do you get a sense from those who work there and work on detainee issues that this is a prison that’s on its way to closing down? Is that the expectation?
ROSENBERG: No. When you go to Guantanamo – and I go about once a month – there’s really no sign that this is going out of business any time soon. It’s an unpopular mission. The soldiers have rotations lined up through, I don’t know how many years out, and they have built a sprawling infrastructure of prison camps and dining facilities and headquarters. And you come and go and there really is no sign that anyone there thinks that this is the last month or the last year of the detention center complex.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs
Another excellent multimedia piece from the NYTimes that will be widely discussed, and yet liable to change exactly nobody’s mind:
… The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved both avowed opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment. Both are challenges now hanging over the American involvement in Syria’s civil conflict….
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Sports
(Jeff Danziger’s website)
From Reuters:
One of two freed members of punk protest band Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said on Friday their release was aimed solely at improving Russia’s image before it hosts the Winter Olympic Games and was not a humanitarian gesture.
Tolokonnikova, 24, and Maria Alyokhina, 25, walked free under a Kremlin amnesty on Monday after serving more than 21 months of a two-year prison term for performing a profanity-laced “punk prayer” protest against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral.
Tolokonnikova said the Winter Olympics, due to be held in February in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi, were Putin’s pet project and that anybody attending them would be supporting him…
Kat Stoeffel, at NYMag:
The two released but unrepentant members of Pussy Riot said in a press conference today that the Russian punk-protest band is breaking up.
“We are not Pussy Riot now,” Nadya Tolokonnikova said.
“We can promote our cause without playing any shows,” Maria Alyokhina added. “And we will never play any shows for money.”…
Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina will limit their artistic activities to inmates because Russia’s prisons are so bad that they require a “cultural revolution,” they said, and probably because when you call yourself a band you’re stuck doing interviews like this one with opposition “It” girl Ksenia Sobchak. Sobchak asked if Tolokonnikova, as the prettiest Pussy Riot member, was the Beyoncé of the group, bound to go solo, and, if so, was that sexist? Eye-roll gifs aplenty at Buzzfeed.
From the Washington Post:
Sochi: Tolokonnikova & Maria Alyokhina, Breaking Up the BandPost + Comments (32)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Sports
Not sure how I got there — sports are not generally my area of interest, nor SB*Nation on my usual reading list — but David Roth’s discussion of Qatar’s preparations to host the 2022 World Cup (of soccer, aka ‘football’ to non-Americans) is most entertaining:
Well, it’s complicated. Just because it’s FIFA and it’s the World Cup and so of course it’s complicated. But a short version I guess would be that FIFA is FIFA, which is to say it’s this sort of smuggo mafia of puffy, predatory globo-elite males in suits, all of them dedicated to extracting some sort of rent from the world’s totally helpless and justified love for soccer. And FIFA being FIFA, it has all these wildly un-transparent internal processes — everything done by design in secret, endless dodgy handshake deals between men whose handshakes are mostly worthless — that seem almost to incent lawlessness.
And so the result of this is that the very fact that the World Cup is awarded in the way that it is, by the people that award it, creates this ambient sense of corruption. It’s just very difficult to imagine this bunch of crooks using the system they built to make a reasonable decision for the right reasons. And this is true even if they make the right decision! Because it’s the bribe-takingest, patronage-swappingest and generally sketchiest organization of its type in the world, it’s basically impossible to assume FIFA picked Qatar to host the World Cup in 2022 because of how good Qatar’s bid was. There is no reason to assume that this organization is awarding World Cup bids, or doing anything else, for anything like the right reasons…
I was speaking to James Dorsey, a Moroccan-born writer on soccer in the Middle East and professor at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is an old hand in the Gulf, and first visited Doha less than a decade after independence… I was trying to answer a question he’d asked, and had admittedly run long in my answer. He shook his head: no. “That’s how Qatar got the World Cup,” he said. “I asked why Qatar got it.”…
“Every bidder does a cost/benefit analysis,” Dorsey said. “Australia puts a dollar figure on that: $45 million, that’s what it’s willing to gamble in hopes that it wins the bid. Could they put $200 million on the table? Of course they could. It wasn’t worth it to them. But if you’re doing this as a key pillar of your defense and security, your cost/benefit is very different. It’s worth that much more.”
Qatar would, of course, also have to spend that much more to make it work. There were three large-ish stadiums to be expanded to World Cup standards, and nine new stadiums that needed building. All of this would happen in a nation roughly the size of Connecticut, and which is for the most part frankly uninhabitable. Leaving aside the question of whether or not a World Cup should be held in a small desert country that does not yet have a full slate of sidewalks in its capital city or a handle on how to enforce its own labor laws, it seems more or less reasonable that it would cost $220 billion to stage it there…
To have the World Cup in Qatar is to have the World Cup in very close quarters, which is not necessarily bad — fans could indeed see two or three games in a day, and could conceivably swipe their Qatar MetroCard to see those games without so much as getting into a car. In the video, Pep Guardiola smilingly makes this very point. Granted, this would involve taking a Metro that does not yet exist to stadiums that do not yet exist, and then watching two teams play in a microclimate made bearable by world-changing technology that also does not yet exist. But a salesman is got to dream, and also, crass as it may seem, if such an implausible multi-layered miracle can be bought, Qatar would be one of the nations that both could and would buy it.
But, again, with all the things in this world on which to spend money — Damien Hirst installations are just the beginning — and with the dismal track records of such expenditures paying off for the nations that spend on this sort of thing, given all that: why so much, and why on this?
The answer is complicated, and certainly more complicated than Because The Emir Wanted It. Of all the risible sentences in Ball’s retracted opus, the one that came to seem the most ridiculous after talking with people working for the World Cup bid — call it Q22 if you really want to sound like you know what’s up — and familiar with Qatar was this: “at the swish of the emir’s gold pen, new laws come into effect.” Bizarre huzzah-for-authoritarianism tone to the side, this is not really correct. It’s confusing a country without democracy for a country without politics. Qatar has only the barest cosmetic modicum of the former, and a suffocatingly large amount of the latter….
This is actually a chunk from the fourth of five parts, and it’s all worth reading.