Month: February, 2015
Guardian Corrects Anti-Russian Story Based on ‘Research’ of Own Reporter
| February 19, 2015 | 10:08 pm | Russia, Ukraine | Comments closed

The Guardian was forced to correct an article by Eliot Higgins, a self-styled “citizen journalist”, who claimed Russian military units fired on the Ukrainian Army from inside the Russian border on the basis of his jointly authored research with the Guardian’s Diplomatic Editor.

SputnikNews.com, 23:50 19.02.2015
http://sputniknews.com/military/20150219/1018504330.html

 

EDINBURGH (Sputnik), Mark Hirst — The Guardian was forced to correct an article claiming Russian military units fired on the Ukrainian Army from inside the Russian border after Sputnik news agency learned the newspaper’s reporter had himself jointly authored the research on which the story was based.

 

On Tuesday Eliot Higgins, a self-styled “citizen journalist” wrote a joint news article with the Guardian’s Diplomatic Editor, Julian Borger, based on a study published by the so-called “Bellingcat investigative group”. Under the headline “Russia shelled Ukrainians from within its own territory, says study” Higgins and Borger detail the claims made by the group based on “self-taught” analysis of satellite maps freely available on the internet. N. B.!

 

Unusually, The Guardian article was reproduced by the newspaper in the English, German and Russian languages.

 

But Sputnik News learned Thursday that Higgins was one of the co-authors of the study on which the apparent news story was based and was in fact responsible for founding the Bellingcat group.

 

“Eliot Higgins is the founder of the Bellingcat investigative journalism network and lead author of the report Origins of Artillery Attacks on Ukrainian Military Positions in Eastern Ukraine Between 14 July 2014 and 8 August 2014,” said the footnote added to the article Thursday.

 

Responding to Sputnik an official spokesman for The Guardian newspaper, who declined to be named said, “The article in question should have made clear that Eliot Higgins was lead author of the report and the founder of the Bellingcat investigative journalism network. N. B.!  We have now footnoted the article to reflect this and amended Eliot Higgins’ byline profile.”

 

The article had remained published online for more than two days and had attracted 1658 online comments before the changes were made.

 

Sputnik also learned Thursday that Higgins is a research fellow with the UK based security and intelligence organization CENTRIC, based at Sheffield University. N. B.!  CENTRIC’s website boasts the organization has “close collaboration in security research and activity started between Sheffield Hallam University and Law Enforcement Agencies” and whose board comprises of individuals from UK policing and the British intelligence community. N. B.!  

 

Responding to questions from Sputnik, Higgins said, “If anyone has any questions about the validity of the work we produce we provide enough detail for them to check our methodology and conclusions. CENTRIC has had zero influence or involvement on the cross border artillery attack report, so any perception they did would be deeply flawed.”

 

Asked about the central claims made in the study that his group of unpaid [N. B.!] “citizen journalists” had found evidence of direct Russian military attacks on the Ukrainian army when NATO and the Western powers [also the OSCE and the Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen. Viktor Mazhenko—MJS] had been unable to produce a single piece of credible evidence to support that [or admitting there was no such evidence—MJS], Higgins replied, “Maybe they have, and weren’t sharing it, but I couldn’t really speak on behalf of the intelligence services in that regard.”  N. B.!

 

Higgins added he played no part in the editorial decision that should have made clear he was both the author of the news report and also co-author of the study on which the article was published.

 

“The Guardian editorial team is best placed to explain their decision making process,” Higgins told Sputnik.

 

When challenged directly on whether he and his Bellingcat group had any links to the well-documented CIA-front organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, Higgins said, “We’ve no direct links and I’m unaware of any indirect links.”

 

One former senior CIA officer told Sputnik there were questions over how much reliance anyone could place on “intelligence” gathered purely from freely available online satellite images.

 

“To truly figure out what’s happening inside Ukraine and Russia you’d need human sources,” Robert Baer, who spent 21 years working with the CIA, told Sputnik Thursday. N. B.!


“[Human sources] are something American intelligence decided wasn’t necessary when the [Berlin] Wall came down. Has it changed since I left? I don’t know. But ex-colleagues tell me it hasn’t,” Baer told Sputnik.

Baer previously told Sputnik that in intelligence terms the US and the West were “blind” in the Donbass. N. B.!

 

In an interview with another UK newspaper, The Independent, in January 2015 Higgins admitted he had been approached to work for an undisclosed “commercial intelligence organisation”, but told the newspaper he was persuaded to turn down the offer by his social media “followers” who, the newspaper reported, “persuaded him to use crowd-funding to set up Bellingcat.”

 

Records held by Companies House reveal that Higgins’ business, “Brown Moses Ltd”, which owns the Bellingcat website, was established in December 2013, just months before the Kiev coup took place in February 2014.

 

Despite these facts, the Guardian article by Higgins and Borger on Russia’s alleged shelling of Ukrainians was apparently taken at face value by UK diplomatic services. On Tuesday the article was retweeted by the UK Delegation to NATO, @UKNATO.

 

On Wednesday, the UK delegation to NATO and the UK embassy in Ukraine almost simultaneously published a slide by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office titled “Further proof [sic] of Russian military involvement in Ukraine” with photographs which allegedly show Russian military equipment on Ukrainian territory.

 

@UKNATO said tweeting the instruction by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, on “How to Recognise Russia’s Pantsir-S-1 (or SA-22) which is not operated by Ukrainian forces.”


However, the data on the pictures posted by UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK delegation to NATO and UK embassy in Ukraine, regarding the time and place they were taken, does not coincide with the information on the very same photographs, published on other websites, including armamentresearch.com and Bellingcat earlier. There is also no visual proof that the equipment belongs to Russia or that the photographs were made in Ukraine. N. B.!

Russia shelled Ukrainians from within its own territory, says study

Satellite images, digital detective work and social media provide strongest evidence yet of Russian crossborder shelling, according to investigation
Julian Borger and Eliot Higgins
The Guardian, Tuesday 17 February 2015 09.00 EST

[Related Videos Accessible Only at the URL for this Article]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/17/russia-shelled-ukrainians-from-within-its-own-territory-says-study
When Ukrainian forces came under withering attack in the east of the country last summer, soldiers were surprised as much as scared by the ferocity of the attack. The separatists they were up against had proven fierce and organised. But this was something else.
Now a group of British investigative journalists using digital detection techniques, satellite imagery and social media has provided near conclusive proof that the shelling came from across the border in Russia.
The work by the Bellingcat investigative journalism group highlights a murky [sic] aspect of the war in Ukraine, which continues to sputter despite last week’s attempt in Minsk to draw up a ceasefire, with reports of heavy fighting around the railway hub of Debaltseve on Tuesday.
Russia has long been accused of funnelling soldiers, munitions and military vehicles into eastern Ukraine to help separatists take on the Ukrainian army. But until now, little [virually nothing—MJS] has been written about Russian military units shelling across the border into Ukraine. N. B.!
The Bellingcat team analysed crater patterns from satellite photos of three battlefields where the Ukrainian army came under particularly savage attack last summer and traced the estimated trajectories back to likely firing positions, where it identified scorch marks and tyre tracks on satellite images consistent with Russian rocket-launchers.
With a single exception, the identified firing positions were on Russian soil. Furthermore, the tracks to and from the firing positions led further inside Russia, further evidence that they were Russian units, not separatist fighters who had strayed across the border. Images of the same terrain just before the attacks show no track marks or scorched earth.
An independent military forensics expert warned that the accuracy of crater analysis in determining direction of fire on the basis of satellite photography was scientifically unproven, but said that the images of firing positions on the Russian side of the border were compelling and raised questions of what they were doing there.
The incidents happened last summer, during an intensive period of fighting in which the Ukrainian army began to gain the upper hand against separatists and Russia began to supply more overt aid to ensure the rebels were not defeated. In mid-August the Guardian saw a column of Russian armour cross the border, and Kiev claims that thousands [9,000 to be exact—MJS] of regular Russian troops effectively invaded. A ceasefire was signed in Minsk in September, though it broke down almost immediately.
In early February, the governor of Luhansk [sic], Gennady Moskal, made new allegations that Russian forces were shelling Ukrainian territory from inside Russia, as part of the battles that raged before the signing of the new Minsk accords last week.
Russia has repeatedly denied the involvement of its troops in eastern Ukraine, insisting the war against government forces there is being fought by local insurgents. Vladimir Putin has described them as “volunteers”. “We’re not attacking anyone; we’re not warmongers,” he declared in December. 
The families of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine have been put under pressure not to talk publicly about it, and have reportedly been threatened with a withdrawal of state death benefits if they do, but some have begun to speak out. [Evidence?]
In an earlier investigation, Bellingcat – a group of investigative journalists specialising in image analysis – tracked the movement of the Buk, which was photographed by members of the public near the crash site on the day MH17 was shot down, and the photographs were posted online. Bellingcat showed that the same launcher was part of a Russian unit. 
 
It has also published research on the use of munitions, including chemical weapons, in the Syrian civil war.
In its new investigation of artillery use in Ukraine, Bellingcat focused on three battles in July as pro-Moscow separatists pushed back a Ukrainian government offensive that had regained a large section of the Russian-Ukrainian border. The separatist counter-offensive was supported by heavy artillery, which proved decisive in driving the Ukrainian army out of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Bellingcat used publicly available satellite imagery of the battlegrounds and adapted established procedures for analysing craters on the ground for determining the trajectory of artillery fire, applying them to the photographs. It looked at two main types of crater: low angle, which produce a distinctive diagonal spray of soil from the central crater, and high angle, which make a triangular shaped crater. Both can show the direction of fire.
The first battle studied was near the town of Amvrosiivka, where there was a crater field showing 330 separate impacts from an artillery attack on Ukrainian army positions on 14 July.
From the shape of the craters, an average trajectory was worked out. The Bellingcat team traced that line back through satellite photographs of the area until they found a potential firing position, identified by burn marks on the agricultural land, of the sort caused by multiple rocket launcher systems (MLRS). This was nine miles away, across the border and near the Russian village of Seleznev. Scrutiny of the imagery showed a pattern of tyre tracks at the suspected firing position, suggesting a number of vehicles parked in a line at the site.
The report said: “The visible tracks that lead to the site come from further inside Russian territory. This leads us to believe that there was no crossborder (Ukraine to Russia) movement of military equipment for this particular location.”
A second site analysed in the report was in the region of Chervonopartyzansk, where Ukrainian units came under heavy artillery barrages between 14 July and 8 August, forcing a Ukrainian retreat. Looking at a field of 813 craters, it appeared there were six separate attacks from five different directions. Using the same methods, the Bellingcat team found five separate firing positions, four of which were in Russia. In each of those cases, “all the observable tracks near the firing sites were exclusively within the territory of Russia”.
One of the identified firing positions was near the Russian town of Gukovo. Six videos uploaded by local residents to YouTube, and another social media video site, VK, showed MLRS (multiple launch rocket system) salvos being fired on 16 July, throwing up large plumes of smoke. By working out the direction from which the videos were shot using visible geographical features, the team estimated two firing positions near Gukovo – where satellite photos showed telltale burn marks and tyre tracks.
The video footage taken by members of the public in Gukovo showed rockets leaving the launchers, so the investigative team could measure the angle of elevation at which they were fired. In each case, that was found to be 20 degrees. Using a firing table for a 122mm rocket fired from a BM-21 Grad launcher, the most likely system used, that suggested a range of between 15 and 16 km. The actual distance between the estimated firing positions and the crater fields over the border in Ukraine was 9.5 miles.
The investigation made similar findings on a third artillery barrage, on 25 July, south of Sverdlovsk, where Ukrainian forces came under heavy fire – an attack Russian media attributed to the separatist Luhansk People’s Militia. Trajectories calculated from a crater field, however, led to two firing positions in Russia, one at a military base near Pavlovka, just across the border.
Stephen Johnson, a weapons expert at the Cranfield Forensic Institute, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, said that the application of crater analysis techniques to satellite imagery was “highly experimental and prone to inaccuracy”.  N. B.!
“This does not mean there is no value to the method, but that any results must be considered with caution and require corroboration,” Johnson said in an email after reviewing the Bellingcat report. N. B.!  He added that “the most significant part of the report” was the discovery of the apparent firing positions on the border.
The ground markings do not seem to be consistent with agricultural machinery, Johnson said. “They indicate an orientation of vehicles that would not be unusual for artillery vehicles, and there does appear to be some ‘scorch’ damage that is not a wheel or track.”
Read the full Bellingcat report in English, German or Russian

 This footnote was added on 19 February 2015. Eliot Higgins is the founder of the Bellingcat investigative journalism network and lead author of the report Origins of Artillery Attacks on Ukrainian Military Positions in Eastern Ukraine Between 14 July 2014 and 8 August 2014.
 

‘Stick to Minsk deal’: Russia slams Ukraine idea for EU peacekeepers
| February 19, 2015 | 10:06 pm | Russia, Ukraine | Comments closed

 

RT.com: Published February 18, 2015 20:21; Edited February 19, 2015 13:59
http://rt.com/news/233579-poroshenko-peacekeepers-ukraine-eu/
Moscow criticized Kiev’s plan to invite an EU police force under the EU’s aegis for a peacekeeping mission in war-torn eastern Ukraine, saying the move would undermine the Minsk ceasefire agreement.
Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council said it will call on the UN and EU to deploy a peacekeeping mission as requested by President Petro Poroshenko. Moscow believes Kiev is trying to sideline the OSCE mission, which was tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreement.
“I think it’s a little bit disturbing, because they just signed the Minsk agreements on February 12. And the Minsk agreements provide for the role of the OSCE, There is nothing about the UN or European Union,”Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, told RT.
“So for them to start talking immediately about something else… I think instead of coming up with new ideas they should really work harder on implementing what they agreed on,” Churkin told RT.
On Thursday, the EU said it was waiting for Kiev to provide concrete terms of the proposed peacekeeping mandate before making further comments.
Poroshenko’s announcement of an EU policing mission comes as a surprise, after a major stumbling block that stood in the way of the implementation of Minsk peace agreements – the encirclement of Ukrainian forces in Debaltsevo, which Kiev denied – was partially resolved.
Earlier on Wednesday Poroshenko confirmed in a video statement that troops have been withdrawing from Debaltsevo.
Fight for border control
Poroshenko asked his security body to call in European peacekeepers on Wednesday, saying that an“EU police mission” would be the best format for an international presence in Ukraine.
“The best format for us is a policing mission from the European Union. We are convinced that this will be the most effective and optimal solution in a situation when promises of peace have not been kept,” said Poroshenko.
The council’s head Aleksandr Turchinov said the peacekeepers should be stationed not only along the disengagement line separating Kiev’s troops and the anti-government forces, but also along the part of the Russian-Ukrainian border, which is now controlled by the self-proclaimed republics. Such deployment will help “observe, and most importantly, to localize the violations, and provide real steps for the peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine,” he said.
The Minsk agreement was negotiated in the Belarusian capital last week by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine and endorsed on Tuesday by a UN Security Council resolution. It states that Kiev would gain control over the border between Russia and its dissenting regions only after implementing far-reaching constitutional reform and giving wide autonomy to those regions.
The rebels called Kiev’s proposal to place peacekeepers along the border “premature,” saying that OSCE monitors are already there. Russia invited observers to its border checkpoints in response to numerous accusations from Ukraine and its foreign sponsors of sending regular troops and weapons to the rebels.
Ceasefire holding despite Debaltsevo retreat
Despite sporadic flares of confrontation and the fight for Debaltsevo, the international community mostly agrees that the Ukrainian ceasefire is holding. According to the 13-point Minsk plan, a ceasefire went into effect on Saturday, and heavy weapons withdrawal is scheduled to be completed before March 1.
The OSCE, which is monitoring the ceasefire, confirmed the pullback of heavy weapons from the disengagement line by Lugansk militia, the Russian Ambassador to the OSCE, Andrey Kelin, told TASS.
“The OSCE is receiving reports on an ongoing pullback of armaments by the [self-proclaimed] Lugansk republic,” he said, adding that in Donetsk the organization placed about 20 patrol teams along the front line.
Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the ceasefire in Ukraine is “being observed along practically the entire frontline and in a few regions there is a readiness – at least the militia announced it publicly – to withdraw heavy weapons.”
At the same time, Lavrov noted that the US might still try to use the Debaltsevo events as a pretext for further anti-Russia moves, as its latest rhetoric corresponds with Washington’s “unconstructive” line on Ukraine.
Washington admitted the ceasefire in Ukraine is holding, with US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki saying on Wednesday that the State Department doesn’t consider it to be “dead.”
Citing OSCE reports, Psaki admitted clashes are continuing but the “quantity and intensity has decreased,” and both sides have withdrawn heavy weapons in certain areas as outlined by the Minsk peace plan. “We remain focused on supporting the implementation of this agreement,” she said.
The Obama administration is still deciding whether to provide “defensive lethal weapons” to Kiev, according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest. He said that both the rebels and Moscow have failed to comply with the ceasefire terms and “their failure to do so does put them at risk of greater costs.”

Kremlin press secretary doubts UK Defense Secretary’s understanding of what he says
| February 19, 2015 | 10:04 pm | Russia | Comments closed

 

Dmitry Peskov made this comment regarding the statement of Britain’s Defense Secretary Michael Fallon where he drew a comparison between Russia and Islamic State

 

ITAR-TASS News Agency, February 19, 2015, 21:27 UTC+3
http://tass.ru/en/russia/778793
 

MOSCOW, February 19, 2015. /TASS/. Russian President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday he doubted very much that Britain’s Defense Secretary Michael Fallon understood full well what he was saying as he drew a comparison between Russia and Islamic State.
“A person who found it possible to say this scarcely understood the substance of what he was saying,” Peskov said in an interview with the Russian News Service radio.

What weapons does USA ship to Europe for war in Ukraine?
| February 19, 2015 | 10:01 pm | Russia, Ukraine | Comments closed

 

Pravda.Ru, 19.02.2015
http://english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/19-02-2015/129863-usa_europe_ukraine-0/
Germany is unable to stop arms shipments to Ukraine, including from the US and Canada, Karl-Georg Wellmann, a member of the Christian Democratic Union stated in Bundestag, Pravda.Ru reports with reference to Bloomberg.
The legislator said that the United States Air Force was intended to send ten military aircraft to Europe. It goes about the A-10 attack aircraft, aka “tank busters.” According to Pentagon officials, this is being done to “increase rotational presence in Europe to reassure our allies and partner nations that our commitment to European security is a priority.” 
Wellmann also referred to the warning from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said that the war would never end, if Kiev continues to believe that the military solution is the only way out of the crisis. According to the German lawmaker, the conflict in Ukraine may evolve into a full-scale war, Pravda.Ru reports
It was previously reported that the US attack aircraft would be deployed to the air base in Spangdahlem, Germany, as well as in other “partner countries” in Eastern Europe as part of “Operation Atlantic Resolve that was formed after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine last year.”
 

Pravda.Ru 

Books Instead Of Bombs: Bernie Sanders Proposes Massive College Tuition Cut
| February 19, 2015 | 9:53 pm | Bernie Sanders, National, political struggle | Comments closed
By: Jason Easley

Thursday, February, 19th, 2015
Source: PoliticusUSA
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tonight a plan to take some of the proposed increases in military spending and spend it on a 55% cut in tuition for students at all public colleges and universities.
Sen Sanders’s will announce his proposal during a town hall at the University of Iowa:
“If the federal government were to invest $18 billion a year, with a dollar-for-dollar match from state governments, we would slash college tuition in the United States by more than half.
Many of my colleagues in Washington would look at that number – $18 billion a year – and tell you that we can’t afford to make that kind of
investment in our nation’s young people. To put it simply, they are wrong.
In the budget proposal President Obama released two weeks ago, he requested $561 billion for the Department of Defense – $38 billion over budget caps that are currently in place.
If we were to reduce the President’s proposed increase in military spending by less than half, and instead invest that money in educational opportunities for today’s college students, we could cut tuition by 55%. So I challenge all of you… ask yourselves, where should our priorities lie?”
The Pentagon doesn’t need all of the proposed increases in military spending. There is a lot of military spending that is nothing more than red state welfare programs disguised as national security.
The country needs lower college tuition costs more than it needs a few billion dollars thrown at the Pentagon. This is a proposal that makes sense, but Republicans will definitely oppose it by claiming that it is too expensive.
The GOP would rather see a nation of college graduates drowning in debt, and the doors of economic opportunity bolted shut before they would consider doing anything to lower the cost of tuition.
Sen. Sanders has a powerful common sense message to offer. The fact that the issue of the cost of higher education is being discussed is serious progress. The Republican motto of you’re on your own isn’t going to cut it.
Exclusive: Interview With Maximilien Sánchez Arveláiz, Venezuelan Ambassador-Designate to the U.S.
| February 19, 2015 | 9:15 pm | Analysis, International, Latin America, National, political struggle, Venezuela | Comments closed

Posted: Updated:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/exclusive-interview-with-_26_b_6704780.html
Dan Kovalik
Human rights attorney

2015-02-18-Max.jpg
Photo of Maximilien Sánchez Arveláiz (Courtesy of Venezuelan Embassy)

Dan: I was just reading that, even with the economic problems in Venezuela, the government has decided to press forward in fully funding its social programs.

MA: Yes definitely, we want to keep and maintain our social programs, and that is our priority, to take care of Venezuelan families. We already have some progress to show and we want to maintain that. . . . [W]hat’s going on in Venezuela for the last 10 years, and longer, and in the rest of the region, is a bit like The New Deal . . . and to a certain extent the Civil Rights Movement. We are talking about economic, social inclusion and political inclusion. . . .

Dan: And there has been a real decline in poverty and extreme poverty in Venezuela in the last 15 years?

MA: Yes, definitely. Remember when Chavez was elected in 1999, at that time . . . the poverty rate at that time stood around 42-45% and I think right now it has been reduced to 25%. And extreme poverty rate that fell [from 23.4%] to 7% and I think it was last year when the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recognized Venezuela as the leader in Latin America for the eradication of hunger. I think in 2014 again you have this Gini coefficient . . . [t]hat shows again that inequality fell even more in 2014. So, we are moving in the right direction. . . . See, World Bank figures.

Dan: I have recently been reading comparisons between Venezuela now and Chile in 1973, and I wonder if you think that is a fair comparison.

MA: Definitely, you know that wonderful documentary done by Patricio Guzman, The Battle of Chile? Maybe at that time it was in black and white, and now it is in color. But if you see some of the images, some of the sequences on that documentary and you look to Caracas now, you could find some similarities . . . for example, what President Maduro just denounced – the sabotage; the same recipe with the same ingredient. So, right now, they are trying to promote a coup on our economy. For the last two years, we have been facing hording, contraband and many forms of fraud in order to destabilize the distribution of food and obviously create the sensation of chaos and then you have all these pictures of people in long queues waiting to go the market. Again, the same trick. . . . I hope that we will not be able to make a “Battle of Venezuela,” or, if yes, the result in the end would be better.

Dan: Can you talk about the U.S.’s recently-imposed sanctions against Venezuela?

M.A.: In Venezuela, the sanctions could be seen as a green light for certain sectors of the opposition. So we will see what happens. In April, we will have the Summit of the Americas in Panama. So that’s going to be quite interesting to see where we are then. A few days ago at the CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean states) meeting in Costa Rica, there was a unanimous resolution condemning the unilateral imposition of sanctions by the U.S. upon Venezuela. All of the governments, all of the delegations, that were part of that summit, we are talking about all of the regions of Latin America, condemn it. . . .

Dan: I wonder if you could comment on Noam Chomsky’s statement that Chavez led the historic liberation of Latin America.

M.A.: I understand what Chomsky was saying, but I think that Chavez did not think of himself as a leader of the movement, but rather as a part of a cultural struggle to bring progress and provide for the basic necessities of the Venezuelan, and to some extent, all of the Latin American people. Now, it was true that when Chavez was elected in 1999, we were maybe the only ones in the region, with the clear exception of Cuba, who saw themselves as part of this struggle. But then after Chavez, and maybe because we were the avant-garde to some extent, you had other leaders who were elected — like Lula in Brazil, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia — leaders that have been promoting social and political inclusion which are key elements to guaranteeing social development and democracy. So, yes, Chavez was an amazing leader. . . . You know, he was born in a mud hut. . . . He came from the very lower classes, and he never forgot where he came from. And, all his life he dedicated himself to help the poor and to improve their lives, and to some extent we can say that he died because of that and for them. . . . Similarly, Nicolas Maduro was a bus driver, he had a working class background, and he is somebody again who knows where he comes from as well, and will never forget that. . . . And, it is unfortunate that some people can’t accept that somebody that doesn’t come from the higher classes can lead their country.

Dan: When you refer to the Civil Rights Movement, it reminds me that when I was in Caracas during the elections in April 2013, I witnessed a pro-Maduro rally and what struck me was that nearly everyone at that rally was black. People in this country don’t think about the historic oppression of Afro-Venezuelans, and what the Chavista revolution has done for them.

MA: Yes, we are talking about people who were disenfranchised citizens, second-class citizens and they have now become a real part of society. Again, when we are talking about the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s it was quite violent actually here the reaction against this movement. Yes, you know, so you can understand how you could have sectors of Venezuelan society who might react in a certain violent manner against this process of inclusion. . . .

Kiev court judges refuse to take part in Communist Party banning case
| February 18, 2015 | 9:05 pm | Analysis, International, political struggle, Russia, Ukraine | Comments closed

 

Judges at an administrative court in Kiev have refused to try a case banning the activities of the Communist Party of Ukraine, after police conducted a search and seizure operation in the office of one their colleagues.

Judge Valery Kuzmenko, who was presiding over the Justice Ministry’s suit against the Communist Party, withdrew from the case on Wednesday, the Interfax news agency reports.

All the other judges in the Kiev District Administrative Court have also filed applications to be excused from hearing the case, Kuzmenko said.

The judge explained the move by saying that the prosecutors and police searched his office and seized his computer, with working materials on the Communist Party case and others.

He said he views the law enforcement officials’ actions as an attempt to put pressure on the court.

According to the prosecutors, Monday’s search and seizure was performed as part of the criminal case, launched over the “abuse of power or position” and “forgery” by the judges, RIA-Novosti reports.

READ MORE: Ukraine communist leader: Kiev labeled 7 mn people ‘terrorists,’ slaughtered civilians

The Communist Party has been speaking against Ukraine’s new authorities since the coup in February 2014, which saw President Viktor Yanukovich ousted.

However, the persecution of the Communists Party began in April, shortly after Kiev launched a military operation against the country’s south-eastern regions.

Communist leader, Pyotr Simonenko, said the military campaign is Kiev’s war against its own people, stressing that if he was the head of state, he “would immediately recall all the troops.”

He openly accused the Ukrainian authorities of the “slaughter of civilians and mass murder,” saying they had labeled the 7 million people in Donetsk and Lugansk as “terrorists.”

In June, Ukraine’s justice minister, Pavel Petrenko, announced a lawsuit to ban the Communist Party in Ukraine.

In mid-summer, the Communist faction was dissolved by the Ukrainian parliament,with the official explanation for the move being an insufficient number of MPs in the party.

Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, said that 308 criminal cases had been launched against members of the Communist Party, with its leaders accused of supporting Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation and backing the creation of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as financing the rebels.

In November, a group of MPs introduced a draft law to the parliament, making any dissemination of Communist ideology in Ukraine illegal and proposing punishment of up to 10 years in prison for the perpetrators.

READ MORE: Ukraine authorities in massive ‘Rename Soviet Places’ drive

The Communist Party banning trial was rescheduled several times and eventually postponed by the Kiev District Administrative Court. The decision was reversed by an appeal court on December 24.

The Communists aren’t the only party facing persecution in Ukraine over their opposition stance. MPs from six parties have also come under scrutiny.

On February 2, Radical Party leader, Oleg Lyashko, demanded the dissolving of the opposition block after it became the only faction in the parliament to vote against recognizing Russia as “an aggressor state” in the Ukrainian conflict.

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