Democracy gone Astray: Sunday, September 24, 2023

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, September 24, 2023

US imposes new sanctions on Russia, expels diplomats

United States President Joe Biden has signed an executive order that imposes a slate of new sanctions against Russia, as well as expelling 10 diplomats from the US, in response to a massive Russian hacking campaign that breached vital federal agencies, as well as for election interference.

President Biden said he warned Russia President Vladimir Putin about the sanctions when they spoke by telephone in a “candid, respectful conversation” on April 13.

Over the past few weeks, Russia has been amassing troops at the Ukrainian border, triggering alarm in Kyiv and European Union capitals. Kremlin-controlled TV channels have been busy preparing the public in Russia for a fresh outbreak of war. Alarmingly jingoistic statements are being made on various talk shows, with hosts and guests suggesting the possibility of Russia seizing new chunks of Ukrainian territory or even advancing as far as Kyiv.

Tensions between Russia and the West rose on Tuesday over fears Moscow is attempting to escalate its conflict with Ukraine over the Donbas region.

Addressing reporters alongside Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg accused Russia of having moved “thousands of combat-ready troops to Ukraine’s borders”.

Nato’s secretary general has called on Russia to halt its military buildup around Ukraine, describing it as “unjustified, unexplained and deeply concerning”.

Later on Tuesday, Moscow hit back, saying the deployments were a reaction to what it claimed were Nato plans to move troops closer to Russia’s borders in the Baltic and Black Sea regions.

Flanked by Ukraine’s foreign minister at a press conference on Tuesday morning, Nato’s Jens Stoltenberg said Russia had moved thousands of combat troops to Ukraine’s borders in “the largest massing of Russian troops since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014”.

China has warned the United States “not to play with fire” on Taiwan issues after the Department of State updated its guidelines easing restrictions on meetings between US officials and their counterparts from the island, which Beijing claims as its own.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian urged the US to “immediately stop any form of US-Taiwan official contacts, cautiously and appropriately handle the matter, and not send wrong signals to Taiwan independence forces so as not to subversively influence and damage Sino-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait”.

Tehran, Iran – Iran and Russia have held high-level talks on bilateral ties, the region, and Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers during Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s trip to Tehran on Tuesday.

In a meeting with Lavrov, President Hassan Rouhani said Iran wishes to expand regional cooperation with Russia on Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen in order to help establish stability and combat American interventions.

He also called for more defence and military cooperation, especially as a United Nations Security Council arms embargo on Iran ended in October 2020.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russia denies it wants war.

Asked why it amassed 40,000 troops, armoured personnel carriers, tanks and artillery near Ukraine’s eastern border and another 40,000 servicemen in annexed Crimea in recent weeks, Moscow “refused to provide substantial information”, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

A day earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Nobody is planning to move towards the war.”

As Russia amasses the highest number of troops on Ukraine’s border since 2014, the question for Kyiv now becomes: Is it time to start putting U.S.-made weapons in the field?

Ukraine purchased 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 37 launchers from the U.S. in 2018 for approximately $47 million, and the State Department approved the sale of a second batch of 150 missiles and 10 launch units in late 2019. But with them came a variety of restrictions on their usage, including that they be stored in western Ukraine, far from the front lines.

Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Sunday the US is concerned about China’s aggressive actions against Taiwan and warned it would be a “serious mistake” for anyone to try to change the status quo in the western Pacific by force.

“What we’ve seen, and what is of real concern to us, is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan, raising tensions in the Straits,” Blinken told NBC’s Meet the Press.

The Ukrainian military said a soldier was killed and another seriously wounded in artillery fire from Russia-backed separatist rebels, as hostilities rose sharply in the east of the country.

As of the reported attack on Sunday, Ukraine says 27 soldiers have been killed in the east this year, more than half the number who died in all of 2020. Attacks have intensified in recent weeks and Russia has built up troops along the Ukraine border.

Western nations chided Russia for failing to turn up at talks in Vienna on Saturday aimed at defusing tension over Ukraine, where a Russian troop buildup close to the border between the two countries has sparked fears of renewed conflict.

“We regret that Russia did not avail itself of this opportunity to address concerns and reduce risks,” the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said in a tweet.

The talks at the OSCE were called by Ukraine after what France and Germany described as “unusual military activities” on the border causing “increasing concern.”

Ukraine maintained Saturday that it will not back down to pressure from Russia amid increased hostilities along the border between the two countries.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Andrii Taran said Russia was trying to force Kiev to cave in negotiations by ramping up its military presence on the border, but he declared that Ukraine would not let up fighting.

“[T]he actual goals of building up of military presence by the Russian Federation alongside the Ukrainian border and at the temporary occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, might be the increase of pressure on Ukraine for the purpose of forcing it to yield in the course of the negotiation process,” Taran said in a statement Saturday.

Kremlin officials have said that its forces massing on the border with Ukraine could intervene if Kyiv launches an assault on Russian-backed separatists, as concerns grow about the largest military buildup since 2014.

Open source intelligence reports have shown that tanks, rocket artillery, and short-range ballistic missiles have been transported to just 150 miles from Ukraine, where Russia has established a large new military staging area.

In the early years of the 21st century, Russian President Vladimir Putin, then a novice at his job, introduced the concept of "Managed Democracy."

The system he installed allowed him to claim that Russia featured regular elections, as well as three branches of government and a separation of powers.

That was the (formal) "democracy" part. But what about the "managed" part?

Vladimir Putin has signed a law that will allow him to run for the presidency twice more in his lifetime, potentially keeping him in office until 2036.

The Russian president signed the legislation on Monday, ending a year-long process to “reset” his presidential terms by rewriting the constitution through a referendum-like process that his critics have called a crude power grab.

Putin has been Russia’s most powerful politician since he assumed the presidency in 2000, after the resignation of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

As the midterm campaign’s first fundraising deadline approached this week, several vulnerable House Democrats got an unwelcome surprise in their accounts: $5,000 from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York Democrat sent the contributions to her colleagues to help keep the House majority ahead of a tough cycle without directly contributing to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with which she’s publicly clashed. But Ocasio-Cortez’s largesse — and an oversight at the campaign headquarters — has instead raised awkward questions among her colleagues as some swing-district Democrats fret over whether to return her money before the GOP can turn it into an attack ad.

Europe's attempt to keep politics and business apart in China is blowing up in its face.

Only three months after China and the EU struck a trade deal to make it easier to do business in each other's markets, Beijing's acid-tongued officials are now training their full ire on the EU and other Western countries. Party officials and celebrities alike are encouraging 1.4 billion consumers to boycott certain European brands. Hundreds if not thousands of shops are closing their doors to European clothes amid a nationwide backlash over Western sanctions imposed last week because of Beijing's crackdown against Muslim Uyghurs.

The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8 trillion of financing for fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015, according to a report by a coalition of NGOs.

Despite the Covid-19 pandemic cutting energy use, overall funding remains on an upward trend and the finance provided in 2020 was higher than in 2016 or 2017, a fact the report’s authors and others described as “shocking.”

By the time Antony Blinken's plane touched down in Brussels on Monday night, America's top diplomat had already acquired an unlikely ally in his push for a deeper transatlantic partnership: China.

Over the past few months, China has sparked more division than consensus between Washington and Europe. While the U.S. has taken a tough line and imposed trade sanctions over the treatment of China's Uyghur Muslim minority, Brussels has taken the opposite approach and in December agreed a landmark trade deal with Beijing that was intended to boost big European investors in China, particularly German car makers. Europe's top leaders like France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Angela Merkel gave short shrift to U.S. President Joe Biden's offer to form an alliance of democracies against China.

A senior Saudi official issued what was perceived to be a death threat against the independent United Nations investigator, Agnès Callamard, after her investigation into the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In an interview with the Guardian, the outgoing special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings said that a UN colleague alerted her in January 2020 that a senior Saudi official had twice threatened in a meeting with other senior UN officials in Geneva that month to have Callamard “taken care of” if she was not reined in by the UN.

Russia and China have called for a United Nations Security Council summit over what they term heightened “global political turbulence”, which has seen Western powers impose fresh sanctions on the pair over alleged human rights violations.

The two allies, whose relations with the West are under increasing strain, made the call in a joint statement on Tuesday following talks in Guilin between Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.

Britain and the EU have taken joint action with the US and Canada to impose parallel sanctions on senior Chinese officials involved in the mass internment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province in the first such western action against Beijing since Joe Biden took office.

The move also marked the first time in three decades that the UK or the EU had punished China for human rights abuses, and both will now be working hard to contain the potential political and economic fallout. China hit back immediately, blacklisting MEPs, European diplomats and thinktanks.

A trained KGB agent, Vladimir Putin knows how to hide his feelings, but in 2013, after former President Barack Obama described him looking like “the bored kid in the back of the classroom,” Putin let it be known that he was furious. And rightly so: kids in the back of the room are rarely ambitious. Putin, from day one of his rule 21 years ago, has had big, ambitious plans for himself and for Russia.

A far greater Soviet patriot than a Russian one, one of his first priorities when he became president in 2000 was to recover state ownership or control of the key political and economic assets lost in the Soviet Union’s demise: major industries, courts, media, national politics. Then, in his third and fourth presidencies, he turned his ambition to geopolitics: to incursions into Ukraine and Crimea, an alliance with Syria, and various assaults on Western democracies with what the KGB used to call “active measures” recast as cyberattacks.

Russia and Iran undertook campaigns to influence the 2020 U.S. election, but intelligence agencies found no evidence that foreign actors tried to alter votes or other technical aspects of the voting process, according to conclusions of a declassified report released Tuesday.

The two foreign campaigns sought to influence the election for different results — Russia, to promote former President Trump, while Iran went against him — but among five key judgements outlined in the declassified report is that no foreign actor interfered in the 2020 voting process.

The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has warned the US not to "cause a stink", as President Joe Biden prepares to set out his Korean policy.

In remarks on state media, Kim Yo-jong criticised the US and South Korea for conducting joint military exercises.

Her comments come a day before top US officials are due to arrive in Seoul.

A group of Indigenous women in leadership roles came together online today to kick off a conversation they hope will empower women and bring an end to gender-based discrimination in their communities and politics.

The webinar was hosted by Carrier Sekani Tribal Chief Mina Holmes and focused on the Assembly of First Nations’ Resolution 13, which passed in December and called for an independent investigation to end sexual-orientation and gender-based discrimination within the organization.

Chief Doris Bill with the Kwanlin Dün First Nation in the Yukon seconded the resolution, which was moved by Khelsilem of the Squamish First Nation.

Russian police detained about 150 people at a meeting of independent and opposition politicians in Moscow on Saturday, accusing them of links to an “undesirable organisation”, a monitoring group and a TV station said.

The detentions come amid a crackdown on anti-Kremlin sentiment, following the arrest and imprisonment of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who returned to Russia in January after recovering from a nerve agent poisoning in Siberia.

Russian police have detained more than 170 participants of a forum of independent members of municipal councils, an action that comes amid the authorities’ multi-pronged crackdown on dissent.

Police showed up at the gathering in Moscow on Saturday shortly after it opened, saying that all those present will be arrested for taking part in an event organised by an “undesirable” organisation. A police officer leading the raid said the detainees will be taken down to police precincts and charged with administrative violations.

China is responsible for an “ongoing genocide” against its Uyghur ethnic minority, according to the first independent legal analysis of the situation undertaken by a nongovernmental organization. The report, published this week by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy think tank in Washington, DC, brought together the findings of 50 experts in human rights and international law.

Governments around the world are also increasingly declaring that China’s persecution of Uyghurs constitutes genocide. The United States applied that label in January, and the Canadian and Dutch parliaments followed suit in February.

Sweden is going through a sea change, and Rear Admiral Ewa Skoog Haslum is the woman in charge.

While “strategic autonomy” is a relatively new buzzword in Brussels, Fortress Sweden was once its embodiment: historically nonaligned, outside of NATO, with citizens prepared to fend off superpowers in a “total defense” posture. Yet today, Stockholm is emerging as a forceful advocate for deepening Western military partnerships in the face of growing threats from Moscow and Beijing.

So even as Skoog Haslum, chief of the navy since January 2020, oversees the biggest expansion of the marine defenses since the Cold War, she is keeping tight ties with the U.S. and Brexit Britain.

A legal amendment in Syria has been greeted with anger and dismay by people displaced by the civil war who are now at risk of losing homes and property they left behind unless they pay exorbitant fines to the government in Damascus.

Bashar al-Assad’s sanctions-hit, cash-strapped government, looking to raise money in any way possible, announced a change to an article of the law concerning military conscription last month. Under the amended law, those who did not do military service before the age of 43 must pay $8,000 (£5,700) or lose their property without notice or any right to appeal.

A US intelligence report has found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the murder of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

The report released by the Biden administration says the prince approved a plan to either "capture or kill" Khashoggi.

The US announced sanctions on dozens of Saudis but not the prince himself.

Hundreds of unarmed civilians were massacred in less than 48 hours by Eritrean troops during the war in the restive northern Ethiopian province of Tigray last year, Amnesty International has said.

The soldiers systematically killed hundreds of civilians in the northern city of Axum, opening fire in the streets and conducting house-to-house raids in a massacre that may amount to a crime against humanity, it said in a report.

Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti, who is seen as the leader of the First and Second Intifada, is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. His intention to run for president in the upcoming Palestinian elections has shaken the Palestinian political scene. If he runs and wins, as recent polls have suggested he might, his victory could reshape the Palestinian cause with great implications for the Israeli occupation.

Predictably, Barghouti is facing a stiff opposition from the octogenarian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is planning a rerun, and from his clique of loyalists in the Fatah party, who have been running the Palestinian Authority for over two decades.

Amnesty International has stripped Alexey Navalny of the “prisoner of conscience” status it had given him, saying some of the Kremlin critic’s past comments were akin to hate speech.

In a statement sent to Al Jazeera on Wednesday, the rights group said it would however continue to “fight for his freedom” – referring to the 44-year-old’s current imprisonment in Moscow.

“Amnesty International took an internal decision to stop referring to [Alexey] Navalny as a prisoner of conscience in relation to comments he made in the past. Some of these comments, which Navalny has not publicly denounced, reach the threshold of advocacy of hatred, and this is at odds with Amnesty’s definition of a prisoner of conscience,” the statement said, without specifying what those comments were.

MOSCOW — Supporters of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny came out to residential courtyards and shined their cellphone flashlights Sunday in a display of unity, despite efforts by Russian authorities to extinguish the illuminated protests.

Navalny’s team sent photos of small groups with lit-up cellphones in cities from Siberia to the Moscow region. It was unclear how many people participated overall.

No arrests were immediately reported. However, police detained nine people at a daytime demonstration in the city of Kazan calling for the release of political prisoners, according to OVD-Info, a human rights group that monitors political arrests.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, where the ancient Yarlung civilisation established the first Tibetan Empire, China has plans to build the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam.

In November of last year, China’s state-owned media shared plans for a 60-gigawatt mega-dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR).

Now with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, Beijing has redoubled its efforts on its hydropower projects in Tibet, even though the dams have drawn criticism from Tibetan rights groups and environmentalists.

JERUSALEM/GAZA (Reuters) - Many Palestinians see a ruling by the International Criminal Court that it has jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories as a belated chance of justice for victims of Israeli attacks.

But for many Israelis, Friday’s ruling is worrying because they say they are the “good guys” defending themselves against Palestinian violence.

The ruling, delivered by a pre-trial chamber of three ICC judges, could lead to criminal investigations of Israel and Palestinian militant groups including Hamas. No probe was expected in the near future, however.

Russian police detained thousands of people as protesters took to the streets across the country demanding the release of jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny.

At least 5,021 people were detained nationwide on Sunday, including 1,608 in Moscow, according to OVD-Info, a protest monitoring group.

Security forces detained Yulia Navalnaya, wife of Navalny, at a protest in Moscow, his supporters said on social media.

The Russian businessman Arkady Rotenberg said on Saturday he owns a palace in southern Russia which jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has linked to Vladimir Putin.

Navalny and his anti-corruption foundation have published a video in which they allege the opulent mansion belongs to the Russian president. The video has been viewed more than 103m times.

Rotenberg, Putin’s former judo sparring partner who sold his stake in the gas pipeline construction firm Stroygazmontazh in 2019 for a sum which RBC business daily puts at some 75bn roubles (£720m), said he bought the palace two years ago.

China has warned Taiwan that any attempt to seek independence "means war".

The warning comes days after China stepped up its military activities and flew warplanes near the island.

It also comes after new US President Joe Biden reaffirmed his commitment to Taiwan, and set out his stance in Asia.

Four prominent allies of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny were detained overnight in what appeared to be an effort from law enforcement to blunt more anti-government demonstrations scheduled for this weekend.

Authorities arrested Navalny’s brother Oleg Navalny; top ally Lyubov Sobol; Anastasia Vasilyeva, who is a member of the Navalny-supported Alliance of Doctors; and Maria Alyokhina, a member of the Pussy Riot punk band. The arrests were first confirmed by Ivan Zhdanov, another prominent opposition figure and the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian court on Thursday rejected opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s appeal against his arrest while authorities detained several of his allies and issued warnings to social media companies after tens of thousands swarmed the streets in over 100 Russian cities last weekend demanding his release.

Speaking to court via video link from jail, Navalny denounced criminal proceedings against him as part of the government’s efforts to intimidate the opposition.

“You won’t succeed in scaring tens of millions of people who have been robbed by that government,” he said.

Russia’s FSB security agency has confirmed it enforced a no-fly zone over the £1bn seaside palace that Vladimir Putin has assured the public he does not own. It said the restrictions were imposed last summer to protect the Black Sea coast from Nato spies. Coincidentally, that stretch of coastline also hid an opulent chateau of murky provenance boasting its own casino, skating rink and vineyard.

The Kremlin has been scrambling to explain away an investigation by Alexei Navalny into the 17,691 sq metre seaside mansion that was allegedly funded by a number of Putin’s friends and guarded by the government agencies that also protect Putin and his family. The investigation was released after Navalny, an opposition leader, was jailed and threatened with years in prison on charges he claims are political. the video has been viewed more than 95m times on YouTube.

Israel’s top general warned attack plans against Iran were being revised and said any US return to the 2015 nuclear accord with Tehran would be “wrong”.

Israeli Lieutenant-General Aviv Kochavi made the remarks on Tuesday in an address to Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. He said the move was made after Iran began restarting its nuclear programme in recent months.

“In light of this fundamental analysis, I have instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare a number of operational plans, in addition to those already in place,” Kochavi said.

On January 12, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem made headlines when it released its report, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

This built on its January 28, 2020 statement where B’Tselem had already used the “A” word, describing former U.S. president Trump’s “peace plan” as amounting to apartheid, not peace.

MOSCOW — The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin says the U.S. Embassy’s statements about the nationwide protests, in which more than 3,500 people reportedly were arrested, interfere in the country’s domestic affairs and encourage Russians to break the law.

Dmitry Peskov made the criticism on Sunday, a day after protests took place across the country demanding the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption activist who is Putin’s most well-known critic.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned as "illegal and dangerous" the mass rallies in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Tens of thousands defied a heavy police presence to join the rallies across Russia on Saturday. More than 3,500 were detained, monitors say.

EU foreign ministers discussed the protests on Monday, but did not agree on further sanctions on Russia.

As riot police surged to retake Moscow’s Pushkin square on Saturday, all you could see of them from the crowd were their truncheons raised high, ready to strike. Then their black helmets came into view, and finally they pushed forward, driving waves of panicked Russians out on to the boulevards and side streets of the capital. “Respected citizens, the current event is illegal. We are doing everything to ensure your safety,” an officer repeated over a loudspeaker, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

China has passed a law that for the first time explicitly allows its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels, a move that could make the contested South China Sea and nearby waters more choppy.

The Coast Guard Law passed on Friday empowers it to “take all necessary measures, including the use of weapons when national sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction are being illegally infringed upon by foreign organisations or individuals at sea”.