Pajamas Media ^ | May 13, 2011 | Kim Zigfeld
Posted on Friday, May 13, 2011 1:23:37 PM by Kaslin
Moscow zeroes in on another lonely voice of opposition.
The motto Vladimir Putin lives by is simple: If you can’t beat them, jail them. If you can’t jail them, kill them. And make no mistake: these days Putin is able to live by that motto in large part because of the craven cowardice of U.S. President Barack Obama.
The definitive case in point is that of attorney activist Alexei Navalny.
Just like businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky before him, Navalny has boldly stepped forward to challenge financial corruption in Putin’s Russia.
The country ranks a genuinely shocking #154 out of 178 world nations when surveyed for corruption, meaning that Russia is the 24th most corrupt country on the planet. A new report by former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov documents that this corruption reaches to the highest levels of the Kremlin, including Putin himself.
By choosing Putin, the proud KGB spy, Russians were supposed to be gaining strict law and order in exchange for civil rights and liberties. What’s actually happened is that they’ve got the worst of all possible worlds.
The stronger Navalny has become — in just the past three months, his website has garnered 6.5 million rubles in donations from thousands of people all across Russia — the more pressure he has felt from the Kremlin. Just as with Khodorkovsky, a presidential election approaches; Russians begin to think Navalny would be a good candidate; confidence in the Kremin wavers (last month, approval dropped below a majority). The pressure has reached a crescendo.
In response, the Kremlin’s assault on Navalny has been sudden, relentless, and brutal. First came a massive DDOS cyber attack on Navalny’s website, knocking it off the Internet. Then came KGB pressure on Yandex, the Russian PayPal, to reveal the names and addresses of Navalny’s Internet donors.
Then, a wave of harassing phone calls to those donors from Nashi, Putin’s youth cult. Now, to round things out, the Kremlin has announced a criminal investigation, which could put Navalny in prison for five years — maybe even in a Siberian cell right next to Khodorkovsky.
That’s if Navalny is lucky. But maybe he won’t be.
Maybe the Kremlin will decide it can’t afford a long, drawn-out trial and is only using the threat of prosecution to see if it will silence Navalny.
If that doesn’t work, maybe the Kremlin won’t risk allowing Navalny to generate the kind of publicity that Khodorkovsky has been able to manage (he gives interviews and releases opinion pieces from his jail cell). Maybe, instead, the Kremlin will decide to implement the “Politkovskaya solution” and simply have Navalny killed.
When Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in October 2006, the U.S. was led by a man, George W. Bush, who “looked in Putin’s eye, got a sense of his soul” and pronounced him “trustworthy.”
Today, Obama meets with Putin’s hand-picked puppet “president” Dmitri Medvedev, munches burgers, and offers the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. ballistic missile defense systems from Eastern Europe — as well as a nuclear arms treaty that calls upon only the U.S. to cut ICBMs.
When America sends the message that it will look the other way when Putin strikes, Putin does not waste time in doing so. During the Bush administration there was a whole host of murders of Putin’s political foes. Not once was a killer brought to justice.
If Obama does not speak up soon, the world may well see Navalny’s name added to that list — and an iron curtain descending once again across the continent of Europe.
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