In Russia, Putin’s democracy looking more like a facade

In Russia, Putin’s democracy looking more like a facade

Former leader Mikhail Gorbachev and others are outraged after last week's elections, which only 3 percent of Russians believed were fair, according to a poll.

By Fred Weir | Correspondent 10.19.09

What can one single vote, confirmed missing, tell us about the current state of democracy in Russia?

A lot, says Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the liberal Yabloko party. He says that the lost vote in question – his own – offers startling evidence to back widespread opposition claims that regional polls held across Russia last week were stage-managed to ensure the victory of pro-Kremlin forces.

The United Russia (UR) party, which is led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, won about 80 percent of all contested positions in some 7,000 districts around the country. In the crucial center of Moscow, UR swept up 32 of the 35 city council seats.

Along with millions of other Russians, Mr. Mitrokhin went with his family to vote at their local polling station, No. 192, in Moscow’s tony Khamovniki district on election day. He knows for sure that he voted for his own party ticket.

But when the final official tally was released last weekend, it showed that zero votes for Yabloko were registered at polling station No. 192.

“We know there were massive falsifications in the vote counting, but really, not a single vote for Yabloko?” says Mitrokhin. “It’s almost as if they wanted to prove I don’t exist as a living being. It looks like the authorities are not even trying to pretend any longer that we are having real elections.”

Gorbachev: democratic system is ‘maimed’
A public opinion survey published this week by the daily Noviye Izvestia newspaper found that just 3 percent of respondents believe the elections were a fair and true democratic exercise. A third thought that UR’s victory was due to “massive falsifications” while a further 44 percent said the party benefited unduly from its command of “administrative resources,” meaning official influence, state media backing, and access to government funds.

Yabloko has documented multiple cases of what is says is official fraud, coercion, and other legal violations in the election campaign and subsequent voting, some of which has been translated and posted on the party’s English-language website (http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/).

But Mitrokhin’s outrage over what looks like the most seriously miscarried electoral exercise in Russia’s post-Soviet history has been increasingly echoed by independent commentators, including the father of Russia’s troubled democracy, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

“In the eyes of everyone, elections have turned into a mockery of the people and people have great distrust over how their votes are used,” Mr. Gorbachev told the opposition weekly Novaya Gazeta, of which he is part owner, on Monday.

“What is democracy when the people don’t participate in it?” he said. “The electoral system has been utterly maimed. We need an alternative.”

‘Everyone knows the electoral process is dirty’
Last week, scores of opposition parliamentarians staged a walkout from the State Duma to dramatize their complaints about the elections, but by Monday all but a few deputies of the Communist Party had returned.

The chairman of Russia’s official Electoral Commission, Vladimir Churov, warned the protesting lawmakers that they might be breaking the law, and added if they had doubts about the process they could challenge them by “signing an official protocol” of complaint. If that doesn’t work, he added, they can “file a lawsuit.”

Lawsuits against electoral authorities in the past have almost always been dismissed by state-dominated courts.

“Everyone knows that the electoral process is dirty, and that UR basically controls the system,” says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “In fact, the whole world sees this, and it’s causing serious damage to the image of the country’s top leaders. The Kremlin needs to take action to change this situation,” before the next cycle of elections in just over two years time, he says.

Since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, Russia’s political system has been forcibly reshaped to eliminate pesky opposition parties and game elections to favor the giant and reliably pro-Kremlin UR. Mr. Putin’s party now controls the vast majority of regional legislatures, most big city councils, and a more than two-thirds majority in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

That system, dubbed “managed democracy,” reached a climax last year when Putin ushered his hand-picked successor Dmitri Medvedev into the Kremlin against virtually no opposition.

Kremlin facade of democracy
The Kremlin’s efforts to create a facade that looks like genuinely contested elections – while ruthlessly eliminating serious contenders – took on almost comical dimensions in polls to choose a new mayor for Sochi, the host of the 2014 Olympic Games, where Putin has invested about $12 billion of the state’s cash and much of his own personal credibility.

In the event last March, Putin’s candidate won with a 77 percent majority, while opposition candidates and democracy activists launched futile protests over what they called heavy-handed state manipulation at every stage of the process.

But experts say the wave of regional elections carried out last week make those polls look almost fair by comparison.

“As we have seen in the past, candidates who were unwanted by the authorities were simply disqualified early in the process,” says Andrei Buzin, chairman of the Interregional Association of Voters, a grassroots monitoring group. “As before, the police were often deployed to block opposition activities and meetings. But, unlike the past, when we didn’t see direct falsifications, there was a lot of falsification in the vote counting in these elections.”

Mr. Buzin says “the situation is getting worse, subjectively and objectively, much worse.”

Former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who faced huge obstacles in his bid to run for mayor of Sochi last April, says that this time around no candidate from his Solidarnost movement was allowed to run for city office in Moscow.

“Every single one of our candidates was disqualified, supposedly due to fraudulent signatures on their nomination forms,” says Mr. Nemtsov. Even Nemtsov’s own signature on one of the forms was declared invalid by officials, he says.

“It’s absolutely terrible, like an election in the German Democratic Republic [the former East Germany],” he says. “Forget about elections in this country. It’s just fraud, manipulation, and corruption. It’s a great big fiction.”

U.S. Seeks to Keep Watching Russia’s Weapons

U.S. Seeks to Keep Watching Russia’s Weapons

By THOM SHANKER and PETER BAKER

Published: October 19, 2009

WASHINGTON — With a key arms control treaty set to expire soon, the Obama administration is searching for ways to keep inspectors in Russia or else it risks losing American eyes on the world’s second most formidable nuclear weapons arsenal for the first time in decades.

The administration has been negotiating a replacement for the pact, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, which goes out of force on Dec. 5. But even if the talks produce a new agreement by then, the Senate and the Russian Parliament will not have time to ratify it before the old one expires — and some Republicans on Capitol Hill are warning that approval is far from certain.

In the absence of a treaty or an ad hoc but legally binding “bridge” authority, American inspectors would be forced to leave Russia when the treaty expired, and Russian inspectors would have to leave the United States. State Department lawyers are examining several options in hopes of preserving the ability to monitor and collect information about Russia’s nuclear weapons, administration officials confirm.

Under Start, the United States is allowed a maximum of 30 inspectors in Russia to monitor compliance with the treaty. Russia likewise has interests in finding a bridge mechanism to continue its similar rights to inspections in the United States.

If negotiators for President Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia reach agreement on a follow-up treaty that the two leaders can sign by Dec. 5, then the administration may seek what is called “provisional application,” putting the terms of the treaty into place on a temporary basis pending a Senate vote.

If the two sides do not settle on a new treaty, then the administration may seek some form of executive agreement with the Russians permitting inspectors to stay and information to be shared on terms similar to the current Start agreement while negotiators continue to talk.

Such an agreement, at least according to administration officials, would not require Senate approval, although lawmakers are demanding that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee be brought into the discussion. Administration officials said they would consult with Senate leaders on the plan.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the issue with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, during talks in Moscow last week, according to senior officials. But the two sides have not yet agreed to any specific measures to continue verification efforts in the absence of a new treaty, these officials said.

“We are working on options to provide transparency on strategic forces during the time before the new treaty enters into force,” a senior administration official said Friday. “But I think it’s premature to discuss specifics of any transparency options. Our focus is on getting the new treaty finished.”

The impending lapse of the treaty is already raising significant concerns on Capitol Hill.

Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, asked the State Department for a report on what legal instruments were being considered as a “bridge” between the expiration of Start and a new treaty, and for a description of what verification activities could take place without a treaty.

Andy Fisher, a senior adviser to the senator, said Mr. Lugar had also asked whether any of the proposed verification mechanisms would require Congressional authority. The senator has expressed specific concern that verification measures not be allowed to lapse, Mr. Fisher said.

The Start agreement was signed in 1991 before the collapse of the Soviet Union and went into effect in 1994, requiring both sides to reduce their arsenals to 6,000 warheads. The two sides are trying to produce a new treaty that keeps many of the verification and inspection elements of Start, while bringing the legal ceiling on strategic warheads and delivery vehicles down even below today’s much lower levels.

The administration hopes to follow up with a new round of negotiations on another treaty with Russia that would enact more far-reaching reductions in nuclear weapons as part of Mr. Obama’s goal of eventually ridding the world of all nuclear arms.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev struck a preliminary agreement on the terms of a new treaty during a meeting in Moscow in July that would cut the arsenals of both sides by at least a quarter. The two presidents agreed to cut each side’s strategic nuclear warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675, down from the 2,200 called for in 2012 by the Treaty of Moscow, which was signed in 2002.

The number of delivery vehicles, like land-based intercontinental missiles, submarine-based missiles and long-range bombers, would be cut to between 500 and 1,100, down from the 1,600 currently allowed under Start.

Negotiations are progressing, but Russia continues to press for restrictions on missile defense systems to be included in the treaty, something the United States has refused to consider. Even though Mr. Obama reshaped President George W. Bush’s plan for an antimissile shield based in Europe, Russian officials insist on legal limits.

Senior Republican aides in the Senate said a number of members were angered that the administration had undermined relations with two important NATO allies by canceling the Bush plan. It had called for 10 interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic; some senators have vowed to fight any post-Start treaty that includes provisions limiting missile defense.

Republicans also have called attention to comments by Russian military officers, who said that they might decide to field missiles with multiple warheads, which is seen as destabilizing and contrary to any new effort to lock in nuclear arms reductions.

Ratification of a follow-up treaty would require Mr. Obama and the Democratic leadership to hold all members of their party and gain at least seven more votes from Republicans.

Senators from both parties who specialize in arms control and military issues are asking that the president concentrate as well on how to enhance the safety of the nuclear stockpile and modernize the nation’s weapons facilities in parallel with submitting a draft treaty for ratification.

Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain, both Republicans of Arizona, are leading that effort. A senior Republican Senate aide said some members were gearing up to push the administration to commit to developing a new warhead, although a number of senior Democrats argue that reopening a warhead assembly line would undermine the administration’s nonproliferation message.

Korean Buddhists' Young San ceremony aims to spread goodness and peace

BELIEFS

Korean Buddhists' Young San ceremony aims to spread goodness and peace
The ritual performance, which involves sacred chants and elaborate dances, was almost lost under restrictions imposed during Japanese colonialism in the first half of the 20th century.
By Paloma Esquivel

October 19, 2009

It begins on a darkened stage. Someone chants. The sound of water flows from speakers. The lights come up slowly in imitation of dawn. A gong sounds, and five monks walk in procession onto the stage. The first one carries a candle and stops in front of an altar and an image of Buddha. The others stand behind him. In quick succession they kneel and stand, kneel and stand.

The ritual, performed by South Korea's Young San Preservation Group at the Irvine Barclay Theatre this month, is meant to awaken the forces of the natural world. On stage, it was a sacred ceremony condensed -- a five-minute greeting for the day.

In their 80-minute version of the Young San ritual, the group's eight monks performed traditional dances known as chakpop and music known as pomp'ae -- unwritten chants learned by ear and recited from memory. Pomp'ae, translated to mean "sacred chant," consists of long, drawn-out melodic lines punctuated by gongs and drums.

The group was touring the United States under the sponsorship of the Korea Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting awareness and cooperation between South Korea and the U.S. Just hours after the Irvine presentation, the monks headed east for performances at Princeton University and the Smithsonian Institution.

Each performance of the ritual is meant to "spread the goodness of the Buddha to all the world," the Venerable Dong Hee, a monk and the group's director, said through a translator.

The music and dance help bring peace not only to those who are still alive but also to the sprits of those who have died unfairly, she said.

Hee has dedicated a lifetime to preserving the rituals of this ceremony, which was nearly lost under restrictions imposed during Japanese colonialism in the first half of the 20th century. She began learning the chants as a child studying under the Venerable Song-am Park, a revered Korean monk who helped preserve the ritual during the colonial period, and is the first woman to join the lineage of the pomp'ae monks.

She learned the music first, then the dancing, she said.

"A profound understanding of the music leads to the dance," Hee said. "Without understanding the music, there is no dancing."

When the music fills her body, she said, she imagines the ideal world and tries to send that vision out to those around her.

Shortly after the five-minute awakening performance, five monks took the stage for Insong, a 10-minute chant to request that all Bodhisattvas -- enlightened beings -- attend the ceremony.

Chanting, interspersed with cymbal dances, a drum dance and a butterfly dance, followed.

In one cymbal dance, six monks walked in procession onto the stage, each carrying a pair of brass cymbals. They waved them over their heads, then brought them together -- not quite touching at first, then sliding them against each other ever so lightly so that the slightest reverberations could be heard around the theater. They did this three times in unison, then knelt together on the floor. The soft tap, tap, tap was followed by a louder clash. The shiny, pounded-metal cymbals were like a cluster of fluttering autumn leaves.

The monks stood again and danced with cymbals overhead. They bowed and most walked slowly off the stage, leaving one behind to chant alone.

A few minutes later, Hee stood in front of a drum, drumsticks in hand, and played and danced alone. The drum dance is a wish, she said, that all beings be enlightened in response to the beat.

In the butterfly dance, the monks entered in flowing robes and brightly colored headdresses. Each one carried a large peony and stepped slowly in rhythm around the center of the stage. They extended their arms like butterflies and then knelt to the floor.

The final performance was a 10-minute chant by Hee, accompanied by a lone drummer. The lights were dimmed for a time, then came up slowly as the drumbeat and the chant picked up speed.

It is a supplication, the group says, that all the blessings from the ceremony be transferred to the realization of peace.

paloma.esquivel@latimes.com

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times