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4201. Chechnya Weekly: Zyazikov Reportedly Beaten Up by Opposition Businessman

Publication Date:
05-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
The opposition Ingushetiya.ru website reported on April 30 that around two weeks earlier, Musa Keligov, the former deputy presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District and well-known businessman who some call the “purse” of the opposition to Murat Zyazikov, Ingushetia's president (Chechnya Weekly, March 20), by chance ran into Zyazikov in a Moscow hotel. According to Ingushetiya.ru, the chance encounter ended with Zyazikov's bodyguards finding him “unconscious and with a smashed face.” The website reported that Keligov asked Zyazikov bodyguards to tell Zyazikov once he regained consciousness that he had been dealt with “according to Ingush laws” and that judgment according to Russian laws lay ahead.
Topic:
Security and Ethnic Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Asia

4202. The US-Russia Strategic Framework Declaration

Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Council of American Ambassadors
Abstract:
President Bush and President Putin issued on April 6, 2008, in Sochi [Russia], a Declaration setting forth a framework for strategic cooperation between the United States and Russia. The Declaration outlines key elements of ongoing and new strategic initiatives between the two countries, including steps to promote security in the face of new and emerging threats; prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction; combat global terrorism; and advance economic cooperation. The Strategic Framework Declaration also acknowledges differences between the two countries, while agreeing to discuss these differences in a forthright manner without allowing these differences to prevent cooperation in other important areas.
Topic:
International Relations and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, Asia, and Sochi

4203. A Mediterranean Success Story: Malta's EU Integration

Author:
Molly Bordonaro
Publication Date:
03-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
Council of American Ambassadors
Abstract:
Within the space of a few weeks earlier this year, the Mediterranean island nation of Malta further advanced its integration into European Union institutions by adopting the euro currency and joining the Schengen zone. Malta has the distinction of being the first and only EU member state to adopt the euro and join Schengen at the same time. This achievement is even more impressive when you consider the fact that Malta joined the European Union less than four years earlier, in May 2004.
Topic:
Economics and Markets
Political Geography:
Europe

4204. Will the Real Serbia Please Stand Up?

Publication Date:
04-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
Kosovo's independence declaration on 17 February 2008 sent shock waves through Serbia's politics and society, polarising the former in a manner not seen since the Milosevic era. Rioting led to attacks on nine Western embassies, destruction of foreign property and massive looting. The government fell on 10 March, split over whether to pursue a nationalist or pro-Western path. Belgrade's efforts to create a de facto partitioning of the north of Kosovo threaten the new state's territorial integrity and challenge deployment of European Union (EU) missions there, and Serbian parliamentary and local elections on 11 May are unlikely to change the basic policy towards the new state, even in the unlikely event a pro-Western government comes to power. They may, however, well give Serbia's nationalist parties new leverage.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Conflict Prevention, Nationalism, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Europe, Kosovo, Serbia, and Balkans

4205. Chechnya Weekly: Kadyrov Keeps the Heat on the Yamadaevs

Publication Date:
05-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
In what appears to be an ongoing campaign by Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration against the Vostok Battalion of the GRU (Russian military intelligence), investigators with the republic's law-enforcement bodies are looking into the battalion's possible involvement in the murder of the Arsamakov brothers (Chechnya Weekly, April 17 and 24; May 1). Kavkazky Uzel on May 8 quoted a Chechen law-enforcement source as saying that investigators who are looking into the Vostok Battalion's activities have information about the possible involvement of battalion members in the kidnapping and subsequent brutal murder of Yusup and Yunus Arsamakov and their driver, who disappeared in early February of 2007.
Topic:
Security and Ethnic Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, and Moscow

4206. Memory and Violence in Israel/Palestine

Author:
K.M. Fierke
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
In 2008, Israel will turn sixty. Landmark birthdays often give rise to reflection on the past. In this case, questions about memory, and whose memory to privilege or commemorate, may have consequences for the future of the region. For the Israelis, the object of memory, and the vehicle of its birth, was the 1948 “War of Independence,” where like David and Goliath, a numerically smaller but technologically and culturally superior power, faced down a larger but inferior one. Following just a few years after the Holocaust in Europe, Israel's military victory offered, in the words of Nahum Goldman, an American Zionist leader, “a glorious contrast to the centuries of persecution and humiliation, of adaptation and compromise” (Shlaim 2000: 40). For Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, the Israeli narrative is not merely offensive but a source of humiliation itself, given the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians that occurred during al Nakba (the Catastrophe), with the dispossession of over 750,000 indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and their descendents. For Palestinians, the failure of the Israeli state to ac knowledge 1948 as an ethnic cleansing continues to underpin the conflict.
Political Geography:
America, Europe, Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

4207. Rights and the Hijâb: Rationality and Discourse in the Public Sphere

Author:
Howard Adelman
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
When I took my family to France for one of the hottest summers on record, we went to a local municipal pool in Beaune. After paying the en trance fee and entering the pool area, we were informed that my children would not be allowed to swim wearing their North American boxer-style swimming shorts. “Public health” required that they wear speedo-type suits. No reason or evidence was offered to explain the policy. The officials simply said it was French law. The swimming pool administration generously provided washed speedos. My children had a great time. The next day, my youngest son developed an itch in his crotch. When we took him to the doctor, he was diagnosed with a serious skin infection most likely contracted from the borrowed swim suit.
Topic:
Civil Society, Islam, and Nationalism
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and North America

4208. Germany, Afterwards

Author:
Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Human Rights and Human Welfare - Review Essays
Institution:
Josef Korbel Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver
Abstract:
Do human rights scholars need to learn more about the minutiae of the Nazi period, or the immediate post-war period? One wonders whether there is any benefit, other than one of historical interest, to learning about the way African-American soldiers and their children with white German women were treated under the American occupation of Germany. Similarly, one might wonder whether the study of continued German and American Catholic anti-Semitism after 1945 can be of any benefit, when the largest question concerning Jews in the 21st century is the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Moreover, in an age when mass rape in warfare is common, it may be mere prurience to read about mass rapes of German women by Russian soldiers. And since the fall of the Berlin Wall, do we need to know that East German Communists were often as corrupt as their Nazi predecessors?
Topic:
Civil Society and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
Africa, America, Europe, Palestine, and Germany

4209. Chechnya Weekly: Russian Commander: Chechen Rebels Supported by Local Population

Publication Date:
05-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
North Caucasus Weekly (formerly Chechnya Weekly), The Jamestown Foundation
Abstract:
The commander of the Combined Group of Forces in the North Caucasus, Major General Nikolai Sivak, said in an interview published in the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda on May 20 that 17 servicemen have been killed in the region so far this year, which is an increase over the same period last year, Interfax reported. “Unfortunately, we were unable to reduce the losses compared to last year,” he told the military newspaper. “Since the beginning of this year up to 27 April, 17 people have died; last year [2007] 15 people died during the same period.” Sivak said that 32 militants had been killed since the start of 2008. "Last year the figure was about the same," he said.
Topic:
Security and Ethnic Conflict
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Asia

4210. Russia's Security Policy Grows "Muscular": Should the West Be Worried?

Author:
Pavel K. Baev
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Finnish Institute of International Affairs
Abstract:
The self-assertive rhetoric of the Russian leadership, in which President Putin's Munich speech marked a shift towards a more aggressive style, has been translated into such demonstrative actions as the resumption of regular patrols by Long Range Aviation and the unilateral suspension of the CFE Treaty. Despite new funding and against confident self-assessments, Russia's strategic arsenal continues to shrink, and many key modernization projects, such as the Bulava missile for strategic submarines, have encountered setbacks. The need for brandishing the diminishing capabilities is driven by the desire to deter the perceived threat of a 'coloured revolution' sponsored by the West, the urge to assert a more solid status than just that of an 'energy super-power', and the complicated intrigues surrounding the on-going reconfiguration of the political leadership. Expanding demonstrations of the dilapidated strategic arsenal increase the risks of technical failures but fall far short of initiating a new confrontation of the Cold War type. The most worrisome point in Russia's ambivalent power policy is Georgia, which has been the target of choice for multiple propaganda attacks, but which now faces the challenge of an external intervention in its domestic crises since Moscow has built up usable military instruments in the North Caucasus. Russia's desire to secure higher international status does not amount to malicious revisionism; so over-reaction to its experiments with muscle-flexing could constitute a greater risk to the Western strategy of engagement than underestimating its ambitions.
Topic:
International Relations and International Political Economy
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Asia