Re: Open letter to Vladimir Putin

yp11 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> On 28 Oct 2003 15:29:23 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Ilya Shambat) wrote:
> 
> >[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mikhail Medved) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> >> Russians who lost their lifetime savings in one of the schemes devised
> >> by Khdorkovsky (Menatep) would respectfully disagree with your
> >> opinion. It would be better if you take an effort to know the subject
> >> before writing philippics. There are better role models than economic
> >> criminals.
> >
> >If he did Menatep, he is in fact a bandit, and it would be correct to
> >add that to the list of offenses for which he is tried.
> 
> There was an interesting discussion this evening on PBS' NewsHour with
> Jim Lehrer about "Law and Order" in Russia under Putin and the
> Khodorkovsky arrest and imprisonment. The two experts who were
> interviewed were Marshall Goldman of the Center for Russian and
> Eurasian Studies at Harvard and Dmitri Simes, president of the Nixon
> Center. 

Since the definition of democracy is by and large in the eye of the
beholder, I am not really interested in a scholastic argument whether
Russia is ademocracy or not.

> The conclusion was that Russia under Putin is quite far from a
> democracy and in fact its freedoms of speech, of press and of
> political action are now worse than they were during Boris Yeltsin.

Any proof to that? Russian press is much more free than that in the
west. And the biggest threat to that is not from the government but
from criminals who killed a large number of crime-investigating
journalists lately.

> There was absolutely no due process in the arrest and imprisonment of
> Mikhail Khodorkovsky which was obviously an act of intimidation by
> Putin.

Any proof to that? What articles of the procedural code were violated?

> The Police was even sent to the school where Khodorkovsky's
> daughter is a student.

There was a report that computers to that school were donatet by
YUKOS, which used them previously for storage of accounting
information. Of course, this claim may be false, but why don't you
prove that claim is false, instead of making a judicially empty and
politically charged statement?

> What Vladimir Putin wanted to show is that if
> he can arrest and put in jail the richest man in Russia, he can arrest
> and put in jail anyone he wants. So, those who want to oppose him, be
> careful. 

Is there any proof to the political opposition of the arrested to
President Putin? I don't recall any.

> The world can now clearly see what kind of "democracy" Russia
> provides, including trumped-up elections in Chechnya and St.
> Petersburg, etc. Dmitri Simes concluded that the biggest joke was when
> during their meeting, George Bush called Putin a great democrat. Simes
> said that Putin probably laughed his head off thereafter.

Yeah, right. Dmitri Simes is a professional cold warrior. I rest my
case.

> Yuri