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Syria: SNC Convinces Russia To Increase Help For Assad
The exile Syrian National Council was invited to Moscow and when there tried to convince the Russian of their cause. The way they did it shows a grotesque and amateurish stupidity.
Russia needs to understand that the conflict in Syria is not a dispute between the opposition and regime but a revolution, the chief of the main exiled opposition group said in Moscow on Wednesday.
“The events in Syria are not disagreements between the opposition and the government but a revolution,” Syrian National Council (SNC) chief Abdul Basset Sayda told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, comparing the events in his country to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
To set fall of the Soviet Union, which wasn't caused by revolution but by the wrangling within the political leadership, as an example for Syria's future will have convinced all Russians to double their effort to stand by the Syrian government. Here is why:
Speaking to the nation in his annual address, Putin used some of his strongest language to describe his country's fate over the past 14 years.
"The collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Putin said. "For the Russian people, it became a real drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and countrymen found themselves outside Russian territory. The epidemic of disintegration also spread to Russia itself."
That the fall of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe is not only Putin's opinion:
"It is very clear that for the great majority of Russian people, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a personal catastrophe," [Boris] Kagarlitskii[, the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies in Moscow,] said. "It was also a catastrophe for a tremendous majority of people in Tajikistan, quite a lot of people in Uzbekistan, and so on, including many people in Ukraine. Because families were divided, people's lives were ruined, living standards collapsed, the minimal standards of human justice, and very often of freedom, were also neglected."
That is indeed also the likely the perspective for the majority of Syrians should the western sponsored insurgency win.
To remind the Russians of that is the most dumb thing the SNC chief could have done in Moscow. Putin's support, and that of the Russian people, for the Syrian government may well increase after this SNC lecture.
The SNC is irrelevant on the ground if they cannot control the funding of the FSA or get international support for intervention or even recognition as the representatives of Syria and I suppose they can neither of these things.
Another point is how cohesive / competitive for funds the FSA is, I guess the strategy of the Syrian government now is to strike individual deals with people on the ground.
Russia and China have drawn a line, they are not going to change that, no matter what the SNC says or does. Russia presumably has more information on Syria than the expatriate SNC has:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/russias-ties-to-syria-are-familial-as-well-as-political-643002/?print=1
“But there is also a human factor, set in motion 50 years ago when social ties were forged among young people who met in college. Walk into any government ministry or corporate headquarters in Syria and you will almost certainly find men who spent their 20s in Russia; many brought home wives and raised children in Russian-speaking households.
“They are wives of the elite, who can have some influence, but it’s a soft influence,” said Nina Sergeyeva, who until recently led an organization of Russian expatriates from her home in Latakia. “The elite of Syria, the men, are very oriented toward Russia.”
As the conflict in Syria continues to defy a diplomatic solution, there are an estimated 30,000 Russian citizens living there, most of them women and children, Russian government officials estimate. This is an issue that Moscow has confronted before in the Middle East, when the collapse of Soviet-allied governments left Russian citizens stranded. But it has not faced anything on these proportions, or in the age of social media, when the plight of ethnic Russians could prove a serious embarrassment to Moscow.
“Based on the experience of evacuation from Lebanon and Palestine in recent years, problems always arise — though there, we weren’t talking about thousands or tens of thousands of people, but several hundred,” said Moscow political analyst Yelena Suponina, a Middle East specialist. The task of evacuating Russians from Syria, she said, “would be 100 times worse.”
The Russian population in Syria is the result of an experiment begun in 1963, when the socialist Baath Party came to power. The Soviets provided education to top students from Asia, Africa and Latin America, throwing them together with Soviet classmates in work brigades and “evenings of friendship.”
The goal was to forge a global, pro-Soviet intellectual elite; the immediate result was weddings. Young women emigrated as the wives of doctors, professors and officials; “the Soviet side said farewell to them and essentially gave them up for lost,” said historian Natalya Krylova, who has published widely on Russian populations in Africa.
Syrian-Russian unions were especially common — and not just for geopolitical reasons, husbands and wives said in interviews. Many Syrian men felt genuinely transformed by their time in Russia; they also sought to avoid paying a bride-price, as is customary in the Middle East.
Mahmoud al-Hamza, who met his wife, Nadezhda, in a Moscow park in 1971, said that in order to marry a Syrian, “you need an apartment, you need to pay money, you need to buy gold — and for a Russian woman, you just need a wedding ring.”
A Russian consular official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said about 9,000 Russians have officially registered with the embassy, though upward of 30,000 citizens are believed to be in Syria. He said there are no plans for evacuation, but said that if the need arose, buses would be sent to cities to transport Russian citizens to safety.”
Posted by: somebody | Jul 11 2012 16:27 utc | 3
@ Somebody “Hubris, you take that Schiff story completely out of context “
complete and utter bullshit – you obviously didn’t even go and read the Wiki article you linked to – or more importantly have a look at it’s sources – if you had you’d seen that I take that Schiff Story EXACTLY in context –
for example four source relevant to this are listed on Wiki – 1) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10F15FA…DF1D3
2 ) Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917-1918, Second Edition, Kehillah, New York, (1919), p. 1019
3) Steed, Henry Wickham. Through thirty years, 1892-1922: a personal narrative, Volume 2. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924. p. 302
4) Sutton, Antony. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, Vol. II. Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, 1973. p. 340n
ALL of them tell the same story –
nd here From the book “Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership” By Naomi Wiener Cohen – it is stated that Schiff and George Keenan finance the disemination of Bolshevik propaganda amongst Russian soldier from as early as 1905 – the Bolsheviks had only been formed into a recognisable unit 2 years earlier – So essentially Schiff didn’t just hop on a bandwaggon – he helped create it.
and also there the fact that William Boyce Thompson, a Governor of the Federal Reserve was an open promoter of Western support for the Alexander Kerensky and Bolshevik governments of Russia,
In the book “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution” By Antony C. Sutton – Chapter V – h“>http://www.scribd.com/doc/83087104/Antony-C-Sutton-Wall-Street-and-the-Bolshevik-Revolution
it states :
Acting as head of an American Red Cross mission to Russia, W.B. Thompson’s contribution of $1Million to the Bolshevik cause was recorded in the contemporary American press.
The Washington Post of February 2, 1918, carried the following paragraphs:
GIVES BOLSHEVIKI A MILLION
W. B. Thompson, Red Cross Donor, Believes Party Misrepresented. New York, Feb. 2 (1918).
William B. Thompson, who was in Petrograd from July until November last, has made a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviki for the purpose of spreading their doctrine in Germany and Austria.
Mr. Thompson had an opportunity to study Russian conditions as head of the American Red Cross Mission, expenses of which also were largely defrayed by his personal contributions. He believes that the Bolsheviki constitute the greatest power against Pro-Germanism in Russia and that their propaganda has been undermining the militarist regimes of the General Empires.
Mr. Thompson deprecates American criticism of the Bolsheviki. He believes they have been misrepresented and has made the financial contribution to the cause in the belief that it will be money well spent for the future of Russia as well as for the Allied cause.
Hermann Hagedorn’s biography The Magnate: William Boyce Thompson and His Time (1869-1930) reproduces a photograph of a cablegram from J.P. Morgan in New York to W. B. Thompson, “Care American Red Cross, Hotel Europe, Petrograd.” The cable is date-stamped, showing it was received at Petrograd “8-Dek 1917” (8 December 1917), and reads:
New York Y757/5 24W5 Nil — Your cable second received. We have paid National City Bank one million dollars as instructed — Morgan.
The National City Bank branch in Petrograd had been exempted from the Bolshevik nationalization decree — the only foreign or domestic Russian bank to have been so exempted.
Hagedorn says that this million dollars paid into Thompson’s NCB account was used for “political purposes.”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/83087104/Antony-C-Sutton-Wall-Street-and-the-Bolshevik-Revolution
So how exactly has ANYTHING been ‘taken out of context’ ??
Posted by: Hu Bris | Jul 12 2012 16:13 utc | 52
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