Category Archives: Society

Arts, Books, Russia, Society

Book Review: Putin’s People

LITERARY REVIEW

Belton

HEGEMONY

IN Russia, the national referendum to extend Vladimir Putin’s stay in office for another 12 years has been postponed.

The proposal that he was to continue for two more six-year terms after his present mandate ends in 2024 was due to be put to the people on Wednesday, 22 April. But due to coronavirus, or Covid-19, the vote was deferred.

Given his vice-like grip on the levers of power of that vast country and the muted opposition to him, there can be little doubt which way it would have gone. He would effectively have been endorsed as president for life.

But now there is a pause – if a brief one – in his relentless pursuit of an unchallenged and supreme autocracy.

That even tough gut Vlad – “The Papa” or “The Number One” as his cronies call him – must bow to the virus is almost a relief. Because in the twenty years since he grabbed the presidency, no one at home has managed to stand in his way without being rolled over, removed, imprisoned, killed, cowed or bribed into submission.

At the same time, he has turned a clapped-out post-communist nation going nowhere into an aggressive and much feared international power. Putin’s Russia now has its insidious fingers in every political, diplomatic, military and financial pie around the world – with deeply worrying implications for all of us.

How this man seemingly from nowhere managed his Napoleonic rise from mere deputy mayor of St Petersburg to absolute power is arguably the biggest story of the 21st century so far.

In forensically unravelling it, journalist Catherine Belton, former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has done a great service, producing a book that western experts on modern Russia acknowledge as vital to our understanding of the Putin phenomenon.

Her study and thesis is chilling indeed. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and communism gave way to a makeshift form of democracy, the KGB, Moscow’s underground army of spies, crooks and secret policemen, disappeared from the radar. But they hadn’t gone for good. They weren’t defeated, only biding their time.

Their moment came when the oligarchs, who in effect ran Russia after making vast fortunes from oil, gas and mineral rights amid the economic and political chaos of the Yeltsin years, catapulted the seemingly pliable Putin into the presidency.

They promoted him as their man to sort the country out and bring it to some semblance of liberal democracy. They didn’t expect him to last more than one four-year term.

What they didn’t reckon on was that Putin was KGB to the core. He’d cut his teeth spying on the West in the old communist days, subverting Western businessmen, stealing industrial secrets, and smuggling. And it was with his old pals that his true allegiance lay.

With Putin in the driving seat, Belton argues, the KGB was back in control of Russia and its grip on the country is as strong now as it ever was in the Soviet days.

His agenda – eagerly taken up by the so-called siloviki (the word means “strongmen”) he recruited from the old ranks – was to make the nation all-powerful again, a top-down, state-run force not to be trifled with at home or abroad.

Along the way they would feather their own nests, through money-laundering, bribery, fraud, rake-offs, slush funds and theft. Putin’s Russia would become not just an autocracy but a kleptocracy.

He turned the tables on the oligarchs who’d sponsored him, strong-arming them into acquiescence. They worked for him now, not the other way round.

What emerged, writes Belton, was “a system in which all businesses of any scale were dependent on the Kremlin. Tycoons had to serve the state in order to preserve their standing and wealth”.

Those who resisted found the police knocking on their doors with arrest warrants for tax evasion, fraud or other serious crime. Backed by the state, he had them at his mercy.

Some ran – like media magnate Boris Berezovsky, only to end up dying mysteriously in England. Some went to prison – Russia’s richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said to be worth £12 billion, was boarding his private jet in Siberia when commandos arrested him. Most caved in and did as they were told – Roman Abramovich, says Belton, purchased Chelsea FC on Putin’s instructions, as a way of enhancing Russian prestige in the West.

CROOKED

EVEN those closest to him weren’t safe, especially if they got too big for their boots. Sergei Pugachev made billions as Putin’s favourite banker before “Papa” turned on him and looted his vast assets.

In exile, Moscow mafia thugs turned up, took him out to a yacht in the Mediterranean and demanded £280 million to guarantee the “safety” of his family.

Belton draws on published sources and deep-throat contacts to plot a course through the maze of crooked financial manoeuvres – the sleights of hand, the backroom deals, the “loans” from state banks, the kick-backs on contracts – that Putin and his courtiers got up to as they systematically drew the wealth to themselves as inexorably as iron fillings to a magnet.

They stashed their ill-gotten gains overseas, their so-called “black cash” amounting to a staggering £640 billion in all, according to one estimate, while at home they flaunted their riches, kitting themselves out with yachts and private planes and vast palaces. One of these had a garage for 15 cars and a storeroom for fur coats.

All the while, human rights, freedom and the rule of law went increasingly by the board. Local governors were stripped of their authority. Dissent was suppressed. The courts acted as an arm of the Kremlin. Judges toed the line.

Though Russia was ostensibly a democracy, the reality was that power emanated from the top down, with Putin as a feudal monarch, a tyrant, a tsar like Peter the Great, surrounded by his henchmen, his boyars, who owed their fealty and their vast riches to him.

Belton finds it shameful that the West – which had worked for and then welcomed the demise of communist rule in Russia – connived in this return to autocracy.

Bankers and brokers in London, in particular, fell over themselves to get a slice of the financial action, happy to look the other way as fortunes were hidden in offshore havens.

Peers of the realm lined up to lend their apparent respectability to the boardrooms of Russian ventures. Russian money swirling around London earned the capital the nickname of “Londongrad” or Moskva-na-Thames. In the United States, Donald Trump, before he became president, did deals with the Russians to bail out and expand his property empire.CROOKED

WEALTHY POWER-BROKER

GREED triumphed over principle, with the result that the West, by slavishly following its own money-making instincts, has allowed itself to be infiltrated. Belton warns: “The weakness of the Western capitalist system, in which money ultimately outweighs all other considerations, has left it wide open for the Kremlin to manipulate.”

Making matters worse is that the siloviki were on a mission, not just to get very rich, but to use that wealth to undermine the West. Under communism, the KGB had seen the West as its enemy. Its successors, led by Putin, feel the same way.

Under him, Russia, once a busted flush on the world stage, has become the world’s power broker again, whether openly, as in Ukraine and the Middle East, or covertly.

In its new guise, the KGB has adopted the tricks of the old KGB, causing disruption in the West wherever it can.

Its money backs political extremists, Right or Left – the cause isn’t important, only the confusion they cause. It gets up to all sorts of mischief to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe. It encourages unrest and dissension just to stir the pot.

In the eyes of Putin and his cronies, the Cold War has never ended, just moved into a new phase. We have clearly been warned.

– Putin’s People by Catherine Belton is published by William Collins, 640pp

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Arts, Books, Human Rights, Society

Book Review: Our Bodies Their Battlefield

 

Christina Lamb

From award-winning war reporter and co-author of I Am Malala, this is the first major account to address the scale of rape and sexual violence in modern conflict.

WAR

IN this devastating book, foreign correspondent Christina Lamb stares into the face of one of the world’s great hidden evils.

Deeply unsettling to read – and no-doubt traumatic to write – it is a global chronicle of mass-rape in war: a brutal and shocking indictment of man’s inhumanity to woman in the frenzied aftermath of battle. The most dreadful thing about it – apart from the physical injuries and the ruining of hundreds of thousands of women’s lives – is that all too often it happens with impunity.

Deeply embedded in the human psyche there seems to be a belief that rape is an acceptable side-effect of conflict, permissible because the circumstances of war are extraordinary. Some perpetrators have even talked as if by committing rapes they were being chivalrous, because they were not killing the women. Heinous. The horrific accounts from the survivors to whom Lamb interviews are clearly there to see.

With the violence done to their bodies, and the lack of justice for the perpetrators to bring closure, these women feel as good as dead.

Even by speaking out, they are being heroic. Once the secret is out, these people are in danger of becoming outcasts. But in order for anything to change, the stories need to be told. The reader should brace themselves for a profoundly distressing tour of war-torn countries and refugee camps, and for ordeals you will not be able to forget.

Naima was an 18-year-old Yazidi girl in Iraq when ISIS came to her town in 2014. The women and girls were herded into the Galaxy Cinema and sorted into “ugly” and “beautiful”. Their ISIS captors then “passed us around like sweets”, she said. They put the girls’ names in a bottle, almost like a lucky dip. Naima was sold on and on as a sex slave to 12 men, each of whom raped her several times a day.

Lamb was shown a typical ISIS “Certificate of Ownership”, with two thumb prints of seller and buyer, date, and a price of $1,500. No name for this “product”. Just “Age 20, with hazel green eyes, thin and short, height 1.3m”.

“They took something from me I can’t get back,” says Turko, who was traded on the internet forum called “Caliphate Market”, along with PlayStation consoles. She was raped three times a day by her “owners”.

This male rape-lust has nothing to do with desire, apparently. It’s all about total power: “pure violence”, as Anthony Beevor describes it.

In the Spanish Civil War, Fascist troops were given two hours after the capture of any village to “enjoy” the women.

Lamb meets a pair of elderly ladies from the Philippines who were two of the 200,000 “comfort women” (dreadful euphemism) for Japanese soldiers during World War II. They didn’t dare speak out about it until the 1990s and were rejected by their own families when they did.

Rape, Lamb writes, is the only crime in which society is more likely to stigmatise the victim than punish the perpetrator. There are some glimmers of light in this appalling story. The brave Tutsi rape victims who did dare to speak out, helped to bring the first conviction for rape as a war crime: in 1988 Rwandan Mayor, Jean-Paul Akayesu, was sentenced to life imprisonment for atrocities against the Tutsi ethnic group, including rape.

Heroes shine out of Lamb’s journey: she meets Dr Mukwege, who has treated 35,000 rape victims in his hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he’s a virtual prisoner in fear of his life; Christine Schuler Deschryver, who runs a haven of rescue and help for rape victims in that country; and Abdullah Shrim (“the Beekeeper of Aleppo”), who rescued 265 Yazidi girls captured by ISIS.

But the real heroes are the women who have experienced unfathomable cruelty and dared to speak out.

– Our Bodies Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb is published by William Collins, 432pp

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Arts, Christianity, Religion, Society

The competitive Corinthian mindset

Unity in diversity

1 Corinthians 1:10-17; 3:1-19

IN 1996, there were 243 Christian denominations recorded in the UK Christian Handbook, an almost threefold increase in 20 years.

In one sense “the body of Christ” is divided today in a way that not even the Corinthians could imagine (1:10). Their divisions were caused by quarrelling and jealousy (3:3), yet another manifestation of the proud and competitive Corinthian mindset.

While it can be argued that the main historic denominations formed out of major theological rifts (such as the conflict over salvation by faith or works which spawned the Lutheran and Calvinist churches), sadly the “quarrelling and jealousy” of leaders has caused the modern multiplication of church groups (cf. 1:12; 3:4).

Consumer choice has become society’s holy grail, and independence its lowest common denominator. The disease also infects the church as we choose churches with subtly different spiritual flavours. To outsiders, it must look as if Christianity has many religions.

The New Testament urges leaders to sort out their differences. There is only one church, although it not restricted to one denomination (the “true” church is not an organisation but a fellowship of believers).

Today we can maintain the unity of our own group by learning to appreciate people’s different approaches to spiritual life which reflect our diversity. We can also find ways to work with others to present a united front to society. This is, however, harder work than sniping at each other.

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