This 20 September 2013 video is called Torture Tape Rage: Thousands protest Georgian prison horror.
That prison sexual torture scandal cost Mikheil Saakashvili his job as dictator of Georgia.
It even cost him his Georgian nationality.
However, another iffy politician, President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, well-known from the Panama Papers scandal, gave Saakashvili a new, Ukrainian, passport; and a new job: governor of Odessa.
Another however: in 2016, Poroshenko quarreled with Saakashvili, and sacked him as governor of Odessa.
Today, Poroshenko annulled Saakashvili’s Ukrainian nationality as well.
Translated from Dutch daily De Volkskrant today:
Michail Saakashvili, Georgia’s former president … has become stateless. Two years after Georgia put him out on the streets, Ukraine is now also canceling Saakashvili’s citizenship.
By Tom Vennink
The decree was signed by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. He gave no reason for the decision. …
[Saakashvili] blamed Poroshenko. The president, he said, covers up crimes of various gangs.
The Volkskrant article is very uncritical on Saakashvili’s role in the conflict and one-sidedly anti-Poroshenko. While Poroshenko is certainly up to his neck in financial scandals, ex-dictator Saakashvili is certainly not squeaky clean in corruption issues. The conflict is more like the pot calling the kettle black and vice versa.
Dutch corporate media are usually very uncritical on Saakashvili, in which a factor is that his wife is Dutch.
US Defense Secretary James Mattis declared during a trip to Ukraine on Thursday that the American government is actively considering moving forward with a plan to arm Kiev with lethal weaponry for the first time: here.
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OK I am very intersted in this and will get back to you
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Dictators are a deplorable lot.
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Friday 28th July 2017
posted by Morning Star in World
FUGITIVE Georgian ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili vowed yesterday to fight for his short-lived Ukrainian citizenship after it was revoked on Wednesday.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko personally stripped Mr Saakashvili of his citizenship by special decree after receiving unspecified documents from Georgia.
He is wanted in his home country for ordering excessive use of force to break up protests against his rule in 2007.
But Ukraine’s State Migration Service said he provided false information in his 2015 citizenship application.
Mr Saakashvili, who is currently in the US, posted a video on Facebook yesterday. Calling himself “a simple Ukrainian,” he said he was “being subjected to the same approaches that are used by Ukraine’s prosecutors or bureaucrats against regular Ukrainians, whose rights are spat upon.
“I have only one citizenship, that of Ukraine, and I will not be deprived of it,” he declared.
“Now there is an attempt under way to force me to become a refugee. This will not happen!”
As president of Georgia, Mr Saakashvili launched the disastrous August 2008 attack on the tiny breakaway republic of South Ossetia.
Russian peacekeepers were killed in the initial artillery barrage, prompting a swift and overwhelming military response that ended with Moscow’s troops in sight of the capital Tbilisi and the president chewing his tie on live TV.
In February 2015 he was appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region — site of the 2014 Trade Union House massacre perpetrated by neonazi militias who supported that year’s Maidan Square coup.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-dc6d-Exiled-Saakashvili-vows-to-win-back-Ukrainian-passport#.WXt-SVFpwdU
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Saturday 2nd September 2017
posted by Morning Star in Features
Ukraine’s Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko speaks to Ben Chacko about the Institute of National Memory and the wave of destruction engulfing his country
CLASHES over the removal of statues to Confederacy leaders in the United States have dominated headlines over the past month.
The politics of this new iconoclasm is hotly debated on the left: should statues of racists, tyrants and oppressors be torn down on principle, or should countries have to look their past, however ugly, in the eye? Who decides which statues are unacceptable, and on what grounds?
The battles in the US are more complicated than that: many statues do not date from the civil war but were erected in the era of the Jim Crow laws as a conscious symbol of the subjugation of Black people; their current role as active rallying points for white supremacists and fascists strengthens the left case for tearing them down.
But while our ears are full of the sound and fury of US culture wars, a far more thorough wave of destruction has taken place in Ukraine.
And there it’s the fascists who are attacking monuments to the country’s past.
Volodymyr Viatrovych, head of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory, reported last month that 1,320 statues of Lenin had been removed — every public statue of the Russian revolutionary leader in the land, along with 1,069 “other Soviet monuments.”
“The destruction of Lenin’s monuments became the ‘idée fixe’ of the regime,” Petro Symonenko, leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU), tells me.
Symonenko is unconvinced that tearing down statues is necessarily positive even when the statues are of racists, as is the case in the United States, though he does wryly note that it is not merely a southern problem in the US: “In New York there is a monument to General Philip Sheridan, who wanted to kill all the buffalo to exterminate the Native Americans, who said he only met ‘good Indians among the corpses of Indians’.”
But the Ukrainian context is different.
The “Maidan” uprising of 2014 was hailed by the US and EU as democratic, despite the fact that the president it overthrew, Viktor Yanukovych, was elected.
The new government in Kiev was backed from the start by openly fascist paramilitaries, and its aggressive Ukrainian nationalism and attacks on trade unionists and leftwingers (most notoriously the 42 burned alive in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014) sparked a revolt in the country’s mainly Russian-speaking east, causing a war that continues to this day.
The Communist Party were no fans of Yanukovych’s corruption-riddled administration, but the violence and brutality of the new order is much worse: “A band of thieves has been replaced by a band of robbers,” Symonenko remarks bitterly.
“The regime relies on ultra-right forces and criminal organisations” (such as the fascist Svoboda and Right Sector parties, or the neonazi Azov and Aidan paramilitary battalions). “So-called ‘professional patriots’.
“Their patriotism consists only of destroying, plundering, sowing hatred between peoples, even the physical destruction of dissenters.”
Ukraine’s right take as their political inspiration Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the thinking of Dmitri Dontsov, who acknowledged his intellectual debt to Hitler and Mussolini.
Street violence and vandalism were part of Maidan from the beginning. “In Kiev, after the armed coup in February 2014, a mob led by neonazis barbarously destroyed a monument to Lenin.
“A journalist from one of the TV channels showed me a fragment of the granite, asking with a smirk: ‘Do you know what this is?’“I answered: ‘These are the splinters of Ukraine.’
“To my great regret I was right. The Crimea is gone. The Donbass is blazing in the fire of civil war. And right across Ukraine there is a ‘cold’ civil war: a war between the ideologists of Hitler and the nazi collaborators of the OUN, and the anti-fascists, whose leaders have always been the communists.”
The destruction of statues of Lenin, alongside that of monuments to Red Army soldiers and Jewish and Polish victims of the OUN, is part of the “de-communisation” process that has seen a concerted effort to ban the KPU, the renaming of any streets with names deemed pro-Soviet, and the criminalisation of positive references to the Soviet Union in print. Kiev’s attacks on freedom of expression have been condemned internationally, including by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and Amnesty International.
Masterminding this process is the Institute of National Memory, founded under former president Viktor Yuschenko in 2006 but since 2014 “the regime’s main tool in falsifying history and promoting neonazism as state ideology,” in Symonenko’s words.
“People call it the institute of national unconsciousness — absence of memory,” he says. “Its task is to reshape public consciousness, to erase everything connected with the heroic victories of the Soviet Ukrainian people.
“This people, together with other peoples within the USSR, liberated Europe from fascism, restored a country destroyed by the nazi invaders.”
He compares the institute to Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, which sought to create myths about the origins and ancient past of the German race.
It too prattles about the “exclusivity of the Ukrainian nation,” its “superiority” and tries to assert that Ukrainians are pure-blood Aryans. Symonenko notes that pseudo-science and pseudo-archaeology is back in a big way.
“It’s not by chance that the media spreads nonsense about the Ukrainian origin of Jesus Christ, or that the Ukrainian nation is ‘older than the pyramids’,” he sighs.
The institute has also worked hard to portray Russia as an eternal “enemy and aggressor” against Ukraine, despite the countries’ histories being so intertwined that both trace their states back to the Kievan Rus federation with its capital at Kiev in the 9th century.
“School history textbooks affirm that there was no Great Patriotic War of the Soviet peoples against the Hitler hordes,” he says.
“No millions of Ukrainian Red Army warriors dying on the battlefield to liberate Europe from fascism.
“According to them there was an invasion of Ukraine by German and Soviet troops.”
This narrative gets confusing, of course, since the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) collaborated with the nazis and played an active part in the Holocaust.
“The thugs who served with the SS, the Wehrmacht, the OUN-UPA are ‘warriors of light’ waging a ‘war of liberation’ against an evil enemy, Bolshevik Russia.”
Institute chief Viatrovych has repeatedly been accused by other academics of faking historical documents. Jeffrey Burds of the Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, says that “scholars on his staff publish document collections that are falsified.
“I know because I have seen the originals, made copies, and have compared their transcriptions to the originals.”
Burds says whole sentences that might portray Ukrainian nationalists of the past in a bad light are removed from documents.
His criticisms are echoed by a researcher at the Kennan Institute and Holocaust Memorial Museum in the United States, Jared McBride.
“When Viatrovych was chief archivist at the SBU [Ukraine’s security service], he created a digital archive open to Ukrainian citizens and foreigners.
“He and his team made sure to exclude any documents from the archive that may cast a negative light on the OUN-UPA, including their involvement in the Holocaust and other war crimes,” he told Josh Cohen of the publication Foreign Policy last year.
Because Ukraine’s history is being so thoroughly rewritten, it is not merely statues of Lenin which are being torn down.
“Monuments to Soviet soldiers are desecrated practically every day. Monuments and plaques to heroes of the resistance, partisans, state and party leaders who made a huge contribution to victory over Hitler, are being destroyed.
“In the Dnepropetrovsk region a monument to the unknown soldier has recently been damaged, as was another such monument in Odessa.
“In Kiev they vandalised the complex of the eternal flame in the Park of Eternal Glory to the Soldiers of World War II. They defiled the monument to the liberator of Kiev, General Nikolai Vatutin.”
General Vatutin was commanding the Ukrainian front against the nazis when he was ambushed and killed by OUN-UPA collaborators in 1944.
The UPA’s involvement in the Holocaust has been a particular embarrassment to the country’s new rulers, explaining their eagerness to destroy memorials to both Polish and Jewish victims of its ethnic cleansing operation.
Attempts to remove tributes to the Poles who died in the Volyn massacre — the UPA had promised a “shameful death” to all Poles in Ukraine — caused protests earlier this year.
“The crimes of the OUN-UPA against civilians are crimes against humanity that do not have a statute of limitations,” Symonenko contends.
“The Volyn massacre, the burning of Khatyn, anti-Jewish pogroms in Lviv and Babi Yar, these are only the most famous crimes of Bandera and the nationalists.
“Wherever their foot went you’ll find a local Babi Yar.”
The Communist Party, he says, will always maintain that hiding the truth about these crimes is unacceptable. He quotes the monument to the victims at Volyn: “If I forget them, God in the sky, forget about me.”
He lists more examples than there is space for in a Morning Star article — memorials to Marshal Zhukov, who led the Soviet armies in the second world war, to leaders of the partisan resistance against German occupation such as Sidor Kovpak, Alexey Fedorov and Alexander Saburov and many more have been defaced or smashed.
But he is unsurprised by the events in Ukraine: “After all, the oligarchs’ rule is now based on right-wing radical forces composed of the ideological heirs of Hitler’s henchmen.
“Under slogans of struggling for democracy and liberation from the totalitarian communist past, the ideology of neonazism is being actively seeded in Ukraine.
“Recently the National Guard’s deputy commander Major General Yaroslav Spodar, in an interview with Ukrainian News, said he would not condemn the Azov battalion for sporting nazi tattoos and greeting each other with ‘sieg heils,’ because ‘they have their own view on the National Socialist movement in Germany and that is normal’.”
It adds insult to injury that alongside the destruction of memorials to the anti-fascists of the second world war, monuments are being raised and streets renamed in honour of the collaborators.
“The perpetuation of the names of these executioners on our streets is no smaller a crime than their original atrocities,” he says furiously.
“Through your newspaper, please urge the progressive public to support our struggle, to ensure that in other cities around the world we do not see streets named for nazi agents and Hitlerite officers, and we preserve the boulevards and avenues named in memory of those who liberated the world from the brown plague of Hitler.”
This fighting spirit is a key reason banning the Communist Party has been a priority for the Ukrainian government ever since Maidan, even though the party was not an ally of the Yanukovych administration the coup overthrew.
The KPU — which at the last pre-coup elections in 2012 won 32 seats and more than 2.6 million votes (over 13 per cent) — is now banned by a ministerial decree it considers unconstitutional from having a parliamentary presence.
In July, a court postponed a final decision on whether to ban the KPU outright pending a ruling from the Constitutional Court on whether the decommunisation laws were in accordance with the constitution. But Symonenko is not optimistic that the Constitutional Court will do the right thing.
“This court is completely controlled by President Poroshenko,” he sighs, “and he has said his ‘main achievement’ is that the KPU is not allowed to participate in parliamentary elections.”
It’s true Poroshenko cannot claim to have achieved much else. The CIA says Ukraine’s mortality rate is the second-highest in the world after Lesotho’s. Average wages have collapsed since 2014 while the cost of basics such as energy and food have soared.
Much of the case against Yanukovych was made by justifiable charges that his government was corrupt — but Symonenko says that while most Ukrainians are now poorer, “the capital of officials of all ranks grows like mushrooms after rain.
“Corruption and embezzlement permeate all spheres of public life. The cynicism and banditry of the authorities is gobsmacking.
“In the first six months of 2017, eight employees at the Justice Ministry each received more than 23 million hryvnia (£690,000) in ‘premiums.’
“That’s $60-300,000 a month when the average monthly wage is $250. And the cherry on the cake? According to your audit company Ernst & Young, Ukraine is the most corrupt and fraudulent country in Europe.”
But he insists the communists will “fight on to victory,” whatever challenges are thrown in its way. “The decommunisation laws prohibit not just Soviet but international communist symbols, like the hammer and sickle. They equate those who profess communist ideology to criminals and terrorists.
“Over the three years since the coup, more than 400 criminal cases have been fabricated against communists, including myself.”
He says that among the most poignant was the case of Alla Aleksandrovskaya, first secretary of the KPU’s Kharkiv committee, who was thrown into jail for nearly five months, despite being unwell and in her late sixties, for proposing to the city council that it appeal to the president in favour of elected local governors.
In June, KPU lawyers were able to have verdicts overturned against Viktor Ryzhevol and Alexander Tsymbal, two party members jailed on charges of ‘violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity’ for allegedly participating in counting votes held in the self-declared Lugansk People’s Republic.
The case is not a one-off: “The Communist Party will continue to fight for every comrade who is persecuted.” He ends with an appeal to the readers of “your well-known and respected British newspaper”: “Support our struggle.”
Given the near-universal ignorance in Britain about the crimes being committed by a regime enjoying full support from our government, spreading the word is the least we can do.
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-df1b-A-chilling-rewriting-of-history-is-taking-place-in-Ukraine#.WapxyMZpwdU
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Tuesday 12th September 2017
posted by Morning Star in World
HUNGARY slammed neighbouring Ukraine’s new education law yesterday that “drastically” limits children’s rights to study in their first language.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said that he was appealing to the UN, EU and other international bodies to try to prevent the law from taking effect.
“We consider the new education law approved by the Ukrainian parliament to be shameful and disgraceful,” he said.
“This law — in a manner incompatible with European values and laws — drastically limits the access of minorities, including the Hungarian community, to education in the mother tongue.”
Mr Szijjarto added that the new rules make it “practically impossible” for ethnic minorities to study in their own language beyond Year 5.
There are some 150,000 ethnic Hungarians in Ukraine, along with a similar number of Poles, 400,000 Romanian speakers and millions of ethnic Russians.
The US embassy in Kiev welcomed the new law but Poland and Romania expressed concerns.
Since the fascist-backed 2014 Maidan Square coup, minority languages have come under attack, as they did following the 2005 “orange revolution.”
Meanwhile yesterday, President Petro Poroshenko criticised his ex-pal the former Georgian president and Odessa provincial governor Mikheil Saakashvili for forcing his way across the border from Poland on Sunday night with a mob of hundreds of supporters.
Mr Saakashvili vowed to return after Mr Poroshenko stripped him of citizenship in July while he was in the US.
Mr Saakashvili has also lost citizenship his home country, where he faces jail over for abuse of power. Georgia has requested his extradition.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c0f8-Ukraine-Kiev-slammed-for-clampdown-on-other-languages#.WbftScZpEdU
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Wednesday 27th September 2017
UKRAINE’S President Petro Poroshenko sparked a row with his neighbours yesterday after signing a controversial education law that will sideline minority languages.
The law specifies that Ukrainian will be the main language used in schools, rolling back the option for lessons to be taught in other mother tongues.
Russia, Moldova, Hungary and Romania all expressed concern over the Bill when it was drafted, saying that it would infringe the rights of ethnic minorities.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto savaged Mr Poroshenko’s signing of the law as “a shame and a disgrace,” vowing to block Kiev’s efforts to integrate with the EU.
Language has been a politically charged issue in Ukraine, where 30 per cent of those polled in the 2001 census called Russian their mother tongue.
Russian officials have condemned the law, saying that it violates Ukraine’s international obligations.
Romania has cancelled bilateral visits to Ukraine, where there are an estimated 400,000 Romanian speakers.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-f743-Ukraine-Poroshenko-pushes-aside-languages-of-minorities#.WcwIbMZpEdU
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Friday 29th September 2017
posted by Morning Star in World
Ukraine ’s chief military prosecutor ruled out foreign sabotage yesterday in a massive fire at an ammunition depot that forced the evacuation of thousands of people.
Both Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and Ukrainian Security Service spokesman Olena Gitlyanska said they suspected sabotage by Ukraine’s “enemies” on Wednesday.
But Anatoliy Matios denied that, saying investigators were probing negligence, abuse of power or sabotage by those authorised to handle the munitions.
Mr Matios also said investigators discovered that the fire alarm at the depot wasn’t working and that its security force was understaffed.
“Neither the investigators, nor the security service, nor any law enforcement agencies found any groups of saboteurs in the Vinnytsia region that people are talking about on Facebook,” he said.
The fire at the military base in Kalynivka broke out on Tuesday night, setting off a series of explosions in 188,000 tons of munitions and prompting the evacuation of 30,000 people. It was still burning yesterday.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-913a-Ukraine-Sabotage-ruled-out-in-munitions-dump-fire#.Wc7BQ8ZpEdU
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Monday 16th October 2017
UKRAINIAN border guards have stopped young communists from attending the World Festival of Youth and Students (WFYS) in neighbouring Russia.
The Ukrainian Komsomol delegation tried to cross at the Goptovka border checkpoint north of Kharkiv on Friday but were detained by the guards.
They were heading for Sochi, where the 19th edition of the festival started on Saturday with about 20,000 delegates from 150 countries gathering in the Black Sea city to mark its 70th anniversary and the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Komsomol first secretary Michael Kononovich condemned their detention, with the youth organisation saying that the right-wing oligarchic regime in Kiev had gone from calls for a boycott of the festival to direct threats and attacks. It said that the government was panicking at the thought of the communists telling the world about what was actually happening in Ukraine.
On Saturday roughly 10,000 neonazis marched in central Kiev to mark the “day of the defender of Ukraine” and the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
The UPA was a militia that collaborated with the nazis during the second world war and, among others, massacred tens of thousands of Poles and Jews.
Mounted police led the column of marchers in Kiev, with participants holding the flags of the Right Sector, Svoboda and National Corps far-right parties. National Corps was formed out of the neonazi Azov Battalion militia.
They chanted: “Glory to the nation, death to the enemies” and “Ukraine is above all!”
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-cc07-Young-Ukrainians-heading-to-festival-held-on-border#.WeWzUDtpEdU
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Monday 23rd October 2017
UKRAINIAN spooks raided a Communist Party office in the south-east on Saturday after a celebration of the Russian Revolution centenary.
In a statement yesterday, the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) said the SBU security service searched its Oleshky office in Kherson oblast without a warrant.
It said agents claimed that the party was banned under the so-called decommunisation laws — which the KPU is challenging in court — and seized party flags, communist symbols, posters and other materials.
“The KPU is not banned,” the statement asserted.
The party said the real aim was to halt a video feed from a KPU meeting in Kiev celebrating the 1917 revolution, “thanks to which the state of Ukraine and the Ukrainian nation itself was created.”
KPU leader Petro Symonenko said the revolution gave the communist movement “flesh and blood as a real historical alternative, as a politically organised path to a new humanistic world.”
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-6d10-SBU-raids-KPU-offices-to-halt-revolution-broadcast#.We2xkHZpEdU
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Tuesday 5th December 2017
Former Georgian leader breaks out of police custody after arrest in Ukraine
UKRAINIAN supporters of fugitive former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili freed him from a police van yesterday shortly after his dramatic rooftop arrest.
Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) agents went to Mr Saakashvili’s Kiev flat to arrest the now-stateless ex-governor of Odessa province. In a dramatic turn of events he climbed onto the roof and threatened to jump off.
Mr Saakashvili’s attempted arrest followed accusations that he has been plotting to oust Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko whom he has branded a “criminal, thief and traitor.”
“They want to kidnap me because I’ve risen up to protect the Ukrainian people,” Mr Saakashvili told a crowd gathered below.
The SBU eventually bundled him into a van but were blocked by hundreds of supporters surrounding the vehicle. After an hour-long stand-off in which tear gas was used on protesters, Mr Saakashvili was released from the van.
He then led the crowd to the Verkhovna Rada parliament to demand Mr Poroshenko’s resignation.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-33e1-Saakashvili-escapes-after-roof-arrest-drama#.Wib0GHmDMdU
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