----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 7:49 AM Subject: [downwithcapitalism] FW: Putin's Legitimacy Challenged (con't.) One year later......................... Moscow Times archives. Excerpts. Saturday, Sep. 9, 2000. The Moscow Times has documented enough falsification in the March 26 presidential election to question the legitimacy of the vote. Abdulla Magomedov, a 42-year-old police officer and a father of three, was on duty guarding the entrance to a government building in Dagestan when two Volgas pulled up---one black, the other white. Three men and a woman got out, flashed government ID cards to enter the building, and then reemerged carrying large sacks. "I am supposed to control anything leaving the building," Magomedov recalled. "I checked what was in the bags. They were stuffed with ballots filled in for [Communist candidate Gennady] Zyuganov, with the seals and signs of polling stations, I know how they look, I was an observer at the elections." It was 11 a.m. on Sunday, April 16, three weeks after the March 26 election that had confirmed Vladimir Putin in office with 52.94 percent of the vote... April was dry in Makhachkala, and on a visit later that month to the site of [a] fire [where Zyuganov's ballots were burned] indicated by Magomedov, The Moscow Times was able to collect the ashes of the ballots. The names of the candidates in the March 26 elections can be clearly seen. Were 1.3 million voters simply made up and added to the elections rolls? It sure looks that way. Russian and foreign demographic experts have wondered how 1.3 million new voters could have materialized in just three months last winter. Perhaps they could find enlightenment by talking with Alkhat Zaripov, a 65-year-old pensioner who lives in a multistory apartment block in Kazan. "I came to vote, but suddenly I noticed that there were extra apartments registered in the form where we all sign and give our passport details," said Zaripov, in an April interview outside his apartment at 107 Ulitsa Fuchika. Zaripov remembered being confused: The form listed 209 apartments in the building, while he knew in reality there were only 180 apartments there. Twenty-nine apartments, filled no doubt with at least 60 or 70 fictional voters, had apparently been created by the imagination of the local election precinct. A list for the apartment block next door, a building that held 108 apartments, recorded that it had 125. Zaripov said he asked for an explanation, but a commission member just picked up the form and walked away. "This is a lie! Why is this called democratic elections?" Zaripov said. Officially, 108,073,956 voters were registered for the 1999 Duma elections---of which 66,667,682, or 61.69 percent, actually voted. By March 26, just three months later, the CEC was reporting 109,372,046, of which 75,070,776, or 68.64 percent, participated. In other words, an additional 1.3 million voters appeared on the rolls. Able to obtain only a fraction of the protocols, Alexander Salys Duma commission has resorted to extrapolating from the roughly 88,000 stolen votes he has documented to conclude that 700,000 votes were stolen across Dagestan. A more conservative guesstimate by The Moscow Times puts the figure at 551,000. ... "They [territorial commission members] tried to get me drunk on election day," said Abdusalam Magomedov, a private businessman and member of Makhachkalas Leninsky territorial commission, noted foul play in his district. He was also in touch with observers who were stationed at the 23 polling stations that make up the Leninsky district territorial commission. They said the tallies at each of the polling stations were padded. In the district of 71,114 registered voters, observers said that 14,000 votes, or nearly 20 percent of the vote were forged. On March 22, as the Saransk Communist Party was preparing for the presidential elections, the local police sent them a warning. "At 6 a.m. four days before the elections, our office was broken into by the police," said Valentina Lyukzayeva, a secretary of Saransk Communist Party and a deputy in the local legislative assembly. "One of our men spotted them and called me. When I got there they were searching around and, in a mocking way, said they had gotten a bomb threat," said Lyukzayeva. "Around the same time they broke into the homes of our [political] activists as well. We all told our relatives not to open the door. I was afraid for my daughter. It was an obvious warning telling us to sit still." Indeed, according to Lyukzayeva, the administration in this region 500 kilometers southeast of Moscow did everything they could to make sure that people voted for Vladimir Putin: Employees of the housing maintenance services were sent from door to door asking people for whom they were planning to vote. Even after the local Communists reported several complaints to the election commission, the visits didn't stop. Older residents were threatened that they would not get their pensions if they didn't vote for Putin, Lyukzayeva said, citing one incident in her home village of Permiyevo where the head of the collective farm warned residents that if they voted for Zyuganov---and he would find out if they did---they would not get tractors for planting or cars needed to carry wood or food. "Of course the villagers, most of whom are old women, got frightened and voted for Putin," she said. To further push the message, many local administrations sent representatives to sit at the polling stations during election day. ... Olga Tarasova, a poll observer for Yabloko, says the blatant stacking of votes in Putin's favor she saw going on in Tatarstan makes her feel sick to her stomach. "Before they threw me out at 9:45 p.m., I saw [precinct] commission members quietly taking piles of ballots for Yavlinsky and other candidates from the counting tables to another room," Tarasova said by telephone from Mendeleyevsk, Naberezhniye Chelny. "Then they brought back equally sized piles of ballots, which they put in Putin's pile," she said. ... Yabloko observer Oleg Bashkatov from the neighboring No. 1976 district also signed the complaint. He wrote he was forced out of the precinct by one of his bosses during the counting of ballots. "When I was leaving, I noticed that there were about 40 ballots in the pile for Yavlinsky," Bashkatov wrote. "But in the final count, there were only 15." At the precincts where Communists had observers, Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov got from 30 percent to 40 percent of the votes and Vladimir Putin from 55 percent to 65 percent, according to local Communist Party representatives. For example, at the No. 242 precinct in Kazan, 400 votes were cast for Putin and 242 for Zyuganov while at the No. 1166 precinct in the rural Buinsky district, Putin got 369 votes and Zyuganov 296 votes. But the difference widened tremendously at the unobserved stations. Zyuganov got 1.2 percent of votes while Putin walked away with 85.1 percent in the No. 159 district of Kirovsky in Kazan. Likewise, Zyuganov got only 8.6 percent while Putin 84.3 percent in the No. 155 precinct in the same region. In the more rural areas, the difference grew even more... Khalyaf Gafurov says he has concrete proof that election fraud took place at his village in Bashkortostan: Only one vote for Gannady Zyuganov showed up in the official tally, but he knows that both he and his wife voted for the Communist candidate. Now 12 other people from the village in the Arkhangelsk district of Bashkortostan have also signed a statement that they cast ballots for Zyuganov. Gafurov said those votes had simply been thrown away by the elections commission, as had Communist votes at the No. 1594 precinct in neighboring Tavakachevo. He said a friend, a teacher who served as an elections commission member, was forced to stand by and watch as ballots for Zyuganov were thrown away by the commission head and an equal number of ballots for Vladimir Putin were put in. ... Ask anyone in Chechnya about the presidential elections and his or her answer will be the same: Chechens did not elect Vladimir Putin. But nonetheless, he won in Chechnya with just over 50 percent of the vote. "The person who sent troops to Chechnya, who destroyed everything around us and caused thousands of civilians to die---how could we vote for him?" said 38-year-old Grozny resident Saikhan Taramov. "I firmly believe that the presidential elections were 100 percent forged in Chechnya." Ikhvan Kharikhanov, a resident of Grozny's Zavodskoi district, said he was not even given the chance to cast a ballot. "When after lunch I came to our polling station, I found out there were no spare ballots. They had already been cast for us by the commission. I guess they all were signed for Putin," said Kharikhanov. According to Salman Vakhayev, only 0.01 percent of the people living in his Grozny suburb supported Putin. ... Surprisingly, some officials close to Tatarstan's central elections commission acknowledge that falsification took place. ... It took next to a miracle to land an interview with the head of a local elections commission in Dagestan. Eager to hold onto their jobs and afraid for their families, many refused to talk. But one brave soul, under strict condition of anonymity, agreed to reveal how elections were falsified. "Our political system is the root of the evil here... There are no laws here--- the boss is the law. No one needs you to get the job done right; what they need is your obsequiousness and obedience," said the head of the commission. "In Dagestan, about 65 percent of the workforce does not have jobs; it is easy to replace the disobedient." ... "There was complete fraud throughout the republic. Pressure was put on all mid-level directors of factories, etc. They were told they must obey or be fired. In this system everything is controlled by the local administrations. They are the ones to compile the final [election] results. They destroyed ballots for Zyuganov and other [candidates] and added the necessary number for Putin." "They told us to use any tricks we could not to give copies of the protocols [to observers] on election day until the administration could straighten out the results the next morning," he said. "We could bring them, say, 64 percent [of the vote] for Putin and they would reject it and demand we increase the percentage." ..................................................... Conclusion. Saturday, Oct. 28, 2000. On Sept. 9, The Moscow Times published an eight-page article detailing fraud in the March presidential election. The article concluded that, given Vladimir Putins narrow 2.2 million-vote margin of victory, fraud put him over the top. The article also reported that if not for fraud, Putin would have faced Communist Gennady Zyuganov in a run-off and most likely would have won anyway. And it explored the Wests unwillingness to address the fact of widespread fraud and vote manipulation... <>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<> Any comparison to the November 2000 U.S. election is strictly formal. Both Gore and Bush represented powerful factions within the U.S. capitalist class. Whoever received the job of ventriloquist dummy, the capitalist class as a whole would remain at the helm of state---and world. In Russia, a qualitative difference occurred: at least HALF the population voted for the Communist Party---despite the 'repressive' history of the CPSU. The conclusion of the Moscow Times, that Putin would have 'most likely would have won anyway,' is arbitrary. It was close. And 'it' was nothing less than a democratic repudiation of capitalism itself. None of this is an explicit endorsement of Zyuganov or the CPR.* That's not the point. The point is: Zyuganov and the CPR is the best MASS party Russia can produce at the moment (a dire moment), and the 50%---or more---of the Russian people who voted for him were voting---attempting to vote---against capitalism. This fact alone conclusively demolishes any talk that 'communism is dead.' Spread the word. * More info: <http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3198/>. PLEASE DISREGARD ANY SPAM THAT MAY FOLLOW THIS LINE ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-~> Make good on the promise you made at graduation to keep in touch. Classmates.com has over 14 million registered high school alumni--chances are you'll find your friends! http://us.click.yahoo.com/03IJGA/DMUCAA/4ihDAA/4GJWlB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
