>From The Times (UK) http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/04/19/timopnope01004.html {{<Begin>}} April 19 2000 OPINION Thanks so much for having me, Mr Blair From the President of the Russian Federation To Tony Blair Dear Tony, Thank you for your hospitality. I am a man careful of his words and of little wit. I enjoyed lunch and was happy to meet your press. What fools. As for the lady to whom you sent me for tea at Windsor, what was that supposed to be about? Anyway, thank you. To business. I am told I do not smile much. I do not smile. I am trained KGB. Governing Russia is no smiling matter. The place is rotten and without discipline. You see two bags under my eyes? One is Chechnya, the other is corruption. That is why I do not smile. I am afraid Westerners still do not understand Russia. You talk all the time of Chechnya, as if you meant to rule the world. I wish to rule only Russia. We have Muslim fanatics raging through our southern provinces. Why do I need to defend my actions to your press? We fought these terrorists and then tried letting them rule in Grozny. It did not work. Chechnya was in anarchy. Those people killed anyone, including British civilians. They were invading Dagestan. This is a dangerous, turbulent part of the world. It is our Balkans. We must be firm, and I had to let our soldiers do the job we asked them to do. As you unleashed Nato's bombers last year, so I unleashed mine. The difference is that I persuaded your enemy to cave in before mine did. The Russian Army is charged with flattening cities, creating refugees and committing human rights atrocities. Democrats cannot have it both ways. I have the same problem that you had in Yugoslavia with infantry casualties. Nobody wants them. So we used bombs, not bullets, which are less accurate. You are still bombing Iraq, killing people every week. You do not tell your country about this. You claim only to be standing firm against Muslim extremism. That is what Russia is doing in Chechnya. I am apparently accused of using "disproportionate firepower". Last year Nato bombed the cities of Belgrade and Novi Sad and Nis. You hit houses, markets, offices, railways, bridges and said you would go on until Milosevic capitulated. From your rhetoric, I am sure you would have "flattened" Belgrade. Did Nato kill more civilians than has Russia? Who knows? Is morality in the body count? There are also 250,000 refugees in Serbia, driven out of Nato's puppet state of Kosovo, often in Nato trucks. Your press publicises Chechen refugees, my press publicises Serbian ones. You claim not to be responsible for what your KLA allies do on the ground. We shall doubtless say the same in Grozny. We are both members of the realpolitik club. The difference is that Chechnya is part of Russia. I did not lecture you on Northern Ireland. Some journalist had the cheek to ask me about human rights abuses. What of the human rights of Iraqi civilians, of Serb refugees, of Kosovan Gypsies, or of the hundreds of children orphaned by Nato bombing? Where do your two-faced journalists think Grozny is located, somewhere north of Islington? I have agreed a commission to look into military abuses. I can tell you, it will be fudged and do no good. I see you have a commission looking into your own military atrocities in Northern Ireland. I note that it is dealing with killings 30 years after the event. I offer you a deal, Tony. I will activate my Chechnya commission, British style, in 2030. You Westerners are still imperialists at heart. You cannot keep your noses out of other people's business. There is, however, a matter on which I would appreciate real help. I admire the way you slipped in ahead of Clinton and the others and came first to see me. There was little in this for you except some glamorous photo calls at the Mariinsky Theatre. But you could be a useful intermediary, like your hero Margaret Thatcher, between Russia and the pestilential Americans. I am now slashing our nuclear arsenal. The Duma ratified Start 2 last Friday. Do not underestimate the historic significance of this. I soon intend to eliminate all our multi-warhead missiles, the most feared of Russian weapons. Under Start 3 the arsenal will reduce to just 1,500 single-head missiles. Nato has demanded this for three decades. We will deliver. So why is Washington seeking to abrogate the ABM Treaty, to push ahead with its anti-ballistic missile Star Wars programme? The programme is a technological fantasy. You know that. Yet any treaty revision will infuriate Russia's military. The way to contain rogue states is by fighting them, as in the Gulf and Chechnya. None of us needs Star Wars against Pakistan or Iraq. Nuclear war is avoided by us all sticking with non-proliferation and continuing to destroy missiles. Russia is not joking. It has swallowed one humiliation after another. We pulled back from Serbia and even got you off the hook in Kosovo. We endured your moralising on Chechnya. We accepted the bitter pill of Nato enlargement. We did all this with no predicted nationalist coup. I kept our hawks in line. Why can't Clinton do the same on ABM? Perhaps the Communists were right. Washington is all military-industrial complex and no government. Perhaps it is as corrupt as Moscow. You claim to be a nuclear disarmer, Tony. Prove it. On the subject of corruption I heard the CBI say that they "can do business with Putin". Tell them the days of doing business with people like Putin are over. They must do business with the Russian people, and that means opening their doors to trade. For ten years I have watched your bankers in bed with our bankers, laundering World Bank and IMF aid. I watched that aid make Russia's rich richer and its poor poorer. Our growth rate was negative. Even our population is declining. Half the aid has been stolen, the other half channelled back to Western banks. In St Petersburg I watch aid corrupt my friend, Mayor Sobchak. Russia's biggest problem is corruption and the biggest corrupter is aid. I know I must police Russia's new economy. I must collect taxes and enforce company law and regulate internal markets. If Poland can do it, then Russia can. But what it needs above all is trade, and that is what you are least inclined to offer. We poor states are the same. You love lending us money, because it makes you seem generous and your taxpayers guarantee it. We waste it and then have to give it back with interest. Trade is different. The European Union hates it as much as America hates it, because it upsets the producer lobbies. Yet a free market for trade is the one aid that can discipline Russia and generate a market economy. That and order. Russia needs order. It needs the culture of the KGB at its best, of my one-time lord and master, Yuri Andropov. It needs the cunning of the spy and the discipline of the State. It needs nastiness. I must be nasty to venal businessmen and corrupt officials. I must be nasty to provincial governors. I must be nasty to the press, and perhaps to many one-time dissidents much loved in your country. I will be described as backsliding on democracy, as "a disappointment". The best news I can offer you is that my enemies would be yours: the incompetents, speculators, black marketeers, Yeltsin courtiers and mafiosi. They are the ghosts of Russia's past, of a gigantic history and a world power. You may think that my cold exterior hides a warm heart. Pray that it does not. I am young and have yet to suffer the occupational disease of Kremlin occupants, that of vanity. I am determined, sober, clever, plain-speaking, uncorrupted. History suggests that I will not be this for long. You can lecture me all you like. It will merely earn my contempt. Your interest must lie in a stronger, more confident Russia. With Putin, you have a window of opportunity to get that Russia, or do you want another Yeltsin? By the way, they tell me you like big cars, motorcades, VIP fast lanes, the old Communist stuff. I confess, I like them too. Perks were the one thing the old guard got right. Let me send you the new Zil 7-seater stretch-limo. It is armour-plated top, bottom and sides, leather interior, V8 engine, with 118mph top speed. With outriders, it did Windsor to Heathrow in five minutes. It will show your Ken Livingstone who's really in control. Yours ever, Vladimir {{<End>}} A<>E<>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense." --Buddha + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." 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