-Caveat Lector-
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11/12/wput12.xml
West in mortal danger from Islam, says Putin
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels and Julius Strauss in Moscow
(Filed: 12/11/2002)
Islamic radicals are pursuing the systematic annihilation of non-Muslims, President
Vladimir Putin claimed yesterday.
The Russian leader said at a European Union summit in Brussels that western
civilisation faced a mortal threat from Muslim terrorists, and claimed that they had
plans
to create a "worldwide caliphate".
President Vladimir Putin
His words overshadowed the main achievement of the summit, which was to end years of
wrangling over Moscow's isolated enclave in Kaliningrad.
The EU and Russia reached a compromise deal that will prevent Russian citizens from
being cut off in the Baltic port as the EU's borders move east in 2004.
Mr Putin said the world no longer faced isolated acts of terrorism but a "concerted
effort
and programme" by a global network bent on slaughter, perhaps with nuclear weapons.
He said the West should face up to the reality that Chechen terrorists were religious
extremists in league with al-Qa'eda, rather than a separatist movement seeking a
breakaway republic.
If the West failed to deal with the Chechen terrorist threat, he said, there would be
repeats of the Moscow theatre siege and the Bali bombing "all over the world".
Mr Putin secured a joint EU-Russian action plan to fight terrorism at the mini-summit,
but
he was firmly warned that Europe would not give Russia carte blanche in its fight
against
terrorism, particularly after reports that fragmentation bombs were being used widely
against civilians in Chechnya.
Privately, EU diplomats said Mr Putin was playing the al-Qa'eda card for all it was
worth,
seeing it as a useful way to create a sense of common purpose with the West and
heighten the strategic value of Russia.
The resolution of the Kaliningrad issue, which is highly emotive in Moscow, will have
satisfied Mr Putin. The Russian press had warned of a "blue curtain" encircling a
million
Russians in EU territory.
But the Russian president said yesterday he was now "satisfied" that fellow-citizens
living
in the drab industrial hub, once the great German city of Konigsberg but now a
smuggling centre, would be able to travel freely across Lithuanian territory.
Under the deal, residents of Kaliningrad will be given cheap multiple visas. This will
allow
Lithuania and Poland to comply with the Schengen agreement, which obliges them to
eliminate their western border posts once they join the EU but at the same time erect
more rigid barriers to the east, including tougher visa restrictions on Russians.
The agreement clears away one of the last obstacles to the EU's "Big Bang" enlargement
of 10 mostly ex-communist states.
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