A funny sort of democracy
By Neil Clark

New Statesman
11/17/2003

It is well documented that a cabal of Likud-supporting American
neoconservatives played an important role in bringing about this
year's illegal war against Iraq. What is less well known is the link
the group has with the billionaire oligarchs in Russia and how they
are trying to use the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky to harden US
policy towards Moscow. Richard Perle's gang of regime-changers and
advocates of total war are taking advantage of their disproportionate
influence in the western media to portray the arrest of the billionaire
businessman as a major international scandal and evidence that
Vladimir Putin, a man whose elevation to power they largely welcomed
three years ago, is now the new Stalin. Perle's interest in Russia
goes back a long way. As for most Likudniks of his generation, the
Soviet Union was the "evil empire" - not so much for its clampdowns
on western-style freedoms, but for the support it gave to secular Arab
regimes and its sponsorship of Palestinian liberation movements. Perle
helped draft the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment which, to the chagrin
of supporters of d?tente, made US-Soviet trade deals dependent on
the Soviets facilitating Jewish emigration. In the 20 years that
followed, more than a million Russian Jews left for Israel, boosting
the electoral prospects of Likud and the far right. This also produced
new settlements in the occupied territories, which did much to provoke
today's troubles.

The eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union and the shock therapy
of Russia's road to a "market" economy were widely welcomed by Perle
and his supporters, even though this led to the impoverishment of
swathes of the population. With the rapid transition to capitalism
came the emergence of the oligarchs - seven businessmen who used
their connections with the corrupt Yeltsin administration to seize
valuable state assets at knockdown prices. In the oligarchs, Perle
and his fellow hawks saw a way in which the US and Israel could, by
proxy, gain political and economic power in Russia and, by doing so,
eventually gain control of enormous energy resources.

But seven years on from the heady days of 1996, when the intervention
of the oligarchs and their backers in the west guaranteed re-election
for the "reformer" Boris Yeltsin, things have gone very wrong. Boris
Berezovsky, the "Godfather of the Kremlin", and his fellow oligarch
Vladimir Gusinsky are both in exile. Earlier this year, Russia's
stubborn holding of its line on Iraq infuriated the neoconservatives
and increased their determination to work towards regime change at
the next presidential elections in 2004 - and to accelerate their
plans to secure Russia's energy resources.

Before his arrest, Khodorkovsky had been in talks with US oil companies
over a merger with Yukos. Now, with their man in Moscow behind bars,
it is time for the neoconservative propaganda war against Putin to
go into overdrive. Perle was first out of the blocks, calling for
Russia's expulsion from the G8 and its exclusion from any postwar
Iraq oil contracts, and accusing it of collusion with Iran's nuclear
power programme.

Bruce P Jackson - like Perle a member of the Project for the New
American Century and president of the hawkish Project on Transitional
Democracies - used his column in the Washington Post to argue
that Putin had established a "de facto cold war administration in
Moscow" and that the Russian president's actions were motivated by
anti-Semitism (a claim echoed by Ariel Sharon). "In dollar terms we
are witnessing the largest illegal appropriation of Jewish property
since the Nazi seizures during the 1930s."

For Jackson, Putin is not just a new tsar and a new Stalin, but a new
Hitler, too. In Britain, the Daily Telegraph, a paper not known for
handing its comment pages to refugees wanted for criminal activities
in their own country, did just that. Boris Berezovsky condemned the
"increasing totalitarianism" of the Putin regime.

In the unrelenting pro-Khodorkovsky, anti-Putin propaganda we have been
subjected to, much has been made of the oligarchs' role in building
Russian "democracy" - as opposed to the crude attempts of the Russian
president to shunt his country back to the days of Peter the Great. But
the "democracy" that Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky stand for is the
"democracy" of an elite of billionaire businessmen to buy themselves
not just political power, but immunity from the laws of the land.

"We hired First Deputy Chubais," Berezovsky boasted in 1997. "We
invested huge sums of money. We guaranteed Yeltsin's re-election. Now
we have the right to occupy government posts and use the fruits of
our victory."

True democracy in Russia would mean not only the return of property
held by the oligarchs to their rightful owners - the Russian people -
but the formation of a government that puts the needs and interests
of Russia first, rather than those of the US or Israel.

For all their lip-service to the democratic ideal, that is the last
thing Richard Perle, the oligarchs and their supporters in the west
really want.