Dutch threaten Eurosong boycott over gay rights

NRC/international


'They probably won't make it to the finals, but the Dutch entry for the Eurovision Song Contest - The Toppers - are raising hell over Russia's gay rights record.

'Singer Gordon of the trio The Toppers will boycott Saturday night's Eurovision song contest in Moscow if violence is used against a gay rights march planned for that day. Gordon told a reporter from NOS Dutch public radio: "If people of my kind are being discriminated against in such a way, I have nothing to expect from this Russia, and I will be on the first plane home."

'Russian gay activist groups are seizing the opportunity of the Eurovision song contest - which is hugely popular in the gay community - to organise a march for gay rights. Public demonstrations in support of gays and lesbians are illegal in Russia and the police often crack down on them with violence, or stand by when neo-Nazis attack demonstrators.

MYSTERY SOLVED: DNA - DETECTIVE IN THE GRAVES AT YEKATERINBURG

The Independent:-- Scientists have pieced together DNA evidence from two graves near Yekaterinburg and have conclusively shown that Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, died with all five of their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and their haemophiliac son, the crown prince, Alexei. The only remaining mystery is whether the girl buried alongside Alexei in a separate grave from the rest of the family was Maria or Anastasia...

The Romanov study used three different ways of analysing DNA to determine family relationships within the graves – and the relationship, if any, to living relatives of the Russian royal family. Mitochondrial DNA, inherited only down the maternal line, was used to assess the relationship of Prince Philip, who is related to the Tsarina through his mother, with bone fragments found in the grave. This helped to determine that the Tsarina and her four daughters were indeed buried in the two graves. DNA known to be inherited only from fathers by sons on the male Y chromosome was used to determine the relationship between the crown prince, Alexei, and his father, Tsar Nicholas II. And finally, DNA from the rest of the chromosomes was used to find out who was who in the mass graves – separating family members from three servants and a doctor.

For your information here are the latest published articles, which discuss the DNA investigations conducted on the skeletal remains found in Yekaterinburg: 1. Michael D. Coble 2. Dr E. Rogaev (opens PDF)


In the photo, the Romanovs visiting a regiment during World War I. From left to right, Grand Duchess Anastasia, Grand Duchess Olga, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarevich and Grand Duke Alexei, Grand Duchess Tatiana, and Grand Duchess Maria, with Cossacks regiment.

(Photo credit: Romanov Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.)

THE GUNS OF AUGUST

Been searching the last few days and found some good analysis on the Georgia-Russia conflict.

OBSOLETE [Another war in the silly season.]

Atrocities have undoubtedly been committed by both sides. Craig Murray calls Georgia's actions lawful, but by the survivor accounts we have heard they were certainly being completely indiscriminate in both shelling and sniping. Russia's response has also clearly gone beyond the realms of defending citizens that both they and it regard as subjectively their own; the raids on Gori, attacks on Tbilisi airport and the targeting of economic as well as military installations further confirms this.
---
There are, to repeat, no good guys here. Russia, as if it needed to be mentioned, is hardly acquiescent when it comes to regions which want to break away from it, such as Chechnya, subjected to horrific conflict throughout the 90s and into the 00s, with the destruction which Grozny suffered an reminder of what Georgia might yet be in store for. Georgia however, and its desire to be seen as the victim, are equally as false and facile. What must urgently be rejected is the tendency to see this either as a resurrection of the cold war or as a great opportunity for the old Russiaphobia to once again take hold, something which CiF seems to be trying to achieve. All of the historical precedents which have been sited, whether they be 1938, 1956 or 1968, are not yet applicable, nor does it seem they will become so. It also undoubtedly punctures another hole in the fatuous idea of Thomas Friedman's that countries that have McDonald's don't go to war with each other. The key now is ensuring that this war is ended before any McDonald's themselves are destroyed.

korova in MoA [South Ossetia Through the Looking Glass]

Whilst it appears to have been forgotten by much of the media, it was Georgia that instigated the recent violence. Keen to recover the kind of popularity he received at the instigation of the Rose Revolution, Saakashavili has seen his approval rating plummet from around 86% when entering office to around 16% at the end of 2007. Given the problems in South Ossetia, an attempt to unify Georgia would surely boost approval ratings. All that was needed was the support of the US and other Western allies to ensure that it could go ahead without getting in the way of Georgia's broader ambitions (EU, NATO etc). Given the strategic significance of the region for the US (particularly in light of the missile defence program), there was no way that the US would stand in the way. In fact, there has been some evidence that the US had been actively involved in the assault on South Ossetia.
---
The fact that Georgia had increased it's military spending from $30 million to $1 billion, and that the US was giving massive military aid, indicates that the Georgian government were preparing for open conflict. Furthermore, the US has further worsened the situation in South Ossetia by airlifting Georgian troops from Iraq into Georgia in an attempt to aid the Georgian government. Bush's finger prints are all over this one. Clearly they have pushed the boat out to aid a fellow economic liberal in yet another disastrous foreign intervention. Much like the situation in Lebanon in 2006, the US's actions will only lead to a strengthening of the power they were seeking to undermine. The 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon led to the strengthening of Hezbollah and Iran. There is no doubt that this current conflict will lead to the strengthening of Russia within the region.

GEORGIA VS RUSSIA

An olympian confrontation maybe, but this is not about the games.

AMERICAN LEFTIST

Are Wall Street fund managers and investors stupid enough to believe that a new Cold War is a good idea? Evidently so. Because that's the objective of the Georgian leadership and their American and Israeli supporters in the defense and intelligence services. As for the rest of us, they could care less. Why should they? We haven't done anything for a quite awhile to compel them to do so. We can, however, be certain that we will hear very little of the fact that the Georgian military has been trained by the US (so far, only in the context of allying fears that some US officers may have been killed or wounded during a Russian air attack), and nothing about the sales of Israeli weapons to Georgia.

One gets the troubling sense that the US, France and Britain, among others, are going to adopt the same response that they did after the Israel conducted a campaign of air strikes upon Lebanon around this same time in the summer of 2006: use the United Nations to pressure the side subject to the attack to make concessions to the aggressor. The Lebanese victims of Israeli airstrikes, over 1,300 people, plus the prospect of subsequent deaths and injuries as a result of cluster bombs, meant nothing to them in the face of more cynical, abstract, geopolitical concerns of the imperialist kind, and the lives of South Ossetians will be equally irrelevant.

Read the rest here , and more - as the story broke earlier this week - here and here.

Last night I watched the BBC World News lengthy coverage of this conflict and noticed that neither the US training the Georgians nor Israeli arms connection was mentioned.

SOLZHENITZYN

LENIN'S TOMB [Solzhenitsyn and the right.]

But his usefulness to the American empire was limited, and definitively reached its sell-by date by 1990. Neoconservatives might have appreciated his critic of the degeneracy of the West and its failure to defend itself by being more God-fearing, but he was a Russian nationalist and this stance made him unpopular with some of Reagan's advisors, who presumably hoped to turn the country into an IMF basket-case. In fact, his argument against communism was by no means a defense of liberal universalism. Instead, he appealled to Americans to understand the 'West' as a distinct cultural entity which, while it had to be defended both against its communist opponents and its internal decadence, had little applicability to other societies. He wrote to Reagan to explain that once the putative threat from the USSR had gone, the US should pull out of every country it was involved in, from Central America to Africa to South-East Asia, and leave the world to its own devices. Once he was able to return to Russia in 1990, his austere conservative criticisms of the decadence of Western society, long articulated but generally glossed over by his supporters, came to the fore. He became rather unfashionable at this point. By the time he was castigating US military interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and defending the Putin administration, the American right had no more use for him.