Yeltsin Turns to the 'Narod'
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Yeltsin Turns to the 'Narod' The failed August 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and his ouster in December of that year, were part of...
...The common thread is Islamic fundamentalism...
...The killings were, in effect, subsidized with U.S...
...Wasn 't that a half dozen human tragedies ago, long since erased from our radar screen to make room for Somalia, Bosnia and all the rest...
...Now, thanks to an impressive piece of investigation by U.S...
...The missions—by unarmed lumbering aircraft—were called "ferret flights...
...The Western community, starting with the United States, has been quick to rally around Russia's President...
...From time to time I have wondered whether the RB-47, and Gary Powers' U-2 shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960, were singular incidents or part of something bigger...
...The current confrontation between President Boris N. Yeltsin and his opponents in the Congress of People's Deputies is part of the birth pangs of the Democratic New Order, struggling to stay alive...
...The report has an emblematic quality...
...meanwhile, they have witnessed the rise of a new class of suddenly opulent wheeler-dealers...
...The crisis is not, in any sense that would be meaningful to Americans, a constitutional showdown...
...A pity that Israel did not discover the Iranian menace seven or eight years ago, when it was shipping arms to Iran and influencing the Reagan Administration to do the same...
...The weapon of choice is a dynamite-packed car...
...I am referring to the thousands of American servicemen quite intentionally exposed to radiation during atomic tests...
...That left Yeltsin little choice but to go on television to announce he would take power into his own hands and proceed with the referendum...
...On a visit here in mid-March Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin warned that the wave of fundamentalist fervor, and terror, sweeping out of Iran was much more threatening than secular Iraq ever was...
...Perhaps worst of all were the nuclear experiments...
...President Bill Clinton has also been impressed by the views of ex-President Richard M. Nixon, who turned up at the White House after publishing a long piece on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times in early March...
...Other monstrous things were done as well...
...tax dollars, since the Salvadoran officers were trained in this country...
...In Operation Plumbob at the Nevada test site in 1957, troops were ordered to watch the explosion unprotected from 12 miles away, then sent into the contaminated area three days later to carry out combat tasks and retrieve equipment...
...Many of those involved are being amnestied...
...Would have saved everyone a lot of tsoris...
...We were going to meet two American airmen who, it suddenly had been announced, were freed from a Soviet prison...
...Referring to the Air Force ferret operation, General Andrew Goodpaster, onetime nato commander, said, "Our view then, and it would be my view now, was that we had to do it...
...News & World Report, I finally have my answer...
...The targets in Latin America are most often American symbols, including even Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises...
...That is why the United Nations is trying to set up a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia...
...For ultimately authority rests with the narod—the long-suffering Russian people—who first began to discover this in August '91, after tank units sent to subdue the masses instead fraternized with them...
...It was a matter of dispute whether they had intruded into Soviet air space...
...When the Congress tried to fence him in by asserting the right to veto his reform program and his top-level appointments, and reneged on an agreement reached last December to hold a referendum that would pave the way for a new constitution, gridlock ensued...
...One day we hear of a bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, another day of attacks on vacationers in Egypt designed to discourage tourist trade, another day of the killing of an Iranian dissident in Rome...
...In January 1961, when I was stationed in Germany as a CBS correspondent, I drove through an all-night blizzard with a camera crew to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport...
...In mid-March, along comes the report of a United Nations panel quaintly named Commission on the Truth...
...It serves to remind the individuals responsible for massacres now in progress and still to come that the truth may not stay buried with the victims...
...I am not referring to radiation "accidentally" released from weapons plants—an unfortunate concomitant to arming for Armageddon, paralleled by radiation disasters in the Soviet Union...
...It tells of El Salvador's military top bananas organizing cold-blooded murders...
...The vexing question is whether the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated on American soil had its origin across the river, in New Jersey, across the ocean, in the Middle East, or some combination of the two...
...Such legitimacy as exists resides in Yeltsin, the only Russian head of state ever popularly elected (along with Vice President Aleksandr V. Rutskoi...
...At this writing it is difficult to know how the Russians will vote on April 25, or even the precise questions they will find on the ballot...
...Recently the State Department branded Iran "the world's most dangerous state sponsor of terrorism," and called the Iranian-supported Hezbollah in Lebanon "the most aggressive and lethal" sponsor of terrorism in the world...
...About an international war crimes prosecution for El Salvador it is silent, as befits a co-conspirator...
...But Russia has no constitution worthy of the name—merelya patched-up version of an old Communist charter...
...Their RB-47 reconnaissance plane had been shot down the previous July over the Barents Sea...
...For good reason...
...The radicals tend to assemble most easily not in Arab countries, such as Syria or Egypt, where tough rulers give them little elbow room, but in South and North America...
...An Air Force meteorologist who briefed some of the crews broke his long silence to tell U.S...
...Wasn't that where we were saving Central America from the Communist foe, and the Reagan Administration was saying that stories of massacres were invented by Left-wing reporters for the New York Times and Washington Post...
...Some have gone abroad as ambassadors...
...Out of 252 crew members downed, only 90 were recovered...
...Fundamental Terror Shortly after the explosion in New York's World Trade Center on February 26, President Clinton said he would decide "the appropriate course for the United States" once he knew more about what lay behind the bombing...
...It seems a little unreal today, this playing with American lives to protect America...
...This is the "major foreign policy issue of our time," Nixon wrote, and that may very well prove to be true...
...The Minister of Defense, for example, ordered the killing of six Jesuits, and gave specific instructions that this was to be done "without leaving witnesses...
...El Salvador...
...Yet the mood in Moscow doesn't really tell us what the feelings of the people of that vast country will be if they are asked to determine the fate of their endangered experiment with democracy...
...The United States supports the effort...
...But some of those involved still have no apologies to make...
...While I'm getting things off my chest...
...A system is needed to punish such crimes without first having to win a war against human rights violators...
...the other four crew members were never recovered...
...Between 1950 and 1970, 31 planes were lost in high-risk reconnaissance missions to flush out the locations and capabilities of Soviet radar and defenses...
...Dimly discernible, though, is the hand of Iran—where theology and ideology merge—instigating, supporting and inspiring acts designed to bring down secular Arab governments, to destroy Israel and to strike at America, "the Great Satan...
...These unstructured groups are united only by a common set of beliefs, hatreds and grievances, all reinforced by local clerics...
...The Americans were, in a word, expendable—sacrificed on the altar of the Cold War...
...Later it became known that the airmen had been released as a gesture by Nikita S. Khrushchev to the new President, John F. Kennedy...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Yeltsin Turns to the 'Narod' The failed August 1991 coup against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and his ouster in December of that year, were part of the death throes of the Communist Old Order...
...Typically, the acts of self-starting terrorist cells do not go off with the smooth precision of the attack on American Marines in Lebanon or the downing of Pan Am Flight 103...
...As in the Trade Center bombing, one finds elements of both professionalism and amateurishness...
...The commission did not have subpoena power and, until nearly the end, received no help from Washington...
...Yet disclosure is not the same as justice...
...But the name could also be Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Moslem Brotherhood, or Islamic Salvation Front...
...It may sound like one when you hear of a balance of powers dispute between the Executive and Legislative branches, or threats of impeachment, or statements of the Con-stitutional Court...
...There looms a new pattern of terror, so loosely organized that its structure is hard to see...
...The shadowy groups often cluster around mosques with radical sheikhs, like Omar Abdel Rahman...
...Playing with Lives El Salvador, where some 75,000 died in a 12-year civil war...
...News, "my government has done some monstrous things...
...He had cautioned that the crisis in Russia—the sole nation capable of destroying the United States —could lead to the emergence of an aggressive nationalist regime that would doom Clinton's chances for restoring the American economy...
...Erecting a foundation of popular mandate may not work, but it's too early to give up on Yeltsin—and the narod...
...however, he exhorts his followers to "Hit hard and kill the enemies of God in every spot...
...The Army, the Navy and the CIA performed drug experiments on unwitting Americans—one of whom, a military officer, committed suicide under the influence of LSD...
...Generally, international justice is for losers, like the Nuremberg trials after World War II...
...The conventional man-in-the-street wisdom from correspondents in Moscow is that most Russians are turned off by the whole political process: It has brought them no relief from unemployment, shortages and staggering inflation...
...Their records listed their assignment only as "temporary duty...
...The consensus seems to be that unlike 1991, when President George Bush was accused of sticking to Gorbachev too long, now there is no more democratic alternative, only a less democratic one...
...Sheikh Omar says he has never issued anordertokill...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 5
