Russia’s Putin continues to intimidate and threaten out of business some of the last vestiges of democracy. From the Washington Post:
“Russia on Thursday suspended the activities of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Republican Institute and more than 90 other foreign nongovernmental organizations, saying they failed to meet the registration requirements of a controversial new law designed to bring activists here under much closer government scrutiny.
Across the country, foreign grass-roots organizations that investigate human rights abuses, promote democracy and work with refugees folded their tents until further notice, informing staff that all operations must cease immediately. The only work officially authorized was the paying of staff and bills.
The law, signed by President Vladimir Putin at the start of the year, drew broad criticism as part of a general rollback of democratic freedoms in Russia. Activists said it was intended to rein in one of the last areas of independent civic life here; Putin called it necessary to prevent foreigners from interfering in the country’s political process.”
This CNN report from 2001 shows George W. Bush’s opinion, at least initially, about Putin:
“After nearly two hours of face-to-face talks on Saturday, Bush said he felt he could “trust” Putin.
The leaders agreed to meet for summits in each country. Bush invited Putin to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in the autumn. Putin returned the courtesy with an invitation to his home in Moscow.
They will also meet at the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa, Italy, next month and in Shanghai at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in October.
“I wouldn’t have invited him to my ranch if I didn’t trust him,” Bush said at a joint news conference after the two spent 1 hour and 40 minutes in one-on-one talks — more than twice the time originally scheduled. “We can make the world safer, more prosperous.”
[…]
The body language between the two appeared genuinely comfortable. Bush said the talks never digressed into “diplomatic chit chat” and that during the talks he took a measure of Putin’s soul, finding the Russian leaders “straight-forward and trustworthy.”
“Mark me down as very pleased,” Bush said at one point.
Putin said the new U.S. president understood Russia‘s history and found himself impressed with his global perspective on a number of issues. Significantly, Putin said it was “very important” for him to hear Bush say Russia was no longer an enemy.”
Many people in America don’t like those human rights organizations much either, by the way. Are their reasons entirely different than Putin’s? As Aryeh Neier writes in the New York Review of Books:
“One of those who responded angrily to the Human Rights Watch report was Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He said, “Human Rights Watch’s approach to these problems is immorality at the highest level,” and he accused Kenneth Roth of engaging in “a classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews” for using the term an “eye for an eye” when referring to Israel’s policies.[2] Rabbi Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, a leading Orthodox group, compared Roth to Mel Gibson.[3] Martin Peretz of The New Republic said that “this Human Rights Watch libel has utterly destroyed its credibility, at least for me.”[4] And Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, never to be outdone, wrote in The Jerusalem Post, “When it comes to Israel and its enemies, Human Rights Watch cooks the books about facts, cheats on interviews, and puts out predetermined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence.”[5]”
[photo of Putin: flickr.com]