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Police initiate charges against Czech-Afghan chamber head ... Havel said in Sunday television discussion programme that the EU should be tougher with Russia and not be so much interested in Russian gas supplies, which is nice to say but hard to do, Viliam Buchert writes in the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD). Havel knows well that the Czech voice is very weak from the global perspective, Buchert says. He says the idea of imposing sanctions on Russia for its actions in Georgia is nonsense. One should admit that Russia holds the Czech Republic and others at bay, at least now now and the situation cannot change overnight, Buchert writes. He says one may feel a hero when verbally attacking Russia, but people need gas for heating and petrol for their cars. Apart from Russia, Havel also criticised his old rival, current President Vaclav Klaus, but he never mentioned him directly nad only said some people long for the old times of communism and the safe world controlled by the Big Brother, Russia, Buchert notes. Why? Is Havel afraid of the confrontation? Buchert asks. Klaus says Georgia was to blame for the conflict, arguing that President Mikheil Saakashvili's started the armed conflict by using force against separatist groups in South Ossetia. Havel should climb down from heaven, stop preaching.
His sermons may be pleasant to hear, but they have little in common with the real world, Buchert concludes. To understand the present Russian occupation of Georgia, one needs to return to 1991 when current Russian President Vladimir Putin was an officer of the Soviet KGB secret police stationed in Dresden, Germany, Lubos Palata writes in Lidove noviny. Georgia sought independence, similarly as the Baltic states and the Kremlin tried to prevent it by all possible means, Palata writes. Moscow supported Georgian separatists, first South Ossetians, then Abkhazians. It supplied them weapons, KGB officers and troops. The aim was not to allow Georgia be really independent, or at least not to allow independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Palata says. Moscow financed the puppet regimes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Russian "peacekeeping" troops in fact occupied both regions in the past 15 years. Moscow even distributed Russian passports among the citizens in these regions, Palata notes. Now than Russia feels stronger, it used the first pretext to invade Georgia. The fault of President Saakashvili is only that he gave Moscow the pretext. When Czechoslovak president Edvard Benes ordered to suppress an uprising of Konrad Henlein's pro-Nazi movement in Czechoslovakia's border regions in 1938, it was a similar situation, Buchert says. Soon afterwards, Adolf Hitler added the Czech border regions to Germany, making the step legal by the Munich Agreement. The West now faces a devastating Russian information attack that resembles both the KGB and Nazi propaganda, Buchert concludes. If Russia sent its military consultants to Cuba, supported the modernisation of the Cuban army, and said it was because Cuban leaders share the same values as Russia, what would the United States do? Alexandr Mitrofanov asks in Pravo. The answer is clear: U.S. representatives would condemn such action as an interference in its own sphere of influence, Mitrofanov says. If Russia is stripped of such a right, it can mean a single thing: the United States and its allies do not want a state controlled by the Kremlin as a power that can claim its own spheres of interest, he writes. Putin's military operation in Georgia wants to make the West change its stance, Mitrofanov says.
(Ceske Noviny)
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