Russia opposes air strikes in Libya

Miriam Elder

March 21, 2011

“Our position in this matter is well-known – we are for the inadmissibility of violence in Libya, as in other countries, and for the situation’s return to the political channel,” foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said this weekend. “We call on countries involved to stop the non-selective use of force.”

As awkwardly phrased as it might be, the statement maintains a calm logic. Russia has always been against Western military involvement – be it in the ex-Yugoslavia or Iraq. There are no shades of gray.

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Russian state-run TV has been less levelheaded. First, the anchor notes that the military action was launched by “Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama and famous peacekeeper Nicolas Sarkozy” (Sarkozy led peace deal efforts in Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia over South Ossetia). Switch to the reporter’s voice: “In order to understand, in the midst of total disinformation, what is actually going on right now in Libya, it’s enough to simply call things by their names: aggression by the great world powers against the sovereign country started with approval from the UN.” The reporter notes Gaddafi’s “to put it lightly, extravagant leadership” but says that wasn’t the real reason for Western intervention: “Gaddafi’s rejection of a deal with France to deliver modern arms and it’s desire not to privatize its oil industry – that’s what can be behind such a sudden war.” It warns that civilian causalities as a result of military intervention will be much higher than Gaddafi’s own aggression against his people (while images of hospital patients – and it’s by no means clear whether they are in fact victims of the bombing or of Gaddafi’s own actions). Images of CNN and other international news channels flood the screen as Russia warns of the West’s total propaganda war. Finally, the report directly links the current turn of events in Libya to Western intervention in Serbia and Kosovo – something Russia was also sternly against.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is currently in Russia on a planned visit and expected to meet President Dmitry Medvedev tomorrow.

BACKGROUND ON ASIA

Extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh, ethnic violence in Burma and lack of free press in Cambodia are all indicators of a drift toward authoritarianism in many Asian nations. Some countries, though, have bucked this trend; except in conflict areas like Kashmir widespread rights violations in India are the exception rather than the rule. Still the region is home perhaps the globe’s worst human rights offender aging dictator, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, who has set the standard for state repression with prison camps of hundreds of thousands and a strangle-hold on resources.

As other Asian states like the Philippines and Thailand make halting progress toward protecting human rights, China stands out for a lack of fundamental freedoms and routine human rights violations against its population of 1.3 billion. The research scholar Li Xiaorong commented bluntly that “after a generation of economic development, after many rounds of US-China human rights dialogues and after millions of dollars of assistance to promote ‘rule of law and other ’reforms’,” still, “The human rights situation in China has not fundamentally improved.”

Large swaths of Chinese minority groups, such as Uighurs and Tibetans have few guaranteed rights amid ongoing and continuous state oppression that includes lethal indiscriminate force. The country heavily censors press, lawyers have “disappeared” indefinitely and at least 26 Chinese journalists are in prison. Human rights activists are also regularly silenced by imprisonment. An estimated 500,000 people have been imprisoned without charge or trial. In bureaucratic double-speak China amended the constitution in 2004 to read that, “the state respects and preserves human rights,” but continued imprisoning high-profile dissidents such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo on "subversion" charges.??China’s human rights record threatens the popular belief that global economic interdependence will bring consensus that states should, if not protect human rights, at least value them.