Published: 3 February, 2009, 06:33
Edited: 3 February, 2009, 06:33
This Tuesday, Russian newspapers report on China’s plans for crisis management, reveal the specifics of North Korea’s defence doctrine and explore the possibility of genocide in the Gaza Strip.
NEZAVISIMAYA GAZETA reports on Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s trip to Europe that included his participation in the Davos forum and visits to Germany, Spain, EU Headquarters in Brussels and the U.K. In London, says the paper, the Prime Minister made it clear that China acknowledges that there is a slow-down in the world economy, but refuses to use any part of its currency reserves to revitalise the IMF or the World Bank if China gets no additional voting and management rights in these organisations.
The paper says Wen Jiabao explained in a Financial Times interview that China is going to fight the crisis with an energetic stimulation of the national economy and very careful steps in the world market. In response to rumors about a U.S. – Chinese trade war allegedly about to begin, he said that Beijing is not going to ‘manipulate’ its currency to protect its economy, notes the paper, but he also didn’t promise that the Yuan will not be devalued.
The paper says that if the U.S. chooses to protect its producers from competition with Chinese products, China will have to respond and a real trade war may start.
VREMYA NOVOSTEI publishes an article by Professor Anatoly Tsyganok of the Centre for Military Prognosis who writes that even if North Korea’s announcement that it is on the brink of a war with South Korea is a bluff, it may be interesting to find out the odds of such a conflict. The author writes that the North has 750,000 troops on active duty with 4.5 million trained reservists against 560,000 soldiers of the South Korean army and a 30,000-strong U.S. Expedition force.
The writer says the North has 27,000 tanks, 24,000 thousand armoured vehicles, 646 combat fixed-winged aircraft and 330 helicopters, 86 surface ships and submarines, and 510 boats of various types, most of these weapons positioned close to the South Korean border.
Apart from that, says Tsyganok, North Korea is the only nation in the world that includes sabotage and guerilla warfare among the main elements of its defence doctrine. North Korea’s special forces’ total strength, says the author, exceeds 90,000 men.
The writer says that in his opinion, in case of an armed conflict, North Korea is capable of engaging all of the South Korean military while effectively blocking any action by U.S. forces. He adds that the military doctrine of North Korea allows for the use of chemical weapons in warfare on the Korean peninsula.
KOMMERSANT writes that neither side in the truce between Israel and Hamas is following its terms in full: missiles are launched at Israel from Gaza and, in retaliation, Israeli aircraft bomb the areas where the missiles come from. The paper says Israel denies the existence of any plans to enter Gaza again but makes it clear that there will be retaliation for every missile attack originating in Gaza.
In spite of the continuing exchange of attacks, the paper says that many in Israel still hope for a longer-term peace accord with Hamas. The treaty, supposed to be in effect for one year, is being prepared with the participation of Egypt but the newspaper is pessimistic about the outcome as Egypt still finds it impossible to guarantee the effective enforcement by Hamas of such conditions as a complete ceasefire and the ban on arms smuggling into the Gaza strip.
KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA publishes an article by its correspondent Darya Aslamova, entitled ‘Are the victims of the Holocaust capable of committing genocide?’ The author, just back from a stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, shares the viewpoint of some Israeli opponents of the Israeli government’s actions in the Gaza strip, saying that the engine of the war there was oiled by the notion of the Jews as ‘the chosen people.’ She quotes Israeli dissidents saying that Zionism in Palestine is playing the same role as German nationalism played in the Holocaust and white supremacy in the extermination of Native Americans.
Aslamova writes that the big difference between Zionism and other nationalist ideologies lies in the fact that the Zionists have acquired significant control over the world media, so they can always plant their own interpretation of events in the minds of the international public. She analyses the words pronounced in media appearances by some well-known figures of the Russian opposition, people known for their publicised role as champions of human rights – and shows that all of them, from Viktor Shenderovich and Valeria Novodvorskaya to Garry Kasparov, have taken the side of Israel in the conflict with Hamas, while among the fatal casualties of that conflict there were scores of Palestinian civilians and just a little over a dozen Israeli soldiers.
The paper also publishes a response to Aslamova’s article penned by Evgeny Satanovsky, the vice-president of the Russian Jewish congress, in which the author mockingly thanks Aslamova for ‘the most Zionist article ever written.’ He says that Aslamova is honest in her ignorance and hints at her lack of qualifications as a war correspondent and analyst. He also writes that whatever Israel does in Gaza in the future, it should not pay heed to what the world says, because ‘for the world there’s no difference – what you do or not do, what you want – or do not want, they will write bad about you anyways.’ The author also says that the Israeli troops enter Gaza not only to fight and kill but to feed the hungry and treat the sick, to teach and educate their Palestinian neighbors.
ROSSIYSKAYA GAZETA publishes an opinion article by political scientist Leonid Radzikhovsky who writes that in our current thinking process dedicated to the fight against the global economic crisis we tend to forget that besides ‘tomorrow,’ the day when the crisis ends, there will also be ‘the day after tomorrow’ and it will be affected by today’s anti-crisis actions.
The author writes that today it is possible to predict that the end of the crisis will come for Russia when oil prices start to rise. Russia, says Radzikhovsky, ‘Hangs on an oil and gas pipe driven into the wall of the European economy.’ At some point tomorrow, things will become better for Russia, he says, but the improvement may come at the expense of those living the day after tomorrow.
The author insists that without a significant technological breakthrough, Russia will enter the post-crisis world in the same capacity of a supplier of raw materials, technologically and industrially behind the U.S., EU and Southeast Asia by at least a generation. He says even the Soviet Union in 1985 was not that dependent upon oil and gas exports: their share in total Soviet exports was 54 per cent against modern Russia’s 70 per cent.
Radzikhovsky says that it is not the task for a political scientist or a journalist to offer ready-made solutions to the powers-that-be, but if some politicians read the article and start thinking about the day after tomorrow, he will find that his efforts were not in vain.
Evgeny Belenkiy, RT