France's New President (Unlike Trump) Stands Up to Putin

I have always liked France and the French, perhaps because I am part French due to my grandmother's New Orleans French ancestry, my knowledge of French history and love of Paris, and knowledge that but for France and the French fleet, American forces would likely have been defeated at the battle of Yorktown (where we were yesterday for a wedding in a Revolutionary era B&B).  Now, France's newly elected president, Emmanuel Macron, has added to the list of reasons to admire France.  In his first meeting with Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, Macron stood up to Putin and even challenged him over the anti-gay pogroms that are ongoing in Chechnya.  Donald Trump, in contrast, has more or less kissed Putin's ass and seemingly acted on Putin's script to damage U.S. - European relations.  A piece in Politico looks at Macron's impressive performance.  Here are highlights:

The official line on the first meeting between Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin was that it was “frank” and “open” and covered Syria, Ukraine and a host of other topics — but the differences between the two leaders were plain to see.

The new French president struck a firm, at times defiant tone. There was even a flash of anger when the subject of election hacking was brought up. He said Russian state-backed media outlets RT and Sputnik “did not behave like press outlets, but behaved like agents of influence and propaganda” which spread “serious falsehoods.” “I will never give in to that,” he said while standing next to Putin.

There were less awkward moments. Speaking to journalists at the Versailles palace, the two leaders said they had agreed to restart talks on Ukraine in the “coming days and weeks” under the so-called Normandy format — referring to four-way consultations between Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany that have been paused.

“No essential topic can be addressed without dialogue with Russia,” Macron said during their joint news conference in the Gallery of Battlesk, a huge gilded hall covered in paintings depicting scenes of war. “It was a frank exchange, extremely direct … We share disagreements, but we also see how to construct a common action.”

While Putin was granted a statesman’s welcome in grand surroundings, at times he looked uncomfortable during his brief appearance with Macron in front of journalists.

The Russian leader, who had not been to France since 2015, offered brief answers to just four questions from some 200 journalists in the room, dismissing one about election meddling as something that “does not exist.”

The only time he went into anything approaching detail was to offer a defense of his decision to meet far-right leader Marine Le Pen during France’s presidential campaign — a meeting he said had been initiated by the National Front leader.

Macron, just back from a G7 meeting in Sicily, wasn’t so shy about speaking out. On Syria, he said “any use of chemical weapons” would prompt an “armed response,” and added that France would “remain vigilant” on human rights issues including abuses of gay people in Chechnya and the treatment of non-governmental organizations in Russia.

Macron’s team wanted Putin to feel more welcome than challenged. They used an exhibit on Peter the Great’s 1717 visit to Versailles as an excuse to invite Putin to France, a move that was both deliberate and designed to speak to Putin’s notions of his own importance.

Macron aides insisted on the need to re-establish a working relationship after a bad patch in Franco-Russia ties under his predecessor François Hollande.

“This is a new departure in our relations,” Russia’s ambassador to Paris, Alexandre Orlov, told the RIA Novosti agency. “It seems that between Macron and Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], there are many common points, and they should be able to understand each other well.”

France, unlike America at the moment, has a president who is intelligent, informed, and concerned with more that fanning his own insatiable ego.  Then, of course, there is the issue that unlike Trump, Macron was not put in office thanks to Russian electoral subterfuge and sabotage. 

Chechnya’s Anti-Gay Pogrom

If Donald Trump signs the promised anti-LGBT "religious freedom" executive order today, America will have taken the first step to legalize the open abuse of LGBT Americans.  The move will electrify the 81% of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump, a twice divorced, serial adulterer and sexual predator as part of their quest to inflict a form of Christian sharia law on America.  From Trump's perspective, the move will be akin to Vladimir Putin's anti-homosexuality laws aimed at strengthening support from the similarly anti-gay Russian Orthodox Church which has long placed advancing its own political power ahead of democratic principles and/or the civil rights of others. The New York Times looks at the anti-gay pogrom underway in the Russian republic of Chechnya which is an outgrowth of legalized homophobia and religious extremism being championed by one of Putin's henchmen.  The ultimate motivation is political both for Putin and his lapdog, Ramzan Kadyrov.  Here are highlights:

At the beginning of April, reports surfaced that a crackdown on gay men was afoot in Chechnya, the small, turbulent republic on the southern edge of the Russian Federation. According to the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, more than 100 gay men were rounded up by the police and brutalized in secret prisons, and at least three of them were killed. Many remain in detention.

In fear and desperation, 75 people called in to the Russian LGBT Network’s Chechnya hotline. Of these, 52 said they had been victims of the recent violence, and 30 fled to Moscow where they received help from L.G.B.T. activists.

“Once they bring you there,” a survivor told me, referring to the secret prison in Chechnya where he’d been detained, “they immediately start the beatings and electrocutions, demanding information about who you were dating.”

This persecution of gays is symptomatic of the repressive regime that now runs Chechnya. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a quarter-century ago, that rugged outpost of the old empire has lived through separatist agitation, terrorism and two bloody wars. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, some 5,000 are still missing, and its towns were left in ruins.

Chechnya’s autocratic leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, has enjoyed near unconditional support from Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad, started out as a separatist Islamic leader, but at the beginning of Russia’s second military campaign against Chechen rebels, which began in 1999, he swapped sides to support Moscow.

Mr. Kadyrov ensured that his fighters were integrated into the local police force, largely preserving the command chains, and their violent skills were deployed in heavy-handed counterterrorism operations on behalf of the Kremlin.

Loyalty to Moscow was rewarded with lavish federal funds to raise Chechen towns from rubble and build shiny skyscrapers in the capital, Grozny.

Collective punishment is the hallmark of Mr. Kadyrov’s repression. Relatives of those who displease the authorities are threatened, beaten, held hostage, expelled from the republic or have their homes burned down. Such methods were first applied to suspected rebels but have spread to regime critics, religious dissenters, even drunken drivers. The same techniques have now been applied to the families of men thought to be gay, which are threatened with detention unless the suspects turn themselves in to the police.

In this climate of humiliation and immense fear, Chechens are fleeing the Russian Federation en masse. Yet the Kremlin turns a blind eye to such excesses in return for allegiance. Mr. Kadyrov calls himself a foot soldier for Mr. Putin.

The regime’s coercive methods are allied with punitive conservative values. Official Chechen ideology is a mix of traditionalism, Sufi Islam and Putinism. The authorities have banned alcohol, enforced dress codes and “moral behavior” for women, supported honor killings and blood feuds, and even closed orphanages as being alien to Chechen culture.

As news reports emerged about the arrests of gay men in the republic, Mr. Kadyrov met with Mr. Putin on April 19. Mr. Kadyrov is said to have complained to the Russian president about the “provocative articles” in the news media on issues he felt “embarrassed” to talk about. This show of coyness and piety no doubt played well with his supporters. Since the news broke, the Chechen leadership has fomented homophobia. . . . . in fact, it is part of their new ideology of a ‘pure nation.’ ”

By promoting nationalism and traditionalism, Mr. Kadyrov tries to prove to Chechens that their republic now has more autonomy than separatist leaders ever dreamed of; and this justifies his strong pro-Putin position. But his appeal to tradition is self-serving and spurious. Until now, Chechnya never had any record of organized violence against gays.

Mr. Kadyrov and his clique depend entirely on Mr. Putin. It is within the Russian president’s power to halt the violence against gay men, empty the illegal prisons and force an investigation into this crackdown. If Mr. Putin continues to give the Kremlin’s tacit approval to Mr. Kadyrov’s repressions, he is only storing up trouble for the Russian Federation.

The Chechen conflict has not been resolved but merely contained by brute force and a personal bond between the two leaders. In the long run, such an unstable situation makes a deadly new conflict in Chechnya almost inevitable.

Putin will not stop the mayhem since he needs the Russian Orthodox Church to help legitimize his dictatorship in Russia.   That Trump seemingly supports despots like Putin and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines ought to gravely concern decent and moral Americans.  As shown by their support of Trump, this latter categorization does not include evangelical Christians as a whole.

Why Russia’s Persecution Of Gays Matters

In the wake of the Pulse night club massacre last June, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der  Trumpenführer, lied and said that he would be an ally to LGBT Americans and would defend them from anti-gay Islamic extremists (in France, Marine Le Pen is making similar false claims).  That same month, of course, he sold the LGBT community out when he promised an anti-gay jihad to a gathering of Christofascist in New York City.   Then there is the treatment of gays by Trump's BFF, Vladimir Putin of Russia who has sponsored the equivalent to anti-gay pogroms and legislation that criminalizes sexual orientation as a means to gain support from the historically anti-gay Russian Orthodox Church.  Add to this poisonous mix, Trump's reversal of LGBT protections and was on transgender Americans and it becomes clear to all but the willingly blind, that Trump is menace to LGBT Americans.  All of it represents an assault of liberal democratic values.  It bodes ill for the future and not just for members of the LGBT community.  A piece in Huffington Post makes this argument.  Here are excerpts:

“The beatings begin as soon as you’re brought in. The electric shocks, being beaten with plastic pipes. They said that we were ‘dogs who have no right to life.’” This is a firsthand account of the torture being suffered by gay men in Chechnya, a conservative Muslim republic in Russia’s Caucasus region. Reports of Chechen authorities launching a violent crackdown on suspected gay men have circulated widely in recent weeks. Men as young as 19 are reportedly being abducted, and shoved into overcrowded cells in secret prisons where they are brutally tortured, and sometimes beaten to death.

In a virulently homophobic society such as Chechnya’s, where persecution of homosexuals is policy, gay men go to extraordinary lengths to keep their sexual orientation hidden. One dangerous consequence of being detained on suspicion of homosexuality in such homophobic societies is that your orientation is revealed to your family. In one case, a gay man in his early twenties was returned by Chechen officers to his family, only to be killed by his uncle.

Chechen authorities often set up traps for men they suspect of being gay, and abduct them without releasing any information on their whereabouts. Those detained are then tortured until they release names of gay friends and acquaintances.

But none of this appears to have moved Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who made no public remark on the matter during his visit to Moscow last week, ignoring a letter signed by 50 members of Congress to do so. In fact, there appears to be no indication that Tillerson even raised the abuses in Chechnya in his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite a message of condemnation from the State Department prior to Tillerson’s Russia trip.

Regardless of the disdain for LGBT rights openly displayed by the Trump administration, it is a grave error to allow Russia to get away with flagrant human rights abuses on its own soil. What is at stake here is the very notion of universal human rights, in the specific context of how citizens are treated within their national borders.

What Russia does to its own citizens resonates in the rest of the world. As one of the world’s major powers, Russia enjoys a privileged status in the international hierarchy of states – see, for example, its veto-wielding permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Allowing Russia to lower those standards provides a carte blanche for smaller countries to follow suit. If Russia can get away with torturing and killing LGBT persons, why can’t Uganda? Or Saudi Arabia? Or Iran? If Russia can get away with persecuting LGBT persons today, who will they persecute tomorrow?

As part of its effort to undermine American power (both hard and soft), Russia aims to present an alternative for the world’s nations. That alternative includes tolerance for kleptocracy, the assassination of political opponents, the intimidation of journalists, and the persecution of “unwanted” minorities. Russian authorities have continuously targeted the LGBT community for over a decade (and not only in Chechnya). Chechnya’s abuses are not an isolated blemish. They are a symptom of the neo-fascist Russia that Putin has systematically cultivated.

When Moscow allows one of its local cutthroats to go on a killing spree of vulnerable minorities, it is effectively advertising to the world that countries no longer need follow the liberal democratic model of the United States. . . . . We should think long and carefully about the risks of giving up support for such values. The price for abandoning them will be high.