A President Who Uses the War on Terror As A Fig Leaf for Crushing Freedom At Home

Vladimir Putin:

LAST SUNDAY, while returning home from Pakistan aboard Air Force One, President Bush received a telephone call from his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The two men discussed several issues that threaten to disrupt U.S.-Russian solidarity in the war on terror--foremost, Russia's diplomatic support for Iran in the dispute over its nuclear program at the IAEA, and its decision to welcome Hamas, which recently won control of the Palestinian parliament, to Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is set to continue this dialogue in Washington this week in a series of direct talks with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Unfortunately, absent from the agenda will be any discussion of the domestic factors that lie at the root of Russia's recent foreign policy maneuvers: namely, Putin's growing accommodation of terror at the expense of Russian democracy and the safety of its own citizens.

A week before the Hamas delegation's visit to the Russian capital, the Russian authorities closed two regional newspapers--Gorodskie Vesti in Volgograd and Nash Region in Vologda--for printing the Danish Mohammad cartoons. The local prosecutor's office consequently charged Anna Smirnova, the editor of the Nash Region, with "inciting ethnic tensions"--an offense punishable by up to five years in prison under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code. The Danish Refugee Council, a non-governmental charity that provides food, health care, education, and reconstruction in Chechnya, was likewise instructed by the authorities to suspend its work. The stated reason: "concerns of reprisals" from the predominantly Muslim population in the region.