Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-11-Speech-3-075"
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"en.20061011.14.3-075"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Anna Politkovskaya, visited this House on two occasions, at the invitation of our group, to report to us on the situation in Chechnya and the state of play as regards freedom of speech in Russia.
I really do think it is high time that we named names. Someone said that the guilty parties should be condemned; well, you will be dining with one of them tonight – with President Putin himself. Let us make an end of this constant self-deception; Russia is at present subject to a system engaged in the day-by-day curtailment of freedom of opinion, with newspapers being bought up and then disappearing from the scene, and their owners thrown into jail. That is going on day in and day out.
Mr Schulz is right; we do indeed need Russia, but we have to be aware of the fact that the Russia with which we have to deal is a Russia that does not shrink back from taking people out of circulation, and I can predict how its story is going to turn out, for it has already been written down in a book that is about to come out, entitled ‘The Day of the Opritschnik’ by Vladimir Sorokin, and I urge you to read it. In it, the author describes, from the point of view of an officer in the security services, the things that go on in Russia today, and we will read it: we will read about how some small-time crook, some small-time drug pusher gets caught, gets sentenced to ‘life’, gets taken off to some prison on the other side of the Urals, and then they will say, ‘Look, we've caught one!’ As for those, though, at whose behest the crime was committed, those who gave the money – as we have seen with the forty other journalists and the newspapers – well, nobody will ask, because nobody will be interested, for – as we saw yesterday evening on German television when Chancellor Merkel met him – we need Vladimir Putin. And why do we need Vladimir Putin? We need him because we – by which I mean Germany, with its Grand Coalition of red and green that has entered into an impossible treaty with Russia and avoided the Europeanisation of energy policy – because we have established a link with Russia. Even so, names do need to be named, and then, perhaps, we might get somewhere.
Yes, of course there have to be negotiations with Russia, but I am firmly convinced that now – yet again – is the time for us to display the necessary attitude; yes, of course we can laugh when Schalke 04 is bought by Gazprom, when Chelsea is bought by Roman Abramovich; all these things we can find amusing, just as we think it is terrific that Mr Putin is with us everywhere and turns up to watch Federal League matches every Saturday; the only problem is that the price we are paying is the price that the people of Russia have paid and the price that the people of Chechnya have paid, namely the price that you pay for doing no more than cohabiting with one of the most dangerously oppressive systems, smiling sweetly at it and otherwise looking the other way. I find it simply shameful that we look the other way. We say how appalled we are, and then we come back down to earth and say, ‘Oh, Vladimir, do you think you have a problem? What makes you do these things? But it is good that you are paying your bills more promptly.’ So that is all right, then. That is our attitude.
All I can say, by way of summary, is that we will resolve the energy issues, the immigration issue, and all the other issues only if – and this is where Mr Watson has got it right – we, at some point, speak frankly about what the problems are and say honestly about what we will or will not do. We must, I think, negotiate with Putin, but that does not mean that we have to dine with him like mates together."@en1
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