Four days after Moscow sent tanks into Georgia, leaders of the five European states on Russia’s borders joined Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in a show of support.
At a rally in Tbilisi, capital of the besieged country being ravaged by Russian troops, Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski declared, “Our neighbour thinks it can fight us. We are telling it no.”
He was referring to Russia that wants a return to “old times,” and he spoke in the company of leaders from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine.
President Victor Yushchenko of Ukraine told the assembled Georgians, “Here, today, in the hardest times for Georgia we proclaim that Georgia has the right for freedom, the right for independence.” He survived an attempted murder through poisoning in 2004, which most Ukrainians believe was Moscow’s way of getting rid of a pro-West leader.
Each one of these European leaders standing in solidarity with the Georgian leader have shared the vivid experience of their people tormented by communist rulers of the former Soviet Union, and communist quislings in their countries doing Moscow’s bidding.
Each knows well the history of the region, and of how once again Moscow was using the pretext of support for secessionists in South Ossetia to wreck Georgia, just as Moscow armed the Abkhazian secessionists soon after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to maintain its hold on the Black Sea coast.
These new European democracies on Russia’s borders understand the meaning of freedom and independence, and how fragile both are when standing alone next to a state where the demise of Soviet communism has been replaced with the older form of authoritarianism practised by big-Russia chauvinists.
It was these European democracies that Donald Rumsfeld, as the U.S. defence secretary, referred to in January 2003 as “New Europe” in contrast to “Old Europe” of Germany and France. It brought outrage in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and wherever the ungrateful gather to berate the United States, which thrice saved “Old Europe” in the last century from its own barbarians.
“New Europe” has sought protection and distance from Moscow through membership in NATO – plainly speaking, alliance with the United States – and by entrance into the European Union.
Saakashvili’s objective for Georgia is the same, but it has been viewed by Vladimir Putin and his oligarchy of former KGB officials as insolently criminal. This is the reason – not the pretext of supporting South Ossetian secessionists – that brought Moscow to slice Georgia nearly in half.
“Old Europe’s” response to Moscow’s latest outrage was predictable. It is as Moscow expects from old media hands equivocating, and then painting the Georgian leader as the provocateur of his country’s rape.
Noise has been made by the same blame-America-first-crowd in Europe and its echo chamber around the world suggesting Moscow’s patience was overly stretched by Saakashvili’s preening as pro-West, and Russia acted within its rights in moving into Georgia.
There is probably not much the West can do in checking Moscow’s rapacity on its borders besides rushing humanitarian assistance, since Russia remains the world’s biggest nuclear-armed rogue state sitting on top of huge energy resources.
But the least people living in freedom can do is not insult victims of rogue powers by blaming them for their abuse.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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