For all the intrigue that had surrounded the mayoral elections in Sochi, acting Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov managed to avoid confronting his critics — or even acknowledging their existence — until Friday, when he was outfoxed by a grandmaster.
Pakhomov, the Kremlin-backed candidate, won a landslide victory in the race for the mayor’s post in Sochi, host city of the Olympic Winter Games in 2014, news reports said yesterday.
The Itar-Tass news agency, quoting election officials, said with about 80 percent of the votes counted, Pakhomov had won 77 percent of the vote. Opposition candidate Boris Nemtsov came second with 13.5 percent.
PHOTO: AFP
With only a few hours left in the campaign, Pakhomov attended a ceremony on Friday commemorating the Armenian genocide during World War I, a crucial gesture to the city’s large Armenian population. He delivered a short address that was respectful, if a bit wooden, and then stepped back to polite clapping, making room for a row of schoolgirls to recite verses that they had memorized.
But an animated gray-haired man had edged his way alongside the podium and then he stepped onto it, sending whispers rippling through the crowd. It was Garry Kasparov, the chess champion, who was in Sochi promoting the campaign of Pakhomov’s archrival, Boris Nemtsov.
Kasparov, who is Armenian, had been sitting quietly, signing autographs for nearly two hours. He was mobbed by admirers, men in their 40s and 50s who had loved him since childhood.
Kasparov’s remarks began innocently enough. He made an offhand mention of Nemtsov, so subtle that it was easy to miss. Then he began to sling arrows at Moscow, saying the Soviet Union had supported Turkey at the time of the massacres.
Two minutes and 33 seconds into Kasparov’s speech, a local official stepped forward and said his time was up. Kasparov turned to the crowd with an incredulous look.
“What’s happening?” he said loudly. “I cannot speak? Maybe it’s better to be silent?”
They shouted “No,” and erupted into applause. He went on, at leisure, to criticize the rise of racist violence in Russia, saying: “Genocide doesn’t just appear out of nowhere and, to put it mildly, the government is doing very little to stop this debauch of nationalism.”
He said Moscow had prevented generations of Armenians from connecting with their roots and then he went further.
“The authorities are the source of problems,” he said. “The KGB was behind the Armenian pogroms in Baku. The KGB set nations against each other. We should never give in to these provocations.”
He finished up: “I love you and we are one family.”
In the audience, Vartyan Mardirosyan, a lawyer, was chuckling delightedly at the spectacle. He said that the authorities in Sochi had cracked down so hard on dissent that it reminded him of Soviet times, when people were too afraid to express their political opinions outside their own kitchens.
The ceremony had been an “undeclared competition,” said Mardirosyan, with Kasparov both the underdog and undisputed winner.
“He didn’t just play chess,” Mardirosyan said. “That was a checkmate.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS