Vladimir Putin's much-discussed op-ed piece in The New York Times — A Plea for Caution on Syria from Russia – is certainly a piece of work that is now getting lots of scrutiny and intensive debate.
The story goes that he conceived of it himself and picked the Times as the place it should go — but of course his team of propaganda writers worked up the Russian original for his approval. Then it turned out that the text went to Ketchum, the Americna PR agency, and naturally there was a lot of word-smithing that went on in that shop.
I'm not sure if we can even speak of a "Russian original," as the PR company may have shaped this text, and then it got back-translated. But the article "The Syrian Alternative" — as it is more obliquely and less emotionally titled in Russian — is printed on the Kremlin's official page for Putin's speeches.
My daughter brought home from school a lesson in her Russian class that contained both of the speeches side by side, and the class instantly discovered one main difference:
In the Russian, Putin speaks of the Boston marathon tragedy — in the final version in the NYT, this is missing.
So here, in the English, the paragraphs go like this:
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict
between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are
few champions of democracy in Syria.
But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all
stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has
designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,
fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal
conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one
of the bloodiest in the world.Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of
militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our
deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience
acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved
on to Mali. This threatens us all.
In Russian, those paragraphs go like this — and I'm staying close to the Russian original to capture the emphasis:
We must undrestand that in Syria today it is not a question of a struggle for the establishment of democracy, but of an armed conflict between the government and the opposition in this multi-confessional country. There are not that many advocates of democracy there. But there are plenty of extremists of all stripes and Al Qaeda members on the side of the opposition. In fact, the US State Department itself declared as terrorists those fighting in the camp of the opposition organizations Al Nusra Front and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The internal confrontation which from the very beginning was fueled by deliveries of weapons from outside to the opposition members has spilled into one of the most bloody conflicts in the world. We cannot help but be concerned that in Syria not only mercenaries from Arab countries are fighting but hundreds of fighters from Western states and even Russia. Who can guarantee that these bandits, who have acquired experience will not wind up later in our countries, as happened in Mali after the Libyan events? This is a real threat to us all. The terrible tragedy during the Boston marathon once again confirms this.
Put at the end of that paragraph that way, that sentence makes it seem as if Putin views the Boston marathon explosion committed by the Tsarnaev Brothers, two Chechens from Dagestan, as a spillover of Al Qaeda terrorism — even the kind of terrorism whose practitioners go abroad for training, then "wind up" back in Russia (and in this case, go to Boston).
But that flies in the face of the narrative that increasingly liberal media and the FBI seem to be feeding us, that the Tsarnaevs are "homegrown terrorists" who have only loose ties to Russia's North Caucasus where they were originally raised. In this narratove, these two violent young emigres are not terrorists created in a backlash to Kremlin brutality, or manipulated by the Kremlin in its domestic war on terrorism, but are rather disgruntled by "America's wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan from what they read on the Internet, so that they felt were somehow unfair or launched against Muslims specifically, and that leads them to then commit terrorism to bring justice.
Of course, the very active question remains as to why Putin's secret police didn't tell us more about these two brothers, and about specifically the fact that Tamerlan was in touch with jihadists who were assassinated by Russian special forcess in the summer he hung around in Makhachkala. THAT is the issue I've always had with this tragedy — not that the FBI somehow missed its cue. The Russians surely had to know more about this and could have told us more, including on what passport Tamerlan got around with and where and whom he met with, since surveillance is intense in this republic. But it didn't.
And now Putin — or Ketchum — or New York Times editors — and I think probably Putin's people — took this line out. Oh, surely for space reasons…
That's the main difference between the texts, although I see more evidence of different nuances and emphases which I will come back and report later.
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