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... GLOBAL NEWS ... NEWS SMART CARD PASSPORT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN MOSCOW by Bill Doares CONTROL Shortly after his tanks set Russia's Parliament House ablaze, President Boris Yeltsin called up Bill Clinton. According to a White House spokesperson, Yeltsin ‘reassured’ the US presi- dent that "an obstacle to reform and democracy has been removed". Most of Russia's elected legislators were in prison. Newspapers that disagreed with Yeltsin were banned. So were most of the country’s political parties. Hundreds of protesters had been shot; thousands were arrested. And Yeltsin was preparing to ban the Constitutional Court. Clinton was pleased. Russia, he declared at a press conference, is “on the path to democra- Travellers entering some ports of the USA are being asked to offer a hand, par- don the pun, to test an automatic system for identifying passengers. The system, known as Inspass, aims to speed the trav- ellers through Immigration controls by a teem lep is Sree Ot hale The corporate US news media joined with Clinton in trying to justify Yeltsin's vicious mea- 7 S : sures. With little variation in language, their headlines and sound bites hailed this reign of ter- Inspass provides each traveller with a | ror as a ‘defence of democracy’, Time magazine called those opposed to Yeltsin "a drunken smart card, on which is recorded a mathe- | mob of hardliners". The New York Times one-upped them with "a noxious crowd of thugs”. matical description of the shape of their | J turns out on closer look that the ‘armed thugs’ were tens of thousands of workers whose hand. On arrival in the USA, the traveller | tives are being shattered by Yeltsin's ‘reforms’. Tuns the card through the machine and | Russia's elected Parliament wouldn't agree to Yeltsin's plans to rapidly turn state-owned places the hand into a scanner, which |industry over to Western investors, So Yeltsin ‘abolished’ the Parliament. He cut off| checks that the hand fits the description on | Parliament House's heat, water and electricity and surrounded it with troops. When thousands the card. If hand and card match, the |of workers, many of them elderly retirees, protested Yeltsin's actions, they were brutally machine issues an entry pass and opens a |assaulted by the real armed thugs—the OMON riot police. gate, allowing the traveller to enter the | Writing in the 10 October European, Moscow-based reporter Vitali Vitaliev said, "For some country. reason the clashes of Yeltsin's OMON with the still peaceful anti-Yeltsin protesters in Moscow A test in 1991 by researchers at the US |on 30 September [three days before the events at the White House] went largely unreported in Department of Energy's Sandia National |the West. The scuffles were at the Bartikadnaya and Pushkinskaya metro stations, quite a dis- Laboratories, showed that the hand geome- |tance from Parliament House.” try system made fewer mistakes than iden- | Describing live reports on Moscow radio, Vitaliev told how "OMON daredevils were pick- tification systems using voiceprints or reti- |ing up the weakest and oldest in the crowd and beating them up. "What are they doing?’ the nal patterns. inet ayo bare de a just cectrihet pil baa on _ escalator : — and broken her leg!’ The chairman of the Cheryomus! strict:council, who was pass- (Source: New Scientist, 16 October 1993) ing, was pushed to the ground and kicked unconscious by OMON men." On 3 October, after days of such outrages,:tens of thousands of workers; armed only with THI a sticks, responded to a call by Labor Russia and other communist organisations and marched on the Parliament building. They put Yeltsin's goons to flight. They then marched to the central Something strange must be going on in |TV Station, which had barred anti-Yeltsin views, and demanded to be allowed on the air. space. The latest incident involves the | Yeltsin's forces opened fire on the marchers, killing dozens. Said oil worker Dolgikh, "When Landsat 6 remote-sensing satellite, which |we were across the street, the shooting started. I thought they were shooting in the air, but it has disappeared without trace since its | Was at the people. In the first volley I was hit. The bullet penetrated my intestines,” launch on 12 October. The massacre at the TV tower began a reign of terror. Early on 4 October, Yeltsin's tanks Landsat 6, which cost US$220 million, |0Pened fire on Parliament House. They kept firing for hours, although the legislators ordered was launched on a refurbished Titan 2 |theit meagerly armed defenders not to shoot back. The 5 October Moscow Tribune, an feet : ish-1 - in daily, Yeltsin's troops were shooting “in all direc- nuclear missile from Vandenberg Air Force |Easlish To va? ho cat a that Base in California. Officials believe the |0ns’ and that a number of civilians were hit, a rocket functioned correctly, but the satellite Russia's largest newspaper, the pro-Yeltsin daily /zvestia, admitted in a 6 October headline, PA yil "Troops Near the White House Shot Everything That Moved”. At least 190 people were killed, never made contact with ground control. . . 5 . ” . ._ [almost all of them anti-Yeltsin protesters. Some 1,500 arrested anti-Yeltsin protesters "under- Incidentally, the manufacturer, Martin | went ‘filtration’ on the field of Malaya Sports Arena,” The European reported. ‘The majority of Marietta Astro Space, also built the Mars | Moscow's City Council were arrested. Observer and a civilian weather satellite, | During the next few days the Yeltsin regime banned Pravda, Sovietskaya Rossiya, Molnya both of which have gone mute—or gone! | and other opposition newspapers. It banned Russia's largest political party, the 600,000-mem- (Source: New Scientist, 16 October 1993) —_ \ber Communist Party of the Russian Federation, along with the Russian Communist Workers Party, Labor Russia, the Union of Communist Parties of the Soviet Union, the National MILLEN NIAL MESS? Salvation Front and parliamentary leader Aleksandr Rutskoi's Party of Free Russia. Your computers wil go buggy in the year | A witchhunt was launched in the search for opposition leaders, especially Victor Anpilov of 2000. Most machines use only the last two | Labor Russia and the Russian Communist Workers Party, Anpilov was arrested near Tula on 7 digits of a year in their calculations (e.g., |October. Charges against the parliamentary and working-class leaders are pending, and will 93 for 1993) so the 00 will screw up a lot | probably be serious. of mathematics, including interest and pen- Clinton, Yeltsin and the bankers and businessmen behind them may hope that by crushing sion calculations. Computer World esti- |Parliament they have cleared the way for the wholesale takeover of Russia by US corporations. mates this will cost $50 billion to fix, with |But there is a much bigger obstacle in their way: Russia's multinational working class, And it each Fortune 50 company taking a hit of up | is just beginning to fight. to $100 million. Wawee: Workers World Service, 55 West 17 St, New York, NY 10011; written 2:17 pm, 18 (Source: Eortune, 4 October 1993) October 1993, by ww@blythe.org in peg:alt.conspiracy) SMART CARD PASSPORT CONTROL THIRD SPACECRAFT DISAPPEARS NEXUS*9 MILLENNIAL MESS? DECEMBER 1993 - JANUARY 1994