- Russian President Vladimir Putin called on the United
States to stop its war against Iraq and rejected US claims that President
Saddam Hussein's regime had posed a danger to other countries.
-
- Putin convened an emergency session of the Russian security
council as Moscow plotted its response to a war it had for months fought
hard to avert and that officials here said threatened to topple existing
global security mechanisms.
-
- "If we install the rule of force in place of international
security structures, no country in the world will feel secure," Putin
told a meeting attended by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and the foreign
and defense ministers.
-
- "That is why Russia insists on a quick end to military
operations," he said.
-
- Putin said "there was no need" for military
strikes on Iraq because UN-led weapons inspections in the country were
taking their course.
-
- "I would like to underline that military action
is taking place contrary to international public opinion and contrary to
the principles of international law," said Putin.
-
- The United States abandoned its efforts to have the UN
Security Council approve military action against Baghdad after apparently
failing to gather enough votes in the body.
-
- "This military action is unjustified," Putin
stressed. "There has been no answer to the main question: Are there
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and if so, which ones?"
-
- Some 200 demonstrators protested the war outside the
US embassy and security was stepped up across the country as the foreign
ministry called on all Russian media to pull out of Iraq.
-
- The three major Russian television stations have reporters
filing regular dispatches from Baghdad and Channel One cancelled all morning
television programs and devoted all its air time to the war.
-
- Meanwhile Russia's lower house of parliament agreed to
vote later Thursday on a resolution calling for the UN General Assembly
to hold an emergency session on Iraq and called for the war to stop.
-
- Russia had struck an alliance with fellow permanent UN
Security Council members France and China, along with Germany, in a hard-nosed
diplomatic drive to block the joint US-British strikes.
-
- Nationalist Russian lawmakers condemned the United States
for what they said was a flagrant violation of international law.
-
- "All the mechanisms of solving international disputes
are being ruined" by the attacks, Communist Party boss Gennady Zyuganov
told the RIA Novosti news agency.
-
- The United States "has completely ignored the will
of the people around the world and decisions reached by international organizations,"
Zyuganov said.
-
- Others called for calm and a diplomatic counterstrike
to the US-led war against Moscow's Soviet-era ally.
-
- "We must keep a cool head and ask ourselves to what
extent what is happening presents a threat to our national security, and
how we can influence the situation," said Vladimir Lukin, the deputy
speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.
-
- "I do not think there is any way in which we can
influence the situation through military means," he told Channel One
television.
-
- "What we can now do is improve our relations with
nations whose positions (on Iraq) are close to ours, in order to try and
limit the damage being done (by the United States) to the international
rules of the game," he said.
-
- But ordinary Russians seemed filled with foreboding at
news that the Iraq war has been launched.
-
- "This is the worst scenario. This war is a disgrace
for all mankind," Irina Loseva, a 62-year-old theology teacher, told
AFP.
-
- Many Russians drew uneasy parallels with the Chechen
conflict, where federal troops are still bogged down fighting a separatist
insurgency after intervening in 1999 after a three-year cease fire.
-
- Although Russia has a large Muslim population in the
North Caucasus region, the Kremlin said it did not expect the outbreak
of war in Iraq to inflame the situation in the volatile breakaway republic.
-
- More than 500,000 Chechens are due Sunday to hold a referendum
on a new constitution that Moscow says will pave the way to a peaceful
settlement to a long-running separatist insurgency.
-
-
-
- Copyright © 2002 AFP. All rights reserved. All information
displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected
by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence
you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any
way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the
prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.
|
