Putin warns opponents against protests

RUSSIA: Russian president Vladimir Putin insisted yesterday that he was committed to fostering democracy in the world's largest country, but warned opponents that he would not tolerate the kind of street protests that have ousted his allies in other ex-Soviet states.

Mr Putin used the annual state of the nation address to reiterate his support for independent media and courts, multiparty politics and transparent business, areas that US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice queried on a visit to Moscow last week.

"The main political-ideological task is the development of Russia as a free, democratic country," he told politicians, officials and Orthodox Church clergy in a 47-minute Kremlin speech broadcast live on state television.

"Without liberty and democracy there can be no order, no stability and no sustainable economic policies."

He also told the notorious tax police to stop "terrorising" business, just two days before oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky is due to hear the verdict of his trial for tax evasion and fraud, a case that has sent a sharp chill through Russia's business climate.

Mr Putin tried to calm Russia's jittery "oligarchs" and encourage investment by vowing to protect them from corrupt bureaucrats and offering to levy only the standard 13 per cent tax on capital returned to Russia from overseas. He also proposed that prosecutors only investigate dubious privatisations conducted in the last three years.

But the former KGB spy balanced attempts to woo critics at home and abroad with a strong caution to any opponents who may consider emulating the Georgians, Ukrainians and Kyrgyz whose huge demonstrations helped topple their autocratic leaders.

Mr Putin, who succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000, said a "special feature" of Russia's path to democracy was that it would not be followed at the expense of law and order or stability.

"Russia will decide for itself the pace, terms and conditions of moving towards democracy," he said, sending a clear signal to US and EU officials who backed the protests in Georgia and Ukraine and last week urged Belorussians to oppose President Alexander Lukashenko, a Russian ally whom Dr Rice called Europe's last dictator.

"Any unlawful methods of struggle for ethnic, religious and other interests contradict the principles of democracy," Mr Putin said. "The state will react with legal - but tough - means."

The speech was a response to Dr Rice's concerns that he has too much personal power, and her support for Belarus's beleaguered opposition activists at a Nato gathering in Lithuania last week, the first such meeting on ex-Soviet soil.

To Mr Putin, her call for regime change in Belarus must have sounded like the first chord of a now familiar and melancholy tune.

While concentrating the Kremlin's control over Russian politics, media and business, Mr Putin has endured a humiliating 18 months internationally, watching chunks of what his compatriots call the "near abroad" slide away towards the West.

The kind of street protests that Mr Putin cautioned against yesterday carried pro-western leaders to power in Georgia and Ukraine, and both are intent on guiding their countries out of Russia's grip and into Nato and the EU.

Just last month, Mr Putin lost another trusted ally in Askar Akayev, long-time president of Kyrgyzstan, who fled to Russia after angry mobs stormed parliament in protest at corruption and his own election-rigging antics.

His replacement is not likely to steer a course away from Russia, but the violent nature of his overthrow sparked fears of wider unrest in Central Asia, a volatile region where autocrats have lined their pockets while throttling opposition groups, on the pretext of crushing the extremism that their hard-line policies have actually fuelled.

"Belarus is really the last true dictatorship in the centre of Europe and it is time for change to come to Belarus," Dr Rice said.

The next day she revealed Washington's timeframe for change.

"The international community ought to be prepared and ready to help Belarus to carry out free and fair elections in 2006," she said, echoing America's rallying cry ahead of the momentous elections in Georgia and Ukraine.

The EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, concurred: "There is no doubt that the time has come for change, I have said that many, many, many years ago."

Russian liberals, weary of Mr Putin's political hegemony and media control, have already mooted moving to Kiev to oppose him from Ukraine.

Belarus could be an even better base, and its "defection" would be another heavy blow to the prestige of a man who, like most of his old KGB colleagues, was appalled by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the swift unravelling of its strictly ordered society, an event he called yesterday "the geopolitical catastrophe of the century."