The Unanswered Question of the Budraitskis-Vernik
Affair
Burtsev.ru, the investigative branch of Russian
weekly Left.ru, has been conducting its own inquiry into the
Budraitskis-Vernik affair and preparing a report on it. While the lessons
of this case are primarily political, there remains one crucial, yet
unanswered question of a 'technical' nature: What passports did these
people use when visiting their Western sponsors? Fake or real?
What is remarkable about the accounts and the statements of all
the foreign groups affected by the stint is their complete silence on this
one but potentially the most serious of all questions, at least, for the
Russian Left. Yet, according to these accounts it appears that there was a
substantial human traffic involved in their relations with the
perpetrators of the fraud. Is it possible that in the conditions of the
post-9-11 stiffened border controls the citizens of Western countries who
invited these con artists from non-Westerns countries did not have basic
information about their travel documents? Perhaps, they did not. Did they
care to know? Probably, not.
Neither would we if it were not for
the fact that the Ukrainian and, especially, the Russian CWIs have been
playing leading roles in their countries' "anti-globalization movement".
Suffices to say that Ilya Budraitskis figures as one of the organizers of
the "Second Forum on the Future of the Russian Left," coming this November
and hosted by the CPRF, Kagarlitsky's Institute of Globalization Problems,
and ATTAC-Moscow, this last controlled by Budraitskis. The question of
travel documents is then relevant to the question of WHO controls this
movement of the broad left. If it turns out that the fraudsters not only
misrepresented themselves to their sponsors but also traveled abroad under
fake identities this case will have to be re-classified and may have much
more serious political implications. Then the mother of all questions will
be WHO provided them with fake ID's good enough to get them through
Western passport controls.
We are going to address these questions
publicly to the Russian and Ukrainian participants of this fraud and
invite them to clear themselves of at least this kind of suspicions. But
we also invite the political groups victimized by this gang, as well as
all honest leftists, to help us to answer this unanswered
question.
Andrey Petrov, Vadim Stolz, Marina
Stolz
burtsev@left.ru http://www.left.ru/inter/2003/oct/www.left.ru/burtsev
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