Yesterday, Russian President's Special Representative for the Middle East and African countries, Deputy Foreign Minister Bogdanov received Israeli ambassador Heifetz in Moscow at his request and after a couple of hours at the request of the Israeli side, Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The topic of both conversations was the situation in the Middle East. "It seems that our Western colleagues haven’t yet to realized consequences of their military operations in the Middle East and Africa in recent years,’’ Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, said yesterday. They intended to remove the regimes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, bringing democracy to Iraq and Libya. Instead of this, there is chaos, military warehouses and military arsenals were plundered. All weapons, including MANPADS. Hundreds of tons of ammunition disappeared. Now there are fratricidal wars in these countries, the end is not expected in the near future."
In this connection, Russia intends to raise the issue during the forthcoming session of the UN General Assembly in respect of protection of Christians in the Middle East. According to Commissioner for Human Rights, democracy and the rule of law, Konstantin Dolgov, "the situation in the vast regions of the Middle East and North Africa remains extremely difficult. The level of conflict is high, violations of human rights are also extremely serious. This is a direct result of the extremely short-sighted, illiterate, ignorant policies by a series of Western countries, primarily the United States, aimed at removing undesirable regimes, policies to ‘export’ its own faulty patterns of democracy. All this was done without taking into account ethnic, religious, cultural features, sometimes even without the knowledge of regional and country realities. The disintegration of state structures in a series of countries, uncontrolled fragmentation of the Middle East's political and social space led to numerous tensions in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen. Certainly, the zone of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict still remains a problem. In recent years, it is also a direct consequence of the policy by the West due to which terrorist threat has sharply increased. Actions of terrorists are far beyond the Middle East and North Africa, but the objects of actions of terrorists and extremists. The objects of their deliberate policy of destruction became civilian population and world cultural heritage, which is alien to them. The fate of the Christian population in the region causes particular concerns."
According to Dolgov, the exile of Christians from places of permanent residence in the Middle East is a systemic problem, a challenge to safety and stability in the region: "The region is the cradle of three world religions, and depriving of one these elements would cause irreparable damage to the entire regional structure. It would bring negative consequences far beyond the region. We are against any phobias on religious grounds, harassment and persecution of all religions and faiths. Inciting of inter religious conflicts is the shortest way to destabilizations at the national and international levels."
