By Vestnik Kavkaza
The head of the State Duma committee on international affairs Alexei Pushkov devoted his next meeting with journalists to the visit of the USA State Secretary John Kerry to Moscow and his talks with Sergey Lavrov. Moscow considers the results of the talks as a success.
“The first issue which was discussed at the meeting between Lavrov and Kerry is the problem of adoption. It is the first time this issue has been considered at this level. Kerry pledged to Lavrov to do this personally and to ensure that there was transparency and access to information for the Russian side on adoption,” Pushkov stated. “A group of U.S. senators, about 12 people led by Mary Landrieu, the Senator from the State of Louisiana, who is professionally engaged in the protection of children's rights, was willing to address these issues… We are now much more aware of what is happening in the field of child adoption and domestic violence in general in the US. In 2011, according to American NGOs, 1570 children died from abuse or lack of attention from parents. According to some other organizations, there were about 2000 children. For example, 80% of that number are children aged under 4 years. For Russia the information that is present shows that the figures are comparable.
“The fact that the U.S. Senate approved Chuck Hegel as Minister of Defense inspires some hope. I met with Hegel in 2005 in Washington, he made the impression of a very reasonable person to me. This, of course, is a pragmatic, rather a realistic politician in the foreign affairs of the United States, in contrast to, say, people like John McCain, like Romney, like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Hillary Clinton, who sought an ideological content of American foreign policy and the promotion of these so- called values. I think that the people that have now come to the State Department and the Department of Defense are much more pragmatic, and, like Obama, they understand that America is not all-powerful, that it must work together with other powers, it cannot prop up an infinite number of wars, and there is a limit to American power.”
Pushkov hopes that the new foreign policy and military-political team in the U.S. will be more realistic to look at some things - in particular, at the Syrian issue: “Former officials in the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA have insisted that the United States began to arm the Syrian rebels. Obama decided not to do this. I think the decision is correct, because it all starts with weapons, then the country is involved in a war it does not want to get involved. The Syrian issue is very complicated. If we are able to negotiate the possibility of starting negotiations, then it will be very good… Supporting the current situation is hopeless for everyone - for Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and the United States, and for all those who thought that the opposition would topple Assad soon."
According to Pushkov the following events happened in Syria: “Most of the people who watched the actions of the opposition suddenly came to the conclusion that they had nothing to do with it. The fact that Syria now recalls Assad's reign as a time of heaven on earth is absolutely clear to me. Suddenly, people, even criticizing Assad and his government, saw that these people were massacring entire villages, simply because those were Shiite villages. Therefore, Christians, Shiites and Alawites, and Druze, and Kurds - the Kurds also distanced themselves from this opposition, though at first they thought to join it, because they saw that it did not go in right direction, not in the direction of democracy, not towards a multiethnic Syria, in the direction of multi-confessional Syria.
And New York Times has shamefully admitted that the opposition did not manage to win the hearts and minds of the Syrians, who were undecided and were prepared in principle to support it. Therefore, the potential of public support for the opposition in Syria is limited to the support that they now have. Fewer and fewer people gets in its way, even the skeptical or negatively related to the current government. Because the actions of the opposition were totally not the ones that would be expected by th population that wanted to hope for the best. This is a very serious moment. In Syria, there was a small turn amongst those who watched the developments and thought about what to decide. Many now see that those armed groups that are, in particular, those that did not recognize the national coalition, because they did not want to be bound by the national coalition, they have their own problems, their owners, I think, their centers of support. These people solve their problems, not problems of the Syrian people, united Syria and so on. There is a completely different agenda, and this is very clear. now in Syria. Now Assad would be in the siege at the presidential palace, and had to be around the raging crowd. Somehow I do not see it. I do not have that feeling. Where is the raging crowd? There is no crowd. On the contrary, there is a great fear of this "democratic force," as it was represented to us by the Western media, which wants it to take power. So I think that the most important result of 2012 is as follows: a significant part of the armed opposition strongly discredited itself by their actions, their attacks on civilians, on Christian monasteries, with their statements such as "Christians - to Lebanon, Shiites - to the cemetery" . Are they going to come to power with such slogans? That's why I think that now we have a situation, which makes us more realistically assess the situation, in particular, the forces that are fighting for power in Syria.”
