Tributes have been pouring in for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author, former Soviet dissident and Nobel Literature prize laureate who died on Sunday aged 89.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, described the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” as a man of unique destiny and said: ”He was one of the first people who spoke up about the inhumanity of Stalin’s regime with a full voice, and about the people who lived through this but were not broken.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called him ”one of Russia’s greatest consciences of the 20th century” and said: ”His refusal to compromise, his ideals and his long and eventful life make Alexander Solzhenitsyn a romantic figure, an heir of Dostoyevsky’s.”  He said Solzhenitsyn “belongs to the pantheon of world literature.” 

London’s Daily Telegraph said Solzhenitsyn ”was not only a great man, but a passionately committed writer - he believed it was his moral duty, in the face of systematic totalitarian obfuscation, to record Russia’s 20th-century experience for posterity.” 

The Washington Post described him as ”a symbol of freedom and the durability of the human spirit” whose subject matter was the struggle between good and evil in the Russian soul.

Yury Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, last year said Solzhenitsyn was “the author of works without which the history of the 20th century is unthinkable”.  

Solzhenitsyn was widely read in the West and in Russia even though he did not court fame. He had admirers both for his literary work and for the contribution he made as a dissident.  

How good a writer do you think Alexander Solzhenitsyn was? How important do you think his role was as a dissident and as the nation’s moral conscience?     

Radovan Karadzic has finally appeared in public without his disguise for the first time in more than a decade. The former Bosnian Serb leader looked gaunt after 11 years on the run as he stood before a judge at a United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Some media commentators said he was a shadow of his former self but there were still signs of defiance from the man who defied the West for so long during the 1992-95 Bosnia war. Some said his performance brought back memories of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who died in detention in 2006 before his trial at The Hague ended.

      Karadzic says it is unimaginable that he could get a fair trial because the world’s media have already branded him a war criminal. 

     Here’s what some of the world’s media are saying about him and his trial.

     The Paris-based International Herald Tribune said Karadzic ”seemed a shadow of the flamboyant ideologue who incited Bosnian Serbs to follow him into an ethnic war that turned into genocide.” It quoted specialists who say that prosecuting the case against Karadzic will be simpler than the case against Milosevic.    

    The Washington Post said Karadzic was purse-lipped and defiant. “In remarks cut short by the judge, the former Bosnian Serb leader suggested he would attempt to expose alleged double-dealing by the West, particularly the United States, in the wake of the 1992-95 Bosnian war. That could presage the kind of political grandstanding that former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who also represented himself, used to sidetrack his prosecution before he died in his cell at the tribunal’s detention center in 2006.”   

     The Financial Times in London said that unlike Milosevic, Karadzic had not sought to question the court’s legitimacy but tried to score procedural points. The Independent newspaper in London said justice must be quick but ”the most difficult dilemma is how to give a fair trial to a man who wants to be tried unfairly.”  

    The Sydney Morning Herald and the Gulf Daily News highlighted Karadzic’s allegations a deal was offered by the United States. The Chinese news agency Xinhua highlighted the fact that Karadzic was gravely concerned about his life because he said the United States might be seeking to “liquidate” him.  

   An article in the Gulf Daily News also noted: “Mothers of those killed in the Srebrenica massacre sat around a television set in their small Sarajevo office and charged that Karadzic was given rights that their husbands and sons were denied.” 

    The Arab News contained an article portraying Karadzic as a “showman who always sought the limelight”.  

        What did you think of Karadzic’s appearance and what do you expect of his trial? Will it be fair? 

      The extradition of former Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic on Wednesday to
face genocide charges in The Hague sends
a signal that the international community
means business in bringing fugitives to
justice. 
    Reinforcing the same message, 
Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor
of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia, called again
for the arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime
commander Ratko Mladic. Like Karadzic,
Mladic is accused of  genocide over the
43-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995
massacre of some 8,000 Muslims at
Srebrenica.

    This ought to ring alarm bells for Sudan’s president, Omar
Hassan al-Bashir, who is also accused of war crimes. But world
leaders are also sending other signals which may ease any
concerns he has that he may soon be arrested.
    Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC)
prosecutor, has charged Bashir with masterminding a campaign of
genocide in Darfur, killing 35,000 people and persecuting 2.5
million. But the U.N. Security Council is divided over his calls
for an arrest warrant against Bashir. Some countries hope the
ICC will halt any genocide indictment in the interests of peace,
fearing any attempt to arrest him could cause more bloodshed.
    Dumisani Kumalo, South Africa’s ambassador to the United
Nations, made this clear on Tuesday as the U.N Security Council
prepared to consider a South African and Libyan proposal that it
call on the ICC’s judges to refrain from taking any action.
    “We are not saying ’stop doing it’ to the prosecutor of the
ICC,” the ambassador said. 
    “We are saying, give peace a chance, can you just give it a
year, let’s see UNAMID deployed,” Kumalo said, referring to the
U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur.
    UNAMID’s mandate expires on Thursday and Britain has drafted
a resolution on extending the mandate until July 31, 2009. But
South Africa and Libya want to insert a paragraph calling for a
suspension of any ICC moves. Such moves suggest Bashir, who
denies the charges against him, is unlikely to be arrested any
time soon. 

   If arrested, Bashir would follow prominent figures such as Karadzic,
late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, former Liberian President
Charles Taylor and Congolese former rebel warlord and vice-president
Jean-Pierre Bemba into the dock.
    Taylor is accused by the U.N. -backed Special Court for Sierra
Leone of orchestrating rebel atrocities during Sierra Leone’s
1991-2002 conflict. Milosevic died in detention in 2006 before a
verdict was reached in his trial on genocide charges. Bemba is
accused by the ICC of leading Congolese rebels in a campaign
of rape and torture in the Central African Republic in 2002 and
2003. 
    The chances of Karadzic or Milosevic being arrested and
brought to trial initially seemed slim, but political changes in
Serbia — namely the appointment of a Western-leaning government
keen to join the European Union — helped secure his arrest.
    Bashir’s arrest is more complicated as he is a sitting head
of state. It also appears to depend heavily on political will
and political change — but are there any signs of this? Should 
Karadzic’s arrest and detention give Bashir any real cause for
concern?

  The capture of Radovan Karadzic
after 11 years on the run is likely
to improve Serbia’s chances of joining
the European Union and enhance the
new government’s credentials with EU
leaders. It also gives ordinary Serbs hope
of a better life, 17 years after the start of
the wars that preceded the break-up of
Yugoslavia.
    Karadzic wanted Serb areas of Bosnia to be linked to a greater
Serbia at a time when Slobodan Milosevic was fanning nationalism in
Serbia. When I first met him in November 1990, he was already
warning of civil war because of what he saw as a conspiracy against
Serbs in multi-ethnic Bosnia.
    He still has some die-hard supporters in Serbia but
otherwise there is little sympathy for the man facing genocide
charges over the deaths of about 100,000 people in the siege of
Sarajevo and 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of
Srebrenica during the war.
    The U.S.-brokered Dayton peace agreement ended the war
without a clear winner, dividing the country into two
ethnic-based halves — the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb
Republic, which have co-existed in an uneasy alliance since.
  

  Karadzic’s arrest sets the stage for a major trial at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
created 15 years ago to prosecute war crimes committed during
the 1992-95 Bosnia war. Milosevic, his former ally, went on
trial at the ICTY on genocide charges but died in 2003 before
the end of the trial.
    Avril McDonald, an associate lecturer at Groningen
University and a specialist on the tribunal’s proceedings, says
the Office of the Prosecutor will need to deliver a speedy and
efficient trial as the tribunal faces a deadline to wrap up
proceedings within the next couple of years. “The trial
doesn’t need to last more than a year,” McDonald said.
“They will try to get a conviction quickly.” 
    During Milosevic’s four-year trial, prosecutors called
nearly 300 witnesses and the annual budget at times ran to more
than $270 million. Milosevic chose to defend himself and used
the tribunal as a platform to advance his political views and
disrupt proceedings.
    Critics fear Karadzic could do the same. Costs will be high.
    But the arrest and trial offers many individuals a chance of
some closure on a bloody chapter in their personal lives. It
also represents an opportunity for Serbia to finally move on
after a violent period of recent history.
    “They can now begin to put the past behind them and move
forward towards Europe,” said Paddy Ashdown, who for almost four
years was peace overseer in Bosnia.

Russia’s angry response to an accord between Washington and Prague on building part of a U.S. missile defence shield in the Czech Republic is reminiscent of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Although Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says Moscow still wants talks on the missile shield, his Foreign Ministry has threatened a “military-technical” response if the shield is deployed.

That phrase could have come straight out of the Soviet lexicon and seems more at home in the second half of the last century than now. Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer called it psychological pressure to try to encourage opposition to the missile system among Europeans, and described it as “the same sort that was used in the 1980s by the Soviet Union when the United States deployed cruise missiles in Europe.”

We are, of course, a long way from the tensions of the Cold War. But the dispute is reminiscent of the war of words between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1980s over another missile defence system — the Strategic Defence Initiative proposed by Ronald Reagan. His dream of a partly space-based missile system, otherwise known as Star Wars after George Lucas’ 1977 film, never became a reality but the row over it plagued Soviet-U.S. relations for years.

The disagreement over the missile defence system that George W. Bush now wants to be partly based in Europe risks having a similar impact on U.S.-Russian relations. Perhaps fittingly, it has been referred to as Son of Star Wars.

I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s when the dispute over Star Wars was at its height. The disagreements were clear. Reagan wanted to deploy a multi-billion-dollar land- and space-based shield to shoot down incoming missiles. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said the programme would disrupt the nuclear balance and fuel an arms race in space, and expressed  hope that Europe would not become “a testing-ground for the Pentagon’s doctrines of a limited nuclear war”. 

The disagreement led to the collapse of a 1986 superpower summit in Iceland.

When I was back in Moscow in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were at loggerheads over U.S. plans for a Star Wars-style missile defence umbrella, even though Clinton had pulled the plug on Star Wars in 1993. Moscow said plans to develop the new missile defence system would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement Moscow saw as a cornerstone of global security.

Similar issues hung over Vladimir Putin’s presidency and now threaten to strike a severe blow to hopes of an improvement in U.S.-Russian ties at the very start of Medvedev’s presidency.

Washington says it needs a missile defence system based partly in Europe to provide protection against any attack on  European or U.S. targets by rogue states such as Iran, which tested new long- and medium-range missiles on Wednesday. Russia says the missiles could threaten its own defences and might become a bigger threat over time it if the system expanded.

In the 1980s, Moscow was worried about a project that would have based missiles outside the former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. It is now concerned about a system that would be even closer to home. A radar tracker is to be placed on Czech soil and, if a deal is reached with Warsaw, 10 interceptor missiles could be installed in Poland. Both Poland and what was then Czechoslovakia were members of the Warsaw Pact.

If Poland does not reach an agreement with the United States, Lithuania has been suggested an alternative site for the interceptors. That would be an even less welcome prospect for Moscow because the Baltic state was part of the Soviet Union. Little surprise, then, that Medvedev took a firm line on the issue in comments he made at the group of Eight summit in Japan.

But Moscow could risk shooting itself in the foot by reverting to rhetoric that harks back to the Cold War. Michal Kaminski, an aide to Polish President Lech Kaczynski said on Wednesday Russia’s reaction was unacceptable. He said it showed Poland should “strengthen our alliance with the United States because beyond our eastern border there are politicians who use a language we thought had vanished many years ago, the language of might and imperial ambitions.”