West in mortal danger from Islam, says Putin
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels and Julius Strauss in Moscow
(Filed: 12/11/2002)

Islamic radicals are pursuing the systematic annihilation of non-Muslims, President Vladimir Putin claimed yesterday.

The Russian leader said at a European Union summit in Brussels that western civilisation faced a mortal threat from Muslim terrorists, and claimed that they had plans to create a "worldwide caliphate".
 
President Vladimir Putin

His words overshadowed the main achievement of the summit, which was to end years of wrangling over Moscow's isolated enclave in Kaliningrad.

The EU and Russia reached a compromise deal that will prevent Russian citizens from being cut off in the Baltic port as the EU's borders move east in 2004.

Mr Putin said the world no longer faced isolated acts of terrorism but a "concerted effort and programme" by a global network bent on slaughter, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

He said the West should face up to the reality that Chechen terrorists were religious extremists in league with al-Qa'eda, rather than a separatist movement seeking a breakaway republic.
If the West failed to deal with the Chechen terrorist threat, he said, there would be repeats of the Moscow theatre siege and the Bali bombing "all over the world".

Mr Putin secured a joint EU-Russian action plan to fight terrorism at the mini-summit, but he was firmly warned that Europe would not give Russia carte blanche in its fight against terrorism, particularly after reports that fragmentation bombs were being used widely against civilians in Chechnya.
Privately, EU diplomats said Mr Putin was playing the al-Qa'eda card for all it was worth, seeing it as a useful way to create a sense of common purpose with the West and heighten the strategic value of Russia.

The resolution of the Kaliningrad issue, which is highly emotive in Moscow, will have satisfied Mr Putin. The Russian press had warned of a "blue curtain" encircling a million Russians in EU territory.
But the Russian president said yesterday he was now "satisfied" that fellow-citizens living in the drab industrial hub, once the great German city of Konigsberg but now a smuggling centre, would be able to travel freely across Lithuanian territory.

Under the deal, residents of Kaliningrad will be given cheap multiple visas. This will allow Lithuania and Poland to comply with the Schengen agreement, which obliges them to eliminate their western border posts once they join the EU but at the same time erect more rigid barriers to the east, including tougher visa restrictions on Russians.

The agreement clears away one of the last obstacles to the EU's "Big Bang" enlargement of 10 mostly ex-communist states.