Annals of Religion

Sacred and Profane

How not to negotiate with believers.

by Malcolm Gladwell The New Yorker

At Waco, the F.B.I. treated a community’s religious claims as a mere distraction.

When Clive Doyle was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-fifties, he and his mother met an itinerant preacher outside their church, in Melbourne, Australia. He was a big, gruff Scotsman named Daniel Smith. The Doyles were devout Seventh-Day Adventists. But Smith was the follower of a self-proclaimed prophet named Victor Houteff, who became an Adventist just after the First World War and parted ways with the Church a decade later. The Doyles listened to Smith’s account of the Houteff teachings until the small hours of the morning and were impressed. "We were taught that if someone comes with a message based on the Bible, instead of trying to fight it, instead of trying to put it down or trying to prove it wrong, we should study the Bible to perceive whether the message is true," Doyle writes in his autobiography. "Study to see if it’s so."

The Houteff group held that those in the mainstream Seventh-Day Adventist Church had lost their sense of urgency regarding the Second Coming and would soon face the judgment of God. To the Doyles, however, this presented a problem: where did it leave Seventh-Day Adventists who hadn’t heard the Houteff message? The Doyles knew, for example, that no one had taken the Houteff teachings to Tasmania, off Australia’s south coast. So, in 1958, Doyle quit his job as an apprentice in a cabinet shop, and he and his mother took the overnight boat to Tasmania, where they spent a month trudging around the back roads of the island, going from one Seventh-Day Adventist church to the next. "My mother had borrowed the biggest suitcase she could find," he writes. "We had packed it full of books because we thought: They’re going to want to know what we believe, so we’ll give Bible studies . . . and we’ll use the Bible to prove our points. I was just a teenager lugging this huge suitcase all over the island. It weighed a ton."

The Doyles were neither wealthy nor well educated. Clive Doyle’s mother worked in a garment factory. His father had left before he was born. Doyle once came home from Sunday school and solemnly greeted his mother with: "You’ve shaken hands with a servant of the Lord." He writes, "I was two or three years behind everybody. I was never in the ‘in’ crowd in school." He and his mother were religiously committed, and indifferent to what others thought of them. Matters of religious doctrine, in their view, required action and commitment. In Tasmania, Doyle was looking for people who wanted to "actually get down to the nitty-gritty" and study the Scriptures with him. That search would end up consuming Doyle’s life, leading him clear across the world to a religious retreat founded by Houteff, just outside Waco, Texas. The group that Doyle joined was called the Branch Davidians. Their retreat was called Mount Carmel, and the most famous of its leaders was a young man named David Koresh.

"A Journey to Waco," Doyle’s memoir, is an account of what it means to be a religious radical—to worship on the fringes of contemporary Christianity. Doyle takes the story from his childhood in Australia through the extraordinary events of 1993, when some eighty armed agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the Mount Carmel community, in an effort to serve a search and arrest warrant on Koresh, on suspicion of violating federal firearms rules. "I want you all to go back to your rooms and stay calm," Doyle recalls Koresh saying, as federal agents descended on Mount Carmel. Doyle goes on, "I could hear David’s steps going down the hall toward the front door. . . . Then all of a sudden I heard David say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! There are women and children in here!’ Then all hell broke loose—just a barrage of shots from outside coming in. It sounded like a bloodbath."

In the resulting gun battle, four A.T.F. agents and six Davidians were killed. The F.B.I. was called in. The Davidian property was surrounded. An army of trained negotiators were flown to the scene, and for the next fifty-one days the two sides talked day and night—arguing, lecturing, bargaining—with the highlights of their conversations repeated at press conferences and broadcasts around the world. The Waco standoff was one of the most public conversations in the history of American law enforcement, and the question Doyle poses in his memoir, with genuine puzzlement, is how a religious community could go to such lengths to explain itself to such little effect.

"If people read this account, they will at least gain a different perspective on who David Koresh was, where he was coming from, who we were, and why we believe the way we do," he begins. "Most people think ‘cult’ about us and think we are people who were brainwashed and deceived. They think our church members don’t know what they’re doing or where they’re going. Hopefully, my story can open their eyes."

The Branch Davidians belonged to the religious tradition that sees Christ’s return to earth and the establishment of a divine Kingdom as imminent. They were millennialists. Millennial movements believe that within the pages of the Bible are specific clues about when and how the Second Coming will arrive. They also rely on what the Biblical scholar James Tabor calls "inspired interpreters," prophets equipped with the divine insight to interpret those clues and prepare their followers to be among God’s chosen. Mormonism began, in the nineteenth century, as a millennial movement; its "inspired interpreter" was Joseph Smith. Jehovah’s Witnesses began as a millennial movement, as did the Pentecostal Church.

Of all mainstream contemporary American churches, though, the Seventh-Day Adventists have the strongest millennial tradition. The Church—which has around eighteen million adherents worldwide—was formed by followers of the early-nineteenth-century evangelist William Miller, who prophesied that the world would end in 1843. During the next century, the Adventist community produced one "inspired interpreter" after another. Ellen G. White laid down the foundations of the Church in the eighteen-sixties. Victor Houteff broke away to start the Davidian movement at Mount Carmel, and after he died, in 1955, the movement splintered again, creating the Branch Davidians, headed by Ben and then Lois Roden. Doyle came to Mount Carmel during the Roden era and stayed with the group as it underwent its final iteration, under the leadership of David Koresh.

David Koresh was born in Houston in 1959, to a fifteen-year-old single mother. He arrived at Mount Carmel at the age of twenty-two, pulling up to the retreat in a yellow Buick—another in the long line of disenchanted Seventh-Day Adventists in search of a purer church. Koresh was not slick or charismatic, in the conventional sense. He was thin, with long wavy dark hair and a gentle manner. He was good with engines and guns, and he played in a rock band. His formal education was limited. His vocabulary was full of words of his own invention. He wore dirty jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, and, after study sessions, would gather some of the other young men and head into Waco, as another survivor’s memoir, by David Thibodeau and Leon Whiteson put it, to "kick back, swallow some suds, play some tunes."

When it came to the Bible, however, he was without peer. Doyle had heard Koresh’s predecessor, Lois Roden, speak and had "wrestled" with her message. But, the first few times he heard Koresh speak, he was convinced that "this was of God." Koresh, he writes, "made scripture come alive. He showed that all of the prophets in the Bible were writing more for our day than for their own time." Koresh would speak of obscure Old Testament kings like Ahaz and Hezekiah as if they were household names. He didn’t preach. He threw out theories and ideas—inviting argument and discussion.

To the Branch Davidians, who walked and talked and dreamed about the Bible, this was intoxicating. "We thought of Mt. Carmel as a training ground and haven," Doyle writes. By the early nineteen-nineties, the community consisted of about a hundred and fifty people—many of them sleeping in spartan dormitories. Doyle continues, "A lot of them came with their heads in the clouds or with cameras, thinking they were tourists, if it was their first time. David straightened them out pretty quick." Koresh told them, "You should come here to learn, that’s why you came. If you want to do those other things, you might as well leave now and go have your fun. . . . But if you are here to study, you need to get your priorities straight." There were Bible studies at night, and smaller group studies during the day. As another Branch Davidian put it, "Lots of times, maybe he would say, ‘I am tired of giving Bible studies to you guys. I wish you would learn Bible studies.’ So everybody would hang around. And he’d say, ‘What is it that you want? More Bible study?’ And everyone would run and get their Bibles and come down. We might sit there for fifteen, nineteen hours, ten hours, six hours. It would depend, it was never a bore."

Koresh’s focus, like that of many millennialists, was the Book of Revelation—in particular, the difficult passages concerning the Seven Seals. There God is described as holding a scroll, locked by seven seals, on which is written prophecies about the end of time. "Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?" the passage asks. The answer given is "the Lamb." But who was the Lamb? The question was a crucial one for the Branch Davidians, because they believed that whoever unlocked the seals and revealed the secrets written on those scrolls would set in motion the end of time. In "Armageddon in Waco," a book of essays about the Davidian conflict, James Tabor writes:

In Isaiah 48:14 we read, "The LORD has loved him: he will do his pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be on the Chaldeans." Koresh would ask, who is the "him," here, who is the "arm of Yahweh," who is to destroy Babylon? The text goes on to say, "I, even I, have spoken, yea, I have called him: I have brought him, and he shall make his way prosperous . . . and now the Lord GOD, and his Spirit hath sent me." Psalm 80:17 states "Let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand, upon the son of man whom thou madest strong for thyself." Who is this man of God’s right hand?, Koresh would ask. He would painstakingly take his followers through these and other related sections of Scripture, repeatedly asserting that this mysterious figure could not have been Jesus of Nazareth, who fulfilled none of these prophecies.

Koresh’s answer to the puzzle was simple: he was the Lamb. That’s why he was so good at making sense of the Seven Seals. This exalted station was how he justified his most controversial practice—taking numerous "spiritual wives" from among the daughters and wives of his followers. At least a couple of these "wives" were reportedly as young as twelve and thirteen, in a state where the legal age of marriage with parental consent was fourteen. Psalm 45 speaks of a great king, anointed by God, who marries many princesses and creates a mighty dynasty that will one day command the world, and Koresh argued that his "spiritual wives" had been taken in fulfillment of that prophecy.

Koresh’s status as "the Lamb" also explains the nature of the Branch Davidians’ relationship to him. The F.B.I., to justify its decision to bring about a sudden and violent end to the siege, believed that the Branch Davidians were dangerously in the thrall of Koresh; it feared a catastrophic act like the mass suicide, in 1978, in Guyana, of the cult leader Jim Jones and his followers in the People’s Temple. But the Davidians weren’t like the People’s Temple. Doyle’s memoir emerged from an oral-history project conducted by the religious-studies scholar Catherine Wessinger, who maintains that the People’s Temple was an example of the "fragile" subset of millennial groups: defensive and unstable, and willing to initiate great violence in response to an outside threat.

The Branch Davidians, however, were far from fragile. They engaged freely and happily with the world around them. Doyle went to California periodically to work for an audiotape-dubbing company and make money. Other Davidians started small businesses around Waco. Wayne Martin, a prominent member of the community, was a Harvard Law School graduate with a legal practice in town.

They did not worship Koresh, the way you would a deity. He was just the latest of many teachers, in a religious tradition that dated back half a century. "I’m just a messenger of the truth," Koresh would say. "I’m like a Dixie cup that God will crumple up and throw away when he’s done with it." Or, as his deputy, Steve Schneider, put it, "All of these places talk about a man in the last days that’s a sinner. He can do one thing, open up the words of the book, open up the Seven Seals. Can’t do any miracles, doesn’t raise the dead, heal the sick, isn’t a psychic but . . . if people have questions about life and death, eternal life, no matter what the question is, he will show it in context from the book."

There is a telling moment during the siege when Schneider is talking to an F.B.I. negotiator about an undercover A.T.F. agent who used the name Robert Gonzalez. The A.T.F. believed that the Branch Davidians—who ran a small business selling weapons at gun shows—had converted a batch of firearms from semiautomatic to automatic without the proper permits. Gonzalez’s job was to infiltrate the Davidian community and look for evidence. (He found none, a fact that—along with the A.T.F.’s bizarre decision to serve a warrant on Koresh by force, rather than arresting him on those numerous occasions when he ventured into town—loomed large in the many Waco postmortems.) Here is Schneider and a negotiator talking about what happened after the Davidians realized that Gonzalez was not who he said he was:

F.B.I.: Why didn’t you have a confrontation [with Gonzalez] and say look, l just . . . don’t appreciate you being here?
SCHNEIDER: Well . . . because here’s a possible guy, here’s a soul maybe, here’s someone like myself—
F.B.I.: Yeah. But he wasn’t there to have his soul saved, right?
SCHNEIDER: Well, who knows, though? You never can tell.
F.B.I.: Wait a minute. I know . . . I worked under cover years and years ago and I wasn’t there to have somebody save my soul.

The F.B.I. agent expected that the Davidians, like a fragile cult, would turn paranoid and defensive in the presence of a threat. He didn’t grasp that he was dealing with a very different kind of group—the sort whose idea of a good evening’s fun was a six-hour Bible study wrestling with a tricky passage of Revelation. It was a crucial misunderstanding, and would feed directly into the tragedy that was to come. The agent continued: Did the Branch Davidians realize that Gonzalez, as a government investigator trained to uncover criminal evidence, was an unlikely prospect for conversion?

SCHNEIDER: I realize that. . . . [But], still, we love people so much, you give them the opportunity. . . . Even if it’s one out of a million, even if it’s that, whatever it might be, he’s still a person that was made, created by an authority above himself and we loved the guy. I mean . . . we spent enough time with him where we really do appreciate the man’s character and personality.

At one point during the siege, Koresh made a home video. He is sitting down, wearing a white tank top. He was wounded in the raid and looks worse for wear—thin and unkempt. Next to him is a young woman. On both their laps are small children, and Koresh announces that he wants to introduce the world to his family: "These children that I have are for a reason, and unless we really have the ear and the eyes to open ourselves up and understand the prophecies in a lot of the Seven Seals the explanation would seem almost foolish."

A young boy with long blond hair comes into the frame. Koresh introduces him as Cyrus. He waves at the camera. Then a young girl climbs onto Koresh’s lap, followed by a boy named Bobby and a girl named Holly—and then, one after another, come a parade of toddlers and babies, accompanied by two other young women, one of whom looks no older than sixteen.

"This is my family, and no one is going to come in on top of my family and start pushing my family around. It is not going to happen," Koresh declares. He puts on a pair of aviator sunglasses. "You come pointing guns in the direction of my wives and my kids, damn it. I’m going to meet you at the door every time."

Doyle says very little about Koresh’s sexual practices in "A Journey to Waco," even though his own daughter, Shari, became one of Koresh’s spiritual wives at the age of fourteen. In other memoirs of Davidian survivors, the issue is treated with similar reticence. But Koresh’s behavior seems to have been controversial even within Mount Carmel. It was discussed at length during Bible study. Some people left the Church over it. In a separate interview, Doyle recalled that, at first, "I wondered, I asked, is this God or is this horny old David?" But, in the end, he and the other Branch Davidians who stayed accepted the logic of it: if Koresh was indeed the Lamb, then it followed that he was entitled to the privileges promised to the Lamb in prophecy. It seems not to have mattered that this conclusion was at odds with virtually every social convention of modern life. No one became a Branch Davidian if he required the comfort of religious orthodoxy. One of Koresh’s predecessors, George Roden, had multiple wives as well, arguing his case in an essay on the Mosaic law of polygamy. Roden’s mother, Lois, had advanced an innovative argument that the Holy Spirit was feminine. From the movement’s beginnings, the point of being a Davidian was to be different.

The second, more serious problem with the way the F.B.I. viewed the Branch Davidians was the fact that the agents could not accept that beliefs such as these—as eccentric as they were—were matters of principle for those within Mount Carmel. During the siege, two of the leaders of the F.B.I. team referred to Koresh’s theology as "Bible-babble" and called him a "self-centered liar," "coward," "phony messiah," "child molester," "con-man," "cheap thug who interprets the Bible through the barrel of a gun," "delusional," "egotistical," and "fanatic." For another essay, published in "Armageddon in Waco," the religious scholar Nancy Ammerman interviewed many of the F.B.I. hostage negotiators involved, and she says that nearly all of them dismissed the religious beliefs of the Davidians: "For these men, David Koresh was a sociopath, and his followers were hostages. Religion was a convenient cover for Koresh’s desire to control his followers and monopolize all the rewards for himself."

In the government’s eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat. The bureau trained spotlights on the property and set up giant speakers that blasted noise day and night—the sound of "rabbits being killed, warped-up music, Nancy Sinatra singing ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking,’ Tibetan monks chanting, Christmas carols, telephones ringing, reveille." Doyle writes, "I got to where I was only getting about an hour or two of sleep every twenty-four hours."

Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the F.B.I. assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history: ten Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, six hundred and sixty-eight agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, fifteen U.S. Army personnel, thirteen members of the Texas National Guard, thirty-one Texas Rangers, a hundred and thirty-one officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, seventeen from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and eighteen Waco police, for a total of eight hundred and ninety-nine people. Their task, as they saw it, was to peel away the pretense—Koresh’s posturing, his lies, his grandiosity—and compel him to take specific steps toward a resolution.

That is standard negotiation practice, which is based on the idea that, through sufficient patience and reason, a deranged husband or a cornered bank robber can be moved from emotionality to rationality. Negotiation is an exercise in pragmatism—in bargaining over a series of concrete objectives: If you give up one of your weapons, I will bring you water. When this approach failed, the F.B.I. threw up its hands. In bureau parlance, the situation at Mount Carmel became "non-negotiable." What more could the bureau have done? "I guess we could have fenced it off and called it a federal prison," Bob Ricks, one of the lead F.B.I. agents during the siege, said last year in an interview

But, as the conflict-studies scholar Jayne Docherty argues, the F.B.I.’s approach was doomed from the outset. In "Learning Lessons from Waco"—one of the very best of the Mount Carmel retrospectives—Docherty points out that the techniques that work on bank robbers don’t work on committed believers. There was no pragmatism hidden below a layer of posturing, lies, and grandiosity. Docherty uses Max Weber’s typology to describe the Davidians. They were "value-rational"—that is to say, their rationality was organized around values, not goals. A value-rational person would accept his fourteen-year-old daughter’s polygamous marriage, if he was convinced that it was in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Because the F.B.I. could not take the faith of the Branch Davidians seriously, it had no meaningful way to communicate with them:

F.B.I.: What I’m saying is that if you could make an agreement with your people that they’re walking out of there and you could—
KORESH: I am not going to tell them what to do. I never have and never will. I show them out of a book what God teaches. Then it’s for them to decide.
F.B.I.: David, these kids need their parents, and we want everybody to be safe. How about the women? Can—will you let them come out of there? . . .
KORESH: Yeah, but the thing of it is that if they wanted to, they, they could.
F.B.I.: Well, I, I think they feel like they can’t because you don’t want them to.
KORESH: No, no, no, no. Let’s stop that now.

To the F.B.I. agent, Mount Carmel was a hostage situation, and the purpose of the "negotiation" was to get the man behind the barricade to release some of his captives. But Koresh saw his followers as his students. They were there of their own free will, to learn the prophecies of Revelation. How could he release people whom he was not holding in the first place?

On another occasion, the Davidians asked the F.B.I. to bring milk for their children, and the bureau insisted that some of the children be released before the supplies were handed over:

F.B.I.: We got the milk for you . . . we’ll bring the milk down. We’ll drop it off. . . . In return, we want four of your kids to come up, and we’re going to give you the milk for the kids.

This is how negotiations are supposed to work: tit for tat. But what proposal could have been more offensive and perplexing to a Branch Davidian? The bureau wanted to separate children from their parents and extract them from the community to which they belonged in exchange for milk. "That doesn’t make any sense," a Davidian named Kathy S. tells the negotiator. But the negotiator thinks she means that the terms of the deal aren’t good enough:

F.B.I.: Listen. I’ll, I’ll get the milk to you for two kids.

Again, Kathy S. reacts angrily, and the negotiator gives up. He thinks the problem is that he’s saddled with someone who just isn’t reasonable:

F.B.I.: Kathy, perhaps we’re wasting each other’s time. All right? Put somebody else on.
K.S.: I mean, all you want, all you want to do is bargain?
F.B.I.: Kathy!
K.S.: Are you going to bargain with human lives?
F.B.I.: Kathy! I’ve told you what we’ll do and, and if that’s not agreeable to you, perhaps we’re wasting one another’s time. All right? . . . Why don’t you put somebody else on, please?
K.S.: Look . . . there are babies here that need the milk. Are you that inhumane that you can’t just send us the milk for not sending out kids, or sending out David, or sending out women?
F.B.I.: Our concern, our concern is for those children first and foremost and the rest of you also. All right? The children—
K.S.: So, your concern is that these babies get fed the milk they need?
F.B.I.: Kathy.
K.S.: It doesn’t sound like you are concerned.

Even at the beginning of the siege, in the first call that Koresh made after the A.T.F. attack, the fundamental misunderstanding between those inside and those outside Mount Carmel was plain. Koresh telephoned Larry Lynch, in the local sheriff’s office, and—while the battle outside raged—insisted on talking about the Seven Seals:

KORESH: In the prophecies—
LYNCH: All right.
KORESH: it says—
LYNCH: Let me, can I interrupt you for a minute?
KORESH: Sure.
LYNCH: All right, we can talk theology. But right now—

What Lynch means is that right now there are dead and wounded bodies scattered across the Mount Carmel property and a gunfight is going on between federal agents and Koresh’s followers. For those who don’t take the Bible seriously, talking about Scripture when there is a battle going on seems like an evasion. For those who do, however, it makes perfect sense:

KORESH: No, this is life. This is life and death!
LYNCH: Okay.
KORESH: Theology—
LYNCH: That’s what I’m talking about.
KORESH: is life and death.

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy. But the Cornell historian R. Laurence Moore, in his classic book "Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans," points out that the moral hysteria over the Mormons was misplaced. The Mormons were quintessential Americans. "Like the Puritans before them, the Mormons linked disciplined labor with religious duty," Moore writes. "Mormon culture promoted all the virtues usually associated with the formation of middle-class consciousness—thrift, the denial of immediate gratification, and strict control over one’s passions." Polygamy, the practice that so excited popular passions, was of little importance to the Church: "First, the vast majority of nineteenth century Mormons did not practice polygamy, and many of them found it distasteful, at least as a way of conducting their own lives. Second, those who did practice plural marriage scarcely exhibited the lascivious behavior made familiar in anti-Mormon literature. Plural wives were commonly the widowed or unmarried sisters of the original wife."

So why were nineteenth-century Americans so upset with the Mormons? Moore’s answer is that Americans thought the Mormons were different from them because the Mormons themselves "said they were different and because their claims, frequently advanced in the most obnoxious way possible, prompted others to agree and to treat them as such." In order to give his followers a sense of identity and resilience, Joseph Smith "required them to maintain certain fictions of cultural apartness." Moore describes this as a very American pattern. Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness. Koresh faced the same problem, and he, too, made his claims, at least in the eyes of the outside world, "in the most obnoxious way possible."

The risks of such a strategy are obvious. Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community. Whenever these liberal feats are accomplished, we congratulate ourselves. But it is not exactly a major moral accomplishment for Waspy golfers to accept Jews who have decided that they, too, wish to play golf. It is a much harder form of tolerance to accept an outsider group that chooses to maximize its differences from the broader culture. And the lesson of Clive Doyle’s memoir—and the battle of Mount Carmel—is that Americans aren’t very good at respecting the freedom of others to be so obnoxiously different. Many Mormons, incidentally, would say the same thing. When the Mormons settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, local public opinion turned against them. Joseph Smith was charged with perjury and adultery, then arrested for inciting a riot. While he was in custody awaiting trial, in 1844, an armed mob stormed the prison and shot him dead.

Not long after the Waco siege began, James Tabor, the Biblical scholar, heard David Koresh on CNN talking about the Seven Seals. Tabor is an expert on Biblical apocalypticism and recognized the Branch Davidians for what they were—a community immersed in the world of the Old Testament prophets. He contacted a fellow religious scholar, Phillip Arnold, and together they went to the F.B.I. "It became clear to me that neither the officials in charge nor the media who were sensationally reporting the sexual escapades of David Koresh had a clue about the biblical world which this group inhabited," Tabor writes, in an essay about his role in the Mount Carmel conflict. "I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts."

Arnold and Tabor began long discussions with Livingstone Fagan, a Branch Davidian who had been sent out of Mount Carmel early in the siege to act as a spokesman. Fagan was a Jamaican-born Brit, and one of the community’s scholars—a man known for greeting others with the very English "Hello, Livingstone Fagan here. Shall we study?" Fagan helped Tabor and Arnold understand that Mount Carmel’s adherents thought they were living through the "fifth seal"—a late stage in the end of time, during which believers are asked to suffer through a round of bloodshed, to "wait a little season," and then to suffer a second round.

This was why the Davidians wouldn’t leave. They had been through the first round of violence, with the initial A.T.F. raid. Now they were doing as they believed the Bible compelled them to do—waiting. "We were fascinated by the way in which the literal words of this text dominated the entire situation," Tabor writes. But they also saw the peril ahead—the promised second round of bloodshed. "Might they not provoke a violent end to things simply because they felt it was the predetermined will of God, moving things along to the sixth seal, which was the great Judgment Day of God?" Tabor asks.

Koresh needed another way to make sense of the prophecies in the Book of Revelation, so that a violent end was not preordained. Tabor and Arnold made a tape—a long, technical discussion of an alternative reading of Revelation—aired it on the radio, and sent it to Koresh. Koresh listened and was persuaded. He had been called a liar, a child molester, a con man, and a phony messiah. He had been invited to treat his children like bargaining chips and his followers like hostages. But now someone was taking his beliefs seriously. "I am presently being permitted to document in structured form the decoded messages of the seven seals," he wrote back. "Upon the completion of this task, I will be freed of my waiting period. . . . As soon as I can see that people like Jim Tabor and Phil Arnold have a copy, I will come out and then you can do your thing with this beast."

Inside Mount Carmel, Doyle writes, there was rejoicing. Soon they would all come out together, and the ordeal would be over. The F.B.I., however, remained skeptical. "Then what’s next?" one of the agents in charge allegedly said. "He’s going to write his memoirs?" The negotiators quizzed Koresh, again and again:

F.B.I.: Now listen. Let’s get back to the point in hand. This ah—you know—the writing of the seals. Ok. You’ve got to do that in there, and its gonna take you x amount of time. But—just tell me this, David—are you saying that when you finish that manuscript—
KORESH: Then I’m not bound any longer.
F.B.I.: No. But see, that doesn’t answer the question.
KORESH: Then I’ll be out—yes—definitely.
F.B.I.: I know you’ll be out. But that could mean a lot of things, David.
KORESH: I’ll be in custody in the jailhouse.

The negotiator doesn’t believe him. The conversation goes on—and on:

F.B.I.: I know—I know that some point in time that’s true. But I’m getting from you—I’m asking you, "When that is finished, are you telling me that you are coming out the next day, or two hours after you send that out or what?"

That conversation took place on Friday, April 16th. Doyle says that he thinks Koresh would have finished the manuscript within two weeks. The F.B.I. waited three days. By the morning of April 19th, the Feds had had enough. The F.B.I.’s tanks rumbled up to the Mount Carmel buildings, and punched holes in the walls with their mechanical arms. Some four hundred cannisters of CS gas—which can be flammable under certain conditions—were shot into enclosed spaces lit by candles and Coleman lanterns. Walls were rammed, sending huge chunks of concrete crashing down on those huddled inside. Doyle says that he crouched on the chapel floor, between the pews, trying to escape the tear gas. Someone yelled that a fire had started. He and a group of nine or ten people had been clustered in a passage at the back of the chapel when, suddenly, he says, everything turned black. He was hit by a wave of unbearable heat, and fell to the floor. He prayed to God for a miracle. He saw a hole in the wall, and crawled toward it.

Outside, the F.B.I. agents manning the loudspeaker system were chanting: "David, you have had your fifteen minutes of fame. [Koresh] is finished. He is no longer the Messiah." Doyle continues, "I looked at myself. My jacket was melting all over me and smoking. The skin was rolling off my hands. It was not blistering, it was just rolling off. I turned around and looked at the hole, and it was a big mass of flames. The thought that went through my head was: No one is coming out of there now."

In the fire, Koresh and seventy-three others perished, including twenty-five children. Doyle writes:

I came out the little driveway on the side of the building and got onto the main driveway that ran along the front of the building. As I turned the corner . . . one of the agents outside a tank started screaming at me to come over to him. My left ankle was all blistered, the skin was rolling off my hands, and my face was burned down the right side of my neck where the mask had been. I guess I took the mask off after I got out. It was kind of melting onto my face. . . . He was cussing me out, telling me if I made a false move he was going to blow my so-and-so head off. But he said: you’re gonna remember this day for the rest of your life. I thought: at least that is a true statement. ♦






PHOTOGRAPH: Ron Heflin/AP

They Kept a Lower East Side Lot Vacant for 47 Years

Classic case of corruption greed and bigotry.

By RUSS BUETTNER NY TIMES

Nearly four decades ago, a new assemblyman named Sheldon Silver and

his young protégé escorted Edward I. Koch, then a mayoral candidate, through the Orthodox Jewish enclave on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where the two had both grown up.

It was the first day of Rosh Hashana, 1977, and Mr. Koch and his opponent, Mario M. Cuomo, had agreed not to campaign, even as they were locked in a frantic runoff for the Democratic nomination.

But the air of religious observance provided cover for Mr. Koch to walk along Grand Street with his two new friends, shaking the hands of influential rabbis and throwing bread into the East River, part of the ritual casting off of sins.

Six days later, Mr. Koch carried the Jewish vote and won the primary. His team long remained grateful for the guided tour by Mr. Silver and the protégé, William E. Rapfogel, then a recent college graduate who ran his own Jewish newspaper.

"They helped us big time in the runoff," recalled John LoCicero, Mr. Koch’s chief political adviser. "It revved up the Jewish vote for Koch against Cuomo."

The long-ago walk was the first public display of an alliance that became central to the lives and careers of both Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Silver. They worked together across the decades while climbing parallel ladders: Mr. Silver to Assembly speaker and Mr. Rapfogel to leadership of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a large, publicly financed charity.

But their long affiliation came to an abrupt end last year when Mr. Rapfogel, 59, was arrested and charged in a scheme that had allegedly looted more than $7 million in kickbacks from Met Council’s insurance broker over the years. He is due back in court in April.

The arrest cast new light on a relationship about which little was known beyond the obvious: Mr. Silver has funneled millions of public dollars to the organization that Mr. Rapfogel led, and he employs Mr. Rapfogel’s wife, Judy, as his chief of staff.

A primary focus of their alliance had been a struggle to preserve the Jewish identity of the neighborhood they delivered for Mr. Koch all those years ago.

Their battleground was some 20 barren acres along the southern side of Delancey Street, where, in 1967, the city leveled blocks of rundown apartment buildings. More than 1,800 low-income families, largely Puerto Rican, were sent packing and promised a chance to return to new apartments someday. Now, nearly 50 years later, the land is still a fallow stretch of weed- and rat-ridden parking lots, though in the waning days of the Bloomberg administration, the city announced that the land would finally be developed into a complex called Essex Crossing, to include retail markets, restaurants, office and cultural space. And new apartments.

Mr. Silver has long characterized his role in plans for the site, known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, or Spura, as limited to insisting that all groups have a voice in the outcome, not promoting a specific plan or developer. "The speaker’s position was always that any development at Spura had to be achieved by consensus among all of the diverse communities that make up the Lower East Side," his spokesman, Michael Whyland, said in a recent written statement.

But an extensive review of the archives of four mayors and more than two dozen interviews show Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel diligently working behind the scenes to promote specific plans and favored developers. Mr. Rapfogel made clear that the goal was to maintain the area’s Jewish identity, seemingly at the expense of other communities.

Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel steadfastly opposed any mention of affordable housing, which would have altered the demographics of the neighborhood and put Mr. Silver’s political base in question. And Mr. Silver appears to have occasionally misrepresented the desires of his Chinese and Hispanic constituents in conversations with city officials to quash housing plans for the site.

"They’re the reason that this site has been empty for 50 years," said Edward Delgado, known as Tito, who was a teenager when the city cleared the blocks and his family was evicted. He has been advocating for affordable homes at the site in the decades since.

Mr. Rapfogel, who led the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, was arrested last year and accused of looting the agency. Credit Anthony Lanzilote for The New York Times

Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel were born in the neighborhood to Jewish parents. Mr. Silver, 70, grew up in a tenement on Henry Street. His father owned a neighborhood hardware business. Mr. Rapfogel’s father was a clerk for city government.

When they were boys, the blocks along Grand Street teemed with Jewish peddlers and dozens of small synagogues. Unions were building 12 apartment buildings in the neighborhood to house 4,500 families, mostly garment workers. Known as Cooperative Village, the apartments would anchor a new Jewish middle class.

It was the quaint urban hamlet that served as the home of Bubbie in the movie "Crossing Delancey." But it was also an island apart.

Cooperative Village was surrounded by more than 14,000 units of public housing to the north, east and south. Those buildings were full of less prosperous African-Americans and more recent Hispanic arrivals. Chinatown, to the south and west, was expanding, as Jewish numbers declined.

From the perspective of Grand Street’s Jewish leaders, any development with affordable housing that replaced the cleared tenements would tilt the balance of the entire neighborhood.

Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel fought that possibility, chiefly through a community group called United Jewish Council of the East Side. Mr. Rapfogel’s father, Hyman, was a co-founder and Judy Rapfogel was on its board of directors in the 1970s. Mr. Silver was the group’s lawyer and headed one of its housing corporations.

In the early 1970s, the city built a 360-unit housing project on a corner of the site. But that project wound up the subject of a court dispute when Jews were given many of the apartments. And the fate of rest of the site was still deadlocked.

By December 1977, Mr. Silver was still serving as United Jewish Council’s lawyer. He wrote to members of the departing administration of Mayor Abraham D. Beame about a plan he and the group had submitted years earlier for a "mini shopping center" on the Spura site. In drawings, it resembled a massive airplane hangar. It included no housing, but the group said it would create needed jobs.

"I would very much appreciate meeting with you or members of your staff in order to set up a program of incentive to get this plan off the ground," Mr. Silver wrote. "It has been quite some time since the proposal was submitted and, to date, there has been no action."

A rendering of the proposed Essex Crossing development. Credit SHoP Architects

Mr. Koch took office weeks later. He hired Mr. Rapfogel, then 23, as a spokesman at a city agency. Mr. Silver was pleased. He was sure Mr. Rapfogel would be "a capable spokesman in such a sensitive area of your administration," he wrote to Mr. Koch.

Soon after, United Jewish Council began pushing its friends in the administration to support the "international mall" plan, and its handpicked developer, Howard Blitman, arguing that the neighborhood was "clearly saturated" with public housing.

Mr. Rapfogel, Mr. Silver and others discussed the plan with city officials at several private meetings. During one, talk turned to the "political problem" presented by a request from a Chinatown group to sponsor 150 units of low-income housing for senior citizens in the development.

"Assemblyman Silver announced that he had a compromise," according to minutes of the meeting, which was to move the Chinatown project out of the area.

 

Asked about the agreement recently, Allen Cohen, who was then executive director of the Chinatown Planning Council, said Mr. Silver never asked his organization to agree to any such plan.

"We were not involved in that," he said.

Eventually, the Koch administration selected the Chinatown Planning Council to build a 156-unit building for seniors on a lot near the main site. United Jewish Council, working with the Bialystoker Synagogue, was awarded 124 senior units in a different project nearby.

The mall plan briefly got traction, but city officials backed off when other groups got wind of it and complained.

Three years later, in April 1980, another proposal that included low-income housing was considered by the city’s Board of Estimate. It was opposed by Mr. Silver and United Jewish Council, according to records and former city officials.

More than 1,800 low-income families, mostly Puerto Rican, were promised a chance to move into new apartments in the Lower East Side lot, after a 1967 clearance. But plans were blocked over the years, with affordable housing the usual sticking point. Credit Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

"This is a compromise, and like all good compromises, no one is completely happy," wrote a planning department official, Jolie B. Hammer, in a letter to a former colleague. "Off the record, however," she continued "the only true objections are coming from U.J.C."

Mr. LoCicero, the political adviser to Mr. Koch, said Mr. Silver made his opposition clear and won the support of Harrison (Jay) Goldin, then the city comptroller, who had a crucial vote on the board and coveted the Grand Street Jewish vote for future elections.

"Shelly said: ‘Are you crazy? We’ve got enough low income housing,’ " Mr. LoCicero recalled. "He aligned himself with Jay Goldin at the Board of Estimate, and they beat us."

Mr. LoCicero said he appreciated the concerns of the Jewish community, but opposing the Koch administration’s compromise plan just a few years after Mr. Koch’s walk along Grand Street felt like a betrayal. "You put us in here, and now you’re going to destroy us?" Mr. LoCicero said.

Soon after, Mr. Rapfogel took a post in Mr. Goldin’s office as liaison to the Jewish community. He also became head of United Jewish Council’s development arm, South Manhattan Development Corporation, and soon after wrote an article in the group’s newspaper saying his mission was to "retain the distinctly Jewish religious and cultural identity of our community."

"We wait with bated breath for the development of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area," he wrote in 1985. "City government must never again believe that it will force more low-income housing on a community that has been made into a poverty ghetto."

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Mr. Silver and Mr. Rapfogel co-hosted annual legislative meetings put on by U.J.C., and later by Met Council, with the affable Mr. Rapfogel serving as the master of ceremonies and the taciturn Mr. Silver lending gravitas. Plans for the site were an occasional focus of those meetings.

That was the case in 1988, after the Koch administration selected the Lefrak Organization to build a project with a mix of commercial and residential projects on the site. Advocates for the poor opposed the plan’s dearth of low-income housing. At U.J.C.’s annual legislative conference, Mr. Silver introduced the city housing commissioner, Abe Biderman, to promote the plan.

"Our job now is to follow up throughout the year to check on the progress of the items discussed," Mr. Rapfogel wrote in U.J.C.’s newspaper regarding the proposal.

Mr. Silver, the Assembly speaker, says he has severed ties with Mr. Rapfogel, his protégé. Credit Mike Groll/Associated Press

That plan was eventually dropped by the city.

In 1994, Mr. Silver became speaker of the Assembly in Albany. Almost 30 years after it was cleared, the vast space on the Lower East Side remained desolate. That year he faced renewed accusations from housing advocates that he and U.J.C. had blocked plans for housing on the site to preserve his power and keep out other groups.

"They would rather have the vacant lots and rats than have minority people there," said Frances Goldin, a leader in the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council, which fought for housing on the site, speaking to The New York Times that year.

In response, Mr. Silver said he only wanted "a buildable consensus plan" in a neighborhood that was too split to proceed.

But months later, he and Mr. Rapfogel quietly put their weight behind yet another new plan, from a handpicked developer who included no housing. According to official memos, Mr. Silver asked city officials to approve a "big box" store, like Costco, on the site. The developer, Bruce Ratner, would build it. The sponsor would be the South Manhattan Development Corporation, which Mr. Rapfogel then headed.

"This proposal’s most prominent supporter is Assemblyman Sheldon Silver," wrote Deborah C. Wright, the city’s housing commissioner under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, in an internal memo. "I would love to see something positive happen here under our administration, but the conflicts here rival Bosnia!"

Charles Millard, then the head of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, wrote in another memo that Mr. Silver told him "the community does not want housing on the site."

The plan was never publicly discussed and went nowhere.

"We had no idea Silver had done that," said Harriet Cohen, who argued for affordable housing on the site as co-chairwoman of the Seward Park Area Redevelopment Coalition.

In the years that followed, the neighborhood underwent major changes. Jewish dominance waned. A wave of fashionable urban professionals changed the look and feel of the shops and restaurants.

Stores that sold skullcaps or kosher wine were replaced by hip wine bars and cafes. Kossar’s Hot Bialys, a Jewish institution on Grand Street, remains, but two doors down is Doughnut Plant, which sells things like Valrhona chocolate doughnuts, for as much as $3 apiece.

At Cooperative Village, where the Rapfogels and Silvers raised their children and still live, tenants were allowed to sell on the open market beginning in 2000, after decades of values’ being capped. One two-bedroom apartment was recently on the market for $965,000.

And the ties between Mr. Silver, Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Ratner strengthened.

The Rapfogels’ eldest son, Michael, finished law school in 2005 and soon went to work for Mr. Ratner. The job was seen internally as a way to please Mr. Silver, say people familiar with the son’s work; Mr. Ratner’s company rejects the notion.

"Michael Rapfogel was hired in 2005 as a young lawyer because he is smart, a hard worker and interested in community and economic development," said Ashley Cotton, a senior vice president at Forest City Ratner Companies. "He is a valued member of our staff."

In 2006, the Public Authorities Control Board, over which Mr. Silver has significant control, approved Mr. Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. Intervention by Mr. Silver and others enabled the project to retain a lucrative tax break, even as that break was actually being phased out.

In 2008, Forest City Ratner, which compared to other developers makes few political contributions, gave $58,420 to the Democratic Assembly Housekeeping Committee, which is controlled by Mr. Silver.

That same year, Mr. Ratner helped raise $1 million for Met Council and was honored at a luncheon given by Mr. Rapfogel and Mr. Silver. "Bruce is responsible for much of the development and growth that’s gone on in Brooklyn and in Manhattan," Mr. Silver said at the event. "He is a major force in New York City for the good."

By 2011, with all the neighborhood changes, consensus finally seemed possible. The local community board adopted development guidelines that included 800 to 1,000 apartments, with 20 percent, or as few as 160 units, set aside for low-income tenants. Mr. Silver gave the guidelines his blessing. Longtime advocates went along, seeing a portion of something as better than all of nothing.

"Hopefully it will move forward, but it should not have taken 40 years," said Mr. Delgado. "It’s sad because the truth is that they have more in common with us than with the millionaires moving in now."

Developers bidding for the Seward Park site were required to team up with a local nonprofit. Mr. Ratner chose Mr. Rapfogel’s Met Council. As the process was nearing a close last year, Mr. Rapfogel was arrested. On Sept. 18, another bidder was selected.

In announcing the new plan, the city said priority would be given to some of the mostly Puerto Rican families displaced four decades ago. Construction is expected to begin next year.

Mr. Delgado says he has kept in touch with some former neighborhood occupants, and though most are scattered apart and elderly, he hopes their children will have a chance to return.

Mr. Silver has steadfastly stood by Judy Rapfogel. But as to his long alliance with Mr. Rapfogel, that is done. "Let’s be clear," he said in a recent interview, "I have nothing to do with Willie Rapfogel."

Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.

The Graves of Forgotten New Yorkers

By BESS LOVEJOY and ALLISON C. MEIER NY TIMES

ON New York City maps, Hart Island drifts off the edge of the Bronx

like an amputated leg. Among overgrown vegetation and ramshackle buildings spread out over 101 acres, about a million bodies are buried — the homeless, the poor, the stillborn, the unidentified and the unclaimed. The island is said to be home to the largest active potter’s field in America. Until recently, it was off limits to all but the most persistent.

Hart Island is controlled by the city’s Department of Correction. The burials — up to 1,500 a year — are performed by inmates from Rikers Island who are paid 50 cents an hour. Common graves that stretch for 70 feet hold about 150 adults each, while plots for babies hold a thousand stillborn fetuses and infants interred in miniature coffins. (There is at least one individual grave on the island: the first child to die of AIDS in New York.) For years, the only public access to the island has been sporadic "closure visits," in which family members of the dead can step into a rough-hewed gazebo near the docks, the graves nowhere nearby.

But last Wednesday, five New York City Council members reintroduced legislation to transfer Hart Island from the Department of Correction to the Department of Parks and Recreation. A separate bill would establish regular public ferry service to the island. Together, the changes could one day allow anyone to visit the island. They come in large part thanks to a determined local artist named Melinda Hunt, who has been pushing for years to open up the island cemetery.

At one point, Manhattan was home to about a hundred graveyards. But during the 19th century, rising real estate values and fears that decomposing cadavers were producing an unhealthful "miasma" prompted New Yorkers to move their dead out to Brooklyn, Queens and beyond. Of course, some of New York’s dead were never buried in the heart of town: The earliest black residents were interred outside the boundaries of the New Amsterdam settlement, near today’s African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan. Then, as now, the hierarchies of the dead reflected the hierarchies of the living. Today that hierarchy continues on Hart Island, where the city’s poorest are laid to rest by criminals — the untouchables burying the untouchables.

This may have once made some sense. In the years after the city bought Hart Island in 1868, the Department of Public Charities and Correction operated an asylum and a workhouse there. But these days, the burials are the island’s only operation. Security concerns, in part prompted by the inmates who work there, stigmatize visitors. The prohibition against grieving families’ visiting graves and the requirement that they hand over cameras and phones even on closure visits have made mourners feel like prisoners themselves.

For millenniums, humans have visited the graves of their dead as part of the mourning and healing process. How can we deny this fundamental right to the families of the poor, homeless or stillborn?

While the idea of turning this lonely island into a public space might make people uncomfortable, there’s a historical precedent. In the early days of the city, New Yorkers encountered cemeteries every day. It’s no coincidence that many graves bore the epitaph "memento mori" — remember that you will die. People frequently handled the funerals and burials of their loved ones, caring for them in an intimate way we’ve now mostly delegated to funeral homes.

Even when burials were exiled to the boroughs outside Manhattan, the "rural" cemeteries were meant to be as much for the living as for the dead. Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, incorporated in 1838, was designed with carriage routes and picnicking vistas looking to the harbor. When someone suggested that Green-Wood name itself a "necropolis," the cemetery’s first president, D. B. Douglass, retorted, "A necropolis is a mere depository for dead bodies — ours is a cemetery, a place of repose."

Today, Green-Wood holds concerts and talks in its chapel and catacombs and invites the public in to partake of a rare oasis of green amid a bustling city. Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, founded in 1863, offers tours among its grand mausoleums and stargazing events away from the shadows of skyscrapers. One park even has its own cemetery: Prospect Park in Brooklyn holds the Friends Quaker Cemetery, which predates it, and still quietly operates alongside those who come for recreation. And it’s all done with respect to the memory of those who rest beneath.

Few people know it today, but many of New York City’s parks are former cemeteries. Washington Square Park, Madison Square Park, Bryant Park and other public spaces were once potter’s fields. Human remains have been unearthed in Washington Square over the years, and most likely linger in other city parks.

This city has proved numerous times that spaces for the dead can become spaces for the living. But Hart Island offers us a powerful opportunity to preserve the memory of the departed, and to mourn in a place where so many have already been forgotten once.

Bess Lovejoy is the author of "Rest in Pieces:

Address by President of the Russian Federation

Complete Text of President Putin's  address to Russia from Kremlin concerning annexation of Crimea.

From Russia Federation Web Page Moscow

  

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Federation Council members, State Duma deputies, good afternoon.  Representatives of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol are here among us, citizens of Russia, residents of Crimea and Sevastopol!
Dear friends, we have gathered here today in connection with an issue that is of vital, historic significance to all of us. A referendum was held in Crimea on March 16 in full compliance with democratic procedures and international norms.
More than 82 percent of the electorate took part in the vote. Over 96 percent of them spoke out in favour of reuniting with Russia. These numbers speak for themselves.
To understand the reason behind such a choice it is enough to know the history of Crimea and what Russia and Crimea have always meant for each other.
Everything in Crimea speaks of our shared history and pride. This is the location of ancient Khersones, where Prince Vladimir was baptised. His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The graves of Russian soldiers whose bravery brought Crimea into the Russian empire are also in Crimea. This is also Sevastopol – a legendary city with an outstanding history, a fortress that serves as the birthplace of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is Balaklava and Kerch, Malakhov Kurgan and Sapun Ridge. Each one of these places is dear to our hearts, symbolising Russian military glory and outstanding valour.
Crimea is a unique blend of different peoples’ cultures and traditions. This makes it similar to Russia as a whole, where not a single ethnic group has been lost over the centuries. Russians and Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and people of other ethnic groups have lived side by side in Crimea, retaining their own identity, traditions, languages and faith.
Incidentally, the total population of the Crimean Peninsula today is 2.2 million people, of whom almost 1.5 million are Russians, 350,000 are Ukrainians who predominantly consider Russian their native language, and about 290,000-300,000 are Crimean Tatars, who, as the referendum has shown, also lean towards Russia.
True, there was a time when Crimean Tatars were treated unfairly, just as a number of other peoples in the USSR. There is only one thing I can say here: millions of people of various ethnicities suffered during those repressions, and primarily Russians.
Crimean Tatars returned to their homeland. I believe we should make all the necessary political and legislative decisions to finalise the rehabilitation of Crimean Tatars, restore them in their rights and clear their good name.
We have great respect for people of all the ethnic groups living in Crimea. This is their common home, their motherland, and it would be right – I know the local population supports this – for Crimea to have three equal national languages: Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar.
Colleagues,
In people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia. This firm conviction is based on truth and justice and was passed from generation to generation, over time, under any circumstances, despite all the dramatic changes our country went through during the entire 20^th century.
After the revolution, the Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine. Then, in 1954, a decision was made to transfer Crimean Region to Ukraine, along with Sevastopol, despite the fact that it was a city of union subordination. This was the personal initiative of the Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev. What stood behind this decision of his – a desire to win the support of the Ukrainian political establishment or to atone for the mass repressions of the 1930’s in Ukraine – is for historians to figure out.
What matters now is that this decision was made in clear violation of the constitutional norms that were in place even then. The decision was made behind the scenes. Naturally, in a totalitarian state nobody bothered to ask the citizens of Crimea and Sevastopol. They were faced with the fact. People, of course, wondered why all of a sudden Crimea became part of Ukraine. But on the whole – and we must state this clearly, we all know it – this decision was treated as a formality of sorts because the territory was transferred within the boundaries of a single state. Back then, it was impossible to imagine that Ukraine and Russia may split up and become two separate states. However, this has happened.
Unfortunately, what seemed impossible became a reality. The USSR fell apart. Things developed so swiftly that few people realised how truly dramatic those events and their consequences would be. Many people both in Russia and in Ukraine, as well as in other republics hoped that the Commonwealth of Independent States that was created at the time would become the new common form of statehood. They were told that there would be a single currency, a single economic space, joint armed forces; however, all this remained empty promises, while the big country was gone. It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.
At the same time, we have to admit that by launching the sovereignty parade Russia itself aided in the collapse of the Soviet Union. And as this collapse was legalised, everyone forgot about Crimea and Sevastopol ­– the main base of the Black Sea Fleet. Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.
Now, many years later, I heard residents of Crimea say that back in 1991 they were handed over like a sack of potatoes. This is hard to disagree with. And what about the Russian state? What about Russia? It humbly accepted the situation. This country was going through such hard times then that realistically it was incapable of protecting its interests. However, the people could not reconcile themselves to this outrageous historical injustice. All these years, citizens and many public figures came back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city. Yes, we all knew this in our hearts and minds, but we had to proceed from the existing reality and build our good-neighbourly relations with independent Ukraine on a new basis. Meanwhile, our relations with Ukraine, with the fraternal Ukrainian people have always been and will remain of foremost importance for us. (Applause)
Today we can speak about it openly, and I would like to share with you some details of the negotiations that took place in the early 2000s. The then President of Ukraine Mr Kuchma asked me to expedite the process of delimiting the Russian-Ukrainian border. At that time, the process was practically at a standstill.  Russia seemed to have recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine, but there were no negotiations on delimiting the borders. Despite the complexity of the situation, I immediately issued instructions to Russian government agencies to speed up their work to document the borders, so that everyone had a clear understanding that by agreeing to delimit the border we admitted de facto and de jure that Crimea was Ukrainian territory, thereby closing the issue.
We accommodated Ukraine not only regarding Crimea, but also on such a complicated matter as the maritime boundary in the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait. What we proceeded from back then was that good relations with Ukraine matter most for us and they should not fall hostage to deadlock territorial disputes. However, we expected Ukraine to remain our good neighbour, we hoped that Russian citizens and Russian speakers in Ukraine, especially its southeast and Crimea, would live in a friendly, democratic and civilised state that would protect their rights in line with the norms of international law.
However, this is not how the situation developed. Time and time again attempts were made to deprive Russians of their historical memory, even of their language and to subject them to forced assimilation. Moreover, Russians, just as other citizens of Ukraine are suffering from the constant political and state crisis that has been rocking the country for over 20 years.
I understand why Ukrainian people wanted change. They have had enough of the authorities in power during the years of Ukraine’s independence. Presidents, prime ministers and parliamentarians changed, but their attitude to the country and its people remained the same. They milked the country, fought among themselves for power, assets and cash flows and did not care much about the ordinary people. They did not wonder why it was that millions of Ukrainian citizens saw no prospects at home and went to other countries to work as day labourers. I would like to stress this: it was not some Silicon Valley they fled to, but to become day labourers. Last year alone almost 3 million people found such jobs in Russia. According to some sources, in 2013 their earnings in Russia totalled over $20 billion, which is about 12% of Ukraine’s GDP.
I would like to reiterate that I understand those who came out on Maidan with peaceful slogans against corruption, inefficient state management and poverty. The right to peaceful protest, democratic procedures and elections exist for the sole purpose of replacing the authorities that do not satisfy the people. However, those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.
The new so-called authorities began by introducing a draft law to revise the language policy, which was a direct infringement on the rights of ethnic minorities. However, they were immediately ‘disciplined’ by the foreign sponsors of these so-called politicians. One has to admit that the mentors of these current authorities are smart and know well what such attempts to build a purely Ukrainian state may lead to. The draft law was set aside, but clearly reserved for the future. Hardly any mention is made of this attempt now, probably on the presumption that people have a short memory. Nevertheless, we can all clearly see the intentions of these ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.
It is also obvious that there is no legitimate executive authority in Ukraine now, nobody to talk to. Many government agencies have been taken over by the impostors, but they do not have any control in the country, while they themselves – and I would like to stress this – are often controlled by radicals. In some cases, you need a special permit from the militants on Maidan to meet with certain ministers of the current government. This is not a joke – this is reality.
Those who opposed the coup were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities.
Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.
First, we had to help create conditions so that the residents of Crimea for the first time in history were able to peacefully express their free will regarding their own future. However, what do we hear from our colleagues in Western Europe and North America? They say we are violating norms of international law.  Firstly, it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law – better late than never.
Secondly, and most importantly – what exactly are we violating? True, the President of the Russian Federation received permission from the Upper House of Parliament to use the Armed Forces in Ukraine.  However, strictly speaking, nobody has acted on this permission yet.  Russia’s Armed Forces never entered Crimea; they were there already in line with an international agreement.  True, we did enhance our forces there; however – this is something I would like everyone to hear and know – we did not exceed the personnel limit of our Armed Forces in Crimea, which is set at 25,000, because there was no need to do so.
Next. As it declared independence and decided to hold a referendum, the Supreme Council of Crimea referred to the United Nations Charter, which speaks of the right of nations to self-determination. Incidentally, I would like to remind you that when Ukraine seceded from the USSR it did exactly the same thing, almost word for word. Ukraine used this right, yet the residents of Crimea are denied it.  Why is that?
Moreover, the Crimean authorities referred to the well-known Kosovo precedent – a precedent our western colleagues created with their own hands in a very similar situation, when they agreed that the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia, exactly what Crimea is doing now, was legitimate and did not require any permission from the country’s central authorities. Pursuant to Article 2, Chapter 1 of the United Nations Charter, the UN International Court agreed with this approach and made the following comment in its ruling of July 22, 2010, and I quote: “No general prohibition may be inferred from the practice of the Security Council with regard to declarations of independence,” and “General international law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence.” Crystal clear, as they say.
I do not like to resort to quotes, but in this case, I cannot help it. Here is a quote from another official document: the Written Statement of the United States America of April 17, 2009, submitted to the same UN International Court in connection with the hearings on Kosovo. Again, I quote: “Declarations of independence may, and often do, violate domestic legislation. However, this does not make them violations of international law.” End of quote.  They wrote this, disseminated it all over the world, had everyone agree and now they are outraged. Over what? The actions of Crimean people completely fit in with these instructions, as it were. For some reason, things that Kosovo Albanians (and we have full respect for them) were permitted to do, Russians, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars in Crimea are not allowed. Again, one wonders why.
We keep hearing from the United States and Western Europe that Kosovo is some special case. What makes it so special in the eyes of our colleagues? It turns out that it is the fact that the conflict in Kosovo resulted in so many human casualties.  Is this a legal argument? The ruling of the International Court says nothing about this. This is not even double standards; this is amazing, primitive, blunt cynicism. One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow. According to this logic, we have to make sure every conflict leads to human losses.
I will state clearly - if the Crimean local self-defence units had not taken the situation under control, there could have been casualties as well. Fortunately this did not happen. There was not a single armed confrontation in Crimea and no casualties. Why do you think this was so? The answer is simple: because it is very difficult, practically impossible to fight against the will of the people. Here I would like to thank the Ukrainian military – and this is 22,000 fully armed servicemen. I would like to thank those Ukrainian service members who refrained from bloodshed and did not smear their uniforms in blood.
Other thoughts come to mind in this connection. They keep talking of some Russian intervention in Crimea, some sort of aggression. This is strange to hear. I cannot recall a single case in history of an intervention without a single shot being fired and with no human casualties.
Colleagues,
Like a mirror, the situation in Ukraine reflects what is going on and what has been happening in the world over the past several decades. After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability. Key international institutions are not getting any stronger; on the contrary, in many cases, they are sadly degrading. Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle “If you are not with us, you are against us.” To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organisations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall.
This happened in Yugoslavia; we remember 1999 very well. It was hard to believe, even seeing it with my own eyes, that at the end of the 20^th century, one of Europe’s capitals, Belgrade, was under missile attack for several weeks, and then came the real intervention. Was there a UN Security Council resolution on this matter, allowing for these actions? Nothing of the sort. And then, they hit Afghanistan, Iraq, and frankly violated the UN Security Council resolution on Libya, when instead of imposing the so-called no-fly zone over it they started bombing it too.
There was a whole series of controlled “colour” revolutions. Clearly, the people in those nations, where these events took place, were sick of tyranny and poverty, of their lack of prospects; but these feelings were taken advantage of cynically. Standards were imposed on these nations that did not in any way correspond to their way of life, traditions, or these peoples’ cultures. As a result, instead of democracy and freedom, there was chaos, outbreaks in violence and a series of upheavals. The Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter.
A similar situation unfolded in Ukraine. In 2004, to push the necessary candidate through at the presidential elections, they thought up some sort of third round that was not stipulated by the law. It was absurd and a mockery of the constitution. And now, they have thrown in an organised and well-equipped army of militants.
We understand what is happening; we understand that these actions were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration. And all this while Russia strived to engage in dialogue with our colleagues in the West. We are constantly proposing cooperation on all key issues; we want to strengthen our level of trust and for our relations to be equal, open and fair. But we saw no reciprocal steps