USAF F-22 Fighters Intercepted Russian Strategic Bombers in International Airspace near Alaska

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On Wednesday, the Minoborony Rossii reported that USAF F-22 fighters intercepted Tu-95MS strategic bombers on a patrol mission in international airspace near Alaska:

On 17 April 2017, two Tu-95MS strategic bombers from the Ukrainka airbase (in the Far Eastern Amur Oblast) successfully performed tasks under the air patrol schedule. The route of the flight ran above neutral waters in the Pacific Ocean, along the Aleutian Islands. The aircraft covered about 5,000 kilometres (3,107 miles) at a speed of up to 850 kph (528 mph) and at a height of up to 10,000 metres (32,809 feet). The flight lasted more than seven hours. USAF F-22 fighters accompanied the Tu-95MS bombers for 27 minutes. Long-Range Aviation regularly carries out patrol missions above neutral waters in the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Black Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. It carries out all such missions in strict compliance with international regulations and with respect to national borders.

Earlier, Pentagon spokesman Michelle Baldanza told TASS that the USAF scrambled two F-22 fighters on Tuesday to intercept Russian bombers near the coast of Alaska. Citing unnamed US defence officials, Fox News reported that the USAF scrambled two F-22 fighters and an E-3 airborne early warning plane to intercept the Russian aircraft, which flew roughly 280 miles (450 kilometres) southwest of Elmendorf Air Force Base, within the USA’s Air Defence Identification Zone. Fox stated that the last spotting of Russian bombers near the US borders was on 4 July 2015, off the coasts of Alaska and California, coming as close as 40 miles (65 kilometres) to Mendocino in California.

19 April 2017

TASS

http://tass.com/defense/941993

Editor:

As the Tu-95s were in international airspace, they had every right to be there. This was a subtle warning from the “polite people” to the “exceptional Americans”… “We’re not pushovers and we’re not going to kowtow to you, either”. One wonders if Trump got the message…

BMD

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Alaska’s Unangax Work to Preserve Culture Quashed by World War II Internment

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Harriet Hope’s family was last together in one place at the dawn of World War II, when she was five-years-old. In 1942, Hope was one of nearly 900 indigenous Unangax that were given only hours of notice to pack one suitcase and leave their homes in Alaska’s Aleutian and Pribilof islands. Without any choice or sign of where they were going, American soldiers put them onto crowded ships, who sent them to squalid internment camps in the then-territory’s southeastern rainforests. Hope, now in her late 70s, said, “Our whole lives were just a total upside down wreck. It was a huge tragedy that the US government pushed on us”. In 1945, the USA resettled the last interned Unangax. According to the National Parks Service, at least 74 people died in the camps, many from the unsanitary conditions. Many elders, who would’ve passed on traditions and customs to younger generations, succumbed to disease in the camps, along with the very young. Seven decades later, the cultural damage of the internment is still clear and many of the remaining survivors are hesitant to talk about the experience. However, even as the number of survivors dwindles, Unangax communities peppered along hundreds of miles of volcanic islands are working to preserve and restore their culture through educational programmes geared towards their youngest members.

Restoring a Culture

Sharon Svarny-Livingston’s mother, Harriet Hope’s older sister, was 12 when the family had to leave Unalaska. She went to a boarding school with other school-aged Unangax kids. She said, “The boarding school was the first place they learned that they would be beaten for speaking their language. So, a whole generation of these kids never taught their kids to speak their language. Our mother never taught us. When you lose those languages, you lose so much”. In the 1990s, for a short time, the school in Unalaska was able to hire a teacher who was fluent in the native language. As a result, they passed on the language, Unungam Tunuu, to a few young people, including the man who is now the Russian Orthodox priest in Unalaska. Svarny-Livingston noted, “To be able to keep that language in the church and be able to have the kids hear it is so important”. Svarny-Livingston also mentioned how important it is to teach subsistence to the next generation, the traditional way of living off the land and sea still practised by many Alaska Native communities, “It’s not necessary to survive, it’s necessary to sustain spirit”. Harriet Hope recalled, “None of the men were able to bring any kind of subsistence gear when they were interned. We couldn’t go out on our own and subsist. It’s sad. They just disconnected us from our whole culture”.

In the decades following the internment, Alaska’s Unangax community mobilised to preserve its cultural traditions; it’s created programs to pass them onto the next generation. Crystal Dushkin of Atka, who is involved in one of several Alaska summer camps that promote Unangax culture, said, “I’ve always wanted us to keep everything we’ve had and make sure that future generations know about it and learn about it, because it’s who we are, we aren’t the immigrants that make up the rest of this country. We actually originated here. This is where we belong”. The camps focus on traditional foods and other activities, such as basket weaving and carpentry. Dushkin observed, “So much has been lost as a result of World War II, and just all the changes that have come around since then”.

Rachel Mason, senior anthropologist with the National Park Service’s Alaska Regional Office, said, “The internment really hastened the erosion of some of the old customs. The deaths of many elders and the forgetting the language, and being outside of their ordinary environment, hastened the loss of the traditional way of life”. Mason was part of an effort that facilitated a trip to several Unangax villages never resettled after the internment. In 2010, a handful of former residents and their families visited three such settlements. She added, “It’s painful thing, and the trauma continues”.

Dark Years

The Japanese invaded Alaska in 1942, capturing the 44 inhabitants of the Unangax village on Attu in the Aleutian Islands. They eventually took them to Japan as POWs, where many would die, including Brenda Maly’s great-grandfather. Maly, 39, whose grandfather Nick Golodoff was six when the Japanese captured Attu, said, “They were strong at the time. My grandfather’s mother, I think she was the strongest of them all, because she remained strong after her husband disappeared in Japan”. Eventually released, the US government didn’t allow the surviving people of Attu to return to their village, as the battle to take back the islands destroyed its remnants. Maly, who has never been to Attu, said, “The war robbed them and future generations of their island and their sense of place. It’s history. If there’s no history, there’s no today”.

The Japanese also bombed the port of Dutch Harbor near Unalaska, prompting the quick evacuation of the Unangax to camps near Juneau in 1942. The government only forced the native people of the Aleutians to leave their homes and villages… they allowed the region’s white residents to stay, sometimes, breaking up mixed families like Hope’s. Even though they were still in Alaska, the camps were in a different world. They dropped the Unangax in the damp forested panhandle in southeastern Alaska, more than a thousand miles across the Gulf of Alaska, far from the treeless, wind-swept islands in the North Pacific and Bering Sea they’d called home for thousands of years. Hope said, “It just broke up the whole family, and it broke up other families. When it came time to come home, a lot of them couldn’t come home for whatever reason, and a lot of them got back home and their homes were just wrecked by the military. It’s just sad”. 88-year-old Nicholai Lekanoff said of Unalaska’s historic Russian Orthodox church, recalling when he first saw it after the war, “They’d thrown rocks and everything at it. [They’d] broken the windows”.

There were as many as 20,000 Unangax living in the Aleutian Islands when Russian explorers arrived in the late 1700s. There were less than 1,000 in the islands by the time of the internment after waves of violence, disease, and famine took its toll on the population over the centuries. Near Juneau, the government put the Unangax in inadequate living quarters, sometimes, dozens of people in one structure, with a few days’ clothes. There was no electricity or running water. Tuberculosis and other diseases persisted with little or no medical services available in most of the camps. Survivors reported facing discrimination in nearby towns where many sought work. Hope recalled, “As I grew into the age that my mother was at the time [of the internment], I thought, ‘My gosh, how did they manage this?’ I started getting angrier and angrier because of what they’d done not to me, but to my parents and family”. Congress passed the Aleut Restitution Act in 1988, giving a one-time payment to the surviving Unangax evacuees, months after granting Japanese-American internment survivors similar compensation. The act also provided funds to restore damaged Russian Orthodox churches in Unangax villages. Hope remembered getting her restitution check, reportedly about half the amount given to Japanese-Americans, in the mail, and thinking it was too little too late, “This shouldn’t ever happen to another group of people again. How they got away with it last time is beyond me”.

16 August 2015

Ryan Schuessler

al-Jazeera America

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/16/alaskas-unangax-work-to-preserve-culture-quashed-by-wwii-internment.html

Orthodox Cathedral Desecrated During Vandalism Spree in Kodiak

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A 21-year-old man is under arrest for allegedly vandalising one of Kodiak’s most historic buildings, Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral, and many of its contents. A press release from the Kodiak Police Department stated that police arrested Arkimedes Garcia around 20.00 Wednesday as he was exiting the church. Thursday morning, Fr Innocent Dresdow, the Dean of the Holy Resurrection Church, said that the vandal damaged many holy items, stating, “It’s clear from the pattern of destruction that this dear soul is deeply troubled and his anger and his rage appeared to be directed at, frankly God. From the perspective of the Church, he knew exactly which things were holiest. Those were the things that were in absolute disarray”. He said that he removed most holy items from the church to an undisclosed location, for reconsecration.

Fr Innocent said Garcia broke several windows and made his way into the church’s Sanctuary behind the Nave where he not only damaged items, but desecrated them as well, noting, “You can see in the hand crosses, if you look carefully… they’re bent upward. All of the crosses that he just damaged are bent upward in the same pattern, including St Herman’s Monastic Cross, which is the most priceless damage that was done last night. The tabernacle is where the reserved sacraments, the Holy Mysteries, the Body and Blood of Christ are kept. Well, that was on the floor, with the Holy Mysteries and all the holy items that were on the altar were on the floor on both sides. He bled on the holy table, he bled on the back wall, he bled in the church in different places, and on the altar particularly is a major desecration”. Our reporter asked, “So he injured himself?” Fr Innocent replied, “He injured himself, yes”.

Fr Innocent said that even though the church sustained physical damage in the attack, services will go on as planned, stating, “Scheduled services for tonight, at 6 pm, the Akathist to St Herman, will be held as scheduled. We have a clean-up crew coming in at 1 pm. People are welcome to join us from the community. They don’t have to be Orthodox if they want to come and help. We’re essentially trying to go over the floor, chairs, everything to make sure all, the minutest glass shards are out of the floor and items. We have lots of children here and we want to make sure nobody gets hurt”. According to the Kodiak Police Department press release, Garcia emerged from the church “partially unclothed”, but didn’t explain further. Police Chief Ronda Wallace was unavailable for comment. Garcia was booked on four felony counts of burglary and criminal mischief.

11 June 2015

Jay Barrett

KMXT (Kodiak AK USA) 

Alaska Public Media

http://www.alaskapublic.org/2015/06/11/orthodox-cathedral-desecrated-during-vandalism-spree-in-kodiak/

The OCA official version is here