Pussy Riot sentenced

Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina join a long line of courageous women in Russia who, in recent years, have been imprisoned, threatened, intimidated and killed for speaking out against the authorities. Many believe that state repression has worsened under Vladimir Putin with a return to Soviet-era tactics, such as psychiatric detention, to silence dissident voices.

Award-winning journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead on 7 October 2006, her body found slumped in an elevator outside her apartment in Moscow. Her murder had all the hallmarks of a contract killing, down to the kontrolnyi vystrel – the control shot, a final bullet into the head at close range – and there is no doubt that her death was in retribution for her fearless reporting, particularly on human rights abuses in Chechnya.

At the time of her death, she had been working on an article about torture in the region that implicated Ramzan Kadyrov, then the Chechen Prime Minister.

On 5 July 2007, Larisa Arap was forcibly detained in a psychiatric clinic near the Arctic city of Murmansk. It was believed that the move was in retaliation for an article by Arap in which she exposed abusive practices in a local children’s psychiatric ward and noted the use of violence and electric shock treatment. Arap was also a member of one of the few opposition groups left operating in Russia, the United Civil Front, led by chess champion turned dissident Garry Kasparov. Some believe that this association was another reason behind her incarceration. (Kasparov was among several people arrested outside the court in Moscow, where members of Pussy Riot were standing trial.)

According to Arap, the ‘hospital personnel tied her to her bed, beat her, tried to smother her with a pillow, and injected her with undisclosed drugs’. Yelena Vasilyeva, head of the United Civil Front in Murmansk, said that when Arap’s husband and daughter arrived at the clinic, the doctor on duty threw a copy of the newspaper containing the critical article in their faces, yelling at them that “no one has a right to write on what is going on in the hospital”. Following a concerted international campaign, Arap was finally released after forty-six days. Yevgeny Zenin, the hospital’s chief doctor, denied the allegations of abuse and said: “We are representatives of a state medical institution; they are libeling Russia.”

On 15 July 2009 another award-winning human rights activist and freelance journalist, Natalia Estemirova, was brutally murdered. Estemirova worked with Memorial, one of Russia’s best known and oldest human rights group. She was a close friend and colleague of Politkovskaya and they investigated some of the same cases together for the independent Moscow-based paper Novaya Gazeta and other local papers.

On the morning of 15 July, Estemirova was reportedly seized by four unknown men as she left for work and was bundled into the back of a white car. Neighbours at her house in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, heard her shout: “I’m being kidnapped.” Later her body was found dumped on the main road of a village in Chechnya’s neighbouring republic, Ingushetia. She had been shot in the head and the chest. At the time of her death, Estemirova was documenting the rise in kidnappings and extrajudicial executions in Chechnya.

Last week, three members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a labour camp. But their provocative act of resistance and subsequent trial has drawn global attention to the level of repression in Russia today and the Russian Orthodox Church’s close ties to the Kremlin. Their plight has not been restricted to human rights lobby groups advocating for their release, but has evidently struck a chord with thousands of ordinary people around the world.

Their action did not cause physical damage to any person, building or property and would normally have resulted in a lesser punishment, caution or financial penalty. Many are now sending appeals to President Putin via the Kremlin website calling for the release of the three women whose harsh sentence is clearly in retaliation for their lyrics, containing language that is strongly critical of the Church and of President Putin. As such, it is in breach of Article 19 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which Russia is a signatory. Messages of solidarity can be sent via the FreePussyRiot website.

Originally published by the Independent online

Book Review – The Man Without a Face

During December’s parliamentary elections in Russia, Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, suffered severe losses, while protesters took to the streets in response to perceived corruption. Putin jokingly referred to the symbolic white ribbons worn by many of the demonstrators as condoms. By mocking the protests, he attempted to downplay their importance. It is a tactic that has served him well in the past but may yet be his undoing.

Masha Gessen, a Moscow-based journalist and author, underlines Putin’s propensity for crude humour throughout her courageous, enlightening account of his rise to power. It is part of the thuggish image that Putin has himself helped to create, she claims. His response to the 1999 terrorist bombings in Moscow and other cities was to promise brutal retribution: “We will hunt them down … we will destroy them … we will rub them out in the outhouse.” This sort of rhetoric, “Putin’s signature oratorical device”, Gessen suggests, contributed to his initial popularity.

Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952, “a city of hunger, poverty, destruction, aggression and death”. The Putins shared a makeshift kitchen and toilet with three other families. As a teenager, Putin’s dream was to join the KGB but it wasn’t until his fourth year of University that he achieved his ambition. After a few years in Dresden spent pushing papers, Putin returned to Leningrad. Shortly afterwards, he was appointed a deputy under Anatoly Sobchak, a law professor and then chairman of Leningrad’s city council, where he gained the necessary leverage to launch his own political career. President Boris Yeltsin made Putin deputy chief of presidential staff in 1997, and he swiftly gained prominence to become one of three deputy prime ministers in 1999.

Much of this biographical detail is already well known, but Gessen uses it as a springboard to explore early signs of Putin’s ruthlessness. This began to reveal itself when he was working with Sobchak. Gessen’s book claims that Putin’s department had entered into a dozen lucrative contracts involving the export of natural resources in return for foodstuffs. But the food never arrived. Marina Salye, who took part in an investigation commissioned by the city legislative council, concluded that profits from the sale of public resources were being pocketed. No action was taken against Putin, and Salye, evidently terrified, fled to a remote village where she lives today. It took Gessen two years to persuade her to talk.

Several key events come under scrutiny in the book, including the 1999 series of bombings that abruptly stopped after explosives were found in an apartment block in Ryazan. When the FSB put out a story suggesting that the explosives had been part of a training exercise, journalists such as Gessen began to question whether the FSB had been behind the previous explosions, “intended to unite Russians in fear and in a desperate desire for a new … aggressive leader who would spare no enemy”.

As well as Putin’s mishandling of the Kursk submarine disaster, in particular his lack of empathy for the victim’s families, Gessen criticises the authorities’ response to the 2002 Moscow Theatre hostage crisis. Special Forces had filled the theatre with gas, allowing them to enter the building where they summarily executed the terrorists. Despite declaring it a victory against terrorism, 129 people died – many choking on their own vomit. It later emerged that one of the terrorists, Khanpash Terkibaev, had escaped. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya (who was murdered in October 2006) met him, and he claimed to have been working for Moscow. Politkovskaya’s editor, Yuri Shchekochikhin, uncovered more damning evidence: some of the women terrorists were convicted felons whose release could only have been secured by those with extra-legal powers. But before he could publish his story in 2003, Shchekochikhin died of organ failure caused by an unknown toxin.

Better known is the poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent who died in November 2006. He had also been investigating the FSB’s involvement in the 1999 bombings and Moscow Theatre siege, and had accused Putin of ordering the murder of Politkovskaya. According to Gessen, “no other killing in the long line of murders of journalists and politicians has quite so clear-cut and obvious a story”.

Building on these investigations, Gessen provides compelling evidence to support theories that during the Beslan Massacre and the theatre siege, “Russian troops acted in ways that maximised bloodshed; they actually aimed to multiply the fear and horror.” Few doubt that Putin will win the presidential election on 4 March but, as recent demonstrations suggest, Russians are significantly less in thrall to his authoritarian regime. Despite the suppression of the media and the murder of critics and political rivals, brave voices like Gessen’s, and those before her, have helped shed some much needed light on Putin’s “criminal tyranny”.

Originally published in the Independent on Sunday on 26 February 2012

The death of Natalia

I can’t bear seeing these pictures of a bare-chested Vladimir Putin on horseback. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6738969.ece As well as beefing up his macho image, the one of him feeding his mount suggests a sensitivity, a gentler, caring side that, alas, is severely lacking in Russia’s PM. It’s a very shrewd but cynical tactic to have released the photographs for public consumption. I’ve always believed animal lovers to have a compassionate streak, and when I saw Putin kissing a horse (in a previous picture) I hesitated… for a fraction of a second.

But no! This was the man (then President) who refused for three days to issue a statement on the brutal contract killing of courageous journalist Anna Politkovskaya. When he was finally drawn, he callously remarked that “Politkovskaya’s political influence inside the country was of little significance.” The writer was shot dead on 7 October 2006, her body found slumped in an elevator outside her apartment in Moscow. At the time of her death, she was working on an article about torture in Chechnya that implicated Ramzan Kadyrov, then the pro-Kremlin Chechan Prime Minister. After her murder, rumours began to circulate that Kadyrov had ordered the contract killing to coincide with Putin’s Birthday.

Russia bears comparison with Mexico; a country that, in recent months, has been referred to as “a failed state”. One can see a similar pattern of violence in Russia, and in particular in the republic of Chechnya, where violence and corruption has created a lawlessness that Moscow seems increasingly to be unable to keep in check. On coming to power, Putin ordered a ground offensive in 1999 that was to become the Second Chechen War. Russia’s superior military power, its indiscriminate bombing and sheer brute force severely disabled the Chechen resistance and Putin installed a pro-Moscow Chechen regime under Akhmad Kadyrov that lasted until his assassination in 2004. His son, Ramzan Kadyrov, succeeded him, becoming President of Chechnya in February 2007. Over the past decade, Amnesty has published a horrific list of human rights abuses taking place in Chechnya, including extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and abductions, torture in unofficial detention centres and arbitrary detentions. It is these abuses that Politkovskaya was so intent on reporting and bringing to the world’s attention and that, few dispute, resulted in her murder.

And now, almost three years later, we are mourning the loss of another courageous female activist who has been slayed in a contract killing for her work. Natalia Estemirova, an award-winning Russian human rights activist and freelance journalist, was murdered on 15 July 2009.

Estemirova worked with Memorial, one of Russia’s best known and oldest human rights group. She was a close friend and colleague of Politkovskaya and they investigated some of the same cases together, writing about them in the independent Novaya Gazeta and other local papers. Estemirova was half-Russian and half-Chechen and had often interpreted for Politkovskaya. In October 2007, she came to England to accept the  inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Award from the Reach All Women in War campaign group; an award established to honour female human rights defenders from conflict zones who stand up for the victims of conflict, often at a great personal risk.

On the morning of 15 July, Estemirova was reportedly seized by four unknown men as she left for work and was bundled into the back of a white car. Neighbours at her house in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, heard her shout: “I’m being kidnapped.” Later her body was found slumped on the main road of a village in Ingushetia, the neighbouring republic to Chechnya. She had been shot in the head and chest. The news of her death, coming so soon after Politkovskya’s, is heartbreaking. Just, fifty years old, Estemirova leaves behind a fifteen-year-old daughter.

There are many similarities between the lives and deaths of these two courageous women. Both were investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya. Both would listen to the stories of Chechen victims, who would tell them how their relatives had been shot by Kadyrov’s troops, or who had been kidnapped and tortured or who had just disappeared. Both wrote articles for Novaya Gazeta, well-known for its critical and coverage of Russian political and social affairs, and both collaborated with human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.  They were scathing critics of Kadyrov, who is a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Their murders bear all the hall marks of contract killings and in both cases their colleagues have pointed the finger at Chechnya’s president.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), since 2000, under Putin’s tenure, seventeen journalists have been murdered for their work or have died under suspicious circumstances in Russia. They have been murdered with impunity; in only one case have the killers been convicted, and the masterminds remain unpunished.

When Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev, backed by Putin, became President, he pledged to enforce the rule of law by investigating crimes against the press. But according to CPJ, attacks on journalists continue unchecked. In the past year alone, CPJ has documented work-related violence against 19 journalists in various parts of the country. English PEN has reported on four journalists killed in the opening months of 2009.

One has to wonder why the most powerful man in Russia today, who is trying to soften his brutish image by posing in photos with horses, cannot stem the tidal wave of murders of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists in his country. Why do these courageous men and women keep on being killed and why do the perpetrators never get caught?

Click here to visit International PEN’s website for further info and suggestions of how you can help.