Shooting Demonstrators

Window on Eurasia:
Moscow in 2002 Secretly Authorized Police to Shoot
Demonstrators

Paul Goble

Tartu, June 1 - The Russian Interior Ministry in October 2002
issued an order, restricted "for official use only," to militia offices
around the country permitting them in undefined special circumstances to use
lethal force against protesters even if the latter are unarmed and to
confine suspects of various kinds in "filtration points"

This order, numbered 870 and signed by Boris Gryzlov, who was
then Russian Interior Ministry and is now chairman of the State Duma, was
uncovered by human rights activists looking into police attacks in
Blagoveshchensk and reported by them at a press conference on Monday
(http://www.polit.ru/analytics/2005/06/01/prik_print.html).

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the longtime president of the Moscow Helsinki Group and
a leading specialist on Russian government violations of human rights, said
that she and her colleagues had long suspected the existence of just such an
order but that they had not been able to extract a copy from the authorities
until recently.

As she and other human rights activists examined the Blagoveshchensk
incidents, she continued, "local law enforcement organs themselves showed
[them] the order as a justification for their actions." They were, from
their perspective, simply following orders from above.

Georgiy Satarov, another leading human rights activist, pointed out at the
same press conference that this order had been issued long before the events
in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine that some have suggested were prompting
Moscow to take a new, harder line. Rather, he said, the country's force
structures were given a green light for cruelty much earlier.

And Valeriy Borshchev, the president of the Social Partnership
Fund, said that the order, being a normative act of the state, should have
been made public immediately rather than issued "for official use only." And
other participants said that the failure of the order to precisely define
the circumstances in which it could be used invited official misconduct.

Valeriy Gribakin, the head of the Interior Ministry's Public
Affairs Administration who attended the press conference, dismissed the
argument that Russian law somehow required that this order be made public.
He said that the issuance of orders "for official use only" was normal
practice within the Russian MVD.

But in response to questions from the audience and other
participants, Gribakin said that he personally was not in a position to
provide definitions of what constituted "extraordinary circumstances" that
would justify the use of force by the militia or to define "filtration
points" and the actions permitted against those confined in them.

For their part, human rights leaders Alexeyeva and Satarov said
that they were calling on General Procurator Vladimir Ustinov and Justice
Minister Yuri Chaika to explain just what this order actually means and also
to consider whether both its provisions and the way it was issued are in
conformity with Russian law.

But these human rights activists are not hopeful that the
Russian government will annul this 2002 order. Indeed, in an interview in
yesterday's "Nezavisimaya gazeta - Religii," Alexeyeva that she fears that
the Russian government now is more interested in restricting the rights of
its citizens than in defending those rights.
(http://religare.ru/print18186.htm)