Combating Press Freedom

From a recent Reuters report (via LN):

The United Nations top human rights body condemned “defamation” of religion on Friday and, in an apparent reference to the storm over the Prophet cartoons, said press freedom had its limits.

With the support of China, Russia and Cuba, Moslem and Arab states comfortably won a vote on the 47-state Human Rights Council to express concern at “negative stereotyping” of religions and “attempts to identify Islam with terrorism”.

RFE/RL has a further report.

And there's a graphic comment here. (hat tip: JP)

RCFS at Vienna

Although its relations with NGOs in general are increasingly frosty, the Russian government seems to have taken an especial dislike to the Russian Chechen Friendship Society, which a Russian court recently ordered to be dissolved. The main reason for the hostility -which exceeds the norm in such cases - appears to be the fact that the Society once published some public statements by Aslan Maskhadov (murdered by Russian forces in March 2005) and Akhmed Zakayev (now living in London, England). This, it appears, is enough to brand the RCFS as an “extremist organization”.

Now Russian representatives at the OSCE are objecting to an invitation issued to the RCFS to attend the Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Freedom of Assembly, Association and Expression that is currently taking place in Vienna, Austria.

Oksana Chelysheva writes (via JP):

I am in Vienna now at the OSCE meeting. The day was really horrible as the Russian official delegation kept labelling us terrorists. One “political technologist from the Kremlin’s public chamber even insulted me in public…

Their behaviour is so absurdly stupid that all the delegations here are expressing their indignation. Except the Spanish who want “to make the balance” and not “offend their Russian friends”. I am coping with it although it really hurts.

As an honorary member of the RCFS, I protest against the behaviour of the Russian authorities, which is surely counter-productive, and will only serve to increase antipathy between Russia and the West.

Dudayev's Man

In Chechnya Weekly, political analyst Mayrbek Vachagayev has some interesting comments on the recent appointment of Supyan Abdullayev as Ichkerian vice-president:

After the First Chechen War, Supyan Abdullaev held the rank of colonel and following the appointment of Islam Khalimov to the post of minister of internal affairs in 1997, became his deputy. Both of the men left the ministry following the gun battle in Gudermes between the Salafites and the supporters of Aslan Maskhadov on July 15, 1998. In the aftermath, Abdullaev grew distant from politics and was well known as a “second stringer.”

During the Second Chechen War, Supyan entered the ranks of the resistance in the very beginning, and even though he was a dzhamaat member, remained loyal to Aslan Maskhadov. Known for his calm and deliberate manner, Abdullaev never became part of any internal disputes and reached the level of brigadier general by the end of the conflict. He also started out as a leader of a dzhamaat and eventually became the commander of a front and a member of the Maskhadov government (www.newsru.com, August 5, 2004).

The choice was made in favor of Abdullaev because he is a member of the old guard who began his career with Dzhokhar Dudaev. Even though he was not one of the primary figures during that time, his involvement with the resistance traces back to the early 1990’s; today, there are very few remaining who have experienced both of the Chechen wars. And it is because of this that Dokka Umarov chose this man out of his group of comrades that have been in close contact with him for almost twenty years.

This is not, however, the only reason for Abdullaev’s new position. The leader of the Chechen resistance movement understands that Supyan has significant influence over the Salafites, who are one of the best-organized groups within the Dagestani dzhamaat. This is an important concern for Umarov, since the “Shariat” dzhamaat of Dagestan has recently followed in the footsteps of Karachai’s dzhamaat by creating its own website. This is a notable departure from the times of Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev, when all of the dzhamaats were united in using the services of the “Kavkaz-Center” internet portal controlled by Movladi Udugov.

Imperial March

On April 8 Moscow will be the scene of an “Imperial March”, organized by the Eurasian Youth Union.

It will be interesting to see if police take action of the kind that was taken against the recent “March of the Dissenters” (Marsh nesoglasnykh) in St Petersburg, and even more so against a similarly-titled march that took place in Nizhny Novgorod on March 24,and was actually broken up by police.

The President and the Ambassador

A press release from the office of Estonia’s President:

Today, President Toomas Hendrik Ilves received Dr. Reza Nazarahari, Iran’s Ambassador to Estonia, who presented his credentials to the Estonian Head of State.

During the conversation that followed, the President of the State revealed that the European Union is concerned regarding Iran’s extended presence in the international spotlight in association with the problems surfacing in co-operation with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and now also due to the arrest of the British marines.

“We are anticipating that all the British marines that were detained on 23th March, would be released as soon as possible,” told the Estonian Head of State to the Iranian Ambassador.

In addition, President Ilves expressed his hope that in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution 1747, Iran will transform the Iran’s nuclear programme to comply with the requirements of IAEA.

“Estonia has high hopes that Iran would lean towards the diplomatic solution, opting for the so called stimulus package presented by the European Union in June last year,” stated the Estonian Head of State. “The very package could form a basis for a long term agreement that would allow Iran to develop modern civilian nuclear technology in compliance with the IAEA standards.”

Dr. Reza Nazarahari, Iranian Ambassador, affirmed that Iranian authorities are working to address the issue of the arrested British marines.

Ambassador Nazarahari, residing in Helsinki, Finland, took an opportunity to introduce the various possibilities of economic partnership and tourism between Estona and Iran.

(via LN)

Islamism and Communism

At Counterterrorism Blog, Lorenzo Vidino discusses the links in Italy between Islamist forces and those of the extreme left, and focuses his attention on recent statements by a prominent Islamist and former militant Communist who gave a speech in which the example of the street riots in France two years ago was held up as a model for other radical forces around the world to follow. Vidino concludes:

Piccardo’s speech seems that of a Communist leader, rather than that of the leader of one of Italy’s most important Muslim organization. An explanation can be found in Piccardo’s past involvement in the militant Communist underworld. Before his conversion to Islam in 1975, Piccardo had been a member of Autonomia Operaia, one of Italy’s most radical leftist formations during the 1970s. Piccardo, like other UCOII members that come from the radical left, dreams of a fusion of Communist and Islamist ideologies, with anti-capitalism, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as the glues for this odd marriage. The UCOII case is not an isolated example of the alliance between far left and radical Islam in Europe. Another notorious example is Respect, the unlikely political formation borne out of the alliance between the Brotherhood-linked Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and fringe leftist groups headed by George Galloway. The phenomenon needs to be monitored, as the repercussions for both the security and the social cohesion of Europe can be serious.

Estonian Coalition Formed

The leaders of three Estonian political parties have now initialled a coalition agreement, Postimees reports. Andrus Ansip, Pro Patria and Res Publica Alliance (IRL) leader Mart Laar and Social Democrat chairman Ivari Padar finalised their discussions at the government residence on Toompea today. Not all cabinet positions have yet been assigned, but the run-down so far looks like the following:

IRL: speaker of parliament, five ministerial portfolios (ministries of defence, education, agriculture, economy, regional development) as well as heads of three parliamentary commissions (EU, environment and law commission).

Reform Party: prime minister and deputy speaker of parliament, five heads of ministries (ministries of foreign affairs, justice, environment, culture and social Affairs), plus chairs of four commissions in the parliament (financial, economic, defence, constitutional).

SDP: three ministerial positions (ministry of finance, interior ministry, ministry of population), plus heads of four commissions: foreign affairs, social affairs, cultural affairs and rural life.

(hat tip: LN)

Litvinenko: Russian investigators now in London

Interfax reports that

Russian investigators probing the murder of former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Litvinenko are in London, where they are expected to question more than 100 people, including exiled businessman
Boris Berezovsky.

Interfax learned on Tuesday that a delegation headed by Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Zvyagintsev left for the United Kingdom a day earlier.

The Avoidance of the Past

Commenting on Russia’s recent criticism of the March 25 commemoration of the 1949 deportations in Estonia, Vladimir Socor writes that

At the societal level […] Russia has not experienced the post-totalitarian process known in post-totalitarian Germany as Vergangenheits-Bewaeltigung, the paradigmatic “coming to terms” with history, including its crimes. Absent such coming to terms, many Russian officials and citizens tend to confuse occupations and annexations with liberations, cling to symbols of brutal conquest as attributes of national prestige, and seem startled when confronted with these issues. The aborted coming to terms with Soviet history is casting shadows on Russia’s relations with its neighbors.

Pictures of Grozny

Julia at Kunstkamera LiveJournal blog has posted a remarkable series of recent photographs taken in Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya.

(hat tip: TV)

Review of a review of a review

Norbert Strade has written a review of Edward Lucas’s Economist review of Tony Wood’s new book Chechnya - The Case for Independence, of which I’ve only so far read excerpts.

I think Norbert’s comments are justified with regard to the obvious tendency of Western media to apply to the Chechen conflict criteria and priorities that are simply not adequate to its nature. After all, it’s a conflict that really belongs, in a certain sense, to an earlier phase of modern history, and is more akin to events like the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

On the other hand, there may be other, additional reasons for the “resistance to information” of which Norbert writes. It’s unfortunate, for example, that the cause of Chechen independence should have been taken up by organisations in the West - mostly on the left wing of politics - whose commitment to democracy in general is shaky, to say the least. And sources like the propaganda website of Kavkaz Center, with its extreme anti-Western bias, also do little to help in this regard.

It still seems to me that the best hope lies with the non-political watchdogs and NGOs, both inside and outside Russia, which can at least record the humanitarian situation in Chechnya on a week-by-week basis, and can provide the missing information, even if it’s often ignored by the rest of the media.

Shooting in Urdyukhoi

A news report which shows that atrocities by federal forces against civilians in Chechnya continue. The noncombatants in this case were three women gathering wild leeks (cheremsha) near their home village of Urdyukhoi in southern Chechnya.

An interesting but tragic detail not included in the Interfax report, but mentioned in a REGNUM bulletin cited by Lenta.ru, is that two of the women were apparently wearing camouflage jackets.

Military suspected of firing at noncombatants in Chechnya - ombudsman

GROZNY. March 24 (Interfax) - A group of soldiers suspected of firing at noncombatants has been detained in Chechnya, Nurdi Nukhazhiyev, Chechnya’s ombudsman, told Interfax.

“Law enforcement agencies arrested Lieut. Col. Alexei Korgun, the commander of a reconnaissance squad of the Shatoi military commandant’s office, and several of his subordinates,” the ombudsman said.

“Materials gathered by investigators show that Korgun’s group deliberately opened fire at women gathering wild leeks,” he said.

“This happened in the afternoon. The military clearly saw that they were females, and any mistake should be ruled out,” Nukhazhiyev said.

According to earlier reports, one woman was killed and two others wounded.

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov held a conference in Grozny on Saturday, at which he instructed the Chechen prosecutor’s office, the military prosecutor’s office of the combined forces in the North Caucasus, and the Chechen police “to carry out an investigation into the death and wounding of the women.”

Street Children in Chechnya

Via Prague Watchdog (my tr.):

Large numbers of street children discovered in Chechnya

By Ruslan Isayev

CHECHNYA, March 23, 2007 – The Chechen Interior Ministry’s “Operation Homeless Child” has identified 1,000 children who are involved in vagrancy. Even allowing for the fact that the republic has experienced two wars, this figure is a very large one.

In the scramble for the political dividends to be obtained from various amnesties, reconstruction projects and other much-bruited activities, street children have escaped the attention of Chechen society and the Chechen leadership.

But even now, when a peacetime mode of existence is becoming quite clearly established, the numbers of such children are increasing rather than the reverse. Over the past year, some 800 of them have been discovered. And about a thousand parents have been taken to court for child neglect.

The “difficult” children, as they are called by the staff of the republic’s juvenile rehabilitation inspectorates, are now approaching their favourite time of year, when it becomes possible for them to sleep out in the open. With the arrival of spring, their numbers usually increase.

The lives of such children have a rather narrow focus, which is centred mostly on begging, stealing, or at best a job at a gas station. Many of them start smoking or experimenting with alcohol at any early age. The most common activity is glue-sniffing. Before the war, foreign cameramen could literally “smell out” the places where such children were hiding, and the estranged faces of young drug addicts often appeared in the world’s television news.

Rustam was only 10 when the second war began. His was the usual fate of the neglected child : divorced parents, a bad stepmother, a drunken father. Now he is almost 17. He has a job as an ancillary worker on a construction site, and earns around 300 roubles (about $12) a day. He is going to get married. He likes to remember the time when he was homeless. “They were the freest years of my life,” he jokes.

“For example, there are an awful lot of homeless kids in the village of Chernorechye [on the outskirts of Grozny], where I live. They live in basements and abandoned houses. I know some of them. I even tried to drag one of them out of there. I told a police officer I knew, and he took the boy home. But then he ran away from home again. Now he’s in custody, charged with a criminal offence. A lot of kids end their childhood like that – behind bars.”

He is sure that such children bring shame on all Chechens, who have always been proud of their traditions. When adults see street children, they pretend not to notice them, and some just swear at them.

At one point, Rustam was put in a children’s home in Ingushetia. But a few days later he ran away from there. He said he didn’t like it when the staff shouted at him. He thinks it’s a good thing that the children’s homes are being closed down, because the children in them were not being educated but morally crippled.

The measures taken by the authorities to identify neglected children in Chechnya have shown the seriousness of the problem this situation could lead to. Many observers are of the opinion that children of this kind need an individual approach, and a special program.

Although many Chechens would be glad to adopt children from the disbanded orphanages, it is doubtful that any families would take in children whose mental and physical health has been already been ruined by smoking and drinking, or who are addicted to glue-sniffing

Cuba-Sweden row deepens

Via the BBC:

Sweden’s foreign minister is standing by his criticism of Cuba’s human rights record, as a diplomatic row between the two countries shows no sign of abating.

Cuba responded to Carl Bildt’s comments at the UN by deriding what it called Sweden’s imperial past.

Mr Bildt has hit back describing Havana’s response as “a desperate attack by a desperate regime”.

He also told the BBC that diplomatic mail at the Swedish embassy in Havana was being tampered with.

Chechen Society Today

My digest of items in the new issue (from Prague Watchdog):

Tenth issue of the monthly Chechen Society Today released

PRAGUE, March 22 - The tenth issue of the monthly Chechenskoye obshchestvo segodnya (Chechen Society Today) has been released.

The second issue of 2007 presents a wide spectrum of writing about people and events associated with the past, present and future of Chechnya. Personal memoirs and historical studies rub shoulders with informal articles about contemporary life in the republic and interviews with Chechen celebrities.

In an opening editorial column, Zara Osmayeva describes the advent of spring in Grozny, a time of change given special emphasis this year by the appointment of a new president, and discusses the links between Grozny and Moscow, two cities that seem to exist in a symbiotic, “love-hate” relationship.

Kommersant’s Musa Muradov discusses the possibility that the new Chechen president really will keep his promise to reconsider the cases of Chechen residents who were jailed on fabricated charges during the two recent wars, and to bring them back to Chechnya from the prisons in other parts of Russia where they are currently being held.

An article on 20th century Chechen history by Professor Isa Kasin discusses the geopolitical trading at the Cecilienhof Potsdam Conference of 1945 in the context of the Caucasus deportations and Stalin’s territorial designs on Turkey, and this leads on to a remarkable set of memoirs by two female witnesses and survivors of the Chechen deportation of 1944, transcribed and edited by Tamara Chagayeva.

Other notable items in this issue include the story of Malika and her daughter Dzhamilya, who survived the holocaust of the two recent wars, told in a moving essay by Tatyana Gantimurova; a report on a new exhibition and associated website based in Catalonia, Spain, that aim to break the silence about the human rights situation in Chechnya; a feature about a Chechen orphan’s search for her family – a quest that ultimately had a happy ending; a selection of readers’ letters; an interview with Chechen singer Elina Murtazaliyeva in which she talks to Amina Gelagayeva about her early training, her career and and her hopes for the future; an account of the musical past of well-known photographer Mikhail Patalov; a portrait of Chechen athlete Rustam Dzhabrailov; and the first part of Elimbek Matsiyev’s historical study of the Sharo-Argun valley in south-eastern Chechnya – a place with an ancient past whose people and scenery once inspired the writing of Russian authors like Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy, and which was the scene of heavy fighting in the second Chechen war.

Visit this page to see and download the latest issue of the Russian-language journal (2(10)/2007).

Ilves Extends Condolences

Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has extended his condolences to President Putin in connection with the tragic accidents at the Ulyanovskaya mine in Russia’s Kemerovo region and the Kamyshevatskaya nursing home in the Krasnodar Krai.

Kodori Night Attack

Vladimir Socor writes that

Increasing direct evidence as well as strong circumstantial evidence suggests that the air attack on Georgia’s upper Kodori Valley during the night of March 11-12 was carried out by Russian helicopters. An investigative report is due for release in the next few days under a United Nations imprint. The political issue at hand is whether the UN would, as usual, seek to obscure Russia’s responsibility.

Two or three helicopters violated Georgia’s internationally recognized air space over the upper Kodori Valley that night, flying in from Russia’s Karachaevo-Cherkessia region. The helicopters, apparently of the Mi-24 type, fired at least 20 guided projectiles, damaging the local government headquarters, a school, and some other civilian administration buildings in several villages. The damaged building in the village of Chkhalta is shared by the government office and a school.

Shrapnel from those projectiles was collected after the strikes. Some additional shrapnel seems consistent with a reported strike by a ground-launched unguided rocket from the Abkhaz-controlled lower part of Kodori, which is monitored by Russian “peacekeeping” troops. No human casualties were reported (Rustavi-2 and Imedi televisions, March 12-16).

In two closely related articles for EDM, Socor suggests that one of the main reasons for such attacks is that Moscow resents the relative prosperity that has come to the upper Kodori valley area under Georgian protection, showing up the rest of Abkhazia in an unfavourable light. He also notes that if the United Nations report fails to point out Moscow’s responsibility in the matter, and the UNSC takes Russia’s side as it did in October 2006, the Russian authorities - and particularly the Russian military - may feel emboldened to launch more attacks, increasing the escalation still further.

Anna Politkovskaya In Memoriam

Today a worldwide reading of texts and reports by Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered on October 7 2006, will be held in many countries. The event will take place at locations in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Luxemburg, Palestine, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Switzerland, Sweden, the USA, and elsewhere.

For details see the web site of the Peter Weiss Foundation for Art and Politics.

A Russian Diary

This week the Guardian is publishing extracts from Anna Politkovskaya’s last book. Today’s excerpt is about the Beslan hostage siege.

Replying to Propaganda

On Friday, Estonia’s London ambassador replied to the propaganda article in the Guardian newspaper by Konstantin Kosachev about Estonia’s role in World War II, and Estonia’s plans to move a war monument from the centre of Tallinn to a cemetery.

Today, a Guardian reader has pointed to the existence of another Tallinn memorial:

There are three memorials in Tallinn which mark not the controversial period
of the second world war for Estonia but Britain’s role in her prewar independence (Letters, March 9).

One is the submarine Lembit, taken by the Soviet navy on the occupation of Estonia in 1940, retired in 1979 and now restored to her 1930s appearance. It is the only British-built submarine of that era preserved afloat anywhere.

A plaque on the city wall near the port, unveiled by Prince Andrew in 1998, commemorates the Royal Navy’s presence in the Baltic in 1918-20, which enabled Estonia and Latvia to declare independence from the Bolshevik USSR.