Medvedev convenes meeting of Presidential Human Rights Council on April 28, 2012; Ludmila Alexeyeva is in the foreground. The group raised the case of Belarusian human rights leader Ales Bialiatski. Is that Vladislav Surkov to the left of Medvedev? Photo by Viasna.
Russian human rights advocates have done an important deed this week by meeting with outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in his last days in office and raising the problematic role of Russia in propping up the dictatorships of Belarus and Turkmenistan.
The independent Belarusian news site Charter97.org reported yesterday that Russian members of the Presidential Council on Human Rights said that the Russian Foreign Ministry only seems to notice human rights violations in countries that criticize Moscow, and never comments on their allies.
Yuri Dzhibladze, a member of the Council, an advisor to the ombudsmen's office, and a member of various other NGOs said:
"Our country, striving to have a leading situation in the world, cannot and should not ignore the problem of human rights, not only at home, but in neighbouring countries. To whom is given much and who aspires to much, much is demanded, and the accountability needs to be more serious," said the human rights advocate.
He mentioned the plight of Russian citizens who are languishing in Turkmenistan who are being forced to give up their Russian citizenship to be eligible for a Turkmen passport, so that they can travel -- but then risk never being able to travel to Russia or anywhere, as Turkmen citizens. Russia doesn't seem to be going to bat for these people, and the usual bilateral commissions and meetings aren't solving the problem because of lack of good will on the part of Ashgabat.
The Russian activists also handed Medvedev a petition on behalf of Belarusian human rights leader Ales Bialiatski. Interestingly -- probably because it was nearly his last day in office and he really had nothing to lose -- Medvedev seemed to concede the problem (my translation of his quotes in Russian on charter97.org)
"Our Foreign Ministry is what it is, it has its stronger sides of the Chicherin and Molotov school, and its not very strong sides. And I myself, as head of state, repeatedly appealed on this topic, but even so, I can't agree with this. Of course, the Foreign Ministry must take the appropriate position but to believe that the Foreign Ministry only bites those who bite us, that isn't entirely fair," said Medvedev.
Dmitry Medvedev emphasized that, for example, during a certain period, both he and the Foreign Ministery had to "make entirely harsh statements concerning the observance of rights in Belarus and Ukraine." He noted that these are "really very close countries," and on an entire range of issues which are being reviewed at the present time, "they have become severely offended" at Russia.
"Even so, this was in fact my position, and I gave instructions to the Foreign Ministry, including the issue of persecution of political opponents -- that is absolutely unacceptable, this casts a shadow on the whole state, for example, if we speak about Ukraine, and those who are making decisions. You can hate one another, you can say all you want in a polemical quarrel, in the heat of the political fray, but when participants in a presidential race are sitting on the defendants' bench and wind up in prison, your direct rival sin the political process, that, as a minimum, provokes enormous incomprehension, even taking into account our rich totalitarian traditions," said Medvedev.
Well, hmm, notably he left out any mention of Turkmenistan, and he means primarily Yulia Timoshenko here, the jailed Ukrainian politician. I do have to wonder what instructions he really ever gave about, say, raising the issue of Andrei Sannikov, the presidential candidate in Belarus just released two weeks ago from prison through the efforts primarily of the European Union, not Russia, although there is some reason to believe Moscow raised the issues quietly at times.
So this was all good, getting Medvedev on the record (after all, he will go on to switch places now with Putin and be Prime Minister to Putin's President) and getting the Russian domestic human rights movement which has been preoccupied with its own problems and absorbed in demonstrating against election fraud for months, to realize that their country helps cause human rights abuses elsewhere in the "near abroad".
There was a bit less than met the eye here, however, as it was rather late for Russian activists to be doing this. In fact, they should always be trying to raise the near abroad, and international groups like Human Rights Watch should do a lot more of this as well. To be sure, through a new Helsinki-branded movement announced at the OSCE ministerial in December 2011, and even at UN and OSCE meetings before that, Yuri and his colleagues have raised the issue of political prisoners in Belarus, Turkmenistan and elsewhere in Russia's orbit. There's something a bit managed and docile about all this, and not everyone is happy with Russians leading this movement with US grants, but there it is... As I always say, "politics is the art of the possible; human rights is the art of the impossible."
Yuri has a lot of accomplishments behind him, working on the issues of the NGO law, conscientious objection and conscription, anti-racism, and so on. Yuri was the one who stood up and named Russia at the UN during the World Conference Against Racism's preparatory conferences in Geneva in 2001, when Russia and other states tried to force a "no naming of countries" rule that has sometimes prevailed at UN meetings -- and broke that barrier. He also led the effort to launch an alternative document to the deplorable NGO document at the Durban WCAR, which contained hateful passages about Israel. So it's all good.
But I've criticized him in the past for playing the game of moral equivalency in politics -- when he got some face time with Obama, he used it not to raise issues like jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky's case, nor to explain to Obama that his claim that Khodorkovsky's case was "an internal affair" set back Helsink progress 35 years. Instead, he raised...Guantanamo. This was coals to Newcastle, or, as they say in Russia, samovars to Tulevo...or something. That is, US activists already raise Guantanamo at every turn, and what Obama needed to hear from a Russian was an issue that in fact US groups rarely raise (because some have become quiet or even soft on the Kremlin in recent years, hypnotized by the "reset") -- Russia's internal human rights issues. This is especially true as Dzhibladze met the president in a group of defenders and there were plenty of others who could have raised Guantanamo. In part, I blame his American colleagues who thought it would be chic to posture as international citizens above and beyond Russia or America and mix and match. We all draw from the universality and internationalization of human rights; we would do well to understand what kind of vast differences there are between the two countries, like this.
No, the activists didn't raise Pussy Riot with Medvedev, as far as I can tell. Well, everybody's a critic. I na tom spasibo that they raised at least Belarus and the case of Ales, founder of the human rights group Viasna (Spring), a remaining political prisoner, falsely charged with "tax evasion" and sentenced to 4.5 years merely for handling his nonprofit group's legitimate grants. Actually, Poland and Lithuania helped the authorities nab him because their banks with his accounts abroad for his human rights groups reported back to Minsk about them. Both countries later apologized, but it's symptomatic of the lack of, well, tradecraft these days.
You know, this Russian Presidential Council isn't the greatest thing. I mean, with now Putin, the president of Russia going to run it, and all. I think it's important to note that a highly respected human rights defender, Svetlana Gannushkina, who has worked on the rights of migrant workers, refugees and internally-displaced persons for years -- a real saint -- recently announced she was stepping down from the council because of Putin becoming president. She had found it useful to work with Medvedev in the past, because it highlighted her issues, got more press for them, and he'd promise to do things and sometimes do them.
But then, well, it stopped, and she got off the train. As did Elena Panfilova, who has led the NGO effort on anti-corruption as the Transparency International representative in Russia. She just stepped down, too.
That leaves some stalwarts like Ludmila Alexeyeva, who has always believed that you keep trying to dialogue with the authorities even when they are rude and non-compliant, while of course continuing to speak out in condemnation of human rights violations. She's always pulled it off. Not everyone does. She's wondering if Putin will keep her, given that she has denounced the elections as unfair.
We'll see...
