Paul Goble
Vienna, October 22 –Increasingly harsh conditions in Russia’s penal institutions and the unwillingness of officials responsible for them to address complaints have combined to cause ever more inmates to organize and stage large revolts over the last three years.
Last week’s outbreak of violence at the Kirovograd youth detention center in Sverdlovsk oblast was only the latest of at least 24 such prison riots in the Russian Federation since April 2004, according to a study of the problem in the latest issue of Ekspert Online (http://www.expert.ru/articles/2007/10/19/bunt).
According to its author, Elena Borisova, two things are notable about this trend. On the one hand, jailers and the interior ministry officials over them continue to insist that nothing is really wrong and that this violence reflects the kind of people who are behind bars.
And on the other, this wave of violence in the Russian prison system features something new: A few years ago, most prisoners, however much despair they felt, acted individually, staging hunger strikes or cutting themselves. Now, however, out of a sense that they have nothing to lose, they are getting organized.
Borisova notes that in all of the recent cases, the prisoners have acted collectively, have seized hostages, and organized escape attempts, actions that have led the authorities to use lethal violence against them but that have become legendary among prisoners and thus the model for future revolts.
She says that all specialists and human rights activists say that these protest actions in almost ever case occur because of “the unbearable conditions” in which Russia’s prisoners are now kept, conditions which in many cases are even worse than they were in Soviet times or even in the 1990s.
Vladimir Lukin, the federal ombudsmen, who investigated a prison revolt in Kursk oblast in June 2005, said that those who took part in it were only seeking to defend their rights to adequate food, reasonable sanitation facilities, and opportunities to file protests.
This last possibility is especially important to prisoners, but guards and prison commandants do everything they can to prevent protests from being lodged or going forward. In one case, Lukin found, guards beat a prisoner who wanted to file a protest for 15 minutes and then made him eat the protest.
A commission of inquiry that examined the prison revolt in Leningrad oblast in 2006 found that prisoners were being charged up to 100 US dollars in order to go to the bathroom or to avoid being raped and that they were often confined for extended period in unheated and unsanitary disciplinary cells.
Because conditions in Russia’s prisons appear to be deteriorating and because ever more prisoners, on the occasion of their release, are telling both the media and groups involved in the defense of prisoners’ rights about them, more and more activists are speaking out, warning of still worse explosions to come.
Indeed, Valeriy Abramkin, the director of the Center for the Reform of Criminal Justice, told Borisova that Russian prisoners today have been driven to such a level of despair that they are “ready for anything.” After all, he continued, they now believe “they have nothing to lose.”
And Abramkin added that “if nothing is changed in the penitentiary system, [such outbreaks of violence] will increase in geometric progression.”
Among the groups now getting involved in trying to do something about Russia’s prisons are religious ones. The Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church has a special department for work with prisoners, but it has the reputation of doing what it can to support the authorities rather than prisoners.
Over the last several years, Muslim groups have become more active in this area, especially in the Middle Volga and North Caucasus where Muslims are the most numerous and Muslim prisoners the most common. Mullahs routinely visit prisons and have overseen the construction of mosques in a growing number of these institutions.
But now a Muslim website, http://azir.biz, has upped the ante, not only reporting on the good works of Muslim leaders among prisoners but providing a channel for prisoners to communicate with the outside world and to bring complaints about their problems to a broader audience.
The site is extremely well developed, with news, information, and even radio podcasts, and as such, it may lead to even greater organization among the roughly one prisoner in 20 who is an active Muslim believer, a development with potentially explosive consequences.
Most immediately, growing awareness among Muslim prisoners of their problems could have the effect of triggering clashes between them and the one prisoner in ten who is Orthodox or the remainder who profess no religion at all (http://tatar-inform.ru/news/society/?id=87072).
And more generally and long term, as the problems Muslim prisoners now confront become more widely known, ever more Muslims outside prison walls could be radicalized as well, asking whether these prisoners are being treated badly because they are prisoners or because they are Muslims.
Some in the Russian penitentiary system may be only too pleased to seek to maintain their power by a process of divide and rule, but in this case, such an approach is beyond doubt a most dangerous game, one that could be the equivalent of dousing a fire with gasoline and thereby producing a broader conflagration.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Russian Prosecutors’ Actions Undercut Putin’s Claims on Tatarstan
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 22 – Even as President Vladimir Putin was insisting during his town meeting last week that Tatarstan is “a very good example of the fraternal existence of various cultures and religions,” Russian Federation prosecutors in that Middle Volga republic were behaving in ways that call his words into question.
According to the Tatarstan newspaper “Zvezda Povolzh’ya,” Moscow prosecutors started by conducting a search in the Tatar-Turkish lycees for the works of Turkish theologian Said Nursi, whose books have been declared extremist by the Russian courts (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2007-10-19/#18177).
But not finding a single copy of Nursi’s writings, the prosecutors cast their net wider in an operation they called “Strengthening Tolerance.” In fact, it was anything but. The officials demanded that the schools stop teaching physics, mathematics and chemistry in English and using texts published in England or translated from Russian.
Teachers and parents of the students, the paper continued, were “shocked by such obscurantism,” especially because Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiyev repeatedly has declared that young people in his republic should seek to learn English “to perfection.”
When teachers pointed out that there was no such thing as “Christian” or “Islamic” physics or mathematics, the prosecutors then backed down and said that the Turkish instructors at these lycees did not have the right to teach in English, but then it turned out that their diplomas to do so had been certified by Moscow.
And after learning that, the prosecutors said that nonetheless the lycees could not continue to function because supposedly their registration documents “do not correspond to the latest laws of the State Duma” – although the Moscow officials were not able to specify with which laws these documents did not correspond.
“Zvezda Povol’zhya” concluded that “those from Moscow doing the checking are saying approximately the following: they have given us the task of closing the Tatar-Turkish lycees and we will close them regardless of the facts,” and the paper speculated that all this is a prelude to an attack on Shaimiyev himself.
Putin’s description of the situation in Tatarstan where he said Kazan officials had done the right thing by not tearing down a church to restore a mosque but rather rebuilding the latter next to it and that the Kazan mosque compared favorably with the one in his hometown of St. Petersburg received international coverage.
But the actions of his agents in Kazan at virtually the same time have been ignored, not only because they took place far from the Russian capital but also because they do not correspond to the image of life in the Russian Federation that Putin and his boosters there and in the West want to project.
Unfortunately, as reports from two other events this month have highlighted, this kind of action by Russian officials against Muslims of even the most moderate kind is far from restricted to Tatarstan.
At an OSCE meeting in Cordoba devoted to Islamophobia, Galina Kozhevnikova of the SOVA Center in Moscow said that Muslims in her country increasingly are becoming “the objects of persecution from the side of law enforcement organs and prosecutors” (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/islamofobia/isprof/).
The “overwhelming majority” of cases brought against them, she continued, are “fabricated, with the courts generally ignoring such official malfeasance. Equally bad, she said, Russian officials routinely deport citizens of other countries in such cases, “despite the threat of much more severe persecution than in Russia itself.”
And at a Makhachkala session devoted to the human and religious rights situation in Daghestan, visitors from Moscow were provided with overwhelming evidence that Russian officials routinely ignore not only law but also reasonableness in their efforts to crack down on Muslims (http://www.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/news/id/1190885.html).
Mamat Baisultanov of Khasavyurt told the visitors about how these officials treated him and his family. Searching for bandits, they broke into his house by mistake, but instead of apologizing and withdrawing, they found guns in the yard, arrested his son and charged him with participating in bandit groups and having ties to Shamil Basayev.
“At the court,” Baisultanov said, “I said look at the date of birth of my son. It turns out that when he was supposed to be fighting with Basayev, he was 11 years old.” After that, the judge dropped “all the charges” except for keeping arms illegally. For that he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Sergei Kovalev, a longtime human rights campaigner at this meeting observeed: “The arbitariness committed by certain law enforcement structures in Daghestan is part of the Russian system. Throughout the country, a tight grouup of FSB officers and generals exists and influences the government” throughout the country.”
If the Russian Federation in general and Daghestan in particular are to have a chance for a better future, that situation needs to change, Kovalev concluded, saying ”We must have a government which does not use the law as a weapon but rather one that is subordinate to it.”
Vienna, October 22 – Even as President Vladimir Putin was insisting during his town meeting last week that Tatarstan is “a very good example of the fraternal existence of various cultures and religions,” Russian Federation prosecutors in that Middle Volga republic were behaving in ways that call his words into question.
According to the Tatarstan newspaper “Zvezda Povolzh’ya,” Moscow prosecutors started by conducting a search in the Tatar-Turkish lycees for the works of Turkish theologian Said Nursi, whose books have been declared extremist by the Russian courts (http://www.islam.ru/rus/2007-10-19/#18177).
But not finding a single copy of Nursi’s writings, the prosecutors cast their net wider in an operation they called “Strengthening Tolerance.” In fact, it was anything but. The officials demanded that the schools stop teaching physics, mathematics and chemistry in English and using texts published in England or translated from Russian.
Teachers and parents of the students, the paper continued, were “shocked by such obscurantism,” especially because Tatarstan President Mintimir Shaimiyev repeatedly has declared that young people in his republic should seek to learn English “to perfection.”
When teachers pointed out that there was no such thing as “Christian” or “Islamic” physics or mathematics, the prosecutors then backed down and said that the Turkish instructors at these lycees did not have the right to teach in English, but then it turned out that their diplomas to do so had been certified by Moscow.
And after learning that, the prosecutors said that nonetheless the lycees could not continue to function because supposedly their registration documents “do not correspond to the latest laws of the State Duma” – although the Moscow officials were not able to specify with which laws these documents did not correspond.
“Zvezda Povol’zhya” concluded that “those from Moscow doing the checking are saying approximately the following: they have given us the task of closing the Tatar-Turkish lycees and we will close them regardless of the facts,” and the paper speculated that all this is a prelude to an attack on Shaimiyev himself.
Putin’s description of the situation in Tatarstan where he said Kazan officials had done the right thing by not tearing down a church to restore a mosque but rather rebuilding the latter next to it and that the Kazan mosque compared favorably with the one in his hometown of St. Petersburg received international coverage.
But the actions of his agents in Kazan at virtually the same time have been ignored, not only because they took place far from the Russian capital but also because they do not correspond to the image of life in the Russian Federation that Putin and his boosters there and in the West want to project.
Unfortunately, as reports from two other events this month have highlighted, this kind of action by Russian officials against Muslims of even the most moderate kind is far from restricted to Tatarstan.
At an OSCE meeting in Cordoba devoted to Islamophobia, Galina Kozhevnikova of the SOVA Center in Moscow said that Muslims in her country increasingly are becoming “the objects of persecution from the side of law enforcement organs and prosecutors” (http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/islamofobia/isprof/).
The “overwhelming majority” of cases brought against them, she continued, are “fabricated, with the courts generally ignoring such official malfeasance. Equally bad, she said, Russian officials routinely deport citizens of other countries in such cases, “despite the threat of much more severe persecution than in Russia itself.”
And at a Makhachkala session devoted to the human and religious rights situation in Daghestan, visitors from Moscow were provided with overwhelming evidence that Russian officials routinely ignore not only law but also reasonableness in their efforts to crack down on Muslims (http://www.kavkaz.memo.ru/newstext/news/id/1190885.html).
Mamat Baisultanov of Khasavyurt told the visitors about how these officials treated him and his family. Searching for bandits, they broke into his house by mistake, but instead of apologizing and withdrawing, they found guns in the yard, arrested his son and charged him with participating in bandit groups and having ties to Shamil Basayev.
“At the court,” Baisultanov said, “I said look at the date of birth of my son. It turns out that when he was supposed to be fighting with Basayev, he was 11 years old.” After that, the judge dropped “all the charges” except for keeping arms illegally. For that he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Sergei Kovalev, a longtime human rights campaigner at this meeting observeed: “The arbitariness committed by certain law enforcement structures in Daghestan is part of the Russian system. Throughout the country, a tight grouup of FSB officers and generals exists and influences the government” throughout the country.”
If the Russian Federation in general and Daghestan in particular are to have a chance for a better future, that situation needs to change, Kovalev concluded, saying ”We must have a government which does not use the law as a weapon but rather one that is subordinate to it.”
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