Paul Goble
Vienna, October 1 -- With direct assistance of the FSB, pro-Moscow officials have gained control over two of the three main Circassian national groups in the North Caucasus, a victory that may move Pyrrhic because it is leading to the decline of the influence of these groups and the radicalization of many younger Circassians.
In fact, two articles published online this week suggest, Moscow’s efforts -- which have effectively gelded what was a more active national movement in the 1990s -- threaten to transform the western portions of the North Caucasus where most of the 700,000 Circassians of Russia live from relative quiescence into Daghestan-style instability and violence.
And this danger is not “beyond the mountains,” as some in the Caucasus say. This weekend, that trend is likely to be in evidence at an international Circassian meeting in Maykop where some younger members of the nation plan to challenge the government-controlled and relatively passive leadership of the International Circassian Association (ICA).
In an article posted online yesterday, analyst Anton Surikov describes the efforts of Russian and pro-Russian officials to gain control over the three largest Circassian organizations in the North Caucasus – the ICA itself, the Adyge Khase, and the Circassian Congress (pravda.info/protest/69727.html).
The ICA was established in the early 1990s and initially led by Yury Kalmykov who had been Russian minister of justice. Under his leadership, the group pressed for the repatriation of Circassians living abroad and the restoration of a single Circassian homeland in the North Caucasus in place of the several republics into which Stalin had divided them.
After Kalmykov’s “unexpected” death in 1996 – “the official version” is that he suffered a heart attack, Surikov says – “the ICA became essentially an entirely different organization. Its headquarters was moved from Europe to the North Caucasus, it was completely “financed by the federal authorities through republic structures, and it was controlled by officials.
The ICA, Surikov continues, now consists “in fact of government employees and their representatives and relatives,” not Circassian activists. As a result, “in the course of its 20 years of existence, the ICA has not solved a single issue concerning the interests of the Circassian people,” and recently it has said that it “will not get involved in political questions.”
Despite that, the analyst continues, “the Circassian diaspora which has little information and certain Circassians [in the North Caucasus] all the same lay false hopes on the ICA,” perhaps because they do not see any alternative.
A second Circassian organization that the authorities have seized control of is Adyge Khase. Up until 1996, Surikov says, this group conducted a certain amount of independent political activity. But in that year, then-Kabardino-Balkar President Valery Kokov used “administrative and financial levers” to establish “complete control” over it.
Those Circassians who were prepared to cooperate, he continues, received jobs and apartments, and “from that moment on, Adyge Khase as a national organization which would work in the interests of the Circassians in fact ceased to exist. The “trade” between the organization and the powers that be in the KBR has left it with little influence in the population.
In Surikov’s view, it is a third group, the Circassian Congress, which today “is the only organization which really defends the national interests of the Circassian people,” by disseminating information, demanding recognition of the genocide, and organizing protests around the world on May 21st, the anniversary of the tsarist expulsion of the Circassians.
The success of the Circassian Congress, Surikov says, has “frightened Moscow, and the Russian government has begun to try to activate the ICA and the Adyge Khase in the hopes of checking the activities of the Circassian Congress and undercutting its appeal based on a demand for recognition of the genocide, repatriation, and the creation of a single Circassian Republic.
But Moscow’s efforts to get the two “marionette organizations” to change their form won’t work as the Russian powers that be intend. On the one hand, any changes only highlight the strength of the Circassian Congress. And on the other, such transparent moves are likely to radicalize the young and create “a situation like those in Ingushetia and Daghestan.”
In the second article, Nart Matuko, a political science graduate student at the UN University, provides additional details about the ways in which young Circassians are likely to try to take on the government-controlled old guard at the 8th Congress of the ICA October 2-4 (www.elot.ru/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1465&Itemid=1).
Three weeks ago, the All-Russian Forum of Circassian Youth met in Cherkessk and declared that “to [their] great regret, in the course of the last nine years, work toward the resolution of the most important national questions has been carried out in an unsatisfactory manner.”
“The interference of social and governmental employees in the work of the ICA has frozen all the processes begun by the best minds of the nation in the 1990s. We consider the cardinal reformation of this organization and the rejuvenation of the composition of its executive committee to be necessary.”
The Circassian young people further said that the problems of the ICA and Adyge Khase had begun when the security structures and local political leaders seized control of these “main institutions of civil society in 2000,” a development that led “to the massive departure of young people into the ranks of the illegal band formations.”
And it warned that if these government-controlled organizations continue as they have in recent years their policy of “inaction,” then that will beyond question lead “to more negative consequences.”
Unfortunately for them and for the future of stability in the western portion of the North Caucasus where the Circassians live, those who control the ICA and Adyge Khase appear to have decided to dig in, to maintain their control of these organizations even at the price of losing influence in society, Matuko argues.
That the Russian government in Moscow is behind this hard-line and ultimately counter-productive approach appears obvious: the political science graduate student notes that the main “inspector” watching over what is going on now just as he has for the last nine years is a retired KGB office named A. Kodzokov.
These developments might appear marginal and unimportant were it not for two things. On the one hand, Moscow is sowing the seeds of future problems for itself where things had been relatively quiet. And on the other, the five million Circassians living abroad will be watching to see whether a re-energized Circassian movement will emerge in their homeland.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Window on Eurasia: Russian Nazi Says His Group Killed Ethnographer for Testifying against Extremists
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 1 – A Russian Nazi who has turned state’s evidence says that members of his group murdered Nikolay Girenko in June 2004 because the prominent St. Petersburg ethnographer had helped expose and send to prison right-wing extremists who were terrorizing non-Russian communities in the northern capital.
In an article in today’s “Vremya novostei,” journalist Natalya Shkurenok describes in chilling detail the ongoing trial in St. Petersburg during which “members of a Nazi group have explained how and why they killed the ethnographer Girenko” and in which prosecutors have described some of their other crimes (www.vremya.ru/2009/180/46/238685.html).
At the trial of the Borovikov-Voevodin Nazi group in St. Petersburg, Shkurenok reports, prosecutors have begun to lay out details about the Nazis decision to identify him as “an ideological enemy” and then to kill him on June 19, 2004, because “thanks to [Girenko’s] testimony, many Nazis had landed in prison.”
Fourteen individuals have been brought to trial --, including Aleksey Voevodin, their leader who was earlier a member of the Shults—88 and Mad Dog neo-Nazi groups that Girenko helped expose. (Several others remain at large or are in psychiatric detention. AndDmitry Borovikov, the other leader of this group, was shot and killed while resisting arrest.)
The group’s members, Shkurenok continues, carried out “approximately 20 crimes” including “the beating and murder of ‘non-Russians,’ theft, the distribution of narcotics, and the stirring up of inter-ethnic hatred.” But what has attracted widespread attention is their murder of Girenko.
Girenko, who was 64 at the time of his death, had been a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. An internationally recognized scholar, he served as an expert witness in “almost all the criminal cases brought against Nazis” in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and first years of this century.
Not only did his murder attract national and international attention at the time, but ethnographers and human rights activists have marked the anniversary of his death with meetings and demonstrations each year since that time in the hopes that the Russian authorities would bring those responsible to justice.
The current case against the Voevodin-Borovikov Nazi group “began in February but it has proceeded only with difficulty.” Over the last six months, the court has held only three sessions. On Monday, the court heart from the elder daughter of Girenko who told how she had opened the door to the individual who then shot and killed her father.
Andrey Kostrachenkov, one of the members of the Nazi group who is now cooperating with the authorities, provided the following details. He said that “approximately a week before the murder [of Girenko,] Borovikov assembled Voevodin, [himself] and [a third member of the group] and said that it was necessary to kill Nikolai Girenko.”
“In fact,” Kostrachenkov said, the group’s leader “gave an order” which no one of the members considered it in their power to challenge because Borovikov told them that “Girenko had given the evidence that led to the convictions of his comrades in arms from the Shults-88 and Mad Crowd groups.”
According to Kostrachenkov, this was the first time that he had heard “the name of Girenko” and that he “knew nothing about [the ethnographer’s] work.” He added that four of the group’s members cased out the scholar’s apartment, planning to kill him on June 17th. But they changed their plans when on that occasion Girenko’s younger daughter opened the door.
Prosecutors say that this Nazi group also killed Rostislav Gofman and Aleksey Golovchenko, among other. They plan to do that in the coming days, but today’s newspaper report that a Russian Nazi has acknowledged that he and his comrades killed Girenko is important on its own in two regards.
On the one hand, it suggests that at least some Russian prosecutors are prepared to pursue extremist nationalists, at least in high profile cases, a welcome development given their frequent failure to do so earlier. But on the other, this case sends a chilling message to the members of Russia’s hard-pressed human rights community that Russian Nazis are ready to come after them.
Vienna, October 1 – A Russian Nazi who has turned state’s evidence says that members of his group murdered Nikolay Girenko in June 2004 because the prominent St. Petersburg ethnographer had helped expose and send to prison right-wing extremists who were terrorizing non-Russian communities in the northern capital.
In an article in today’s “Vremya novostei,” journalist Natalya Shkurenok describes in chilling detail the ongoing trial in St. Petersburg during which “members of a Nazi group have explained how and why they killed the ethnographer Girenko” and in which prosecutors have described some of their other crimes (www.vremya.ru/2009/180/46/238685.html).
At the trial of the Borovikov-Voevodin Nazi group in St. Petersburg, Shkurenok reports, prosecutors have begun to lay out details about the Nazis decision to identify him as “an ideological enemy” and then to kill him on June 19, 2004, because “thanks to [Girenko’s] testimony, many Nazis had landed in prison.”
Fourteen individuals have been brought to trial --, including Aleksey Voevodin, their leader who was earlier a member of the Shults—88 and Mad Dog neo-Nazi groups that Girenko helped expose. (Several others remain at large or are in psychiatric detention. AndDmitry Borovikov, the other leader of this group, was shot and killed while resisting arrest.)
The group’s members, Shkurenok continues, carried out “approximately 20 crimes” including “the beating and murder of ‘non-Russians,’ theft, the distribution of narcotics, and the stirring up of inter-ethnic hatred.” But what has attracted widespread attention is their murder of Girenko.
Girenko, who was 64 at the time of his death, had been a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. An internationally recognized scholar, he served as an expert witness in “almost all the criminal cases brought against Nazis” in St. Petersburg in the 1990s and first years of this century.
Not only did his murder attract national and international attention at the time, but ethnographers and human rights activists have marked the anniversary of his death with meetings and demonstrations each year since that time in the hopes that the Russian authorities would bring those responsible to justice.
The current case against the Voevodin-Borovikov Nazi group “began in February but it has proceeded only with difficulty.” Over the last six months, the court has held only three sessions. On Monday, the court heart from the elder daughter of Girenko who told how she had opened the door to the individual who then shot and killed her father.
Andrey Kostrachenkov, one of the members of the Nazi group who is now cooperating with the authorities, provided the following details. He said that “approximately a week before the murder [of Girenko,] Borovikov assembled Voevodin, [himself] and [a third member of the group] and said that it was necessary to kill Nikolai Girenko.”
“In fact,” Kostrachenkov said, the group’s leader “gave an order” which no one of the members considered it in their power to challenge because Borovikov told them that “Girenko had given the evidence that led to the convictions of his comrades in arms from the Shults-88 and Mad Crowd groups.”
According to Kostrachenkov, this was the first time that he had heard “the name of Girenko” and that he “knew nothing about [the ethnographer’s] work.” He added that four of the group’s members cased out the scholar’s apartment, planning to kill him on June 17th. But they changed their plans when on that occasion Girenko’s younger daughter opened the door.
Prosecutors say that this Nazi group also killed Rostislav Gofman and Aleksey Golovchenko, among other. They plan to do that in the coming days, but today’s newspaper report that a Russian Nazi has acknowledged that he and his comrades killed Girenko is important on its own in two regards.
On the one hand, it suggests that at least some Russian prosecutors are prepared to pursue extremist nationalists, at least in high profile cases, a welcome development given their frequent failure to do so earlier. But on the other, this case sends a chilling message to the members of Russia’s hard-pressed human rights community that Russian Nazis are ready to come after them.
Window on Eurasia: EU Report on War in Georgia Opens the Way to More Russian Aggression, Illarionov Warns
Paul Goble
Vienna, October 1 – Many in Moscow are celebrating the conclusion of the European Union’s commission that Georgia rather than Russia bears primary responsibility for the start of the August 2008 war as a vindication of the Russian government’s insistence then and now that it only responded to “Georgian aggression.”
But Andrey Illarionov, a former advisor to the Russian president who now heads the Moscow Institute of Economic Analysis, warns on his blog that the European Union “in essence is supporting the aggressor, by justifying the intervention that took place and offering quasi-legal support both for that aggression and future acts of aggression which alas are not excluded.”
The outspoken researcher says that his “first impression” of the document is that “this is a scandal.” The EU commission, he points out, is “a commission of investigators not of judges.” It is “not a tribunal” and its conclusions “are not a verdict but can serve as the basis for a verdict,” something Moscow has been prompt to suggest (aillarionov.livejournal.com/118326.html).
Illarionov continues that the report itself contains “many true observations and conclusions and also new materials” gathered on the basis of responses from officials in Moscow, Tbilisi, Tskhinvali and Sukhumi, and it pointedly calls “many of the actions of the Russian powers that be and Russian forces illegal.”
But he continues, “the significant part of the Report cannot be called anything but scandalous,” and Illarionov offers five arguments to support that contention. First of all, he points out, “the Report to a remarkable extent adopts the version, terminology and chronology of events created (and falsified) by the Russian powers that be.”
Thus, for example, it speaks of “the five-day war” and says that “the war began with the shelling of Tskhinvali by Georgian forces,” thereby “ignoring “the colossal amount of publically available information which refutes that version, chronology and terminology.” Despite having “all these materials” in its possession, the Commission “nevertheless preferred the falsified ones.”
Second, the Commission “in fact ignored practically all the data about the penetration into the territory of Georgia and the location there long before the evening of August 7th of mercenaries from Russia and regular Russian forces.” The Commission had access to information on this point but apparently did not consider it relevant.
Third, Illarionov continues, the Report “did not recognize Georgia’s right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity by military means” against “aggression from abroad.” Instead, it “recognized as “legally based … the central part of the Russian official version [that Moscow acted to defend] Russian citizens and peacekeepers on the territory of Georgia.”
Fourth, “to the extent that the Report acknowledges as illegal the actions of Russian forces only when they occurred beyond the borders of South Ossetia, it in this way de facto recognizes the legality of the actions of Russian forces throughout South Ossetia … and thus the legality of the crossing of the international Russian-Georgian forces by Russian forces.”
And fifth – and this is the most serious danger that arises from the European Union report, Illarionov argues – “the Report in essence supports the aggressor, justifying the intervention that took place” when Russia invaded Georgian territory and thus offering a “legal” justification for “future acts of aggression which, alas, are not excluded.”
In this respect, Illarionov concludes, “the report of the European Commission [released today] represents a new edition of the 1938 Munich Pact which in the name of the European great powers denied to Czechoslovakia its right to defend itself against local bandits who were supported and inspired by a neighbor and aggressor,” Nazi Germany.
That was not the only victory Moscow appears to have won in Europe today. Despite the expectations of some, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe did not vote to deny Russia the right to participate in its sessions because of Moscow’s repeated refusal to live up to its commitments to that body.
As a result of both the report and that decision, some Moscow commentators are calling all this “a Russian triumph” (www.chaskor.ru/p.php?id=10871), while others are concerned that this “euphoria arising out of a sense of being beyond punishment” may open the way to more tragedies ahead (www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=4AC467141C71A).
Vienna, October 1 – Many in Moscow are celebrating the conclusion of the European Union’s commission that Georgia rather than Russia bears primary responsibility for the start of the August 2008 war as a vindication of the Russian government’s insistence then and now that it only responded to “Georgian aggression.”
But Andrey Illarionov, a former advisor to the Russian president who now heads the Moscow Institute of Economic Analysis, warns on his blog that the European Union “in essence is supporting the aggressor, by justifying the intervention that took place and offering quasi-legal support both for that aggression and future acts of aggression which alas are not excluded.”
The outspoken researcher says that his “first impression” of the document is that “this is a scandal.” The EU commission, he points out, is “a commission of investigators not of judges.” It is “not a tribunal” and its conclusions “are not a verdict but can serve as the basis for a verdict,” something Moscow has been prompt to suggest (aillarionov.livejournal.com/118326.html).
Illarionov continues that the report itself contains “many true observations and conclusions and also new materials” gathered on the basis of responses from officials in Moscow, Tbilisi, Tskhinvali and Sukhumi, and it pointedly calls “many of the actions of the Russian powers that be and Russian forces illegal.”
But he continues, “the significant part of the Report cannot be called anything but scandalous,” and Illarionov offers five arguments to support that contention. First of all, he points out, “the Report to a remarkable extent adopts the version, terminology and chronology of events created (and falsified) by the Russian powers that be.”
Thus, for example, it speaks of “the five-day war” and says that “the war began with the shelling of Tskhinvali by Georgian forces,” thereby “ignoring “the colossal amount of publically available information which refutes that version, chronology and terminology.” Despite having “all these materials” in its possession, the Commission “nevertheless preferred the falsified ones.”
Second, the Commission “in fact ignored practically all the data about the penetration into the territory of Georgia and the location there long before the evening of August 7th of mercenaries from Russia and regular Russian forces.” The Commission had access to information on this point but apparently did not consider it relevant.
Third, Illarionov continues, the Report “did not recognize Georgia’s right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity by military means” against “aggression from abroad.” Instead, it “recognized as “legally based … the central part of the Russian official version [that Moscow acted to defend] Russian citizens and peacekeepers on the territory of Georgia.”
Fourth, “to the extent that the Report acknowledges as illegal the actions of Russian forces only when they occurred beyond the borders of South Ossetia, it in this way de facto recognizes the legality of the actions of Russian forces throughout South Ossetia … and thus the legality of the crossing of the international Russian-Georgian forces by Russian forces.”
And fifth – and this is the most serious danger that arises from the European Union report, Illarionov argues – “the Report in essence supports the aggressor, justifying the intervention that took place” when Russia invaded Georgian territory and thus offering a “legal” justification for “future acts of aggression which, alas, are not excluded.”
In this respect, Illarionov concludes, “the report of the European Commission [released today] represents a new edition of the 1938 Munich Pact which in the name of the European great powers denied to Czechoslovakia its right to defend itself against local bandits who were supported and inspired by a neighbor and aggressor,” Nazi Germany.
That was not the only victory Moscow appears to have won in Europe today. Despite the expectations of some, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe did not vote to deny Russia the right to participate in its sessions because of Moscow’s repeated refusal to live up to its commitments to that body.
As a result of both the report and that decision, some Moscow commentators are calling all this “a Russian triumph” (www.chaskor.ru/p.php?id=10871), while others are concerned that this “euphoria arising out of a sense of being beyond punishment” may open the way to more tragedies ahead (www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=4AC467141C71A).
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