Window on Eurasia: 2.5 Million Russian Witnesses Every Year Change Testimony Out of Fear of Reprisals from Criminals

Paul Goble

Baku, May 15 – Even though Russia has a witness protection program, one out of four witnesses in Russian trials – some 2.5 million people – change their stories when called to the stand fearful that criminals will take reprisal against them, yet another obstacle on Russia’s road to a law-based society.
Many countries have long recognized the need to provide protection to witnesses, and in 1985, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on countries without such programs to set them up. Russia did not do so until January 2005, but to date only about 5,000 people are being protected under its terms (www.argumenti.ru/publications/9572).
Some of that relatively small group have been moved to new locations, given new names and biographies, and even provided with plastic surgery to change the way they appear, but that has not proved sufficient to guarantee that witnesses will testify accurately or even that they will testify at all.
A major reason for that is the small size of the program. In 2005, the Russian government budgeted only 10 million rubles (400,000 US dollars) for witness protection, an amount so small, “Argumenty i fakty” suggested that criminals can “sleep quietly” because they have enough money to deal with witnesses against them.
Because of a lack of resources, the number of witnesses who are given protection and the amount of protection they receive are absurdly little. In 2006, the weekly reports, only 505 of 17 million witnesses in Russian courts were granted protection, and none of them were assisted with changing their residence or appearance.
Even Ukraine does better, the Moscow paper says, noting that SBU Mykola Melnichenko, who provided transcripts linking that country’s former president with the murder of a journalist, was recently given plastic surgery to change his image and thus provide him with greater protection.
Moreover, the Russian program must contend with popular attitudes: Sixty percent of Russians prefer not to report crimes lest they get involved with the authorities. 41 percent say they are afraid of be subject to pressure if they do serve as witnesses, and 90 percent say they are prepared to change their testimony or remain silent.
The more serious the charges being heard, the more likely witnesses are to have reason to fear that they will be subject to pressure from the accused or his associates. Every fifth witness in such cases, the authorities say, is subject to threats, and “from 150,000 to 300,000 witnesses are subject to pressure from criminal clans.”
And even though the Russian government in 1998 adopted a law providing for the protection of judges and prosecutors, that legislation has not been completely effective either, with many in both subject to threats, something that in the absence of credible protection raises questions about the honesty of their decisions.
Witness protection programs are hardly the first thing people focus on when they discuss the rule of law, but as the “Argumenty i fakty” article suggests, they may be critical, especially in societies like the Russian where people remain deeply skeptical about the courts and about the willingness of the authorities to protect those who simply do their duty and tell the truth.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Militia Play Up Ethnic Crime to Justify Crackdown on Minorities

Paul Goble

Baku, May 15 – The Moscow militia, in league with media outlets interested in sensationalism, is vastly overstating the extent and nature of ethnic crime in the Russian capital in order to get approval for a sweeping crackdown against minorities, according to a former interior ministry officer.
Dmitry Berkut told Kavkaz-Uzel.ru this week that the authorities do not keep the kind of ethnically specific statistics on crime many newspapers and websites report and that there is no basis to talk about “the beginning of ‘a major war between ethnic criminal groups,’ … or between clans of one of the national criminal groups” (www.kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/154116).
Of course, there are cases of violence by members of one ethnic group against another, he continued, but any suggestions that these constitute the opening of an ethnic “’apocalypse’ is a “cynical” effort by the militia to secure a green light for the kind of crackdown against these minorities that many members of the many militiamen took part in the North Caucasus.
“As soon as people begin to talk about some kind of ‘ethnic war,’ Berkut said, “I assure you, a directive will come to conduct raids in the marks, construction sites, auto services and other places where people called in the language of the militia ‘persons of Caucasus appearance’ are working.”
At that point, he continued, “the OMON will receive carte blanche for ‘soft cleansings’ in these places,” a kind of official blessing in advance that will allow the militia to operate with even less attention to legality than normally and with their work being celebrated by the media as a valiant defense of public order.
Berkut said that when he worked in the militia it often happened that after a murder or attack on or by a member of a non-Russian minority, the militia would be given unwritten orders to “restore order” and show “who is boss in the city," orders the militiamen on the street interpreted to mean that they were free to act as they pleased.
“As a result, the militia, which hardly famed for its tolerance, simply begins to conduct itself as many of its officers became accustomed to act during the special operations in the North Caucasus,” with the militiamen focusing not on the actions of individuals but on their assumptions about groups.
Such ethnic profiling has become especially common in Moscow, he continued, where specific ethnic groups are typically connected in the public mind with specific sectors of the economy – the Azerbaijanis with construction and markets, for example, and the Armenians with restaurants, clubs, and automobile dealerships.
And this pattern which has some basis in fact, the former interior ministry officer continues, provides the basis for the media reports about “inter-ethnic wars,” conflicts that have supposedly begun because the economic downturn is forcing members of some nationalities to try to take over sectors controlled by members of another nationality.
Some of that may be happening, Berkut concedes, but media reporting about it is vastly overblown. Indeed, such reports about “new ethnic wars” are in almost all cases simply efforts by the interior ministry to justify its call for tougher laws and for more public understanding of and support for the militia’s need to use harsh measures.
To the extent Berkut is correct – and both his own experience and the internal consistency of his argument make that seem very likely – the current upsurge in media reporting about ethnic “crimes” in the Russian capital suggests that more clashes are likely to be ahead not so much between the various nationalities as between the nationalities and the Russian militia.

Window on Eurasia: Ukraine’s Muslims are Part of ‘Muslim European Community’

Paul Goble

Baku, May 15 -- “Ukraine is a European country and the Muslims of Ukraine are part of the Muslim European community,” according to the head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations of Europe (FIOE) – yet another way in which the people of Ukraine are underscoring their attachment to Europe rather than Eurasia.
During a visit to the Islamic Cultural Center in Kyiv last week, Shakib Benmakhlyuf, FIOE president, not only stressed the Europeanness of Ukraine and of Ukraine’s Muslims but “positively assessed” both the speed of Islamic rebirth there and “the public activity” of Islamic community there (www.islam.in.ua/3/ukr/full_news/2801/visibletype/1/index.html).
In response, Mufti Said Ismagilov, the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Ukraine, said his community would like to expand its cooperation with FIOE and that he and the Muslims of Ukraine believe that the recent adoption of the Charter of Muslims of Europe can promote more active ties among European countries.
Convinced that religious attachments can underlie cultural and political ones, the Russian government and the Moscow Patriarchate have devoted a great deal of effort to block the formation of a single autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine and its absorption of the more than 12,000 Orthodox parishes there now subordinate to Moscow.
Indeed, Patriarch Kirill has made the maintenance of his patriarchate’s control of those churches in Ukraine a centerpiece of his policy, not only for the entirely selfish reason that the departure of these parishes would leave his Russian Orthodox Church much reduced in size and influence but also because of the contribution his church makes to Moscow’s political goals.
But both because of the relatively small size of the Muslim community in Ukraine and because there is no single MSD in the Russian Federation to which Muslims in Ukraine have subordinated themselves, no one in Moscow appears to have devoted much attention to the question of Russian influence over Muslims.
That may now change, because the integration of the Muslims of Ukraine into European institutions would lessen the influence of Muslims from other parts of the former Soviet Union but also serve as a precedent Kyiv may be quick to invoke in its effort to establish a single national Orthodox church.
This latest development in Kyiv may lead to a new round of calls not by Muslims but by Russian officials for the creation of a single MSD for the Russian Federation with pretentions to unite Muslim communities in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, especially those where Muslims are minorities.
At the same time, however, any move in that direction would likely generate a reaction not only within the Russian Muslim community, many of whose members have never been entirely comfortable with the entire MSD system, which has no religious basis for existing, but also among Muslims in the other former Soviet countries.
Recent polls in Western Europe, however, have shown that Muslims there tend to be more patriotic than other citizens, and given the Islamic injunction for the faithful to support the country in which they live, efforts by Moscow to subordinate the Islamic communities of the other former Soviet republics could generate an unintended backlash.
Moreover, this assertion of the Europeanness of Ukrainian Islam may prompt Moscow officials to try to divide the Muslims of Ukraine and the other countries by playing on existing tensions between Muslim migrants from Central Asia and the South Caucasus and historically indigenous Muslim communities like the Crimean Tatars.
And finally because of the welcome Ukraine’s Muslims gave to FIOE and its assertion of the European nature of their Islam, it is entirely possible that FIOE and other Euro-Islamic groups will seek to reach out to Muslims in the former Soviet West even more than they have up to now, setting the stage for a somewhat unexpected form of the clash of civilizations.

Window on Eurasia: Amalrik’s 1969 Predictions about the USSR Apply to Russia Now, Analyst Says

Paul Goble

Baku, May 14 – Andrey Amalrik’s 1969 samizdat text, “Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?” remains instructive for those who want to understand not only why the USSR ended as it did but also for also why the Russian Federation faces many of the same threats to its existence, according to a Moscow commentator.
In an essay in the current issue of “Gazeta,” Sergey Shelin argues that the continuing relevance of Amalrik’s work can be seen by replacing the word “Soviet” with the word “Russian” and considering his precisely worded academic argument rather than just his final judgment on the Soviet system (www.gazeta.ru/comments/2009/05/13_a_2985726.shtml).
Amalrik’s text, composed in the second quarter of 1969, immediately distinguished itself, Shelin notes, from most of the samizdat at that time by both its focus – on the future rather than on the current situation or the past – and its tone – one almost clinically academic rather than emotionally charged.
But what is striking for one who rereads him now, something even the many who know his title have not done, is just how contemporary his argument and even his specific phrases sound and how much they resemble the content of many articles in Russian newspapers, journals and websites.
As an example of this, he cites Amalrik’s observation that “Soviet society may be compared to a kind of three-layer cake, with a ruling bureaucratic upper stratum, a middle stratum which we call ‘the middle class’ … and the most numerous lower stratum – the workers…, petty employees, service personal and the like.”
The future of the country depended, the samizdat writer said, on the relative speeds in the growth of these three groups. If the middle stratum grows most rapidly and begins to organize itself, then the system might survive, but if it does not, then the weight of the other strata will pull the entire system down.
“Replace the word ‘Soviet’ with ‘Russian,’ and this excerpt would not surprise” anyone if it appeared in any present day analysis. But Amalrik deserves credit as a prophet because he said this 40 years ago, long before it became “a commonplace,” and because of his skepticism about all three social strata.
“The upper stratum,” in Amalrik’s view, was “rotting and incapable of government-level creativity. ‘The regime did not want either ‘to restore Stalinism,’ ‘persecute representatives of the intelligentsia,’ of ‘provide fraternal help’ to those who asked that of it. Instead, “it only wants that everything will be as it was before.”
The “middle class” was cowardly and bureaucratized and so intellectually passive that “the success of a democratic movement based on this stratum seems to [Amalrik] extremely problematic,” even though it has been the rise of middle classes elsewhere that has opened the way to modernity and freedom.
And for Amalrik, “the popular masses are a destructive force.” If the economy slows, they could explode, even though he was confident they lacked the ability to organize themselves. Clearly, Amalrik suggested, such a society will not be able to withstand the first serious test, a test that he wrongly assumed would arise from a drawn-out war with China.
Because that war did not happen -- in Shelin’s view, the Afghan war was enough -- and because the Soviet Union fell apart seven years later than Amalrik predicted many people have ignored his other comments and predictions. This is a mistake, Shelin says, because Amalrik’s predictions were not only remarkably accurate but call attention to some looming problems.
In 1969, Amalrik suggested that the East European satellites would be the first to “fall away,” that the GDR would be united with Western Germany, and that “nationalist tendencies among the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union, above all in the Baltics, the Caucasus and in Ukraine, and then in Central Asia and the Middle Volga” would rapidly “strengthen.”
And he predicted, in what Shelin sees with remarkable prescience that “for a long time will continue to exist [states there] which will consider [themselves] the successor of the USSR and combine a traditional communist ideology, phraseology, and form with aspects of eastern despotism, a kind of contemporary Byzantine empire.”
The true value of Amalrik’s work, the Moscow commentator says, is not to be found in these predictions which have come true and not even his description of the reality Russians now find themselves but in another place altogether: in his understanding that a society which freely takes control of its destiny can survive but one that leaves that to others won’t.

Window on Eurasia: Bill against ‘Rehabilitation of Fascism’ Likely to Have Negative Consequences for Russia Itself, Pavlova Says

Paul Goble

Baku, May 14 – The authors of draft Russian legislation intended to prevent “the rehabilitation of Nazism” on the territory of the former republics of the USSR and most of those who have commented on it have focused on the ways such a law could be used by Moscow against the governments of some of these countries.
But Irina Pavlova, one of the most thoughtful Moscow commentators on public life there, argues that the real and far more negative impact of this legislation is likely to be on the Russian Federation itself, where, she suggests, this legislation sets the stage for the re-imposition of a Soviet-style official version of the Russian past (grani.ru/Politics/Russia/m.151005.html).
In an essay she entitled “An Afterward to Victory Day,” Pavlova argues that “far from everyone understands the genuine meaning of this legislative initiative.” And she seeks to provide it by noting that “what is important is Russia is not so much the laws themselves as the subtexts and instructions about what society as a whole may not suspect” until too late.
Consequently, in order to understand what this legislation may ultimately mean, it is important to look beyond the text itself which is clearly directed against non-Russian nations, some of whose members cooperated with the Nazis, and consider those at the top of the Russian political system who send “signals” as to how they want this act to be applied more generally.
On his video blog, she points out, President Dmitry Medvedev noted that “we have begun to encounter what are called historical falsifications” and these “are becoming ever more severe, evil and aggressive.” Consequently, he said, there is a need, in Pavlova’s words, “to be objective as the powers that be understand” whatever issue is at hand.
That sent a clear “signal” to those who wanted to hear. General Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Academy of Military Science and an officer long associated with official views on World War II, responded to Medvedev’s words with a reassertion of the need for “an objective treatment of the military history of Russia.”
He told an Ekho Moskvy interviewer that “no historians will give an answer” like that. “It is necessary,” the general continued, “that government organs participate in the creation of a new work. For example, only the General Staff, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the KGB and the FSB today can explain what really happened in 1941.”
Another person who heard this signal from Medvedev was Yury Zhukov, a researcher at the Institute of Russian History who has played “a definite role in the contemporary glamorization of Stalin,” told “Komsomolskaya Pravda” that “Russian citizens who intentionally distort the facts of history must be subject to criminal punishment.”
“All deviations from the official truth about the war,” Pavlova suggests, “from his point of view are “a clear expression of a pro-American and anti-Russian view about that which we by rights call the Great Fatherland War.” To prevent the situation from deteriorating further, Zhukov said, “it is necessary to create a single state history textbook.”
In this way, Sergei Shoigu’s initiative is being transformed into a weapon not so much against people in other countries who may have different views about World War II than Russians do than against “independent historians” who are not prepared to follow the line laid down by “veteran-preservers and historians who serve the present day powers that be.”
“The very threat of the use of the law in this way will lead to still greater difficulties in the search for truth about the Second World War,” Pavlova writes on the basis of her own experience as a historian, “although even now because of the inaccessibility of still classified documents, this search is extremely difficult.”
And “in such an atmosphere, inevitably will take place the further degradation of domestic research on Soviet and post-Soviet history [more generally], not to speak about the instruction” of the next generation of historians and of ordinary citizens of the Russian Federation.
In 2002, Pavlova writes, she attempted to do research on Stalin and the war and found her access to the archives contested by veterans groups who felt she was denigrating the Soviet leader. Her “opponents” at that time “could only dream about such a law” as the present one, at least in the interpretation of it that people like Gareyev and Zhukov are suggesting.
Given her own experience, the Moscow commentator says, she is confident that the chief victims of the new legislation will not be the leaders of Estonia or Ukraine but rather “those who permit themselves to doubt” the generally received “truth about the war” and are willing to look the facts of the case in the face, even if the current regime thinks no one should know.
Pavlova clearly recognizes that if this legislation passes and if it is then used by the Gareyevs and Zhukovs who are confident they have heard “a signal” from President Medvedev, the officialization of history will not be limited to World War II. It will spread, and those who care about truth will again have to fight on many fronts.

Window on Eurasia: Conflict between ‘Official’ and ‘Unofficial’ Islam Arose after 1991, Russian Orientalist Says

Paul Goble

Baku, May 14 – The conflict between “official” Islam – which includes those institutions supported and sometimes controlled by Moscow – and “unofficial” or underground Islam – which opposes those institutions in the name of the true faith -- did not begin in Soviet times but rather after the collapse of the USSR, according to a leading Russian orientalist.
In part, this is a game of definitions – what people mean or have meant by these two categories has changed over time – but in another, Vladimir Bobrovnikov’s point, made in comments to the Regnum news agency, strikes at a fundamental set of assumptions long made by Western and Russian researchers (www.regnum.ru/news/1162403.html).
Perhaps more important, Bobrovnikov, an expert on Islam in the North Caucasus at the Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies, is a member of the Russian justice ministry’s Expert Council on State Religious Expertise. And consequently, his views merit particular attention because they may inform Moscow’s policies toward Islam.
There are several possible approaches to Islamic structures that Bobrovnikov’s comments suggest. On the one hand, much of his argument implies that he would favor a sharp reduction in the number of MSDs and even of mosques so that there would be a clear “power vertical” within Islam in the North Caucasus.
But on the other, his words indicate that he favors either providing even more support for the MSDs in order to ensure that they are in a better position to control the situation or, more speculatively, eliminating state support for them lest they be tarred by association with a secular state.
These two strategies are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, it is entirely possible that in his new position, Bobrovnikov may argue for the adoption of a regionally variegated one. But regardless of what he supports and Moscow does, his remarks suggest that the official-unofficial divide is going to get deeper before it might be resolved.
The antagonism between “official” Muslim spiritual administrations (MSDs) in the North Caucasus and “official” (or “parallel”) Islam did not exist in Soviet times in the North Caucasus but rather arose after 1991 when the number of MSDs multiplied, their independence from the state increased, and Muslims returning from abroad challenged them.
In Soviet times, Bobrovnikov points out, “official Muslim structures in essence had no rights, but on the other hand,” in his view, they were never opposed by any Muslims outside these structures as many Muslims now stand in opposition to the MSDs during the last decade or so.
The basic preconditions for the split, the Moscow orientalist argues, “arose in the first half of the 1990s when it became possible to create an unlimited number of Muslim structures which bean to compete with one another” and who found themselves sometimes allied with and sometimes opposed by young Muslims who had received their Islamic training abroad.
“Among part of the young” who studied abroad, “the view arose that ‘the old men’ were teaching Islam incorrectly.” This was especially marked in the Northwestern Caucasus where, unlike in Daghestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, there was no institution of sheikhs” whose authority was based on spiritual descent” rather than on expertise, often not high.
The post-Soviet conflict between official and unofficial Islam, Bobrovnikov says, “was exacerbated by yet another circumstance: Over the last 150 years, internal migration has been taking place at various levels of intensity.” Many areas, he says, are thus “mixed,” and “often there is not a single juma mosque,” but rather several, something that helps divide Muslims.
“The decisive stimulus” for the appearance of the conflict between “official” and “unofficial” Islam, Bobrovnikov argues, “became the events of 1999-2002 when the authorities returned de facto to the spiritual administrations the status of official Islamic structures which receive state support, including the backing of the siloviki.”
Many in Moscow saw this as a way of establishing tighter control over the Muslim communities, but in many parts of the North Caucasus, Bobrovnikov suggests, this re-officialization of the MSDs had the effect of triggering a dispute, with some of the MSDs compromised and marginalized as a result.
That opened the way for the young, often trained abroad or affected by literature from or contacts with militants in Daghestan and Chechnya to step up their campaign for alternatives to the official structures. Indeed, the Moscow orientalist strongly implies, the support Moscow gave to the MSDs at that time was just enough to make this split almost inevitable.

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Window on Eurasia: Out-Migration from Russian North Increasingly Hurting Economy There

Paul Goble

Baku, May 13 – The departure of workers and their families from northern regions of the Russian Federation like Murmansk oblast is not only reducing the number of people available for employment there but also cutting the number of people in prime child-bearing age groups, trends that are slowing economic activity there.
And while there has been a slight decline in the number of people leaving over the last several years – most who wanted and could leave have already done so – and a slight uptick in childbirths given the larger pool of women born circa 1990, demographers say this is only “the calm before the storm” of further declines (www.mbnews.ru/content/view/17761/99/).
In an article on MBNews.ru this week entitled “We are Losing an Entire Murmansk,” Elena Malyshkina says that the population of Murmansk oblast fell by 340,000 over the last 18 years, approximately 30 percent of its peak figure of 1,191,500 in 1990. The “lion’s share” of this decline – “from 70 to 90 percent in various years – consisted of those who left the region.
That outmigration is equivalent, she notes, to the entire population of the city of Murmansk.
Over the last several years, the decline in the population has slowed compared to the 1990s, but that trend may not last. Indeed, there are some reasons to think it could even be reversed: “In 2008, losses from migration increased 48.5 percent in comparison to losses in 2007.”
Officials in the region have been pleased by the recent increase in the number of births there, and some of them predict that if that trend continues, then soon, the number of births each year will be equal to the number of deaths, a situation in which the population losses Murmansk has suffered on that account “could become equal to zero.”
But Malyshkina says, “most likely, this is simply the calm before the storm” because specialists are predicting that in the immediate future there will be an essential reduction in the number of births as the number of women entering prime child-bearing ages will fall across the country.
The numbers of potential new mothers in the Russian north are likely to decline even more precipitously, because they are members of an age group that is the most likely to leave. And consequently, the percentage decline in the population in Murmansk and neighboring regions is likely to be far higher than elsewhere.
According to the projections of Russian demographers, the journalist reports, by 2026, the population of Murmansk oblast will fall from its current 842,000 to 688,000, of which outmigration will account for 131,000 of the 154,000 overall decline. And those figures may prove to be overly optimistic.
Malyshkina suggests that “the first indications” of this new decline have appeared already this year: In January-February 2009, compared to the first two months of 2008, the natural decline [deaths over births] increased by three percent, [while] the migration loss rose by 29 percent.”
The continuing departure of workers, she says, “could become for the economy of the oblast a powerful brake,” possibly bringing many enterprises to a complete halt because most of their workers there know that they can make as much or more elsewhere and not have to suffer the climatic and other problems of the north.
If the situation is to be improved, she says, there must be a sharp increase in the pay and benefits for people working there, the introduction of significant number of Gastarbeiters from Central Asia and the Caucasus, and/or a change in the way the firms and companies there do business, including the possibility of shifting to more innovative forms of development.
But as “Novaya gazeta” pointed out this week, United Nations studies show that “it is significantly easier to die in Russia than to be born,” in large measure because “there is no state policy not only to preserve the nation but even to prevent its degeneration” (www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/048/19.html).