Human Rights in Chechnya

They never go out alone, and when they are in their small apartment here in the capital of Chechnya, a flat screen on the wall displays a continuous feed from security cameras in the hall and stairway outside.

When the three men squeeze into their little car, they can activate a video camera and microphone in case of trouble and push a small red button on their dashboard to transmit sound directly to their main office 900 miles away.

“It’s an internal rule,” said Vladislav Sadykov, 46, a lawyer who leads the group. “We always travel together. If you are alone, it is easier to kidnap and torture you. The pictures are for protection, and also in case they kill us it will be recorded.”

The three men make up the current shift in a rotation of visiting human rights investigators called the Joint Mobile Group, which has taken on kidnapping and torture cases in this Russian republic that it considers too dangerous for resident human rights workers to handle.

“All local human rights people here live in danger,” said Dmitri Laptev, 24, a lawyer who has been in Grozny for 45 days on his third rotation. “Their homes can be burned. Their children can be kidnapped.”

The separatist war is mostly over in Chechnya, but kidnappings and extrajudicial killings continue in a more targeted way against people who support the rebels or speak out against the government of the Chechen leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, human rights groups say.

“When you talk to ordinary people, you are shocked to see how afraid they are,” Mr. Laptev said.

The human rights group Memorial said its monitors were finding it more difficult to do their work, partly because victims and their relatives have become more frightened than in the past about reporting abuses.

“The kidnapping goes on without fear,” said Mr. Sadykov, who is here on his fourth tour. “They do it openly. They show that they are with law enforcement, and law enforcement leaves them alone.”

He added: “It’s simple work, no investigation, no documents, no legal steps. Just seize someone and take him away.”

The Joint Mobile Group, with its main office in Nizhny Novgorod, recruits lawyers and investigators from human rights organizations around the country to work in teams of three in Chechnya for a month or more.

In May, the group was recognized with the annual Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, awarded in Dublin by the Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice, for its work in bringing human rights abuses to light.

“We work like investigators, looking at pictures, talking to witnesses,” Mr. Sadykov said. “We do all this the way it should be done, though we have no official standing. We get evidence and then we ask official organs to make their own investigation.”

The team’s work sometimes bears fruit, he said, and charges have been brought against some law enforcement officers.

The Joint Mobile Group was founded in 2009 after the abduction and killing of Natalya Estemirova, a local researcher for Memorial who was one of the most persistent and best-known activists in Chechnya.

Two of Ms. Estemirova’s colleagues at Memorial were evacuated and one who worked closely with her moved to Norway.

Since Ms. Estemirova’s death, human rights advocates here have mostly stepped back from confronting the authorities directly with reports of abuses, Mr. Sadykov said. Memorial has at times withdrawn its monitors from Chechnya for periods of several weeks or several months.

In a way, the Joint Mobile Group is carrying on Ms. Estemirova’s work.

“They had the idea that she was causing problems and without her there would be fewer problems,” Mr. Sadykov said. “But who am I? We rotate. They know there are people behind us and that if they kill me someone else will come.”

Among the half-dozen cases the group is currently pursuing is one of Ms. Estemirova’s final ones, the disappearance of a former rebel named Apti Zainalov, 23 at the time, who had turned himself in and served a year in prison. After his release, he disappeared in 2009, reappeared briefly under armed guard in a hospital and then vanished again.

In the days before she was killed, Ms. Estemirova had been demanding information about him from the hospital and the police, and the Joint Mobile Group has continued the pressure.

But Mr. Zainalov’s mother, Aima Makayeva, said she was weary of the pursuit and was ready to abandon the legal case if the authorities would just hand back her son.

“The only thing left is to go to Kadyrov,” she said. It is a view that is often expressed in Chechnya, where Mr. Kadyrov is in firm control of both the government and the security forces.

The tactic might work, Mr. Sadykov said. It would relieve the authorities of the constant pressure being brought by the investigators, and of the possibility that someone might actually be arrested and charged.

But, Mr. Sadykov said, it would run counter to the aim of the advocates to foster the rule of law and would instead demonstrate that it is still the men with guns who have the power to seize and release.

“The system is like a swamp,” Mr. Laptev said. “You throw in a stone and you make some ripples, and then it quiets down and the stone sinks to the bottom.”

Mr. Sadykov had an inside look at the system last year when he was part of a three-person team held overnight in a police station while investigating a report of a human rights violation. The group was released unharmed and has filed its own case charging illegal detention.

In a late-night discussion, he said, the police defended their methods, saying a harsh environment demands harsh tactics. “You have to torture,” he said one officer told him. “Without torture how can you fight terrorism?”

But Mr. Sadykov also observed that the work of human rights monitors seemed at least to be making an impression. When the three were released, he said, an officer asked him to sign a statement confirming that they had not been mistreated.

“Otherwise,” the officer said, “you will say we tortured you.”

28m

It´s estimated that, between 1450 and 1800, around 28m people were abducted in Africa to be sold as slaves mainly in America.

Free Birtukan Midekissa

Say the "K" word please!

A Turkish university will for the first time teach the Kurdish language, which was banned throughout the country until 1991, Turkish officials say.

Postgraduate studies in Kurdish will begin at Artuklu University, in the southeastern province of Mardin (Kurdistan, FYI).

The language will be offered alongside Farsi, Arabic and Syriac, at a new "Living Languages in Turkey" institute.

Expanding Kurdish language rights is part of a government drive to end years of conflict with armed Kurdish rebels.

In January, Turkey's public broadcaster launched a 24-hour Kurdish-language television channel.

As many as one in five people in Turkey are ethnically Kurdish, most of them living in the country's south-east (BBC means Kurdistan but they don´t mention it in order not to upset Turkey).

The head of Turkey's higher education board, Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, announced the new language course on Thursday, saying the goal would be to train academics to teach the minority languages.

The EU has urged Turkey to do more to improve Kurdish cultural rights, among a package of reforms demanded by the EU as conditions for joining the 27-nation bloc.

Turkey's EU accession talks opened in October 2005, but progress has been slow.

(from the BBC website)

Helen Suzman (RIP)

APPEARANCES deceived where Helen Suzman was concerned. The petite and elegant figure, clad in two-pieces or nicely pressed slacks, her hair Thatcher-perfect, was clearly a denizen of the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where discreet black domestics clipped the acacias and golf was played at weekends. Houghton, rich and Jewish, was indeed her constituency, and privilege was her life. But there the comfortable impression ended. Among the solid and overwhelmingly male Afrikaners in Parliament, “baying like hounds at a meet”, she was noisy, rude, contemptuous, “thoroughly nasty when I get going”. “A vicious little cat”, said P.W. Botha, South Africa’s prime minister, who often felt her claws in him. “The honourable member does not like me,” he observed once in Parliament. “Like you? I can’t stand you,” came the spitting reply. Verwoerd, an earlier prime minister, a man she admitted she was “scared stiff” of, fared no better. “I have written you off,” he told her. “The whole world has written you off,” she retorted.

Then there were her questions: as many as 200 of them a year, asked in Parliament and recorded in Hansard, on any subject that might embarrass South Africa’s white rulers. How many people were being held without trial? How many blacks were arrested each day for violating the Pass Laws? Why were they being forcibly removed to areas with nothing but rows of tin latrines, where only wattles grew in the sand? Why did the police turn up to remove them at four in the morning? Why did they use rubber bullets to disperse protesting crowds? Was it true that prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, beaten with straps, made to sleep on the floor? On, on, on. One National Party MP said she reminded him of “a cricket in a tree when it is very dry in the bushvelt. His chirping makes you deaf but the tune remains the same.” Botha said her “chattering” was like water dripping on a tin roof. Mrs Suzman was delighted to annoy them in the cause of justice.

Good liberal instincts

In a parliamentary career of 36 years, she spent only six in a party of any size. She quit the paternal United Party in 1959, frustrated that it was so wobbly against apartheid, to join a Progressive Party of 12 members that was wiped out in an election two years later. She was the sole survivor, for 13 years a one-woman opposition to the relentless consolidation of white rule. The small but determined voice of the “neo-communist” and “sickly humanist” would call out “No”—to the Sabotage Act, the Terrorism Act, the Ninety-Day Detention Law—and she would be left sitting alone in a sea of empty green benches.

Her strength was that she knew the facts, and knew her rights. South Africa’s devotion to the Westminster parliamentary system, a figleaf of democracy over barbarism, meant that the Speaker was bound to let this “lone Prog” speak, and ministers had to answer her questions. She was allowed to bring one Private Member’s Motion a year, so she would try single-handedly to repeal the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, or propose a minimum wage for blacks. As an MP, she could also visit prisons and “black spots” barred to the public; which was how she found herself talking to Nelson Mandela in his cell on Robben Island in 1967, or tramping through squatters’ camps of plastic sheets and corrugated iron. She was a precious mouthpiece to the world, as she was also the first resort for communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, banned people, Coloureds resentful of their racial classification, and all the “sad harvest of the seeds of apartheid” that drifted through her office.

Did it make any difference? By 1974, after 20 years in Parliament, Mrs Suzman felt she had achieved little except identity-numbers for policemen, “because it helps to know who is beating you round the head”. She had stopped no law, and white rule was to run on for 20 more years. Her critics on the left always said far more force was needed to remove it. But she did not believe in force. Outsiders thought economic sanctions were the answer: but she did not believe in those, either. Her principles, to which she was always truthful, were those of a good old-fashioned liberal. Free markets, capitalism, the paramountcy of democracy and civil institutions, equal opportunity. She had always argued with her father, Sam Gavronsky, who had emigrated from Lithuania and made a success of the leather-and-soap trade, that blacks were oppressed rather than lazy, and couldn’t build a new life as readily as he had done. But when the African National Congress, once in power, began to impose quotas for blacks in jobs, she naturally and ferociously opposed it.

In many ways black rule proved “a huge disappointment” to her: corrupt, spendthrift, anti-white, and doing little to help the millions of poor blacks whose lot she had tried to improve. Thabo Mbeki’s wilful ignorance over AIDS appalled her. She spoke out about all of it, though the ANC seldom deigned to notice or reply. She was the past. In old age she sometimes seemed just another rich white suburbanite, comfortably behind her security fence, sighing over her whisky and soda about “that president of ours”. But the claws on her “pretty little pink hands” had drawn blood, and they were never retracted.