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The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001)
A link tip: Article source for monitoring Belarus:
(Useful during this election year.)
SOUTHERN CAUCASUS
The Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze has refused to participate the CIS presidents summit in Sochi at the North Caucasian Black Sea coast. Shevardnadze explained as a reason the murder of the journalist Georgi Sanaia, but he said there were also "other reasons" for his absence, probably referring to Georgian defiance at Russian desires to rule over the other CIS states. Georgia has been shaken by a scandal connected with a murder case of an opposition journalist, similar to the scandal that earlier shook Ukraine. In Ukraine, the murder of the journalist Georgi Gongadze (with Georgian roots) was directly connected with President Leonid Kuchma. In Georgia, the president is not directly accused of Sanaia’s murder. (ORT Review, 30th July; HS.)
NORTHERN CAUCASUS
Some descendants of Circassians have returned from Kosova to the North Caucasus, permitted to settle in the Republic of Adygeia, one of the four autonomous republics, into which the Circassian nation was split after the wars and genocide by imperial Russia against the Circassians in late 1800s. Besides Adygeia, the other three are Kabarda-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, and Abkhazia which is legally part of Georgia. For more information on the fate of Circassians, see A. Leitzinger: "The Circassian Genocide", The Eurasian Politician, Issue 2:
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/issue2/circass.htm
In the conquest and destruction of Circassia by czarist Russia as many as 90 % of the Circassian nation were killed or forced as refugees most of all to Turkey. In the Turkish Empire of that time, Caucasian refugees were resettled throughout the empire, due to which there are still descendants of the Circassian and other Caucasian diasporas in the Balkans, Middle East and North Africa (as all these belonged to the Turkish Empire). On present maps, the Circassians are divided into Kabardines, Cherkessians, Adygeians and Abkhazians. Balkars and Karachays are Turkic peoples.
Originally the Circassians inhabited the western parts of the North Caucasus, and the Black Sea coast from the Sea of Azoff south to the Georgian Black Sea coast. The coastline nowadays known as "Russian Riviera", where also the tourist resort Sochi, former Circassian capital, is located, has been effectively cleansed of Circassians. However, there are still lots of Circassians living also outside the nominal republics.
The first returners from Kosova came to Adygeia three years ago, when the republic’s government took the initiative to allow return immigration of Circassian refugees fleeing from the Serbian massacres against Kosovar Muslims. The returners were no more than 38, but still already at that time Russian nationalists and authorities were categorically against Circassian migration, threatened with new anti-Caucasian pogroms, and were speaking about "genocide of Russians", meaning that the proportion of Russians in the population of non-Russian republics could be reduced by increasing emigration of ethnic Russians towards Russian heartlands and correspondent Caucasian re-immigration to the regions where they were earlier expelled by Russia. More importantly than from Kosova, Caucasians have been tried to return to their homelands from the remote deportation sites in Siberia and Central Asia.
However, now the official Russian media try to turn the whole issue upside down. They write: "After having lived three years in Russia [i.e. in Adygeia], the returned Adygeians do not even think about returning to Kosovo." (ORT Review, 30th July.)
In Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala, security troops attacked against Caucasians market traders, resulting a fight where 20 people were wounded and seven policemen are in critical condition. (ORT Review, 31st July.)
Geoffrey York has written about the missing persons in Chechnya in a Canadian newspaper, with the title "You can be arrested any time: Almost everyone in Chechnya knows someone who’s missing". The Russian habit has been to keep captured Chechen civilians in ground holes, where there is no place to move, where the victims usually get pneumonia, and often die to suffocation. "If you are not released in a couple of days, you probably disappear", commented a survivor Tamerlan, a 25-year-old student of the Grozny University. "Usually, if they take you to the hole, you will never be released." In recent months disappearing of hundreds of civilians has continued everywhere in the Russian-controlled areas. Later doznes of corpses have been discovered in massgraves throughout Russian-occupied Chechnya.
Tamerlan’s rescue was due to the fact that his father-in-love was a lieutenant-colonel in the Russian army. Tamerlan has had a falsified Russian identification card made for him in order to avoid arrests, but yet he has been arrested thrice. He tries to spend all his free time in his home and when he goes to obligatory lectures, he is trying to avoid the biggest streets and Russian checkpoints.
Nina Dubayeva’s 28-year-old son Beslan was arrested in Grozny last year when he had gone for water. He never came back. Despite the Russian measures against information, human rights organisations have tried to compile lists of the hundred arrested and disappeared Chechen civilians. The lists include already more than thousand people, according to the Russian Memorial Foundation. New massgraves are being discovered all the time – recently in a massgrave discovered in Grozny contained more than 50 bodies, of whom 19 could be identified. Among these 19, 16 were Chechen civilians who were known to had been arrested by Russians.
York writes that the motive for murders committed by the Russian troops is often money. First they can demand ransom for arrested Chechens from the victims’ family members, and later also the corpses can be sold to the mourning relatives. For Chechens, the dead are sacred and it is a matter of honour for the family to bury their dead in the property of the family. Many have been demanded even 4’000 USD for a hostage to be given back alive, and absurd sums are also being demanded for information about where the killed relatives have been buried.
In this month, hundreds of Chechen villagers were beaten and tortured with electric shocks in revenge for five Russian soldiers having fallen on a road near to the village. Many villagers died and about 20 of them disappeared. Besides, homes were looted and vandalised, safety boxes of the inhabitants were being blown up, the farmacist’s shops were looted and also the village’s school and hospital were vandalised, looted and destroyed by Russian troops. Putin commented these acts as "maybe necessary and unavoidable consequences of the fight against terrorism".
In another village three villagers arrested the earlier month were found covered with boils and burn wounds and unable to speak. This incident was commented even by the leader of the pro-Moscow puppet regime Ahmad Kadyrov as "bestial". Roza Bazayeva, who leads the Committee of the Relatives of the Disappeared, has lost his 19-year-old twin sons. They disappeared last March. Mrs. Bazayeva estimated that thousands of disappeared Chechens are also kept alive in the Russian base at Khankala, where they are being tortured, kept in holes and used as slave labour. (The Globe and Mail, 31st July.)
RUSSIA
The Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats wrote about the return of the Soviet Union and Soviet practises in both Russia and in Western Europe. According to Ms. Albats "it is clear that a modernised version of the Soviet Union has already been reinstituted – in smaller scale than before and with more rational economic approach". (Moscow Times, 31st July.)
Ms. Albats thinks that the return of Soviet practises was manifested by the latest G-7 meeting in Genua, in which Russia participated and where "much-saying silence prevailed over such issues as the Russian atrocities in Chechnya". Albats wrote: "Would you expect for example Richard Nixon to discuss democracy with his ABM treaty partner Leonid Brezhnev? Of course not. You would expect them to speak about problems of security policy and to leave all talks of humanitarian issues to journalists and human rights activists." (Moscow Times, 31st July.)
"But let’s forget Russia, like the G-7 did, too", writes Albats, and remarks that the revenge of the Soviet Union has returned in larger scale than Russia, as violent protests in the streets of the most prosperous countries of the world. First in Seattle, then in Davos, Prague, again Davos, Gothenburg and latest in Genua. Albats warns that we should not mix the present anti-globalisation violence with the hippie movements of the 60s, which were dominated by frustrated children of rich families. Then the communist extremist movement was channeled into naïve admiration of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union, in its turn, threw out money to sponsor the communist parties in order to keep the Western leftist movement in her control. Yevgenia Albats warns that the present rioteers are different in character. Their heads would not be turned even if they would understand what happened in the gulags. They have not been cheated about the happiness of life in the Soviet Union, like the 60s generation. This violent generation is simply driving its own interests, not those of poor fellow people. (Moscow Times, 31st July.)
In Tyumen, there were large confrontation between the police and youth, marking the 415th anniversary of the city’s founding. Seventy people were arrested and two of them were noticed to have been wanted by police. (ORT Review, 30th July.)
The communist candidate Gennady Khodyrev won the gubernatorial election of Nizhnii Novgorod. Victory of the communists in a region traditionally considered to be pro-reform and not part of the "red zone" of Central Russia, the zone of strong communist support, was unexpected. The reason may be the people’s tiring up with Ivan Sklyarov who has governed the oblast. Khodyrev however immediately hurried to inform that he gives up his communist party membership and leans "alone to President Putin". (ORT Review, 30th July.)
"The human rights situation of Chechnya is changing every day more critical, but is getting less and less attention", remarked the veteran dissident and human rights activist Sergei Grigoriants, leader of the Glasnost Foundation. The Glasnost Foundation is among the last watchdog institutions of independent information in Russia. "Here we see the truth about the country’s new information policy. If the Kremlin does not want some news to be reported, it won’t be reported." (Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 1st August.) See also Grigoriants’s article on the power of the secret services in Russia, The Eurasian Politician, Issue 4.
The US National Intelligence Council arranged on 1st June a conference on Russia’s role in the international community. Here’s the link:
http://www.odci.gov/nic/pubs/conference_reports/russia_conf.html
A visiting professor of the University of Yale, the Italian Federico Varese, has written a book about the Russian mafia and its activities:
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829736-XSee also Vladimir Ivanidze’s article on Russian mafia’s connections with the secret services in The Eurasian Politician, Issue 4.
IDEL-URAL
In Tatarstan’s capital Kazan there was a cholera epidemy. Of the 33 diagnosted patients 17 has been hospitalised, including 8 children. The epidemy spread from a polluted reservoir, where many Kazan inhabitants used to swim. (ORT Review, 31st July.) In result, Estonia decided not to let Tatarstani citizens enter the country without a document proving cholera vaccination. (Postimees 7th August.)