Daily Archives: March 2, 2015

Moscow If the track record is anything to go by, Russians may never find out who gunned down liberal activist Boris Nemtsov on a bridge beside the Kremlin last Friday, or why.

Mr. Nemtsov, who served as deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin,is by far the highest ranking official to meet such a fate. But he is only the latest of well over a dozen high-profile Russian politicians, human rights activists, and journalists who've been murdered over the last two decades in similarly professional style and almost certainly for political reasons.

And those are just the figures whose deaths made international headlines, such as investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya and human rights worker Natalya Estimirova, and it doesn't begin to illustrate the breadth of political assassinations in post-Soviet Russia. A compendium of journalists from across Russia's 11 time zones who've been slain in the line of work since 1993, prepared by Russian non-governmental groups, runs to well over 300 names.

Not a single one of those major cases, and very few of the lesser-known ones, has ever been fully solved. Even as tens of thousands of Russians gathered in downtown Moscow Sunday to mourn Nemtsov, the few people who keep track of such things were marking the 20th anniversary of the gangland-style murder of Vladislav Listyev, one of Russia's most celebrated political journalists and chief editor of Russia's public TV network. In terse remarks to reporters, spokesman for the Kremlin's Investigative Committee the same body charged with hunting down Nemtsov's killers insisted that Mr. Listyev's case is not closed and "investigative measures are under way to uncover the mastermind of this crime and every accomplice."

Oleg Orlov, chair of Memorial, Russia's largest human rights network, says this dismal record is the main reason most Russians shrug and say they doubt Nemtsov's murderers will ever be found. "Law and order is just on the surface; underneath there is no control. Nemtsov devoted himself to struggling for a law-governed state, but he fell victim to this reality," he says.

The reasons for the failure of Russian justice to get to the bottom of such cases may be complex, but ultimately authorities just don't want to discover the truth, says human rights lawyer Sergei Davidis, a member of the board of Solidarity, an opposition movement.

"Some murders might involve some measure of official complicity. I don't mean to suggest that Putin ordered Nemtsov's death, or anything like that, but the fact that it happened right under the Kremlin wall indicates a high degree of confidence on the part of killers that they wouldn't get caught in that place," he says. "Even if some connection to power isn't present in the crime, investigators will fear that it may be and not want to risk the consequences of uncovering it. In short, that's why we get investigations that consist mainly of foot-dragging and window dressing."

The demonstration effect of Nemtsov's murder is hard to miss. The photos of his dead body, beamed around the world, all showed the iconic spires of Red Square's St. Basil's Cathedral as the backdrop. And he was shot on a newly-minted holiday ordered by Putin to honor Russia's Special Forces. Experts say that bears similar earmarks to the 2006 slaying of Ms. Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the lobby of her apartment building on Putin's birthday.

"It was clearly a political murder and a provocation. It's just hard to discern who may have done it and what they were trying to provoke," says Nikolai Petrov, a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. "We should watch what follows from this very carefully, and especially the reactions of the Kremlin."

Some observers are likening it to the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, a highly capable and charming Communist apparatchik who was the chief rival to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. The full truth may never be known, but it seems likely that Stalin's secret police covertly orchestrated the killing, which was blamed on the opposition and used as a pretext for a wave of murderous purges that wiped all traces of dissent. There's a chilling hint of that possibility in a weekend statement from the Investigative Committee, noting that one theory they're looking into is that the anti-Kremlin opposition may have "sacrificed" Nemtsov to create a liberal martyr.

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Nemtsov joins long list of those assassinated in post-Soviet Russia

March 2, 2015 - 18:16 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, is showing signs of a frantic despotism. Journalists, bloggers, lawyers, human rights activists and others who speak out for individual liberty are arbitrarily being swept up in a wave of arrests and detentions, an article on the Washington Post says.

Aliyev, suffering a decline in the oil revenue that has propped up his regime for years, seems to be striking out at anyone who opposes him.

One of Aliyevs favorite tools for silencing people is pretrial detention, the article notes. Azeri law states that it is to be used only in limited cases, and Azerbaijans criminal procedure code put this power in the hands of the courts, not prosecutors, more than a decade ago. In practice, though, the courts have become servants of the prosecution. The European Court for Human Rights noted in a case last year that Azeri courts have frequently endorsed prosecution requests for detention automatically.

Leyla Yunus, a prominent human rights activist, has been in pretrial detention since July 30 on arbitrary and trumped-up charges of treason and tax evasion. She is suffering from a liver condition and diabetes. On Feb 18, an appeals court dismissed her appeal and gave her another five months in pretrial detention, at the end of which she will have been behind bars for nearly a year without trial. Her husband, Arif Yunus, a historian who suffers from cardiovascular disease, was detained on Aug 5. His appeal was dismissed Feb 23, and he, too, was given another five months in pretrial detention.

Meanwhile, the campaign against critical journalists continues. The investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova, who described her situation in a letter from prison that ran as a recent Post op-ed, remains behind bars in pretrial detention. A closed-door trial was held Feb 23, three days after her letter appeared, and she was found guilty of criminal libel and fined. The libel charge stemmed from accusations made in 2014 by a man who claimed she defamed him on Facebook, which she denied. In the twisted, Orwellian nature of the Azeri justice system, she was first arrested in December on a charge of inciting a former colleague to attempt suicide and since has been slapped with new charges, including embezzlement, tax evasion, illegal entrepreneurship and abuse of power.

Aliyev seems particularly uncomfortable with the work of the Azerbaijani service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, to which Ismayilova had contributed, the Washington Post says. On the same day as her snap trial, a former chief of the services Baku bureau was stopped at the airport, prevented from boarding a plane and told he was under a travel ban at the request of the prosecutors office. More than 26 journalists and staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have been interrogated by Azeri authorities since a Dec 26 raid on the Baku bureau. The news organization is funded by the United States through the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

In a recent magazine advertisement, Aliyev said he wanted to make Azerbaijan one of the most developed and competitive countries in the world. It certainly wont become that if he continues to rule like a despot, the article concludes.

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The Washington Post: Aliyev showing signs of frantic despotism