Russian human rights activists accuse Nobel Committee of pandering to Kremlin
Russia's human rights community accused the Nobel Committee of pandering to the Kremlin after Lidia Yusupova, a leading activist who exposed abuses in Chechnya, was overlooked for this year's peace prize.
Mrs Yusupova, a lawyer who has been described as "the bravest woman in Europe" by international rights watchdogs, had been among the favourites to win the prestigious award. Pundits had also named several Chinese activists, among them the jailed civil rights campaigner Hu Jia, as likely recipients. Instead the committee chose to give the award to Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland. Many commentators see the veteran mediator , who has played an important role in negotiating conflict resolutions from Namibia and Northern Ireland to Kosovo and Indonesia, as a deliberately non-controversial choice.
In the 60th year of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, activists had hoped that the peace prize would be given to someone who championed the cause of civilians repressed by their own governments. Instead, the Nobel Committee now stands accused of shying away from sending a message of disapprobation to the Russian and Chinese governments over their human rights records. Activists at Memorial, the Russian human rights organization where Mrs Yusupova worked for many years, were visibly upset that their colleague had been passed over.
"We feel indignant and disappointed," said Svetlana Gannushkina, a member of Memorial's executive committee who was also a nominee for her work as a champion of refugee rights. "I think it was a political decision. This award should support those who fight oppression. It should give them and their followers moral support." "I think it is strange, to put it mildly, that it is given instead to prosperous politicians," she said.
Sergei Kovalyov, a veteran Soviet-era dissident who publicly opposed the Russian military campaign in Chechnya, also condemned the Nobel Committee, saying it was fearful of upsetting the Kremlin at a time when Europe is becoming increasingly dependent on Russian energy. "Oil is expensive, so one must be nice and not offend your friends, even if they are mean friends, by giving such a prominent award to someone they don't like," he said. "This is realpolitik in action and shows how little the world regards the Declaration of Human Rights."
There is little doubt that the Kremlin would have privately seethed at seeing Mrs Yusupova win the award. Despite facing repeated death threats for her work, she has relentlessly championed the civilian victims of atrocities carried out by Russian soldiers and their local proxies in Chechnya ever since Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, sent troops back into the querulous province in 1999. For many years she headed the Chechen arm of Memorial, widely considered the Kremlin's least favourite human rights organization. From a few threadbare rooms in a dilapidated apartment block tucked discretely off a quiet street in central Grozny, the Chechen capital, Mrs Yusupova and five colleagues worked to expose the terrors unleashed on the province by Russian and loyalist Chechen security forces.
Over the past eight years, Memorial has documented over 5,000 civilian abductions carried out by militias loyal to the Kremlin and has revealed secret prisons where extrajudicial executions, torture and rape were carried out with impunity. Without the work of Mrs Yusupova and her colleagues, little of what was happening in Chechnya would have been known. Russia banned foreign reporters from working independently in the republic and it was simply too dangerous for international organizations to station staff there permanently. The risks were great for Mrs Yusupova too. She often went to bed at night fully clothed in order to retain a modicum of dignity and comfort if she were kidnapped.
Mrs Yusupova's work did not just extend to exposing abuses. Using her legal skills she helped victims build up a case against the security forces to seek redress. In the past few years, Russia has been ordered to make dozens of compensation payments to some of those victims by the European Court of Human Rights. Inevitably, Mrs Yusupova's work drew the ire of the Kremlin, although so respected was Memorial's international reputation that the government could do little to silence her work abroad.
Within Russia itself, it was easier to marginalise her. Little of Memorial's work was ever mentioned on state television. Indeed, Mrs Yusupova has merited no news coverage at all in the build up the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, despite being among the favourites to win it. Yet Mrs Yusupova, who was brought up in Chechnya but is an ethnic Russian, worked just as hard to expose abuses committed by Chechen rebels and she won praise for her even-handedness in the human rights community. That did little to deter her critics in the Russian administration or in the thuggish regime of Ramzan Kadyrov, a loyalist strongman appointed by the Kremlin to run Chechnya.
When she was nominated for the peace prize in 2006, she received death threats on her mobile phone from a man speaking in Chechen. "So you're a candidate for the peace prize," he told her. "But in order to receive it, you have to survive. It will be best for you if you halt your work and that you don't win the prize – that is even if you live that long." The threat was a serious one. Just a week before, Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading investigative journalist who exposed atrocities in Chechnya, was shot dead outside her flat in Moscow. Her murder remains unsolved.
Although she no longer works for Memorial, Mrs Yusupova remains active in the human rights community and continues to champion the cause of Chechnya long after it became an unfashionable topic in Europe's liberal circles. Today she is attending a photo exhibition on Chechnya in Turin. The work of Memorial in Grozny continues, now led by Natalia Estemirova, another female activist who has won widespread admiration for her work.
Källa: Daily Telegraph, By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow 10 Oct 2008.