Francis Chartrand for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles

The Russian supreme court today ordered that the case against three alleged accomplices to journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s murder should be returned to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation, overturning a lower court ruling on 7 August blocking this possibility.

A representative of the prosecutor general said the investigation into the accomplices would be combined with the investigation into those who carried out Politkovskaya’s October 2006 murder and those who ordered it.

“Like Politkovskaya’s relatives, who appealed against the 7 August decision, we are relieved by the supreme court’s ruling,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Sending the case back for further investigation revives a degree of hope that the facts may yet emerge. We nonetheless fear that the security forces will block all attempts to solve this murder. More effort and more vigilance are needed if the truth is ever to be established.”

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Labels: Noémie Cournoyer, Reporters without borders, Russia

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 2:58 AM 0 Comments

A court in the Ingush city of Nazran has ruled that the detention of Magomed Yevloyev, the owner of the Ingushetiya.ru news website, by interior ministry agents on 31 August - during which he was shot dead - was “illegal,” Yevloyev family lawyer Mussa Pliyev reported on 12 November.

“This is a first step towards recognising the political nature of the behaviour of the Ingush security forces in this case,” Reporters Without Borders said. “We hope that a thorough and impartial investigation will soon be carried out into the exact circumstances of Yevloyev’s death.”

An opponent of then Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, Yevloyev was arrested by interior ministry personnel in Magas, Ingushetia’s new capital, as he disembarked from the plane that had brought him from Moscow. During the flight, he had a violent argument with President Zyazikov, who happened to be aboard the same plane.

Yevloyev was fatally shot in the head after being forcibly driven away in a police car. The local authorities have blamed his death on “negligence.” This is rejected by the Ingush opposition and the Yevloyev family.

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev issued a decree on 30 October replacing Zyazikov as Ingush president by Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. A career military officer who was awarded the “Hero of Russia” title for his role in the fighting in neighbouring Chechnya, Zyazikov had been president of Ingushetia since 2002. His previous posts included that of deputy chief of military intelligence for the Ural-Volga region.

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Labels: Francis Chartrand, Reporters without borders, Russia

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 12:03 AM 0 Comments

MSF continues to deliver medical care and to distribute basic relief supplies to displaced people in and around Tbilisi. A large number of them are already trying to go back to their hometowns while others are receiving assistance from different organizations.

The MSF medical team begins the day by visiting a kindergarten which has been converted into a centre for displaced people. It is located in an outlying suburb of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. Kindergarten N°9 currently houses 70 people. But before the Russian forces started their retreat towards South Ossetia following the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia, there were 113 people staying there. Some men have already gone back to their villages to see if a permanent return is possible.

The director of the kindergarten quickly finds a room so that the MSF team can give consultations. No other medical aid has been provided up until now. Mothers come with their children, and there are also elderly people. Nino, a young pregnant woman, wants to see a doctor. Since she left Mereti, her village in the separatist province of South Ossetia, this young Georgian woman has not been examined. Eight months pregnant, there is the possibility she could deliver prematurely. These last weeks have been trying. When fighting broke out on 8 August, she fled Ossetia with her three-year-old daughter. For several days, she had no news of her husband until he was able to join her in Tbilisi. Her daughter is still afraid. “She wakes up in the night when she hears the noise of a plane,” explains Nino. “She thinks that the bombings are starting again.”

In general however, the children are at ease in this new environment. There is a playground in the courtyard, there are some toys. All the families receive food and washing detergent. The only things missing are diapers for the babies, and the MSF team will bring them this afternoon.

However, the conditions are clearly more difficult in a large four-floor building, 100 metres away from the kindergarten. When the displaced families came to this building, a former cardiology institute, there was no water or electricity. The offices were cluttered with laboratory equipment. “We have done everything ourselves,” explains one man. “We have connected plastic pipes so that there is water in a few sinks and toilets and we’ve also connected the electricity.” As for food, supply remains uncertain. From time to time, the 92 people who are living there receive some bread and some sausages as well as rations which are supplied by other organizations.

After being informed about this situation, the MSF team begins its consultations, mainly for women, children and the elderly. The doctors have brought a supply of drugs with them and give the necessary medication to the patients. But they will have to come back in the afternoon to distribute hygiene kits to all the families (soap, washing detergent, buckets, toothpaste) and some kits for babies.

On August 14, the MSF teams began going to the areas in Tbilisi where the displaced people were staying to deliver medical aid. This was their first visit to this particular area. But they will return regularly to all the sites to do follow-up medical care. This is especially important for people with chronic illnesses, in order that they will be able to continue their treatment.

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Labels: Doctors Without Borders, Georgia, Marie-Êve Marineau, Russia

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 12:02 AM 0 Comments

(New York, August 9, 2008) – Georgia and Russia should not under any circumstances target civilians as the current hostilities intensify in South Ossetia, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch, concerned by reports of attacks targeting civilians, called on all sides to respect the absolute ban against targeting civilians or carrying out attacks that indiscriminately harm civilians.

“All sides must remember that attacks on civilians, or acts intended to terrorize civilians, clearly violate international humanitarian law, and may constitute war crimes,” said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “This would be true even if they are carried out in reprisal for indiscriminate attacks by the adversary.”

After weeks of low-level hostilities, the conflict in South Ossetia, a breakaway region of Georgia backed by Moscow, escalated dramatically in the early morning of August 8, 2008. Georgia declared that it intended to restore constitutional order and launched a large-scale military offensive. Russia sent additional troops to South Ossetia, saying they were reinforcements to Russian peacekeepers who are in the area to monitor a 1992 ceasefire between Georgian and South Ossetian forces.

South Ossetia authorities claimed that Georgian forces used Grad multiple launch rocket systems to shell civilian areas, particularly in the capital, Tskhinvali, and that dozens of buildings were destroyed or damaged, including the university, the hospital, a shopping center, schools, and several government buildings. According to unconfirmed media reports, several Ossetian villages, including Dmenis and Tsunar, also sustained significant damage.

Reports on casualties vary widely, with different media agencies citing figures ranging from 15 to 1,400 people killed in South Ossetia as a result of the attacks. None of these reports could be confirmed.

According to the Russian Federal Migration Service, 971 people fled South Ossetia on August 8 and sought refuge in North Ossetia, a Russian province that borders South Ossetia. North Ossetian hospitals reported that they were ready to admit the wounded; but the head of the regional hospital was quoted by Kavkazskii Uzel, a news website, as saying that, “the road which was intended for evacuation of the wounded has been bombed,” and doctors did not have access to the wounded.

Russia’s military command claimed that 12 Russian peacekeepers deployed in South Ossetia were killed and 120 injured, and also blamed the Georgian side for obstructing the evacuation of the wounded from Tskhinvali.

In the meantime, according to the BBC and other international media, Russian tanks have reportedly reached the northern suburbs of Tskhinvali while the Russian air force has been carrying out air raids in South Ossetia and further into Georgian territory. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili accused Moscow of bombing Georgian air bases and towns, resulting in the deaths of 30 military personnel and civilians.

Human Rights Watch called on both parties to abide by the fundamental principle of international humanitarian law, which requires armed forces to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and between military objects and civilian objects, at all times. It is also forbidden to carry out indiscriminate attacks or attacks that cause damage disproportionate to the anticipated concrete military advantage.

South Ossetia was an autonomous province of Georgia during the Soviet era. It declared independence from Georgia in 1990, and armed conflict between South Ossetian and Georgian forces ensued in 1991 and 1992. The conflict ended in 1992 with a ceasefire and establishment of a tripartite peacekeeping force, with Russian, Ossetian and Georgian peacekeeping battalions. The ceasefire adhered, but tensions continued, with Georgia accusing Russia of providing assistance to South Ossetia’s separatist movement.

Labels: Francis Chartrand, Human Rights Watch, Russia

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 10:21 PM 0 Comments

The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in the night from Saturday to Sunday in Moscow announced Russian news agencies. He was 89 years old.

According to his son, quoted by the Itar-Tass agency, he died as a result of acute heart failure. A student at school and university science Rostov-on-Don, he studied literature, mathematics and Communist doctrine he knew well. He joined the revolutionary ideals of the time. During the German invasion in 1941, he fights as a gunner. He was sentenced in 1945 to 8 years imprisonment in labour camps for activity against-revolutionary, having maintained a critical match against the Stalinist political skills and his warriors. According to Solzhenitsyn, the war with Nazi Germany could have been avoided if the Soviet government had reached a compromise with Hitler. Solzhenitsyn accused the Soviet government and Joseph Stalin have been more responsible Hitler of the terrible consequences of war on the Soviet people. He was sentenced to time as a traitor. When he left the camp in 1953, a few weeks before Stalin's death, he was sent to perpetual exile in Kazakhstan. He was rehabilitated in 1956 and settled in Ryazan, 200 km south of Moscow, where he teaches physical sciences.

It was his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 in the journal Soviet Novi Mir, thanks to approval by Nikita Khrushchev in person, who acquired him international acclaim. However, three years later, it is impossible to publish anything in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and his novels Prime Circle and The Cancer Pavilion and the first volume of his historical epic The Red Wheel, appeared in the West where he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, reward it may levy that four years later after being expelled from the USSR. It has not been able to travel to Stockholm for fear of being stripped of his Soviet nationality and unable to return to the USSR, the Swedish government refused to submit the price to its embassy in Moscow.

His life becomes a permanent conspiracy to steal the right to write in spite of monitoring more and more diligent KGB. A portion of its archives is entered in one of his friends in September 1965, and there is insufficient be assassinated in August 1971 (by a "Bulgarian umbrella"). One of his closest collaborators has narrowly escaped a strangulation and a car accident. In December 1973, appears in Paris (in Russian) The Gulag Archipelago, where he exposes the system of the Soviet Gulag concentration camps, he lived on the inside, and the nature of the totalitarian regime. Written between 1958 and 1967 on tiny pieces of paper buried one by one in gardens friends, a copy was sent to the West to escape censure. He decided his release after one of his aides was found hanged: she had confessed to the KGB cache whereabouts of a copy of the work. This publication brings him to be stripped of his citizenship and be expelled from the USSR in February 1974.

He settled first in Switzerland, then emigrated to the USA. After a turbulent period of interviews and speeches (including the famous speech delivered at Harvard in 1978), the USA, Solzhenitsyn was often invited to major conferences. On 15 July 1975, he was even invited to give a lecture on the world situation in the U.S. Senate. The West discovered a man and deeply conservative Orthodox slavophile very critical of Western society of consumption. He withdrew with his family in Vermont, in St. Johnsberry, to write the work which he dreamed since his youth: The Red Wheel. Historical epic tells the embourbement of Russia in the revolutionary madness, it has several thousand pages.

After the fall of the USSR, the Russian nationality he is returned and the Gulag Archipelago published. Via France (inauguration of the memorial Lucs Boulogne-sur-(Vendée) on September 25 1993), then he returned to Russia Friday, May 27, 1994 where he resides since. Until 1998, it retains an intense social activity at its own television show, travels through Russia, meets a multitude of people. The disease has interrupted this activity.

A committed intellectual ... and finally recognized

Long a symbol of intellectual resistance to Soviet oppression, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is regularly attacked. The operations of destabilization against him have practically never ceased since the 1960's. A zek (detainee), manipulated by the KGB, accused of being an informer of the communist authorities, and why writing a false denunciation. The KGB did write a few books against him by former friends, as his former editor, Alec Flagon, and even by his first wife. During his literary career, no indictment has not been spared: successively or at the same time accused of being nationalist, tsarist, ultra-Orthodox, anti-Semitic or supported Israel, traitor, accomplice objective of the Gestapo, the CIA, francs Masons, french secret services and even the KGB. Solzhenitsyn has responded to these accusations by juxtaposing to cancel them, in writing his autobiography, The grain fell between the millstones, and again recently in an article of the Litératournaïa Gazeta, "barbouilleurs not looking light ". In fact, his political opinions, forged throughout his life by a common destiny outside, are too complex to be labelled. He did not believe that the country can move, overnight, a totalitarian regime to a regime-type Western democracy. If it supports a strong presidency, it is especially supporter of local democracy, quite close to the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville: Solzhenitsyn, true democracy is not established by the electoral system but by a fabric d 'associations managing local affairs independently of the central government which, he should take care that national affairs (army, foreign policy, etc.).. It is a fervent patriot, but not a nationalist: for example he always opposed the war in Chechnya. He had a favorable comment to President Putin during his coming to power, hoping to significant changes, then took his distances quickly. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has never refuted the accusations of royalisme brought against him by Soviet power. His orthodox religious beliefs are also distrust in progressive circles.

According to Moshe Lewin, who relays this criticism, "as long as [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] conducted its battle of the interior, foreign observers have assumed that he fought for a democratic system [...]. But once Solzhenitsyn exiled in the West, they quickly realized that was not automatically anti-bearer of democracy. The battle Solzhenitsyn was actually in the service of an ideology deeply undemocratic, which combined elements of "national-statism" archaic traits of the Orthodox religion, but the very concept of Democracy. In short there were at Solzhenitsyn a deep attachment to a authoritarianism of its own which, if it was not made during his first appearances in the public arena, has developed during his fight. "

The American historian Richard Pipes, whose work on the history of Soviet Russia had been described by Solzhenitsyn "Polish version of Russian history" (Pipes is of Polish origin), responded to it in the taxing of anti-Semitism and ultra-nationalism. In 1985, Pipes has developed his remarks in his criticism of a new Solzhenitsyn, August 1914: "Each culture has a clean form of anti-Semitism. In the case of Solzhenitsyn, it is not racial. This has nothing to do with blood. He [Solzhenitsyn] is not racist, the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. It has many similarities with Dostoyevsky, who was a devout Christian, a patriot and a fierce anti-Semitic. Solzhenitsyn takes place in doubt the vision of the Revolution defended by the extreme-right Russian, as a creation of Jews."

It has been throughout her literary accusations of anti-Semitism because of the publication named administrative manager of the Gulag, its historical work on the Bolshevik revolution and, more recently, because of its opposition to Russian oligarchs and the publication of his book historical Two centuries on relations between Jews and Russians from 1795 to 1995: the writer and former Soviet dissident Vladimir Voinovich has tried to demonstrate anti-Semitic character of this book in a study controversy. In France, Trotskyist historian Jean-Jacques Marie devoted a section to each of Volume Two centuries together, which he describes as "anti-Semitic Bible." According to Jean-Jacques Marie, "Solzhenitsyn describes, in two centuries together, a conception of the history of Jews in Russia worthy of being included in a handbook of falsifying history" by restoring a history of pogroms "as it was seen by Tsarist police." The British historian Robert Service, however, defended the book by Solzhenitsyn, arguing that a study of the place of Jews in the Bolshevik party was fully justified and that Trotsky himself had criticized their overrepresentation in the leadership of the party.

The end

Solzhenitsyn lives near Moscow withdrew in the midst of his family. The Fund assists Solzhenitsyn former zeks and their families in paying their pensions, paying for medicines. After thought he would play a decisive role in post-communist Russia, then disappointed, having already more or less "buried", the Russians seem these days look again at its figure and rediscover value of his writings politico-social. An international symposium on his work was dedicated in December 2003 in Moscow.

On 12 June 2007, President Vladimir Putin paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn in awarding him the prestigious State Medals.

Friend of Philippe de Villiers, Chairman of the Vendee, he called a college of Aizenay College Alexander Solzhenitsyn, inaugurated by the son of the writer.

He died at his home in Moscow to 89 years in the night of 3 to 4 August an acute heart failure.

Labels: Art and culture, Francis Chartrand, Russia

# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 10:36 AM 0 Comments