WPT University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Tanya Lokshina, "Rampant Abuses in Russia"  January 20, 2011 UP541   cc >> Ted Gerber: Today's speaker, we're very fortunate to have, and it's a special pleasure for me to introduce Tanya Lokshina, whom I've known for about eight years and from whom I've learned a tremendous amount about human rights, democracy or problems with democracy and other issues in Russia. Tanya has a very interesting background, and she made me promise I wouldn't tell too much about it, but I will say a few words nonetheless. Tanya actually has an MA in comparative literature from Brandeis University, but she decided that rather than pursue an academic career she wanted to do something that was relevant to the real world, and so she decided to pursue journalism. And she's actually been working as a journalist, writing articles about Russia since 1997. She started to pursue that full time in the early 2000s. She's currently serving as the Russia researcher for the Moscow office of the organization Human Rights Watch where she's worked since 2008. Prior to that, she ran a think-tank called Demos, which does work on human rights issues in Russia. She helped found that organization. And prior to that she worked for the Moscow Helsinki group. Tanya is probably best known for her extensive reporting from the North Caucasus and also the South Caucasus. 

Places like Grozny, Abkhazia, Beslan, these are, for most of the people in the room I imagine, somewhat frightening abstractions. Frightening but abstractions all the same. For Tanya these places are her work place. And thus it is a tremendous honor and a pleasure to introduce to you Tanya Lokshina. [APPLAUSE] >> Tanya Lokshina: Thank you very much, Ted. I'm very appreciative for you inviting me to speak to all of you today. It's my first time at the university and actually my first time in Wisconsin. Hopefully many happy returns. I'd like to talk about the Northern Caucasus or rather the human rights aspect of the very complex situation in the Northern Caucasus. Widest region in particular. 

Russia is a huge country, as you all very well know, and there are some fascinating places there, and there are plenty of human rights issues as far as Russia is concerned. You can talk about the lack of freedom of assembly, the lack of freedom of associations, police violence, violence in the armed forces, arbitrariness of the law enforcement and security agencies in general, violations of social and economic rights which is something that the population of Russia is very concerned about. Plenty of issues out there on the table. So why the Northern Caucasus after all, and isn't it a marginal sort of an issue if compared to some other problems which are so pressing in the Russian federation. Many people are saying indeed that the Northern Caucasus somewhere over here is there very remote place which has nothing to do with Russia as a whole. In fact, you can hear people describing the Northern Caucasus, so the so-called mainland, as them. It's us here on the mainland and it's them out there in the Caucasus. They're different, they have a different life and their problems supposedly do not concern us. Likewise, when you hear the residents of the Northern Caucasus talking about the mainland, they would almost on all occasions refer to them. And when you're coming to, say, Ingushetia or Dagestan or Chechnya, one of those republics in the Northern Caucasus, someone is very likely to ask you and what is the weather like now in Russia? So there is this almost clear line of division in people's minds. 

Though the Northern Caucasus is a federal district of the Russian federation and supposedly all those republics in the Northern Caucasus are just normal Russian regions. I would argue, in fact, that all the problems, human rights wise, that we see in the Northern Caucasus today they are relevant for the country as a whole. It's just that in the Northern Caucasus they are magnified out of all proportion, and if you study those problems in the Northern Caucasus it is as if you're looking at similar problems in the rest of the country but through a very powerful magnifying glass. So that's why the Northern Caucasus is so important. And many troubles of Russia are rooted in that region. One in particular that is worth talking about is the government struggle with insurgency. One of the most unfortunate results of the second Chechen war which began in 1999 and which essentially brought Vladimir Putin to power, that's how he became popular. That was his winning card on the way to the Russia's presidency. So one of the outcomes of that war was that human rights abuses and insurgent activity both spilled out to the rest of the Northern Caucasus region. And at this point in time we are not talking about Chechen insurgency anymore, we are talking about the insurgency of jihadist nature operating throughout the Northern Caucasus. 

And the government is desperately trying to suppress that insurgency, which isn't an Islamic insurgency, not separatist any longer and by no means moderate. And in trying to suppress the insurgency, the law enforcement security agencies are running those counter insurgency operations. And during these operations unlawful methods such as abductions of people, enforced disappearances, torture, executions are used in a systematic basis. So that in itself creates a vicious circle because in order to effectively fight insurgency, any government needs support of the population on the ground, but people in the Northern Caucasus are the ones who suffer during those counterinsurgency operations and they're so antagonized by those unlawful practices that they actually have no trust for the government, they have no trust for law enforcement and security agencies, and in fact many of them perceive law enforcement and security officials to be their primary enemies. And as a result, this plays into the hands of the insurgents because it makes the recruitment such an easy task for them. They are essentially saying to the public, well listen this government does not protect you. The laws that are there on paper, they do not work. All around you is filth, all around you are corruption, all around you is lawlessness. But you can come to us, you can overthrow this useless corrupt government, you can live under -- rule, and your rights are going to be protected and you're going to be well taken care of. And believe it or not this propaganda is incredibly effective especially in a placed like, say, Dagestan where Islam is rooted very deeply. 

Now, those unlawful counterinsurgency methods, all those abductions, acts of torture and so on and so forth, these are problems which are common for the entire Northern Caucasus region. Insurgent activity is also an issue common for the entire region, and by way of an example I should be saying that if you compare 2010 with 2009, according to official statistics, the rise in the number of insurgent attacks was 20%. That's, to my mind, an incredibly dramatic figure. Despite all the efforts of the government, despite all the efforts of law enforcement and security agencies, the situation keeps deteriorating. And for Russia today, especially in light of the Olympic games which are supposedly going to happen in Sochi, and Sochi is almost in the Northern Caucasus region, right, in the year 2014, the situation is just getting out of hand. And the government is desperate to find a way out. Russia's policy in the region has always been a policy of force. And it is quite obvious now that the policy doesn't work because it's being implemented consistently and systemically throughout many years, and at the same time the results seem to be negative because now it's not only Chechnya, it's the region as a whole. The insurgent activity keeps growing so something is definitely wrong there. The government, however, is not ready to change its ways. 

It's not ready to develop a new well thought out policy in the Northern Caucasus region that would actually have a strong human rights component and that would bring the situation within the framework of the rule of law. The one new thing that the government is trying to do is to put out the fire by throwing money into it. Meaning that it is trying to invest into social and economic infrastructure, and that's important to improve the infrastructure, to build some new schools, to build some new hospitals, especially in the mountain villages, that, in itself, is wonderful, to create new working places also a great thing to do considering the very high level of unemployment. However, with corruption being so pervasive lots of money simply disappears into a black hole, and on the other hand, you cannot solve the crisis, you cannot untie the knot simply by trying to boost local economy. You also have to do something about the frustration of the population at large with all those counterinsurgency operations, with lawless behavior of the officials, and unless the government focuses on that, no improvement, in my opinion, is feasible. Now despite many similarities, there are some stark differences between those different republics in the Caucasus. I would rather start with Chechnya, the region which is most familiar to me as I've been working there for the past eight years, traveling there every few months. Chechnya has a very unique position in Russia today. Officially known as just another region of the Russian federation, but in fact it operates like an enclave which has absolutely nothing to do with Russia's legislative framework or even with Russia's cultural framework for that matter. The only rules and the only laws that are applicable to Chechens today are those that are proclaimed by the leader of the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who was appointed directly by the Kremlin. 

Ramzan Kadyrov does whatever he wants in the republic given to him. And his position is also absolutely special because he is the only governor in the Russian federation, the only head of a region in the Russian federation, who de facto controls all of the law enforcement and security agencies in the territory of his region. As a rule, those agencies are controlled by the federal center, top down. But he was given very special powers. He is also given a lot of money by the Kremlin, and as you may have read in the media Grozny, which used to be leveled with ground, literally, is now reconstructed in a very impressive manner and looks like normal, even beautiful as some people believe, city. That was done on federal money, needless to say. But Ramzan Kadyrov of trying to get more popularity is presenting the reconstruction of Grozny and the overall reconstruction of Chechnya as his own personal achievement as if the money came out of his own pockets. Now why is the Kremlin so  generous with Kadyrov? Why does Kadyrov get away with some things that no other governor in Russia can get away with? All the money, all the power, and whatever he does which is completely contrary to Russia's legislation, to Russia's Constitution is being totally ignored by the Kremlin. Why is this happening? There appears to be some form of a non-written agreement between Mr. Kadyrov and Mr. Putin. That is Kadyrov was given the freedom to do whatever he wanted in Chechnya in case he was doing a good job suppressing insurgency. 

Now, he appointed president back in 2007. And in 2007 he was indeed quite successful in fighting insurgents in Chechnya, and in fact that year there were practically no insurgent attacks in the republic even though they required a lot of those in neighboring republic of Ingushetia. But, by 2008 the situation started deteriorating in this respect because more and more young people would actually flee to the woods and join the insurgents. Why would they do that? This in itself is a very complicated question. For some of them this decision was made as a result of a personal victimization during one of those counterinsurgency operations. Some of them actually had brothers or fathers who were kidnapped, disappeared or killed, and to them it was a matter of personal revenge. For some of the others, frankly, as far as I knew from talking to some people in Chechnya, it was for starters just an expression of personal protest. Because if you disagree with the government, if you disagree with the way Mr. Kadyrov runs Chechnya, if you want to criticize him, what are you going to do? Are you going to talk to a journalist? No, it's too dangerous and then again there are just no independent newspapers in Chechnya at all. Are you going to go out in the streets and organize some kind of a protest rally? Well that's suicidal just as well. There is absolutely no way in which one living in Chechnya today and being unhappy with whatever is going on in the republic could actually express his disagreement with Kadyrov's policy in a peaceful manner. 

So many of the young people that joined the rebels, they in fact did not support jihadist attitudes. It's not a key motivation. However once they're in the woods, they become indoctrinated in a matter of weeks because this kind of ideology is quite powerful. Now Kadyrov, trying to keep up his promises to the Kremlin, decided that the way to suppress this phenomenon, the way to stop more young people from running off to the woods and the way to possibly secure return of some of those who already joined the insurgents, he chose to go after the families. And law enforcement and security agencies operating in Chechnya under his control started putting consolidated pressure on relatives of those people who were known or presumed to be insurgents. And that pressure was about at first just calling them up for conversations and threatening them and telling them that unless they make their son, unless they make their brother return from the woods and give up his weapon, then the entire family would have to pay a heavy price and would have serious problems. And then, of course, the problems would actually start. Some of those families lost their houses to punitive house burnings. And the way it happened is that law enforcement officials would simply come at night, kick the family out of the house in a very business-like manner, they would move the furniture together, put easily flammable items on top in a pile, take some canisters with gasoline especially prepared from the trunks of their cars, pour them all over the place, torch the place and then just hang out there for the next half hour to an hour and wait just to make sure the house is properly on fire and the family is not able to put out the fire. Now I documented about 30 such cases all together in those families and only five of the families dared complained to the prosecutor's office. 

And all of those five families in the end several weeks later had to withdraw their complaints because of the pressure that they were getting from police. Police officials would come to them and would tell them that unless they claimed that their initial complaint was fake, they would have some family members abducted and they would come to more trouble. So those people would run to the prosecutor's office and sign a document saying that the house got on fire because actually a little piece of coal fell out of the oven or a candle got overturned at night and it was their own fault and the only reason why they submitted the complaint was simply to try and dupe the government and get some sort of financial compensation. People in Chechnya are completely paralyzed by fear. And the main difference that I can see from the viewpoint of a researcher or a journalist whose work was focused largely on this region between, say, the situation eight years ago and the situation today is that when I started in Chechnya eight years ago everyone wanted to tell his story. All those victims, you did not need to seek them out. They would come to you. And even if they knew that you could not help them in a practical level, they would still want to talk because they wanted the world to know what was happening to them. And now at the same time when it's not about bombing, when it's not about shelling, when it's not about massive special operations where people disappear by the dozens, when it looks completely normal and Grozny has all those restaurants and boutiques and that beautiful mosque which is a mirror image of the old mosques of Istanbul, when life seems to be so good and so not war like, in fact the level of fear is much higher than it used to be during the war proper. And today when you find out somehow from your own sources that this particular individual was abducted from this particular village and you find the family and you knock on their door, you start asking questions and they refuse to talk to you because they know that you mean trouble. 

And once you leave, someone is going to come from police and ask questions and try to find out who was that stranger that they were talking to and for which reason they chose to talk to that stranger and if they are, god forbid, unhappy about something. So it's really difficult today for a journalist or a human rights worker to get the job done. Secondly, it's next to impossible to name any names because some people are still ready to talk to you but they will always ask you simply to protect them and their families, not to reveal any information about their identity. And what it makes impossible is actually trying to pursue justice through the available legal channels because you can document dozens of cases but you cannot take those cases to court because the victims are not ready to sign the complaints any longer. And this fear is probably the most important thing to know about Chechnya today. In addition to abductions and disappearances and acts of torture by law enforcement and security agencies that represent a huge problem human rights wise, in addition to those collective punishment practices used against relatives of allegiant insurgents and some of such practices are absolutely barbaric, one of the cases that I was working on for example was a case of a demonstrative public execution. When a man who lived in a small mountain village in Chechnya, sort of in the outskirts of the village on the edge of the woods, had a knock on his door late at night, as far as the story was reported to me, and they were the insurgents and they were asking him for food. And, frankly, I have no way to know whether he had any sympathy for the insurgency. Maybe yes, maybe no, but a barrel of the Kalashnikov staring into your face is a very persuasive argument. Even if you detest the insurgents and do not want them to be around at all, when several people armed with guns come to your door and demand food, you're going to give it to them. 

There is just no other way. So supposedly the man in question gave them one of his sheep and one of the neighbors heard this happening and he informed on the man because that's another thing about Chechnya today, many commentators actually compare it to Russia in 1937 at the height of Stalin's repression when people were reporting on their friends and neighbors because they were simply frightened that unless they inform on them, their friends and neighbors would actually inform first and they would get in trouble. So the neighbor informed law enforcement and security agencies of what he heard and what he suspected. The man was abducted the very next day, together with his son. The son disappeared and the man himself was brought back to the village late at night by police officials, beaten to pulp. They threw him out of the car on to the ground, and there were several local young people just sort of standing around and they asked him did you give a sheep to the insurgents? He was beaten up to the point where he couldn't even answer the question, and then they shot him dead in the presence of those people. And they told those people, listen, if any one of you gives even a crust of bread to the insurgents, this is what's going to happen, so watch it and tell the others. Such are the matters used in Chechnya, supposedly, to fight insurgency. And, naturally, people are unhappy about what's happening, but they are too frightened to talk. Another thing that makes Chechnya very special and very unique is forced Islamization. 

Mr. Kadyrov himself is Muslim and a strong believer. If you ask a resident of Chechnya whether he is Muslim, he would say yes, any given person, generally. Chechnya is pretty monoethnic these days as a result of the war. Years ago there was some, well there was a large Russian population. There was some Jews, there was some Romanians, but with the war they eventually fled. So now it's just about Chechens and Ingushes, the two peoples that form this one ethnic group called the Vainakh, and anyone describing himself would identify himself as a Muslim. However, people in the region were mostly secular in their behavior and even in their view. Self-description as a Muslim was rather part of national identity, if you will. Kadyrov, on the one hand, being an apparently strong believer, and on the other hand trying to juxtapose his own version of Islamization to the one advanced by the insurgents as the insurgents are jihadists, is trying to turn Chechnya into essentially an Islamic state. There is an effective ban on alcohol, for example, introduced through oral orders by the head of the republic, and women these days are forced to wear head scarves. 

I should say that head scarf is rather traditional in Chechnya for a female. Not a hijab proper, but a small scarf that they tie in the back. Women of the elder generations had to wear it. But Kadyrov actually insists that all women have their head fully covered which is rather new for the republic. And it really does create a lot of resistance. On the one hand, many women are unhappy with it as well as with the demands that they have their sleeves up to the wrist and they have their legs fully covered by their skirts. But also it is offensive to the male population because, again, according to the Chechen tradition, if I'm a female in Chechnya, my father, my brother, my husband can actually tell me how to dress. That's the traditional approach. But a stranger, and who cares whether he's called leader or president or whatever, when he tells a woman from a Chechen family how to dress, his orders are offensive to all the males in that family because they essentially indicate that they have no control of their own family life. People are reluctant but too frightened to resist. 

And in order to make sure that women actually keep themselves covered up, what Kadyrov is doing is banning women without head scarves from entering the universities in Chechnya, for example. I had a rather ridiculous experience myself when I had a meeting at the Chechen State University in Grozny a couple of years ago, and I generally do wear a head scarf when in Chechnya just to be less visible. But this time around I actually forgot it. And I tried to get in and the security guards would not allow me into the building claiming that not a single woman without a head scarf could not be admitted, and those were the orders from the very top, that is from Mr. Kadyrov. I was telling them, being quite exasperated, not only that it was against the law, it was against the Constitution, Russia is a secular state, but I was telling them I'm not Chechen, I'm Russian. I'm not Muslim. I'm actually Christian. I was so exasperated and I needed to get in there that I actually pulled out my cross and showed it to them. No, presidential orders concern everyone. Girls are not allowed to go to school if they do not have their hair covered from the very first grade. 

That's where the situation stands today. You can't work in the public sector if you refuse to wear a head scarf. But apparently that was not enough because there are some people who not in school, who are not students, who are not working for the government. So in June last year armed people started, and many of the members of the law enforcement, recognizable members of the law enforcement agencies, started pelleting women who walk the streets of Grozny without a head scarf from paint ball guns. There were a lot of reports of those incidents, and I documented quite a few of them myself, and not only they were doing this violent, lawless, cruel thing to the women but they would also spread out leaflets in Grozny, in the Chechnya capital, saying we are shooting at you with paint today just by way of a warning. If you do not behave, you will force us to resort to more radical measures. And every woman that I interviewed in Chechnya on the subject interpreted those more radical measures as shooting for real. So all those things are happening under the Kremlin's nose, and the Kremlin is not reacting at all. The situation in Ingushetia and the situation in Dagestan is quite different. Meaning that local governors do not represent the key sources of human rights abuse in those regions. 

They are, in fact, even trying to do something in order to have the situation improve, but it appears that they're lacking capacity. In Ingushetia, the majority of enforced disappearances, abductions and killings are perpetrated not by the Ingushetia police, but rather by federal servicemen from federal police deployed in the region or from the FSB, from the Federal Security Service. In Dagestan the picture is very mixed. But in Dagestan victims of human rights abuses are mainly Salafi Muslims. As I said, Islam is very strongly rooted in Dagestan, and Salafi Islam came to the region mainly in the early '90s because many preachers were flooding the Northern Caucasus then, coming from the Middle East, coming from Uzbekistan, and the number of Salafis in the region today is not high at all. It is about 10% of the entire population of Dagestan by very liberal estimations, but it keeps growing and it keeps growing very fast. I'm saying Salafi Islam, does everyone understand what it is? Fundamentalist form of Islam? People know it. Good. And as the insurgency is about Islam and is about fundamentalist Islam, all those Salafi Muslims in Dagestan are automatically suspected of having connections with insurgents. And so if there is an insurgent attack, which is followed always by counterinsurgency operations, law enforcement officials automatically go after local Salafis, and they have databases of Salafi Muslims where everyone is listed by name with addresses and personal details so those people are easily found, and those who are detained during such operations, they are tortured routinely because law enforcement officials want to get some information about the insurgents and the only way they know how to get information is by applying brutal force, by torturing people. 

And even if such an individual is lucky, he's not put to jail, he's not disappeared but he's simply kept in detention for several days or several weeks and then released, then as he knows that his name is already on the radar screen of law enforcement and security agencies, he keeps looking over his shoulder because he is absolutely righteously convinced that next time something happens in his neighborhood they're going to pick him up and they're going to torture him. And this prospect itself is so far from pleasant that some of those people actually prefer joining the insurgents because they cannot lead a normal life anyways. To give you another example, victimization of Salafi Muslims, it's not only about those very brutal methods that have been documented in many human rights reports, sometimes those things happen on a more trivial level, and that, I think, also makes a huge negative impact on the Salafi communities and leads to their gradual but obvious marginalization and radicalization. For example, its pressure on women to wear hijabs. And it really does sound ridiculous because here is it Chechnya, which borders directly on Dagestan, and Chechen women are forced to wear hijabs. In Dagestan it's the other way around. Or, for example, this is, I think, a story which is most illustrative of what's happening in the republic today, when two women from Dagestan blew themselves up in the Moscow metro just in spring last year. And naturally with so many casualties and the horror of this attack, because those of you who ever travel to Moscow know that the metro is the lifeline of the city and everyone uses it and people cannot avoid it and that's where you go when you need to go to work. So that concerned everyone. And the level of paranoia was apparently very high. 

And one of the leading mainstream newspapers published an article on its front page about 10 days after the actual attack with photographs of Salafi women, several dozens of Salafi women, that they identified as future suicide bombers based on the information that was supposedly leaked to them by the security agencies. Those were big portraits, very recognizable portraits of concrete women with their names, indicating the towns where they lived, and also including some personal details about their employment, and the only reason those women were being identified as future suicide bombers is because they were related to some active already killed insurgents. Now I interviewed about five of those women in detail this past summer, and you can't imagine, I guess, what their lives turned into. It's just a living nightmare. They were dismissed from their jobs simply because their employers did not want to have anything to do with them. They were finger-pointed at in the streets. They were harassed by neighbors who would tell them get out of this neighborhood, you are too dangerous, we do not want to live next to you. And their only crime was being related to allegiant insurgents. Now one of those women, who is deeply religious herself, she had a son in a secular school in Makhachkala, capital of Dagestan, because she felt that the boy growing up in a secular state needed to have a secular education. When her picture was published in that newspaper, one of the teachers at that school hit her son. 

Actually she shook the boy, and the boy was just eight years of age and threw him head first against the blackboard. What did the mother do? She took the child out of school, which is something that any mother would do under the circumstances. When she tried to ask questions of the principal, the principal actually explained to her that the teacher in question was widowed recently, and her husband was a policeman who was killed by insurgents in one of those armed clashes. So she was traumatized, she was victimized herself, and when she found out that the little boy's father was an insurgent, things got out of control. The mother decided not to lodge an official complaint and she simply took the child out of school and where did she put him? Into a rather strict madrasah, religious Islamic school. He will not get any secular education. That's a done thing. Even though initially his mother's plan for him was to have him get one. So those policies, those kinds of treatment, really does result in marginalizing those people and pretty much pushing them into the hands of the rebels. And if this doesn't change, if the governmental policy does not change, Russia is in really big trouble. 

I'll end it here. I'll be very happy to answer questions about the Northern Caucasus but also about other aspects of the human rights situation in Russia. I can also talk about Southern Caucasus and even a bit about central Asia. So feel free to ask me whatever you want. If I'm ignorant, I'll just tell you that. [APPLAUSE]