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]