The Brutal Consequences of Unchecked Power
February 12, 2007
For brazen disregard of minimal standards of human decency few things match the Russian government’s vindictive treatment of Vasily Alexanyan, a former vice-president of the Yukos energy conglomerate, currently in prison awaiting trial for alleged money laundering, dying from AIDS. The authorities have been refusing to provide him with the essential life saving medication he needs to treat his illness in an apparent effort to force him to testify against his former Yukos colleagues.
Alexanyan contracted tuberculosis while in prison and has lost his sight. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly called on the Russian authorities to allow him to receive the treatment he needs in a properly equipped medical clinic.
At the end of January, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former Yukos head, declared a hunger strike to protest the denial of treatment to Alexanyan. Khodorkovsky began his hunger strike after being told of Alexanyan's testimony before the Supreme Court, in which he stated that his interrogators said that he would not receive medical attention unless he agreed to provide evidence against Khodorkovsky and others of his Yukos colleagues.
Under mounting international pressure, Alexanyan was eventually moved out of pre-trial detention on February 7, but his lawyers do not know where he is now being held or what, if any treatment he is receiving.
The gruesome victimization of Alexanyan is an extreme example of the kind of extralegal measures pursued by the Russian authorities against Khodorkovsky and his associates for years. The Yukos defendants have been made into the public scapegoats for the economic dislocation of the 1990s, a period that President Putin and his supporters like to contrast with the “stability and prosperity” of the Putin years.
The extent to which Putin deserves credit for Russia’s recent rapid economic growth is the subject of considerable debate, freely outside of Russia and somewhat more circumspectly inside.
Whatever the economic crimes of the Yukos directors, and it is unlikely that in the fevered atmosphere of the sell-off of state assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union they observed every particular of the law, there is little doubt that they are the victims of selective prosecution. Other oligarchs who enriched themselves enormously in the 1990s have managed to retain their fortunes and to maintain close mutually advantageous relations with the Kremlin.
What differentiated Khodorkovsky from other oligarchs was his determination to create alternative power centers to the centralized authority of the presidency. He did this through supporting opposition political parties and through the Open Russia Foundation, which served as a domestic source of support for independent civil society organizations throughout Russia, including many human rights organizations.
Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment in 2003, his subsequent prosecution and conviction and the break up of his company has provided an exemplary lesson of the consequences of daring to challenge President Putin’s increasingly centralized and authoritarian grip on power. One result has been to make Russian human rights organizations more dependent on foreign assistance to support their work, which has conveniently provided the Kremlin with another pretext to criticize them, for serving foreign interests and therefore being anti-Russian.
Faced with a torrent of hostile propaganda, much of it orchestrated from the Kremlin through state controlled television channels, human rights activists are habitually identified in the media with oligarchs and foreign powers, and therefore lumped into an undifferentiated mass of hostile forces that wish Russia ill.
While the world marvels at Putin’s achievements as a consequential leader, and western democracies adapt uncomfortably to the proximity of a newly assertive latent great power, Russian human rights activists feel increasingly beleaguered as the pincers of the super-empowered repressive forces of the state move against them.
Incidents like the slow torture of Alexanyan at least show in clear light the consequences of power unchecked by an independent judiciary or any countervailing force.
For brazen disregard of minimal standards of human decency few things match the Russian government’s vindictive treatment of Vasily Alexanyan, a former vice-president of the Yukos energy conglomerate, currently in prison awaiting trial for alleged money laundering, dying from AIDS. The authorities have been refusing to provide him with the essential life saving medication he needs to treat his illness in an apparent effort to force him to testify against his former Yukos colleagues.
Alexanyan contracted tuberculosis while in prison and has lost his sight. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly called on the Russian authorities to allow him to receive the treatment he needs in a properly equipped medical clinic.
At the end of January, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former Yukos head, declared a hunger strike to protest the denial of treatment to Alexanyan. Khodorkovsky began his hunger strike after being told of Alexanyan's testimony before the Supreme Court, in which he stated that his interrogators said that he would not receive medical attention unless he agreed to provide evidence against Khodorkovsky and others of his Yukos colleagues.
Under mounting international pressure, Alexanyan was eventually moved out of pre-trial detention on February 7, but his lawyers do not know where he is now being held or what, if any treatment he is receiving.
The gruesome victimization of Alexanyan is an extreme example of the kind of extralegal measures pursued by the Russian authorities against Khodorkovsky and his associates for years. The Yukos defendants have been made into the public scapegoats for the economic dislocation of the 1990s, a period that President Putin and his supporters like to contrast with the “stability and prosperity” of the Putin years.
The extent to which Putin deserves credit for Russia’s recent rapid economic growth is the subject of considerable debate, freely outside of Russia and somewhat more circumspectly inside.
Whatever the economic crimes of the Yukos directors, and it is unlikely that in the fevered atmosphere of the sell-off of state assets after the collapse of the Soviet Union they observed every particular of the law, there is little doubt that they are the victims of selective prosecution. Other oligarchs who enriched themselves enormously in the 1990s have managed to retain their fortunes and to maintain close mutually advantageous relations with the Kremlin.
What differentiated Khodorkovsky from other oligarchs was his determination to create alternative power centers to the centralized authority of the presidency. He did this through supporting opposition political parties and through the Open Russia Foundation, which served as a domestic source of support for independent civil society organizations throughout Russia, including many human rights organizations.
Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment in 2003, his subsequent prosecution and conviction and the break up of his company has provided an exemplary lesson of the consequences of daring to challenge President Putin’s increasingly centralized and authoritarian grip on power. One result has been to make Russian human rights organizations more dependent on foreign assistance to support their work, which has conveniently provided the Kremlin with another pretext to criticize them, for serving foreign interests and therefore being anti-Russian.
Faced with a torrent of hostile propaganda, much of it orchestrated from the Kremlin through state controlled television channels, human rights activists are habitually identified in the media with oligarchs and foreign powers, and therefore lumped into an undifferentiated mass of hostile forces that wish Russia ill.
While the world marvels at Putin’s achievements as a consequential leader, and western democracies adapt uncomfortably to the proximity of a newly assertive latent great power, Russian human rights activists feel increasingly beleaguered as the pincers of the super-empowered repressive forces of the state move against them.
Incidents like the slow torture of Alexanyan at least show in clear light the consequences of power unchecked by an independent judiciary or any countervailing force.
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posted by Neil at
2/12/2008 11:09:00 AM
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