Results matching “Manana”

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A well-known Russian journalist, head of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations  Oleg Panfilov in early November moved for permanent residency from Moscow to Tbilisi. In a conversation with journalists he explained that his decision was based on the fact that in Russia unknowns were constantly threatening him through the internet with physical lynching.

This news appeared on the internet on the 9th of November. To me this «news» was known two months ago: Oleg himself had told me about his desire to forsake Russia. In so doing no arguments in the form of threats did he name. I think that in this situation, unnamed colleagues were inaccurately treating the essence of the event.

Oleg told me that he intends to live in Georgia and to read lectures at the journalism school in the Tbilisi state university, as well as to actively cooperate on the "Caucasian telechannel"  being opened as of the new year in Tbilisi, which, presumably, will broadcast to the whole Caucasian region.

I recently found myself at a rather uneventful conference near the border of the world's newest nation - at least in the eyes of the Kremlin as well as two other Latin American statesmen with high degrees of interest and knowledge of the Caucasus - and I thought to myself, why not see if I could hitch up with a tour across the border and do a report for the blog? What follows are some of my impressions from my first Abkhaz experience. - G.P.

As reported on yesterday's news blast, Mikhail Gorbachev has come out in support of Svetlana Bakhmina, one of the Yukos prisoners who along with Mikhail Khodorkovsky has spent years illegally imprisoned. Gorbachev has called upon the Russian leadership for her immediate release. Below is the full translation of the interview with izbrannoye.ru.

Mikhail Gorbachev – for pardon for Bakhmina

The president of the USSR in an interview with editor-in-chief of the internet-newspaper “Izbrannoye” Lyudmila Telen highly assessed the civic initiative of the internet-community, which is gathering signatures under an Appeal to Dmitry Medvedev with a request to pardon YUKOS ex-lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina.

Mikhail Gorbachev, in part, said:

“Svetlana Bakhmina has already completed the greater part of her term. She has, to the best of my knowledge, two little boys and she’s pregnant besides, the press writes, she’s to give birth in December. Why hold her behind bars? Methinks, president of Russia Dmitry Anatolievich Medvedev in this situation can make use of his right to a pardon. I would welcome this.”

TODAY: Putin ‘defiant’ on troops in breakaway regions, signs new agreements with France; Medvedev responds to Condoleezza Rice; EU struggling on human rights issues against Russia. Aslamazyan to pay fine and go free; cartoons banned. Yushchenko on Russia.

Russia’s decisions on troop numbers in the former Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia will be taken ‘defiantly’, without consulting the West, which has urged Russia to withdraw completely from the areas.

Russia and France strengthened their cooperation over the weekend, signing agreements on education, renewable energy and Kyoto protocol. France’s Prime Minister, François Fillon, who met with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Sochi, said that EU-Russia talks could resume next month. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has played down the image of Russia as a threat, balancing out some of Condoleezza Rice’s more incendiary statements. President Dmitry Medvedev has responded mockingly to Rice’s comments on Russia’s legal system.

Remarks on Russian reality

Grigory Pasko, journalist

1. Fools and roads

130 kilometers outside Moscow in Vladimir Oblast is the little village of Ileykino. From Ileykino to the nearest population center with shops, a hospital and school – is 8 kilometers. But neither hospitals nor schools, from all appearances, really interest the inhabitants of the village. They’re accustomed to treating what ails them with folk remedies. And there’s nobody to go to school – children only appear during the summer holidays, coming to visit the old folks from the cities where their parents live and work. A grocery-store-on-wheels truck comes by once a week: for the old people living out their days in Ileykino, that is enough.

True, there is one unpleasantness: the electricity is often turned off. But without it is difficult. Because the village doesn’t have gas (the kindness of Gazprom still hasn’t reached such faraway places – a whole 130 km from Moscow!), and there’s nothing to burn in the stoves.

As soon as the wind even starts to blow or the rain to fall, immediately – as if though by someone’s malicious command – the electricity in the village goes out. What haven’t the inhabitants done: they’ve written letters, made phone calls, travelled to the rayon center to the management to demand, tried to themselves collect (and did collect!) the money to restore the electric transmission lines… All senselessly. The power is cut off regularly, from year to year.

It’s people who make the system

Grigory Pasko, journalist

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The chattering continues… I’m talking here about the fact that a command has obviously been given to the Russian mass media to hype the thesis of the newly-sprung president Medvedev about “legal nihilism” and the necessity of struggle for an independent judiciary.

And so it is that even the procurator-general himself has revealed his word to the people. In Russia, said Yuri Chaika recently, thousands of people are unlawfully brought to criminal liability every year. Of course, what forgot to mention was that this lawlessness is happening largely through the fault of none other than procuratorial workers. And I’m interested: what was it that kept Chaika from proclaiming such a well-known truth earlier, before Medvedev said that thing about “nihilism”?

Chaika also said this: “…annually as a result of an outright defect in the work of preliminary investigation the number of persons having the right to rehabilitation after criminal prosecution continue [sic] to number in the thousands. “If in the year 2006 the right to rehabilitation received 6234 persons, then in 2007 - 5265. In so doing more than a quarter of them were held in detention”, underscored the procurator.

Photo: Procurator-General Chaika (source)

The international human rights NGO Freedom House makes no attempt to hide the fact that about 80% of the funding comes from the U.S. government (as stated in each of their annual reports), something that causes many foreign governments to recoil in disgust and react with vituperative rants to any critical report the group may produce. Some say that this association with Washington affects their research choices, but does that necessarily mean that what they publish isn't true? Out there in the irascible blogosphere on Russia, Freedom House is most frequently a protagonist in the double standards narrative of human rights apologists.

Having met many senior officers and researchers from Freedom House, I have always held their professionalism and fairness in high regard, and thoroughly believe that they publish very good work and are not as tied to the presidential administration as you might suspect. Yet when I read over the country report on Russia in their latest Nations in Transition 2008 report (written by Robert W. Orttung of the Jefferson Institute), I must admit that I found parts of it spotty with unfair or unbalanced opinion.

An article by Peter Finn in yesterday's Washington Post makes an interesting point about Yelena Valyavina's surprising confession in late May about Kremlin interference in the courts: now we're at least allowed to talk about rule of law and legal reform in Russia, which some are taking as an optimistic sign of the new Medvedev era.

As Finn writes in his article, the fact that Valyavina's boss, Anton Ivanov, is one of Medvedev's closest supporters is "not lost on anyone," and given that there is zero disagreement between Putin and Medvedev on foreign affairs or security issues, legal reform could be his "instrument" to build his own individual popularity and support, playing to the popular discontent with the corrupt and inefficient courts.

It's an interesting theory, accompanied by both supportive and damaging evidence.

TODAY: Putin and Medvedev “work as a team”; EU to take a “fresh look” on relations; Russia threatens Ukraine over NATO; Medvedev emphasizes ecological responsibility; actions Abkhazia "could threaten Olympics"; Gorbechev says Lenin should be buried; more pressure on the media.

A Duma speaker says President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin work as a team, and are not competing for power. The EU’s external relations commissioner says Medvedev's emphasis on human rights and democracy will allow the European Union to “take a fresh look” at relations with Russia, but speculated that Moscow's recent actions in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia might threaten the 2014 Sochi Olympics. The State Duma has reportedly recommended that the Kremlin consider pulling out of a friendship treaty with Ukraine if it takes further steps to join NATO.

The country has reversed its stance on the Kyoto Protocol by pledging budget funds for clean energy and calling for limits on greenhouse gas emissions. "I cannot neglect the necessity of overhauling the system of ecological responsibility," said Medvedev.

TODAY: Vladimir Putin interviewed by French newspaper; Kasparov criticizes western media; smuggling case lawyer attacked; gay rights activists detained; Russia sends more “personnel” into Abkhazia.

Vladimir Putin’s weekend interview with French newspaper Le Monde produced some interesting soundbites. The prime minister promised to raise wages, pensions and social benefits to compensate for rising prices and minimize the effects of Russia’s anti-inflation policy, and compared the US to a “frightening monster”. He also said he has “never heard of” Bill Browder, the hedge-fund founder barred from Russia since November 2005, and that he opposes clemency for Mikhail Khodorkovky because he “broke the law”. Russia Today has published a full transcript of the interview, and a video is also available.

The Moscow Times has published an interview with the mother of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

First we had the positive decision for Manana Aslamazyan yesterday, and now this ... dare we feel optimistic? I may have to stop using the word "rare" so often.

From AP:

A judge's call of interference holds hope for Russia's troubled justice system

MOSCOW (AP) - It was a rare moment in the politically charged, corruption-tainted world of Russian justice: A senior judge from a top court testified that she was pressured by a Kremlin bureaucrat.

The unlikely drama, played out in a Moscow courtroom this month, cast a ray of hope for change under a new president who says cleaning up the compromised justice system is crucial to Russia's future.

Manana Aslamazyan does not cast a very threatening image. The Russian civil society organizer is intelligently calm, soft-spoken, and bears the distinctive eyewear of a schoolteacher, not your prototype of a dangerous social agitator. Perhaps for this reason so many of us were appalled by the Kremlin's unfair persecution of Aslamazyan and her organization, the Educated Media Foundation, a group which has helped to train more than 15,000 broadcast journalists in the best practices of the trade. (A good background of this case has been done by the New York Review of Books).

Last January Aslamazyan entered Russia carrying €9,500 ($15,000) without properly declaring it to customs - something that brought about swift criminal charges of smuggling in an effort that was largely perceived to be a pretext for shutting down her organization. During her forced exile in France, she resigned from her post at EMF, and told the press: "It seems that there's a common attitude of suspicion toward nonprofit organizations financed abroad. We fell victim to this attitude. But we clearly worked within the legal structure of the Russian Federation, and we were extremely careful and accurate with all our documents and the registration of our funding."

However this week Aslamazyan was able to win an important court victory, as Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that her arrest warrant was illegal. "The criminal case against Aslamazyan will be closed. She can come right now. No one is going to go after her. The arrest warrant will be cancelled," said Irina Dudkina, head of the investigative committee's press service. However, reports note that the media training organization has been successfully eliminated, and that Aslamazyan has no plans to revive EMF.

More details after the cut.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the U.S. State Department has opened up an invitation for civil society organizations in Russia to apply for up to $4 million in grants to promote "programs that will (1) bolster media freedom; priority areas include journalist training, media monitoring, supporting networks of journalists covering high-risk topics, and objective information dissemination, and (2) and programs to support the advocacy, transparency, networking, and professionalism of the NGO sector in order to promote themes that advance democratic development and the promotion of human rights."

The varying levels of funding dedicated to different regions of the world in this invitation reveal to some extent just how concerned the U.S. government is about press freedom in the respective countries. Four million dollars is rather paltry amount to spread across a territory as vast as Russia, Belarus, the Balkans, and Kosovo, especially compared to what is being dedicated to other areas (however Africa is virtually ignored). The big money ($6.4 million) obviously goes to Iran and Syria, and a totally disproportionate $3.65 million for programs in Cuba.

Of course the ideal organization to carry out such a program of journalist training would be the Educated Media Foundation (EMF), but ever since the Kremlin launched its campaign against Manana Aslamazyan based on minor customs infractions, the civil society group has been shut down. Click here to read a recent letter to Vladimir Putin by the International Press Institute in defense of EMF.

The New York Review of Books has another excellent article on the plight of Russia's journalists, taking the persecution of Manana Aslamazyan as a point of departure.:

Putin Strikes Again

By Jamey Gambrell

Russian journalists have suffered crippling attacks in recent years, as Vladimir Putin pursues his policy of strengthening the "vertical" dimension of his administration's "power pyramid." The Kremlin's geometrical terminology means enforcing, from the top down, an ideology intended to align all sectors of Russia's "managed democracy" (another key phrase of the Putin era) into tidy, clearly demarcated, easily controlled zones of activity and influence. No strong minority views, no awkward revelations in the press are to mar the sleek façades of the state. The messy disarray normally associated with functioning democracy—the irritating criticism, noisy opposition, and inconvenient news uncovered by investigative reporters (what Russians proudly called glasnost a mere seventeen years ago)—has been summarily and sometimes harshly dealt with.

The techniques range from mild bureaucratic harassment of news organizations to physical attacks on individual journalists. The body count among Russian reporters is now thirteen murders in the line of duty since Putin has been in power. In each case the reporter was investigating or had published stories critical of government or business officials. No one has been convicted of these killings, even in the rare instances when the police have apprehended suspects. The murder last October of the brave, rash Anna Politkovskaya, about whom Robert Cottrell wrote eloquently in these pages recently,[1] got worldwide attention but others are little known abroad. The Committee to Protect Journalists found in 2006 that Russia was the third most deadly country in the world for reporters.[2]

Murdering journalists is simply the most visible manifestation of the constant campaign against the press. Far more effective are the economic, judicial, and administrative measures being used systematically to quash human rights and information-gathering organizations and other genuinely independent members of civil society. Frequent tax audits and expensive, time-consuming re-registration procedures have been among the weapons of choice. In recent months there have been raids on news organizations to confiscate "illegal software"; shuffles of top-level management between government-controlled and "private" national television stations that provide most Russians with their news; managerial directives to present 50 percent "positive" news; "stop lists" of politicians and activists not to be mentioned on the air; and an end to live, on-the-scene reporting and live talk shows.[3] Local television and radio stations are especially vulnerable to ad hoc attacks—e.g., the regional governor or big-city mayor who tells companies not to advertise on "disloyal" TV stations, the municipal authorities who suddenly discover problems with a lease, or violations of fire or sanitation codes.

One of the most recent victims of the Putin bureaucracy has been an NGO called the Educated Media Foundation (EMF), formerly known as Internews Russia. Over the past decade, this nonprofit organization has trained more than 15,000 Russian broadcast journalists, mostly from the provinces, in the best practices of journalism. It has, for example, conducted seminars, workshops, and classes for news writers, editors, managers, advertising directors, and program producers that have helped them to establish independent television and radio stations. It has given awards for documentaries of high quality, and worked out arrangements for sharing originally produced material among regional radio and television stations, thus encouraging the regions to report on themselves while achieving financial independence. The only "ideological" aspect of their work has been to explain and encourage internationally recognized ethical standards for fair reporting.

On April 18, EMF (whose headquarters are located in Moscow's famed House of Journalists) was raided by twenty officers of the Department of Economic Security of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. During the eleven-hour "occupation," no one was allowed to leave, and the ministry police confiscated all of the organization's computer servers, in addition to all current financial and administrative records, from contracts to entries for an upcoming journalism award competition. EMF was effectively shut down and forced to suspend its programs indefinitely.

In an editorial published in late May (during the conference of the International Federation of Journalists, held in Moscow this year), Vedomosti, a prestigious Russian-language business daily produced jointly with The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, wrote:

Yet another trend has made itself abundantly evident in the situation of "Educated Media." It is not unusual for Russian law enforcement agencies to engage in "inverse ad hominem" attacks in which they transplant charges brought against a private citizen onto the organization run by that person even when alleged transgressions are nothing but a private act.

The ostensible reason for raiding the offices of EMF was a minor personal infraction of customs laws by the EMF's president, Manana Aslamazyan. In January of this year, she returned to Russia from a trip abroad, entering the country without declaring 9,550 euros, or some $12,900; by doing so she slightly exceeded the legal limit of $10,000. Though this would normally incur a small fine, it was transformed into a criminal charge of transporting "contraband" and used to close down the entire organization.

Ms. Aslamazyan is a well-known and highly respected figure among Russian journalists; she has been a member of the Russian Federal Broadcast Licensing Committee and has received numerous awards. After the raid halted the EMF's programs, over two thousand journalists from throughout the country signed an open protest letter to President Putin, among them Russia's most prominent television journalists, including Sergei Dorenko, Mikhail Osokin, Leonid Parfenov, Vladimir Pozner, and Svetlana Sorokina.

Despite this unprecedented show of solidarity and support, it is unlikely that the protest will have any effect. Everyone recognizes that the government's aim was to "manage" another aspect of Russian "democracy": i.e., NGOs that have received funding from foreign sources—in this case, USAID, TACIS, and numerous American and European foundations. EMF had also been supported by the Open Russia Foundation, established by the billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose political ambitions, many feel, led to his present internment in a remote Siberian prison camp for allegedly committing fraud in his business dealings.

The impact of this single episode may appear negligible—after all, no actual TV stations were closed, and EMF did no more than train and advise journalists; it wasn't itself a news-gathering organization; but the tactics being used are much the same as those employed to dismantle Yukos, the oil company run by Khodorkovsky, and to prevent anyone even remotely related to it from exercising the constitutional freedoms guaranteed in the Russian constitution. In a May 30 article in the paper Novoe Vremia, titled "Why Manana?," Irina Yasina, former program director of Open Russia, now chairperson of the Regional Journalists Association, explained the rationale behind the recent actions against EMF:

What are the driving forces of yet another pogrom on the already sterilized landscape of Russian television? Why was one necessary in the first place?... This is all about making an example of one to scare others. No need to kill off an entire pack of wolves if... you can just take out the alpha male, right?... Others will simply get the message well in advance and do what is expected of them....

It is difficult to keep track of what is going on regional television from the Kremlin. There are way too many regional TV outlets in the country.... People watch their programming simply because they can no longer take all the propaganda rushing in from the channels controlled by the federal government. In order to... "streamline" the broadcasting on all the [recalcitrant regional] channels without incurring too high an expense for staff censors, one fires a single shot across the bow to scare them all into submission at once....

For this to have the desired effect, the target of choice has to have iconic status in regional journalism. If you simply trump up some charges against a reporter or even an editor-in-chief from Siberia, people elsewhere— for example, in Stavropol'ye or in Lipetsk—may or may not perceive that as a threat to them....

Choosing Manana Aslamazyan for the role of a "whipping girl" is dead-on accurate. The taming of the "old NTV" [the formerly independent TV channel] was a perfect choice. It was all a slam dunk from there. The case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's wealthiest and most successful businessman, was a perfect choice as well. Now, all business leaders, from the very prominent to the most obscure, see in their sleep the chilling visuals of the Krasnokamensk correctional facility.[4]

The authorities twice extended the "criminal investigation" beyond the original sixty-day timeline for filing charges established by Russian law. Lawyers for Ms. Aslamazyan and the Educated Media Foundation's founders (the Russian equivalent of trustees) are continuing to pursue a legal remedy through the courts to prevent the case against Ms. Aslamazyan personally from being expanded to include the organization. The damage, however, has been done. A criminal indictment for "contraband" was handed down on June 19. Ms. Aslamazyan has decided to resign from EMF and to accept a consulting position with the Internews Network. See her open letter to friends and supporters on www.internews.org/russia.

The attack on EMF—and on organizations like it—deserves attention from writers, editors, and civil libertarians outside Russia. Links to the Open Letter to President Putin and a list of its signers (in English and Russian), as well as to numerous other articles in the Russian and Western press, can be found at the Internews site. Writers, editors, and others concerned about press freedom wishing to sign the international version of the petition can find it at the Global Forum for Media Development, www.gfmd.info.

Another day, another fraudulent set of criminal charges - this time aimed at shutting down an NGO which trains journalists.

Manana Aslamazyan

AP: Russian NGO Paralyzed, Head Flees

Investigators pounced on a minor infraction committed by Manana Aslamazyan, director of the Educated Media Foundation, using it to shutter the respected media training and development organization and frighten other NGOs and journalists, the lawyers said.

The prosecution of Aslamazyan and pressure on the foundation, which receives funding from the U.S. government, follows repeated claims by President Vladimir Putin and other officials that foreign governments use NGOs to weaken Russia and undermine its leadership.

The Moscow-based group's troubles began in January after Aslamazyan, returning from a trip abroad, brought cash worth more than $10,000 into Russia without declaring it at customs, as required by law.

She has been charged with smuggling, and authorities are considering prosecuting the fund's leadership on money-laundering charges, according to one of her lawyers, Viktor Parshutkin.
...
Parshutkin said he believes the Kremlin is behind Aslamazyan's prosecution.

"This entire affair is motivated exclusively by politics. Through criminal investigation they have organized the public whipping to make other NGOs that receive money from foreign governments stand at attention and frighten them," he said.

He suggested the foundation, which trained and developed Russian provincial media, was targeted "to send a signal to journalists before the elections that they are all under the czar's eye _ that if somebody tries to do something independent, they will be dealt with."
...
In an open letter last week thanking her supporters, Aslamazyan said she had accepted an offer to work as a consultant for an international organization with offices in the United States, Asia, Africa and Europe. Parshutkin said he and another lawyer had advised her to leave the country and that she is living in Paris.

In the letter, Aslamazyan said she would live abroad, continue to pay taxes in Russia and "wait until a court finally figures out why my personal mistake, for which I am ready to accept a fair and appropriate penalty, became the excuse for suspending the work of a large organization that brought a lot of benefit to the country."