Putin's Russian Question
FINROSFORUM // The Finnish-Russian Civic Forum strives to promote cooperation between the peoples of Finland and Russia by supporting civic initiatives for democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech.
Russia seeks an agreement with Switzerland which would allow Russia to send soldiers for mountain training in the Swiss Alps, RIA Novosti reports. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has approved a draft agreement, proposed by the country's defence ministry, foreseeing joint exercises and conferences with Switzerland. Putin instructed the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry to begin negotiations with their Swiss counterparts on the agreement. Russia has had two mountain infantry brigades stationed in its volatile North Caucasus region since 2007.
http://de.rian.ru/security_and_military/20110113/258077968.html
“Fear is a companion which will never leave you,” says Lidiya Yusupova, who was called "the bravest woman in Europe" by BBC and Amnesty International. She was a Nobel Prize Candidate in 2006 for her work as a human rights defender in Chechnya. Giancarlo Bocchi interviewed Ms Yusupova for Prensa Marea Socialista in August 2010: The European Court of Human Rights could do more to stop the Russian authorities. There are partial “small victories” which represent hope for the relatives of the victims. These victories also may introduce to Russia the same legal standards that are practised throughout the rest of the democratic world. Citizens of the Russian Federation have great faith that the European Court of Human Rights will deliver justice, and this gives them the hope and energy to continue fighting. It is necessary to work internationally in the area of law. It is useless to use foreign media to make a list of the dead and wounded people every day. We need to defend victims internationally. Many of our colleagues were persecuted for reporting the facts to international tribunals because Russia has not obeyed any international agreements. If not today, then tomorrow or maybe in five or ten years, Russian politicians will be tried for the crimes committed in the Caucasus.
Read the full interview:
http://www.waynakh.com/eng/2010/08/lidya-yusupova-russian-politicians-will-be-tried-for-the-crimes-which-have-been-committed-in-the-caucasus/
Lack of hard evidence, boilerplate answers from Russian envoys and poor follow-up have seen EU-Russia human rights talks add up to little more than diplomats getting to know each other. EU delegates at the 11th EU-Russia "human rights consultations," held in Brussels on 28 April 2010, gave the Russian side a list of needling questions about 31 individual cases, including big names such as oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and anti-fraud lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, as well as several hardly-known victims. The union did not receive any real answers to its queries in April and it does not expect to receive any at the 12th round of talks under the upcoming Belgian EU presidency. "We have never learned anything we did not know already," an EU contact said.
As the Moscow bombings remind, the simmering insurgency and brutal crackdown in the Caucasus have left a landscape of damaged women, some all too ready to spread their pain to Russia's heartland.The last time Patimat Magomedova saw her daughter, she was puttering around the house, manicuring her nails and using henna to dye her hair bright red. Maryam Sharipova, 27, had traveled a thousand miles to Moscow and climbed onto a crowded subway train at rush hour with an explosives-packed belt strapped around her waist. She was accompanied by a 17-year-old girl, also from Dagestan, who blew herself up at another station. In the Russian news media, the women were immediately dubbed "black widows." Their assault on the subway was taken as proof that the country had been shuttled back to the fearsome days when hollow-eyed female militants stalked Moscow and other cities far from the wars where their men fought Russian forces. The subway bombings also sent ripples of unease across the turbulent, mostly Muslim republics strung along Russia's southern edge. But it came as slim surprise that women were ready to die. This is a landscape of damaged women, grieving losses they dare not dwell upon. The closer you get to the fighting in the Caucasus, the murkier it appears. The violence in Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia is not easy to classify -- it is a mix of rebels who want independence, Islamist extremists bent on waging jihad, local clan and gang warfare and sectarian strife. And as the fighting intensifies, it is the men who disappear. Masked agents pound on the door and cart them off for questioning. They come back beaten, or not at all. Sometimes the men are rebels; other times, their affiliations are bafflingly vague. It is the women who are left behind, their status and material comforts tangled up in the choices of their fathers, sons and husbands.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/13/world/la-fg-women-bombers13-2010apr13
