Posts Tagged ‘kasparov’

05
November 2013

Magnitsky Plaza? Let’s Rename the Streets Outside Dictators’ Embassies

Daily Beast

In the ’80s, the Senate renamed the street outside the Soviet Embassy Sakharov Plaza to protest the dissident’s treatment. It’s time to give similar reminders to today’s dictatorships.

In May 1984, when the communist authorities prohibited Andrei Sakharov’s wife from traveling abroad for medical treatment, the Soviet dissident began a hunger strike. Four years earlier, the government had exiled Sakharov to the city of Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow, hoping to keep him out of the public eye. Sakharov had long been the most visible domestic political critic of the Soviet Union, winning the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, which the country’s leaders prohibited him from accepting. To keep Sakharov alive, they force-fed him. “First, they would do it intravenously, then through a tube in his nose,” Sakharov’s wife, Yelena Bonner, wrote in a note smuggled out of the country. “A clamp would then be put on his nose and whenever he opened his mouth to breathe, they would pour food down his throat. Excruciating.”

Three months later, the United States Senate took a seemingly small but provocative step in protest of Sakharov’s treatment. Responsible for much of the administration of Washington, D.C., the chamber passed a measure changing the mailing address of the Soviet Embassy from 1125 16th Street to No. 1 Andrei Sakharov Plaza. From that point forward, every Soviet official entering his place of work would be confronted with his government’s repression of its most outspoken critic. “Every piece of mail the Soviets get will remind them that we want to know what has happened to the Sakharovs,” then-Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-NY), who proposed the measure, said at the time. The following year, the Soviet authorities permitted Bonner to travel abroad, and the year after that, reformist Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev permitted Sakharov and his wife to return to Moscow.

Today, Sakharov Plaza is no more. But as Russia falls further into the depths of dictatorship under Vladimir Putin, the name of another human rights hero, Sergei Magnitsky, ought to grace the mailing addresses of Russian embassies and diplomatic postings in Washington and the capital cities of free countries around the world. A conscientious young lawyer who uncovered large-scale corruption by senior Russian government officials, Magnitsky was imprisoned, tortured, and denied medical treatment before suffering an agonizing death in 2009. A measure President Obama signed into law last year placing visa restrictions and asset freezes on Russian officials responsible for human rights violations was named after Magnitsky.

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13
June 2013

Fright follows flight

Fright follows flight

A growing number of Russians want to emigrate; but even those who leave have cause for fear
Sergei Guriev admits that his wife was right. Two years ago she left for Paris, saying that it was not safe to live under the regime of President Vladimir Putin. Now the leading Russian economist is joining her. The trigger was a request from the authorities to seize his emails, apparently in preparation for a case against him. His crime is unclear: it may have been giving an expert opinion about the legal status of Yukos, once Russia’s largest oil company, which was spectacularly dismembered in a Kremlin-sponsored raid ten years ago.

Guriev’s departure is part of a trend. Garry Kasparov, the chess champion and opposition leader, says it is too risky to return to Russia. Friends of Alexei Navalny, another opposition leader, fear he has left it too late: he faces jail on trumped-up fraud charges.

The mixture of lawlessness and repression is chilling. Overall, nearly a quarter of Russians want to emigrate. The figure is striking: 22%, up from 13% in 2009. The survey is by the Levada centre, Russia’s best-known opinion pollster, which the authorities are harassing because it receives some money from abroad and is therefore a “foreign agent”.

The unhappiest are the middle classes, who should be the biggest beneficiaries of the boom of the past 13 years: 45% of students and 38% of entrepreneurs want to leave, with the highest figures in Moscow and other big cities. So far emigration is a ripple, not a wave. About three-quarters of the discontented say they will stay put. Only 1% of those surveyed are actually taking practical steps to go.

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13
June 2013

Garry Kasparov: Out Of The Country, But Not Out Of The Picture

Radio Free Europe

Garry Kasparov may be staying away from his homeland for a while, but he has no intention of steering clear of Russian politics.

The chess grandmaster turned opposition figure does not mince his words when he speaks of what he calls the “Hitleresque essence” of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

“These days, judges rubber-stamp sentences,” he told RFE/RL’s Russian Service by telephone from New York. “Police commanders give the order to beat and hound people, to arrest them. Governors in the regions can do whatever they like and act like all-powerful lords in their domains.”

In one of his first interviews since announcing last week that he “will refrain from returning” to Russia “for the time being” for fear of a politically motivated prosecution, Kasparov said that he is focusing his efforts on trying to get European countries to adopt sanctions against senior Russian officials implicated in human-rights abuses – similar to the so-called Magnitsky list adopted by the United States in 2012.

The U.S. law is named after whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in custody in 2009 after exposing a massive tax fraud that implicated Russian officials.

According to Kasparov, such sanctions are effective at capturing the attention of Russia’s ruling elite.

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03
April 2013

The New Russian Mob

New York Times

I realize this is a somewhat irresponsible thought, but I keep wondering why anyone should care if some Russian oligarchs and businesses — and corrupt officials — lose a bundle in Cyprus.

Yes, I know, the European Union’s original, ham-handed proposal — a tax on every bank deposit in Cyprus — was potentially destabilizing to the world’s financial system. It raised the specter of bank runs not just in Cyprus but all over Europe. It served as a jolting reminder that the European crisis is still with us. Yada, yada.

But it also turns out that much of the hot money held in the Cypriot banking system is Russian. Russian companies like the low taxes that come with having entities in Cyprus. Because of the wink, wink, nod, nod relationship between Cyprus and Russia, rubles deposited in Cypriot banks are as untraceable as dollars once were in Swiss bank accounts, according to Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition politician (about whom more in a moment). Corrupt officials who embezzle money have long found Cyprus to be a friendly haven. Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this week that a substantial amount of the $230 million fraud perpetrated in 2007 against Hermitage Capital — a crime unearthed by Sergei Magnitsky, the brave lawyer who died in prison after he exposed the fraud — can be traced to Cyprus.

To put it another way, the henchmen of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who have gotten rich by trampling over the rule of law, are now getting a taste of their own medicine. In Cyprus, with no warning, the rules changed, and deposits larger than 100,000 euros may now face “haircuts” of as much as 40 percent. Though the purpose of the tax is to save the country’s banking system, the outcome is the same as when Russian officials create phony tax charges to steal a businessman’s assets. People feel they are being robbed. And they become extremely upset.

The funniest part is that according to Reuters, some Russian entities are threatening to sue. Actually, that makes a certain perverse sense: one of the reasons Russian bureaucrats are so quick to move their newly stolen wealth out of Russia is that they want it in a place where the rule of law actually has some meaning. They don’t want done to them what they’ve done to their fellow citizens.

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07
February 2013

Goldman Sachs Shouldn’t Work for Russia, Human Rights Group Says

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18
November 2012

Garry Kasparov: Right On, Angela Merkel

The Daily Beast

The German chancellor tussled with Putin over his human-rights record. Good for her, opposition leader Garry Kasparov tells Eli Lake—but the West must offer more than just talk.

Chess master and Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her denunciation of the Russian government’s human-rights record, but he said she must go further than public statements.

Kasparov provided a statement to The Daily Beast following an awkward public confrontation in Moscow between Merkel and Russian president Vladimir Putin in which Merkel singled out the Kremlin’s harsh sentence of two years in a labor camp for a member of the protest punk rock group Pussy Riot.

“Our friendship won’t be better, our economic cooperation won’t be better, if we sweep everything under the carpet and only say when we’re of a single opinion,” Merkel said to Putin on Friday.

Kasparov, who himself was arrested and beaten for protesting the trial of Pussy Riot, told The Daily Beast, “I am always happy to see a western leader bringing up human rights to Putin, especially to his face in Moscow. I was beginning to think the breed had gone extinct. Chancellor Merkel’s words are welcome, but unless they are followed by action they will be taken by Putin and his gang as just another sign that even when the West actually talks about repression it means nothing, and that it’s all still business as usual.”

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29
October 2012

New Coordination Council Weighs Rally and Magnitsky

The Moscow Times

Members of the opposition’s newly elected Coordination Council agreed at their first meeting over the weekend to stage their next rally in December and press the U.S. to expand its Magnitsky list of banned Russian officials.

The opposition group, which met at a restaurant in central Moscow on Saturday, is tasked with trying to mount a structured challenge to President Vladimir Putin.

“They gave us the mandate of trust and made us responsible for coordinating efforts of dozens, hundreds, thousands and millions of people who want positive changes in our country,” said Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger who collected the most votes in the Oct. 20-22 online elections for the Coordination Council.

After some bickering, the new group of 45 leaders agreed to hold the next rally in December to mark the anniversary of the first anti-Putin protests after disputed State Duma elections.

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03
September 2012

Keep Russia Civilised

EU Reporter

‘Political repressions are becoming massive’, – Russian opposition politician Garry Kasparov told EU Reporter. – ‘After Putins’ inauguration the authorities are on the offensive, because the legitimacy of Putin is questioned by the overwhelming majority of people, especially in big cities. It became obvious that the wave of protests is not going down – the temperature is high and the society is boiling. As a response the authorities try to behead the protest movement’.

Within the group of opposition politicians Kasparov had found a hideaway in Tallinn ‘to be sure that there is no unwelcome interventions’ and the group can discuss the strategies for autumn without unpleasant surprises.

Kasparov knows what he is talking about, because just a few days before he had been seized was by Russian forces without any reason on his way to the court hearing of the political feminist group ‘Pussy Riot’.

‘The authorities have chosen to frighten the opposition politicians and politically active citizens in general, using the most primitive methods’, – continues Kasparov. – ‘They signal that any citizen, even the one just participating in a peaceful demonstration can become a victim of the police brutality’.

The situation has aggravated in recent weeks because criminal procedures have been launched against the well-known opposition figures Alexey Navalny and Boris Nemtzov. Charges against Garry Kasparov were not dropped, although his unlawful arrest is well documented, filmed and transmitted through internet.

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22
August 2012

Of Putin and Punks

Wall Street Journal

Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin has become expert at using the power of the courts to break opponents and crush political dissent. In the latest episode, the three young women of the “Pussy Riot” punk band were sentenced Friday to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

The women were arrested in March for performing an anti-Putin stunt inside the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, where they beseeched “Virgin Mary, drive away drive away Putin!” The clips went viral on YouTube, which is what really must have irked the Kremlin.

Following the method of Putin justice, the court barred much defense testimony, though it allowed prosecution witnesses who had not been at the cathedral. The judge on Friday took more than three hours to read the verdict, which included detailed descriptions of the shape of the defendants’ heads. According to the live-tweets of reporter Simon Shuster, the judge also noted their “mixed psychological disorders” that include “individualism, stubborn expression of opinions, unwillingness to cede positions.”

The proceedings were no less farcical than those that have kept oil tycoon and Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky behind bars since 2003. And the trial follows the recent indictment of Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption blogger and lawyer, on charges of embezzling money from a state company. Mr. Navalny faces between five and 10 years in prison, though the charges against him were investigated and dropped twice by regional prosecutors. He has become a Putin target because his writings are a focal point for the growing protests against the authoritarian regime.

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