United Press International, January 4, 2001
Russian NGOs Threatened, Praised By Officialdom
By Joseph Boris
While Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Canada last month telling an
interviewer that he admires environmentalists and wouldn't mind spending his
retirement as a green activist, his would-be colleagues back home were
reeling.
Not from the president's remarks, but a landslide vote the day before in
parliament to allow Russia to import 21,000 tons of radioactive waste from
Europe and Asia. Activists from across Russia had collected 2.5 million
signatures on a petition to force a national referendum on the issue, but
election authorities in November threw out more than 600,000 for errors such
as incomplete cross-outs, leaving the greens short of their goal.
The election commission will forward the signatures it did accept to Putin
and parliament (final action on the nuclear-waste bill is pending, though it
is expected to pass), and the president did give that pro-green interview,
but activists in Russia -- not only environmentalists but members of other
nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs -- have reason to regard such actions
with skepticism.
They also know the reality of a Putin government that generally allows NGOs
to freely pursue their varied goals but swiftly cracks down when those
groups are seen as threatening state security -- the bedrock tenet of the
former KGB officer's presidency.
"With a president a man who came through the KGB, the special services and
the police have decided they can throw their weight around much more
freely," said Mikhail Bogomolov, who heads the Moscow-based group Citizen,
which runs a Web site and handles press queries for about 30 Russian NGOs.
For example, two Russian environmentalists were charged with spying in the
late 1990s by the Federal Security Service, or FSB, an agency that Putin
once headed.
Many Russian NGOs complain they are routinely bogged down by bureaucracy as
they try to solve the many problems facing a society long accustomed to the
state doing everything. Because many NGOs in Russia do work that relieves
the Russian government of some of the cost of providing social services,
from community cleanup projects and wildlife-habitat protection to women's
shelters and family planning, the groups are welcomed. What rattles
officialdom in Putin's increasingly re-centralized Russia is when an NGO
involves itself in matters of national security or military secrets -- a
threshold that under Putin has included several officials labeling all
environmentalists as spies and the launch of Internet snooping technology
for use by the tax police and security agencies in investigations.
"I think both positions are tenable -- I think you can be an
environmentalist but you can also want to crush some environmentalists,"
said D.J. Peterson, a researcher at the Rand Corporation in California who
monitors NGOs in the former Soviet Union. "And I think it breaks down (along
the lines of) 'conservation is good; messing around with the energy system,
messing around with the military is bad and you don't want to do that."
A case in point is Alexander Nikitin, who was cleared by the Russian Supreme
Court in September after a 4 1/2-year ordeal that included a year in jail,
surveillance of his family and prosecutors' refusal even to specify the
state secrets the retired captain was accused of divulging when he co-wrote
a report on the Russian navy's mishandling of nuclear waste.
In a similar case, journalist Grigory Pasko was charged in 1997 with giving
away state secrets when he filed reports to a Japanese television network
about mishandling of nuclear waste by Russia's Pacific Fleet. After Pasko
spent 20 months in jail awaiting trial, a military court convicted him last
July of improper conduct but released him under a nationwide amnesty. In
November, however, the Supreme Court ruled that his case can be sent back to
the military tribunal for review by different judges, and Pasko may be
jailed again.
Protests and activism against nuclear power plants quickly draw the
attention of the FSB and its security brethren because of the Soviet legacy
of giving a military priority to such installations, Peterson noted.
And, although they did not involve activists, a series of controversial
prosecutions last year served notice of Putin's emphasis on security to rein
in the political and economic disorder of the Yeltsin years. An American
businessman, Edmond Pope, was convicted of spying -- and pardoned by Putin
as a goodwill move -- after he bought blueprints for a Russian torpedo;
Vladimir Gusinsky, a media tycoon and one of the so-called oligarchs who own
much of Russia's industrial base, is under house arrest in Spain pending
possible extradition to Russia on an embezzlement charge; Igor Sutyagin, a
researcher at a Moscow think tank focused on North American affairs, is now
on trial, accused of giving away military secrets; and Radio Liberty
reporter Andrei Babitsky was detained for using a fake passport after
drawing criticism from officials for his coverage of the war in Chechnya.
For NGOs, though, the most immediate threat posed by the state is more
mundane: bureaucracy.
The required registration for NGOs in Russia entails such mysteries as the
need to maintain office space (neither a private apartment nor a post office
box alone will do) and the ability to prove the group is represented in at
least 46 of Russia's 89 regions, and the process can take several months and
require bribes. Some regions have reputations for almost never registering
NGOs, said Ivan Blokov, campaign director for Greenpeace Russia, and the
question of whether organized activists feel threatened by state power
depends in part on the political climate in their home region.
"In Karelia, a prosecutor was trying to shut down an NGO which protected the
rights of people who suffered from the effects of an aluminum plant at
Nadvoitsk," Blokov said, referring to a case in northern Russia last March
that was part of a nationwide investigation of environmental groups.
"It's quite complicated to survive, but at the same time it is not the
general situation that NGOs are threatened," he added. "In terms of
registration, it is very complicated to be registered, but I cannot say that
it's impossible
Another worry for activists, whose organizing owes much to the Internet, has
been electronic surveillance of e-mail and other Internet traffic between
Russian Internet service providers, or ISPs, and their users, via a system
that includes a high-speed line from each ISP direct to the FSB's Moscow
headquarters. Investigators are supposed to obtain a warrant to review any
suspicious transmissions, but the ease with which checks can be made make it
unlikely the FSB will be sticklers for procedure. Security agencies in the
United States and Britain have developed similar monitoring systems.
Eliza Klose, executive director of the Washington-based Initiative for
Social Action and Renewal in Eurasia, said that among the Russian NGOs her
organization supports, she has not heard any firsthand reports of
intercepted e-mail. "But several (activists) have told me they know of
someone somewhere who's had their e-mail checked."
The Russian tax code, with its vague language, can be another headache and
more, especially when the tax police, who often wear masks, dress in black
and carry assault weapons, are sent to conduct a raid. Last spring the
federal tax inspectorate sent teams of maskless inspectors to Russia's
regions to look over the financial records of NGOs, with surprising results,
said Klose.
"Some of the inspectors became very interested in what the NGOs were doing,
they were asking lots of questions about their work because they had never
seen anything like it before," she said.
Another group reported that several tax inspections actually resulted in
regional authorities' expressing support for the work of NGOs, particularly
the environmental groups, which were among the first to develop under the
glasnost policy of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
"We destroyed their image of us as 'enemies of the people,'" Oleg Bodrov of
the group Green World was quoted as saying in another NGO's newsletter. "In
the end, not only did the inspectors find no infractions of the law, they
discovered people working to protect valuable regional resources and to
honor the natural world."
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