Johann Hari, writing in The Independent, makes out a compelling argument for people in the West to help dissidents in Russia:
"The critics of Vladimir Putin – Russia's Prime Minister and former KGB agent – have a strange habit of being found shot or stabbed or poisoned. This week, I met a man who is half-expecting an assassin's bullet – here, in London. He is not alone. Ahmed Zakayev – a big, broad man with a grey beard and grief-soaked eyes – says: "I remember holding a press conference near here with my dear friends Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Now they are murdered and I am the only one left. But I have no right to sit in a hole and shake. I have to speak."
Zakayev is a Chechen, and his people have been pounded by Putin and his predecessors for too long. The people of his small mountainous province in the Northern Caucusus – rich in natural resources – are one of the most abused populations on earth. In the 1940s, Joseph Stalin deported every single one of them to Siberia and elsewhere. A third died on the way there; a third died on the way back.
"My grandmother never recovered from this," Zakayev says. When the Soviet Empire finally fell in 1991, the people of Chechnya tried to carve out some autonomy from their vast neighbour – and they were then pummelled into submission by aerial bombardments and ground invasions that killed hundreds of thousands of people. "There were corpses everywhere. I see them [in my mind] all the time," Zakayev adds.
The current killing spree of Russian dissidents is, in part, an attempt to silence criticisms of these crimes. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist – one of the greatest of our time – who travelled to Chechnya to expose the mass torture and slaughter by Russian troops there. She believed that Chechnya was a test-bed for tyranny that was spreading back across Russia itself, leading to "the re-establishment of the Soviet Union". As if to prove her point, first she was poisoned. She survived. Then she was shot dead in the lift shaft of her apartment block.
Last week, the trial for her killing ended in Moscow. The case conspicuously avoided asking who ordered her killing, or why. It focused on "the middlemen" – the alleged driver and look-out for the assassin. They were acquitted. Nobody will be punished now.
Alexander Litvinenko was a Russian agent sent to Chechnya in the 1990s. He believed he was "fighting terrorism" – but he was startled by what he found. For him, the turning point was when he arrested a 16-year-old "resistance fighter". He told the boy he should be at school. "I want to be," the boy said, "but my school was blown up."
Litvinenko began to speak out against the assault on Chechnya – and had to run for his life, to London, where he became a British citizen. His food was spiked with nuclear material in a restaurant in Central London, and he died in agony, of radiation poisoning. The trail of nuclear material ran quite literally through British Airways planes – back to Moscow.
"The critics of Vladimir Putin – Russia's Prime Minister and former KGB agent – have a strange habit of being found shot or stabbed or poisoned. This week, I met a man who is half-expecting an assassin's bullet – here, in London. He is not alone. Ahmed Zakayev – a big, broad man with a grey beard and grief-soaked eyes – says: "I remember holding a press conference near here with my dear friends Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya. Now they are murdered and I am the only one left. But I have no right to sit in a hole and shake. I have to speak."
Zakayev is a Chechen, and his people have been pounded by Putin and his predecessors for too long. The people of his small mountainous province in the Northern Caucusus – rich in natural resources – are one of the most abused populations on earth. In the 1940s, Joseph Stalin deported every single one of them to Siberia and elsewhere. A third died on the way there; a third died on the way back.
"My grandmother never recovered from this," Zakayev says. When the Soviet Empire finally fell in 1991, the people of Chechnya tried to carve out some autonomy from their vast neighbour – and they were then pummelled into submission by aerial bombardments and ground invasions that killed hundreds of thousands of people. "There were corpses everywhere. I see them [in my mind] all the time," Zakayev adds.
The current killing spree of Russian dissidents is, in part, an attempt to silence criticisms of these crimes. Anna Politkovskaya was a journalist – one of the greatest of our time – who travelled to Chechnya to expose the mass torture and slaughter by Russian troops there. She believed that Chechnya was a test-bed for tyranny that was spreading back across Russia itself, leading to "the re-establishment of the Soviet Union". As if to prove her point, first she was poisoned. She survived. Then she was shot dead in the lift shaft of her apartment block.
Last week, the trial for her killing ended in Moscow. The case conspicuously avoided asking who ordered her killing, or why. It focused on "the middlemen" – the alleged driver and look-out for the assassin. They were acquitted. Nobody will be punished now.
Alexander Litvinenko was a Russian agent sent to Chechnya in the 1990s. He believed he was "fighting terrorism" – but he was startled by what he found. For him, the turning point was when he arrested a 16-year-old "resistance fighter". He told the boy he should be at school. "I want to be," the boy said, "but my school was blown up."
Litvinenko began to speak out against the assault on Chechnya – and had to run for his life, to London, where he became a British citizen. His food was spiked with nuclear material in a restaurant in Central London, and he died in agony, of radiation poisoning. The trail of nuclear material ran quite literally through British Airways planes – back to Moscow.
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