16 Jan 2012 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, Russia
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has launched a website dedicated to his run in the forthcoming presidential elections on 4 March. Minutes after the site went live on 12 January, comments in the site’s “suggestions” section called on him not to run in the presidential campaign. 98 per cent of visitors voted in favour of the comments, but the suggestions soon disappeared from the website. Bloggers quickly published screenshots, expressing concerns over censorship and noted that the website’s moderators left only comments wishing Putin success, and best wishes.
Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied the censorship allegation. “The website froze for a few hours due to the huge amount of visitors,” he told RIA Novosti news agency. Eventually, after numerous blog posts and news items, the comments calling for Putin not to run were restored.
Putin did not comment on the issue and is unlikely to do so in the near future, as he has announced he won’t be taking part in pre-election debates.
Meanwhile his potential opponents in the presidential campaign are facing hard times.
The leader of The Other Russia opposition movement Eduard Limonov has filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights claiming Russia’s Central Election Committee has refused to register him as a candidate. He says the police stopped his supporters from entering the building where its meeting was to be held. Under Russian electoral law, a person who wants to run in a presidential campaign has to hold meeting with at least 500 people who sign a paper in support of the candidate, which is then passed to the Central Election Committee. Liminov’s group of initiators eventually had to hold a meeting in a bus, and the Committee refused to recognise its results.
The leaders of two political parties that did not enter the State Duma as they din’t get over the threshold of seven per cent required by the law — economist Grigory Yavlinsky of “Yabloko” and oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov of “Pravoe Delo” — had to collect the two million signatures the law demands of them to be registered. Prokhorov claims his team has accomplished the task, though a number of experts remain skeptical about the accuracy of their work. Yavlinsky is still collecting the signatures, his team has complained about the artificial obstacles Russian electoral election law creates. For example, the number of signatories from each Russian region is limited to 50,000 people. In Moscow and St Petersburg it is relatively easy to find supporters, but regional work is harder.
Candidates are given 25 days to accurately collect two million signatures. They will have to hand them in to the Central Election Committee on 18 January.
Meanwhile, Sergei Mironov of A Just Russia and Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party have been asked to become “transitional presidents” by many participants of the December rallies. The Left Front opposition movement sent a proposal to them saying should they win the elections they should carry out a comprehensive election law reform, hold new parliamentary elections in just one year and then step down. Mironov has accepted the proposal, while Zyuganov said he was ready to implement the election reform and re-run the parliamentary elections but did not like the idea of stepping down.
A similar proposal was made to all candidates by notable Russian political scientist Andrey Piontkovsky. In an article he suggested that candidates who oppose Putin should “sign a contract with voters” promising to become a transitional president. This would involve carrying out radical reforms of election legislation, police and judiciary system; limiting the president’s power through passing amendments to the constitution; holding new parliamentary elections; and then within one to one-and-a-half years stepping down to participate in early presidential elections, which would be held according to new democratic laws. The candidates are yet to respond to him.
“The core goal for opposition is not to let Putin run the country again”, says Piontkovsky, who views transitional presidency as the way to achieve that. The “contract” between presidential candidates and civil society is to be “signed” on 4 February, on a third protest action for fair elections, which is expected to be the biggest yet.
13 Jan 2012 | Russia
The first weeks of January have been marked with a number of public moves, which opposition activists say are aimed at smearing them.
Russian general prosecutor Yuri Chaika has alleged that participants of two historically large rallies for new, fair parliamentary elections in December were financed by foreigners “for dishonorable aims”.
“Some individuals using people as an instrument for achieving their political goals, which are indeed dishonorable, is intolerable. And money for this comes from sources outside Russia,” Chaika said in an interview to state-owned daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
A journalist interviewing Chaika said that the protesters “had insulted the authorities” and asked whether they would be punished, prompting the general prosecutor to stress that defamation decriminalisation “doesn’t mean permissiveness and the lack of responsibility for slander and insult”. The punishment is still “quite sensible financially”, Chaika warned.
Novaya Gazeta has asked Yuri Chaika to provide documents proving his allegations, along with explanations of what Russian legislation had been violated.
Chaika’s allegations go in line with the Kremlin tendency to claim that opposition leaders and activists critical of Kremlin are financed “by the West in order to destabilise the situation in Russia”. Soon after the first rally on 10 December prime-minister Vladimir Putin said the protesters had been paid to attend the rally. Many joked about the allegation at the second rally on 24 December, as they held posters with “Hillary Clinton paid us in kind”, “Where’s the money, State Department?”, and “I’m here for free”. Similar allegations were made against Russia’s leading election monitor — GOLOS Association by the state-owned NTV channel, days before parliamentary elections.
Chaika’s interview was preceded by a scandal involving the publication of a fake photo of Alexey Navalny, one of the opposition leaders. Pro-Kremlin youth movements in Ekaterinburg circulated a newspaper entitled “Arguments and Facts. Ural Digest” with a photo of Navalny with disgraced Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The caption said Navalny “had never concealed” that he had received financial backing from the oligarch. The issue also said that Vladimir Putin’s United People’s Front — an organisation initiated to broaden United Russia’s electorate — contributed to it. Both the newspaper’s head and editor-in-chief claimed they didn’t release the issue, and denied any role in creating it. More controversial statements came from the United People’s Front members, but nobody can be sure who is responsible for the issue.
Alexei Navalny proved the photo was doctored by publishing the real image in his blog, where he is pictured with Russian tycoon and presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov. “What an entertaining job it must be to cut one oligarch and pasting in another” – Navalny wrote ironically in his blog.
Just like Putin’s allegations, the fake photo was used as a joke by tens of thousands of people participating in protest rallies against alleged fraud on elections. Many of them further photomontaged the photo, replacing Berezovsky with Putin, Stalin, aliens and even Harry Potter’s nemesis Lord Voldemort. Protestors agreed that Kremlin’s traditional allegations against its critics can no longer be taken seriously.
6 Jan 2012 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, News
Europe’s last dictatorship is clamping down on online activism, with a new law effectively requiring everyone to be a state spy. Mike Harris reports
As of this morning, the internet in Belarus got smaller. A draconian new law is in force that allows the authorities to prosecute internet cafes if their users visit any foreign sites without being “monitored” by the owner. All commercial activity online is now illegal unless conducted via a .by (Belarusian) domain name, making Amazon and eBay’s operations against the law unless they collaborate with the regime’s censorship and register there. The law effectively implements the privatisation of state censorship: everyone is required to be a state spy. Belarusians who allow friends to use their internet connection at home will be responsible for the sites they visit. Some have tried to defend the law, stating all countries regulate the internet in some form – but the Belarusian banned list of websites contains all the leading opposition websites. The fine for visiting these sites is half a month’s wages for a single view.
The Arab spring has been a wake-up call to the world’s remaining despots. The internet allowed images of open dissent to disseminate instantly. As Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak found out, once you reach a critical mass of public protest you haven’t got long to board your private jet. It’s a lesson learned by Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and Europe’s last dictator, and also by the Belarusian opposition.
Lukashenko attempted to destroy the political opposition after the rigged 2010 presidential elections. Seven of the nine presidential candidates were arrested alongside thousands of political activists. The will of those detained was tested: there are allegations that presidential candidates Andrei Sannikov and Mikalai Statkevich have been tortured while in prison. The opposition is yet to recover; many of its leading figures have fled to Lithuania and Poland.
Within this vacuum of leadership, the internet helped spur a civil society backlash. After the sentencing of the presidential candidates, a movement inspired by the Arab spring “The Revolution Via Social Networks” mushroomed into a wave of protests that brought dissent to towns across Belarus usually loyal to Lukashenko. As the penal code had already criminalised spontaneous political protest with its requirements for pre-notification, the demonstrations were silent, with no slogans, no banners, no flags, no shouting, no swearing – just clapping.
“The Revolution Via Social Networks” (RSN) helped co-ordinate these protests online via VKontakte (the biggest rival to Facebook in Russia and Belarus with more than 135 million registered users). RSN now has more than 32,000 supporters.
RSN splits its four administrators between Minsk and Krakow to keep the page active even when the state blocks access to the page, or the country’s secret police (hauntingly still called the KGB) intimidate them.
The protests were so effective at associating clapping with dissent that the traditional 3 July independence day military parade was held without applause with only the brass bands of the military puncturing the silence. As lines of soldiers, trucks, tanks and special forces paraded past Lukashenko and his six-year-old son dressed in military uniform, those gathered waved flags in a crowd packed with plain-clothed agents ready to arrest anyone who dared clap or boo.
The internet has kept the pressure on the regime in other ways. Protesters photograph the KGB and post their pictures online in readiness for future trials against those who commit human rights violations. A Facebook group “Wanted criminals in civilian clothes”, blogs and Posobniki.com all help to expose those complicit in the regime’s crimes. The web has also helped spread the stories of individuals who have faced brutality by the regime.
It’s this effectiveness that has made the internet a target for Lukashenko. The law enacted in July 2010 allowed the government to force Belarusian ISPs to block sites within 24 hours.
The new measures coming into force today merely build upon these restrictions. The official position of the Belarusian government from the operations and analysis centre of the presidential administration is: “The access of citizens to internet resources, including foreign ones, is not restricted in Belarus.” Yet, in reality the government blocks websites at will, especially during protests. Just after Christmas, the leading opposition website Charter 97 (which works closely with Index on Censorship) was hacked, its archive part-deleted and a defamatory post about jailed presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov published on the site. The site’s editor, Natalia Radzina, who has faced years of vile death and rape threats and escaped from Belarus after being placed in internal exile last year, says she has “no doubt” that the government was behind the hack. This is one of a series of attacks on Charter 97, which include co-ordinated DDoS (denial of service) attacks orchestrated by the KGB through an illegal botnet of up to 35,000 infected computers worldwide.
The regime has even darker methods of silencing its critics. In September 2010, I flew to Minsk to meet Belarusian civil society activists including the founder of the Charter 97 website, Oleg Bebenin. The day I landed he was found hung in his dacha, his leg broken, with his beloved son’s hammock wrapped around his neck. I spoke to his closest friends at his funeral including Andrei Sannikov and Natalia Radzina. No one believed he had committed suicide, all thought he had been killed by the state. Bebenin isn’t the only opposition figure to have died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances under Lukashenko’s rule, a chill on freedom of expression far more powerful than any changes in the law.
Today marks yet another low in Belarus’s miserable slide back to its Soviet past. Clapping in the street is now illegal. NGOs have been forced underground and their work criminalised.
Former presidential candidates languish in jail. The internet is the last free public space.
Lukashenko will do all he can to close down this freedom. In Europe, the battle has opened between the netizens of Belarus and its government. Who wins will be a matter of interest for us all.
Mike Harris is Head of Advocacy at Index on Censorship.
This article originally appeared on Comment is Free on 6 January.
31 Dec 2011 | Russia
Opposition activist Taisiya Osipova was sentenced to ten years on charges of drug trafficking on Friday. Rights activists allege that her arrest is a political move to silence both her and her husband. Both are members of The Other Russia opposition movement.
No journalists were present at the Smolensk city court when Ospiova was sentenced to ten years of liberty deprivation in a colony on 29 December. The Other Russia condemned her arrest in a statement said that the sentence would be fatal for Osipova, who has severe diabetes and pancreatitis as well as a five year old child.
Osipova and her husband Sergey Fomchenkov both support the founder of the Russian radical National Bolshevik Party (NBP) Eduard Limonov, which was banned in 2005 and subsequently revived under the name The Other Russia. Fomchenkov is a political council member for the organisation, and Osipova is an activist.
Taisiya Osipova first became well-known in 2003, when she smacked the Smolensk governor Victor Maslov with a bunch of carnations and shouted “You are getting fat at the expense of simple people. NBP says hello.” She was then given one year’s probation.
Osipova was initially arrested on drug charges in November 2010 after police found suspicious powder and marked bonds in her flat. Investigators accused her of selling and storing heroin, and a criminal case was then filed. Human rights activists expressed concern over the credibility of the sentence, because no fingerprints were analysed with the drugs allegedly found at Osipova’s flat, and three witnesses in the case were pro-Kremlin youth movement members, who are traditionally hostile to opposition organisations. This has raised suspicions that the drugs were planted in her flat to frame her, which is a common practise with corrupt law enforcement official.
Many organisations and activists have spoken out against Osipova’s arrest and called for her release, including The Other Russia, World Organization Against Torture, Russian rights activist organisations including Memorial and The Committee for Civil Rights, and public figures like musician Yury Shevchuk and Evgenia Chirikova, an activist for the Khimki forest. Osipova claims that operatives told her that they would release her if she testified against her husband; she refused.
A number of peaceful protests were held in Russia’s biggest cities this year, and many participants were detained by the police. Two biggest post-Soviet rallies in Moscow had a demand to release political prisoners immediately in their resolutions. But Osipova has yet to be released.
While many criminals are allowed to remain free, Osipova, “whose case the public considers faked-up”, remains in prison, Yury Shevchuk stated in his video address in Osipova’s support.
Along with antiextremism and defamation, drug law is often times used to silence opposition activists and outspoken critics of the Kremlin. One of the remarkable examples is that of the artist Artyom Loskutov who was arrested based on drug charges in 2009. The Novosibirsk-based artist Loskutov is famous for orchestrating “monstrations”—which are flash mobs with absurd slogans including “Who’s there?,” “Tanya, don’t cry,” and “System, why so nervous?” Loskutov said marijuana was dropped into his pocket by antiextremism police force operatives, as his fingerprints were not found on the pacakge with drugs, and no drug traces were found in his blood or on his hands. In a statement supporting Osipova, Loskutov said “drugs are used as an instrument for political repressions.”
