The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is calling on Kyrgyz authorities to investigate the harassment of journalists working for independent outlets while they were covering the country’s nationwide constitutional referendum on April 11.
Police detained at least four journalists covering voting in the southern city of Osh and in the capital, Bishkek, while election onlookers attacked at least one reporter in Osh, the New York-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement on April 13.
Kyrgyz authorities must investigate the police detentions and ensure that “all members of the press can cover events of national significance freely and safely,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator.
“If Kyrgyzstan’s elections are to be seen as free, fair, and legitimate, journalists must be able to cover them freely and without fear of detention and harassment,” she said.
In Osh, a group of people confronted two correspondents for the independent news website Kloop, Bekmyrza Isakov and Aliyma Alymova, while they were trying to interview a group of voters at a polling station, according to CPJ.
It cited news reports and Ayzirek Almazbekova, coordinator of Kloop’s election-monitoring program, as saying that the group called the journalists “traitors,” with one woman pushing Isakov, striking him in the arm, and taking his phone.
When Isakov took out a second cell phone to film the altercation, a man in the group stole it as well, along with the phone of a volunteer election monitor who was assisting the Kloop team.
Police officers who were present at the scene only intervened after the woman who struck Isakov refused to return the phones except at a police station, according to reports, which said that the two journalists, the election monitor, and the woman were taken to a police station for questioning.
The woman filed a complaint accusing the journalists of “hooliganism”; the journalists filed a countercomplaint, Almazbekova said.
Police later returned the two cell phones to the journalists, who were released without charge. However, police kept the election monitor’s phone.
Police in Osh also detained a reporter with the independent news website Eldik.media, Ayarbek Joldoshbaev, while he was filming at another polling station, according to news reports and an Eldik.media representative.
Police told Joldoshbaev that he did not have permission from the polling station’s chairman to film there and held the journalist for about an hour at a police station.
Authorities are continuing to investigate the case, according to Eldik.media.
In the capital, Bishkek, a Kloop reporter was detained while she was filming at a polling station, according to Almazbekova.
She said the journalist, Aijan Avazbekova, was held for at least two hours and was released after giving a statement.
In both Joldoshbayev and Avazbekova’s detentions, police reportedly claimed that the journalists lacked the necessary permission to film.
But under Kyrgyz laws, media workers have the right to film within polling stations during elections and referendums, CPJ said.
The winter months are especially harsh for the homeless in Russia’s northern city of St. Petersburg, especially for those suffering serious medical problems.
“Recuperating from many illnesses in the winter and on the streets is impossible. After release from the hospital, they end up back on the streets in conditions that aren’t conducive to recovery,” said Sergei Iyevkov, the founder and direct of Charity Hospital, which has more than 100 volunteers — including dozens of doctors — delivering health care to the homeless.
Irina Safonova attends to a patient who injured his leg in an accident at a construction site.
An estimated 50,000 people in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, are believed to lack a permanent home. Beyond the daily struggle to find food and shelter, those in need of medical attention face further hurdles. Many lack health insurance or even basic identification documents. Without those, only emergency wards and the city’s sole specialized hospital for infectious diseases will treat them. Discrimination and hostility on the part of some health-care workers also dissuades many of the homeless from seeking hospital treatment, experts say. And even if they are treated for an illness, many of them never fully recover.
A homeless man is taken by volunteers for a medical examination.
“For example, a person gets frostbite on his leg, has it amputated, and is discharged. He may then suffer acute pain, get infections or a fever. Getting to a health center is not always possible. Plus, they need to find a place to sleep. In most cases, they end up in the emergency ward again. It’s a vicious circle,” Iyevkov told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Charity Hospital and other NGOs — including the Bus of Mercy, which is run by the Russian Orthodox Church — are providing the much-needed help the homeless aren’t getting elsewhere. Much of the medical care Charity Hospital is dispensing is done inside vans, including the Bus of Mercy and the Night Bus, run by another NGO, Nochlezhka.
“In reality, what’s the alternative to our work? These people are quietly dying on the streets or elsewhere without any care. Our goal is to give them hope. They are recovering. Many will be healthy again,” said Irina Safonova, a surgeon who volunteers with Charity Hospital — Blagotvoritelnaya Bolnitsa in Russian.
“It’s impossible not to see what’s going on in the streets,” she said. “The problem is that few think about it. Even some of my friends and family don’t know about my work here; for many, it doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, even in the medical field, hardly anyone knows about our work either.”
“These people are quietly dying on the streets or elsewhere without any care. Our goal is to give them hope,” said one volunteer doctor.
Ivan Grigoryevich turned up at an emergency ward with the hope of having his frostbitten toes amputated. However, only a wound on his head was re-bandaged; his feet were ignored.
“They didn’t even look at them and just waved me away,” he recounted at a homeless shelter in St. Petersburg that is run by the Order of Malta.
Like several homeless people who spoke to Current Time, he gave only his first name and patronymic, not his last name.
Doctors bandage a victim of frostbite.
After he was turned back a second time, Ivan returned with a volunteer from the Charity Hospital. This time, the amputation was performed.
In the same shelter with Ivan was Andrei, who said the volunteers from Charity Hospital tended to his wounds after he suffered a fall at a worksite in St. Petersburg just before New Year’s Eve. His said he was wary about going to a hospital because he was working on the site “illegally.”
Ivan Grigoryevich went to an emergency ward for his frostbitten toes, but was only given cursory treatment. “They didn’t even look at them and just waved me away,” he said.
“The other workers took me to the gate and I waited for the ambulance. I’m from the Urals, from Perm. The people from the Night Bus helped get me into this shelter,” said Ivan, who has no plans to return to his hometown 1,500 kilometers east of St. Petersburg. “What would I do there? I can’t sit in my mother’s lap!”
He’s not the only undocumented construction worker who has been helped by the volunteers of Charity Hospital.
“Two years ago, I fell eight floors at a construction site,” said 46-year-old Nikolai Mikhailovich. “I don’t know how I survived. I was in and out of hospitals for two years. Fractures of the chest, arms, legs. Now I have [metal] plates everywhere. My wife died; my daughter kicked me out. I have a criminal record and was in prison in the ’90s, and she’s a [police] investigator. She did it to save her career.”
“It was like being born again,” Viktor Aleksandrovich said after two eye surgeries.
Worsening cataracts had left Viktor Aleksandrovich nearly blind in both eyes. His plight was brought to the attention of Anna Matveyeva, an ophthalmologist and Charity Hospital volunteer, who took him to a hospital with which the charity has an agreement to perform surgical procedures.
“She picked me up in her car, took me for an examination. Then, two operations were performed in the medical center,” Viktor told Current Time. “I could see again. The light and the sky. I [had] a new life. It was like being born again. I was so happy. Before the operation, I couldn’t see where I was walking [and] got around by touch. I knew my way around the shelter and knew how to get to the toilet. Now, I’m happy.”
Volunteer doctors tend to the homeless on the Night Bus.
For many of those volunteering at Charity Hospital, the experience has not only opened their eyes to the plight of the homeless but given them a deeper understanding of the scope of the problem.
The resilience and dignity displayed by the homeless as they struggle with the daily challenge to survive has left a deep impression on Matveyeva.
“Every time I come across a display of courage or compassion in a person in such a situation, I feel admiration,” she said.
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Tony Wesolowsky based on reporting by Current Time photographer Artyom Leshko
VOLOGDA, Russia — Savely Narizhny is a 15-year-old former high school student in the northwestern Russian city of Vologda. On the evening of January 23, he was stopped in the center of the city after attending an unsanctioned mass demonstration in support of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who at the time was jailed and facing serious criminal charges. Narizhny wasn’t detained, but police confiscated his telephone. Three days later, police came for him at home.
Narizhny admits that he wrote graffiti calling longtime authoritarian President Vladimir Putin a “thief” on the wall of the regional administration headquarters. A short time later, prosecutors categorized the act as “an action committed by a group of people and motivated by political, ideological, race-based, nationalist, or religious hatred or enmity.” If convicted, he could face up to three years in prison.
After the criminal charges were filed, Narizhny was called into the administration of his school. Officials pressured him into withdrawing from the school.
“They told me, ‘we don’t need criminals’ and so on,” Narizhny told RFE/RL. “‘It will be better for you to withdraw of your own volition.’”
Now he attends classes at night school while awaiting trial.
During the wave of protests in support of Navalny and against Putin’s government in January and February, Russian officials and state-controlled media — noting the relative youthfulness of the movement — regularly accused the opposition of luring minors
“It’s absolutely unacceptable to thrust minors forward,” Putin said. “After all, that’s what terrorists do.”
Leading state television moderator Dmitry Kiselyov railed against the opposition on his prime-time show, accusing them of “pulling children into politics like political pedophiles.” Opposition supporters, however, were quick to create a video that overlaid Kiselyov’s tirade with a montage of photographs of small children attending events organized by the ruling United Russia party.
In the weeks since the demonstrations, local officials across the country have cracked down on young people — not just minors — who participated in the demonstrations. Many have found themselves facing expulsion from their educational institutions, serious criminal charges, or — as in Narizhny’s case — both.
Also caught up in the post-protest crackdown in Vologda was 17-year-old Ilya Yelshin. A self-confessed bad student at the Spassky Middle School, Yelshin spent most of his time cultivating his quirky YouTube channel featuring videos of him, for instance, watching a single clip by Russian rapper Morgenshtern for more than six hours or strolling around in temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius wearing just a t-shirt and jeans.
‘Getting Upset’
In January, however, as Navalny was preparing to return from Germany where he’d spent weeks recuperating from an August nerve-agent poisoning that he says was carried out by Federal Security Service (FSB) operatives at the behest of Putin and the government was threatening to arrest him if he appeared in Russia, Yelshin began including political content on his channel, including surveying other youths about whether they supported Navalny or Putin.
On January 23, he published a YouTube livestream from the Navalny demonstration in Vologda.
Pro-Navalny demonstrators march in Vologda on January 23.
“I started getting upset about what was happening in Russia at that moment. And things are still bad, as a matter of fact,” he told RFE/RL. “The protests started, and I began looking into things. Russia’s problems, Putin….”
Although teachers had lectured students before the protest about the “danger” of participating in such activities, nothing happened to Yelshin during the demonstration. The next day, however, two plainclothes police showed up at his house and warned him that he was the target of a criminal investigation. Shortly thereafter, he was summoned to the regional prosecutor’s office.
“Don’t you understand that you are putting your life in danger by getting involved in this?” the prosecutor asked him, according to an audio recording that Yelshin made surreptitiously and posted on social media. “You are being used. You don’t even understand how they are using you.”
“And have you thought about how you are being used?” Yelshin retorted.
Navalny’s supporters called for another major protest on January 31. Shortly before that date, Yelshin posted a video in which he said: “If you want to go, go. But think carefully many times before you decide not to go.”
According to Yelshin’s lawyer, Sergei Tikhonov, the director of Yelshin’s school telephoned the police to report that video and soon his real troubles began.
Spassky Middle School Director Lyudmila Guseva declined to be interviewed for this article.
Vologda politician Yevgeny Domozhirov, who is a member of the Central Council of Navalny’s Party of Progress, posted an image of the police report of Guseva’s call dated January 29.
He accuses Guseva of hypocrisy for warning students not to get involved in politics while, at the same time, welcoming the United Russia party into her school.
“It is enough to go onto the school’s webpage and to see there the constant reposts from the party of crooks and thieves and photographs of their events at the school,” Domozhirov wrote, using the dismissive moniker that Navalny coined to refer to United Russia, in a blog post that featured numerous links to such posts from the Spassky school’s social media pages.
‘It Will Only Get Worse’
Yelshin was detained at the January 31 demonstration. Police treated him as an “organizer” of the protest because of the video that Guseva had flagged for them. In the end, he was fined 20,000 rubles ($260) on that count and 10,000 rubles ($130) for participating in a second unsanctioned demonstration. In addition, his parents were fined 100 rubles ($1.30) for “failing to fulfill their parental obligations.”
Within days, Yelshin — like Narizhny — was summoned to the school administration and pressured to withdraw.
“‘Ilyusha, of course we aren’t forcing you to do anything, but it would be better if you withdrew,’” Yelshin said he was told. “They told me: ‘You know yourself that it will only get worse.’”
Since he left school, Yelshin said, he has more time to work on his YouTube channel. Among other things, he posted a video about how he was “driven out of school.”
“Now I am no longer a student,” he said. “I don’t study anywhere. In short, I’m a bum.”
Student Vera Inozemtseva was expelled from university for attending a pro-Navalny protest in Astrakhan on January 23.
In the southern Russian city of Astrakhan, 22-year-old Vera Inozemtseva and two other students were expelled from Astrakhan State University for attending the Navalny protest in that city on January 23. She said that after the demonstration she was “abducted” by plainclothes police officers who took her telephone and used it to post incriminating messages on her social media accounts.
“I was taken from room to room,” she said of her time at a police station that evening, “and finally I was brought to a room and an officer from Center E came in.” Center E is the Interior Ministry department responsible for combating extremism, which has been widely criticized for cracking down on peaceful political dissent.
“I tried to find out what was the legal grounds for this conversation and where my telephone was, but the officer didn’t answer my questions and just asked me why I don’t like Putin,” she added. She said she was returned home by three masked men in an unmarked car. One of them asked her, “You are going to behave now, right?”
“I answered that I would complain to the prosecutor’s office,” she said. As soon as the masked men let her go, two uniformed police officers walked up to her and ordered her to go with them.
‘I Don’t Want To Quit’
“I thought that maybe I had gone out of my mind or that I was in the middle of a nightmare,” she said. In the end, she was fined 10,000 rubles for participating in the demonstration.
She filed her complaint with prosecutors on January 24, but the Investigative Committee declined to open an investigation.
“We are appealing that refusal,” she said.
In March, a local court rejected Inozemtseva’s appeal against her expulsion from the university.
“Now we are preparing another appeal,” Inozemtseva, who was working on a master’s degree in political science before being kicked out, told RFE/RL. “I am ready to go to the Supreme Court and to the European Court of Human Rights.”
“But I want to win my case against the university here in Russia and not at the European court,” she added. “And I want to see the people who abducted me on January 23 punished.”
“I don’t want to quit,” she concluded, falling into thought. “Quit what? You can’t even call it activism. I just do what I do. But if I stop doing that, I will become just another indifferent person. And although Russia does not love me, I cannot be indifferent to it.”
Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Vologda by RFE/RL Russian Service North.Realities correspondent Kirill Kruglikov.. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Darya Yegorova contributed from Astrakhan.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is urging Kyiv to repatriate dozens of Ukrainian women and children it says are being held in “horrific” conditions in Syrian camps.
An estimated 40 Ukrainian women and children are “unlawfully” detained in two camps in northeastern Syria, the New York-based human rights watchdog said in a statement on April 13. The majority of them are children, some as young as 2 years old, it added.
The group is among nearly 43,000 foreigners linked to the Islamic State (IS) extremist group who are being held by regional authorities.
HRW said it had sent letters to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba requesting the government take prompt action to assist and repatriate the Ukrainian women and children.
“Ukrainian women and children are being held in horrific and appalling conditions while their government chooses to look the other way,” said Yulia Gorbunova, senior Ukraine researcher at HRW.
Kyiv “should comply with the regional authorities’ repeated calls for countries to bring home their nationals, prioritizing the most vulnerable,” Gorbunova added.
Ukraine’s government, as well as administrations in several other countries with similar situations, have been reluctant to repatriate such cases, contending that it poses too high a security risk.
None of the 40 Ukrainian women and children detained at the Al-Hol and Roj camps have been brought before a court or investigated or prosecuted for any crime, and their “arbitrary” detention by the armed forces of the Kurdish-led autonomous administration of northeastern Syria violates international law, according to HRW.
The group said that the conditions in the camps were “often inhumane and life-threatening, with growing insecurity and shortages of vital aid.”
The coronavirus pandemic “presents another threat to the lives of these detainees,” with the United Nations reporting at least 8,537 coronavirus cases in northeastern Syria as of February.
The watchdog quoted Children in Syria and Iraq, a group of independent Ukrainian investigative journalists and activists that monitors the issue, as saying that the detainees “live in constant fear and are terrified for their health and safety.”
Three of the detained women and one child were said to have disabilities, while one woman has an acute kidney disease, one child and one woman shrapnel injuries, and one child a severe gum infection.
HRW called on the Ukrainian government, which has already repatriated two women and seven children from northeastern Syria, to bring home its remaining nationals and their children.
The government should also increase consular assistance to its citizens and humanitarian aid to the camps and prisons in northeastern Syria “to complement — not replace — repatriations.”
Citizens of dozens of countries are being held as IS suspects and family members in northeastern Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Turkey. Many countries cite the potential security risks posed by their nationals as a reason for not bringing them home.
“Detaining people in such inhuman and degrading conditions is clearly prohibited under international law,” Gorbunova said, adding that countries whose nationals are being held as IS suspects had “a responsibility to protect its citizens and uphold their rights.”
ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Kenzhebek Abishev, who was jailed for being linked to a political movement founded by a fugitive tycoon, has launched a hunger strike after his early release on parole was cancelled at the last moment.
Kazakhstan’s International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law said on April 12 that Abishev started the hunger strike the previous day. It published a letter from the activist addressed to President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, urging him to intervene on his behalf.
In his letter, Abishev calls the cancellation of the court’s decision to release him on parole in February and the case against him “illegal,” adding that his medical conditions — heart and respiratory problems — had worsened due to the lack of proper medical treatment in prison.
“There is no sense for me to continue living, consuming food, and treat my illnesses. Do you want to kill me? Then kill me. I am tired of life,” Abishev said in his letter to the president.
There have been no official statements regarding Abishev’s hunger strike either by the Penitentiary Service or the Prosecutor-General’s Office.
On February 1, a court in the southern city of Qapshaghai ruled that Abishev could be released on February 16, more than three years early, for good behavior while in prison, a procedure allowed by Kazakh law.
However, the Almaty regional prosecutor’s office appealed the ruling at the very last moment, arguing that the 53-year-old activist’s good behavior in custody was not enough for his release since he still had more than three years to serve.
The court then scrapped the move, leaving Abishev in prison.
Abishev was sentenced to seven years in prison in December 2018 after he and two other activists were found guilty of planning a “holy war” because they were spreading the ideas of the banned Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) movement. His prison term was later cut by eight months.
Abishev, whom Kazakh rights groups have recognized as a political prisoner, pleaded not guilty, calling the case against him politically motivated.
The DVK was founded by Mukhtar Ablyazov, an outspoken critic of the government who has been living in France for several years.
Ablyazov has organized unsanctioned anti-government rallies in Kazakhstan via the Internet in recent years.
Jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says he has filed a lawsuit against the administration of Correctional Colony No. 2, where he is incarcerated, for not allowing him to read the Koran.
Navalny wrote on Instagram on April 13 that the holy book for Muslims, the Koran, and all of the other books he brought with him to the penitentiary in early March had been withheld, as the guards said that they needed three months to check all his books — including the Koran — for extremism.
“The problem is that they have not given me my Koran. When they incarcerated me, I made a list of tasks to improve myself while in prison. One of such points was to study deeply and understand the Koran and the Prophet’s followers…. I understood that my development as a Christian also requires the study of the Koran,” Navalny wrote.
Navalny’s statement comes on the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, during which practicing Muslims abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and sex from dawn to sunset.
Some 10 percent of Russia’s population of more than 144 million are Muslims or from an Islamic cultural background.
Navalny was arrested in January on his arrival from Germany, where he was treated for a poisoning in Siberia with what was defined by European labs as a nerve agent in August 2020. Navalny accused President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, which Kremlin has denied.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered to be politically motivated.
His 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted into a prison term, though the court said he will serve just over 2 1/2 years in prison given time he had been held in detention.
Navalny has complained recently of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and has accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
The 44-year-old politician has lost 13 kilograms since his imprisonment and continues a hunger strike aimed at forcing prison officials to allow him to be treated by his own doctor.
PETUSHKI, Russia — Anastasia Vasilyeva, the personal doctor of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, has been fined over her attempt to see the ailing Kremlin critic last week at the prison he is being held in outside of Moscow.
The Petushki district court in the Vladimir region late on April 12 ordered Vasilyeva, who is the chairwoman of the Alliance of Doctors union, to pay 180,000 rubles ($2,320), for what the court described as the “organization of a mass gathering near a penitentiary that led to obstacles for transport operations.”
Vasilyeva’s lawyer, Mikhail Arsenyev, said the court ruling will be appealed.
Vasilyeva and several others were detained by police on April 6 after they arrived at the Correctional Colony No. 2 in the town of Pokrov, some 100 kilometers from Moscow, demanding that the penitentiary’s administration allow Navalny access to an independent physician to examine him amid concerns over his health condition.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
Prison authorities have said they were monitoring Navalny’s health, which they evaluated as “satisfactory.”
Vasilyeva and most of the Navalny supporters were released after several hours, but on April 8, the Pertushki district court found four of the detained supporters of Navalny guilty of illegally gathering near a penitentiary and sentenced them to several days in jail.
In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that is widely considered as being politically motivated. Navalny’s 3 1/2 year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve 2 1/2 years in prison given time he had been held in detention.
The 44-year-old politician has lost 13 kilograms since his imprisonment and continues a hunger strike aimed at forcing prison officials to allow him to be treated by his own doctor.
MINSK — Police in Belarus have reportedly detained the chairman of opposition Belarusian Popular Front (BNF) party, Ryhor Kastusyou, amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent following a disputed presidential election that handed victory to strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
According to Kastusyou’s relatives, the politician was detained on unspecified charges in the eastern city of Shklou on April 12 and transported to Minsk.
There has been no official announcement by authorities on Kastusyou’s detainment so far.
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
Lukashenka, who has ruled the country since 1994, was declared the winner in the August 2020 election, which was widely viewed as rigged in his favor.
Thousands of citizens have since taken to the streets to protest the results, saying Lukashenka’s challenger, Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, actually won the election.
Tsikhanouskaya left Belarus for Lithuania after the election for security reasons, while Lukashenka has directed a brutal postelection crackdown in which almost 30,000 have been detained, hundreds beaten, several killed, and journalists targeted in the action.
Many other senior opposition figures have also left, or were forced to leave Belarus, fearing for their safety, while several of those who haven’t left have been detained by security officials.
The controversial new constitution that returns Kyrgyzstan to a presidential form of government has been approved in a nationwide referendum, but almost everything surrounding the document suggests it may live a short life in a country that has had three revolutions in 16 years.
Central Election Commission (CEC) Chairwoman Nurzhan Shayldabekova said on April 12 that 79.3 percent of those who cast ballots in the referendum — some 1.03 million people — voted in favor of the new constitution, with just 13.65 percent voting against it.
Kyrgyzstan has some 6.5 million citizens, so it is possible to question whether the approval of this new constitution represents the will of the people when less than 1-in-6 citizens voted for it.
Only 30 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s eligible voters needed to participate for the April 11 referendum to be declared legitimate. Preliminary results show some 37.1 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the poll, as local elections and the referendum were held simultaneously.
That is slightly less than the approximately 39 percent who turned out for the January 10 election in which voters chose a new president and decided to hold the constitutional referendum.
Some 1.35 million people cast ballots in January, with 81.44 percent — about 1.1 million people — voting in favor of holding the referendum.
But controversy surrounded the new constitution from the very beginning.
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov and his wife, Aigul Asanbaeva, cast their ballots at a polling station in Bishkek.
Shortly after being freed from jail by a mob during the unrest that followed the fraudulent October 4 parliamentary elections, Sadyr Japarov — who was subsequently elected president in January — suggested changing the semi-parliamentary form of government that Kyrgyzstan has had since 2010 to a presidential one under a new constitution.
The newly approved constitution is very similar to what Kyrgyzstan had under former Presidents Askar Akaev and Kurmanbek Bakiev, both of whom were chased from power partly due to amendments to the constitution that gave them more power.
Japarov and others argued that the 2010 constitution, which was also adopted in a referendum, created a parliament filled with deputies who bought their seats and mainly bickered, accomplishing very little.
The October 4 polls were eventually annulled after large demonstrations. With their mandates expiring and no replacement elections scheduled, the parliamentary deputies who were elected in 2015 voted to extend their mandates, which were to expire on October 28.
Many legal experts say that action puts into question every decision this parliament has made since its term was extended.
The same parliament then passed the draft of the new constitution on all three readings in December over the course of a few days, which violated the constitution that was still in effect.
Several changes were also made to the draft constitution after it had been approved by parliament, which many of its detractors note.
Furthermore, the decision in late November to form a Constitutional Chamber and the subsequent selection of its 89 members has also been called into question.
Many also wonder how much, if any, of the public’s opinion played a role in drafting the new constitution, which was also supposed to be put up for public discussion before it was approved by parliament. But that was not done.
That is in great contrast to the 2010 constitution, which civil society and other public groups contributed to during the drafting stage.
WATCH: October’s Upheaval In Kyrgyzstan Followed Two Revolutions This Century
Polls conducted in the days leading up to the April 11 referendum indicated most people did not know very much about the changes contained in the new constitution.
Fresh parliamentary elections that were originally scheduled to be held just days after the October 4 elections were later postponed.
It now seems new parliamentary elections will take place no sooner than this summer, which is strange since it was the popular resistance to the October 4 parliamentary elections that started Kyrgyzstan down its current path that led to the new constitution being approved.
Parliament loses many of its powers under the constitution approved on April 11, which also reduces the number of seats in the body from 120 to 90.
It is not difficult to see that there is ample ground for people to question the legitimacy of this new constitution, something Kyrgyz citizens could do if the become dissatisfied with the new president and his government.
Opponents of the new constitution will say that the constitution was pushed through by a leader who was in prison until October 4; drafted by a group that the public had no role in appointing; approved by a parliament whose mandate had expired; altered after that approval; and endorsed by less than 16 percent of the country’s population in a referendum.
In 2005, 2010, and 2020, such dissatisfaction led to the ousting of the country’s leaders.
The U.S. State Department has called for the release of an RFE/RL freelance correspondent arrested in Ukraine’s Russia-annexed Crimea region and joined human rights groups in expressing concern over his treatment and a televised “confession” he gave.
“Troubled by reports that Russian occupation authorities in Crimea tortured @RFERL freelance journalist [Vladyslav] Yesypenko to coerce his confession. We call for his release, and for Russia to cease its reprisals against independent voices in Crimea,” spokesman Ned Price tweeted on April 13.
Yesypenko’s lawyer on April 6 said his client testified during a closed-door court hearing that he was tortured with electric shocks, beaten, and threatened with death unless he “confessed” to spying on behalf of Ukraine.
Lawyer Aleksei Ladin said after the hearing that the torture lasted two days after Yesypenko’s arrest on March 10 on what the defense calls false charges against the journalist, who has Ukrainian and Russian dual nationality.
RFE/RL President Jamie Fly at the time said that the broadcaster is “outraged” to learn what Yesypenko said during his testimony, saying the journalist “must be set free now, and allowed to rejoin his family in Ukraine immediately.”
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said Yesypenko, a freelance contributor to Crimea.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, was suspected of collecting information for Ukrainian intelligence, and claimed that an object “looking like an explosive device” was found in his automobile during his apprehension.
The journalist was charged with “making firearms,” which is punishable by up to six years in prison.
Ladin said that a televised interview broadcast on March 18, in which Yesypenko “confessed” to spying for Ukraine, was staged. The lawyer quoted his client as saying he was given a written text to read aloud and then answered questions that people in charge of his detainment asked.
According to Ladin, Yesypenko also said at the trial that he has serious problems with his kidneys and needs medicine for the ailment.
RFE/RL President Fly has questioned the circumstances under which Yesypenko made his confession, saying it appeared “to be forced and made without access to legal counsel.”
“The Russian authorities have similarly smeared RFE/RL Ukrainian Service contributors with false charges in the past. Vladyslav is a freelance contributor with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service, not a spy, and he should be released,” he said.
Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service has described the arrest as “a convenient attempt to distract the attention of the population away from the numerous internal problems of the peninsula” around the seventh anniversary of its forcible annexation, which was marked on March 18.
The U.S. State Department has called Yesypenko’s arrest “another attempt to repress those who speak the truth about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.”
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries after Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted amid a wave of public protests.
Rights groups say that since then, Russia has moved aggressively to prosecute Ukrainian activists and anyone who questions the annexation.
Moscow also backs separatists in a war against Ukrainian government forces that has killed more than 13,000 people in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.
HOMEL, Belarus — Four associates of Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya have pleaded not guilty to charges of organizing protests against authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka as their trial started on April 12 in the southeastern city of Homel.
Tatsyana Kaneuskaya, Yury Ulasau, Dzmitry Ivashkou, and Alyaksandr Shabalin were members of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign team and arrested just days before an August 9, 2020, presidential election for organizing gatherings and demonstrations demanding independent candidates be registered for the vote.
The four were also charged with the seizure of a building, while Ulasau was additionally charged with publicly insulting an official.
RFE/RL correspondents reported that dozens of people came to support the four activists at the courthouse on April 12, but only one person for each defendant’s family was allowed to enter the building due to what officials called “coronavirus precautions.”
Journalists were also not allowed into the courtroom.
Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.
Those relatives who were allowed to enter the building were forced to leave their telephones at a security desk before entering the courtroom.
Kaneuskaya’s son, Alyaksey Kaneuski, who was allowed to be present at the trial, told journalists later in the day that all four defendants pleaded not guilty.
Tens of thousands of Belarusians have taken to the streets, almost weekly, since the election when Lukashenka claimed reelection in a vote that Tsikhanouskaya and her supporters called fraudulent.
The demonstrators are demanding that Lukashenka leave and new elections be held, but Belarus’s strongman has been defiant. Security officials have arrested thousands and forced Tsikhanouskaya and other top opposition figures out of the country.
Several protesters have been killed in the violence and some rights organizations say there is credible evidence of torture being used against some of those detained.
Tsikhanouskaya left Belarus for Lithuania after the election for security reasons and has been rallying international support for the pro-democracy movement.
More than 30,000 people have been detained in the protests, with hundreds beaten, several killed, and reports from rights groups that there is credible evidence of torture being used by security officials.
In response to the ongoing crackdown, the West has slapped sanctions on top officials and refused to recognize Lukashenka as the legitimate leader of the former Soviet republic.
MINSK — Belarusian authorities have stopped the European news network Euronews from broadcasting inside the country amid a campaign to muzzle independent media and journalists as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent following a disputed presidential election that returned strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka to power.
The Information Ministry said in a statement on April 12 that the right given to Euronews, a 24-hour television channel covering world news in 12 language editions, including Russian, to distribute its programs in Belarus had expired.
It added that Russia’s Pobeda (Victory) channel focusing on World War II had commenced broadcasting in Euronews’s place. In recent years, Russia has been promoting the victory of the Soviet Union and allies over Nazi Germany in 1945 in its state propaganda against the West.
A ministry spokeswoman was quoted by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti as saying that Euronews’s license had not been renewed because the channel violated legislation by running advertisements in English, instead of Russian or Belarusian.
Euronews, which is headquartered in the French city of Lyon, did not immediately comment on the move.
Tens of thousands of Belarusians have taken the streets, almost weekly, since August 2020 when Lukashenka claimed reelection in a vote that opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya and her supporters called fraudulent.
The demonstrators are demanding that Lukashenka leave and new elections be held, but Belarus’s strongman has been defiant. Security officials have arrested thousands and forced Tsikhanouskaya and other top opposition figures out of the country.
Several protesters have been killed in the violence and some rights organizations say there is credible evidence of torture being used against some of those detained.
Meanwhile, Barys Haretski, deputy chairman of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, says the government has embarked on the largest crackdown on journalists and rights activists Europe has ever seen.
“Since last summer, the authorities have systematically created, let us say, ‘a Great Wall of China’ around Belarusian society. They have repressed journalists and shut down media outlets,” Haretski said.
Lukashenka, who has run Belarus since 1994, and other top officials have been slapped with sanctions by the West, which refuses to recognize him as the legitimate leader of the country.
Minsk-based media expert Paulyuk Bykouski said the move to ban Euronews cuts off a main point of access to fair and unfiltered news for Belarusians, who “do not have access to such information projects as CNN, Fox News, and any other channels that could be a possible alternative to what is being broadcast by Belarusian state media and Russian television channels.”
A 58-year-old ethnic Kazakh man has emerged from a 17-year nightmare of Chinese imprisonment and “reeducation” to be reunited with his family in Kazakhstan.
Raqyzhan Zeinolla was welcomed at Almaty’s international airport on April 9 by family members, including his wife and grandchildren he’d never met.
It was a precious moment of happiness for one of the many families caught up in Beijing’s massive campaign of internment and forced assimilation targeting more than a million Muslims in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Province.
As a reminder of the ongoing repression, a group of fellow Xinjiang natives stood alongside Zeinolla’s family at the airport, holding up photos of their relatives jailed or trapped in China. They see Zeinolla’s case as a glimmer of hope.
Caught Up In A Crackdown
Zeinolla, a naturalized Kazakh citizen, traveled from Almaty to Xinjiang in 2004 for what was supposed to be a brief visit to see relatives and friends. The trip soon turned into a yearslong ordeal for him and his family.
“Chinese authorities accused him of being a spy and sentenced him to 13 years in prison,” his wife, Farida Qabylbek, told RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service.
Farida Qabylbek (right) fought to get her husband back for years.
She said her husband was an ordinary merchant who had never worked at any government agency nor been interested in political activism. She said the spying charge against Zeinolla stemmed from the fact that he helped to prepare documents for a group of around 20 young people in Xinjiang who were hoping to study abroad in Kazakhstan.
He spent the full 13 years in prison, then upon his release from prison in 2018 was sent for another year and a half to a “political reeducation camp” as Beijing was increasingly cracking down on the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority. After that, he spent most of his time under house arrest before returning to Kazakhstan this month.
Wife’s Campaign
Back in Almaty, Qabylbek had spent the years since his prison release pleading with Kazakh officials for help to secure her husband’s release and return. The authorities said formal requests were sent to the Chinese authorities but there was never a positive response.
In 2020, increasingly desperate, Qabylbek began regular protests in front of the Chinese Consulate in Almaty and the embassy in Nur-Sultan, demanding the repatriation of her husband. Qabylbek staged several solo pickets. She also joined protests by other natives of Xinjiang who say their relatives are being kept in Chinese detention centers.
Amid the brutal crackdown on its Muslim population since 2017, China has built hundreds of detention facilities in Xinjiang. They are said to range from reeducation camps to high-security prisons. Rights activists say at least 1 million Muslims, most of them ethnic Uyghurs, have been placed in internment camps, where detainees are subjected to torture, rape, and forced labor, according to survivors. Some women have reported being forcibly sterilized.
Locked Up In China: The Plight Of Xinjiang’s Muslims
Radio Free Radio/Radio Liberty is partnering with its sister organization, Radio Free Asia, to highlight the plight of Muslims living in China’s western province of Xinjiang.
China’s actions in Xinjiang are thought to represent the largest internment of any religious or ethnic minority in the world since the Nazi targeting of Jewish and Romany populations during World War II. The United States has labeled it a “genocide.” Beijing rejects that and other accusations of systematic rights abuses in Xinjiang and says the camps are vocational training centers aimed at preventing religious extremism.
But even those Muslims who are free in Xinjiang have seen their rights and liberties severely curtailed. Many mosques have been razed, and community leaders arrested. The government has embedded more than 1 million civil servants from the country’s majority Han Chinese population to live with Muslim families in Xinjiang as part of the assimilation effort.
Silence In Nur-Sultan
Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s most ethnically diverse post-Soviet republic, offers citizenship for ethnic Kazakhs who return to their ancestral home.
Zeinolla, his wife, and their two children were among thousands of ethnic Kazakhs who relocated from China to Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They settled in Almaty in 2000. The family was granted Kazakh citizenship in 2003, shortly before Zeinolla’s fateful decision to visit Xinjiang.
Zeinolla’s eldest child was 14 and his youngest just 5 years old when he last saw them. Both have since finished school, married, and had children of their own. Zeinolla met his daughter-in-law, son-in-law, and grandchildren for the first time at the Almaty airport after his flight this month from Chengdu.
After the emotional reunion, Zeinolla greeted other ethnic Kazakhs from Xinjiang who had come to the airport to support the family. He suggested that their relatives “will be released soon” too but declined to explain.
“I’m happy to have returned to my homeland,” he said. “Long live friendship between the two countries.” Asked if he had been warned by Chinese officials against speaking to reporters, Zeinolla responded, “No.”
Qabylbek said her protests are over now. But other Kazakh families continue to campaign for their own missing loved ones.
Zeinolla’s return provides new hope for them, according to Bekzat Maqsutkhan, the head of Real Atazhurt, a volunteer group that collects information on the Xinjiang internment camps and alleged rights abuses through testimony from survivors and other sources.
Other Kazakhs hold photos of their relatives trapped in China’s Xinjiang region.
“We believe that Zeinolla was released because of the pressure on China by the international human rights groups and other institutions,” Maqsutkhan said. “It proves that sanctions against China indeed give results,” he added.
Last month, the United States, Britain, Canada, and the European Union imposed sanctions on several Chinese officials over the reported rights abuses in Xinjiang. The coordinated move followed Washington’s declaration in January that China had committed genocide in its repression of the Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities.
But the Kazakh government has refrained from criticizing China, a key investor in Kazakhstan’s economy. The Kazakh authorities have said that they don’t interfere in China’s treatment of its own citizens, including more than 1.5 million ethnic Kazakhs living in Xinjiang.
Written by Farangis Najibullah with reports by RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service
DUSHANBE — A man suspected of theft has died after officials say he “jumped” out of a police building in Tajikistan.
The Interior Ministry said on April 10 that the incident took place in the city of Vahdat, about 19 kilometers from the capital, Dushanbe.
According to the ministry, 31-year-old Mehriddin Gadozoda “jumped out of the window on the third floor with the intention of avoiding criminal charges” and died hours later in the hospital.
The ministry said that Gadozoda was detained and had been brought to police after investigators found him in possession items that had been reported stolen in 12 robbery cases.
Vahdat
Gadozoda’s relatives have yet to comment, and it was not immediately possible to verify the police account through independent sources. The case is one of several in Tajikistan where suspects have died while in police custody. In most of the cases, the relatives of the deceased have alleged foul play, saying their loved ones were beaten or tortured to death.
Domestic and international human rights groups have criticized Tajik authorities for beating and torturing suspects and prison inmates for years.
Tajik authorities have acknowledged that brutality involving police or prison guards occurs, but insist that such cases are not common.
In March 2018, authorities in the southern city of Kulob said a suspect, Abdurasul Nazarov, died of a heart attack while in police custody, while his relatives said his body showed signs of beating and torture.
In 2015, Shamsiddin Zaidulloev, detained on suspicion of illegal drugs-related crime in Dushanbe, died while in custody. Officials said at the time that the death was caused by a heart attack. That explanation was rejected by the man’s relatives, who insisted that Zaidulloev died after he was severely beaten by police.
Also in 2015, police in Vahdat said that Umar Bobojonov had died in police custody after he fell inside a concrete well while drunk. Bobojonov’s relatives said at the time that he had been beaten to death by police after he was detained for wearing a beard amid a government crackdown on radical Muslims.
In 2011, the Interior Ministry said that another theft suspect, Bahromiddin Shodiev, died in the hospital after he jumped out of a window on the second floor of a police station in Dushanbe. The man’s relatives have insisted that he was severely beaten and tortured by police.
In March 2011, 37-year-old Dushanbe resident Safarali Sangov died several days after he was beaten and taken from his house by plainclothes officers. Police said then that Sangov, suspected of drugs possession, tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a first-floor window during his interrogation, while the man’s relatives said he was tortured by police.
YEREVAN — When Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian signed a Russian-brokered cease-fire in November to end the war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, it created a tumultuous postwar crisis that has eroded public confidence in Yerevan’s political establishment.
Opinion polls show the approval rating of Pashinian’s government has fallen from about 60 percent in September 2020 to around 30 percent today.
Pashinian’s allies — faced with political upheaval and declining public confidence in politicians — are now working to change the country’s election laws ahead of snap parliamentary elections expected in June.
The 45-year-old Pashinian’s My Step alliance is revamping parts of the Electoral Code that were put in place in 2016 by his predecessors, the Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), two years before the “Velvet Revolution” swept him into office.
My Step gained power with 70 percent of the vote in 2018 snap elections after Pashinian led mass protests against the HHK-led government. It was enough for My Step to take a commanding 88 of the 132 seats in Armenia’s single-chamber parliament.
By comparison, the discredited pro-Russian HHK of former President Serzh Sarkisian failed to clear the minimum 5 percent threshold needed to win parliamentary seats. That left the Republicans sidelined along with more than a dozen other small parties that remain outside of parliament.
Postwar Crisis
Five lawmakers have quit My Step’s parliamentary faction since the end of the war to become nonaligned deputies — leaving My Step with 83 parliament seats.
Strikingly, the two opposition parties in parliament have not benefited from My Step’s evaporating support. Research by the International Republican Institute reveals a simultaneous decline in public support for the opposition Prosperous Armenia and a rival opposition faction, Bright Armenia.
Prosperous Armenia leader Gagik Tsarukian gives a speech in parliament in Yerevan.
Led by powerful businessman Gagik Tsarukian, Prosperous Armenia had been a member of the Republican Party’s governing coalition from 2008 to 2012 — calling itself a “nongoverning party” after that until 2015, when it formally declared itself in opposition to the Republicans.
Controversial former President Robert Kocharian has also been an influential figure in Prosperous Armenia, which has 24 deputies in the current parliament.
Bright Armenia is led by Edmon Marukian, a Western-educated former ally of Pashinian who is seen to have pro-European leanings. Bright Armenia has 17 deputies in the current parliament.
Bright Armenia leader Edmon Marukian (file photo)
Rounding out parliament are eight nonaligned lawmakers, including two who vote with the My Step faction on many issues.
Outside of parliament, 17 anti-Pashinian groups with differing political orientations formed a postwar tactical coalition called the Homeland Salvation Movement (HPS).
The HPS is not a separate political entity. But it organized demonstrations that brought thousands of protesters to the streets throughout the winter to demand Pashinian’s resignation over his handling of the Nagorno-Karabakh war, which led to Armenian forces losing control of large swaths of territory.
Pashinian responded to the criticism by blaming his predecessors for the country’s war losses — including members of the HPS — saying they had neglected Armenian’s military forces for more than a decade.
Amid the mudslinging and declining public confidence in all political factions, Pashinian announced on March 18 that he will soon resign so the next general elections, originally scheduled for December 2023, can be moved forward to June 20.
Larisa Minasian, executive director of Open Society Fund-Armenia, says Armenia’s political crisis has morphed into “a deep societal crisis — meaning a substantial loss of trust in the government” and “frustration with the opposition, which obviously…feeds off the tragedy” of Armenia’s battlefield losses.
Larisa Minasian
“Recent polls show that the frustration is quite widely shared amongst the Armenian population,” Minasian says. “An average of 42 percent and, in Yerevan, as much as 50 percent — half of the population — are really deeply frustrated with [all] sides.”
“After a long back and forth to maneuver through the crisis, finally the government decided to go with snap elections…as the means to get out of this crisis,” Minasian says.
Election Law Changes
Political analyst Stepan Grigorian says holding a new election without changing the Electoral Code created in 2016 by the then-ruling HHK will not resolve the deepening crisis. “If we do not change the electoral code we will have the same parliament. We will have a newly elected parliament and we will have, again, the current government in place,” says Grigorian, who heads the Yerevan-based Analytical Center on Globalization and Regional Cooperation.
“We will be hearing this mutual accusation process again, where one side says, ‘You’re a traitor,’ and the other one says, ‘No, you’re the traitor.’”
“That’s why a transition to a ‘multipartisan’ system is what we need” to replace a parliament long characterized by the dominance of one party and a divided opposition, he says.
Stepan Grigorian
Grigorian says numerous smaller parties left out of parliament need to be brought into the political process so that views emerging across Armenia since the end of the war are also represented in the legislature. “Our purpose is to get a discussion started so the parliament becomes multipartisan,” he concludes.
In fact, the My Step alliance has been using its continued control of parliament to push through election law changes that had been among the promises made during the Velvet Revolution. A key amendment passed on April 1 eliminated so-called “district list” voting for individual candidates. That change to the technical rules of voting transforms Armenia’s electoral system into one of fully proportional representation.
Bright Armenia, the party that first warned about faults within the district-list system, is now criticizing its elimination — saying the move will leave regions outside of Yerevan underrepresented in the next parliament. None of Bright Armenia’s deputies participated in the April 1 vote.
The opposition Prosperous Armenia faction boycotted the parliamentary session at which the change was approved.
Lilit Makunts, leader of the pro-Pashinian majority in parliament, says other amendments still could be introduced to the Electoral Code ahead of the June vote. On April 5, Makunts said those changes could include lowering the threshold needed by political parties to win seats — a move that gives smaller parties a better chance to enter parliament.
She said any additional changes would have the backing of the Venice Commission, an influential advisory body to the Council of Europe on constitutional law. Makunts also said Armenia’s Central Election Commission must deem any changes as feasible within the time remaining before the vote and consult other political parties.
Can Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian hold on to power?
The proposed amendments have already been submitted to the Venice Commission for review. They include lowering the threshold for a party to enter parliament from 5 percent to 4 percent of the vote. Another proposed change would raise the threshold for political alliances to 8 percent for two-party alliances, 9 percent for three-party alliances, and 10 percent for alliances with more than three parties.
Political analysts say such reforms could restore public confidence in democracy by encouraging and fostering a multiparty system that represents a wider range of voter views. They say the logic is to ensure political parties are encouraged to participate independently and to reveal their ideologies so that voters understand the party platforms.
With more parties entering parliament, analysts say governing coalitions can be formed to better represent the will of the people when a single party doesn’t control a majority.
Leveling The Playing Field
The Electoral Code pushed through parliament ahead of the 2017 parliamentary elections was widely seen as giving unfair advantages to the ruling HHK. That party was described by The Economist magazine in 2007 as a “typical post-Soviet ‘party of power’ mainly comprising senior government officials, civil servants, and wealthy business people dependent on government connections.”
Vardine Grigorian is the coordinator of Democratic Institutions Monitoring at the Vanadzor branch of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly-Armenian Committee. Her NGO has taken part in proposing and drafting changes to the 2016 election laws in an attempt to level the playing field for smaller political parties.
Grigorian explains that the HHK had seen a way in 2016 to gain an advantage by changing technical details of what was then a mixed electoral system — a blend of proportional representation and races between individual candidates.
Vardine Grigorian
For proportional voting, each party presents its party list of potential lawmakers. Voters cast a ballot for the party of their choice and parliamentary seats are distributed according to the percentage of votes received by each party — provided a party crosses the minimum threshold needed to enter parliament.
In past elections, voters in about half of Armenia’s precincts would cast ballots in races between individual candidates. “Before the 2017 parliamentary elections, if two majoritarian candidates were competing against each other the winner would take all. But these votes did not transfer to party votes,” Vardine Grigorian notes.
“The Republican Party realized this mixed system was not conducive to getting as many votes as they needed,” she says. “So they introduced something called ‘district lists,’ which allowed any candidate running from a party to bring their votes directly to the political party.”
“This allowed the Republican Party to get more than 100,000 additional votes in the 2017 parliamentary elections, even though their approval ratings were a lot lower than the years before,” she says.
“The district lists were good for the protection of the ruling [HHK] regime because it allowed them to be able to recruit all the influential business and administrative people in the regions that would be able to bring in as many votes as possible,” she says. “We saw while looking at the electoral process how violations evolved and became so sophisticated. Before, election fraud had been actual falsification of results, forging protocols, and things like that.”
“Then, the violations moved out of the polling stations. It became issues of vote buying, abuse of administrative resources, and forcing people to participate in meetings and to vote in a certain way by threatening them with losing their job,” she says.
It’s hoped that electoral reforms would bring a more honest level of political discourse to parliament.
Political analyst Stepan Grigorian agrees. He notes that district lists are a Western norm that works well in established and affluent democracies. “But Armenia is a poor country. In our situation, the district-list system meant a bigger influence for those with money and administrative resources,” he tells RFE/RL. “Removing the district lists was necessary to diminish the serious influence that our oligarchs had on the outcome of elections through their resources and money, and through corruption.”
Armenia’s district lists also discouraged the development of smaller political parties because of a requirement that all political parties have at least five candidates in all 13 regions of Armenia — with each paying a high deposit cost.
“All the conditions were there for less political participation, for fewer parties to participate, and for more parities to go into alliances and form alliances before they entered into parliament,” Vardine Grigorian says.
“These alliances were not really sustainable. Most of them would fall apart with the next disagreement that appeared in parliament,” she says. “Alliances would be a onetime opportunity to be able to pass that minimum threshold. But then the parliament wouldn’t reflect the will of the people and what they voted for.”
“Meanwhile, the focus was so much on those races with individual candidates that the competition in the election campaign became very apolitical,” she says. “They were not focused on the party platforms or contributing to the development of the party system — which is so needed for trying to establish and work out this parliamentary system in Armenia.”
“That’s why we’ve been trying to develop on this process since 2016,” she says.
Written and reported from Prague by Ron Synovitz with additional reporting by Suren Musayelian in Yerevan
Since 2016, when Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov, died, the authorities have been working to change the image the country inherited from Karimov as a chronic rights abuser.
There have been some signs of progress but starting in late February, things began to fall apart.
A group trying to register as an opposition party was harassed and some of its members attacked; activists trying to form the country’s first independent labor union came under pressure; calls for changing laws against the LGBT community were flatly rejected and met with violence; and a new law was introduced making it a crime for bloggers and others to insult the honor of President Shavkat Mirziyoev on the Internet, less than half a year before he is due to run for reelection.
On this week’s Majlis Podcast, RFE/RL media-relations manager Muhammad Tahir moderates a discussion on the regression in Uzbekistan’s declared domestic reforms.
This week’s guests are: from Uzbekistan, Dilfuza Kurolova, human rights lawyer and founding curator of Global Shapers’ Tashkent Hub; also from Uzbekistan, Dilmira Matyakubowa, co-director of Uzinvestigations and a fellow at the London-based Foreign Policy Center; veteran Central Asia watcher Steve Swerdlow, who is a rights lawyer and currently associate professor of the practice of human rights at the University of Southern California; and Bruce Pannier, the author of the Qishloq Ovozi blog.
Britain and the United States “firmly oppose Russia’s campaign to destabilize Ukraine” and call on Russia to de-escalate the situation, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken “& I agreed Russia must immediately de-escalate the situation & live up to the international commitments that it signed up to at @OSCE,” the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Raab said on Twitter.
Major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Russian-occupied Crimea have been captured in photographs, video, and other data, fueling concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are a sovereign, internal issue.
The statement by Raab comes a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy briefed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the situation.
After their talks in Istanbul, Erdogan called recent developments “worrying” and said he hoped the conflict would be resolved peacefully through dialogue and in line with Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
“We believe that the current crisis can be solved with peaceful and diplomatic means on the basis of the integrity of Ukraine and international law,” Erdogan said.
During their meeting, the presidents also discussed expanding defense cooperation between their countries. Zelenskiy said the stepped-up cooperation would apply especially to weaponry and the construction of fighter jets.
Zelenskiy, who visited Ukrainians troops in the Donbas region on April 8, said Kyiv and Ankara shared the same view on threats in the Black Sea region and the response to those threats.
Washington has called Moscow’s military buildup “destabilizing,” and the White House has expressed concern about the recent troop movements.
U.S. Secretary of State Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers on April 9 about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup on the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries.
Since then, overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has continued to lend diplomatic and military aid to armed separatists fighting in the Donbas region.
The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since April 2014.
An electrical problem has been reported at Iran’s Natanz nuclear site, a day after Tehran launched new advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium more quickly.
It was the latest incident to strike one of Tehran’s most secure sites amid negotiations over the tattered atomic accord with world powers.
“The incident caused no casualties or pollution,” Iranian Atomic Energy Organization spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said, adding that “electricity was affected at the Natanz facility.”
Last year, a fire broke out at the Natanz nuclear facility that the government said was an attempt to sabotage its nuclear program.
The underground Natanz site is key to Iran’s uranium enrichment program and monitored by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog.
Israel, Iran’s regional archenemy, is suspected of carrying out an attack there, as well as launching other assaults.
Iran also blamed Israel for the killing of a scientist who began the country’s military nuclear program decades earlier. Israel has not claimed any of the attacks, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described Iran as the major threat faced by his country in recent weeks.
The incident at Natanz comes amid efforts to revive the international 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers that former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from three years ago. Trump reimposed sanctions that were lifted on the Islamic republic, and brought in many more.
In reaction, Iran breached many restrictions imposed by the accord. Tehran has abandoned all the limits of its uranium stockpile. It now enriches up to 20 percent purity, a technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
Earlier this week, talks began in Vienna aimed at bringing the United States and Iran back into full compliance with the deal.
On April 10, Iran announced it had launched a chain of 164 IR-6 centrifuges at Natanz, injecting them with the uranium gas and beginning their rapid spinning.
Officials also began testing the IR-9 centrifuge, which they say will enrich uranium 50 times faster than Iran’s first-generation centrifuges, the IR-1. The nuclear deal limited Iran to using only IR-1s for enrichment.
Iran maintains its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes, but fears about Tehran having the ability to make a bomb saw world powers reach the deal with the Islamic republic in 2015.
The deal lifted economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for it limiting its program and allowing inspectors from the IAEA to keep a close watch on its work.
An electrical problem has been reported at Iran’s Natanz nuclear site, a day after Tehran launched new advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium more quickly.
It was the latest incident to strike one of Tehran’s most secure sites amid negotiations over the tattered atomic accord with world powers.
“The incident caused no casualties or pollution,” Iranian Atomic Energy Organization spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said, adding that “electricity was affected at the Natanz facility.”
Last year, a fire broke out at the Natanz nuclear facility that the government said was an attempt to sabotage its nuclear program.
The underground Natanz site is key to Iran’s uranium enrichment program and monitored by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog.
Israel, Iran’s regional archenemy, is suspected of carrying out an attack there, as well as launching other assaults.
Iran also blamed Israel for the killing of a scientist who began the country’s military nuclear program decades earlier. Israel has not claimed any of the attacks, though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described Iran as the major threat faced by his country in recent weeks.
The incident at Natanz comes amid efforts to revive the international 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers that former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from three years ago. Trump reimposed sanctions that were lifted on the Islamic republic, and brought in many more.
In reaction, Iran breached many restrictions imposed by the accord. Tehran has abandoned all the limits of its uranium stockpile. It now enriches up to 20 percent purity, a technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
Earlier this week, talks began in Vienna aimed at bringing the United States and Iran back into full compliance with the deal.
On April 10, Iran announced it had launched a chain of 164 IR-6 centrifuges at Natanz, injecting them with the uranium gas and beginning their rapid spinning.
Officials also began testing the IR-9 centrifuge, which they say will enrich uranium 50 times faster than Iran’s first-generation centrifuges, the IR-1. The nuclear deal limited Iran to using only IR-1s for enrichment.
Iran maintains its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes, but fears about Tehran having the ability to make a bomb saw world powers reach the deal with the Islamic republic in 2015.
The deal lifted economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for it limiting its program and allowing inspectors from the IAEA to keep a close watch on its work.
Several thousand people protested in Belgrade on April 10th in front of the Serbian Parliament to demand a more vigorous government response to environmental damage caused by industries and pollution due to aging power plants and water systems.
The protest was organized by more than 60 environmental organizations and movements, RFE/RL’s Balkan Service reported. Ahead of the protest, the organizations signed a proclamation addressed to the authorities with 13 demands.
Among them are the preservation of rivers and the suspension of small hydroelectric power plant projects. The organizations are also demanding that the government find solutions to the problem of air pollution and measures to protect forests and green areas.
Speakers at the event, which organizers called an “eco uprising,” said Serbia needs development, but not the kind that causes pollution and leads to deforestation.
“This is our country!” said Aleksandar Jovanovic, one of the protest leaders. “You are all welcome — the Russians and Chinese, Americans. But under one condition: there must be no poisoning of our children.”
The protest also opposed new mining projects, including a plan to mine lithium in western Serbia, which environmentalists fear will destroy natural habitats.
After the speeches, protesters marched through central Belgrade. People from several towns in Serbia carried banners with messages such as, “Young people are leaving Serbia because they cannot breathe,” “Cut corruption and crime, not forests!,” and “Stop killing our rivers and nature.”
The protest, which took place despite restrictions to control the spread of the coronavirus, was also attended by green activists from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, who emphasized the importance of unity across the Balkans and called on people not to allow governments to divide them.
The pan-Balkan association of various environmental movements began four years ago, as part of the fight against the construction of small hydroelectric power plants in protected areas.
According to the Serbian Ministry of Environmental Protection, by the end of 2019 more than 100 small hydroelectric power plants had been built, including 18 in protected areas.
The problem of excessive air pollution in 14 cities and municipalities in Serbia has also been raised by the groups that protested in Belgrade.
In most of these cities the limits on values of suspended particles have been exceeded, according to the European Environmental Protection Agency’s 2019 report.
Much of the air pollution comes from outdated coal power plants, but activists also accused Serbian authorities of turning a blind eye to pollution generated by foreign-funded projects.
Organizers of the protest also expressed concerns about drinking water. The Institute for Public Health noted in 2019 that 50 water supply systems in urban areas have faulty drinking water.
Hours before the demonstration the Ministry of Environmental Protection insisted that the government has launched projects aimed at finding long-term solutions to pollution.
Environment Minister Irena Vujovic described the protest as political, saying organizers wanted to make “quick political gains” rather than work to solve problems.
With reporting by Gordana Cosic of RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, Reuters, AP, and dpa
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan called for an end to what he described as “worrying” developments in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on April 10.
The meeting, which lasted more than three hours in Istanbul, was part of a previously scheduled visit but coincided with increased tensions between Kyiv and Moscow over the long-running conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Erdogan expressed his concern about the current fraught situation at a news conference alongside Zelenskiy, adding that he hoped the conflict would be resolved peacefully through dialogue and in line with Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv and Ankara share the same view on threats in the Black Sea region and the response to those threats.
Zelenskiy, who visited troops in the Donbas region two days ago, said he had briefed Erdogan on the situation in detail.
Major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula have been captured in photographs, video, and other data, fueling concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are an internal sovereign issue.
Washington has called Moscow’s military buildup “destabilizing,” and the White House has expressed concern about the recent troop movements.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers on April 9 about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, sending in troops and staging a referendum denounced as illegitimate by at least 100 countries.
Since then, overwhelming evidence suggests Russia has continued to lend diplomatic and military aid to armed separatists fighting in the Donbas region.
The conflict has killed more than 13,000 people and displaced more than 1 million since April 2014.
Several thousand people blocked traffic in front of the Serbian parliament on April 10 in a protest against the lack of government action to prevent pollution by heavy industry. Serbia is ranked among Europe’s most polluted countries and its reliance on coal for heating and electricity has had a devastating effect on its air quality. Protesters, who came to Belgrade from all over Serbia, held banners reading “Cut corruption and crime, not forests,” and “Young people are leaving because they cannot breathe.” The protest called “Eco Uprising” was also attended by green activists from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro who emphasized the importance of unity across the Balkans.
Members of the German Bundestag have described the treatment of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny as “targeted torture” and demanded the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture review the conditions of his detention.
The letter, posted on Facebook on April 10, called Navalny’s treatment “incompatible” with the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, saying Russia is a party to the convention as a member of the Council of Europe.
The letter is signed by Manuel Sarrazin, with Germany’s Green Party, and a bipartisan group of 11 other members of the Bundestag, the lower house in Germany’s parliament. It was made available on Sarrazin’s Facebook page in German and Russian.
“Notwithstanding the arbitrariness and illegality of the judgments pronounced against you, we demand a review of your conditions of detention by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture,” the politicians said.
The lawmakers said they believe the legal process against him was not carried out under the standards of rule of law and consider the judgment politically motivated and arbitrary with the goal of silencing him.
They said they were following reports about his imprisonment and health condition with great concern and expressed their “full solidarity” with him.
Navalny was imprisoned after returning to Russia in January from his recuperation in Germany after his exposure to a nerve agent last August in Siberia. He has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering security agents to assassinate him, something the Kremlin denies.
Navalny was treated in Germany after the poisoning, and Sarrazin said that he had the impression that Navalny’s treatment was meant to reverse his partial recovery.
Navalny has complained of back pain and numbness in his hands and legs and accused the authorities of withholding adequate medical treatment.
Navalny declared a hunger strike last week, raising even more concerns about his overall health.
Attorneys for Navalny, 44, said after visiting him on April 8 that he was suffering from two herniated disks in his back and a third bulging disk, and said he is losing about 1 kilogram a day.
Iranian President Hassan Rohani oversaw the launch of a production line of advanced centrifuges on April 10 in an apparent new violation of the 2015 nuclear deal after talks began earlier this week in Vienna aimed at bringing the United States and Iran back into full compliance with the accord.
Rohani was seen in a live state TV broadcast at the Natanz nuclear plant ordering the injection of uranium gas into the centrifuges and mechanical tests on its newest advanced nuclear centrifuge.
The ceremony marked National Nuclear Technology Day and unveiled 133 advances over the past year in the country’s nuclear industry mostly in the fields of medicine, power, agricultural, and energy, state television said.
“Once again, I stress that all our nuclear activities are peaceful and for non-military purposes,” Rohani said. “We continue to be committed to our pledge to NPT (nonproliferation treaty) and to the world not to deviate militarily from our nuclear program,” he added.
Although Tehran says it nuclear program is for civilian purposes, there have long been concerns in the international community that the country is inching ever closer to producing enough fissile material for an atomic bomb.
The April 10 broadcast showed no images of the injection of uranium hexafluoride gas but showed a link with engineers at the plant who said they had started the process.
The centrifuges that were started up on April 10 allow uranium to be enriched more quickly and in greater amounts than Iran’s first-generation centrifuges, which are the only ones that the 2015 deal allows it to use.
Iran has breached many restrictions imposed by the deal since former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it in 2018.
‘Good Start’ To Vienna Talks
The talks in Vienna are aimed at restoring restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of U.S. and other international sanctions.
All sides said the talks, in which Washington is not participating directly but has the European Union as an intermediary, had got off to a good start.
Two working groups have been formed to hammer out a compromise, which if reached could still be weeks away. One expert group is focused on how to lift U.S. sanctions to bring Washington back into compliance with the accord. Another group is tasked with detailing a path for Iran to comply with restrictions on its nuclear program, including limits on uranium enrichment and centrifuges.
An EU statement after the last session on April 9 said the so-called Joint Commission on JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) had been “briefed on the work of the two expert groups on sanctions lifting and nuclear implementation measures and participants noted the constructive and results oriented exchanges.”
It said “the participants emphasized their resolve to further pursue the ongoing joint diplomatic effort” and that a coordinator under EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell “will continue his separate contacts with all JCPOA participants and the United States.”
In addition to reimposing nuclear-related sanctions, the Trump administration slapped a web of sanctions on Tehran over a range of issues such as terrorism, human rights, and ballistic missiles. They include sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a part of Iran’s armed forces that the Trump administration labeled a terrorist organization.
Briefing reporters after talks wrapped up on April 9, a senior State Department official said the initial talks were encouraging but that the United States would not meet Iranian demands to lift all sanctions.
“If Iran sticks to the position that every sanction that has been imposed since 2017 has to be lifted or there will be no deal, then we are heading towards an impasse,” the senior U.S. official told reporters on a conference call.
The official said the Trump administration’s sanction policy on Iran had a “purposeful and self-avowed intent to make it difficult for any future administration” to return to the nuclear deal.
VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.
Central Vorkuta as it looks today.
But close to a century after its founding, a city whose population approached 250,000 in the late 1980s now has fewer than 60,000 residents and is shrinking faster than any other in Russia. The communist slogans that adorn its buildings, promising a bright future, endure as symbols of the chasm between the utopian vision of the U.S.S.R. and its capacity to turn that vision into reality.
‘Widespread Abandonment’
“We all had an understanding in high school that we’d graduate and leave this place,” says Anastasia Sadvary, a 33-year-old legal consultant who was born in Rudnik and now divides her time between Vorkuta and Syktyvkar, the capital of the surrounding Komi Region, some 900 kilometers further south. “Now most of my friends have left, and I’m an exception to the rule.”
Anastasia Sadvary
At its peak, Vorkuta was the geographical hub of a sprawling network of 13 coal mines that encircled the city like the hour indicators of an enormous clock, spawning vibrant settlements complete with schools, kindergartens, stores, medical clinics and cultural centers.
Today, only four of the 13 coal mines remain, and many of the settlements have become ghost towns along the highway connecting their once-thriving communities with the city.
A cargo train transports coal from the Vorgashorskaya mine, one of just four remaining around Vorkuta.
In the untrammeled capitalism that replaced the planned Soviet economy, the coal business struggled, the rate of deadly accidents grew, and the mines closed one by one, leaving behind derelict villages whose inhabitants moved to Vorkuta or, if they could, to Russia’s warmer regions. The latest mine shuttered in 2016 after a methane gas leak triggered explosions that claimed 36 lives.
“What we see now, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, is the drawn-out death of Vorkuta,” said Alan Barenberg, a historian at Texas Tech University and author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor And Its Legacy In Vorkuta. “It’s no longer an ideological imperative to prove to the world that maintaining a coal-mining city of 250,000 people in the Arctic is a triumph of Soviet ingenuity — so you see the widespread abandonment of settlements and mines, with more surely to come.”
“More Coal For The Motherland!” is the communist-era slogan emblazoned atop the headquarters of the Vorkutaugol mining company in central Vorkuta.
Life in Vorkuta isn’t for the faint-hearted, with average temperatures of -5 degrees Celsius and winters that last up to 10 months. No roads connect the city to the rest of Russia, meaning it’s reachable year-round only via rail or, from April to October, by flights that are frequently delayed due to blizzards and strong winds.
Vorkuta now has the dubious honor of offering the cheapest housing of any Russian city, with three-room apartments frequently going for as little as $1,000. And the exorbitant cost of utilities like water and electricity means it’s sometimes more cost-effective to give your apartment away for free than wait months or years for a buyer.
The abandoned prisoner-built settlement of Rudnik is today only reachable from Vorkuta via a rickety wooden bridge that’s missing most of its wooden planks.
The situation is far worse in the coal-mining settlements around Vorkuta. Inside their deserted five-story housing blocks, apartment doors swivel on creaky hinges as if beckoning visitors to explore the possessions left strewn across the floor by owners who chose a swift departure over the protracted ordeal of gambling on the moribund housing market.
‘Every Man For Himself’
Outside the entrances to these apartment blocks, chalk lettering redolent of wartime signs by air-raid survivors denotes stairwells that still have at least one inhabitant, for whose benefit that entire stairwell’s central heating system is kept on.
According to official figures, there are 15,500 empty apartments in Vorkuta and surrounding settlements, a third of which are connected to the grid at an annual cost of 570 million rubles ($7.4 million) to the state budget.
Igor Krutko, one of the few remaining residents in the village of Komsomolsky.
“The Soviet Union valued such places,” says Igor Krutko, a 57-year-old living in Komsomolsky, a village 22 kilometers from Vorkuta that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has a mere 200, with a tiny grocery shop as their only means of sustenance in a place left for the elements to slowly devour. “Today we have Wild West capitalism — every man for himself.”
In 1993, during the traumatic years after the Soviet collapse when rampant wage arrears drove depopulation from remote areas like Vorkuta, President Boris Yeltsin signed legislation that guaranteed free resettlement for retired long-time residents of the Far North.
A street in Komsomolsky, a coal-mining village that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has just 200.
But the program has all but ground to a halt. Approximately 15,000 people in Vorkuta are eligible for resettlement, but only around 250 families across the whole of the vast Komi Region are moved each year.
“They’re holding us hostage,” says Vladimir Zharuk, a 60-year-old ex-miner with thick forearms and boundless energy who moved from his native Ukraine in the 1970s and now lives in Vorgashor village, beside a still-operative coal mine that was Europe’s largest when it opened in 1975.
Vladimir Zharuk at his apartment in Vorgashor village.
Zharuk, who collects a monthly pension of 25,000 rubles ($325), has been on the list for relocation since 1997, and says he is somewhere around spot 6,000 — which, by his calculations, means he’d need to wait another 120 years for his turn if the glacial pace of resettlement continues. Faced with the realistic prospect of never leaving Vorgashor, he devotes his energy to aiding other stranded retirees as part of a civic organization he calls Hostages of the Far North.
‘It Makes My Heart Bleed’
In the meantime, he has watched the village around him gradually turn to ruin, with the only community center closed two years ago despite protests from remaining residents. “Vorgashor will fight to the bitter end,” he says. “But it makes my heart bleed to see what’s taking place.”
To understand why Krutko and Zharuk decided to settle in Vorkuta in the first place, one must understand what the city once represented. After Stalin’s death, thousands of ex-prisoners of the crumbling Gulag system left, and amid a scramble to replace the workforce at the mines, authorities in Vorkuta lured recruits with salaries that were often five times the Soviet average, and generous bonuses that provided for free summer vacations in Crimea and a comfortable early retirement.
A playroom inside Vorgashor’s former House of Culture, which closed two years ago amid protests from locals.
Driven by an influx of workers attracted by these packages, Vorkuta soon became a showpiece Soviet city. It boasted grand neoclassical buildings whose foundations were sunk meters into the ground to prevent them from collapsing into the thawing permafrost, and panel housing blocks that sprang up like mushrooms, sometimes taking as few as 16 days to complete and displaying bold slogans like “More Coal For The Motherland!” and “Glory to the Conquerors of the Arctic!”
Possessions left strewn inside the living room of an abandoned apartment in Komsomolsky that is still connected to the central heating system.
For a tiny fraction of their monthly salary, miners like Zharuk and Krutko could purchase tickets on one of six daily flights to Moscow, spending two days at a time wandering the streets of the grand Soviet capital before making it back to Vorkuta for the Monday shift.
“Vorkuta was a unique city. So many interesting and intelligent people congregated here,” said Mikhail Tverskoi, an 88-year-old former mining engineer who at the age of 36 left a cramped communal apartment in St. Petersburg and accepted an offer to work in Vorkuta — with the three-bedroom apartment and all the privileges that came with the position.
Watching a technical rehearsal in the main auditorium of the Miners’ Palace of Culture in Vorkuta.
More than half a century later, it’s not all doom and gloom. Vorkuta may be a shadow of its former self, but it retains a combative, feisty energy and a city center that even during the polar darkness in December is filled with young mothers pushing ski-equipped strollers that glide across the snow faster than the children trudging to and from school in hats and gloves.
A dance class inside the Miners’ Palace of Culture, which was built in 1961 to showcase Vorkuta’s growing status as a model Soviet city in the Arctic.
Inside the spectacular Miners’ Palace of Culture, built in 1961, ballet and dance classes take place each evening and volleyball matches are played in the top-floor sports hall.
A trickle of labor migrants from Central Asia in recent years has slightly offset the exodus from Vorkuta, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of former residents has returned after losing jobs in other cities.
‘No Coal, No City’
Russia has sought ways to develop the Arctic, a task that will become easier as global warming accelerates. But an estimated 1 million people have left its Arctic zone since the Soviet collapse, and depopulation is cited as a major obstacle to the plans. A land giveaway program launched in Russia’s Far East will be expanded to the Arctic this summer — but even in more fertile climes it has hardly proved a hit.
“I’m absolutely convinced this city will survive. It will shrink further, but it will survive,” said Tverskoi. He hopes Vorkuta will escape the fate of other Soviet single-industry towns by tapping anew its abundant natural resources. But he warns: “If there’s no coal, there’s no city.”
On a recent visit to Rudnik, the abandoned prisoner-built settlement that gave rise to Vorkuta and is now only accessible via a rickety bridge missing most of its wooden planks, Sadvary, the legal consultant, pointed out the probable location of her childhood home — a wooden barracks that her family heated with coal brought home by her father from the mines.
Wooden crosses outside the city indicate the burial places of 42 prisoners killed during an uprising at a Vorkuta forced labor camp in 1953.
In 2006, she married a local man in a ceremony that culminated with raucous festivities at Vorkuta’s Ural Restaurant, once a popular venue for revelers.
Today, her childhood home is gone, and her wedding venue is a hollowed-out wreck.
Rudnik, the mining settlement that was established by Gulag prisoners in 1932 and gave rise to the city of Vorkuta, is now a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts.
“I look at all this and see our future,” she said, gazing at the six-story buildings that have become a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts. “This city only exists for the extraction of natural resources. Once they’re gone, the city will go. And they’ll have the perfect setting for movies about the zombie apocalypse.”
VORKUTA, Russia — In May 1931, a group of 39 prisoners toiling in the Soviet Union’s expanding network of forced labor camps set off north from the town of Ukhta to explore the vast coal basin in the Russian Arctic.
Joined by a team of geologists and camp guards, the men traveled for weeks through barely navigable waters and icy tundra into the frigid, inhospitable region that would test the limits of the lauded Soviet conquest of the Far North.
They were soon joined by more prisoners, hundreds of whom died from sickness, hypothermia, and starvation. But by the spring of 1932, they founded Rudnik, a small coal-mining settlement 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle that would soon grow into the city of Vorkuta.
It had been a barren, forbidding terrain known only to indigenous Nenets reindeer herders; within a decade, it hosted one of the deadliest Gulag camps in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death in 1953, a burgeoning metropolis that would be upheld as a symbol of Soviet power.
Central Vorkuta as it looks today.
But close to a century after its founding, a city whose population approached 250,000 in the late 1980s now has fewer than 60,000 residents and is shrinking faster than any other in Russia. The communist slogans that adorn its buildings, promising a bright future, endure as symbols of the chasm between the utopian vision of the U.S.S.R. and its capacity to turn that vision into reality.
‘Widespread Abandonment’
“We all had an understanding in high school that we’d graduate and leave this place,” says Anastasia Sadvary, a 33-year-old legal consultant who was born in Rudnik and now divides her time between Vorkuta and Syktyvkar, the capital of the surrounding Komi Region, some 900 kilometers further south. “Now most of my friends have left, and I’m an exception to the rule.”
Anastasia Sadvary
At its peak, Vorkuta was the geographical hub of a sprawling network of 13 coal mines that encircled the city like the hour indicators of an enormous clock, spawning vibrant settlements complete with schools, kindergartens, stores, medical clinics and cultural centers.
Today, only four of the 13 coal mines remain, and many of the settlements have become ghost towns along the highway connecting their once-thriving communities with the city.
A cargo train transports coal from the Vorgashorskaya mine, one of just four remaining around Vorkuta.
In the untrammeled capitalism that replaced the planned Soviet economy, the coal business struggled, the rate of deadly accidents grew, and the mines closed one by one, leaving behind derelict villages whose inhabitants moved to Vorkuta or, if they could, to Russia’s warmer regions. The latest mine shuttered in 2016 after a methane gas leak triggered explosions that claimed 36 lives.
“What we see now, 30 years after the Soviet collapse, is the drawn-out death of Vorkuta,” said Alan Barenberg, a historian at Texas Tech University and author of Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor And Its Legacy In Vorkuta. “It’s no longer an ideological imperative to prove to the world that maintaining a coal-mining city of 250,000 people in the Arctic is a triumph of Soviet ingenuity — so you see the widespread abandonment of settlements and mines, with more surely to come.”
“More Coal For The Motherland!” is the communist-era slogan emblazoned atop the headquarters of the Vorkutaugol mining company in central Vorkuta.
Life in Vorkuta isn’t for the faint-hearted, with average temperatures of -5 degrees Celsius and winters that last up to 10 months. No roads connect the city to the rest of Russia, meaning it’s reachable year-round only via rail or, from April to October, by flights that are frequently delayed due to blizzards and strong winds.
Vorkuta now has the dubious honor of offering the cheapest housing of any Russian city, with three-room apartments frequently going for as little as $1,000. And the exorbitant cost of utilities like water and electricity means it’s sometimes more cost-effective to give your apartment away for free than wait months or years for a buyer.
The abandoned prisoner-built settlement of Rudnik is today only reachable from Vorkuta via a rickety wooden bridge that’s missing most of its wooden planks.
The situation is far worse in the coal-mining settlements around Vorkuta. Inside their deserted five-story housing blocks, apartment doors swivel on creaky hinges as if beckoning visitors to explore the possessions left strewn across the floor by owners who chose a swift departure over the protracted ordeal of gambling on the moribund housing market.
‘Every Man For Himself’
Outside the entrances to these apartment blocks, chalk lettering redolent of wartime signs by air-raid survivors denotes stairwells that still have at least one inhabitant, for whose benefit that entire stairwell’s central heating system is kept on.
According to official figures, there are 15,500 empty apartments in Vorkuta and surrounding settlements, a third of which are connected to the grid at an annual cost of 570 million rubles ($7.4 million) to the state budget.
Igor Krutko, one of the few remaining residents in the village of Komsomolsky.
“The Soviet Union valued such places,” says Igor Krutko, a 57-year-old living in Komsomolsky, a village 22 kilometers from Vorkuta that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has a mere 200, with a tiny grocery shop as their only means of sustenance in a place left for the elements to slowly devour. “Today we have Wild West capitalism — every man for himself.”
In 1993, during the traumatic years after the Soviet collapse when rampant wage arrears drove depopulation from remote areas like Vorkuta, President Boris Yeltsin signed legislation that guaranteed free resettlement for retired long-time residents of the Far North.
A street in Komsomolsky, a coal-mining village that once had 20,000 inhabitants and now has just 200.
But the program has all but ground to a halt. Approximately 15,000 people in Vorkuta are eligible for resettlement, but only around 250 families across the whole of the vast Komi Region are moved each year.
“They’re holding us hostage,” says Vladimir Zharuk, a 60-year-old ex-miner with thick forearms and boundless energy who moved from his native Ukraine in the 1970s and now lives in Vorgashor village, beside a still-operative coal mine that was Europe’s largest when it opened in 1975.
Vladimir Zharuk at his apartment in Vorgashor village.
Zharuk, who collects a monthly pension of 25,000 rubles ($325), has been on the list for relocation since 1997, and says he is somewhere around spot 6,000 — which, by his calculations, means he’d need to wait another 120 years for his turn if the glacial pace of resettlement continues. Faced with the realistic prospect of never leaving Vorgashor, he devotes his energy to aiding other stranded retirees as part of a civic organization he calls Hostages of the Far North.
‘It Makes My Heart Bleed’
In the meantime, he has watched the village around him gradually turn to ruin, with the only community center closed two years ago despite protests from remaining residents. “Vorgashor will fight to the bitter end,” he says. “But it makes my heart bleed to see what’s taking place.”
To understand why Krutko and Zharuk decided to settle in Vorkuta in the first place, one must understand what the city once represented. After Stalin’s death, thousands of ex-prisoners of the crumbling Gulag system left, and amid a scramble to replace the workforce at the mines, authorities in Vorkuta lured recruits with salaries that were often five times the Soviet average, and generous bonuses that provided for free summer vacations in Crimea and a comfortable early retirement.
A playroom inside Vorgashor’s former House of Culture, which closed two years ago amid protests from locals.
Driven by an influx of workers attracted by these packages, Vorkuta soon became a showpiece Soviet city. It boasted grand neoclassical buildings whose foundations were sunk meters into the ground to prevent them from collapsing into the thawing permafrost, and panel housing blocks that sprang up like mushrooms, sometimes taking as few as 16 days to complete and displaying bold slogans like “More Coal For The Motherland!” and “Glory to the Conquerors of the Arctic!”
Possessions left strewn inside the living room of an abandoned apartment in Komsomolsky that is still connected to the central heating system.
For a tiny fraction of their monthly salary, miners like Zharuk and Krutko could purchase tickets on one of six daily flights to Moscow, spending two days at a time wandering the streets of the grand Soviet capital before making it back to Vorkuta for the Monday shift.
“Vorkuta was a unique city. So many interesting and intelligent people congregated here,” said Mikhail Tverskoi, an 88-year-old former mining engineer who at the age of 36 left a cramped communal apartment in St. Petersburg and accepted an offer to work in Vorkuta — with the three-bedroom apartment and all the privileges that came with the position.
Watching a technical rehearsal in the main auditorium of the Miners’ Palace of Culture in Vorkuta.
More than half a century later, it’s not all doom and gloom. Vorkuta may be a shadow of its former self, but it retains a combative, feisty energy and a city center that even during the polar darkness in December is filled with young mothers pushing ski-equipped strollers that glide across the snow faster than the children trudging to and from school in hats and gloves.
A dance class inside the Miners’ Palace of Culture, which was built in 1961 to showcase Vorkuta’s growing status as a model Soviet city in the Arctic.
Inside the spectacular Miners’ Palace of Culture, built in 1961, ballet and dance classes take place each evening and volleyball matches are played in the top-floor sports hall.
A trickle of labor migrants from Central Asia in recent years has slightly offset the exodus from Vorkuta, and amid the coronavirus pandemic, a small number of former residents has returned after losing jobs in other cities.
‘No Coal, No City’
Russia has sought ways to develop the Arctic, a task that will become easier as global warming accelerates. But an estimated 1 million people have left its Arctic zone since the Soviet collapse, and depopulation is cited as a major obstacle to the plans. A land giveaway program launched in Russia’s Far East will be expanded to the Arctic this summer — but even in more fertile climes it has hardly proved a hit.
“I’m absolutely convinced this city will survive. It will shrink further, but it will survive,” said Tverskoi. He hopes Vorkuta will escape the fate of other Soviet single-industry towns by tapping anew its abundant natural resources. But he warns: “If there’s no coal, there’s no city.”
On a recent visit to Rudnik, the abandoned prisoner-built settlement that gave rise to Vorkuta and is now only accessible via a rickety bridge missing most of its wooden planks, Sadvary, the legal consultant, pointed out the probable location of her childhood home — a wooden barracks that her family heated with coal brought home by her father from the mines.
Wooden crosses outside the city indicate the burial places of 42 prisoners killed during an uprising at a Vorkuta forced labor camp in 1953.
In 2006, she married a local man in a ceremony that culminated with raucous festivities at Vorkuta’s Ural Restaurant, once a popular venue for revelers.
Today, her childhood home is gone, and her wedding venue is a hollowed-out wreck.
Rudnik, the mining settlement that was established by Gulag prisoners in 1932 and gave rise to the city of Vorkuta, is now a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts.
“I look at all this and see our future,” she said, gazing at the six-story buildings that have become a haven for Airsoft enthusiasts. “This city only exists for the extraction of natural resources. Once they’re gone, the city will go. And they’ll have the perfect setting for movies about the zombie apocalypse.”
A British coroner has determined that an exiled Russian critic of President Vladimir Putin was strangled to death by “a third party” at his home in a southwest suburb of London.
Self-exiled Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov was found dead at his home in New Malden, England, in March 2018.
Senior coroner Chinyere Inyama ruled that Glushkov was “unlawfully killed” after the West London Coroner’s Court heard evidence suggesting his death was made to look like a suicide and that there had been “third-party involvement.”
Glushkov fled Russia after authorities accused him of fraud during his time as deputy director of the state-owned Aeroflot airline.
He was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom in 2010.
He had been a close friend of the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, also a vocal critic of Putin, who was found hanged at his home west of London in 2013.
In 2017, during Glushkov’s trial in absentia, a Russian court convicted him of stealing about $120 million from Aeroflot. It sentenced him to eight years in prison.
Glushkov had been due to appear at the Commercial Court in London to defend himself on March 12, 2018 — the day his body was discovered by his daughter, Natalia.
His death came a week after the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury, England, of the Russian former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
‘Unlawful Killing’
A pathology report presented to the West London Coroner’s Court said Glushkov’s injuries “could be consistent with a neck-hold, applied from behind, and the assailant being behind the victim.”
The pathology report said: “There is a lack of injuries to suggest prolonged grappling or restraint with the third party, and a lack of injuries of a defensive nature to the upper limbs.”
The coroner’s verdict said: “From all the documentation, all the evidence gathered, Nikolai Glushkov died from an unlawful killing.”
British detectives are renewing an appeal for witnesses who were in the New Malden area on March 11-12, 2018.
The inquest coincides with a renewed appeal by London’s Met Police counterterrorism unit for more information about Glushkov’s death.
Commander Richard Smith says more than 1,800 potential witnesses have been contacted and more than 420 statements taken.
London police say no arrests have been made and a motive for the killing has not yet been established.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was due on April 10 to embark on a series of overseas meetings with U.S. allies amid rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia and what Washington calls Moscow’s “destabilizing behavior.”
During the week ahead, Austin is due to meet with government and military leaders in Israel, Germany, at NATO Headquarters in Belgium, and in the United Kingdom. .
A Pentagon statement late on April 8 said Austin will “meet with his counterparts and other senior officials to discuss the importance of international defense relationships, and reinforce the United States’ commitment to deterrence and defense, burden sharing, and enduring trans-Atlantic security.”
The Pentagon says Austin’s April 14 meeting in Brussels with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg will focus on “how the Alliance is tackling destabilizing behavior by Russia,” as well as “rising China, terrorism, and global challenges such as COVID-19 and climate change.”
Ahead of that meeting, Austin was scheduled to visit in Berlin with German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Chancellery Foreign and Security Policy Adviser Jan Hecker.
The Pentagon says the agenda of Austin’s Berlin talks include “combatting the malign influence of our shared strategic rivals, and continued dialogue on U.S. force posture in Germany and elsewhere.”
Austin’s tour starts a day after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken consulted the German and French foreign ministers about the need for Russia to cease its military buildup in the occupied Crimean Peninsula and near Ukraine’s eastern borders.
Washington has accused Russia of “provocations” in eastern Ukraine and using “inflammatory rhetoric.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (file photo)
A statement from the U.S. State Department said Blinken spoke separately with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian about the need for stepped-up consultations among NATO allies as fears grow of a major escalation in the eastern Ukraine conflict.
Kyiv and the West blame the Russia-backed separatists holding parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions for a recent spike in hostilities, while Moscow has pointed the finger at Kyiv.
A recent accumulation of photographs, video, and other data has revealed major movements of Russian armed forces toward or near Ukraine’s borders and into Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.
That has fueled concerns that Moscow may be preparing to send forces into eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin has rejected Western calls to pull back its troops, denying they are a threat while adding that military movements within Russia are an internal sovereign issue.
On April 9, the Kremlin issued a stark warning that Russia could take steps to “protect civilians” in the region in the event of a resumption of full-scale combat operations there.
The first stop on Austin’s four-country tour is Israel where he is to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benjamin Gantz.
The final item on Austin’s agenda, after visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels, is talks in the United Kingdom with Secretary of State for Defense Ben Wallace.
The Pentagon says the purpose of that visit is “to reaffirm the continuing importance of U.S.-United Kingdom defense cooperation to meet global security challenges.”
YEREVAN — More than five months after the guns fell silent on the battlefields of Nagorno-Karabakh, the dust is settling in the halls of power in Stepanakert, the disputed region’s de facto capital.
In Karabakh’s very opaque political environment, however, it’s not entirely clear who has come out on top after the 44-day Second Karabakh War won convincingly by Azerbaijan late last year.
There are two men who appear to be in close competition to control the Azerbaijani region predominantly inhabited by ethnic Armenians: de facto President Arayik Harutiunian and the region’s influential security chief, Vitaly Balasanian.
Harutiunian has led the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, as it’s known by Armenians, since his victory in the March 2020 presidential election.
That vote was by far the most competitive in Karabakh’s post-Soviet history and saw Harutiunian — who was prime minister from 2007 to 2017 — emerge victorious in a runoff after securing just under 50 percent of the vote in the first round.
One of his opponents in that first round was Vitaly Balasanian, a former general-turned-opposition leader who garnered nearly 15 percent of the vote, finishing third.
But after the dismal showing in the war with Azerbaijan led to unhappiness with Nagorno-Karabakh’s leadership, Balasanian is now poised to be the president’s main challenger domestically.
Defeat Brings Change
The crushing defeat resulted in a major political shakeup in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In the months following the November 10 cease-fire deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan — which was brokered by Russia — nearly all of the region’s cabinet ministers were replaced.
Harutiunian himself said he would resign at some unannounced date and leave politics — something he has not yet done.
Arayik Harutiunian (file photo)
In the meantime, Balasanian was appointed by Harutiunian on December 2 as head of Karabakh’s powerful Security Council, the chief military body for the region. Harutiunian also announced two weeks later that Karabakh’s armed forces were subordinate to the council, effectively granting huge power to Balasanian.
That move led many to speculate that he would formally replace Harutiunian as Karabakh leader and had, in fact, already garnered sufficient power to exercise authority in the breakaway state.
Who Holds The Most Power?
But it is still unclear which of the two men has more influence in Karabakh.
Emil Sanamyan, a fellow at the University of Southern California’s Institute of Armenian Studies, thinks Balasanian is indeed in the ascendent.
Sanamyan said it seems “very likely” that Balasanian will replace Harutiunian as Karabakh’s president.
“The question is when that might happen,” he added, pointing out that Karabakh is not in a position to hold an election anytime soon.
Sanamyan suggested Harutiunian might thus remain as a figurehead, the formal leader in Karabakh but with Balasanian exercising “effective commander in chief powers.”
Vitaly Balasanian (file photo)
Balasanian gained prominence in the First Karabakh War as head of the Askeran regiment that spearheaded the operation to seize the Azerbaijani city of Agdam in 1993, resulting in tens of thousands of ethnic Azerbaijanis being expelled.
He left the army in 2005 to join Karabakh’s political opposition, making a name for himself as “the opposition general.”
He ran for president of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2012, finishing second. He first served as head of the Security Council from 2016 to 2019.
In the last two years he became known for his political stances, particularly his strident opposition to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, whom Balasanian slammed as a “Western stooge.”
Some people think his opposition to the previously popular Pashinian and his first tenure heading the Security Council has cost him politically.
“In 2016, [Balasanian] became the head of the security council [Nagrono-Karabakh], joining a small group of ‘siloviki’” in the region, said an Armenian official with knowledge of Karabakh politics, speaking on condition of anonymity. “This was the turning point for him. The modest, noncorrupt general became part of the most corrupt group in Karabakh.”
Sanamyan has a completely different view of Balasanian.
“He is a man of integrity and not known for any criminal or corrupt activity,” he said.
And Then There’s Russia
The narrative about the rise of Balasanian has grown beyond what the situation in Stepanakert reflects, said the anonymous official.
“There’s a real hype around [Balasanian], especially in Yerevan, but this doesn’t reflect reality,” the official said. “Balasanian doesn’t have the administrative resources [that Harutiunian] does and there are only three members of parliament [from his party],” he added.
Russian peacekeepers on the move in Nagorno-Karabakh late last year.
But observers warn that the political savvy of Harutiunian should not be discounted.
“Arayik [Harutiunian] has effectively consolidated power in the last few months,” the official continued. “He has tied everyone to him by bringing them into his cabinet. There is a joke right now in Karabakh: if you want to be a minister, just criticize [Harutiunian],” he explained. “I don’t think Balasanian has anywhere near the influence [that Harutiunian] has,” he said.
Whatever the true balance of power behind the scenes, many think that both men are still playing second fiddle to the real authority in town: Russia.
“De facto, real authority [in Karabakh] is now in Russia’s hands,” said Benyamin Poghosian, chairman of the Yerevan-based Center for Political and Economic Strategic Studies. “[Rustam] Muradov, the Russian peacekeeping head [in Karabakh], is the no. 1 guy. The Karabakh government does still function, but [the situation is] somewhere between strong Russian influence and de facto control.”
General Rustam Muradov (left) with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (file photo)
For the time being at least, Harutiunian and Balasanian appear to be prepared to try to ride out the tough situation in the sparsely populated, war-torn region, which Armenian forces controlled from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until last year.
“I don’t think [Harutiunian] is going anywhere,” said the official. “A few months ago, when people were demanding his resignation, he said he wouldn’t leave because the Russians want him there. He has very good relations [with Muradov].”
“There’s some speculation that [Harutiunian] will resign on May 21, the one-year anniversary [of his swearing-in as president], but I’m not sure,” said Poghosian. “Many people also think he will stay [in office beyond that date].”
Of course high politics are currently of little concern to the average Karabakh Armenian civilian, many of whom are still reeling from the bitter defeat in the war, which led to large swaths of territory being taken by Azerbaijani forces.
“It’s hard to speculate about [politics and] policies considering the situation [Karabakh] finds itself in,” concludes Sanamian. “The priority [is] people’s security.”
