Ireland’s historic commitment to the promotion of human rights will no doubt be focused again on the situation in Russia, where the trial of those charged with the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya is back in the news
The 58-year-old Russian journalist and human rights activist was gunned down at the entrance to her Moscow apartment block on 7 October 2006, and her family have expressed concern that the Russian court will try to speed up the murder trial to coincide with the anniversary of her death this October.
Politkovskaya was assassinated in Moscow following the publication of her critical book about President Vladimir Putin. Previously she had made her name as a journalist for Novaya Gazeta from 1999 to 2006, a period that coincided with the rise of Putin to the Russian presidency and the launching of the second Chechen War.
I find it difficult to be optimistic about Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the basis of his record in denying freedom of expression and abuse of human rights, and of my recent visit to Russia during which I met a wide range of representatives from political groups, NGOs, journalists, academics and students.
A regime of total terror
I travelled two hours north of the city of Perm to visit the former Soviet labour camp near the village of Kuchino, in the Urals on the Siberian border. The Perm-36 camp is the only preserved facility of the gulag era throughout the former USSR; it was founded in 1943 and operated until the date of its closure in 1988.
The gulag system comprised thousands of labour camps and millions of convicts who were forced into slave labour at a time when the main resource of the Soviet Union was its people. Everyone was forced to work and lived in fear in a regime of total terror.
Originally a logging camp, typical of those throughout the country, after the death of Stalin in 1953 it began to house political prisoners, and in 1972 was converted into one of the harshest political camps in the country, with 24-hour closed cells.
Though this gulag closed in 1988, its spectre still haunts Russia, going by the account of Guardian journalist Luke Harding, who was expelled from Moscow by the Kremlin in 2011, becoming the first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War. His is a haunting description of the brutal methods practiced in Putin’s Russia against journalists, human rights workers, and opposition activists.
The anticipation that the collapse of the Soviet Union would herald an end to the denial of human rights has not materialised, and my visit highlighted the need to place human rights at the top of the political agenda as we work to improve relations between the EU and Russia.
I have to say that I feel that some of Gorbachev’s initiatives in working for a more open society in the Soviet Union and for peace internationally contrast sharply with Putin’s record, and may well be judged more favourably than today by future historians.
I met Gorbechev in Brussels in the European Parliament following his removal from the world stage, when it appeared his interest in promoting peace had not waned. And it is difficult to forget the historic meeting of Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland in the mid 1980s, which almost rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Relations between Europe and Russia deserve to be taken more seriously. We share the same continent, and it is in our mutual interest to work hard for peace and human rights. And that is a particular challenge for Ireland, whose first woman head of state Mary Robinson was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, and is one of the group of 13 global Elders which includes Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Kofi Annan, an alliance intent on using their moral authority to work for peace and human rights around the world.
Tributes to the courage of Politkovskaya – as a journalist and human rights activist known for her opposition to the Chechen conflict and to President Putin – poured in from across the world following her killing in Moscow in October 2006, and her life and work has been marked in Brussels, where a room in the European Parliament Press Centre has been dedicated in her honour.
Michael McGowan is a former MEP and president of the development committee of the European Parliament.
