AGAIN ON RUSSIAN HUMAN RIGHTS AND CONTEXT Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:19 AM PDT COMMENTARY by Gordon Hahn In an October 5th Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, Robert Orttung, president of the Resource Security Institute, and Christopher Walker, director of studies at Freedom House, published the only kind of article on Russia politics allowed in the U.S. mainstream media print. It was yet another article on Russia's, albeit, less than sterling human rights record. Specifically, the article rehashes the unsolved murders of Novaya gazeta journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova and criticizes Russia authorities’ use of slander laws to silence critics like Oleg Orlov of the Russian human rights organization ‘Memorial’. To be sure, these issues deserve some attention, but compared to what? The issue was the unsolved murders of journalists and the authorities’ efforts to muzzle the media. The focus of the three activists mentioned in the WSJ article – Politkovskaya, Estemirova, and Orlov – has been the violation of human rights in Chechnya. But in Chechnya ...
The Caucasus: An Introduction. By Thomas de Waal. Oxford University Press; 259 pages; $18.95 and £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE area between the Black Sea and the Caspian is beautiful, fertile, mountainous—and much fought over, most recently in August 2008 when Russia and Georgia went to war. This was no surprise: tension over the Russian-backed enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had been high for months. Yet, as Thomas de Waal notes, all wars in the Caucasus are about the past as well as the present. To understand the region, one must know its history.
Mr de Waal, a former journalist (and one-time contributor to The Economist) now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC, is an expert on the region, especially on Azerbaijan and Armenia, and on Chechnya, the subjects of two previous books. It is a pity that he has not found space in ...
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