 What is happening to rights activist Said-Emin Ibragimov?
Very strange things have been happening to Said-Emin Ibragimov, head of the Peace and Human Rights organisation, in the past few weeks, or to be more exact since Russia took over chairmanship of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers in May.
The office of the Peace and Human Rights International Association in the centre of Strasbourg has been closed without good reason and with very confused explanations. The office had been working for a long time without any censure.
There’s more. For the first time since the association was registered, on 29 January 2002, the Strasbourg police banned a demonstration outside the Council of Europe during a PACE session, planned for 28 July 2006, suggesting that it be held in University Square, which would have been pointless.
Then, Said-Emin Ibragimov’s e-mail address, miriprava@hotmail.com, was closed, something which I thought couldn’t happen here in the West. He had been using the address without any problems for more than three years. The Hotmail administration said that his account had been closed because allegedly banned campaigning letters were regularly sent from the address to prominent politicians and international activists.
The closure of the miriprava@hotmail.com e-mail account gives rise to many questions:
Hotmail’s explanations mean only one thing – the employees of this previously respected firm, whose services are used by millions of people, have violated the fundamental human right to distribute and receive information by opening and checking the content of Said-Emin Ibragimov’s letters.
This is a very crude violation of the rights of someone who is conducting an open struggle for the rights of the Chechen people, subjected to blatant genocide. Ibragimov has been doing his human rights work in full view of those politicians to whom he sent his letters, while the international community is well informed about his public protests, which have included frequent hunger strikes and peace marches, demonstrations and rallies to stop the war and restore human rights in Chechnya outside the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
The closure of Ibragimov’s e-mail account gives food for thought, first of all that the Hotmail e-mail provider has fallen into the sights of the Kremlin’s special services and now fulfils its directives, just like Russian e-mail account providers, such as mail.ru, yandex.ru, rambler.ru and others, which are controlled by the special services.
Can the Hotmail leadership really not understand that this harms their reputation and causes colossal damage to a well-known firm? Or are they basing their electronic lawlessness on the expectation that there will be no response from Said-Emin Ibragimov?
There’s more. During this time telephone attacks began against the head of the Peace and Human Rights International Association. He received endless telephone calls, up to 40 a day. This telephone terror has a distinguishing characteristic – previous callers used to present themselves as well-wishers and would say that Ibragimov’s human rights protests were pointless, that he shouldn’t put himself or others through so much, that he shouldn’t waste his and other people’s money, while the other callers have moved to a different kind of threat.
I was in Said-Emin Ibragimov’s apartment for three days and saw for myself the blatant telephone terror. Once I picked up the receiver and said that if the blackmail continued, Ibragimov would have to go the Strasbourg police. His Lubyanka opponents, whose telephone tentacles reach into the heart of Europe, changed their tactics and now make silent phone calls throughout their working day, diligently earning their wages.
Alongside this, the Lubyanka telephone terrorists are also using a new tactic – they have started to phone and ask questions in Arabic, presumably trying in this primitive way to link the human rights activist with international terrorist organisations. The calls are now coming to his mobile, too.
It is not difficult to understand the crude, primitive methods so characteristic of the KGB. Their calculation is simple – to frighten and silence rights activist Ibragimov. But here they have met their match, although the Kremlin-Lubyanka brotherhood should have realised a long time ago that Said-Emin Ibragimov is a tough character and not the kind of person to give in to provocation.
Then came the meanest attack on the head of the Peace and Human Rights International Association from an unexpected quarter – the Free Caucasus (Svobodnyy Kavkaz) Chechen information agency, led by the notorious Akhmad Sardali. The agency published a filthy parody of this respected Chechen, who is over 60, who has many times been on the verge of death and miraculously survived and is now trying to restore his strength. Moreover, the part of the parody which concerns the work of the head of the international association repeats practically word for word the content of the telephone calls from the Kremlin-Lubyanka “well-wishers”.
What is most surprising is that the parody was published by the same journalists who, Ibragimov said, were concerned day and night about his fate during the critical days of his long hunger strike. Now they have taken off their masks. The reader can draw his or her own conclusions: have these lamentable journalists deliberately set off on the path of betrayal or is it a misunderstanding? I think that the official bodies in our government responsible for the Chechen state’s information policy will also make their own conclusions.
I am sure that neither the leadership nor the ordinary citizens of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria have the slightest doubt about the enormous benefit of the one Chechen who does real human rights work, especially if you judge by the gigantic financial and material resources used by the Kremlin to block the activity of Said-Emin Ibragimov. But it is strange – how can this lawlessness towards a human rights activist take place in the heart of civilised Europe?
And here the perceptive remarks made in an interview by the first Chechen president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, come to mind: “If Russia joins the Council of Europe, then Europe will become an internal affair of Russia.” It looks as though this is what has happened and is the only true explanation of what has been happening to the head of the Peace and Human Rights International Association, Said-Emin Ibragimov.
Mayrbek Taramov
- director of Chechen Human Rights Center
Appeal signed:
Nadja Banchik – Amnesty International, USA;
Larisa Volodimerova – Maarexa, Holland;
Yaras Valyukenas – human rights activist, Lithuania;
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