By IPS Correspondents
HELSINKI, Jul 16 2007 (IPS)

Human rights campaigners in Russia and Finland fear that denial of rights will continue beyond the term of President Vladimir Putin, who is expected to step down in March next year.

“A new person will emerge with a different name, but he will be just a new Putin,” Dmitry Lanko, assistant professor at the Department of European Studies at the School of International Relations in St Petersburg State University said at a seminar.

The seminar organised by the Finnish-Russian Civic Forum Jul. 3-4 was part of a campaign to give voice to civil society groups in Russia struggling for civil liberties and political freedom. The forum and individual campaigners plan to keep up their campaign.

“What is considered normal here in Finland such as forming a non-governmental organisation is not that normal in Russia because people engaged in such activities can be charged with extremism under Russian law,” said Heidi Hautala, Finnish member of parliament and chairperson of the Finnish-Russian Civic Forum.

Hautala said human rights violations and political repression raise concerns in Finland, a small Nordic country of five million which shares a long border with Russia.

“Russia is less of a military threat than a political and social one because insofar as the present authoritarian system persists, it is possible for the leaders to manipulate the people to turn them inwards, and view everything coming from the West as threat,” Hautala told IPS.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, hopes were raised that a more democratic Russia would replace the totalitarian Soviet system, but such hopes appear to have been dashed since Putin came to power nearly eight years ago.

“Torture in police custody and pre-trial detention is a fact across Russia. The country is failing both its international and national obligations to protect its citizens,” says human rights organisation Amnesty International.

“We don’t have to lecture ourselves about human rights violations in Russia, we have to ask ourselves the famous Russian question ‘What is to be done’,” said Aron Rhodes, director of the Vienna-based International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights.

The answer, according to Lyudmila Alekseyev, veteran human rights activist since the Soviet era, is to strengthen Russian civil society. “Fighting human rights alone isn’t enough, the only way to guarantee the future is to build a strong civil society in Russia to stand up to the bureaucracy and the oligarchy.”

It might take up to 15 years for such an effort to bear fruit, she said.

Nearly all major television stations are controlled by the state, with very little room for dissenting voices to be heard, and journalists who speak out against corruption and human rights violations face serious risks of imprisonment and death, human rights activists say.

The high profile murder case in October last year of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya which drew widespread international condemnation is widely believed to be linked to her relentless criticism of Russia’s human rights violation in the Chechen war.

But a new leadership in Russia will not guarantee political freedoms due to fear that a slight move in that direction would spin out of control because people would demand more, says Andrey Nekrasov, film director and producer of the widely acclaimed documentary ‘My Friend Sasha’ about the recent poisoning of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London.

“The fear is that too many people would like to go all the way, and so to avoid that they will like to keep control,” Nekrasov told IPS.

“They have learnt lessons from Gorbachev,” he said, referring to the political reforms initiated by the last Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev that were followed by the rule of Boris Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet system. They are also fearful of an orange revolution of the type that recently took place in neighbouring Ukraine.

Nekrasov said that in a large country such as Russia where there are massive injustices and inequalities, revolutionary changes come about not as a result of too much repression but from attempts to loosen up a bit.

Lanko believes that the Russian elite – made up of the current leadership and the oligarchs – is not going to give up power because it would inevitably face unpleasant questions from new rulers.

“The present leadership is made up of men who are more businessmen than politicians,” said Lanko. “It is no secret that Putin has major interests in Gazprom.” Other members of the ruling elite are chief executive officers (CEOs) of large corporations, he said.

Gazprom is the biggest oil and gas conglomerate in Russia in which the state has controlling shares. “They have a lot of power and money, and nobody will give up these things voluntarily,” Lanko said.

There is little chance of any opposition group assuming power at the Kremlin because the opposition forces in Russia are in disarray, says Nekrasov.

Known as ‘The Other Russia’, the Russian opposition is made up of disparate political groupings ranging from radical leftists to right-wing Thatcherites under the leadership of former world chess champion Gary Gasporov. The only thing that unites them is their common opposition to Putin, says Nekrasov.

An opposition group can come to power in Russia only in the event of a dramatic event such as a collapse in oil prices, Lanko believes. Western countries, he says, can only bring subtle pressure for political reforms through the G8 – the group of highly industrialised which includes Russia.

But for outside pressure to produce significant changes, “Western countries must identify alternative forms of energy,” said Lanko, referring to the overwhelming Western reliance on Russian oil and gas.

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