You can, indeed, sign the petition started by Lev Ponamarev, or send money to the parents of the “Network Case” defendants, or go to Penza. We already have those options, and a lot of support here as well. Now we need to suggest some further steps: we need to take part in a public investigation of other terrorism cases, where the same supposed members of Hizb ut-Tahrir are being given sentences of up to 25 years, as we know from situations in Crimea and Muslim republics in Russia.
There has as yet been no attention paid to these areas, but we need to dig in in that direction. And we must provide some help of various kinds for the Committee Against Torture, or get involved with the Public Verdict campaign against torture in the Yaroslavl prison system. In other words, we need to think about what we can offer those supporter groups, and we still haven’t achieved a lot in terms of a human rights support movement.
In other words, one of the main tasks is to create not professional groups and individual expert organisations, but a human rights culture in general?
Yes, the expert organisations and “fighting groups” who are operating “behind enemy lines” need some support. Otherwise it would be very easy for everything to collapse: their members could be arrested, could lose their foreign passports or, as happened in Chechnya, individual figures could simply be murdered or put in prison. When the human rights movement is isolated, it’s paralysed.
The response to this challenge was developed immediately after the murder of Natalia Estemirova [in 2009]: a joint mobile group with representatives from several rights organisations. The response that can be given now is an even broader wave of support for human rights work. The self-organisation around important rights problems or difficult topics should be broader, it should address not only formalised, institutional structures, but different support and solidarity groups.
This kind of horizontal culture should emerge regardless of the efforts of people involved in the Youth Human Rights Movement.
To recap: the human rights agenda in Russia should not only belong to the experts, but should be used by many different people in different contexts. Have we already seen this new horizontal culture in the “Network Case”? Did it manifest itself somehow?
It’s beginning to manifest itself, although, of course, it’s not quite enough yet. We see it in waves – in the Ivan Golunov case, where the core of the movement was the Moscow journalist community. But these connections are being built and remain, and there are already some communities which have become concerned, and are working from case to case.
This ability to self-organise comes from a feeling that this isn’t the last battle for your friends and family, or for your clients, as it happens for relatives or lawyers when their loved one or client is on trial. For Russian society on the whole, each of these cases is another link in a chain of battles for a Russia free from repression and torture.
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Editors of oDR | Radio Free (2020-03-04T23:00:00+00:00) In Russia, solidarity is hard work – but a new activist movement is emerging. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/04/in-russia-solidarity-is-hard-work-but-a-new-activist-movement-is-emerging/
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