Russian rights veteran says ‘irritating’ NGOs will not avoid ‘foreign agent’ tag

Lyudmila Alekseyeva file photo

(Interfax – May 8, 2013) Russian rights veteran and head of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alekseyeva has said that the fate of certain NGOs is sealed as regards being required to register as a “foreign agent”. She also criticized the incumbent authorities for their crackdown on dissenters but said she did not expect the return of an Iron Curtain. Interfax news agency carried Alekseyeva’s remarks at an 8 May news conference in a series of reports on the same day.

Speaking about the campaign of NGO checks and official demands for foreign-funded NGOs to register as foreign agents, Alekseyeva said: “No matter what they do, I imagine that a decision has been taken somewhere at the top to shut down some organizations that are irritating for our authorities. And irrespective of how they conduct themselves, whether there are any sort of violations on their part, they are doomed to be faced with the demand to brand themselves with the humiliating and entirely irrelevant stamp of an agent of a foreign state”.

She added that in the three months since the mass checks begun, “we have well and truly established that one’s attitude towards these checks plays no part”.

Alekseyeva described the present situation with NGOs in Russia as “not only leaving much to be desired, but actually reaching a very dangerous threshold”. “And beyond this, it is unclear whether rights, environmental, educational bodies, which have been dealt the biggest blow, will be able to continue working,” she warned.

She added that “the most harmless organizations that have nothing to do with politics” are being swept up in this crackdown on NGOs, just because “they were unlucky enough to receive foreign aid grants a couple of times”.

Interfax separately carried Alekseyeva’s remarks comparing the present day and the Stalin era. “I have to say that today’s leaders are keen to bring back those times – with the suppression of all independent opinion and demonstration of civil activity,” she said, citing the so-called Bolotnaya Case on mass unrest following a protest in Moscow on 6 May 2012 and attempts to “isolate the country from the world”.

Nevertheless, she said she did not expect a return of the Iron Curtain. “Stalin’s times will not make a comeback and they will not create an Iron Curtain – where would they go to ski? I am not making any accusations about this, I welcome it. We have to be open to the word – both at the government level and the level of civil society. But we cannot have a situation where we are part of the G8 but people are told – don’t you dare! – you sit here behind the Iron Curtain, else you’re all foreign agents,” she said.

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