American Board on awarding the highest in America journalist prize, Pulitzer Prize, started reviewing thousands of letters from Ukrainians residing n different countries of the world. They demand to posthumously revoke American journalist Walter Duranty’s prize, which was awarded to him in 1932. According to Ukrainians, the New York Times correspondent Duranty was an accomplice of Joseph Stalin and other organizers of the artificial famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. Full Story...
On the night of 7 June, the OMON (interior ministry force) arrested more than 120 people at the “Granite” industrial complex in Moscow. Most of them were reported to be migrants from the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The center of public relations of the FSB (part of the former Soviet KGB) announced that 55 of the detainees were active members of the Islamic organization “Khizb Ut Takhrir”. The remaining suspects were under suspicion of belonging to this organization. The arrestees were shown on television to millions of viewers in a pose typical for such events: the people were filmed standing with their hands pressed against a wall. However, the affair may not have been quite what it seemed.
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It seems that everybody — from top-ranking officials to the most deprived and rejected citizens of our vast country — agrees that it is necessary to defend human rights. The first to recognise such necessity in the 1960s were those who were later called human rights activists, dissidents, traitors and renegades — depending on the outlook and social status. For this they were unfailingly placed into prisons, labour camps, exiles, psychiatric hospitals and were sentenced without trial. Full Story...
Ukraine’s law enforcement bodies have set up a special commission to investigate the situation related to recent arrests in Moscow of dozens of alleged supporters of Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami, a fundamentalist Islamic group outlawed in Russia. The party, which name means the party of Islamic liberation, was founded in 1953 with the aim of introducing Sharia law into Arab countries. According to Russia’s security services, ‘militants’ of Hizb-ut-Tahrir planned an attempt on the life of Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. Ukraine’s law enforcement bodies cannot, however, grasp why the Islamist group might have wanted to kill the foreign head of state that has never persecuted the Muslims. Full Story...
Police in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh are investigating an incident that has put on the alert US security services. On the morning of May 20, an e-mail came to the FBI website. The message read: “I will kill all the americans in bishkek.” It was signed by someone who called himself Chucha Khan Maranu. Full Story...
Uzbek authorities have launched another re-location scheme, moving its citizens -- to wit, ethnic Tajiks – farther away from the Tajik border area in the south-west of the country. Like two and a half years ago, they do it forcedly and without paying travelling expenses. The Uzbek leadership claims it’s being done because of a landslide threat, while human rights groups argue the people are re-located because of mines laid by their own army along Uzbekistan’s border with Tajikistan as many locals explode on them. Full Story...
State propaganda machinery in Turkmenistan has once again made a fool of its people. In its issue of June 12, the central Russian-language newspaper “Neutral Turkmenistan” published a list of people who sent their congratulations to the Turkmen president on electing a Turkmen representative a deputy chairman of the 58th annual session of the United Nations General Assembly. The names of these persons appeared under a heading “Sincere Congratulations to Saparmurat Turkmenbashi” which has now become common for the Turkmen press. Full Story...
”The Americans are forcing our government to care about its own people,” said the head of the voluntary organization “Union for Chemical Safety”, Lev Fedorov, to a PRIMA correspondent. He was commenting on the Russian foreign ministry’s June 5 response to the US Congress decision to allocate $100 million next year for the destruction of Russian chemical weapons. The official representative of the foreign affairs ministry Alexander Yakovenko, along with expressing satisfaction with the decision of the American legislators complained that the United States, while allocating financial resources was doing so with strings attached. He referred to the US demand that Russia or any third country also contribute to these purposes. Full Story...
In Turkmenistan, the representative of the Foreign Office of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Kotenev, was left with a bitter smile after receiving a message from the Turkmen government, referring to Turkmenistan’s decision to revoke regulations on dual citizenship, and their assurances this would nonetheless not harm the interests of Russians living in the country. Full Story...
Kazakh police have “deported” 500 foreigners illegally working in Alma-Ata. They did that in a very peculiar manner. The drove them up to the Chu Valley in Kyrgyzstan and then dumped them in a field for a night. To cut short a possible “outrage” , a Kazakh police sergeant fired some warning shots in the air. Full Story...