…WHILE NEWSPAPER CLAIMS SOME HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS IGNORE INTERESTS OF RUSSIAN STATE. “

Publication: Monitor Volume: 4 Issue: 228

Nezavisimaya gazeta” devoted its main front page article today to analyzing the issue of human rights on the UN Universal Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary. The newspaper said that Russia’s record was not ideal, and listed by way of illustration everything from the war in Chechnya to the murder of Galina Starovoitova to delays in salaries and pensions to the mistreatment of Russians in the other former Soviet republics. The newspaper, however, also lashed out at CIS states for ignoring human right, and at some veteran Russian human rights activists for ignoring the interests of the Russian state (Nezavisimaya gazeta, December 10).

“Nezavisimaya gazeta” was particularly disturbed by the comments of former dissident Valeria Novodvorskaya, who said in a recent interview that the human rights issue had simply been an instrument that “we, the CIA and United States used as a battering ram for the destruction of the communist regime and the break-up of the Soviet Union.” Novodvorskaya, known for her radically anticommunist views, warned that the human rights issue should not be used to “chop down the branch on which we are all sitting”–that is, to undermine the Yeltsin government and allow the communists back in power. These and other comments by Novodvorskaya were subsequently challenged by Sergei Kovalev, President Boris Yeltsin’s former human rights ombudsman who broke with the Kremlin over the Chechen war. A debate between Kovalev and Novodvorskaya was published in the weekly “Novye Vremya” (Novye vremya, No. 48-49, December 6, 1998).

TABLOID ALLEGES TOP OUR HOME IS RUSSIA OFFICIAL WAS INVOLVED IN MURDER PLOT.