Health of Zarifa Sautiyeva, Only Woman among Ingush Seven, Deteriorating, Her Lawyer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 6 – Zarifa Sautiyeva, the only woman among the Ingush Seven, needs to be seen by an endocrinologist because her health is deteriorating, but her jailors say that such a doctor can be called only if Sautiyeva provides evidence of illness, effectively putting her in a Catch-22 situation (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/362576/).

            Her relatives and friends are trying to gather such evidence by taking blood samples during visits, but restrictions on their activities and problems of ensuring that her samples are the ones doctors will examine to the satisfaction of jailors means that her lawyers fear there is little chance she will get the treatment she needs.

            Sautiyeva was well enough to attend today’s session of the court as were the six other Ingush protest leaders being tried for extremism and attacking police, the first time all seven were there together since the six declared a hunger strike and stopped coming to court to try to secure Sautiyeva’s release to home detention.

            She is back in a detention center, but the seven, on the advice of human rights lawyers, have decided to attend the court sessions to monitor what the government is saying and to speak in their own defense in closing statements (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/362574/ and kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/362574/).

            At today’s session, five Russian Guardsmen testified, four as secret informants and one openly. None of them provided any evidence in support of the charges against the Seven. Instead, all five specified that they did not feel that they had been attacked by anyone, the result they suggested of their well-padded uniforms.

            Meanwhile, repressions continued outside the courtroom, with siloviki raiding more homes of protesters and forcing the dismissal of a member of a local rock band that had participated in demonstrations in support of long-haul truckers earlier (fortanga.org/2021/04/ciloviki-provodyat-obyski-v-dome-zaderzhannogo-po-delu-o-protestah-2019-goda/, kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/362603/ and fortanga.org/2021/04/rukovoditel-ansamblya-sunzha-uvolilsya-pod-davleniem-vlastej/).

            Perhaps the most dramatic development in Ingush affairs today occurred at the Documentary Film Festival where officials refused to allow the showing of Marianna Kalmykova’s film about the Ingush protests. She said that wasn’t unexpected because the Russian authorities have refused to approve it for showing (fortanga.org/2021/04/film-o-protestah-v-ingushetii-snyat-s-pokaza-festivalya-avtorskogo-dokumentalnogo-kino-artdokfest/ and kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/362612/).

            But she said that this ban would not prevent her from putting the film online where anyone who wants to see it can do so.