Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 14 – At the request
of the authorities, a justice of the Supreme Court of Ingushetia has banned the
Ingush Committee of National Unity for failing to comply with regulations governing
public organizations. But lawyers for the group say the justice is wrong:
temporary groups like the ICNU don’t have to follow those rules (ovdinfo.org/express-news/2020/07/13/sud-zapretil-deyatelnost-ingushskogo-komiteta-nacionalnogo-edinstva).
The ICNU was set up in November 2018
to guide the protest movement in Ingushetia in the wake of republic head
Yunus-Bek Yevkurov’s deal giving Chechnya ten percent of the smallest federal
subject (other than Moscow and St. Petersburg) to Chechnya and thus doesn’t
fall under the law on NGOs. Indeed, that law explicitly exempts groups like the
ICNU.
Izabella Yevloyeva, the founding
editor of the Fortanga portal and a member of ICNU, explains the situation (fortanga.org/2020/07/u-vas-ne-poluchitsya-zapretit-dodavit-rastoptat-nas/).
She writes:
“ICNU was a temporary union. Representative
of civil society joined it, unified by a desire to defend the territorial integrity
of Ingushetia … Initially, this was an organizing committee of meetings [against
the Yevkurov giveaway] which then took the form of the ICNU.
“It was not registered and the law
permits this. There were no legal or any other forms … All the statements of
its members, part of whom are under arrest, were directed exclusively toward
observing the laws of the Russian Federation. But our judicial system is unique.
It can charge anyone for anything. What is surprising is that ICNU was not
identified as extremism as the Bashkort group was.
“Banning ICNU is pressure on the civil
society of Ingushetia. Banning, suppressing or pushing about all who one way or
another are connected with the Ingush protest is task number one. The powers
that be cannot forgive and do not forgive us for our open and public statements
against their decisions.
“In the same way, the Union of Teips
was banned. In the same way are being banned other organizations throughout
Russia and some of them are now on the list of foreign agents and some are
called extremism. In the same way, throughout all of Russia, the powers are
going after those who demonstrate, planting drugs on journalists and
fabricating cases.
“The methods for this are common
throughout Russia, but the regions and people involved vary. Members of ICNU
also understood that they were falling into the all-Russian meatgrinder of
pressure on civil society.
“What will be the ICNU’s future?
“As the ICNU, it has ceased to exist,
but it could become the Ingush Committee of POPULAR Unity. What matters is not
its name but its actions. Some members will leave, some will be imprisoned, and
some of us are now in exile beyond the borders of Russia. But one way or another, people will not cease
to be agitated by the problem which led to the creation of ICNU and this means
it will live.
“For members of the ICNU, as for the
Council of Teips, the decision about the ban does not play any role. The ICNU although
perhaps under other names will continue its activity. And the ban is simply the
latest act of intimidation by the system.”
What
Yevloyeva does not say but what makes the situation worse is that most of the
leaders of the ICNU are in detention and this ban will make it even easier for
the powers that be to stage the show trial they seem bent on arranging in an attempt
to discredit the Ingush national cause. The Fortanga editor’s words show why there
may be a trial but that it won’t have that effect.
Meanwhile,
a court in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, declared a book by
Ingush writer Idris Abadiyev extremist because he has always spoken for the
Ingush cause and thus has opposed the actions of Ramzan Kadyrov (fortanga.org/2020/07/ezdel-idrisa-abadieva-priznana-ekstremistskim-materialom/).
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