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Foreign diplomats defy Kremlin warning to attend anti-Putin meet
By Olga Nedbayeva
AFP
MOSCOW
Petroleumworld.com 07 12 06
President Vladimir Putin's fiercest opponents gathered Tuesday in Moscow at a conference attended by Western diplomats in defiance of a Kremlin warning that a foreign official presence at the meeting would be considered "unfriendly."
"We are here to show our interest, support and recognition of the process of democratic transformation in Russia. This is not at all an unfriendly act against the Russian government," Christopher Westdal, Canada's ambassador to Moscow, told AFP.
Moscow's envoy to the G8 said earlier that senior foreign officials should not attend the two-day meeting ahead of the G8 summit starting in Saint Petersburg on Saturday.
"If high officials take part... we will view this as an unfriendly gesture," Igor Shuvalov was quoted as saying in an interview with the Financial Times Deutschland this month.
British ambassador Anthony Brenton and two US embassy officials also attended the opening of the two-day conference entitled "The Other Russia" in which more than 300 human rights activists, opposition politicians and journalists took part.
Former world chess master Garry Kasparov, now a leading opposition figure and organiser of the conference, said on Monday that some 20 political activists had been either arrested or beaten to prevent them from travelling to the meeting.
"The aim of this conference is to show that the official Russia we see on television is not the real Russia," Kasparov said Tuesday ahead of the start of the conference, which included a photo exhibition on abuses in the Russian army.
In a comment on Russia's membership of the G8 published in the Moscow Times on Tuesday, Kasparov said: "I continue to hope that the West will find its collective backbone and make Russia's participation contingent on its actually being a democracy."
At the conference, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, accused Russian authorities of cracking down on the media, opposition parties and private business, as well as putting dissenters in jail.
"We have political prisoners. We have been spared this shame since Soviet times.
Among them are Muslim faithful, Russian scientists and (oil tycoon Mikhail) Khodorkovsky," Alexeyeva said.
Former Russian prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who has declared his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election, also took part. As he spoke to reporters, a protester tried to punch him in the face.
Three protesters from the Eurasian Union of Youth, a nationalist anti-liberal organisation, also disrupted Brenton's speech by standing up and chanting "Hail Eurasia!" They were quickly led away by security guards.
In his speech, Brenton defended Russian non-governmental organisations against a new law imposing stricter financial and registration checks and seen as a way of better controlling government critics.
"Non-governmental organisations play an important role to check the government is transparent and not corrupt... We are spending millions of pounds on NGOs including for freedom of expression, the economy and defending the environment," Brenton said.
The conference was funded by private Russian foundations and two US-based groups: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Open Society Institute set up by financier George Soros.
AFP 11 1155 GMT 07 06
Copyright ©2006 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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