David Cameron must stand up to Putin

The Guardian

European leaders could honour the memory of Russian reformer Yelena Bonner by helping activists confront this corrupt cabal.

The death on Saturday of Yelena Bonner, widow of Andrei Sakharov, will be lamented across Russia. Her trenchant criticisms of Vladimir Putin’s autocracy – she was the first signatory of the “Putin Must Go” manifesto last March – was echoing as recently as last Thursday at a conference of reformists in Moscow.

Whether her death will have any effect on the decline in democracy in her beloved Russia may be discovered this week.

Russia’s justice minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, is the puppet who will announce this week whether or not the Putin regime will allow any opposition parties to put up candidates in December’s parliamentary elections and the presidential poll next March.

A formal request last December by a liberal group led by former premier Mikhail Kasyanov and other reformists could be the ninth party to be blocked by the increasingly authoritarian Moscow “tandem” of President Medvedev and his nominal prime minister, Putin.

I first visited Russia in 1970 and have been there on numerous occasions before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first reformer I met was Bonner, chain-smoking as always in her tiny flat. She was a large part of my inspiration for setting up the EU’s €160m democracy and human rights instrument. We met again even during the last spasm of real communist agitation in the attempted coup d’état against President Yeltsin in 1993. She backed Yeltsin then, but strongly criticised the “genocide of the Chechen people”.

Optimism developed about political and economic progress during the following decade and the EU’s democracy programme, which I founded, was highly active among reformists. However, since the beginning of the Putin era in 2000 the slide towards autocracy has accelerated. When Bonner spoke in 2008 at the European parliament on the 20th anniversary of the founding of its Sakharov prize for freedom of expression, she attacked the EU for its failure to criticise the Putin regime.

At a conference in the Metropol Hotel just off Red Square last week, I said that Bonner and her friend, the veteran human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov, were an inspiration – the consciences of Europe. Kovalyov described, to much applause, European leaders’ comments on the regime as the sort of mumbo-jumbo used by magicians. His uncompromising criticism of those who can afford to speak out, whether European or American, was shared by other speakers, who condemned the recent EU-Russia summit for its focus on EU cucumber exports, not the state of democracy in Russia.

Kasyanov implored us to encourage EU leaders to “tell the truth” about his country’s current leadership. All the Russians we met, including Grigori Yavlinsky, founder of the Yabloko party, scorned the mealy-mouthed statements made at the Nizhny-Novgorod summit by José Manuel Barroso and Herman van Rompuy, the respective presidents of the EU commission and council.

Dissent is tolerated in today’s Russia, unless it threatens the interests of the regime, as in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, the lawyer who exposed a huge tax fraud in his country and was rewarded by being tortured and killed in prison. At least 17 journalists have been killed in recent years, most notably Anna Politkovskaya.

What is needed is a transatlantic political consensus that the EU’s largest neighbour and the source of much of its oil and gas is not just a democratic backslider but a real threat to stability led by an unaccountable and corrupt cabal.

Despite talk of a “reset” of its policy towards Russia, the Obama administration seems unwilling to speak out. US senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain will soon introduce a resolution calling on Russia to register opposition political parties, allow free media, respect freedom of assembly and permit international and domestic monitors for the coming elections – and calling on President Obama to make these issues a priority.

The European parliament, now with increased powers under the Lisbon treaty, has been forthright.

In a resolution which I co-authored and adopted just before the 10 June summit, MEPs favour more ambitious trade, visa and co-operation agreements with Russia, but only if they do more to protect basic human rights, eg by ending “politically motivated court decisions” against various figures, most recently Mikhail Khodorkovsky, removing curbs on press freedom, pulling its troops out of Georgia and allowing gay parades.

The Arab spring, which has sprinkled its magic as far as China, has had no reflection in Russia. We were told that this was because Putin had so distorted the Russian economy that incomes continued to rise in a false boom.

Sergei Aleksashenko, former deputy minister of finance and former deputy governor of the Russian central bank, was gloomy about the consequences of this dangerous approach. He and others warned us of potential instability in Russia when reality dawned on its brittle society.

It is essential that Russia’s major trading partner, the EU, gets its act together. David Cameron is to visit Moscow soon. He should not forget that his predecessor Margaret Thatcher earned respect by speaking the truth about the Soviet Union. Europe needs leadership on Russia. Britain is one of few countries that does not depend on Russian oil and gas. Cameron can afford to speak the truth.

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