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nunia
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2005/11/04
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL had a better headline than LR:
http://larussophobe.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/editorial-more-blood-on-vladimir-putins-hands/
Murder by Natural Causes
With Sergei Magnitsky’s slow assassination, Moscow consummates the marriage of brutality and revisionism in Russia..
This week Vladimir Putin’s regime proved an even colder and darker place than what a Russian winter alone can offer.
Ethicists may debate when not preventing a death becomes murder. But one doesn’t need a Ph.D. to conclude that the death of Sergei Magnitsky was just that—a state sanctioned murder. Don’t expect Moscow to recognize it as such: It doesn’t have to. Unlike the execution-style killings of human-rights campaigners Natalya Estemirova and Stanislav Markelov and journalists Anna Politkovskaya and Anastasia Baburova, or the polonium poisoning of defector Alexander Litvinenko, Magnitsky’s demise can, with technical honesty, be attributed to “natural causes”: toxic shock, heart failure, or rupture to his abdominal membrane, depending on which Russian official you ask. All as natural as the will to power.
The 37-year old Russian lawyer and father of two died in a detention center in Moscow on Monday, having been incarcerated for nearly a year, no trial in sight, on trumped-up tax evasion charges. His real crime was to claim widespread corruption by Russian Interior Ministry officials while defending Hermitage Capital Management against frauds. Late in 2008, Magnitsky gave formal testimony naming Interior Ministry officers involved in Hermitage’s case. Shortly after, he was arrested by a team of the same officers named in his testimony, according to Hermitage. Over the last year, Magnitsky’s detention conditions worsened the longer he refused to fabricate a story against Hermitage.
In other words, Magnitsky died fighting for the rule of law in a country that has no national memory of what that concept means.
Hermitage chief William Browder describes his late attorney as “a healthy 37-year-old professional” when he entered the jail. But being completely cut off from his family, and the physical pressures he endured while in custody, proved too much. Magnitsky made numerous official complaints of his treatment, including a 40-page report to the general prosecutor describing squalid conditions, treatment bordering on torture, and the onset of gallbladder stones, pancreatitis, and a severe digestive ailment.
“Prior to confinement, I didn’t have these illnesses or at least there were no symptoms,” he writes in the report, detailing how repeated requests for treatment were ignored.
When Magnitsky’s lawyers came to see him at the Butyrskaya prison on Monday, they were told he couldn’t leave his cell due to the state of his health. And yet Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Dudukina said there was no record of health problems in Magnitsky’s file.
The slow-motion assassination of the young lawyer marks a new low in Russia. The families of Estemirova, Politkovskaya, Markelov, Baburova, and Litvinenko at least get no argument that their loved ones were murdered, even if the official “investigations” into those crimes will likely prove useless.
An official investigation is planned into Magnitsky’s death, but here we suspect the proceedings will prove worse than ineffectual—expect the conclusion in this case that malice played no part in his demise.
With this new milestone, Moscow consummates the marriage of brutality and revisionism. Contemporary Russia is almost comically weak when viewed from the West, which once feared Moscow would destroy the world. But that doesn’t mitigate the merger of Stalinism with Putinism, nor the tragedy that means for the Russian people.
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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