If Putin’s so popular, why is he afraid of competition?
“WE ARE not doing anything wrong. Please help us by uncovering the truth.” Those words on Wednesday from Kyaw Soe Oo, on the steps of a courthouse in Yangon, Myanmar, are an apt description of a test case for the nation’s democratic aspirations. Kyaw Soe Oo is a Reuters reporter and, with a colleague, Wa Lone, has been imprisoned and charged with carrying out the “crime” of investigative journalism. They must be freed if Myanmar is to sustain even a shred of respect for democracy.
The two journalists were investigating reports of a mass grave in Rakhine state, where the Myanmar military has conducted a scorched-earth campaign against the Rohingya population. Long marginalised by the majority Buddhists, the Rohingya have in recent months been subject to ethnic cleansing from their villages, propelling about 650,000 into exodus in neighbouring Bangladesh, where they are crowded into camps.
The journalists were looking into reports of a mass grave in the village of Inn Din. Reporting such as this has been difficult because of government restrictions on journalists. The journalists were arrested December 12 after being invited to meet police officials on the outskirts of Yangon, where they were first given some documents, then almost immediately taken into custody. The government has said the reporters “illegally acquired information with the intention to share it with foreign media”. On Wednesday, they were formally charged with obtaining state secrets, a law with a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.
Later on Wednesday, the military released results of its probe into the mass grave the journalists were looking into. A statement said 10 bodies there were of Muslims who had been killed by villagers and security forces “because they were terrorists”. The military campaign was triggered by an attack on security posts by a Rohingya militant group, but the military’s statement about terrorism should be viewed with acute scepticism. The Reuters journalists were chasing it, and putting them in jail was to prevent them from finding it.
Myanmar’s military remains a powerful force in the country, even though it has passed partial control to civilians, now under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Her weak response to the Rohingya operation may be explained by the military’s continued dominance of security matters, but she should not tolerate the prosecution of the two reporters. Already, journalists complain there has been backsliding of press freedom under her government. She must stand up for a free press as the core of a free society, demand release of the Reuters pair and allow unfettered access to Rakhine state.
NOT once during his 18 years in power has Vladimir Putin faced off against a genuine challenger. His original competitor in the race for the Kremlin, Yevgeny Primakov – like him, a former prime minister and official in the Soviet KGB – was neutralised by a sustained television campaign filled with sleaze and disinformation. It included claims that Primakov was a NATO pawn and plotter of attempts to assassinate a head of state; at one point, when Primakov underwent a hip replacement operation, his enemies broadcast graphic images of surgery, with doctors drilling and hammering through a bloody human leg. No methods were shunned.
By the time Channel One host Sergei Dorenko (dubbed “the TV killer”) was done, Primakov’s poll standing had collapsed from 32 percent to 8 percent, and, in February 2000, the former prime minister withdrew from the presidential race, angrily noting “how far our society is . . . from genuine democracy”.
Methods became less sophisticated. From 2008, opponents of the regime were simply barred from the ballot, leaving Putin (or his technical stand-in, Dmitry Medvedev) to “defeat” perennial candidates and handpicked shadow-boxers. It must be convenient to be able to select your own rivals. In 2008, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov was disqualified over supposed irregularities in the signatures in support of his nomination.
Another candidate, wellknown Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, wasn’t even allowed to collect signatures after his candidacy was blocked by officials of the Central Election Commission who complained that he did not submit documents proving that he was a writer. Russian journalists had a field day quoting from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita – “If you wanted to make sure that Dostoevsky was a writer, would you really ask him for his membership card?” – but officials were unimpressed. In 2012, at the height of the mass protests that began after a rigged parliamentary election, one opposition leader, the veteran Grigory Yavlinsky, was disqualified from the presidential race, also on the pretext of signature irregularities.
Two prominent opposition leaders were planning to run in this year’s presidential election. One was Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and regional governor, four-term member of parliament, and the only authentic opposition politician who won an election in Putin’s Russia, becoming a regional legislator in 2013. He was planning a return to the Russian parliament in 2016 and considering a challenge to Putin in 2018. The plans came to an end when Nemtsov was gunned down in the centre of Moscow on the evening of February 27, 2015.
The second challenger was Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner who finished second in Moscow’s
2013 mayoral race. He opened headquarters in dozens of regions, attracting hundreds of volunteers. On January 6, the Supreme Court barred Navalny from the race, confirming a decision by the Central Election Commission. The disqualification was based on Navalny’s conviction on fraud charges in 2014, a verdict that was clearly aimed at disqualifying him.
Western commentators who buy into the Kremlin line about Putin’s “popularity” among Russian citizens would do well to remember that this assertion has never been tested in a free and fair election against credible opponents. Leaving aside the other methods of controlling elections practised by Putin’s regime – its monopoly on access to television, administrative pressure on state-dependent voters, and outright fraud – the fact that opponents are not allowed on the ballot should in itself be enough to stop anyone from viewing elections in today’s Russia as substantially different from one-party “elections” in the Soviet Union.
In the absence of objective official indicators, one is left to look for empirical evidence of popular enthusiasm for Putin’s rule. One such glimpse was offered on New Year’s Eve, when activists in the western Siberian city of Tyumen held a public meeting in support of Putin’s nomination for president – announced in the local media, but not organised in the usual way, with compulsory attendance by state and municipal employees. In a city of 740,000, this pro-Putin gathering was voluntarily attended by nine people. Stories such as this seem to confirm the selfevident) truth: that a leader with popular support would not be afraid of real competition.
Vladimir Kara-Murza is vice chairman of the Open Russia movement and chairman of the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom.