SCIENTIST SEEKS SANCTUARY
Elena Musikhina fears for her life. She is seeking refuge in Canada because, she says, her research on the environmental impact of military and industrial installations in Siberia has made her a target in Russia. Joanne Laucius reports.
This is a story about a Russian scientist and vocal critic of the Putin government who collected evidence of environmental disaster in Siberia and is now seeking asylum in Canada.
It’s a convoluted tale that sounds like something out of a Cold War novel. The veracity of some of the events in question is impossible to independently confirm. The story involves sensitive information about military installations and industrial polluters, the mysterious deaths of a half-dozen other people who knew about the data, dead seals drifting to the shores of the world’s most ancient lake, a pet dog shot in the head and a helicopter crash involving both a senior government official and a bear. (There is skepticism about the bear’s involvement in the crash. However, Russian media reported the incident was indeed fatal to the humans.)
The upshot is scientist Elena Musikhina and her husband, Mikhail Musikhin, who have lived in Gatineau since December 2015, say they face grave danger if they are forced to return to Russia. A random bullet, a pedestrian shoved onto the road in the path of an oncoming car. It happens all the time, Musikhina says.
Their application for refugee protection was turned down in June 2016, with a tribunal concluding that they didn’t qualify as refugees. An appeal of that decision also failed. Now they say their only hope is that they will win their case in Federal Court, although no date has been set for a hearing and the court has a track record of deciding against applicants.
“At this point, she’s desperate,” said Musikhina’s daughter Olesia Sunatori, acting as her interpreter.
Musikhina has influential supporters who don’t doubt that she’s in danger, including Aurel Braun, an expert in international relations and Russian affairs at the University of Toronto. Based on the information he has seen, he said sending the couple back would be “unconscionable.”
“I think it would be reckless on the part of Canada to send these people back. As a democracy that has been taking in refugees, we have a policy of helping people,” Braun said. “It would offend the conscience of Canadians. I find it hard to believe we have not been more helpful.”
Former MP David Kilgour — who was deputy speaker and secretary of state for Latin America and Africa between 1997 and 2002 and for Asia-Pacific between 2002 and 2003 — heard about the case through Ottawa’s Ukrainian community. He has written to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to express concern.
“I’ve met with them several times. When you read her affidavit, you realize she must be one of the bravest people in Siberia. Her life would be in extreme danger,” he said in an interview last week. “I think the government of Canada is becoming a little less naive about what Russia is capable of doing.”
Musikhina’s fear is legitimate, Braun said. “In Russia, there is a relentless intimidation of any kind of opposition.”
Musikhina was a professor and researcher at the Irkutsk State Technical University in Irkutsk, a Siberian city of about 600,000 people near Lake Baikal. She was working as an independent expert and volunteer on a project predicting flood areas, mud flows and the effects of deforestation and industrial production, and mapping out high-risk zones.
The project involved access to sensitive information, which she could not remove from the university. By 2007, with the help of a mobile laboratory, Musikhina said she and a group of students were looking for backup water supplies, assessing the risk of environmental pollution and predicting accidents and fires caused by industrial infrastructure and assessing risk “in case of war.”
In an affidavit written to support her refugee claim, Musikhina said while she was working on the project, she could not copy anything, or take notes. But while she was recovering from surgery, a colleague brought the files to her so she could work on them.
Musikhina was concerned about the changes to Lake Baikal’s ecosystem. The lake is considered the deepest in the world — by volume, it contains more fresh water than all the Great Lakes put together. It is home to Baikal seals, the only species of seal that lives exclusively in fresh water. Dead seals were washing up on the shore.
Musikhina presented some of her work to Igor Esipovski, the governor of Irkutsk, in late April 2009.
“I suggested that it was very dangerous to have all those factories in one region; any significant incident in one factory can cause others to be destroyed or contaminated,” she said in an affidavit presented in her appeal.
“Also, many of them are located in seismic zones and can cause environmental disasters. Very influential people who had financial gain in the weapons industry offered me money to shut up, but I refused. Some of the companies should be shut down, according to my recommendation.”
In May 2009, Esipovski, who also opposed deforestation of a national park, died in a helicopter crash. The official reason for the crash, says Musikhina, was that the governor was hunting a bear, the bear’s body was dragged in a net attached to the helicopter, then the bear woke up and grabbed at a tree, causing the helicopter to crash. She doesn’t buy it.
“This story is self-evidently ridiculous,” Musikhina wrote in her affidavit. “However, no one was allowed to go to the crash site for a few days. There were no survivors. I believe that his helicopter death was not an accident and was related to his environment protection activity in which I was also involved.”
There were other “accidents.” In November 2009, Musikhina says, shots were fired over her head while she was walking near the family’s home in suburban Irkutsk.
A week later, the family’s dog was shot dead in the same place. On another occasion, a homeless man pushed her onto the street.
“It would be untraceable. It’s the way things work in Russia,” Sunatori said. “People only care about money. If you’re in the way, they just get rid of you.”
This was not the last in a series of accidents to befall people who knew about the data. In 2015, Esipovski’s son died in a car crash in Moscow. Another man associated with the project perished in a helicopter explosion. A woman and her young son died in a car crash.
“Evgeni Hamaganov, with whom we protested together to protect Lake Baikal. We protested between 2014 and 2015. He was beaten to death,” Musikhina said.
She did not stop speaking out against the Russian government in 2009. Musikhina was critical of the annexations of Ukraine and Crimea. In 2014, her teaching duties were restricted as a result, she said.
“In any conversation with anyone, she has said what she thinks. Even to students,” Sunatori said.
In September 2015, Musikhina was hauled before the vice-rector of the university for a “scolding.” She says he threatened to have criminal charges brought against her for her extremism and forced her to resign. Musikhina and Musikhin travelled to St. Petersburg in the hope of finding work, with no luck. They lived briefly in Poland, where their son Aleksei was studying. They applied for travel visas to come to Canada to visit their daughter, who has lived in Canada since 2012.
In their testimony before a tribunal of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, the couple claimed that authorities in Russia planned to accuse them under Section 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. But the tribunal did not accept this explanation and concluded that the fact they left Russia unhindered “diminishes their credibility on regards to whether the authorities were seeking them.”
The documents presented to the tribunal provide context to Musikhina’s work-related problems at the university, but the couple had not demonstrated they were in serious danger of persecution under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act or they were in danger of torture, a threat to life or a risk of cruel and unusual punishment, the tribunal found.
They “did not provide credible testimony and did not establish their allegations on the balance of probabilities,” said the decision.
On the question of her parents’ credibility, Sunatori comments bitterly: “If you’re not dead, there was no attempt to kill you.”
Musikhina points out that was a missing piece in her testimony — she did not mention anything about the sensitive data during her initial refugee hearing. At the time, her son Aleksei was studying in Poland, having brought the data with him, perhaps accidentally, on a computer.
Poland was too close to Russia for Musikhina’s comfort. “I did not want to risk his life. No one at all knew that I had sensitive data,” she said.
An appeal decision released March 12 agreed with the tribunal’s findings. However, the appeal did not consider the sensitive documents, says Musikhina’s lawyer, Pacifique Siryuyumusi.
The refugee tribunal may have doubted the credibility of Musikhina’s story, but Braun, the University of Toronto professor, finds it believable.
I think it would be reckless on the part of Canada to send these people back . ... It would offend the conscience of Canadians. I find it hard to believe we have not been more helpful.
... There is a common thread leading to
Ms. Musikhina and the information that she had, information which the Kremlin could and highly likely would view as highly damaging.
Very influential people who had financial gain in the weapons industry offered me money to shut up, but I refused.
ELENA MUSIKHINA
Critics of the Russian government have died under mysterious and bizarre circumstances.
Former spy and critic of the Kremlin Alexander Litvinenko, who fled to Britain, died in 2006 after consuming radioactive polonium-210, believed to have been administered in a cup of tea.
On March 4, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found on a park bench in Salisbury, England, poisoned by a nerve agent. A number of other countries have since expelled Russian diplomats, including Canada, which expelled four and declined three pending applications on March 26.
In April, Maxim Borodin, a journalist who reported on the deaths of mercenaries in Syria, died after falling from his fifth-floor apartment in Yekaterinburg.
Braun knew Boris Nemstov, the anti-Putin politician who was assassinated in February 2015. Nemstov was about to reveal research that he had conducted regarding the extent of corruption in the Kremlin. The death of several senior and influential individuals under suspicious circumstances within a short period should be sufficiently alarming, he said.
“In light of what has happened to journalists critical of the regime or political opponents, there seem to be just too many coincidences here,” he wrote in a letter supporting Musikhina’s claim. “Especially given that there is a common thread leading to Ms. Musikhina and the information that she had, information which the Kremlin could and highly likely would view as highly damaging.”
The Irkutsk region is home to number of manufacturing facilities, including some that produce weapons, a nuclear waste factory and an institution that researches and manufacturers biological weapons — in a fragile environment, Braun said.
“What we have seen in Russia is a continuing shrinking of the zone of democracy. The government has less and less tolerance of any kind of dissent,” he said. “It is always possible that there is an accident. When there is a common thread, where there are people who showed opposition, then there are too many accidents.”
Kilgour said if there was an obvious case where a family should stay in Canada, this is it. “If they ’ll do this to a former spy (Skripal) what about a woman who has held this level of responsibility? I would think there’s serious danger.”
In a letter responding to Kilgour in March 2017, the Immigration Department noted that “everyone ordered removed from Canada is entitled to due process before the law and all removal orders are subject to various levels of appeal. Removal of individuals cannot take place until all legal stays elapse and no other impediments exist.”
The number of Russian refugee claimants more than doubled between 2016 and 2017, from 95 in 2016 to 191 in 2017, according to refugee board statistics. Russian refugee claimants are a rather small minority in the system, where there were 47,425 total claims in 2017 and 23,350 in 2016. In 2016, 13 of the Russian claimants were rejected. In 2017, 18 were rejected.
Siryuyumusi filed papers with the Federal Court on April 30. He says it will take at least two months before the court decides whether the case will be heard. If it is accepted, it will likely take three more months before the case is heard.
He hopes Musikhina’s sensitive documents will be admissible as evidence. Meanwhile, if he gets a chance, he will also be arguing that she has a significant profile on social media as a dissident in Russia and has protested against the Russian government in Canada as recently as this March.
“There’s enough information in her profile to give her refugee status,” he said. “She faces risk.”
Sunatori says her parents are afraid for their safety, even in Canada. “But at least I am grateful that they are in Canada and not somewhere else.”
As for the data, it is now in a safe and undisclosed place, Musikhina said.
She also fears for her safety. “The government knows very well that I am at large and that I had access to that information and that it can be used against Russia since I was myself against the regime, though they can’t know for sure if it is in my hand.”