Counter-extremism campaign intensified

On 23 April 2009, Yuri Kokov, the commanding General of the Department to Combat Extremism of the Interior Ministry, announced that the new structure is fully prepared to be deployed. The Interior Ministry announced the establishement of the Department to Combat Extremism in September of 2008. The department was based on the Department to Combat Organized Crime and Terrorism (DBOPiT).

As result of reform, Centers for Combating Extremism (So called “E” Centers) were established throughout the country. A legal chain of command has been created under the struggle with extremism: it is made up of the extremism departments in the public prosecutor’s office and the investigative committee.

Nobody is hiding the fact that there are plans to use the units to combat extremism for the repression of popular demonstrations. Yurii Kokov, the chief of the new department, did not exclude the department’s participation in suppressing social protests.

The official reason given for Medvedev’s change to the Interior Ministry was offered in February 2009 by Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev, who declared victory in the fight against organized crime: “There will be no new criminal revolution in Russia. . . . The number of crimes is decreasing. . . . We can state: An epoch of criminal wars is in the past.”

On April 15, 2009, at a public meeting, Yuri Kokov, the head of the new department, was more revealing: “The operative situation might get worse under the conditions of the global crisis, [with] deterioration of the social and economic situation.” He was supported by Alexei Sedov, the FSB’s chief of the service for protection of the constitutional system and struggle against terrorism. “We need to consider the consequences of the world financial crisis as a possible catalyst for terrorist activity and increasing extremist manifestations, including violent forms of resistance carried out by all kinds of dissenters, unauthorized opposition, youth, and students.”

Since the spring of 2009, thousands of policemen throughout the entire country have been forced to engage in the search for extremists. It is already plain to see that there aren’t enough extremists to go around: according to the Ministry of Internal Affair’s [MVD] Central Informational-Analytical Center (GIATs), in 2008, there were 379 people in Russia identified for committing “extremist” crimes. For a whole Department of the MVD, which has units (the E centers) in nearly every region, this is clearly insufficient. Which means that the number of extremists must be supplemented. But doing this legally, through the courts, will be difficult: in the last year, the courts refused to recognize extremist motives in nearly half of all cases, and the cases fell apart. In such a situation, the policemen will need to work on “preventing” crimes, as Minister [Rashid] Nurgaliev is constantly calling on them to do. And this calls for different methods for the tacit surveillance of suspects: tapping telephones, opening and inspecting mail, monitoring travel within the country and outside its borders, and so forth. But first, the circle of people suspected of extremism must be determined, designating the people whose potential crime consists of spreading radical views or simply points of view that don’t coincide with the views of authorities.

The fact that these “black” lists of citizens exist has not only been expressed by human rights activists, but by policemen themselves as they report on the work they have done.

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