Sochi: The Other Civil Rights Outrage

 

Followers of mainstream North American media might well conclude that there are only two big Olympic stories (apart from the events themselves): LGBT rights, and the threat of a terrorist attack. Despite the valiant efforts of Human Rights Watch and other groups, Russia’s treatment of the Islamic people of the Caucasus, and most notably those from around Sochi, is being all-but-ignored.

For a year now people have been disappearing. Russian plain-clothed police and security units haunt the streets, snatching Islamic people up and sweeping them away. Sometimes they return after a few weeks; sometimes they do not return at all. Are they all terrorists? It is enough, apparently, to argue that they might be, or they might be sympathetic to terrorists, or they might be related to terrorists.

These arrests are Russia’s preemptive response to the threat of terror. They are made without any semblance of a legitimate legal process. The victims have no recourse to lawyers or courts. There is, of course, a precedent: in the 1930s the Soviet secret police swept up the innocent and guilty alike in their hundreds of thousands. Ironically, in the West we once called this “the Great Terror” and we condemned it.