Russia did not violate rights of Katyn victims’ relatives – ECHR

Russia did not violate rights of Katyn victims’ relatives – ECHR 
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Published time: October 21, 2013 14:16

The Katyn Memorial in the Smolensk Region. (RIA Novosti/Iliya Pitalev)

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled Russia did not violate the rights of the relatives of the 1940 Katyn massacre victims. The court, however, criticized the country for refusing to hand over copies of classified documents for the proceedings.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) announced on Monday its final judgment in the case initiated by 15 relatives of the Katyn massacre victims, who accused Russia of conducting an inadequate investigation into the tragedy, dating back to WWII. In 1940, Soviet security services (NKVD) killed, without trial, about 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and buried them in mass graves. Most executions took place in the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk. 

The ECHR ruled it has no competence in verifying the adequacy of the Russian investigation into events which had taken place ten years before the European Convention on human rights was adopted. 

Relatives of the Katyn victims accused Russia of “inhuman or degrading treatment” towards them, citing Article 3 of the Convention. For several decades Moscow refused to reveal the truth about the mass executions. The ECHR cleared Russia in this respect, saying that by the time Russia joined the Convention in 1998 it had already publicly acknowledged that the Soviet authorities were responsible for the massacre. 

What the Court found Russia guilty of is a breach of Article 38 of the Convention (obligation to furnish necessary facilities for examination of the case). Moscow refused to submit a copy of the 2004 decision to stop the Katyn investigation to the ECHR, explaining that it was a classified document and national legislation prohibited such papers to be shown to foreign individuals and organizations.

Poland was disappointed by the Court decision.

“The ruling does not take into account all the arguments of the Polish side that have here a great moral and historic right,” the Polish Undersecretary of State, Artur Nowak-Far said in a statement.

It was not until 1990, 50 years after the Katyn massacre, that the Soviet Union recognized it was responsible for the deaths of the Polish prisoners. Before that the tragedy had been blamed on the Nazis. 

President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, apologized to the Polish people, and Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered some of the secret documents related to the Katyn case to be released to historians.

Nevertheless the tragedy has persisted in casting a shadow over the two countries’ relations. 

Many in Poland were dissatisfied with the fact that Russia shelved the Katyn massacre investigation in 2004. Moscow explained the move by saying all of the Soviet officials allegedly responsible for the executions were already dead. 

The decision to terminate the investigation was classified as “top secret”, together with 36 out of a total of 183 volumes of the Katyn case’s files. 

In November 2010, Russia’s State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, adopted a statement admitting that the executions of Polish citizens near Katyn in 1940 took place on the direct orders of Josef Stalin and other Soviet leaders. The statement titled “The Katyn Tragedy and its Victims” said that it was necessary to continue “verifying the lists of victims, restoring the good names of those who perished in Katyn and other places, and uncovering the circumstances of the tragedy”. 

RT – News

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Relatives of missing in India floods maintain hope

LUCKNOW, India (AP) — A day after the government said it would treat more than 5,700 people missing in floods in northern India last month as presumed dead, relatives said Wednesday they still held out hope that their loved ones had survived.

The provisional death toll — officials said some of the missing still could turn up alive — would make the Uttarakhand floods the worst natural disaster in India since more than 10,000 people were killed here in the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

The toll was worsened by the presence of tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims visiting the state’s temples and the many vacationers who head to its cool hills to escape the summer heat. The government said it was presuming those missing for a month were dead so it could start giving compensation to their families.

Anuradha Raizada, left her home in the state of Uttar Pradesh and went to the temple town of Kedarnath with her husband and two sons – Ashwal, 18, and Atharav, 16. She returned home alone.

On June 16, a wall of water struck the hotel where they were staying. Her husband and one of her sons were swept away.

“There was a deafening noise of water and rain. I clung to my younger son, who had injured his leg and could not walk,” she said. The next day, when he complained of thirst, she left to fetch him water, but she got lost when she tried to return to him. That was the last she saw of him.

She later stumbled across her husband’s dead body, recognizing him from the shirt he had been wearing. She still holds out hope for her children.

She met Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna, who assured her that every corner of Kedar valley would be searched for her two sons, she said.

“I know my sons will return one day. They are safe somewhere in the hills,” she said.

Since the flood, Manoj Jaiswal, 40, has not heard from his brother, sister-in-law or their two children, who had been on a pilgrimage in the area. He said the morning just before the flood, his brother called him to say they were staying an extra day.

“This proved fatal for them,” he said.

Jaiswal had gone to the area to search for his relatives. “The hotel where they were staying is badly damaged. Twenty-eight people died in that hotel, but my brother’s name is not there in the casualty list,” he said.

The state government has been criticized for poor emergency preparedness in a disaster-prone Himalayan area, and chaotic development has been blamed for exacerbating the damage from mudslides and overflowing rivers.

Bahuguna said the government would address those concerns.

“We will devise a scientific system where a balance could be maintained between development and nature,” he said.

More than 1,100 roads were damaged because of the rains and landslides and many of them remained cut off, said R.P. Bhatt, the chief engineer at the Public Works Department. Entire villages were buried in silt and debris.

Ramesh Pokhriyal, a former chief minister of the state and a top official with the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party said many villages could not get food supplies and he feared people would begin dying of hunger if immediate action was not taken.

Bahuguna said the government was working on alleviating the suffering.

“Work is under way at a great speed to redevelop and reconstruct the affected areas and to provide relief to those hit by the disaster,” he said.

A report sent to Parliament by India’s top audit body in April, said the state was badly unprepared for disasters, even though it was vulnerable to earthquakes, landslides and torrential rain.

One state body formed to deal with disasters has never met since it was formed in 2007. Another group, the State Disaster Management Authority, set no rules, regulations or policies since it was formed the same year.

A disaster management plan was still being prepared, there was no early warning system in the state, communication infrastructure was inadequate, emergency service jobs were left unfilled and medical personnel were not trained to deal with disasters, the report said.

“The state authorities were virtually nonfunctional,” it said.

Nevertheless, army troops, paramilitary soldiers and volunteers rescued more than 100,000 people who had been stranded by the disaster.

The air force and private companies made thousands of helicopter sorties to pick up people stuck on rooftops or marooned on hilltops and to drop off food and drinking water.

In a rare feat, a mule stranded in a small island in the middle of the Alaknanda River, was tranquillized and airlifted by a helicopter to safety a month after being swept away in the floods, Captain Bhupinder of Sumit Aviation said. The owners of hundreds of other mules and horses staged a sit-in demanding the rescue of their injured and starving animals.

Associated Press

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Relatives of missing in India floods maintain hope