Garry Kasparov: I Will Not Return to the Dark Reality of Putin's Russia
by Garry Kasparov Jun 20, 2013 4:45 AM EDT
Press conferences are supposed to make headlines, but on June 5 in Geneva I made a little more news than I had intended. I was there to receive the Morris B. Abram Human Rights Award from the organization UN Watch. It was a great honor to receive an award bearing the name of the American civil rights champion who worked with Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy before becoming a global rights figure in co-founding UN Watch in Geneva.
At the press conference a reporter asked a question I have received hundreds of times, about whether or not I feared for my safety and freedom in Putin’s Russia. But I did not give my usual reply about nothing in life being certain. I answered that if I returned to Russia I had serious doubts I would be able to leave again, since it had become obvious in February that I would be part of the ongoing crackdown against political protesters. “So for the time being,” I concluded (if I may quote myself to make the record clear), “I refrain from returning to Russia.”
This was not intended to be a declaration of leaving my home country, permanently or otherwise. In the context of the question, even the Russia experts among the journalists in attendance failed to pick up anything special about my cautious response. It was only when The Moscow Times reported it that the headlines and speculation began to fly. I was simply expressing the dark reality of the situation in Russia today, where nearly half the members of the opposition’s Coordinating Council are under criminal investigation on concocted charges ranging from illegal protest to embezzlement. This difficult decision was already old news to me and my family; I have not been home since February. Even my 50th birthday in April was celebrated in Oslo, as much as it pained me to make my mother and other close family travel abroad.
My principal work on the opposition Council is foreign relations, which mostly entails lobbying governments and organizations abroad to condemn the appalling human rights record of the Putin regime and to bring sanctions against his government and his cronies. Putin’s rage at this year’s passage of the U.S. Magnitsky Act legislation shows this is the correct path and this path must be followed in Europe as well. The Moscow prosecutor’s office opening an investigation that would limit my ability to travel would cripple these efforts. It would keep me from my professional speaking engagements, all of which are abroad since my dissident status has denied me any possibility of earning an income in Putin’s Russia. A travel ban would also limit my critical work for the nonprofit Kasparov Chess Foundation, which has centers in New York City, Brussels, and Johannesburg to promote chess in education.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/20/my-fight-for-russia-goes-on-garry-kasparov-declares.html
