TALLINN, Estonia, April 29 (UPI) -- Six months after violent clashes rocked Nalchik in the North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, that city's residents continue to be terrorized by the local militia, with many fearful that they or their children will be arrested, tortured, killed, or simply "disappeared," human rights activists and lawyers say.
Larisa Dorogova, a lawyer who has attempted to defend or otherwise protect those arrested last October, said in April that "everyone [in Nalchik] lives in fear because he expects that at any moment, the authorities may seize his son" - regardless of guilt or innocence, according to a report carried on the web site islam.ru/pressclub.
Indeed, she suggests, the level of fear among local people has "only increased" with each passing month. One reason for that is because of what people are learning about the action of the authorities from a variety of sources -- including unusual one provided by the republic's interior ministry.
More than 2,000 people were suspected of participating in the uprising last October, At least 50 were arrested immediately. And many of those were tortured or even killed by the authorities, according to reports that Human Rights Watch and Moscow media outlets like "Gazeta" have documented via testimonials of those detained and pictures of torture victims.
To keep the memory of such actions by the authorities alive, the local militia has been distributing cassettes and DVDs that feature pictures of those tortured and killed in order local lawyers and activists say to intimidate the population via the implicit threat that the interior ministry officers are quite prepared to do the same thing again.
As a result of the dissemination of these materials, many people in Nalchik remain afraid to come forward to describe what happened to them or to others when they were in the hands of the authorities. But the pictures on these cassettes and DVDs are so horrific that many more are increasingly angry at the authorities.
But the activists say, it is not just a question of remembering something horrible from the past. The interior ministry there continues to refuse to return the bodies of those who died to relatives who hope to bury them, to bring charges against those they have arrested so that the latter can have their day in court, or even to allow lawyers access to those in detention.
Moreover, Adam Chukho, the author of the Islam.ru report says, many militiamen, both locals and those brought in from elsewhere in the Russian Federation continue to behave in an arbitrary manner despite some cosmetic changes including the replacement of the interior minister of Kabardino-Balkaria with an official from the Adygei Republic.
Given this pattern, Chukho argues, it is difficult to expect that people in the region can expect understanding let alone justice from the Moscow-backed authorities in Nalchik or to think that the events of last fall will not soon be repeated there or elsewhere in the already tense northern Caucasus.
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(Paul Goble teaches at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia.)
